Part 16

The keynote of Mrs. Fiske’s acting is akin to that of naturalistic drama itself, as the dramatist himself understands it. He must portray humanity as it is, with the selection and stress necessary for effectiveness in the theatre. His heroines must be embodied through similar methods. Such impersonation Mrs. Fiske accomplishes with the utmost economy of gesture, action and voice. There is no staginess, none of the aggressive grace of the actress playing a part; she is rather the woman living it. There is obvious none of the routine technique which actors frequently learn of each other, or in schools. This is not to say that her style is not an outgrowth of an earlier technique of a period when no doubt she was sufficiently “stagey” and conventional. In the later period she has refined, out of this earlier experience and her own insight, a method remarkable for its suggestion, its repression, its freedom from familiar device. To the end of theatric effect and illusion she, like all artists, has well defined, recognizable means--some, like her wide-ranged, emotion-charged voice, natural gifts; others more or less deliberate. How deliberate, it would be hard to say, so closely knit in good acting are calculation and instinctive action. Her power of imparting the details of impersonation is notable. Gesture, walk, pose, facial play, intonation, pause, all are worked out with precision and yet with a reticent naturalness that makes strongly for effectiveness. Particularly convincing is her power of pregnant silence. In Hedda Gabler, “Mrs. Fiske’s power of ominously significant silence, of play of feature that reveals the working brain behind, rises very high in the final scene with Brack. He knows her share in Lovborg’s ruin; he can bring his knowledge into play in the sordid theatre of the police court. The price of silence is the submission that Hedda, with all her curiosity and zest for evil, is too coldly cowardly to pay. All her tragedy has curdled mean. Her only refuge is the meaner and cowardly escape of suicide. She does not speak, yet one sees the idea germinate, mount and possess her, until it flowers into reckless action.”[171]

In the first act of _Salvation Nell_ “Mrs. Fiske, as the scrub woman in the barroom, sat holding her drunken lover’s head in her lap for fully ten minutes without a word, almost without a motion. Gradually one could watch nothing else; one became absorbed in the silent pathos of that dumb, sitting figure. Miss Mary Garden, herself a distinguished actress, said of this, ‘Ah, to be able to do nothing like that.’ In _Pillars of Society_, while the Consul was making his confession to the mob, again Mrs. Fiske, as Lona, sat quiet, one of the crowd; but gradually, as she saw the man she loved throwing off his yoke of hypocrisy, the light of a great joy radiated from her face, ending in a stifled cry, half-sob, half-laugh of triumph, of indescribable poignancy. To one beholder, at least, it brought the rush of tears, and made the emotional as well as the intellectual drift of the play completely clear, completely fused and compelling. Is not this acting of a very high order, this so intense living in the whole life of the drama that her quietest moment is charged with tingling significance? Is this not true ‘impersonation,’ indeed?”[172]

Akin to this power of eloquent silence is Mrs. Fiske’s use of “felicitous pause.” In the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word, will come a momentary halt such as anyone in real life is constantly making. The effect is strikingly realistic; the wonder is that many others have not discovered and profited by its simplicity and naturalness. And then, coupled with her many sided faculty of repression, is a power of sudden, telling, emotional speech. Piercing a mood of charged silence, a sentence spoken in Mrs. Fiske’s eloquent voice is often of electrical effect.

By such methods, she made Hedda, “an abnormally evil and soulless woman, steadily plausible, momentarily potent, always conceivably human.” In the words of the same critic[173] she gave to Nora, in _A Doll’s House_ “the very semblance of life. When these traits (disdain of convention, curiosity, self-concentration) become abnormal and pass over into morbid chagrin and recklessness, sordid selfishness, vicious vindictiveness, hard soullessness and mean cowardice, Mrs. Fiske’s intellect and her temperament follow them.”

Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West in _Rosmersholm_ excited differences of opinion. To some any Ibsen play is a brilliant study of certain phases of life, to others only a depressing study in degeneracy. It is natural that the actress’ work should make varied impressions. In the moments of intense passion she rose superbly to the occasion; her Rebecca had intellectual poise; she suggested beautifully Rebecca’s renouncing love. It was, as far as it went, a portrait equal to any of her others, but in a degree she failed to suggest plausibly the fascinating half-intellectual and half-emotional force that gave Rebecca her influence in Rosmer’s house. She was a shade too detached, a little lacking in the warmth that must have belonged to Rebecca’s ideals and to her love for Rosmer.

One may frankly admit, indeed, that Mrs. Fiske’s acting does not please all tastes. What some find to be her repressive force is in the eyes of others “stilted awkwardness.” The qualities which to most are her most salient characteristics are to some her “intolerable mannerisms.” One comment on her Hedda was that there was “not a large or spontaneous moment in it,” that it was “an adroitly articulated mosaic, an assemblage of details, all precise exposition, rather than a jointless and living whole.” Her personality has been described as “cerebral” and “brittle,” and her art as “too predominantly intellectual.” Attention has been called to her “maddening rising inflection,” and, with wearisome reiteration, to what has been called her “unfortunate mannerism of runningallthewordsofasentenceintooneanother.” In this last criticism there is a measure of justice, for at times her speech has been disconcertingly rapid. There has been improvement in this respect of late years, however, and to those playgoers themselves temperamentally adapted to enjoy her work, her enunciation has been seldom indistinct, her so-called awkwardness and mannerisms full of significance, and her “cerebral” acting and personality the means of true impersonation.

_The Pillars of Society_, since it is a social satire rather than an outright tragedy, afforded Mrs. Fiske as Lona Hessel an opportunity for brilliant comedy. It was a small part, too small indeed to have bestowed on it her powers. But she has never chosen plays for their “star parts.” She made Lona a delightfully humorous, honest-hearted woman, a masterpiece, within its limits, of satiric comedy. Especially fine was her acting during Bernick’s confession to the mob. We have already seen how she sat in one of her motionless silences, listening, in her face the joy of victory--a joy that finally expressed itself in “a little smothered sob of triumphant love which no other American actress could have invented, or could have executed.”

Mrs. Fiske’s skillful acting of the lighter passages in _The Pillars of Society_ gives point to a contention of many of her admirers--that she should oftener be seen in comedy. In the two conspicuous instances of her ventures into comedy--_Divorçons_ and _The New York Idea_, she has been strikingly successful. In Sardou’s play she acted with “a refined abandon that was positively captivating, making Cyprienne deliciously capricious and delightfully feminine.” _The New York Idea_ William Archer found to be “a social satire so largely conceived and so vigorously executed that it might take an honorable place in any dramatic literature.” It is an example of high comedy, the comedy “that smiles as it chastises.” The title is explained in one of the lines: “Marry for whim and leave the rest to the divorce court--that’s the New York idea of marriage.” In its lightness of mood and speech the play is a comedy, yet in the author’s mind the underlying interest is serious, his purpose being not to make fun of or satirize true love, but to make fun of and call attention to the frivolous, inconsequential attitude toward marriage and divorce. American playwrights have seldom attempted the satirical high comedy of manners. _The New York Idea_, with its spirited, delicately pungent wit, is by all odds the best example so far. Mrs. Fiske brought to bear on her part, that of a wife whose love for her husband persisted after divorce, a lightness and sureness of touch that were a match for the play’s best qualities. Her resources of changeful mood happily expressed Cynthia Karslake’s high bred reticence of sentiment and rather sophisticated gayety.[174]

