HELENA MODJESKA
The acting of Madame Modjeska is still remembered vividly by American and English theatregoers, yet its beginnings lie as far away in time as the sixties and as distant in place as Poland. She was born on October 12, 1840, in Cracow, the old Polish capital, now the second city of Galitzia, or Austrian Poland. Twenty-five years before, by the agreement of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, it had been proclaimed a free city. In the year when Modjeska was six, however, Austria, greedy then as now, broke her pledge and annexed the city. The Poles were always a passionately patriotic people, and did not submit calmly. Discontent grew to open revolt, but the hopes of the Cracovians were crushed by the bombardment of the city by the Austrians in 1848.
HELENA MODJESKA
Thus the little Helcia[43] was born in tragic times, and as a little girl saw scenes of terror and bloodshed. Her mother’s house was struck by the cannon shot, and she saw men and children killed before her very door. The horrors of those days were vividly impressed upon her memory and were perhaps not without their effect upon the nature of the future actress.
Her father, Michael Opid, born in the Carpathian mountains, and a teacher in the high school in Cracow, was a simple-hearted, lovable man, something of a scholar and a great lover of music. He was extremely fond of children. His own girls and boys and those of his neighbors would gather about him in the evening, listening to the folk lore of the mountaineers, Polish legends, and tales from the Iliad. When Helcia, years later, herself studied Homer, those winter evenings and their stories were vividly recalled. But Michael Opid’s chief delight was music. He played several instruments, the flute especially well. His melodies appealed almost too strongly to the sensitive little Helcia, who during plaintive passages in the music would burst into wails and cries. Singers and musicians were frequent visitors at the Opid house, and in its atmosphere there was thus an artistic element, which undoubtedly had some influence in determining the career of Helcia. Her father died when she was seven, of consumption, induced by exposure while seeking his drowned brother’s body. When he knew he was dangerously ill, he returned to his native mountains to die.
It had been the second marriage of Madame Opid. She had been Madame Benda, and having altogether ten children to care for, she could give by no means exclusive attention to any one of them, even had she known that that one was to be a great actress. The children were well cared for so far as their bodily wants were concerned, but their personalities were left to themselves to develop. For Helcia this was not altogether unfortunate, for her imagination, stirred by history-making events and by the songs and poems of which she was so fond, had free rein. She did not care much for the society of other children, and was not popular with them. She was a little dreamer, almost painfully bashful, living much in a world of her imagination, and fond of going to church. She would steal away alone to the Dominican chapel, where she would lie face down on the floor, in the manner of the peasant women, arms outstretched, kissing the floor and praying for a miracle or a glimpse of an angel or a saint.
Her first schooling was in the house of a friend of her mother’s, a woman with two well-educated daughters who taught the little Helcia, by the time she was seven, to read with ease. She fed her imagination with all the books she could find at hand. In school she liked her Polish history, her French and her grammar.
When Helcia was seven, she was taken to the theatre for the first time. The play was The Daughter of the Regiment, and was followed by a ballet The Siren of Dniestr, in which little Josephine Hofmann (to be Josef Hofmann’s aunt) dressed as a butterfly, hovered about in the air. Helcia was entranced; to her it was all a dream of joy come true.[44] She went to bed that night with a high fever, and for weeks afterward she practiced the butterfly dance, watching her shadow on the wall, much to the amusement of her small brothers. But theatricals became the family pastime. Helcia’s three older brothers were enthusiastic. They rigged up a stage at home, with the help of some other boys formed a little company, and every month gave performances for admiring friends. They excluded the girls, and played all the women’s parts themselves. The home theatre was probably of great influence in the lives of its members, for two of the boys, besides Helcia and her sister, subsequently went on the stage.
In 1850, when Helcia was in her tenth year, Cracow was burned. The conflagration lasted ten days, and a large part of the city was destroyed. Madame Opid up to this time had been a woman of some property. Her first husband had left her a small estate which she had managed skillfully. Her two houses were now destroyed, her insurance had lapsed ten days before, and she was practically ruined. Here was more misfortune to impress the growing Helcia, to make her, for her years, unusually sensitive and thoughtful. After a few days of almost vagabondage, the family was given temporary quarters in a friend’s house. There Helcia, left much to herself, spent her time reading her Life of St. Genevieve, a treasured volume which she rescued in the moment of peril. At length installed in a newly hired house, Madame Opid sent Helcia and her little sister Josephine as day pupils to St. John’s convent, and supplemented the teachings of the sisters with lessons at home in music and dancing.
It was at this time, when Helena was ten, that she first met Gustave Modrzejewski,[45] who was later to be her husband. He was twenty years her senior. He was a friend of the family and taught the children German, the hated language of the oppressor.
