Part 16

In fact, Goodwin, so it seems to me, threw away a golden opportunity. After the retirement of Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough there was an opening for an ambitious actor to win recognition as their worthy successor; and this was an altitude to which Goodwin could have aspired, if he had not been deficient in that intangible and indefinable quality which we call character and which for success in life is really more important than ability. Ability he had in abundance but he did not husband it. He did not take life seriously enough; and therefore his art suffered and failed to mature as it might have done. He dissipated his ardor and wasted his strength in default of the implacable ambition which compels self-control. Nature had bestowed on him a richer gift than on Lawrence Barrett, who had made himself what he was by stern determination, whereby he overcame his disadvantages. Goodwin had more intensity, more power, more resources; and he might have carved a name for himself as Shylock, Richard III and Iago.

But it was not to be; and he made shipwreck of his career. I failed to see him when he attempted Shylock, for which he ought to have had the fire and the passion, but for which he lacked the training he might easily have attained, if he had forced himself to acquire it. I did see him in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; and altho my memories of George L. Fox and of James Lewis as Bottom are still vivid, they are not as gratifying as my recollection of Goodwin in the same part. This revival of Shakspere’s most fanciful and most humorous comedy failed to attract the public, and the blame was currently laid upon Goodwin. To my mind this was unjust, since his rendering of the part seemed to me excellent, firmer in outline and richer in color than that of either Fox or Lewis. I can never forget the delicious self-sufficiency of his performance in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ his exuberant vanity, his adroit suggestion of the eternal complacency of the self-satisfied amateur.

I may be wrong, of course; I may be crediting Goodwin with more than he possessed, as I am certainly ascribing to him more than he ever displayed. But I think he had it in him to do finer and stronger things than he ever aimed at. “The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!”

V

It would be difficult to find two careers in sharper contrast than those of Nat Goodwin in the United States and of Beerbohm Tree in Great Britain. As there was a vacancy at the head of the procession in America after the withdrawal of Booth and Barrett and McCullough, so there was one in England after the decline and disappearance of Henry Irving. Goodwin was unable to seize the occasion, even if he saw it; Tree saw it and seized it. Altho nature had been niggardly to Tree where she had been bountiful to Goodwin, Tree had the inestimable advantage of a resolute will and of the innate power which impels a man to master the many difficulties besetting our paths in life. It was by sheer force of ambition rather than by assured skill as an actor that Tree forged to the front and took his place as the leader of the profession in the British Isles, catching the mantle of Irving as it fell and wearing it as best he could.

When I first knew Tree he had recently graduated from comic opera to farce, making his earliest hit in the ‘Private Secretary’ and replacing Arthur Cecil in the ‘Magistrate.’ From farce he turned to melodrama and advanced his reputation as an actor by the versatility he displayed in ‘Called Back’ and in the ‘Red Lamp.’ For two reasons this versatility was more apparent than real; in the first place because the methods of farce and of melodrama are closely akin, and in the second place because the differentiation of the parts Tree was then playing was largely external, being mainly a matter of make-up, which incompletely disguised his own rather thin and brittle manner.

In time he assumed the management of the Haymarket theater; and still later he was able to build the spacious and sumptuous His Majesty’s. At the Haymarket he produced more than one interesting modern comedy and he made more than one interesting revival, notably of W. S. Gilbert’s ever-delightful ‘Engaged.’ At His Majesty’s he was soon forced—somewhat to his surprise, so his half-brother, Max Beerbohm once told me—to abandon the more refined types of comedy and farce, simply because the house was too large for any form of drama demanding delicacy. He found himself compelled to rely on more strenuous plays, which permitted elaborate spectacular adornment. He brought out the ‘Herod’ of Stephen Phillips and he imported the ‘Darling of the Gods’ of Belasco and Long. Thus it was that both this necessity and his lofty ambition led him to a series of elaborately pictorial revivals of Shakspere’s tragedies, histories and comedies.

As a producer he continued the tradition of Irving, bestowing upon Shakspere’s plays superb settings, rivaling Irving’s in their splendor, their expensiveness and their taste. For ‘Twelfth Night,’ for example, he designed an Italian garden, rising terrace upon terrace to the very back of the stage, a scene so exquisitely beautiful in itself, so completely satisfying to the eye, that—so Sir Martin Conway told me—some spectators felt it to be an intrusion when the actors entered and distracted attention from the lovely vision. Tree displayed his scenic dexterity and his artistic invention in a dozen or a score of other Shaksperian plays, notably ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ produced while Queen Victoria was still upon the throne. There is an anecdote which is doubtless familiar to many, but which I feel I have no right to omit here, to the effect that as the amorous adventures of the serpent of old Nile were unrolled before the entranced audience, one British matron whispered to another British matron, “How different to the happy home life of our dear Queen!”

