The ultimate partial victory for international copyright in March, 1891, just as Congress was ending its session, left the Evening Post dissatisfied. It admitted that the law was a triumph for honesty, and that it put an end to the Algerine system of fostering the national intelligence. “But if we said that it was a measure to be proud of, we should be going far beyond the truth. The obligation under which it places the foreign author of having his book ‘manufactured’ in this country, as a condition of protection for it, is a piece of tariff barbarism which is enough to make one hang one’s head.” Unfortunately, the manufacturing clause, after thirty years, is still retained in our copyright legislation.
Mr. Towse’s promotion from a reportership to the dramatic editorship was no accident, for by training and taste he was admirably fitted for the position. He had been taken regularly to the theater from his eighth birthday, had seen Charles Kean play, and recalls a performance at the old Adelphi in London in April, 1853. As a boy he was a constant and sometimes surreptitious attendant in the pit of the Old Drury, Haymarket, and other theaters. The Haymarket at the time was the recognized home of polite comedy in London, and there Mr. Towse saw admirable performances of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, as well as E. A. Sothern as Lord Dundreary before the part had been made the piece of broad buffoonery which it later became in America. The Adelphi was the home of melodrama, well played. But the performances which made the chief impression upon the boy were those of the famous actor-manager Samuel Phelps, who in the fifties and early sixties raised Sadler’s Wells Theater, in the shabby and despised suburb of Islington, into a famous shrine of dramatic art, and who later appeared in other London theaters. Phelps is pronounced by Mr. Towse to have been beyond doubt the most versatile actor of the nineteenth century.
The outstanding merits of the London stage of this period lay in the fact that it rested upon the old stock companies, in which the standards of acting were far more uniformly high than those which obtained after the introduction of the star system. The actors and actresses had been reared in a school of hard work, small pay, and rigid insistence upon the difference between a mere performance and a characterization. All had served a long apprenticeship, and gained such a comprehensive knowledge of their craft that they knew how to acquit themselves creditably in comedy, tragedy, or melodrama. Mr. Towse recalls their striking diversity and authority of gesture, their distinction of speech, their easy adaptation of manner to the character, and remarkable power of emotional expression. Versatility was unescapable. At Sadler’s Wells, for instance, all Shakespeare’s plays except two were produced during Phelps’s seventeen years of management, along with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and many plays by later or contemporary authors—Colman, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Knowles, Bulwer, and so on; there being a change of bill at least twice or thrice a week.
When Mr. Towse began to review plays for the Evening Post in the early seventies, he found in New York still several very flourishing stock companies, though the theater was rapidly entering upon a transition to the star-and-circuit system. Their proficiency was like that of the British companies, although, being fewer, they did not supply so many all-round actors. A number of the best of the players had disappeared or were disappearing. James K. Hackett, Junius Brutus Booth, and J. W. Wallack were gone, Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman were meditating their farewells, and Edwin Booth was in a period of temporary eclipse. The speculative manager, almost wholly ignorant of anything about the theater but its money-making possibilities, was beginning to arise and foreshadow the day when he would make the typical New York production one in which one or two fairly able players would be supported by a parcel of supernumeraries.
But the performances at Wallack’s in the seventies and eighties were found by Mr. Towse to compare favorably with those given by the Haymarket company in London. He saw John Gilbert in a number of striking characterizations, notably Sir Harcourt Courtly, Sir Peter Teazle, and Sir Anthony Absolute, while Lester Wallack played admirably in other parts; and two other performers of note were Charles and Rose Coghlan. Augustin Daly’s company gave many brilliant, if uneven, performances in the late seventies and early eighties, and included a number of players of trained skill: Charles Fisher, Fanny Davenport, John Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Ada Rehan, and others. When “Romeo and Juliet” was presented in 1877, with Adelaide Neilson as Juliet, Mr. Towse gave her at once a place among the very great Juliets. The Union Square Company was almost wholly limited to melodrama, but within that field it was the best in the country, and probably in the world. With it Clara Morris achieved some remarkable successes. In later years Mr. Towse recalls her as playing with Tommaso Salvini, whom he thinks “not only incomparably the greatest actor and artist I have ever seen, but one who has never had an equal, probably, since the days of Garrick.”
