MRS. FISKE
One afternoon a decade ago Minnie Maddern Fiske journeyed out from Boston to the neighboring university city, went to Sanders Theatre, scene of Harvard’s august ceremonies, and there she talked—engrossingly—on her art. The occasion was in a way memorable. In times not remotely past the possibility of an actress lecturing in Sanders would have been doubtful.[162] But in 1905 Harvard was well along in its career as one of the springs of the renaissance which has of late years manifested itself in the English-speaking theatre. If one said “Professor Baker’s work was beginning to make itself felt” it would be saying the same thing in a different way. In many respects the occasion was unusual The audience was interesting: the professors were there to add dignity and academic distinction; the students, of Harvard and Radcliffe, were there in force to represent the newer spirit of inquiry and effort in matters dramatic; the stage was represented in the audience as well as on the platform (and, oddly, Francis Wilson, Edward H. Sothern and the speaker cover nearly the whole dramatic range). There was an enthusiastic expectancy in the air. One felt that here was the manifestation of something genuine and strong. The speaker did not disappoint. Poised and confident, eager and enthusiastic, she spoke for more than an hour and one felt at the end that this small woman had signalized a new spirit in the theatre and in the attitude of educated men toward the drama and its exponents.
MRS. FISKE
She had started life as a baby actress and her formal schooling was snatched here and there in the midst of an ever busy career. Most men (and women) can exhaust the resources of academic training with a total result less brilliant, however, than her hour on the stage of Sanders. But it was only one form of a recognition which is freely accorded. It is quite safe to say that since the death of Mansfield she has been the most noteworthy American person of the theatre. She has consistently championed drama of a high order, which is something superior to theatrical art of a high order. So much would be true if she remained the producer only. Mrs. Fiske, the actress, has placed herself among the chosen few. She, as much as any other, brought to bear on the American theatre what it sorely needed, a keen intellect attuned to the new spirit of naturalism. She was born in a lucky day for this purpose, for, as we shall see, she came to maturity at just about the time when the rebirth in the English drama was making itself evident.
The stage always attracts to itself numbers of people who no doubt sincerely fancy themselves drawn thither irresistibly. The theatre’s lure is strong, yet most of its followers have entered upon a stage career more or less as a matter of choice. With a small number, however, the life has been inevitable. There has been no choice, no attraction or glamour even. Such is Mrs. Fiske; she is indigenously of the theatre.
Early in the last century an English girl of good family eloped with her music teacher. Here, perhaps, began Minnie Maddern’s artistic career, for this girl was her grandmother. After a while this music master brought his family to America, where he conducted concert tours. One daughter, Lizzie Maddern, the mother of Mrs. Fiske, not only was the youthful cornetist of the company, but she arranged the music for the orchestra and, indeed, became a musician of genuine ability, and, later, an acceptable actress. She married Thomas Davey, a pioneer theatrical manager who carried his company up and down through the South and West in the days before personal management gave way to the highly impersonal direction of the Broadway offices. Davey was noted for his invasion of small unheard-of towns, where often the inn dining-room served as a theatre and scenery was of the scantiest. The actor’s life has its uncertainties and hardships in any age or country, but in Western America of the middle of the nineteenth century the conditions were often those known by the strolling players of old. As we shall see, Mrs. Fiske long afterward, and for quite different reasons, reverted for a time to the old practice of playing on extemporized stages.
On December 19, 1865, Marie Augusta Davey was born in New Orleans. From the first of her stage career, which began almost immediately, she was known as Minnie Maddern. There is a pretty story of her first, quite informal stage appearance. A careless nurse had left the baby unguarded. She climbed from her bed, donned her clothes and went out in search of the theatre and her mother. “I forgot to cry, I forgot to be frightened, and I saw some fascinating things before a good-natured fellow picked me up, discovered my identity and took me safely to the theatre. I recall distinctly being held by my new friend and identified at the box-office; then being passed over to a boy who took me around to a narrow, dark door and carried me into a lumbery place and put me in a chair where I looked out into what seemed a bright, sunshiny world with queer trees and fairies. Just then I spied my mother. She was dressed like a fairy, and she was just coming out of a water lily—for it was the transformation scene of a spectacle. I slipped right out of that chair, and, before any one saw what I was going to do, I ran right to her and began explaining my nurse’s treachery. I am told that I was received with applause, and that my first appearance, even though it was impromptu, was a success.”
