Chapter IX: Part II: Interpretations (6)

Here and there throughout the book, like freckles on the face of Juno, are sprinkled gems of wisdom. “All the great literature of the past has been tragic”--_Rabelais_ and _Don Quixote_, for instance. “The fundamental insanity believed by the majority of the world to-day to be the truth is that the work of the world is to be done by defectives who are not clever enough to escape from work.” How pleasant it must be to be so omniscient! Dr. Crane must admit that Lenine and Trotzky did not have that fundamental insanity. And how sane Mussolini is!

* * * * *

Mr. Dawson is a clergyman and the leaves on his tree of life are sere and yellow. When they were green they were smudged by the smokes of London and Glasgow where he pumped up emotion in Methodist Chapel and peddled rhetoric in Presbyterian Church, and thereby gained such fame as pulpit orator that he was called to Newark, N. J., where he ministered unto the needs of the parishioners of the Old First Church for twenty years or thereabouts. Now one of the dreams of his youth has come true; he is living in a simple house near a flowing stream, and the sound of its running water lulls him to sleep and its garrulous voice calls him at dawn. The other, that one day he would become a great writer, he knows will not materialise, but he continues to write because that which was nearly an agony for Flaubert and an exhausting labour for Anatole France is not only a joy but a necessity for Mr. Dawson. To him, it is nearly a fundamental urge. Early in life while he was attending to the spiritual needs of the Wesleyans in the small towns of Devon and Cornwall he wrote poetry by the ream to save himself from the soporific effect of the thick, stagnant atmosphere of dulness that enveloped him. Fate made him a preacher, but his secret aim was to make himself a writer. If authorship of forty books entitles one to such designation, Mr. Dawson is a writer. Another writer whose career closely parallels Mr. Dawson’s, save that Dr. Algernon S. Crapsey had the notoriety of a trial for heresy, recently wrote that he had never seen nor heard Mr. Dawson’s name until the publisher sent him _The Autobiography of a Mind_ for review. That is the only experience that Dr. Crapsey and the writer have had in common so far as I know save that we both read the book through in one sleepless night. But it provoked neither tears nor laughter in me as it did in his colleague. It provoked in me a series of interrogations. Why did he call his book the _Autobiography of a Mind_? Why did he stay in the Church upward of half a century? How did he reconcile his practices and his preachings? Why did a man so beholden to the ideas of intellectuality not do anything concrete to realise them? Why has a man who has written so extensively and has lived so conspicuously in the public eye been unsung?

To answer these questions it is not sufficient to say it was because he lacked humility; because he did not love his fellow-man, because he had a superiority complex. Many men who have made a permanent impression upon their time bore with similar limitations and suffered similar infirmities; it must be that Mr. Dawson lacked the talent which his personality, conditioned by his conscious mind, proclaimed. Were his book a biography of the mind he would have analysed his failure to obtain the success as a man of letters which he believed his talent justified.

The truth is Mr. Dawson is an emotionalist, not an intellectualist. So far as I can judge from his autobiography he never did any constructive work to fit himself for a writer. Early in life, he began to externalise emotional states in writing and he has continued to do so ever since. Emotional states, unless they are panoplied such as those of Shelley, Rimbaud, Poe, Dostoievsky and countless others, interest only the possessor and those who love him or are beholden to him.

It is passing strange to hear a young Methodist minister of robust health say: “I can not imagine how I could have endured life had I not found early a means of self-expression in my pen. Life would be unendurable for most of us without some means of escape from ourselves. Some find it in golf, others in collecting stamps, others in netting butterflies.” Others find it in cheerful labour in the Lord’s vineyard and that is where it is becoming for all clergymen to find it. If their quest is unsuccessful then they should find other employment. _Tedium vitæ_ is the most unbecoming disease for a priest, and if he has it he should not talk about it.

Mr. Dawson’s father, hard-shelled, self-sacrificing, saturated with a spirit of service, was able, largely through the resourcefulness of an industrious, pious, tireless wife to put aside every year a few shillings. When the legacy came to his son, then pastor of a Church in London, it was quite a tidy sum. He promptly gambled with it and lost. “It was a very pious man of most gracious manners who first persuaded me that it was a foolish thing to buy shares and stocks for honest investment when I could buy a hundred times as many shares on margin. So I bought shares in a gold mine in Africa and a coal mine in Australia.” There is a _naïveté_ about this that is equalled only by his account of his exaltation on the discovery of the word ineluctable and the pleasure he had in using it.

Mr. Dawson had the conventional Christian attitude toward avarice, holding that it is the root of all evil; but he also realised that without money there was no flowering of the softer and more delicate amenities of life. How much mental misery might have been spared the poetic pastor had he, in one of his trips to Italy, “whither I went on all possible occasion,” come upon the story of one Francis Bernardone. One day while Francis was still a boy he had an emotional crisis which in its genesis was not unlike that which Mr. Dawson had when he became conscious that something mysterious was happening to himself. “I--the essential Ego, the thinking Self--was passing out of my body.” Some of Francis’ constant joyousness might have crept into his soul, and the enthusiastic love of poverty which was the keynote of the character of the Poverello of Assisi might have heartened him in many hours of apprehension. But though he had long loved Francis and year by year sought his shrine, and even lectured in his own monastery he would never have succeeded in assimilating his spirit.

