shadow of financial trouble fell across my peace. Yet still I never
thought of returning to the stage.
One day I was driving in a narrow lane, when the wheel of the pony-cart
came off. I was standing there, thinking what I should do next, when a
whole crowd of horsemen in "pink" came leaping over the hedge into the
lane. One of them stopped and asked if he could do anything. Then he
looked hard at me and exclaimed: "Good God! it's Nelly!"
The man was Charles Reade.
"Where have you been all these years?" he said.
"I have been having a very happy time," I answered.
"Well, you've had it long enough. Come back to the stage!"
"No, never!"
"You're a fool! You ought to come back."
Suddenly I remembered the bailiff in the house a few miles away, and I
said laughingly: "Well, perhaps, I would think of it if some one would
give me forty pounds a week!"
"Done!" said Charles Reade. "I'll give you that, and more, if you'll
come and play Philippa Chester in 'The Wandering Heir.'"
He went on to explain that Mrs. John Wood, who had been playing Philippa
at the New Queen's, of which he was the lessee, would have to relinquish
the part soon, because she was under contract to appear elsewhere. The
piece was a great success, and promised to run a long time if he could
find a good Philippa to replace Mrs. Wood. It was a kind of Rosalind
part, and Charles Reade only exaggerated pardonably when he said that I
should never have any part better suited to me!
In a very short time after that meeting in the lane, it was announced
that the new Philippa was to be an actress who was returning to the
stage "after a long period of retirement." Only just before the first
night did anyone guess who it was, and then there was great excitement
among those who remembered me. The acclamation with which I was welcomed
back on the first night surprised me. The papers were more flattering
than they had ever been before. It was a tremendous success for me, and
I was all the more pleased because I was following an accomplished
actress in the part.
It is curious how often I have "followed" others. I never "created" a
part, as theatrical parlance has it, until I played Olivia at the Court,
and I had to challenge comparison, in turn, with Miss Marie Wilton, Mrs.
John Wood and Mrs. Kendal. Perhaps it was better for me than if I had
had parts specially written for me, and with which no other names were
associated.
The hero of "The Wandering Heir," when I first took up the part of
Philippa, was played by Edmund Leathes, but afterward by Johnston
Forbes-Robertson. Everyone knows how good-looking he is now, but as a
boy he was wonderful--a dreamy, poetic-looking creature in a blue smock,
far more of an artist than an actor--he promised to paint quite
beautifully--and full of aspirations and ideals. In those days began a
friendship between us which has lasted unbroken until this moment. His
father and mother were delightful people, and very kind to me always.
Everyone was kind to me at this time. Friends whom I had thought would
be estranged by my long absence rallied round me and welcomed me as if
it were six minutes instead of six years since I had dropped out of
their ken. I was not yet a "made" woman, but I had a profitable
engagement, and a delightful one, too, with Charles Reade, and I felt an
enthusiasm for my work which had been wholly absent when I had returned
to the stage the first time. My children were left in the country at
first, but they came up and joined me when, in the year following "The
Wandering Heir," I went to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales's. I
never had the slightest fear of leaving them to their own devices, for
they always knew how to amuse themselves, and were very independent and
dependable in spite of their extreme youth. I have often thanked Heaven
since that, with all their faults, my boy and girl have never been lazy
and never dull. At this time Teddy always had a pencil in his hand, when
he wasn't looking for his biscuit--he was a greedy little thing!--and
Edy was hammering clothes onto her dolls with tin-tacks! Teddy said
poetry beautifully, and when he and his sister were still tiny mites,
they used to go through scene after scene of "As You Like It," for their
own amusement, not for an audience, in the wilderness at Hampton Court.
They were by no means prodigies, but it did not surprise me that my son,
when he grew up, should be first a good actor, then an artist of some
originality, and should finally turn all his brains and industry to new
developments in the art of the theater. My daughter has acted also--not
enough to please me, for I have a very firm belief in her talents--and
has shown again and again that she can design and make clothes for the
stage that are both lovely and effective. In all my most successful
stage dresses lately she has had a hand, and if I had anything to do
with a national theater, I should, without prejudice, put her in charge
of the wardrobe at once!
