a child,” she wrote long afterwards, “rehearsals often used to last
until four or five in the morning. What weary work it was to be sure!
My poor little legs used to ache, and sometimes I could hardly keep
my eyes open when I was on the stage. Often I used to creep into the
green-room, and there, curled up in the deep recess of the window,
forget myself, my troubles, and my art--if you can talk of art in
connection with a child of eight--in a delicious sleep.” In the years
to come Ellen Terry rose to distinction first of all by virtue of her
radiant, charming personality and a natural gift for acting. But only
less important has been the infinitely varied, toilsome schooling in
actual experience, thus so early begun.[76]
When Ellen was twelve Charles Kean’s management of the Princess’s
came to an end. Her parents at once took advantage of the measure of
popularity which the sisters had acquired and presented them in a
“drawing-room entertainment.” It consisted of two short plays in which
Ellen and Kate assumed all the characters, of both sexes. The venture
was a success, and the little troupe, father, mother, two daughters
and a pianist, traveled far and wide throughout the Kingdom for more
than two years, driving from place to place in the primitive style of
strolling players.
Returning to London, Ellen Terry, whose name seems already to have
been fairly well established, had a part at the Royalty Theatre in a
dreadful play founded on Sue’s _Atar-Gull_. It was her rôle in this
gruesome drama to appear on the stage wrapped in the coils of a huge
serpent, and shrieking the terror appropriate to the situation. This
was at least an opportunity for one kind of acting and Miss Terry made
the most of it. The contemporary accounts show that she shrieked most
startlingly and whole-heartedly.
Kate Terry had joined the stock company at Bristol, and there Ellen,
when she was fourteen, went also. For a year she had the sound
training--the best an actor can have--of acting many widely varying
parts. “If I had to describe her acting in those days,” wrote a member
of the company, “I should say its chief characteristic was a vivacious
sauciness. Her voice already had some of the rich sympathetic quality
which has since been one of her most distinctive charms. Although
only in the first flush of a joyous girlhood, she was yet familiar
enough with the stage to be absolutely at home on it.... We, the young
fellows of that day, thought she was perfection; we toasted her in our
necessarily frugal measures; we would gladly have been her hewers of
wood and drawers of water. She had personal charm as well as histrionic
skill. Her smiles were very sweet, but, alack for all of us, they were
mathematically impartial.” During this stay in the west of England
(the Bristol company appeared also at Bath) she acted a wide range of
parts, from Shakespeare to extravaganza. The training, in quantity and
variety, which was afforded by the stock companies of the middle of the
last century, cannot easily be matched to-day. The theatrical system
of England and America has been revolutionized, and the long run,
the country-wide tour, the specialized actor, have become the rule.
Only within the last few years, as in the rise of the Irish national
theatre, the Manchester Players, and the upward trend in certain
American stock companies, can we see something of a return to earlier
conditions.
There followed a year in London, in the company, headed by the older
Sothern, which was playing at the Haymarket. She was but fifteen,
yet the _Times_ said: “She is now matured into one of the happiest
specimens of what the French call the _ingénue_.” She played Gertrude
in _The Little Treasure_, Hero in _Much Ado about Nothing_, Lady
Touchwood in _The Belle’s Stratagem_, Julia in _The Rivals_, and also
Mary Meredith in a revival of _Our American Cousin_, in which Sothern
was his famous other self, Lord Dundreary;--not bad for fifteen!
At sixteen came one of those sudden and complete absences from the
stage that have strangely marked the career of one born to act. She
was married in 1864 to George Frederick Watts, the famous artist. He
was thirty-one years her senior. Watts was a man of great nobility of
character, he cared for her deeply, and the brief period of her life
with him she herself declared not wholly unhappy. Yet the marriage
was a mistake. Though she responded to the beauty and peace of her
new surroundings, and for a while at least was contented to forget
the theatre, she was little more than a child--exuberant, unused to
the restraint of a quiet country home; and she had tasted success.
