My mother, always anxious for me to profit by criticism that might have value, said that perhaps the man was right. At any rate, between the two, I became so self-conscious that the next time I sang Felina I could not get into the mood of it at all. Not to seem restricted in gesture, I waved my arms as if I were in _Norma_; and the performance was a very poor one in consequence. Yet, in spite of Jarrett's machinations, it was said of me in the press of the day:
" ...Her rendering of Felina was a magnificent success. From the first scene on the balcony until her light-hearted laughter dies away, she is a vision of beauty and grace, appealing to every high aesthetic emotion and charming all hearts with her sweetness."
[Illustration: =Clara Louise Kellogg in _Mignon_=
Furthermore, an eminent Shakespearean critic, writing then, said:
As an actress, Miss Kellogg's superiority cannot justly be questioned. Some things are exquisitely represented by the fair Swede, Miss Nilsson, such as the dazed look, the stupefaction caused by a great shock, like that of the death of Valentin, for instance; such as the madness to which the distracting conflict of many selfish feelings and passions leads. But she is always circumscribed by her own consciousness. Her soul never passes beyond that limit--never surrounds her--filling the stage and infecting the audience with a magnetic atmosphere which is a part of herself, or herself transfused, if such expressions be allowable. In this respect Miss Kellogg is very different and greatly superior. Her sympathies are large. She conceives well the effects of the warmer and more generous passions upon the person who feels them. She can, by the force of her imagination, abandon herself to these influences, and, by her artistic skill, give them apt expression. She can cease to be self-conscious, and feel but the fictitious consciousness of the personage whom she represents, while the force of her own illusion magnetises her auditors till they respond like well-tuned harps to every chord of feeling which she strikes.
Such notices, such critiques, were compensations! Taken as a whole, Felina was a successful part for me; largely on account of that piece of glittering generalities, the Polonaise. In this, according to one critic, "she aroused the admiration of her auditors to a condition that was really a tempestuous _furore_." So, as I say, there were compensations for Jarrett's unkindnesses.