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Title: Mrs. Siddons
Author: Kennard, Nina A.
Language: English
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_Eminent Women Series_
EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM
MRS. SIDDONS.
(_All rights reserved_)
MRS. SIDDONS
BY
MRS. A. KENNARD.
LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.
1887.
(_All rights reserved._)
LONDON:
PRINTED BY W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W.
PREFACE.
In spite of Mrs. Siddons’s professed shrinking from the celebrity that
biographers would confer upon her, and her preference for the “still
small voice of tender relatives and estimable friends,” we know that she
bequeathed her Memoranda, Letters, and Diary to the poet Campbell—an
intimate friend during her latter years—with a request that he would
prepare them for publication. How, with the ample material at his
command, Campbell wrote so bad a life, it is difficult to conceive. He
seemed conscious himself that he was not doing justice to his subject.
The task of finishing it weighed on him like a nightmare. To secure
himself from interruption he would fix a placard on the door of his
chambers announcing that “Mr. Campbell was engaged with the biography of
Mrs. Siddons, and was not to be disturbed.”
Though performing the task unwillingly, he stubbornly refused to allow
anyone else to attempt it. When Mrs. Jameson contemplated writing a life
of the great actress he was most indignant, and expressed himself as
unable to understand how Mrs. Combe (Cecilia Siddons) could patronise a
life of her mother by Mrs. Jameson, knowing that he had been appointed
the biographer.
Boaden’s account of Mrs. Siddons is sketchy and meagre, and his style,
if possible, more pedantic and ponderous than Campbell’s. Crabb Robinson
declared it to be “one of the most worthless books of biography in
existence.”
In writing an account of a woman like Mrs. Siddons, or, indeed, of
anyone whose life has been passed entirely before the public, it is
necessary to divest the character as much as possible of the legendary
traditions adhering to it. It must be brought down into the regions of
ordinary life, and the only way to accomplish this is to transcribe her
actual words and expressions written without thought of publication. We
must therefore ask our readers to forgive us for quoting so many of her
letters in full. When we attempt to shorten or interpolate, all their
easy charm and freshness seems to evaporate.
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in his _Lives of the Kembles_, has incorporated
Mrs. Siddons’s history with that of her brother, John Kemble, and written
by far the best biography yet done of the great actress. To him we must
express our deep obligation, and almost our contrition, for venturing to
treat a subject already so ably handled in his interesting volumes. We
must also express our gratitude to Mr. Alfred Morrison and Mr. Thibaudeau
for allowing us to make use of the valuable documents contained in the
Morrison collection of autograph letters.
NINA A. KENNARD.
February, 1887.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.—PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 1
CHAPTER II.—MARRIAGE 18
CHAPTER III.—“DAVEY” 33
CHAPTER IV.—WORK 48
CHAPTER V.—SUCCESS 67
CHAPTER VI.—DUBLIN AND EDINBURGH 81
CHAPTER VII.—CLOUDS 95
CHAPTER VIII.—LADY MACBETH 115
CHAPTER IX.—FRIENDS 130
CHAPTER X.—1782 TO 1798 149
CHAPTER XI.—SHERIDAN 172
CHAPTER XII.—HERMIONE 186
CHAPTER XIII.—SORROWS 202
CHAPTER XIV.—WESTBOURNE FARM 216
CHAPTER XV.—RETIREMENT 239
CHAPTER XVI.—OLD AGE 255
MRS. SIDDONS.
CHAPTER I.
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD.
The lax morality prevailing in England at the time of the Restoration,
produced a literary and dramatic school of art suited to the taste of the
public. Congreve wrote _Love for Love_, and coolly remarked, when accused
of immorality, “that, if _it_ were an immodest play, he was incapable of
writing a modest one.”
The reaction from the almost overstrained energy and chivalry of the
Elizabethan age, which a century of Stuart rule effected in the minds of
Englishmen, had brought them thus low. Manners were looked upon as better
than morals. Scepticism as better than belief, as well when it concerned
the tenets of the Bible as the honour of their neighbours’ wives.
The stage—especially when the public has no other intellectual outlet—is
invariably the test by which we can discover the moral condition of a
country. When that condition is unnatural and feverish, proportionally
artificial and stimulating must be the mental food presented to it, until
the audience gradually becomes incapable of digesting any other. The
want at the end of the seventeenth century produced the supply. A drama
arose which was polished, dainty, finished in detail, but from the stage
of which virtue was excluded like a poor relation, who, clad in fustian,
and shod with hob-nail boots, is not supposed to be fit company for
profligate gentlemen in gold-embroidered coats and lace ruffles.
Shakespeare was too strong food for the digestive capacities of an age
whose poets preferred falsehood to truth. Pepys speaks of _Henry VIII._
as a simple thing made up “of a great many patches.” _The Tempest_, he
thinks, “has no great art, but yet good above ordinary plays.” _Othello_
was to him “a mean thing,” compared to the last new comedy. He is good
enough, however, to allow that he liked or disliked _Macbeth_, according
to the humour of the hour, but there was a “_divertissement_” in it,
which struck him as being a droll thing in tragedy.
The fiery energy of Pitt was needed to galvanise the paralysed
enthusiasm, the fanatical earnestness of John Wesley was needed to
arouse the deadened moral sense of England. Religion and patriotism come
first as important factors in the education of a people, but they are
closely followed by poetry and the drama. If Pitt and Wesley did much to
elevate the political and religious tone, as much was done to elevate the
literary and dramatic by Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick,
and Sarah Siddons.
Our readers may be inclined to think we exaggerate the importance of the
stage, by thus classing poets and players together; but if we wish to
appreciate the influence wielded by players a hundred years ago, we have
but to examine the careers of these last two great artists; and if we
wish to appreciate the moral reform effected, we have but to turn to a
list of the plays in vogue at the time of the Restoration and the plays
in vogue twenty years after Garrick had been acting, and ten years after
Sarah Siddons’s first appearance.
The reaction came, as do all reactions, with too great intensity; vice
was not only punished in its own person, but the sins of the father
were visited on the children, with a harshness almost Semitic. Through
the fine-spun sentiment of _The Fatal Marriage_, and the melodramatic
heroism of _The Grecian Daughter_, two of Mrs. Siddons’ greatest parts,
we trace the high moral tone that cleared away eventually the foul and
noisome atmosphere hanging over the theatrical world. Gloomy morality and
dramatic pathos paved the way for the return of the _Winter’s Tale_ and
_Hamlet_.
Justly are the memories of David Garrick and Sarah Siddons revered
by Englishmen, not only because they devoted their genius to the
reinstatement of England’s greatest dramatist, but that, also, by their
strict adherence to an almost rigid decorum in public behaviour and
private life, they raised a profession that had hitherto been despised
and looked upon as one unbefitting a modest woman, or an honourable man,
into a position of respectability and consideration.
That these two great artists had faults, who can wonder? No reformation
was ever yet accomplished by the flaccid-minded ones, and we must
remember that many of the stories told of his vanity and meanness and her
hardness and reserve, were circulated by their enemies on and off the
stage, because of their very rigidity and morality. In spite, however, of
some passing clouds, never was there a career so admired, a personality
so adored in public life, as that of Mrs. Siddons. Whenever she appeared,
enthusiastic applause rang through the house, not only on account of her
pre-eminent genius, but because of her untarnished private character.
Step by step we propose to trace the career of this wonderful woman,
who, dowered with singular beauty and genius, and placed amid all the
temptations of a profession in which so few of her sex remain pure, has
shown an example of unswerving rectitude and religious fervour, unusual
in any walk of life, keeping her to the last a “great simple being,”
direct and truthful, noble and industrious. She had faults, as we have
said, but they were so far outbalanced by her virtues that we can
well afford to forgive them; always remembering that, though only the
daughter of a strolling actor, born amidst the lowliest surroundings, she
conceived an ideal of her art which enabled her to raise the stage of
her country, from consisting simply in the delineation of the coarsest
gallantry, into a source of the highest moral and artistic instruction.
Far from the strife of political parties or the vagaries of fashionable
dramatists, both she and Garrick, with whose name we have coupled hers,
were born in the romantic country of Wales: he at Hereford; she in the
small town of Brecon, by the shores of the river Usk. The following copy
of her certificate of baptism, from the register-book in St. Mary’s,
Brecon, is given in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ in 1826: “Baptism, 1755,
July 14th, Sarah, daughter of George Kemble, a commedian (_sic_), and
Sarah, his wife, was baptised. Thomas Bevan, curate.” Her father’s name
was “Roger,” not “George,” as given above. The young couple’s theatrical
wanderings happened to bring them, at the time of Mrs. Kemble’s
confinement, to the little Welsh town, where they had put up in the High
Street at a public-house familiarly called “The Shoulder of Mutton.” In
1755 the inn was a picturesque gable-fronted old house, with projecting
upper storey, exhibiting as sign-board a large shoulder of mutton. It
was much frequented by the farmers on market-day for its good ale and
its legs of mutton, which might regularly in those days be seen roasting
before the kitchen fire, on a spit turned by a dog in a wheel.
Brecon is not without dramatic and historic interest, and, as Mrs.
Siddons afterwards was fond of pointing out, is several times mentioned
by Shakespeare. Buckingham, in _Richard III._, says:
Oh! let me think on Hastings, and begone
To Brecon whilst my fearful head is on.
Sir Hugh Evans also, that “remnant of Welsh flannel,” in the _Merry Wives
of Windsor_, was curate of the priory of Brecon in the days of Queen
Elizabeth; and from the intimacy which existed between Shakespeare and
the priors of the priory, Campbell tells us, “an idea prevails that he
frequently visited them at their residence in Brecon, and that he not
only availed himself of the whimsicalities of old Sir Hugh, but that he
was indebted for much of the romantic setting of the _Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ to the surrounding scenery, where Puck and his fairy companions
are familiar household words, one of the glens in the neighbourhood
being named Cwm Pwca, or the Valley of Puck.” Be this as it may, we
cannot wonder at Mrs. Siddons’ desire to connect the places that played
important parts in her fortunes with the name of the great poet whom she
honoured so devotedly and so well.
Roger Kemble, father of the little girl, was the manager of a strolling
company of actors, his theatrical “circuit” including the counties of
Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire. He was born in Hereford
in the year 1721, and it was said that he began life as a “barber.” John
Kemble, when convivial, would sometimes allude to this fact; but, indeed,
in those days many actors are said to have been “barbers,” the fact being
that, when strolling, it was sometimes found convenient for one of the
company to combine the two professions. He was a Roman Catholic, and
was fond of tracing his descent from an old English family, claiming as
ancestors a Captain Kemble, who fought at Worcester in the camp of the
Stuarts, and a Father Kemble, who died for the faith a few years later.
Her mother was a Miss Ward, daughter also of an actor and manager of
a strolling company. Peg Woffington, when only fifteen, played at his
theatre in Auniger Street, until Mr. Ward’s strait-laced severity drove
the wild young Irish girl away. The Wards seem, indeed, to have been
almost Methodistical in their strict religious views. The following
inscription may be seen on their tomb at Leominster:
Here, waiting for the Saviour’s great assize,
And hoping through His merits hence to rise
In glorious mode, in this dark closet lies
JOHN WARD, GENT.,
Who died Oct. 30th, 1773, aged 69 years;
Also
SARAH, HIS WIFE,
Who died Jan. 30th, 1786, aged 75 years.
Mrs. Siddons was, therefore, 31 before her grandmother died. Tough,
vigorous races, both Kembles and Wards, full of religion and prejudices,
which they kept intact until they died. On one side we see the great
actress inherited Irish blood. John Ward was an Irishman, and Sally, his
daughter, was born in Clonmel. Roger Kemble, a member of Ward’s company,
aided by his good looks, courteous manners, and fine black eyes, won the
heart of Sally Ward. The father strongly objected to the match; but,
finding opposition of no avail, at last reluctantly consented, making
the hackneyed joke—afterwards attributed to Roger Kemble himself, on
the occasion of Sarah’s marriage with Siddons—that “he wished her not
to become the wife of an actor, and she had certainly complied with his
request.”
The young couple were married at Cirencester in the year 1753. Sarah was
their first child. John Philip, the second, was born two years after his
sister, at Prescott in Lancashire. They had ten brothers and sisters,
and, although all of them—except those who died in very early youth—went
on the stage, none reached the pre-eminence of the two eldest. They were
an intelligent, industrious family, blossoming into genius in one member
and very remarkable talent in another. As Roger Kemble was a Catholic and
his wife a Protestant, it was agreed that the girls were to be brought up
in the mother’s faith, the boys in their father’s.
The accounts given us of Mrs. Siddons’ childhood are meagre; but, from
numerous memoirs and racy theatrical reminiscences, we can see what the
life of the travelling actor in England a hundred years ago was like,
with all its accompaniments of squalor and humiliation. In these days,
when actors and actresses of no very great eminence are whirled about
in first-class express carriages or in special trains from place to
place, it is difficult, in spite of accurate information, to realise the
hardships attending the profession then. The travelling from town to town
in all weathers, in carts little better than those constituting a gipsy
caravan; the parading through the streets, offering play-bills and puffs.
A resident of Warwick—Walter Whiter, the commentator on Shakespeare—when
Mrs. Siddons had “become known all the world over,” recalled as one
of the sights of his boyhood in the town, the daylight procession of
old Roger Kemble’s company, advertising and giving a foretaste of the
evening’s entertainment. A little girl, the future Queen of Tragedy,
marched with them in white and spangles, her train held by a handsome boy
in black velvet, John Philip Kemble, of the “all hail hereafter.”
It is almost impossible to conceive the ignominy the company was
subjected to, when either the mayor of the town—which was often the
case—had forbidden theatrical representation, or when, owing to
the pranks of some rowdy members of the troupe, the feeling of the
inhabitants was aroused against them collectively, and they were obliged
to cringe and supplicate for a renewal of the favour of the changeable
and narrow-minded provincials.
Enough of the Puritan spirit still remained to induce Government to
frequently place restrictions on the representations of the “Servants
of Belial.” A story is told of the Kemble company evading the tax
on unlicensed houses, introduced by Sir Robert Walpole, by selling
tooth-powder at a shilling a box, and giving the ticket; a proceeding
which reminds one of the old smuggling trick of selling a sham sack of
corn, and making a present of the keg of brandy placed within it.
The representations of these strolling actors, FitzGerald tells us,
took place sometimes in a coach-house or barn, or sometimes in a room
of an inn; even the open inn-yard, with its galleries running round,
was now and then converted into a theatre. All sorts of old clothes and
decorations were borrowed, a few candles stuck in bottles in front, and
then the play began. Very often the proceeds did not cover expenses, and
either debts were made or the owner of the inn let them go scot-free in
consideration of the amusement they had afforded his guests.
The shifts and tribulations, related later by the Kembles themselves,
seem almost incredible. Stephen Kemble, the wittiest of the family,
described with great humour a season of privation in a wretched village,
where the unfortunate actors could not muster a farthing, and were
in consequence dunned and abused by their landladies. To avoid their
persecution he lay in bed two days, suffering the pangs of hunger, and
then was obliged to take refuge in a distant turnip-field, where he
persuaded a fellow-actor to accompany him by boasting of the hospitality
and size of the establishment.
In one town the theatre was said to have been built, the stage in
Sussex, the audience in Kent, the two being divided by a ditch, so as
to enable the players to evade their bailiffs by escaping into another
county. There is a certain humour and tragedy running through all
these theatrical histories, that makes us laugh at one moment at the
comical incidents related, and makes us sad the next to think of men of
talent—often men of genius—being subjected to such degradation.
It is difficult to understand how Sarah and John Kemble can have emerged
from it so untainted by its associations, and so far above its social and
artistic aims and ideals; or how their stately manners and stem ideas
of morality and decorum can have been fostered in such an atmosphere.
In blaming them, perhaps, later, for what their detractors called their
“closeness” about money matters, we must remember that the years of
suffering and privation they had been through, and the very laxity they
saw around them, was likely to crystallise strong natures like theirs
into hardness and rigidity, exaggerating, perhaps, their ideas of
theatrical dignity and self-respect.
There can be no doubt, in spite of all its drawbacks, that, from a
professional point of view, the Bohemian existence of the strolling
comedian was a valuable discipline for artistic perception. The intimate
communion in which all lived together, gave much more chance of expansion
to rising genius than the artificial barriers now erected between the
leader of a company and his subordinates. Not only was the freemasonry
existing between underling and superior invaluable, but also the course
of probation before country audiences, who, uninfluenced by prestige or
fashion, spoke their mind without reserve. Young recruits, who arrived
ignorant and raw, thus obtained the necessary ease of deportment and
knowledge of stage effects, uninfluenced by preconceived ideas. The very
fact, also, of so much depending on the individual excellence of the
actor, independently of scenery and accessories, was a valuable stimulus.
His expression, his action, had to tell the story.
In passing his earliest years upon the stage, the strolling actor
obtained a power of identification with theatrical representation only to
be thus acquired. The atmosphere he breathed from his earliest years was
dramatic. When quite a child, Sarah Kemble was announced as an “Infant
phenomenon,” at an entertainment the company gave. As she appeared, some
confusion arose in the gallery which overpowered all her attempts. Her
mother immediately led her down to the footlights, and made her recite
the fable of _The Boys and Frogs_, which at once lulled the tumult and
restored good humour. Thus early was the actress taught to dominate her
audience, an art that stood her in good stead in after life.
Besides this early theatrical training, Sarah received as good an
education in the ordinary rudiments of learning as it was possible for
her energetic mother to obtain for her. Mrs. Kemble sent her child to
respectable day schools, we are told, in the country towns to which their
various wanderings brought the troupe. At Worcester, a schoolmistress
of the name of Harris received her among her pupils at Thornloe House,
refusing to accept any payment. An old lady, living not long ago,
recalled perfectly the contempt of the young girls in the establishment
for the “play actors’ daughter,” until, some private theatricals being
set on foot, her histrionic taste and experience made her services
extremely valuable. She won universal popularity by exhibiting a device
for imitating a “sack back” with thick sugar-loaf paper procured from the
grocer. But this education must have been desultory, for Roger Kemble
could not afford to dispense with the girl’s assistance.
Besides the appearance mentioned above, we hear of her acting as a
child, in a barn at the back of the “Old Bell Inn,” at Stourbridge,
Worcestershire, when some officers quartered in the neighbourhood gave
their services. It is said that she burst into laughter at the most
tragic moment, and inflamed to fury the military tragedian who acted with
her. The play was _The Grecian Daughter_. Another tradition tells us that
her first appearance in a regular five-act piece was as Leonora in _The
Padlock_.
A play-bill of one of these early performances was found not long ago,
pasted on a brick wall in a shoemaker’s shop, in one of the country towns
of the Kemble circuit.
Campbell tells that Roger Kemble determined not to allow his children to
follow his vocation; we think, however, this statement must be bracketed
with the legend of the ancestor at the battle of Worcester, for we
find him, as we have seen, making Sarah appear when almost a baby, and
taking John away from a day school at Worcester, while still in frock
and pinafores, to act in Havard’s tragedy of _Charles the First_. The
characters were thus cast: James, Duke of Richmond, by Mr. Siddons, who
was now an actor in Kemble’s company; James, Duke of York, by Master John
Kemble, who was then eleven years old; the young princess by Miss Kemble,
then about thirteen; Lady Fairfax, by Mrs. Kemble. Singing between the
acts by Mr. Fowler and Miss Kemble. In the April following, we again
find “Mr. Kemble’s company of Comedians” appearing in “a celebrated
comedy,” called _The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island_, with all the
scenery, machinery, music, monsters, and the decorations proper to be
given, entirely new. “The performance will open with a representation
of a tempestuous sea (in perpetual agitation), and storm, in which
the usurper’s ship is wrecked; the wreck ends with a beautiful shower
of fire; and the whole to conclude with a calm sea, on which appears
Neptune, poetick god of the ocean, and his royal consort, Amphitrite,
in a chariot drawn by sea-horses, &c. &c.” It was in this performance,
as Ariel, Chief Spirit, that, at the age of thirteen, Sarah made her
first success. “She darted hither and thither,” we are told, “with such
airy grace; there was something so sprite-like in her free swiftness of
motion, she seemed to be so entirely a creature born of the loves of a
breeze and a sunbeam, that the whole audience broke into frantic applause
at the end of the play, and her proud happy father began dimly to foresee
his daughter’s future.”
Later, we find a performance by the company of _Love in a Village_
announced, the names printed thus:—
Sir William Meadows, by Mr. K—mb—le.
Young Meadows, by Mr. S—dd—ns.
Rosetta, by Miss K—mb—le.
Madge, by Mrs. K—mb—le.
Housemaid, by Miss F. K—mb—le.
In the November following, John Philip was sent to Sedgely Park near
Wolverhampton, a Catholic seminary. A short entry has been discovered
in the College books, stating that “John and (_sic_) Philip Kemble came
Nov. 3rd 1767, and brought 4 suits of clothes, 12 shirts, 12 pairs of
stockings, 6 pairs of shoes, 4 hats, 2 _Daily Companions_, a Half Manual,
knives, forks, spoons, _Æsop’s Fables_, combs, 1 brush 8 handkerchiefs, 8
nightcaps.”
“Jack abiit, July 28, 1771.”
After four years’ residence here, his father sent him to the English
College at Douai, to pursue a regular divinity course, his intention
being to put the future Coriolanus into the priesthood.
Sarah still continued her studies, such as they were, at the various
towns at which the “comedians” pitched their tent in their wanderings to
and fro. She was taught vocal and instrumental music, and her father,
remarking that she had fine natural powers of elocution, wished them
cultivated by regular tuition as a part of her education, with no view
to the stage; for this purpose he was tempted to enter into an agreement
with an individual named William Combe, to give her a course of lessons.
The itinerant players were generally looked upon as a valuable addition
to the inn parlour, and were welcome to a supper or a pot of ale in
return for their society and amusing talk. It was on one of these
occasions that Roger Kemble, who was a jovial and popular companion, met
Combe, and was so attracted by his clever conversation, as to engage
him as instructor to his daughter. Mrs. Kemble, evidently a woman
of considerable common sense and penetration, refused to ratify the
appointment, however, and Roger was obliged to get out of his promise by
giving a performance for the benefit of the adventurer, who, having run
through a fortune, was perfectly penniless.
To the last day of his life William Combe entertained a rancorous
dislike to the great actress, and took pleasure in telling his friends
maliciously how sordid her early life had been, and how he himself
remembered her, when a girl, standing at the wing of a country theatre,
beating snuffers against a candlestick to represent the sound of a
windmill, in some rude pantomime.
Curiously enough, Milton’s poetry more than Shakespeare’s was the object
of Sarah’s admiration in her youth. When but ten years old, Campbell
tells us, she pored over _Paradise Lost_ for hours together. The long,
tiresome speeches between Adam and his wife, Satan’s address to the
sun—most children’s despair—were her delight. The stately, ponderous
verse suited her genius. The poet also gives us a story which, he tells,
Mrs. Siddons left amongst her memoranda.
One day her mother promised to take her out with a party of friends
picnicking in the neighbourhood. She was to wear a new pink dress, if the
weather were fine. On going to bed the evening before the great event,
she took her prayer-book with her, and opening it, as she supposed, at
the prayer for fine weather, fell asleep with the book folded in her
arms. At daybreak the child found, to her dismay, that she had been
holding the prayer for rain to her breast, and that the rain—Heaven
having taken her at her word—was pelting against the windows. She went to
bed again, with the book opened at the right place, and found the mistake
remedied. When she awoke the morning was as rosy as the dress she was to
wear.
Croker thinks it necessary, with all the weight of his authority, to
refute this childish reminiscence, by pointing out that the prayers for
rain and fine weather are on the same page of the prayer-book. We repeat
the story principally because it shows the quaint methodistical piety and
almost childish superstition which dwelt with Mrs. Siddons all through
her chequered career. There is little doubt this piety was greatly owing
to the principles inculcated by her mother.
Mrs. Kemble was a stately, austere woman, with a certain amount of
genius and much force of character, and energetic and brave in her
humble sphere of life, in most difficult circumstances. She fought by
the side of her husband a hard battle with poverty, and maintained and
educated a family of twelve children. Spartan in her views of training
youth, her imperious despotism of character has often been described
as absolutely awful. It was the custom of the time to rule a household
with some sternness, but her children trembled in her presence. In later
days she addressed a characteristic reproof to her son John: “Sir, you
are as proud as Lucifer.” He and that majestic mother of his must indeed
have been a Coriolanus and Volumnia in every-day life. Her voice had
much of the measured emphasis of her daughter’s, and her portrait, the
only one we know of, that always hung in Mrs. Siddons’ sitting-room,
had an intellectual, almost grand expression, reminding us more of a
good-looking Elizabeth Fry, with the tight-fitting frilled cap, and soft
muslin handkerchief crossed around the throat, than what one might have
pictured Sally Kemble, the strolling actress. Though extremely handsome
when Roger Kemble first married her, and subjected to all the temptations
of an actress’s life, she never wavered in wifely devotion, and would
maintain to the last day of her life that in some parts her Roger was
“unparalleled.” Hers is the only testimony to that effect, and we rather
imagine him to have been a very indifferent actor, but a handsome
good-tempered man with the manners of a gentleman, and views of life
beyond his humble profession.
Proud, reserved, John Kemble paid, years after, the best tribute to his
memory, when, on hearing of his death, he wrote to his brother from
Madrid, on 31st December 1802: “How sincerely I always loved my father
and respected his sound understanding, you know too well for it to be
necessary that I should even mention what I feel this moment, on opening
your letter. God Almighty receive him into His everlasting happiness,
and teach me to be resigned and resolute, to deserve to follow him
when my appointed hour is come. My poor mother, though I know she will
exert becoming firmness of mind in this, and every passage of her life,
cannot but feel a melancholy void in losing the companion of her youth,
the associate of her advancing years, and the father of her children.
I regret from the very bottom of my heart that I cannot, with the most
dutiful affection, assure her, at her feet, that what a grateful son
can offer and do shall never be wanting from me to promote her content
and ease and happiness. How, in vain, have I delighted myself in
thousands of inconvenient occurrences on this journey, with the thought
of contemplating my father’s cautious incredulity while I related them
to him! Millions of things, uninteresting maybe to anybody else, I had
treasured up for his surprise and scrutiny! It is God’s pleasure that he
is gone from us. The resignation I had long observed in him to the will
of Heaven, and his habitual piety, are no small consolation to me; yet I
cannot help feeling a dejected swelling at my heart, that keeps me in a
flood of tears for him, in spite of all I can do to stop them.”
CHAPTER II.
MARRIAGE.
