influenced by the melodramas and farces of his youth, as has already
been noted; and it was natural that they should tempt adapters to
dramatize them. They abounded in robustly drawn character, often
verging into caricature; and therefore they appealed to the actor.
They had episodes of violence certain to prove attractive to the
public which liked to be powerfully moved and which had little
delicacy as to the passions portrayed. Dickens’s sprawling serials
were too straggling in story ever to make it possible to compress
them into a solidly built framework of plot; but it was not difficult
to disentangle a succession of situations sufficient to make an
effective panorama of action, peopled with familiar figures. And of
these there have been an unnumbered host.
If Thackeray’s novels lend themselves less temptingly to the
paste-and-scissors method of the dramatizer, they had an immediate
vogue and an enduring reputation, which have allured a host of
playwrights, most of whom have confined their exertion to the
singling out of a salient character and to the presentation in a
play of the more important situations in which this personality is
involved, utilizing the other figures and the other episodes only
in so far as these might be necessary to set off the chosen hero or
heroine. Naturally enough it is upon ‘Vanity Fair’ that they have
laid hands most frequently. The final monthly part of the original
publication had scarcely been issued when John Brougham ventured upon
a stage-version of it, which he produced at Burton’s theater in New
York in 1849.
This was an attempt to dramatize the novel as a whole, although
necessarily Becky Sharp held the center of the stage. There was
a revival of Brougham’s adaptation a few years later; there was
another attempt by George Fawcett Rowe; and then in 1893 Sir James
Barrie made a one-act playlet out of the last glimpse of Becky that
Thackeray affords us, when she and Jos. Sedley, Amelia and Dobbin
find themselves together in the little German watering-place and when
Amelia learns the truth about her dead husband’s advances to Becky.
Sir James has kindly informed me that he thinks that every word
spoken in his little piece was Thackeray’s, “but some of them were
probably taken from different chapters.”
A few years later two other Becky Sharp pieces were produced, one on
either side of the Atlantic. The American play was adroitly prepared
by Langdon Mitchell; it was called ‘Becky Sharp’; it was produced
in 1899 and it has been revived at least once since; Mrs. Fiske was
the Becky. The British play was by Robert Hichens and Cosmo Gordon
Lennox; it was originally performed in London, with Marie Tempest as
Becky; and she came over to the United States to present it a few
times at the New Theater in New York in 1910.
A similar method—the method of focussing the attention of the
audience on a single dominating personality and of excluding all
the episodes in which this personality was not supreme—was followed
in more recent plays cut out of the ‘Newcomes’ and ‘Pendennis.’ No
doubt this was the only possible way of dramatizing novels of such
complexity of episode. Brownell has declared that the range of the
‘Newcomes’ is extraordinary for the thread of a single story to
follow:
Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are numerous and
varied. It is Thackeray’s largest canvas, and it is filled with the
greatest ease and to the borders.... It illustrates manners with
an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of which, without
repetition or confusion, without digression or discord, exhibits
the control of the artist equally with the imaginative and creative
faculty of the poet.
A story as vast as the ‘Newcomes’ simply defies the dramatizer; and
all he can do is to build his play about a single group or, better
still, around a single character, relentlessly excluding all the
other allied groups of personages not less interesting in themselves.
This has been the method, it may be recorded, chosen by the several
French playwrights who have been moved to make dramas out of one or
another of the almost equally complex novels of Balzac.
So it was that Michael Morton made a ‘Colonel Newcome’ piece for
Beerbohm Tree in 1906 and that Langdon Mitchell made a ‘Major
Pendennis’ piece for John Drew in 1916. So it was that Francis
Burnand made a ‘Jeames’ piece for Edward Terry in 1878 out of the
‘Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche.’ Altho Edward Terry was an amusing
Jeames and altho Nelly Farren was an amusing Mary Ann Hoggins,
the “New and Original Comedy” (as its adapter styled it) did not
strike me as amusing in itself; it was three-quarters Burnand and
barely one quarter Thackeray—and the blending was not to my taste.
As I sat through the performance patiently I came to understand the
provocation which had led a gallery boy to shout down to Burnand as
he took the author’s curtain call on the first night,—“I say, Frank,
it’s a good thing Thackeray is dead, isn’t it?”
