Part 15

Early in the last century an English girl of good family eloped with her music teacher. Here, perhaps, began Minnie Maddern’s artistic career, for this girl was her grandmother. After a while this music master brought his family to America, where he conducted concert tours. One daughter, Lizzie Maddern, the mother of Mrs. Fiske, not only was the youthful cornetist of the company, but she arranged the music for the orchestra and, indeed, became a musician of genuine ability, and, later, an acceptable actress. She married Thomas Davey, a pioneer theatrical manager who carried his company up and down through the South and West in the days before personal management gave way to the highly impersonal direction of the Broadway offices. Davey was noted for his invasion of small unheard-of towns, where often the inn dining-room served as a theatre and scenery was of the scantiest. The actor’s life has its uncertainties and hardships in any age or country, but in Western America of the middle of the nineteenth century the conditions were often those known by the strolling players of old. As we shall see, Mrs. Fiske long afterward, and for quite different reasons, reverted for a time to the old practice of playing on extemporized stages.

On December 19, 1865, Marie Augusta Davey was born in New Orleans. From the first of her stage career, which began almost immediately, she was known as Minnie Maddern. There is a pretty story of her first, quite informal stage appearance. A careless nurse had left the baby unguarded. She climbed from her bed, donned her clothes and went out in search of the theatre and her mother. “I forgot to cry, I forgot to be frightened, and I saw some fascinating things before a good-natured fellow picked me up, discovered my identity and took me safely to the theatre. I recall distinctly being held by my new friend and identified at the box-office; then being passed over to a boy who took me around to a narrow, dark door and carried me into a lumbery place and put me in a chair where I looked out into what seemed a bright, sunshiny world with queer trees and fairies. Just then I spied my mother. She was dressed like a fairy, and she was just coming out of a water lily--for it was the transformation scene of a spectacle. I slipped right out of that chair, and, before any one saw what I was going to do, I ran right to her and began explaining my nurse’s treachery. I am told that I was received with applause, and that my first appearance, even though it was impromptu, was a success.”

Previously, she had been “taken on” when the action required the presence of a baby, and soon afterwards little Minnie appeared between the farce and the tragedy to do her songs and dances. At three came her first premeditated speaking appearance,[163] as the Duke of York in _Richard III_, and from that day to this, excepting brief periods in school[164] and a few years at the time of her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske, in 1890, she has been continuously and busily engaged in her profession.

Her career divides sharply into two periods. To the first of these, the twenty-five years that carried her to the time of her marriage, she is now disposed to be rather indifferent. When she refers at all to that time, which is not often, she speaks of the “prehistoric days.”[165] It was, nevertheless, a period of thorough schooling, arduous, but fruitful of technical excellence, and bringing early triumphs--a babyhood and girlhood apprenticeship which is today, for various reasons (one of them being laws in some states restricting the appearance of children on the stage) practically inaccessible. To indicate briefly her early experience it is enough to say that before she was sixteen Minnie Maddern had appeared not only with her father’s company, but with a dozen or more of the stars of the day, Laura Keene, J. K. Emmet, Lucille Western, John McCullough, Joseph Jefferson, E. L. Davenport, and the rest of that almost forgotten day. She went through the whole range of juvenile parts,[166] soubrettes, harassed young heroines, boys, fairies, the lads of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on through the list, playing wherever the need of a clever child actress called her. She wore long dresses on the stage long before she assumed them in her own person, and by the time she was sixteen she was conspicuously successful in old woman rôles![167] At sixteen, too, she became a star in New York, though this venture was ill-advised. She had won a public by her cleverness and her marked personality, but, much to her credit, she was not adapted to the crude and blatantly personal form of entertainment represented by _Fogg’s Ferry_, which was one of the “protean shows” of those days. She was to wait, indeed, many years more for the beginning of her identification with really significant drama. During this young womanhood, from sixteen to twenty-odd, she acted in plays which are never resurrected nowadays by even the most undiscriminating stock company, and which are remembered, if at all, by some old theatregoer who likes to recollect how appealingly, in _Caprice_, Minnie Maddern used to sing “In the Gloaming.” _The Storm Child_, _In Spite of All_, _The Child Wife_, _The Puritan Maid_, _Lady Jemima_, _Featherbrain_--these are not so much as names nowadays, even to those who know the theatre well. She had gained thorough, indispensable training, but as yet no memorable achievement.[168]

In 1890 came her marriage and three years of retirement.[169] It is, for many reasons, not strange that when she again took up her stage career a new era seemed to begin for her. Not only must her own nature, her insight, and her artistic equipment now have combined to qualify her for new and greater efforts; the whole English speaking theatre was gaining a new lease of life. Arthur Wing Pinero, just emerging into his period of sureness of technique and a frank facing of life; Henry Arthur Jones, dropping his earlier melodramatic manner and about to produce _Michael and His Lost Angel_; Oscar Wilde, with his momentary flash of high comedy; George Bernard Shaw, watchful of the experimentation of others and in addition well saturated with Ibsen; above all, the great Norwegian himself, whose influence knew no difference of language;--these men were, in the early nineties, bringing into English drama a vigor and a relation to life such as it had not enjoyed since the closing of the theatres in 1642.