As Sarah Kemble passed from childhood to early womanhood, she continued
to act the round of all the company’s plays, taking more important parts
as she grew older. The very atmosphere she breathed was dramatic. To walk
the stage was a second nature to her. She was not, however, at the same
time shut out from common-place every-day matters. She helped her mother
in the household work, and went from a rehearsal to the making of a
pudding or the darning of a pair of stockings. There is little doubt that
this free mixing in the simple family life of her home gave a healthy
balance to her mind. Like her mother, she always kept her domestic life
intact in the midst of her professional occupations, and ever remained
simple and womanly. Her fine friends in later days would tell how they
had found her ironing a frock for one of her children, or studying a new
part while she rocked the cradle of the last baby.
At the age of sixteen, Sarah’s beauty had attracted the attention of
her audiences. One or two squires of the county places they visited
offered her their homage; but before she was seventeen her affections
were already engaged by a member of the troupe, an ex-apprentice from
Birmingham.
We have already seen the name of Siddons figuring on the Kemble
play-bills, when Sarah was only thirteen years of age. We can imagine,
therefore, all the opportunities that the young people had of falling
in love, rehearsing together, acting together, with the continual
communion of interest brought about by their profession. No wonder that
even Mr. Evans, a Welsh squire, with three hundred a year, who, enslaved
by Sarah’s singing of _Robin, Sweet Robin_, offered her his hand, was
ignominiously refused. Her parents, however, took a different view, and,
allured by the splendour of Mr. Evans’s offer, revoked the unwilling
consent they had given to their daughter’s engagement to Siddons, and
summarily dismissed him from the company.
The indignant lover had recourse to a method of revenge that seems as
novel as it was ungentlemanly. Being allowed a farewell benefit, he
took the opportunity—it was at Brecon—of taking the audience into his
confidence, and, in doggrel of the worst description, informed them of
his woes:—
Ye ladies of Brecon, whose hearts ever feel
For wrongs like to this I’m about to reveal,
Excuse the first product, nor pass unregarded
The complaints of poor Colin, a lover discarded.
Yet still on his Phyllis his hopes were all placed,
That her vows were so firm they could ne’er be effaced;
But soon she convinced him ’twas all a mere joke,
For duty rose up, _and her vows were all broke_.
Dear ladies, avoid one indelible stain,
Excuse me, I beg, if my verse is too plain;
_But a jilt is the devil_, as has long been confessed,
Which a heart like poor Colin’s must ever detest.
We only give three verses of the eleven, being as much, we think, as our
readers could submit to with patience.
How a girl of any spirit could forgive a lover for thus exposing their
private affairs, and how a girl of any artistic appreciation could
forgive a lover such bad verses, and take him back into her good graces,
is more than we can understand. Mrs. Kemble, her mother, seemed to take
the most correct view of the situation, for, instead of excusing “the
first product” of the luckless poet, “his merits tho’ small,” she amply
rewarded with a ringing box on the ears as he left the stage.
Jones, a member of Roger Kemble’s company, preserved some verses written
by Sarah to her lover, which show her to be as superior to him in taste
and poetic perception, as she afterwards proved herself in dramatic
power:—
Say not, Strephon, I’m untrue,
When I only think of you;
If you do but think of me
As I of you, then shall you be
Without a rival in my heart,
Which ne’er can play a tyrant’s part.
Trust me, Strephon, with thy love—
I swear by Cupid’s bow above,
Nought shall make me e’er betray
Thy passion till my dying day:
If I live, or if I die,
Upon my constancy rely.
Siddons sufficiently relied on her constancy, in spite of his statements
to “ye ladies of Brecon,” to suggest to his beloved an immediate
elopement, which suggestion she, as Campbell quaintly puts it, “tempering
amatory with filial duty,” politely declined, and her lover left.
As it was considered advisable to wean Sarah from old associations she
was sent away for a time, and lived “under the protection” of Mrs.
Greatheed, of Guy’s Cliff in Warwickshire. Some have maintained that she
was nursemaid or housemaid; but the terms she was on with her mistress,
who presented her with a copy of Milton, precludes that idea, unless,
by her smartness and industry, she, within a very short period of her
engagement, worked herself into a better position. Campbell also points
out that there were no children to be nursed in the Greatheed family
at that time. “Her station with them,” he continues, “was humble, but
not servile, and her principal employment was to read to the elder Mr.
Greatheed.” The secret history of the green room informs us that she was
maid to Lady Mary Bertie, Samuel Greatheed’s second wife; and the Duchess
of Ancaster told Mrs. Geneste she well remembered Lady Mary once bringing
this attractive attendant with her on a visit.
It was remarked that she delighted in reciting fragments of plays for
the entertainment of the servants’ hall. Lord Robert Bertie was so fond
of listening and admiring her declamation, that Lady Mary had to beg of
him to desist, and “not encourage the girl to go on the stage.” Young
Greatheed told Miss Wynn later on that he had often heard Mrs. Siddons
read _Macbeth_ when she was his mother’s maid.
Lady Mary confessed years afterwards to “Conversation” Sharp, that so
queenly was the bearing of the young girl, even at that early age, that
she always felt an irresistible inclination to rise from her chair when
her maid came to attend her.
We can imagine the romantic girl wandering through the lonely glades,
and amongst the stately elm-groves of Guy’s Cliff, or along the shores of
the soft-flowing Avon, Shakespeare’s Avon, that glides at the foot of the
rocks between green meadows, dreaming of her love, and reading the poet
she loved so well, whose birth-place and burial-place lay so near where
she was. She must have heard reminiscences told of the great Jubilee that
had taken place in 1769, only three years before, when Mr. Garrick and a
“brilliant company of nobility and gentry,” had come down to Stratford
to celebrate the Shakesperean centenary. She little knew then that it
was in a repetition of the Jubilee procession on the boards of Drury
Lane she was destined to make her first bow to a London audience. There
is a tradition that she met Garrick during her stay at Guy’s Cliff. It
is not impossible, as, after the Jubilee, he was a constant guest of
the Greatheeds. The statement hardly tallies, however, with his writing
sometime later to Moody to the effect that there “was a woman Siddons”
acting at Liverpool, who might suit the Drury Lane company, and asking
him to go and have a look at her. He might easily, however, have failed
to connect the girl Sarah Kemble with the woman Mrs. Siddons.
It redounds much to the credit both of the Greatheeds and the actress,
that afterwards, in spite of the change of circumstances, Mrs. Siddons
ever remained a firm friend of the family. We find Miss Berry in 1822,
forty-seven years later, writing in her journal:—
“Guy’s Cliff, Tuesday, Jan. 1st.—Mrs. Siddons and her daughter arrived.
“Wednesday, 2nd.—Mrs. Siddons read _Othello_, the two parts of Iago and
Othello, quite _à merveille_.”
We find Bertie Greatheed standing sponsor for her daughter Cecilia in
1794; and, greatest test of true friendship, writing a tragedy, _The
Regent_, which failed disastrously.
In spite of stern parents and social obstacles, “Love will be ever Lord
of all.” William Siddons came several times to Guy’s Cliff to see her.
There, almost within sight of Shottery, where Shakespeare enacted his
love story with Anne Hathaway, Sarah Kemble enacted hers. Wandering
amidst the scented fields through which Shakespeare wandered, William
Siddons again pleaded his cause, and was forgiven his bad verses and
untimely confidences for the sake of his persistency.
The Kembles, seeing the attachment was serious, at last gave their
consent, and in her nineteenth year Sarah Kemble became Mrs. Siddons.
The marriage took place at Trinity Church, Coventry, November 26th, 1773,
and on the 4th of October following, the first child, Henry, was born, at
Wolverhampton.
Mr. Siddons was just the man to fascinate a young and high-spirited
girl. Good-looking, calm, sedate, even-tempered, not over-burdened with
brain-power, and not too much will of his own. One might apply to him
what Johnson said of Sheridan’s father, “He is not a bad man, no, Sir;
were mankind to be divided into good and bad, he would stand considerably
within the ranks of the good.” “A damned rascally player,” the Rev.
Henry Bate says forcibly, “but a civil fellow.” We are told that he had
not only that invention which in provincial theatres is the first of
requisites, but he also possessed the second, a quick study, in almost
unequalled perfection. He could make himself master of the longest
dramatic character between night and night, and deliver it with the
accuracy that seems to result only from long application; but so slight
was the impression made, that it escaped from his memory in as few hours
as he had employed to learn it. It was said later, by members of his
wife’s company, that though Siddons was a bad actor himself, he was an
excellent judge, always drilling his wife, and very cross at any failure.
His position as husband of the “great Mrs. Siddons,” continually cast
into the shade by her superiority, was an unthankful one, but we must
confess that he filled it with commendable equanimity.
Their love wore better than the tinsel finery amidst which it began. The
happy domestic life that succeeded was undoubtedly a great safe-guard
amidst the dangers and difficulties of her life, saving her from much
that is the ruin of her less protected sisters. We are told that in the
days of her success, when her would-be admirers and lovers were legion,
her husband’s ear was the one to which she confided all the incidents of
attempted gallantry, invariably attending an actress’s life; and many
were the hearty laughs they indulged in together over them. Perhaps
now and then there was too great an inclination to make use of him. We
find the poor man writing to managers as their obedient humble servant,
making piteous appeals to Garrick, and put forward to dun Sheridan for
the amount due to his wife; but at first they seem to have shared all the
trials and struggles of their profession together.
Wolverhampton was their first stage after their marriage. The reigning
Mayor seems to have nourished a prejudice against all actors. He had
closed the King’s Head Yard, and declared contemptuously that “neither
player, puppy, nor monkey,” should perform in the town. After a popular
demonstration, he was induced to rescind this harsh interdict; and by
the Christmas of 1773, Roger Kemble was giving two stock dramas, _The
West Indian_ and _The Padlock_. Sarah appeared for the first time as Mrs.
Siddons, at a farewell “Bespeak.” An address, written by herself, and
spoken on this occasion, has been found and published by an inhabitant of
Wolverhampton:—
Ladies and Gentlemen,—my spouse and I
Have had a squabble, and I’ll tell you why.
He said I must appear; nay, vowed ’twas right
To give you thanks for favours shown to-night.
...
He still insisted, and, to win consent,
Strove to o’ercome me with a compliment;
Told me that I the favourite here had reigned,
While he but small or no applause had gained.
“Pen me some lines where I may talk and swagger,
Of poisons, murders, done by bowl or dagger;
Or let me, with my brogue and action ready,
Give them a brush, my dear, of Widow Brady.”
...
First, for a father, who on this fair ground,
Has met with friendship seldom to be found,
May th’ All-Good Power your every virtue nourish,
Health, wealth, and trade in Wolverhampton flourish!
This doggrel is almost on a par with Mr. Siddons’s effusion to the Ladies
of Brecon.
In the year following Mr. and Mrs. Siddons made their way to Cheltenham,
then a town consisting of but one street, “through the middle of which
ran a clear stream of water, with stepping-stones that served as a
bridge.” Already, however, its merits as a watering place had been
noised abroad, and some of the “people of quality” had begun to find
their way there. Seeing the play of _Venice Preserved_ announced for
representation at the theatre, some of the fashionables took tickets,
hoping to be highly diverted with the badness of the rustic performance.
The man at the box-office, who had listened to their thoughtless remarks,
reported them to Mrs. Siddons, who was to act the part of Belvidera. The
young actress felt oppressed at the idea of the ordeal she was to be
subjected to. Ridicule was all her life the one thing the tragic muse
could not face; and from the moment of first coming on she was conscious
of the antagonistic influence in one of the boxes, and imagined she
heard sounds of suppressed laughter. She left the theatre after the
play, deeply mortified. Next day, Mr. Siddons met Lord Aylesbury in the
street, who inquired after Mrs. Siddons’s health. He then expressed
his admiration of her acting the night before, and declared that the
ladies of his party had wept so excessively that they were laid up with
headaches. Mr. Siddons rushed home to gladden his wife’s heart with the
news. The actress owed one of the truest friendships of her life to this
incident, for Miss Boyle, Lord Aylesbury’s step-daughter, came to call
on her the same day to express her delight in person, and from that time
never allowed the intimacy to drop. This lady seems to have possessed
considerable artistic gifts in several ways, having, as Campbell tells us
with much emphasis, written _An Ode to a Poppy_, which was thought full
of merit in her day. What was of more importance to the young actress,
however, than her new friend’s qualifications for writing “odes” was her
power of making costumes for different parts with her own hands, and her
generosity in supplying “properties” from her own wardrobe. There were
some, however, that even the Honourable Miss Boyle did not possess. For
the male habiliments of the Widow Brady, the young actress found on the
night of the performance that no provision had been made. The story goes
that a gentleman politely left the box where he was seated, lent her his
coat, and stood in the side-scenes with a petticoat over his shoulders
until his property was restored to him. Whether this courteous individual
was Lord Aylesbury we are not told, but we know that he was one of Miss
Boyle’s party.
The particular fascination of Mrs. Siddons’s acting in those early days
was its simplicity and pathos, which, united with remarkable beauty and
power of expression, gained the hearts of all rustic audiences. Her
talent, however, seems to have been singularly immature, considering the
continual practice she had enjoyed, almost from her cradle, in stage
affairs. Rachel reached the summit of her power at seventeen, Mrs.
Siddons not until she was thirty. She herself confesses later, in the
account she gives of her first reading of _Macbeth_: “Being then only
twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little
more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity
of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my
life, had scarcely entered into my imagination.”
The power of drawing tears, however, was already hers, and rumours of the
charm and beauty of the young actress had been wafted to London, reaching
even the ears of the great Garrick himself. Mrs. Siddons tells us, in
her Autograph Recollections: “Mr. King, by order of Mr. Garrick, who had
heard some account of me from the Aylesbury family, came to Cheltenham to
see me in the _Fair Penitent_. I knew neither Mr. King nor his purpose
at the time.” Neither did she know of the second emissary whom Garrick
sent, the Rev. Henry Bate, who in 1781 took the name of Dudley, and was
afterwards made a canon and a baronet; a bruising, muscular clergyman of
the old school, who fought duels one moment and wrote “slashing” articles
on every subject, “human and divine,” the next. He was well known as
a theatrical censor and critic of considerable acumen. We know him by
Gainsborough’s portrait, standing in a garden with his dog. It is said
that a political opponent remarked that the man wanted “execution” and
the dog “hanging.” We find Garrick continually sending him on theatrical
errands. We give the letters he wrote about Mrs. Siddons very nearly in
their entirety, on account of their characteristic quaint humour and
shrewd power of observation; and also because they to a certain degree
exonerate Garrick from some of the charges brought against him by Mrs.
Siddons:—
MY DEAR FRIEND,
After combatting the various difficulties of one of the
cussidest cross-roads in this kingdom, we arrived safe at
Cheltenham on Thursday last, and saw the theatrical heroine
of that place in the character of Rosalind. Though I beheld
her from the side wing of the stage (a barn about three yards
over), and consequently under almost every disadvantage, I
own she made so strong an impression upon me, that I think
she cannot fail to be a valuable acquisition to Drury Lane.
Her figure must be remarkably fine, although marred for the
present. Her face (if I could judge from where I saw it) is one
of the most strikingly beautiful for stage effect that I ever
beheld, but I shall surprise you more when I assure you that
these are nothing to her action and general stage deportment,
which are remarkably pleasing and characteristic; in short, I
know no woman who marks the different passages and transitions
with so much variety, and at the same time propriety of
expression. In the latter humbug scene with Orlando previous
to her revealing herself, she did more with it than anyone I
ever saw, not even your divine Mrs. Barry excepted. It is
necessary after this panegyric, however, to inform you that her
voice struck me at first as rather dissonant, and I fancy, from
the private conversation I had with her, that in impassioned
scenes it must be somewhat grating; however, as I found it wear
away as the business became more interesting, I am inclined to
think it only an error of affectation, which may be corrected,
if not totally removed. She informed me she has been upon the
stage from her cradle. This, though it surprised me, gave me
the highest opinion of her judgment, to find she had contracted
no strolling habits, which have so often been the bane of
many a theatrical genius. She will most certainly be of great
use to you, at all events, on account of the great number of
characters she plays, all of which, I will venture to assert,
she fills with propriety, though I have yet seen her but in
one. She is, as you have been informed, a very good breeches
figure, and plays in _Widow Brady_, I am informed, admirably.
I should not wonder, from her ease, figure, and manner, if she
made the _proudest_ she of either house tremble in genteel
comedy—nay, beware yourself, _Great Little Man_, for she plays
Hamlet to the satisfaction of the Worcestershire critics.
The moment the play was over I wrote a note to her husband
(who is a damned rascally player, though seemingly a very
civil fellow) requesting an interview with him and his wife,
intimating at the same time the nature of my business. You will
not blame me for making this forced march in your favour, as I
learnt that some of the Covent Garden Mohawks were intrenched
near the place and intended carrying her by surprise. At the
conclusion of the farce they waited upon me, and, after I
had opened my commission, she expressed herself happy at the
opportunity of being brought out under your eye, but declined
proposing any terms, leaving it entirely with you to reward her
as you thought proper.
You will perceive that at present she has all that diffidence
usually the first attendant on merit; how soon the force of
Drury Lane examples, added to the rising vanity of a stage
heroine, may transform her, I cannot say. It happens very
luckily that the company comes to Worcester for the race week,
when I shall take every opportunity of seeing her, and if I
find the least reason to alter my opinion (perhaps too hastily
formed), you shall immediately have my recantation. My wife,
whose judgment in theatrical matters I have a high opinion
of, joins with me in these sentiments respecting her merit.
I should have wrote to you before, but no post went out from
anywhere near here but this night’s.
I shall expect to hear from you by return of the post, as
Siddons will call upon me to know whether you look upon her
as engaged. My wife joins me in respects to Mrs. Garrick and
yourself. I remain, my dear Sir (after writing a damned jargon,
I suppose, of unintelligible stuff in haste),
Ever yours most truly,
H. BATE.
Worcester, 12th August, 1775.
P.S.—Direct to me at the “Hop Pole.”
To David Garrick, Esq., Adelphi, London.
* * * * *
Worcester, Aug. 19th, 1775.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
I received your very friendly letter, and take the first post
from hence to answer it. I found it unnecessary to make the
intimation you desired to the _husband_, since he requires only
to be employed in any manner you shall think proper; and as
he is much more tolerable than I thought him at first, it may
be no very difficult matter to station him so as to satisfy
the man, without burdening the property. I saw him the other
evening in Young Marlow in Goldsmith’s Comedy, and then he was
far from despicable; neither his figure nor face contemptible.
A jealousy prevailing through the theatre, upon a suspicion of
their leaving them, the acting manager seems determined that I
shall not see her again in any character wherein she might give
me a second display of her theatrical powers. I am resolved,
however, to continue the siege till they give her something
capital, knowing _that_ must speedily be the case, or the
garrison must fall by famine.
She has already gone _six months_, so that pretty early in
December she will be fit for service; as you certainly mean to
open the ensuing campaign, by charging in person at the head
of your lines, I conceive she will come at a very favourable
crisis to take a second command, when the retreat from the
field may be politically necessary. I am strongly for her first
appearance in _Rosalind_; but you may judge better, perhaps,
after a perusal of the list on the other side; the characters
marked under [in _italics_] are those which she prefers to
others:—
Jane Shore.
_Alicia._
Roxana.
_Grecian Daughter._
Matilda.
_Belvidera._
Calista.
Monimia.
Juliet.
Cordelia.
Horatia.
Imogen.
Marianne.
_Lady Townley._
_Portia._
Mrs. Belville.
Violante.
_Rosalind._
Mrs. Strickland.
Clarinda.
Miss Aubrey.
Charlotte.
_Widow Brady._
You are certainly right respecting a memorandum between you;
the moment, therefore, I receive one from you, it shall be
conveyed to them at Cheltenham, where they return next week,
and they have promised to return me an answer immediately at
Birmingham, for which place I shall set off the instant I have
received your letter in any way to town, in order to conclude
this business finally, and to the satisfaction of all parties.
I am desired to request your answer to the three following
particulars:—
1st. As they are ready to attend your summons at any time,
Whether they are not to be allowed something to subsist upon
when they come to town previous to her appearance?
2nd. Whether you have any objection to employ him in any
situation in which you may think him likely “to be useful”?
3rd. When you chuse they should attend you?
As to the first, without you are inclined to have them at the
opening of the house, perhaps her remaining in the country,
in their own company, where they do very well, may ease you
of some expense; but of this you must be the best judge. With
respect to him, I think you can have no objection to take him
upon the terms he proposes himself. I forgot to tell you that
Mrs. Siddons is about twenty years of age. It would be unjust
not to remark one circumstance in favour of them both; I mean
the universal good character they have preserved here for many
years, on account of their public as well as private conduct
in life. I beg you to be very particular in your answer to the
three queries, and likewise expressly to mention the time you
wish to see them, that they may arrange their little matters
accordingly.
In a _postscript_ he adds:—
She is the most extraordinary quick study I ever heard of.
This cannot be amiss, for, if I recollect right, we have a
sufficient number of the _leaden-headed_ ones at D. Lane
already.
Then come letters from Siddons, in answer to some from Bate, concluding
an engagement. We can see the trembling anxiety of the young couple.
“They were in much concern,” he says, “at not hearing sooner,” as from
the line he had shown him in Mr. Garrick’s handwriting, he had been
sure of Mrs. Siddons’s engagement. They had, in consequence, given his
partners in management at Cheltenham notice of his intention to go;
if anything had happened, therefore, to prevent their engagement, it
would have “proved a very unlucky circumstance.” He then touches on a
very necessary point—their pressing need of money to tide them over Mrs.
Siddons’s expected confinement. “Mr. Garrick,” he says, “has conferred an
eternal obligation by his kind offer of the cash.”
In his next letter, dated Gloucester, November 9th, 1775, he
writes:—“From my former accounts of Mrs. Siddons’s time, you’ll be
surprised when I tell you she is brought to bed; she was unexpectedly
taken ill when performing on the stage, and early the next morning
produc’d me a fine girl. They are both, thank Heaven, likely to do well;
but I am afraid, Sir, notwithstanding this, I shan’t be able to leave
this much sooner than the time I last mentioned.” He then alludes to
twenty pounds borrowed in Garrick’s name to meet pressing demands.
This “fine girl” was Mrs. Siddons’ daughter Sarah, whose premature death
later nearly broke her mother’s heart.
CHAPTER III.
“DAVEY.”
“Have you ever heard,” asked Garrick, in an unpublished letter to Moody,
then at Liverpool, “of a woman Siddons, who is strolling about somewhere
near you?” Four months later, by the help of the Rev. Henry Bate’s
favourable report of her powers, she made her first appearance at Drury
Lane. The Golden Gates of the Temple of Fame were thrown open. The young
priestess had but to enter, one would have thought, and light the sacred
flame; but genius is not to be bound by expediency or opportunity.
It was in 1775, the year when Garrick gave up the management, that Mrs.
Siddons appeared on the boards of Drury Lane. She had reached the highest
point of her ambition—she was to act with the greatest actor of his time
before a dramatic audience rendered fastidious and critical by great
traditions.
This is the most unfortunate portion of her life to recount. Failure
and disappointment attended every step she made; and this failure and
disappointment, although it did not in the least discourage her in the
prosecution of her art, hurried her into bitterness and an unjust feeling
of rancour against Garrick, which an examination of the circumstances of
the case in no way warrants. One of the Kemble weaknesses was a proud
sensitiveness to anything like slight or neglect, and these slights were
as often as not phantoms of their own imaginations.
It gives one a mournful sense of injustice to see the charge of jealousy
she openly brings repeated by the earlier biographer who wrote about
her—when we, who have fuller light thrown upon the great actor’s life
by the publication of his correspondence, know how free he was from the
besetting sins of his craft. To be popular, a man must have the faults
of those among whom he is placed. Garrick was called stingy because he
did not throw away his money like his colleagues; stiff, because he was a
moral man amidst a laxity of manners that has become proverbial; jealous,
because he placed the honour of his art and his theatre above personal
considerations. He was an object of envy because of his unparalleled
success. The two clouds which veiled the nobility of his character—love
of money and love of fine friends—vanished like mists in the sunshine if
he were really called upon to help a case of distress or take notice of
an old friend. These faults were harped upon, however, by Johnson, Foote,
and hosts of others. Well might Garrick, in the evening of his days,
sitting on the terrace of his house at Twickenham, make the, for him,
bitter observation, “I have not always met gratitude in a play-house.”
It was at the time, no doubt, a salve to Mrs. Siddons’s disappointment to
listen to the specious Mr. Sheridan’s insinuation of Garrick’s jealousy;
but it is a curious fact, if Sheridan were sincere in his statements,
that when he succeeded Garrick as manager he never endeavoured to
re-engage her; indeed, on the contrary, abruptly and discourteously
closed all negotiations and cancelled all agreements made both with the
actress and her husband for a reappearance at Drury Lane.
We will allow the reader, however, to judge the story upon its own merits.
After the favourable reports of King and Bate, Garrick, as we have seen
by the Bate letters, engaged Mrs. Siddons and her husband. The energy
that afterwards distinguished her to such an extraordinary extent was now
exhibited.
Although not at all strong—her eldest girl, and second child, as we have
seen, having only been born on the 5th of November 1775—in the beginning
of December she began making preparations for her journey to London, no
joke in those days when, “starting two hours before day, or as late at
night,” it took three days to reach Bristol.
Five days, Mrs. Delaney tells us, travelling over the same road the
Siddons had now to face, it took to reach her father’s place in
Gloucestershire. “Every half hour flop we went into a slough, not
overturned, but stuck. Out we were hauled, and the coach with much
difficulty was set up again.”
Full of hope and excitement, however, the young actress, accompanied by
husband and babies, prepared for their expedition. No pilgrim approaching
the shrine of Mecca was ever more enthusiastic than she approaching the
bourne of all actors of that day, Drury Lane. Yet already, through all
her delight, we hear a note of dissatisfaction that is displeasing.
Garrick had arranged to give her five pounds a week, a munificent salary
for a beginner in those days. Mrs. Abington and Mrs. Yates only received
ten. She had heard the charge of stinginess made against him, and,
parrot-like, repeated it, without really considering if in her own case
it were true.
We will relate the story, however, in her own words, taken from
Recollections written many years after, but full of as much bitterness as
though penned while still smarting under her reverse.
“Happy to be placed where I presumptuously augured that I should do all
that I have since achieved, if I could but once gain the opportunity,
I instantly paid my respects to the great man. I was at that time
good-looking; and certainly, all things considered, an actress well
worth my poor five pounds a week. His praises were most liberally
conferred upon me.” We are told by Campbell that he complimented her in
this interview for not having the regular “tie-tum-tie” or sing-song of
the provincial actress. “But,” she goes on, “his attentions, great and
unremitting as they were, ended in worse than nothing. How was all this
admiration to be accounted for consistently with his subsequent conduct?
