Mrs. Fiske was keenly, if to a certain degree unconsciously, alive to these influences. To one attuned they were the zeitgeist. With an eagerness new to the American theatre she was ambitious to attempt the modern drama—a drama honest and frank in its outlook on life, free from conventional restraint in its choice of themes, and taking its tone from the realities in human character. Not always have the qualities of the play been a match for the powers of the actress. Yet, looking over the period since 1893,[170] the list is distinctly noteworthy—first of all, Ibsen, who found in Mrs. Fiske a ready champion. A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society; surely they form a goodly showing. As for other Europeans, we have Sardou furnishing her, in Divorçons, an opportunity, brilliantly embraced, for comedy; Dumas fils is represented by La Femme de Claude, Sudermann by Magda, and Hauptmann by the short play Hannele. Two of her greatest successes, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Becky Sharp were unusually skillful and satisfying experiments in that difficult form, the dramatized novel. Leah Kleschna was worth while as an attempt to raise melodrama into the field of social drama; The New York Idea is, so far, the best American example of sophisticated, ironic comedy; and in very recent days Edward Sheldon’s plays, Salvation Nell and The High Road, have been courageous and justified experiments—the most striking examples we have had of the encouragement of the native dramatist of the newer school.
The capacity to key oneself to the inner meaning of a play, to react on the genius of the author with sympathy and insight, sets apart the artist from the crowd of mechanical players. For different actors there are naturally different forms of this power. For Mrs. Fiske, it can be said that her genius displays itself in the naturalism that reveals at once the realities and the beauties of human nature. Let us see how the group of representative plays named above has represented this power.
It can fairly be said that the distinguishing mark of this group of plays has been its close relation to actual human life. This is of course the distinguishing work of the most characteristic and significant of modern English drama as a whole; but there is much more of this sort of drama now than there was eighteen or twenty years ago, and there has been, until very recently, more of this leaven of truth to nature in the British theatre than in the American. Consider for a moment the character of the average play upon which the public in the United States spent during this period (and rightly enough still spends) millions of dollars and hours. To name a few undoubted successes: When Knightwood was in Flower, The Heart of Maryland, Lovers’ Lane, The Christian, Way Down East, Secret Service, The Music Master, The Man from Home, Zaza, Charley’s Aunt, The Prisoner of Zenda, Sherlock Holmes, The Chorus Lady, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Woman, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. Without denying the necessity of the theatre of mere amusement, of light sentiment, of melodrama, one feels grateful for an ambition that has sought and found something deeper.
To examine Mrs. Fiske’s plays more in detail will indicate both the temper of the modern realistic school and the quality of her interpretations.
As for Ibsen, there has been warm dispute as to the validity and helpfulness of his message. Many go to the extreme of saying that he should never be performed at all. With this question we are now concerned only so far as to determine his attitude toward life and the drama for there is no question as to his strength in determining the tone and technique of later-day dramatists. As Mrs. Fiske herself has said, “the most interesting, the most valuable plays written by others are almost without exception pieces which display the influence of the Norseman’s work. It would be an impertinence to say that Sudermann, Fulda, Pinero, d’Annunzio and the Spanish playwright Echegaray do not write interesting plays. They do, but after all their works are merely those of devoted disciples—not those of the master.” To follow her in her Ibsen creed (and she has the best critical thought with her) is to believe him responsible for our search of truth in the theatre, for the truth to nature that has brought a toning down of violent action and heightened the desire, as Maeterlinck says, “to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness and place moral problems upon a high pedestal. Bloodshed has grown less frequent, passions less turbulent; heroism has become less unbending, courage less material and less ferocious.” Ibsen appeals to the actor’s imagination, to all he has of brain and soul. In these plays also the sensitive, discerning auditor finds, not the sordid pessimism with which Ibsen has been so often charged, but a burning zeal for rockbottom truth and sincerity and, in some cases, the exaltation of tragedy. It is to be admitted that in his reaction against the drama of futile romanticism, the “story book play” of no character or consequence, Ibsen drew what were, in contrast, grim pictures.