Of course, Tree reserved for himself all the great Shaksperian characters, tragic and comic, Mark Antony, Macbeth and Hamlet, Falstaff and Malvolio. For the loftier tragic parts he lacked the physique and the temperament. He had not the beauty of person, the grace of gesture, the princely bearing, the appealing voice, which the performer of Hamlet ought to possess. He had not the power, the passion, the largeness needed for Macbeth. He had not the elocutionary skill required for the proper impersonation of Mark Antony in ‘Julius Cæsar.’ But he was intelligent, untiring, strong-willed and self-willed; and he was able to get the British public to accept him in these unsuitable parts, perhaps in some measure because there was then no actor on the British stage who could contest its chieftainship with him.

It is reported that Gilbert said to him after seeing his Hamlet, “Very good, Tree, very good indeed. You were funny without being vulgar.” And when Gilbert went around to Tree’s dressing room after his exhausting performance of another of Shakspere’s tragic characters, a performance which had left the actor weakened and perspiring, the pitiless wit remarked, “Tree, how well your skin acts.” Altho Tree took himself seriously he had a keen sense of humor; and even if he winced under the satiric lash of Gilbert, he could take the joke without offense.

In fact, his sense of humor often came to his rescue, as another anecdote testifies. He was once acting Hamlet in the provinces when his friend, John Hare, happened to be in the same town. He sent Hare a box; and the unwilling Hare felt that as a fellow-manager he could not refuse this unwelcome invitation. Hare sat in the box in solitary state; and after the curtain fell, he was about to escape when Tree’s secretary caught him at the door with the request that he should come to supper. Again the kindly Hare felt that courtesy demanded his acceptance. At table Hare did not mention ‘Hamlet’ nor did Tree. As soon as he could, Hare bade Tree good night. Tree saw him to the door, and they parted without a word about the performance. Before Hare had gone half-a-dozen paces, Tree called him back. As Hare returned sadly, Tree said with a smile, “I say, Johnny, it is a good _play_, isn’t it?”

We may be sure that Tree appreciated the merry jest of his half-brother when at last he attained the honor of knighthood, the final reward of every British actor-manager. As usual the announcement preceded by several days the actual ceremony; and in the interval a friend asked Max Beerbohm as to the actor’s exact status during this awkward intermission: “Is your brother a knight now, or isn’t he?” And Max answered that he supposed his brother in the eye of the law was still Mr. Tree,—“but he is Sir Herbert in the sight of God!”

Tree’s disqualifications for the mighty characters in Shakspere’s tragic plays were obvious, but his histrionic limitations were less apparent in the chief characters of the comedies. I did not see him in ‘Twelfth Night’ but I should conjecture that he gave a not unsatisfactory interpretation of Malvolio, altho it probably lacked the gentle dignity and the melancholy humor which Irving bestowed upon the part. I did see his Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ and it seemed to me altogether the best of his Shaksperian experiments. After all, the ‘Merry Wives’ is only farce, brisk and bustling; and Tree was experienced and skillful in farce, with no objection to getting all the laughs that the lively situations might authorize. Yet, as I watched his dextrous efforts, I was conscious always that Tree’s Falstaff was not really fat; he might be padded out to his proper proportions, but he did not move like a creature of portly figure; and his humor was devoid of unction. He disclosed himself as a clever thin man trying to pass himself off as a humorous fat man.

And in his latter performances of Falstaff he yielded more and more to his besetting temptation to overdecorate a character with petty ingenuities and with finicky details, which came in time to detract from its broad outlines. He had an inventive mind and he was continually in search of novelties of gesture and of business. Even in his tragic parts he was prone to obtrusive pettinesses. Often at the end of the run of a play, and sometimes even at the beginning, he seemed to act outside the character rather than inside it.