Why, thus, I believe: he was retiring from the management of Drury Lane,
and, I suppose, at that time wished to wash his hands of all its concerns
and details. However this may be, he always objected to my appearance
in any very prominent character, telling me that Mrs. Yates and Miss
Young would poison me if I did. I, of course, thought him not only an
oracle but my friend; and, in consequence of his advice, Portia, in the
_Merchant of Venice_, was fixed upon for my _début_, a character in which
it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation. _I was,
therefore, merely tolerated._”
We here beg to mention that it can hardly be correct that Mrs. Siddons
thought she would make no impression in Portia, as she had underlined
Portia in the list she gave Mr. Bate of her favourite parts, and we find
her choosing it later as the character in which to appear before Horace
Walpole when desirous of propitiating the pitiless critic. But we will
continue to relate the unfortunate story of this period in her own words.
“The fulsome adulation that courted Garrick in the theatre cannot be
imagined; and whosoever was the luckless wight who should be honoured by
his distinguished and envied smiles, of course, became an object of spite
and malevolence. Little did I imagine that I myself was now that wretched
victim. He would sometimes hand me from my own seat in the green-room
to place me next to his own.... He also,” she goes on, “selected me to
personate Venus at the revival of the _Jubilee_. This gained me the
malicious appellation of Garrick’s ‘Venus,’ and the ladies who so kindly
bestowed it on me rushed before me in the last scene, so that if he
(Mr. Garrick) had not brought us forward with him with his own hands,
my little Cupid and myself, whose appointed situations were in the very
front of the stage, might have as well been in the Island of Paphos at
that moment.”
Thomas Dibdin, the Cupid on this occasion, afterwards told Campbell that,
as it was necessary for him to smile in the part of his godship, Mrs.
Siddons kept him in good humour by asking him what sort of sugar-plums
he liked best, and promising him a large supply of them. After the
performance she kept her word. This is a characteristic trait; most young
actresses under the circumstances would have been rather occupied with
the effect of their own beauty on the audience than of the smiles of
their Cupids.
At last the day came on which her fate was to be decided. It fell in
Christmas week, 1775, and the audience present is described as “numerous
and splendid.”
The following is a copy of the play-bill:—
(Not acted these two years.)
By Her Majesty’s Company at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
This day will be performed
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
Shylock Mr. KING.
Antonio Mr. REDDISH.
Gratiano Mr. DODD.
Lorenzo (with songs) Mr. VERNON.
&c. &c.
Then Jessica (with a song) Miss JARRETT.
Nerissa Mrs. DAVIES.
Portia, by a Young Lady (her first appearance).
The result can best be known by the judgment of the newspaper critics.
One says: “On before us tottered rather than walked a very pretty,
delicate, fragile-looking young creature, dressed in a most unbecoming
manner, in a faded salmon-coloured sack and coat, and uncertain
whereabouts to fix either her eyes or her feet. She spoke in broken,
tremulous tones; and at the close of each sentence her voice sank into
a ‘horrid whisper’ that was almost inaudible. After her first exit, the
judgment of the pit was unanimous as to her beauty, but declared her
awkward and provincial.”
In the famous Trial scene she regained her courage, and delivered the
great speech to Shylock with “critical propriety,” but with a faintness
of utterance which seemed the result of physical weakness rather than of
want of spirit or feeling. Another paper, who “understood that the new
Portia had been the heroine of one of those petty parties of travelling
comedians which wander over the country,” owned that she had a fine
stage-figure; her features were expressive; she was uncommonly graceful;
but her voice was deficient in variety of tone and clearness. This,
however, might be the effect of a cold or nervousness. Her words were
delivered with good sense and taste, only there was no fire or spirit
in the performance. “Nothing,” the critic ends, “is so barren of either
profit or fame as a cold correctness.”
Knowing the Kemble failing of over-study and self-restraint, this seems a
fair enough criticism. She represented Portia again a few nights later,
but her name did not appear on the bills. She showed more confidence, and
succeeded a little better, but does not seem to have got a hold of her
audience.
Garrick was at this time employed in mounting an abridgment by
Colman of Ben Jonson’s _Epicœne_, and trusting, we conclude, to the
statement of his friend Mr. Bate, that the _débutante_ had “a very good
breeches-figure,” he selected her for the heroine’s part. The result
was a failure. Critics complained of “the confusion, when Mrs. Siddons,
disguised in the piece as a woman, revealed herself at the end as a boy.”
The _Morning Post_, edited by Parson Bate, was the only paper that spoke
in favour of the attempt.
The next part she was put into was by this same Bate, _The Blackamoor
White-washed_. We can see how Garrick was forced by the exigencies of
his obligations to Bate to put this play on the stage; the only mistake
he made was in subjecting the young actress to the risks and chances
of the first representation, which, in consequence of the slashing pen
and vigorous fists of its author, was not likely to be received with
unalloyed approbation. Unfortunately he did not understand the proud
timidity of the girl on whom he had laid the task. His other ladies did
not mind a rebuff, and would do anything for a critic who praised them,
as Mr. Bate had praised “Portia.” As to a theatrical riot, they rather
enjoyed it than otherwise, if it were not turned against them personally.
Though treated to many a one afterwards, Mrs. Siddons never forgot this
first experience. A band of prize-fighters, supposed to be supporters
of the parson’s, burst into the pit, and, striking out right and left,
silenced the would-be detractors of the play. On the next night both
sides mustered in force, and the scene defied description. Officers in
the boxes fought with gentlemen from the pit and galleries. The ladies
were driven from the boxes, leaving them in possession of the combatants.
Garrick, who appeared to try and appease the mob, had an orange flung
at him, and a lighted candle passed close to King, who came from the
author to announce the withdrawal of the piece. Even this statement had
not the effect of restoring quiet until past midnight, when, weary with
their exertions, the rioters dispersed. Next day all the papers abused
the Julia of the piece, who had not been allowed a chance of making
herself heard. “Mrs. Siddons, having no comedy in her nature,” one said,
“rendered that ridiculous which the author evidently intended to be
pleasant.”
On the 15th of February, Garrick again allowed her to appear; this time
in Mrs. Cowley’s _Runaway_—a slight but telling part, which caused one
of her critics to say that she dropped into the walking gentlewoman, and
was not permitted a long walk before she became the “Runaway.” Garrick
then paid her the compliment of entrusting her with the acting of Mrs.
Strickland to his Ranger in the old comedy of _The Suspicious Husband_.
One lady confesses to being moved to tears by Mrs. Siddons in this part,
but the majority of the audience and the newspapers seem to have passed
her over in complete silence.
Garrick now began his farewell performances. He selected her to act the
Lady Anne to his Richard III.—a selection which was an honour coveted by
most of the ladies of the company. The actor surpassed his finest days;
the young actress was almost petrified by the ferocity and fire of his
gaze. She forgot, in her flurry, his important order that she should
stand so that _his_ face might be presented to the audience. The look she
received made her almost faint with terror, and no doubt betrayed her
fright in her acting. The critics pronounced that she was “lamentable,”
and the public were utterly indifferent. This was her last appearance.
And so ended her first disastrous season at Drury Lane. We think every
unbiassed person in reading the account of it will entirely absolve
Garrick of the charges brought against him. Other causes were at work
which the offended actress did not take into consideration.
Garrick could not forgive crudeness, want of finish. He himself had
stepped on the London stage with as much natural ease, and in his
representation of Richard III. had taken the town as completely by storm
the first time as the last time he acted it. He never made allowances for
timidity, and grew impatient at want of confidence. We know he utterly
despaired of Mrs. Graham, afterwards the great Mrs. Yates, when he
first saw her in the part of Marcia; and Miss Barton, afterwards Mrs.
Abington, he allowed to leave Drury Lane at first because he could not,
he said, give her a fitting part. The Kemble genius, on the other hand,
was a plant of tardy growth, needing much cultivation and many years to
bring it to perfection.
Garrick was above all a manager who had the honour of his theatre at
heart. He had held the helm at Drury Lane for years, guiding the fortunes
of the company through stormy waters safely into the haven of financial
and artistic success such as no theatre had ever enjoyed before; but at
what a cost! Tormented by the jealousies, insolence, and greed of his
leading ladies, disheartened by the envy and treachery of his oldest
friends, he must have been glad to contemplate retirement from the
turmoil, to enjoy undisturbed the competency he had been able to save
from a long life spent in the service of his art and the public. He had
but one year more of thraldom, but the harness had begun to gall almost
beyond endurance. When he came home ill and worn out after protracted
rehearsals, he found petulant letters to be answered, when he went back
to the theatre hostile attacks to be avoided, while outside were ranged
secret and declared foes, jealous of his success, anxious to find a flaw
in his honour or his genius. Suddenly he bethought him of a method, tried
before with success, to curb the fiery tempers of the ladies within “his
kingdom.” He had heard of a lovely young actress, member of a company
strolling in the provinces. He determined to engage her and use her as
a foil against the rebellious members of his female staff, for the last
year of office. It was not likely that, coming from humble surroundings
and hard work, she would afflict him with many airs and graces; and
before time had been given her to spoil, his term as manager would have
ceased. Garrick had never been given much cause to think highly of women
during his long life as an actor—his own wife always excepted—and he
most likely put Sarah Siddons on the same level as the others—sordid,
like Miss Pope; jealous, like Mrs. Yates; or ill-tempered, like Mrs.
Clive—well able to take care of herself, and not gifted with those two
rare qualities amongst theatrical ladies, modesty or sensitiveness. How
could he guess, even with all his perspicacity and experience, that this
young creature—whose life hitherto had been spent strolling from place
to place with the vagabonds and adventurers her profession threw her
with—was proud, sensitive, timid, nourishing the very highest ideal of
her art, and indifferent to any homage given to her person and not to her
intellectual power of interpreting the works of the great poets of her
country? How could he tell that beneath the pretty exterior of this young
and trembling recruit lay hidden the fiery soul of the majestic, terrific
Lady Macbeth? He treated her with an amount of consideration and courtesy
unusual even with him, sending her boxes for all his great performances,
when Cabinet Ministers were imploring places and had to be refused. He
would hand her from the green-room and put her in the place of honour
beside him; and gave her parts which according to his judgment, formed
hastily on what he had had an opportunity of seeing, best suited her. And
how was he rewarded? By a resentment nourished the whole of a lifetime,
and by a charge persistently stated and repeated by her friends, that the
great “Roscius” was jealous of an unskilled, untrained, country actress!
Why, then, had he not shown jealousy of Mrs. Abington, Mrs. Clive, or,
still more, of the gentlemen of his company, Barry and Smith, the Romeo
and Charles Surface of their day. There are so few figures in public
life complete and admirable as David Garrick’s, so far removed above
the pettiness and egotism accompanying success, that it is with pain we
read Mrs. Siddons’s accusations, and think the only way to excuse her is
to show the anguish experienced by both her husband and herself in the
miserable sequel to the sad story of failure and disappointment, and to
ascribe her injustice to the misery of lives embittered and prospects
blighted, for the time, making her ever afterwards see the facts of the
case through a distorted medium. We will relate in her own words what now
took place:—
“He (Garrick) promised Mr. Siddons to procure me a good engagement with
the new managers, and desired him to give himself no trouble about the
matter, but to put my cause entirely into his hands. He let me down,
however, after all these protestations, in the most humiliating manner,
and, instead of doing me common justice with those gentlemen, rather
depreciated my talents. This Mr. Sheridan afterwards told me; and said
that when Mrs. Abington heard of my impending dismissal, she told them
they were all acting like fools. When the London season was over, I made
an engagement at Birmingham for the ensuing summer, little doubting of my
return to Drury Lane for the next winter; but, whilst I was fulfilling my
engagement at Birmingham, to my utter dismay and astonishment, I received
an official letter from the prompter of Drury Lane, acquainting me that
my services would be no longer required. It was a stunning and cruel
blow, overwhelming all my ambitious hopes, and involving peril even to
the subsistence of my helpless babes. It was very near destroying me. My
blighted prospects, indeed, induced a state of mind that preyed upon my
health, and for a year and a half I was supposed to be hastening to a
decline. For the sake of my poor children, however, I roused myself to
shake off this despondency, and my endeavours were blest with success,
_in spite of the degradation I had suffered in being banished from Drury
Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune_.”
Siddons wrote piteously to Garrick on the 9th of February 1776,
soliciting his “friendship” and “endeavour” for their continuance in
Drury Lane. “I account we have been doubly unfortunate at our onset
in the theatre, first that particular circumstances prevented us from
joining it at a proper time, and thereby rendered it impossible for us
to be mingled in the business of the season, where our utility might
have been more observed; second, that we are going to be deprived of you
as manager, and left to those who, perhaps, may not have an opportunity
this winter of observing us at all: these considerations, Sir, have
occasioned this address, with hopes you will lay them before Mr. Lacy and
those gentlemen your successors; and as there has been no agreement with
regard to salary between you and us, it may now be necessary to propose
that article, thereby to acquaint them with what we shall expect, which
(as we are so young in the theatre) is no more than what we can decently
subsist on and appear with some credit to the profession. That is, for
Mrs. Siddons three pounds a week, for myself two; this, I flatter myself,
we shall both be found worthy of for the first year; after that (as it
may be presumed we shall be more experienced in our business) shall wish
to rise as our merits may demand. I am, Sir, with many apologies for this
freedom, your most obedient and very humble servant, WM. SIDDONS.”
It shows how disastrous the effect of her acting must have been that, in
spite of the smallness of their demands, Lacy, Sheridan & Co. refused to
entertain their proposal.
It is a curious fact, if, as she says, the treatment she received at
Garrick’s hands was unjust, that at this juncture the managers of the
rival theatre of Covent Garden, who had already been in treaty with her,
and thought themselves unhandsomely dealt with when Garrick secured her,
did not come forward now. It is clear that the anxiety of the Covent
Garden managers for her assistance was extinguished by her performance;
those talents which they were ready before her appearance to contest with
Garrick, they subsequently resigned without an effort to the obscurity
of a strolling company. We have a curious corollary to her statement,
“that Mrs. Abington told them they were all acting like fools,” in the
lately published Memoirs of Crabbe Robinson, in which he relates a
conversation he held in 1811 with Mrs. Abington on the subject of Mrs.
Siddons. She was by no means warm, he says, in her praise. She objected
to the elaborate emphasis given to very insignificant words. “That was
brought in by them,” she added, with truth, alluding to the weakness of
the family. Perhaps the fair Abington’s praise at first was as conclusive
a sign of failure as Sheridan’s dismissal.
Good-natured Pivey Clive was more honest in saying nothing at the time;
but on going with Mrs. Garrick to see her later, when she was in the
heyday of her success, she pronounced the young actress, in her own
characteristic fashion, to be “all truth and daylight.”
We never hear Garrick’s name mentioned again with hers, except in a note
in connection with two folio Shakespeares of 1623. “In 1776,” Payne
Collier says, “Garrick had presented the volume (one of the folio copies
with the autographs of David Garrick and Sarah Siddons) to Mrs. Siddons
as a testimony of her merits, and of his obligation.” So far Payne
Collier. Another writer, commenting on this note, demonstrates that it
is not likely that Garrick presented so great a treasure as the folio
Shakespeare of 1623 to Mrs. Siddons, especially as the words “a testimony
of her merits and his obligation” was an addition of Payne Collier. He
then relates the circumstances of her first appearance. Garrick, he says,
amongst other things, noticed some awkward action of her arms, and said
“if she waved them about in that fashion she would knock off his wig,”
upon which she retorted to the person who told her, “He was only afraid I
should overshadow his nose.” A mutual feeling not likely to lead to such
a gift. It would be interesting, therefore, to know through what hands
the volume passed from Garrick to Mrs. Siddons, and from Mrs. Siddons
to Lilly the bookseller. With the great actor’s wife she was afterwards
on terms of friendship; and when Mrs. Garrick died, she left her in her
will a pair of gloves which were Shakespeare’s, “and were presented
to my late dear husband by one of the family during the Jubilee at
Stratford-on-Avon.” And so “Davey” vanishes from her life.
CHAPTER IV.
WORK.
The rebuff she had sustained at Drury Lane called out all that was finest
in Mrs. Siddons’ nature. The blow had been “stunning and cruel,” as she
says; but the resolute valiant nature she had inherited from her mother
soon reasserted itself. In spite of delicate health, which Wilkinson,
who acted with her in _Evander_, feared “might disable her from
sustaining the fatigues of duty,” we find her moving from place to place,
unintermitting in study, attaining a step higher each new representation
she essayed, persistently raising her audience to her level, not
descending to theirs.
She no longer led the “vagabond” life of her early strolling days, but
still one of constant anxiety and unrest. The young actress returned to
the provinces with the prestige of having acted with the great Garrick,
and of having even excited the jealousy of “Roscius” by her dramatic
power—a report industriously circulated by her friends and managers,
and, no doubt, confirmed by the actress herself. So unconsciously does
self-interest colour our opinions.
In saying that she no longer led the “vagabond” life of her early days,
we mean that instead of wandering, as strolling players were obliged to
do, from town to town, trusting to the chances of the hour, pitching
their tent in a barn or an inn, and trusting to the caprice and humours
of the public officials of the places they came to, she now secured
fixed engagements at the best provincial theatres, which, owing to the
difficulties and expenses of a journey to London, were attended during
the season by many of the county magnates, and the lesser stars following
and surrounding the brighter planets.
Bath stood at the head of these provincial theatres. York, Hull,
Manchester, Hereford, Liverpool, Worcester, and many others came next in
order of merit.
The first engagement she received on quitting Drury Lane was at
Birmingham, where she remained the whole summer of 1776, acting parts of
the highest standing. Here she enjoyed the privilege of having Henderson
as coadjutor, who, Campbell tells us, was so struck by her merits, that
he wrote immediately to Palmer, the manager of the Bath Theatre, urging
him in the strongest terms to engage her. Palmer was unable to follow
this advice just then, but did so later.
The only direct communication we have from her during this time of
work and struggle is a letter to Mrs. Inchbald, whose friendship with
the Kembles had begun in 1776. Charges were, indeed, “tremendous
circumstances” to her who, at the best of times in those early days, only
enjoyed a salary of three pounds a week. Her observations about “exotics”
are amusing, she herself figuring so largely later in that character, to
the dread of all provincial actresses:—
“I played _Hamlet_ in Liverpool, to near a hundred pounds, and wish
I had taken it to myself; but the fear of charges, which, you know,
are most tremendous circumstances, persuaded me to take part of a
benefit with Barry, for which I have since been very much blamed; but
he, I believe, was very much satisfied—and, in short, so am I. Strange
resolutions are formed in our theatrical ministry; one of them I think
very prudent—this little rogue Harry is chattering to such a degree,
I scarce know what I am about. [Her eldest boy was then four.] But to
proceed: Our managers have determined to employ no more exotics; they
have found that Miss Yonge’s late visit to us (which you must have heard
of) has rather hurt than done them service; so that Liverpool must, from
this time forth, be content with such homely fare as we small folks can
furnish to its delicate sense.... Present our kind compliments to Mr. and
Mrs. Wilkinson, and tell the former I never mention his name but I wish
to be regaling with him over a pinch of his most excellent Irish snuff,
which I have never had a snift of but in idea since I left York.” It is
difficult to conceive the divine Melpomene taking snuff, though she did
so all her life; but in that day it was the fashion for everyone to snuff.
Early in 1777 she played at Manchester, where she made so great an
impression that the shrewd and enterprising Tate Wilkinson, lessee of
the York Theatre, offered her an engagement. Her range of characters
now included “the Grecian Daughter,” Alicia, Jane Shore, Matilda, Lady
Townley—all the tearful dramas of the day, which the young actress
brought into fashion instead of the artificial comedy of the preceding
age. At Manchester, we are astonished to hear, one of her most applauded
characters was _Hamlet_.
Her playing this great play in strolling days, as Mr. Bate tells us,
“was most likely only a girlish freak.” Her acting it now shows that
she was cultivating her dramatic genius in every direction, working
out of the restricted domain of Jane Shore, the Grecian Daughter, and
Calista, no longer content to move her audience by her pathos and grace,
but determined to bring them to her feet by her intellectual power. It
is curious that, though many years afterwards she acted it in Dublin,
she never could be persuaded to appear in it in London. Her dislike to
anything approaching male attire was almost morbid, and even in Rosalind
she vastly amused the town by her costume—“mysterious nondescript
garments,” that were neither male nor female, devised to satisfy a
prudery which in such a character was wholly out of place.
At York, where Mrs. Siddons acted for Tate Wilkinson, the manager,
from Easter to Whitsuntide 1777, she enjoyed an unequivocal success.
“All lifted up their eyes with astonishment that such a voice, such
a judgment, and such acting, should have been neglected by a London
audience, and by the first actor in the world!”—another hit at Garrick
made by Wilkinson, who, generously aided by Garrick at the beginning
of his career, had turned against his benefactor, and never missed an
opportunity of detracting from his merits.
The most critical local censors were lavish in their praise, though all
remarked “how ill and pale she was, and wondered how she got through her
parts.” She acted the round of her characters. Her attitudes and figure
were vastly admired; she was thought “so elegant.” Wilkinson endeavoured
to secure her permanently as a member of his company, and in his Memoirs
tells how he endeavoured to tempt her by fine clothes, providing for
one of her parts a most “elegant sack-back, all over silver trimmings.”
He did not understand any more than Garrick the nature of the woman
with whom he had to deal. On the 17th May she acted Semiramis for her
benefit, and the York season closed. Palmer, of the Bath Theatre, had
not forgotten Henderson’s strong recommendation, and, finding at last an
opening, he concluded an engagement with her.
Bath was first in importance among the provincial theatres. The audience,
indeed, was very largely composed of the London “fashionables,” who
came to drink the waters; no “sack-backs,” therefore, “all over silver
trimmings,” were allowed to interfere with her determination, for,
although in her petulant moments she was wont to declare that she
preferred the country, and had been treated so cruelly in London she
never would play there again, in her heart she was resolved to rule
supreme on those boards she had once trod with Garrick.
“I now made an engagement at Bath,” she says in her _Memoranda_. “There
my talents and industry were encouraged by the greatest indulgence,
and, I may say, with some admiration. Tragedies which had been almost
banished, again resumed their proper interest; but still I had the
mortification of being obliged to personate many subordinate characters
in comedy, the first being, by contract, in the possession of another
lady. To this I was obliged to submit, or to forfeit a portion of my
salary, _which was only three pounds a week_. Tragedies were now becoming
more and more fashionable. This was favourable to my cast of powers;
and, whilst I laboured hard, I began to earn a distinct and flattering
reputation. Hard labour, indeed, it was! for, after the rehearsal at
Bath, and on a Monday morning, I had to go and act at Bristol on the
evening of the same day, and reaching Bath again, after a drive of
twelve miles, I was obliged to represent some fatiguing part there on
the Tuesday evening. When I recollect all this labour of mind and body,
I wonder that I had strength and courage to support it, interrupted as
I was by the care of a mother, and by the childish sports of my little
ones, who were often most unwillingly hushed to silence for interrupting
their mother’s studies.”
From the pages of Horace Walpole, Mrs. Montagu, and Fanny Burney, we
can bring the Pan-tiles of Tunbridge Wells or the parade at Bath, with
their periwigs, powder-patches, and scandal, distinctly before us. Let us
stand for a moment on the parade, and watch the noteworthy people, muses,
poets, statesmen, who have assembled there, in 1778, to drink the water.
Royal dukes and princesses might be seen sauntering about, playing whist
and E. O. in the evening, and taking “three glasses of water, a toasted
roll, a Bath cake, and a cold walk in the mornings.” Next to them, the
celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, loveliest of the lovely, gayest of the
gay, attracts most notice. Her dazzling beauty, and those eyes the Irish
labourer at the Fox Election said he could light his pipe at, are said
to have taken away the readiness of hand and happiness of touch of the
young painter “reported to have some talent,” named Gainsborough, while
painting her this year at Bath.
After the Queen of Beauty comes the Queen of the Blues, Mrs. Montagu,
“brilliant in clothes, solid in judgment, critical in talk, with the
air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished and of great
parts.” She writes in her letters of hating “ye higgledy-piggledy of
the watering-places,” but seems happy enough combating for precedence
“with the only other candidate for colloquial eminence” she thought
worthy to be her peer—short, plump, brisk Mrs. Thrale; on the one side a
placid, high-strained intellectual exertion, on the other an exuberant
pleasantry, without the smallest malice in either. All the “Johnsonhood,”
as Horace Walpole calls the circle, musters round the two brilliant
ladies, the Great Bear in the centre, for he and Boswell are stopping at
the Pelican Inn. The conversation turns on _Evelina_, the universal topic
of the day; Johnson declaring he had sat up all night to read it, much to
Fanny Burney’s delight, who, thirsting for flattery, sits with observant
eyes and sarcastic little mouth, that belies the prudishly-folded hands
and prim air. Moving about from group to group is the brilliant Sheridan,
walking with his father and wife, and surrounded by the Linley family,
to whom the lovely Cecilia is recounting the honours heaped on them in
London.
Unnoticed among all these great people is a little lame Scottish boy,
destined to be the greatest of them all. Mrs. Siddons most likely saw
and knew the little fellow then, who afterwards became so true a friend,
for Walter Scott, in his autobiography, tells us he was frequently taken
to Bath for his lameness, and, after he had bathed in the morning, got
through a reading-lesson at the old dame’s near the parade, and had had
a drive over the downs, his uncle would sometimes take him to the old
theatre. On one occasion, witnessing _As You Like It_, his interest was
so great that, in the middle of the wrestling scene in the first act, he
screamed out, “A’n’t they brothers?”
Amongst this “higgledy-piggledy,” we are suddenly struck by a beautiful
young creature, whose arrival seems to cause a flutter among the
fashionables. She is accompanied by a handsome fair man and two beautiful
children. This is the new actress who is turning every head. From
Lawrence’s coloured crayon drawing, done of her during this stay at
Bath, we can form a distinct idea of what she was like. He has drawn her
three-quarter face, black velvet hat and plume, white muslin cavalier
tie, brown riding spencer with big buttons and lappels turned back.
Under the shadow of the hat is the refined, noble face, with delicate,
arched eye-brows, aquiline nose, finely modelled mouth, and round cleft
chin. She is not yet the tragic muse of Reynolds, nor the full-orbed,
fashionable beauty of Gainsborough, but a lovely young Diana, with frank,
large, out-looking eyes, and a pretty air of defiance and resolution, the
brightness undimmed by the anxiety and hard work of later days; the young
beauty is evidently determined to conquer the universe.
It was a world strangely at issue with her own ideas into which she had
stepped—a dandified, ceremonious world, full of witty and wicked ladies
and gentlemen, who played cards and backed horses; but, mercifully
for her, a world at the same time full of childish enthusiasm, an age
of pallor and fainting and hysterics. Grown men and women sitting up
at night weeping and laughing over the woes and escapades of Clarissa
Harlowe and Evelina; ladies writing to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, make
Lovelace happy; you can so easily do it. Pray reform him! Will you not
save a soul?”