_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was written by Lorimer Stoddard within one week, but the result was, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, one of the great modern tragedies, worthy to be ranked with Ibsen’s _Ghosts_. At least Mr. Stoddard wrote a strong, truthful play, in the main faithful to the novel by Thomas Hardy that was its original. It was felt at the time that the American stage had risen for once to unaccustomed literary and dramatic heights. The play was produced in 1897. It was as Tess that Mrs. Fiske fully “arrived.” Of her most notable characters only Nora in _A Doll’s House_ had preceded. Her abilities had been generally recognized but until now play and part had never so fortunately aided her. She was not Thomas Hardy’s Tess. It was futile to expect that she would be, for the Tess of the book was simple, primitive, impulsive, whereas Mrs. Fiske’s art was always better adapted to reflection and complexity. Such qualities she gave her Tess. And naturally her smallness and blondness do not at once suggest Hardy’s heroine. Yet her work was enthusiastically praised. In spite of her disadvantages, in this part, of person and method, the keenness of her perception of _her_ Tess and the nervous force with which she imparted that perception to the audience made a deep impression. Ir moments like that in which she discovers her husband to be ignorant of her past life, or that of the return of the supposed dead Angel Clare, her power of repressed emotion was most effective. While actually doing almost nothing, her horror and amazement were strongly felt across the footlights. The few sentences to her husband that recall the years of waiting and disillusion, were simply spoken but with the agony of Tess’s pitiful tragedy. The play was at once successful, and the admirers of Mrs. Fiske, who had waited long for a suitable opportunity for her, felt at last satisfied.

It is as Becky Sharp, in a play based on Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_, that Mrs. Fiske is by many most gratefully remembered. The author was Langdon Mitchell, who several years later was to write for her _The New York Idea_. _Vanity Fair_ is of course an immensely complicated study of all kinds of characters in all sorts of relations. At first blush it does not seem promising theatrical material. Mr. Mitchell wisely did not attempt to produce a “dramatization,” but selected the most dramatic incidents of the book, took the bare plot thence and wove about it, largely in his own dialogue, a well-constructed play. The climax is the scene of Lord Steyne’s visit to Rebecca, with the unexpected arrival home of Rawdon Crawley. This scene, played with consummate skill by Maurice Barrymore as Rawdon, Tyrone Power (and later George Arliss) as Steyne, and Mrs. Fiske as Becky, was admittedly one of the high water marks in the history of American acting. The scene of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo, with the stage full of people at first gay and thoughtless, and then in succession attentive, doubtful, certain of danger, terror-struck, was a masterpiece of complex and thrilling illusion. Mrs. Fiske’s Becky is thought by many her finest portrait. Here was an opportunity for subtlety, for piquancy, for brilliancy, for varying moods, for humor. If the Steyne incident was the big moment of the play there were a number of lesser ones. In the half-comic, half-tragic scene in which Becky wheedles out of Steyne money to pay Rawdon’s debts, Mrs. Fiske was superb. In its uniformly effective acting, its literary interest, its legitimately spectacular appeal, and its success as an experiment with the native dramatist, Becky Sharp stands strongly forth in any review of Mrs. Fiske’s career.

In _Mary of Magdala_ Mrs. Fiske ventured, none too wisely, into the field of poetic Biblical tragedy. Christ and his teachings, and the greatest tragedy of all, form the substance of the play. The stage management was imposing, the production sumptuous and accurate. Tyrone Power as Judas was a genuinely tragic figure and in the strongest scene--that of the temptation by the Roman who was seeking to have Mary buy the safety of Jesus--Mrs. Fiske showed great power. Yet the play was superficial and often clumsy, the treatment of its lofty theme incongruous, and Mrs. Fiske’s acting in a measure disappointing. She lacks the sensuous in her temperament and method, and on the whole she lacked in this part sustained power. She was hardly the Magdalene of the Orient.

