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All which may be contentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter, and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to come; when the last may be the first, and the first the last; when Lazarus may sit above Cæsar, and the just, obscure on earth, shall shine like the sun in heaven; when personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever.
It is generally at night that they go through their personations, and when they have dressed for their part, they generally choose a moment when your attention is attracted by a cunning diversion. On looking up you are astounded to find some utter stranger standing behind your chair, or stalking solemnly round the room.
When freely developed, it is the pulse-beat of the people. And so, throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the allegorical drama giving way to more definite and direct personations.
It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to "make believe," to make believe she had any and every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to "be fond" of, because there would be nothing to take hold of.
Some there may have been who gave more vividly the salient points of a character, or who, as in the case of Kean's Othello, infused into their personations of some of the grandest but least complex of Shakespeare's creations an intensity of passion that defied all rivalry.
Alboni, among several of her well-established personations, was enabled to appear in a new opera by Auber, "Corbeille d'Oranges," a work which attained only a brief success. It became painfully apparent about this time that the greatest of contralto singers was losing the delicious quality of her voice, and that her method was becoming more and more conventional.
When girls are taught wisely how to love, and what qualities to esteem in a companion for life, instead of being left to gather their stock of information on the subject from the fictitious and generally false personations given to them in novels; and when young men accustom themselves to think of the virtues, graces, and solid acquirements requisite in a wife, with whom they are to spend their days, and on whose temper and good sense the whole happiness of their home is to depend, then it will be found that there is very little of the "lottery " in marriage; and that, like any concern of business or of life, the man or woman who judges and acts wisely, with proper foresight and discrimination, will reap the almost certain consequences in a happy and prosperous future.
It is related, that Fuseli, the celebrated artist, when he wished to summon Nightmare, and bid her sit for her picture, or any other grotesque or horrible personations, was wont to prime himself for the feat by supping on about three pounds of half-dressed pork-chops. An infant was brought for baptism into a country church.
Whether this peculiarity is to be accounted for by the desire of the artist to signify the superiority of the Pagan divinities over mortals, by this absence of any trace of earthly feelings, or whether it was thought that any decided expression might deteriorate from the character of repose and beauty that marks the works of the great sculptors of antiquity, I know not, but the effect produced on my mind by the contemplation of these calm and beautiful faces, has something so soothing in it, that I can well imagine with what pleasure those engaged in the turmoils of war, or the scarcely less exciting arena of politics, in former ages, must have turned from their mundane cares to look on these personations of their fabled deities, whose tranquil beauty forms so soothing a contrast to mortal toils.
She came back to the stage renewed and invigorated, and with still more of that depth of feeling and atmosphere of soul wich had so enriched her personations before.
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