LAWRENCE BARRETT AS CAIUS CASSIUS.
IN “JULIUS CAESAR”
“If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed;
If not, ’tis true this parting was well made!”
—Act V. sc. 1
From a steel engraving.
Author’s Collection.
manager, Alexander Henderson, and I remember her as a female at whom it was easily possible to gaze without blinking. Montgomery never married her. Walter Montgomery (Richard Tomlinson, 1827-1871: Montgomery was his mother’s name) married an actress called Winnetta Montague. Her real name was Laleah Burpré Bigelow. She had been the wife of a Boston gentleman, Arnold W. Taylor. Montgomery met her on the stage at the Boston Theatre. She was attracted by him, followed him to England, and captured him. Their marriage occurred on August 30, 1871, and on September 2, in a lodging in Stafford Street, Bond Street, London, he committed suicide, by shooting, and he was buried in Brompton Cemetery. Winnetta Montague returned to America, resumed acting, allied herself with an Irish comedian named James M. Ward, died in New York, in abject poverty, in 1877, and was buried by charitable members of the dramatic profession.
The excellent and famous personation of Fagin which was shown throughout our country by J. W. Wallack, the Younger, is ascribed by Belasco to “Lester’s father,” J. W. Wallack, the Elder, who was “Jim” Wallack’s uncle, and by whom the part was never played. The movable stage introduced at the Madison Square Theatre in 1879 is designated “an innovation” invented by Steele Mackaye, whereas, in fact, it was a variant of the movable stage scheme introduced at Booth’s Theatre, in 1869, by Edwin Booth.
“Looking over theatrical history,” Belasco exclaims, “has it ever occurred to you how many players have based their fame on just one rôle?—Salvini as Othello, Irving as Mathias, in “The Bells”; Booth as Hamlet, Raymond as Mulberry Sellers, Sothern as Dundreary, Emmet as Fritz, Jefferson as Rip, Mayo as Davy Crockett, Chanfrau as Kit?... Most of these men struggled a lifetime and gained recognition as creditable actors. Then, suddenly, they struck a particular part, a sort of entertainment, a combination of all the excellent things they had done throughout their lives but never before had concentrated on one rôle. And there you are! Any other actor might have become just as famous if Fate had thrown the part first in his way. I have seen three Rips,—that of Jefferson, that of Robert McWade, and finally that of James A. Herne. This last was a wonderful characterization, with all the softness and pathos of the part. I was a Dwarf, to Herne’s Rip, in the Maguire’s Opera House days. But Fate chose to thrust forward Jefferson as the only Rip that ever was or ever could be. I happen to know better. Jefferson was never the Dutchman; he was the Yankee personating the Dutchman. But James A. Herne’s Rip was the real thing.... These actors of one part are like the favored children of heaven; they are handed something on a golden platter, already created by the author. It is to the author, the director, the stage manager, that the true credit of the creation belongs. Jefferson did not really create Rip; through a certain undeniable art of his he simply put into visible form what Washington Irving in the story suggested and Dion Boucicault so cleverly fitted to his personality for the stage; he utilized every bit of the descriptive business of the tale.”
Seldom has so much error and injustice been packed into so small a space! It is true that, in many instances, individual actors have abundantly prospered by the long-continued repetition of a single performance: this fact, I remember, was impatiently noticed many years ago by Don Piatt, who testily expressed in a Washington newspaper an ardent wish that old Rip Van Winkle and old Fanchon would get married and both retire. It is not because the individual actor finds “a particular part, a sort of entertainment, a combination of all the excellent things” he has done throughout his life, that he often becomes most famous in one part; it is because, in every art, the artist’s range of supreme merit is, comparatively, narrow; no matter how well he can do fifty things, he can, as a rule, do one thing best of all,—that thing being always one for which, whether he happens to like it or not, he possesses a peculiar capacity, one with which he possesses a close artistic and physical affinity, so that, in the doing of it, he can make an ampler and more effective display of his talents than he can make in any other way; and also because the public (with a generally sound instinctive preference for seeing an actor in the thing which he can do best) insists on seeing him in it and will not go in large numbers to see him in anything else.