Previously, she had been “taken on” when the action required the presence of a baby, and soon afterwards little Minnie appeared between the farce and the tragedy to do her songs and dances. At three came her first premeditated speaking appearance,[163] as the Duke of York in Richard III, and from that day to this, excepting brief periods in school[164] and a few years at the time of her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske, in 1890, she has been continuously and busily engaged in her profession.
Her career divides sharply into two periods. To the first of these, the twenty-five years that carried her to the time of her marriage, she is now disposed to be rather indifferent. When she refers at all to that time, which is not often, she speaks of the “prehistoric days.”[165] It was, nevertheless, a period of thorough schooling, arduous, but fruitful of technical excellence, and bringing early triumphs—a babyhood and girlhood apprenticeship which is today, for various reasons (one of them being laws in some states restricting the appearance of children on the stage) practically inaccessible. To indicate briefly her early experience it is enough to say that before she was sixteen Minnie Maddern had appeared not only with her father’s company, but with a dozen or more of the stars of the day, Laura Keene, J. K. Emmet, Lucille Western, John McCullough, Joseph Jefferson, E. L. Davenport, and the rest of that almost forgotten day. She went through the whole range of juvenile parts,[166] soubrettes, harassed young heroines, boys, fairies, the lads of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on through the list, playing wherever the need of a clever child actress called her. She wore long dresses on the stage long before she assumed them in her own person, and by the time she was sixteen she was conspicuously successful in old woman rôles![167] At sixteen, too, she became a star in New York, though this venture was ill-advised. She had won a public by her cleverness and her marked personality, but, much to her credit, she was not adapted to the crude and blatantly personal form of entertainment represented by Fogg’s Ferry, which was one of the “protean shows” of those days. She was to wait, indeed, many years more for the beginning of her identification with really significant drama. During this young womanhood, from sixteen to twenty-odd, she acted in plays which are never resurrected nowadays by even the most undiscriminating stock company, and which are remembered, if at all, by some old theatregoer who likes to recollect how appealingly, in Caprice, Minnie Maddern used to sing “In the Gloaming.” The Storm Child, In Spite of All, The Child Wife, The Puritan Maid, Lady Jemima, Featherbrain—these are not so much as names nowadays, even to those who know the theatre well. She had gained thorough, indispensable training, but as yet no memorable achievement.[168]
In 1890 came her marriage and three years of retirement.[169] It is, for many reasons, not strange that when she again took up her stage career a new era seemed to begin for her. Not only must her own nature, her insight, and her artistic equipment now have combined to qualify her for new and greater efforts; the whole English speaking theatre was gaining a new lease of life. Arthur Wing Pinero, just emerging into his period of sureness of technique and a frank facing of life; Henry Arthur Jones, dropping his earlier melodramatic manner and about to produce Michael and His Lost Angel; Oscar Wilde, with his momentary flash of high comedy; George Bernard Shaw, watchful of the experimentation of others and in addition well saturated with Ibsen; above all, the great Norwegian himself, whose influence knew no difference of language;—these men were, in the early nineties, bringing into English drama a vigor and a relation to life such as it had not enjoyed since the closing of the theatres in 1642.
Mrs. Fiske was keenly, if to a certain degree unconsciously, alive to these influences. To one attuned they were the zeitgeist. With an eagerness new to the American theatre she was ambitious to attempt the modern drama—a drama honest and frank in its outlook on life, free from conventional restraint in its choice of themes, and taking its tone from the realities in human character. Not always have the qualities of the play been a match for the powers of the actress. Yet, looking over the period since 1893,[170] the list is distinctly noteworthy—first of all, Ibsen, who found in Mrs. Fiske a ready champion. A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society; surely they form a goodly showing. As for other Europeans, we have Sardou furnishing her, in Divorçons, an opportunity, brilliantly embraced, for comedy; Dumas fils is represented by La Femme de Claude, Sudermann by Magda, and Hauptmann by the short play Hannele. Two of her greatest successes, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Becky Sharp were unusually skillful and satisfying experiments in that difficult form, the dramatized novel. Leah Kleschna was worth while as an attempt to raise melodrama into the field of social drama; The New York Idea is, so far, the best American example of sophisticated, ironic comedy; and in very recent days Edward Sheldon’s plays, Salvation Nell and The High Road, have been courageous and justified experiments—the most striking examples we have had of the encouragement of the native dramatist of the newer school.
