Why is it that the public, loyal as it has been to them, has taken their untiring campaign in fostering the Shakespeare tradition so much as a matter of course? Perhaps it is because nearly everyone speaking English now takes Shakespeare himself as a matter of course, to be accepted, like starlight and the blessings of a free government, with unenthusiastic complacence, and because Miss Marlowe herself is so utterly Shakespearean. For everything she has done has had a Shakespearean tinge. “She was so infinitely more charming [as Mary Tudor] than the play justified her in being,” someone once wrote. “She looked exactly as she would have looked had the play been Shakespeare’s.”
“Those of us who saw her as the Queen Fiametta remember well how incongruously like Hermione she looked and was. When Miss Marlowe played Colombe in Colombe’s Birthday she seemed to forget that she wasn’t playing Rosalind. And even in Mr. Esmond’s distinctly modern drama, Fools of Nature, Miss Marlowe to more than one spectator suggested the England of Shakespeare’s day oftener than the England of to-day.”[194] As for Shakespeare’s plays themselves: Her Viola, both of the early days and of the later period, was so lovely an embodiment of the poet’s ideal that he himself would have been satisfied with it; her Juliet, her Beatrice, her Rosalind, all in more or less degree, were filled with the peculiarly Shakespearean spirit, the radiant sweetness and vitality of his women.
There is abroad among the theatregoers of America a peculiar, almost personal affection for Miss Marlowe, which is not inconsistent with the complacent feeling of which we have spoken. There is about Marlowe none of the overpowering sense of riding the whirlwind that has accompanied Bernhardt in her royal progresses about the planet; she has none of the picturesque ebullience of a Terry, nor even the specialized appeal of Maude Adams. She has been a happy “combination of the poetically ideal and the humanly real” that wins, for a beautiful and skillful actress, a position in the popular heart, even if it does not take her, because of more or less extraneous characteristics, into the front rank of “personages.”
Miss Marlowe, in her quoted utterances, has occasionally thrown light on her attitude toward her own work and toward her profession:
“I wish they wouldn’t confound me so much with the parts I play and imagine I must be playing my own emotions because I give the part I am playing an air of reality.”
“It isn’t the rewards that one works for;[195] we work because we have to, because we can’t stop. Except for a shallow or vain nature there is nothing in the rewards of this profession commensurate with its pains; but in the very labor of it there’s joy, if you’re born to know it, that nothing else can approximate for you.”
Those who have known Miss Marlowe in her own person say that the simplicity and the good taste observable in her work as an actress find a counterpart in her life off the stage. The home she maintained for years at Highmount in the Catskills was a quiet retreat where she enjoyed the outdoors, her books, and the society of a group of friends, most of whom were not personages known to the theatergoing public. Her liking for books, which is said to be keen, induced her not only to carry about on her travels hundreds of volumes, but at one time to take up seriously the study of the mysteries of bookbinding. One summer she spent in Germany, taking lessons in that craft, and in her library are a number of volumes, illuminated and bound by her own hands. She sings a little, plays the piano well, and has a well-grounded musical knowledge. Unlike many another successful actress—Mary Anderson, for instance—she retained her early strong love for her profession.
“The rarest quality of Miss Marlowe’s art,” says Elizabeth McCracken, one of Miss Marlowe’s closest friends, with what is probably true insight, “is its lovely youthfulness. Her mirth is utterly young; at its gayest, it is tinged by a certain wistful gravity. Her woe is young, too; at its saddest, no drop of bitterness stains it. Children instinctively accept her as a kindred spirit, someone not so different from themselves as most grown-ups.”
Add to this engaging youthfulness—another name, perhaps, for her sense of poetry—her dark and buoyant beauty, her rich voice that lent its own music to Shakespeare’s, and you have Julia Marlowe, not a genius, certainly, but one of America’s gracious women, who has brought beauty in many forms to the American stage in a period when, but for her, it had been sadly lacking.