Part 14

_Romeo and Juliet_ was the play determined upon for the next season in London. A trip to Verona in quest of local data and sketches was to occupy the summer. “What!” exclaimed James Russell Lowell when he heard of this, “going into that glorious country for the first time, and in the flush of youth! I am selfish enough to envy you.” While visiting in Paris Miss Anderson had a charming interview with Victor Hugo, who proposed a reception in her honor. But she pressed on to Verona, and, like many another before and since, found the old city irresistible.

The Mary Anderson production of _Romeo and Juliet_ at the Lyceum in 1884 was lavish. So much of her time indeed was taken by the details of the preparation of scenery and other accessories that she had scant opportunity for re-studying her own part. But her excellent memory helped her immensely. Once, after _Ion_ had been dropped from her repertoire for three or four years, she rehearsed her entire long part without in the meantime reading it, and with hardly a mistake. The circumstances of the dress rehearsal of this production of _Romeo and Juliet_ show how far the stagecraft of the day had departed from the Elizabethan custom. The scenes were so many and so elaborate that though the rehearsal began at seven in the evening, at five in the morning Romeo, Juliet and Friar Laurence were still waiting for the last act to be set. At eight in the evening the public would be there. Discouraged and weary, Miss Anderson could not sleep; when she came to the theatre to face the “first nighters,” she was tired in mind and body and unfit for her work. The strain of that performance was nerve-racking. Yet the audience was unaware that Juliet had all she could do to get through her lines, and the cumbersome scenery was set with amazing rapidity. The play was over at half after eleven, a great success; yet to the actress herself her work that night was more painfully unsatisfactory than any other she ever did. But she was hard to please where her own impersonations were concerned. In her fourteen years before the public, she was satisfied with her acting only once as Bianca, once as Ion, never as Perdita and only once as Hermione. _Romeo and Juliet_ ran, however, for a hundred nights. Mary Anderson became so imbued with the sufferings of Juliet that she continually spoke of them in her sleep. It is typical of her that, profoundly dissatisfied with her impersonation, she constantly restudied and remodeled it until she liked it better. The brother Joe, who used to gaze with Mary on the green curtain of the Louisville Theatre, was the Tybalt of this production.

At this time (1885) it was proposed that Mary Anderson play _As You Like It_ in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford, and she gladly accepted. She had never played Rosalind, and she studied the character carefully. The occasion aroused great interest, and the usually placid village was a gay place. The journalists were there from London, people came from far and near for the play, the stage was decorated with flowers from Shakespeare’s own garden. The audience was distinguished and appreciative. The dean of American critics, William Winter, was present, and, in his words, “It was for her [Miss Anderson] that the audience reserved its enthusiasm, and this, when at length she appeared as Rosalind, burst forth in vociferous plaudits and cheers, so that it was long before the familiar voice, so copious, resonant, and tender, rolled out its music upon the eager throng and her action could proceed. Before the night ended she was continually cheered.” After a provincial tour ending in Dublin, where her admirers gathered in thousands under her window and sang _Come Back to Erin_, Miss Anderson in September, 1885, returned to her own country after an absence of two years.

The accounts that preceded her of the remarkable scene that took place in the Lyceum on her last night in London added interest to her reappearance in America. One who was present that night wrote: “During the evening it was manifest from the fervor of the applause with which she was favored during the performance of _Pygmalion and Galatea_ and _Comedy and Tragedy_ that the audience was exceptionally sympathetic, but no idea of the scenes which followed the descent of the curtain even entered the wildest dreams of any one present. The audience had been all the evening quivering with emotion. As the curtain fell Miss Anderson was loudly called for, and after the storm of applause which greeted her presence had subsided to some extent, the lady, who was transfigured with the excitement of the moment, said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen--the dreaded last night has come--dreaded at least by me. I have to part with you who have been so kind to me. The delight I naturally feel at the prospect of returning to my native country is tempered with a great regret, saddened by the thought that I must leave you. I little imagined when I came before you for the first time, a stranger feeling very helpless, tremblingly wondering what your verdict on my poor efforts would be, how soon I should find friends among you or what pain it would cost me to say, as I must say to-night, “good-bye” to you. You have been very, very good. I have tried hard to deserve your goodness. Please do not quite forget me. I can never forget you or your goodness to me. I hope I am not saying good-bye to you forever. I want to come back to you. [Tumultuous applause and cries of ‘Do! Do!’ ‘Why leave at all?’] Dare I hope you will be a little glad to see me. [Loud cries ‘We will!’ ‘Yes!’ etc.] I shall be very glad to see you. [Immense cheers.] Until I do, good-bye. I thank you again and again.’ At the conclusion of the speech the cheering and applause continued without interruption until Miss Anderson--down whose cheeks tears were pouring--had again come eight times before the curtain. The audience, which by this time was on its feet in every part of the house, and wildly waving handkerchiefs and hats, seemed struck by one thought, and the first strain of _Auld Lang Syne_ seemed to burst simultaneously from stalls and gallery. People who had never met before seized and wrung each other’s hands. Ladies wept and flourished their handkerchiefs hysterically. It is impossible to describe the scene. When I tell you that it lasted for fully half an hour, you will get an idea of what the Englishman, whom you Yankees call phlegmatic, can do in the way of enthusiasm when you touch his heart. It was an ovation which might have affected a monarch.”

