Chapter IV: Appendix: 368 (3)

In 1893 Madame Modjeska was one of four actresses[67] who addressed the Women’s Congress at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Besides her appearance before the Congress as an actress, she was asked to speak on another occasion as a representative of Poland. The women who were expected from Poland evidently feared the Czar’s displeasure in case they spoke frankly concerning their country, and failed to appear in Chicago. But Modjeska spoke her mind freely concerning the grievances of the Poles. She was widely quoted in the papers, and news of her speech reached St. Petersburg. Playing two years later in Poland, she was about to act in Warsaw when word came from the Russian government forbidding her appearance. Plans were made for an engagement in St. Petersburg itself, but at the last moment, when large sums had already been spent in preparation, she was told that her appearance in the capital was forbidden. Shortly afterwards Modjeska and her husband were ordered to leave Warsaw, and an imperial decree was issued to the effect that they were never thereafter to enter any part of the Russian territory. Efforts were often made to obtain permission to go to Warsaw, but to the end of her life Modjeska was excluded from the Czar’s dominions.[68]

In April, 1905, Madame Modjeska, then living in practical retirement in California, received a letter signed by a number of authors, fellow actors and artists in New York which acknowledged in affectionate terms their debt and gratitude for her career, and offered her a public testimonial in New York. This was the idea of Paderewski, who had visited her in California but a short time before and like many others was disturbed by the lack of public acclaim with which she was modestly sinking into retirement.[69] The great pianist, much to his distress, was prevented by an accident from being present, but the best known actors appearing in New York at the time lent their services. Modjeska herself played scenes from _Macbeth_ and _Mary Stuart_. Edmund Clarence Stedman presented to Madame Modjeska a memorial scroll bearing signatures of her many friends, actors, actresses, and her “attached votaries in other walks of life--all made associates,” Mr. Stedman said in addressing her, “by their delight in your genius and career. A quarter-century ago you came to us from a land invested with traditions of valor, beauty, and romance, from the brave and soulful country that flashed its sword in our behalf and that in our own times enthralls us with music,[70] and through you with impassioned tenderness and artistic power. The felicities of art are limitless, and, as in creations of our master playwright you found the most alluring range for your own powers, so your fresh impersonations woke in us the sense of ‘something rich and strange.’”

Modjeska, with tears in her eyes and her voice breaking with emotion, briefly expressed her gratitude.

“Long may your enviable years flow on,” Mr. Stedman had said. But it was only four years later that she died,[71] in California, where she had always maintained her home, in a beautiful country place she called Arden, not far from the scene of that ill-starred venture which after all had its justification in giving to America a great actress. She was buried in Cracow, the city of her birth.

“Hail to thee upon thy return to thy last resting place,” said Michael Tarasiewicz at her funeral, “welcome thou, who might say of thyself as did Countess Idalia: ‘I am here as a passing angel. I have let thee see the lightning and disappeared upon the firmament of the sky.’... For thy art, for thy constant work, for that thou hast never become renegade to thy ideal, and that, in perfecting thy soul, thou hast been perfecting the soul of humanity, be blessed.”

ELLEN TERRY

There was, in Sir Walter Scott’s day, an actor named Daniel Terry, who was a part proprietor of the Adelphi Theatre in London. He was furnished funds for that venture by Sir Walter, and according to Lockhart enjoyed a large share of Scott’s regard and confidence. An effort has sometimes been made to identify this Terry with the family that in the latter half of the nineteenth century furnished England with some of her most accomplished stage artists. But the connection was one of name only, for Benjamin Terry, the father of Ellen, was the son of an Irish builder, and eloped with the daughter of a Scottish minister.

Benjamin Terry and his wife, the parents of Ellen, were both actors, not reckoned among the brilliant stars of their day, but respectably talented, well-trained actors of the old school, better known in the provinces than in the metropolis. Benjamin Terry was “a handsome, fine-looking brown-haired man,” and his wife “a tall, graceful creature, with an abundance of fair hair, and with big blue eyes set in a charming face.” On the outlying “circuits,” in Edinburgh, and later in the London company of Charles Kean, they were reasonably successful in their profession; but their distinction--and a sufficient one surely--is their remarkable family of sons and daughters. “Think of it,” wrote Clement Scott; “Kate, with her lovely figure and comely features; Ellen, with her quite indescribable charm; Marion, with a something in her deeper, more tender, and more feminine than either of them; Florence, who became lovelier as a woman than as a girl; and the brothers Fred and Charles, both splendid specimens of the athletic Englishman.”[72]

It was while Benjamin Terry and his wife were playing in Coventry that, on February 27, 1848, their second daughter, Ellen Alicia, was born. Coventry is proud of the fact, and there has been a rather brisk dispute as to which house was the birthplace.[73]

From her earliest childhood, Ellen Terry knew the theatre and its people. She was not one of those who, like Mary Anderson or Modjeska, are forced to cherish ambitions in secret, for naturally and inevitably the theatre absorbed her. She and her sister Kate, four years her elder, were in their early girlhood as firmly established as popular favorites as actresses of that age can be.

Ellen Terry’s fame has exceeded that of any other of Benjamin Terry’s large family, but when she began her stage career she was naturally known as Kate Terry’s little sister. Before Ellen made her first appearance, at the age of eight, Kate had achieved marked success, for a child, in Charles Kean’s company, and until she was twenty-three, when she married and retired from the stage, she was recognized as one of England’s leading actresses. The third of the Terry sisters, Marion, and the youngest, Florence, had less distinguished but creditable careers. There has not been a better instance of the hereditary beauty and talent that occasionally concentrate in theatrical families.