I may be a proud parent, but I have always refrained from "pushing" my
children. They have had to fight for themselves, and to their mother
their actual achievements have mattered very little. So long as they
were not lazy, I have always felt that I could forgive them anything!
And now Teddy and Edy--Teddy in a minute white piquŽ suit, and Edy in a
tiny kimono, in which she looked as Japanese as everything which
surrounded her--disappear from these pages for quite a long time. But
all this time, you must understand, they are educating their mother!
Charles Reade, having brought me back to the stage, and being my manager
into the bargain, was deeply concerned about my progress as an actress.
During the run of "The Wandering Heir" he used to sit in a private box
every night to watch the play, and would send me round notes between
the acts, telling me what I had done ill and what well in the preceding
act. Dear, kind, unjust, generous, cautious, impulsive, passionate,
gentle Charles Reade. Never have I known anyone who combined so many
qualities, far asunder as the poles, in one single disposition. He was
placid and turbulent, yet always majestic. He was inexplicable and
entirely lovable--a stupid old dear, and as wise as Solomon! He seemed
guileless, and yet had moments of suspicion and craftiness worthy of the
wisdom of the serpent. One moment he would call me "dearest child"; the
next, with indignant emphasis, "_Madam_!"
When "The Wandering Heir" had at last exhausted its great popularity, I
went on a tour with Charles Reade in several of his plays. In spite of
his many and varied interests, he had entirely succumbed to the magic of
the "irresistible theater," and it used to strike me as rather pathetic
to see a man of his power and originality working the stage sea at
nights, in company with a rough lad, in his dramatic version of "Hard
Cash." In this play, which was known as "Our Seaman," I had a part which
I could not bear to be paid twenty-five pounds a week for acting. I knew
that the tour was not a financial success, and I ventured to suggest
that it would be good economy to get some one else for Susan Merton. For
answer I got a fiery "Madam, you are a rat! You desert a sinking ship!"
My dear old companion, Boo, who was with me, resented this very much:
"How can you say such things to my Nelly?"
"Your Nelly!" said Charles Reade. "I love her a thousand times better
than you do, or any puling woman."
Another time he grew white with rage, and his dark eyes blazed, because
the same "puling woman" said very lightly and playfully: "Why did poor
Nell come home from rehearsal looking so tired yesterday? You work her
too hard." He thought this unfair, as the work had to be done, and
flamed out at us with such violence that it was almost impossible to
identify him with the kind old gentleman of the Colonel Newcome type
whom I had seen stand up at the Tom Taylors', on Sunday evenings, and
sing "The Girl I Left Behind Me" with such pathos that he himself was
moved to tears. But, though it was a painful time for both of us, it was
almost worth while to quarrel with him, because when we made it up he
was sure to give me some "treat"--a luncheon, a present, or a drive. We
both felt we needed some jollification because we had suffered so much
from being estranged. He used to say that there should be no such word
as "quarrel," and one morning he wrote me a letter with the following
postscript written in big letters:
"THERE DO EXIST SUCH THINGS AS HONEST MISUNDERSTANDINGS.
"There, my Eleanora Delicia" (this was his name for me, my real,
full name being Ellen Alicia), "stick that up in some place where
you will often see it. Better put it on _your looking-glass_. And
if you can once get those words into your noddle, it will save you
a world of unhappiness."
I think he was quite right about this. Would that he had been as right
in his theories about stage management! He was a rare one for realism.
He had _preached_ it in all his plays, and when he produced a one-act
play, "Rachael the Reaper," in front of "The Wandering Heir," he began
to practice what he preached--jumped into reality up to the neck!
He began by buying _real_ pigs, _real_ sheep, a _real_ goat, and a
_real_ dog. _Real_ litter was strewn all over the stage, much to the
inconvenience of the unreal farm-laborer, Charles Kelly, who could not
compete with it, although he looked as like a farmer as any actor could.
They all looked their parts better than the real wall which ran across
the stage, piteously naked of _real_ shadows, owing to the absence of
the _real_ sun, and, of course, deficient in the painted shadows which
make a painted wall look so like the real thing.
