Again, playwriting and acting, hand in hand, have become more realistic, more subtle, more psychological; there are far fewer opportunities for broad effects than in the old days, there is far less of the intense concentration of playwright and audience on a single character and a single actor or actress. It is probable that even if a Bernhardt or a Duse or a Cushman should spring up in our midst she would find effective physical and psychological barriers to an ascension to starship as those illustrious women have known it.
Very briefly indicated, these are some of the phases of the phenomenon that may easily be mistaken by the cherisher of traditions as the passing of first-rate acting. Though it is different in tone and method, and leads less often to extreme heights of public notice, acting to-day succeeds as well in its adaptation to the newer ideal of the primacy of the play as did the older school in the exaltation of the actor.
It is a rather odd circumstance that while the English stage is rich in its actors and comparatively scantily supplied with excellent actresses, the reverse is true in America, so far as concerns the younger generation. Our civilization seems to breed actresses thickly at home, and to entice them from abroad. When Edward Sothern, Otis Skinner, David Warfield, Henry Miller, Robert Mantell, John Drew, William Gillette and even Mr. Hackett, Mr. Faversham and Mr. Daly shall have retired from the stage, who is to help Ernest Glendinning and the imported Mr. Lou-Tellegen maintain the honors of their sex? But when Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams shall have followed Julia Marlowe into retirement, there still will be, even if Ethel Barrymore and Margaret Anglin should regrettably have left the stage, a considerable group of still younger actresses, none of whom may ever achieve stardom as it was once practiced, but each of whom fits with admirable ability into the newer order of things.
Better than almost any one else, Miss Barrymore represents the dangers of the star system. The daughter of one of America’s best actors, Maurice Barrymore,[213] and the niece of another, John Drew, she was a marked victim from the beginning. Charles Frohman made her a star in 1900, when she was twenty-one. She had had a scant half dozen years of training in her uncle’s company in America and in Henry Irving’s company in England, and had not played more than a dozen parts in all. She was made a star simply on the strength of a pleasing personality, intelligence, a pretty face, and a working grasp of stage behavior.
During the next decade, playing in pieces like Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Cousin Kate, and Sunday, she attracted and held a loyal public that liked to see her personality exploited in those comparatively insignificant plays, just as adoring theatregoers throng today to see Billie Burke and Marie Doro, whatever the slenderness and frothiness of the play. But let Miss Barrymore, in an effort to be a real actress, try her hand at submerging herself in an un-Barrymorelike character, in a play of any serious interest, and that adoring public was bewildered and disappointed and remained away from the theatre. Such are the fruits of thinking of the theatre in terms of the actor.
But Miss Barrymore had it in her to be a real actress. Once in a while, prompted by her ambition, she would do something that her fond followers would think was queer. Thus, during this decade, from 1900 to 1910, in the midst of her prosperous playing of popular pieces, she acted at one time or another Carrots, a one-act play from the French in which she gave a pathetic picture of the boy-hero; then, at a single plunge, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; then Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire, a play that Barrie wrote for Ellen Terry, and in which Miss Barrymore, to the consternation of her peculiar public, appeared as a gray-haired matron; and finally The Silver Box, an unrelievedly serious and honest play by Galsworthy, in which she descended to the depths by acting an ordinary scrub-woman.
Not all of these did Miss Barrymore play signally well; her starship, limiting her to a play or two per year, had simply not afforded her the training to become the actress she has since shown herself to be. But in these brief experiments at least she was feeling her way out of the entanglements of theatrical pettiness.
When Miss Barrymore, in January, 1910, appeared in Pinero’s Mid-Channel, she had married and become a mother. Whether the admirers of her former girlish charm and slenderness liked it or not, she was now inevitably a deeper-natured and more mature woman and, consequently, capable of deeper and better acting. The fact was speedily proved in Mid-Channel. The play is a grim tragedy of English middle-class life, in which a fine-natured wife, after a gradual course of unhappy, deteriorating life with a selfish and sensual husband, ends her problems with suicide;—surely not one of the pretty Barrymore parts. “There will be hosts of the ‘Barrymore public,’ no doubt, who will feel that in Mid-Channel they cannot laugh with her,” wrote Walter Prichard Eaton. “But to some more thoughtful men and women it is a source of rare satisfaction that at last the promise of that lovely voice and expressive face has been fulfilled, and you can weep with her, suffer with her, understand through the spell of her acting a little better the sorrows and perplexities of our frail humanity. In short, Miss Barrymore has become an actress.... Her many admirers, gathered in force, who evidently knew more about her than they cared about Pinero, were disposed to laugh in the first act during the scenes of her bickerings. But never after that did she allow them to suppose for an instant that they were not watching a serious and passionate study of a woman’s tragedy.”
After Mid-Channel, Miss Barrymore had to be considered as one of the artists of our stage, if she and her managers could only agree to let her remain so. She revived Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire, and played it with far more feeling and a more convincing sense of maternity than she had shown before; she has played the insurgent wife in Barrie’s one-act masterpiece, The Twelve-Pound-Look, with a sure-handed mastery of the ironic and subtle that belongs only to a finished actress; she has, most recently of all, acted Madame Okraska, in the dramatization of Tante, with a keenness of insight into character and a finesse that showed again how far she had traveled since the days of Captain Jinks. Let us hope that henceforth Miss Barrymore’s unquestioned talent will not be allowed to expend itself on unworthy material.
Next to Mrs. Fiske, the leading actress of our contemporary stage is undoubtedly Margaret Anglin.[214] Her training has had a wider range, and her artistry a more varied accomplishment, than those of any other actress on our stage. Born in Canada of a non-theatrical family, she came to New York to study. She is one of our few brilliant actresses who have come to the stage by way of the dramatic schools. In 1894, when she was eighteen, she was Madeline West in Charles Frohman’s production of Shenandoah. When she was twenty she was playing Ophelia and Virginia in James O’Neill’s company, and from that day to this she has been one of America’s dependable and versatile stage artists.