As the author had provided the ‘History of Henry Esmond’ with a
unifying figure, the dramatizers have only too abundant material for
a chronicle-play showing him at different periods in his long and
honorable career. To make a compact play, a true drama, out of the
protracted story, would be plainly impossible, yet it might not be so
difficult to select salient episodes which would serve as a succinct
summary of the story. But altho the attempt has been made several
times—once for Henry Irving—no one of the versions has ever been put
up for a run in any of the principal playhouses of either New York
or London. In any dramatization one scene would impose itself, the
scene in which Esmond breaks his sword before the prince whom he has
loyally served, the scene in which Thackeray is most truly dramatic
in the noblest sense of the word. If this had been put on the stage
it would have been only a rendering unto the theater of a thing that
belonged to the theater, since perhaps Thackeray had it suggested to
him by the corresponding scene in the opera of ‘The Favorite’—altho
the suggestion may also have come from the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne’ or
from the later play which Dumas made out of his own story.
There remains to be mentioned only one other dramatization, that
of the ‘Rose and the Ring,’ made by H. Savile Clark in 1890. From
all accounts the performance of this little play, with its music by
Walter Slaughter, provided a charming spectacle for children, one to
which we may be sure that Thackeray would have had no objection and
which indeed might have delighted his heart.
IV
It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is
continually telling us that this or that character went to the play.
He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful
Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published
anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond
had the whole impression destroyed. And the first of the George
Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of
them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas
the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky
Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a
most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the
hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who
failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg
in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage,
since her mother had been a ballet-dancer.
Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a
novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of
a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth
century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and
actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in ‘Pendennis’
we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under
the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays
is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that
Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light
of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon
and all those poor theatrical people in that charming book,” said
Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And
what a good humor!”
Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the
penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find
in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’
there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait
of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical
novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show
the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior
intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display
it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the
mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly
Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was
not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She
had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the
tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which
would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.
Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently
uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater
has been credited to the superior intellect of her brother, John
Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was
always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé
recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and
transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity
of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she
said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could
play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a
genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer;
and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who
has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given
by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her.
Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far
duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality.
She was teachable and Little Bows taught her.
He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil
learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set
and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable
patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made
her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or
ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored.
She might not be grateful, but she knew very well who had made her;
she said so simply enough, explaining why she had not earlier played
the more important parts, “I didn’t take the leading business then; I
wasn’t fit for it till Bows taught me.”
So it was that Adrienne Lecouvreur, in the play which Scribe and
Legouvé wrote for Rachel, thanked the little old prompter, Michonnet,
who had taught her, “I was ungrateful in saying I had never had
a teacher. There is a kind-hearted man, a sincere friend, whose
counsels have always sustained me.” And Legouvé has told us that at
one of the rehearsals Rachel suddenly turned from Regnier, who was
the Michonnet, and knelt before Samson, who was the Duc de Bouillon,
and addressed this speech directly to him.
It would be interesting to know whether Thackeray ever saw ‘Adrienne
Lecouvreur,’ which was produced in Paris in April, 1849, six months
before ‘Pendennis’ began to appear in monthly parts.
(1920)
IX
MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER
IX
MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER
I
Mark Twain was a born story-teller; he was a born actor; he was not
affrighted by the idea of facing an audience; he was fond of the
theater; he lived in a time when the drama was regaining its proud
position in our literature and when men of letters who had begun as
novelists were turning dramatists. Why is it that he did not leave
us even one play worthy to be set by the side of the ‘Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn’? Why is it that the only piece of his which was
successful on the stage, is a poor thing, not wholly his own? Why
is it that he did not persevere in playwriting as did his fellow
humorists, George Bernard Shaw and George Ade, and his fellow
story-tellers, Barrie and Tarkington?
These are questions which must have occurred to not a few of his
admirers; and they are questions to which it is not easy to find
an immediate answer. Yet there must be an explanation of some sort
for this puzzling fact; and there may be profit in trying to
discover it. Even if the answer shall prove to be incomplete and
unsatisfactory, the inquiry is worth while for its own sake.