When Mr. Dawson approached his fiftieth year, he had an emotional experience of a kind that has often been described; some call it conversion, others seeing a light. He who had an insatiable appetite for pleasure now learned that there was a great difference between pleasure and happiness. For the first time in his life he was completely happy: he had discovered the poor and the sinful and he was moved to deliver them, to succour them, and to purge them. For the first time, he found himself invaded with a spirit of service. He coveted martyrdom for the uplifting of the South London poor. He would devote his strength and the remainder of his days to put in the way of recovery those who had been bruised and battered out of human shape by a terrible misfortune or more terrible vices, and those past cure, he would absolve from their sins and bury. It was all a wonder and a wild delight--while it lasted. But like all emotional states it was transitory.

Perhaps nothing conveys Mr. Dawson’s subjugation to the emotional states like his experience with Roosevelt. The latter talked to him of the virtues of one of his books, _The Quest of the Simple Life_, which apparently impressed the President as did Pastor Wagner’s classic. The author was forced to the humiliating confession that he had totally forgotten it. The phase of thought and feeling which had produced the book was past. The late Marcel Proust and Mr. W. J. Dawson would not have been congenial! The twelve years that he spent as pastor of the Congregational Church in South London added to his reputation as a pulpit orator and he says that they were marked by great intellectual growth. We have to take his word; there is no display of it in his autobiography.

At the end of this period he came to the United States to lecture. He looked upon Newark and saw that it was a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariot. New Jersey’s metropolis said, “Rise up, come away,” and he came. Whether he found it the rose of Sharon or the lily of the valley we shall not know until his next book is published, but it is safe to assume that he liked it better than South London. We trust he found there “that rare kind of friendship which is rooted in intellectual intimacy,” and that he encountered people interested in the kind of thoughts most vital to him, so that he was not forced, as he was in London, “to relatively low levels of conversation.” Had Mr. Dawson called his book _Recollections of Emotional States_ it would have been far more fitting than _The Autobiography of a Mind_. The reader who can divine the writer’s mind from this book has perspicacity and penetration that I do not possess.

From the photograph of the frontispiece, and from the lines of the book, I gather that Mr. Dawson was leonine externally and feline internally; that he had great sensitiveness to verbal intoxication and that always logorrhœa threatened to exhaust him; that there was within him a big hedonist and a little puritan, that the latter sat in adverse judgment of the former at all times, and tried to trip him when Mr. Dawson was not watching his step; that he was sensitive as a child and self-conscious as a man; that his ear was not attuned to the reproofs of life and that his eye constantly mistook the comb for the honey.

IX
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS

MY MUSICAL LIFE, by _Walter Damrosch_. IRVING BERLIN,
by _Alexander Woollcott_. SUNLIGHT AND SONG, by _Maria
Jeritza_. WITH PENCIL, BRUSH AND CHISEL, by _Emil Fuchs_.

Neither Mr. Damrosch nor Mr. Berlin may admit that he likes to be bracketed with the other, but expediency suggests that it be done here.

_My Musical Life_ does not profess to be an autobiography though it is a more revealing one than many that purport to be autobiographies. Leopold Damrosch, the father, was forty years old when he determined to find out if a living and a career could be made for him and his family in the land of the free, and in the home of the brave, so he came to the U. S. A. The way Walter, the author of this book, feels about the country of his adoption may be gathered from the opening sentence, “I am an American musician and have lived in this country since my ninth year.” Judged from his book his life has been an interesting one. He has been on terms of intimacy with all the great figures in the world of music; we read that Liszt, Wagner, von Bülow, Clara Schumann, Taussig, Joachim, Auer, Haenselt, Rubinstein, when they were in Breslau, generally stayed at the Damrosch house, and he has known most of the great musicians that have favoured us with their talent.

Of it all he makes a charming kaleidoscopic picture, in which nearly every musician of note the past fifty years passes in review:

_Photograph by Gutekunst_

“It was not until midnight that we accompanied Liszt
through the park and the lovely Goethe Garden back to
his house. It was a gentle summer night with a hazy moon
giving an indescribable glamour to the trees and bushes,
and suddenly Liszt laid his hand on my shoulder and said
‛Listen!’

“From the bushes came the song of a nightingale. I had
never heard one before and stood spellbound. It seemed
incredible that such ecstatic sweetness, such songs of
joy and sorrow, could come from the throat of a little
bird, and to hear it all at twenty-four years of age and
standing at the side of Liszt! Dear reader, I confess
that to-day, thirty-five years later, I still thrill at
the memory of it.”