Benjamin Terry and his wife became members of the company which about the middle of the century the younger Kean gathered at the Princess’s Theatre. Whatever the disappointments of Charles Kean’s career, he was earnestly devoted to his art, he greatly developed the scenic equipment of the stage of his day, and he made the Princess’s Theatre an excellent school of acting.

Benjamin Terry not only acted parts at the Princess’s, but assisted with the productions and stage management. Naturally enough, when Kean’s series of Shakespearean revivals required the appearance of children, the young Terry sisters were chosen. They had received what training their parents could give them. “It must be remembered,” Ellen Terry long afterward wrote, “that my sister and I had the advantage of exceedingly clever and conscientious parents, who spared no pains to bring out and perfect any talents that we possessed. My father was a very charming elocutionist, and my mother read Shakespeare beautifully, and they both were very fond of us and saw our faults with eyes of love, though they were unsparing in their corrections. And, indeed, they had need of all their patience; for my own part, I know I was a most troublesome, wayward pupil.” Her father was constantly calling for impromptu rehearsals of her lines--at the table, in the street or ’bus--whenever opportunity came. She remembers vividly going into a drug store, where her father stood her on a chair to say her part for the proprietor.

Trained for the stage from her earliest childhood, and destined unquestioningly for the career of an actress, her first appearance came and went so much as a matter of course that there has remained some uncertainty as to the date and part. Miss Terry herself declares for April 28, 1856, and Mamillius, in _The Winter’s Tale_. Much painstaking research has been applied to the question, confirming her strong impression. Yet Dutton Cook said he remembered seeing Kate and Ellen Terry as the two princes in _Richard III_, and wrote: “My recollection of Ellen Terry dates from her impersonation of the little Duke of York. She was a child of six, or thereabout, slim and dainty of form, with profuse flaxen curls, and delicately featured face, curiously bright and arch of expression; and she won, as I remember, her first applause when, in clear resonant tones, she delivered the lines:

‘Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me;
Because that I am little, like an ape,
He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’

Richard’s representative [Charles Kean] meanwhile scowling wickedly and tugging at his gloves desperately, pursuant to paternal example and stage tradition. A year or two later and the baby actress was representing now Mamillius and now Puck.”

Mr. Cook’s recollection is not borne out by the play bills, however, and it may safely be said that Ellen Terry’s first appearance was as Mamillius when she was eight years old.[74]

Miss Terry has given us her own impressions of her first night as Mamillius. “How my young heart swelled with pride--I can recall the sensation now--when I was told what I had to do. There is something in a woman’s nature which always makes her recollect how she was dressed at any especially eventful moment of her life, and I can see myself, as though it were yesterday, in my little red and white coat--very short--_very_ pink silk stockings, and a row of tight sausage curls--my mother was always very careful that they should be in perfect order and regularity--clustered round my head. A small go-cart, which it was my duty to drag about the stage, was also a keen source of pride, and a great trouble to me. My first dramatic failure dates from that go-cart. I was told to run about with it on the stage, and while carrying out my instructions with more vigor than discretion, tripped over the handle, and down I came on my back. A titter ran through the house, and I felt that my career as an actress was ruined forever. Bitter and copious were the tears I shed--but I am not sure that the incident has materially altered the course of my life.”[75] The _Times_ concluded its review of the production with the words: “And last--aye, and least too--Miss Ellen Terry plays the boy Mamillius with a vivacious precocity that proves her a worthy relative of her sister Miss Kate.”

She had soon played not only Mamillius, but also Puck in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Prince Arthur in _King John_, Fleance in _Macbeth_ and other childish parts in plays less well remembered. “In those days,” says Miss Terry, “I was cast for many a ‘dumb’ part. I walked on in _The Merchant of Venice_ carrying a basket of doves; in _Richard II_ I climbed up a pole in the street scene; in _Henry VIII_ I was ‘top angel’ in the vision, and I remember that the heat of the gas at that dizzy height made me sick at the dress rehearsal! I was a little boy ‘cheering’ in several other productions.... In _The Merchant of Venice_ I was firmly convinced that the basket of doves which I carried on my shoulder was the principal attraction of the scene in which it appeared. The other little boys and girls in the company regarded those doves with eyes of bitter envy. One little chorus boy, especially, though he professed a personal devotion of the tenderest kind for me, could never quite get over those doves.”

It is not to be thought that the young Terry sisters were merely attractive and clever children. They were applauded, wrote Dutton Cook, “not simply because of their cleverness and prettiness, their graces of aspect, the careful training they evidenced, and the pains they took, but because of the leaven of genius discernible in all their performances--they were born actresses.... Here were little players who could not merely repeat accurately the words they had learnt by rote, but could impart sentiment to their speeches, could identify themselves with the characters they played, could personate and portray.”

