65 William Winter in the New York Tribune.

66 Memories and Impressions.

67 The others being Clara Morris, Georgia Cayvan, and Julia Marlowe.

68 This prohibition did not apply to Austrian or Prussian Poland, of course, and she afterwards acted more than once in Cracow, Lemberg, and Posen.

69 “During her long professional career, though Modjeska was ‘presented’ by various managers, her personal representative was her husband, Bozenta,—one of the kindest, most intellectual, and most drolly eccentric men it has been my fortune to know. Neither he nor his wife was judicious in worldly matters, while—as is not unusual in such cases—both thought themselves exceptionally shrewd and capable. Their professional labors were abundantly remunerative, but, being improvident and generous, they did not accumulate wealth. The close of Modjeska’s life, contrasted with the brilliancy of her career, was pathetic and forlorn. I called on her, a few months before her death, in the refuge, a little cottage, she had found, at East Newport. The great actress greeted me with gentle kindness and presently, as though my coming had reminded her of other days and scenes, she looked about the small narrow room in which we were. ‘Ah, it ees small,’ she said, ‘very small, this place of ours. But, what of that? It ees large enough for two old people to sit in—and wait.’ As I came away her lovely eyes were suffused with tears. She looked at me long and fixedly. ‘Good-by, my good friend,’ was all she said. She seemed to foresee that it was our last parting.”—(William Winter, The Wallet of Time.) It is not to be thought from this that Modjeska died poor. Of the vast sum (said to be $800,000) that she earned on the American stage, she left at her death something over $100,000, in California real estate, stocks and bonds, and jewelry. It is true, however, that she was lavishly generous, and that her bounty was bestowed in many places, private and public. She was the founder of an industrial school for girls in Cracow, for which she gave $100,000.

70 A reference to Sembrich and Paderewski.

71 April 8, 1909, on Bay Island, East Newport, California, whither she had moved from “Arden” but a few months before. Her final appearance on the stage was in the spring of 1907.

72 These brothers and sisters were all actors or actresses except Charles, who was a stage manager, and the father of the actresses Minnie and Beatrice Terry. Mr. Scott does not mention another brother—George—who was identified with the business side of the theatre. Fred Terry married the actress Julia Neilson, and their daughter, Phyllis Neilson-Terry, is today among the most promising young women on England’s stage. There were two other brothers, Ben and Thomas, and three children died—twelve in all.

73 No. 5 Market Street makes out the best case.

74 Her own memory is perhaps not an infallible guide, but in a characteristic letter (September 26, 1887) to Clement Scott she was emphatic enough: “Mr. Dutton Cook’s statement was inaccurate, that’s all! I didn’t contradict it, although asked to do so by my father at the time, for I thought it of little, if of any interest. The very first time I ever appeared on any stage was on the first night of The Winter’s Tale, at the Princess’s Theatre, with dear Charles Kean. As for the young princes,—them unfortunate little men, I never played—not neither of them—there. What a cry about a little wool! It’s flattering to be fussed about, but ‘Fax is Fax!’”

75 Another childish blunder marks Miss Terry’s only meeting with the great actor Macready. She accidentally jostled him while running to her dressing-room. He smiled at her apology, and said: “Never mind, you are a very polite little girl, and you act very earnestly and speak very nicely.”

76 Miss Terry relates the rise and fall of her childish vanity at this time: “The parts we play influence our characters to some extent, and Puck made me a bit of a romp. I grew vain and rather ‘cocky,’ and it was just as well that during the rehearsals for the Christmas pantomime in 1857, I was tried for the part of the fairy Dragonetta and rejected. [The children’s parts at the Princess’s were assigned after competitive trials. For Mamillius “Nelly” had been chosen out of half a dozen aspirants.] I believe that my failure was principally due to the fact that I hadn’t flashing eyes and raven hair—without which, as every one knows, no bad fairy can hold up her head and respect herself.... Only the extreme beauty of my dress as the maudlin ‘good fairy’ Golden-star, consoled me. I used to think I looked beautiful in it. I wore a trembling star in my forehead, too, which was enough to upset any girl.” A little later: “I think my part in Pizarro saw the last of my vanity. I was a worshiper of the sun and, in a pink feather, pink swathings of muslin, and black arms, I was again struck by my own beauty. I grew quite attached to the looking glass which reflected that feather! Then suddenly there came a change. I began to see the whole thing. My attentive watching of other people began to bear fruit, and the labor and perseverance, care and intelligence, which had gone to make these enormous productions dawned on my young mind. Up to this time I had loved acting because it was great fun, but I had not loved the grind. After I began to rehearse Prince Arthur in King John, I understood that if I did not work I could not act! And I wanted to work. I used to get up in the middle of the night and watch my gestures in the glass. I used to try my voice and bring it up and down in the right places. And all my vanity fell away from me.”