The chapter on Lilli Lehmann is delightful. He draws a picture of the stately Lilli in Pittsburgh, dressed in white, ready for her appearance as Brünhilde, covered from head to foot with soot, and at the same time he gives us an example of ready wit and graceful gesture. Lehmann insisted it was not Frau Engelhardt’s fault though she perpetrated the outrage, and that it was wrong of Damrosch to discharge her:

“Slowly I allowed myself to be persuaded and at the
psychological moment gently left the dressing room,
giving Frau Engelhardt a comprehensive glance which she
understood.”

We realise what a diplomat was lost to the service when we read:

“Outside the dressing room I found my faithful Hans, son
of my prompter, Goettich. I gave him some money and told
him to run to a florist and buy a bunch of the whitest
flowers that he could find and to bring them to Madame
Lehmann with my compliments.”

We get interesting glimpses of the tribulations attached to the life of a musician in New York over fifty years ago:

“I enjoyed my weekly rehearsals in Newark immensely,
although horse-cars, ferry-boats, and trains made
the trip in those days a cumbersome one. But after
each rehearsal, Mr. Schuyler Brinkerhoff Jackson, the
president of the Society, Mr. Shinkle, the secretary,
my dear old friend Zach Belcher, enthusiastic tenor and
music lover, Frank Sealey, my pianist and since then for
so many years accompanist and organist of the New York
Oratorio Society, used to go with me to a nice German
beer saloon near the railroad station where, over a glass
of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, we waited until
train time and discussed the welfare of the Harmonic
Society and music in general.”

In his efforts to familiarise the American public with Wagner’s music, he had many amusing, discouraging and thrilling experiences. Great singers there were in those days--Fischer, Sachs, Brema, Alvary and Gadski. With the coming of Melba, a successful combination of the French and Italian was made with the German school and we read of that remarkable group of singers, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Bispham, Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and of performances of “Tristan,” “which came as near perfection as I ever hope to witness.... At the close we were so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the last curtain fell.”

And how touching his account of a concert in Monte Carlo:

“Jean de Reszke was in the fifth row of the parquet,
and as I came to the ‛Prize Song in the Meistersinger
Overture which he had sung so often and so ravishingly
in New York, I could not help but turn around to look at
him. He gave me an immediate smile, but the tears were
running down his face.”

Mr. Damrosch may accept the assurance that he is wrong in thinking many of the happenings described may prove dull reading; there is not a word in the book most readers would be willing to part with. He did not need Mr. Roosevelt’s letter to establish his Americanism. But as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, we must tell him that the little fireman he brought from the wings with Materna could not possibly have said “Be jabbers.” Occasionally Irishmen will say “Be jabers,” but the introduction of the extra “b” is a reflection on the good English they justly pride themselves on using.

Up until the time _My Musical Life_ appeared, we believed editors and statesmen had a monopoly of writing the most interesting reminiscences; but Mr. Damrosch’s book suggests that the belief is not well founded.

* * * * *

As Irving Berlin IS American music, this biography is as much the story of the development--or rather, the birth of national music--as it is of its creator. It is more a panegyric than a biography. The fact that Irving Berlin, Izzy Baline, was born in Russia and brought to this country when he was a few years old, after his village had been destroyed by fire, makes him all the more an American figure. He had, blended in him, the characteristics of his race which have given to his music the touch of sadness and the occasional suspicion that its author is feeling sorry for himself--self-pity being, in Mr. Woollcott’s idea, one of the fundamental qualities of the Russian Jew--and he has added to his inherited qualities the “pep” the “jazz” and the optimism of his adopted country.

_The Story of Irving Berlin_ has been written by a friend, and friends despite the adage have a way of being kind and indulgent which is all to their credit, but which lessens somewhat the value of the adjectives of praise they are tempted to use. According to Mr. Woollcott’s study, Irving Berlin is as nearly perfect as a human being can be. He has the detachment, the disinterestedness, the temperament, the lack of sense of time and the etherealness of the artist. With those, he combines a business acumen, a practicality, a flair and a knowledge of the value of publicity of one who is determined to make a success in business, and to have an income larger than he can spend. These qualities do not clash in Irving Berlin; they make concessions to each other, and the result is a quiet, keen, sensitive looking young man, who seldom raises his voice and never hurts the feelings of any one--whose eye surveys the acting of his characters on the stage and the credit and debit list of his company’s returns with equal comprehensiveness, whose ears are sensitive to good music but refuse to be “sold” to a piece that will not be popular, and whose soul is everlastingly travelling from Florida to Europe, from Virginia to Atlantic City. He is a composer and a musical publisher. The two functions can be made to work hand in hand: Irving Berlin has done it. As a composer he publishes his own music, and as a publisher he accepts only his own compositions: they are sure to sell.

Mr. Woollcott lingers lovingly on Irving Berlin’s youth. These early years, spent in the tenement house of Cherry Street, are well pictured. We like the devoted mother who had a sense of responsibility and a sense of humour. She had to laugh at this absurd country which was paying handsomely for her youngest child’s music while she, industrious and economical, had a hard time to keep together the bodies and souls of five hungry children. When she went after much effort to hear Irving Berlin play on Broadway--after he had shed for good his waiter’s coat--and heard the applause and saw the little figure of her son on the stage, she went home with the impression that somehow New York was “picking” on her Benjamin. These years were hard ones for young “Izzy.” He had to contend with the sense of inferiority engendered by his meagre earnings; he had to stand the rebuke of the young emigrants who feel as Sophomores feel toward Freshmen; they have just been through the period of acclimatisation, and no sooner have they found their way about in the new land than they turn and scowl at those who come after them.