The artist himself was oppressed with a feeling that he had spoiled
her life. In any event they soon separated, and she met him only once
thereafter, though years later they exchanged friendly letters.
When she was nearing twenty Ellen Terry returned to the stage, more or
less under the direction of Charles Reade, the famous novelist, then
part manager of the Queen’s. One of the best of English novelists of
the second degree, his main artistic interest was the theatre, and
he was, mistakenly, more ambitious of fame as a dramatist than as a
novelist. His play _The Double Marriage_ was founded on his novel
_White Lies_. It was well acted (Ellen Terry playing the heroine), and
well mounted, but a failure. Charles Reade’s oft-quoted description of
Ellen Terry in a way characterizes them both, the charming actress and
the brusque, facile writer: “Her eyes are pale, her nose rather long,
her mouth nothing particular, complexion a delicate brick-dust, her
hair rather like tow. Yet somehow she is beautiful. Her expression
kills any pretty face you see beside her. Her figure is lean and bony;
her hands masculine in size and form. Yet she is a pattern of fawn-like
grace. Whether in movement or repose, grace pervades the hussy.” The
two were to be excellent, even affectionate, friends.
The most noteworthy event of this brief engagement at the Queen’s was
her first appearance with Henry Irving, then of course a rising actor,
not yet the distinguished manager of later days. The play was Garrick’s
“mutilation” of _The Taming of the Shrew_ which he called _Katherine
and Petruchio_. Of this foreshadowing of what was to be, Miss Terry
writes: “There is an old story told of Mr. Irving being ‘struck with my
talent at this time and promising that if he ever had a theatre of his
own he’d give me an engagement!’ But that is all moonshine. As a matter
of fact I’m sure he never thought of me at all at that time. I was just
then acting very badly, and feeling ill, caring scarcely at all for
my work or a theatre, or anybody belonging to a theatre.” And again:
“From the first I noticed that Mr. Irving worked more concentratedly
than all the other actors put together, and the most important lesson
of my working life I learnt from him, that to do one’s work well one
must _work continually_, live a life of constant self-denial for that
purpose, and, in short, keep one’s nose upon the grindstone.” Of her
performance in the pseudo-Shakespearean piece the critics varied. “I
have not much recollection of the performance,” wrote Clement Scott,
“save that Ellen Terry was the sweetest shrew ever seen and that it
seemed barbaric to crack a whip in her presence.”
After acting for about a year at the Queen’s, Miss Terry again retired
from the stage, this time for six years. She disappeared from London
and the stage and wholeheartedly gave herself up to a tranquil domestic
life in the country. This was the period of her union with Charles
Wardell, her second husband, an excellent actor known to playgoers
as Charles Kelly. Of this union there have been two children, Ailsa
Craig, who played small parts at the Lyceum with her mother and Henry
Irving, and Gordon Craig, who, first an actor, is today recognized as
one of the most important and fertile workers toward a new art of stage
setting.
“I led a most unconventional life,” writes Miss Terry, “and experienced
exquisite delight from the mere fact of being in the country. No one
knows what ‘the country’ means until he or she has lived in it. ‘Then,
if ever, come perfect days.’... For the first time I was able to put
all my energies into living.... I began gardening, ‘the purest of human
pleasures’; I learned to cook, and in time cooked very well, though my
first essay in that difficult art was rewarded with dire and complete
failure.[77]
“My hour of rising at this pleasant place near Mackery End in
Hertfordshire was six. Then I washed the babies. I had a perfect mania
for _washing_ everything and everybody. We had one little servant, and
I insisted on washing her head. Her mother came up from the village
to protest. ‘Never washed her head in my life. Never washed any of my
children’s heads.’
“After the washing I fed the animals. There were two hundred ducks and
fowls to feed, as well as the children. By the time I had done this,
and cooked the dinner, the morning had flown away. After the midday
meal I sewed. Sometimes I drove out in the pony-cart. And in the
evening I walked across the common to fetch the milk. The babies used
to roam where they liked on this common in charge of a bulldog, while
I sat and read. I studied cookery-books instead of parts--Mrs. Beeton
instead of Shakespeare!