Thus Ellen Terry’s training began early and rigorously. “When I was a child,” she wrote long afterwards, “rehearsals often used to last until four or five in the morning. What weary work it was to be sure! My poor little legs used to ache, and sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was on the stage. Often I used to creep into the green-room, and there, curled up in the deep recess of the window, forget myself, my troubles, and my art--if you can talk of art in connection with a child of eight--in a delicious sleep.” In the years to come Ellen Terry rose to distinction first of all by virtue of her radiant, charming personality and a natural gift for acting. But only less important has been the infinitely varied, toilsome schooling in actual experience, thus so early begun.[76]

When Ellen was twelve Charles Kean’s management of the Princess’s came to an end. Her parents at once took advantage of the measure of popularity which the sisters had acquired and presented them in a “drawing-room entertainment.” It consisted of two short plays in which Ellen and Kate assumed all the characters, of both sexes. The venture was a success, and the little troupe, father, mother, two daughters and a pianist, traveled far and wide throughout the Kingdom for more than two years, driving from place to place in the primitive style of strolling players.

Returning to London, Ellen Terry, whose name seems already to have been fairly well established, had a part at the Royalty Theatre in a dreadful play founded on Sue’s _Atar-Gull_. It was her rôle in this gruesome drama to appear on the stage wrapped in the coils of a huge serpent, and shrieking the terror appropriate to the situation. This was at least an opportunity for one kind of acting and Miss Terry made the most of it. The contemporary accounts show that she shrieked most startlingly and whole-heartedly.

Kate Terry had joined the stock company at Bristol, and there Ellen, when she was fourteen, went also. For a year she had the sound training--the best an actor can have--of acting many widely varying parts. “If I had to describe her acting in those days,” wrote a member of the company, “I should say its chief characteristic was a vivacious sauciness. Her voice already had some of the rich sympathetic quality which has since been one of her most distinctive charms. Although only in the first flush of a joyous girlhood, she was yet familiar enough with the stage to be absolutely at home on it.... We, the young fellows of that day, thought she was perfection; we toasted her in our necessarily frugal measures; we would gladly have been her hewers of wood and drawers of water. She had personal charm as well as histrionic skill. Her smiles were very sweet, but, alack for all of us, they were mathematically impartial.” During this stay in the west of England (the Bristol company appeared also at Bath) she acted a wide range of parts, from Shakespeare to extravaganza. The training, in quantity and variety, which was afforded by the stock companies of the middle of the last century, cannot easily be matched to-day. The theatrical system of England and America has been revolutionized, and the long run, the country-wide tour, the specialized actor, have become the rule. Only within the last few years, as in the rise of the Irish national theatre, the Manchester Players, and the upward trend in certain American stock companies, can we see something of a return to earlier conditions.

There followed a year in London, in the company, headed by the older Sothern, which was playing at the Haymarket. She was but fifteen, yet the _Times_ said: “She is now matured into one of the happiest specimens of what the French call the _ingénue_.” She played Gertrude in _The Little Treasure_, Hero in _Much Ado about Nothing_, Lady Touchwood in _The Belle’s Stratagem_, Julia in _The Rivals_, and also Mary Meredith in a revival of _Our American Cousin_, in which Sothern was his famous other self, Lord Dundreary;--not bad for fifteen!

At sixteen came one of those sudden and complete absences from the stage that have strangely marked the career of one born to act. She was married in 1864 to George Frederick Watts, the famous artist. He was thirty-one years her senior. Watts was a man of great nobility of character, he cared for her deeply, and the brief period of her life with him she herself declared not wholly unhappy. Yet the marriage was a mistake. Though she responded to the beauty and peace of her new surroundings, and for a while at least was contented to forget the theatre, she was little more than a child--exuberant, unused to the restraint of a quiet country home; and she had tasted success. The artist himself was oppressed with a feeling that he had spoiled her life. In any event they soon separated, and she met him only once thereafter, though years later they exchanged friendly letters.

When she was nearing twenty Ellen Terry returned to the stage, more or less under the direction of Charles Reade, the famous novelist, then part manager of the Queen’s. One of the best of English novelists of the second degree, his main artistic interest was the theatre, and he was, mistakenly, more ambitious of fame as a dramatist than as a novelist. His play _The Double Marriage_ was founded on his novel _White Lies_. It was well acted (Ellen Terry playing the heroine), and well mounted, but a failure. Charles Reade’s oft-quoted description of Ellen Terry in a way characterizes them both, the charming actress and the brusque, facile writer: “Her eyes are pale, her nose rather long, her mouth nothing particular, complexion a delicate brick-dust, her hair rather like tow. Yet somehow she is beautiful. Her expression kills any pretty face you see beside her. Her figure is lean and bony; her hands masculine in size and form. Yet she is a pattern of fawn-like grace. Whether in movement or repose, grace pervades the hussy.” The two were to be excellent, even affectionate, friends.

The most noteworthy event of this brief engagement at the Queen’s was her first appearance with Henry Irving, then of course a rising actor, not yet the distinguished manager of later days. The play was Garrick’s “mutilation” of _The Taming of the Shrew_ which he called _Katherine and Petruchio_. Of this foreshadowing of what was to be, Miss Terry writes: “There is an old story told of Mr. Irving being ‘struck with my talent at this time and promising that if he ever had a theatre of his own he’d give me an engagement!’ But that is all moonshine. As a matter of fact I’m sure he never thought of me at all at that time. I was just then acting very badly, and feeling ill, caring scarcely at all for my work or a theatre, or anybody belonging to a theatre.” And again: “From the first I noticed that Mr. Irving worked more concentratedly than all the other actors put together, and the most important lesson of my working life I learnt from him, that to do one’s work well one must _work continually_, live a life of constant self-denial for that purpose, and, in short, keep one’s nose upon the grindstone.” Of her performance in the pseudo-Shakespearean piece the critics varied. “I have not much recollection of the performance,” wrote Clement Scott, “save that Ellen Terry was the sweetest shrew ever seen and that it seemed barbaric to crack a whip in her presence.”

