Part 19

A marvelous exhibition of what Miss Adams and Mr. Frohman, when they put their heads together, could do in the way of contrast to Phœbe Throssell and Maggie Wylie, was the production for a single performance in the great Stadium at Harvard, one night in June, 1909, of Schiller’s _Maid of Orleans_. Miss Adams had played _Twelfth Night_ in Sanders Theatre one evening a year before. The _Maid of Orleans_ was an outgrowth of the earlier performance and was undertaken at the suggestion of the German department of Harvard. That there were one hundred and fifty mounted knights in full armor, one thousand men-at-arms, two hundred citizens, one hundred and fifty women and children, one hundred and twenty musicians, and ninety singers, besides sixty speaking parts, gives some idea of the magnitude of this unique presentation. In the coronation scene more than fifteen hundred persons were on the improvised Stadium stage. The cost of this single evening’s performance, with its specially constructed scenery and long preparation, was tremendous. And Maude Adams planned and carried through the entire proceeding. “This,” said one perhaps over-enthusiastic spectator, “is the biggest thing ever undertaken by any woman, except the one she is representing.” And through it all Miss Adams was playing the Maid, even to leading, on a great white charger, the troops of France in the battle charge. The spectacular effects--the storm scene, the battle scene, the scene of the coronation--were vastly impressive, though the petite figure and delicate art of the principal actress were often lost in the largeness of her surroundings.

Maude Adams and James M. Barrie seem to have been, artistically, born for each other. At any rate, it is in his plays--_The Little Minister_, _Quality Street_, _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_,--that she has deservedly won her fame. The latest in the list is _The Legend of Leonora_, in which she has forsaken Chanticler’s feathers and Peter Pan’s breeches once more to don petticoats. It brings Miss Adams back to a doting public in a part that gives rein to her old time ability as a light _comédienne_. That a portion of this public is more or less shocked to see its beloved Maude Adams playing the part of a murderess--even though Leonora and her crime are amiable unrealities--indicates the strongly personal element in the popularity of the actress.[211]

This personal element has been introduced into the Maude Adams worship solely across the footlights. That is to say, the public knows next to nothing of her as a human being except as her personality is poured into and out of her work. Out of a native shyness as well as out of a desire to avoid publicity except as an actress, she carries her self-effacement off the stage to the last degree. She is never met at social gatherings, she has never addressed meetings or written magazine articles; she is seldom seen on the streets or driving in the park, and the occasions on which she has, in many years, gone to any theatre as one of the audience could be numbered on one’s fingers. She dresses with the utmost quietness and with small regard to current styles.

But her shrinking from “the general” is, one need hardly say, without trace of a sour attitude toward the world. She is said to be chary of personal friendships, but those who know her best speak glowingly of her bountiful kindness. She has, of course, made a great deal of money. A considerable share of it has gone, unostentatiously, to the relief of the needy. She is said to have a list of pensioners:--old, destitute players, or acquaintances of her early life.[212]

Miss Adams has always taken a keen interest in the mechanical side of the theatre. More than most actresses she knows the intricacies and the artistry of scenery and lighting, and has much to say of them when she is to appear in a new part. She has, indeed, her own office in the Empire Theatre building and there conducts the many details of organizing a production. In adoring a sweet and fragile woman her admirers are likely to forget that Maude Adams is a thoroughly trained woman of the theatre, of tried executive ability.

The sweetness and simplicity of Maude Adams herself and of her acting comes in part, one is tempted to think, from her very real love of nature. She has a New York home--and a quiet retreat it is--but her real abiding place, when her work permits, is at Sandygarth Farm on Long Island, where she owns what may fairly be called an estate. She has there her stables, her kennels, her fields under cultivation, her woods; and she knows the details of farming only less well than the secrets of stagecraft. She has, too, a bungalow in the Catskills. She is fond of riding and of long walks in the country. Books form an inevitable furnishing in all three houses. She has given herself a good schooling in French, and she is on more than speaking terms with the philosophers and poets. She likes foreign travel, and has made several trips to Europe and the near East. She plays well the piano and the harp and when opportunity offers she goes to symphony concerts. Altogether she is a serious-minded devotee of the essential, the beautiful and the simple. She is of course aware of her own great popularity. But the feeling it inspires in her is said by her friends to be one of humility and wonder. And whatever her rank as an artist, she has sent across the footlights her simplicity, her sense of sweetness and light, to be a beneficent influence. Her picture, cut from a magazine and pinned to the wall of a ranch house in the far West, or of a tenement in the slums of an Eastern city, is a symbol of something good added to American life.