The same vivid interest was taken in dramatic situations. It was a common
thing for women—and, indeed, men also—to be carried out fainting; and as
to the crying and sobbing, it was generally audible all over the house.
In a pathetic piece, Miss Burney describes two young ladies, who sat in
a box above her, being both so much shocked at the death of Douglas that
“they both burst into a loud fit of roaring, and sobbed on afterwards
for almost half the farce.” Needless to say, therefore, the enthusiasm
a beautiful young actress like Mrs. Siddons would create. It was not,
however, immediate; she was obliged, as we have seen, to personate
subordinate characters, and was obliged to act in comedy that did not
suit her.
Thursdays were the nights of the Cotillon balls at Bath, and of the
assemblies at Lady Miller’s, of Bath Easton vase celebrity, which are
alluded to by Horace Walpole: “They hold a Parnassus fair every Thursday,
before the balls, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux at
Bath contend for the prizes. A Roman vase, dressed with pink ribbons
and myrtles, receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival.
Six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest
compositions, which the respective successful ten candidates acknowledge.”
These events always emptied the theatre, and it was one of the young
actress’s grievances that for a time she was put forward—no doubt owing
to the claims of the leading ladies—on these occasions. Gradually,
however, her attraction increased, and on various occasions she succeeded
in drawing the frequenters of the balls to the theatre. She brought
tragedies into fashion, and in _The Mourning Bride_, Juliet, the Queen
in _Hamlet_, Jane Shore, Isabella, succeeded in gaining the suffrages of
her Bath audience.
We find the “tonish” young men, on the occasion of her benefit,
presenting her with sixty guineas “in order to secure tickets, as they
were afraid the demand for them would be so great by-and-bye.” “Was it
not elegant?” she asks. One of these benefits produced to her one hundred
and forty-six pounds—a handsome sum in those days. Before two years of
her four years’ stay at Bath had elapsed, we see her the favourite and
friend of all the great people in the place. The Duchess of Devonshire
showed her particular favour; and subsequently, when her engagement at
Drury Lane hung in the balance, threw the weight of her influence, which
was supreme, into the scale.
We cannot help remarking, in spite of the accusations so frequently
brought against her of her love of fine friends, that those who clustered
about her in those early Bath days occupied the same position in her
heart thirty years later. One of these, a Dr. Whalley, and his wife, were
true and devoted friends all her life, and her letters to him contribute
some of the most valuable materials we have for writing her life. Dr.
Thomas Sedgwick Whalley was a gentleman of taste and good income, derived
from his own private estates, and the rich stipend of an unwholesome
Lincolnshire living, which a kind-hearted bishop had given him on
condition he never resided on it. He enjoyed some literary celebrity as
the author of a long narrative poem, _Edwy and Edilda_. He occupied one
of the finest houses on the Crescent; was intimate with Mrs. Piozzi;
corresponded with the voluminous letter-writer, Miss Seward; and was, in
fact, a fine specimen of the _dilettante_ gentleman of the old school.
Little Burney’s sharp-pointed pen describes Whalley exactly:
One of the clergymen was Mr. W⸺, a young man who has a house
on the Crescent, and is one of the best supporters of Lady
Miller’s vase at Bath Easton. He is immensely tall, thin,
and handsome, but affected, delicate, and sentimentally
pathetic; and his conversation about his own “feelings,” about
“amiable motives,” and about the wind—which, at the Crescent,
he said in a tone of dying horror, “blew in a manner really
frightful!”—diverted me the whole evening. But Miss Thrale, not
content with private diversion, laughed out at his expressions,
till I am sure he perceived and understood her merriment.
Later she mentions:—
In the evening we had Mrs. Lambart, who brought us a tale
called _Edwy and Edilda_, by the sentimental Mr. Whalley, and
unreadably soft and tender and senseless is it.
He was of the soft and tender school; Miss Seward’s heart “vibrates
to every sentence of his last charming letter”; they indulge in the
“communication of responsive ideas”; and on leaving Bath she thus
addresses him:—
Edwy, farewell! To Lichfield’s darkened grove,
With aching heart and rising sighs, I go.
Yet bear a grateful spirit as I rove,
For all of thine which balm’d a cureless woe.
We cannot tell whether the “communication of responsive ideas” with so
many fair ladies aroused Mrs. Whalley’s jealousy ultimately, or whether
incompatibility of temper was the cause, but in 1819 Mrs. Piozzi writes:—
I hear wondrous tales of Doctor and Mrs. Whalley; half the town
saying he is the party aggrieved, and the other half lamenting
the lady’s fate. Two wiseacres sure, old acquaintances of forty
years’ standing, and both past seventy years old!
When Mrs. Siddons first knew them at Bath, there was evidently nothing
of that sort. She writes to him from Bristol:—
“I cannot express how much I am honoured by your friendship; therefore
you must not expect words, but as much gratitude as can inhabit the bosom
of a human being. I hope, with a fervency unusual upon such occasions,
that you will not be disappointed in your expectations of me to-night;
but sorry am I to say I have often observed that I have performed worst
when I most ardently wished to do better than ever. Strange perverseness!
And this leads me to observe—as I believe I may have done before—that
those who act mechanically are sure to be in some sort right; while we
who trust to nature—if we do not happen to be in the humour (which,
however, Heaven be praised! seldom happens)—are dull as anything can be
imagined, because we cannot feign. But I hope Mrs. Whalley will remember
that it was your commendations which she heard, and judge of your praises
by the benevolent heart from which they proceed, more than as standards
of my deserving. Luckily I have been able to procure places in the front
row, next to the stage-box, on the left-hand of you as you go in. These,
I hope, will please you.”
Meantime, Henderson, who had before so strongly recommended her to the
Bath manager, came down for one or two nights and acted Benedict to her
Beatrice; returned to London so full of her praises that the managers
of Drury Lane made her the offer of an engagement in the summer of
1782. “After my former dismissal from thence,” she says later in her
_Memoranda_, “it may be imagined that this was to me a triumphant moment.”
At the same time, she was loth to leave her appreciative friends
at Bath, and, curiously enough, hesitated at the last moment about
accepting; so that Whalley’s congratulatory poem on her engagement at
Drury Lane, contributed to Lady Miller’s “Roman Vase,” was a little
premature. At last, however, her departure was formally announced, and
she took her farewell benefit. She acted in the _Distressed Mother_ and
_The Devil to Pay_, and then came forward and recited some lines _of her
own composition_, of which we give the reader only a short sample, as the
“Virgin Muse” does not soar very high:—
Have I not raised some expectation here?
“Wrote by herself? What! authoress and player?
True, we have heard her”—thus I guess’d you’d say—
“With decency recite another’s lay;
But never heard, nor ever could we dream,
Herself had sipp’d the Heliconian stream.”
Perhaps you farther said—Excuse me, pray,
For thus supposing all that you might say—
“What will she treat of in this same address?
Is it to show her learning? Can you guess?”
Here let me answer: No. Far different views
Possess’d my soul, and fired my virgin Muse.
’Twas honest gratitude, at whose request
Sham’d be the heart that will not do its best!
She then informs them they must part; that, if only she meets as much
kindness elsewhere,
Envy, o’ercome, will hurl her pointless dart,
And critic gall be shed without its smart.
Nothing would drag her from Bath, she says, but one thing; here she went
to the wing and led forward her children:—
These are the moles that bear me from your side,
Where I was rooted—where I could have died.
The moles now numbered three, her second daughter and third child,
Maria, having been born on 1st July 1779.
Stand forth, ye elves! and plead your mother’s cause,
Ye little magnets, whose soft influence draws
Me from a point where every gentle breeze
Wafted my bark to happiness and ease—
Sends me adventurous on a larger main,
In hopes that you may profit by my gain.
Have I been hasty? Am I, then, to blame?
Answer, all ye who own a parent’s name!
Thus have I tired you with an untaught muse,
Who for your favour still most humbly sues;
That you for classic learning will receive
My soul’s best wishes, which I freely give—
For polished periods round, and touched with art,
The fervent offering of my grateful heart.
So Mrs. Siddons made her bow. When she next appeared at Bath it was as
the greatest tragic actress then on the stage.
Towards the end of August, she set out determined to make her way slowly
to London, acting at various country theatres as she went along. Her
letters written to the Whalleys are full of fun, and show she had the pen
of a ready writer.
“You will be pleased to hear,” she says, “that Mrs. Carr was very civil
to me—gave me a comfortable bed, and I slept very well. We were five of
us in the machine, all females but one, a youth of about sixteen, and the
most civilized being you can conceive—a native of Bristol, too.
“One of the ladies was, I believe verily, a little insane. Her dress was
the most peculiar, and manner the most offensive, I ever remember to have
met with; her person was taller and more thin than you can imagine; her
hair raven black, drawn as tight as possible over her cushion before and
behind; and at the top of her head was placed a solitary fly-cap of the
last century, composed of materials of about twenty sorts, and as dirty
as the ground; her neck, which was a thin scrag of a quarter of a yard
long, and the colour of a walnut, she wore uncovered, for the solace
of all beholders; her Circassian was an olive-coloured cotton of three
several sorts, about two breadths wide in the skirt, and tied up exactly
in the middle in one place only. She had a black petticoat spotted with
red, and over that a very thin white muslin one, with a long black gauze
apron, and without the least hoop. I never in my life saw so odd an
appearance; and my opinion was not singular, for wherever we stopped she
inspired either mirth or amazement, but was quite innocent of it herself.
On taking her seat among us at Bristol, she flew into a violent passion
on seeing one of the windows down. I said I would put it up, if she
pleased. ‘To be sure,’ said she; ‘I have no ambition to catch my death!’
No sooner had she done with me, but she began to scold the woman who sat
opposite to her for touching her foot. ‘You have not been used to riding
in a _coach_, I fancy, good woman.’ She met in this lady a little more
spirit than she found in me, and we were obliged to her for keeping this
unhappy woman in tolerable order for the remainder of the day. Bless
me! I had almost forgot to tell you that I was desired to make tea at
breakfast. Vain were my endeavours to please this strange creature. She
had desired to have her tea in a basin, and I followed her directions
as near as it was possible in the making her tea; but she had no sooner
tasted it than she bounced to the window and threw it out, declaring she
had never met with such a set of awkward, ill-bred people. What could be
expected in a stage-coach, indeed? She snatched the canister from me,
poured a great quantity into the basin, with sugar, cream, and water, and
drank it all together. Did you ever hear of anything so strange? When we
sat down to dinner, she seemed terrified to death lest anybody should eat
but herself.
“The remaining part of our journey was made almost intolerable by
her fretfulness. One minute she was screaming out lest the coachman
should overturn us; she was sure he would, because she would not give
him anything for neglecting to keep her trunk dry; and, though it was
immoderately hot, we were obliged very often to sit with the windows up,
for she had been told that the air was pestilential after sunset, and
that, however people liked it, she did not choose to hazard her life
by sitting with the windows open. All were disposed, for the sake of
peace, to let her have her own way, except the person whom we were really
obliged to for quieting her every now and then. She had been handsome,
but was now, I suppose, sixty years old. I pity her temper, and am sorry
for her situation, which I have set down as that of a disappointed old
maid.
“At about seven o’clock we arrived at Dorchester. On my stepping out
of the coach, a gentleman very civilly gave me his hand. Who should it
be but Mr. Siddons! who was come on purpose to meet me. He was very
well, and the same night I had the pleasure of seeing my dear boy, more
benefited by the sea than can be conceived. He desires me to thank Mr.
Whalley for the fruit, which he enjoyed very much. We have got a most
deplorable lodging, and the water and the bread are intolerable; ‘but
travellers must be content.’ Mr. Whalley was so good as to be interested
about my bathing. Is there anything I could refuse to do at his or your
request? I intend to bathe to-morrow morning, cost what pain it will. I
expected to have found more company here.
“I went to Dorchester yesterday to dine with Mr. Beach, who is on a visit
to a relation, and has been laid up with the gout, but is recovering very
fast. He longs to see Langford, and I am anxious to have him see it. I
suppose Mr. Whalley has heard when Mr. Pratt comes. [Mr. Pratt was a Bath
bookseller who had given her lessons in elocution; and afterwards, when
she was not allowed by the manager of Drury Lane to act in his tragedy,
declared he would write an ode on Ingratitude and dedicate it to her.]
Pray present the kindest wishes of Mr. Siddons, little Harry, and myself.
I hope Mr. Whalley will do me the favour to choose the ribbon for my
watch-string. I should like it as near the colour of little dear Paphy’s
ear as possible. I did not very well comprehend what Lady Mary (Knollys)
said about the buckles. Will you please to give her my respectful
compliments, and say I beg her pardon for having deferred speaking to her
on that subject to so awkward a time, but hope my illness the last day I
had the honour of seeing her ladyship will be my excuse. I hope I shall
be favoured with a line from you, and that her ladyship will explain
herself more fully then. Harry has just puzzled me very much. When going
to eat some filberts after dinner, I told him you desired he would not
eat them; ‘But,’ says he, ‘what would you have done if Mr. Whalley had
desired you would?’ I was at a stand for a little while, and at last he
found a means to save me from my embarrassment by saying, ‘But you know
Mr. Whalley would not desire you to eat them if he thought they would
hurt you.’ ‘Very true, Harry,’ says I; so it ended there.”
The following shows that the engagement with the London manager was not
yet completely ratified; she was probably standing out for better terms,
which he was not inclined to give.
“I look forward with inexpressible delight to our snug parties, and
I have the pleasure to inform you that I shall not go to London this
winter. Mr. Linley thinks my making a partial appearance will neither
benefit myself nor the proprietors. Mrs. Crawford threatens to leave them
very often, he says, but I suppose she knows her own interest better.
I should suppose she has a very good fortune, and I should be vastly
obliged to her if she would go and live very comfortably upon it. I’ll
give her leave to stay and be of as much service to my good and dear
friend’s tragedy as she possibly can, and then let her retire as soon
as she pleases. I hope I shall not tire you; Mr. Siddons is afraid I
shall, and in compliance to him (who, with me, returns his grateful
acknowledgments for all your kindnesses), I conclude with, I hope, an
unnecessary assurance, that I am ever your grateful and affectionate
servant, S. SIDDONS.
“P.S.—Please to present our joint compliments to Mr. Whalley, Mrs.
Whalley, and Miss Squire, and, in short, the whole circle, not forgetting
Mrs. Reeves, to whom I am much obliged. In an especial manner, I beg
to be remembered to the cruel beauty, Sappho. She knows her power, and
therefore treats me like a little tyrant. Adieu! God for ever bless you
and yours! The beach here is the most beautiful I ever saw.”
She alludes above to Whalley’s tragedy _Morval_, which was acted later
with her as heroine. It was a complete failure, and was only performed
three nights.
Mrs. Siddons became fond of Weymouth, and often returned there in after
years. Miss Burney, in her _Memoirs_, tells us of being there once on
duty with the King and Royal Family. They met the actress, who made
a sweeping curtsey, walking on the sands with her children. The King
commanded a performance at the theatre, but the Royal Family having
gone away on an expedition, did not get back in time, and kept everyone
waiting. The King and Queen arriving at last, sent a page home for their
wigs, so as not to keep the audience waiting any longer.
CHAPTER V.
SUCCESS.
At last all difficulties were arranged between the manager of Drury Lane
and Mrs. Siddons, and the day dawned on which she was again destined
to make her bow before a London audience. It was the 10th October
1782. Important changes had taken place in the theatre since the fatal
December seven years before. The proud pre-eminence of Drury Lane had
passed away; the magic circle of theatrical genius that Garrick kept
together by his personal influence had been broken up and dispersed
under Sheridan’s erratic management. Mrs. Abington, Mrs. Yates, and
Miss Young had deserted to other companies. So that the fine selection
of plays, ever ready with the same set of players at hand to act them,
ensuring a perfection never achieved before, were now mounted without
care of thought, and acted by whomever the capricious manager chose to
select for the moment. Old trained hands, accustomed to the methodical
rule of Garrick, would not submit to be transferred from part to part,
receiving no due notice beforehand, and, above all, they would not submit
to the irregularity in the money arrangements which had begun almost
immediately after the impecunious Irishman took the reins of government.
There were hardly any names of note now to be seen on the bills except
those of Smith, Palmer, and King, and they openly talked of deserting the
sinking ship.
There is something almost heroic, therefore, in the appearance of the
young actress on the boards of Drury Lane at this particular juncture.
Alone and unaided, against enormous odds, she saved the famous theatre,
endeared to every lover of dramatic art, from artistic and financial
ruin. She had hitherto proved herself to have indomitable industry and
energy, to have all the qualities of a hard-working, painstaking artist;
now she was suddenly to flash forth in all the splendour of her genius
and power. And yet how simple and womanly she remained. There was no
undue reliance on her own gifts, in spite of the indiscriminate praise
that had been heaped on her at Bath by too zealous friends. She turned
a deaf ear to Miss Seward—“all asterisks and exclamations,” and to Dr.
Whalley—“all sighs and admiration”; but listened to the wise suggestions
of Mr. Linley and of old Sheridan, the father of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, himself a retired actor with full knowledge of the stage and
its requirements. She and they were afraid her voice was not equal to
filling a large London theatre. “But we soon had reason to think,” she
tells us, “that the bad construction of the Bath theatre, and not the
weakness of my voice was the cause of our mutual fears.”
Isabella, in Southerne’s pathetic play of _The Fatal Marriage_, was the
part Sheridan recommended her to choose for her first appearance, and
the selection showed his appreciative knowledge both of her powers and
of the audience she was to act to; the combined tenderness, grief and
indignation showing the variety and range of expression of which she
was capable. Hamilton painted a picture of her in this part, dressed
in deep black, holding her boy by the hand, and appealing for help to
her father-in-law, that even now brings the tears to one’s eyes as one
looks at it. Her son Henry, then eight years old, acted with her. It is
said that, observing his mother at rehearsal in the agonies of the dying
scene, he took the fiction for reality, and burst into a flood of tears.
She herself for the fortnight before her appearance suffered from nervous
agitation more than can be imagined. The whole account of her mental
state is best told in her own words.
“No wonder I was nervous before the _memorable_ day on which hung my
own fate and that of my little family. I had quitted Bath, where all
my efforts had been successful, and I feared lest a second failure in
London might influence the public mind greatly to my prejudice, in the
event of my return from Drury Lane, disgraced as I formerly had been. In
due time I was summoned to the rehearsal of Isabella. Who can imagine
my terror? I feared to utter a sound above an audible whisper; but by
degrees enthusiasm cheered me into a forgetfulness of my fears, and I
unconsciously threw out my voice, which failed not to be heard in the
remotest part of the house by a friend who kindly undertook to ascertain
the happy circumstance.
“The countenances, no less than tears and flattering encouragements of
my companions, emboldened me more and more, and the second rehearsal was
even more affecting than the first. Mr. King, who was then manager,
was loud in his applause. This second rehearsal took place on the 8th
October 1782, and on the evening of that day I was seized with a nervous
hoarseness, which made me extremely wretched; for I dreaded being obliged
to defer my appearance on the 10th, longing, as I most earnestly did, at
least to know the worst. I went to bed, therefore, in a state of dreadful
suspense. Awaking the next morning, however, though out of restless,
unrefreshing sleep, I found, upon speaking to my husband, that my voice
was very much clearer. This, of course, was a great comfort to me; and,
moreover, the sun, which had been completely obscured for many days,
shone brightly through my curtains. I hailed it, though tearfully, yet
thankfully, as a happy omen; and even now I am not ashamed of _this_
(as it may, perhaps, be called) childish superstition. On the morning
of the 10th my voice was, most happily, perfectly restored; and again
‘_the blessed sun shone brightly on me_.’ On this eventful day my father
arrived to comfort me, and to be a witness of my trial. He accompanied me
to my dressing-room at the theatre. There he left me; and I, in one of
what I call my desperate tranquillities, which usually impress me under
terrific circumstances, there completed my dress, to the astonishment
of my attendants, without uttering one word, though often sighing most
profoundly.”
The young actress had been puffed industriously before by Sheridan in
the play-bills, and he had, no doubt, circulated in his dexterous way
that the cause of her previous failure had been Garrick’s jealousy, as,
indeed, we know he told the actress herself.
There was a certain amount of expectancy and discussion. The house
was full of all that was most brilliant, intellectual, and “tonish”
in the London of that day. They had all come with powdered heads,
gold-laced coats, and diamond-encircled throats to see a pretty woman
act an affecting play; but they were hardly prepared for the passion and
pathos that for the time being shook them out of their artificial lace
handkerchief grief and bowed the powdered heads with genuine emotion. She
was well supported—Smith, Palmer, Farren, Packer, and Mrs. Love acting
with her, to say nothing of the veteran Roger Kemble, her father, who
was, she tells us, little less agitated than herself. Her husband did not
even venture to appear behind or before the scenes, his agitation was so
great.
“At length I was called to my fiery trial. The awful consciousness that
one is the sole object of attention to that immense space, lined, as
it were, with human intellect from top to bottom and all around, may,
perhaps, be imagined, but can never be described, and can never be
forgotten.”
If that night were never to pass from the memory of Mrs. Siddons, neither
would it ever pass from the memory of those who were present, nor ever be
erased from the annals of the English stage, of which that beautiful and
pathetic face and form was to be for many years the chief pride.
The story of _Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage_, is simple in
construction, the interest centring in one figure, that of the heroine.
Biron, son of a proud and worldly-minded man, marries a girl beneath him
in station, contrary to his father’s wish. A son is born, but Biron has
hardly had time to rejoice over his birth before he is called away to the
war, and, after some months, is reported as killed in battle. The wife
appears with the child in the first scene, appealing in vain, for pity’s
sake, to her father-in-law to give her something to support her and the
infant. As the bailiff enters to arrest her for debt, Villeroy (whose
attentions she had repelled, grieving as she was for her husband) comes
forward, frees her from the importunities of her creditors, and induces
her, for her child’s sake, to marry him. Hardly is she Villeroy’s wife
before Biron returns. In despair, she kills herself.
There were moments, sentences that became traditional after this first
night, as when, in reply to the question put to her on the arrival of
the creditors as to what she would do, she answered, “Do! Nothing!” the
very tone of the words told all her story. Miss Gordon fainted away on
hearing the cry “Biron! Biron!” while we know Madame de Staël’s account
in _Corinne_ of the hysterical laugh when Isabella kills herself at the
end.
It was an extraordinary evening. The house was carried away in a storm of
emotion; men were not ashamed to sob, and many women went into violent
hysterics. It is difficult, indeed, for us now to understand such
agitation; we fritter away our sentiment on the ordinary business of
life:—
The town in those days mostly lay
Betwixt the tavern and the play.
The penny press had not yet come within the radius of everyone, and men
depended on the theatre for their fictitious excitement. A new play, a
young actor or actress, were greater subjects of interest than even Mr.
Pitt’s or Mr. Fox’s last speech, which they only heard of piecemeal.
Mrs. Siddons had the good fortune still to play to audiences who were in
the full enjoyment of their natural and critical powers of appreciation.
She bent all her powers to calling forth their emotions. She touched
them to the quick with her pathos and power. The audience surrendered
at discretion to the summons of the young enchantress. Her own simple
account of it all is very attractive; and afterwards, in the history of
her life, when a little hardness, or a rather too abrupt assertion of
superiority, is to be regretted, we turn to this spontaneous, almost
girlish account of her first triumph—through which we can see the smiles
beaming, the tears glistening—with pleasure and relief.
“I reached my own quiet fireside,” she says, “on retiring from the
scene of reiterated shouts and plaudits. I was half dead; and my joy
and thankfulness were of too solemn and overpowering a nature to admit
of words, or even tears. My father, my husband, and myself sat down to
a frugal neat supper in a silence uninterrupted except by exclamations
of gladness from Mr. Siddons. My father enjoyed his refreshments, but
occasionally stopped short, and, laying down his knife and fork, lifting
up his venerable face, and throwing back his silver hair, gave way
to tears of happiness. We soon parted for the night; and I, worn out
with continually broken rest and laborious exertion, after an hour’s
retrospection (who can conceive the intenseness of that reverie?), fell
into a sweet and profound sleep, which lasted to the middle of the next
day. I arose alert in mind and body.”
And so the seven long years spent in tempering her genius, in working to
gain strength and confidence, had borne their result, for we will not
allow, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, that her present success was owing to the
absence “of the restraint from the patronizing instruction of Garrick,”
or any other exterior circumstance. The change had come from within,
not from without. Hers was essentially a genius of tardy growth, both
physically and mentally she did not reach her full development until the
time when most actresses have enjoyed seven or eight years’ success. She
had worked, and, like all other workers, had reaped her reward; though,
unlike the common run of workers, having genius to back her, the reward
she reaped was not only a temporary success, but fame. The memory of
this night has been handed down to us in company with Garrick’s first
appearance in _Richard III._ and Edmund Kean’s in Shylock in 1814.
The critics next day were unanimous in her praise. Some found the voice
a little harsh, the passion a little too “restless and fluttering,” but
all were agreed that a great event had occurred in the dramatic world.
It is of little use repeating the praise and criticism, all _that_ can
be done in a reviewal of her artistic life; we are more interested in
the personal history of the woman who had thus stirred up the waters
that had threatened to become stagnant since the retirement of Garrick.
It is natural for us rather to like to hear personal anecdotes of those
who appear publicly before us than pages of hackneyed verbiage on their
acting and appearance.
She wrote to Dr. Whalley one of those genuine, spontaneous letters
that show how she was misunderstood by those who thought her hard and
reserved:—“My dear, dear friend, the trying moment is passed, and I am
crowned with a success which far exceeds even my hopes. God be praised!
I am extremely hurried, being obliged to dine at Linley’s; have been
at the rehearsal of a new tragedy in prose, a most affecting play, in
which I have a part I like very much. I believe my next character will be
Zara in the _Mourning Bride_. My friend Pratt was, I believe in my soul,
as much agitated, and is as much rejoiced as myself. As I know it will
give you pleasure, I venture to assure you I never in my life heard such
peals of applause. I thought they would not have suffered Mr. Packer to
end the play. Oh! how I wished for you last night, to share a joy which
was too much for me to bear alone! My poor husband was so agitated that
he durst not venture near the house. I enclose an epilogue which my good
friend wrote for me, but which I could not, from excessive fatigue of
mind and body, speak. Never, never let me forget his goodness to me. I
have suffered tortures for (of?) the unblest these three days and nights
past, and believe I am not in perfect possession of myself at present;
therefore excuse, my dear Mr. Whalley, the incorrectness of this scrawl,
and accept it as the first tribute of love (after the first decisive
moment) from your ever grateful and truly affectionate, S. SIDDONS.”
