triumph to triumph. But in her case one feels that biographical detail,
the accidents of place and date, matter comparatively little. She
was a curiously detached spirit. “If I had my will,” she once told
Arthur Symons, “I would live in a ship in the sea, and never come
nearer to humanity than that.” As it was, she lived only in the realm
of her art. She was of infinite natural dignity, a shy, proud woman,
always far removed from the petty publicities of theatrical life, like
some patrician living her isolated life on a country estate. An utter
simplicity and sincerity, the fruits of a fine nature and of “the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” attended her always.[122] Her
face, pale and typically Italian, at once sad and ardent, is the face
of a woman who has thoroughly lived, but whose soul is equal to great
trials. Her health was never robust,[123] and bodily weakness has often
interrupted her work. Her voice was sad, her habit silence, though on
rare occasions she is said to talk merrily. Although Duse as an actress
and as a woman gives the impression of an all-pervading sadness, of a
profound thoughtfulness, “the thoughtfulness of one who comes toward
us from a sanctuary of brooding on life’s eternal questions,” the more
amiable and human traits are not wholly lacking in her. She is said
to be quick to grasp a joke and to be fond of humorous books. She is
extravagant in her delight in flowers. At her country place in Tuscany
she has literally thousands of rose bushes.
Of only medium height, she somehow on the stage suggested tallness.
Her hair was once of typical Italian jet-blackness, but long ago it
turned quite white, and she was forced on the stage to wear wigs; off
the stage, she is said to have taken pride in her white hair. For many
years she appeared on the stage without “make-up” of any kind, but
after about 1900 she found it necessary as a means to the appearance
of youth. Among the Italians she was known as “_dalle belle mani_,”
for her hands were, perhaps, her chief beauty, small and beautifully
wrought; and like the Italian she was, she used them expressively and
gracefully. Her reticent nature showed itself in her personal tastes.
Off stage and on she dressed with great simplicity, and she disliked
jewelry.[124]
She became a great reader, and though she never acquired English,
Shakespeare was one of her enthusiasms. Maeterlinck was another.
Cryptic sciences fascinated her. In modern art, her sympathies were
with the symbolists and impressionists. It was not strange that
d’Annunzio, the poet-dramatist-novelist who was making his presence
felt in Italy about the time of her Paris triumph, should appeal to
her as a kindred spirit. His fiery exaltation of human passions, his
undoubted poetic gifts, she took for real genius, and about 1900 the
world heard that Duse had forsworn all dramatists else and would act
henceforth nothing but d’Annunzio’s plays. The poet and the actress
formed an association that was plainly more than that of friendship
or professional coöperation. That she was passionately devoted to
d’Annunzio for some years, and that their friendship was broken by the
publication of one of his novels--in which he made literary use of
what she considered their sacred alliance--was the talk of Europe. The
resulting separation she is said to have taken, as she had her earlier
love affair, with tragic seriousness. How much her retirement from the
stage was due to this disappointment, and how much merely to advancing
age, it is difficult to say.
The d’Annunzio campaign was not a success, even in Italy. His plays
were not saved by patriotic interest in the author or by affection
for the actress from being thought decadent and undramatic, though
everywhere the richness of their poetic strain was recognized. Duse’s
faith however, until the rupture with d’Annunzio, was unreasoning and
unswerving. She came to the United States again in 1902, acting in
his plays.[125] She did nothing with them to add to the fame she had
earlier acquired, though, in spite of d’Annunzio, her acting still
retained its freedom from artificiality or exaggeration.[126]
After her return to Europe her appearances became more infrequent. In
1904 she gave a “command performance” at the English court (she had
always been popular in England, which received comparatively well even
the d’Annunzio plays), and in 1906 she came all the way from Italy to
assist in the great testimonial to Ellen Terry. Illness, which assailed
her often, and weariness of her work, herself and all things else, kept
her from the stage most of the time. She continued, however, to keep
her company constantly under salary and at her command, and as late as
1909 it was her custom, when at rare intervals the spirit moved her,
to assemble them for brief appearances in the European capitals. Of
late years she has given her energy to the founding of a home for aged
actors.
By means first of vivid imagining and then by the revealing power of
an unobtrusive, lucid art Duse made herself the greatest _artiste_ of
her day. When the French said she had widened the horizon of her art
they paid tribute to what was, after all, something akin to original
genius.