When Helena was twelve, her half-brothers Joseph and Felix Benda had gone away to be actors on the professional stage. To relieve the quiet at home she and her brother Adolphe Opid, who was then fifteen, wrote a play, a one-act tragedy. The scene was laid in Greece, and the acting required the death of Adolphe, and an impassioned scene of grief by Helena when with a sob she threw herself over her dead lover’s body. She drew from the sympathetic servants and her great-aunt Theresa genuine tears, but her practical mother was unmoved, thought Helena over-excited and forbade further theatricals.
At fourteen Helena finished the highest grade at the convent. This was the end of her formal schooling, but she at once began a strenuous and varied course of reading. She began with the Polish poets, of whom there are several proudly cherished by their countrymen. It was the family’s pleasant custom, fostered by the well-read Mr. Modrzejewski, to read aloud in the winter evenings. In this way Helena learned of Scott, Dickens, Dumas, George Sand, and many another. She had neglected her German, and it was to stimulate an interest in the disliked language that Mr. Modrzejewski proposed that she be taken to see a German play. She was immensely excited, for it was seven years since she had been to the theatre. The play was Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. She entered the theatre in a state of awe, she sat through the performance in spellbound fascination, and the next morning with the help of a dictionary began reading Schiller in German. Schiller became for the time an overwhelming enthusiasm with her. She imagined herself in love with him, and placed before her in her room his statuette, as a kind of idol. Such extravagances as this, and the religious period that preceded it, would have indicated to a discerning eye a promisingly responsive and emotional nature. To those about her, however, even to her mother, she was only a moody and at times excitable child whose enthusiasm was to be repressed and whose future was doubtful. She helped with the family work, as all did in this time of stress, but she was living apart in a world of poetry, of vague and ardent dreams.
She was now taken to the theatre occasionally. Felix Benda had become one of the popular actors of the local theatre. One day, when Helena was about sixteen, he overheard her reciting to her sister. Surprised and pleased, he took her next day to the house of one of the leading actresses of the company, who as an artist of experience could judge of the young girl’s chances of success on the stage. All this came very suddenly. Helena had not seriously thought of a stage career. The hearing was a trying ordeal, for she was terribly frightened. After giving Helena a lesson or two, the actress was discouraging. She advised Madame Opid to keep the young girl at home rather than allow her to become a mediocre actress. For a while Helcia’s budding ambitions were crushed.
Madame Opid, for one, was not disappointed. The family was not so well off as it was before the fire and to Helcia fell a large share of the housework. But she studied and read and thought, with unsettled mind and changing purpose. At one time she thought she would try to achieve fame as a writer; again, at her mother’s wish, she studied furiously with a teacher’s examination in mind; again, to become a nun seemed the only thing worth while. But shortly there came a rude shock to all these plans. Fritz Devrient, a German actor of great talent, played Hamlet in Cracow, and Helena was taken to see him. She had heard of Shakespeare, but had never seen or read any of his plays. The effect on her was overwhelming. Shakespeare became her master then and there, and she never deserted him. She spent a sleepless night, and the longing to be an actress returned with redoubled strength. She greedily read the plays of Shakespeare in Polish translations, and his bust speedily replaced that of Schiller. The family friend, Gustave Modrzejewski, to her great delight seconded her in her renewed ambition, recommended that she study for the German stage as offering a wider field than the Polish, and arranged for lessons from an excellent actor, Herr Axtman. Indeed, his interest extended further, for when Helcia was seventeen he urged that their marriage, which had come to be an understood thing, take place at once. She had seen much of him; they had read together Goethe and Lessing and the northern sagas; he was her guardian and the kindly counselor of the family; and she looked on him, a man more than twice her age, with real affection; and so they were married at once.
After Helena had taken the name which she was to make so famous, there followed a few quiet years during which her ambitions lay in abeyance. When she was twenty her son Rudolphe was born. The little family, and Madame Opid as well, moved to Bochnia, a little town in Austrian Poland. Here it was that, owing to the circumstance that Bochnia possessed salt mines, Mme. Modjeska had her first opportunity to appear on a real stage. Some of the miners had been killed in an accident. It occurred to the Modjeskis to give, for the benefit of the bereaved families, some amateur theatricals. They met a friend, a dancing master named Loboiko, who obtained a hall, hastily built some scenery and acted as leading man of the company. There were but three others—a young man who was the dancing master’s pupil, Helena as leading lady, and Josephine, her younger sister. Stasia, their nine-year-old niece, was prompter. The plays were two pieces now forgotten—The White Camelia, in one act, in which Helena was a countess, and The Prima-Donna, in which she was an Italian peasant girl who became an actress. Delighted as she was to realize her cherished ambition to appear on the stage before an actual audience, when the bell rang for the rise of the curtain she was thoroughly frightened. Before she went on she could not think of her lines, and she fairly shook with nervousness. Yet once on the stage her words came to her and she found herself, much to her surprise, quite at her ease. The dignitaries and the country gentlemen of the district and the townspeople all turned out for the performance, and for the two others that followed it, in unexpectedly large numbers. Madame Modjeska’s acting, at this her first opportunity for showing it, attracted attention. An actor and stage manager from Warsaw, who happened to be in Bochnia and saw her act, asked her how long she had been on the stage,—an amusing and pleasing question,—and urged her to turn her eyes toward Warsaw. Such men do not pay empty compliments, and Helena’s confidence now took new hold. The prospect of going to Warsaw drove from her mind any idea of becoming a German actress. It was Warsaw and the Imperial Theatre, or die!
