IV
Fortunately for the authors, thus unexpectedly bereft of the actor for whom the piece had been composed and to whose personality it had been adjusted, Helen Tracy, who had played the heroine in the single performance which Raymond had given, wrote at once to Nat Goodwin, advising him to secure our play, as it had made a hit and as the star-part would just suit him. Goodwin asked us to let him read the piece; he liked it and we soon came to terms with him, both Jessop and I believing that he was an actor of promise, altho up to that time he had never undertaken a part demanding any subtlety of treatment or any veracity of characterization.
When he was a very young man, Goodwin had made his first appearance in a variety-show, giving imitations of the actors then prominent. It is a curious fact that even the most adroit mimics are rarely able to become accomplished actors, competent to sustain a character consistently throughout a play. Goodwin was one of the few exceptions to this rule. He soon gave up mimicry for burlesque, succeeding that fine comedian William H. Crane, in the chief comic part of the perennially popular ‘Evangeline’ and playing it in careful imitation of his predecessor. As Joseph Jefferson—who had often appeared in burlesque early in his career, notably in a parody of ‘Mazeppa’—once said to me, “burlesque is a very good school for a young comedian, as it tends to give him breadth of effect and certainty of execution.”
From burlesque Goodwin progressed to farce; and when he came to us for ‘A Gold Mine,’ he was playing the part of a drunken undertaker in ‘Turned Up,’ a robustious piece of British manufacture. As the attraction of this whirlwind farcicality was not exhausted, Goodwin arranged with us to postpone our play for a year; and he utilized the delay to prepare the public to accept him in a comedy of a more refined type. He added to his bill the ingenious and whimsical piece called ‘Lend Me Five Shillings’ which Jefferson was still acting occasionally. As he said to me, “I’d sooner finish third to Jefferson than run a dead heat with Dixey!”—Dixey having just made a great hit in ‘Adonis.’
Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K. Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold mine. “That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory, instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a certain Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet.
‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a complicated plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of the two collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating widow with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play Goodwin engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at least adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston Theater produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable suggestion for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the end of the second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain that he could play this serious bit and carry the audience with him, the actor answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m going to do it in imitation of Charley Thorne.”
This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example, played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly different from Regnier’s.
It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and in the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character which Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of the foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in two Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was he considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite his prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it had been sagely administered.
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!”