It is by the standards thus acquired in studying the old British and American stock companies that Mr. Towse has measured the present-day stage—standards of the utmost severity, which he believes show a steady and lamentable fall in the general level of acting. He has always been ready to admit the high merit of a good many, and the genius of a few, stars; but from the time of Edwin Booth, who encouraged the star system by his failure to insist upon good supporting casts, until to-day, he has condemned the indifference shown to the subordinate rôles. The lack of taste and artistic conscience among most of the managers of our time he equally deplores. His standards of criticism are severe from not only the histrionic and literary standpoints, but from the moral standpoint. Convinced that the theater is one of the most important educational influences, good or bad, within the resources of modern civilization, he insists upon drawing a clear line between inspiring and ennobling plays, and vicious plays. No other critic in England or America has a background of experience approaching Mr. Towse’s, and none writes with more responsibility and weight.
Mr. Finck, on the other hand, has had the advantage of finding New York’s music improving from decade to decade, until the city is one of the world’s greatest music centers. When he joined the Evening Post, operatic singers and audiences were divided into two hostile camps, the Italian and German—both accepting the French as allies. Companies which gave German opera sneered at the Italian; companies which, like Mapleson’s at the Academy of Music, gave Italian opera, ignored all Germans save those who, like Gluck and Mozart, wrote more or less in the Italian manner. The revolution which erased this narrow hostility was effected, in the main, by the growth of Wagner’s popularity among operatic performers until it became irresistible.
From the beginning Mr. Finck was a champion of the German opera which Mapleson systematically slighted. During the summer of 1882 he sent the Post from Bayreuth a series of highly interesting letters upon the Wagner performances there. He described old Wagner, almost seventy, as busy half the day overseeing the productions; pleased as a child whenever the effects were especially fine, and once even shouting to Frau Cosima across the whole auditorium, “You see, my dear little wife, that we can get up something together, after all.” Mr. Finck poked fun unmercifully at the more florid Italian operas, and assisted greatly in driving pieces like Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” from the stage. In October, 1883, he was able to hail the opening of the new Metropolitan, with a company that, including Campanini and Mme. Nilsson, was willing to do full justice to the Germans; and when in the spring of 1887 he reviewed the third season of German opera, he could rejoice that of sixty-two performances Wagner had received thirty-two.
Conservative and dignified though it was, in every direction the Evening Post had a marked growth during the eighties and nineties. It found its first sporting editor in Charles Pike Sawyer, who joined the staff in the spring of 1886. It soon had a real estate editor. Its steady expansion led to the abandonment, on Oct. 31, 1887, of the folio shape in which it had always appeared since 1801. The blanket sheet was unmanageable; it could not be stereotyped, so that the printing had to be done direct from the locked type; and it gave too little space. As Godkin said, the change was a contribution to the anti-profanity movement. The sturdiness of the Post is evinced by the fact that in occasional years its profits were large, and that for the whole period the balance was decidedly upon the right side of the ledger; from 1881 to 1915, the net profits on the capital invested were about two per cent. a year. This was in spite of the fact that Henry Villard did not expect it to be a money-making business, the fact that its business managers were not aggressive, and the fact that Mr. Godkin’s editorial fearlessness and bluntness inevitably made enemies. Near the end of his editorship, Godkin’s attacks upon the smallness of the hundred-dollar tariff exemption for travelers returning from abroad involved him in a dispute with mercantile interests in New York. He made some untactful remarks concerning small tradesmen, and the result was a boycott of the paper, involving most of the department stores, which cost it large sums. Henry Villard accepted this blow in an admirable spirit, and it was determined that it would not be allowed to hamper the management in any of its activities.
Mr. Godkin once said he had never known any other man capable of the generosity Mr. Villard showed with the Evening Post. The owner never sought to influence the paper; he rarely entered the office unless invited; and he submitted without a word to attacks by the financial editor upon his railway policies. Throughout his life and for years after his death Mrs. Villard, who became the owner, upheld the editors even when Mr. Godkin assailed causes near her heart, like woman suffrage, and made large financial sacrifices to sustain the paper.