The American tour that followed, in the season of 1885–6, took Miss Anderson and her company (the custom by now was that of the traveling organization) not only to New York, Boston, and the other cities in the East and South, but to the Pacific coast. New York did not take to _As You Like It_, but _Romeo and Juliet_ was a brilliant success. A public reception in Sacramento proved the affection for Mary Anderson of the city of her birth, but, strange to say, in the single night she played there, the people of Sacramento provided her with only a meagre audience. In San Francisco the warmth of her reception was very different from the crushing disappointment she experienced there a dozen years before.

Now came an entire year of rest. Offers to play in Spain, Germany, France and Australia were refused. The glamour of stage life was a thing of the past with Mary Anderson. By no means blind to the artistic possibilities of the drama, and with still a high faith in its moral function, a stage life for herself was becoming more and more repugnant. She felt the need of calm, of normal life away from the glare of the footlights. The winter of 1886–7 she spent in Paris, in general study and particularly with her French and music. It is characteristic of her that with a chance for recreation and social life, and with all her triumphs behind her, she still sought to mend an education she knew to be faulty.

The Lyceum in London was engaged for the following year (1887–8). After casting about for some time for a suitable new play,[157] she again fell back on Shakespeare and decided to give _The Winter’s Tale_, “doubling” Perdita and Hermione--that is, playing both parts. It was not an easy task. To Tennyson she mentioned her fear that the critics would not receive the venture well. His reply was: “Thank God the time is past for the _Quarterly_ or the _Times_ to make or mar a poem, play or artist! Few original things are well received at first. People must grow accustomed to what is out of the common before adopting it. Your idea, if carried out as you feel it, will be well received generally--and before long.”

_The Winter’s Tale_ was not enthusiastically received on its first night. But if it was not at once a critical success, it was a popular one, for it ran a hundred and sixty-four nights and could have continued longer. This was the only time that Mary Anderson acted the same play throughout a season. It is worth mentioning that the Leontes of this production was J. Forbes-Robertson.[158]

It was during this London engagement that Miss Anderson saw much of Tennyson. She visited him in his Surrey home, and on the Isle of Wight; she joined him in long walks, rain or shine, in the country; he read and talked to her for hours together at his own fireside. He prepared for her a play _The Foresters_, a version of his pastoral _Robin Hood_, and they visited the New Forest together in search of ideas for scenery; but the play she never produced.

Mary Anderson was to have but one more season, or rather part of a season, before retiring from the stage forever. She has become the classic example of the actor retiring in the midst of a highly successful career. She has herself[159] indicated the chief reason for her choice: “After so much kindness from the public, it seems ungrateful to confess that the _practice_ of my art (not the study of it) had grown, as time went on, more and more distasteful to me. To quote Fanny Kemble on the same subject: ‘Never’ (in my case for the last three years of my public life) ‘have I presented myself before an audience without a feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their presence without thinking the excitement I had undergone unwholesome, and the personal exhibition odious.’ To be conscious that one’s person was a target for any one who paid to make it one; to live for months at a time in one groove, with uncongenial surroundings, and in an atmosphere seldom penetrated by the sun and air; and to be continually repeating the same passions and thoughts in the same words--that was the most part of my daily life, and became so like slavery to me that I resolved after one more season’s work to cut myself free from the stage fetters forever.”

There is much in this passage to give pause to the girl who longs for a stage career, for the youthfully ambitious seldom see such a career in its true perspective. Mary Anderson, one in ten thousand in her equipment as an actress, one in a million in the triumphs she won, yet was eager to give it all up. On the audience’s side of the footlights the stage is (and rightfully so) a place of beauty, of inspiration, of revelation of the truth. To the actor or actress it is more often than not a place of stern toil, of uncertainty, of disappointment and disillusionment.

