a season, before retiring from the stage forever. She has become
the classic example of the actor retiring in the midst of a highly
successful career. She has herself[159] indicated the chief reason
for her choice: “After so much kindness from the public, it seems
ungrateful to confess that the _practice_ of my art (not the study of
it) had grown, as time went on, more and more distasteful to me. To
quote Fanny Kemble on the same subject: ‘Never’ (in my case for the
last three years of my public life) ‘have I presented myself before
an audience without a feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their
presence without thinking the excitement I had undergone unwholesome,
and the personal exhibition odious.’ To be conscious that one’s person
was a target for any one who paid to make it one; to live for months
at a time in one groove, with uncongenial surroundings, and in an
atmosphere seldom penetrated by the sun and air; and to be continually
repeating the same passions and thoughts in the same words--that was
the most part of my daily life, and became so like slavery to me that I
resolved after one more season’s work to cut myself free from the stage
fetters forever.”
There is much in this passage to give pause to the girl who longs for
a stage career, for the youthfully ambitious seldom see such a career
in its true perspective. Mary Anderson, one in ten thousand in her
equipment as an actress, one in a million in the triumphs she won, yet
was eager to give it all up. On the audience’s side of the footlights
the stage is (and rightfully so) a place of beauty, of inspiration,
of revelation of the truth. To the actor or actress it is more often
than not a place of stern toil, of uncertainty, of disappointment and
disillusionment.
The provincial tour following the London engagement ended at Dublin,
where the public was as wildly enthusiastic as before. Some of the last
night audience even went so far as to follow in the same train to
Queenstown, awakening her at each stop with cheers and greetings.
There followed the final tour in the United States. At Louisville
she visited the scenes of her youth and received the congratulatory
resolutions of the state senate. She had begun the season with as much
zest as she could command, but the strain was beginning to tell on her
health. At Cincinnati she acted with difficulty, but completed the
engagement. At Washington, in the middle of inauguration week, in 1889,
the crisis was reached. “The first scenes of _The Winter’s Tale_ went
very smoothly. The theatre was crowded. Perdita danced apparently as
gayly as ever, but after the exertion fell fainting from exhaustion and
was carried off the stage. I was taken into the dressing-room, which
in a few moments was filled with people from the boxes. Recovering
consciousness quickly, I begged them to clear the room. Realizing
then that I would probably not be able to act any more that season,
though there were many weeks yet unfinished, I resolved at any cost to
complete that night’s work. Hurriedly putting on some color, I passed
the groups of people discussing the incident, and before the doctor or
my brother were aware of my purpose, ordered the curtain to be rung
up and walked quickly upon the stage. As I did so I heard a loud hum,
which I was afterwards told was a great burst of applause from the
audience. The pastoral scene came to an end. There was only one more
act to go through. Donning the statue-like draperies of Hermione, I
mounted the pedestal. My physician, formerly an officer in the army,
said that he had never, even in the midst of a battle, felt so nervous
as when he saw the figure of Hermione swaying on her pedestal up that
long flight of stairs. Every moment there was an hour of torture to
me, for I felt myself growing fainter and fainter. All my remaining
strength was put into that last effort. I descended from the pedestal,
and was able to speak all but the final line. This remained unuttered,
and the curtain rang down on my last appearance on the stage.”[160]
A little over a year after this unexpected close to her brilliant
public career Mary Anderson became Mrs. Antonio F. de Navarro. Her
husband was a native of New York, of Spanish extraction, and like
herself, of Catholic faith. They were married on June 17, 1890, at the
Catholic church at Hampstead, London. During the last half dozen years
of her stage career Mary Anderson had become almost an Englishwoman
by adoption. Her new home was made in the little village of Broadway,
Worcestershire, and there she has always since lived, enjoying the
peaceful life and the domestic happiness for which she longed and which
she so richly deserved. She has two children, a son and a daughter.