Never, never can I forget Charles Reade's arrival at the theater in a
four-wheeler with a goat and a lot of little pigs. When the cab drew up
at the stage-door, the goat seemed to say, as plainly as any goat could:
"I'm dashed if I stay in this cab any longer with these pigs!" and while
Charles Reade was trying to pacify it, the piggies escaped!
Unfortunately, they didn't all go in the same direction, and poor dear
Charles Reade had a "divided duty." There was the goat, too, in a nasty
mood. Oh, his serious face, as he decided to leave the goat and run for
the pigs, with his loose trousers, each one a yard wide at least,
flapping in the wind!
"That's a relief, at any rate," said Charles Kelly, who was watching the
flight of the pigs. "I sha'n't have those d----d pigs to spoil my acting
as well as the d----d dog and the d----d goat!"
How we all laughed when Charles Reade returned from the pig-hunt to
rehearsal with the brief direction to the stage manager that the pigs
would be "cut out."
The reason for the real wall was made more evident when the real goat
was tied up to it. A painted wall would never have stood such a strain.
On the first night, the real dog bit Kelly's real ankles, and in real
anger he kicked the real animal by a real mistake into the orchestra's
real drum.
So much for realism as practiced by Charles Reade! There was still
something to remind him of the experiment in Rachael, the circus goat.
Rachael--he was no she, but what of that?--was given the free run of the
garden of Reade's house at Knightsbridge. He had everything that any
normal goat could desire--a rustic stable, a green lawn, the best of
food. Yet Rachael pined and grew thinner and thinner. One night when we
were all sitting at dinner, with the French windows open onto the lawn
because it was a hot night, Rachael came prancing into the room, looking
happy, lively, and quite at home. All the time, while Charles Reade had
been fashing himself to provide every sort of rural joy for his goat,
the ungrateful beast had been longing for the naphtha lights of the
circus, for lively conversation and the applause of the crowd.
You can't force a goat any more than you can force a child to live the
simple life. "N'Yawk's the place," said the child of a Bowery tenement
in New York, on the night of her return from an enforced sojourn in
Arcady. She hated picking daisies, and drinking rich new milk made her
sick. When the kind teacher who had brought her to the country strove to
impress her by taking her to see a cow milked, she remarked witheringly
to the man who was milking: "Gee! You put it in!"
Rachael's sentiments were of the same type, I think. "Back to the
circus!" was his cry, not "Back to the land!"
I hope, when he felt the sawdust under his feet again (I think Charles
Reade sent him back to the ring), he remembered his late master with
gratitude. To how many animals, and not only four-footed ones, was not
Charles Reade generously kind, and to none of them more kind than to
Ellen Terry.
V
THE ACTRESS AND THE PLAYWRIGHT
THE END OF MY APPRENTICESHIP
1874
The relation between author and actor is a very important element in the
life of the stage. It is the way with some dramatists to despise those
who interpret their plays, to accuse us of ruining their creations, to
suffer disappointment and rage because we do not, or cannot, carry out
their ideas.
Other dramatists admit that we players can teach them something; but I
have noticed that it is generally in "the other fellow's" play that we
can teach them, not in their own!
As they are necessary to us, and we to them, the great thing is to
reduce friction by sympathy. The actor should understand that the author
can be of use to him; the author, on his side, should believe that the
actor can be of service to the author, and sometimes in ways which only
a long and severe training in the actor's trade can discover.
The first author with whom I had to deal, at a critical point in my
progress as an actress, was Charles Reade, and he helped me enormously.
He might, and often did, make twelve suggestions that were wrong; but
against them he would make one that was so right that its value was
immeasurable and unforgettable.
It is through the dissatisfaction of a man like Charles Reade that an
actress _learns_--that is, if she is not conceited. Conceit is an
insuperable obstacle to all progress. On the other hand, it is of little
use to take criticism in a slavish spirit and to act on it without
understanding it. Charles Reade constantly wrote and said things to me
which were not absolutely just criticism; but they directed my attention
to the true cause of the faults which he found in my performance, and
put me on the way to mending them.
