Identifier: lifeartofrichard01wint (find matches)
Title: Life and art of Richard Mansfield : with selections from his letters
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Winter, William, 1836-1917
Subjects: Mansfield, Richard, 1857-1907
Publisher: New York : Moffat, Yard and company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Public Library

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that mistaken notionof injustice, he became much embittered. In amagazine article that he published, several yearsafterward, his views and feelings relative to thismelancholy subject were thus made known: ... The saddest spot in the sad life of the actor is to beforgotten. . . . Every character he creates is a child he bears.There is labor and there is pain. He has bestowed upon it hislove and incessant thought, and, sleeping and waking, it is withhim as with a mother. When it is born it is born like thechildren of the King,—in public. . . . Sometimes, when thepeople have acclaimed it, those whose business it is to sit injudgment on the child condemn it on first sight, and it is buriedin its little coffin, and only its mother weeps over it. ...Poor, wretched, fever-wrought Rodion stands before me. . . .After the scene of delirium, in which Rodion kills his imaginedvictim, I broke down. The curtain had fallen; the audiencesat perfectly still; there was not a breath of applause. I had
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Photograph ~bu HalL Xeic York E. M. HOLLAND SOTHERN AS RODION 241 failed. I was carried to my room. Then there came to me thethunder of approval. It woke me—it revivified me. I wentbefore the curtain, again and again. My child had triumphed!All my troubles, my sickness, my losses, were forgotten. Butthere is no mercy in these matters. The next day my child waskilled. The next night he was dead of neglect, and there wasno one at his funeral. The pathos of that lament is somewhat vitiatedby remembrance of the fact that the newspapernotices of Mansfields performance of Eodion were,in general, favorable. The child languished, andultimately expired, because the public was not inter-ested by it, and the public was not interested by itbecause it was not interesting. It may not beamiss to mention that twelve years later, in the sea-son of 1907-08, a drama on the same subject,called The Fool Hath Said—There Is No God,by Lawrence Irving, was presented by EdwardH. Sothern, who acted the same

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