Читать книгу Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections - Clara Morris - Страница 9

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The Regular Season Opens—I have a Small Part to Play—I am among Lovers of Shakespeare—I too Stand at his Knee and Fall under the Charm.

Up to this time the only world I had known had been narrow and sordid and lay chill under the shadow of poverty; and it is sunlight that makes the earth smile into flower and fruit and laugh aloud through the throats of birds. But now, standing humbly at the knee of Shakespeare, I began to learn something of another world—fairy-like in fascination, marvellous in reality. A world of sunny days and jewelled nights, of splendid palaces, caves of horror, forests of mystery, and meadows of smiling candor. All peopled, too, with such soldiers, statesmen, lovers, clowns, such women of splendid chill chastity, fierce ambition, thistle-down lightness, and burning, tragic love as made the heart beat fast to think of.

Perhaps if I had attempted simply to read Shakespeare at that time, I might have fallen short both in profit and in pleasure; but it was the hearing him that roused my attention. There was such music in the sound of the words, that the mind was impelled to study out their meaning. It seems to me that a human voice is to poetry what a clear even light is to a reader, making each word give up its full store of meaning.

At that time Forrest, crowned and wrapped in royal robes, was yet tottering on his throne. Charlotte Cushman was the Tragic Queen of the stage. Mr. James Murdoch, frail and aging, but still acting, was highly esteemed. Joseph Jefferson, E. L. Davenport, J. K. Hackett, Edwin Adams, John E. Owens, Dan. Setchell, Peter Richings and his daughter Caroline, Mrs. D. P. Bowers, Miss Lucille Western, Miss Maggie Mitchell, Mr. and Mrs. Conway, Matilda Heron, Charles Couldock, Joseph Proctor, Mr. and Mrs. Albaugh, Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams, the Webb Sisters, Kate Reynolds, were all great favorites, not pausing to mention many more, while Edwin Booth, the greatest light of all, was rising in golden glory in the East.

Of the above-mentioned twenty-eight stars, eighteen acted in Shakespeare's plays. All stars played a week's engagement—many played two weeks, therefore at least twenty-four of our forty-two week season was given over to Shakespearean productions, and every actor and actress had the Bard at their tongue's tip.

In the far past the great disgrace of our profession was the inebriety of its men. At the time I write of, the severity of the managers had nearly eradicated the terrible habit, and I never saw but two of that class of brilliant actor-drunkards, beloved of newspaper story writers, who made too much of their absurd vagaries.

Looking back to the actors of '65, I can't help noticing the difference between their attitude of mind toward their profession, and that of the actor of to-day. Salaries were much smaller then, work was harder, but life was simpler. The actor had no social standing; he was no longer looked down upon, but he was an unknown quantity; he was, in short, an actor pure and simple. He had enthusiasm for his profession—he lived to act, not merely living by acting. He had more superstition than religion, and no politics at all; but he was patriotic and shouldered his gun and marched away in the ranks as cheerfully as any other citizen soldier.

But above all and beyond all else, the men and women respected their chosen profession. Their constant association of mind with Shakespeare seemed to have given them a certain dignity of bearing as well as of speech.

To-day our actors have in many cases won some social recognition, and they must therefore give a portion of their time to social duties. They are clubmen and another portion of their time goes in club lounging. They draw large salaries and too frequently they have to act in long running plays, that are made up of smartish wit and cheapest cynicism—mere froth and frivolity, while the effective smashing of the Seventh Commandment has been for so long a time the principal motif of both drama and farce, that one cannot wonder much at the general tone of flippancy prevailing among the theatrical people of to-day. They guy everything and everybody, and would jeer at their profession as readily as they would at an old man on the street wearing a last year's hat.

They are sober, they are honest, they are generous, but they seem to have grown utterly flippant, and I can't help wondering if this alteration can have come about through the change in their mental pabulum.

At all events, as I watched and listened in the old days, it seemed to me they were never weary of discussing readings, expressions, emphasis, and action. One would remark, say at a rehearsal of "Hamlet," that Macready gave a certain line in this manner, and another would instantly express a preference for a Forrest—or a Davenport—rendering, and then the argument would be on, and only a call to the stage would end the weighing of words, the placing of commas, etc.

I well remember my first step into theatrical controversy. "Macbeth" was being rehearsed, and the star had just exclaimed: "Hang out our banners on the outward walls!" That was enough—argument was on. It grew animated. Some were for: "Hang out our banners! on the outward walls the cry is still: they come!" while one or two were with the star's reading.

I stood listening and looking on and fairly sizzling with hot desire to speak, but dared not take the liberty, I stood in such awe of my elders. Presently the "old-man" turned and, noticing my eagerness, laughingly said: "Well, what is it, Clara? you'll have a fit if you don't ease your mind with speech."

"Oh, Uncle Dick," I answered, my words fairly tripping over each other in my haste. "I have a picture home, I cut it out of a paper, it's a picture of a great castle, with towers and moats and things, and on the outer walls there are men with spears and shields, and they seem to be looking for the enemy, and, Uncle Dick, the banner is floating over the high tower!"