“Oh, blissful quiet days! How soon they came to an end! Already the
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 someone 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_.’”
Thus it was “dear, lovable, aggravating, childlike, crafty, gentle,
obstinate, and entirely delightful and interesting Charles Reade,”
to use Ellen Terry’s own characterization, who in 1874 induced her to
return to the stage. He was then managing the Queen’s. Since 1868 she
had not acted at all, but she was well remembered, and her reappearance
was cordially welcomed. The play was one of Reade’s own, _The Wandering
Heir_, and in course of it Miss Terry appeared in male attire--one of
the few times she had what old timers used to know as “breeches parts.”
From all accounts it was a buoyant, charming impersonation. The author
complimented her on her 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.’”
From this time, in 1874, until more than thirty years later, Ellen
Terry was continuously before the public. In 1875, S. B. Bancroft
(later Sir Squire)--one of the ablest actor-managers of the
day--determined upon a daring experiment at his little Prince of
Wales’s Theatre, a bandbox of a theatre hitherto dedicated to the
“teacup and saucer drama.” This was his production of _The Merchant of
Venice_. The play has never been set more beautifully, and as we shall
see, it was in one part acted to perfection. But it failed through the
failure of Charles Coghlan as Shylock. For Ellen Terry, however, it
was really the first great triumph of her career. For her Portia on
this occasion was a real triumph. She was twenty-seven, in the very
perfection of her youth and beauty, and it was her first important
venture with a Shakespearean part. Her success was immediate, and
Portia, in the minds of many, always remained her most charming and
characteristic impersonation.[78] “Success I had had of a kind, and
I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had
liked them back again! But never until I appeared as Portia at the
Prince of Wales’s had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which
comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime--the
feeling of the conqueror. In homely parlance, I knew that I had ‘got
them’ at the moment when I spoke the speech beginning: ‘You see me,
Lord Bassanio, where I stand.’ ‘What can this be?’ I thought. ‘_Quite_
this thing has never come to me before.’ It was never to be quite the
same again. Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke
of the mighty wing of glory--call it by any name--it was as Portia
that I had my first and last sense of it.”
In spite of Miss Terry’s personal success, the Bancrofts’ splendid
revival of _The Merchant of Venice_ was short lived. Its thirty-six
performances served, however, to lay firmly the foundations of Ellen
Terry’s fame. Only three years were to elapse before she made her
epoch-making association with Henry Irving. She spent first a year
with the Bancrofts, helping them give life to a group of already
old-fashioned dramas, _Money_, _The Lady of Lyons_, _Masks and Faces_,
and _Ours_. “She enacted Clara Douglas and Pauline as well as they
have been ever played in our time, and showed us that the staginess of
the stagiest of old plays can be eliminated by acting so sincere and
natural as that of Ellen Terry.”[79]
Then came, in John Hare’s company at the Court Theatre, where the
other members included her husband and Charles Coghlan (besides Mr.
Hare himself), two years remarkable chiefly for _Olivia_. The success
of Mr. Hare’s venture was doubtful, when suddenly a happy idea came
to him,--a play made from _The Vicar of Wakefield_. It was a time of
enthusiasm for the eighteenth century. “We were all mad about blue
china, Chippendale chairs, Sheraton sideboards, old spinets, and brass
fire irons,” says one writer. “The age was exactly ripe for _The Vicar
of Wakefield_, and John Hare, with his keen instinct, pictured in
his mind’s eye an ideal Olivia in Ellen Terry.” W. G. Wills made the
play, and made it well. Play, setting, and acting conspired to make
_Olivia_ one of the best examples of the “play of a period.” As Olivia
herself Ellen Terry was supremely successful and appealing. Among her
non-Shakespearean characters it undoubtedly stands first, and for her
sake _Olivia_ was introduced into the Lyceum repertoire, and acted by
Irving and Terry for many years.
