Forrest Izard

“ Only an artist of the highest type could create so profound an impression with so little apparent effort or forethought, by some light and seemingly spontaneous gesture, by a sudden change of facial expression, or by some subtle inflection of the180 voice. The chief beauties of her impersonation are to be found in its lesser and, to the inexperienced eye, insignificant details. All her by-play, although it appears to be due only to the impulse of the moment, is dearly the result of the most deliberate design, and changes with every variety of mood or condition which it is meant to illustrate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile if only she is made much of. Her dresses and diamonds, if not exactly splendid, are at least splendacious; her figure, far too scantily upholstered in the old days, is at its best; and her complexion shows that she has not studied modern art in vain.... She is beautiful with the beauty of her school, and entirely inhuman and incredible. ”

“ But let us not seem to require too much of a providence that vouchsafes so rarely an Ellen Terry. If criticism, when the final estimate is written, is forced to recognize in her a circumscribed talent, we who have seen her would not have had her otherwise than as she was. And if one says she was not truly a great artist, another may reply truthfully that with her art was second, life itself first. “In contrast to Irving, to whom his art was everything and his life nothing, she has found life itself more interesting than art,” says George Bernard Shaw. ”

“ One talks vaguely of genius, but I had never till now comprehended how much of Rachel’s superiority was purely in intellectual power, how eminently this power counts in the actor’s art as in all art, how just is the instinct which led the Greeks to mark with a high and severe stamp the Muses. Temperament and quick intelligence, passion, nervous mobility, grace, smile, voice, charm, poetry—Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt has them all; one watches her with pleasure, with admiration, and yet not without a secret disquietude. Something is wanting, or, at least, not present in sufficient force ”

“ When the Odéon reopened, in the fall of 1871, Sarcey, the great critic, said of Sarah, who played (in Jean-Marie) a young Breton girl: “No one could be more innocently poetic than this young lady. She will become a great comédienne, and she is already an admirable artist. Everything she does has a special savor of its own. It is impossible to say whether she is pretty. She is thin, and her expression is sad, but she has queenly grace, charm, and the inexpressible je ne sais quoi. She is an artist by nature, and an incomparable one. There is no one like her at the Comédie Française.” ”

“ Réjane’s freshness, naturalness, tenderness, and charmingly subtle sense of comedy as Catherine Hubscher in Madame Sans-Gêne was instantly recognized and celebrated in every American city that she visited. In Ma Cousine, a light farce, she acted the soubrette Riquette with an abandon, a cleverness, a joyousness, that emphasized her new public’s admiration of her. Her Nora, however, in Maison de Poupée (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) , revealed her in a new and more serious light, demonstrating at once her genuine versatility and her considerable emotional power. ”

“ The coaxing suits well with the childishly egotistical character of40 her acting, which is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her wildly when the curtain falls. It is the art of finding out all your weaknesses and practicing on them—cajoling you, harrowing you, exciting you—on the whole, fooling you. And it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you. ”

“ The whole audience is on its feet, quivering, with arms outstretched toward the prodigious artiste, who makes an effort to bow, but is overcome by the force of her emotion. The curtain rises and falls an incalculable number of times, disclosing the great tragédienne in her gracious attitude of homage to the great dramatist. And then, with a movement of touching spontaneity, Sarah goes to La Duse, seizes her hand, and both incline before the bust of the master. ”

“ Rehan herself has never had such a testimonial, though she deserved one as richly as the great Polish actress. Unostentatiously she entered her profession, so she pursued it, and so she left it, slipping out of public life so quietly that many playgoers were half consciously expecting her reappearance years after she had quit the stage for good. But she can have, as long as she lives, the reward of as genuine a success as can come to any actress. ”

“ A brougham stops at a door; a woman, enveloped in furs, jumps out, threads her way with a smile through the crowd attracted by the jingling of the bell on the harness, and mounts a winding stair; plunges into a room crowded with flowers and heated like a hothouse, throws her little beribboned handbag with its apparently inexhaustible contents into one corner, and her bewinged hat into another, takes off her furs and instantaneously dwindles into a mere scabbard of white silk; rushes on to a dimly lighted stage and immediately puts life into a whole crowd of listless, yawning, loitering folk ”

“ That is to say, the public knows next to nothing of her as a human being except as her personality is poured into and out of her work. Out of a native shyness as well as out of a desire to avoid publicity except as an actress, she carries her self-effacement off the stage to the last degree. She is never met at social gatherings, she has never addressed meetings or written magazine articles; she is seldom seen on the streets or driving in the park, and the occasions on which she has, in many years, gone to any theatre as one of the audience could be numbered on one’s fingers. ”