Such was the modest beginning of a career. Mr. Modjeski, so far from objecting to his young wife’s being an actress, saw in the new turn of affairs a chance to retrieve the family fortunes and to get a living for them all. A license for a traveling company was obtained from Cracow, Mr. Modjeski constituted himself manager, and the little band of players, travelling in a peasant’s wagon, went on to New Sandec.[46] Here the company was gradually enlarged until it had nineteen members, and here they stayed all summer. Helena was from the beginning their star. She and her comrades were but strolling players, living in poorly furnished quarters and eating frugal meals. She had but two dresses, one black for tragedy, the other white for comedy. Yet she was happy as never before or perhaps since. Long afterward she thrilled with the recollection of the enthusiasm and joy of those early days. To live in her own world of youth and eager beginnings and at the same time in the imaginary world of her heroines, was a happiness that outweighed all lack of comforts.
For more than a year the company traveled about in Austrian Poland. It was during this period that the Polish insurrection of 1863 was brewing. The oppression under which Russian Poland suffered found sympathy in Galitzia and indeed the entire Polish people was in mourning. Every one, at least in the towns, wore black, for the wearing of colors was practically forbidden by public feeling. Yet people contrived to go to the theatre, and “The New Sandec Combination,” as it was called, prospered. Their Polish historical pieces roused the patriotism of their audiences and did their share in maintaining the spirit of the people in the face of the Russian outrages.
Madame Modjeska was the favorite of the provincial public to which her company addressed itself. The popular demand for her was such that the audiences fell off when she was not in the cast, and she consequently was forced to appear constantly. When her daughter was born[47] she had finished acting her part in a five act tragedy only two hours before; and in ten days she was again appearing. The company grew in size and improved in quality, and their repertoire was enlarged to include such plays as Schiller’s Die Räuber and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.
This year and a half of “barnstorming” was invaluable experience for Modjeska. It gave her confidence and technique, and, finally, recognition. One of the managers of the endowed theatre of Lemberg[48] had seen and liked her acting. In the autumn of 1862 the Modjeskis retired from the strolling company, and after a few probationary performances Helena, then twenty-two, was enrolled a member of the resident company at Lemberg. With her first opportunity to play on a well-equipped stage, with good actors, and before a city audience, she felt that she had made a distinct step upward. She played a wide variety of characters, ranging from great ladies to pages, ingénues, and the soubrette parts in operetta. She profited by the example and the friendly advice of Madame Ashberger, who was the leading lady, but the younger women of the company were jealous of the upstart newcomer with the pretty face. They influenced the management to give Modjeska only small parts, and this, with the insufficiency of the salary, so discouraged her that after a year at Lemberg she and her husband returned to try their fortunes again in the provinces.
Mr. Modjeski established in the town of Czerniowce a stock company that was largely a family affair. Joseph and Felix Benda, Helena’s half-brothers, her sister’s husband and Josephine herself, all were members, while Simon Benda led the orchestra. There were more than twenty actors altogether, some of whom afterwards became famous in Poland. The two years at Czerniowce Modjeska filled with hard work. 1863 marked the crisis in the affairs of unhappy Poland. The Galitzians were only less stirred by the tyranny and bloodshed in Russian Poland than their kinsfolk, the victims. Excitement and patriotic feeling ran high and troops were being raised everywhere; yet throughout this troublous period the theatres prospered. As for Modjeska, with admirable energy and ambition she studied and worked. So far she had not played in tragedy. On a visit to Vienna, a brief vacation she took to see a bit of the world with Mr. Modjeski, a manager before whom she tried her powers in a scene from Marie Stuart advised her to cultivate her voice and her German before essaying the more serious rôles. Accordingly she practiced faithfully in the midst of a busy career at the theatre. She had attained a considerable reputation in Galitzia, and, as before, appeared constantly, not only in the company’s home town but in towns about the province. She was happy in her work, but her health was suffering, and for a while consumption threatened her. Other troubles soon came. In 1865 her two year old daughter died, and soon afterwards other misfortunes, of a domestic nature, ended in her separation from her husband, whom she never saw again.
