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It was by the encouragement of this class that Booth was enabled to give Hamlet one hundred consecutive evenings, and Fechter was induced to linger here and build a theatre. In comparison with the verdicts of such people, the opinions of fashionable sets are of little importance.
O. A. Fechter of North Yakima, Washington, U.S.A., was sent to my husband by an old friend, Mrs. Bartlett, wife of the Rev. H. M. Bartlett, rector of the church in the same place. He liked it and returned it at once, begging that the other articles, which had appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau, though not yet published as a book, might be translated.
The doctor recalled a story told him by one of his friends, a story which the friend himself heard from the lips of the distinguished actor, the late Mr. Fechter. The actor maintained that Rachel had no genius as an actress. It was all Samson's training and study, according to him, which explained the secret of her wonderful effectiveness on the stage.
There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything" might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's triumphant idyll now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar.
Then my husband said without any alteration of tone or gesture that I was aware of, "Drive that dog away, Fechter." He immediately rushed at him, and we saw no more of our troubler. I have long thought that dogs do understand, not "the precise sounds themselves, but the intention put into them by the speaker."
Fechter holds that relation towards me; not only because it is the fact, but also because our friendship originated in my public appreciation of him. I had studied his acting closely, and had admired it highly, both in Paris and in London, years before we exchanged a word. Consequently my appreciation is not the result of personal regard, but personal regard has sprung out of my appreciation.
In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim. I have seen many Hamlets Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere!
He stared from the little dog to his victims, turned them over with his stout stick and counted them, and stared again. Bobby fixed his pleading eyes on the man and stood at strained attention while fate hung in the balance. "Guile wark! Guile wark! A braw doggie, an' an unco' fechter. Losh! but ye're a deil o' a bit dog!"
A man does not look in the glass, and talk about his complexion, when he is going to kill what he loves best in life; and if the words are broken and unintelligible, they are all the truer to Nature. The whole of the last act, as arranged by Fechter, is bad.
Seriously, it is less adapted to speaking than Westminster Abbey, and is as large.... I hope you will see Fechter in a really clever piece by Wilkie. Also you will see the Academy Exhibition, which will be a very good one; and also we will, please God, see everything and more, and everything else after that.
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