The provincial tour following the London engagement ended at Dublin, where the public was as wildly enthusiastic as before. Some of the last night audience even went so far as to follow in the same train to Queenstown, awakening her at each stop with cheers and greetings.

There followed the final tour in the United States. At Louisville she visited the scenes of her youth and received the congratulatory resolutions of the state senate. She had begun the season with as much zest as she could command, but the strain was beginning to tell on her health. At Cincinnati she acted with difficulty, but completed the engagement. At Washington, in the middle of inauguration week, in 1889, the crisis was reached. “The first scenes of _The Winter’s Tale_ went very smoothly. The theatre was crowded. Perdita danced apparently as gayly as ever, but after the exertion fell fainting from exhaustion and was carried off the stage. I was taken into the dressing-room, which in a few moments was filled with people from the boxes. Recovering consciousness quickly, I begged them to clear the room. Realizing then that I would probably not be able to act any more that season, though there were many weeks yet unfinished, I resolved at any cost to complete that night’s work. Hurriedly putting on some color, I passed the groups of people discussing the incident, and before the doctor or my brother were aware of my purpose, ordered the curtain to be rung up and walked quickly upon the stage. As I did so I heard a loud hum, which I was afterwards told was a great burst of applause from the audience. The pastoral scene came to an end. There was only one more act to go through. Donning the statue-like draperies of Hermione, I mounted the pedestal. My physician, formerly an officer in the army, said that he had never, even in the midst of a battle, felt so nervous as when he saw the figure of Hermione swaying on her pedestal up that long flight of stairs. Every moment there was an hour of torture to me, for I felt myself growing fainter and fainter. All my remaining strength was put into that last effort. I descended from the pedestal, and was able to speak all but the final line. This remained unuttered, and the curtain rang down on my last appearance on the stage.”[160]

A little over a year after this unexpected close to her brilliant public career Mary Anderson became Mrs. Antonio F. de Navarro. Her husband was a native of New York, of Spanish extraction, and like herself, of Catholic faith. They were married on June 17, 1890, at the Catholic church at Hampstead, London. During the last half dozen years of her stage career Mary Anderson had become almost an Englishwoman by adoption. Her new home was made in the little village of Broadway, Worcestershire, and there she has always since lived, enjoying the peaceful life and the domestic happiness for which she longed and which she so richly deserved. She has two children, a son and a daughter. There have not been lacking attempts to tempt her again behind the footlights. Enormous sums have been offered without the least effect. For charity she has read or sung once or twice in modest programs, but that is all. The people of Broadway fairly worship her for the gracious and kindly lady she is. Since her marriage she has made a few visits to America, and the American public of the theatre was recently reminded of the former light of its stage when she assisted Robert Hichens in the dramatization of _The Garden of Allah_. But Mary Anderson, though she is now well under sixty, for a quarter of a century has been to most of us only an illustrious name of the past, and to our elders a tenderly treasured memory.

The estimate of Mary Anderson with which she has usually been dismissed by the casually critical is that she was not a great actress, but an unusually handsome, charming and talented woman who is memorable chiefly as a demonstration that the stage can be the working place of a wholesome, womanly woman.

As to whether she was a great actress there was and is a wide difference of opinion. To her more partial admirers she was the “authentic queen of the American stage,” who in each of her parts “gave an individual and potential impersonation.”[161] “Such moments in her acting,” wrote William Winter, who has always been her friend and admirer, “as that of Galatea’s mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of Juliet’s desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione’s despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, are the eloquent, the absolute, the final denotements of genius.”

A great deal of contemporary criticism was decidedly less enthusiastic than this. While thoroughly believing in Miss Anderson’s devotion to her profession and her conviction of its dignity, many good judges saw in her a woman of talent only, not a genius. The art of the theatre was to her a matter of the highest ideals, deserving the service of the best and noblest in the natures of its followers. Yet as an actress practicing this art she seemed to many incapable of placing her work on any but a personal basis. Insight into character, it was said, was impossible to her--her Galatea, Parthenia, Pauline, Rosalind and the rest were but herself in different guises. A striking instance of her lack of dramatic insight was her inability to adapt herself to W. S. Gilbert’s conception of his own _Galatea_. He wished her to suggest the comic or satiric value of some of her speeches, but she was unable to bring about the necessary subordination of her own personality. The heroic and obviously tragic were her forte. A thoroughly good woman herself, she was rigidly confined by the limits of her temperament, as well as by her views of what the stage should show, to the delineation of good women. She was probably quite incapable of expressing a purely animal nature. “Her acting is polished, and in correct taste,” said the _Morning Post_ of London, “what it wants is freshness, spontaneity, _abandon_. Of the _feu sacre_ which irradiated Rachel and gives to Bernhardt splendor ineffable, Miss Anderson has not a spark. She is not inspired. Hers is a pure, bright, steady light; but it lacks any mystic effulgence. She is beautiful, winsome, gifted, and accomplished. To say this is to say much, and it fills to the brim the measure of legitimate praise. She is an eminently good, but not a great artist.”