“ From a small career, notable in its way, as a child actress, through a girlhood that had its struggles and trials, to an early share of success and then to an amazing degree of affectionate popularity, a popularity far exceeding that of greater artists, has been her record. The mere announcement of her name, without respect to the play she is acting, is enough to fill any theatre in the United States. Her popularity is such that it amounts almost to an unreasoning worship. One can safely say that, among the women, at least, of America there is an unorganized Maude Adams cult. ”

“ As yet there was little thought of her as other than an Italian for the Italians. Dumas’ appeals to act in Paris had always been in vain. If reports of her acting had been carried home by visitors from the great capitals, she was not thought of, as yet, as a world’s actress. To carry plays to Moscow, to Vienna, to Berlin, and act them there effectively in a foreign tongue, an actress must needs be of great power, must have a genius that makes itself felt above all differences of speech. ”

“ Unlike many another successful actress—Mary Anderson,323 for instance—she retained her early strong love for her profession.
“The rarest quality of Miss Marlowe’s art,” says Elizabeth McCracken, one of Miss Marlowe’s closest friends, with what is probably true insight, “is its lovely youthfulness. Her mirth is utterly young; at its gayest, it is tinged by a certain wistful gravity. Her woe is young, too; at its saddest, no drop of bitterness stains it. Children instinctively accept her as a kindred spirit, someone not so different from themselves as most grown-ups.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet in all these displays Rehan is never violent in a narrow way, or streaky, or hard, or wiry.... The beauty of repose is delightful in her, the calm musing meditation, and the deep harmonious passion of devotion; so also is the quick salient swerve of emotion wherein the soul is suddenly shaken to its depths by love, by fear, by admiration ... we find life and flesh and blood throughout, and everywhere the fire of the soul that animates it. ”

“ It was not strange that197 d’Annunzio, the poet-dramatist-novelist who was making his presence felt in Italy about the time of her Paris triumph, should appeal to her as a kindred spirit. His fiery exaltation of human passions, his undoubted poetic gifts, she took for real genius, and about 1900 the world heard that Duse had forsworn all dramatists else and would act henceforth nothing but d’Annunzio’s plays. The poet and the actress formed an association that was plainly more than that of friendship or professional coöperation. ”

“ ADA REHAN As a superbly alive, radiant personality, Ada Rehan stands out in the memory of any one who has ever seen her. She is of the great line of actresses. She is (or one should say was, for Ada Rehan several years ago passed from the stage) more nearly a Woffington, a Terry, than any actress America has yet produced. Like Ellen Terry, she was a miraculous blend of regal force, charm, and thoroughly grounded ability. ”

“ Offers to play in Spain, Germany, France and Australia were refused. The glamour of stage life was a thing of the past with Mary Anderson. By no means blind to the artistic possibilities of the drama, and with still a high faith in its moral function, a stage life for herself was becoming more and more repugnant. She felt the need of calm, of normal life away from the glare of the footlights. ”

“ When the opening night came the thought that almost on the scene of the triumphs of Siddons, Garrick and Kean she was to venture before a strange audience, filled her with dread. She found in her dressing-room flowers from actor friends and telegrams from Booth, McCullough, Lawrence Barrett, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and other cordial well-wishers. When she made her first entrance she was greeted with the longest and heartiest burst of applause that she had ever received. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was a matter of common observation, even in that supposed center of case-hardened worldliness, New York, that the audiences were largely of grown-ups, and that stock-brokers, “tired business men,” and others who would flee miles from the ordinary “children’s play,” came not once, but thrice, a dozen times, in some cases, to see the triumph of Peter over Captain Hook. The elfin quality, the gracious charm and warm-hearted humor of Miss Adams’ Peter Pan may not have been sufficient to make it, as a feat of acting, her most memorable achievement ”

“ If it seems true that with the passing from our stage of Madame Modjeska, Miss Rehan and Miss Marlowe the robes of high priestess of our stage, to whom all the people delight to burn incense, grace alone the slender form of Miss Maude Adams, that fact does not necessarily argue a lack of genius in the artists that remain. ”

“ There is about Marlowe none of the overpowering sense of riding the whirlwind that has accompanied Bernhardt in her royal progresses about the planet; she has none of the picturesque ebullience of a Terry, nor even the specialized appeal of Maude Adams. She has been a happy “combination of the poetically ideal and the humanly real” that wins, for a beautiful and skillful actress, a position in the popular heart, even if it does not take her, because of more or less extraneous characteristics, into the front rank of “personages.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”