A characteristic trait of Irving Berlin was the manner in which he was accidentally drowned in the East River. When he woke up in Gouverneur Hospital, his fist was firmly closed on the five pennies he had just obtained from the sale of newspapers. This is the story of Irving Berlin in miniature. He would be drowned mentally in the composition of his music--at the same time, he would never lose sight of his material achievement. His music must sell.

Mr. Woollcott has no timidity about saying that Irving Berlin is a genius, and we are nearly ready to agree with him when we hear that the greatest of American composers can neither read nor write music. Some who have heard his compositions will say “I knew it.” Homer could neither read nor write, and his poetry has stirred the hearts of thousands of generations. But if Carlyle was right that genius is unconscious of its excellence, Mr. Berlin would not qualify. Yet it is genius more than art which has made Irving Berlin so popular. And his popularity is due, largely, to his sense of the apropos. He catches a familiar American expression, he allows it to say itself in music in his mind, and when he has caught the rhythm that will make feet, young and old, want to beat time to it, he has created a “best-seller.” His genius rests on his musical interpretation of American everyday life. His songs are a monument to American language; they are as national as baseball and chewing gum; Irving Berlin is the pioneer of modern American music, and not only Mr. Woollcott, but a few of the great musical critics are hoping that his composition in the form of an operatic score may some time be heard in the Metropolitan House. But, of course, that would be in the distant future, and those who love real music will be thankful that they will be spared the ordeal. Mr. Woollcott would never call it that, however. He believes in Irving Berlin, not only as a successful interpreter of a passing craze, but as one who will live. He thinks that the musical historian of the year 2000 will find the birthday of American music and that of the creative ignoramus Irving Berlin to be the same. And if it be objected that he was born in Russia and can not be really American, his admirers will reply, probably, that if the musical interpreter of American civilisation came over in the foul hold of a ship, so did American civilisation.

Little of the qualities of heart and mind of Irving Berlin are discussed in this biography. Mr. Woollcott has been so intent on the cortex of Mr. Berlin’s life that he has forgotten to show us the marrow of it. He is too young, says his biographer, to be loaded with the usual embellishments that human kindness lavishes on those who have just passed away, to give him as Philip Guedella said somewhere “the studied discourtesy of a premature obituary,” but throughout we can feel that Irving Berlin’s qualities of heart are numerous, that his kindness is great, that his friends are many and his friendship valuable.

When Mr. Woollcott gets into his subject, he becomes less and less self-conscious, and more and more likeable. He has touches of sentiment, of humour and of keen observation which come on the reader unaware and are therefore the more delightful. The story might have been entitled, “From Rags to Riches,” undoubtedly; but it would have given an idea of something spectacular, and that was unnecessary.

But like all biographers who are prompted by friendship while their subject is still alive, and who are chiefly preoccupied with the personal side of their effort, Mr. Woollcott has lost a real opportunity to point out the value of the contribution of the negro to ragtime music; this would have afforded a certain amount of colour, of which the book is sadly in need. He is a musical critic and undoubtedly has definite views about the subject, and he could readily have got an incentive from the preface to James Weldon Johnson’s book, _The Book of American Negro Poetry_. He might equally well have attempted a summary of the birth and growth of jazz. Opinions are widely split on the value of such music. To some it appears as part of the American nation, and they can see beyond it, a taste for achievements higher than mere material comfort; but others shake their heads, discouraged. They do not believe that jazz is the way to anything worth while or lasting; they lament the efforts of American composers to deprave the taste of their countrymen, and shudder at the success attending the efforts. Mr. Woollcott would have earned our gratitude, had he expressed some views on the question. But then, he might have had to admit that the only picture he could give of Irving Berlin was that of a business and social success.

* * * * *

It is the fashion among the famous artists and actors of our time to write their lives which, appearing while they are at the apogee of their success, promote their artistic and business interests, and reveal the personality of the writer at the time when his name is constantly in the eyes of the public. As Maria Jeritza says in _Sunlight and Song_ there is no denying that reminiscences are fresher when “the laurels are green, and personalities and events described are alive in the public mind.” Why should an artist wait until his career is finished to write his memoirs? But the point which might be contested is the desirability of publishing such writing when it is without merit and when it can interest only the person who writes it, or those mentioned or discussed in it.

_Sunlight and Song_ is one of the most uninteresting narratives of stage life that has ever been published. It is neither more nor less than a record of Maria Jeritza’s creations and interpretations, comparisons of her waistline to those of other prima donnas, assurances that her hair is all her own, except of course when she wears a black wig--and even then she has her own--and auto-appreciation and repetition of the flattering things that others have said of her.