77 “It was a chicken! Now, as all the chickens had names—Sultan, Sultan, Duke, Lord Tom Noddy, Lady Teazle, and so forth—and as I was very proud of them as living birds, it was a great wrench to kill one at all, to start with. It was the murder of Sultan, not the killing of a chicken. However, at last it was done, and Sultan deprived of his feathers, floured, and trussed. I had no idea how this was all done, but I tried to make him ‘sit up’ nicely like the chickens in the shops.

“He came up to the table looking magnificent—almost turkey-like in his proportions.

“‘Hasn’t this chicken rather an odd smell?’ said our visitor.

“‘How can you!’ I answered. ‘It must be quite fresh—it’s Sultan!’

“However, when we began to carve, the smell grew more and more potent.

“I had cooked Sultan without taking out his in’ards!

“There was no dinner that day except bread-sauce, beautifully made, well-cooked vegetables, and pastry like the foam of the sea. I had a wonderful hand for pastry.”

78 Of her first night as Portia the London Daily News said: “This is indeed the Portia that Shakespeare drew. The bold innocence, the lively wit and quick intelligence, the grace and elegance of manner, and all the youth and freshness of this exquisite creation can rarely have been depicted in such harmonious combination. Nor is this delightful actress less successful in indicating the tenderness and depth of passion which lie under that frolicsome exterior. Miss Terry’s figure, at once graceful and commanding, and her singularly sweet and expressive countenance, doubtless aid her much; but this performance is essentially artistic, ... in the style of art which cannot be taught.”

79 Clement Scott.

80 Ellen Terry dismisses Ibsen’s women as “silly ladies,” “drawn in straight lines,” and easy to play; a characteristic, if radically unjustified view.

81 “She has always been an indefatigable and charming letter-writer, one of the greatest letter writers that ever lived,” says Mr. Shaw, the happy recipient of many of her letters.

82 On one of her last American tours Miss Terry attended in New York the first night of a young playwright’s new work, and at the end of the third act he was presented to her. She congratulated him warmly: “It is very good,” she said, “your play is very good indeed, and I shall send all my American friends to see it.”

“In that case,” said the playwright, with a very low and courtly bow, “my little piece will sell ninety million tickets.”

83 The dates of her most important impersonations since joining Henry Irving: Ophelia in Hamlet, 1878; Pauline in The Lady of Lyons; Ruth Meadows in The Fate of Eugene Aram, Queen Henrietta Maria in Charles I, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, 1879; Iolanthe in King René’s Daughter, Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, 1880; Camma in The Cup, Letitia Hardy in The Belle’s Stratagem, Desdemona in Othello, 1881; Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice at the Lyceum (her previous appearance had been at Leeds), 1882; Viola in Twelfth Night, 1884; Olivia in Olivia (revival), Margaret in Faust, 1885; Ellaline in The Amber Heart, 1887; Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth, 1888; Catherine Duval in The Dead Heart, 1889; Lucy Ashton in Ravenswood, 1890; Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, Cordelia in King Lear, 1892; Rosamund in Becket, Nance Oldfield in Nance Oldfield, 1893; Queen Guinevere in King Arthur, 1895; Imogen in Cymbeline, 1896; Madame Sans-Gêne in the play of that name, 1897; Clarisse in Robespierre, 1899; Volumnia in Coriolanus, 1901; she acted under Irving’s management for the last time in 1902, playing Portia at his final performance at the Lyceum; Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1903; Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire, 1905; Lady Cecily Waynflete in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, 1906. On April 28, 1906, the fiftieth anniversary of her first appearance, she played Francisca in Measure for Measure (once only) at the Adelphi.

