Part 5

The suddenly achieved result was that Sienkiewicz sailed for America in a few months, and the others arranged to follow. Modjeska obtained leave of absence from the president of the theatre, who cheerfully expected her to come back, but fixed a forfeit of six thousand roubles if she did not. In June, 1876, she appeared in Warsaw for the last time. There was a great popular demonstration. The house was crowded and to the highest degree enthusiastic. After the performance the audience formed a double rank to the gates of the theatre grounds and shouted their farewells and praises. The public, at least, was with her to the last.[57]

In July, 1876, she sailed from Bremen for New York, with Count Chlapowski, her son Rudolphe, Jules Sypniewski, his wife and two children, and Lucian Paprocki,--a strange band of pilgrims, artists with little but their ideals and comradeship to fit them for pioneering in a strange country, headed by a woman who was giving up a career of _grande dame_ and _première artiste_ for the prospect of life on a farm eight thousand miles or so from the scene of her triumphs!

Modjeska had never seen the ocean, and the voyage of thirteen days was invigorating. Her party spent about a month in New York, making excursions to Philadelphia to see the exposition, where she admired the vegetables and fruits from California, experimented with those dainties new to her, pop-corn and peanuts, and found them tasteless, and visited the art exhibits. New York of 1876 she thought a “monstrous, untidy bazaar.” In August they started for California, taking ship for Panama. She found charming her first glimpse of the tropics, during the railroad trip across the Isthmus, and the three weeks’ voyage on the Pacific went far to restore her vigor and peace of mind.

The impression has been that Modjeska returned to the stage because of the failure of the farming experiment which was now to be made. To a certain extent this is true, but even before she reached California she certainly had vague plans to act again. In a letter from New York she had said: “It seems that I may be able to play in English, but first we must go to California, according to our original plan.... Perhaps after we get established in this new paradise I may pick up enough English to play there, and when I get more mastery over the new language, I may come here; for, however unattractive New York seems to me, it is the metropolis of America, and it will give me pleasure to conquer it.” This was surely forecasting the future. When she reached San Francisco, Edwin Booth was playing there. It was proposed that she act Ophelia in Polish, to his _Hamlet_. Rather to her relief, Booth, who had never heard of her, declined. She saw him as Antony and as Shylock and of course recognized him as the great actor that he was, though as yet she could not understand English.[58]

As for the community farming experiment at Anaheim, it was a failure that would appear ludicrous if it were not for its element of tragedy. All of the experimenters were desperately homesick, and none of them had the least practical notion of the task they had set themselves. They talked more than they worked, quarreled and made up, and were generally helpless. Modjeska, the queen of the Warsaw stage, did the cooking, with the frightened assistance of a Polish maid they had taken from a convent to be a helper with the children.[59] They had several cows, but no one knew how to milk them, and their butter and milk they had to buy. The orange trees were too young to bear, the season was dry, the neighbors’ cattle ate the barley, the dogs ate the eggs, and the ready money was fast disappearing. The unfortunate town-bred would-be farmers were doomed to failure from the start. So Modjeska determined upon the courageous and difficult course which brought in time so great an addition to her fame. She decided to go to San Francisco, learn English, and go upon the American stage.

In March, 1877, she wrote from San Francisco to a friend in Poland: “I am hard at work, studying. That was my secret plan, at the very beginning of our venture. Country life was simply to restore my health and strength, which it did so effectively that people give me twenty-four or twenty-six years of age, not more.... Next autumn I want to ask the president[60] which he prefers, either six thousand roubles for breaking my contract, or my return in two years with fame.”

She could not have returned to Warsaw, indeed, had she wished to do so, for she was now poor. She even sold some of her family silver to maintain herself and her son in San Francisco while Mr. Chlapowski[61] was winding up the affairs of the farm. With a young Polish-American woman as tutor, she labored incessantly with English, and to such good effect that in about six months, having gotten Adrienne and Juliet letter-perfect, she applied for an engagement at the California Theatre. John McCullough was the star and manager, but he was absent. His representative, Barton Hill, knew nothing of Madame Modjeska and told her there was no opportunity to engage her as a star. Her friend the tutor persisted, and obtained an appointment for a hearing, but when Modjeska presented herself at the theatre he found himself unable to keep the engagement. She was deeply discouraged. A star of the first magnitude at home, here she had to beg for a hearing, and then be refused. When she again applied at the theatre and Mr. Hill sent word that he was too busy to see her, she was genuinely humiliated. Some Polish friends interceded, however, and a rehearsal was arranged. Mr. Hill at last heard her, in an act of _Adrienne Lecouvreur_. He was unprepared for what he was to experience, for so far as he knew she was merely another “society woman” with a craze for the stage. She was stung to her best efforts, and at the end of the scene Mr. Hill was a changed man.[62] Modjeska was to have a week, more if possible. She had to go through another trial when Mr. McCullough returned, but the result was a fortnight’s engagement. On the first night, playing in a strange tongue, she was quite free from nervousness, and knowing the part well did it full justice. She sent a dispatch of a single word, “Victory,” to her husband; the newspapers pronounced her appearance “the most confirmed dramatic triumph that ever occurred in the city”; Sienkiewicz, then in San Francisco, sent a glowing letter to his Warsaw paper, and Modjeska’s American career was launched.[63]