The capacity to key oneself to the inner meaning of a play, to react on the genius of the author with sympathy and insight, sets apart the artist from the crowd of mechanical players. For different actors there are naturally different forms of this power. For Mrs. Fiske, it can be said that her genius displays itself in the naturalism that reveals at once the realities and the beauties of human nature. Let us see how the group of representative plays named above has represented this power.
It can fairly be said that the distinguishing mark of this group of plays has been its close relation to actual human life. This is of course the distinguishing work of the most characteristic and significant of modern English drama as a whole; but there is much more of this sort of drama now than there was eighteen or twenty years ago, and there has been, until very recently, more of this leaven of truth to nature in the British theatre than in the American. Consider for a moment the character of the average play upon which the public in the United States spent during this period (and rightly enough still spends) millions of dollars and hours. To name a few undoubted successes: When Knightwood was in Flower, The Heart of Maryland, Lovers’ Lane, The Christian, Way Down East, Secret Service, The Music Master, The Man from Home, Zaza, Charley’s Aunt, The Prisoner of Zenda, Sherlock Holmes, The Chorus Lady, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Woman, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. Without denying the necessity of the theatre of mere amusement, of light sentiment, of melodrama, one feels grateful for an ambition that has sought and found something deeper.
To examine Mrs. Fiske’s plays more in detail will indicate both the temper of the modern realistic school and the quality of her interpretations.
As for Ibsen, there has been warm dispute as to the validity and helpfulness of his message. Many go to the extreme of saying that he should never be performed at all. With this question we are now concerned only so far as to determine his attitude toward life and the drama for there is no question as to his strength in determining the tone and technique of later-day dramatists. As Mrs. Fiske herself has said, “the most interesting, the most valuable plays written by others are almost without exception pieces which display the influence of the Norseman’s work. It would be an impertinence to say that Sudermann, Fulda, Pinero, d’Annunzio and the Spanish playwright Echegaray do not write interesting plays. They do, but after all their works are merely those of devoted disciples—not those of the master.” To follow her in her Ibsen creed (and she has the best critical thought with her) is to believe him responsible for our search of truth in the theatre, for the truth to nature that has brought a toning down of violent action and heightened the desire, as Maeterlinck says, “to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness and place moral problems upon a high pedestal. Bloodshed has grown less frequent, passions less turbulent; heroism has become less unbending, courage less material and less ferocious.” Ibsen appeals to the actor’s imagination, to all he has of brain and soul. In these plays also the sensitive, discerning auditor finds, not the sordid pessimism with which Ibsen has been so often charged, but a burning zeal for rockbottom truth and sincerity and, in some cases, the exaltation of tragedy. It is to be admitted that in his reaction against the drama of futile romanticism, the “story book play” of no character or consequence, Ibsen drew what were, in contrast, grim pictures.
By her unmistakable vocation for the realistic drama, her intellectual acumen, her power and habit of thinking out her parts, both in their larger significance and in their revealing details, Mrs. Fiske was obviously fitted for Ibsen. The restlessness of his women, their curiosity, their keen concentration, found a response in her temperament as her blonde and nervous person pictured their physical aspect. Histrionic methods moreover adapted themselves to both mood and matter. It is interesting to inquire in a little detail what these methods were and are, for, with modifications, they characterize all her work.