Yet, when all is said, it remains that Tree deserved well of the playgoing public of London; and this public could not well help being grateful for the many opportunities he had provided for it to behold Shakspere’s plays, always beautifully and tastefully mounted. It had become accustomed to his mannerisms and it knew what to expect when it flocked to His Majesty’s Theater. But in the United States, Tree was never able to establish a position comparable with that which he held in Great Britain. On our side of the Atlantic he was only a wandering star; he was not the manager of the foremost theater with the credit of a score of Shaksperian revivals; and we Americans had not become habituated to his defects, and therefore we could not be expected to be as tolerant of them as were his British followers. He was well aware of this atmosphere of indifference, so to speak, in America, an atmosphere he could never dispel. When I saw him last in London, ten or fifteen years ago, he told me that he was thinking of crossing over again. “But you don’t like my acting in New York,” he added sadly; and I could not honestly contradict him, as perhaps he hoped that I should.

VI

Where the performances of Shakspere’s plays at His Majesty’s were sometimes insufficient was in the acting; and this was not Tree’s fault, for he was always eager to strengthen his cast by the engagement of the best actors available. At more than one of his revivals of the ‘Merry Wives’ he persuaded Ellen Terry and Mrs. Kendal to emerge from retirement to disport themselves as the joyous dames who delight in befooling Falstaff. The fault lay in the fact that fine performers were not to be had. Actors who were good in Shaksperian parts have always been scarce, and they are now steadily becoming scarcer.

Even fifty years ago, when Edwin Booth opened the stately theater he had built for himself, there arose a loud outcry against the mediocrity of his company, an outcry which rankled in Booth’s memory and which led him a score of years later to explain to me that he thought the complaint, even if justified, was unjust to him, since he had secured as well equipt a company as it was then possible to collect, with Edwin Adams and Mark Smith at the head of it. This came back to my memory when Henry Irving a little later spoke to me about the difficulty he had had in getting fit performers for Laertes and Mercutio and the other important parts of youthful buoyancy. “I engaged Forbes-Robertson and George Alexander and William Terriss, one after another, and I tried to tempt them to stay with me,” so Irving said to me. “But they preferred to set up for themselves. I don’t blame them, of course; but it is now almost impossible for me to find anybody whom I can trust with these important parts.”

It was sometimes meanly suggested that Booth and Irving were each of them unwilling, and perhaps even afraid, to surround themselves with first class actors. The suggestion is as absurd as it is unworthy; and it is plainly contradicted by the record. In the sixties of the last century, when Booth was consolidating his reputation by the earliest hundred night run of ‘Hamlet’ that any actor had ever achieved, Bogumil Davison came to New York; and the young American promptly invited the German tragedian to play Othello to his own Iago. More than a score of years later Booth again appeared as Iago to the Othello of Salvini. At one time or another he joined forces with Charlotte Cushman and with Modjeska. Henry Irving was equally free from petty jealousy; he always treated Ellen Terry as a co-star; and when he engaged Mrs. Sterling for the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he advertized her name as prominently as his own. No actor ever displayed more generosity to a friendly rival than Irving did when he invited Booth to come for a fortnight to the Lyceum to alternate Iago and Othello.

It was never difficult for Jefferson to find competent actors to support him as Rip Van Winkle; and he always rehearsed the piece carefully to make sure of the needful unity of tone. But it was very hard indeed to find performers of presence, of authority and of the sweep of style required by the boldly contrasted and highly colored characters of a rich old comedy like the ‘Rivals.’ At one time or another Jefferson secured the companionship of Mrs. Drew, of John Gilbert, and of W. J. Florence, gladly sharing his glory with them. He was delighted with the brief tour of the ‘Rivals,’ when a galaxy of stars deserted their orbits to twinkle by the side of his Bob Acres. Mrs. Drew was Mrs. Malaprop, Julia Marlowe was Lydia Languish, Robert Taber was Captain Absolute, Nat Goodwin was Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Francis Wilson was Fag and William H. Crane was Sir Anthony Absolute. Here was truly an all-star cast; and the combination was triumphantly prosperous. I saw it at the sole performance in New York, a matinee at that; and it was perhaps the best all around rendering of the ‘Rivals’ that I have ever seen, altho several of those who took part in it, accustomed to the more modern methods of our latter-day dramatists, were not quite at ease in their efforts to catch the tone of artificial comedy.

It is true, alas! that there are actors, and some of them are expert and accomplished performers, who when they rise to be stars not only seek to grasp all the good things for themselves and to monopolize the spot-light, but who even go so far as to begrudge any laughter or any applause which may be evoked by the members of their companies. Forty years ago one of the most prominent comedians on our stage had this pitiable characteristic. At the first performance of a play specially written for him, this star was standing in the wings waiting his turn to go on. Suddenly there was a roar of laughter and a round of applause. “Who’s that?” cried the star, “What did he say?” And at the second performance the line which had been so well received was cut out. And twenty years ago there was an American comic actress of robust force and wide popularity who slowly lost the favor of the public because she insisted on producing plays in which she never left the stage and for which she engaged actors and actresses who were feeble and colorless.