There have not been lacking attempts to tempt her again behind the
footlights. Enormous sums have been offered without the least effect.
For charity she has read or sung once or twice in modest programs, but
that is all. The people of Broadway fairly worship her for the gracious
and kindly lady she is. Since her marriage she has made a few visits to
America, and the American public of the theatre was recently reminded
of the former light of its stage when she assisted Robert Hichens in
the dramatization of _The Garden of Allah_. But Mary Anderson, though
she is now well under sixty, for a quarter of a century has been to
most of us only an illustrious name of the past, and to our elders a
tenderly treasured memory.
The estimate of Mary Anderson with which she has usually been
dismissed by the casually critical is that she was not a great actress,
but an unusually handsome, charming and talented woman who is memorable
chiefly as a demonstration that the stage can be the working place of a
wholesome, womanly woman.
As to whether she was a great actress there was and is a wide
difference of opinion. To her more partial admirers she was the
“authentic queen of the American stage,” who in each of her parts
“gave an individual and potential impersonation.”[161] “Such moments
in her acting,” wrote William Winter, who has always been her friend
and admirer, “as that of Galatea’s mute supplication at the last of
earthly life, that of Juliet’s desolation after the final midnight
parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that
of Hermione’s despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken
dead, are the eloquent, the absolute, the final denotements of genius.”
A great deal of contemporary criticism was decidedly less enthusiastic
than this. While thoroughly believing in Miss Anderson’s devotion to
her profession and her conviction of its dignity, many good judges saw
in her a woman of talent only, not a genius. The art of the theatre was
to her a matter of the highest ideals, deserving the service of the
best and noblest in the natures of its followers. Yet as an actress
practicing this art she seemed to many incapable of placing her work
on any but a personal basis. Insight into character, it was said, was
impossible to her--her Galatea, Parthenia, Pauline, Rosalind and the
rest were but herself in different guises. A striking instance of her
lack of dramatic insight was her inability to adapt herself to W. S.
Gilbert’s conception of his own _Galatea_. He wished her to suggest
the comic or satiric value of some of her speeches, but she was unable
to bring about the necessary subordination of her own personality. The
heroic and obviously tragic were her forte. A thoroughly good woman
herself, she was rigidly confined by the limits of her temperament, as
well as by her views of what the stage should show, to the delineation
of good women. She was probably quite incapable of expressing a purely
animal nature. “Her acting is polished, and in correct taste,” said the
_Morning Post_ of London, “what it wants is freshness, spontaneity,
_abandon_. Of the _feu sacre_ which irradiated Rachel and gives to
Bernhardt splendor ineffable, Miss Anderson has not a spark. She is not
inspired. Hers is a pure, bright, steady light; but it lacks any mystic
effulgence. She is beautiful, winsome, gifted, and accomplished. To say
this is to say much, and it fills to the brim the measure of legitimate
praise. She is an eminently good, but not a great artist.”
The word “beautiful” is sure to turn up in any criticism of Mary
Anderson. Never was the word used with more justification. She was “a
classic figure gotten by mistake into an unclassic epoch.” She was
of innate dignity, tall and statuesque, “of imperial figure,” fair
haired, blue-eyed. Her features were finely chiseled and regular and
at once suggested the Greek ideal. Her voice, rich, tender, and with
wonderfully full bodied and expressive lower tones, was one of her
chief charms. Many men today have those tones still echoing in their
minds.
But the spell of her beauty was that it seemed more than skin-deep. It
was the expression of a noble temperament, the beauty of a woman of
high feeling and sensitiveness, and yet of dignity. It was an essential
part of her appeal, though this was not an appeal to the eye alone.
It was the beauty of the actress, who could be sincerely concerned
first of all with the ideals of her art, of the woman who could say:
“The highest praise I receive is the knowledge that someone has gone
from the audience with an increased light as to the development of
character, a higher sense of moral responsibility, a better spiritual
condition for having seen the play.”