The keynote of Mrs. Fiske’s acting is akin to that of naturalistic drama itself, as the dramatist himself understands it. He must portray humanity as it is, with the selection and stress necessary for effectiveness in the theatre. His heroines must be embodied through similar methods. Such impersonation Mrs. Fiske accomplishes with the utmost economy of gesture, action and voice. There is no staginess, none of the aggressive grace of the actress playing a part; she is rather the woman living it. There is obvious none of the routine technique which actors frequently learn of each other, or in schools. This is not to say that her style is not an outgrowth of an earlier technique of a period when no doubt she was sufficiently “stagey” and conventional. In the later period she has refined, out of this earlier experience and her own insight, a method remarkable for its suggestion, its repression, its freedom from familiar device. To the end of theatric effect and illusion she, like all artists, has well defined, recognizable means—some, like her wide-ranged, emotion-charged voice, natural gifts; others more or less deliberate. How deliberate, it would be hard to say, so closely knit in good acting are calculation and instinctive action. Her power of imparting the details of impersonation is notable. Gesture, walk, pose, facial play, intonation, pause, all are worked out with precision and yet with a reticent naturalness that makes strongly for effectiveness. Particularly convincing is her power of pregnant silence. In Hedda Gabler, “Mrs. Fiske’s power of ominously significant silence, of play of feature that reveals the working brain behind, rises very high in the final scene with Brack. He knows her share in Lovborg’s ruin; he can bring his knowledge into play in the sordid theatre of the police court. The price of silence is the submission that Hedda, with all her curiosity and zest for evil, is too coldly cowardly to pay. All her tragedy has curdled mean. Her only refuge is the meaner and cowardly escape of suicide. She does not speak, yet one sees the idea germinate, mount and possess her, until it flowers into reckless action.”[171]
In the first act of Salvation Nell “Mrs. Fiske, as the scrub woman in the barroom, sat holding her drunken lover’s head in her lap for fully ten minutes without a word, almost without a motion. Gradually one could watch nothing else; one became absorbed in the silent pathos of that dumb, sitting figure. Miss Mary Garden, herself a distinguished actress, said of this, ‘Ah, to be able to do nothing like that.’ In Pillars of Society, while the Consul was making his confession to the mob, again Mrs. Fiske, as Lona, sat quiet, one of the crowd; but gradually, as she saw the man she loved throwing off his yoke of hypocrisy, the light of a great joy radiated from her face, ending in a stifled cry, half-sob, half-laugh of triumph, of indescribable poignancy. To one beholder, at least, it brought the rush of tears, and made the emotional as well as the intellectual drift of the play completely clear, completely fused and compelling. Is not this acting of a very high order, this so intense living in the whole life of the drama that her quietest moment is charged with tingling significance? Is this not true ‘impersonation,’ indeed?”[172]
Akin to this power of eloquent silence is Mrs. Fiske’s use of “felicitous pause.” In the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word, will come a momentary halt such as anyone in real life is constantly making. The effect is strikingly realistic; the wonder is that many others have not discovered and profited by its simplicity and naturalness. And then, coupled with her many sided faculty of repression, is a power of sudden, telling, emotional speech. Piercing a mood of charged silence, a sentence spoken in Mrs. Fiske’s eloquent voice is often of electrical effect.
By such methods, she made Hedda, “an abnormally evil and soulless woman, steadily plausible, momentarily potent, always conceivably human.” In the words of the same critic[173] she gave to Nora, in A Doll’s House “the very semblance of life. When these traits (disdain of convention, curiosity, self-concentration) become abnormal and pass over into morbid chagrin and recklessness, sordid selfishness, vicious vindictiveness, hard soullessness and mean cowardice, Mrs. Fiske’s intellect and her temperament follow them.”
Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West in Rosmersholm excited differences of opinion. To some any Ibsen play is a brilliant study of certain phases of life, to others only a depressing study in degeneracy. It is natural that the actress’ work should make varied impressions. In the moments of intense passion she rose superbly to the occasion; her Rebecca had intellectual poise; she suggested beautifully Rebecca’s renouncing love. It was, as far as it went, a portrait equal to any of her others, but in a degree she failed to suggest plausibly the fascinating half-intellectual and half-emotional force that gave Rebecca her influence in Rosmer’s house. She was a shade too detached, a little lacking in the warmth that must have belonged to Rebecca’s ideals and to her love for Rosmer.
One may frankly admit, indeed, that Mrs. Fiske’s acting does not please all tastes. What some find to be her repressive force is in the eyes of others “stilted awkwardness.” The qualities which to most are her most salient characteristics are to some her “intolerable mannerisms.” One comment on her Hedda was that there was “not a large or spontaneous moment in it,” that it was “an adroitly articulated mosaic, an assemblage of details, all precise exposition, rather than a jointless and living whole.” Her personality has been described as “cerebral” and “brittle,” and her art as “too predominantly intellectual.” Attention has been called to her “maddening rising inflection,” and, with wearisome reiteration, to what has been called her “unfortunate mannerism of runningallthewordsofasentenceintooneanother.” In this last criticism there is a measure of justice, for at times her speech has been disconcertingly rapid. There has been improvement in this respect of late years, however, and to those playgoers themselves temperamentally adapted to enjoy her work, her enunciation has been seldom indistinct, her so-called awkwardness and mannerisms full of significance, and her “cerebral” acting and personality the means of true impersonation.
