“We wish to congratulate you on your skill as a professional masher. You are the first man who has succeeded in picking up Maude Adams.”
This was my first and only meeting with her, but she must represent a type that I think beautiful, for one of the figures in a decoration that I made entirely out of my head resembles her so much that I have been asked many times if she did not pose for it. Miss Adams is one of the women who have helped to bring the stage to that position among the arts which men like Booth hoped it would reach.
Besides women, who always come first—who is it who says, “A man and his wife are one, and she’s the one?”—The Players have entertained many notable men, both local and foreign. I met Theodore Roosevelt there for the first time. Not long after, I was in a Broadway car, when I saw him hanging on to a strap. The talk turned to war. I had been back from Europe only a short time and argued that America was not like England, a cuttlefish with a vulnerable body needing long arms to get its food and protect itself against its enemies; but rather like China, an oyster covered by hard shell. The large navy necessary to the first was superfluous to the second. I was met with a hurricane of abuse, to the amusement of the whole car. I did not know that Roosevelt had just been made Secretary of the Navy at Washington.
He told this story to us at the club. Two young Englishmen once turned up at his office and he sent them out to visit at his home in Oyster Bay. After some Saturday night festivities, when the women had all retired from the table, one of the young men started to give his impressions of America. He had been here two weeks.
“Mr. Roosevelt,” he said, “do you not feel that one arriving in a foreign country is often shocked by things that the people living there have gotten used to? Now we have been horrified by the American habit of lynching. Cowardly, you’ll admit; subversive of all law and barbarous?”
“Oh yes,” said T. R., “that’s only natural. Now, for instance, I am always shocked, when I land in England, at your habit of knocking down your womenfolk and kicking them in the stomach. Subversive of all law, cowardly you’ll admit—”
“Of course, that happens only among the lower classes,” replied the young man, laughing mightily.
Roosevelt then showed all his teeth in a grin and said, “Well, I don’t think you boys will be asked to meet any lynchers at dinner.”
Literature and the stage meet in The Players, but the stage generally gets the better of it. Brander Matthews was talking to me once about a play by him and Bronson Howard that was to open shortly. I asked him about its possibilities. “Oh,” he said, “if it goes it will be called another of Bronson’s successes, but if not it will be just another failure of mine.”
Tarkington was one of the successful writer-playwrights even in those days. He is one of the few who have borne out their early promise, a man if there ever was one, with a joy of life that is abounding and a tremendous interest in his fellow beings, however humble. This natural curiosity about life and living seems to me a necessity for anyone who is to do big work in the world. He was modest about his writing. I went with him to the first night of Richard Mansfield in “Monsieur Beaucaire.” We were in tweeds and sat up in the “nigger heaven.” On the stairs I said, “I suppose you dramatized this?”