Moving now to her birthplace, Cracow, with her mother, her little son and her brother Felix, she was soon a member of the company at the old theatre where she had been taken, years before, to see the plays that had so greatly excited her.
Modjeska began her three years at Cracow when she was almost twenty-five. She had attained genuine popularity in her own province and her reputation was beginning, among those particularly interested in the drama, to extend to other parts of Poland. As the able stage director at Cracow, Mr. Jasinski, told her, she had been petted by the public and spoiled by the critics.[49] The Cracow theatre was beginning a new era just at this time and with the importation into its management of a group of enthusiastic and artistically well-equipped men it set for itself a standard equal to that of the national theatre at Warsaw. It was natural therefore that her term of service here taught Modjeska much. First she learned from Mr. Jasinski for the first time the proper delivery of blank verse. At his earnest solicitation, and under the sting of remarks by a jealous fellow actress, who advised her to leave serious parts alone, she resolutely undertook tragic characters for the first time. Her parts were sometimes small, sometimes important.[50] After her performance in Don Carlos, which came a few months after she joined the company and for which she prepared herself (since Mr. Jasinski had returned to Warsaw), she felt that she had to a degree realized her ambition. She had succeeded in a serious part, and was a recognized member of an important company. She was absorbed and happy in her work and thought of little else.[51] The political troubles of Poland, if not settled, were at least stifled. There was outward calm to match the content with which Modjeska labored during these important years. Those who consider success on the stage easily achieved have only to look at such a period as this in the life of a great actress. She frequently arose at five in the morning and studied and rehearsed all day. She and her brother Felix would go over scenes at all hours and in all places. She carefully worked out the last detail of costuming, of pose or intonation, developing her impersonations to her utmost. And when the time for performance came, she threw herself into her work body and soul. There has always been much discussion as to whether or not an actor, for the best effect, should “feel his part.” Modjeska was always one of those who did. “I really passed through all the emotions of my heroines,” she afterwards wrote. “I suffered with them, cried real tears, which I often could not stop even after the curtain was down. Owing to this extreme sensitiveness I was exhausted after each emotional part, and often had to rest motionless after the play until my strength returned. I tried hard to master my emotions, but during my whole career I could not succeed in giving a performance without feeling the agonies of my heroines.”
It was during a visit of the Cracow Company to Posen, the capital of Prussian Poland, that Madame Modjeska met Count Karol Bozenta Chlapowski, who was soon to be her second husband.[52] He came of a noble Polish family and had served in the revolt of 1863. At the time he met Modjeska (1866) he was a writer on politics and the drama for one of the newspapers of Posen. In this capacity he commented frankly on the shortcomings he found in Modjeska’s acting, but his candor did not prevent their becoming good friends. He coached her in French, and they read and talked much together. It was here, when romance was coming into her own life, that she read for the first time Romeo and Juliet. It carried her to the highest pitch of enthusiasm for Shakespeare. At her earnest wish, it was played successfully with Modjeska as Juliet, while the company was in Posen.
Before she returned to Cracow to act, Modjeska was granted leave of six weeks, with the suggestion that she go to Paris and study the best French actors. Paris charmed her, while her visits to the theatres—and every evening found her in one or another—were inspiring to the sensitive young woman on the threshold of her own career. The restraint of the French actors’ methods, their admirable grace and precision, their imaginative identification with their characters, and the ensemble which is the mark of the French stage at its best, were noted for her own good by the rising Polish star.
She was given an ovation when she reappeared at Cracow. Romeo and Juliet was repeated and, to her delight (for Shakespeare was her constant enthusiasm), she had an opportunity to appear as Lady Anne in Richard the Third, as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and as Desdemona in Othello. Many plays from the French and German were also given, but the basis of the Cracow theatre’s repertoire was naturally Polish.
This was to Modjeska a happy and successful period. As was her custom, she threw herself into her work with all her energy, and besides her parts studied hard her French, her music, and even an elaborate course in history. Indeed she worked so during this year (1866–7) that one day, during a rehearsal of Kabale und Liebe she suddenly lost her memory; she could not think of a word of her part. In two weeks, however, she had recovered and was at work again.
In 1868 she married Count Chlapowski and thereby became a member of the aristocracy. She was not the first actress to marry into the Polish nobility, but in her case, as in none before, the husband’s family and society in general welcomed her with open arms. And indeed, in receiving into their number a woman of her personal worth and attainments, they were accepting rather than bestowing honor.
