Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

Always at this time of year there is an influx of foreign actresses into London. They come; they are seen; but they never conquer. They must be awfully tired of it, for history has such a sad way of repeating itself. This year, however, one French actress has made a good deal of a stir, but under such distinctly new conditions that the stir is quite intelligible. This young woman, Madame Simone Le Bargy, of whom I wrote you last year when I reviewed “Le Retour de Jerusalem” from Paris, was brought to London by George Alexander, the actor-manager of the St. James Theater, not for a season “on her own,” but as his leading lady, and in English, too!

A French actress in English! Could anything be more unusual? Sarah Bernhardt, who has been cavorting around the English-speaking world for portentous yet vulgar fractions of a century, never managed to acquire even a suspicion of English; Rêjane, who has done London and New York pretty thoroughly, would have an artistic fit at the idea of juggling with English, at her time of life; Jane Hading, Jeanne Granier and others are quite willing to play anywhere, but it must be in French.

Madame Simone Le Bargy played the leading rôle in “The Man of the Moment,” at the St. James Theater, and was duly and unselfishly boomed by Mr. George Alexander, as “of the Gymnase Théâtre, Paris. Her first appearance in England.” The piece was an adaptation, by Harry Melvill, of “L’Adversaire,” by Alfred Capus and Emmanuel Arène. The English actor-manager was a wise man in his London generation. He had a weak play, most indifferently adapted, but he had Le Bargy, and for a while she caught the town.

While English leading ladies must have fumed at Alexander’s neglect of “home talent,” Madame Le Bargy showed that it is quite possible not only to play with grace and facility in a foreign language, but actually to prove more intelligible than a good many London actresses who flatter themselves that they speak good English. Madame Le Bargy’s English was an absolute revelation. Naturally it had an accent – a delightful one – and Paris was stamped on everything she said, but compared with Mrs. Fiske in New York, or Miss Ashwell in London, Madame Le Bargy’s diction was wonderful. Every word she uttered was intelligible. She rattled off various speeches almost as quickly as she might have done in French, but never once did their meaning miscarry. I’ve seen all sorts of foreign actresses waylay the English language – Modjeska and Janauschek being in the list – but seldom have such results as those given by this little, thin, nervous Frenchwoman been attained.

Oddly enough, it is said that Madame Le Bargy had never been in London before, and that she had acquired English in France. In which case, I would suggest that half a dozen popular New York actresses – I won’t mention names – should sail for France at an early date, and see if they could learn English there. It is as difficult to acquire in London as it is in New York.

“The Man of the Moment” was saved from rapid extinction by the little Gymnase actress. It had four acts, through two of which you could have slept comfortably while various alleged French characters sat round drawing rooms and talked endlessly about nothing whatsoever. Then, in the third act, you learned that Marianne Darlay, the wife of Maurice, had been lured to infidelity by a dark gentleman named Langlade. As she still loved her husband, and didn’t love Langlade, this little escapade failed entirely to interest. The “great scene” occurred when the wife gave herself away to the husband, and the play ended with a vista of divorce. Divorce, in real life, may be a serenely satisfactory settlement of domestic wrangles, but on the stage its unromantic practicality has not yet succeeded in appealing, except in farce. “The Man of the Moment” had no dramatic action, and no movement of any sort. You were unable to sympathize with the woman, or to feel much interest in the man. In fact, “The Man of the Moment” must have been so-called because he had none.

Capus in French is always exhilarating. The “chatter” is refreshing and genuinely amusing, but translated into English, it seemed extremely dull. Mr. Melvill did poor Capus into the sort of language that is encountered in burlesque at little Mr. Weber’s music hall. The result was fatal. Yet, in addition to Madame Le Bargy’s very excellent work, there was George Alexander, whose efforts were most praiseworthy. He seemed perfectly satisfied to take what was assuredly second place in the cast. “The Man of the Moment” was beautifully put on, as is every production at the St. James Theater. George Alexander is one of the few London actors who have not been to the United States within the last decade – in fact, he has never been, except as a member of Irving’s forces, many years ago – and the abstinence seems to agree with him. He does more, and he does it more luxuriously, than the traveling English actor whom we have seen so often. Perhaps it is true, after all, that a rolling stone gathers no moss – though I should hate to believe that there could possibly be anything in a popular proverb.

