McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908

I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.

THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]

When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House. There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then--the building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of beauty in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember New York without it.

THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY]

I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless hansoms of London plying in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars, unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty cents!

Irving Brings Shakespeare to America

There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its naivete. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown, and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were new. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the dressing-rooms were inferior.

FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R. A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF LONDON]

DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY'S JUBILEE IN 1906]

FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R. A.]

Our First Appearance Before an American Audience

Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and appreciative. We felt that the Americans wanted to like us. We felt in a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a foreign city was quickly wiped out.

ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY]

On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.

American Clothes

My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever at the demi-toilette as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy, blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!

London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all, I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.

"Very."

"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming back to England is the hopeless look on so many faces; the dejection and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One millionaire's house is modelled on a French chateau, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.

The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens

It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens, that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was superb."

Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au metier_.' So has Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.

It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were substituted.