After acting for about a year at the Queen’s, Miss Terry again retired from the stage, this time for six years. She disappeared from London and the stage and wholeheartedly gave herself up to a tranquil domestic life in the country. This was the period of her union with Charles Wardell, her second husband, an excellent actor known to playgoers as Charles Kelly. Of this union there have been two children, Ailsa Craig, who played small parts at the Lyceum with her mother and Henry Irving, and Gordon Craig, who, first an actor, is today recognized as one of the most important and fertile workers toward a new art of stage setting.

“I led a most unconventional life,” writes Miss Terry, “and experienced exquisite delight from the mere fact of being in the country. No one knows what ‘the country’ means until he or she has lived in it. ‘Then, if ever, come perfect days.’... For the first time I was able to put all my energies into living.... I began gardening, ‘the purest of human pleasures’; I learned to cook, and in time cooked very well, though my first essay in that difficult art was rewarded with dire and complete failure.[77]

“My hour of rising at this pleasant place near Mackery End in Hertfordshire was six. Then I washed the babies. I had a perfect mania for _washing_ everything and everybody. We had one little servant, and I insisted on washing her head. Her mother came up from the village to protest. ‘Never washed her head in my life. Never washed any of my children’s heads.’

“After the washing I fed the animals. There were two hundred ducks and fowls to feed, as well as the children. By the time I had done this, and cooked the dinner, the morning had flown away. After the midday meal I sewed. Sometimes I drove out in the pony-cart. And in the evening I walked across the common to fetch the milk. The babies used to roam where they liked on this common in charge of a bulldog, while I sat and read. I studied cookery-books instead of parts--Mrs. Beeton instead of Shakespeare!

“Oh, blissful quiet days! How soon they came to an end! Already the shadow of financial trouble fell across my peace. Yet still I never thought of returning to the stage.

“One day I was driving in a narrow lane, when the wheel of the pony-cart came off. I was standing there, thinking what I should do next, when a whole crowd of horsemen in ‘pink’ came leaping over the hedge into the lane. One of them stopped and asked if he could do anything. Then he looked hard at me and exclaimed: ‘Good God! It’s Nelly!’ The man was Charles Reade.

“‘Where have you been all these years?’ he said.

“‘I have been having a very happy time,’ I answered.

“‘Well, you’ve had it long enough. Come back to the stage!’

“‘No, never!’

“‘You’re a fool! You ought to come back.’

“Suddenly I remembered the bailiff in the house a few miles away, and I said laughingly: ‘Well, perhaps I would think of it if someone would give me forty pounds a week!’

“‘Done!’ said Charles Reade. ‘I’ll give you that, and more, if you’ll come and play Philippa Chester in _The Wandering Heir_.’”

Thus it was “dear, lovable, aggravating, childlike, crafty, gentle, obstinate, and entirely delightful and interesting Charles Reade,” to use Ellen Terry’s own characterization, who in 1874 induced her to return to the stage. He was then managing the Queen’s. Since 1868 she had not acted at all, but she was well remembered, and her reappearance was cordially welcomed. The play was one of Reade’s own, _The Wandering Heir_, and in course of it Miss Terry appeared in male attire--one of the few times she had what old timers used to know as “breeches parts.” From all accounts it was a buoyant, charming impersonation. The author complimented her on her self-denial in making what he called “some sacrifice of beauty to pass for a boy, so that the audience can’t say: ‘Why, James must be a fool not to see she is a girl.’”

From this time, in 1874, until more than thirty years later, Ellen Terry was continuously before the public. In 1875, S. B. Bancroft (later Sir Squire)--one of the ablest actor-managers of the day--determined upon a daring experiment at his little Prince of Wales’s Theatre, a bandbox of a theatre hitherto dedicated to the “teacup and saucer drama.” This was his production of _The Merchant of Venice_. The play has never been set more beautifully, and as we shall see, it was in one part acted to perfection. But it failed through the failure of Charles Coghlan as Shylock. For Ellen Terry, however, it was really the first great triumph of her career. For her Portia on this occasion was a real triumph. She was twenty-seven, in the very perfection of her youth and beauty, and it was her first important venture with a Shakespearean part. Her success was immediate, and Portia, in the minds of many, always remained her most charming and characteristic impersonation.[78] “Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back again! But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales’s had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime--the feeling of the conqueror. In homely parlance, I knew that I had ‘got them’ at the moment when I spoke the speech beginning: ‘You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand.’ ‘What can this be?’ I thought. ‘_Quite_ this thing has never come to me before.’ It was never to be quite the same again. Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty wing of glory--call it by any name--it was as Portia that I had my first and last sense of it.”