The next morning at eight o’clock an enterprising theatrical manager called to propose her appearance in the eastern cities. In December, 1877, after less than a year’s study of English she appeared as a star in New York. The story of her career in Poland had been one of long continued striving, of years of mingled hard work and disappointment, and of final brilliant success. In America, by what has become in stage annals a classical example of will and courage, she attained equally brilliant success in a few weeks, in a foreign land and in a recently acquired tongue.

It was not long before Modjeska was firmly established as an international artist--a title that has been applied with justification to actresses only very rarely. From this time, in the early eighties, until the close of the century she led the life of such an artist--known to the theatregoers of two continents as no other of her time save only Bernhardt. Her American tours brought her before the public throughout the country, her name was equally familiar in the various cities of the British Isles, while during her frequent visits to Poland she acted in her own tongue among those to whom she had become one of the country’s glories.[64]

In seeking the reasons for Modjeska’s brilliant success and in estimating her as an actress, one at once recognizes that she was first of all a woman of great charm, dignity and intelligence. She was a _grande dame_, a woman who was also a “lady,” in the best sense of that miscellaneous word. Her friendships in her native Poland included literally almost every one who was distinguished or gave promise of being so. Though born among the people, by unaffected personal worth she found herself at once at home among the aristocracy into which she married, an aristocracy of genuine breeding and simplicity. As we shall see, her record of friendships in England and America was of the kind that is achieved only by a choice spirit.

Provided she remains herself simple and well-poised, a woman of this sort, when placed on the stage, has an obvious advantage in parts such as Modjeska’s over the woman who with equal technical ability has not had the same experience of the world. Without in the least forfeiting acting ability or a capacity for identifying herself with a character, Modjeska was plainly a gracious and noble-spirited woman. This quality came over the footlights to her audience and was one of the secrets of her appeal. “To mention her name, as the years drift away, will be to recall a presence of stately dignity, of tender poetic beauty, of exquisite refinement, and of perfect grace.... Her ministration as an actress has taught again the old and precious lesson that poetry is not a dream.”[65]

Modjeska’s art was fine tempered, subtle, delicate. She was not physically robust, her voice was not the great tragic voice of a Rachel, nor had it the thrilling tones of a Mary Anderson. And there was always between her and her English speaking audiences the intangible film of difference of speech, for obviously her pronunciation could never be perfect. Yet by a genuinely dramatic insight that was indisputably hers, a spontaneous naturalness of word and gesture, and her great power of quiet intensity, she achieved a forcefulness far beyond that possible to mere physical and vocal effort.

An example of her individual quality is afforded by her impersonation of the heroine of _Camille_. In the hands of other actresses the play had seemed “a piece that befogs moral perceptions and perplexes all sentiments of right and duty.” Yet Modjeska’s Marguérite Gauthier redeemed the play and made its heroine a real and tragic woman. “As we think upon it,” said William Winter, “there rises in fancy a lithe, willowy figure, just touched with a kind of strange richness--and whose every movement is perfect grace. The face is pallid with sorrow; the large, dark, liquid eyes are full of mournful light; the voice pierces to the heart in its tones of supplication, and vibrates with a nameless thrill of despairing agony. This figure obeys in every motion the feeling that possesses it. The tumult of self-reproach, the bitterness of doubt, the ecstasy of contented and confiding love, the mingled torment and sublimity of enforced self-sacrifice, the devotion to virtuous purpose, and the conflict betwixt earthly hope and heavenly resignation are all expressed by it with the elements of absolute sincerity and in a form responsive to the nicest touch of the guiding thought which controls every particle of the work. It is impossible to recognize with too much acceptance the splendid mechanism with which the _artiste_ acts. It is a network of movement, attitudes, gestures, pauses, glances, and quiet, indescribable, subtle suggestions which, altogether, is faultless in delicacy and superb in completeness.” This comes from one who watched Modjeska’s career with the kindly interest of a friend, but it states with fairness, if with enthusiasm, the distinctive qualities of Modjeska’s acting.

