One important factor in Mrs. Fiske’s success has been only hinted. The married life of people of the theatre has been a frequent and sometimes justified cause for unpleasant comment. In the case of Mrs. Fiske much of the success of the better known half of the house has been to a degree due to her husband. It is pleasant to record this fact—not that it is a unique situation (for married stage folk can be normally happy more readily than is thought) but because Mr. Fiske’s share in his wife’s productions has not been wholly understood. In a recent letter which Mrs. Fiske distributed to the press she gives to her husband a generous share of the credit for the excellence which has always marked the productions of the Manhattan Company. To him is due, she says, the taste and thoroughness of the settings. The play which she was giving at the time and which gave the announcement point, was The High Road. The second act is placed in an apartment in upper New York, furnished by an artist of training and knowledge. The scene bears this out in a way that strikes a new note in stage decoration. The tapestries, the reproductions of oil paintings, carved doors and mantelpiece, the furniture, are accurate to the last detail.
Mr. Fiske leased and managed the Manhattan Theatre in New York for the few years beginning in 1901. With this theatre as headquarters the Fiskes waged vigorous war for eight years against the so-called theatrical syndicate, a combination of theatre owners and producing managers which had for years been acquiring the leases or ownership of most of the theatres of the country. The Fiskes steadfastly held out against the dictates of this syndicate as to their plans for tours, and preferred not to become the property of a monopoly which was operated primarily for its money gains. When their continued resistance was strengthened by other “independents,” the trust made it increasingly difficult to find theatres to play in. During her tour in 1904 in Leah Kleschna Mrs. Fiske in some cities played in summer gardens, and on improvised stages in halls, much as she used to do in the old days of barnstorming. With the rise of a rival syndicate, a rise made possible partly through Mrs. Fiske’s help, the lines have loosened and the Fiskes have no longer any difficulty in “booking” their plays.
The Fiskes’ organization has become definitely known as the Manhattan Company, though they no longer control the theatre of that name. “As a producer of plays” Madame Réjane once said, “Mrs. Fiske has no superior in Europe.” The uniformity of ability in the actors, the adjustment of the characters which often kept Mrs. Fiske herself in the background, contrary to the usages of “stars,” the detailed excellence of the stage “business” (as the ballroom scene in Becky Sharp) have always given the productions the interest, the appearance of life itself. It is familiar knowledge among those who have closely watched the American stage that Mrs. Fiske is one of the best stage directors of the time. The careful, extended rehearsal of a play is hard work, but Mrs. Fiske, with the active nervous temperament that demands hard work, is equal to it. She personally directs the rehearsals of her companies, and when one remembers Mary of Magdala, for instance, which demanded a hundred actors and was rehearsed more than six weeks, or when one recollects the practically flawless stage management of any Fiske production, her merit as an imaginative producer becomes apparent. Like her acting, her stage management is quiet, effective, tensely alive.
During the retirement immediately following her marriage, and since, Mrs. Fiske has found time to write a number of plays. A Light from St. Agnes is a one-act play of much dramatic power telling a tragic story of low life among the bayous of Louisiana. The Rose is another one-act tragedy once played by Rosina Vokes’s company. The Eyes of the Heart is likewise a short play, having for its principal character an old blind man who, after losing his fortune, is kept in ignorance of his poverty by his family and friends. All three of these pieces were played at various times and with considerable success by Mrs. Fiske and her company. She wrote several other plays, some of them longer, but none well known today. John Doe was a dramatization of a sketch by Mr. Fiske; Grandpapa, Not Guilty and Common Clay were all long plays; Fontenelle, which she wrote with Mr. Fiske, was played by James O’Neill; Countess Roudine was written with the help of Paul Kester and was once in the repertoire of Modjeska. The Dream of Matthew Wayne was also written by Mrs. Fiske.