The Pillars of Society, since it is a social satire rather than an outright tragedy, afforded Mrs. Fiske as Lona Hessel an opportunity for brilliant comedy. It was a small part, too small indeed to have bestowed on it her powers. But she has never chosen plays for their “star parts.” She made Lona a delightfully humorous, honest-hearted woman, a masterpiece, within its limits, of satiric comedy. Especially fine was her acting during Bernick’s confession to the mob. We have already seen how she sat in one of her motionless silences, listening, in her face the joy of victory—a joy that finally expressed itself in “a little smothered sob of triumphant love which no other American actress could have invented, or could have executed.”
Mrs. Fiske’s skillful acting of the lighter passages in The Pillars of Society gives point to a contention of many of her admirers—that she should oftener be seen in comedy. In the two conspicuous instances of her ventures into comedy—Divorçons and The New York Idea, she has been strikingly successful. In Sardou’s play she acted with “a refined abandon that was positively captivating, making Cyprienne deliciously capricious and delightfully feminine.” The New York Idea William Archer found to be “a social satire so largely conceived and so vigorously executed that it might take an honorable place in any dramatic literature.” It is an example of high comedy, the comedy “that smiles as it chastises.” The title is explained in one of the lines: “Marry for whim and leave the rest to the divorce court—that’s the New York idea of marriage.” In its lightness of mood and speech the play is a comedy, yet in the author’s mind the underlying interest is serious, his purpose being not to make fun of or satirize true love, but to make fun of and call attention to the frivolous, inconsequential attitude toward marriage and divorce. American playwrights have seldom attempted the satirical high comedy of manners. The New York Idea, with its spirited, delicately pungent wit, is by all odds the best example so far. Mrs. Fiske brought to bear on her part, that of a wife whose love for her husband persisted after divorce, a lightness and sureness of touch that were a match for the play’s best qualities. Her resources of changeful mood happily expressed Cynthia Karslake’s high bred reticence of sentiment and rather sophisticated gayety.[174]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles was written by Lorimer Stoddard within one week, but the result was, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, one of the great modern tragedies, worthy to be ranked with Ibsen’s Ghosts. At least Mr. Stoddard wrote a strong, truthful play, in the main faithful to the novel by Thomas Hardy that was its original. It was felt at the time that the American stage had risen for once to unaccustomed literary and dramatic heights. The play was produced in 1897. It was as Tess that Mrs. Fiske fully “arrived.” Of her most notable characters only Nora in A Doll’s House had preceded. Her abilities had been generally recognized but until now play and part had never so fortunately aided her. She was not Thomas Hardy’s Tess. It was futile to expect that she would be, for the Tess of the book was simple, primitive, impulsive, whereas Mrs. Fiske’s art was always better adapted to reflection and complexity. Such qualities she gave her Tess. And naturally her smallness and blondness do not at once suggest Hardy’s heroine. Yet her work was enthusiastically praised. In spite of her disadvantages, in this part, of person and method, the keenness of her perception of her Tess and the nervous force with which she imparted that perception to the audience made a deep impression. Ir moments like that in which she discovers her husband to be ignorant of her past life, or that of the return of the supposed dead Angel Clare, her power of repressed emotion was most effective. While actually doing almost nothing, her horror and amazement were strongly felt across the footlights. The few sentences to her husband that recall the years of waiting and disillusion, were simply spoken but with the agony of Tess’s pitiful tragedy. The play was at once successful, and the admirers of Mrs. Fiske, who had waited long for a suitable opportunity for her, felt at last satisfied.