On the next night her success was even greater. The lobbies were lined
with crowds of ladies and gentlemen “of the highest fashion.” Lady
Shelburne, Lord North the politician, Lady Essex, Mr. Sheridan and the
Linley family weeping in his box, and hosts of others.
She very soon began to reap substantial benefits from her success.
“I should be afraid to say,” she continues, “how many times _Isabella_
was repeated successively, with still increasing favour. I was now
highly gratified by a removal from my very indifferent and inconvenient
dressing-room to one on the stage-floor, instead of climbing a long
staircase; and this room (oh, unexpected happiness!) had been Garrick’s
dressing-room. It is impossible to conceive my gratification when I saw
my own figure in the self-same glass which had so often reflected the
face and form of that unequalled genius—not, perhaps, without some vague,
fanciful hope of a little degree of inspiration from it.”
For eight nights the play was acted, and still every time she appeared
the tide of popular favour ran higher. The box office was besieged by
people wanting tickets, and the most ridiculous stories were told of
the crush. Two old men stationed themselves to play chess outside at
all hours, so as to secure tickets. Footmen lay stretched out asleep
from dawn to buy places for their mistresses. Years afterwards, when
at a great meeting at Edinburgh, Mrs. Siddons’ health was proposed,
Sir Walter Scott described the scene on one of those far-famed nights:
the breakfasting near the theatre, waiting the whole day, the crushing
at the doors at six o’clock, the getting in and counting their fingers
till seven. But the very first step, the first word she uttered, was
sufficient to overpay everyone their weariness. The house was then
electrified, and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius
that one could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence may be
carried. “Those young fellows,” added Sir Walter, “who have only seen the
setting sun of this distinguished performer, beautiful and serene as it
is, must give us old fellows, who have seen its rise, leave to hold our
heads a little higher.”
After _Isabella_, the actress appeared in Murphy’s _Grecian Daughter_, a
very indifferent play, but one into which she breathed life and beauty by
the power of her intuition.
Not yet had the ninety-one of the past century dawned upon civilisation
with its Goddess of Reason, its scanty classic draperies, and its
sandalled, bare-footed beauties. Toupees, toques, bouffantes, hoops,
sacques, and all the paraphernalia of horse-hair, powder, pomatum, and
pins were still in the ascendant. Not yet had Charlotte Corday sacrificed
her life for the liberty of her people; but the muttering of the coming
storm was heard in the distance, and, with the prescience of genius, the
young actress anticipated its advent, and amazed her audience by the
simple beauty of her classic draperies, and shook them with excitement by
her rapturous appeals to Liberty.
There was a glorious enthusiasm about her delivery of certain portions.
She came to perish or to conquer. She seemed to grow several inches
taller. Her voice gained tones undreamt of before:—
Shall he not tremble when a daughter comes,
Wild with her griefs, and terrible with wrongs?
The _Man of blood shall hear me_! Yes, my voice
Shall mount aloft upon the whirlwind’s wing.
Her scorn was magnificent. Her reply to Dionysius, when he asks her to
induce her husband to withdraw his army—
Thinkest thou then
So meanly of my Phocion? Dost thou deem him
Poorly wound up to a mere fit of valour,
To melt away in a weak woman’s tears?
Oh, thou dost little know him.
At the last line, Boaden tells us, there was a triumphant hurry and
enjoyment in her scorn, which the audience caught as electrical and
applauded in rapture, for at least a minute:—
A daughter’s arm, fell monster, strikes the blow!
Yes, _first_ she strikes—an injured daughter’s arm
Sends thee devoted to the infernal gods!
After this she acted Jane Shore. “Mrs Siddons,” as one of the critics
remarked on this performance, “has the air of never being an actress; she
seems unconscious that there is a motley crowd called the pit waiting
to applaud her, or that a dozen fiddlers are waiting for her exit.”
Her “Forgive me, but forgive me,” when asking pardon of her husband,
convulsed the house with sobs. Crabb Robinson, while witnessing this
harrowing performance, burst into a peal of laughter, and, upon being
removed, was found to be in strong hysterics.
After Jane Shore, she appeared as Calista, Belvidera, and Zara. All were
received with the same enthusiasm.
On the 5th June she acted Isabella for the last time that season, having
performed in all about eighty nights, and on six of them for the benefit
of others; and during that short time she may be said to have completely
revolutionised the English stage. Nothing now was applauded but tragedy.
The farces which before had won a laugh, were now not listened to. The
young actress so completely depressed the spirits of the audience,
that the best comic actor seemed unable to raise them. Already she was
preparing the way for the stately solemnity of John Kemble and the
Revival of Shakespearean Tragedy.
The town went “born mad,” as Horace Walpole said, after her. The papers
wrote about her continually, her dress, her movements. Nothing else
seemed to have the same interest. Her salary, originally five pounds a
week, was raised to twenty pounds before the end of the season, and her
first benefit realised eight hundred pounds.
On this latter occasion she addressed a letter to the public:—
“Mrs. Siddons would not have remained so long without expressing the
high sense she had of the great honours done her at her late benefit,
but that, after repeated trials, she could not find words adequate to
her feelings, and she must at present be content with the plain language
of a grateful mind; that her heart thanks all her benefactors for the
distinguished and, she fears, too partial encouragement which they
bestowed on this occasion. She is told that the splendid appearance on
that night, and the emoluments arising from it, exceed anything ever
recorded on a similar account in the annals of the English stage; but
she has not the vanity to imagine that this arose from any superiority
over many of her predecessors or some of her contemporaries. She
attributes it wholly to that liberality of sentiment which distinguishes
the inhabitants of this great metropolis from those of any other in the
world. They know her story—they know that for many years, by a strange
fatality, she was confined to move in a narrow sphere, in which the
rewards attendant on her labours were proportionally small. With a
generosity unexampled, they proposed at once to balance the account, and
pay off the arrears due, according to the rate, the too partial rate,
at which they valued her talents. She knows the danger arising from
extraordinary and unmerited favours, and will carefully guard against
any approach of pride, too often their attendant. Happy shall she
esteem herself, if by the utmost assiduity, and constant exertion of her
poor abilities, she shall be able to lessen, though hopeless ever to
discharge, the vast debt she owes the public.”
Mrs. Siddons was always too fond of taking the public into her
confidence. Everything in this letter can be taken for granted; and it
would have been more dignified to have kept silence.
More pleasing and natural are the letters written to her friends. She
wrote thus to Dr. Whalley about this time:—
“Just at this moment are you, my dear Sir, sitting down to supper,
and ‘every guest’s a friend.’ Oh! that I were with you, but for one
half-hour. ‘Oh! God forbid!’ says my dear Mrs. Whalley; ‘for he would
talk so loud and so fast, that he would throw himself into a fever, and
die of unsatisfied curiosity into the bargain.’ Do I flatter myself, my
dear Sir? Oh no! you have both done me the honour to assure me that you
love me, and I would not forego the blessed idea for the world ... I
did receive all your letters, and thank you for them a thousand times.
One line of them is worth all the acclamations of ten thousand shouting
theatres.”
And so closes this wonderful year in the great actress’s life—the one
to which she always looked back as the climax of her happiness and good
fortune.
CHAPTER VI.
DUBLIN AND EDINBURGH.
Irishmen have a natural theatrical instinct, and Dublin, at the time of
which we write, was to a certain degree valued as a censor in dramatic
affairs as highly as London. A Dublin audience often ventured to dissent
from the judgments of the metropolis, and, as in the case of Mrs.
Pritchard, who, Campbell quaintly tells us, “electrified the Irish with
disappointment,” to entirely reverse them. Most of the best Drury Lane
players had begun their career at the Smock Alley theatre, and many of
them had Irish blood in their veins. The theatre was the finest in the
kingdom next to Drury Lane, boasting the innovation of a drop scene,
representing the Houses of Parliament, instead of the conventional green
curtain.
The same causes which placed the provincial towns of England in an
important position, so far as social and dramatic affairs were concerned,
operated still more effectually in the case of Dublin. To cross to London
in those days was as long and tedious a journey as to go to New York in
ours; and none even of the nobility thought of doing so every year. The
vice-regal court was, therefore, really a court, surrounded by a certain
amount of brilliancy and splendour. Ever since the days of Peg Woffington
and the Miss Gunnings, Irish beauties had dared to set the fashion; and
we read in a letter written from Dublin, by a leader of fashion of the
day, that it is of no use English women coming over unless they are
prepared to “make their waists of the circumference of two oranges, no
more”; their “heads a foot high, exclusive of feathers, and stretching to
a pent-house of most horrible projection behind, the breadth from wing
to wing considerably broader than your shoulders; and as many different
things in your cap as in Noah’s ark.... Verily,” the lady ends, “I never
did see such monsters as the heads now in vogue; I am a monster, too, but
a moderate one.”
Round the small court fluttered young equerries who wrote plays, and were
devoted to the drama. Actors and actresses themselves, if at all within
the pale of respectability, were admitted to the vice-regal circle.
Mrs. Inchbald was intimate with many of the fashionable and literary
ladies. Daly, the manager of the theatre, was a regular _habitué_ of the
“Castle”; and John Kemble, who had arrived in Ireland some time before
his sister, had been introduced by the equerry Jephson to the “set,”
including Tighe, Courtenay, and others.
All this society was thrown into a ferment of excitement when it was
announced that the beautiful young actress, who had turned all heads in
London, was coming to Dublin. Kemble was interviewed and pestered with
inquiries on the subject. Indeed, his prestige for the time was vastly
increased by his relationship. At a dinner at the Castle, Lord Inchiquin
gave as a toast, “The matchless Mrs. Siddons,” and sent her brother a
ring containing her miniature set in diamonds.
Daly had gone over himself to engage her; and it was said she had refused
all provincial offers in England for the sake of winning the hearts of
the Irish critics. All seemed propitious, and the way prepared for the
coming of the conquering heroine. Events, however, did not turn out
as expected. There, where the vivacious, impudent, good-natured Peg
Woffington, with her “bad” voice and swaggering way, became a popular
idol, the queenly Siddons, with her imperious, tragic manner, extorted
praise for her acting, no doubt, but never won their hearts. In spite of
the Irish blood in her veins, she had no fellow-feeling for the people;
and an antagonism sprang up between her and her Dublin audience from the
first. She disliked the dirt, ostentation, insincerity, and frivolity of
Irishmen, and refused to acknowledge their kind-heartedness and genuine
artistic appreciation.
By her letters we can see the impression the country made on her. She
started in the beginning of July, accompanied by a small party, which
consisted of Brereton, her husband, and her sister. On the 14th she
writes to her friend Whalley:—
“I thank you a thousand and a thousand times for your letter; but you
don’t mention having heard from me since you left England. We rejoice
most sincerely that you are arrived without any material accident,
without any dangerous ones I mean, for, to be sure, some of them were
very _materially_ entertaining. Oh! how I laugh whenever the drowsy
adventure comes across my imagination, for ‘more was meant than met
the ear.’ I am sure I would have given the world to have seen my dear
Mrs. Whalley upon the little old tub. How happy you are in your
descriptions! So she was very well; then very jocular she must be. I
think her conversation, thus enthroned and thus surrounded, must have
been the highest treat in all the world. Some parts of your tour must
have been enchanting. How good it was of you to wish me a partaker of
your pastoral dinner! Be assured, my dear, dear friends, no one can thank
you more sincerely, or be more sensible of the honour of your regard,
though many may deserve it better. What a comfortable thing to meet with
such agreeable people! But society and converse like yours and dear Mrs.
Whalley’s must very soon make savages agreeable. How did poor little
Paphy bear it? Did she remonstrate in her usual melting tones? I am sure
she was very glad to be at rest, which does not happen in a carriage, I
remember, for any length of time. I can conceive nothing so provoking or
ridiculous as the Frenchman’s politeness, and poor Vincent’s perplexity.
You will have heard, long ere this reaches you, that our sweet D⸺ is
safely delivered of a very fine girl, which, I know, will give you no
small pleasure. Now for myself. Our journey was delightful; the roads
through Wales present you with mountains unsurmountable, the grandest and
most beautiful prospects to be conceived; but I want your pen to describe
them.
“We got very safe to Holyhead, and then I felt as if some great event
was going to take place, having never been on the sea. I was awed, but
not terrified; feeling myself in the hands of a great and powerful God
‘whose mercy is over all His works.’ The sea was particularly rough; we
were lifted mountains high, and sank again as low in an instant. Good
God! how tremendous, how wonderful! A pleasing terror took hold on me,
which it is impossible to describe, and I never felt the majesty of the
Divine Creator so fully before. I was dreadfully sick, and so were my
poor sister and Mr. Brereton. Mr. Siddons was pretty well; and here, my
dear friend, let me give you a little wholesome advice: allways (you see
I have forgot to spell) go to bed the instant you go on board, for by
lying horizontally, and keeping very quiet, you cheat the sea of half
its influence. We arrived in Dublin the 16th June, half-past twelve at
night. There is not a tavern or a house of any kind in this capital city
of a rising kingdom, as they call themselves, that will take a woman in;
and, do you know, I was obliged, after being shut up in the Custom-house
officer’s room, to have the things examined, which room was more like a
dungeon than anything else—after staying here above an hour and a half,
I tell you, I was obliged, sick and weary as I was, to wander about
the streets on foot (for the coaches and chairs were all gone off the
stands) till almost two o’clock in the morning, raining, too, as if
heaven and earth were coming together. A pretty beginning! thought I; but
these people are a thousand years behind us in every respect. At length
Mr. Brereton, whose father had provided a bed for him on his arrival,
ventured to say he would insist on having a bed for us at the house where
he was to sleep. Well, we got to this place, and the lady of the house
vouchsafed, after many times telling us that she never took in ladies, to
say we should sleep there that night.”
The actress’s first appearance was made in _Isabella_, on the 21st
June 1783. The theatre was crowded to suffocation, and guineas and
half-guineas were paid for seats in the pit and gallery; but after the
first night the enthusiasm seemed to die away, and Mrs. Crawford, at
Crow Street Theatre, who had been completely dethroned by Mrs. Siddons
in London, now boldly ventured to come forward in opposition to her
rival, and, to her own astonishment, as well as that of everyone else,
soon commanded larger houses. The critics also soon began their attacks,
taking the form of ridicule, a method of warfare very trying to a person
of her proud, sensitive nature.
“On Saturday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking,
exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and comely person, for the first
time, in the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley. The house was crowded with
hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators
that went away without a sight. She was nature itself; she was the most
exquisite work of art. Several fainted, even before the curtain drew up.
The fiddlers in the orchestra blubbered like hungry children crying for
their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the
acts, the tears ran from the bassoon player’s eyes in such showers that
they choked the finger-stops, and, making a spout of the instrument,
poured in such a torrent upon the first fiddler’s book, that, not seeing
the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played
in two flats; but the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the
noise of the corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistake
being discovered. The briny pond in the pit was three feet deep, and the
people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position
up to their ankles in tears. An Act of Parliament against her playing
will certainly pass, for she has infected the volunteers, and they sit
reading _The Fatal Marriage_, crying and roaring all the time. May the
curses of an insulted nation pursue the gentlemen of the College, the
gentlemen of the Bar, and the peers and peeresses that hissed her on the
second night. True it is that Mr. Garrick never could make anything of
her, and pronounced her below mediocrity; true it is the London audience
did not like her; but what of that?”
Her consciousness of the antagonism that existed against her in the press
and amongst the public made her stay in the capital by no means either
pleasant or successful, and she was glad to start with the party which
Daly had got together to go the round of the country. It consisted of the
manager and his future wife, Miss Barsanti, the two Kembles, Miss Younge,
Digges, Miss Philipps, and Mrs. Melnotte, wife of Pratt Melnotte, of Bath
celebrity.
An amusing account of the tour has been left by Bernard the actor, who
happened to be in Ireland at the time. The solemn Kembles certainly seem
out of place in the rollicking fun, and we can imagine Mrs. Siddons’s
stately disgust when a gentleman from the pit called out, “Sally, me
jewel, how are you?” or, as occurred several times, when a general dance
took place in the gallery as soon as the orchestra began.
Mrs. Siddons does not seem to have had any occasion for changing later
the first opinion she formed of the country, for we find her writing
confidentially to Mr. Whalley from Cork, on the 29th of August, that she
thinks the city of Dublin a sink of filthiness.
“The noisome smells, and the multitudes of shocking and most
miserable objects, made me resolve never to stir out but
to my business. I like not the people either; they are all
ostentation and insincerity, and in their ideas of finery
very like the French, but not so cleanly; and they not only
speak, but think coarsely. This is in confidence; therefore,
your fingers on your lips, I pray. They are tenacious of their
country to a degree of folly that is very laughable, and
would call me the blackest of ingrates were they to know my
sentiments of them. I have got a thousand pounds among them
this summer. I always acknowledge myself obliged to them, but
I cannot love them. I know but one among them that can in any
degree atone for the barbarism of the rest, who thinks there
are other means of expressing esteem besides forcing people to
eat and to drink, the doing which to a most offensive degree
they call Irish hospitality. I long to be at home, sitting
quietly in the little snug parlour, where I had last the
pleasure, or rather the pain, of seeing you that night. For
the first time in my life I wished not to see you. I dreaded
it, and with reason. I knew (which was the case) I should not
recover that cruel farewell for several days.
“Oh! my dear friend, do the pleasures of life compensate for
the pangs? I think not. Some people place the whole happiness
of life in the pleasures of imagination, in building castles;
for my part, I am not one that builds very magnificent ones.
Nay; I don’t build any castles, but cottages without end. May
the great Disposer of all events but permit me to spend the
evening of my toilsome, bustling day in a cottage, where I may
sometimes have the converse and society which will make me more
worthy those imperishable habitations which are prepared for
the spirits of just men made perfect! Yes, let me take up my
rest in this world near my beloved Langford. You know this has
been my castle any time these four years. And I am making a
little snug party. Mr. Nott and my dear sister I have secured,
and make no doubt of gaining a few others. Is not this a
delightful scheme?
“I have played for one charity since I have been here (I
am at Cork, I should tell you), and am to play for another
to-morrow—your favourite Zara, in the _Mourning Bride_. I am
extremely happy that you like your little companion so well
[alluding to a miniature of herself she had sent him]. I
have sat to a young man in this place, who has made a small
full-length of me in Isabella, upon the first entrance of
Biron. You will think this an arduous undertaking, but he has
succeeded to admiration. I think it more like me than any I
have ever yet seen. I am sure you would have been delighted
with it. I never was so well in my life as I have been in
Ireland; but, God be praised, I shall set out for dear England
next Tuesday.
“This letter has been begun this month, and finished by a line
or two at a time, so you’ll find it a fine scrawl, and I am
still so mere a matter-of-fact body as to despair of giving
you the least entertainment. I can boast no other claim to the
honour and happiness of your correspondence than a very sincere
affection for you both, joined with the most perfect esteem for
your most amiable qualities and great talent. Say all that’s
kind for me to my dear Mrs. W⸺, and believe me, ever your most
affectionate
“S. SIDDONS.”
* * * * *
“Cork, August 29th.
“I hope you will give me the pleasure of hearing from you soon.”
* * * * *
“London, October 7th, 1783.
“For God’s sake, my dear friends, pray for my memory. I had
forgot to pay the postage, as you kindly desired, and this poor
letter has been wandering about the world ever since I left
Cork.
“It was opened in Ireland, you see, so I must never show my
face there again. The King commands _Isabella_ to-morrow, and I
play _Jane Shore_ on Saturday. I have affronted Mrs. Jackson by
not being able to procure her places. I am extremely sorry for
it, as I had the highest esteem for herself, and her friendship
to you had tied her close to my heart. I have done all I could
to reinstate myself in her favour, but in vain. Poor Mr. Nott
has been in great trouble; he has lost a brother lately that
was more nearly allied than by blood, and for whose loss he is
inconsolable. He is not in town, but I hope soon to see him.
Adieu! Mr. Siddons, &c., desire kindest wishes. The last letter
I wrote to you I was very near serving in the same manner. Is
it not a little alarming? I fear I shall be superannuated in a
few years.”
Her acrimony is almost incomprehensible. After the expressions used in
the above letter we can quite understand how she made herself unpopular.
She might have wished secrecy kept, but she was not the woman to hide
what she felt. She is unjust also in the statement that Irishmen
“not only think but speak coarsely.” On this, as on other occasions,
she allowed her wounded vanity to dim her power of observation. The
punishment, however, came sharp and sudden, and destroyed her happiness
for many a day.
While Mrs. Siddons was acting in Dublin, Jackson, the manager of the
Edinburgh Theatre, opened communications with her with a view to an
engagement. Finding it difficult to come to terms, he at last travelled
over himself, but the history of the negotiation from beginning to end
makes us understand Mrs. Siddons’s unpopularity with all her managers.
There is too resolute an adherence to her own interests, too much of a
calm, cold superiority. She “haggled” and bargained over every step,
until Jackson almost gave the whole business up in despair. Encouraged,
however, FitzGerald tells us, by a purse of £200, which some noblemen
and gentlemen of Scotland had liberally made up to assist him in making
the engagement, he at last assented to her terms. The Siddons’ demands
for nine nights’ performance, besides a “clear benefit,” was £400. They
soon, however, heard of the £200 subscription, and Mr. Siddons then wrote
to know if that sum was to be included in the £400, or if it were to
come under the head of an extra emolument. The manager was explicit in
his statement that the £200 was intended for his benefit. On this Mrs.
Siddons announced that she did not wish for any given sum, but would take
half the clear receipts. Poor Jackson was obliged to agree to this breach
of contract, as he had already gone so far with his patrons in Edinburgh.
The history of the negotiation, however, is not pleasant reading for Mrs.
Siddons’s admirers, especially when we find later that she contrived
to have the £200 subscription paid over to her without the knowledge
of the manager, and that at the end of her engagement Jackson found
himself a loser. The “charges of the house” were put too low. Actors like
Pope, King, and Miss Farren had always allowed something handsome on
settlement. Nothing was to be obtained from Mrs. Siddons.
The average profit would have been about £25 a night. From Dublin she
returned to London, and acted her second season there; it was even more
brilliant than her first, and rendered noteworthy both by her first
appearance with her brother, John Kemble, in _The Gamester_, who from
that time frequently acted with her, and by her acting of Isabella in
_Measure for Measure_, in which part she made her first success in a
Shakespearean character in London. She looked the novice of St. Clare
to perfection. In the spring she made her way northwards to keep her
engagement with the Edinburgh manager, and on Saturday, 22nd May, 1784,
she appeared on the stage of the Royalty Theatre, in Belvidera. The
well-known impassibility of the Edinburgh audience affected Mrs. Siddons
with an intolerable sense of depression.
After some of her grandest outbursts of passion, to which no expression
of applause had responded, exhausted and breathless, she would pant
out in despair, under her breath, “Stupid people, stupid people!” This
habitual reserve she soon found, however, gave way at times to very
violent exhibitions of enthusiasm, the more fervent from its general
expression—once, indeed, the whole of the sleep-walking scene in
_Macbeth_ was so vehemently applauded that, contrary to all rule, she had
to go over it a second time before the piece was allowed to proceed.
Afterwards, when by these ebullitions of real feeling she had proved
her audience’s appreciation, she could afford to tell stories of their
stolidity when she first appeared amongst them. The second night,
disheartened at the cold reception of her most thrilling passages, after
one desperate effort she paused for a reply. It came at last, when the
silence was broken by a single voice exclaiming, “That’s no bad!” a
tribute which was the signal for unbounded applause. One venerable old
gentleman, who was taken by his daughter to see the great actress in
_Venice Preserved_, sat with perfect composure through the first act
and into the second, when he asked his daughter, “Which was the woman
Siddons?” As Belvidera is the only female part in the play, she had no
difficulty in answering. Nothing more occurred till the catastrophe; he
then inquired, “Is this a comedy or a tragedy?” “Why, bless you, father,
a tragedy.” “So I thought, for I am beginning to feel a commotion.”
This instance was typical of the whole of the audience—and once they
began to “feel a commotion,” there was no longer any doubt about their
expression of it. The passion, indeed, for hysterics and fainting at
her performances ran into a fashionable mania. A distinguished surgeon,
familiarly called “Sandy Wood,” who, with his shrewd common-sense, had
a way of seeing through the follies of his fashionable patients, was
called from his seat in the pit, where he was to be found every evening
Mrs. Siddons acted, to attend upon the hysterics of one of the excitable
ladies who were tumbling around him. On his way through the crowd a
friend said to him, alluding to Mrs. Siddons, “This is glorious acting,
Sandy.” Looking round at the fainting and screaming ladies in the boxes,
Wood answered, “Yes, and a d⸺d deal o’t, too.” Some verses in the _Scot’s
Magazine_ give a picture of the scene, the pit being described as “all
porter and pathos, all whisky and whining,” while—
“From all sides of the house, hark! the cry how it swells,
While the boxes are torn with most heart-piercing yells!”
The enthusiasm to see her was so great, that one day there were more
than 2,500 applications for about 600 seats. The oppression and heat was
so great in the crowded and ill-ventilated theatre, that an epidemic
that attacked the town was humorously attributed to this cause, and was
called “the Siddons fever.” All that was most cultured and intellectual
in Edinburgh came to do her homage—Blair, Hume, Beattie, Mackenzie, Home,
all attended her performances. She made by her engagement, the share of
the house, benefit, and subscription, more than one thousand pounds. And
this success was not only among the educated classes, the pit and gallery
paid their tribute besides. Campbell tells us how a poor servant-girl
with a basket of greens on her arm, one day stopped near her in the High
Street, and hearing her speak, said, “Ah, weel do I ken that sweet voice,
that made me greet sae sair the streen.”
Before she left she was presented with a silver tea-urn, as a mark of
“esteem” for superior genius and unrivalled talents. She refers to this
visit later in her grandiloquent style. “How shall I express my gratitude
for the honours and kindness of my northern friends? for, should I
attempt it, I should be thought the very queen of egotists. But never
can I forget the private no less than public marks of their gratifying
suffrages.”
CHAPTER VII.
CLOUDS.
On the 15th June she tore herself away from all these “private” and
“public marks of gratifying suffrages,” and again paid a visit to Dublin,
which at the beginning was more successful than her former one, but
towards the end was clouded with untoward circumstances, which militated
against her for the whole of her professional career.
This time she became the guest of her former friend Miss Boyle, now
become Mrs. O’Neil of Shane’s Castle. The Lord-Lieutenant welcomed her
as if she were some “great lady of rank,” and she tells us how she
was received “by all the _first families_ with the most flattering
hospitality, and the days I passed with them will be ever remembered
among the most pleasurable of my life.” She paid a visit to Shane’s
Castle. “I have not words to describe the beauty and splendour of this
enchanting place, which, I am sorry to say, has since been levelled to
the earth by a tremendous fire. Here were often assembled all the talent,
and rank, and beauty of Ireland. Among the persons of the Leinster family
whom I met here was poor Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the most amiable,
honourable, though misguided youth I ever knew.
