Mary Garden

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What did the critics mean when they used to say that never again in our generation would there come another Bernhardt? They didn’t mean that there would be no other great actresses because they were writing of actresses, all the time, whom they considered great. In an argument they would talk largely of Bernhardt’s personality. Let them call it personality if they are using the better Oriental meaning of the word: Individuality. But I fear they mean only to limit something unknown so that it may be understood. The more external nullities they bring to prove it personality the more its unknown nature is emphasized. The more talk there is of arresting qualities of person, acts, and dress, of frankness and ferocity, tears and terror—the more talk there is of all its eccentric sanities, the more it recedes and becomes definitely itself, aloof and unnamed.

Arthur Symons tried to express it when he wrote of Bernhardt: “Two magics met and united, in the artist and in the woman.” But after all it is only that through the woman you feel the imminence of something as great and impersonal as the sweep of sea and the growth of flowers. In all the arts, whenever the magic of the artist has been united with this other magic the possessor has been of the first great. Michael Angelo and the dark troubled magic of him....

I wonder why, even in those people to whom has come some appreciation of the magic of the artist, there is still so often such strong resentment and distrust of this other magic. Because of their adventures in the great emotions, those who have it loosen new forces of life; they recreate the great passions; they add something to Fate.

Everyone feels that he has a right to a share in that which the millions are working together in uproar to add to existence. Many long for a share in that which the artists are making in silence for the soul. But who is there except the artist who is willing to feel in this thing the imminence of something beyond life and personality? Who else in the world except the lonely insane, because of their adventures in illusions and hallucinations, ever add anything to Fate? How easy to say that genius is akin to madness. All great antitheses are akin: all unknown things are mysteriously akin, as all known things are naturally akin. But how poignantly akin are the known and unknown! Why does anyone exclude himself from any connection with the infinite?

When I was a little child I lived in a great asylum for the insane. It was a world outside of the world, where realities had to be imagined and where, even through those excursions in illusions and hallucinations, there ran a strange loneliness. The world can never be as lonely in those places where the mind has never come as in a place where the mind has gone. There were no books to read in this place except the great volumes in the Patients’ Library; and I had read them all. There was no one to ask about anything. There was no way to make a connection with “life.” Out there in the world they were working and thinking; here we were still. Very early I had given up every one except the Insane. The others knew nothing about anything, or knew only uninteresting facts. From the Insane I could get everything. They knew everything about nothing, and were my authority; but beyond that there was a silence. Who had made the pictures, the books and the music in the world? And how had they made them? And how could you tell the makers from just people? Did they have a light around their heads? Were there any of them in the world now? And would I ever see one? One day a name came to me suddenly. Some one was talking of a “wicked French actress” who was touring America:—“Sarah Bernhardt.” Even when they said it the name had a light around it! She would come as far as St. Louis. I would go at once. But I was too little. I had no money.... I would run away. I would walk the whole distance to her. But she would be gone before I could get there.... Some day I would go to Paris. Other people had got that far. I would go on living for that.

And then she came again! I was there, the first night, sitting in the balcony with some other art students. We had sold our futures to sit so close. I was burning with hot excitement and shaking with cold fear until the moment—it was Camille—when the long french doors opened and she came languidly and as if from a great distance; hands extended as if balancing her exquisitely upon an enchanted atmosphere, her suave voluptuous tawny head bent slightly down. I threw myself mind and soul into the waves of that caressing fiery magic which swept out to us.

After this came a new agony: the critics had said there would never be another. There was Duse, whom I have never seen; but she has always filled me with a restless trouble. What artist has ever so dared to offend Art? Never in all her life as an actress did she choose a play in which her great art could come into its own. It always seems that there is more laid upon the artist than a willingness to serve; it is almost a command to serve. Did Duse deny the command and by so doing add the martyrdom of Art to a great personal tragedy? Or was it because she tried to create an art out of nature itself that Art revenged itself upon her through nature? As an actress she had “no resources outside simple human nature.” As a woman she had no resource in Art.

Then a new name came across the world, with a new radiance. Not with the glow of Duse’s halo, nor with the threat of Bernhardt’s heat-lightning, but with the radiance of the Northern Lights it shone above the horizon.... Mary Garden! Her magics have this kind of splendor. She has brought a new temper into the drama—something not Latin, not English. Duse could never be unnatural; Bernhardt can never be unsophisticated, un-French; English actresses can seldom be unconventional. But Mary Garden.... She brings a sharp new ecstasy of life, an inexorable sadness of love; she brings an energy that is grace and a calm that is energy; she brings a frankness that is mystery. There is something Norsk about Mary Garden. In her the pure metal of the mind seems to have been annealed by an Oriental fire, adding to it a passion without vehemence. There is something unconquered about her, as if she came from that land where the sun shines at midnight; from that race which never made for itself a beneficent God.

I don’t know where to begin to write about Mary Garden’s art. There is art within art within art, and then there is Mary Garden.