It is as Becky Sharp, in a play based on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, that Mrs. Fiske is by many most gratefully remembered. The author was Langdon Mitchell, who several years later was to write for her The New York Idea. Vanity Fair is of course an immensely complicated study of all kinds of characters in all sorts of relations. At first blush it does not seem promising theatrical material. Mr. Mitchell wisely did not attempt to produce a “dramatization,” but selected the most dramatic incidents of the book, took the bare plot thence and wove about it, largely in his own dialogue, a well-constructed play. The climax is the scene of Lord Steyne’s visit to Rebecca, with the unexpected arrival home of Rawdon Crawley. This scene, played with consummate skill by Maurice Barrymore as Rawdon, Tyrone Power (and later George Arliss) as Steyne, and Mrs. Fiske as Becky, was admittedly one of the high water marks in the history of American acting. The scene of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo, with the stage full of people at first gay and thoughtless, and then in succession attentive, doubtful, certain of danger, terror-struck, was a masterpiece of complex and thrilling illusion. Mrs. Fiske’s Becky is thought by many her finest portrait. Here was an opportunity for subtlety, for piquancy, for brilliancy, for varying moods, for humor. If the Steyne incident was the big moment of the play there were a number of lesser ones. In the half-comic, half-tragic scene in which Becky wheedles out of Steyne money to pay Rawdon’s debts, Mrs. Fiske was superb. In its uniformly effective acting, its literary interest, its legitimately spectacular appeal, and its success as an experiment with the native dramatist, Becky Sharp stands strongly forth in any review of Mrs. Fiske’s career.
In Mary of Magdala Mrs. Fiske ventured, none too wisely, into the field of poetic Biblical tragedy. Christ and his teachings, and the greatest tragedy of all, form the substance of the play. The stage management was imposing, the production sumptuous and accurate. Tyrone Power as Judas was a genuinely tragic figure and in the strongest scene—that of the temptation by the Roman who was seeking to have Mary buy the safety of Jesus—Mrs. Fiske showed great power. Yet the play was superficial and often clumsy, the treatment of its lofty theme incongruous, and Mrs. Fiske’s acting in a measure disappointing. She lacks the sensuous in her temperament and method, and on the whole she lacked in this part sustained power. She was hardly the Magdalene of the Orient.
More surely within the sphere designated by her large but specialized talents was Leah Kleschna, a strong drama of the redemption of a thief’s daughter by the influence of a man whose house she attempted to rob. The narrative is continuously and plausibly interesting, the incidents of great dramatic effectiveness. The play was “modulated melodrama”—an effort to lift a story of striking incident and broadly drawn emotions into the realm of reality. In the light it throws on the nature of the thief, its making and its possible breaking, the play had its social bearing. The immediate popularity of Leah Kleschna was a hopeful sign to those interested in the growth of a worthy native drama. With some point it was asked why the author had not placed the scene of his play in America instead of Paris. Mr. McLellan has not, perhaps, borne out the promise of this one play, but it is interesting to note how many of Mrs. Fiske’s later plays have been of native writing. To be sure success has not always been the result. With moderately gratifying results she has played three one-act plays of her own writing,—The Rose, A Light from St. Agnes, and The Eyes of the Heart, all written years before, besides a one-act play, Dolce, by John Luther Long. The New York Idea and Salvation Nell are both, of course, absolutely American. After Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh and The New Marriage, both by Americans, came The High Road by Edward Sheldon, the young author of Salvation Nell. The foreign-made plays, Rosmersholm, Hannele, The Pillars of Society and Lady Patricia have varied this programme, but it is plain that Mrs. Fiske in her encouragement of the native dramatist has been courageous and persistent to a point that few of her rival managers have cared to follow.
The most interesting instance is Mr. Sheldon. While he was still a student in Harvard, his Salvation Nell was accepted by Mrs. Fiske. Produced in 1908, it made a curious impression. Without the contour or substance of sound, full-bodied drama, and largely depending for its popular appeal on the faithfulness of the scenes of the New York slums, the play nevertheless showed the young author’s gift for situation, and afforded Mrs. Fiske a part well adapted to her gifts. This comment is almost equally true of The High Road, of four years later, which Mr. Sheldon does not call a play at all. It is a “pilgrimage” in which Mary Page is taken through nearly forty years of her life, successively as a young New York State country girl, the mistress of a rich young artist, the awakening young idealist rebelling as she matures, as the woman’s labor organizer, and as the devoted wife of a distinguished statesman. The play is not a great one, nor even a big one, but it is firmly interesting and the range of effect for Mrs. Fiske is obvious.