While one little foreign actress was capturing London by her clever manipulation of London’s language, others were not as happy. Eleanora Duse’s season at the Messrs. Shubert’s new Waldorf Theater, in the new street called Aldwych, on the Strand, must have been very discouraging to the haughty lady herself. In fact, it is asserted that she will never again appear in England. Half-filled houses are something that must be distressing to the “artistic temperament,” and Duse played to a most elongated series of them. Few people seemed to know that she was in London. In New York we, in our occasionally provincial appreciation of an actress whom we are unable to understand – and probably because we can’t understand her – go into ecstasies over Duse, and pack the theater to overflowing. London is too sophisticated. Duse made no stir at all this time. Even the critics gave her but merely polite attention. Possibly in English she could charm the English-speaking world. But, save in the case of Madame Simone Le Bargy, nobody seems to think that worth while. Perhaps it isn’t.

As for the tireless Sarah – she gets on one’s nerves. After a brief season at the Coronet Theater, in Notting Hill, where she produced her own version of “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” and Victor Hugo’s “Angelo” – which fell flat as a pancake – Sarah rushed through the English provinces with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in their freak performance of “Pelleas and Melisande.” In a manufacturing town, like Birmingham, for instance, Maeterlinck, at advanced prices, seemed like some ghastly joke! Sarah visits England annually, in a veritable desperation of energy, but it is very seldom worth her while. This year she was less interesting than Madame Le Bargy; and the same may be said of Réjane.

I had not been in London very long before I found myself battling with the musical comedy whirlpool. It hedged me in; panic-stricken, I tried to get myself free. A dreadful sensation of helplessness overcame me. In a condition of numbed protest, I was carried along with the torrent, and it was a long time before I finally emerged. My system being impoverished and quite run down by a strenuous musical-comedy dose in New York, I was not in the state of mind to render the continued ordeal endurable.

Yet a very estimable gentleman, Max Beerbohm, who is supposed to write fantasy, whimsicality or oddity, has undertaken to champion musical comedy. The championship of “Max,” however, is a sort of “swan song” for musical comedy. He says: “Were musical comedy other than it is, the highest intellects in the land would be deprived of an incomparable safety valve. And what would become of that ‘fifty millions – mostly fools’ – who find in musical comedy an art-form conducted precisely on the level of their understanding? I have no sympathy at all with the growls so constantly emitted by professional critics of this art-form. Of course musical comedy might be made a vehicle for keen satire, for delicate humor, for gracious lyricism, and what not. But I prefer that it should remain as it is. Let us continue to cry aloud for a serious drama, by all means, but long live mere silliness in mere entertainment.”

One could almost regret that this writer had no “job” in New York City as a “press agent.” He writes with such verve on topics of which he is avowedly ignorant, for at the beginning of his defense, he says: “Nor do I ever see a musical comedy of my own accord.” That is it. That is precisely it. It is so easy to speak of an “art-form,” or an “incomparable safety valve,” when you’d run a mile or jump into anything to avoid it.

There are four musical-comedy productions in London that a sheer sense of duty compelled me to see. Such a list! It was unescapable. No self-deception or hypocrisy could possibly excuse a traveling critic from sampling this quartet. One can always elude a solitary performance, for it proves nothing and makes no point. But four of a kind at one fell swoop! Surely, if four West End theaters can devote themselves irrevocably to this “art-form,” one has no right to balk, or to look the other way. The four affairs in question are “The Little Michus,” at Daly’s, “Lady Madcap,” at the Prince of Wales’, “The Spring-Chicken,” at the Gaiety, and “The Catch of the Season,” at the Vaudeville. Three of them are scheduled for production in New York, but I should say that one only has a fighting chance, and that “The Catch of the Season.”