Mrs. Fiske was keenly, if to a certain degree unconsciously, alive to these influences. To one attuned they were the _zeitgeist_. With an eagerness new to the American theatre she was ambitious to attempt the modern drama--a drama honest and frank in its outlook on life, free from conventional restraint in its choice of themes, and taking its tone from the realities in human character. Not always have the qualities of the play been a match for the powers of the actress. Yet, looking over the period since 1893,[170] the list is distinctly noteworthy--first of all, Ibsen, who found in Mrs. Fiske a ready champion. _A Doll’s House_, _Hedda Gabler_, _Rosmersholm_, _The Pillars of Society_; surely they form a goodly showing. As for other Europeans, we have Sardou furnishing her, in _Divorçons_, an opportunity, brilliantly embraced, for comedy; Dumas _fils_ is represented by _La Femme de Claude_, Sudermann by _Magda_, and Hauptmann by the short play _Hannele_. Two of her greatest successes, _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and _Becky Sharp_ were unusually skillful and satisfying experiments in that difficult form, the dramatized novel. _Leah Kleschna_ was worth while as an attempt to raise melodrama into the field of social drama; _The New York Idea_ is, so far, the best American example of sophisticated, ironic comedy; and in very recent days Edward Sheldon’s plays, _Salvation Nell_ and _The High Road_, have been courageous and justified experiments--the most striking examples we have had of the encouragement of the native dramatist of the newer school.

The capacity to key oneself to the inner meaning of a play, to react on the genius of the author with sympathy and insight, sets apart the artist from the crowd of mechanical players. For different actors there are naturally different forms of this power. For Mrs. Fiske, it can be said that her genius displays itself in the naturalism that reveals at once the realities and the beauties of human nature. Let us see how the group of representative plays named above has represented this power.

It can fairly be said that the distinguishing mark of this group of plays has been its close relation to actual human life. This is of course the distinguishing work of the most characteristic and significant of modern English drama as a whole; but there is much more of this sort of drama now than there was eighteen or twenty years ago, and there has been, until very recently, more of this leaven of truth to nature in the British theatre than in the American. Consider for a moment the character of the average play upon which the public in the United States spent during this period (and rightly enough still spends) millions of dollars and hours. To name a few undoubted successes: _When Knightwood was in Flower_, _The Heart of Maryland_, _Lovers’ Lane_, _The Christian_, _Way Down East_, _Secret Service_, _The Music Master_, _The Man from Home_, _Zaza_, _Charley’s Aunt_, _The Prisoner of Zenda_, _Sherlock Holmes_, _The Chorus Lady_, _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, _The Woman_, _Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford_. Without denying the necessity of the theatre of mere amusement, of light sentiment, of melodrama, one feels grateful for an ambition that has sought and found something deeper.

To examine Mrs. Fiske’s plays more in detail will indicate both the temper of the modern realistic school and the quality of her interpretations.

As for Ibsen, there has been warm dispute as to the validity and helpfulness of his message. Many go to the extreme of saying that he should never be performed at all. With this question we are now concerned only so far as to determine his attitude toward life and the drama for there is no question as to his strength in determining the tone and technique of later-day dramatists. As Mrs. Fiske herself has said, “the most interesting, the most valuable plays written by others are almost without exception pieces which display the influence of the Norseman’s work. It would be an impertinence to say that Sudermann, Fulda, Pinero, d’Annunzio and the Spanish playwright Echegaray do not write interesting plays. They do, but after all their works are merely those of devoted disciples--not those of the master.” To follow her in her Ibsen creed (and she has the best critical thought with her) is to believe him responsible for our search of truth in the theatre, for the truth to nature that has brought a toning down of violent action and heightened the desire, as Maeterlinck says, “to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness and place moral problems upon a high pedestal. Bloodshed has grown less frequent, passions less turbulent; heroism has become less unbending, courage less material and less ferocious.” Ibsen appeals to the actor’s imagination, to all he has of brain and soul. In these plays also the sensitive, discerning auditor finds, not the sordid pessimism with which Ibsen has been so often charged, but a burning zeal for rockbottom truth and sincerity and, in some cases, the exaltation of tragedy. It is to be admitted that in his reaction against the drama of futile romanticism, the “story book play” of no character or consequence, Ibsen drew what were, in contrast, grim pictures.

