Part 20

During the next decade, playing in pieces like _Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines_, _Cousin Kate_, and _Sunday_, she attracted and held a loyal public that liked to see her personality exploited in those comparatively insignificant plays, just as adoring theatregoers throng today to see Billie Burke and Marie Doro, whatever the slenderness and frothiness of the play. But let Miss Barrymore, in an effort to be a real actress, try her hand at submerging herself in an un-Barrymorelike character, in a play of any serious interest, and that adoring public was bewildered and disappointed and remained away from the theatre. Such are the fruits of thinking of the theatre in terms of the actor.

But Miss Barrymore had it in her to be a real actress. Once in a while, prompted by her ambition, she would do something that her fond followers would think was queer. Thus, during this decade, from 1900 to 1910, in the midst of her prosperous playing of popular pieces, she acted at one time or another _Carrots_, a one-act play from the French in which she gave a pathetic picture of the boy-hero; then, at a single plunge, Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_; then _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, a play that Barrie wrote for Ellen Terry, and in which Miss Barrymore, to the consternation of her peculiar public, appeared as a gray-haired matron; and finally _The Silver Box_, an unrelievedly serious and honest play by Galsworthy, in which she descended to the depths by acting an ordinary scrub-woman.

Not all of these did Miss Barrymore play signally well; her starship, limiting her to a play or two per year, had simply not afforded her the training to become the actress she has since shown herself to be. But in these brief experiments at least she was feeling her way out of the entanglements of theatrical pettiness.

When Miss Barrymore, in January, 1910, appeared in Pinero’s _Mid-Channel_, she had married and become a mother. Whether the admirers of her former girlish charm and slenderness liked it or not, she was now inevitably a deeper-natured and more mature woman and, consequently, capable of deeper and better acting. The fact was speedily proved in _Mid-Channel_. The play is a grim tragedy of English middle-class life, in which a fine-natured wife, after a gradual course of unhappy, deteriorating life with a selfish and sensual husband, ends her problems with suicide;--surely not one of the pretty Barrymore parts. “There will be hosts of the ‘Barrymore public,’ no doubt, who will feel that in _Mid-Channel_ they cannot laugh with her,” wrote Walter Prichard Eaton. “But to some more thoughtful men and women it is a source of rare satisfaction that at last the promise of that lovely voice and expressive face has been fulfilled, and you can weep with her, suffer with her, understand through the spell of her acting a little better the sorrows and perplexities of our frail humanity. In short, Miss Barrymore has become an actress.... Her many admirers, gathered in force, who evidently knew more about her than they cared about Pinero, were disposed to laugh in the first act during the scenes of her bickerings. But never after that did she allow them to suppose for an instant that they were not watching a serious and passionate study of a woman’s tragedy.”

After _Mid-Channel_, Miss Barrymore had to be considered as one of the artists of our stage, if she and her managers could only agree to let her remain so. She revived _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, and played it with far more feeling and a more convincing sense of maternity than she had shown before; she has played the insurgent wife in Barrie’s one-act masterpiece, _The Twelve-Pound-Look_, with a sure-handed mastery of the ironic and subtle that belongs only to a finished actress; she has, most recently of all, acted Madame Okraska, in the dramatization of _Tante_, with a keenness of insight into character and a finesse that showed again how far she had traveled since the days of _Captain Jinks_. Let us hope that henceforth Miss Barrymore’s unquestioned talent will not be allowed to expend itself on unworthy material.

Next to Mrs. Fiske, the leading actress of our contemporary stage is undoubtedly Margaret Anglin.[214] Her training has had a wider range, and her artistry a more varied accomplishment, than those of any other actress on our stage. Born in Canada of a non-theatrical family, she came to New York to study. She is one of our few brilliant actresses who have come to the stage by way of the dramatic schools. In 1894, when she was eighteen, she was Madeline West in Charles Frohman’s production of _Shenandoah_. When she was twenty she was playing Ophelia and Virginia in James O’Neill’s company, and from that day to this she has been one of America’s dependable and versatile stage artists.

