“But if any of us ever had doubts concerning the healthfully hilarious influence exerted by Mr. Daly’s benignity upon a great comedy company we have only to glance at Miss Rehan and be converted. We have had that baby pout of hers in opera and in Shakespeare, that imperious, uplifted nose of hers in Jenny O’Jones and Helena, and as the snows of various cycles descend on the heads of her worshipers the musical purr of the Rehan still sings the third sweet song of seven. And when she smiles, the light of pearls and rubies creeps out and illumines the nooks that the calcium cannot penetrate.
“So why should not Mr. Daly live in a padded room and manage the electric buttons that blush all this youth and divine color across a befogged community? He is entitled to padded rooms, bulldogs and cold hands. If he does nothing for the next forty years but keep the crack of doom out of Rehan’s purr he will have earned the right to be made Sheriff of New York County.”
[141] The list of parts played by Miss Rehan before she began the acquirement of her more famous repertoire cannot, and need not, be made complete here. Some of them were: Isabelle in Wives; Cherry Monogram in The Way We Live; Donna Antonina in The Royal Middy; Psyche in Cinderella at School; Muttra in Xanina; Selina in Needles and Pins; Phronie in Dollars and Sense; Thisbe in Quits; Tekla in The Passing Regiment; Tony and Jenny O’Jones in Red Letter Nights; Barbee in Our English Friend; Aphra in The Wooden Spoon; Floss in Seven-Twenty-Eight; Nancy Brusher in Nancy and Company, and Etna in The Great Unknown.
The more important parts played by Miss Rehan during her twenty years with Mr. Daly were: Baroness Vera in The Last Word; Tilburina in The Critic; Oriana in The Inconstant; Julia in The Hunchback; Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal; Miss Hayden in The Relapse; Pierrot; The Princess in Love’s Labours Lost; Valentine Osprey in The Railroad of Love; Mrs. Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor; Peggy Thrift in The Country Girl; Odette in Odette; Rose in The Prayer; Annis Austin in Love on Crutches; Doris in An International Match; Thisbe in A Night Off; Dina in A Priceless Paragon; Mrs. Jassamine in A Test Case; Hippolyta in She Would and She Would Not; Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew; Rosalind in As You Like It; Viola in Twelfth Night; Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing; Letitia Hardy in The Belle’s Stratagem; Sylvia (and Captain Pinch) in The Recruiting Officer; Xantippe in La Femme de Socrate; Kate Verity in The Squire.
[142] “Ada Rehan is of a superior race of women. She can be enormously interesting simply standing looking out of a window, her back to the audience, immobile, but with a ‘calmness’ that sends off vibrations that stir the pulses very curiously, and make her always the magnet, the center. She pauses, but it is the pause of a fine balance of strong feelings. She is all alive; she whirls round and comes into the action with a bold ringing stroke that has been adjudged to perfection. She can stride—not like a man, for she is always a fine woman—but like the daughter of Fingal, the sister of Ossian. She can bang a door like a chord of martial music. She can precipitate herself headlong into a room, and seizing her opponent or her lover, for she is equal to all occasions, at the critical wavering movement, sweep in with a wrestler’s power and lift him metaphorically helpless off his feet. Yet in all these displays Rehan is never violent in a narrow way, or streaky, or hard, or wiry.... The beauty of repose is delightful in her, the calm musing meditation, and the deep harmonious passion of devotion; so also is the quick salient swerve of emotion wherein the soul is suddenly shaken to its depths by love, by fear, by admiration ... we find life and flesh and blood throughout, and everywhere the fire of the soul that animates it.” Arthur Lynch, in Human Documents, London, 1896.
[143] “Playing Katherine brought me much satisfaction, but a very bad reputation for temper,” she once said. “I have often been amused at seeing the effect that a first performance of the ‘Shrew’ in a strange place produced on the employers of the stage. They shunned me as something actually to be feared. During a long run I have heard it said that I hated my Petruchio. I looked upon this as a compliment.”
[144] For an enlightening exposition of Miss Rehan’s acting in her various rôles see his The Wallet of Time, Vol. II.
[145] On a later visit of the Daly company to London, Mr. Archer chewed and swallowed these words, thus: “‘Crude and bouncing.’ Ye gods! this of the swan-like Valentine Osprey of The Railroad of Love and the divine Katherine of The Taming of the Shrew! True, it is six years since these lines were written, and Miss Rehan’s art may—nay, must—have ripened in the interval. I try to persuade myself that I may not have been so far wrong after all, but it won’t do.... There must have been beauties in the performance of six years ago to which I was inexcusably blind.”
[146] In spite of Clement Scott’s praise: “Acting of this kind, so beneath the surface, so distinctly opposed to the commonplace, and so eloquent with finest touches of woman’s nature, we do not believe has been seen since the death of Aimée Desclée.”
[147] October 30, 1891.