By her unmistakable vocation for the realistic drama, her intellectual acumen, her power and habit of thinking out her parts, both in their larger significance and in their revealing details, Mrs. Fiske was obviously fitted for Ibsen. The restlessness of his women, their curiosity, their keen concentration, found a response in her temperament as her blonde and nervous person pictured their physical aspect. Histrionic methods moreover adapted themselves to both mood and matter. It is interesting to inquire in a little detail what these methods were and are, for, with modifications, they characterize all her work.

The keynote of Mrs. Fiske’s acting is akin to that of naturalistic drama itself, as the dramatist himself understands it. He must portray humanity as it is, with the selection and stress necessary for effectiveness in the theatre. His heroines must be embodied through similar methods. Such impersonation Mrs. Fiske accomplishes with the utmost economy of gesture, action and voice. There is no staginess, none of the aggressive grace of the actress playing a part; she is rather the woman living it. There is obvious none of the routine technique which actors frequently learn of each other, or in schools. This is not to say that her style is not an outgrowth of an earlier technique of a period when no doubt she was sufficiently “stagey” and conventional. In the later period she has refined, out of this earlier experience and her own insight, a method remarkable for its suggestion, its repression, its freedom from familiar device. To the end of theatric effect and illusion she, like all artists, has well defined, recognizable means--some, like her wide-ranged, emotion-charged voice, natural gifts; others more or less deliberate. How deliberate, it would be hard to say, so closely knit in good acting are calculation and instinctive action. Her power of imparting the details of impersonation is notable. Gesture, walk, pose, facial play, intonation, pause, all are worked out with precision and yet with a reticent naturalness that makes strongly for effectiveness. Particularly convincing is her power of pregnant silence. In Hedda Gabler, “Mrs. Fiske’s power of ominously significant silence, of play of feature that reveals the working brain behind, rises very high in the final scene with Brack. He knows her share in Lovborg’s ruin; he can bring his knowledge into play in the sordid theatre of the police court. The price of silence is the submission that Hedda, with all her curiosity and zest for evil, is too coldly cowardly to pay. All her tragedy has curdled mean. Her only refuge is the meaner and cowardly escape of suicide. She does not speak, yet one sees the idea germinate, mount and possess her, until it flowers into reckless action.”[171]

In the first act of _Salvation Nell_ “Mrs. Fiske, as the scrub woman in the barroom, sat holding her drunken lover’s head in her lap for fully ten minutes without a word, almost without a motion. Gradually one could watch nothing else; one became absorbed in the silent pathos of that dumb, sitting figure. Miss Mary Garden, herself a distinguished actress, said of this, ‘Ah, to be able to do nothing like that.’ In _Pillars of Society_, while the Consul was making his confession to the mob, again Mrs. Fiske, as Lona, sat quiet, one of the crowd; but gradually, as she saw the man she loved throwing off his yoke of hypocrisy, the light of a great joy radiated from her face, ending in a stifled cry, half-sob, half-laugh of triumph, of indescribable poignancy. To one beholder, at least, it brought the rush of tears, and made the emotional as well as the intellectual drift of the play completely clear, completely fused and compelling. Is not this acting of a very high order, this so intense living in the whole life of the drama that her quietest moment is charged with tingling significance? Is this not true ‘impersonation,’ indeed?”[172]

Akin to this power of eloquent silence is Mrs. Fiske’s use of “felicitous pause.” In the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word, will come a momentary halt such as anyone in real life is constantly making. The effect is strikingly realistic; the wonder is that many others have not discovered and profited by its simplicity and naturalness. And then, coupled with her many sided faculty of repression, is a power of sudden, telling, emotional speech. Piercing a mood of charged silence, a sentence spoken in Mrs. Fiske’s eloquent voice is often of electrical effect.

By such methods, she made Hedda, “an abnormally evil and soulless woman, steadily plausible, momentarily potent, always conceivably human.” In the words of the same critic[173] she gave to Nora, in _A Doll’s House_ “the very semblance of life. When these traits (disdain of convention, curiosity, self-concentration) become abnormal and pass over into morbid chagrin and recklessness, sordid selfishness, vicious vindictiveness, hard soullessness and mean cowardice, Mrs. Fiske’s intellect and her temperament follow them.”

Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West in _Rosmersholm_ excited differences of opinion. To some any Ibsen play is a brilliant study of certain phases of life, to others only a depressing study in degeneracy. It is natural that the actress’ work should make varied impressions. In the moments of intense passion she rose superbly to the occasion; her Rebecca had intellectual poise; she suggested beautifully Rebecca’s renouncing love. It was, as far as it went, a portrait equal to any of her others, but in a degree she failed to suggest plausibly the fascinating half-intellectual and half-emotional force that gave Rebecca her influence in Rosmer’s house. She was a shade too detached, a little lacking in the warmth that must have belonged to Rebecca’s ideals and to her love for Rosmer.

