Ellen Terry, writing from Boston to a friend, said: "I believe there was more money in the house one night than there ever had been before, and do you know what the play was? The dear old 'Merchant of Venice'!" Miss Terry's Portia was described by Norman Hapgood: "Her gait, her voice, her face, the wave of her hand, the toss of her head, all glow with the quick, warm throbbing life of spring, of buds and inspiring air!" Another beloved actress of the nineties who played in "The Merchant of Venice" and "The School for Scandal" was Ada Rehan. She inspired the austere Hapgood to speak of her "beautiful simplicity, matchless elocution, and quiet, melting poetry."

In the nineties Minnie Maddern Fiske played "Becky Sharp" and Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Mrs. Fiske could, if she chose, project no more than the profile of her nose and chin beyond the edge of the wings and, with as little as that, direct as much personality out upon the audience and excite as much emotion as some other actors using all their resources. No actress ever did more with the concentration of a fine, strong mentality into a richly vibrant voice than Mrs. Fiske in a single sentence: "It's too late, Becky Sharp!"

In October, 1898, Richard Mansfield played “Cyrano de Bergerac" at the Garden Theatre, New York. That event of the nineties was the introduction to America of what turned out to be "the most successful play that has ever been produced at any time in the history of the drama. No other play in history has been so immediately and so enormously successful in every country of the world." Those words are Clayton Hamilton's.1

1 I wrote to Mr. Hamilton about the inclusiveness of this judgment, and he replied: "I mean that it was the most instantaneously and universally popular play in the history of the theatre. It is not the greatest nor anything near the greatest, but it is, I think, the most contagious-and Walter Hampden ranks equally with Coquelin and Mansfield in the playing of the hero."

So far as they compose a judgment, they are subject to difference of opinion. But Mr. Hamilton has also set down, not as judgment, but as recollection of vivid fact, the way in which Rostand's words moved the youth of the nineties: Rostand "taught me in my teens to love the loveliness of words, an affection I have not as yet outlived. I remember how when I was sixteen I used to walk the streets repeating the verses of Rostand over and over to myself. I find myself doing it to this day. .. No other man has ever shown a greater mastery of words."

That was Clayton Hamilton and many, many other American youths of the time of Mansfield's production of "Cyrano" in the 1890's. More than a quarter of a century later, in the fall of 1924, Walter Hampden restored "Cyrano" to the American stage1 and proved that, with respect to this play at least, the taste of 1924 did not differ from that of 1898. Hampden was advised by nearly every friend he had among producers not to court

1 When Hampden's 1924 tour brought him to Washington I had occasion to observe the effect of the magic of Rostand's verse on another lad, one whose youth did not depend on mere years, but on temperament, and was permanent. Joseph P. Tumulty, after going to Washington as Secretary to President Woodrow Wilson, had a table in the Shoreham dining-room for lunch every day, a table that became an institution. One day as I entered the dining-room I observed that the casual lunchers, travellers and strangers, had their eyes on Tumulty's table, with an expression partly amusement, partly wonder. Tumulty was alone, his big horn spectacles on his nose, in one hand a book, the other busy with gestures of scorn. His voice rapt, sonorous, and considerably louder than his utter preoccupation realized, rolling out the dramatic shadings of

Callous, and cultivate a supple spine

Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No, thank you!"

As I sat down, Tumulty asked me if I had seen Hampden in "Cyrano" the night before. Too rapt to wait for an answer, he cast me, without my will, in the rôle of Le Bret; and now having adequate dramatis personæ for the scene, raised his

"CYRANO DE BERGERAC"

227 disaster with so hazardous a revival. He was told that times had changed during the hiatus of a quarter-century, and the piece would seem old-fashioned; that twentiethcentury American audiences did not care for costume dramas, and would not sit through a play in verse. Hampden reasoned, however, that "Cyrano," being of the seventeenth century-being, more accurately, of all time and no time, being of the date that one identifies merely as long ago - Hampden reasoned that its popularity did not depend on any element of timeliness

it would be no more out of date in 1924 than it had been in 1898. He reasoned also that it would be new to all theatregoers under thirty, and that its high-spirited exuberance would appeal to youth. Most of all, Hampden took counsel of his own feeling for what is fine. His courage was rewarded. At the opening performance, November 1, 1924, the audience stood up and cheered; voice to a still higher vehemence, and directed his withering "No, thank you's"

at me:

"Scratch the back of any swine

That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns

Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right,

Too proud to know his partner's business,

Takes in the fee? No, thank you! Use the fire

God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone?

No, thank you!... Publish verses at my own
Expense? No, thank you!

Calculate, scheme, be afraid,

Love more to make a visit than a poem,

Seek introductions, favor, influences?

No, thank you! No, I thank you,

And again

I thank you!"

While I, trying to seem not to shrink from his gestures of outraged scorn, had occasion to wonder uneasily how many of the listening lunchers had seen "Cyrano" the night before, or were otherwise equipped to understand that the vehemence of which I was the object had been evoked as merely the vicarious echo of a poet in the French tongue, translated by Brian Hooker and declaimed by Walter Hampden. Tumulty was a man of forty-five, a seasoned theatregoer, but he— and many others, youths either by the almanac or by the permanent license of temperament thrilled like a sensitive, romantic child to the translation of Rostand's verse, of which Brander Matthews said: "It is utterly impossible to translate 'Cyrano de Bergerac' into English verse; and Brian Hooker has done it."

in its fourth month it was playing to twenty thousand dollars a week.1

Richard Mansfield's introduction of "Cyrano de Bergerac" to America was one of his many services to the theatre, many pleasures to the public. He produced the first of Bernard Shaw's plays to be brought to America, "Arms and the Man," in 1894; and the second, “The Devil's Disciple," in 1897. He wanted to play "Candida," and put it in rehearsal, but abandoned it because, Shaw said, the actor could not embody the poet physically. Mansfield also played in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "Henry V," "Beau Brummell," "A Parisian Romance."

In the nineties, Julia Marlowe was playing in rôles of exquisite youth, "The Countess Valeska," Rosalind in "As You Like It." Of Miss Marlowe as she was in these and others of her early impersonations, Augustus Thomas, out of his wide experience, says: "She had every requisite for success in star parts on the stage that a girl could need

youth and health, with their attractiveness; facial and physical beauty; stature, poise, carriage, voice, diction, proper pronunciation, mobile expression, definite and graceful gesture, and competent, well-shaped, responsive hands. Her mental equipment included gaiety, hospitality for humor, self-reliance, ready emotions under fair control, a capacity for attention. . . . Her voice, then as now, the best woman's speaking voice on the American or English stage." Norman Hapgood, recalling the glamour of his own youth during the nineties, and that of one of the most beautiful women who ever played on any stage, said of Miss Marlowe: "She burst upon the students of Harvard College like each one's personal dream."

Joseph Jefferson was playing "Rip Van Winkle,"

1 For much about Hampden's revival of “Cyrano" I am indebted to Clayton Hamilton, who was closely associated with him.