Now a personality cannot be put on paper; it cannot be talked over except in the most superficial and unsatisfactory way. It can only be felt. When one has declared that a certain actor's personality is unusually attractive, he has spoken the last word. Edna Wallace Hopper, in common with all other light opera soubrettes, is a personality. She is there to be liked or disliked just as the notion happens to strike one; but whether one likes or dislikes her, there is no possible ground for an argument about the matter. This person here, who is unmoved by her presence, may claim that she cannot sing and that she is wholly artificial. That person there, who finds her altogether delightful, will declare that he does not care whether she sings or not, and such a dainty creature is she that her frank artificiality is a positive delight.
Personally I have always found Edna Wallace Hopper exceptionally entertaining. I first bowed the knee before her smile and her coaxing dimples--a great deal of Mrs. Hopper's fascination is smiles and dimples--when she was very new to the stage, and I have never wholly escaped from their thraldom since that time. I acknowledge freely all her shortcomings,--her lack of versatility and resourcefulness, her narrowness of range,--but as long as she keeps her smile and her dimples, I am certain that I shall never be absolutely insensible to her allurements. She is wholly and fixedly a soubrette, a pretty, dancing, laughing creature without a suggestion of seriousness or the slightest trace of emotion. She is not to be studied, and she does not pretend to any depth of illusion. She is an impression, to be admired or scorned always in the present tense.
Edna Wallace was born in San Francisco and was educated at the Vanness Seminary there. It was due entirely to Roland Reed, the light comedian, that the idea of going on the stage ever entered her head. Mr. Reed met Miss Wallace at a reception while he was playing in San Francisco in 1891. She was then not far from seventeen years old. Impressed with her vivacity, he laughingly offered her a position in his company, and, behold! the mischief was done. She accepted quickly; and although her parents did not approve of the plan in the least, she journeyed east during the summer, and in August made her appearance at the Boston Museum with Mr. Reed as Mabel Douglass in "The Club Friend."