Great, however, as were Modjeska’s achievements as a tragic actress, it was in Shakespearean comedy, that, in the opinion of many, she succeeded most individually. Hers was essentially the imaginative style of acting, and to Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice and Portia she gave character and individuality as well as charm and grace. “To get out of myself,” she said of her work, “to forget all about Helena Modjeska, to throw my whole soul into the assumed character, to lead its life, to be moved by its emotions, thrilled by its passions, to suffer or rejoice,--in one word, to identify myself with it and reincarnate another soul and body, this became my ideal, the goal of all my aspirations, and at the same time the enchantment and attraction of my work.” Thus her Rosalind and her Viola were not mere graceful, spirited women. There was, besides, an idealization that lifted them into the realm of poetry and a sense of impersonation that was a fitting response to the imagination with which the characters were conceived.

With Modjeska’s first American tour began the formation of that circle of friendships outside the theatre that would alone mark her as an extraordinary woman. The names must suffice: Longfellow, Richard Watson Gilder, Grant, Sherman, Henry Watterson, Eugene Field; and in Europe: Tennyson, Lowell, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Watts, Justin McCarthy, George Brandes, Hans von Bülow. With Longfellow, perhaps, was her most cherished friendship. During her first visit to Boston he called on her at her hotel and she and her son went to his house in Cambridge. “I said I would gladly study some passages from his poems and recite them to him, and I mentioned _Hiawatha_, but he stopped me with the words: ‘You do not want to waste your time in memorizing those things, and don’t you speak of _Hiawatha_, or I will call you Mudjikiewis, which, by the way, sounds somewhat like your name.’”[66]

It was Longfellow who urged Modjeska to act in London--the very summit of her ambition. When in 1880 she had repeated there her American success he wrote to her: “Now I can add my congratulations on your triumphal entry into London. How pleasant it is to be able to say, ‘I told you so!’ And did I not tell you so? Am I not worthy to be counted among the Minor Prophets? I cannot tell you how greatly rejoiced I am at this new success--this new wreath of laurel.” For London was immediately won. Public, critics, society and fellow actors united to make her welcome.

Poland, a small and unhappy country, has done more than its share in furnishing the world with artists. With some of the most famous of them Modjeska’s name is curiously linked. Paderewski, during her visit to Poland in 1884, used to come to visit her. He was then a young man of twenty-one whom it was impossible to keep away from the piano. She encouraged him, overcame his doubts as to his fitness for a public career, and that summer they appeared in the same program in Cracow. They were friends during the rest of her life, and it was Paderewski who in 1905 inspired the great farewell testimonial to Modjeska in New York. “The first encouraging words I heard as a pianist,” he wrote, “came from her lips; the first successful concert I had in my life was due to her assistance.” It was she, too, who years before, in a Polish mountain summer resort, first brought Jan and Eduard de Reszke before an audience. They were both then under twenty.

In 1893 Madame Modjeska was one of four actresses[67] who addressed the Women’s Congress at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Besides her appearance before the Congress as an actress, she was asked to speak on another occasion as a representative of Poland. The women who were expected from Poland evidently feared the Czar’s displeasure in case they spoke frankly concerning their country, and failed to appear in Chicago. But Modjeska spoke her mind freely concerning the grievances of the Poles. She was widely quoted in the papers, and news of her speech reached St. Petersburg. Playing two years later in Poland, she was about to act in Warsaw when word came from the Russian government forbidding her appearance. Plans were made for an engagement in St. Petersburg itself, but at the last moment, when large sums had already been spent in preparation, she was told that her appearance in the capital was forbidden. Shortly afterwards Modjeska and her husband were ordered to leave Warsaw, and an imperial decree was issued to the effect that they were never thereafter to enter any part of the Russian territory. Efforts were often made to obtain permission to go to Warsaw, but to the end of her life Modjeska was excluded from the Czar’s dominions.[68]

In April, 1905, Madame Modjeska, then living in practical retirement in California, received a letter signed by a number of authors, fellow actors and artists in New York which acknowledged in affectionate terms their debt and gratitude for her career, and offered her a public testimonial in New York. This was the idea of Paderewski, who had visited her in California but a short time before and like many others was disturbed by the lack of public acclaim with which she was modestly sinking into retirement.[69] The great pianist, much to his distress, was prevented by an accident from being present, but the best known actors appearing in New York at the time lent their services. Modjeska herself played scenes from _Macbeth_ and _Mary Stuart_. Edmund Clarence Stedman presented to Madame Modjeska a memorial scroll bearing signatures of her many friends, actors, actresses, and her “attached votaries in other walks of life--all made associates,” Mr. Stedman said in addressing her, “by their delight in your genius and career. A quarter-century ago you came to us from a land invested with traditions of valor, beauty, and romance, from the brave and soulful country that flashed its sword in our behalf and that in our own times enthralls us with music,[70] and through you with impassioned tenderness and artistic power. The felicities of art are limitless, and, as in creations of our master playwright you found the most alluring range for your own powers, so your fresh impersonations woke in us the sense of ‘something rich and strange.’”