There is no intimate or personal recollection, no confession or avowal. Of her own life, not a word, so that neither the reports of gossip nor the known facts about her personal record are denied or sanctioned; and despite oft-repeated beliefs that artists should not meddle in politics, and that “art and politics have nothing in common, but sometimes they have” we have more of the too-well-known story and tragedy of the Emperor of Austria and his family than we care to have, especially as it is viewed from an altogether prejudiced angle. To crown the insipidity of _Sunlight and Song_, either Maria Jeritza or the translator has strewn it with the American use of superlatives, so that a good teacher is always a wonderful teacher, a wonderful singer and a wonderful woman.

It would be harmful to the career of a prima donna in her full maturity, with a prospect of many years of success ahead of her and a valuable list of successes behind her, to tell the truth about her fellow-artists or even about herself. So with one exception Frau Jeritza gracefully avoids the subject. She knows that a giantess could scarcely play the rôle of the heroine in “Madame Butterfly,” so she willingly admits it would be impossible to do it better than Farrar did it.

However, Madame Jeritza is no poorer an autobiographer than her semi-countryman, Emil Fuchs. Both in their different lines succeed in obstructing their personality under the bulk of the personal pronoun “I,” and neither reveals anything not known already.

* * * * *

Mr. Fuchs’ book mentions art occasionally, but most of the large volume is devoted to himself, his material success, his influential friends, his successful ascent of the ladder of fame. We do not expect the life of an artist to read like an Almanach de Gotha, or a Blue Book--made readable by the addition of gossip and the personal memoirs of their editor. Mr. Fuchs takes his readers through the years of his prosperity, without more than a passing glance at his youth, at his formative years, at his friendships and enmities. His life has been a series of successes, and he is well aware of it. The accounts of his royal friends, of his noble admirers and wealthy patrons smack of the _nouveau riche_. Mr. Fuchs knows it is not good taste to appear conceited or vain--so he tries to be as genially simple as he can, but all the time he makes one feel he is on the point of exploding with pride. It is useless to deny that he has some reasons to be proud. He has made his name synonymous with other things than success--his work is art, and his art has a method, a tradition, and a foundation in painstaking love, in culture and in thorough understanding of his craft. It is because Mr. Fuchs could have given us a book on the artist which would be something more than the creation of a social puppet that we complain. Many authors can tell us of royalty and the English peerage, but few can make a contribution to art. It is to be admitted, however, that the former find a more ready market for their wares, but, since Mr. Fuchs’ book was first written in the form of articles for the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ who no doubt enjoyed them to the full, why did not the author, in collecting these articles into a book, revise them, leave out half the social world and allow his pen free play to discuss Art? What he has to say of art comes as a reward, it seems, after one has waded through the first half of the book.

“Art and music tend to supplement each other and to
blend with and relieve one another--like the cold and
warm hues on the palette of the painter. Or like the
major and minor chord. In fact, creation was founded on
this principle of positive and negative; it pervades
everything, commencing with the colours of the rainbow
... each needing its contrasting counterpart for the
formation of a homogeneous entity, the structure of
existence.”

Later, he expands a little, but not generously, on the art of sketching:

“It is the gift of expressing with a few well-defined
strokes a hasty impression; and if each of these strokes
testifies to the mastery of the artist, the sketch often
stirs the imagination by its freshness and spontaneity to
a greater degree than the finished work. But to look at a
sketch by a dauber is like having to read a sentence with
every word misspelled.”

This, with a few lines on art criticism, ends practically Mr. Fuchs’ effort to write a book on the life of an artist. He has told us much we do not care to know, and little that interests us.

No one is expected to have whole-hearted love for one’s competitors, but at times Mr. Fuchs oversteps the limits of _bon ton_ by the pleasure he takes in pointing to the mote in his neighbour’s eye!

X
ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

ELEONORA DUSE, by _Jeanne Bordeux_.
ELEONORA DUSE, by _Edouard Schneider_.
THE TRUTH AT LAST, by _Charles Hawtrey_.
A PLAYER UNDER THREE REIGNS, by _Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson_.
FOOTLIGHTS AND SPOTLIGHTS, by _Otis Skinner_.
TWENTY YEARS ON BROADWAY, by _George Cohan_.
LETTERS OF AN UNSUCCESSFUL ACTOR.
WEBER AND FIELDS, by _Felix Isman_.

Arthur Symonds once spoke of Eleonora Duse as “a chalice for the wine of imagination.” She was just that, from the time of her birth in a railway carriage near Venice, to the day when she lay, dressed in white, in the mortuary chapel in Pittsburgh, and that she will remain for those who knew her, and for those who will know her through tradition and fame. None of those who heard her recite can forget her--none of those who did not should cease to regret it. Her personality was art come to life, and her life was devoted to her art, to love and to the theatre.

It has been said that no one ever _knew_ Eleonora Duse. She, who unfolded her soul on the stage, remained a mystery to her friends; nevertheless, since her death, several biographies have been published, each giving personal recollections, “intimate views” and character studies of the greatest actress Italy ever produced. Of these biographies, two stand out more conspicuously than the others: Jeanne Bordeux’s for its irrelevancy; Edouard Schneider’s for its revelatory qualities.

