both artistic and economic. The actor—sometimes under contract for
several years—could settle down and have a home where he could bring
up his children; he was not a tramp, ever on the go and not knowing
where he might be one week from another. He was informed as to
approximate length of the theatrical season, and he was not in dread
of being thrown out of an engagement in the middle of the winter or
of being stranded on the road with his salary unpaid for a month.
There was a certain stability and security in his position, altho
there was also always the possibility that the manager might exhaust
his often meager resources and so find himself unable to keep the
theater open or to meet his obligations to his company.
With its incessant changes of bill and with the unending variety
of the plays presented, the actors had far more practise in their
art than the performers of to-day. With the frequent production of
Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, even the minor members of the
company had at least an opportunity to learn how to read blank verse.
The permanence of the organization enabled the inexpert young people
to become familiar with the methods of their more skilful elders;
and it also tended toward the development of that harmony of effort,
that team-play, which is of prime importance. On the other hand, the
haste with which the constant succession of pieces had to be prepared
interfered with thoroughness and with delicacy of interpretation.
When a drama was pitchforked on the stage, so to speak, for only
half-a-dozen performances, as was often the case, the actors had
neither time nor energy to do their best; and they were tempted to
fall into the habit of happy-go-lucky slovenliness.
Then the symmetry of the performance was not infrequently blemished
by the fact that there was often in the company no performer really
capable of acting a salient part in the play about to be produced;
and yet this part had to be undertaken by somebody, however ill at
ease he might be. There were round pegs in square holes; and this was
unavoidable since it was impossible, more often than not, to engage
outside performers, even if the manager had desired to do so,—which
he rarely did.
If I may be allowed to call myself as a witness I can depose that
I have seen not a few performances of the well chosen company at
Wallack’s Theater forty-odd years ago which were far less effective
than they might have been because one or two prominent characters
had to be assigned to performers who were good actors in their own
lines but who were hopelessly unsuited to the parts forced upon
them because they alone were available. In the ‘Shaughraun’ of Dion
Boucicault, for instance, by the side of Boucicault himself and
Harry Beckett, Ada Dyas and H. J. Montague, John Gilbert and Madam
Ponisi, who were all admirably adapted to the characters Boucicault
had composed for them, there were also Joseph Polk and Ione Burke,
who were entirely unsuited to the parts they were forced to play.
And there were two equally unfortunate miscastings in ‘Diplomacy.’
If this was the case not infrequently at Wallack’s with its long
prestige, how much more frequent and more flagrant must have been the
misfits in the performances in theaters of inferior grade?
Professor Phelps tells us that all would go well if there could
be established a stock-company in every city and even in every
large town; but Professor Phelps—fortunately for him—was not born
long enough ago to have seen the artistic inadequacy which is
inevitable in the stock-company, inadequacy in the acting, in the
stage-management and in the mounting. The productions of the managers
of traveling companies have set a standard to which no resident
stock-company can hope to attain. And the cost of an ambitious
attempt to satisfy the expectations of the playgoing public would be
prohibitive to any intending manager of a stock-company. He would not
dare to undertake the task unless he was supported by an endowment,
by a subsidy, or by a large body of subscribers, who being sharers
in the enterprize might be more tolerant of relatively unimportant
deficiencies in acting and in mounting.
There is no doubt that a repertory theater is highly desirable.
It might be of inestimable service both to the author and to the
actor. The actor is very unfortunate if, in the malleable years of
his youth, he finds himself appearing in the same part for two or
three hundred nights; and the author is unfortunate when his play
has had its two or three hundred nights and then drops out of sight
forevermore. A repertory theater would provide varied experience for
the performers and afford them opportunity to acquire versatility;
and it could do a great service to the reputation of the playwrights
by reviving and keeping on hand, so to speak, the plays which deserve
to be seen again and again.
But under present conditions a repertory theater is economically
impossible. The rent of a building and the salaries of actors are
now prohibitive. A repertory theater in New York, even if it did not
aspire to be a rival of the Théâtre Français, must be described as a
luxury,—and like all luxuries it would be expensive. It can come into
existence, and it can have a chance to continue to exist, only when a
group of lovers of the arts of the drama shall combine to provide the
theater itself and to make the path easy for its manager.
(1920)
XIV
MEMORIES OF ACTORS
XIV
MEMORIES OF ACTORS
I
A playgoer from my youth up, a playgoer in Paris and London as
well as in New York, I have had the good fortune to be on terms of
friendly intimacy with not a few of the leading actors of the past
half-century, French and British and American. I have elsewhere set
down my memories of Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson
and Constant Coquelin, four of the foremost figures in the theater
at the end of the nineteenth century. There are a dozen or a score
of other players with whom I foregathered at one time or another,
less prominent in their profession but not for that reason any less
attractive in their several ways and not less companionable.