“The furthest extremes of Duse’s range as an artist,” wrote Bernard
Shaw, who is only one of the critics to give her the foremost place
among modern actresses, “must always remain a secret between herself
and a few fine observers. I should say without qualification that
it is the best modern acting I have ever seen.... Duse is the first
actress whom we have seen applying the method of the great school
to characteristically modern parts or to characteristically modern
conceptions of old parts.... In Duse you necessarily get the great
school in its perfect integrity, because Duse without her genius would
be a plain little woman of no use to any manager.... Duse, _with_ her
genius, is so fascinating that it is positively difficult to attend
to the play, instead of attending wholly to her.... Sarah Bernhardt
has nothing but her own charm.... Duse’s own private charm has not yet
been given to the public. She gives you Césarine’s charm, Marguérite
Gauthier’s charm, the charm of La Locandiera, the charm, in short,
belonging to the character she impersonates; and you are enthralled by
its reality and delighted by the magical skill of the artist without
for a moment feeling any complicity either on your own part or on hers
in the passion represented.” Shaw did not hesitate to enter into the
once popular game of comparing Bernhardt and Duse, and in his estimate
Madame Sarah is indeed a bad second. “The French artist’s stock of
attitudes and facial effects could be catalogued as easily as her stock
of dramatic ideas: the counting would hardly go beyond the fingers of
both hands. Duse produces the illusion of being infinite in variety
of beautiful pose and motion. Every idea, every shade of thought and
mood, expresses itself delicately but vividly to the eye.... When it is
remembered that the majority of tragic actors excel only in explosions
of those passions which are common to man and brute, there will be no
difficulty in understanding the indescribable distinction which Duse’s
acting acquires from the fact that behind every stroke of it is a
distinctively human idea.”
Duse even in her early career, when she was but little more than
twenty, had already broken with dramatic traditions.[127] There was
a fairly definite Italian tradition which had been made familiar by
Ristori and which had been fostered by Salvini. If Duse had been French
instead of Italian and if she had undergone the regular training of
the _Conservatoire_, she would have met with another tradition, of
which at the time Bernhardt was becoming an efficient missionary,
imposing its standards even outside of France. Duse in some way escaped
all traditions. Her training, such as it was, had been with strolling
players and in provincial theatres. What this experience did succeed
in giving her was the habit of dramatic expression, a habit that, by
the time she had arrived at the age when the usual stage-struck girl
becomes an actress, had made her mistress of self-expression, free
from self-consciousness. Added to this habit of going directly to the
expression of an idea or emotion there was, in Duse’s case, besides
the sheer womanliness that shone through all her work, the ardent,
sympathetic imagination that enabled her to project herself into
another personality, sharing its emotions and divining its experiences
and actions. When these emotions and these actions reached the stage
of expression there was no rigid, school-taught method to hamper
her. An ingrained habit of expression, coupled with an illuminating,
self-effacing imagination, formed the secret of Duse’s famed
“naturalness.” Most actresses interpret or “portray” a character; Duse
became the character itself, transmuted into life in terms of Duse’s
own mind and spirit, and, as often as not something finer, more noble,
more sensitive, than the dramatist’s conception. Such a character, with
her, was “a figure designed and modeled beforehand, proportioned,
poised, and polished to the finger tips with a sculptor’s patient
assiduity, and then, by an ever renewed miracle endowed with ‘the
crowded hour of glorious life’ at the electric touch of the artist’s
imagination.”[128]
ADA REHAN
As a superbly alive, radiant personality, Ada Rehan stands out in the
memory of any one who has ever seen her. She is of the great line of
actresses. She is (or one should say _was_, for Ada Rehan several
years ago passed from the stage) more nearly a Woffington, a Terry,
than any actress America has yet produced. Like Ellen Terry, she was a
miraculous blend of regal force, charm, and thoroughly grounded ability.
[Illustration: ADA REHAN]
Yet “miraculous” is hardly the word, for Ada Rehan labored long and
devotedly for the eminence that both America and England accorded her.