A few years ago we thought of her as a powerful emotional actress who had come through an apprenticeship in barnstorming, and an early recognition of merit as Roxane to Mansfield’s Cyrano, to full measured achievement in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_, _The Great Divide_, and _The Awakening of Helena Ritchie_,--with a large number of plays and parts scattered in between. But of late years she has broadened her art and made secure her place among contemporary actresses not only by plunging wholeheartedly into a campaign in Shakespeare, but by ranging even farther and acting the heroines of Greek tragedy. Miss Anglin is as effective in comedy--witness _Green Stockings_ and _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ as recent instances, and her Lady Eastney in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_ for an earlier one--as she is in emotional rôles; she has acted in Australia as well as in America; she was the first artist to carry about the country a repertoire of plays set in accordance with the ideals of the new stagecraft; and as Mr. Eaton has said, “as a stage manager she has succeeded in reviving something of the atmosphere of good breeding, of polite comedy, of perfect ensemble and polish, which we associate with the memory of Lester Wallack.” It is an ample, dignified career, now happily at its height, of hard working service to the art of the actress.

When in 1913 Miss Anglin made herself a Shakespearean actress-manager, the size of her repertoire, the general excellence of her interpretations, and the revelation of the beauties of the new stage art that signalized her performances combined to give American theatregoers a new idea of her ability and broadening ambition. The plays were _The Taming of the Shrew_, _Twelfth Night_, _As You Like It_, and _Antony and Cleopatra_; the scenery in each case was a beautiful example--by Livingston Platt--of the imaginative revolt from old stage conventions that has notably marked the last decade; and Miss Anglin’s own women of Shakespeare,--though her Cleopatra was a comparative failure and was soon dropped from her repertoire, and though her Viola was to a degree lacking in high spirits--were charming and technically admirable impersonations.

In the Greek Theatre of the University of California at Berkeley, Miss Anglin has acted four of the classic dramas of ancient Greece,--the _Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of Sophocles, the _Iphigenia in Auris_ and the _Medea_ of Euripides. Though her training and her speech have always been primarily those of the modern actress, she has revealed in these classic tragedies a simplicity of method and an authority of voice and presence that few actresses, either of England or America, could equal. With Miss Lillah McCarthy presenting so beautifully the women of Greek tragedy at one end of the country, and Miss Anglin at the other, the classics have had a day of real, if brief, glory.

If the roster of American actresses is given a cosmopolitan aspect by the inclusion of the names of Edith Wynne Matthison, Martha Hedman, Hedwig Reicher and Bertha Kalich, all of whom lived many years in Europe, the most striking example of all is Alla Nazimova.[215] She was born in Russia, went to school in Switzerland, studied the violin at Odessa, the drama in Moscow, and after a few years’ apprenticeship in her native land and a year at St. Petersburg, she acted with Paul Orleneff’s company (of course, in Russian) in London. Coming then to America she played a season in Russian with her compatriots; and then, in June, 1906, having signed a contract to act in English in November of the same year, she set herself to the mastery of the new language, much as Modjeska had done thirty years before. She kept her word, and when the appointed time came she acted _Hedda Gabler_, which she followed during the next half-dozen years, with others of Ibsen’s plays: _A Doll’s House_, _The Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, as well as several other plays, like _The Comet_, _The Marionettes_, and _Bella Donna_, in none of which the actress possessed the significance that marked her when she confined herself to Ibsen.