Now came the moment that Modjeska herself always believed to be the turning point in her career. Seven years before, when she and three other amateurs were giving their little plays for charity in Bochnia, she had been seen, it will be remembered, by one of the staff of managers of the Warsaw Imperial Theatre. He had told her that one day he hoped to see her in Warsaw. Now, in 1868, her reputation as one of the leading actresses of the Cracow theatre brought about the fulfillment of his hope, for she was invited to Warsaw to give a special series of performances. As for her, this was the realization of a dream. She did not then even think of the career she was to have in foreign lands in a language other than Polish. She was intensely patriotic, and the utmost reasonable limit of her ambition was to act in the Imperial Theatre at Warsaw. It was one of the great state theatres of Europe, controlled and subsidized by the Russian Government, and, with its various companies for serious drama, comedy, opera, and comic opera, its ballet, choruses, orchestras, schools, officials and employees, enrolled something over seven hundred people. It was extraordinary for an actress who had not gone through the school and waited her chance of gradual promotion to appear on its stage; and the innovation aroused the keenest hostility among the members of the company. The husband of one of the actresses was an editor, and before Modjeska appeared, attacked her in print. When the newcomer rehearsed for the first time attempts were begun to discredit her. The rehearsal of her part in Les Idées de Madame Aubray went so well that she was jubilant until it was suddenly announced that owing to the sickness of one of the actors (who up to now was apparently in perfect health) the play would have to be changed. In the rehearsal Modjeska had shown such ability that the clique arrayed against her knew their point would be lost unless some play were put on that would test her powers more severely. So Adrienne Lecouvreur was suggested, a play in which Rachel had been the only one thoroughly to succeed. Modjeska saw the danger, but agreed to play Adrienne. At rehearsal she little more than “walked through” her part, taking care not to reveal her best powers, lest the unpleasant incident be repeated. The cabal succeeded, however, in playing her another trick: at the last moment another actress, the wife of the hostile editor, was given Modjeska’s part of Adrienne for the first performance of the play’s revival. This was intended to decrease the interest in Modjeska’s first appearance; yet when her night arrived the great house was filled. The controversy over her invitation to Warsaw, and the unusual spectacle of a nobleman’s actress-wife continuing to act after her marriage, combined to arouse the keenest interest.
The audience received her cordially, and listened attentively. At the close of the fable of the two pigeons, a passage which she delivered with much charm and tenderness, there was such applause as she had never heard before. After each act she was called out again and again, and at the end of the play received an unprecedented ovation. Even those members of the company who had tried to prevent her appearance were won over by her power, her grace, and her immediate success, and appeared in her dressing-room to congratulate her. Next day all the papers praised her, and during the next week the cards and invitations that formed the tribute of Warsaw society poured in upon her.
Within a few days Modjeska had signed a contract to play at the Imperial Warsaw Theatre the rest of her life, the term of her service to begin in the autumn of 1869, for she had still (in 1868) to complete her season in Cracow. In view of the conditions under which American and English actors, even those of the first rank, are to-day obliged to work, it is interesting to note the terms of Modjeska’s contract at Warsaw. She was to have twenty-five thousand florins[53] a year, four months holiday in each year, eight hundred roubles[54] yearly for gowns, and an annual benefit performance. She was to be permitted to act each year in six new plays of her own choice (a great concession on the part of a conservative management) and was to be expected to appear only three times a week! When she departed for Cracow, the people of Warsaw crowded to the station, throwing flowers into her carriage, and shouting their farewells. The visit to Warsaw had indeed been a triumph.
Count Chlapowski’s interest in a new political party and his editorship of its daily paper in Cracow brought about him and his wife, who after the end of the season in the spring of 1869 laid aside for the moment her theatrical work, a political and literary salon. Poets, patriots, scientific men, artists, all were found at the house of the charming actress and the nobleman-editor[55]. During her three seasons at Cracow she had played one hundred and thirteen parts—an impressive achievement in itself. Modjeska was now expected to act in Warsaw for the rest of her life. Instead, she remained less than seven years.