Hers was no sudden Mary-Anderson-like leap into “stardom,” nor did she
gain a prominent place on the stage with the comparative ease that
seems possible in these days. As we shall see, her apprenticeship was
exceedingly long and arduous. In proportion was her radiance, when
once she was placed in the map of “stars,” for Rehan will be at least
a tradition, to be placed with those of Woffington and Terry, when her
lesser sisters are long since quite forgotten. She was the supreme
embodiment for all time, one feels certain, of Katherine, Shakespeare’s
Shrew. That part she was born to play. Her Beatrice, her Rosalind, her
Viola were all memorable impersonations; and she played the heroines of
old English comedy in a way that again recalled the famous actresses of
the past.
Ada Rehan[129] was born in Limerick, Ireland. The fact is rich in
significance, for though she was brought to the United States while she
was a mere child, and received here all of her stage training, there
is no denying the strong Celtic strain in her, the Irish buoyancy and
geniality.
The family came to America in 1865,[130] when Ada was about ten, and
settled in Brooklyn. None of her family had ever been on the stage, and
she went to school, as any other girl would, quite as if she were never
destined to be an actress. The three Crehan sisters must have been a
talented, attractive group of girls, however, for both of Ada’s elder
sisters preceded her to the stage, though neither of them gained a
tithe of the repute that was to come to the youngest of the three.[131]
When Ada first stepped on a stage, Kate, the eldest, had been on the
stage half-a-dozen years, and for four years had been the wife of
Oliver Doud Byron, the author and star of _Across the Continent_, a
great popular success of the day.[132] One night, when the Byrons were
playing _Across the Continent_, in Newark, New Jersey, the actress who
played Clara, a small part, was suddenly taken ill. Ada, who up to now
had had no idea, no definite idea at least, of attempting a stage
career, was pressed into service, and played the part that one night,
and played it with such confidence and success that a family council
straightway determined her fate for her. She was to go on the stage.
This date, 1873, is the first one of great importance in Miss Rehan’s
stage career. The next came six years later when Augustin Daly engaged
her as a member of his company at Daly’s Theatre. Theatre, company,
manager and “leading woman” there combined to write one of the most
brilliant chapters in America’s theatrical history.
The record of those six early years after her first appearance, and
before she went to Daly, is one of the most amazing industry and
progress. She played for a time with the Byrons, and made while with
them her first appearance in New York (1873) in a small part in _The
Thoroughbred_. Soon she went to Philadelphia for her first regular
engagement, as a member of Mrs. John Drew’s company at the Arch Street
Theatre. John Drew, the younger, the present actor of that name, made
his first appearance at about the same time, also in Mrs. Drew’s
company. Here Miss Rehan remained for two seasons (1873–75) receiving
much valuable training, though as yet she played only subordinate parts.
Then came several seasons of “stock”--“stock” according to the
old-fashioned system, in which the “stars” wandered from city to city,
finding in each place a company ready to support them in the standard
plays and ready to “get up” in new plays at short notice. As many of
the “stars” acted in the same plays, the stock company was less like
the present day organization so called, which presents a new play each
week and then drops it for good, than like a “repertoire company,” with
a number of plays always thoroughly at its command. The system made
for thorough training, as it combined with a wide range of material
opportunities for many performances of any given play. The later Daly
company, often called a stock company, was really such a repertoire
company save that it boasted its own fixed and brilliant “star,” Ada
Rehan.
After her two years with Mrs. John Drew, Miss Rehan went to Louisville
to join the stock company of Macauley’s Theatre, where she remained one
season (1875–6). If she had remained a few months longer she would have
assisted in the _début_ there of Mary Anderson.
She followed her year in Louisville with two seasons (1876–8) as a
member of John W. Albaugh’s company in Albany.[133] Here it was,
in December, 1877, while she was playing Bianca in _Katherine and
Petruchio_,[134] that Augustin Daly first saw her and observed her
exceptional talent.
At the end of her service with Mr. Albaugh she was but twenty-three.
And yet she had been a regularly engaged professional actress for
five years, had played Ophelia to Booth’s Hamlet and Lady Anne to John
McCullough’s Richard III, besides acting at various times Cordelia in
_Lear_, Desdemona in _Othello_, Celia in _As You Like It_, and Olivia
in _Twelfth Night_, and had appeared not only with Booth and McCullough
but with Adelaide Neilson, Lawrence Barrett, John Brougham, John T.