Praise for her steadfast desire to search out native-made plays cannot be too strong, and some of these ventures have been among her unqualified successes, but many of her admirers feel that Mrs. Fiske’s continued experimentation with the newer school of American dramatists should be modified—if modification is necessary—to obtain the thorough-going effectiveness of play, player and production she has at times attained. Let us have more Becky Sharps and New York Ideas, even if it must be in revival.
One important factor in Mrs. Fiske’s success has been only hinted. The married life of people of the theatre has been a frequent and sometimes justified cause for unpleasant comment. In the case of Mrs. Fiske much of the success of the better known half of the house has been to a degree due to her husband. It is pleasant to record this fact—not that it is a unique situation (for married stage folk can be normally happy more readily than is thought) but because Mr. Fiske’s share in his wife’s productions has not been wholly understood. In a recent letter which Mrs. Fiske distributed to the press she gives to her husband a generous share of the credit for the excellence which has always marked the productions of the Manhattan Company. To him is due, she says, the taste and thoroughness of the settings. The play which she was giving at the time and which gave the announcement point, was The High Road. The second act is placed in an apartment in upper New York, furnished by an artist of training and knowledge. The scene bears this out in a way that strikes a new note in stage decoration. The tapestries, the reproductions of oil paintings, carved doors and mantelpiece, the furniture, are accurate to the last detail.
Mr. Fiske leased and managed the Manhattan Theatre in New York for the few years beginning in 1901. With this theatre as headquarters the Fiskes waged vigorous war for eight years against the so-called theatrical syndicate, a combination of theatre owners and producing managers which had for years been acquiring the leases or ownership of most of the theatres of the country. The Fiskes steadfastly held out against the dictates of this syndicate as to their plans for tours, and preferred not to become the property of a monopoly which was operated primarily for its money gains. When their continued resistance was strengthened by other “independents,” the trust made it increasingly difficult to find theatres to play in. During her tour in 1904 in Leah Kleschna Mrs. Fiske in some cities played in summer gardens, and on improvised stages in halls, much as she used to do in the old days of barnstorming. With the rise of a rival syndicate, a rise made possible partly through Mrs. Fiske’s help, the lines have loosened and the Fiskes have no longer any difficulty in “booking” their plays.
The Fiskes’ organization has become definitely known as the Manhattan Company, though they no longer control the theatre of that name. “As a producer of plays” Madame Réjane once said, “Mrs. Fiske has no superior in Europe.” The uniformity of ability in the actors, the adjustment of the characters which often kept Mrs. Fiske herself in the background, contrary to the usages of “stars,” the detailed excellence of the stage “business” (as the ballroom scene in Becky Sharp) have always given the productions the interest, the appearance of life itself. It is familiar knowledge among those who have closely watched the American stage that Mrs. Fiske is one of the best stage directors of the time. The careful, extended rehearsal of a play is hard work, but Mrs. Fiske, with the active nervous temperament that demands hard work, is equal to it. She personally directs the rehearsals of her companies, and when one remembers Mary of Magdala, for instance, which demanded a hundred actors and was rehearsed more than six weeks, or when one recollects the practically flawless stage management of any Fiske production, her merit as an imaginative producer becomes apparent. Like her acting, her stage management is quiet, effective, tensely alive.
During the retirement immediately following her marriage, and since, Mrs. Fiske has found time to write a number of plays. A Light from St. Agnes is a one-act play of much dramatic power telling a tragic story of low life among the bayous of Louisiana. The Rose is another one-act tragedy once played by Rosina Vokes’s company. The Eyes of the Heart is likewise a short play, having for its principal character an old blind man who, after losing his fortune, is kept in ignorance of his poverty by his family and friends. All three of these pieces were played at various times and with considerable success by Mrs. Fiske and her company. She wrote several other plays, some of them longer, but none well known today. John Doe was a dramatization of a sketch by Mr. Fiske; Grandpapa, Not Guilty and Common Clay were all long plays; Fontenelle, which she wrote with Mr. Fiske, was played by James O’Neill; Countess Roudine was written with the help of Paul Kester and was once in the repertoire of Modjeska. The Dream of Matthew Wayne was also written by Mrs. Fiske.
