"William Gillette portentously flicked the ashes from his cigar"

If you ask me—and we'll assume that you have asked me—what is responsible for this sort of an achievement, I shall answer "self." I don't mean personality. I mean that, whether he wishes it or not, what "gets over" isn't so often what a man thinks or desires, but what he is. The same thing is true of painters and sculptors and novelists—"For," said Walter Bagehot, "we know that authors don't keep tame steam engines to write their books"—and how much more likely is it to be true of the artist who is himself the expression of his art. In the footlight trough of a burlesque theater in the Bowery, invisible to the audience but staring the performers in the face, is the legend: "Smile, ladies, smile!" Yet these ladies, thus, perpetually reminded, never spread the contagion of merriment and good humor for which a Puritan community would have quarantined Blanche Ring. Don't tell me Miss Ring is an artist. She isn't, but she's jolly!

The board of governors, or the house committee, or whatever it is that directs the destinies of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau isn't far wrong, if, as is reported, it insists upon purity in its Madonna and beneficence in its Man of Sorrows. Imagine a woman of notoriously evil life, or even of evil life that wasn't notorious, impersonating Sister Beatrice in the marvelous miracle play of Maeterlinck's. A gentleman who had driven four wives—tandem—to death or the divorce court would have been an offense as Manson in "The Servant in the House." Mr. Forbes-Robertson is an admirable artist, but it was his spirituality, his asceticism that "got over" in his delightful portrayal of The "Third Floor Back". Certainly, it isn't the frankness of lines, verbal or anatomical, that makes the difference between a musical comedy and a salacious "girl show." It's the intention; the character of producer and produced.

"Robert Loraine isn't a good actor," William A. Brady said to me once, "but he's sure to be a popular star, because of the vigor, the virility, the fresh young manhood, the breath of outdoors that he sends over the footlights." Consider the lilies in the cheeks of Billie Burke, and then, if you can tear yourself away from that floricultural exhibition, consider the box-office value of the youth that spills itself from the lips of Wallace Eddinger and Douglas Fairbanks. All the genius of Mrs. Fiske couldn't make an audience believe in her motherhood in "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch"—"I wouldn't trust her with a baby of mine," whispered a woman in the first-night audience at the Manhattan—but how we felt the maternalism of Jennie Eustace in "The Witching Hour," and, in another way, of Jessie Millward in "The Hypocrites." Hedwig Reicher is a capital actress, but she is also a self-reliant woman, and her skill couldn't win sympathy for her supposed helplessness in "The Next of Kin."

Two years ago I was trying terribly to make prospective audiences sense the pitiful plight of poor little Anna Victoria in "Such a Little Queen." I wrote a dozen lines as to the discomfort of starvation, the inconvenience of being put into the street. They were things that I thought, and then I remembered that, when I came to New York with nothing but my "cheek" a woman might say under the circumstances, I and two dollars in money, I used to look out of the windows—the window—of my top-story room and think: "In all this great city there isn't a human being who cares whether I live or die." These very words I put into the mouth of Anna Victoria, and, of all my fine speeches, that was the only one that really "got over."

It "got over" because it was true, and because, whatever else truth may be—has any one ever satisfactorily answered Pontius Pilate?—it is the best bullet one can shoot across the footlights. Vicarious experience sometimes does the trick, but only for persons of highly developed mimetic faculty. I remember a woman in a play who was supposed to receive her death blow with an "Oh, my God!" She was particularly requested not to scream it, or to groan it, or to do anything else conventional with it. It was to be a helpless "Oh, my God!", a hopeless "Oh, my God!", an "Oh, my God!" that sounded like the thud of a hammer at the heart. One night she got the tone. "How?" we asked. "I heard a woman say it in the street. An ambulance surgeon had told her her baby was dead."

The first principle of "getting it over," then, is being, feeling, believing. It is a principle that draws interest. Believing is very important. Do you think John Mason could have held his audience through the episode under the electrolier in "The Witching Hour" if he hadn't believed in it? I don't. Perriton Carlyle, in "The Little Gray Lady," made a mistake. It was a bad mistake, composed chiefly of a hundred dollars that didn't belong to him. I never knew any one in my life who hadn't stolen something sometime, and many of my friends are pretty respectable now. I believed that Carlyle's foot had slipped, and that, in spite of the accident, he might walk straight the rest of his days. I couldn't get an actor to believe it. Edgar Selwyn didn't, and Eugene Ormonde didn't, and, while they played the part, nobody did. John Albaugh, Jr., an actor inferior to both of them, felt sure of the inherent goodness of Carlyle, and so made possible the success of a piece that could not have succeeded without universal sympathy for its hero.

Well, we've ridden a long way astride of a hobby. Let's get back, and admit that we like sugar on our strawberries, which is to say art with our nature. For, after all, a generous admixture of skill is required in the expression of instinct, just as the peach-bloomiest complexion, displayed in the high light of the theater, must have rouge upon it to seem what it really is. Every stage manager knows the genuine society girl who is engaged to lend verisimilitude to a drawing-room drama, and who, at rehearsals, regards her teacup as though it were some strange and savage animal.

Edwin Booth's Othello was the triumph of an artist. He made audiences forget that his embodiment of the Moor was a thin-chested, undersized student of sensitive face and dreamy eyes. Charles Kean's first appearance in London was as Macbeth, and his Lady Macbeth, a great woman in both senses of the word, refused to play opposite a leading man who "looked like a half-grown boy." Afterwards, she swore that he grew during the performance. Salvini drawing tears from an audience ignorant of his tongue by counting from one to an hundred; Bernhardt scolding an actor in the death tones of Camille; Margaret Anglin repeating "Poor little ice-cream soda" until her hearers broke down sobbing—these are examples of pure artistry, of "getting over" impressions without even a thought behind them. No one who knows the first thing about the theater can underrate, be it never so slightly, the value of training, of experience; the effectiveness of carefully-thought-out "business", of inflection, of nuance, of pitch, of rhythm, of all the things that require years of study, labor, and perseverance.

Tully Marshall, whose Hannock in "The City" was the finest, and seemed the most inspired, acting of last season, tells me that he [Pg 281]
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[Pg 283]worked out, almost mechanically, every thrill in his big scene at the end of Act III. Mr. Marshall made so convincing the degeneracy, the besottedness of the character that I have heard laymen insist he must be a drug fiend. Yet this actor knows exactly how he produced his effects. Ethel Barrymore, on the other hand, knew only that she had striven for years, and had never quite felt herself "go smashing past the footlights and into the brains of her auditors."