It was sometimes meanly suggested that Booth and Irving were each of them unwilling, and perhaps even afraid, to surround themselves with first class actors. The suggestion is as absurd as it is unworthy; and it is plainly contradicted by the record. In the sixties of the last century, when Booth was consolidating his reputation by the earliest hundred night run of ‘Hamlet’ that any actor had ever achieved, Bogumil Davison came to New York; and the young American promptly invited the German tragedian to play Othello to his own Iago. More than a score of years later Booth again appeared as Iago to the Othello of Salvini. At one time or another he joined forces with Charlotte Cushman and with Modjeska. Henry Irving was equally free from petty jealousy; he always treated Ellen Terry as a co-star; and when he engaged Mrs. Sterling for the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he advertized her name as prominently as his own. No actor ever displayed more generosity to a friendly rival than Irving did when he invited Booth to come for a fortnight to the Lyceum to alternate Iago and Othello.
It was never difficult for Jefferson to find competent actors to support him as Rip Van Winkle; and he always rehearsed the piece carefully to make sure of the needful unity of tone. But it was very hard indeed to find performers of presence, of authority and of the sweep of style required by the boldly contrasted and highly colored characters of a rich old comedy like the ‘Rivals.’ At one time or another Jefferson secured the companionship of Mrs. Drew, of John Gilbert, and of W. J. Florence, gladly sharing his glory with them. He was delighted with the brief tour of the ‘Rivals,’ when a galaxy of stars deserted their orbits to twinkle by the side of his Bob Acres. Mrs. Drew was Mrs. Malaprop, Julia Marlowe was Lydia Languish, Robert Taber was Captain Absolute, Nat Goodwin was Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Francis Wilson was Fag and William H. Crane was Sir Anthony Absolute. Here was truly an all-star cast; and the combination was triumphantly prosperous. I saw it at the sole performance in New York, a matinee at that; and it was perhaps the best all around rendering of the ‘Rivals’ that I have ever seen, altho several of those who took part in it, accustomed to the more modern methods of our latter-day dramatists, were not quite at ease in their efforts to catch the tone of artificial comedy.
It is true, alas! that there are actors, and some of them are expert and accomplished performers, who when they rise to be stars not only seek to grasp all the good things for themselves and to monopolize the spot-light, but who even go so far as to begrudge any laughter or any applause which may be evoked by the members of their companies. Forty years ago one of the most prominent comedians on our stage had this pitiable characteristic. At the first performance of a play specially written for him, this star was standing in the wings waiting his turn to go on. Suddenly there was a roar of laughter and a round of applause. “Who’s that?” cried the star, “What did he say?” And at the second performance the line which had been so well received was cut out. And twenty years ago there was an American comic actress of robust force and wide popularity who slowly lost the favor of the public because she insisted on producing plays in which she never left the stage and for which she engaged actors and actresses who were feeble and colorless.
It is not only natural, it is also wise, for a star to see to it that his part is interesting and that it holds its interest from the first act to the last. He cannot help knowing that he is the lodestone which attracts the audiences. They pay their money to see him; and they are not getting their money’s worth if they do not see enough of him. But the spectators are best pleased with the star himself, they are most likely to hold him in delighted remembrance and to want to see him when next he comes to town, if he has given them a well-balanced play, in which every part is filled by a performer who can get out of it all it is worth. There are some stars who are almost self-effacing, and who do not even care whether or not they have their full share of the emphatic situations upon which the curtain falls. It was pointed out by not a few of those who saw ‘Leah Kleschna,’ when Mrs. Fiske produced it with a brilliant and well-balanced cast,—John Mason, George Arliss, Charles Cartwright, William B. Mack,—that the star let Mack have the curtain of the third act.
VII
If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is far more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the men and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak the language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at an apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and therefore they have not been called upon to acquire the art of delivering the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines. They are all striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the scenery and the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life. They are likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but seem to them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”
Of course, no stage-dialog can be natural, strictly speaking. It must be compact and significant; it must flow unbroken in the shortest distance between two points. But to-day actors and audiences alike are so accustomed to the picked and polished prose of Barrie and Pinero, of Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas, that this appears “natural” to them, because they do not note its divergence from the average talk that falls on their ears outside the theater, whereas they cannot help feeling that the steady march of ten-syllabled iambics is a violent departure from our habitual manner of communicating information and of expressing emotion. In other words, even if our stage-dialog to-day is “unnatural,” as stage-dialog always has been and always will be, it is far less obviously “unnatural” than blank verse. A long and severe self-training is necessary before a performer can feel at home in blank verse, and before he can impart colloquial ease to it.
Yet it is a fact that we who speak English have a tendency toward the iambic rhythm when we seek to move an audience. This rhythm may be unconscious and it may be irregular; but it is unmistakable in the death-bed scenes of Dickens, for example, where he was insisting on the pathetic, and in the orations of Ingersoll, where he was making his most powerful appeal. The Kembles were so subdued to what they worked in on the stage that they were prone to drop into blank verse on occasions when it was not appropriate. Mrs. Siddons is said to have startled the salesman who was showing her a piece of goods by asking, “And will it wash?” The first time she met Washington Irving after he had published the ‘Sketch-Book,’ she said to him, “Young man, you’ve made me weep”; and when she next met him after he had published another book, she said “Young man, you’ve made me weep again!”
Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a great friend of Sir Walter Scott; and once when they were crossing a field together, they were chased by a bull. “Sheriff,” said the actor to the author, “methinks I’ll get me up into a tree.” Fanny Kemble, whose reading of Shakspere’s plays Longfellow commemorated in a noble sonnet, was the daughter of Charles, another brother of Mrs. Siddons. Once when she went on the platform to read, she found that a cane-bottomed chair had been provided for her. She turned majestically to the gentleman who was escorting her and inquired, “And would you give my velvet gown the small-pox?” When her remote kinswoman, the fragile amateur, who called herself Mrs. Scott-Siddons, came to Fanny Kemble for professional guidance, she begged for advice about making points; and she was not a little frightened by the force of the swift retort: “Points, girl? I never was a point actress!”