It had the usual array of sponsor-meddlers – two for the pieces, one for the lyrics, two for the music; and its aim is higher than that of the conventional brand, for it is a modernization of the Cinderella story – a story that has never shown any sign of age, and probably never will. Nobody has tried to do anything clever with Cinderella. There is no satire, very little humor and nothing in the least skittish. It is just pretty, and at this Vaudeville Theater it is Miss Ellaline Terriss, London’s sample Christmas card beauty, who does the Cinderella act. It is not necessary to say very much more about “The Catch of the Season.” Its music is trivial, and its book is worse. But its specialties please, and one can sit through this little entertainment without that sense of degradation that the brand sometimes induces. That is a good deal. For New York many alterations will be made – I write in the future tense, though when these lines are read, they can be translated into the past – and I hope a happy one – new music will be introduced, and Miss Edna May placed in Ellaline Terriss’ dainty shoes.

Of “The Little Michus,” at Daly’s, and “The Spring Chicken,” at the Gaiety, I am scarcely able to write. Two weeks have elapsed since I saw them, and not a single impression of consequence remains. I remember that I was unutterably bored, but I can’t quite recall which was the duller performance of the two. At the time I compared them both with “The Cingalee,” the New York failure of which I correctly prophesied last summer. I should like to suggest that even in the musical-comedy line I am still able to scent novelty, whenever the slightest aroma occurs. It is the expectation of this that keeps me alive during a performance. Without that expectation I should honestly stay away, for I have arrived at a stage when I am not courting martyrdom.

The George Edwardes shows have of late displayed a marked tendency to a sort of stupefying monotony. Either the fear of risking a new idea, or the hope that the old ones have not become too abjectly ancient, has kept them in the one groove. It is quite remarkable when you come to think of it. Even the supply of people has comparatively failed. The Gaiety girls have married – some of them have even taken unto themselves peers – and a new stock has neglected to materialize. In “The Little Michus,” which is supposed to detail the experiences of two young girls who look precisely alike, but who have been changed at birth, these two prominent rôles were intrusted to Adrienne Augarde and Mabel Green – the latter absolutely unknown. In “The Spring Chicken,” which, I may add, is just as calamitous as its title, it was Miss Gertie Millar who had to uphold the traditions of the Gaiety. A pretty girl, a bright little actress and a fairly melodious warbler is Miss Millar, but George Edwardes used to do better than this.

“Lady Madcap” was the best of the three George Edwardes shows in London. Probably that is why it has been left untouched by the American manager. I do not say that any of these entertainments are worth exporting. To trot such drivel across the Atlantic Ocean, while the United States still has its lunatic asylums with numbers of patients ready and willing to do just such work, seems to me like the sorriest sort of jest. Yet “The Catch of the Season” and “Lady Madcap” have their good points.

What is possibly the best song in London this season occurs in “Lady Madcap.” It is sung by Maurice Farkoa, and is called “I Love You in Velvet.” It has pretty music, clever words and much “catchiness,” and it is so admirably and artistically sung that it redeemed the musical comedy itself, and made it quite endurable.

The star of the performance is J. P. Huntley, a prime London favorite and one who has been very well received in New York. Huntley, like a good many other comedians, is far more useful for flavoring purposes than for a steady diet. There was such a dose of him in “Lady Madcap” that he grew to be a terrible bore. This young actor is to leave the George Edwardes forces and go to the Shubert Brothers, and I can’t help wondering which of the two parties will get tired first. I have my own ideas on the subject, but perhaps it would be advisable not to express them.

So barren is this London season that I have not been able to formulate my plan of dealing with it – you may have guessed as much! There is nothing to wax enthusiastic over, and no one performance that remains, luminous, in the mind. At the New Theater – and isn’t that an absurd title for a playhouse, that, with its actors and audiences, is aging daily? – they are playing “Leah Kleschna,” which Mr. Frohman advertises in the New York manner by a catchline from Mr. Walkley’s criticism in the London Times: “It hits you bang in the eye” – or something equally pretty and graphic. I am not at all sure that it does anything of the sort. It is not looked upon as an epoch-maker, and it lacks the charm of oddity and mystery that was given to it in New York by Mrs. Fiske herself.

