MARY ANDERSON’S MEMOIRS.

New Zealand Times, Volume LVIII, Issue 2846, 15 June 1896, Page 3

MARY ANDERSON’S MEMOIRS.

THE MOST INTERESTING AND DE LIGHTFUL BOOK OF THE SEASON,

The recently published "Memoirs” of Mary Anderson (Mrs Navarre), the great Catholic actress, have been received with universal approval, delight and gratification. The simple and unaffected style is so charmingly different from the usual ambitious and strained way in which most works of the kind are written that the book has a charm all its own, and that is as delicious as it is individual. No actress of this century holds such a warm place in the hearts of the whole English-speaking people. The purity of her own life and the genuine efforts she has made to elevate the Stage have cast around her a halo such (as no actress of this or any other age has over enjoyed. The only regret the public have is that her career was not moio prolonged, however fortunate may have been ' tlio circumstances of her leaving it. Writing of plays which influence the public for good, she says :—“ One cannot but regret that so many which leave a painful, often a harmful, effect should be produced, lam aware that to say this is to run counter to the latest development of the drama; but I fortify my opinion by recalling what Joseph Jefferson onco said to me. Ho was very severe upon the plays that drag one through the mire of immorality, even when they show a good lesson at the end. ‘ What I could not invite my friends to hear and see in my own parlour,’ he said, 'I would not feel at liberty to put before my friends in the theatre.' I remember that at a luncheon party years after the above conversation, ‘ La Tosca ’ was discussed, and Mr James Russell Lowell was asked what he thought of tho play. ‘ I have not seen it,’ ho answered; ‘ I refuse to have my mind dragged in the gutter.’ I have also heard Tennyson declaim against ‘this realism, this degradation of the drama,’ as he called it.” The opinions of such men are far to be preferred to any amount of insincere nonsense about representing “ human nature as it is.”

On one occasion the eminent actormanager, Edwin Booth, was asked by a minister if he could not enter the theatre by a side door to avoid being seen. “ No, sir,” answered the great actor “ there’s no door in my theatre that Almighty God can’t see through." Hero was a conscientious manager, and one who more than any other succeeded in lifting from tho theatre the odium which unscrupulous management and depraved patronage had cast upon it. Miss Anderson had the same idea of the stage as that implied in Booth’s answer to the minister. She regarded it as a sacred place where good lessons might bo taught. A STAGE! CAREER DISAPPOINTING. Miss Anderson found, with many other great actors and actresses, that a stage career is in itself a futile and disappointing one. She quotes approvingly Fanny Kemble’s confession :—" Never have I presented myself before an audience without a feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn' from their presence without thinking tho excitement X had undergone unwholesome and the personal exhibition odious.” She enlarges ou the theory. “To bo conscious,” she says, " that one’s person was a target for any who paid to make it one i to live for months at a time in one groove with uncongenial surroundings, and in an atmosphere seldom penetrated by tho sun and air, and to be continually repeating the same passions and thoughts in the same words—that was the worst part of my daily life, and became so likb slavery to me that I resolved to out myself free from the stage fetters for ever.”

A little less than a third of this book has already appeared in print in the shape of magazine articles that dealt with Miss Anderson's early career. But all the moat interesting portion—that which tells of her European experiences—is entirely new. It is to this portion, therefore, that, we shall confine ourselves. Miss Anderson’s first appearance in London was made in 1883, at the Lyceum, and m the part of the heroine of “Ingomar.” There was a month of preparation, full of alarms, doubts and dreams of failure. Then came the opening night. The house was full. FIRST LONDON NIOHT, "After the applause of my first entrance (I had never before received such a long and hearty greeting) I felt that the public of London, so dreaded for months before, had welcomed a stranger in the most friendly spirit. The excitement of the first scenes had evidently weakened me, for in the second act, while weaving garlands for the golden cups, a kindly voice from the pit called out ‘Mary, please speak up a bit!’ This was said with so much feeling that it put an end to my nervousness, and from that moment the play ran smoothly to the end. Every point was received with enthusiasm, and even those who had been so prejudiced against the old-fashioned sentiment voted it a great and instant success." Miss Anderson says:—“Mr Gilbert did not agree with my conception of the classic moaning of Galatea’s character—which seemed to me its strongest and most effective sidesaying that the play was a nineteenth century comedy dressed in Greek costume, ' which,' he added, *is the only classic thing about it.’ ” However, when the first representation was over, “Mr Gilbert acknowledged himself satisfied with his new Galatea,” ON BRITISH AUDIENCES. Mrs Navarro’s notes on British audiences are interesting. In the English provincial towns, either through timidity or self-consciousness, she found playgoers laughed and wept in a very conservative manner. “ Between the large manufacturing towns of England and those of the United States there was a marked similarity in the theatre-going public. The Irish audiences, on the contrary, gave full and often reckless rein to their emotions, interrupting any point that pleased them before it was completed, and cheering until one feared for their throats. Nor was this all; for after the moat violent transports during the play they invariably had energy enough left to sing between the acts, and applaud that impromptu entertainment." In Dublin the overplus of energy was so great that they took the horses from the actress’ carriage every night and dragged it through the streets, with loud shouts of “ God bless our Mary!" “ Hurrah for America!”

Tet, despite 'our Mary’s appreciation of the uncommon kindness of heart which prompted these ebullitions, she confesses that it was in Edinburgh she encountered the most delightful of 5 all audiences “ Always attentive, breathlessly silent during the development of a situation, waiting not only until the climax was reached, but until it was finished, before bursting into a recognition as spontaneous as it was intelligent. They gave their tears as generously as their laughter, and it was not only a pleasure but a help and an incentive to one’s best efforts to appear before them.” Miss Anderson acknowledges a debt of gratitude to her profession for opening to her the doors of the artistic and literary world. “What a charming and helpful world it is!” she cries. .Naturally the book teems with reminiscences of the famous men and women whom she met.