Modjeska, with tears in her eyes and her voice breaking with emotion, briefly expressed her gratitude.

“Long may your enviable years flow on,” Mr. Stedman had said. But it was only four years later that she died,[71] in California, where she had always maintained her home, in a beautiful country place she called Arden, not far from the scene of that ill-starred venture which after all had its justification in giving to America a great actress. She was buried in Cracow, the city of her birth.

“Hail to thee upon thy return to thy last resting place,” said Michael Tarasiewicz at her funeral, “welcome thou, who might say of thyself as did Countess Idalia: ‘I am here as a passing angel. I have let thee see the lightning and disappeared upon the firmament of the sky.’... For thy art, for thy constant work, for that thou hast never become renegade to thy ideal, and that, in perfecting thy soul, thou hast been perfecting the soul of humanity, be blessed.”

ELLEN TERRY

There was, in Sir Walter Scott’s day, an actor named Daniel Terry, who was a part proprietor of the Adelphi Theatre in London. He was furnished funds for that venture by Sir Walter, and according to Lockhart enjoyed a large share of Scott’s regard and confidence. An effort has sometimes been made to identify this Terry with the family that in the latter half of the nineteenth century furnished England with some of her most accomplished stage artists. But the connection was one of name only, for Benjamin Terry, the father of Ellen, was the son of an Irish builder, and eloped with the daughter of a Scottish minister.

Benjamin Terry and his wife, the parents of Ellen, were both actors, not reckoned among the brilliant stars of their day, but respectably talented, well-trained actors of the old school, better known in the provinces than in the metropolis. Benjamin Terry was “a handsome, fine-looking brown-haired man,” and his wife “a tall, graceful creature, with an abundance of fair hair, and with big blue eyes set in a charming face.” On the outlying “circuits,” in Edinburgh, and later in the London company of Charles Kean, they were reasonably successful in their profession; but their distinction--and a sufficient one surely--is their remarkable family of sons and daughters. “Think of it,” wrote Clement Scott; “Kate, with her lovely figure and comely features; Ellen, with her quite indescribable charm; Marion, with a something in her deeper, more tender, and more feminine than either of them; Florence, who became lovelier as a woman than as a girl; and the brothers Fred and Charles, both splendid specimens of the athletic Englishman.”[72]

It was while Benjamin Terry and his wife were playing in Coventry that, on February 27, 1848, their second daughter, Ellen Alicia, was born. Coventry is proud of the fact, and there has been a rather brisk dispute as to which house was the birthplace.[73]

From her earliest childhood, Ellen Terry knew the theatre and its people. She was not one of those who, like Mary Anderson or Modjeska, are forced to cherish ambitions in secret, for naturally and inevitably the theatre absorbed her. She and her sister Kate, four years her elder, were in their early girlhood as firmly established as popular favorites as actresses of that age can be.

Ellen Terry’s fame has exceeded that of any other of Benjamin Terry’s large family, but when she began her stage career she was naturally known as Kate Terry’s little sister. Before Ellen made her first appearance, at the age of eight, Kate had achieved marked success, for a child, in Charles Kean’s company, and until she was twenty-three, when she married and retired from the stage, she was recognized as one of England’s leading actresses. The third of the Terry sisters, Marion, and the youngest, Florence, had less distinguished but creditable careers. There has not been a better instance of the hereditary beauty and talent that occasionally concentrate in theatrical families.

Benjamin Terry and his wife became members of the company which about the middle of the century the younger Kean gathered at the Princess’s Theatre. Whatever the disappointments of Charles Kean’s career, he was earnestly devoted to his art, he greatly developed the scenic equipment of the stage of his day, and he made the Princess’s Theatre an excellent school of acting.

Benjamin Terry not only acted parts at the Princess’s, but assisted with the productions and stage management. Naturally enough, when Kean’s series of Shakespearean revivals required the appearance of children, the young Terry sisters were chosen. They had received what training their parents could give them. “It must be remembered,” Ellen Terry long afterward wrote, “that my sister and I had the advantage of exceedingly clever and conscientious parents, who spared no pains to bring out and perfect any talents that we possessed. My father was a very charming elocutionist, and my mother read Shakespeare beautifully, and they both were very fond of us and saw our faults with eyes of love, though they were unsparing in their corrections. And, indeed, they had need of all their patience; for my own part, I know I was a most troublesome, wayward pupil.” Her father was constantly calling for impromptu rehearsals of her lines--at the table, in the street or ’bus--whenever opportunity came. She remembers vividly going into a drug store, where her father stood her on a chair to say her part for the proprietor.