“The luxury of this establishment almost inspired the recollections
of an Arabian Night’s entertainment. Six or eight carriages, with a
numerous throng of lords and ladies on horseback, began the day by making
excursions around this terrestrial paradise, returning home just in time
to dress for dinner. The table was served with a profusion and elegance
to which I have never seen anything comparable. The sideboards were
decorated with adequate magnificence, on which appeared several immense
silver flagons containing claret. A fine band of musicians played during
the whole of the repast. They were stationed in the corridors, which led
into a fine conservatory, where we plucked our dessert from numerous
trees of the most exquisite fruits. The foot of the conservatory was
washed by the waves of a superb lake, from which the cool and pleasant
wind came, to murmur in concert with the harmony from the corridor. The
graces of the presiding genius, the lovely mistress of the mansion,
seemed to blend with the whole scene.”
These Arabian Nights’ entertainments, delightful as they may have been,
were calculated to make her very unpopular with her profession. Stories
about her fine-lady airs were freely circulated, to which her own want
of tact, and the injudicious behaviour of her husband, gave a certain
foundation.
One of these that was actually believed, and copied into the London
papers, was to the effect that, having been persuaded to visit the
studio of a certain Mr. Home, a local artist, he asked her to sit to
him. “Impossible,” was the reply, “I can hardly find time to sit to
Sir Joshua Reynolds.” The offended artist insinuated that her refusal
would not ruin him; upon which she was said to have boxed his ears and
stormed out of the house. This is so palpably ill-natured, and from a
knowledge of Mrs. Siddons’s character so improbable, that we only give
it, among a mass of other evidence, to show how the feeling against her
gradually arose, which, to a certain extent, was destined to pursue her
through life. Mr. Siddons’s good sense did not materially aid her. On one
occasion, dining, in company with John Kemble, at the house of a Dublin
merchant, their host expressed a great wish to be introduced to the young
actress. “I should like to very much, but do not know how to break the
matter to her,” was the husband’s reply, which, we must confess, was not
calculated to increase the geniality of feeling entertained for her in
general society. She managed also to offend the manager, Mr. Daly, who
by all accounts was not an agreeable person, for we read in Bernard’s
_Reminiscences_ that he was an extremely vain, jealous-tempered man,
proud of his acting and good looks. Mrs. Siddons insinuates that his
dislike arose to her scornful rejection of attentions he endeavoured
to press upon her. However that may be, the following is her own
account of the manner in which he first showed his enmity, and gives a
curious insight into the wretched bickerings and heart-burnings of the
profession:—
“The manager of the theatre also very soon began to adopt every means of
vexation for me that he could possibly devise, merely because I chose
to suggest at rehearsal that his proper situation, as Falconbridge in
_King John_, was at the right hand of the King. During the scene between
Constance and Austria, he thought it necessary that he should, though
he did it most ungraciously, adopt this arrangement; but his malevolence
pursued me unremittedly from that moment. He absurdly fancied that he was
of less consequence when placed at so great a distance from the front
of the stage, at the ends of which the kings were seated; but he had
little or nothing to say, and his being in the front would have greatly
interrupted and diminished the effect of Constance’s best scene. He made
me suffer, however, sufficiently for my personality by employing all the
newspapers to abuse and annoy me the whole time I remained in Dublin, and
to pursue me to England with malignant scandal; but of that anon. The
theatre, meantime, was attended to his heart’s content—indeed, the whole
of this engagement was as profitable as my most sanguine hopes could have
anticipated.”
Presently, however, she was to be put on her trial for a more serious
charge. The unfortunate actor, Digges, while rehearsing with her, was
struck down with paralysis. Lee Lewes, who endeavours to defend her in
all this business, tells us that her engagement was then drawing to a
close, and she was announced to play at Cork a few days after. Asked
to perform in a benefit for the poor man, she replied that she was
sorry she had but one night to spare, and had already promised to play
for the Marshalsea pensioners. Thinking better of this determination,
however, later, she despatched “a messenger” to Digges, saying she
had reconsidered the matter, and would be glad to perform for him.
Digges expressed his gratitude, and the night and play were fixed; but,
according to her own evidence, everything was done to annoy her and
prevent the carrying out of her charitable intentions. This is her
account of the business:—
“When my visit to Shane Castle was over, I entered into another
engagement in Dublin. Among the actors was Mr. Digges, who had formerly
held a high rank in the drama, but who was now by age and infirmity
reduced to a subordinate and mortifying situation. It occurred to me
that I might be of some use to him if I could persuade the manager to
give him a night, and the actors to perform for him, at the close of
my engagement; but when I proposed my request to the manager (Daly
declares, as we shall see, that the proposal came from him, and not
from her), he told me it could not be, because the whole company would
be obliged to leave the Dublin theatre in order to open the theatre at
Limerick, but that he would lend the house for my purpose if I could
procure a sufficient number of actors to perform a play. By indefatigable
labour, and in spite of cruel annoyances, Mr. Siddons and myself got
together, from all the little country theatres, as many as would enable
us to attempt _Venice Preserved_. Oh! to be sure it was a scene of
disgust and confusion. I acted Belvidera, without having ever previously
seen the face of one of the actors—for there was no time for even one
rehearsal—but the motive procured us indulgence. Poor Mr. Digges was most
materially benefited by this most ludicrous performance, and I put my
disgust into my pocket since money passed into his. Thus ended my Irish
engagement, but not so my persecution by the manager, at whose instance
the newspapers were filled with the most unjust and malignant reflections
on me. All the time I was on a visit of some length to the Dowager
Duchess of Leinster, unconscious of the gathering storm, whilst the
public mind was imbibing poisonous prejudices against me. Alas for those
who subsist by the stability of public favour!”
The above was written by Mrs. Siddons in later days, and is eminently
unsatisfactory from every point of view. The dragging in of the
Dowager Duchess of Leinster, when we want a plain statement of facts,
is irritating, and the complaint against public favour at the end is
stilted and artificial. No doubt the manager was unfriendly, but her
first impulse was not a generous one, and she laid herself open to
ill-natured constructions being put on her conduct. The real story we
take to be this: Digges (to whom she was not particularly inclined to be
friendly, owing to her attributing to him the authorship of the satirical
criticisms on her acting when she first arrived in Ireland) was struck
down by illness, in a manner and under circumstances to arouse the
deep sympathy of the members of his profession, ever charitable to one
another. Daly, the manager, before communicating with Digges, asked Mr.
Siddons if his wife would give her services for a benefit. He, instigated
of course by her, refused the request. On this refusal, not unjustly,
were based all the charges brought against her. Daly then offered to pay
for her services; this also was refused, and nothing further was done
until Mrs. Siddons, finding the whole affair unfavourably canvassed,
sent Mr. Siddons to inform Digges that she had arranged to play for his
benefit. This graciousness came too late; the rumour of her refusal had
already got abroad, and very unfavourable comments were made both by the
press and the public. The annoyance also caused her by the inefficient
representation of _Venice Preserved_ might have been avoided if she had
at once acceded to Daly’s request. As it was, the whole company had been
obliged to leave for the opening of the Limerick Theatre. She and Mr.
Siddons, therefore, were obliged to get together a scratch company, and
give the benefit after the season was over, which could not have been
nearly so advantageous to the object of the charity. Money was made,
but not so much as if she had acted in the middle of the season. We can
hardly believe she was actuated in all this by love of money; it is more
likely that the proud resentment she felt when unfavourably criticised in
any way had interfered with her kindlier impulse.
In the case of Brereton, the same unfortunate sensitiveness seems to have
been at work. Brereton was the leading actor of her troupe, always played
lover to her heroine, and, it was said, had at one time made his love
in so earnest a fashion, that the beautiful actress had, as in the case
of Daly, to check his ardour, or, as Boaden expresses it, “in kindling
his imagination the divinity unsettled his reason, and in clasping the
goddess he became sensible of the charms of the woman.” However this may
be, Brereton was by no means friendly, and never missed an opportunity of
covertly attacking her. When asked, therefore, to play for his benefit,
she actually deducted ten pounds from the profits as her own emolument.
Percy Fitzgerald seems inclined to think that “all this wretched muddle
was the work of Mr. Siddons, who, considering the charitable taxes laid
on her, and the many benefits she had to assist, found himself obliged,
like most husbands of money-getting actresses, to bargain and chaffer for
her gifts as if they were wares, and get as much money as they could be
made to bring in.”
But we think that at no time of their married life had Siddons enough
influence to induce her to do anything against her better judgment, and
we doubt very much whether he was ever allowed to complete a bargain
of any kind, although his name was frequently used. What aroused the
sympathy of the public more warmly in the cause of Brereton was the
madness that subsequently fell upon him.
The best side of her character was ever called out by adversity. It was
perhaps undignified to defend herself as she did—or, rather, as Siddons
did in her name—by an exculpatory letter to the papers, appealing to
the two actors, Digges and Brereton, to declare whether she had, or had
not, played for them when asked. Two letters were thus extorted from
them declaring that she had done all that was necessary to satisfy the
calls of charity, &c. Nothing could be conceived more fatal to her cause
than all this bandying of evidence. The idol men set up to worship they
generally delight to drag down and trample under foot if they dare. In
this case, however, they might insult and humiliate, but they could not
drag their victim from the high estate she had achieved.
Her very high qualities as a wife and mother, her decorum of conduct,
so different to others of her profession, seemed to add a zest to the
acrimony with which they assaulted her. The first part in which she
appeared on the London boards after her return from Dublin was Mrs.
Beverley in the _Gamester_ to her brother’s Stukeley. Hardly had the
curtain been raised, before a storm of hooting and hissing broke forth,
and she whom they had late proclaimed a queen, who had seen the town
enslaved at her feet, now stood “the object of public scorn.” She did the
best thing she could by remaining with perfect composure facing them,
but in those few dreadful moments she discounted all the adulation and
success she had enjoyed. How intense the suffering was we can see by the
account written years after.
“I had left London,” she tells us, “the object of universal approbation,
but, on my return, only a few weeks afterwards, I was received, on my
first night’s appearance, with universal opprobrium, accused of hardness
of heart, and total insensibility to everything and everybody except
my own interest. Unhappily, contrary winds had for some days precluded
the possibility of receiving from Dublin such letters as would have
refuted those atrocious calumnies, and saved me from the horrors of this
dreadful night, when I was received with hissing and hooting. Amidst
this afflicting clamour I made several attempts to be heard, when at
length a gentleman stood forth in the middle of the front of the pit,
impelled by benevolent and gentlemanly feeling, who, as I advanced to
make my last attempt at being heard, accosted me with these words: ‘For
Heaven’s sake, Madam, do not degrade yourself by an apology, for there is
nothing necessary to be said!’ I shall always look back with gratitude
to this gallant man’s solitary advocacy of my cause; like Abdiel,
‘faithful found; among the faithless, faithful only he.’ His admonition
was followed by reiterated clamour, when my dear brother appeared, and
carried me away from this scene of insult.
“The instant I quitted it I fainted in his arms; and, on my recovery,
I was thankful that my persecutors had not had the gratification of
beholding this weakness. After I was tolerably restored to myself, I was
induced, by the persuasions of my husband, my brother, and Mr. Sheridan,
to present myself again before that audience by whom I had been so
savagely treated, and before whom, but in consideration of my children,
I would have never appeared again. The play was _The Gamester_, which
commences with a scene between Beverley and Charlotte.
“Great and pleasant was my astonishment to find myself, on the second
rising of the curtain, received with a silence so profound that I was
absolutely awe-struck, and never yet have I been able to account for this
surprising contrast; for I really think that the falling of a pin might
have been then heard upon the stage.”
On her entrance the second time, Mrs. Siddons summoned enough courage to
address the audience:—
“Ladies and gentlemen, the kind and flattering partiality which I have
uniformly experienced in this place would make the present interruption
distressing to me indeed, were I in the slightest degree conscious of
having deserved your censure. I feel no such consciousness.
“The stories which have been circulated against me are calumnies. When
they shall be proved to be true, my aspersors will be justified; but,
till then, my respect for the public leads me to be confident that I
shall be protected from unmerited insult.”
These words, spoken by the Muse of Tragedy, with her stately dignity and
flaming eyes, had an instantaneous effect. She withdrew; the curtain fell.
King, the actor, came forward to beg the indulgence of the audience for a
few moments; and when she appeared again, pale but calm, not an attempt
at interruption was heard. On several occasions after, an attempt was
made to renew the interruption; but the orderly portion of the audience
was strong enough to quell it. She acknowledged the applause when she
came on, and endeavoured to appear perfectly indifferent to the hissing;
but all the triumphant confidence of the first days of success seemed
to have deserted her for the time, and she was again the uncertain,
tottering _débutante_. Her splendid genius was, however, but dimmed, and
all her suffering but lent to serve as a stepping-stone to a higher level
than she had yet attained. We must give here some letters she wrote to
her friends, the Whalleys, as giving an insight into that brave heart
of this wonderful woman, whose “victorious faith upheld her” in this
and many subsequent trials. What wonder, however, that in later years
she grew hard and proud—the first bloom of trust and belief was rubbed
off in these her first encounters with the rough judgment of the mob.
From henceforth the confiding girlish Ophelia and Juliet vanish from the
scene, and Lady Macbeth, with her fierce reliance on intellectual power
alone, and indignant scorn of all human judgment, appears. She wrote to
the Whalleys:—
“MY DEAREST FRIENDS,
“I hardly dare hope that you will remember me. I know I don’t
deserve that you should; but I know, also, that you are too
steadfast and too good to cast me off for a seeming negligence
to which my heart and soul are averse, and the appearance
of which I have incessantly regretted. What can I say in
my defence? I have been very unhappy; now ’tis over I will
venture to tell you so, that you may not ‘lose the dues of
rejoicing.’ ‘Envy, malice, detraction, all the fiends of hell
have compassed me round about to destroy me’; ‘but blessed be
God who hath given me the victory,’ &c. I have been charged
with almost everything bad, except incontinence, and it is
attributed to me as thinking a woman may be guilty of every
crime in the catalogue of crimes, provided she retain her
chastity.
“God help them and forgive them, they know but little of me.
I daresay you will wonder that a favourite should stand her
ground so long; and in truth so do I. I have been degraded; I
am now again the favourite servant of the public, and I have
kept the noiseless tenor of my temper in these extremes. My
spirit has been grieved, but my victorious faith upholds me.
I look forward to a better world for happiness, and am placed
in this in mercy to be a candidate for that. But what makes
the wound rankle deeper is that ingratitude, hypocrisy, and
perfidy have barbed the darts. But it is over, and I am happy.
Good God! what would I give to see you both, but for an hour!
How many thousand, thousand times do I wish myself with you,
and long to unburthen my heart to you. I can’t bear the idea
of your being so long absent. I know you will expect to hear
what I have been doing; and I wish I could do this to your
satisfaction. Suffice it to say that I have acted Lady Macbeth,
Desdemona, and several other things this season with the most
unbounded approbation; and you have no idea how the innocence
and playful simplicity of the latter have laid hold on the
hearts of the people. I am very much flattered by this, as
nobody ever has done anything with that character before. My
brother is charming in _Othello_; indeed, I must do the public
the justice to say that they have been extremely indulgent, if
not partial, to every character I have performed.
“I have never seen Mr. Pratt since I heard from you, but he
discovers his unworthiness to my own family; he abuses me,
it seems, to one of my sisters in the most complete manner.
How distressing is it to be so deceived! Our old Mary, too,
whom you must remember, has proved a very viper. She has
lately taken to drinking, has defrauded us of a great deal of
money given her to pay the tradespeople, and in her cups has
abused Mr. Siddons and me beyond all bounds; and I believe
in my soul that all the scandalous reports of Mr. Siddons’s
ill-treatment of me originated entirely in her. One may pay for
one’s experience, and the consciousness of acting rightly is a
comfort that hell-born malice cannot rob us of. Lady Langham
has done me the honour to call with her daughter. Her drawings
are very wonderful things for such a girl. In the compositions
she has drawn me in _Macbeth_ asleep and awake; but I think she
has been unsuccessful in this effort. Next week I shall see
your daughter and the rest. Sarah is an elegant creature, and
Maria is as beautiful as a seraph. Harry grows very awkward,
sensible, and well-disposed; and, thank God, we are all well. I
can stay no longer than to hope that you are both so, and happy
(see how disinterested I am!); that Reeves and the dear Paphy
are so too; and that you will love me, and believe me, with the
warmest and truest affection, unalterably and gratefully yours,
“S. SIDDONS.”
“My whole family desire the kindest remembrances. We have
bought a house in Gower Street, Bedford Square; the back of it
is most effectually in the country and delightfully pleasant.
“God bless you, my dear Mrs. Whalley! How perfectly do I see
you at this moment; and you, too, my dear friend, for it is
impossible to separate your images in my mind. Pray write to me
soon, and give me another instance of your unwearied kindness.
Adieu!”
We can see how bruised and sore her heart is. For the moment she thinks
all are conspiring to betray her.
The Mr. Pratt she alludes to was a Bath bookseller and dramatist, much
admired by his townsmen. This admiration was not shared by the managers
of Drury Lane, who would not allow Mrs. Siddons to act in his drama
the first year she appeared. She had already sacrificed herself to a
failure, _The Fatal Interview_, which had really injured her professional
reputation. Pratt maintained, however, she might have done him this
service had she been so minded. She herself writes kindly of the aspirant
to fame, but we can see his cause of irritation.
“Your letter,” she writes in 1783 to Dr. Whalley, “to poor Pratty is
lying on the table by me, and I am selfish enough to grudge it him from
the bottom of my heart, and yet I will not; for just now, poor soul, he
wants much comfort; therefore, let him take it, and God bless him with
it!”
And again:—
“_The Fatal Interview_ has been played three times, and is quite done
with; it was the dullest of all representations. Pratty’s Epilogue was
vastly applauded indeed. I shall take care how I get into such another
play; but I fancy the managers will take care of that, too. _They won’t
let me play in Pratty’s comedy._”
All this shows us how often she was the victim of undeserved resentment
on the part of slighted authors, and how, very often, the fact of doing
a kindness got her into trouble. She had accepted _The Fatal Interview_,
and now Pratt thought himself aggrieved that she would not do the same
for him. Most likely at any other time she would have shrugged her
shoulders at Pratt’s machinations, but everything now hurt her wounded
sensibilities.
“I must beg you will not mention (I believe I am giving an unnecessary
caution) anything I have told you concerning Mr. Pratt. I would not
wish him to know, by any means, that I have been informed of his last
unkindness, because it might prevent his asking me to do him a favour,
which I shall be at all times ready to grant, when in my power. I must
tell you that after the very unkind letter he sent me, in answer to mine
requesting the ten pounds, I never wrote to or heard from him until about
three months ago, when he wrote to me as if he had never offered such an
indignity, recommending a work he had just finished to my attention. He
did not tell me what this work was, but I had heard it was a tragedy. To
be made a convenient acquaintance only, did not much gratify me; but,
however, I wrote to say he knew the resolution I had been obliged to make
(having made many enemies by reading some, and not being able to give
time to read all tragedies) to read nobody’s tragedy, and then no one
could take offence; but that if it were accepted by the managers, and
there was anything that I could be of service to him in (doing justice to
myself), that I should be very happy to serve him. I have heard nothing
of him since that time till within these few days, when he wrote to my
sister Fanny, accusing me of ingratitude, and calling himself the ladder
upon which I have mounted to fame, and which I am kicking down.
“What he means by ingratitude I am at a loss to guess, and I fancy he
would be puzzled to explain; our obligations were always, I believe,
pretty mutual. However, in this letter to Fanny, he says he is going to
publish a poem called _Gratitude_, in which he means to show my avarice
and meanness, and all the rest of my amiable qualities to the world, for
having dropped him, as he calls it, so injuriously, and banishing him
my house. Now, as I hope for mercy, I permitted his visits at my house,
after having discovered that he was taking every possible method to
attach my sister to him, which, you may be sure, he took pains to conceal
from us, and I had him to my parties long after I made this discovery.
“In short, till he chose to write this letter, which I disdained to reply
to, he called as usual. He had the modesty to desist from calling on us
from that time, and now has the goodness to throw this unmerited obloquy
on me. I am so well convinced that a very plain tale will put him down,
that his intentions give me very little concern. I am only grieved to see
such daily instances of folly and wickedness in human nature.
“It is worth observing, too, that at the very time he chose to write
this agreeable letter, I was using my best influences with Mr. Siddons
to lend him the money I told you of before. I find he thinks it is not
very prudent to quarrel with me, but has the effrontery to think that I
should make advances toward our reconcilement; but I will die first.
‘My towering virtue, from the assurance of my merit, scorns to stoop so
low.’ If he should come round of himself (for I have learnt that best of
knowledge to forgive) I will, out of respect for what I believe he once
was, be of what service I can to him, for I believe he meant well at
one time, when I knew him first, and the noblest vengeance is the most
complete. Once more, your fingers on your lips, I pray.”
We should like to see less mention of benefits bestowed, the ten pounds
not mentioned; but this letter is a good specimen of the manner in which
she was worried by applicants, and shows how impossible it was for her to
satisfy them all.
The next is a regular eighteenth-century four-pager, but is so
characteristic, and so sincere and full of affection, that we cannot
help quoting it at the end of this chapter, as the best assurance of her
possession of that heart her enemies declared she did not possess.
“Mrs. Wapshawe has been so good as to bestow half an hour upon me.
She speaks of you as I should speak of you—as if she could not find
words, and as if her sentiments could not enough honour you both. If
you could look into the hearts of people, trust me, my beloved and ever
lamented friends, you would be convinced that mine yearns after you with
increasing and unutterable affection. See there now—how have I expressed
myself? That is always the way with me: when I speak or write to you, it
is always so inadequately, that I don’t do justice to myself; for I thank
God that I have a soul capable of loving you, and trust I shall find an
advocate in your bosom to assist my inability and simpleness. You know me
of old for a matter-of-fact woman.
“Mrs. Wapshawe has revived my hopes. She tells me that you will return
sooner than I hoped. Now I’ll begin my cottage again. It has been lying
in heaps a great while, and I have shed many tears over the ruins; but we
will build it up again in joy. You know the spot that I have fixed upon,
and I trust I have not forgotten the plan!
“Oh! what a reward for all that I have suffered, to retire to the
blessings of your society; for, indeed, my dear friends, I have paid
severely for my eminence, and have smarted with the undeserved pain that
should attend the guilty only; but it is the fate of office, and the
rough brake that virtue must go through; and sweet, ‘sweet are the uses
of adversity.’ I kiss the rod.
“Mrs. Wapshawe was quite delighted with Mr. Beach’s picture of you;
but she tells me that you wear coloured clothes and lace ruffles; and
I valued my picture more, if possible, for standing the test of such a
change as these (to me unusual) ornaments must necessarily make in you. I
think I shall long to strip you of these trappings.
“I am so attached to the garments I have been used to see you wear, and
think they harmonize so well with your face and person, that I should
wish them like their dear wearer, who is without change. I am proud
of your chiding, though God knows how unwillingly I would give you a
moment’s pain; nay, more, He knows that I neither go to bed, nor offer
prayers for blessings at His hands, in which your welfare does not make
an ardent petition. But why should I wound your friendly bosoms with the
relation of my vexations? I knew you too well to suppose you could hear
of my distresses without feeling them too poignantly.
“I resolved to write when I had overcome my enemies. You shall always
share my joys, but suffer me to keep my griefs from your knowledge. Now I
am triumphant, the favourite of the public again; and now you hear from
me.
“A strange capricious master is the public. However, one consolation
greater than any other, except one’s own approbation, has been that those
whose suffrages I esteemed most have, through all my troubles, clasped
me closer to their hearts; they have been the touchstone to prove who
were really my friends. You will believe me when I affirm that your
friendship, and my dear Mrs. Whalley’s, is an honour and a happiness I
would not forego for any earthly consideration. Tell my dearest Mrs.
Whalley that neither avocations nor indolence would have prevented your
hearing from me long ago but for the reasons already mentioned. I wrote
to you last Sunday, when I had not received your dear letters; so you
will do me the justice to remember that I was not reminded of you but by
my own heart, which, while it beats, will ever love you both with the
warmest and truest affection; however, as she is so seldom mistaken, we
shall have the honour and glory of laughing at her. Would to God I could
laugh with, or cry with, or anything with you, but for half an hour! To
say the truth, though, your tender reproaches gave me a melancholy which
I could not (and I don’t know if I wished it) shake off. Pray let me
hear from you very soon, and very often. I shall be a better woman, and
more worthy of your invaluable friendship, the more I converse with you.
Surely the converse of good and gentle spirits is the nearest approach
to Heaven that we can know; therefore, once more I beg that I may often
hear from you, and, if you do love me, do not think so unworthily of me
as to suppose my affection can, in the nature of things, ever know the
least abatement. I conjure you both to promise me this, for I cannot bear
it—indeed, I can’t!”
CHAPTER VIII.
LADY MACBETH.
Contemporaneous critics are unanimous in declaring Lady Macbeth to be
Mrs. Siddons’s finest impersonation, and it is with this _rôle_ that
we always connect the Great Actress. She made the part her own, and
identified herself with it in the memories of all who saw her. It is
essentially in Lady Macbeth that Shakespeare proves himself so thoroughly
Anglo-Saxon; the whole conception of the person is Teutonic. The idea
of the remorse-haunted murderess, with her despairing fatalism and
unswerving ambition, is more nearly allied to “Vala,” in the Scandinavian
mythology, than anything in the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, and
this it is that rendered Mrs. Siddons so perfect an embodiment of the
character. She was essentially Teutonic in her grandeur, her stateliness,
and, at the same time, sustained energy and vitality. Rachel had moments
of superhuman grandeur and ferocity, but they only flashed for a moment;
hers was the turning-point of passion of the Latin race, but not the
voluminous grandeur, gaining strength, like a mighty river, as it rolls
along, which distinguishes the heroic emotions of the Teuton.
In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how
circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion,
how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the
fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior
metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure.
Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life
undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow
of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. In her impetuous
indignation at first, she herself said that never again would “she
present herself before that audience that had treated her so savagely”;
but the greater spirit within reasserted itself, and her genius emerged
from the trial strengthened and expanded by a larger range of emotion and
experience.
With her increased knowledge of life, the actress was enabled to form
a more vivid conception of the character. She was naturally intensely
masterful, determined, and ambitious, undaunted in peril. She had
toiled, and attained the highest point of her ambition. She had known
the incentives of distinction, worldly power, applause, yet she remained
a woman, passionate and wayward in her affections to the last; and this
is the view, seen through the medium of her own character, that she took
of Lady Macbeth, and it was through her lofty impersonation of ambition
in its highest and most sublimated form that she moved her audience to
terror, and by this womanly tenderness that she moved them to sympathy
and pity for the murderess of Banquo.
