With Modjeska’s first American tour began the formation of that circle of friendships outside the theatre that would alone mark her as an extraordinary woman. The names must suffice: Longfellow, Richard Watson Gilder, Grant, Sherman, Henry Watterson, Eugene Field; and in Europe: Tennyson, Lowell, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Watts, Justin McCarthy, George Brandes, Hans von Bülow. With Longfellow, perhaps, was her most cherished friendship. During her first visit to Boston he called on her at her hotel and she and her son went to his house in Cambridge. “I said I would gladly study some passages from his poems and recite them to him, and I mentioned Hiawatha, but he stopped me with the words: ‘You do not want to waste your time in memorizing those things, and don’t you speak of Hiawatha, or I will call you Mudjikiewis, which, by the way, sounds somewhat like your name.’”[66]
It was Longfellow who urged Modjeska to act in London—the very summit of her ambition. When in 1880 she had repeated there her American success he wrote to her: “Now I can add my congratulations on your triumphal entry into London. How pleasant it is to be able to say, ‘I told you so!’ And did I not tell you so? Am I not worthy to be counted among the Minor Prophets? I cannot tell you how greatly rejoiced I am at this new success—this new wreath of laurel.” For London was immediately won. Public, critics, society and fellow actors united to make her welcome.
Poland, a small and unhappy country, has done more than its share in furnishing the world with artists. With some of the most famous of them Modjeska’s name is curiously linked. Paderewski, during her visit to Poland in 1884, used to come to visit her. He was then a young man of twenty-one whom it was impossible to keep away from the piano. She encouraged him, overcame his doubts as to his fitness for a public career, and that summer they appeared in the same program in Cracow. They were friends during the rest of her life, and it was Paderewski who in 1905 inspired the great farewell testimonial to Modjeska in New York. “The first encouraging words I heard as a pianist,” he wrote, “came from her lips; the first successful concert I had in my life was due to her assistance.” It was she, too, who years before, in a Polish mountain summer resort, first brought Jan and Eduard de Reszke before an audience. They were both then under twenty.
In 1893 Madame Modjeska was one of four actresses[67] who addressed the Women’s Congress at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Besides her appearance before the Congress as an actress, she was asked to speak on another occasion as a representative of Poland. The women who were expected from Poland evidently feared the Czar’s displeasure in case they spoke frankly concerning their country, and failed to appear in Chicago. But Modjeska spoke her mind freely concerning the grievances of the Poles. She was widely quoted in the papers, and news of her speech reached St. Petersburg. Playing two years later in Poland, she was about to act in Warsaw when word came from the Russian government forbidding her appearance. Plans were made for an engagement in St. Petersburg itself, but at the last moment, when large sums had already been spent in preparation, she was told that her appearance in the capital was forbidden. Shortly afterwards Modjeska and her husband were ordered to leave Warsaw, and an imperial decree was issued to the effect that they were never thereafter to enter any part of the Russian territory. Efforts were often made to obtain permission to go to Warsaw, but to the end of her life Modjeska was excluded from the Czar’s dominions.[68]
In April, 1905, Madame Modjeska, then living in practical retirement in California, received a letter signed by a number of authors, fellow actors and artists in New York which acknowledged in affectionate terms their debt and gratitude for her career, and offered her a public testimonial in New York. This was the idea of Paderewski, who had visited her in California but a short time before and like many others was disturbed by the lack of public acclaim with which she was modestly sinking into retirement.[69] The great pianist, much to his distress, was prevented by an accident from being present, but the best known actors appearing in New York at the time lent their services. Modjeska herself played scenes from Macbeth and Mary Stuart. Edmund Clarence Stedman presented to Madame Modjeska a memorial scroll bearing signatures of her many friends, actors, actresses, and her “attached votaries in other walks of life—all made associates,” Mr. Stedman said in addressing her, “by their delight in your genius and career. A quarter-century ago you came to us from a land invested with traditions of valor, beauty, and romance, from the brave and soulful country that flashed its sword in our behalf and that in our own times enthralls us with music,[70] and through you with impassioned tenderness and artistic power. The felicities of art are limitless, and, as in creations of our master playwright you found the most alluring range for your own powers, so your fresh impersonations woke in us the sense of ‘something rich and strange.’”
Modjeska, with tears in her eyes and her voice breaking with emotion, briefly expressed her gratitude.
“Long may your enviable years flow on,” Mr. Stedman had said. But it was only four years later that she died,[71] in California, where she had always maintained her home, in a beautiful country place she called Arden, not far from the scene of that ill-starred venture which after all had its justification in giving to America a great actress. She was buried in Cracow, the city of her birth.
“Hail to thee upon thy return to thy last resting place,” said Michael Tarasiewicz at her funeral, “welcome thou, who might say of thyself as did Countess Idalia: ‘I am here as a passing angel. I have let thee see the lightning and disappeared upon the firmament of the sky.’... For thy art, for thy constant work, for that thou hast never become renegade to thy ideal, and that, in perfecting thy soul, thou hast been perfecting the soul of humanity, be blessed.”