The former is an objective and impersonal life of Duse. The author speaks of herself only at rare intervals, and with a detachment which shows how engrossed she was in her subject. She focussed all her lights on the “grand artist” as she likes to call her. All the rest is incidental and serves only as background and contrast. The whole life of Duse is held within its covers, and yet it is not a life; it is an after image of some one who must have been great, but who is not obviously so under the pen of the author. The most touching part of the book is the end. We see Duse, a pathetic and lonely figure, fighting with all the strength of her exhausted body to return to Asolo where she had left all she loved. As she realised that the hope of seeing her beloved “Patria” again was becoming more remote, she mustered unsuspecting energy. All in vain. She was to die in America.

Jeanne Bordeux tells us in her preface that no one really knew Eleonora Duse--and we can see no justification for her amendation “no one in the world ever succeeded in knowing her as I did.... Each of her friends, intimates and actors, saw her in a different light; I saw her in all those lights merged in one, as from birth she unfalteringly followed her destiny, magnificently, humbly following the mission for which she was sent into the world.” We should have preferred Jeanne Bordeux to tell us in what way she knew Duse--in what capacity she approached her--what special privilege of intimacy or confidence she enjoyed with the person who had few intimates, and those well-known.

Duse was one of the most subtle and difficult persons to understand that ever lived in the public eye. Jeanne Bordeux gives no proof, either by quoting Duse’s words, or by contributing a particularly enlightening biography, that she either knew or understood her heroine. Duse combined successfully a public life with a secretly guarded private life; no one ventured to trespass on what she considered her own garden; no one dared ask questions; few drew conclusions from what they imagined to be the truth. Jeanne Bordeux did none of these things, and for that she should be thanked. But why colour her statements of what may have been facts with the hue of gossip, the _nuances_ of scandal? Hero-worship should not be carried too far, but there seems little necessity for reviving old affairs which may never have existed, especially when they serve only to whet the curiosity of gossip-lovers. It does not serve the memory of Eleonora Duse to discuss at length her relationship with d’Annunzio. The only high spot in the book, however, is connected with that, but might have been deleted of the unsavoury revelations which precede it, and the portrait of the artist left for our observation would not have suffered by the omission. It is said that long after her separation from d’Annunzio, Duse had an interview with him; at the end of the conversation, d’Annunzio said, taking her hand in his, and kissing it: “Not even you can imagine how I loved you!” And the Duse, serious, with that charming graciousness all her own, replied, “And to-day, not even you can imagine how much I have forgotten--you!” Apocryphal perhaps, but worth recording.

Despite her love for Eleonora Duse, Jeanne Bordeux will not see her as anything but a woman of genius in her chosen line--of ordinary talent in others. She brings out petty faults and weaknesses of temper which can not counteract what we know of her character and of her virtues. Whatever may be said about Duse, her admirers will not lose sight of the genius under the human form; of the suffering under the brave brow; of the tragedy in the soul; of the fundamental goodness and humility of a woman who could have had the world at her feet, and chose to carry it in her heart.

Jeanne Bordeux’s book is not a contribution to literature, because her style is too tenuous, too thin, and she has few of the qualities of pen and of heart that make for good writing. In beauty, sentiment, style and grace, it can not compare with Edouard Schneider’s biography. The latter is of so different a nature, so superior an attitude that it should be translated into English as it is already into German. It seems a pity that Madame Bordeux’s book should be the only one to speak of Duse to the American public.

M. Schneider’s biography has no relation with Jeanne Bordeaux’s. Indeed, it takes an altogether different viewpoint. It constitutes a testimony of psychological, moral and spiritual order; it is not the work of a foreigner who is unable to discern between truth and fiction in tales gathered here and there. Rather is it the direct story of an intimate friend of Eleonora Duse’s last years; he was bound to her by bonds of absolute confidence of the mind and of the heart; and it is important that the English reading public should be confronted with M. Schneider’s biography of Duse, important to establish the basis of a dignified admiration and attachment to the memory of the actress.

If Jeanne Bordeux has given the bulk of Duse’s life, Edouard Schneider has supplied the flavour; she has worked on the warp and woof of the plain fabric; he has incontestably woven his dreams and embroidered his phantasy. His inspiration comes from his love for Duse, and his love has served him as proof, as canvas, as basis. His personal recollections of her have sufficed to make a beautiful book, and he has written it from the fulness of his heart, and from the wealth of his memory; his eyes still lingering on her picture; his ear still thrilling with the music of her voice; his mind still astir with the beauties she has revealed to him; his heart still under the influence of her genius for friendship.

His presentation of Eleonora Duse is the best adapted to the picture we seek of her; he has avoided the personal element; the human weakness; the hardships of everyday life; all he has wished to remember was the beauty of Duse’s genius. At least, that is all he has wished to remember in this biography, but it calls for another one, from the same author. The mine from which he has drawn his inspiration, his memory, must be rich yet in wealth. M. Schneider has not insisted on biographical facts, but every modulation of Duse’s voice, every expression of her incomparable hands, and every utterance of her lips impressed him. He is a playwright of great talent, a poet of renown, and thanks to his magic qualities of pen, he has dramatised for us the poetry of Eleonora Duse’s life. He loved her not as a woman, but as a goddess, and his book is redolent of self-contained emotion, of bashful adoration, of unlimited admiration.

