Mr. Lawrence Barrett the Brilliant and his Brother Joseph the
Unfortunate.
There were few stars with whom I took greater pleasure in acting than
with Mr. Lawrence Barrett. I sometimes wonder if even now this profession
really knows what great reason it has to be proud of him. He was a man
respected by all, admired by many, and if loved but by few, theirs was a
love so profound and so tender it amply sufficed.
We are a censorious people, and just as our greatest virtue is generosity
in giving, so our greatest fault is the eagerness with which we seek out
the mote in our neighbor's eye, without feeling the slightest desire for
the removal of the beam in our own eye. Thus one finds that the first and
clearest memory actors have of Mr. Barrett is of his irascible temper and
a certain air of superiority, not of his erudition, of the high position
he won socially as well as artistically, of the almost Titanic struggle
of his young manhood with adverse circumstances.
Nor does that imply the slightest malice on their part. Actors, as a
family trait, have a touch of childishness about them which they come by
honestly enough. We all know the farther we get from infancy the weaker
the imagination grows. Now it is imagination that makes the man an actor,
so it is not wonderful if with the powerful creative fancy of childhood
he should also retain a touch of its petulance and self-consciousness.
Thus to many actors Mr. Barrett's greatness is lost sight of in the
memory of some dogmatic utterance or sharp reproval that wounded
self-love.
It would seem like presumption for me to offer any word of praise for the
artistic work of his later years; the world remembers it; the world
knows, too, how high he climbed, how secure was his position; but twice I
have heard the stories of his earlier years--some from the lips of his
brave wife, once from the lips of that beloved brother Joe, who was yet
his dread and sorrow--and at each telling my throat ached at the pain of
it, while my nerves thrilled with admiration for such endurance, such
splendid determination.
A paradox is, I believe, something seemingly absurd, yet true in fact. In
that case I was not so very far wrong, in spite of general laughter,
when, after my first rehearsal with him, I termed Mr. Barrett a man of
cold enthusiasm. "But," one cried to me, "you stupid--that's a paradox!
don't you see your words contradict each other?"
"Well," I answered, with shame-faced obstinacy, "perhaps they do, but
they are not contradicted by _him_. You all call him icy-cold, and _I_
know he is truly enthusiastic over the possibilities of this play, so
that makes what I call cold enthusiasm, however par-a-paradoxy (?) _it_
sounds."
And now, after all the years, I can approve that childish judgment. He
was a man whose intellectual enthusiasm was backed by a cold
determination that would never let him say "die" while he had breath in
his body and a stage to rehearse on.
I have a miserable memory for names, and often in the middle of a remark
the name I intended to mention will pass from my remembrance utterly; so,
all my life, I have had the very bad habit of trying to make my hearers
understand whom I meant by imitating or mentioning some trait peculiar to
the nameless one, and I generally succeeded.
As, for instance, when I wished to tell whom I had seen taking away a
certain book, I said: "It was Mr.--er--er, oh, you know, Mr.--er, why
this man," and I pulled in my head like a turtle and hitched up my
shoulders to my ears, and the anxious owner cried: "Oh, Thompson has it,
has he?" Thompson having, so far as _we_ could see, no neck at all--my
pantomime suggested his name.
Everyone can recall the enormous brow of Mr. Barrett, and how beneath his
great, burning eyes his cheeks hollowed suddenly in, thinning down to his
sensitive mouth. I was on the stage in New Orleans, the first morning of
my engagement there (I was under Mr. Daly's management, but he had loaned
me for a fortnight), and I started out with: "Mr. Daly said to please ask
Mr.----," away went the name--goodness gracious, should I forget my own
name next!