One afternoon a decade ago Minnie Maddern Fiske journeyed out from Boston to the neighboring university city, went to Sanders Theatre, scene of Harvard’s august ceremonies, and there she talked—engrossingly—on her art. The occasion was in a way memorable. In times not remotely past the possibility of an actress lecturing in Sanders would have been doubtful.[162] But in 1905 Harvard was well along in its career as one of the springs of the renaissance which has of late years manifested itself in the English-speaking theatre. If one said “Professor Baker’s work was beginning to make itself felt” it would be saying the same thing in a different way. In many respects the occasion was unusual The audience was interesting: the professors were there to add dignity and academic distinction; the students, of Harvard and Radcliffe, were there in force to represent the newer spirit of inquiry and effort in matters dramatic; the stage was represented in the audience as well as on the platform (and, oddly, Francis Wilson, Edward H. Sothern and the speaker cover nearly the whole dramatic range). There was an enthusiastic expectancy in the air. One felt that here was the manifestation of something genuine and strong. The speaker did not disappoint. Poised and confident, eager and enthusiastic, she spoke for more than an hour and one felt at the end that this small woman had signalized a new spirit in the theatre and in the attitude of educated men toward the drama and its exponents.

MRS. FISKE

She had started life as a baby actress and her formal schooling was snatched here and there in the midst of an ever busy career. Most men (and women) can exhaust the resources of academic training with a total result less brilliant, however, than her hour on the stage of Sanders. But it was only one form of a recognition which is freely accorded. It is quite safe to say that since the death of Mansfield she has been the most noteworthy American person of the theatre. She has consistently championed drama of a high order, which is something superior to theatrical art of a high order. So much would be true if she remained the producer only. Mrs. Fiske, the actress, has placed herself among the chosen few. She, as much as any other, brought to bear on the American theatre what it sorely needed, a keen intellect attuned to the new spirit of naturalism. She was born in a lucky day for this purpose, for, as we shall see, she came to maturity at just about the time when the rebirth in the English drama was making itself evident.

The stage always attracts to itself numbers of people who no doubt sincerely fancy themselves drawn thither irresistibly. The theatre’s lure is strong, yet most of its followers have entered upon a stage career more or less as a matter of choice. With a small number, however, the life has been inevitable. There has been no choice, no attraction or glamour even. Such is Mrs. Fiske; she is indigenously of the theatre.

Early in the last century an English girl of good family eloped with her music teacher. Here, perhaps, began Minnie Maddern’s artistic career, for this girl was her grandmother. After a while this music master brought his family to America, where he conducted concert tours. One daughter, Lizzie Maddern, the mother of Mrs. Fiske, not only was the youthful cornetist of the company, but she arranged the music for the orchestra and, indeed, became a musician of genuine ability, and, later, an acceptable actress. She married Thomas Davey, a pioneer theatrical manager who carried his company up and down through the South and West in the days before personal management gave way to the highly impersonal direction of the Broadway offices. Davey was noted for his invasion of small unheard-of towns, where often the inn dining-room served as a theatre and scenery was of the scantiest. The actor’s life has its uncertainties and hardships in any age or country, but in Western America of the middle of the nineteenth century the conditions were often those known by the strolling players of old. As we shall see, Mrs. Fiske long afterward, and for quite different reasons, reverted for a time to the old practice of playing on extemporized stages.

On December 19, 1865, Marie Augusta Davey was born in New Orleans. From the first of her stage career, which began almost immediately, she was known as Minnie Maddern. There is a pretty story of her first, quite informal stage appearance. A careless nurse had left the baby unguarded. She climbed from her bed, donned her clothes and went out in search of the theatre and her mother. “I forgot to cry, I forgot to be frightened, and I saw some fascinating things before a good-natured fellow picked me up, discovered my identity and took me safely to the theatre. I recall distinctly being held by my new friend and identified at the box-office; then being passed over to a boy who took me around to a narrow, dark door and carried me into a lumbery place and put me in a chair where I looked out into what seemed a bright, sunshiny world with queer trees and fairies. Just then I spied my mother. She was dressed like a fairy, and she was just coming out of a water lily—for it was the transformation scene of a spectacle. I slipped right out of that chair, and, before any one saw what I was going to do, I ran right to her and began explaining my nurse’s treachery. I am told that I was received with applause, and that my first appearance, even though it was impromptu, was a success.”

Previously, she had been “taken on” when the action required the presence of a baby, and soon afterwards little Minnie appeared between the farce and the tragedy to do her songs and dances. At three came her first premeditated speaking appearance,[163] as the Duke of York in Richard III, and from that day to this, excepting brief periods in school[164] and a few years at the time of her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske, in 1890, she has been continuously and busily engaged in her profession.

Her career divides sharply into two periods. To the first of these, the twenty-five years that carried her to the time of her marriage, she is now disposed to be rather indifferent. When she refers at all to that time, which is not often, she speaks of the “prehistoric days.”[165] It was, nevertheless, a period of thorough schooling, arduous, but fruitful of technical excellence, and bringing early triumphs—a babyhood and girlhood apprenticeship which is today, for various reasons (one of them being laws in some states restricting the appearance of children on the stage) practically inaccessible. To indicate briefly her early experience it is enough to say that before she was sixteen Minnie Maddern had appeared not only with her father’s company, but with a dozen or more of the stars of the day, Laura Keene, J. K. Emmet, Lucille Western, John McCullough, Joseph Jefferson, E. L. Davenport, and the rest of that almost forgotten day. She went through the whole range of juvenile parts,[166] soubrettes, harassed young heroines, boys, fairies, the lads of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on through the list, playing wherever the need of a clever child actress called her. She wore long dresses on the stage long before she assumed them in her own person, and by the time she was sixteen she was conspicuously successful in old woman rôles![167] At sixteen, too, she became a star in New York, though this venture was ill-advised. She had won a public by her cleverness and her marked personality, but, much to her credit, she was not adapted to the crude and blatantly personal form of entertainment represented by Fogg’s Ferry, which was one of the “protean shows” of those days. She was to wait, indeed, many years more for the beginning of her identification with really significant drama. During this young womanhood, from sixteen to twenty-odd, she acted in plays which are never resurrected nowadays by even the most undiscriminating stock company, and which are remembered, if at all, by some old theatregoer who likes to recollect how appealingly, in Caprice, Minnie Maddern used to sing “In the Gloaming.” The Storm Child, In Spite of All, The Child Wife, The Puritan Maid, Lady Jemima, Featherbrain—these are not so much as names nowadays, even to those who know the theatre well. She had gained thorough, indispensable training, but as yet no memorable achievement.[168]

In 1890 came her marriage and three years of retirement.[169] It is, for many reasons, not strange that when she again took up her stage career a new era seemed to begin for her. Not only must her own nature, her insight, and her artistic equipment now have combined to qualify her for new and greater efforts; the whole English speaking theatre was gaining a new lease of life. Arthur Wing Pinero, just emerging into his period of sureness of technique and a frank facing of life; Henry Arthur Jones, dropping his earlier melodramatic manner and about to produce Michael and His Lost Angel; Oscar Wilde, with his momentary flash of high comedy; George Bernard Shaw, watchful of the experimentation of others and in addition well saturated with Ibsen; above all, the great Norwegian himself, whose influence knew no difference of language;—these men were, in the early nineties, bringing into English drama a vigor and a relation to life such as it had not enjoyed since the closing of the theatres in 1642.