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.