84 Mr. Shaw’s article on Ellen Terry appeared, in German, in the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. And there are several striking passages concerning her in the Dramatic Opinions and Essays.

85 Yet, characteristically, she was better satisfied than some of her admirers: “I have sometimes wondered,” she wrote, “what I should have accomplished without Henry Irving. I might have had ‘bigger’ parts but it doesn’t follow that they would have been better ones, and if they had been written by contemporary dramatists my success would have been less durable. ‘No actor or actress who doesn’t play in the classics—in Shakespeare or old comedy—will be heard of long,’ was one of Henry Irving’s statements, and he was right.”

86 Ellen Terry never played The Man of Destiny. Irving accepted it and shelved it.

87 The first to appear was an elderly woman who long before noon on Monday placed herself and her campstool outside the entrance to the theatre. The performance was not scheduled to begin until the next day at half past one. During Monday afternoon and evening the gathering outside the doors steadily increased in size, until, at midnight there were many hundreds. Miss Terry, late Monday night, appeared to greet the waiting enthusiasts, and Mr. Arthur Collins, the manager of Drury Lane, furnished them a supper of hot coffee, rolls and cake. When the doors were at last opened many of those who had thus patiently waited failed to find room within the theatre. The proceeds of this entertainment, together with those of a popular subscription in England and America, went to Miss Terry and amounted to about forty thousand dollars.

88 It was during this tour that Miss Terry made her third marriage, to James Carew, an actor of her company. Charles Wardell (Charles Kelly) died in 1885.

89 During this tour the honor and affection she had won in the minds of Americans were attested by various testimonials. She was given at a special ceremony the Founder’s Medal of the now extinct New Theatre in New York, a “farewell banquet” was tendered her there, and in both New York and Boston she received an elaborate “book of welcome,” signed by many notable people and accompanied by poetic addresses, composed in one case by Percy MacKaye and in the other by Josephine Preston Peabody.

90 In January, 1914, she appeared at King’s Hall, London, as the Abbess in two performances of Paphnutius, a play written in the tenth century by Hroswitha, a Benedictine nun. It was on this old play that Anatole France founded his romance Thaïs. Thus did Ellen Terry, at nearly three score and ten, continue to furnish proof of her still youthful spirit and readiness for work. Later in the year she went to Australia to give there her Shakspearean lecture-readings. The great European war broke out, and conditions in Australia became so unfavorable that Miss Terry sailed for the United States, where she again lectured in a few of the larger cities.

For some years she had had increasing trouble with her eyes. Frequently she would spend the periods between the scenes in a darkened room. On February 23, 1914, in New York, Miss Terry underwent an operation, which proved successful, for the removal of a cataract from her right eye. In June, 1915, she reappeared in London on the occasion of a matinee given at the Haymarket in aid of one of the war charities. The play—a ballet pantomime called The Princess and the Pea—was the first musical piece in which Miss Terry ever took part. On this occasion also her two grandchildren made their stage début.

91 In “The Yellow Book,” Vol. II (1894).

92 Further precedent for Gabrielle’s career was furnished by her aunt, Mme. Naptal-Arnault, at one time a pensionnaire of the Comédie Française.

93 For much of the information in the early part of this chapter the author is indebted to Loges et Coulisses, by Jules Huret.

94 Who, twenty-eight years later, with Pierre Berton, was to write for her Zaza, one of her most successful plays.

95 Mme. Réjane recalls that her costume on this occasion was the object of much solicitude on the part of Regnier. On the day of the contest he came to her house at nine in the morning to pass judgment on her dress, which was made of white tarlatan at nine sous per metre, and cost in all about ten francs. Mme. Regnier loaned gloves for the occasion.

96 Aimée Olympe Desclée (1836–1874), of the Gymnase, who excelled in modern French emotional plays. She acted with success in London, and also appeared in Belgium and Russia.

97 The students played also in the suburbs, at Versailles, Mantes, and Chartres. It was at Chartres, where she had a part in Les Paysans Lorrains, that the playbills first named her Réjane. Till now she had gone by her own name of Réju. She played also, while still a student, at matinées-conférences at the Porte-Saint-Martin, in Le Depit Amoureux and Les Ménechmes.

