This personal element has been introduced into the Maude Adams worship solely across the footlights. That is to say, the public knows next to nothing of her as a human being except as her personality is poured into and out of her work. Out of a native shyness as well as out of a desire to avoid publicity except as an actress, she carries her self-effacement off the stage to the last degree. She is never met at social gatherings, she has never addressed meetings or written magazine articles; she is seldom seen on the streets or driving in the park, and the occasions on which she has, in many years, gone to any theatre as one of the audience could be numbered on one’s fingers. She dresses with the utmost quietness and with small regard to current styles.
But her shrinking from “the general” is, one need hardly say, without trace of a sour attitude toward the world. She is said to be chary of personal friendships, but those who know her best speak glowingly of her bountiful kindness. She has, of course, made a great deal of money. A considerable share of it has gone, unostentatiously, to the relief of the needy. She is said to have a list of pensioners:—old, destitute players, or acquaintances of her early life.[212]
Miss Adams has always taken a keen interest in the mechanical side of the theatre. More than most actresses she knows the intricacies and the artistry of scenery and lighting, and has much to say of them when she is to appear in a new part. She has, indeed, her own office in the Empire Theatre building and there conducts the many details of organizing a production. In adoring a sweet and fragile woman her admirers are likely to forget that Maude Adams is a thoroughly trained woman of the theatre, of tried executive ability.
The sweetness and simplicity of Maude Adams herself and of her acting comes in part, one is tempted to think, from her very real love of nature. She has a New York home—and a quiet retreat it is—but her real abiding place, when her work permits, is at Sandygarth Farm on Long Island, where she owns what may fairly be called an estate. She has there her stables, her kennels, her fields under cultivation, her woods; and she knows the details of farming only less well than the secrets of stagecraft. She has, too, a bungalow in the Catskills. She is fond of riding and of long walks in the country. Books form an inevitable furnishing in all three houses. She has given herself a good schooling in French, and she is on more than speaking terms with the philosophers and poets. She likes foreign travel, and has made several trips to Europe and the near East. She plays well the piano and the harp and when opportunity offers she goes to symphony concerts. Altogether she is a serious-minded devotee of the essential, the beautiful and the simple. She is of course aware of her own great popularity. But the feeling it inspires in her is said by her friends to be one of humility and wonder. And whatever her rank as an artist, she has sent across the footlights her simplicity, her sense of sweetness and light, to be a beneficent influence. Her picture, cut from a magazine and pinned to the wall of a ranch house in the far West, or of a tenement in the slums of an Eastern city, is a symbol of something good added to American life.
SOME AMERICAN ACTRESSES OF TODAY
“There is no great acting now,” the veteran theatregoer will tell you. “The day of the stars has passed.” He who remembers vividly Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth and Madame Janauschek feels that times have changed indeed. And he is quite right. But sometimes he is sure, with Mr. Winter, that they have changed altogether for the worse. And there he is wrong. If it seems true that with the passing from our stage of Madame Modjeska, Miss Rehan and Miss Marlowe the robes of high priestess of our stage, to whom all the people delight to burn incense, grace alone the slender form of Miss Maude Adams, that fact does not necessarily argue a lack of genius in the artists that remain. We are, on the whole fortunately, abolishing the rank of high priestess.
All the women, with one or two exceptions, who are the subjects of the preceding chapters have been out-and-out exponents of the star system. It is an undesirable system, which is not essential to the theatre and which is only a passing phase, though it has lasted a matter of centuries, and though we owe to it many names that make illustrious the annals of the drama. It is undesirable because it subordinates the play, which first and last should be “the thing,” to the interpreter of the play, because it exercises a vicious influence on playwrights who write to clothe personalities rather than their own ideas, and an equally vicious influence on actors who think of plays primarily as opportunities for histrionic exploits. “But,” some one says, “did not Shakespeare himself write plays that are obviously for stars?” Well, he certainly wrote plays upon which starship has battened. Like any other good plays, however, Shakespeare’s plays are even better when the starship, as such, is left out, as any one will testify who has seen them acted without the extraneous element that is symbolized by enormous type on the play-bill.
To think of the theatre first of all in terms of actors and actresses is, however, natural enough. It is a popular way of looking at the theatre, and it would be idle to expect its total disappearance. And it would be ungrateful. Actors and actresses are public servants and benefactors, to whom recognition and praise are due. But recognition is one thing; starship, with all its adulations,—Bernhardtism,—is another. And there are good reasons for thinking that other aspects of the theatre are also becoming popular.
The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. As an incident in that liberation, the star system is on its way, not to destruction, for the actor of genius will always remain a compelling figure, but at least to broad modification. Starless casts and repertory companies have been plentiful enough to indicate the beginnings of a strong, new current.