At this time James M. Barrie was in America. He was planning the dramatization of his novel The Little Minister. He saw Miss Adams as Dorothy and marked her at once as the woman to play his Lady Babbie. Mr. Frohman already had half-formed plans for promoting her, and the opportunity to play The Little Minister came just at the right moment. Mr. Drew was deprived of his popular leading woman, and on September 13, 1897, at the Lafayette Square Opera House in Washington (and two weeks later at the Empire in New York) Maude Adams was launched upon her career as a “star.” The success of play and player was immediate and great, for on this occasion began that combination of dramatist and actress—Barrie and Maude Adams—that has proved so singularly appealing,—not only in this play, but in Quality Street, in Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows, and in The Legend of Leonora.[204]
For three whole seasons Maude Adams played Lady Babbie, the first season in New York and then, until the spring of 1900, up and down the whole country. It earned for her several fortunes. The play is, as Mr. Winter[205] has said, a “neat but inadequate paraphrase” of the novel, and the character of Babbie has not the substance and power of the Babbie of the book. Relieved of the necessity for an emotional power that is probably beyond her, Miss Adams was left free to delight her audience with the waywardness and sweetness of the new Babbie of the play. Miss Adams gave the character a peculiar other-worldly charm that seemed then to have made its way to the stage for the first time, and that lingers in the minds of many playgoers as the best remembered achievement of her career. It is probably true that she had even before had parts calling for more varied and difficult work, but the popular success of The Little Minister was one of the extraordinary incidents in American theatrical annals.[206]
To vary the task of repeating the same rôle months on end, and (perhaps chiefly) to satisfy her ambitions, Miss Adams essayed, in the Spring of 1899, her first Shakespearean part, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. The result was anything but a complete success, though her thick-and-thin admirers professed themselves pleased. William Faversham was Romeo, and James K. Hackett, Mercutio. Miss Adams as Juliet left much to be desired. She has a gracious, elfish, quite individual charm; she has winning humor and a quiet, directly appealing power of pathos; she is the interpreter par excellence of the delicate, touching whimsies of Barrie; but she has not, or had not then, tragic power. Juliet, it need not be said, demands a large share of such power. Young as Shakespeare represents her to be, she is a creature of glamorous beauty and consuming passion. Such Miss Adams could not make her. She could and did make Juliet pleasantly and touchingly girlish, a graceful, fragile, pathetic figure. But Romeo and Juliet was not an artistic success (though it was a financial one) and Miss Adams speedily dropped the part. “I have not done what I intended to do,” she honestly acknowledged.
But her next part was not, as one might have expected, a return to the medium of her accepted successes. It was even a step further away. Bernhardt, in the spring of 1900, had acted the Duke of Reichstadt in Rostand’s play L’Aiglon. Reichstadt was the son of Napoleon the Great and Marie Louise of Austria. The play tells the story of his abortive attempt to regain his father’s throne. Miss Adams, a few months after Bernhardt’s production in Paris, essayed the part in New York, of course in an English version.[207] Like one part she had played before, Juliet, and another she was to play later, Chanticler, Reichstadt was too large and exacting a part for her. Yet by reason of her own physical characteristics she suggested the weakness and effeminacy of the young Duke, and in the lighter scenes she was pleasing and satisfying. In the more serious scenes—and there are two that require great acting in the tempestuous strain: the Mirror Scene, in which Reichstadt is shown by Metternich the hopeless weakness of his character and the desperation of his cause; and the scene on the battlefield of Wagram, where “the eaglet” is crushed by visions of his father’s ruthless career,—in these scenes Miss Adams was interesting and pathetic, but she hardly exhausted the possibilities.[208] The production of L’Aiglon could not, however, fail to add to her artistic reputation and to her immense popularity, if that were possible.
With Quality Street, a delightful, simple, sunshiny play by Barrie in which she was the lovable and thoroughly feminine Phœbe Throssell, and in the far less attractive play The Pretty Sister of José, in which she was a Spanish girl, “of delicate, winning sensibility,”[209] Miss Adams returned to the sort of acting which in The Little Minister had made her name universally known.
Never, however, before or since, has Miss Adams’ popularity risen to such a pitch as it did upon the production of Peter Pan. First produced in 1905, it ran for three seasons, and when Miss Adams revived it recently and took it far and wide about the country it proved as popular as ever. It may be, as Mr. Winter says, “immeasurably inferior, in fancy and satire, to Alice in Wonderland.” But then, Mr. Winter found it at times puerile and tedious, and could discern nothing in it but a diversion for children. That it certainly was, but the children’s ages ran from four to fourscore. It was a matter of common observation, even in that supposed center of case-hardened worldliness, New York, that the audiences were largely of grown-ups, and that stock-brokers, “tired business men,” and others who would flee miles from the ordinary “children’s play,” came not once, but thrice, a dozen times, in some cases, to see the triumph of Peter over Captain Hook. The elfin quality, the gracious charm and warm-hearted humor of Miss Adams’ Peter Pan may not have been sufficient to make it, as a feat of acting, her most memorable achievement; but play and player have won their way into the public’s affections more thoroughly than anything else she has done—more even than The Little Minister.
