Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/277

1868.] bountiful to other widows and mothers, betakes herself again to the stage. But she has not yet the nerve to face that old, generous New York audience while her loss and pain are so new to her, and she is up in Canada, along with that late best of eccentric comedians, Charles Walcott, Sr., who is managing a theatre there. After awhile, Wallack grows tired of his transpontine audiences in London, who are not over-refined or courteous to the American actor, and he sets up his new house on Broadway, below Broome, and among his company is Mary Gannon. She plays for her début Madam Dentozy, a Lady in Difficulties, and wins great fame thereby.

A year or two later, she is in Baltimore, at the Holliday street house, of which old Charles Bass is manager. But the next season Mary Gannon has returned to Wallack's, and will act under his or his son's management unto the end.

As an actress Miss Gannon was but slightly indebted to mere personal appearances or to physical endowments for her success. Her figure was of medium height, rounded and full, and did not lack a certain grace and elegance. Her step upon the stage was firm, elastic, and she moved across it, never assertant, yet always as if assured of her power; her gesticulation was charmingly natural, graceful, and expressive, and that most difficult thing for an actress to master, the movement of the hands and arms, was always with her perfectly easy and correct, never forestalling the speech, but following it certainly and regularly, as sound follows the blow, or shadow the substance. In her by-play, a movement of her hand, or a change in the wonderfully mobile face, created a meaning out of silence, provoking laughter or tears as no words could do. But generally, her hands seemed only to emphasize the speech, giving it a significance unknown before. Voice and hand moved one before the other, with a propriety and naturalness that could result from no amount of study, but only from an intimate and very human sympathy with her author's meaning.

Her face was of exceeding plainness, but the expression of her features, when in repose, was habitually soft and pleasing; and if any fancy touched them from within, a smile, wonderfully rare in its sweetness, lighted them up, and for the moment made them beautiful. It was a face that attracted beggars, and all hurt and sorrowful people, and it never showed them anything but pity for their pain, and her hand was always ready as her face to enforce its sympathy and human love. Her voice ranged through all the scale of sweet and gentle utterances. Its mellowness, richness, and distinctness had no counterpart upon the American Stage, and it died, leaving us no copy.

Miss Gannon was only lovely in the beauty of her life and art, and it is saying something for the credit of the public in these days, and more for her genius, that she could hold her audience's allegiance so long and closely, considering how plain a face she nightly showed them. There was something of excellence in the oddness of her ways, in her strange simplicity, in her freedom of all effort, and in the gracious human aspect of her genius, in its truthfulness to nature, and her honest, earnest love for her art, that won their sympathy and made her a great artist. Her success in the development and portrayal of character never seemed the result of mere study, but rather of an intense feeling for and kinship with all the personal joys or sorrows of the heroines whose phase of life she depicted. For the time being, the player and the creature she personified became one and inseparable. As an actress, she was without a single trick, and scorned the meretricious art that catches at applause.