Raymond, and many of the other “stars” of the day.[135]
Next, during the season of 1878–79, Miss Rehan was for a brief period
in the company of Fanny Davenport. In the course of this engagement
a now forgotten play, _Pique_, was acted by Miss Davenport, and Ada
Rehan was given the part of Mary Standish. The author of the play was
Augustin Daly. When it was given at the Grand Opera House in New York,
in April, 1879, Mr. Daly again was struck by the promise of the young
actress whom he had seen as Bianca in Albany a year and a half before.
Immediately he placed her under his management and gave her the part
of Big Clémence in his own version of Zola’s _L’Assommoir_, which he
produced at the Olympic Theatre the following month. It was a small
part, she did it well, and within a few weeks was promoted to the part
of Virginie. In September of the same year she appeared for the first
time on the stage of Daly’s Theatre, which was built, oddly enough,
on the site of Wood’s Museum,[136] where six years ago she had acted
her small part in _The Thoroughbred_. It is worth mentioning that the
first parts--both in September, 1879--in the long list, literally of
hundreds, that she was to act during her twenty years with Mr. Daly
were Nelly Beers in _Love’s Young Dream_, and Lu Ten Eyck in _Divorce_.
With Ada Rehan the leading woman of the reorganized Daly company there
began a new era in her career, in Mr. Daly’s, and, it is fair to say,
in American acting. Until Mr. Daly’s death in 1899 Miss Rehan retained
her position, and in that time she progressed from obscurity to the
position of one of the leading actresses of her day, famous alike in
America and England, and famous even on the continent of Europe. With
Mr. Daly’s death, though she continued to act and to act well, there
passed the period of her peculiar fame, and in a half-dozen years she
had ceased to act altogether.
Such, in bald and brief outline, has been Rehan’s career. Of the
struggles, the aspirations, the triumphs of an actress, of her life, in
short, any mere record can tell but little.
What sort of woman was Ada Rehan? Well, she was of the royal line
of women, regal in her stature, opulent in bodily beauty, gracious
and rich in her nature. Her face, like her careless joyousness and
exuberant animal spirits, was Celtic. She was not beautiful in the
conventional sense, but as with Ellen Terry, simple beauty paled
beside her. Her hair was exuberant too, and brown, except where, in
the middle of her career, it became streaked with gray. She had the
gray-blue Irish eye. “What a great woman she was!” wrote one of her
more rhapsodic admirers.[137] “Tall, easy, almost majestic, except
that the geniality of her manner took from majesty its aloofness
and pride. When she spoke her voice came out mellifluently, so that
without forcing it seemed to pervade the room. It had something of the
quality of a blackbird’s note. Ada Rehan is not at all of a classic
type of countenance. She is genuine Celtic. To call her pretty would be
ridiculous, for prettiness is something that seems to dwindle beside
her. To call her beautiful would be neither completely expressive
nor apt, for her features have the warp of too many conflicting,
irrepressible emotions, and the turn of what one feels tempted to call
_rale ould Irish humor_. Yet the eyes, and the brow, and the head are
beautiful--the eyes especially, with their soft, lamp-like, mellow
glow, with their sharp, fiery glints, with their gorgon directness, or
again with their innumerable little twinkles of fun and sly melting
shadows, with the flashing from the lids and the eyelashes of light, or
the deep, still beaming that perhaps most eloquently of all speaks of
soul.” These are high words, indeed, but they had much provocation.
All these things, and more, Rehan appeared across the footlights. Off
the stage, simply as Ada Rehan, she was still the exceptional woman.
An actress who is capable of diverse and subtle characterizations
is often, singularly enough, in her own person a woman of essential
simplicity. Such seems to have been the case with Ada Rehan. Her lack
of pose can be glimpsed in various ways, in her capacity for pleasure
in the success of others, her ability to see and admire beauty and
talent in other women,--a severe test for any actress. “She was
generous and grateful, and she never forgot a kindness,” says Mr.
Winter. “Her mind was free from envy and bitterness ... and she never
spoke an ill word of anybody.” One more evidence of her simplicity was
her un-Bernhardtian sense of contentment in the limited opportunities
for personal glorification afforded by her position with Mr. Daly. As
we shall see, she refused numbers of offers to star, preferring the
comparative obscurity of her position as “Daly’s leading woman.” Notice
the phrases of a writer in the _Sun_, who observed her on the street
in New York in 1894, after her return from triumphant appearances in
London. “She exhibits a degree of calm serenity that might almost be
called matronly.... Her face wears a youthful and almost childish
expression.... Much of her time has been spent since her return in
looking in the shop windows, but apparently she has not purchased much,
either here or in Europe, as her attire is invariably that of a woman
who devotes little thought to dress!” But this writer goes on to say:
“No one would be likely to mistake her for anything but an actress
nowadays. Her distinction of bearing is so great that, even if her face
were not familiar to the public, a great many people would turn around
to look at her a second time as she walks along the street.”
