Mary Anderson | Page 9

ordeal of facing, at the Lyceum, an audience, perhaps the most fastidious and critical in London.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CAREER OF AN AMERICAN STAR.
Mary Anderson returned home from California disheartened and dispirited. To her it had proved anything but a Golden State. Her visit there was the first serious rebuff in her brief dramatic career whose opening months had been so full of promise, and even of triumph. She was barely seventeen, and a spirit less brave, or less confident in its own powers, might easily have succumbed beneath the storm of adverse criticism. Happily for herself, and happily too for the stage on both sides of the Atlantic, the young debutante took the lesson wisely to heart. She saw that the heights of dramatic fame could not be taken by storm; that her past successes, if brilliant, regard being had to her youth and want of training, were far from secure. She was like some fair flower which had sprung up warmed by the genial sunshine, likely enough to wither and die before the first keen blast. Her youth, her beauty, her undoubted dramatic genius, were points strongly in her favor; but these could ill counterbalance, at first at any rate, the want of systematic training, the almost total absence of any experience of the representation by others of the parts which she sought to make her own. She had seen Charlotte Cushman; indeed, in "Meg Merrilies," but of the true rendering of a part so difficult and complex as Shakespeare's Juliet, she knew absolutely nothing but what she had been taught by the promptings of her own artistic instinct. She was herself the only Juliet, as she was the only Bianca, and the only Evadne, she had ever seen upon any stage. In those days she had, perhaps, never heard the remark of Mademoiselle Mars, who was the most charming of Juliets at sixty. "Si j'avais ma jeunesse, je n'aurais pas mon talent."
Coming back then to her Kentucky home from the ill-starred Californian trip, Mary Anderson seems to have determined to essay again the lowest steps of the ladder of fame. She took a summer engagement with a company, which was little else than a band of strolling players. The repertoire was of the usual ambitious character, and Mary was able to assume once more her favorite role of Juliet. The company was deficient in a Romeo, and the part was consequently undertaken by a lady--a role by the way in which Cushman achieved one of her greatest triumphs. In spite, however, of the young star, the little band played to sadly empty houses, and the treasury was so depleted that, in the generosity of her heart, Mary Anderson proposed to organize a benefit matinee, and play Juliet. She went down to the theater at the appointed hour and dressed for her part. After some delay a man strayed into the pit, then a couple of boys peeped over the rails of the gallery, and, at last, a lady entered the dress-circle. The disheartened manager was compelled at length to appear before the curtain and announce that, in consequence of the want of public support, the performance could not take place. That day Mary Anderson walked home to her hotel through the quiet streets of the little Kentucky town--which shall be nameless--with a sort of miserable feeling at her heart, that the world had no soul for the great creations of Shakespeare's master-mind, which had so entranced her youthful fancy. It all seemed like a descent into some chill valley of darkness, after the sweet incense of praise, the perfume of flowers, and the crowded theaters which had been her earlier experiences. But the dark storm cloud was soon to pass over, and henceforth almost unbroken sunshine was to attend Mary Anderson's career. For her there was to be no heart-breaking period of mean obscurity, no years of dull unrequited toil. She burst as a star upon the theatrical world, and a star she has remained to this day, because, through all her successes, she never for a moment lost sight of the fact that she could only maintain her ground by patient study, and steady persistent hard work. Failures she had unquestionably. Her rendering of a part was often rough, often unfinished. Not uncommonly she was surpassed in knowledge of stage business by the most obscure member of the companies with whom she played; but the public recognized instinctively the true light of genius which shone clear and bright through all defects and all shortcomings. It was a rare experience, whether on the stage, or in other paths of art, but not an unknown one. Fanny Kemble, who made her debut at Covent Garden at the same age as Mary Anderson, took the town by storm at once, and