Whether or not this beautiful woman was a great actress, she was
“our Mary” to countless thousands, and such a title is not earned by
commonplaceness and dignity, however beautiful. About Mary Anderson
there hangs somehow a sense of enchantment, of the realization of an
ideal of loveliness, joy and purity. And whether or not she was a
genius, there is something heroic in the amplitude of her career. She
began as a poor girl, living in an obscure place, without connection
with the theatre. By her noble aspirations, her zeal and patience in
their pursuit, and her modesty and worth in their fulfillment, she
succeeded gloriously.
In the autumn of 1915, in a performance for the benefit of
one of the British war-charities, Mary Anderson acted the
sleep-walking scene from _Macbeth_ and the balcony scene from
_Romeo and Juliet_.
MRS. FISKE
One afternoon a decade ago Minnie Maddern Fiske journeyed out
from Boston to the neighboring university city, went to Sanders
Theatre, scene of Harvard’s august ceremonies, and there she
talked--engrossingly--on her art. The occasion was in a way memorable.
In times not remotely past the possibility of an actress lecturing in
Sanders would have been doubtful.[162] But in 1905 Harvard was well
along in its career as one of the springs of the renaissance which
has of late years manifested itself in the English-speaking theatre.
If one said “Professor Baker’s work was beginning to make itself
felt” it would be saying the same thing in a different way. In many
respects the occasion was unusual The audience was interesting: the
professors were there to add dignity and academic distinction; the
students, of Harvard and Radcliffe, were there in force to represent
the newer spirit of inquiry and effort in matters dramatic; the stage
was represented in the audience as well as on the platform (and, oddly,
Francis Wilson, Edward H. Sothern and the speaker cover nearly the
whole dramatic range). There was an enthusiastic expectancy in the air.
One felt that here was the manifestation of something genuine and
strong. The speaker did not disappoint. Poised and confident, eager and
enthusiastic, she spoke for more than an hour and one felt at the end
that this small woman had signalized a new spirit in the theatre and in
the attitude of educated men toward the drama and its exponents.
[Illustration: MRS. FISKE]
She had started life as a baby actress and her formal schooling was
snatched here and there in the midst of an ever busy career. Most men
(and women) can exhaust the resources of academic training with a total
result less brilliant, however, than her hour on the stage of Sanders.
But it was only one form of a recognition which is freely accorded. It
is quite safe to say that since the death of Mansfield she has been the
most noteworthy American person of the theatre. She has consistently
championed drama of a high order, which is something superior to
theatrical art of a high order. So much would be true if she remained
the producer only. Mrs. Fiske, the actress, has placed herself among
the chosen few. She, as much as any other, brought to bear on the
American theatre what it sorely needed, a keen intellect attuned to the
new spirit of naturalism. She was born in a lucky day for this purpose,
for, as we shall see, she came to maturity at just about the time when
the rebirth in the English drama was making itself evident.
The stage always attracts to itself numbers of people who no doubt
sincerely fancy themselves drawn thither irresistibly. The theatre’s
lure is strong, yet most of its followers have entered upon a stage
career more or less as a matter of choice. With a small number,
however, the life has been inevitable. There has been no choice, no
attraction or glamour even. Such is Mrs. Fiske; she is indigenously of
the theatre.
Early in the last century an English girl of good family eloped with
her music teacher. Here, perhaps, began Minnie Maddern’s artistic
career, for this girl was her grandmother. After a while this music
master brought his family to America, where he conducted concert tours.
One daughter, Lizzie Maddern, the mother of Mrs. Fiske, not only was
the youthful cornetist of the company, but she arranged the music for
the orchestra and, indeed, became a musician of genuine ability, and,
later, an acceptable actress. She married Thomas Davey, a pioneer
theatrical manager who carried his company up and down through the
South and West in the days before personal management gave way to
the highly impersonal direction of the Broadway offices. Davey was
noted for his invasion of small unheard-of towns, where often the inn
dining-room served as a theatre and scenery was of the scantiest. The
actor’s life has its uncertainties and hardships in any age or country,
but in Western America of the middle of the nineteenth century the
conditions were often those known by the strolling players of old.