Mrs. Fiske has said that the life of an actor is intolerably narrowed if he has no interests outside the theatre. Such interests she has. The strongest is her devotion to the welfare of dumb animals. The trapping of fur bearers, the cruel conditions in cattle trains, lack of shelter on the ranges, bull-fights, vivisection, all have had her for an enemy. Individual cases of cruelty are constantly receiving relief at her hands and to various allied causes her money and time has been given generously. She often makes addresses before meetings in the interest of such reforms, and at such times the actress is quite forgotten in the humane woman.[175]
The often discussed limitations of Mrs. Fiske have always been said to include her physical equipment. She is no Bernhardt or Terry in stature. During most of her career she has been slender, and there are dozens of women on the stage who will never attain a hundredth part of her compelling personal power, who are nevertheless her superiors in superficial beauty. The truth seems to be that in her has been demonstrated again that when the essentials of acting of a high order are present, actual beauty is a comparatively negligible factor. Nor can beauty, to a degree, be denied her. Her face is, one might say, of the Scandinavian type. Her hair always was and still is, beautiful,—a reddish golden—radiantly golden when dressed to advantage and seen in the glow of the footlights. Her eyes are, at a guess, gray (though even her intimate friends disagree as to their precise color); they are large and, as no one who has watched their part in an impersonation need be told, expressive. Some have complained that her carriage is not graceful; but it has something more and better than grace, for it has significance, fittingness in every walk across the stage, every pose. With more justice has comment been made upon her enunciation, which at times has been undeniably too rapid. As for the voice itself, it is among her chief means to her effects—wide-ranged and sensitive to the mood. It is at one moment charged with emotion, quivering or repressed, at another hard as steel, and again simply matter of fact. The contrasts are of great, and probably nicely calculated, effect.
The high-minded judgment which has enabled Mrs. Fiske to select plays which never have a false appeal, her freedom from that self-importance which distorts the meaning of plays for the sake of giving prominence to the “star,” are indications of her qualities as a woman. She has broad sympathies, enthusiasms for affairs outside the theatre, and cherishes no inflated notion as to her importance other than as a woman of the theatre. In her travels, or visiting other theatres, it is her habit to be heavily veiled and altogether lacking in the “theatrical.”[176] She is much more nervous when addressing, in sua persona, a small meeting in the interests of some humane movement than when facing a theatre full of people. On the other hand she has an unusually keen sense of humor, and some of her best bits of acting are said to be in impromptu efforts called forth by some circumstance arising within the “family” of her company.[177] One of her engaging traits is her complete freedom from the spirit of rivalry and criticism that sometimes characterizes actors. By those close to her she is said never to speak ill of any one. Indeed her acquaintance among other “stars” is limited; while in the world outside the theatre her friends are many and often distinguished. It may not be uninteresting that Mrs. Fiske, unlike many of her profession, likes “playing one-night stands”; that she does not weary of the endless travel of theatrical life;[178] that she is continually studying to perfect her impersonations or to prepare for future work; and that she has a playful dread of being referred to as “intellectual.” That word, as applied to Mrs. Fiske, has become hackneyed.
The warmest admirers of Mrs. Fiske will admit her limitations. They will, indeed, be grateful for them; for her physical and mental equipment, while they withheld from her certain ranges of drama, simply forbade the adoption by her of the tissue of unrealities which constitutes conventional acting. Without either losing for a moment the sense of conditions imposed by the theatre, or gaining her effects by means of commonplaceness set baldly on the stage, she has evolved an extraordinary realism made up of truth to nature combined with a sense of theatric art so nicely adjusted that even in its most telling moments it is the art that conceals art. It is, in the last analysis, a method that is the visible expression of a rich nature. And by the unalterable fixity of her high aims, the dignity and strength of what she has tried to do, she has earned the gratitude of all those who look forward to an influential, high-minded American stage.
In the spring of 1914 Mrs. Fiske revived Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, and in it proved herself at the height of her powers as an adroit comédienne. At the beginning of the season of 1914–15 she acted, in several Middle Western cities, in a new play by John Luther Long and Frank Stayton. Lady Betty Martingale was an ambitious production that took her into an unfamiliar field, and that promised to rival Becky Sharp as a feast of acting and spectacle. It was a “costume comedy,” with the London of the eighteenth century as its setting. The play was unfortunately lacking in substance and dramatic interest, and was withdrawn after a brief career.