XIV
MEMORIES OF ACTORS
I
A playgoer from my youth up, a playgoer in Paris and London as well as in New York, I have had the good fortune to be on terms of friendly intimacy with not a few of the leading actors of the past half-century, French and British and American. I have elsewhere set down my memories of Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson and Constant Coquelin, four of the foremost figures in the theater at the end of the nineteenth century. There are a dozen or a score of other players with whom I foregathered at one time or another, less prominent in their profession but not for that reason any less attractive in their several ways and not less companionable.
Most of the actors with whom I have had relation were good company; they had seen many men and many places; and their journeyings had worn off any abrading angularities their personalities may have possessed. They had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men; and they thereby gained the shrewd knowledge of human nature which they needed in their art. They had acquired polish even if they did not always possess culture. They were no more likely to be bookish in their tastes, or even to be widely read, than are the practitioners of the other professions, painters and musicians, most of whom are probably too alertly interested in the immediate present to be tempted into dusty exploration of the past. They were often apt in anecdote and quick of wit, with a wide command over words, the result of their acquisition of the sharp and swift dialog of the stage. In no other calling have I found men swifter to make a joke or to take one, even if it happened to be pointed against themselves.
It is sometimes asserted that actors as a class are inclined to be unduly aware of their own excellence in the quality they profess and even unduly inclined to communicate to others their own opinion of their own achievements. My experience, such as it is, does not support this assertion. I have found the men of the stage at least as modest as the men of the studio and the men of the study. Over-swollen vanity is not the exclusive property of any one profession, and I doubt if it is more frequent in actors than in authors or artists. Where I comb out my memories the two most exuberant examples of ingrowing and outflowering self-appreciation that I ever had occasion to observe were both of them physicians, who were also authors and who were wholly unable to resist the ever present temptation to dilate upon their own triumphs and to confide to all listeners the frequent compliments they had gluttonously accepted.
There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves, even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference is that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may be only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it.
II
The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.
He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham. I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.