“She knows,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “that she can make her face bewitching—and she knows also that her hair is bewitching without being so made. And she chooses that the world at large shall know it, too.”
She has will-power, has Mary Magdalene. It is her will, her strength, her concentration of all her power to herself that makes her thus bewitching—and that seduces the brains of those who sit watching her as she moves upon the stage.
She controls all her mental and physical features with metallic precision—except her hair, and that she leaves uncontrolled to do its own work. It does its work well.
She has cultivated that mobileness of her lips, probably with hard work and infinite patience—and she makes them damp and brilliant with rouge. She rubs the soft, thick skin of her face with layers of grease. She loads her two white arms with limitless powder. And the two childish eyes are exceeding heavy-laden as to lid and lash with black crayon. One experiences a revulsion as one contemplates them through a glass. Her voice in the days of her youth had drilled into it the power to thrill and vibrate, and to become exquisitely tender upon occasion, and now it does the bidding of its owner with docility and skill. Since its owner has forcefulness and a power of selfish concentration, the voice is mostly magnetic and cold and strong. It is magnetic and cold and strong and contemptuous when its owner says, “My curse upon you!” When its owner’s eyes do hunger and thirst after righteousness the voice brings a miserable, anguished feeling to the throats of those who sit listening. Every emotion that the voice betrays is transmitted to the seduced brains of those who sit listening. The red-haired woman works her audience up to some torturing pitches—the while herself blandly and cold-bloodedly earning an honest livelihood by the sweat of her brow.
Forsooth, it’s always so.
If all the red-haired woman’s scorn and anguish were real, the audience would sit unmoved. If the red-haired woman’s scorn and anguish were real it would strike inward—instead of outward toward the audience—and the audience would not know. If the red-haired woman’s scorn and anguish were real, it would not seem real and would be very uninteresting. And that very likely is the reason why the scorn and anguish of other red-haired women—and of black-haired, and brown-haired, and yellow-haired, and gray-haired, and pale-haired women, who are not working on the stage—is so uninteresting and ineffectual. It is real, and they can not act it out, and so it doesn’t seem real—and you don’t have to pay money to see it done.
To make it seem real they must need go at it cold-bloodedly, and work it up, and charge you a round price for it.
Mary Magdalene isn’t here to do this, but Mrs. Fiske takes her place and does it for her.
She does it exquisitely well.