We all thought when we saw “Leah Kleschna” at the Manhattan Theater that Mrs. Fiske played a non-star part, and subordinated herself to the others. Let me tell you, however, most emphatically, after having seen “Leah Kleschna” twice in New York and once in London, that Mrs. Fiske herself is its mainstay. She is absolutely its very backbone. Without her, at the New Theater, the piece is but a gloomy melodrama, and as such it is received by the London public. Be quite sure of that. Of course the play itself is cheap, but it masquerades somewhat successfully under the guise of a study in criminology – and all that sort of thing. In New York Mrs. Fiske, by her eccentricities, and various little intellectualities that you recall when you see Miss Lena Ashwell’s tame and bloodless performance in London, helped the illusion. She never quite allowed you to believe that “Leah Kleschna” was outside of her own répertoire of peculiarities.

The play is extremely well acted in London by everybody but Miss Ashwell. She is a weak imitation of Mrs. Fiske’s many bad points – notably her indistinctness of diction. Probably Miss Ashwell never saw Mrs. Fiske in all her life, but Mr. Dion Boucicault, who staged the play in London, must have watched Mrs. Fiske attentively, and have given Miss Ashwell full particulars. At times it was quite ludicrous to listen to the English actress positively affecting the American actress’ most lamentable demerit. She bit up her words, emitted the fragments in a frenzied torrent, sank her voice at critical moments, and did all that Mrs. Fiske has been implored not to do.

Charles Warner, who played the father, threw himself successfully at the part, but forced us to recall his long continuous service in “Drink.” Occasionally Kleschna seemed to have “jim-jams,” and one could not dissociate Mr. Warner from his well-known, world-played performance. Herbert Waring played Raoul extremely well, but the Schram of William Devereaux is not to be compared with the capital interpretation given to the part by William B. Mack in New York. All that Mr. Frohman could do for “Leah Kleschna” he did, but the piece needed Mrs. Fiske. Without her it is of little importance – a sort of old Adelphi play in kid gloves.

A piece that seems to have eluded the “American invasion” is “Mr. Hopkinson,” which has been running for months at Wyndham’s Theater. It is the work of Mr. R. C. Carton, who was responsible, as you may remember, for “The Rich Mrs. Repton,” which ran for three nights or so in New York last season. Perhaps the “American invasion” remembered that, for if nothing succeeds like success, certainly nothing fails like failure.

“Mr. Hopkinson,” however, would scarcely be possible for American consumption. Its hero is a cockney cad, who would hardly be intelligible in New York. New York has its own brand of cad – a highly accentuated kind – and should not be blamed for shirking the notion of fathoming the motives of the English style of blackguard. Then the part of Hopkinson is played by Mr. James Welch, for whom it might have been built. I can imagine no other actor playing it, with the possible exception of Francis Wilson. The piece has simply hung onto the coat tails of little Mr. James Welch.

It is a farce filled with nasty types – all titled, of course. People who nauseate, if taken seriously, are used as the excuse for various farcical situations. Hopkinson himself, who is a rich “bounder,” becomes engaged to a pretty society girl, and on the eve of the wedding she elopes. The “hero” then marries a woman whom he has jilted, and who, in her turn, has blackmailed him. Nearly all the characters in the piece are of the decadent order. They are the sort that occur seriously in “The Walls of Jericho,” at the Garrick Theater. They are, perhaps, better there, but quite unnecessary anywhere, and even improper.

“Mr. Hopkinson” has puzzled a good many people who saw it. They have wondered why it ran so long, and what there was in the piece that held it up, so to speak. Its success was simply due to James Welch, a quaint, freakish little actor – a sort of Louie Freear in trousers. Many plays of the same slight artistic value have succeeded because one actor has seemed to give a new wrinkle in comedy to the public. “Mr. Hopkinson” without James Welch would be a singularly risky proposition – worse than “Leah Kleschna” without Mrs. Fiske. Evidently the “American invasion” agreed with me – which makes it pleasant for me, don’t you think?