He was not present at her end, but Pittsburgh and its realities are there; the contrast he has drawn between the woman and Pittsburgh, of all cities, where she was destined to die is one of the most inspired parts of the book. The last chapter has the touch of the poet--and Duse herself would have been pleased with it.

* * * * *

A clever actor who achieved greatness, an incorrigible gambler who never knew satiety, a big heart, a winning personality and a modest man are revealed in _The Truth at Last_, the record of Charles Hawtrey’s life and achievements. As far as life is concerned, the actor-manager-gambler is reticent and diffident. His autobiography is carried along the most objective of lines, and the few words with which Mr. Somerset Maugham introduces and closes the book are more illuminating of Charles Hawtrey the man, than the complete and detailed story of his life as told by himself. It is not a model autobiography, though it tells with a certain amount of humour the failures and successes of the subject--and the failures are certainly the most attractive feature of the tale--but it is so impersonal an achievement, treated with such indifference that the reader feels the vanity there would be in trying to put more of himself into the reading than the author has put into the writing. It is well-known that Charles Hawtrey accepted fame as an actor with a nonchalance that showed how little acting was his true vocation; but his reminiscences show to what height of success good will, tact, charm, personality and the lack of anything better to do, can take a man. The number of times he found himself and his company in the hands of the bankruptcy solicitors is only paralleled by the number of times he pulled himself and his company out of total failure by bold and intelligent backing of a horse.

Horse-races and stage-management, work and gambling, filled his life. The three graces that appealed so to Martin Luther played no part in Hawtrey’s life so far as can be judged from _The Truth at Last_. Only those who knew and admired Charles Hawtrey will be able to enjoy the book with unmixed pleasure. They will have but to recall his ease and grace, his smile, his utter lack of affectation (or so it seemed on the stage) to find excuses for the stilted and unbending presentation of his autobiography. Evidently, Charles Hawtrey was no writer, and self-consciousness, which was unknown to the actor, was his constant companion when “he took his pen in hand.” And then too, he lacks a sense of proportion although this may be due to his determination not to allow his personality, his emotions, likes and dislikes to creep into the record of his life. He devotes the same number of words to the death of his father, of whom he was very fond and to whose guidance he owed the best there was in him, as he does to the purchase of a blanket used on board a steamer; he mentions his second marriage, the War, the impressions left on him by Rome and America, much more casually than he does the receipt of a cheque from Australia, and his first marriage is mentioned only by way of reference. Timidity, self-consciousness, delicacy, lack of self-absorption? Probably a combination of all of them, and an extreme desire to live, to live rapidly, an unchecked interest in the display of life, in horses and in the life of the stage are responsible for that lack of _laisser aller_ which is the greatest charm of autobiographies. It is _The Truth at Last_, and a truth that can probably compare point by point with facts, but it is not the truth about the man who was one of England’s most beloved actors.

* * * * *

To read _A Player Under Three Reigns_ immediately after _The Truth at Last_ is like going from a dark cave where one gropes one’s way around, into the sunlight and the open. Where one author is cramped by a pen and hampered in the choice of the words that make writing the natural expression of thought, the other allows words and ideas to blend in interesting, amusing or touching homogeneity, always harmonious and always natural.

Forbes-Robertson is fundamentally an artist and it is interesting to know that his first calling was to be a painter, a calling in which he displayed gift and talent and which he followed in his spare time. His reminiscences are of great interest not only because of the personality of the author, which is never accentuated in the written words but becomes fascinatingly evident between the lines, but also because Forbes-Robertson has known practically all the people who made art, literature and history in his generation; he has known them personally, some intimately, and his book is almost as much a review of the late years of the nineteenth century in England, in France and in America, as the record of his own life. He is never afraid to add to his memoirs a touch of emotion, an expression of a heartfelt sentiment, and when he does, he is more charming than ever. The layman possibly thinks that all the members of the theatrical world are jealous and envious of each other; occasionally, a movement is set afoot to help some actor who finds himself in poverty after a life of semi-luxury; benefit performances are given to procure a comfortable few years to a man who has given his talent without thinking of the future; but these movements are always in favour of one whose competition is no longer to be feared; and the general opinion is that theatrical people are heartless, selfish and shallow. How quickly this impression is dispelled when we read the tributes Sir Johnston offers to his confrères of the stage. He must have had enemies, but he is careful to avoid wounding them and those whom he has liked have their names and their deeds lauded in _A Player Under Three Reigns_.

Some points of artistic or ethical interest are discussed comprehensively--one, probably the most important, is the author’s contention regarding the appropriateness of actor-managers. He was one for years, not from choice, but from comparative necessity and his opinion is not only valuable, but based on experience.

