Winter, William, 1836-1917 / 2008-10-17 00:00:00
She woke into life the
sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone the Arabian
bird."
Shakespeare's Juliet, the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of his consummate
poem of love and sorrow, was the most effective, if not the highest of
Adelaide Neilson's tragic assumptions. It carried to every eye and to
every heart the convincing and thrilling sense equally of her beauty and
her power. The exuberant womanhood, the celestial affection, the
steadfast nobility, and the lovely, childlike innocence of Imogen--shown
through the constrained medium of a diffusive romance--were not to all
minds appreciable on the instant. The gentle sadness of Viola, playing
around her gleeful animation and absorbing it as the cup of the white
lily swallows the sunshine, might well be, for the more blunt senses of
the average auditor, dim, fitful, evanescent, and ineffective. Ideal
heroism and dream-like fragrance--the colours of Murillo or the poems of
Heine--are truly known but to exceptional natures or in exceptional
moods. The reckless, passionate idolatry of Juliet, on the
contrary,--with its attendant sacrifice, its climax of disaster, and its
sequel of anguish and death,--stands forth as clearly as the white line
of the lightning on a black midnight sky, and no observer can possibly
miss its meaning.
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