SOME AMERICAN ACTRESSES OF TODAY

“There is no great acting now,” the veteran theatregoer will tell you. “The day of the stars has passed.” He who remembers vividly Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth and Madame Janauschek feels that times have changed indeed. And he is quite right. But sometimes he is sure, with Mr. Winter, that they have changed altogether for the worse. And there he is wrong. If it seems true that with the passing from our stage of Madame Modjeska, Miss Rehan and Miss Marlowe the robes of high priestess of our stage, to whom all the people delight to burn incense, grace alone the slender form of Miss Maude Adams, that fact does not necessarily argue a lack of genius in the artists that remain. We are, on the whole fortunately, abolishing the rank of high priestess.

All the women, with one or two exceptions, who are the subjects of the preceding chapters have been out-and-out exponents of the star system. It is an undesirable system, which is not essential to the theatre and which is only a passing phase, though it has lasted a matter of centuries, and though we owe to it many names that make illustrious the annals of the drama. It is undesirable because it subordinates the play, which first and last should be “the thing,” to the interpreter of the play, because it exercises a vicious influence on playwrights who write to clothe personalities rather than their own ideas, and an equally vicious influence on actors who think of plays primarily as opportunities for histrionic exploits. “But,” some one says, “did not Shakespeare himself write plays that are obviously for stars?” Well, he certainly wrote plays upon which starship has battened. Like any other good plays, however, Shakespeare’s plays are even better when the starship, as such, is left out, as any one will testify who has seen them acted without the extraneous element that is symbolized by enormous type on the play-bill.

To think of the theatre first of all in terms of actors and actresses is, however, natural enough. It is a popular way of looking at the theatre, and it would be idle to expect its total disappearance. And it would be ungrateful. Actors and actresses are public servants and benefactors, to whom recognition and praise are due. But recognition is one thing; starship, with all its adulations,--Bernhardtism,--is another. And there are good reasons for thinking that other aspects of the theatre are also becoming popular.

The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. As an incident in that liberation, the star system is on its way, not to destruction, for the actor of genius will always remain a compelling figure, but at least to broad modification. Starless casts and repertory companies have been plentiful enough to indicate the beginnings of a strong, new current.

Again, playwriting and acting, hand in hand, have become more realistic, more subtle, more psychological; there are far fewer opportunities for broad effects than in the old days, there is far less of the intense concentration of playwright and audience on a single character and a single actor or actress. It is probable that even if a Bernhardt or a Duse or a Cushman should spring up in our midst she would find effective physical and psychological barriers to an ascension to starship as those illustrious women have known it.

Very briefly indicated, these are some of the phases of the phenomenon that may easily be mistaken by the cherisher of traditions as the passing of first-rate acting. Though it is different in tone and method, and leads less often to extreme heights of public notice, acting to-day succeeds as well in its adaptation to the newer ideal of the primacy of the play as did the older school in the exaltation of the actor.

It is a rather odd circumstance that while the English stage is rich in its actors and comparatively scantily supplied with excellent actresses, the reverse is true in America, so far as concerns the younger generation. Our civilization seems to breed actresses thickly at home, and to entice them from abroad. When Edward Sothern, Otis Skinner, David Warfield, Henry Miller, Robert Mantell, John Drew, William Gillette and even Mr. Hackett, Mr. Faversham and Mr. Daly shall have retired from the stage, who is to help Ernest Glendinning and the imported Mr. Lou-Tellegen maintain the honors of their sex? But when Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams shall have followed Julia Marlowe into retirement, there still will be, even if Ethel Barrymore and Margaret Anglin should regrettably have left the stage, a considerable group of still younger actresses, none of whom may ever achieve stardom as it was once practiced, but each of whom fits with admirable ability into the newer order of things.

Better than almost any one else, Miss Barrymore represents the dangers of the star system. The daughter of one of America’s best actors, Maurice Barrymore,[213] and the niece of another, John Drew, she was a marked victim from the beginning. Charles Frohman made her a star in 1900, when she was twenty-one. She had had a scant half dozen years of training in her uncle’s company in America and in Henry Irving’s company in England, and had not played more than a dozen parts in all. She was made a star simply on the strength of a pleasing personality, intelligence, a pretty face, and a working grasp of stage behavior.

During the next decade, playing in pieces like _Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines_, _Cousin Kate_, and _Sunday_, she attracted and held a loyal public that liked to see her personality exploited in those comparatively insignificant plays, just as adoring theatregoers throng today to see Billie Burke and Marie Doro, whatever the slenderness and frothiness of the play. But let Miss Barrymore, in an effort to be a real actress, try her hand at submerging herself in an un-Barrymorelike character, in a play of any serious interest, and that adoring public was bewildered and disappointed and remained away from the theatre. Such are the fruits of thinking of the theatre in terms of the actor.