98 Her first appearance at the Vaudeville was on March 25, 1875. Her first three parts were small rôles in La Revue des Deux-Mondes, Fanny Lear, and Vaudeville’s Hotel. There followed: Madame Lili, Midi à Quatorze Heures, Renaudin de Caen, La Corde, 1875; Le Verglas, Le Premier Tapis, Les Dominos Roses, Perfide comme L’Onde, Le Passe, 1876; Pierre, Les Vivacités du Capitaine Tic, Le Club, 1877; Le Mari d’Ida, 1878; Les Memoires du Diable, Les Faux Bonshommes, Les Tapageurs, Les Lionnes Pauvres, 1879; La Vie de Bohème, Le Père Prodigue, 1880; La Petite Sœur, Odette, 1881; L’Auréole, Un Mariage de Paris, 1882; all at the Vaudeville. At various theatres: Les Demoiselles Clochart, La Princess, Les Variétés de Paris, La Nuit de Noces de P. L. M., La Glu, 1882; Ma Camarade, 1883; Les Femmes Terribles, 1884; Clara Soleil, 1885; Allo! Allo!, Monsieur de Morat, 1886–87; Décoré, Germinie Lacerteux, Shylock, 1888; Marquise, 1889; La Famille Benoîton, Le Mariage de Figaro, La Vie à Deux, 1889–90; Ma Cousine, 1890; Amoreuse, Fantasio, La Cigale, Brevet Supérieur, 1891; Lysistrata, Sapho, 1892; Madame Sans-Gêne, 1893; Villégiature, Les Lionnes Pauvres, Maison de Poupée, 1894; Viveurs, 1895; Lolotte, La Bonne Hélène, Le Partage, Divorçons, 1896; La Douloureuse, 1897; Paméla, Le Roi Candaule, Zaza, Le Calice, Georgette Lemeunier, 1898; Le Lys Rouge, Mme. de Lavalette, 1899; Le Faubourg, Le Béguin, La Robe Rouge, Sylvie ou la Curieuse d’Amour, 1900; La Pente Douce, La Course du Flambeau, 1901; La Passerelle, Le Masque, Le Joug, 1902; Heureuse, Antoinette Sabrier, 1903; La Montansier, La Parisienne, 1904; L’Age D’Aimer, 1905; La Piste, 1906. At the Théâtre Réjane: La Savelli, 1906; Paris-New York, Suzeraine, Les Deux Madame Delauze, 1907; Qui Perd Gagne, Israël, 1908; Trains de luxe, L’Impératrice, Le Refuge, 1909; Madame Margot, La Flamme, M’Amour, 1910; L’Enfant de l’Amour (at the Porte St. Martin), La Revue Sans-Gêne, 1911; L’Aigrette, Un Coup de Téléphone, Aglaïs (at Comédie Royale), 1912; Alsace, L’Irrégulière, 1913; Le Concert, 1914.

99 “Her queer little face catches hold of you, by both the good and bad elements in your nature. All the intelligence, the devotion, the pity of a woman are to be read in her wonderful eyes, but below there is the nose and mouth of a sensual little creature, a vicious, almost vulgar, smile, lips pouted for a kiss, but with a lingering, or a dawning, suggestion of irony. Moreover, she is exactly the reigning type, the type that one meets constantly on the Paris pavements when the shop girls are going to lunch. If you happen to be born marquise or duchesse you copy the type, and the result is all the more piquant.”—Augustin Filon, “The Modern French Drama.”

100 The Boston Courier, May 19, 1895.

101 Her second American season began in New York, Nov. 7, 1904. During this tour she appeared for the first time in America in Amoureuse, La Passerelle, Zaza, La Petite Marquise, and La Hirondelle.

102 Originally Madame Sans-Gêne was to have been produced at the Grand-Théâtre, of which M. Porel, Réjane’s husband, was manager. He gave up the house, however, before the play could be given. Other managers begged for it, but of each in turn M. Sardou demanded: “Have you Réjane in your company?” and as the answer was always in the negative, he added: “Then there is no use of our talking about it.” Soon M. Carré admitted M. Porel to a co-directorship of the Vaudeville, and there the play was produced, with immediately great success. M. Sardou was not the sole author. He had considerable help from M. Moreau.