The word “beautiful” is sure to turn up in any criticism of Mary Anderson. Never was the word used with more justification. She was “a classic figure gotten by mistake into an unclassic epoch.” She was of innate dignity, tall and statuesque, “of imperial figure,” fair haired, blue-eyed. Her features were finely chiseled and regular and at once suggested the Greek ideal. Her voice, rich, tender, and with wonderfully full bodied and expressive lower tones, was one of her chief charms. Many men today have those tones still echoing in their minds.

But the spell of her beauty was that it seemed more than skin-deep. It was the expression of a noble temperament, the beauty of a woman of high feeling and sensitiveness, and yet of dignity. It was an essential part of her appeal, though this was not an appeal to the eye alone. It was the beauty of the actress, who could be sincerely concerned first of all with the ideals of her art, of the woman who could say: “The highest praise I receive is the knowledge that someone has gone from the audience with an increased light as to the development of character, a higher sense of moral responsibility, a better spiritual condition for having seen the play.”

Whether or not this beautiful woman was a great actress, she was “our Mary” to countless thousands, and such a title is not earned by commonplaceness and dignity, however beautiful. About Mary Anderson there hangs somehow a sense of enchantment, of the realization of an ideal of loveliness, joy and purity. And whether or not she was a genius, there is something heroic in the amplitude of her career. She began as a poor girl, living in an obscure place, without connection with the theatre. By her noble aspirations, her zeal and patience in their pursuit, and her modesty and worth in their fulfillment, she succeeded gloriously.

In the autumn of 1915, in a performance for the benefit of one of the British war-charities, Mary Anderson acted the sleep-walking scene from _Macbeth_ and the balcony scene from _Romeo and Juliet_.

MRS. FISKE

One afternoon a decade ago Minnie Maddern Fiske journeyed out from Boston to the neighboring university city, went to Sanders Theatre, scene of Harvard’s august ceremonies, and there she talked--engrossingly--on her art. The occasion was in a way memorable. In times not remotely past the possibility of an actress lecturing in Sanders would have been doubtful.[162] But in 1905 Harvard was well along in its career as one of the springs of the renaissance which has of late years manifested itself in the English-speaking theatre. If one said “Professor Baker’s work was beginning to make itself felt” it would be saying the same thing in a different way. In many respects the occasion was unusual The audience was interesting: the professors were there to add dignity and academic distinction; the students, of Harvard and Radcliffe, were there in force to represent the newer spirit of inquiry and effort in matters dramatic; the stage was represented in the audience as well as on the platform (and, oddly, Francis Wilson, Edward H. Sothern and the speaker cover nearly the whole dramatic range). There was an enthusiastic expectancy in the air. One felt that here was the manifestation of something genuine and strong. The speaker did not disappoint. Poised and confident, eager and enthusiastic, she spoke for more than an hour and one felt at the end that this small woman had signalized a new spirit in the theatre and in the attitude of educated men toward the drama and its exponents.

She had started life as a baby actress and her formal schooling was snatched here and there in the midst of an ever busy career. Most men (and women) can exhaust the resources of academic training with a total result less brilliant, however, than her hour on the stage of Sanders. But it was only one form of a recognition which is freely accorded. It is quite safe to say that since the death of Mansfield she has been the most noteworthy American person of the theatre. She has consistently championed drama of a high order, which is something superior to theatrical art of a high order. So much would be true if she remained the producer only. Mrs. Fiske, the actress, has placed herself among the chosen few. She, as much as any other, brought to bear on the American theatre what it sorely needed, a keen intellect attuned to the new spirit of naturalism. She was born in a lucky day for this purpose, for, as we shall see, she came to maturity at just about the time when the rebirth in the English drama was making itself evident.

The stage always attracts to itself numbers of people who no doubt sincerely fancy themselves drawn thither irresistibly. The theatre’s lure is strong, yet most of its followers have entered upon a stage career more or less as a matter of choice. With a small number, however, the life has been inevitable. There has been no choice, no attraction or glamour even. Such is Mrs. Fiske; she is indigenously of the theatre.