"Where it ought to be," interpolated the old gentleman, who was English.

"So," I went on, "don't you think it ought to be read: 'Hang out our banners! on the outward walls'—the outward walls, you know, is where the lookout are standing—'the cry—is still, they come!'"

A general laugh followed my excited explanation, but Uncle Dick patted me very kindly on the shoulder, and said: "Good girl! you stick to your picture—it's right and so are you. Many people read the line that way, but you have worked it out for yourself, and that's a good plan to follow."

And I swelled and swelled, it seemed to me, I was so proud of the gentle old man's approval. But that same night I came quite wofully to grief. I had been one of the crowd of "witches"; I had also had my place at that shameless papier-maché banquet given by Macbeth to his tantalized guests, and then, being off duty, was, as usual, planted in the entrance, watching the acting of the grown-up and the grown-great. Lady Macbeth was giving the sleep-walking scene. Her method was of the old, old school. She spoke at almost the full power of her lungs, throughout that mysterious, awe-inspiring sleep-walking scene. It jarred upon my feelings—I could not have told why, but it did. I believed myself alone, and when the memory-haunted woman roared out: "Yet, who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" I remarked, sotto voce: "Did you expect to find ink in him?"

A sharp "ahem!" right at my shoulder told me I had been overheard, and I turned to face—oh, horror! the stage-manager. He glared angrily at me, and began: "Since when have the ladies of the ballet taken to criticising the work of the stars?"

Humbly enough, I said: "I beg your pardon, sir, I was just talking to myself, that was all."

But he went on: "Oh, you would not criticize a reading, unless you could better it—so pray favor us with your ideas on this speech!"

Each sneering word cut me to the heart. Tears filled my eyes. I struggled hard to keep them from falling, while I just murmured: "I beg your pardon!" Again he demanded my reading, saying they were not "too old to learn," and in sheer desperation, I exclaimed: "I was only speaking to myself, but I thought Lady Macbeth was amazed at the quantity of blood that flowed from the body of such an old man—for when you get old, you know, sir, you don't have so much blood as you used to, and I only just thought, that as the 'sleeping men were laced,' and the knives 'smeared,' and her hands 'bathed' with it, she might have perhaps whispered: 'Yet, who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' I didn't mean an impertinence!" and down fell the tears, for I could not talk and hold them back at the same time.

He looked at me in dead silence for a few moments, then he said: "Humph!" and walked away, while I rushed to the dressing-room and cried and cried, and vowed that never, never again would I talk to myself—in the theatre at all events. I mention these incidents to show how quickly I came under the influence of these Shakespeare-studying men and women, some of whom had received their very adequate education from him alone.

It was odd to hear how they used his words and expressions in their daily conversation. 'Twas not so much quoting him intentionally, as it was an unconscious incorporation into their own language of Shakespeare's lines.

Tramps were to them almost always "vagrom men." When one did some very foolish thing, he almost surely begged to be "written down an ass." The appearance of a pretty actress in her new spring or fall gown was as surely hailed with: "The riches of the ship have come on shore!"

I saw a pet dog break for the third time from restraint to follow his master, who put his hand on the animal's head and rather worriedly remarked: "'The love that follows us sometimes is our trouble—which still'" (with a big sigh) "'we thank as love!' But you'll have to go back, old fellow, all the same." If someone obliged you, and you expressed the fear that you had given him trouble, he would be absolutely certain to reply, pleasantly and quite honestly: "The labor we delight in physics pain!" And so on and on unendingly. And I almost believe that had an old actor seen these three great speeches: The "seven ages" of man, "To be or not to be!" and "Othello's occupation's gone," grouped together, he would have fallen upon his knees and become an idolator there and then.

Yes, I found them odd people, but I liked them. The world was brightening for me, and I felt I had a right to my share of the air and light, and as much of God's earth as my feet could stand upon.

I had had a little part entrusted to me, too, the very first week of the season. A young backwoods-boy, Tom Bruce, by name, and I had borrowed some clothes and had slammed about with my gun, and spoken my few words out loud and clear, and had met with approving looks, if not words, but not yet was the actress aroused in me, I was still a mere school-girl reciting her lessons. My proudest moment had been when I was allowed to go on for the longest witch in the cauldron scene in "Macbeth." Perhaps I might have come to grief over it had I not overheard the leading man say: "That child will never speak those lines in the world!" and the leading man was six feet tall and handsome, and I was thirteen and a half years old, and had to be called a "child!"

I was in a secret rage, and I went over and over my lines, at all hours, under all kinds of circumstances, so that nothing should be able to frighten me at night. And then, with my paste-board crown and white sheet and petticoat, I boiled-up in the cauldron and gave my lines well enough for the manager (who was Hecate just then) to say low, "Good! Good!" and the leading man next night asked me to take care of his watch and chain during his combat scene, and my pride of bearing was most unseemly, and the other ballet-girls loved me not at all, for you see they, too, knew he was six feet tall and handsome.