But Miss Barrymore had it in her to be a real actress. Once in a while, prompted by her ambition, she would do something that her fond followers would think was queer. Thus, during this decade, from 1900 to 1910, in the midst of her prosperous playing of popular pieces, she acted at one time or another _Carrots_, a one-act play from the French in which she gave a pathetic picture of the boy-hero; then, at a single plunge, Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_; then _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, a play that Barrie wrote for Ellen Terry, and in which Miss Barrymore, to the consternation of her peculiar public, appeared as a gray-haired matron; and finally _The Silver Box_, an unrelievedly serious and honest play by Galsworthy, in which she descended to the depths by acting an ordinary scrub-woman.

Not all of these did Miss Barrymore play signally well; her starship, limiting her to a play or two per year, had simply not afforded her the training to become the actress she has since shown herself to be. But in these brief experiments at least she was feeling her way out of the entanglements of theatrical pettiness.

When Miss Barrymore, in January, 1910, appeared in Pinero’s _Mid-Channel_, she had married and become a mother. Whether the admirers of her former girlish charm and slenderness liked it or not, she was now inevitably a deeper-natured and more mature woman and, consequently, capable of deeper and better acting. The fact was speedily proved in _Mid-Channel_. The play is a grim tragedy of English middle-class life, in which a fine-natured wife, after a gradual course of unhappy, deteriorating life with a selfish and sensual husband, ends her problems with suicide;--surely not one of the pretty Barrymore parts. “There will be hosts of the ‘Barrymore public,’ no doubt, who will feel that in _Mid-Channel_ they cannot laugh with her,” wrote Walter Prichard Eaton. “But to some more thoughtful men and women it is a source of rare satisfaction that at last the promise of that lovely voice and expressive face has been fulfilled, and you can weep with her, suffer with her, understand through the spell of her acting a little better the sorrows and perplexities of our frail humanity. In short, Miss Barrymore has become an actress.... Her many admirers, gathered in force, who evidently knew more about her than they cared about Pinero, were disposed to laugh in the first act during the scenes of her bickerings. But never after that did she allow them to suppose for an instant that they were not watching a serious and passionate study of a woman’s tragedy.”

After _Mid-Channel_, Miss Barrymore had to be considered as one of the artists of our stage, if she and her managers could only agree to let her remain so. She revived _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, and played it with far more feeling and a more convincing sense of maternity than she had shown before; she has played the insurgent wife in Barrie’s one-act masterpiece, _The Twelve-Pound-Look_, with a sure-handed mastery of the ironic and subtle that belongs only to a finished actress; she has, most recently of all, acted Madame Okraska, in the dramatization of _Tante_, with a keenness of insight into character and a finesse that showed again how far she had traveled since the days of _Captain Jinks_. Let us hope that henceforth Miss Barrymore’s unquestioned talent will not be allowed to expend itself on unworthy material.

Next to Mrs. Fiske, the leading actress of our contemporary stage is undoubtedly Margaret Anglin.[214] Her training has had a wider range, and her artistry a more varied accomplishment, than those of any other actress on our stage. Born in Canada of a non-theatrical family, she came to New York to study. She is one of our few brilliant actresses who have come to the stage by way of the dramatic schools. In 1894, when she was eighteen, she was Madeline West in Charles Frohman’s production of _Shenandoah_. When she was twenty she was playing Ophelia and Virginia in James O’Neill’s company, and from that day to this she has been one of America’s dependable and versatile stage artists.

A few years ago we thought of her as a powerful emotional actress who had come through an apprenticeship in barnstorming, and an early recognition of merit as Roxane to Mansfield’s Cyrano, to full measured achievement in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_, _The Great Divide_, and _The Awakening of Helena Ritchie_,--with a large number of plays and parts scattered in between. But of late years she has broadened her art and made secure her place among contemporary actresses not only by plunging wholeheartedly into a campaign in Shakespeare, but by ranging even farther and acting the heroines of Greek tragedy. Miss Anglin is as effective in comedy--witness _Green Stockings_ and _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ as recent instances, and her Lady Eastney in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_ for an earlier one--as she is in emotional rôles; she has acted in Australia as well as in America; she was the first artist to carry about the country a repertoire of plays set in accordance with the ideals of the new stagecraft; and as Mr. Eaton has said, “as a stage manager she has succeeded in reviving something of the atmosphere of good breeding, of polite comedy, of perfect ensemble and polish, which we associate with the memory of Lester Wallack.” It is an ample, dignified career, now happily at its height, of hard working service to the art of the actress.

When in 1913 Miss Anglin made herself a Shakespearean actress-manager, the size of her repertoire, the general excellence of her interpretations, and the revelation of the beauties of the new stage art that signalized her performances combined to give American theatregoers a new idea of her ability and broadening ambition. The plays were _The Taming of the Shrew_, _Twelfth Night_, _As You Like It_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_; the scenery in each case was a beautiful example--by Livingston Platt--of the imaginative revolt from old stage conventions that has notably marked the last decade; and Miss Anglin’s own women of Shakespeare,--though her Cleopatra was a comparative failure and was soon dropped from her repertoire, and though her Viola was to a degree lacking in high spirits--were charming and technically admirable impersonations.