Most of the actors with whom I have had relation were good company;
they had seen many men and many places; and their journeyings had
worn off any abrading angularities their personalities may have
possessed. They had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men; and
they thereby gained the shrewd knowledge of human nature which they
needed in their art. They had acquired polish even if they did not
always possess culture. They were no more likely to be bookish in
their tastes, or even to be widely read, than are the practitioners
of the other professions, painters and musicians, most of whom are
probably too alertly interested in the immediate present to be
tempted into dusty exploration of the past. They were often apt in
anecdote and quick of wit, with a wide command over words, the result
of their acquisition of the sharp and swift dialog of the stage. In
no other calling have I found men swifter to make a joke or to take
one, even if it happened to be pointed against themselves.
It is sometimes asserted that actors as a class are inclined
to be unduly aware of their own excellence in the quality they
profess and even unduly inclined to communicate to others their
own opinion of their own achievements. My experience, such as it
is, does not support this assertion. I have found the men of the
stage at least as modest as the men of the studio and the men of
the study. Over-swollen vanity is not the exclusive property of any
one profession, and I doubt if it is more frequent in actors than
in authors or artists. Where I comb out my memories the two most
exuberant examples of ingrowing and outflowering self-appreciation
that I ever had occasion to observe were both of them physicians,
who were also authors and who were wholly unable to resist the ever
present temptation to dilate upon their own triumphs and to confide
to all listeners the frequent compliments they had gluttonously
accepted.
There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or
Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion
and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not
but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot
recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally
self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is
true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position
and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had
played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was
not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed
listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise
available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his
book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves,
even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of
the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it
instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory
that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference
is that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may
be only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually
unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it.
II
The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most
companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had
been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief
management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind
the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the
Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the
Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen
his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself
was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque
of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was
an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I
was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was
still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest
opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.
He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a
competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when
he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality
coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared
to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and
above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir
Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of
the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham.
I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat
Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet
neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly
simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an
American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of
an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent
as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius
a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.
In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham
told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three
thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum
smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And
yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this
modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the
‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the
Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only
less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed
for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence.
These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes,
more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’
Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham
was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the
authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional
association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in
1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting
Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when
Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’
in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made
out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify
that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the
laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that
between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French
physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s
valet explained, “these are our failures.”
Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than
Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more
English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song
Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:
Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras!
Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.
And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and about to
be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my husband I
scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head and inquires
“Lemon or vanilla?”
These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave
of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious.
An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once
notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one summer
afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that Pat
Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at once,
“That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is his’n.”
III
It was also at the Lotos that I got to know John T. Raymond. This
was probably in the fall of 1874, when he was appearing as Colonel
Sellers in Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age.’ The actor and the author
quarreled after a while, quarreled bitterly and never made up their
quarrel. No doubt, Mark knew his own creature better than any one
else and certainly better than the rather shallow Raymond. But
Raymond gave us at least all the external characteristics of the
inspired visionary with his inexpugnable optimism, always about to
acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and yet for the moment
reduced to a frugal dinner of turnips and water, with only a candle
to light up his modest store. I have an impression that the cause
of the breach with Mark was Raymond’s unwillingness to forego two
or three easy effects which were always rewarded with thoughtless
laughter but which were not really in keeping with the character.
Raymond was unduly inclined to skylark even on the stage; I have seen
him, in the last act of the ‘Gilded Age,’ match silver dollars with
a friend he had recognized in the audience. Of course, he chose a
moment for the flip of his coin when the attention of the spectators
was bestowed upon some other performer, and only a few of them
detected his inexcusable pantomime. These lapses from the standard
of propriety may not have been frequent, but they occurred far too
often; and they could not but be offensive to the author of the play
in which the actor was appearing.
When Raymond indulged in tricks of this sort he displayed a lack of
respect alike for his audience and for his art. The art had to suffer
in silence; but the audience might at any time be moved to protest. I
recall that when Raymond was playing Ichabod Crane in 1879 he sent me
a box, to which my wife invited three or four of her young friends.
In the last act Ichabod comes out into the garden to ask Katrina into
the house, where there was merrymaking. To the startled astonishment
of our party, Raymond said “Come on in, Katrina! There’s lots of
fun! Brander Matthews has brought a whole boxful of pretty girls!”—a
speech which nobody in the house—except the boxful—seemed to hear or
at least to apprehend, probably because it had no relation to the
story being acted on the stage.