By her unmistakable vocation for the realistic drama, her intellectual acumen, her power and habit of thinking out her parts, both in their larger significance and in their revealing details, Mrs. Fiske was obviously fitted for Ibsen. The restlessness of his women, their curiosity, their keen concentration, found a response in her temperament as her blonde and nervous person pictured their physical aspect. Histrionic methods moreover adapted themselves to both mood and matter. It is interesting to inquire in a little detail what these methods were and are, for, with modifications, they characterize all her work.
The keynote of Mrs. Fiske’s acting is akin to that of naturalistic drama itself, as the dramatist himself understands it. He must portray humanity as it is, with the selection and stress necessary for effectiveness in the theatre. His heroines must be embodied through similar methods. Such impersonation Mrs. Fiske accomplishes with the utmost economy of gesture, action and voice. There is no staginess, none of the aggressive grace of the actress playing a part; she is rather the woman living it. There is obvious none of the routine technique which actors frequently learn of each other, or in schools. This is not to say that her style is not an outgrowth of an earlier technique of a period when no doubt she was sufficiently “stagey” and conventional. In the later period she has refined, out of this earlier experience and her own insight, a method remarkable for its suggestion, its repression, its freedom from familiar device. To the end of theatric effect and illusion she, like all artists, has well defined, recognizable means—some, like her wide-ranged, emotion-charged voice, natural gifts; others more or less deliberate. How deliberate, it would be hard to say, so closely knit in good acting are calculation and instinctive action. Her power of imparting the details of impersonation is notable. Gesture, walk, pose, facial play, intonation, pause, all are worked out with precision and yet with a reticent naturalness that makes strongly for effectiveness. Particularly convincing is her power of pregnant silence. In Hedda Gabler, “Mrs. Fiske’s power of ominously significant silence, of play of feature that reveals the working brain behind, rises very high in the final scene with Brack. He knows her share in Lovborg’s ruin; he can bring his knowledge into play in the sordid theatre of the police court. The price of silence is the submission that Hedda, with all her curiosity and zest for evil, is too coldly cowardly to pay. All her tragedy has curdled mean. Her only refuge is the meaner and cowardly escape of suicide. She does not speak, yet one sees the idea germinate, mount and possess her, until it flowers into reckless action.”[171]
In the first act of Salvation Nell “Mrs. Fiske, as the scrub woman in the barroom, sat holding her drunken lover’s head in her lap for fully ten minutes without a word, almost without a motion. Gradually one could watch nothing else; one became absorbed in the silent pathos of that dumb, sitting figure. Miss Mary Garden, herself a distinguished actress, said of this, ‘Ah, to be able to do nothing like that.’ In Pillars of Society, while the Consul was making his confession to the mob, again Mrs. Fiske, as Lona, sat quiet, one of the crowd; but gradually, as she saw the man she loved throwing off his yoke of hypocrisy, the light of a great joy radiated from her face, ending in a stifled cry, half-sob, half-laugh of triumph, of indescribable poignancy. To one beholder, at least, it brought the rush of tears, and made the emotional as well as the intellectual drift of the play completely clear, completely fused and compelling. Is not this acting of a very high order, this so intense living in the whole life of the drama that her quietest moment is charged with tingling significance? Is this not true ‘impersonation,’ indeed?”[172]
Akin to this power of eloquent silence is Mrs. Fiske’s use of “felicitous pause.” In the middle of a sentence, sometimes in the middle of a word, will come a momentary halt such as anyone in real life is constantly making. The effect is strikingly realistic; the wonder is that many others have not discovered and profited by its simplicity and naturalness. And then, coupled with her many sided faculty of repression, is a power of sudden, telling, emotional speech. Piercing a mood of charged silence, a sentence spoken in Mrs. Fiske’s eloquent voice is often of electrical effect.
By such methods, she made Hedda, “an abnormally evil and soulless woman, steadily plausible, momentarily potent, always conceivably human.” In the words of the same critic[173] she gave to Nora, in A Doll’s House “the very semblance of life. When these traits (disdain of convention, curiosity, self-concentration) become abnormal and pass over into morbid chagrin and recklessness, sordid selfishness, vicious vindictiveness, hard soullessness and mean cowardice, Mrs. Fiske’s intellect and her temperament follow them.”