In the Greek Theatre of the University of California at Berkeley, Miss Anglin has acted four of the classic dramas of ancient Greece,--the _Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of Sophocles, the _Iphigenia in Auris_ and the _Medea_ of Euripides. Though her training and her speech have always been primarily those of the modern actress, she has revealed in these classic tragedies a simplicity of method and an authority of voice and presence that few actresses, either of England or America, could equal. With Miss Lillah McCarthy presenting so beautifully the women of Greek tragedy at one end of the country, and Miss Anglin at the other, the classics have had a day of real, if brief, glory.

If the roster of American actresses is given a cosmopolitan aspect by the inclusion of the names of Edith Wynne Matthison, Martha Hedman, Hedwig Reicher and Bertha Kalich, all of whom lived many years in Europe, the most striking example of all is Alla Nazimova.[215] She was born in Russia, went to school in Switzerland, studied the violin at Odessa, the drama in Moscow, and after a few years’ apprenticeship in her native land and a year at St. Petersburg, she acted with Paul Orleneff’s company (of course, in Russian) in London. Coming then to America she played a season in Russian with her compatriots; and then, in June, 1906, having signed a contract to act in English in November of the same year, she set herself to the mastery of the new language, much as Modjeska had done thirty years before. She kept her word, and when the appointed time came she acted _Hedda Gabler_, which she followed during the next half-dozen years, with others of Ibsen’s plays: _A Doll’s House_, _The Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, as well as several other plays, like _The Comet_, _The Marionettes_, and _Bella Donna_, in none of which the actress possessed the significance that marked her when she confined herself to Ibsen.

To play first in an obscure hall on the lower East Side, then in two or three scarcely less obscure theatres, and then, a year and a half after her unheralded arrival, to act in a new tongue in one of New York’s leading theatres--it all makes one of the most dramatic of careers. If, however, Nazimova is “a tigress in the leash of art,” as Julius Huneker called her, an artist must hold the leash, or it becomes too much a circus tigress, going through the expected tricks, but in a cage of which she is always conscious. Nazimova did us a real service in her vivid impersonation of Ibsen’s heroines. Mrs. Fiske apart, no one else has done much for Ibsen in this country. But apparently she cannot go on playing Ibsen profitably; her art, which “expresses itself in a continual physical virtuosity which startles and thrills,” does not find an outlet in the sort of play English and American dramatists are likely to write; and, as Mr. Ruhl points out, “of late she has drifted far from her simpler beginnings and over-accented the more exotic side of her personality as if determined to ‘run it into the ground.’” Like another actress of striking talent, Nance O’Neil, Madame Nazimova is idle chiefly because she and the dramatists seem unable to meet on a common ground.

The case for the poetic actress is little better. After acquiring in England a thorough grounding in her profession, Edith Wynne Matthison[216] came to America in 1903 and played _Everyman_ with a dignity, a charm of voice and person, and a poetic poignancy that made the fifteenth-century “morality” forever memorable for any one who saw it. After brief experiments with Viola, Portia, and Kate Hardcastle, she returned to England, and then, after dividing the intervening years between her old home and her new, she settled more or less permanently in America in 1910, when she joined the company of the New Theatre. She must be regarded as of the American theatre.

Miss Matthison is preëminently a poetic actress. Her moods and methods, her rich and tender voice, her whole training and personality fit her rarely for the realization of the heroines of poetic drama. How truly this is not the age of the poetic drama, however, is shown by the short list of rôles--outside of Shakespeare’s heroines--that Miss Matthison has had, at once adapted to her and worthy of her talents. At the New Theatre she played Sister Beatrice in Maeterlinck’s play of that name, _The Piper_, and Light in _The Blue Bird_. And the New Theatre was not wholly a response to public taste; it was largely an attempt to foster it. For the rest, Miss Matthison’s American appearances (and her English experience was similar) have been distributed among many plays of many kinds, some of them excellent, like _The Great Divide_ and _The Servant in the House_, but all of them rather beside the point, so far as Miss Matthison’s peculiar talent was concerned. When she played, and beautifully played, Andromache in Mr. Barker’s recent production of _The Trojan Women_, she again came briefly into her own.

If Miss Anglin and Miss Matthison almost exhaust our list of first-rate poetic actresses (now that Miss Marlowe has retired), the case is far otherwise with the _comédiennes_. There are two, at least,--Grace George and Laura Hope Crews,--who are practiced adepts, thoroughly at home amid the subtleties of high comedy.