More surely within the sphere designated by her large but specialized talents was _Leah Kleschna_, a strong drama of the redemption of a thief’s daughter by the influence of a man whose house she attempted to rob. The narrative is continuously and plausibly interesting, the incidents of great dramatic effectiveness. The play was “modulated melodrama”--an effort to lift a story of striking incident and broadly drawn emotions into the realm of reality. In the light it throws on the nature of the thief, its making and its possible breaking, the play had its social bearing. The immediate popularity of _Leah Kleschna_ was a hopeful sign to those interested in the growth of a worthy native drama. With some point it was asked why the author had not placed the scene of his play in America instead of Paris. Mr. McLellan has not, perhaps, borne out the promise of this one play, but it is interesting to note how many of Mrs. Fiske’s later plays have been of native writing. To be sure success has not always been the result. With moderately gratifying results she has played three one-act plays of her own writing,--_The Rose_, _A Light from St. Agnes_, and _The Eyes of the Heart_, all written years before, besides a one-act play, _Dolce_, by John Luther Long. _The New York Idea_ and _Salvation Nell_ are both, of course, absolutely American. After _Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh_ and _The New Marriage_, both by Americans, came _The High Road_ by Edward Sheldon, the young author of _Salvation Nell_. The foreign-made plays, _Rosmersholm_, _Hannele_, _The Pillars of Society_ and _Lady Patricia_ have varied this programme, but it is plain that Mrs. Fiske in her encouragement of the native dramatist has been courageous and persistent to a point that few of her rival managers have cared to follow.

The most interesting instance is Mr. Sheldon. While he was still a student in Harvard, his _Salvation Nell_ was accepted by Mrs. Fiske. Produced in 1908, it made a curious impression. Without the contour or substance of sound, full-bodied drama, and largely depending for its popular appeal on the faithfulness of the scenes of the New York slums, the play nevertheless showed the young author’s gift for situation, and afforded Mrs. Fiske a part well adapted to her gifts. This comment is almost equally true of _The High Road_, of four years later, which Mr. Sheldon does not call a play at all. It is a “pilgrimage” in which Mary Page is taken through nearly forty years of her life, successively as a young New York State country girl, the mistress of a rich young artist, the awakening young idealist rebelling as she matures, as the woman’s labor organizer, and as the devoted wife of a distinguished statesman. The play is not a great one, nor even a big one, but it is firmly interesting and the range of effect for Mrs. Fiske is obvious.

Praise for her steadfast desire to search out native-made plays cannot be too strong, and some of these ventures have been among her unqualified successes, but many of her admirers feel that Mrs. Fiske’s continued experimentation with the newer school of American dramatists should be modified--if modification is necessary--to obtain the thorough-going effectiveness of play, player and production she has at times attained. Let us have more _Becky Sharps_ and _New York Ideas_, even if it must be in revival.

One important factor in Mrs. Fiske’s success has been only hinted. The married life of people of the theatre has been a frequent and sometimes justified cause for unpleasant comment. In the case of Mrs. Fiske much of the success of the better known half of the house has been to a degree due to her husband. It is pleasant to record this fact--not that it is a unique situation (for married stage folk can be normally happy more readily than is thought) but because Mr. Fiske’s share in his wife’s productions has not been wholly understood. In a recent letter which Mrs. Fiske distributed to the press she gives to her husband a generous share of the credit for the excellence which has always marked the productions of the Manhattan Company. To him is due, she says, the taste and thoroughness of the settings. The play which she was giving at the time and which gave the announcement point, was _The High Road_. The second act is placed in an apartment in upper New York, furnished by an artist of training and knowledge. The scene bears this out in a way that strikes a new note in stage decoration. The tapestries, the reproductions of oil paintings, carved doors and mantelpiece, the furniture, are accurate to the last detail.

Mr. Fiske leased and managed the Manhattan Theatre in New York for the few years beginning in 1901. With this theatre as headquarters the Fiskes waged vigorous war for eight years against the so-called theatrical syndicate, a combination of theatre owners and producing managers which had for years been acquiring the leases or ownership of most of the theatres of the country. The Fiskes steadfastly held out against the dictates of this syndicate as to their plans for tours, and preferred not to become the property of a monopoly which was operated primarily for its money gains. When their continued resistance was strengthened by other “independents,” the trust made it increasingly difficult to find theatres to play in. During her tour in 1904 in _Leah Kleschna_ Mrs. Fiske in some cities played in summer gardens, and on improvised stages in halls, much as she used to do in the old days of barnstorming. With the rise of a rival syndicate, a rise made possible partly through Mrs. Fiske’s help, the lines have loosened and the Fiskes have no longer any difficulty in “booking” their plays.