II
That Mark Twain was a born story-teller needs no argument; and that
he was a born actor was equally evident not only to his few intimates
but to all the many who heard him talk on his feet. If any witness
must be called, the best would be Howells, his friend for forty
years; and Howells’s testimony is emphatic and decisive. He tells us
Mark
held that an actor doubled the value of the author’s words; and
he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most
consummate actor, with this difference from other actors, that he
was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to which
his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the
art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative.
This quotation is from Howells’s introduction to the collection of
Mark’s speeches; and I take another from ‘My Mark Twain’:
He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it
was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform
he was the great and finished actor he probably would not have
been on the stage.... When he read his manuscript to you, it was
with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic
qualities.... He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic;
and rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make
others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every art to that end.
As a born actor, he understood the necessity of preparation and
rehearsal. He left nothing to chance. He knew how his effects
ought to be made; and he knew how to make them. Even his seemingly
spontaneous after-dinner speeches were thought out and worked out,
in every minutest detail of inflection and hesitation. In his
‘How to Tell a Story’ he insisted that the total impression of
his hair-raising ghost-story, the ‘Golden Arm,’ depended upon the
exact calculation of a certain pause; and I can testify that on the
only occasion I had the pleasure of hearing him tell the gruesome
tale—one summer evening in 1890 at Onteora, in a cabin dimly lit
by a flickering wood fire—the pause was long enough to be almost
unbearable.
He stood in no fear of an audience, because he had an imperturbable
self-confidence, rooted in a knowledge of his certain power of
impressing all who came within sound of his voice. Moreover, he
possessed to the end of his life the boyish delight in being
conspicuous that he ascribed to Tom Sawyer. It is true that he was
diffident before he had proved himself as a lecturer; and in a
little speech he made after a musical recital given by his daughter
in 1906, he described his trepidation when he was about to make his
first appearance before an audience:
I had stage-fright then for the first and last time.... After the
first agonizing five minutes, my stage-fright left me, never to
return. I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make
a good showing—and I intend to.
When he was living in Hartford he often took part in private
theatricals, the other performers being members of his own household.
After a performance of a dramatization of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’
by the children of the Educational Alliance in 1907, he was called
upon for a speech and he told the thousand little spectators that
he had himself acted the part of Miles Hendon twenty-two years
earlier. One of his daughters had been the Prince and the daughter
of a neighbor was the Pauper. Mrs. Clemens was the dramatist and
stage-manager. “Our coachman was the assistant stage-manager, second
in command.”
He had many friends among stage-folk, authors, actors and managers.
He accepted the invitation to make the opening address at the
Actors’ Fund Fair in 1907. He lent William Gillette the money which
enabled that veracious actor to start his career. He once gave a
characteristically amusing account of his success in passing through
the sternly defended stage-entrance to Daly’s Theater. At a dinner to
Henry Irving in London in June, 1900, he declared that
the greatest of all arts is to write a drama. It is a most
difficult thing. It requires the highest talents possible and the
rarest gifts. No, there is another talent that ranks with it—for
anybody can write a drama—I have written about four hundred—but to
get one accepted requires real ability. And I have never had that
felicity yet.
He was a persistent playgoer, altho his visits to the theater were
less frequent in later life than they had been earlier. He took the
drama seriously, as he took the other facts of life; and he thought
that the American theater was not doing its duty by the American
people. In an illuminating article “About Play-Acting,” published in
a magazine in 1898 (and most unaccountably not included in any of
the volumes of his complete works) he described a tragedy which he
had seen at the Burg Theater in Vienna. Then he listed the shows on
exhibition in New York in a single week; and he drew a moral from the
contrast:
It is right and wholesome to have these light comedies and
entertaining shows; and I shouldn’t wish to see them diminished.
But none of us is _always_ in the comedy spirit; we have our graver
moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape
them. These moods have their appetites,—healthy and legitimate
appetites—and there ought to be some way of satisfying them.