It was her acting in this part, indeed, that immediately preceded
and to a degree occasioned her becoming the chief support of Henry
Irving, who just at this time (1878) became manager of the Lyceum
Theatre. Irving’s ambition to gather the best possible company made
the choice natural, inevitable indeed. She had just turned thirty, she
was temperamentally fitted to complement his own peculiarly magnetic
personality, she was thoroughly accomplished, and she was already
universally popular. It is a question, as says Clement Scott, “how much
of Henry Irving’s success was due at the outset to the extraordinary
influence, charm, and fascination of Ellen Terry.” They were one in
their enthusiasm for their art, and they were alike in their artistic
prejudices. Like Irving, she was devoted to the poetic and romantic
drama, as opposed to the realistic, psychological drama of modern
life.[80]
Henry Irving and Ellen Terry acted together for twenty-four years.
One is used to being told that the Irving _régime_ at the Lyceum
constituted the most brilliant period of the English stage during the
latter half of the nineteenth century. Brilliant it certainly was--a
splendidly successful, dignified campaign in fostering the best English
stage traditions. Yet one cannot but sympathize with George Bernard
Shaw’s regret that Ellen Terry did not retire from Irving’s company
sooner than she did. “I have never made a secret of my opinion,” wrote
Shaw, “that the Lyceum undertaking, celebrated as it was, involved,
when looked at from the purely dramatic side of the stage art, a most
deplorable waste of two of the most remarkable talents of the end of
the last century.” What Mr. Shaw objected to was the exclusion from
the Lyceum repertoire of modern, radical dramatists, such as Ibsen,
Hauptmann, and doubtless Mr. Shaw himself. But while he thought that
Irving used Shakespeare’s plays not to interpret the dramatist’s
characters but as frames for figures which were creations of the
actor’s imagination, Mr. Shaw must needs say of Ellen Terry that “she
understood Shakespeare, and knew how to impersonate Beatrice, Juliet,
Imogen and the rest, intelligently, charmingly, exactly as they must
have appeared to Shakespeare in his mind’s eye.” And it is probably
true that Ellen Terry, devoted as she was to her “lovely art,” as she
called it, was not more than casually interested in the development
of the allied art, that of the dramatist. She disliked Ibsen, and had
no desire for his sake to desert the Lyceum. “Why did she remain so
long?” asks Mr. Shaw, and replying to himself: “The answer is found in
the fact that the Lyceum, while it did not call her dramatic faculties
into full play, gave the widest scope for the full development of a
wonderful sense of the picturesque.” In other words, she was attracted
by the romantic rather than the realistic, the poetic rather than the
psychological.
We have traced the important steps of her rise to a high place in her
profession. How might one account for the personal element in this
success?--for, trained and accomplished artist as she was, personality
counted heavily in this progress. Well, there has been, can be, but
one Ellen Terry. In writing of her powerful charm the words of strong
men have run riot. “I never saw a more enchanting and ideal creature,”
wrote Clement Scott of her later girlhood. “She was a poem that lived
and breathed, and suggested to us the girl heroines that we most adored
in poetry and the fine arts generally. Later on, as we all know, Ellen
Terry played Queen Guinevere; but at this period she was ‘Elaine the
fair, Elaine the loveable, Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat.’... She
was the Porphyria of Robert Browning and surely one of the crowned
queens in the _Morte d’Arthur_. I wish I could paint with pen an even
vague suggestion of this enchanting personality, tall, fair, willowy,
with hair like spun gold, a faultless complexion, the very poetry of
movement, with that wonderful deep-toned voice that has a heart-throb
in it.” If in her ’teens Ellen Terry was “ideal, mystical, mediæval,”
and suggested Elaine and Undine, who that ever saw her, in her later
career, as Olivia, but saw realized in flesh and blood the ideal of
English beauty?