Her departure was brought about by several causes. It was not long before she became the moving spirit of the whole vast organization. As the extension of the repertoire was largely in her hands, it was to her that translators and authors had to apply. She therefore had considerable responsibility, which she appreciated, concerning the development of the Polish drama. The management found itself deferring to her in all kinds of matters. Moreover, her husband, forced to a choice between his own career and hers, had given up his Cracow interests, and together in Warsaw they soon found themselves the center of social interest. Their salon became an established and brilliant affair. Her domination of an artistic and social world to which she was a newcomer naturally aroused envy, and resulting attempts to make her uncomfortable had their part in wearying her of Warsaw. Then, in her ambition to enlarge and enrich the theatre’s repertoire, she had constantly to combat the autocracy and unintelligence of the Russian censorship. When she wished to produce Hamlet the censor objected to a play in which a King was murdered, as a possible suggestion of disloyal ideas, and it was only when he was shown that the murder was a family affair, not a public assassination, that he reluctantly relented. To another play he objected on the ground that it contained a Polish king, to a Russian an unthinkable person. The king had to be changed to a prince. Covert allusions to the wrongs of Poland were suspected where none existed and even certain words were taboo. A love passage might be suspected to be an apostrophe to the oppressed mother country; the word “slave” was considered objectionable, and “negro” substituted; if a character said: “I love my country and my people,” his affections were transferred by official order to his wife and children, and, in one play the words: “He walked arm in arm with the emperor and whispered in his ear,” were changed to “He walked three steps behind the emperor and whispered in his ear”! Such obstructions to Modjeska’s plans, though often amusing, were oftener maddening.
In 1875 Madame Mouchanoff, the wife of the president of the Warsaw theatre, died. A woman of great refinement, intellect, and force, she had befriended and inspired Modjeska, and the loss of her was severe. In the same year Felix Benda died, another blow, for her half-brother had been a good friend and wise counselor. In the meantime Modjeska had herself had a severe illness. Now, in the spring of 1876, the nervousness induced by her strenuous career on the stage and in society combined with sorrow over the attacks on her and irritation with the censor to induce a melancholy, a pessimism, that brought her to a dangerous state of discouragement and ill-health.
One night the Chlapowskis and their guests were discussing America and the coming Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. At first in jest, a general emigration to America was suggested. They would have there an ideal community, a care-free natural life far removed from Russian oppression, and Pani Helena[56] could have her much needed rest. The idea took root. The would-be emigrants were thought foolish by most of their friends, but Henryk Sienkiewicz (afterwards the famous author of Quo Vadis?), Count Chlapowski himself, his friends Jules Sypniewski and Lucian Paprocki, were all soon in deadly earnest. California they had heard of as an earthly paradise, where life was idyllic and the earth yielded up not only an easily won living, but fortune.
The suddenly achieved result was that Sienkiewicz sailed for America in a few months, and the others arranged to follow. Modjeska obtained leave of absence from the president of the theatre, who cheerfully expected her to come back, but fixed a forfeit of six thousand roubles if she did not. In June, 1876, she appeared in Warsaw for the last time. There was a great popular demonstration. The house was crowded and to the highest degree enthusiastic. After the performance the audience formed a double rank to the gates of the theatre grounds and shouted their farewells and praises. The public, at least, was with her to the last.[57]
In July, 1876, she sailed from Bremen for New York, with Count Chlapowski, her son Rudolphe, Jules Sypniewski, his wife and two children, and Lucian Paprocki,—a strange band of pilgrims, artists with little but their ideals and comradeship to fit them for pioneering in a strange country, headed by a woman who was giving up a career of grande dame and première artiste for the prospect of life on a farm eight thousand miles or so from the scene of her triumphs!
Modjeska had never seen the ocean, and the voyage of thirteen days was invigorating. Her party spent about a month in New York, making excursions to Philadelphia to see the exposition, where she admired the vegetables and fruits from California, experimented with those dainties new to her, pop-corn and peanuts, and found them tasteless, and visited the art exhibits. New York of 1876 she thought a “monstrous, untidy bazaar.” In August they started for California, taking ship for Panama. She found charming her first glimpse of the tropics, during the railroad trip across the Isthmus, and the three weeks’ voyage on the Pacific went far to restore her vigor and peace of mind.
The impression has been that Modjeska returned to the stage because of the failure of the farming experiment which was now to be made. To a certain extent this is true, but even before she reached California she certainly had vague plans to act again. In a letter from New York she had said: “It seems that I may be able to play in English, but first we must go to California, according to our original plan.... Perhaps after we get established in this new paradise I may pick up enough English to play there, and when I get more mastery over the new language, I may come here; for, however unattractive New York seems to me, it is the metropolis of America, and it will give me pleasure to conquer it.” This was surely forecasting the future. When she reached San Francisco, Edwin Booth was playing there. It was proposed that she act Ophelia in Polish, to his Hamlet. Rather to her relief, Booth, who had never heard of her, declined. She saw him as Antony and as Shylock and of course recognized him as the great actor that he was, though as yet she could not understand English.[58]
As for the community farming experiment at Anaheim, it was a failure that would appear ludicrous if it were not for its element of tragedy. All of the experimenters were desperately homesick, and none of them had the least practical notion of the task they had set themselves. They talked more than they worked, quarreled and made up, and were generally helpless. Modjeska, the queen of the Warsaw stage, did the cooking, with the frightened assistance of a Polish maid they had taken from a convent to be a helper with the children.[59] They had several cows, but no one knew how to milk them, and their butter and milk they had to buy. The orange trees were too young to bear, the season was dry, the neighbors’ cattle ate the barley, the dogs ate the eggs, and the ready money was fast disappearing. The unfortunate town-bred would-be farmers were doomed to failure from the start. So Modjeska determined upon the courageous and difficult course which brought in time so great an addition to her fame. She decided to go to San Francisco, learn English, and go upon the American stage.