It seems to me that New York ought to have one theater devoted
to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy
outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support
it. America devotes more time, labor, money and attention to
distributing literary and musical culture among the general
public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her
neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders
and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty
emotion—the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to
haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays when a mood
comes which only Shakspere can set to music, what must we do? Read
Shakspere ourselves? Isn’t it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo
on a jews-harp. _We_ can’t read. None but the Booths can do it....
Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is
wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional
climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built
upon by Shakspere. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my
line; I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on a
vacation.
III
Altho I have quoted Mark’s assertion that he had never had the
felicity of having a play accepted, he did have two pieces produced
by managers; and a third, written in collaboration with Howells,
had a brief and inglorious career at the expense of its authors. His
first play, made out of one of his novels, drew delighted audiences
for several seasons; the second, written in partnership with Bret
Harte, and the third, written in partnership with Howells, met
with so little success that they sank at once beneath the wave of
oblivion, being almost unknown except in the hazy memories of the few
surviving spectators who chanced to see one or the other during its
brief stay on the stage. No one of the three has ever been published.
After Mark had settled in Hartford he formed a close friendship with
his near neighbor Charles Dudley Warner; and in 1873 they joined
forces in a novel, the ‘Gilded Age.’ They wrote it not so much in
collaboration as in conjunction,—that is to say, each of the writers
was responsible for the chapters he prepared himself; and there was
no integrating co-ordination of their respective contributions. Mark
was the author of more than half of the chapters; and he was the
creator of the one outstanding character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers,
an imaginative reproduction of a man he had known since boyhood,
James Lampton. Mark began by writing the first eleven chapters, then
Warner wrote two, Mark followed with two more; and thus they worked
alternately. They labored, so Mark declared, “in the superstition
that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter
of fact, we were writing two incoherent yarns.”
It was not long after the publication of their conjoint work
that they were informed of the performance in San Francisco of a
dramatization by one Gilbert S. Densmore, otherwise unknown to fame,
the character of Colonel Sellers being impersonated by John T.
Raymond. Action was at once taken to put a stop to this infringement
on the copyright of the story. In the end a satisfactory arrangement
was arrived at. Densmore was bought out; Warner, discovering that
his share in the story had been but little drawn upon, relinquished
any claim he might have; Mark made the piece over; and Raymond
continued to play Colonel Sellers, under a contract which divided
the profits between the author and the actor. For a season or two
Mark’s agent travelled with the company and reported on a postal card
every night the author’s share; and Howells has related how these
welcome missives would come about dinnertime and how Mark would read
them aloud in triumph. “One hundred and fifty dollars—two hundred
dollars—three hundred dollars, were the gay figures which they bore
and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table.”
It is difficult now to determine how much of the dramatic skeleton
Densmore had put together to enable Colonel Sellers to exhibit the
facets of his lovable character, survived in the play which drew
crowded houses one long winter in New York. Here Mark himself is the
best witness in his own behalf; and his biographer has quoted from an
unpublished letter a clear-cut statement:
I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
had expected to use little of [Densmore’s] language and but little
of his plot. I do not think that there are now twenty sentences of
Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
wrote and told him I should pay him about as much more as I had
already paid him, in case the play proved a success.
Paine has printed Densmore’s acknowledgment for this second payment,
thanking Mark “for the very handsome manner in which you have acted
in this matter.”
During the run of the play in New York in the winter of 1874-5 I saw
it twice, the second time on the hundredth performance, when Mark
appeared before the curtain to tell the audience the tale of the
man who tried to ride the Mexican plug and to explain that he was
like this man after his fiery steed had thrown him, in that he was
“speechless.” I recall the play as a rickety contrivance; it creaked
in its joints; its plot was arbitrary and violent and unconvincing.
Perhaps it was no worse than the earlier ‘Solon Shingle’ or the
later ‘Mighty Dollar’; but it was little, if any, better. Yet it
served its purpose, which was to be a frame for the humorously
veracious character of Colonel Sellers, the imperturbable visionary
admirably acted by John T. Raymond. Mark himself liked Raymond’s
impersonation,—at least he did at first. Later he and Raymond fell
out; and he put into his autobiography the assertion that Raymond was
lacking in the ability to express the finer qualities of Sellers.