A letter which he wrote me during the run of "The Wandering Heir" was
such a wonderful lesson to me that I am going to quote it almost in
full, in the hope that it may be a lesson to other actresses--"happy in
this, they are not yet so old but they can learn"; unhappy in this, that
they have never had a Charles Reade to give them a trouncing!
Well, the letter begins with sheer eulogy. Eulogy is nice, but one does
not learn anything from it. Had dear Charles Reade stopped after writing
"womanly grace, subtlety, delicacy, the variety yet invariable
truthfulness of the facial expression, compared with which the faces
beside yours are wooden, uniform dolls," he would have done nothing to
advance me in my art; but this was only the jam in which I was to take
the powder!
Here followed more jam--with the first taste of the powder:
"I prefer you for my Philippa to any other actress, and shall do so
still, even if you will not, or cannot, throw more vigor into the
lines that need it. I do not pretend to be as good a writer of
plays as you are an actress [_how naughty of him!_], but I do
pretend to be a great judge of acting in general. [_He wasn't,
although in particular details he was a brilliant critic and
adviser._] And I know how my own lines and business ought to be
rendered infinitely better than any one else, except the
Omniscient. It is only on this narrow ground I presume to teach a
woman of your gifts. If I teach you Philippa, you will teach me
Juliet; for I am very sure that when I have seen you act her, I
shall know a vast deal more about her than I do at present.
"No great quality of an actress is absent from your performance.
Very often you have _vigor_. But in other places where it is as
much required, or even more, you turn _limp_. You have limp lines,
limp business, and in Act III. limp exits instead of ardent exits."
Except in the actual word used, he was perfectly right. I was not
_limp_, but I was exhausted. By a natural instinct, I had produced my
voice scientifically almost from the first, and I had found out for
myself many things, which in these days of Delsarte systems and the
science of voice-production, are taught. But when, after my six years'
absence from the stage, I came back, and played a long and arduous part,
I found that my breathing was still not right. This accounted for my
exhaustion, or limpness and lack of vigor, as Charles Reade preferred to
call it.
As for the "ardent" exits, how right he was! That word set me on the
track of learning the value of moving off the stage with a swift rush. I
had always had the gift of being rapid in movement, but to _have_ a
gift, and to _use_ it, are two very different things.
I never realized that I was rather quick in movement until one day when
I was sitting on a sofa talking to the famous throat specialist, Dr.
Morell Mackenzie. In the middle of one of his sentences I said: "Wait a
minute while I get a glass of water." I was out of the room and back so
soon that he said, "Well, go and get it then!" and was paralyzed when he
saw that the glass was in my hand and that I was sitting down again!
_Consider!_ That was one of Charles Reade's favorite expressions, and
just hearing him say the word used to make me consider, and think, and
come to conclusions--perhaps not always the conclusions that he wished,
but suggested by him.
In this matter of "ardent" exit, he wrote:
"The swift rush of the words, the personal rush, should carry you
off the stage. It is in reality as easy as shelling peas, if you
will only go by the right method instead of by the wrong. You have
overcome far greater difficulties than this, yet night after night
you go on suffering ignoble defeat at this point. Come, courage!
You took a leaf out of Reade's dictionary at Manchester, and
trampled on two difficulties--impossibilities, you called them.
That was on Saturday, Monday you knocked the poor impossibilities
down. Tuesday you kicked them where they lay. Wednesday you walked
placidly over their prostrate bodies!"
The difficulty that he was now urging me to knock down was one of
_pace_, and I am afraid that in all my stage life subsequently I never
quite succeeded in kicking it or walking over its prostrate body!
Looking backward, I remember many times when I failed in rapidity of
utterance, and was "pumped" at moments when swiftness was essential.
Pace is the soul of comedy, and to elaborate lines at the expense of
pace is disastrous. Curiously enough, I have met and envied this gift of
pace in actors who were not conspicuously talented in other respects,
and no Rosalind that I have ever seen has had enough of it. Of course,
it is not a question of swift utterance only, but of swift thinking. I
am able to think more swiftly on the stage now than at the time Charles
Reade wrote to me, and I only wish I were young enough to take advantage
of it. But youth thinks _slowly_, as a rule.
_Vary the pace._ Charles Reade was never tired of saying this, and,
indeed, it is one of the foundations of all good acting.