In spite of Miss Terry’s personal success, the Bancrofts’ splendid revival of _The Merchant of Venice_ was short lived. Its thirty-six performances served, however, to lay firmly the foundations of Ellen Terry’s fame. Only three years were to elapse before she made her epoch-making association with Henry Irving. She spent first a year with the Bancrofts, helping them give life to a group of already old-fashioned dramas, _Money_, _The Lady of Lyons_, _Masks and Faces_, and _Ours_. “She enacted Clara Douglas and Pauline as well as they have been ever played in our time, and showed us that the staginess of the stagiest of old plays can be eliminated by acting so sincere and natural as that of Ellen Terry.”[79]

Then came, in John Hare’s company at the Court Theatre, where the other members included her husband and Charles Coghlan (besides Mr. Hare himself), two years remarkable chiefly for _Olivia_. The success of Mr. Hare’s venture was doubtful, when suddenly a happy idea came to him,--a play made from _The Vicar of Wakefield_. It was a time of enthusiasm for the eighteenth century. “We were all mad about blue china, Chippendale chairs, Sheraton sideboards, old spinets, and brass fire irons,” says one writer. “The age was exactly ripe for _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and John Hare, with his keen instinct, pictured in his mind’s eye an ideal Olivia in Ellen Terry.” W. G. Wills made the play, and made it well. Play, setting, and acting conspired to make _Olivia_ one of the best examples of the “play of a period.” As Olivia herself Ellen Terry was supremely successful and appealing. Among her non-Shakespearean characters it undoubtedly stands first, and for her sake _Olivia_ was introduced into the Lyceum repertoire, and acted by Irving and Terry for many years.

It was her acting in this part, indeed, that immediately preceded and to a degree occasioned her becoming the chief support of Henry Irving, who just at this time (1878) became manager of the Lyceum Theatre. Irving’s ambition to gather the best possible company made the choice natural, inevitable indeed. She had just turned thirty, she was temperamentally fitted to complement his own peculiarly magnetic personality, she was thoroughly accomplished, and she was already universally popular. It is a question, as says Clement Scott, “how much of Henry Irving’s success was due at the outset to the extraordinary influence, charm, and fascination of Ellen Terry.” They were one in their enthusiasm for their art, and they were alike in their artistic prejudices. Like Irving, she was devoted to the poetic and romantic drama, as opposed to the realistic, psychological drama of modern life.[80]

Henry Irving and Ellen Terry acted together for twenty-four years. One is used to being told that the Irving _régime_ at the Lyceum constituted the most brilliant period of the English stage during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Brilliant it certainly was--a splendidly successful, dignified campaign in fostering the best English stage traditions. Yet one cannot but sympathize with George Bernard Shaw’s regret that Ellen Terry did not retire from Irving’s company sooner than she did. “I have never made a secret of my opinion,” wrote Shaw, “that the Lyceum undertaking, celebrated as it was, involved, when looked at from the purely dramatic side of the stage art, a most deplorable waste of two of the most remarkable talents of the end of the last century.” What Mr. Shaw objected to was the exclusion from the Lyceum repertoire of modern, radical dramatists, such as Ibsen, Hauptmann, and doubtless Mr. Shaw himself. But while he thought that Irving used Shakespeare’s plays not to interpret the dramatist’s characters but as frames for figures which were creations of the actor’s imagination, Mr. Shaw must needs say of Ellen Terry that “she understood Shakespeare, and knew how to impersonate Beatrice, Juliet, Imogen and the rest, intelligently, charmingly, exactly as they must have appeared to Shakespeare in his mind’s eye.” And it is probably true that Ellen Terry, devoted as she was to her “lovely art,” as she called it, was not more than casually interested in the development of the allied art, that of the dramatist. She disliked Ibsen, and had no desire for his sake to desert the Lyceum. “Why did she remain so long?” asks Mr. Shaw, and replying to himself: “The answer is found in the fact that the Lyceum, while it did not call her dramatic faculties into full play, gave the widest scope for the full development of a wonderful sense of the picturesque.” In other words, she was attracted by the romantic rather than the realistic, the poetic rather than the psychological.

We have traced the important steps of her rise to a high place in her profession. How might one account for the personal element in this success?--for, trained and accomplished artist as she was, personality counted heavily in this progress. Well, there has been, can be, but one Ellen Terry. In writing of her powerful charm the words of strong men have run riot. “I never saw a more enchanting and ideal creature,” wrote Clement Scott of her later girlhood. “She was a poem that lived and breathed, and suggested to us the girl heroines that we most adored in poetry and the fine arts generally. Later on, as we all know, Ellen Terry played Queen Guinevere; but at this period she was ‘Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable, Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat.’... She was the Porphyria of Robert Browning and surely one of the crowned queens in the _Morte d’Arthur_. I wish I could paint with pen an even vague suggestion of this enchanting personality, tall, fair, willowy, with hair like spun gold, a faultless complexion, the very poetry of movement, with that wonderful deep-toned voice that has a heart-throb in it.” If in her ’teens Ellen Terry was “ideal, mystical, mediæval,” and suggested Elaine and Undine, who that ever saw her, in her later career, as Olivia, but saw realized in flesh and blood the ideal of English beauty?

“The rôle which she played in the life of her times,” says Mr. Shaw, “can only be properly estimated when (perhaps fifty years hence) her letters will be collected and published in twenty or thirty volumes.[81] Then, I think, we shall discover that every celebrated man of the last quarter of the nineteenth century had been in love with Ellen Terry, and that many of these men had found in her friendship the best return that could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose love had already been given elsewhere.” And not only celebrated men. There have been countless lowly, unknown devotees. “That much-used word ‘only’ can be used literally in regard to Ellen Terry,” again says Mr. Shaw with unusual enthusiasm. “If Shakespeare had met Irving on the street he would have recognized in him immediately a distinguished type of the family of artists; if he had met Ellen Terry he would have stared at her as at a new and irresistibly charming type of woman.”