In March, 1877, she wrote from San Francisco to a friend in Poland: “I am hard at work, studying. That was my secret plan, at the very beginning of our venture. Country life was simply to restore my health and strength, which it did so effectively that people give me twenty-four or twenty-six years of age, not more.... Next autumn I want to ask the president[60] which he prefers, either six thousand roubles for breaking my contract, or my return in two years with fame.”
She could not have returned to Warsaw, indeed, had she wished to do so, for she was now poor. She even sold some of her family silver to maintain herself and her son in San Francisco while Mr. Chlapowski[61] was winding up the affairs of the farm. With a young Polish-American woman as tutor, she labored incessantly with English, and to such good effect that in about six months, having gotten Adrienne and Juliet letter-perfect, she applied for an engagement at the California Theatre. John McCullough was the star and manager, but he was absent. His representative, Barton Hill, knew nothing of Madame Modjeska and told her there was no opportunity to engage her as a star. Her friend the tutor persisted, and obtained an appointment for a hearing, but when Modjeska presented herself at the theatre he found himself unable to keep the engagement. She was deeply discouraged. A star of the first magnitude at home, here she had to beg for a hearing, and then be refused. When she again applied at the theatre and Mr. Hill sent word that he was too busy to see her, she was genuinely humiliated. Some Polish friends interceded, however, and a rehearsal was arranged. Mr. Hill at last heard her, in an act of Adrienne Lecouvreur. He was unprepared for what he was to experience, for so far as he knew she was merely another “society woman” with a craze for the stage. She was stung to her best efforts, and at the end of the scene Mr. Hill was a changed man.[62] Modjeska was to have a week, more if possible. She had to go through another trial when Mr. McCullough returned, but the result was a fortnight’s engagement. On the first night, playing in a strange tongue, she was quite free from nervousness, and knowing the part well did it full justice. She sent a dispatch of a single word, “Victory,” to her husband; the newspapers pronounced her appearance “the most confirmed dramatic triumph that ever occurred in the city”; Sienkiewicz, then in San Francisco, sent a glowing letter to his Warsaw paper, and Modjeska’s American career was launched.[63]
The next morning at eight o’clock an enterprising theatrical manager called to propose her appearance in the eastern cities. In December, 1877, after less than a year’s study of English she appeared as a star in New York. The story of her career in Poland had been one of long continued striving, of years of mingled hard work and disappointment, and of final brilliant success. In America, by what has become in stage annals a classical example of will and courage, she attained equally brilliant success in a few weeks, in a foreign land and in a recently acquired tongue.
It was not long before Modjeska was firmly established as an international artist—a title that has been applied with justification to actresses only very rarely. From this time, in the early eighties, until the close of the century she led the life of such an artist—known to the theatregoers of two continents as no other of her time save only Bernhardt. Her American tours brought her before the public throughout the country, her name was equally familiar in the various cities of the British Isles, while during her frequent visits to Poland she acted in her own tongue among those to whom she had become one of the country’s glories.[64]
In seeking the reasons for Modjeska’s brilliant success and in estimating her as an actress, one at once recognizes that she was first of all a woman of great charm, dignity and intelligence. She was a grande dame, a woman who was also a “lady,” in the best sense of that miscellaneous word. Her friendships in her native Poland included literally almost every one who was distinguished or gave promise of being so. Though born among the people, by unaffected personal worth she found herself at once at home among the aristocracy into which she married, an aristocracy of genuine breeding and simplicity. As we shall see, her record of friendships in England and America was of the kind that is achieved only by a choice spirit.
Provided she remains herself simple and well-poised, a woman of this sort, when placed on the stage, has an obvious advantage in parts such as Modjeska’s over the woman who with equal technical ability has not had the same experience of the world. Without in the least forfeiting acting ability or a capacity for identifying herself with a character, Modjeska was plainly a gracious and noble-spirited woman. This quality came over the footlights to her audience and was one of the secrets of her appeal. “To mention her name, as the years drift away, will be to recall a presence of stately dignity, of tender poetic beauty, of exquisite refinement, and of perfect grace.... Her ministration as an actress has taught again the old and precious lesson that poetry is not a dream.”[65]
Modjeska’s art was fine tempered, subtle, delicate. She was not physically robust, her voice was not the great tragic voice of a Rachel, nor had it the thrilling tones of a Mary Anderson. And there was always between her and her English speaking audiences the intangible film of difference of speech, for obviously her pronunciation could never be perfect. Yet by a genuinely dramatic insight that was indisputably hers, a spontaneous naturalness of word and gesture, and her great power of quiet intensity, she achieved a forcefulness far beyond that possible to mere physical and vocal effort.