Mrs. Fiske has said that the life of an actor is intolerably narrowed if he has no interests outside the theatre. Such interests she has. The strongest is her devotion to the welfare of dumb animals. The trapping of fur bearers, the cruel conditions in cattle trains, lack of shelter on the ranges, bull-fights, vivisection, all have had her for an enemy. Individual cases of cruelty are constantly receiving relief at her hands and to various allied causes her money and time has been given generously. She often makes addresses before meetings in the interest of such reforms, and at such times the actress is quite forgotten in the humane woman.[175]
The often discussed limitations of Mrs. Fiske have always been said to include her physical equipment. She is no Bernhardt or Terry in stature. During most of her career she has been slender, and there are dozens of women on the stage who will never attain a hundredth part of her compelling personal power, who are nevertheless her superiors in superficial beauty. The truth seems to be that in her has been demonstrated again that when the essentials of acting of a high order are present, actual beauty is a comparatively negligible factor. Nor can beauty, to a degree, be denied her. Her face is, one might say, of the Scandinavian type. Her hair always was and still is, beautiful,—a reddish golden—radiantly golden when dressed to advantage and seen in the glow of the footlights. Her eyes are, at a guess, gray (though even her intimate friends disagree as to their precise color); they are large and, as no one who has watched their part in an impersonation need be told, expressive. Some have complained that her carriage is not graceful; but it has something more and better than grace, for it has significance, fittingness in every walk across the stage, every pose. With more justice has comment been made upon her enunciation, which at times has been undeniably too rapid. As for the voice itself, it is among her chief means to her effects—wide-ranged and sensitive to the mood. It is at one moment charged with emotion, quivering or repressed, at another hard as steel, and again simply matter of fact. The contrasts are of great, and probably nicely calculated, effect.
The high-minded judgment which has enabled Mrs. Fiske to select plays which never have a false appeal, her freedom from that self-importance which distorts the meaning of plays for the sake of giving prominence to the “star,” are indications of her qualities as a woman. She has broad sympathies, enthusiasms for affairs outside the theatre, and cherishes no inflated notion as to her importance other than as a woman of the theatre. In her travels, or visiting other theatres, it is her habit to be heavily veiled and altogether lacking in the “theatrical.”[176] She is much more nervous when addressing, in sua persona, a small meeting in the interests of some humane movement than when facing a theatre full of people. On the other hand she has an unusually keen sense of humor, and some of her best bits of acting are said to be in impromptu efforts called forth by some circumstance arising within the “family” of her company.[177] One of her engaging traits is her complete freedom from the spirit of rivalry and criticism that sometimes characterizes actors. By those close to her she is said never to speak ill of any one. Indeed her acquaintance among other “stars” is limited; while in the world outside the theatre her friends are many and often distinguished. It may not be uninteresting that Mrs. Fiske, unlike many of her profession, likes “playing one-night stands”; that she does not weary of the endless travel of theatrical life;[178] that she is continually studying to perfect her impersonations or to prepare for future work; and that she has a playful dread of being referred to as “intellectual.” That word, as applied to Mrs. Fiske, has become hackneyed.
The warmest admirers of Mrs. Fiske will admit her limitations. They will, indeed, be grateful for them; for her physical and mental equipment, while they withheld from her certain ranges of drama, simply forbade the adoption by her of the tissue of unrealities which constitutes conventional acting. Without either losing for a moment the sense of conditions imposed by the theatre, or gaining her effects by means of commonplaceness set baldly on the stage, she has evolved an extraordinary realism made up of truth to nature combined with a sense of theatric art so nicely adjusted that even in its most telling moments it is the art that conceals art. It is, in the last analysis, a method that is the visible expression of a rich nature. And by the unalterable fixity of her high aims, the dignity and strength of what she has tried to do, she has earned the gratitude of all those who look forward to an influential, high-minded American stage.
In the spring of 1914 Mrs. Fiske revived Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, and in it proved herself at the height of her powers as an adroit comédienne. At the beginning of the season of 1914–15 she acted, in several Middle Western cities, in a new play by John Luther Long and Frank Stayton. Lady Betty Martingale was an ambitious production that took her into an unfamiliar field, and that promised to rival Becky Sharp as a feast of acting and spectacle. It was a “costume comedy,” with the London of the eighteenth century as its setting. The play was unfortunately lacking in substance and dramatic interest, and was withdrawn after a brief career.