Mrs. Siddons had studied the part of Lady Macbeth when little more than a
girl. She gives us a graphic account of the first time she learnt it for
the purposes of stage representation:—
“It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic
care and business were over. On the night preceding that in which I
was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up as
usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of
Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon
accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many
others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words
into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development
of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my
imagination. But to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in the
silence of the night (a night I never can forget), till I came to the
assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that
made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and
hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk,
and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to
my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last
I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapt my
candlestick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle
out, and I threw myself on my bed without daring to stay even to take
off my clothes. At peep of day I rose to resume my task; but so little
did I know of my part when I appeared in it at night, that my shame and
confusion cured me of procrastinating my business for the remainder of my
life.”
People afterwards were inclined to find her formal and sententious, and
even denied her sensibility off the stage; but it is impossible to read
the account of the manner in which she entered into her parts, and how
they took hold of her in her early days of work, without feeling that she
had depths of pathos and sympathy in her disposition undreamt of by those
who met her later when, under a dignified tragic manner, she had hidden
her youthful spontaneity of feeling. We have only need of the evidence of
the actors she acted with to see how deeply she entered into her part.
Miss Kelly said that when, as Constance, Mrs. Siddons wept over her,
her collar was wet with her tears. Tom Davies is said to have declared
that in the third act of the _Fair Penitent_ she “turned pale under her
rouge.” She tells us herself that “when called upon to personate the
character of Constance, I never, from the beginning of the play to the
end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed,
in order that my attention might be constantly fixed on those distressing
events which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the
stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by
me. Moreover, I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to
hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they
enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the
Dauphin and the Lady Blanche, because the sickening sounds of that march
would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed
confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of
maternal affection to gush into my eyes.”
As a set-off against the above statement, we have Cumberland’s
description of Mrs. Siddons coming off the stage in the full flush of
triumph—having harrowed her audience with emotion—and walking up to the
mirror in the green room to survey herself with perfect composure.
We imagine there is no law to be laid down on the subject of the amount
of feeling an actor really puts into the part he is enacting. It must
vary. Conventionality must, with the greatest of them, now and then take
the place of emotion; or, as Talma expresses it, the “_Métier_ must now
and then take the place of _Le vrai_.”
We know the story of how once, when Garrick was playing King Lear,
Johnson and Murphy kept up an animated conversation at the side-wing
during one of his most important scenes. When Garrick came over the
stage, he said, “You two talk so loud you destroy all my feelings.”
“Prithee,” replied Johnson, “do not talk of feelings; Punch has no
feeling”—a remark which is borne out by another account of Garrick as
Lear rising from the dead body of his daughter Cordelia, where he had
been convulsing the audience with sobs, running into the green-room
gobbling like a turkey to amuse Kitty Clive and Mrs. Abington.
Mrs. Siddons is said to have made the statement that, after playing the
part of Lady Macbeth for thirty years, she never read it over without
discovering in it something new. In her _Remarks_, however, on the
character, left amongst her memoranda, we do not find any particular
depth or originality in her conception, and we doubt if she ever improved
much on her first ideal. As to her notion that Lady Macbeth was a
small, fair, blue-eyed woman, delicate and fragile, it could have been
but a “caprice” of later days, originating in her endeavour to find new
readings and impressions.
A short analysis of some of her opinions on the character may be
interesting.
“In this astonishing creature,” she says, “one sees a woman in
whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the
characteristics of human nature; in whose composition are associated all
the subjugating powers of intellect, and all the charms and graces of
personal beauty. You will probably not agree with me as to the character
of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely
attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself
from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been
so long accustomed to contemplate. According to my notion, it is of that
character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating
to the other sex—fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile—
Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy’s loom,
Float in light visions round the poet’s head.
“Such a combination only—respectable in energy and strength of mind, and
captivating in feminine loveliness—could have composed a charm of such
potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character
so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth, to seduce him to brave all the
dangers of the present and all the terrors of a future world; and we are
constrained, even whilst we abhor his crimes, to pity the infatuated
victim of such a thraldom.
“His letters, which have informed her of the predictions of those
preternatural beings who accosted him on the heath, have lighted up
into daring and desperate determinations all those pernicious slumbering
fires which the enemy of man is ever watchful to awaken in the bosoms
of his unwary victims. To his direful suggestions she is so far from
offering the least opposition, as not only to yield up her soul to them,
but, moreover, to invoke the sightless ministers of remorseful cruelty
to extinguish in her breast all those compunctious visitings of nature
which otherwise might have been mercifully interposed to counteract, and,
perhaps, eventually to overcome, their unholy instigations. But, having
impiously delivered herself up to the excitement of hell, the pitifulness
of heaven itself is withdrawn from her, and she is abandoned to the
guidance of the demons whom she invoked. Lady Macbeth, thus adorned with
every fascination of mind and person, enters for the first time, reading
a part of those portentous letters from her husband.
“‘They met me in the day of success; and I have learnt by the perfectest
report they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burnt with
desire to question them further, they made themselves into thin air,
into which they vanished. Whilst I stood wrapt in the wonder of it, came
missives from the King, who all-hailed me “Thane of Cawdor,” by which
title before these sisters had saluted me, and referred me to the coming
on of time with “Hail, King that shall be!” This I have thought good
to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightest
not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is
promised. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.’
“Now vaulting ambition and intrepid daring, rekindle in a moment all the
splendours of her dark blue eyes. She fatally resolves that Glamis and
Cawdor shall be also that which the mysterious agents of the Evil One
have promised.”
Lady Macbeth then gives the wonderful analysis of her husband’s
character, “Yet I do fear thy nature is too full of the milk of human
kindness to catch the nearest way”; proving him to be of a temper so
irresolute as to require “all the efforts, all the excitement, which her
uncontrollable spirit and her unbounded influence over him can perform.”
“When Macbeth appears, she seems so insensible to everything but the
horrible design which has probably been suggested to her by his letters,
as to have entirely forgotten both the one and the other. It is very
remarkable that Macbeth is frequent in expressions of tenderness to his
wife, while she never betrays one symptom of affection towards him, till,
in the fiery furnace of affliction, her iron heart is melted down to
softness.” This was the side by which Mrs. Siddons had taken such a grasp
of the character of Lady Macbeth. It was by bringing into prominence this
softer side of her character that, while thrilling her audience with
horror, she at the same time brought tears to their eyes with an immense
awe-struck pity. She always held their interest by the human touches
which she brought into as much prominence as possible.
Alluding to the lines:—
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
she says: “Even here, horrified as she is, she shows herself made by
ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of
such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades
one unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of
a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the
most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its
perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that
guilt could use. It is only in soliloquy that she invokes the powers of
hell to unsex her. To her husband she avows, and the naturalness of her
language makes us believe her, that she had felt the instinct of filial
as well as maternal love. But she makes her very virtues the means of a
taunt to her lord: ‘You have the milk of human kindness in your heart,’
she says (in substance) to him, ‘but ambition, which is my ruling
passion, would be also yours if you had courage. With a hankering desire
to suppress, if you could, all your weaknesses of sympathy, you are too
cowardly to will the deed, and can only dare to wish it. You speak of
sympathies and feelings. I, too, have felt with a tenderness which your
sex cannot know; but I am resolute in my ambition to trample on all that
obstructs my way to a crown. Look to me, and be ashamed of your weakness.”
“In the tremendous suspense of these moments” (when Duncan sleeps), Mrs.
Siddons again tells us, “while she recollects her habitual humanity, one
trait of tender feelings is expressed: ‘Had he not resembled my father as
he slept, I had done it.’”
Through many pages Mrs. Siddons thus gives us her views of the character
of Lady Macbeth; sometimes verging on a pomposity that is almost
Johnsonese. Her later criticisms of the parts in which she acted,
bear out the statement that hers was not an intellectual power that
strengthened or expanded after the “middle of the road of life.” This
year, 1785, saw her great triumph. But we doubt if she had not already
mastered the idea of chilling and terrifying her audience when, as
she describes, she worked herself into a paroxysm of terror on first
studying the part as a young girl. The physical power and confidence to
communicate that terror were hers now, but the intellectual comprehension
had been there before, and certainly did not increase; on the contrary,
it deteriorated with years. The power of fresh comprehension passed away,
and with it the elasticity and variety of her earlier effects; and from
being singularly simple and direct, she became stagey and artificial. An
artist gets certain words to utter; he gets the skeleton sketch, as it
were, of the character he has to portray, but the emphasis and passion
he puts into them, which go direct from his heart to the heart of his
audience, must be his, and his alone, and must be as little as possible
the effect of study or deliberation. Thus the ingredients of terror,
ambition, and wifely and maternal love, were the uncomplex emotions at
first impressed on Mrs. Siddons’s brain by the study of the part; and
those were the predominating influences by which she swayed her audience
to the last day she acted it.
Many are the records that we have of this great performance—all the world
has heard of the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons—but, alas! how insufficient
are they to give us an idea of the wondrous reality. The weird-like
tones, that sent an involuntary shudder through the house; the bewildered
melancholy; and, lastly, the piteous cry of the strong heart broken,
have come down to us as traditions; but the grandeur of her majesty, the
earnest accents as the demon of the character took possession of her,
must ever remain an unknown sensation to us. One who saw her once act it
from the side scenes, with the disillusion of red ochre, that was daubed
on by her maid under his eyes; her whisper, which Christopher North
eloquently termed “the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul”; her
face, the terrible mixture of hope, apprehension, and resolution, gave
him a sickly feeling of reality. His tongue clave to the roof of his
mouth, in spite of the evidence of his eyes that the assassination was a
piece of mechanical trickery in which the paint-pot played a conspicuous
part. If a detective had made his appearance at the moment, he declares
he would immediately have given himself up as _particeps criminis_,
accessory before and after the event. The whole fiction, so inimitably
played and so powerfully described, had kicked fact and reason off the
throne.
But we must return to the first night. It was the 2nd of February. All
the intellect and fashion of the town were present: Burke, Fox, Wyndham,
Gibbon, in the front row, and, above all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who took
a particular interest in her performance of the character. He had a
seat in the orchestra, where he was privileged to sit on account of his
deafness. He had constantly urged her to act Lady Macbeth before, and had
designed her dress for the sleep-walking scene. Needless to say that her
usual nervousness was magnified tenfold. All had declared her incapable
of rendering the grander plays of Shakespeare. She had reached, they
maintained, the highest point which she was capable of attaining, and her
straining higher was simply presumption. She knew, therefore, that if
she had been criticised before, the observations now would be much more
severe. The representation of the other parts also did not satisfy her.
Smith, popularly known as “Gentleman Smith” because he generally did the
light and airy part of lover in comedy parts, was the Macbeth, Brereton
the Macduff, and Bensley the Banquo; and the memory of the popularity of
Mrs. Pritchard in the part, seemed to stand between her and her audience.
She had already begged Dr. Johnson to let her know his opinion of Mrs.
Pritchard, whom she had never seen, and she tells us in her _Autograph
Recollections_ that he answered:—
“‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot; she used to speak of her “gownd,” and
she never read any part in a play in which she acted except her own.
She no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken than
a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which the piece of leather of
which he is making a pair of shoes is cut.’ Is it possible, thought
I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths, should
never have read the play? and I concluded that the Doctor must have
been misinformed; but I was afterwards assured by a gentleman, a friend
of Mrs. Pritchard, that he had supped with her one night after she had
acted Lady Macbeth, and that she declared she had never perused the whole
tragedy. I cannot believe it.”
It would seem difficult to such a worker as Mrs. Siddons to conceive the
possibility of a woman not mastering the whole play if she had to act the
part of Lady Macbeth, but we think Dr. Johnson must have been too severe
when he called an actress who for years had held the stage with Garrick
“a vulgar idiot.” And there is little doubt that the tradition of her
acting in the part of Lady Macbeth still had a firm hold on the memory
of the audience. As a proof of this we will here quote an incident that
occurred the first night:—
“Just as I had finished my toilette, and was pondering with fearfulness
my first appearance in the grand fiendish part, comes Mr. Sheridan
knocking at my door, and insisting, in spite of all my entreaties not to
be interrupted at this tremendous moment, to be admitted. He would not be
denied admittance, for he protested he must speak to me on a circumstance
which so deeply concerned my own interest, that it was of the most
serious nature. Well, after much squabbling I was compelled to admit him,
that I might dismiss him the sooner, and compose myself before the play
began.
“But what was my distress and astonishment when I found that he wanted
me, even at this moment of anxiety and terror, to adopt another mode of
acting the sleeping scene! He told me that he had heard with the greatest
surprise and concern that I meant to act it without holding the candle
in my hand; and when I argued the impracticability of washing out that
‘damned spot’ that was certainly implied by both her own words and those
of her gentlewoman, he insisted that if I did put the candle out of my
hand it would be thought a presumptuous innovation, as Mrs. Pritchard
had always retained it in hers. My mind, however, was made up, and it
was then too late to make me alter it, for I was too agitated to adopt
another method. My deference for Mr. Sheridan’s taste and judgment was,
however, so great, that, had he proposed the alteration whilst it was
possible for me to change my own plan, I should have yielded to his
suggestion; though even then it would have been against my own opinion,
and my observation of the accuracy with which somnambulists perform all
the acts of waking persons.
“The scene, of course, was acted as I had myself conceived it, and the
innovation, as Mr. Sheridan called it, was received with approbation.
Mr. Sheridan himself came to me after the play, and most ingenuously
congratulated me on my obstinacy.”
Let us try to recall the vision of Mrs. Siddons as she acted Lady Macbeth
that night. It was in 1785. She was thirty years of age. The “timid
tottering girl,” who had first appeared as Portia on that stage, was now
a queenly woman, in the full meridian of her stately beauty. Success had
developed her intellectually and physically, and she walked the stage in
the plenitude of her power, almost like some superhuman being.
Her dress in the first and second acts was a heavy black robe, with a
broad border, which ran from her shoulders down to her feet, of the
most vivid crimson, over which fell a long white veil. In the third she
changed this costume for another black dress, with great gold bands
lacing it across, and gold ornaments round her neck and in her hair. Both
of these dresses strike us as being “stagey,” but she never had the art
of dressing herself; so great, however, was her power, that all minor
accessories of dress and scenery were forgotten. For the sleep-walking
scene Sir Joshua had designed clouds of white drapery swathing the pale
drawn face; they lent an appalling weirdness to her appearance, whilst
the glassy stare she managed to throw into her eyes completed the horror.
The audience were spellbound; they only saw that woe-worn face, and heard
that voice, broken with agony and remorse. It was a night of nights,
for her and them, and yet no applause, no success, turned her from
concentration on the purpose and issue of her art.
“While standing up before my glass,” she tells us, “and taking off my
mantle, a diverting circumstance occurred to chase away the feelings of
the anxious night, for, _while I was repeating, and endeavouring to call
to mind the appropriate tone and action to the following words_, ‘Here’s
the smell of blood still,’ my dresser innocently exclaimed, ‘Dear me,
Ma’am, how very hysterical you are to-night! I protest and vow, Ma’am, it
was not blood, but rose-pink and water; for I saw the property-man mix it
up with my own eyes.’”
These were, indeed, the palmy days of the English stage. With a
self-collected, courageous energy, artists then saw and recognised
the greatest, and strained every nerve to attain it. Scenic effect
was of minor importance; the development of mental action, the
portrayal of passion, were the end and aim of the actor’s art, to which
everything else was subsidiary. They spent years upon the evolving of
one heroic conception, not with regard to its details of upholstery
and scene-painting, but with regard to the presentment of the poet’s
imagination which they undertook to represent.
CHAPTER IX.
FRIENDS.
Needless to say that in those days, when genius was worshipped and the
entrance to the most exclusive circles of society accorded to talent of
every description, the social homage paid to Mrs. Siddons was of the most
enthusiastic description, passing sometimes the bounds of good taste. The
door of the lodgings she occupied in the Strand the first year she acted
was soon beset by various persons quite unknown to her, some of whom
actually forced their way into her drawing-room, in spite of remonstrance
or opposition.
This was as inconvenient as it was offensive; for as she usually acted
three times a week, and had, besides, to attend the rehearsals, she had
but little time to spend unnecessarily. None were more capable, however,
than she of keeping vulgar curiosity at a respectful distance. She gives
us a comic account of an interview that took place between her and some
of these intrusive individuals:—
“One morning, though I had previously given orders not to be interrupted,
my servant entered the room in a great hurry, saying, ‘Ma’am, I am very
sorry to tell you there are some ladies below who say they must see you,
and it is impossible for me to prevent it. I have told them over and over
again that you are particularly engaged, but all in vain, and now, Ma’am,
you may actually hear them on the stairs.’ I felt extremely indignant at
such unparalleled impertinence, and, before the servant had done speaking
to me, a tall, elegant, invalid-looking person presented herself (whom, I
am afraid, I did not receive very graciously), and after her four more,
in slow succession. A very awkward silence took place. Presently the
first lady spoke. ‘You must think it strange,’ she said, ‘to see a person
entirely unknown to you intrude in this manner upon your privacy; but,
you must know, I am in a very delicate state of health, and my physician
won’t let me go to the theatre to see you, so I am come to look at you
here.’ She accordingly sat down to look, and I to be looked at, for a
few painful moments, when she arose and apologised.” There is something
awful that sends a cold shiver through us as the Tragic Muse tells us,
“I was in no humour to overlook such insolence, and so let her depart in
silence.” We can picture her contemptuous scorn under the circumstances.
But it was not only in her own home she had to pay the penalty of fame;
the theatre was mobbed outside every evening by a crowd anxious to see
her walk across the pavement to her carriage; her dresses were copied,
and the dressmakers to whom she went were importuned to make for all
the fashionable ladies. Not only in these early days, but all her life,
Mrs. Siddons kept a position unexampled for one of her profession. The
house she occupied in Gore Street during her second season was, when
she entertained, filled with all that was brilliant in literature and
fashion; and later at Westbourne Cottage, and when she was in Pall Mall,
Campbell tells us of rows of “coaches and chairs” standing outside her
door. Invitations to most of the great houses in London poured in upon
her, and she herself gives a comic account of the manner in which she was
mobbed by her fashionable devotees at an assembly at the erratic Miss
Monkton’s (afterwards Lady Cork), one of the “Blues” who made oddity of
dress, appearance, and manner a study, and the running after “notorious
folk” a science.
The young actress had steadily declined many invitations, feeling that
the moments snatched from her profession ought to be devoted to the care
of her children. Miss Monkton, however, insisted on her coming one Sunday
evening, assuring her that there would only be some half-a-dozen friends
to meet her.
“The appointed Sunday evening came. I went to her very nearly in undress,
at the early hour of eight, on account of my little boy, whom she desired
me to bring with me, more for effect, I suspect, than for his _beaux
yeux_. I found with her, as I had been taught to expect, three or four
ladies of my acquaintance; and the time passed in agreeable conversation,
till I had remained much longer than I had apprehended.
“I was, of course, preparing speedily to return home, when incessantly
repeated thunderings at the door, and the sudden influx of such a throng
of people as I had never before seen collected in any private house,
counteracted every attempt that I could make for escape. I was therefore
obliged, in a state of indescribable mortification, to sit quietly down
till I know not what hour in the morning; but for hours before my
departure the room I sat in was so painfully crowded that the people
absolutely stood on the chairs, round the walls, that they might look
over their neighbours’ heads to stare at me; and if it had not been for
the benevolent politeness of Mr. Erskine, who had been acquainted with my
arrangement, I know not what weakness I might have been surprised into,
especially being tormented, as I was, by the ridiculous interrogations
of some learned ladies who were called ‘Blues,’ the meaning of which
title I did not at that time appreciate; much less did I comprehend the
meaning of the greater part of their learned talk. These profound ladies,
however, furnished much amusement to the town for many weeks after—nay, I
believe I might say for the whole winter. Glad enough was I at length to
find myself at peace in my own bed-chamber.”
Dr. Doran makes this scene take place at Mrs. Montagu’s; but besides
the victim’s own account of this remarkable evening, that gives such a
picture of the times, we have those of Cumberland and of Miss Burney.
Cumberland, in the _Observer_, disguising the people under feigned names,
tells us:—
I now joined a cluster of people who had crowded round an
actress who sat upon a sofa leaning on her elbow in a pensive
attitude, and seemed to be counting the sticks of her fan,
whilst they were vieing with each other in the most extravagant
encomiums.
“You were adorable last night in Belvidera,” says a pert young
parson with a high toupée. “I sat in Lady Blubber’s box, and I
can assure you she, and her daughters, too, wept most bitterly.
But then that charming mad scene—but, by my soul, it was a
_chef d’œuvre_! Pray, Madam, give me leave to ask you, was you
really in your senses?”
“I strove to do it as well as I could,” answered the actress.
“Do you intend to play comedy next season?” says a lady,
stepping up to her with great eagerness.
“I shall do as the manager bids me,” she replied.
“I should be curious to know,” says an elderly lady, “which
part, Madam, you yourself esteem the best you play?”
“I shall always endeavour to make that which I am about the
best.”
An elegant and enchanting young woman of fashion now took her
turn of interrogating, and, with many apologies, begged to
be informed by her if she studied those enchanting looks and
attitudes before a glass?
“I never study anything but my author.”
“Then you practise them at rehearsals?” rejoined the questioner.
“I seldom rehearse at all.”
“She has fine eyes,” says a tragic poet to an eminent painter.
Vanessa now came up, and, desiring leave to introduce a young
muse to Melpomene, presented a girl in a white frock, with a
fillet of flowers tied round her hair, which hung down her back
in flowing curls. The young muse made a low obeisance, and,
with the most unembarrassed voice and countenance, whilst the
poor actress was covered in blushes, and suffering torture from
the eyes of all in the room, broke forth as follows:—
“O thou, whom Nature calls her own,
Pride of the stage and favourite of the town!”
Miss Burney, who was present, also contributes her account of what took
place:—
My father and I were both engaged to Miss Monckton’s; so was
Sir Joshua, who accompanied us. We found Mrs. Siddons, the
actress, there. She is a woman of excellent character, and,
therefore, I am very glad she is thus patronised, since Mrs.
Abington, and so many frail fair ones, have been thus noticed
by the great. She behaved with great propriety, very calm,
modest, quiet, and unaffected. She has a very fine countenance,
and her eyes look both intelligent and soft. She has, however,
a steadiness in her manner and deportment by no means engaging.
Mrs. Thrale, who was there, said:
“Why, this is a leaden goddess we are all worshipping; however,
we shall soon gild it.”
A lady who sat near me then began a dialogue with Mr. Erskine,
who had placed himself exactly opposite to Mrs. Siddons, and
they debated together upon her manner of studying her parts,
disputing upon the point with great warmth, yet not only
forbearing to ask Mrs. Siddons herself which was right, but
quite overpowering her with their loquacity when she attempted,
unasked, to explain the matter. Most vehement praise of all she
did followed, and the lady turned to me and said:
“What invitation, Miss Burney, is here for genius to display
itself? Everybody, I hear, is at work for Mrs. Siddons; but if
you would work for her, what an inducement to excel you would
both of you have. Dr. Burney⸺”
“Oh, pray, Madam,” cried I, “don’t say to him⸺”
“Oh, but I will. If my influence can do you any mischief you
may depend upon having it.”
She then repeated what she had said to my father, and he
instantly said:
“Your ladyship may be sure of my interest.”
I whispered afterwards to know who she was, and heard she was
Lady Lucan.[1]
It is amusing to see how conceited Fanny Burney always must turn every
incident to herself. When she did work for Mrs. Siddons, the play was
received with roars of laughter, and acted but one night.
We find a clue in the above description to Mrs. Siddons’s unpopularity.
Little Burney, with the frizzled head, and Mrs. Thrale, who “skipped
about like a young kid, all vivacity and sprightliness,” could not
understand the “steadiness in her manner,” and her dignified way of
checking intrusive admirers. No one appreciated admiration and love from
her intimate friends more than Mrs. Siddons, but to the adoration of
general society she was icy cold.
Sir Joshua Reynolds frequently went to see her act, and she was a welcome
guest at the house in Leicester Fields.
“He approved,” she writes, “very much of my costumes, and of my hair
without powder, which at that time was used in great profusion, with
a reddish brown tint, and a great quantity of pomatum, which, well
kneaded together, modelled the fair ladies’ tresses into large curls like
demi-cannon. My locks were generally braided into a small compass, so as
to ascertain the size and shape of my head, which to a painter’s eye was,
of course, an agreeable departure from the mode. My short waist, too, was
to him a pleasing contrast to the long stiff stays and hoop petticoats
which were then the fashion, even on the stage, and it obtained his
unqualified approbation. He always sat in the orchestra; and in that
place were to be seen—O glorious constellation!—Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan,
and Windham.”
It was at Reynolds’s she first met Edmund Burke. The story goes that
she was reading Milton for the benefit of the company, when she heard
the great orator’s deep melodious tones repeat, as she closed the book,
the lines beginning with “The angel ceased.” That wonderful face, full
of fiery power, was to be seen amongst those surrounding her. He was
afterwards frequently present while she sat to Reynolds for her portrait.
She ever counted mercurial Sheridan as a friend, in spite of the way in
which he treated her. She loved his beautiful, gentle wife, and some of
her happiest hours were spent in their society. She there put off all her
stateliness, and became the joyous-hearted young girl of the old Bath
days.
Sir Thomas Lawrence cherished all his life a feeling that was almost akin
to adoration for Mrs. Siddons’s genius and beauty. He painted her and
John Kemble in every dress and every pose. He was engaged subsequently to
two of her daughters, first one and then the other. He proposed to the
eldest daughter, Sarah; was accepted; but, before long, became miserable
and dejected, and at last confessed to Mrs. Siddons that he had mistaken
his feelings—that her younger daughter, and not the elder, was the object
of his affection. Fanny Kemble says:—
Sarah gave up her lover, and he became engaged to the second,
Maria. Both, however, died of consumption. Maria, the youngest,
an exceedingly beautiful girl, died first, and on her death-bed
made her sister promise that she would never marry Lawrence.
The death of her daughters broke off all connection between Sir
Thomas Lawrence and my aunt, and from that time they never saw
or had any intercourse with one another. Yet not long after
this Mrs. Siddons, dining with us one day, asked my mother how
the sketch Lawrence was making of me was getting on. After my
mother’s reply, my aunt remained silent for some time, and
then, laying her hand on my father’s arm, said: “Charles, when
I die, I wish to be carried to my grave by you and Lawrence.”
Lawrence reached his grave when she was yet tottering on the
brink of hers.