To play first in an obscure hall on the lower East Side, then in two or three scarcely less obscure theatres, and then, a year and a half after her unheralded arrival, to act in a new tongue in one of New York’s leading theatres--it all makes one of the most dramatic of careers. If, however, Nazimova is “a tigress in the leash of art,” as Julius Huneker called her, an artist must hold the leash, or it becomes too much a circus tigress, going through the expected tricks, but in a cage of which she is always conscious. Nazimova did us a real service in her vivid impersonation of Ibsen’s heroines. Mrs. Fiske apart, no one else has done much for Ibsen in this country. But apparently she cannot go on playing Ibsen profitably; her art, which “expresses itself in a continual physical virtuosity which startles and thrills,” does not find an outlet in the sort of play English and American dramatists are likely to write; and, as Mr. Ruhl points out, “of late she has drifted far from her simpler beginnings and over-accented the more exotic side of her personality as if determined to ‘run it into the ground.’” Like another actress of striking talent, Nance O’Neil, Madame Nazimova is idle chiefly because she and the dramatists seem unable to meet on a common ground.

The case for the poetic actress is little better. After acquiring in England a thorough grounding in her profession, Edith Wynne Matthison[216] came to America in 1903 and played _Everyman_ with a dignity, a charm of voice and person, and a poetic poignancy that made the fifteenth-century “morality” forever memorable for any one who saw it. After brief experiments with Viola, Portia, and Kate Hardcastle, she returned to England, and then, after dividing the intervening years between her old home and her new, she settled more or less permanently in America in 1910, when she joined the company of the New Theatre. She must be regarded as of the American theatre.

Miss Matthison is preëminently a poetic actress. Her moods and methods, her rich and tender voice, her whole training and personality fit her rarely for the realization of the heroines of poetic drama. How truly this is not the age of the poetic drama, however, is shown by the short list of rôles--outside of Shakespeare’s heroines--that Miss Matthison has had, at once adapted to her and worthy of her talents. At the New Theatre she played Sister Beatrice in Maeterlinck’s play of that name, _The Piper_, and Light in _The Blue Bird_. And the New Theatre was not wholly a response to public taste; it was largely an attempt to foster it. For the rest, Miss Matthison’s American appearances (and her English experience was similar) have been distributed among many plays of many kinds, some of them excellent, like _The Great Divide_ and _The Servant in the House_, but all of them rather beside the point, so far as Miss Matthison’s peculiar talent was concerned. When she played, and beautifully played, Andromache in Mr. Barker’s recent production of _The Trojan Women_, she again came briefly into her own.

If Miss Anglin and Miss Matthison almost exhaust our list of first-rate poetic actresses (now that Miss Marlowe has retired), the case is far otherwise with the _comédiennes_. There are two, at least,--Grace George and Laura Hope Crews,--who are practiced adepts, thoroughly at home amid the subtleties of high comedy.

The place of Miss George[217] among American actresses is only partly indicated by the announcement that she is to direct her own theatre in New York. Though she merits that distinction, it is one that is easily within the grasp of the wife of William A. Brady. But it is indeed something to be one of our few actresses who are mistresses of comedy. Miss George made her first appearance on the professional stage (she had previously acted much as an amateur) as long ago as 1894, but it was not until 1907, when she acted Cyprienne in _Divorçons_, that she disclosed her talent brought to its fullness by long and varied training. Playing with her in _Divorçons_ was that excellent actor, Frank Worthing, and the effect produced by them remains one of the memorable incidents of American acting.[218] During the dozen years that preceded _Divorçons_ and again during the period that has followed, Miss George has been condemned to play in a long succession of comparatively inferior plays. The list is varied only occasionally by brief appearances in genuine high comedy, such as her Lady Teazle in _The School for Scandal_ at the New Theatre and her Beatrice in _Much Ado About Nothing_. Taking it all in all, she is best represented, so far, by her Cyprienne, an admirable impersonation, compact with rich humor, naturalness and charm,--and achievement in real comedy. Miss George promises to come into her own, however, with the opening of the theatre in New York of which she is to be the guiding spirit and the chief actress, for, if promise fails not, it is to be a rigorously guarded home of nothing but the best in the realm of comedy.