As we shall see, Mrs. Fiske long afterward, and for quite different
reasons, reverted for a time to the old practice of playing on
extemporized stages.
On December 19, 1865, Marie Augusta Davey was born in New Orleans.
From the first of her stage career, which began almost immediately,
she was known as Minnie Maddern. There is a pretty story of her first,
quite informal stage appearance. A careless nurse had left the baby
unguarded. She climbed from her bed, donned her clothes and went out
in search of the theatre and her mother. “I forgot to cry, I forgot to
be frightened, and I saw some fascinating things before a good-natured
fellow picked me up, discovered my identity and took me safely to the
theatre. I recall distinctly being held by my new friend and identified
at the box-office; then being passed over to a boy who took me around
to a narrow, dark door and carried me into a lumbery place and put me
in a chair where I looked out into what seemed a bright, sunshiny world
with queer trees and fairies. Just then I spied my mother. She was
dressed like a fairy, and she was just coming out of a water lily--for
it was the transformation scene of a spectacle. I slipped right out of
that chair, and, before any one saw what I was going to do, I ran right
to her and began explaining my nurse’s treachery. I am told that I was
received with applause, and that my first appearance, even though it
was impromptu, was a success.”
Previously, she had been “taken on” when the action required the
presence of a baby, and soon afterwards little Minnie appeared between
the farce and the tragedy to do her songs and dances. At three came
her first premeditated speaking appearance,[163] as the Duke of York
in _Richard III_, and from that day to this, excepting brief periods
in school[164] and a few years at the time of her marriage to Harrison
Grey Fiske, in 1890, she has been continuously and busily engaged in
her profession.
Her career divides sharply into two periods. To the first of these,
the twenty-five years that carried her to the time of her marriage,
she is now disposed to be rather indifferent. When she refers at all
to that time, which is not often, she speaks of the “prehistoric
days.”[165] It was, nevertheless, a period of thorough schooling,
arduous, but fruitful of technical excellence, and bringing early
triumphs--a babyhood and girlhood apprenticeship which is today, for
various reasons (one of them being laws in some states restricting
the appearance of children on the stage) practically inaccessible. To
indicate briefly her early experience it is enough to say that before
she was sixteen Minnie Maddern had appeared not only with her father’s
company, but with a dozen or more of the stars of the day, Laura Keene,
J. K. Emmet, Lucille Western, John McCullough, Joseph Jefferson, E. L.
Davenport, and the rest of that almost forgotten day. She went through
the whole range of juvenile parts,[166] soubrettes, harassed young
heroines, boys, fairies, the lads of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on
through the list, playing wherever the need of a clever child actress
called her. She wore long dresses on the stage long before she assumed
them in her own person, and by the time she was sixteen she was
conspicuously successful in old woman rôles![167] At sixteen, too, she
became a star in New York, though this venture was ill-advised. She had
won a public by her cleverness and her marked personality, but, much
to her credit, she was not adapted to the crude and blatantly personal
form of entertainment represented by _Fogg’s Ferry_, which was one of
the “protean shows” of those days. She was to wait, indeed, many years
more for the beginning of her identification with really significant
drama. During this young womanhood, from sixteen to twenty-odd, she
acted in plays which are never resurrected nowadays by even the most
undiscriminating stock company, and which are remembered, if at all,
by some old theatregoer who likes to recollect how appealingly, in
_Caprice_, Minnie Maddern used to sing “In the Gloaming.” _The Storm
Child_, _In Spite of All_, _The Child Wife_, _The Puritan Maid_, _Lady
Jemima_, _Featherbrain_--these are not so much as names nowadays,
even to those who know the theatre well. She had gained thorough,
indispensable training, but as yet no memorable achievement.[168]
In 1890 came her marriage and three years of retirement.[169] It
is, for many reasons, not strange that when she again took up her
stage career a new era seemed to begin for her. Not only must her own
nature, her insight, and her artistic equipment now have combined to
qualify her for new and greater efforts; the whole English speaking
theatre was gaining a new lease of life. Arthur Wing Pinero, just
emerging into his period of sureness of technique and a frank facing
of life; Henry Arthur Jones, dropping his earlier melodramatic manner
and about to produce _Michael and His Lost Angel_; Oscar Wilde, with
his momentary flash of high comedy; George Bernard Shaw, watchful of
the experimentation of others and in addition well saturated with
Ibsen; above all, the great Norwegian himself, whose influence knew
no difference of language;--these men were, in the early nineties,
bringing into English drama a vigor and a relation to life such as it
had not enjoyed since the closing of the theatres in 1642.