In another Barrie play, What Every Woman Knows—produced after the comparatively short life of The Jesters, a romantic mediæval play in which she displayed her familiar ability without working any great advance or change—Miss Adams accomplished what remains as probably the most noteworthy acting, as acting, of her career. She entered thoroughly into the part of Maggie Wylie—the Scotch woman who, while regaining, in a novel way, her errant husband, demonstrates again “what every woman knows,”—the dependence of mere man upon woman. The play was a delightful instance of Barrie’s gift for dressing human truths in whimsical fancy; Miss Adams, in the well chosen words of Mr. Winter, combined “goodness, tenderness, magnanimity, pride, motherhood, and pity with some little dash of tartness,—and gave a performance which needed only flexibility and more essential Scotch character to make it as entirely enjoyable as it was artistically consistent.”[210]
When Maude Adams was announced as Mr. Frohman’s choice for Chanticler in Rostand’s barnyard drama of that name, there was much plain-spoken wonder. It was felt by even her most cordial well-wishers that her ambitions and Mr. Frohman’s indulgence of them could not well go further. Facetiously expressing this feeling, Life announced that Mr. Frohman’s next production would be Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear, with Maude Adams in the title part. Chanticler demands an actor of the somewhat florid style, at least an actor skilled in poetic speech. The “make-up” is as nearly as possible the fac-simile of our old friend the barnyard rooster, comb, tail feathers, spurs and all. It can easily be seen that an elocutionist, in such a part, is a necessity. It was generally said that the single and obvious choice for Chanticler was Otis Skinner, who would indeed have been ideal. Still, Miss Adams, somehow, certainly escaped failure. She is fragile and a woman, not a robust man; but her Chanticler took on, through her intelligence and sincerity, a share of the impressiveness that the part needed, though one felt that Miss Adams could have been spending her ability to better advantage. The apparent perversity that has taken a sweetly feminine, very American woman, of limited powers but sure ability to delight within her proper, modern field, and made her first a heroine of Shakespearean tragedy, then a decadent, disease-stricken youth, then a young mediæval nobleman in masquerade, and later the embodiment, several times life size, of a rooster, has been one of the strange phenomena of the recent American stage. The extenuating circumstances are first that managers are always more or less at a loss for good plays, particularly for a strongly individualized actress; and further that Miss Adams, greatly to her credit, did nothing without casting over it at least the glamour of a fine intelligence and an admirable ambition.
A marvelous exhibition of what Miss Adams and Mr. Frohman, when they put their heads together, could do in the way of contrast to Phœbe Throssell and Maggie Wylie, was the production for a single performance in the great Stadium at Harvard, one night in June, 1909, of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans. Miss Adams had played Twelfth Night in Sanders Theatre one evening a year before. The Maid of Orleans was an outgrowth of the earlier performance and was undertaken at the suggestion of the German department of Harvard. That there were one hundred and fifty mounted knights in full armor, one thousand men-at-arms, two hundred citizens, one hundred and fifty women and children, one hundred and twenty musicians, and ninety singers, besides sixty speaking parts, gives some idea of the magnitude of this unique presentation. In the coronation scene more than fifteen hundred persons were on the improvised Stadium stage. The cost of this single evening’s performance, with its specially constructed scenery and long preparation, was tremendous. And Maude Adams planned and carried through the entire proceeding. “This,” said one perhaps over-enthusiastic spectator, “is the biggest thing ever undertaken by any woman, except the one she is representing.” And through it all Miss Adams was playing the Maid, even to leading, on a great white charger, the troops of France in the battle charge. The spectacular effects—the storm scene, the battle scene, the scene of the coronation—were vastly impressive, though the petite figure and delicate art of the principal actress were often lost in the largeness of her surroundings.
Maude Adams and James M. Barrie seem to have been, artistically, born for each other. At any rate, it is in his plays—The Little Minister, Quality Street, Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows,—that she has deservedly won her fame. The latest in the list is The Legend of Leonora, in which she has forsaken Chanticler’s feathers and Peter Pan’s breeches once more to don petticoats. It brings Miss Adams back to a doting public in a part that gives rein to her old time ability as a light comédienne. That a portion of this public is more or less shocked to see its beloved Maude Adams playing the part of a murderess—even though Leonora and her crime are amiable unrealities—indicates the strongly personal element in the popularity of the actress.[211]