Humour, wit, lightness, grace and knowledge of facts form a good foundation upon which to build an autobiography; these qualities fell to Sir Forbes-Robertson’s share, and in so far as actor-biographers are concerned they seem to be the lion’s share.

* * * * *

_Footlights and Spotlights_ is a diverting autobiography which has much interest, reveals frankness and humour, and serves the reputation of Otis Skinner, but it will not enhance it. Its author is one of the intellectuals of the American stage and he could have written a better book. However, he is very much alive in its pages and so are the great number of people he has met and liked or disliked. His career has not been a series of successes, and he makes no attempt to conceal it. Apparently he took his troubles with optimism and cheer and he has woven these qualities into his narrative, which unrolls itself as a panorama of the stage-life of the past fifty years. A refreshing feature of the book is the author’s appreciation and praise of others. He is generous, often magnanimous, always charitable. He has not liked every one, and those he has disliked get their deserts in moderation.

Otis Skinner’s life has been a full and varied one, and it is a delightful journey to take with him through countries and behind footlights, travelling and acting, and praying with him that the new show may be a big success.

Mr. Skinner’s book is another of those which suggests there is a great deal to be said in favour of writers who delay publication of their autobiographies until after their death. Undoubtedly all autobiographies would gain in quality if their authors devoted some of the years of their lives, given to preparation of what James Barrie calls “the greatest adventure of life,” to shaping and perfecting the document. They would gain in objectivity if they waited until the fading of their star; they would gain in charm and in honesty if their pens were not guided by fear of the impression they will make and how it will affect their career; and meanwhile they may weave into the work, at leisure, the interesting information that those who make history, literature or art should transmit to posterity, and that so often needs the shadows of death to veil and envelop it.

* * * * *

Recently there has appeared in France a book entitled _Plutarch Lied_. I have no doubt he did, like all mankind save George Washington, but he was truthful when he said that the man who writes his life embraces the opportunity to celebrate certain moral qualities. The quality that George M. Cohan celebrates in himself is courage. He also prides himself on his industry. He was long of courage from his birth, or at least he was before he drained the tank so lavishly. Mr. Cohan is less engaging when he tells how he achieved his success, than when he is actually achieving it on the stage. He uses the personal pronoun, which Pascal said was hateful, more frequently than any author I recall, save Doctor Rainsford in his _Story of a Varied Life_. _Twenty Years on Broadway_ reads like the inventory of a shop; so many pounds of tea, so many ounces of bromide, so many packages of ginger. Nothing is said of their origin, their prices or their uses. The possessor owns them, it is his business how he got them, what they cost him in money and effort and what he is going to do with them.

Any one seeking enlightenment about personality, its perfections or defects should not go to autobiographies of actors: “I guess I am a ham, all right” said Mr. Cohan to himself after he had been mildly echoed by some of his fellow Thespians. I don’t know exactly what a “ham” is but if he is one, he is an amusing one on the stage. In the past twenty years he has written, signed and produced thirty-one plays of his own. It is regrettable that he did not get some one else to tell how he did it.

What Mr. Cohan’s book lacks more than anything else is the revelation of an ideal of life--an ideal other than the ambition to “put Broadway in his pocket.” It may be said in his defence that he was not at a school where such ideals form part of the daily and hourly preoccupations, and that his childhood was spent in an atmosphere not conducive to taking thought of one’s fellow-man’s spiritual needs and welfare. But there is a code of ethics which is particularly that of theatre-people and which is as altruistic in its conception as the Golden Rule; Mr. Cohan may conform his conduct to it, but one would not surmise it from reading his book. I admit he is a dramatist who has set a new style, a popular songwriter with a large following, a clever comedian, a resourceful theatrical technician, and that he knows a lot about the emotional wants of his fellow-citizens; but I am equally sure he knows little about himself, and what he knows he does not know how to tell.

* * * * *

A spiritual biography by one who prefers to withhold his name has recently been published under the title _Letters of an Unsuccessful Actor_. Although it is replete with shrewd observations, timely comment, and evidence of sound thinking and wide reading, R. M. S., to whom the letters were addressed and who is responsible for their publication, should have interpolated the word “self-satisfied” between the last two words of the title.

There are fifty-six letters, and in one or another of them most of the famous players of the last thirty years are discussed. It would seem to be quite fitting that the first letter is in praise of R. M. S. and the last an attempt to answer the question: Is acting merely interpretative? From them both, and from the others, a comprehensive idea may be gained of the man who wrote them and why he was a failure in his profession. It is likely he would not admit he was a failure. “Unsuccessful” probably means that he did not gain the position his talent deserved, nor recognition similar to that accorded Lawrence Barrett, Henry Irving, Dion Boucicault, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare, Charles Hawtrey and scores of others who reached the top during his lifetime. Self-consciousness undoubtedly was his stumbling block, and over-readiness to sit in judgment with a predilection for the adverse aided it. Possibly he was too original to be imitative; too immobilised by ideas to be plastic and malleable; too assertive to be taught and schooled. That is the impression one gets from reading this unusually interesting gossipy book which should appeal to all actors, divert many theatre-goers, and instruct some historians of the stage.