103 Correspondence of Frederick Roy Martin in the Boston Transcript, November 9, 1904.

104 Dec. 29, 1906.

105 In 1906, she attempted, with M. Gaston Mayer, to found a French repertoire theatre in London, but the experiment was not successful and lasted only one season.

106 It is probably for this comedian that the street Calle Duse in Chioggio, near Venice, is named.

107 “A curious circumstance attended her baptism at Vigevano. In accordance with the custom of the country the child was carried to the church in a shrine gilded and ornamented with jewels. A detachment of Austrian soldiery marched past the baptismal procession, and mistaking the shrine for the relics of some saint, halted and saluted. When he returned to his wife the father said to her: ‘Forgive me, dear, that I am unable to bring me a present for giving me a daughter, but I can give you a happy omen. Our daughter will be something great some day; already they have shown her military honors.’”

108 In after years, when she had won fame and name, she used to carry about a little antique coffer in which as a babe she used to lie while her mother was upon the stage.

109 According to Jean Dornis (Le Théâtre Italien Contemporaine) her father said that she contracted a disease known as Salmara—or “The Spleen of Venice.” The victim of this ailment is “enveloped, as in a fantastic mist, with the sadness of the past, the bitterness of the present, and the uncertainty of the future.”

110 Years after the time of which we are speaking, the two met at the home of Dumas, at Marly. When she found herself in the room with the man she had long venerated, she was speechless with emotion, and, the accounts say, burst into tears. When she finally acted in Paris, in 1897, Dumas was dead. She acted there on the occasion of the great testimonial to his memory. See page 188.

111 In the last edition of his plays Dumas appends a footnote to La Princesse de Bagdad: “There is in the last scene a stage direction that is not found in other editions. After having said to her husband: ‘I am innocent, I swear it to you, I swear it to you,’ Leonetta, seeing him incredulous, places her hand on the head of her son and says a third time, ‘I swear it to you!’ This gesture, so noble and convincing, was not used in Paris. Neither Mlle. Croizette nor I thought of it; none the less, it was irrefutable and irresistible. Inflection alone, however powerful, was not enough.” As a matter of fact, until Duse introduced this bit of “business” no one had ever been able to make the scene convincing, and as the success of the whole play hangs on this scene, La Princesse de Bagdad had always been a comparative failure. Dumas goes on to pay tribute to Duse for introducing his work into Italy, and in conclusion says: “It is to be regretted for our art that this extraordinary actress is not French.”

112 1885.

113 Though her first night audience was described as “large and brilliant,” Duse’s audiences during her first American tour were generally not large in numbers. They were, however, drawn from a discriminating part of the public, the part that regards the drama as an art and goes to the theatre only when its own high standards are likely to be met. During the 1896 tour she attracted the same discerning public, but also, this time, that other public which runs to fads. “La Duse” became something of a fad, but happily at no sacrifice of the quality of her acting.

114 The Critic, for January 28, 1893. The story has often been told of Mme. Bartet, the distinguished actress of the Comèdie Française, and Duse’s swoon in La Dame aux Camélias. So powerful and so natural was Duse at the point where Marguérite swoons, that Bartet, perhaps sensible of Duse’s own bodily weakness, cried out: “Great Heavens! She has really fainted.”

115 There is much in Mrs. Fiske’s acting to remind one of Duse, different as the two are in many ways. There is in each, in the first place, the same service to an art of an exceptional intellect, the same high minded devotion to ideals. Each has been a mistress of the subtleties, both of conceptions of characters and of means to set those conceptions forth. Each depends on the significant repression of emotion, rather than on expansive exposition of emotion. Each is, in spite of a fundamental seriousness, expert in comedy. Coming to details, each depends largely on rapidity of utterance, with occasional arbitrary pauses. Of the former—in a possible excess—Mrs. Fiske has been sufficiently charged; the latter Duse has been sometimes accused of carrying to undue lengths. Finally each has her wholesome distaste for eccentricities and meritricious publicity. Mrs. Fiske is Duse translated into American.