It is not only natural, it is also wise, for a star to see to it that his part is interesting and that it holds its interest from the first act to the last. He cannot help knowing that he is the lodestone which attracts the audiences. They pay their money to see him; and they are not getting their money’s worth if they do not see enough of him. But the spectators are best pleased with the star himself, they are most likely to hold him in delighted remembrance and to want to see him when next he comes to town, if he has given them a well-balanced play, in which every part is filled by a performer who can get out of it all it is worth. There are some stars who are almost self-effacing, and who do not even care whether or not they have their full share of the emphatic situations upon which the curtain falls. It was pointed out by not a few of those who saw ‘Leah Kleschna,’ when Mrs. Fiske produced it with a brilliant and well-balanced cast,—John Mason, George Arliss, Charles Cartwright, William B. Mack,—that the star let Mack have the curtain of the third act.

VII

If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is far more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the men and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak the language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at an apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and therefore they have not been called upon to acquire the art of delivering the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines. They are all striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the scenery and the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life. They are likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but seem to them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”

Of course, no stage-dialog can be natural, strictly speaking. It must be compact and significant; it must flow unbroken in the shortest distance between two points. But to-day actors and audiences alike are so accustomed to the picked and polished prose of Barrie and Pinero, of Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas, that this appears “natural” to them, because they do not note its divergence from the average talk that falls on their ears outside the theater, whereas they cannot help feeling that the steady march of ten-syllabled iambics is a violent departure from our habitual manner of communicating information and of expressing emotion. In other words, even if our stage-dialog to-day is “unnatural,” as stage-dialog always has been and always will be, it is far less obviously “unnatural” than blank verse. A long and severe self-training is necessary before a performer can feel at home in blank verse, and before he can impart colloquial ease to it.

Yet it is a fact that we who speak English have a tendency toward the iambic rhythm when we seek to move an audience. This rhythm may be unconscious and it may be irregular; but it is unmistakable in the death-bed scenes of Dickens, for example, where he was insisting on the pathetic, and in the orations of Ingersoll, where he was making his most powerful appeal. The Kembles were so subdued to what they worked in on the stage that they were prone to drop into blank verse on occasions when it was not appropriate. Mrs. Siddons is said to have startled the salesman who was showing her a piece of goods by asking, “And will it wash?” The first time she met Washington Irving after he had published the ‘Sketch-Book,’ she said to him, “Young man, you’ve made me weep”; and when she next met him after he had published another book, she said “Young man, you’ve made me weep again!”

Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a great friend of Sir Walter Scott; and once when they were crossing a field together, they were chased by a bull. “Sheriff,” said the actor to the author, “methinks I’ll get me up into a tree.” Fanny Kemble, whose reading of Shakspere’s plays Longfellow commemorated in a noble sonnet, was the daughter of Charles, another brother of Mrs. Siddons. Once when she went on the platform to read, she found that a cane-bottomed chair had been provided for her. She turned majestically to the gentleman who was escorting her and inquired, “And would you give my velvet gown the small-pox?” When her remote kinswoman, the fragile amateur, who called herself Mrs. Scott-Siddons, came to Fanny Kemble for professional guidance, she begged for advice about making points; and she was not a little frightened by the force of the swift retort: “Points, girl? I never was a point actress!”

This, all this, was long, long ago; and a great deal of water has gone under the bridge since those distant days. I have to confess that I never caught Edwin Booth or Henry Irving lapsing into blank verse off the stage.

(1920)

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 46: ‘were also accusaable’ replaced by ‘were also accusable’. Pg 59: ‘Racine, immitagably’ replaced by ‘Racine, immitigably’. Pg 78: ‘had helpt to’ replaced by ‘had helped to’. Pg 133: ‘two diferent tongues’ replaced by ‘two different tongues’. Pg 141: ‘first apparance as’ replaced by ‘first appearance as’. Pg 142: “Flore et Zephyr” replaced by ‘Flore et Zephyr’. Pg 144: ‘qualties of the’ replaced by ‘qualities of the’. Pg 152: ‘if may be recorded’ replaced by ‘it may be recorded’. Pg 217: ‘unpublisht, and I’ replaced by ‘unpublished, and I’. Pg 269: ‘or less Shakespere’ replaced by ‘or less Shakspere’.