The Fiskes’ organization has become definitely known as the Manhattan Company, though they no longer control the theatre of that name. “As a producer of plays” Madame Réjane once said, “Mrs. Fiske has no superior in Europe.” The uniformity of ability in the actors, the adjustment of the characters which often kept Mrs. Fiske herself in the background, contrary to the usages of “stars,” the detailed excellence of the stage “business” (as the ballroom scene in _Becky Sharp_) have always given the productions the interest, the appearance of life itself. It is familiar knowledge among those who have closely watched the American stage that Mrs. Fiske is one of the best stage directors of the time. The careful, extended rehearsal of a play is hard work, but Mrs. Fiske, with the active nervous temperament that demands hard work, is equal to it. She personally directs the rehearsals of her companies, and when one remembers _Mary of Magdala_, for instance, which demanded a hundred actors and was rehearsed more than six weeks, or when one recollects the practically flawless stage management of any Fiske production, her merit as an imaginative producer becomes apparent. Like her acting, her stage management is quiet, effective, tensely alive.

During the retirement immediately following her marriage, and since, Mrs. Fiske has found time to write a number of plays. _A Light from St. Agnes_ is a one-act play of much dramatic power telling a tragic story of low life among the bayous of Louisiana. _The Rose_ is another one-act tragedy once played by Rosina Vokes’s company. _The Eyes of the Heart_ is likewise a short play, having for its principal character an old blind man who, after losing his fortune, is kept in ignorance of his poverty by his family and friends. All three of these pieces were played at various times and with considerable success by Mrs. Fiske and her company. She wrote several other plays, some of them longer, but none well known today. _John Doe_ was a dramatization of a sketch by Mr. Fiske; _Grandpapa_, _Not Guilty_ and _Common Clay_ were all long plays; _Fontenelle_, which she wrote with Mr. Fiske, was played by James O’Neill; _Countess Roudine_ was written with the help of Paul Kester and was once in the repertoire of Modjeska. _The Dream of Matthew Wayne_ was also written by Mrs. Fiske.

Mrs. Fiske has said that the life of an actor is intolerably narrowed if he has no interests outside the theatre. Such interests she has. The strongest is her devotion to the welfare of dumb animals. The trapping of fur bearers, the cruel conditions in cattle trains, lack of shelter on the ranges, bull-fights, vivisection, all have had her for an enemy. Individual cases of cruelty are constantly receiving relief at her hands and to various allied causes her money and time has been given generously. She often makes addresses before meetings in the interest of such reforms, and at such times the actress is quite forgotten in the humane woman.[175]

The often discussed limitations of Mrs. Fiske have always been said to include her physical equipment. She is no Bernhardt or Terry in stature. During most of her career she has been slender, and there are dozens of women on the stage who will never attain a hundredth part of her compelling personal power, who are nevertheless her superiors in superficial beauty. The truth seems to be that in her has been demonstrated again that when the essentials of acting of a high order are present, actual beauty is a comparatively negligible factor. Nor can beauty, to a degree, be denied her. Her face is, one might say, of the Scandinavian type. Her hair always was and still is, beautiful,--a reddish golden--radiantly golden when dressed to advantage and seen in the glow of the footlights. Her eyes are, at a guess, gray (though even her intimate friends disagree as to their precise color); they are large and, as no one who has watched their part in an impersonation need be told, expressive. Some have complained that her carriage is not graceful; but it has something more and better than grace, for it has significance, fittingness in every walk across the stage, every pose. With more justice has comment been made upon her enunciation, which at times has been undeniably too rapid. As for the voice itself, it is among her chief means to her effects--wide-ranged and sensitive to the mood. It is at one moment charged with emotion, quivering or repressed, at another hard as steel, and again simply matter of fact. The contrasts are of great, and probably nicely calculated, effect.