116 The Critic, February 11, 1893.

117 During her tour in America in 1893, Duse’s parts were: Marguérite Gauthier in La Dame aux Camélias; Fédora; Clotilde in Fernande; Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana; Mirandolina in La Locandiera; Cyprienne in Divorçons; Francine in Francillon, and Césarine in La Femme de Claude. During her second American tour in 1896, Duse played Magda for the first time in this country, and also some plays from her former repertoire, La Dame aux Camélias, Cavalleria Rusticana and La Locandiera. On her next visit, in 1902, which was during the d’Annunzio period, she played La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, and Francesca da Rimini, all by d’Annunzio.

118 She played for London A Doll’s House and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Camille, Fédora, Cavalleria Rusticana and La Locandiera.

119 When Duse was in the United States for the second time, in 1896, she withstood, as before, all attempts to interview her. This fact did not prevent some enterprising persons from publishing to the world that she had confessed a dislike of America. The report was widely spread, but the fact was that Duse did not make the statement.

Her Magda gave a new revelation of her skill. “In suggesting the social standing of the returned prodigal, Mme. Duse takes a middle course between the frank Bohemianism of Bernhardt and the loftier aristocratic air adopted by Modjeska. It is interesting to note how she emphasizes the theatrical nature of Magda’s past life, by just those little exaggerations of pose and gesture common to nearly all stage performers, but from which she herself, in ordinary conditions is almost ideally free. These manifestations of self-consciousness are confined to the second act, and vanish when the inner self of the woman is brought to the surface by the influence of powerful emotions.”—The Critic, March 7, 1896. An instance, this, of Duse’s remarkable subtlety in acting. At the point where Magda drives her former lover from her presence, she “easily reached and maintained herself at a height of emotion which can only be described as tragic, and she wrought the effect without exposing herself, even for an instant, to the charge of exaggeration or rant.” Of this scene William Archer, a little later, said that until he saw it he did not fully realize the dynamic potentialities of human utterance.

120 Unlike many of her sister actresses, Duse made a practice of reading the criticisms of her acting.

121 From Victor Mapes’ Duse and The French, to which the author is indebted for his account of Duse’s Paris début.

122 In 1898 Mme. Vivanti Chartres, one of Duse’s few intimate friends, said (in the New York Dramatic Mirror): “Duse’s hatred of publicity and newspaper interviews has assumed the proportions of a mania.... When we were alone together, talking of the play I was writing for her, or discussing modern art, her youthful struggles with poverty, or the world weariness that came to her finally with her splendid success, Duse was herself—impulsive, eager, passionate, tender, sad. But the mere announcement of a visitor would freeze her into silent hauteur.

“I stayed with her in Turin for some time. We used to go out driving in the Valentino every morning, for Duse said she needed to begin the day by looking at ‘green things.’ She was crowding the Teatro Carignano, the receipts averaging 10,000 francs for each performance—a stupendous sum for Italy. Yes, Duse certainly makes a great deal of money, but she spends all that she makes. She is exceedingly generous. One day she gave a magnificent diamond ring to a dressmaker whom Worth had sent to her from Paris with her Dame aux Camélias dresses. And she pays her entire company all the year round, although during the last eighteen months she has given only twenty-two performances.

“At Monte Carlo we stayed at the Victoria, the dullest if most aristocratic hotel in the place. But Duse has a taste for the dismal and the melancholy. She is very sad—the saddest woman I have ever known. She cannot even bear people’s voices. After the strain of her performance she drives home quite alone, and sits down to her supper in solitude and silence. During the days that I was with her we used to sit at opposite ends of the large table, sometimes without exchanging half a dozen words, and she used to laugh her approval across to me when I absolutely refused to answer her if she made any attempts at polite conversation.

“Duse chez elle dresses almost always in white satin. Her gowns are loose and limp, and folded carelessly around her.... She is a charming woman, highly cultured, sincere, brave and good. Her conversation, when she chooses to speak, is startlingly brilliant.”

123 It was her rule not to play more than four performances a week. When she was in her thirties, the world was told that she was a sufferer from “pulmonary phthisis,” and that her impending doom was one of the causes of her seclusion and sadness. All through her career there were periodic reports of her illness, of canceled engagements and interrupted tours.

124 “She spends enormous sums on books and photographs, on bonbons and scissors—a curious hobby of hers, as she buys pair after pair, which she afterwards loses.... Another of her fads, which in Italy is a decided novelty, is hygiene; for to the average Italian mind, the simplest rules of health and sanitation, even the combination of warmth and good ventilation, are mysteries, to inquire into which would be useless and ridiculous. That Duse should like to have a fire and to sit with the window open at the same time, quite passes their powers of comprehension.” Helen Zimmern in Fortnightly Review, 1900.

