This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example, played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly different from Regnier’s.
It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and in the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character which Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of the foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in two Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was he considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite his prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it had been sagely administered.
In fact, Goodwin, so it seems to me, threw away a golden opportunity. After the retirement of Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough there was an opening for an ambitious actor to win recognition as their worthy successor; and this was an altitude to which Goodwin could have aspired, if he had not been deficient in that intangible and indefinable quality which we call character and which for success in life is really more important than ability. Ability he had in abundance but he did not husband it. He did not take life seriously enough; and therefore his art suffered and failed to mature as it might have done. He dissipated his ardor and wasted his strength in default of the implacable ambition which compels self-control. Nature had bestowed on him a richer gift than on Lawrence Barrett, who had made himself what he was by stern determination, whereby he overcame his disadvantages. Goodwin had more intensity, more power, more resources; and he might have carved a name for himself as Shylock, Richard III and Iago.
But it was not to be; and he made shipwreck of his career. I failed to see him when he attempted Shylock, for which he ought to have had the fire and the passion, but for which he lacked the training he might easily have attained, if he had forced himself to acquire it. I did see him in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; and altho my memories of George L. Fox and of James Lewis as Bottom are still vivid, they are not as gratifying as my recollection of Goodwin in the same part. This revival of Shakspere’s most fanciful and most humorous comedy failed to attract the public, and the blame was currently laid upon Goodwin. To my mind this was unjust, since his rendering of the part seemed to me excellent, firmer in outline and richer in color than that of either Fox or Lewis. I can never forget the delicious self-sufficiency of his performance in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ his exuberant vanity, his adroit suggestion of the eternal complacency of the self-satisfied amateur.
I may be wrong, of course; I may be crediting Goodwin with more than he possessed, as I am certainly ascribing to him more than he ever displayed. But I think he had it in him to do finer and stronger things than he ever aimed at. “The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!”
V
It would be difficult to find two careers in sharper contrast than those of Nat Goodwin in the United States and of Beerbohm Tree in Great Britain. As there was a vacancy at the head of the procession in America after the withdrawal of Booth and Barrett and McCullough, so there was one in England after the decline and disappearance of Henry Irving. Goodwin was unable to seize the occasion, even if he saw it; Tree saw it and seized it. Altho nature had been niggardly to Tree where she had been bountiful to Goodwin, Tree had the inestimable advantage of a resolute will and of the innate power which impels a man to master the many difficulties besetting our paths in life. It was by sheer force of ambition rather than by assured skill as an actor that Tree forged to the front and took his place as the leader of the profession in the British Isles, catching the mantle of Irving as it fell and wearing it as best he could.
When I first knew Tree he had recently graduated from comic opera to farce, making his earliest hit in the ‘Private Secretary’ and replacing Arthur Cecil in the ‘Magistrate.’ From farce he turned to melodrama and advanced his reputation as an actor by the versatility he displayed in ‘Called Back’ and in the ‘Red Lamp.’ For two reasons this versatility was more apparent than real; in the first place because the methods of farce and of melodrama are closely akin, and in the second place because the differentiation of the parts Tree was then playing was largely external, being mainly a matter of make-up, which incompletely disguised his own rather thin and brittle manner.
In time he assumed the management of the Haymarket theater; and still later he was able to build the spacious and sumptuous His Majesty’s. At the Haymarket he produced more than one interesting modern comedy and he made more than one interesting revival, notably of W. S. Gilbert’s ever-delightful ‘Engaged.’ At His Majesty’s he was soon forced—somewhat to his surprise, so his half-brother, Max Beerbohm once told me—to abandon the more refined types of comedy and farce, simply because the house was too large for any form of drama demanding delicacy. He found himself compelled to rely on more strenuous plays, which permitted elaborate spectacular adornment. He brought out the ‘Herod’ of Stephen Phillips and he imported the ‘Darling of the Gods’ of Belasco and Long. Thus it was that both this necessity and his lofty ambition led him to a series of elaborately pictorial revivals of Shakspere’s tragedies, histories and comedies.
As a producer he continued the tradition of Irving, bestowing upon Shakspere’s plays superb settings, rivaling Irving’s in their splendor, their expensiveness and their taste. For ‘Twelfth Night,’ for example, he designed an Italian garden, rising terrace upon terrace to the very back of the stage, a scene so exquisitely beautiful in itself, so completely satisfying to the eye, that—so Sir Martin Conway told me—some spectators felt it to be an intrusion when the actors entered and distracted attention from the lovely vision. Tree displayed his scenic dexterity and his artistic invention in a dozen or a score of other Shaksperian plays, notably ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ produced while Queen Victoria was still upon the throne. There is an anecdote which is doubtless familiar to many, but which I feel I have no right to omit here, to the effect that as the amorous adventures of the serpent of old Nile were unrolled before the entranced audience, one British matron whispered to another British matron, “How different to the happy home life of our dear Queen!”