"You don't seem quite to realize," he writes in the letter before
me, "that uniformity of pace leads inevitably to languor. You
should deliver a pistol-shot or two. Remember Philippa is a fiery
girl; she can snap. If only for variety, she should snap James'
head off when she says, 'Do I _speak_ as if I loved them!'"
My memories of the part of Philippa are rather vague, but I know that
Reade was right in insisting that I needed more "bite" in the passages
when I was dressed as a boy. Though he complimented me on my self-denial
in making what he called "some sacrifice of beauty" to pass for a boy,
"so that the audience can't say, 'Why, James must be a fool not to see
she is a girl,'" he scolded me for my want of bluntness.
"Fix your mind on the adjective 'blunt' and the substantive
'pistol-shot'; they will do you good service."
They did! And I recommend them to anyone who finds it hard to overcome
monotony of pace and languor of diction.
"When you come to tell old Surefoot about his daughter's love," the
letter goes on, "you should fall into a positive imitation of his
manner: crest, motionless, and hands in front, and deliver your
preambles with a nasal twang. But at the second invitation to
speak out, you should cast this to the winds, and go into the other
extreme of bluntness and rapidity. [_Quite right!_] When you meet
him after the exposure, you should speak as you are coming to him
and stop him in mid-career, and _then_ attack him. You should also
(in Act II.) get the pearls back into the tree before you say: 'Oh,
I hope he did not see me!'"
Yes, I remember that in both these places I used to muddle and blur the
effect by doing the business and speaking at the same time. By acting on
Reade's suggestion I gained confidence in making a pause.
"After the beating, wait at least ten seconds longer than you
do--to rouse expectation--and when you do come on, make a little
more of it. You ought to be very pale indeed--even to enter with a
slight totter, done moderately, of course; and before you say a
single word, you ought to stand shaking and with your brows
knitting, looking almost terrible. Of course, I do not expect or
desire to make a melodramatic actress of you, but still I think you
capable of any effect, provided _it is not sustained too long_."
A truer word was never spoken. It has never been in my power to
_sustain_. In private life, I cannot sustain a hatred or a resentment.
On the stage, I can pass swiftly from one effect to another, but I
cannot fix _one_, and dwell on it, with that superb concentration which
seems to me the special attribute of the tragic actress. To sustain,
with me, is to lose the impression that I have created, not to increase
its intensity.
"The last passage of the third act is just a little too hurried.
Break the line. 'Now, James--for England and liberty!'"
I remember that I never could see that he was right about that, and if I
can't see a thing I can't do it. The author's idea must become mine
before I can carry it out--at least, with any sincerity, and obedience
without sincerity would be of small service to an author. It must be
despairing to him, if he wants me to say a line in a certain way, to
find that I always say it in another; but I can't help it. I have tried
to act passages as I have been told, just _because_ I was told and
without conviction, and I have failed miserably and have had to go back
to my own way.
"Climax is reached not only by rush but by increasing pace. Your
exit speech is a failure at present, because you do not vary the
pace of its delivery. Get by yourself for one half-hour--if you
can! Get by the seaside, if you can, since there it was Demosthenes
studied eloquence and overcame mountains--not mole-hills like this.
Being by the seaside, study those lines by themselves: 'And then
let them find their young gentleman, and find him quickly, for
London shall not hold me long--no, nor England either.'
"Study to speak these lines with great volubility and fire, and
settle the exact syllable to run at."
I remember that Reade, with characteristic generosity, gave me ten
pounds and sent me to the seaside in earnest, as he suggests my doing,
half in fun, in the letter. "I know you won't go otherwise," he said,
"because you want to insure your life or do something of that sort.
Here! go to Brighton--go anywhere by the sea for Sunday! Don't thank me!
It's all for Philippa."
As I read these notes of his on anti-climax, monotony of pace, and all
the other offenses against scientific principles of acting which I
committed in this one part, I feel more strongly than ever how important
it is to master these principles. Until you have learned them and
practiced them you cannot afford to discard them. There is all the
difference in the world between departure from recognized rules by one
who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of
training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be
eccentric you must know where the circle is.