Heroines of the Modern Stage

by Forrest Izard

In 1850, when Helcia was in her tenth year, Cracow was burned. The conflagration lasted ten days, and a large part of the city was destroyed. Madame Opid up to this time had been a woman of some property. Her first husband had left her a small estate which she had managed skillfully. Her two houses were now destroyed, her insurance had lapsed ten days before, and she was practically ruined. Here was more misfortune to impress the growing Helcia, to make her, for her years, unusually sensitive and thoughtful. After a few days of almost vagabondage, the family was given temporary quarters in a friend’s house. There Helcia, left much to herself, spent her time reading her Life of St. Genevieve, a treasured volume which she rescued in the moment of peril. At length installed in a newly hired house, Madame Opid sent Helcia and her little sister Josephine as day pupils to St. John’s convent, and supplemented the teachings of the sisters with lessons at home in music and dancing.

It was at this time, when Helena was ten, that she first met Gustave Modrzejewski,[45] who was later to be her husband. He was twenty years her senior. He was a friend of the family and taught the children German, the hated language of the oppressor.

When Helena was twelve, her half-brothers Joseph and Felix Benda had gone away to be actors on the professional stage. To relieve the quiet at home she and her brother Adolphe Opid, who was then fifteen, wrote a play, a one-act tragedy. The scene was laid in Greece, and the acting required the death of Adolphe, and an impassioned scene of grief by Helena when with a sob she threw herself over her dead lover’s body. She drew from the sympathetic servants and her great-aunt Theresa genuine tears, but her practical mother was unmoved, thought Helena over-excited and forbade further theatricals.

At fourteen Helena finished the highest grade at the convent. This was the end of her formal schooling, but she at once began a strenuous and varied course of reading. She began with the Polish poets, of whom there are several proudly cherished by their countrymen. It was the family’s pleasant custom, fostered by the well-read Mr. Modrzejewski, to read aloud in the winter evenings. In this way Helena learned of Scott, Dickens, Dumas, George Sand, and many another. She had neglected her German, and it was to stimulate an interest in the disliked language that Mr. Modrzejewski proposed that she be taken to see a German play. She was immensely excited, for it was seven years since she had been to the theatre. The play was Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. She entered the theatre in a state of awe, she sat through the performance in spellbound fascination, and the next morning with the help of a dictionary began reading Schiller in German. Schiller became for the time an overwhelming enthusiasm with her. She imagined herself in love with him, and placed before her in her room his statuette, as a kind of idol. Such extravagances as this, and the religious period that preceded it, would have indicated to a discerning eye a promisingly responsive and emotional nature. To those about her, however, even to her mother, she was only a moody and at times excitable child whose enthusiasm was to be repressed and whose future was doubtful. She helped with the family work, as all did in this time of stress, but she was living apart in a world of poetry, of vague and ardent dreams.

She was now taken to the theatre occasionally. Felix Benda had become one of the popular actors of the local theatre. One day, when Helena was about sixteen, he overheard her reciting to her sister. Surprised and pleased, he took her next day to the house of one of the leading actresses of the company, who as an artist of experience could judge of the young girl’s chances of success on the stage. All this came very suddenly. Helena had not seriously thought of a stage career. The hearing was a trying ordeal, for she was terribly frightened. After giving Helena a lesson or two, the actress was discouraging. She advised Madame Opid to keep the young girl at home rather than allow her to become a mediocre actress. For a while Helcia’s budding ambitions were crushed.

Madame Opid, for one, was not disappointed. The family was not so well off as it was before the fire and to Helcia fell a large share of the housework. But she studied and read and thought, with unsettled mind and changing purpose. At one time she thought she would try to achieve fame as a writer; again, at her mother’s wish, she studied furiously with a teacher’s examination in mind; again, to become a nun seemed the only thing worth while. But shortly there came a rude shock to all these plans. Fritz Devrient, a German actor of great talent, played Hamlet in Cracow, and Helena was taken to see him. She had heard of Shakespeare, but had never seen or read any of his plays. The effect on her was overwhelming. Shakespeare became her master then and there, and she never deserted him. She spent a sleepless night, and the longing to be an actress returned with redoubled strength. She greedily read the plays of Shakespeare in Polish translations, and his bust speedily replaced that of Schiller. The family friend, Gustave Modrzejewski, to her great delight seconded her in her renewed ambition, recommended that she study for the German stage as offering a wider field than the Polish, and arranged for lessons from an excellent actor, Herr Axtman. Indeed, his interest extended further, for when Helcia was seventeen he urged that their marriage, which had come to be an understood thing, take place at once. She had seen much of him; they had read together Goethe and Lessing and the northern sagas; he was her guardian and the kindly counselor of the family; and she looked on him, a man more than twice her age, with real affection; and so they were married at once.