It seems clear that Ellen Terry’s success was after all one largely of personality. She was splendidly successful, and no one could for a moment deny the fascinating beauty of most of her acting. Yet was she of the first flight of artists? It is difficult to answer _Yes_. Her Portia and her Beatrice were the finest of her time, probably the finest the stage has yet seen; her Olivia was a lovely, indeed a perfect, realization of Goldsmith’s heroine, and in many another character she charmed and moved her hearers. Yet when all is said and done Ellen Terry, in her most successful parts, was simply her glorified self. It is probably true--though the question was never thoroughly put to the test--that she lacked that power, reserved for the artist of first rank, of identifying herself equally well with widely differing characters. True tragedy lay beyond her. Charles Reade, at one time a constant and helpful critic of her acting, told her that she was capable of any effect, _provided it was not sustained too long_. “A truer word was never spoken,” says Miss Terry. “It has never been in my power to sustain. In private life, I cannot sustain a hatred or a resentment. On the stage, I can pass swiftly from one effect to another, but I cannot fix one, and dwell on it, with that superb concentration which seems to me the special attribute of the tragic actress. To sustain, with me, is to lose the impression that I have created, not to increase its intensity.” Always of a volatile, light-hearted temperament in her own self, the acting of tragedy was with her more a matter of routine duty than the natural response of her nature.

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. “And while she was associated with him in his long and brilliant management of the Lyceum Theatre she--the most modern of modern women--considered it a higher honor to be an economic, exemplary housewife than to be a self-conscious woman, whose highest aim was to play the heroine in the old-fashioned plays in which Irving shone.” Again, she lacked that all-sacrificing ambition that carries the artist to the topmost heights. During her two absences from the stage, and especially during the second, when she spent six years in the country, happy as housewife and mother, she had no regrets for the stage, no longing for its triumphs. And she was throughout her career content to be a “useful” actress. She constantly uses that word. She was content, first with private life, then with her ability to help the artistic cause of Henry Irving.

Never has there been a better example than Ellen Terry of the blending of trained acting ability with untamed high spirits. Her acting was sure of its effects and yet shot through with gleams of her own radiant charm and exuberance. And off the stage as well she was this same blithe spirit. It was strange that she disliked the elder Sothern, for if he had his equal in practical joking, it was in Ellen Terry. She was thirty when she joined Irving. Yet one day when he came to the foot of the stairs leading to her dressing room, he looked up to see his new leading woman sliding down the banisters! The act was characteristic, and so is her comment: “I remember feeling as if I had laughed in church.... He smiled at me but didn’t seem able to get over it.” But sunny as she was, she could weep too. When playing Olivia, she generally wept, she says, for the part touched her more than any other. “I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on in _Hamlet_, and in the last act of _Charles I_. My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me. I have had to _work_ to restrain them.” She was occasionally oversensitive to adverse criticism. When a writer in _Blackwood’s_ said she showed plainly that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her, Miss Terry was, she says, for years made uneasy and lacking in sureness at this moment in the play. “Any suggestion of indelicacy in my treatment of a part,” she wrote, “always blighted me.”

To trace in detail the history of “Irving and Terry” would be tedious. They acted together from 1878 to 1902. Their half dozen American tours aroused the same enthusiasm and loyalty that during all that long period was their portion at home.[82] Her retirement is so recent that the actress’s Portia, her Beatrice, Juliet, Imogen, Ophelia (to mention only the outstanding Shakespearean characters) are still fresh memories.[83]

It is probably true, as Mr. Shaw maintains,[84] that despite the opportunities given her to act Shakespeare’s most charming heroines, Miss Terry’s association with Henry Irving really resulted in reducing her total accomplishment. Irving sacrificed her as he did himself and everyone and everything else, to his art. To be sure he mounted a number of plays--notably _Olivia_, _The Lady of Lyons_, _Faust_, _Madame Sans-Gêne_, and perhaps some of the Shakespearean comedies--primarily for her sake. Yet she little better than wasted much time and effort in playing secondary and unsuccessful parts in plays selected primarily for him. And, sorrow of sorrows, Rosalind, whom she was born to play, he never made possible for her. How incomparable she would have been!--a Rosalind of ideal aspect, of delicious high spirits, of consummate grace and tenderness.[85]

But it seems, after all, rather futile and ungrateful, in the face of what has really been, to cavil about what might have been. Ellen Terry has actually been one of those rare spirits who confer a blessing on a gray world by their mere presence. As a woman she was lovable, simple, whole-heartedly human, generous, high spirited; as an actress, uniquely delightful and in many impersonations, by virtue of nature and instinct, of compelling power, even genius. Small wonder that we must reckon her as one of the great line of English women of the theatre, the last indeed of that small and scattered band, who, each in turn, were the queens of the stage; small wonder, too, that by thousands of hearts on both sides of the ocean she has been cherished as an idealized fellow creature.