Like Miss George, Laura Hope Crews[219] has earned by long training and by brilliant accomplishment the admiration she now wins. She had been a child actress in the far West, and, returning to the stage in her ’teens, had undergone the rigorous training of stock company work in San Francisco and New York for a half dozen years before she attracted any considerable notice. Such an experience in American stock companies, with weekly changes of bill, means either a sinking to a dead level of mechanical acting, or a constantly enlarging technical resource. The latter was the case with Miss Crews. As Mr. Eaton has pointed out, though she has come to be looked upon as an actress of such sunny parts as Polly in _The Great Divide_, and the whimsical heroine of _Her Husband’s Wife_, it is because Miss Crews for so long went from such plays as Hoyt’s _A Bunch of Keys_, to others like _Magda_ and _Hedda Gabler_ that she is today not merely an attractive personality, but an actress of complete technical equipment. Such she has again proved herself to be by the finesse of her impersonation of the wife in _The Phantom Rival_. By virtue of the power of consistent impersonation which she brings to bear upon her warmly human heroines, her high spirits and her thoroughly trained resources of humorous suggestion, she has earned a high place as a _comédienne_; but the sincerity and the variety of her art would equip her at a moment’s notice to revert to the emotional heroines of a more sober drama.

It is becoming too apparent that we have seen the last of the charming and delicate art of Annie Russell; the physical power and the emotional intensity of Nance O’Neil’s very real talent find their expression only in plays of a Bernhardtian type that to a great extent has gone out of fashion on the American stage; Rose Stahl, after a long career as America’s best stock actress, leaped into international fame by a single masterpiece of characterization (in _The Chorus Lady_) which she has not since had an occasion to duplicate; and the charming and well-grounded acting ability of Henrietta Crosman, always condemned to deal with second-rate plays, seems to have run its course, so far as the public is concerned.

To replace these and the other actresses[220] who have dropped from the ranks of active service, or who will, before many years pass, do so, there is, as we have said, no lack of younger women. A stage that can count upon Helen Ware, Margaret Illington, Emma Dunn, Elsie Ferguson, Emily Stevens, Frances Starr, Jane Cowl, Martha Hedman, Doris Keane, Laurette Taylor, Irene Fenwick, and Florence Reed is suffering no weakness on its distaff side. If only our accomplished young actors were as numerous! For each of these women is more than a mere personality--she is a real actress, mistress of the tools of her trade.

Like Miss Anglin, Margaret Illington learned the rudiments of her art in a dramatic school. Coming then from Chicago to New York, she was immediately engaged by Daniel Frohman for a part in _The Pride of Jennico_. That was fifteen years ago, and it would be beside the point to rank her with those who are, comparatively, untried beginners. Miss Illington is a practiced player with more than a score of excellent impersonations to her credit; of which Mrs. Leffingwell in _Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots_, Nina Jesson in _His House in Order_, Marie Voysin in _The Thief_, Maggie Schultz in _Kindling_, and Elinor Shale in _The Lie_ are merely the outstanding names. But she is still young and she is one of those who can be counted on to carry on the torch for years to come. “Miss Illington leaves no delicate nuance of expression untouched,” has been written of her. “She has great vitality and physical beauty; she has a perfectly secure and accurate dramatic instinct.... In two of the finest moments [of _The Lie_] Miss Illington rises to tragic heights. In all of the lighter scenes she is deliciously youthful and piquant.... Fleeting glimpses of humor and enfolding sweetness, and then the big frantic outbursts of righteous anger and superb accusations.” In a part of quite another sort, the harassed wife in _Kindling_, Miss Illington “acted the ignorant, dumbly struggling, desperate mother truly, simply, touchingly.”

Miss Ferguson is a graduate of the musical comedy chorus, and, for an actress who shows so much ability, her dramatic training has been brief. Only a half dozen rôles had followed her chorus-girls days when she was given a part in _Such a Little Queen_. She was not a star when the play was produced, but not many days had gone by when her managers boldly, and perhaps prematurely, elevated her to starship. Her beauty and intelligence went far to justify her promotion, and when the pleasantries of _Such a Little Queen_ and _The First Lady of the Land_ were followed by the greater complexities of _The Strange Woman_ and _Outcast_, it became plain that Miss Ferguson’s emotional truth and sense of impersonation could be those of only a genuine actress. The intellectual note that is strong in her work, and the fluency, versatility and certainty of the technique that she has somehow acquired in her short career, make her the most promising of our younger actresses.