An example of her individual quality is afforded by her impersonation of the heroine of Camille. In the hands of other actresses the play had seemed “a piece that befogs moral perceptions and perplexes all sentiments of right and duty.” Yet Modjeska’s Marguérite Gauthier redeemed the play and made its heroine a real and tragic woman. “As we think upon it,” said William Winter, “there rises in fancy a lithe, willowy figure, just touched with a kind of strange richness—and whose every movement is perfect grace. The face is pallid with sorrow; the large, dark, liquid eyes are full of mournful light; the voice pierces to the heart in its tones of supplication, and vibrates with a nameless thrill of despairing agony. This figure obeys in every motion the feeling that possesses it. The tumult of self-reproach, the bitterness of doubt, the ecstasy of contented and confiding love, the mingled torment and sublimity of enforced self-sacrifice, the devotion to virtuous purpose, and the conflict betwixt earthly hope and heavenly resignation are all expressed by it with the elements of absolute sincerity and in a form responsive to the nicest touch of the guiding thought which controls every particle of the work. It is impossible to recognize with too much acceptance the splendid mechanism with which the artiste acts. It is a network of movement, attitudes, gestures, pauses, glances, and quiet, indescribable, subtle suggestions which, altogether, is faultless in delicacy and superb in completeness.” This comes from one who watched Modjeska’s career with the kindly interest of a friend, but it states with fairness, if with enthusiasm, the distinctive qualities of Modjeska’s acting.
Great, however, as were Modjeska’s achievements as a tragic actress, it was in Shakespearean comedy, that, in the opinion of many, she succeeded most individually. Hers was essentially the imaginative style of acting, and to Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice and Portia she gave character and individuality as well as charm and grace. “To get out of myself,” she said of her work, “to forget all about Helena Modjeska, to throw my whole soul into the assumed character, to lead its life, to be moved by its emotions, thrilled by its passions, to suffer or rejoice,—in one word, to identify myself with it and reincarnate another soul and body, this became my ideal, the goal of all my aspirations, and at the same time the enchantment and attraction of my work.” Thus her Rosalind and her Viola were not mere graceful, spirited women. There was, besides, an idealization that lifted them into the realm of poetry and a sense of impersonation that was a fitting response to the imagination with which the characters were conceived.
With Modjeska’s first American tour began the formation of that circle of friendships outside the theatre that would alone mark her as an extraordinary woman. The names must suffice: Longfellow, Richard Watson Gilder, Grant, Sherman, Henry Watterson, Eugene Field; and in Europe: Tennyson, Lowell, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Watts, Justin McCarthy, George Brandes, Hans von Bülow. With Longfellow, perhaps, was her most cherished friendship. During her first visit to Boston he called on her at her hotel and she and her son went to his house in Cambridge. “I said I would gladly study some passages from his poems and recite them to him, and I mentioned Hiawatha, but he stopped me with the words: ‘You do not want to waste your time in memorizing those things, and don’t you speak of Hiawatha, or I will call you Mudjikiewis, which, by the way, sounds somewhat like your name.’”[66]
It was Longfellow who urged Modjeska to act in London—the very summit of her ambition. When in 1880 she had repeated there her American success he wrote to her: “Now I can add my congratulations on your triumphal entry into London. How pleasant it is to be able to say, ‘I told you so!’ And did I not tell you so? Am I not worthy to be counted among the Minor Prophets? I cannot tell you how greatly rejoiced I am at this new success—this new wreath of laurel.” For London was immediately won. Public, critics, society and fellow actors united to make her welcome.
Poland, a small and unhappy country, has done more than its share in furnishing the world with artists. With some of the most famous of them Modjeska’s name is curiously linked. Paderewski, during her visit to Poland in 1884, used to come to visit her. He was then a young man of twenty-one whom it was impossible to keep away from the piano. She encouraged him, overcame his doubts as to his fitness for a public career, and that summer they appeared in the same program in Cracow. They were friends during the rest of her life, and it was Paderewski who in 1905 inspired the great farewell testimonial to Modjeska in New York. “The first encouraging words I heard as a pianist,” he wrote, “came from her lips; the first successful concert I had in my life was due to her assistance.” It was she, too, who years before, in a Polish mountain summer resort, first brought Jan and Eduard de Reszke before an audience. They were both then under twenty.
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.”