None the less was Raymond an accomplished comedian, brisk, lively,
laughter-compelling and authoritative. Like many another comic
actor, he longed to play pathetic parts; and unlike most of those
who have this ambition, he did possess the power of drawing tears. I
had first seen him as Asa Trenchard in Paris during the Exposition
of 1867, when Sothern had ventured across the Channel to disclose
Lord Dundreary to the unresponsive French; and I have never forgotten
the simple and manly pathos of the scene in which Asa burns the will
leaving him the fortune which would otherwise go to the girl he is in
love with. Audiences are always ready to appreciate a brief pathetic
episode when the comic character unexpectedly turns his serious side
to the spectators. But they are resentful when the funny man whom
they have gone to laugh with, and even to laugh at, is presented in a
play wherein he is persistently pathetic and not even intermittently
humorous. Raymond lost money for himself and for his managers when he
impersonated a dreary sobseeker in a dull domestic drama, ‘My Son,’
derived from a tearful Teutonic tale of woe.
In collaboration with H. C. Bunner I put together a rather boisterous
farce called ‘Touch and Go,’ which Raymond liked enough to contract
to produce but not enough for him ever to set about its production.
In its place he had brought out in succession two plays in which
the fun was less acrobatic—‘In Paradise’ and ‘For Congress.’ After
these pieces had run their course, G. H. Jessop (who was a part
author of ‘In Paradise’) came to me with an idea for a comic drama
for Raymond and asked me to join him in working it out. It was to be
called ‘A Gold Mine’; and having in mind Raymond’s Asa Trenchard in
the ‘American Cousin,’ I suggested that we lay the scene in London,
so as to repeat the contrast of an American with the British. We also
decided to develop our plot so that at the end of the second of our
three acts Raymond should have a chance to be pathetic if only for a
brief moment.
When our play was read to Raymond he was delighted with it; the
character suited him and he rejoiced that he was to have an
opportunity to show that he could be serious when the situation
required it. During his annual tour he tried out our comedy in one of
the smaller Western cities on a Friday night. He sent us a glowing
report of the reception of our play and of his own triumph at the end
of the second act. And in less than a fortnight thereafter we read in
the morning paper that he had had a sudden seizure which had carried
him off within twenty-four hours.
IV
Fortunately for the authors, thus unexpectedly bereft of the actor
for whom the piece had been composed and to whose personality it
had been adjusted, Helen Tracy, who had played the heroine in the
single performance which Raymond had given, wrote at once to Nat
Goodwin, advising him to secure our play, as it had made a hit and
as the star-part would just suit him. Goodwin asked us to let him
read the piece; he liked it and we soon came to terms with him, both
Jessop and I believing that he was an actor of promise, altho up to
that time he had never undertaken a part demanding any subtlety of
treatment or any veracity of characterization.
When he was a very young man, Goodwin had made his first appearance
in a variety-show, giving imitations of the actors then prominent.
It is a curious fact that even the most adroit mimics are rarely
able to become accomplished actors, competent to sustain a character
consistently throughout a play. Goodwin was one of the few exceptions
to this rule. He soon gave up mimicry for burlesque, succeeding
that fine comedian William H. Crane, in the chief comic part of the
perennially popular ‘Evangeline’ and playing it in careful imitation
of his predecessor. As Joseph Jefferson—who had often appeared in
burlesque early in his career, notably in a parody of ‘Mazeppa’—once
said to me, “burlesque is a very good school for a young comedian, as
it tends to give him breadth of effect and certainty of execution.”
From burlesque Goodwin progressed to farce; and when he came to us
for ‘A Gold Mine,’ he was playing the part of a drunken undertaker
in ‘Turned Up,’ a robustious piece of British manufacture. As the
attraction of this whirlwind farcicality was not exhausted, Goodwin
arranged with us to postpone our play for a year; and he utilized
the delay to prepare the public to accept him in a comedy of a more
refined type. He added to his bill the ingenious and whimsical piece
called ‘Lend Me Five Shillings’ which Jefferson was still acting
occasionally. As he said to me, “I’d sooner finish third to Jefferson
than run a dead heat with Dixey!”—Dixey having just made a great hit
in ‘Adonis.’
Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K.
Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold mine.
“That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was
all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind
before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be
disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen
speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory,
instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief
episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a certain
Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet.
‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a complicated
plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of the two
collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating widow
with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play Goodwin
engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at least
adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston Theater
produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable suggestion
for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the end of the
second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain that he could
play this serious bit and carry the audience with him, the actor
answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m going to do
it in imitation of Charley Thorne.”
This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of
straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is
profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern
by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another
craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many
masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating
the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave
to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing
and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example,
played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would
have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself
more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to
achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this
assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from
these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied
and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told
me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by
incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly
different from Regnier’s.
It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first
established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and
in the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in
authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on
purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited
in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened
by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the
final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character
which Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of
the foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in
two Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was
he considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite
his prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding
position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it
had been sagely administered.