125 Her d’Annunzio parts, extending from 1897 to 1902, were: Isabella in Sogno di Mattino di Primavera, Anna in La Citta Morta, Silvia in La Gioconda, Helena in La Gloria, and Francesca in Francesca da Rimini.

126 “In La Gioconda, the scene in the studio, when the wife, burdened with a sense of intolerable worry, finds herself face to face with the woman who has supplanted her—would to a second rate actress prove an irresistible temptation to frenzied rant; but Duse plays it with a sustained intensity of controlled detestation and scorn which was infinitely more impressive, more artistic and more true. In the horrible climax she leaves details of her destroyed hand to the imagination.” The Critic.

127 “Her method does not admit even the possibility of pose. In the quietest and most delicate of her scenes Bernhardt always bears traces of her school and its traditions of autorité. Duse on the other hand, goes to the most daring lengths in self-effacement. Her stillness is absolute.

“Even what is exaggerated in Italian gesture has in her a sort of anomalous grace, and preserves the richness and geniality of nature.” The Athenæum, 1885.

128 William Archer.

129 The name was really Crehan. Why was it changed? Perhaps because in its original form it was too baldly Irish. Yet Ada’s two elder sisters had taken to the stage and both appeared with the name O’Neill. Her mother was Harriet O’Neill, her father William Crehan. There were six children, three boys and three girls. The story used to be current that “Crehan” became “Rehan” through an error of printing; that when Ada first appeared in Philadelphia, with Mrs. Drew, she was named on a playbill “Ada C. Rehan”; and that, in view of the favorable newspaper notices given the new actress, Mrs. Drew advised her to retain the name inadvertently given her,—all interesting surely, and perhaps true. Playbills of the Arch Street Theatre (Philadelphia) of 1874, however, give “Ada Crehan.”

130 The date of her birth has always been given as April 22, 1860. There are reasons for thinking it must have been earlier. It would not be the only instance in which an actress’ age has been reduced by a retroactive manipulation of dates. Her first appearances on the stage were in 1873 and 1874, and by the time she went to Daly, in 1879, she had had an extended experience that would be simply marvelous for a girl of nineteen. Her hair began to turn gray about 1894. Mr. Winter says the streaks of gray came prematurely. Of course, they did, in any event, but thirty-four is an extraordinarily early age for such a phenomenon in an actress. An anecdote, not worth repeating, in the Boston Record for November 24, 1888, is introduced in this way: “Ada Rehan is forty years old and over. She makes up fairly for girlish rôles ... but at close sight in the cold light of day she shows her age.” If worthy of any consideration, this paragraph would place the birthdate before 1850, obviously going to the other extreme. The correct date is undoubtedly 1855, or thereabout. Thus she was about eighteen when, in 1873, she made her first appearance.

131 The eldest, Kate, “had been a choir singer in Limerick, and while singing at a concert one day in New York was heard by Harvey Dodworth and invited to join the chorus for Lester Wallack’s production of the opera of Don Cæsar de Bazan. She accepted, and was also joined by her younger sister Hattie, that being the début of the Crehan family upon the stage.”

132 Arthur Byron, the actor, is their son. Harriet, the second sister, had a long and comparatively inconspicuous career on the stage as Hattie Russell. Two brothers, William Crehan and Arthur Rehan, were more or less definitely identified, after Ada’s success, with the business side of the theatre.

133 While in his employ she appeared also in Baltimore.

134 Garrick’s version of The Taming of the Shrew.

135 In these pre-Daly days Miss Rehan played, besides the Shakespearean parts named, a host of others that it would be tedious and useless to name. Most of them would suggest nothing to a present-day theatregoer. A few that may have some significance are: Esther Eccles in Caste, Hebe in Pinafore, Lady Florence in Rosedale, Lady Sarah in Queen Elizabeth, Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, Louise in Frou-Frou, Marie de Comines in Louis XI, Mary Netley in Ours, Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, Queen of France in Henry V, Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing, and Virginia in Virginius. There were about ninety in all.