FOR BOOK LOVERS

Archibald Lowery Sessions

Literary preferences of well known people. How characters and doings in real life are reflected in fiction. Robert Grant’s “The Orchid,” William J. Locke’s “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne.” The twenty-five best selling books of the month

THE public has passed a few pleasant summer hours in discussing, through the medium of various journals, what people like to read. Very interesting information comes to light regarding the sort of fiction preferred by different personalities, female chiefly, in days past and present. There seems to be no difficulty in getting hold of facts; indeed, it becomes apparently a sort of mania with some successful people to explain their own results by hunting up their early literary likes and dislikes. Perhaps stories have molded some of us more or less – in all conscience let us hope so – since we wander in such a wilderness of them.

But, really, the serious thing to be considered just now is not so much what we like to read as what we have to, if we want to be amused. For that which we write depends upon that which we are, of course, and we reap in fiction what we sow in society. Therefore, being rather commercial, rather frivolous and rather in search of new sensations, we get all our business, and small talk, and scandal back again, faithfully reproduced, from the book sellers’ counters, and must go all over it once more with as good a grace as may be.

If taste and idealism are to prevail over hard facts, somebody must see pretty strenuously to it, ere long. In the meantime we may as well settle down to a thoroughly American literary atmosphere, relieved here and there by bits of nebulous romancing which pass for idealistic production. We really don’t object. We love ourselves too well to want company. Anthony Trolloppe, and Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Oliphant, William Black and Thomas Hardy could introduce us to scores of pleasant English people, but their heroes and heroines belong to a different world altogether, and are laid on the shelf nowadays, probably never to be taken up by the mass of readers except as refreshing antiquities when American repetition finally palls on us. The best we can do for an occasional let-up is to hunt up odd people or places, now and then, and write them up. Let us hope the supply will remain inexhaustible, and that the batch of novels for this season may give us a view of life outside of prescribed limits.

“The Orchid,” by Robert Grant, Scribner’s, might be an authentic biography of a twentieth-century society woman, including a faithful delineation of her environment. It is not, strictly speaking, a study of character or society, but rather a photographic reproduction of people and conditions. In this fact is to be found the book’s only defect as a literary work. There is no weighing of motives or analysis of character; nothing but a plain recital of facts as they are found to exist.

Lydia Arnold, who marries for money, is divorced, and remarries for love, is cold-blooded and unscrupulous as many a social queen in real life; and her device for securing the means to support her position as the wife of her lover, revolting as it is to sensitive people, is not entirely unprecedented. It may be that the type to which she belongs is an extreme one, but the fact that she shocked her friends and associates indicates that they had not entirely outgrown their natural impulses rather than that her enormities are absolutely unknown.

We can understand the pessimism of Mrs. Andrew Cunningham when she exclaimed: “The only unpardonable sin in this country is to lose one’s money. Nothing else counts,” but the facts thus far do not justify it; there are some former leaders of society who may be supposed to wish that the generalization were true. They have not found it so.

“Wall Street” has a significance, not merely as the name of a famous thoroughfare, but as epitomizing the forces which produce the profoundest effects upon the industrial and even political and social life of America. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the activities which it represents should be resorted to for a supply of material for interesting stories.

The latest fiction on this subject is Edwin Lefevre’s book, “The Golden Flood,” published by McClure, Phillips & Co. The author, who has to his credit quite a list of short Wall Street stories, is thoroughly familiar with his ground, and possesses, besides, a genuine gift of story-telling. “The Golden Flood” may possibly be criticised as dealing with a somewhat impossible theme – an attempt to corner the gold supply; but the description of the manner in which it affects “the richest man in the world” is so absorbingly interesting that probabilities are forgotten. The mixture of innocence and guile in young Mr. Grinnell, assumed for the purpose of mystifying Mellen and Dawson, is a good bit of character drawing. But, though these men in the story were worked up to the point of believing that Grinnell practised alchemy, it is doubtful if their prototypes in real life could be so affected. The explanation, however, turns out to be a practical one, and it is so timed as to sustain the interest to the end.

Unquestionably the best short stories of American politics so far published are those by Elliott Flower in a volume entitled “Slaves of Success,” L. C. Page & Co. There are eight of them, a connected series in which John Wade and Ben Carroll are the chief actors.