III

Nance Oldfield, as Ellen Terry plays it, is the concentration of a five-act comedy into one act and one scene. It is a play that allows an adequate opportunity of the gifts of the great actress. For Ellen Terry’s gifts are of so wide a range that the mere variety of them is in itself a gift; and the congruity of them in such a play allows them to help each other and each to shine out all the stronger for the contrast.

Ellen Terry had long had in her mind Reade’s play as one to be given in a single act. And now that its opportunity came over the horizon she began to prepare it. This she did herself, I having the honour of assisting her. That preparation was a fine lesson in dramatic construction. Ellen Terry has not only a divine instinct for the truth in stage art, but she is a conscious artist to her finger-tips. No one on the stage in our time—or at any other time—has seen more clearly the direct force of sympathy and understanding between the actor and the audience; but at the same time she was not herself an experienced dramatist. She knew in a general way what it was that was wanting and what she aimed at, but she could not always give it words. During rehearsal or during the play she would in a pause of her own stage work come dancing into my office to ask for help. Ellen Terry’s movements, when she was not playing a sad part, always gave one the idea of a graceful dance. Looking back now to twenty-seven years of artistic companionship and eternal community of ideas, I cannot realise that she did not always actually dance. She would point to some mark which she had made in the altered script and say:

“I want two lines there, please!”

“What kind of lines? What about?” I would ask. She would laugh as she answered.

“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. You must write them!” When she would dance back again I would read her the lines. She would laugh again and say:

“All wrong. Absolutely wrong. They are too serious,” or “they are too light; I should like something to convey the idea of——” and she would in some subtle way—just as Irving did—convey the sentiment, or purpose, or emotion which she wished conveyed. She would know without my saying it when I had got hold of the idea and would rush off to her work quite satisfied. And so the little play would grow and then be cut again and grow again; till at last it was nearly complete. This last bit of it puzzled us both for a long time. At last she conveyed her idea to me that Alexander must not be left with a serious personal passion for Mrs. Oldfield and that yet she should not sink in his esteem. Finally I wrote a line which had the reward of her approbation. The actress was explaining to Mr. Alworthy how his son did not really love her:

“It was the actress he loved and not the woman!”

In this little play, which is typical of her marvellous range of varied excellences, she runs the whole gamut of human emotion. The part where the great actress, wishing to disenchant her boy lover, exemplifies her art and then turns it into ridicule, could not be adequately played by any one not great in both tragedy and comedy. Her rendering here of Juliet’s great speech before taking the potion: “My dismal scene I needs must act alone,” is given with the full tragic force with which she played the real part—when she swept the whole audience—and yet, without the delay of a second she says to the emotional poet: “Now, that’s worth one and ninepence to me!” It is such moments as these that put an actor into history. Records are not troubled with mere excellence.

Happy, I say, should be the real dramatist who has the co-operation of Ellen Terry in a play she is to appear in—of a part she is to act.