“The rôle which she played in the life of her times,” says Mr. Shaw,
“can only be properly estimated when (perhaps fifty years hence)
her letters will be collected and published in twenty or thirty
volumes.[81] Then, I think, we shall discover that every celebrated man
of the last quarter of the nineteenth century had been in love with
Ellen Terry, and that many of these men had found in her friendship
the best return that could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and
beautiful woman, whose love had already been given elsewhere.” And
not only celebrated men. There have been countless lowly, unknown
devotees. “That much-used word ‘only’ can be used literally in regard
to Ellen Terry,” again says Mr. Shaw with unusual enthusiasm. “If
Shakespeare had met Irving on the street he would have recognized in
him immediately a distinguished type of the family of artists; if
he had met Ellen Terry he would have stared at her as at a new and
irresistibly charming type of woman.”
It seems clear that Ellen Terry’s success was after all one largely
of personality. She was splendidly successful, and no one could for
a moment deny the fascinating beauty of most of her acting. Yet was
she of the first flight of artists? It is difficult to answer _Yes_.
Her Portia and her Beatrice were the finest of her time, probably
the finest the stage has yet seen; her Olivia was a lovely, indeed
a perfect, realization of Goldsmith’s heroine, and in many another
character she charmed and moved her hearers. Yet when all is said
and done Ellen Terry, in her most successful parts, was simply her
glorified self. It is probably true--though the question was never
thoroughly put to the test--that she lacked that power, reserved for
the artist of first rank, of identifying herself equally well with
widely differing characters. True tragedy lay beyond her. Charles
Reade, at one time a constant and helpful critic of her acting, told
her that she was capable of any effect, _provided it was not sustained
too long_. “A truer word was never spoken,” says Miss Terry. “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.” Always of a volatile,
light-hearted temperament in her own self, the acting of tragedy was
with her more a matter of routine duty than the natural response of her
nature.
But let us not seem to require too much of a providence that vouchsafes
so rarely an Ellen Terry. If criticism, when the final estimate
is written, is forced to recognize in her a circumscribed talent,
we who have seen her would not have had her otherwise than as she
was. And if one says she was not truly a great artist, another may
reply truthfully that with her art was second, life itself first.
“In contrast to Irving, to whom his art was everything and his life
nothing, she has found life itself more interesting than art,” says
George Bernard Shaw. “And while she was associated with him in his long
and brilliant management of the Lyceum Theatre she--the most modern of
modern women--considered it a higher honor to be an economic, exemplary
housewife than to be a self-conscious woman, whose highest aim was to
play the heroine in the old-fashioned plays in which Irving shone.”
Again, she lacked that all-sacrificing ambition that carries the artist
to the topmost heights. During her two absences from the stage, and
especially during the second, when she spent six years in the country,
happy as housewife and mother, she had no regrets for the stage, no
longing for its triumphs. And she was throughout her career content to
be a “useful” actress. She constantly uses that word. She was content,
first with private life, then with her ability to help the artistic
cause of Henry Irving.
Never has there been a better example than Ellen Terry of the blending
of trained acting ability with untamed high spirits. Her acting was
sure of its effects and yet shot through with gleams of her own radiant
charm and exuberance. And off the stage as well she was this same
blithe spirit. It was strange that she disliked the elder Sothern,
for if he had his equal in practical joking, it was in Ellen Terry.
She was thirty when she joined Irving. Yet one day when he came to
the foot of the stairs leading to her dressing room, he looked up to
see his new leading woman sliding down the banisters! The act was
characteristic, and so is her comment: “I remember feeling as if I had
laughed in church.... He smiled at me but didn’t seem able to get over
it.” But sunny as she was, she could weep too. When playing Olivia, she
generally wept, she says, for the part touched her more than any other.
“I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on in _Hamlet_,
and in the last act of _Charles I_. My real tears on the stage have
astonished some people, and have been the envy of others, but they have
often been a hindrance to me. I have had to _work_ to restrain them.”
She was occasionally oversensitive to adverse criticism. When a writer
in _Blackwood’s_ said she showed plainly that Portia loves Bassanio
before he has actually won her, Miss Terry was, she says, for years
made uneasy and lacking in sureness at this moment in the play. “Any
suggestion of indelicacy in my treatment of a part,” she wrote, “always
blighted me.”