One may frankly admit, indeed, that Mrs. Fiske’s acting does not please all tastes. What some find to be her repressive force is in the eyes of others “stilted awkwardness.” The qualities which to most are her most salient characteristics are to some her “intolerable mannerisms.” One comment on her Hedda was that there was “not a large or spontaneous moment in it,” that it was “an adroitly articulated mosaic, an assemblage of details, all precise exposition, rather than a jointless and living whole.” Her personality has been described as “cerebral” and “brittle,” and her art as “too predominantly intellectual.” Attention has been called to her “maddening rising inflection,” and, with wearisome reiteration, to what has been called her “unfortunate mannerism of runningallthewordsofasentenceintooneanother.” In this last criticism there is a measure of justice, for at times her speech has been disconcertingly rapid. There has been improvement in this respect of late years, however, and to those playgoers themselves temperamentally adapted to enjoy her work, her enunciation has been seldom indistinct, her so-called awkwardness and mannerisms full of significance, and her “cerebral” acting and personality the means of true impersonation.

_The Pillars of Society_, since it is a social satire rather than an outright tragedy, afforded Mrs. Fiske as Lona Hessel an opportunity for brilliant comedy. It was a small part, too small indeed to have bestowed on it her powers. But she has never chosen plays for their “star parts.” She made Lona a delightfully humorous, honest-hearted woman, a masterpiece, within its limits, of satiric comedy. Especially fine was her acting during Bernick’s confession to the mob. We have already seen how she sat in one of her motionless silences, listening, in her face the joy of victory--a joy that finally expressed itself in “a little smothered sob of triumphant love which no other American actress could have invented, or could have executed.”

Mrs. Fiske’s skillful acting of the lighter passages in _The Pillars of Society_ gives point to a contention of many of her admirers--that she should oftener be seen in comedy. In the two conspicuous instances of her ventures into comedy--_Divorçons_ and _The New York Idea_, she has been strikingly successful. In Sardou’s play she acted with “a refined abandon that was positively captivating, making Cyprienne deliciously capricious and delightfully feminine.” _The New York Idea_ William Archer found to be “a social satire so largely conceived and so vigorously executed that it might take an honorable place in any dramatic literature.” It is an example of high comedy, the comedy “that smiles as it chastises.” The title is explained in one of the lines: “Marry for whim and leave the rest to the divorce court--that’s the New York idea of marriage.” In its lightness of mood and speech the play is a comedy, yet in the author’s mind the underlying interest is serious, his purpose being not to make fun of or satirize true love, but to make fun of and call attention to the frivolous, inconsequential attitude toward marriage and divorce. American playwrights have seldom attempted the satirical high comedy of manners. _The New York Idea_, with its spirited, delicately pungent wit, is by all odds the best example so far. Mrs. Fiske brought to bear on her part, that of a wife whose love for her husband persisted after divorce, a lightness and sureness of touch that were a match for the play’s best qualities. Her resources of changeful mood happily expressed Cynthia Karslake’s high bred reticence of sentiment and rather sophisticated gayety.[174]

_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was written by Lorimer Stoddard within one week, but the result was, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, one of the great modern tragedies, worthy to be ranked with Ibsen’s _Ghosts_. At least Mr. Stoddard wrote a strong, truthful play, in the main faithful to the novel by Thomas Hardy that was its original. It was felt at the time that the American stage had risen for once to unaccustomed literary and dramatic heights. The play was produced in 1897. It was as Tess that Mrs. Fiske fully “arrived.” Of her most notable characters only Nora in _A Doll’s House_ had preceded. Her abilities had been generally recognized but until now play and part had never so fortunately aided her. She was not Thomas Hardy’s Tess. It was futile to expect that she would be, for the Tess of the book was simple, primitive, impulsive, whereas Mrs. Fiske’s art was always better adapted to reflection and complexity. Such qualities she gave her Tess. And naturally her smallness and blondness do not at once suggest Hardy’s heroine. Yet her work was enthusiastically praised. In spite of her disadvantages, in this part, of person and method, the keenness of her perception of _her_ Tess and the nervous force with which she imparted that perception to the audience made a deep impression. Ir moments like that in which she discovers her husband to be ignorant of her past life, or that of the return of the supposed dead Angel Clare, her power of repressed emotion was most effective. While actually doing almost nothing, her horror and amazement were strongly felt across the footlights. The few sentences to her husband that recall the years of waiting and disillusion, were simply spoken but with the agony of Tess’s pitiful tragedy. The play was at once successful, and the admirers of Mrs. Fiske, who had waited long for a suitable opportunity for her, felt at last satisfied.