Mrs. Fiske was keenly, if to a certain degree unconsciously, alive to
these influences. To one attuned they were the _zeitgeist_. With an
eagerness new to the American theatre she was ambitious to attempt
the modern drama--a drama honest and frank in its outlook on life,
free from conventional restraint in its choice of themes, and taking
its tone from the realities in human character. Not always have the
qualities of the play been a match for the powers of the actress.
Yet, looking over the period since 1893,[170] the list is distinctly
noteworthy--first of all, Ibsen, who found in Mrs. Fiske a ready
champion. _A Doll’s House_, _Hedda Gabler_, _Rosmersholm_, _The Pillars
of Society_; surely they form a goodly showing. As for other Europeans,
we have Sardou furnishing her, in _Divorçons_, an opportunity,
brilliantly embraced, for comedy; Dumas _fils_ is represented by _La
Femme de Claude_, Sudermann by _Magda_, and Hauptmann by the short play
_Hannele_. Two of her greatest successes, _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_
and _Becky Sharp_ were unusually skillful and satisfying experiments
in that difficult form, the dramatized novel. _Leah Kleschna_ was
worth while as an attempt to raise melodrama into the field of social
drama; _The New York Idea_ is, so far, the best American example of
sophisticated, ironic comedy; and in very recent days Edward Sheldon’s
plays, _Salvation Nell_ and _The High Road_, have been courageous and
justified experiments--the most striking examples we have had of the
encouragement of the native dramatist of the newer school.
The capacity to key oneself to the inner meaning of a play, to react
on the genius of the author with sympathy and insight, sets apart the
artist from the crowd of mechanical players. For different actors there
are naturally different forms of this power. For Mrs. Fiske, it can be
said that her genius displays itself in the naturalism that reveals at
once the realities and the beauties of human nature. Let us see how the
group of representative plays named above has represented this power.
It can fairly be said that the distinguishing mark of this group
of plays has been its close relation to actual human life. This is
of course the distinguishing work of the most characteristic and
significant of modern English drama as a whole; but there is much more
of this sort of drama now than there was eighteen or twenty years
ago, and there has been, until very recently, more of this leaven of
truth to nature in the British theatre than in the American. Consider
for a moment the character of the average play upon which the public
in the United States spent during this period (and rightly enough
still spends) millions of dollars and hours. To name a few undoubted
successes: _When Knightwood was in Flower_, _The Heart of Maryland_,
_Lovers’ Lane_, _The Christian_, _Way Down East_, _Secret Service_,
_The Music Master_, _The Man from Home_, _Zaza_, _Charley’s Aunt_, _The
Prisoner of Zenda_, _Sherlock Holmes_, _The Chorus Lady_, _Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm_, _The Woman_, _Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford_. Without
denying the necessity of the theatre of mere amusement, of light
sentiment, of melodrama, one feels grateful for an ambition that has
sought and found something deeper.
To examine Mrs. Fiske’s plays more in detail will indicate both
the temper of the modern realistic school and the quality of her
interpretations.