When she had at last left Sir Henry she bade fair to enlarge the scope of her already well-rounded career by appearing in plays of a more modern type than any that fell within the Lyceum’s scope. “When her son, Mr. Gordon Craig, became a father,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “she said that no one would ever write plays for a grandmother. I immediately wrote _Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_ to prove the contrary. Once before I had tried to win her when I wrote _The Man of Destiny_ in which the heroine is simply a delineation of Ellen Terry, imperfect, it is true, for who can describe the indescribable?”[86]

When in 1905 Miss Terry played James M. Barrie’s delightful _Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire_, it was felt, by those minded like Mr. Shaw, and not disturbed by seeing her appear in a play widely diverging from the Lyceum traditions, that at last she had come into her own--that she was doing what she should have done years before, in giving her talents to a modern play. And the next year she appeared as Lady Cecily in the play that Shaw had written for a grandmother, and that had waited for her seven years, _Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_.

She had been an actress fifty years. When the anniversary approached the English world of the theatre bestirred itself to mark the date fittingly. The celebration took the form of an astonishing entertainment at Drury Lane. The programme ranged from songs, recitations, _tableaux vivants_, through _Trial by Jury_ and scenes from _The School for Scandal_, to an act from _Much Ado_, in which Miss Terry herself was Beatrice, supported by a cast including a score of the Terry family. The list of those who appeared on the stage of Drury Lane on the afternoon of June 12, 1906, is simply a roster of the pick of the actor’s profession in England; distinguished actors, if nothing more could be found for them to do, thought themselves honored to walk on as supernumeraries; Genée danced; Caruso sang; Signora Duse came all the way from Florence to pay homage; the audience, which had begun to gather for the great occasion as early as the previous day,[87] was overwhelming in its enthusiasm, and altogether the occasion was an unprecedented demonstration of loyalty and affection.

Early in the following year (1907) Miss Terry made her eighth and as an actress her last tour of the United States.[88] Three years later, and again in 1914, she came as a lecturer reading scenes from Shakespeare and commenting on his heroines. It was good to see and hear her again if only on the platform, even though, as William Winter said, it is one thing to act, another to expound. “To see her as an actress was to see a vital creature of beauty, passion, tenderness, and eloquence, a being, in Cleopatra’s fine phrase, all ‘fire and air.’” On the lecture platform she was not quite all that, but she was still Ellen Terry, imperial of figure, rich of voice, buoyant of mood.[89] As such her public in England and America saw its last of her.[90] She is now living quietly in one of those small country houses the “collection” of which has been one of her hobbies. She has given in generous measure pleasure to many, many thousands;--more than pleasure, inspiration indeed, to countless men and women. The realization of this must be a great reward, to make happy the twilight of her life.

GABRIELLE RÉJANE

A certain Frenchman once voiced the feeling of his fellow Parisians concerning Réjane by calling upon all good French provincials, who would learn the language of the Boulevards in a single lesson, and all children of other lands curious as to the pleasures, tastes, and manners of Paris, to harken while he gave them this advice: “Go and see Réjane. Don’t go to the _Opéra_, where the music is German; nor to the _Opéra-Comique_, where it is Italian; nor yet to the _Comédie Française_, where the sublime is made ridiculous, and the heroes and heroines of Racine take on the attitudes of bull-fighters and cigarette-makers; nor to the _Odéon_, nor to the _Palais-Royal_, nor here, nor there, nor elsewhere: go and see Réjane. Be she at London, Chicago, Brussels, St. Petersburg--Réjane is Paris. She carries the soul of Paris with her, wheresoever she listeth.”

Madame Réjane--the Parisienne: they are interchangeable terms. And what is a Parisienne? Let our sprightly French friend--M. Dauphin Meunier--tell us; he does it well:[91]

“A fabulous being, in an everyday human form; a face, not beautiful, scarcely even pretty, which looks upon the world with an air at once ironical and sympathetic; a brow that grows broader or narrower according to the capricious invasions of her aureole of hair; an odd little nose, perked heavenward; two roguish eyes, now blue, now black; the rude accents of a street-girl, suddenly changing to the well-bred murmuring of a great lady; abrupt, abundant gestures, eloquently finishing half-spoken sentences; a supple neck--a slender, opulent figure--a dainty foot, that scarcely touches the earth and yet can fly amazingly near the ceiling; lips, nervous, sensuous, trembling, curling; a frock, simple or sumptuous, bought at a bargain or created by a Court-dressmaker; a gay, a grave demeanor; grace, wit, sweetness, tartness; frivolity and earnestness, tenderness and indifference: such is Woman at Paris: such is the Parisienne.

“No need for her to learn good manners, nor bad ones: she’s born with both. According to the time or place, she will talk to you of politics, of art, of literature--of dress, trade, cookery--of finance, of socialism, of luxury, of starvation--with the patness, the sure touch, the absolute sincerity, of one who has seen all, experienced all, understood all. She is as sentimental as a song, wily as a diplomat, gay as folly, or serious as a novel by Zola. What has she read? Where was she educated? Who cares? Her book of life is Paris; she knows her Paris by heart; and whoso knows Paris can dispense with further knowledge.”

Réjane was from the beginning a veritable child of Paris. She was born on June 6, 1857, at 14 _Rue de la Duane_, in a business section of the city. This street had been “one of the storm centers for almost every great riot known to the Paris of the last century and a half.” The little Gabrielle Charlotte Réju passed her infancy in that busy part of Paris between _Porte Saint-Martin_ and _Place Château d’Eau_.