After Helena had taken the name which she was to make so famous, there followed a few quiet years during which her ambitions lay in abeyance. When she was twenty her son Rudolphe was born. The little family, and Madame Opid as well, moved to Bochnia, a little town in Austrian Poland. Here it was that, owing to the circumstance that Bochnia possessed salt mines, Mme. Modjeska had her first opportunity to appear on a real stage. Some of the miners had been killed in an accident. It occurred to the Modjeskis to give, for the benefit of the bereaved families, some amateur theatricals. They met a friend, a dancing master named Loboiko, who obtained a hall, hastily built some scenery and acted as leading man of the company. There were but three others—a young man who was the dancing master’s pupil, Helena as leading lady, and Josephine, her younger sister. Stasia, their nine-year-old niece, was prompter. The plays were two pieces now forgotten—The White Camelia, in one act, in which Helena was a countess, and The Prima-Donna, in which she was an Italian peasant girl who became an actress. Delighted as she was to realize her cherished ambition to appear on the stage before an actual audience, when the bell rang for the rise of the curtain she was thoroughly frightened. Before she went on she could not think of her lines, and she fairly shook with nervousness. Yet once on the stage her words came to her and she found herself, much to her surprise, quite at her ease. The dignitaries and the country gentlemen of the district and the townspeople all turned out for the performance, and for the two others that followed it, in unexpectedly large numbers. Madame Modjeska’s acting, at this her first opportunity for showing it, attracted attention. An actor and stage manager from Warsaw, who happened to be in Bochnia and saw her act, asked her how long she had been on the stage,—an amusing and pleasing question,—and urged her to turn her eyes toward Warsaw. Such men do not pay empty compliments, and Helena’s confidence now took new hold. The prospect of going to Warsaw drove from her mind any idea of becoming a German actress. It was Warsaw and the Imperial Theatre, or die!

Such was the modest beginning of a career. Mr. Modjeski, so far from objecting to his young wife’s being an actress, saw in the new turn of affairs a chance to retrieve the family fortunes and to get a living for them all. A license for a traveling company was obtained from Cracow, Mr. Modjeski constituted himself manager, and the little band of players, travelling in a peasant’s wagon, went on to New Sandec.[46] Here the company was gradually enlarged until it had nineteen members, and here they stayed all summer. Helena was from the beginning their star. She and her comrades were but strolling players, living in poorly furnished quarters and eating frugal meals. She had but two dresses, one black for tragedy, the other white for comedy. Yet she was happy as never before or perhaps since. Long afterward she thrilled with the recollection of the enthusiasm and joy of those early days. To live in her own world of youth and eager beginnings and at the same time in the imaginary world of her heroines, was a happiness that outweighed all lack of comforts.

For more than a year the company traveled about in Austrian Poland. It was during this period that the Polish insurrection of 1863 was brewing. The oppression under which Russian Poland suffered found sympathy in Galitzia and indeed the entire Polish people was in mourning. Every one, at least in the towns, wore black, for the wearing of colors was practically forbidden by public feeling. Yet people contrived to go to the theatre, and “The New Sandec Combination,” as it was called, prospered. Their Polish historical pieces roused the patriotism of their audiences and did their share in maintaining the spirit of the people in the face of the Russian outrages.

Madame Modjeska was the favorite of the provincial public to which her company addressed itself. The popular demand for her was such that the audiences fell off when she was not in the cast, and she consequently was forced to appear constantly. When her daughter was born[47] she had finished acting her part in a five act tragedy only two hours before; and in ten days she was again appearing. The company grew in size and improved in quality, and their repertoire was enlarged to include such plays as Schiller’s Die Räuber and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.