Like Miss Ferguson, Miss Stevens is beautiful, and alive to the finger-tips with the keen intelligence of the modern American woman at her best. Excellent training in her distinguished cousin’s company she has followed by pleasing performances of Emmy in _Septimus_ and Anne in _Man and Superman_, but of late the plays to which she has been assigned,--like _The Child_ and _The Garden of Paradise_, have failed so lamentably that the light of her talent is in temporary eclipse.

In Helen Ware, America has an actress who, though her art, as so far revealed, is comparatively limited in scope, is in the very first rank of impersonators of highly-colored “character” parts and of the masterful women of modern melodrama. Her vivid gypsy girl in _The Road to Yesterday_ impressed American theatregoers when she had been on the stage a half-dozen years, and since then her work in _The Third Degree_, _The Woman_ and _Within The Law_ have more than reënforced that impression. She is an utterly sincere actress, who plans and executes her characterizations with admirable and convincing consistency.

Emma Dunn’s succession of perfectly limned stage portraits of elderly women; Frances Starr’s achievements as Laura Murdock in _The Easiest Way_ and as Dorothy in _The Case of Becky_; Jane Cowl’s Mary Turner in _Within The Law_, an impersonation that took Miss Cowl at a single bound almost to the side of Helen Ware; the beautifully feminine and intelligent acting--in an acquired tongue--of Martha Hedman, who has come to us from Sweden; the charmingly restrained and skillful work of Florence Reed in _The Yellow Ticket_; Doris Keane’s admirably lifelike and subtle impersonation of a prima donna of the sixties in _Romance_; Irene Fenwick’s vivid Lily Kardos in _The Song of Songs_, and Laurette Taylor’s exotic princess in _The Bird of Paradise_, and her delightfully human, humorously pathetic, internationally memorable Peg;--these have hardly had time to become memories. Surely, so far as actresses are concerned, our stage is richly endowed. And not only with native talent. Hedwig Reicher, of German birth and training and an excellent actress of Ibsen’s heroines, and Bertha Kalich, who was born in Austria and acted in New York in Yiddish, have both adopted America and the English tongue and, like Alla Nazimova and Martha Hedman, must henceforth be counted among America’s actresses. Mimi Aguglia is living in our midst, and acts in Italian when, all too rarely, opportunity presents itself.

As for visitors from England, Marie Tempest, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Gertrude Elliott are almost as familiarly known in this country as at home; the girlish charm of Phyllis Neilson-Terry, and the ample art of Lillah McCarthy, who is equal alike to the exacting demands of Greek tragedy and Shavian satire, it has recently been the privilege of America to witness; Mary Forbes is a newcomer, an actress skilled in both poetic drama and realistic plays; and the too rare visits of the Irish Players have given us the pungent and stimulating art of Sara Allgood.

This chapter, or rather this list,--it could be little more with so many ladies clamoring for their deserved attention,--has at least made one thing clear. On the feminine side of the art of acting, the only art in which women compete with men on more than even terms, the American stage is in a healthy condition. It has been said, often with cynical emphasis, that in America the audiences of women condition the whole art of the drama. But it is not only at the box-office that women outweigh the men in their share in our theatre.

APPENDIX

THE FIRST ENGLISH ACTRESSES, AND THE CHANGE IN THE ACTOR’S SOCIAL STATUS

The actress, as an established element in the theatre, is comparatively modern. The English stage had been a flourishing public institution for something more than a century when, in the first years of the Restoration, veritable women began regularly to replace those lads and beardless men who in Shakespeare’s day enacted stage heroines.