Her early education was inconsiderable, and we are told that even
during her brief career in school she cared less for her lessons
than for romping with her three brothers,--a course that may not
have been without its value in preparing her for her success as
Katherine and Peggy Thrift. Later, however, she read much. She liked
Thackeray, and she particularly admired Balzac. “Her knowledge of
human nature,--gained partly by keen intuition and partly by close
observance,--was ample, various, and sound,” wrote William Winter, who
knew her well. “Her thoughts, and often her talk, dwelt upon traits of
character, fabrics of art, and beauties of nature, and she loved rather
to speak of these than of the commonplaces and practical affairs of the
passing day. Her grasp of character was intuitive; she judged rightly,
and she was seldom or never mistaken in her estimate of individuals.
Her perception was exceedingly acute, and she noted, instantly and
correctly, every essential trait, however slight, of each person who
approached her presence. She was intrinsically sincere, modest, and
humble--neither setting a great value on herself nor esteeming her
powers and achievements to be unusual; she has been known to be in
tears, at what she deemed a professional failure, while a brilliant
throng of friends was waiting to congratulate her on an unequivocal
success.”
Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Winter has poured out his praise with a lavish
hand. Yet it is clear that Ada Rehan added many fine qualities, for
those who knew her, to those qualities known to all who saw her:
vitality, a true sense of comedy, personal charm.
For a long time newspaper interviewers had the greatest difficulty in
getting Miss Rehan to talk for them. Like Duse and Mrs. Fiske, she
loathed the interview. By nature she was, within the circle of her
friends, candid and ingenuous, talking freely, stating frankly her
opinions and drawing freely from a fund of interesting anecdotes about
the personages she met and knew on both sides of the ocean. It is
related that during her first visit to London, she met at a dinner an
editor with whom she talked in her characteristic manner. He printed
all she said. Though she was of a kindly disposition and had said
nothing uncomfortable, she was annoyed by the incident, and for years
avoided journalists.[138]
Daly’s Theatre, in the days when Ada Rehan was at the height of
her charm and power, was sometimes called “the _Théâtre Français_
of America.” The leading man was John Drew (who did not become an
independent “star” until 1892); the comedian was James Lewis, a
talented, intelligent, genuinely comic actor;[139] the “dowager parts”
were played by the incomparable Mrs. James Gilbert; and the younger
women of the company were Isabel Irving and Kitty Cheatham, both
clever actresses, though they paled beside Rehan. At Daly’s one saw
acting that dispelled any impression of theatricalism. Mr. Daly’s
rule was rigorous, his standards exacting.[140] He was altogether an
exceptional manager, scholarly and thorough; and his instructions and
advice were of immense benefit to the actors in his company,--a fact
that Ada Rehan always freely acknowledged.
The list of parts that Miss Rehan in the twenty years between 1879 and
1899 acted in Mr. Daly’s company is simply amazing in its extent and
range. We think of her as Katherine, as Viola, Rosalind or Beatrice,
but she had been with Mr. Daly several years before the company
attempted Shakespeare. Before, there had been a long succession of
plays whose names mean nothing to us nowadays. Many of them were
adaptations, made by the versatile Mr. Daly himself, from the German.
Adaptations from the French, the American, and English stage had seen
in plenty; but the German comedies afforded Mr. Daly a comparatively
unworked field of which he made the most. One gets a satisfying sense
of the essential improvement since 1890 in the art of playwriting in
America upon reflecting that these translations and rearrangements of
pieces grown on a foreign soil would seem, if presented in our theatres
today, peculiarly thin and artificial. Miss Rehan’s more discerning
admirers regretted the waste of her great talent in them, but then, as
now, the theatre had to be made a paying institution in order to exist
at all, and these plays indubitably succeeded. The finished acting of
the Daly company, admirable both in individual impersonation and in
_ensemble_, made them one of the keenest of the theatrical pleasures
of the day.[141]