Her parents were poor. Her father had earlier been an actor and at one time had directed a theatre at Arras.[92] When Gabrielle was born, and during the years of her infancy, he was the ticket-taker and the keeper of the buffet at the _Ambigu_. In the work of dispensing refreshments Madame Réju, who came of a good Valenciennes family, actively assisted, and even Gabrielle herself, when she grew old enough, was pressed into service.[93]

With the home life virtually transferred to the lobbies of the _Ambigu_, it was inevitable that Gabrielle, breathing the mystery-filled atmosphere of a theatre, should at once feel its strong influence. Like Ellen Terry and Mrs. Fiske, and unlike her compatriot the great Sarah, Réjane was, from the beginning, of the theatre. She was an amiably mischievous child, possessed of an immense curiosity about life behind the scenes. She remembers vividly those early days, in which she divided her time between her small duties, napping in corners, and revelling in the delights that presented themselves over the footlights. There she saw many of the stars of the day, Jane Essler, Frédérick Lemaître, Marie Laurent, Adèle Page. On the night of a new production, between the acts, she would go to her mother and recount the story of the play and give childish imitations of the various players. To imitate the fine gowns she saw on the stage, she would make a train from the buffet napkins. One of the memories of her childhood is the enchantment that possessed her when she saw herself, dressed in a velvet robe and a royal diadem, reflected in Adèle Page’s splendid cheval glass.

When Gabrielle was about five, her father died, and mother and daughter were thrown on their own resources. Mme. Réju secured a position at one of the other theatres, and Gabrielle went to school. She was to some extent in the care of a friend, but she was privileged with extraordinary liberties. Her mother gave her a franc each morning with which to buy her evening meal, and it was with immense pride that she would go forth alone to take her dinner at a restaurant. Often she would save enough from her franc to buy an orange which she would take with her into the balcony of the _Ambigu_, where she was still privileged to go. There she would tarry to see an act of the play before she went home.

It is clear that she was a precocious, clever child. She was already, indeed, an actress. Her evening walk would invariably take her past her beloved _Ambigu_. She made an event of this passage, putting on her best attitudes and smiles for the artists who might be seated in the terrace of the café.

This café of the _Ambigu_ was the scene of one of the oft-repeated episodes of Réjane’s childhood. The proprietor, a relative of some sort, was in the habit of beating his wife. One evening, Gabrielle, who knew what to expect, happened--as was not unusual--to be in the café. Soon the poor woman’s cries were heard as her lord and master belabored her. A patron demanded of Gabrielle what the terrible noises meant. “Oh, that, Monsieur,” she said. “Why, they’re rehearsing upstairs.”

Soon the mother changed her work, and took up the painting of fans. Between sessions of the school, and all day on Thursdays, little Gabrielle helped in this work and proved herself adept. They received for this work about fifty cents per dozen fans. Madame Réju seems to have been sensitive as to her new work. She and her young daughter, too proud to have it known that they were doing work of that sort, or perhaps for fear of offending certain rich relatives, took a neighbor into their confidence and paid her for delivering the fans to _la maison Meyer_.

If mother and daughter had continued to live in the immediate neighborhood of the _Ambigu_ it is not unlikely that the already lively ambition of the girl would have found its outlet at that theatre. We have seen something of her enthusiasm for the _Ambigu_ and her close relationship with its entourage. Once launched upon her career there as an actress of popular drama, she would very likely have remained there and missed the valuable training that she was to receive at the _Conservatoire_. As it happened, however, when she was about ten her mother moved from _Rue de Lancry_ to 17 _Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette_, and in large measure the influence of the _Ambigu_ was removed.

On the same floor with Madame Réju and her daughter in their new quarters lived a lady with whom they gradually formed a close friendship. When the war of 1870 broke out, the new friend left Paris, leaving her apartment in charge of Mme. Réju and Gabrielle. There the windows, unlike those of Mme. Réju’s own suite, overlooked the street. When the Commune brought the terrors of civil war to Paris, it was from these windows that the child witnessed what was to her a terrible and long-remembered sight, a street battle between the government troops and the Communists. The bodies of slain men, carried past under those windows, gave her her first glimpse of death.

The war past, Gabrielle, now fourteen, returned to school at the _Pension Boulet_, _Rue Pigalle_. She applied herself diligently to her somewhat neglected studies, and to such good purpose that the mistress of the school, with whom Gabrielle had become a favorite, offered her a position as an assistant with the younger pupils. She was to be paid forty francs a month, and her luncheon. To her mother this seemed to be the opening of an honorable career. Not so Gabrielle herself, who cherished constantly her already fixed ambition to be an actress. She was, however, fond of children, and to tide affairs over she took a class of the younger pupils. She got along well enough with them with their ordinary lessons, but her own instruction in sewing and embroidery had been neglected, and she had to have the help of the older of her pupils, to bridge the gap.

Occasionally, of a Sunday evening, Gabrielle was taken by her mother to the house of a friend who gathered about herself a modest _salon_. There came such men as Félicien David, the composer, Joseph Kelm, the writer, and the architect, Frantz Jourdain. Gabrielle, young as she was, with her natural gayety and spontaneity at once took her place in the circle. She would sing for the assembly the popular songs of the day--compositions often full of doubtful meanings that she very imperfectly understood. Her little successes naturally strengthened her longing to be an actress, to stir great houses as she amused this little circle of friends.