First of all, she seems to be the only singer who knows that all the arts come from the same source and follow the same laws. Critics love to say that pure song and pure music do not express human emotion, although drama, poetry, painting and sculpture do. What logic! Pure music and pure song express exactly what drama, poetry, painting and sculpture express. But none of them expresses human emotion; they express the source of human emotion. To express the emotions of life is to live; to express the life of emotions is to make art.

I wish I could tell beautifully what a great creative artist Mary Garden is. It is one thing for the artist to create a character within the outlines definitely or indefinitely drawn by the composer; to put himself in the place of the character and act as he would act. But the creative artist takes the character to himself and then creates from his imagination in his own image—the image of his soul. The more universal the artist, the greater his power to reveal his soul in different images. What an infinite thing Mary Garden has shown her soul to be: Thaïs, the Jongleur, Monna Vanna, Carmen, Grisélidis, Tosca, Mélisande, Salome!

And so when she creates a character she recreates the opera. Mary Garden is the only singer in opera to whom song is speech. Because in opera song and music have been fused with drama, the voice must become a medium for creating character, thought and emotion, together with the hands, face and body of the actor-singer. There is no need to discuss here what has or what has not been accomplished toward the creation of a new art by this fusion of the arts. You have but to hear and see Mary Garden in Pelléas and Mélisande to find poetry, music, singing and acting united so that the essence of each art comes to us with a rarer flavor than when free. No perfect thing can lose by being united with another perfect thing. However, it is no small task to do this in those older compositions in which music has been written to melodrama, to be sung by elaborate musical instruments. When the music carries beyond the true emotion of the drama, or when it does not reach to the limits of the drama, it is only an artist with flawless intelligence who can break over the barrier of the score and hold the music to the emotion with a backward line of the voice or carry it on by sheer genius to its full task.

And what a voice! You can’t quite stand it when Mary Garden sings words like “amour,” “pitié,” “éternel.” It breaks your heart in a strange way, because she makes you feel more precisely our brief longing, our frail tenderness and our deceiving hope. Many people don’t like it—the same ones who don’t like modern painting, the Imagists, Scriabine, and the rest. They have no idea that it is a new kind of instrument, to which they must bring new ears. They say: Why does she sing at all? Why doesn’t she go into straight drama?—never realizing for a moment that she has a longer reach than Bernhardt, a stronger grasp than Duse. There is not enough resistance for her in pure drama. She must paint the canvas full.

Once before I called Mary Garden a great decorative actress. I am using decoration in the sense in which it is used in painting, where elimination and not elaboration is used to emphasize the intention of line and color. She carries this same idea into her costumes: she can give you the whole spirit and atmosphere of an historical costume by a mere silhouette of its lines. And she can draw in the whole psychology of a scene with one line of her body—the line of her walk. If she is to dominate a situation with her intellect or her beauty she walks from the center of her intelligence, which is the head, giving a length of line that makes the slightest step a stride; if it is a matter of the soul she walks from the center of her presence, which is the top plane of the chest, moving like a Presence—not like a being; when it is love she walks straight from her heart, with a line that repeats a pain; when it is passion she sinks the line to a point lower than the hip, and prowls destructively. In Thaïs, when she is trying to enthrall the monk, she winds about the stage and him, bending slightly in hip and knee. Later, in a scene of contest with him, she lifts the line to her consciousness and stands to the height of her belief in her own beauty and power. When she goes over to the nuns, she moves away with that beautiful unconsciousness of action which is never so mysteriously perfect a thing as in Mélisande.

There is nothing so thrilling in life to me as to watch this living painting which moves in rhythm like a frieze. How I should love to see her working out her designs against a background that has carried out the line of intention of a poem. Imagine Mary Garden in the Tristan Liebestod, coming in upon a scene in which the short lines of a truncated castle rise from the endless planes of a black and purple sea; a fleet of violins in the orchestra singing the Love Death and Mary challenging all this dark negation with the one word “Tristan,” in a voice which is a singing pain. But most of all I wish some one would make operas for her of those exotic things that lie outside of common experience, but which have their place in life: nature too heavily laden or too fantastically free or too weirdly true; bright precious hidden things, corroded jewels, heavy-hanging flowers of sleep—moon-flowers of the day. How passionately and reverently she performed that ritual of dark heat and sex savagery which is Salome.

The electric abundance of life in Mary Garden and the splendor of her body are dazzling at first. But it is a stillness of soul, an exaltation of passion which really stamp her. There is something inviolate about her. Other actresses may be soulful, grave, or innocent; but Mary Garden has authentic purity.

But what talk of all these things? I only want to say, “Ah, Conchobar, have you ever seen her, with her high laughing turbulent head thrown backward?”—this Aphrodite of the North, this bacchante from the sea, this viking of the soul. There is no other who has all beauty. She is the white sincerest pledge of deity.