‘Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me;
Because that I am little, like an ape,
He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’
Richard’s representative [Charles Kean] meanwhile scowling wickedly and tugging at his gloves desperately, pursuant to paternal example and stage tradition. A year or two later and the baby actress was representing now Mamillius and now Puck.”
Mr. Cook’s recollection is not borne out by the play bills, however, and it may safely be said that Ellen Terry’s first appearance was as Mamillius when she was eight years old.[74]
Miss Terry has given us her own impressions of her first night as Mamillius. “How my young heart swelled with pride—I can recall the sensation now—when I was told what I had to do. There is something in a woman’s nature which always makes her recollect how she was dressed at any especially eventful moment of her life, and I can see myself, as though it were yesterday, in my little red and white coat—very short—very pink silk stockings, and a row of tight sausage curls—my mother was always very careful that they should be in perfect order and regularity—clustered round my head. A small go-cart, which it was my duty to drag about the stage, was also a keen source of pride, and a great trouble to me. My first dramatic failure dates from that go-cart. I was told to run about with it on the stage, and while carrying out my instructions with more vigor than discretion, tripped over the handle, and down I came on my back. A titter ran through the house, and I felt that my career as an actress was ruined forever. Bitter and copious were the tears I shed—but I am not sure that the incident has materially altered the course of my life.”[75] The Times concluded its review of the production with the words: “And last—aye, and least too—Miss Ellen Terry plays the boy Mamillius with a vivacious precocity that proves her a worthy relative of her sister Miss Kate.”
She had soon played not only Mamillius, but also Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Prince Arthur in King John, Fleance in Macbeth and other childish parts in plays less well remembered. “In those days,” says Miss Terry, “I was cast for many a ‘dumb’ part. I walked on in The Merchant of Venice carrying a basket of doves; in Richard II I climbed up a pole in the street scene; in Henry VIII I was ‘top angel’ in the vision, and I remember that the heat of the gas at that dizzy height made me sick at the dress rehearsal! I was a little boy ‘cheering’ in several other productions.... In The Merchant of Venice I was firmly convinced that the basket of doves which I carried on my shoulder was the principal attraction of the scene in which it appeared. The other little boys and girls in the company regarded those doves with eyes of bitter envy. One little chorus boy, especially, though he professed a personal devotion of the tenderest kind for me, could never quite get over those doves.”
It is not to be thought that the young Terry sisters were merely attractive and clever children. They were applauded, wrote Dutton Cook, “not simply because of their cleverness and prettiness, their graces of aspect, the careful training they evidenced, and the pains they took, but because of the leaven of genius discernible in all their performances—they were born actresses.... Here were little players who could not merely repeat accurately the words they had learnt by rote, but could impart sentiment to their speeches, could identify themselves with the characters they played, could personate and portray.”
Thus Ellen Terry’s training began early and rigorously. “When I was a child,” she wrote long afterwards, “rehearsals often used to last until four or five in the morning. What weary work it was to be sure! My poor little legs used to ache, and sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was on the stage. Often I used to creep into the green-room, and there, curled up in the deep recess of the window, forget myself, my troubles, and my art—if you can talk of art in connection with a child of eight—in a delicious sleep.” In the years to come Ellen Terry rose to distinction first of all by virtue of her radiant, charming personality and a natural gift for acting. But only less important has been the infinitely varied, toilsome schooling in actual experience, thus so early begun.[76]
When Ellen was twelve Charles Kean’s management of the Princess’s came to an end. Her parents at once took advantage of the measure of popularity which the sisters had acquired and presented them in a “drawing-room entertainment.” It consisted of two short plays in which Ellen and Kate assumed all the characters, of both sexes. The venture was a success, and the little troupe, father, mother, two daughters and a pianist, traveled far and wide throughout the Kingdom for more than two years, driving from place to place in the primitive style of strolling players.
Returning to London, Ellen Terry, whose name seems already to have been fairly well established, had a part at the Royalty Theatre in a dreadful play founded on Sue’s Atar-Gull. It was her rôle in this gruesome drama to appear on the stage wrapped in the coils of a huge serpent, and shrieking the terror appropriate to the situation. This was at least an opportunity for one kind of acting and Miss Terry made the most of it. The contemporary accounts show that she shrieked most startlingly and whole-heartedly.
Kate Terry had joined the stock company at Bristol, and there Ellen, when she was fourteen, went also. For a year she had the sound training—the best an actor can have—of acting many widely varying parts. “If I had to describe her acting in those days,” wrote a member of the company, “I should say its chief characteristic was a vivacious sauciness. Her voice already had some of the rich sympathetic quality which has since been one of her most distinctive charms. Although only in the first flush of a joyous girlhood, she was yet familiar enough with the stage to be absolutely at home on it.... We, the young fellows of that day, thought she was perfection; we toasted her in our necessarily frugal measures; we would gladly have been her hewers of wood and drawers of water. She had personal charm as well as histrionic skill. Her smiles were very sweet, but, alack for all of us, they were mathematically impartial.” During this stay in the west of England (the Bristol company appeared also at Bath) she acted a wide range of parts, from Shakespeare to extravaganza. The training, in quantity and variety, which was afforded by the stock companies of the middle of the last century, cannot easily be matched to-day. The theatrical system of England and America has been revolutionized, and the long run, the country-wide tour, the specialized actor, have become the rule. Only within the last few years, as in the rise of the Irish national theatre, the Manchester Players, and the upward trend in certain American stock companies, can we see something of a return to earlier conditions.