On my twentieth birthday, which occurred soon after my first
appearance, Lawrence sent me a magnificent proof plate of my
aunt as the “Tragic Muse,” beautifully framed, and with this
inscription: “This portrait, by England’s greatest painter, of
the noblest subject of his pencil, is presented to her niece
and _worthy successor_ by her most faithful humble friend and
servant, Lawrence.” When my mother saw this, she exclaimed at
it, and said: “I am surprised he ever brought himself to write
those words ‘worthy successor.’”
A few days after, Lawrence begged me to let him have the print
again, as he was not satisfied with the finish of the frame. It
was sent to him, and when it came back he had effaced the words
in which he had admitted any worthy successor to his “Tragic
Muse”; and Mr. H⸺, who was at that time his secretary, told me
that Lawrence had the print lying with that inscription in his
drawing-room for several days before sending it to me, and had
said to him, “I cannot bear to look at it.”
Among these artists, poets, statesmen, who were continually present at
her representations and attended afterwards at her dressing-room door to
pay their respects, in later years Byron might frequently be seen. He
declared her to be the “_beau ideal_ of acting,” and said, “Miss O’Neill
I would not see for fear of weakening the impression made by the queen of
tragedians. When I read Lady Macbeth’s part I have Mrs. Siddons before
me, and imagination even supplies her voice, whose tones were superhuman
and power over the heart supernatural.” On another occasion, he is
reported to have said that of actors Cook was the most natural, Kemble
the most supernatural, and Kean the medium between the two, but that Mrs.
Siddons was worth them all put together.
The first year she acted, “the gentlemen of the bar adorned her brows
with laurel,” as she says herself. The “laurel” took the substantial
form of a hundred guineas and a wreath presented by two barristers. She
declared it to be the most shining circumstance of her life, and alluded
modestly to her “poor abilities” and insufficient claims. The gentlemen
of Brookes’s Club also made up a handsome present.
“Mrs. Siddons continues to be the mode,” Horace Walpole writes, “and to
be modest and sensible. She declines great dinners, and says the business
and cares of her family take her whole time. When Lord Carlisle carried
her the tribute money from Brookes’s, he said she was not _maniérée_
enough. ‘I suppose she was grateful?’ said my niece, Lady Maria.”
It is easy to imagine the difficulty she experienced in keeping her
fame untarnished amidst that hotbed of vice, Covent Garden, and amidst
all the adulation lavished on her. It is impossible, indeed, to say how
many enemies she made by rejecting inopportune advances, and by exciting
jealousies and envy; but the worst they could ever allege was that she
was hard and haughty. She was continually on her guard. “One would as
soon think of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury” was said
of her later; but in the early days of her first appearance at Drury
Lane she was obliged often to have recourse to an outspoken rebuff to
aspirants to her favour.
As a curious instance of the insidious manner in which attacks were
sometimes made to win her regard, John Taylor relates that one morning,
on calling on her, he found her in the act of burning some letters that
had been returned to her by the executors of the individual to whom they
were addressed. He sat down to help her, and, in doing so, a printed copy
of some scandalous verses on her that had appeared in the _St. James’s
Gazette_ dropped out. Some lines in the handwriting of the deceased poet
that were written on the top of the page proved the author, and proved
that attacker and defender had been one and the same person. In talking
the matter over afterwards, Mrs. Siddons recalled to mind that the same
person had once endeavoured to undermine her affection for her husband by
telling her tales of his infidelity.
We cannot resist giving here a letter which Mrs. Siddons received many
years after her first appearance on the stage, when one might have
thought her age and reputation a sufficient protection against such
addresses:—
Loveliest of women! In Belvidera, Isabella, Juliet, and
Calista, I have admired you until my fancy threatened to burst,
and the strings of my imagination were ready to crack to
pieces; but, as Mrs. Siddons, I love you to madness, and until
my heart and soul are overwhelmed with fondness and desire. Say
not that time has placed any difference in years between you
and me. The youths of her day saw no wrinkles upon the brow of
Ninon de l’Enclos. It is for vulgar souls alone to grow old;
but you shall flourish in eternal youth, amidst the war of
elements, and the crash of worlds.
May 2nd, Barley Mow, Salisbury Square.
So pertinacious became the persecutions of this young Irishman, for he
was an Irishman, that she was obliged to seek the protection of the law.
His bursting imagination was kept in check for some little time by the
sobering effects of a term of imprisonment.
Sometimes, also, her would-be adorers boasted of favours never received.
“If you should meet a Mr. Seton,” she wrote to Dr. Whalley, “who lived
in Leicester Square, you must not be surprised to hear him talk of being
very well with my sister and myself; for, since I have been here, I have
heard the old fright has been giving it out in town. You will find him
rather an unlikely person to be so great a favourite with women.”
Amongst fashionable ladies she counted many and constant friends. The
doors of Mrs. Montagu’s house (centre of intellect and fashion) were
always open to her; and we hear of her there on one occasion when all
the “Blues” swarmed round their “Queen Bee,” and she wore her celebrated
dress embroidered with the “ruins of Palmyra.”
Mrs. Damer (Anne Conway), daughter of General Conway, the celebrated
sculptress and woman of fashion, was also one of her most intimate
friends, and later in life the actress spent many hours in her studio
when bitten herself with the love of modelling. Campbell says that Mrs.
Siddons’s love of modelling in clay, began at Birmingham; and he tells
a story of her going into a shop there, seeing a bust of herself, which
the shopman, not knowing who she was, told her was the likeness of the
greatest actress in the world. Mrs. Siddons bought it, and, thinking she
could make a better replica of her own features, set to work and made
modelling a favourite pursuit. Whether the impetus was thus given we
hardly know, but it was the fashion of the time. Mrs. Damer, who was
declared by her admirers “to be as great a sculptor as Mr. Nollekens,”
and many other dainty fine ladies, put on mob caps and canvas aprons,
wielding mallet and chisel, and kneading wax and clay with their small
white hands. Mrs. Siddons was often the guest of Mrs. Damer at Strawberry
Hill.
In her circle of women friends, we must not forget, either, the
beautiful, fascinating, stuttering Mrs. Inchbald, the dear muse of
her and her brother John. It is said that, coming off the stage one
evening, she was about to sit down by Mrs. Siddons in the green-room,
when, suddenly looking at her magnificent neighbour, she said, “No, I
won’t s-s-s-sit by you; you’re t-t-t-too handsome!” in which respect she
certainly need have feared no competition, and less with Mrs. Siddons
than anyone, their style of beauty being so absolutely dissimilar.
Miss Seward was one of the adorers of her circle, but, in spite of the
pages of rhapsodies on the subject “of the most glorious of her sex,”
written to “her dear Lichfieldians” and the odes poured out to “Isabella”
and “Euphrasia,” it is a significant fact that we do not find one letter
personally to Mrs. Siddons, nor one from Mrs. Siddons addressed to her.
Practical and sincere herself, the great actress disliked “gush” of all
sorts. Miss Seward wrote, “My dear friends, I arrived here at five. Think
of my mortification! Mrs. Siddons in Belvidera to-night, as is supposed,
for the last time before she lies in. I asked Mrs. Barrow if it would be
impossible to get into the pit. “O heaven!” said she, “impossible in any
part of the house!” Mrs. B⸺ is, I find, in the _petit souper_ circle; so
the dear plays oratorios, and will be a little too much for my wishes,
out of question. Adieu! Adieu!”
The Lichfieldian incense was a little too pungent for the nostrils to
which it was offered. The great actress wrote, rather weariedly to her
friend Dr. Whalley:—
“Believe me, my dear Sir, it is not want of inclination, but opportunity,
that prevents my more frequent acknowledgments: but need I tell you this?
No; you generously judge of my heart by your own. I fear I must have
appeared very insensible, and, therefore, unworthy the honour Miss Seward
has done me; but the perpetual round of business in which I am engaged
is incredible. Shall I trespass on your goodness to say that I feel as I
ought on that occasion?”
She then alludes to the kindness of the King and Queen which, sometimes
to an inconvenient extent, was shown towards her all her life.
“I believe I told you that the Queen had graciously put my son down on
her list for the Charterhouse; and she has done me the honour to stamp
my reputation by her honoured approbation. They have seen me in all my
characters but Isabella, which they have commanded for Monday next; but,
having seen me in Jane Shore last night, and, judging very humanely that
too quick repetitions of such exertions may injure my health, the King
himself most graciously sent to the managers, and said he must deny
himself the pleasure of seeing Isabella till Tuesday. This is the second
time he has distinguished me in this manner. You see a vast deal of me
in the papers, of my appointment at Court, and the like. All groundless;
but I have the pleasure to inform you that my success has exceeded even
my hopes. My sister is engaged, and is successful. God be praised for all
His mercies! You will think me an egotist, I fear. I shall certainly be
at Bath in the Passion Week, if I am alive. I count the hours till then.”
Our readers may like to know that when their Majesties, with the Prince
of Wales, the Princess Royal, and the Princess Augusta went in state,
on October 8th, 1783, to see Mrs. Siddons play Isabella, the Sovereign
and his wife sat under a dome covered with crimson velvet and gold; the
heir to the throne sat under another of blue velvet and silver; and the
young Princesses under a third of blue satin and silver fringe. George
III. wore “a plain suit of Quaker-coloured clothes, with gold buttons;
the Queen, a white satin robe, with a head-dress which was ornamented by
a great number of diamonds; the Princess Royal was dressed in a white
and blue figured silk, and Princess Augusta in a rose-coloured and white
silk of the same pattern as her sister’s, having both their head-dresses
richly ornamented with diamonds. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales
had a suit of dark blue Geneva velvet, richly trimmed with gold lace.”
We are further told that on this occasion Mrs. Siddons was much
indisposed previous to her going on the stage; and, after the curtain
dropped at the end of the fifth act, was so very ill as not to be capable
of walking to her dressing-room without support. Notwithstanding her
suffering, she went through the part as if inspired. The Queen was so
affected at her performance, that His Majesty seemed alarmed, and often
diverted her attention from situations and passages that were likely to
distress her.
The following snarl was found among Horace Walpole’s papers:—
For the _Morning Chronicle_. On the King commanding the Tragedy
of _The Grecian Daughter_ on Thursday the 2nd inst. Jan. 10th,
1783.
EPIGRAMMATIC
Siddons to see—King, Lords, and Commons run,
Glad to forget that Britain is undone.
The Jesuit Shelburne, the apostate Fox,
And Bulls and Bears, together in a Box.
Thurlow neglects his promises to friends;
And scribbling Townsend no more letters sends.
Cits leave their feasts, and sots desert their wine;
Each youth cries “Charming!” and each maid, “Divine!”
See, of false tears, a copious torrent flows,
But not one real, for their country’s woes.
The club of spendthrifts, the rapacious bar
Of words, not arms, support the bloodless war.
Let Spain Gibraltar get, our islands France,
So Siddons acts, or Vestris leads the dance.
Run on, mad nation! pleasure’s frantic round;
For acting, fiddling, dancing be renown’d!
Soon foreign fleets shall rule the Western main;
George fill no throne but that of Drury Lane.
_Merlin._
George III. admired her, he said, “for her repose,” adding, “Garrick
could never stand still; he was a great fidget.” The Queen told her, in
broken English, that the only resource was to turn away from the stage;
the acting was, indeed, too “disagreeable.” She was frequently summoned
to read at the Palace, and to give lessons in elocution to the young
Princesses.
In Mrs. Siddons’s memoranda, we are given an account of one of these
readings. She felt extremely awkward, she tells us, in the “sack” with
“hoop and treble ruffles which it was considered necessary to put on,
according to court etiquette.” On her arrival she was led into an
ante-chamber, where there were ladies of rank whom she knew, while
presently the King appeared, drawing one of his little daughters in a
“go-cart.” This little princess was about three years old; and when
Mrs. Siddons remarked to the lady standing next her that she longed to
kiss the child, it held out its tiny hand ... so early had she learnt
this lesson of royalty. Mrs. Siddons was obliged to stand during the
whole of a lengthened evening, preferring this to their offers of
refreshment in an adjoining room, as she was terrified at the thought of
retiring backwards through “the whole length of a long apartment, with
highly-polished, slippery floor.” Her Majesty privately expressed much
astonishment at seeing her so collected, and was pleased to say that the
actress had conducted herself as though she had been used to a court. “I
had certainly often personated queens,” was the actress’s remark.
It may be mentioned as a remarkable fact that the first person outside
the royal family who seems to have entertained a suspicion that insanity
was creeping over the King was Mrs. Siddons. During a visit she paid
to Windsor Castle at the time, the King, without any apparent motive,
placed in her hands a sheet of paper bearing nothing but his signature—an
incident which struck her as so unaccountable, that she immediately
carried it to the Queen, who gratefully thanked her for her discretion.
But more than all the attentions of royalty, more than all the flattery
lavished upon her by great people, more than all the applause and worship
she received from the crowds who besieged the theatre, did she value
the sparingly awarded praises and sincere shake of the shabby, noble,
snuff-covered hand of “the Great Bear,” before whose growl everyone
trembled.
In Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ he tells us the Doctor had a singular
prejudice against players, “futile fellows” whom he rated no higher than
rope-dancers or ballad singers. This prejudice, however, did not prevent
him from hobbling off to see poor crippled Mrs. Porter when forsaken by
all the rest of the world. The beginning of his liking for Mrs. Siddons
is thoroughly characteristic. He always talked to his circle of lady
adorers of that jade, Mrs. Siddons, until one of the “fair females”
suggested that he must see the actress.
“But, indeed, Dr. Johnson,” said Miss Monckton, “you _must_ see Mrs.
Siddons. Won’t you see her in some fine part?”
“Why, if I _must_, Madam, I have no choice.”
“She says, Sir, she shall be very much afraid of you.”
“Madam, that cannot be true.”
“Not true?” said Miss Monckton, staring. “Yes, it is.”
“It _cannot_ be, Madam.”
“But she said so to me; I heard her say it myself.”
“Madam, it is not _possible_; remember, therefore, in future, that even
fiction should be supported by probability.”
Miss Monckton looked all amazement, but insisted upon the truth of what
she had said.
“I do not believe, Madam,” said he, warmly, “that she knows my name.”
“Oh, that is rating her too low,” said a gentleman stranger.
“By not knowing my name,” continued he, “I do not mean literally, but
that when she sees it abused in a newspaper she may possibly recollect
that she has seen it abused in a newspaper before.”
“Well, Sir,” said Miss Monckton, “but you must see her for all this.”
“Well, Madam, if you desire it, I will go; see her, I shall not, nor
hear her; but I’ll go, and that will do. The last time I was at a play
I was ordered there by Mrs. Abington, or a Mrs. Somebody, I do not well
remember who, but I placed myself in the middle of the first row of the
front boxes, to show that when I was called I came.”
He kept his promise, and the huge, slovenly figure, clad in a greasy
brown coat and coarse black worsted stockings, was several times seen
taking handfuls of snuff, and criticising the actress in his outspoken,
growling fashion. She then paid him a visit in his den at Bolt Court, to
which he alludes in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale:—
“Mrs. Siddons, in her visit to me, behaved with great modesty and
propriety, and left nothing behind her to be censured or despised.
Neither praise nor money, the two powerful corrupters of mankind, seemed
to have depraved her. I shall be glad to see her again. Her brother
Kemble calls on me, and pleases me very well. Mrs. Siddons and I talked
of plays, and she told me her intention of exhibiting this winter the
character of Constance, Catherine, and Isabella, in Shakespeare.”
Boswell gives us also the account of what took place:—
“When Mrs. Siddons came into the room, there happened to be no chair
ready for her, which he observing, said with a smile: ‘Madam, you who
so often occasion a want of seats to other people will the more easily
excuse the want of one yourself.’
“Having placed himself by her, he with great good humour entered upon
a consideration of the English drama; and, among other enquiries,
particularly asked her which of Shakespeare’s characters she was most
pleased with. Upon her answering that she thought the character of Queen
Catherine in _Henry VIII._ the most natural: ‘I think so too, Madam,’
said he; ‘and whenever you perform it I will once more hobble out to the
theatre myself.’ Mrs. Siddons promised she would do herself the honour of
acting his favourite part for him, but was unable to do so before grand
old Samuel was laid to his last rest.”
CHAPTER X.
1782 TO 1798.
Mrs. Siddons’s life between the years 1785 to 1798 was passed in the
professional treadmill, and her history during this period is best told
by an account of the characters she personated.
After her appearance as Lady Macbeth on February 2nd, she chose to
act Desdemona to her brother’s Othello, and, to everyone’s surprise,
acted it with a tenderness, playfulness, and simplicity hardly to be
expected of the majestic actress, who had terrified her audience by
her representation of the Thane of Cawdor’s wife. Campbell tells us
that even years after, when he saw her play this part at Edinburgh, not
recognising at first who was acting, he was spellbound by her “exquisite
gracefulness,” and thought it impossible “this soft, sweet creature could
be the Siddons,” until by the emotion and applause of the audience he
knew it could be no other.
Unfortunately, in her first representation of this part, she was
carelessly given a damp bed to lie on in the death scene, and caught so
severe a cold as almost to threaten rheumatic fever. From this time her
delicacy seems to date, for we now find her continually complaining and
incapacitated from appearing by ill-health.
After Desdemona she appeared in Rosalind, which we can dismiss with the
criticism of Young, the actor: “Her Rosalind wanted neither playfulness
nor feminine softness, but it was totally without archness—not because
she did not properly conceive it; but how could such a countenance be
arch?” Her dress, too, excited great amusement—“mysterious nondescript
garments.” We have a letter of hers to Hamilton the artist, asking “if
he would be so good as to make her a slight sketch for a boy’s dress to
conceal the person as much as possible.” The woman who was capable of
taking this view of the representation of Rosalind was not capable of
acting the part.
Imogen, Ophelia, Catherine in the _Taming of the Shrew_, and Cordelia,
all acted with her brother, followed in quick succession. This hard work
entitled her to a salary of twenty-four pounds ten shillings weekly,
while her brother drew ten pounds. Not contented with this, however, she
made a tour in the provinces, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, &c.
These country tours were not only fatiguing in consequence of the amount
of travelling to be done, but also in consequence of the unsympathetic
audiences to be faced, and the discomfort of country theatres. The
system, also, of absorbing all the profits of provincial actors made her
very unpopular in the profession. Some ridiculous stories are related of
these tours.
When playing the “sleeping scene” in _Macbeth_, at Leeds, a boy who had
been sent for some porter appeared by mistake on the stage, and walking
up, presented it to her. In vain she motioned him away, in vain he was
called off behind the scenes; the house roared with laughter, and all
illusion was dispelled for the rest of the evening. On another occasion
at Leeds, when about to drink poison on the stage, one of the audience in
the gallery howled out “Soop it oop, lass!” She endeavoured to frown down
the interrupter, but her own solemnity gave way. She was also at country
theatres often subjected to bearing the brunt of a local quarrel or
facetiousness directed against a member or members of the audience. Once
at Liverpool the play of _Jane Shore_, which had sent London audiences
into fits of sobbing and hysterics, was announced. The house was full,
and Miss Mellon, from whom we have the story, says the actors behind the
scenes expected a repetition of the same emotion; but the people in the
gallery, seeing the principal merchants with their families present,
thought this a delightful opportunity of indulging their wit respecting
the “soldiering.” Accordingly, they formed two bands, one on each side of
the gallery, and, from the commencement of the play to the end, kept up a
cross-dialogue of impertinence, about “charging guns with brown sugar and
cocoanuts,” and “small arms with cinnamon powder and nutmegs.”
Miss Mellon was in agony for the object of her theatrical devotion. She
cried, she ran about behind the wings as if she were going out of her
senses. Mrs. Siddons, however, calm though deadly pale, merely said to
her, with a slight tremor in her voice, “I will go through the _time_
requisite for the scenes, but will not utter them.”
She went on the stage; said aloud, “It is useless to act,” crossed her
arms, and merely murmured the speeches; and it is a fact that, on the
first night one of Mrs. Siddons’s masterpieces was acted in Liverpool,
she went through the entire performance in dumb show.
In December 1785 her second son, George, was born. As soon as she was
able to write, she communicated the fact to her friends, the Whalleys, in
one of her lively, light-hearted letters:—
“I have another son, healthy and lovely as an angel, born the
26th Dec.; so, you see, I take the earliest opportunity of
relieving the anxiety which I know you and my dear Mrs. Whalley
will feel till you hear of me. My sweet boy is so like a person
of the Royal Family, that I’m rather afraid he’ll bring me to
disgrace. My sister jokingly tells me she’s sure ‘my lady his
mother has played false with the prince,’ and I must own he’s
more like him than anybody else. I will just hint to you that
my father was at one time very like the King, which a little
saves my credit. I rejoice that you are well, and have such
pleasant society, but I wish to God you would return! I have no
news for you, except that the prince is going to devote himself
entirely to a Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the whole world is in an
uproar about it. I know very little of her history more than
that it is agreed on all hands that she is a very ambitious and
clever woman, and that ‘all good seeming by her revolt will be
thought put on for villany,’ for she was thought an example of
propriety. I hear, too, that the Duchess of Devonshire is to
take her by the hand, and to give her the first dinner when the
preliminaries are settled; for it seems everything goes on with
the utmost formality—provision made for children, and so on.
Some people rejoice and some mourn at this event. I have not
heard what his mother says to it. The Royal Family have been
nearly all ill, but are now recovering, and they graciously
intend to command me to play in _The Way to Keep Him_ the first
night I perform. They are gracious to me beyond measure on all
occasions, and take all opportunities to show the world that
they are so. How good and considerate is this! They know what
a sanction their countenance is, and they are amiable beyond
description. Since my confinement I have received the kindest
messages from them; they make me of consequence enough to
desire I won’t think of playing till I feel quite strong, and a
thousand more kind things. I perceive a little shooting in my
temples that tells me I have written enough.
“I don’t take leave of you, however, without telling you that
I am very much disappointed in Sherriffe’s picture of me, and
am afraid to employ him about your snuff-box. I don’t know what
to do about it, for that promised to be so well that I almost
engaged him in the fulness of my heart to do it. I have not
been in face these last four months; but now that I am growing
as amiable as ever, I shall sit for it as soon as possible. God
Almighty bless you both!
“Yours,
“S. SIDDONS.”
Later she writes again to Whalley:—
“I have at last, my friend, attained the _ten thousand pounds_
which I set my heart upon, and am now perfectly at ease with
respect to fortune. I thank God who has enabled me to procure
to myself so comfortable an income. I am sure my dear Mrs.
Whalley and you will be pleased to hear this from myself.
What a thing a balloon would be! but, the deuce take them, I
do not find that they are likely to be brought to any good.
Good heaven! what delight it would be to see you for a few
days only! I have a nice house, and I could contrive to make
up a bed. I know you and my dear Mrs. Whalley would accept
my sincere endeavours to accommodate you; but don’t let me
be taken by surprise, my dear friend, for were I to see you
first at the theatre, I can’t answer for what might be the
consequence.
“I stand some knocks with tolerable firmness, I suppose from
habit; but those of joy being so infinitely less frequent, I
conceive must be more difficultly sustained.
“You will find I have been a niggard of my praise, when you
see your Fanny. Oh! my beloved friend, you could not speak to
one who understands those anxieties you mention better than I
do. Surely it is needless to say no one more ardently prays
that God Almighty, in His mercy, will avert the calamity;
and surely, surely there is everything to hope for from such
dispositions, improved by such an education. My family is well,
God be praised! My two sisters are married and happy. Mrs.
Twiss will present us with a new relation towards February.
At Christmas I bring my dear girls from Miss Eames, or rather
she brings them to me. Eliza is the most entertaining creature
in the world; Sally is vastly clever; Maria and George are
beautiful; and Harry, a boy with very good parts, but not
disposed to learning.”
In spite of her statement that once she had made ten thousand pounds
she would rest contented, we find her for the two next years working
without intermission, going from York to Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to
Liverpool. In 1788 Kemble succeeded King as manager of Drury Lane, and
his sister returned to assist, first of all in his spectacular revival
of _Macbeth_, in which, among other innovations, he brought in the black,
grey, and white spirits, as bands of little boys. One of these imps was
insubordinate, and was sent away in disgrace; his name was “Edmund Kean.”
They then acted _Henry VIII._ together, Kemble contenting himself with
“doubling” the characters of Cromwell and Griffith, Bensley having
already possession of the part of Wolsey. The representation was a
success in every way, and Mrs. Siddons’s Queen Katherine was henceforth
ranked as equal to her Lady Macbeth.
On the 7th February following she played for the first time Volumnia to
her brother’s Coriolanus. An eye-witness tells us:—
“I remember her coming down the stage in the triumphal entry of her son
Coriolanus, when her dumb show drew plaudits that shook the building. She
came alone, marching and beating time to the music; rolling (if that be
not too strong a term to describe her motion) from side to side, swelling
with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which
flashed from her eye, and lit up her whole face, that the effect was
irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession
to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus, banner, and
pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.”
Many are the testimonies of actors and actresses that show her
extraordinary personal power. Young relates that he was once acting
Beverley with her at Edinburgh. They had reached the fifth act, when
Beverley had swallowed the poison, and Bates comes in, and says to the
dying man, “Jarvis found you quarrelling with Jewson in the streets
last night.” Mrs. Beverley says, “No, I am sure he did not!” to which
Jarvis replies, “Or if I did?” meaning, it may be supposed, to add, “The
fault was not with my master.” But the moment he utters the words “Or
if I did?” Mrs. Beverley exclaims, “’Tis false, old man! They had no
quarrel—there was no cause for quarrel!” In uttering this, Mrs. Siddons
caught hold of Jarvis, and gave the exclamation with such piercing grief,
that Young said his throat swelled and his utterance was choked. He
stood unable to repeat the words which, as Beverley, he ought to have
immediately delivered. The prompter repeated the speech several times,
till Mrs. Siddons, coming up to her fellow-actor, put the tips of her
fingers on his shoulders, and said in a low voice, “Mr. Young, recollect
yourself.”
Macready relates an equally remarkable instance of her power. In the last
act of Rowe’s _Tamerlane_, when, by the order of the tyrant Moneses,
Aspasia’s lover is strangled before her face, she worked herself up
to such a pitch of agony that, as she sank a lifeless heap before the
murderer, the audience remained for several moments awe-struck, then
clamoured for the curtain to fall, believing that she was really dead;
and only the earnest assurances of the manager to the contrary could
satisfy them. Holman and the elder Macready were among the spectators,
and looked aghast at one another. “Macready, do I look as pale as you?”
inquired the former.
On another occasion, when performing _Henry VIII._ with a raw
“supernumerary” who was playing Surveyor, when she warned him against
giving false testimony against his master, her look was so terrific that
the unfortunate youth came off perspiring with terror, and swearing that
nothing would induce him to meet that woman’s eyes again.
Had Mrs. Siddons lived in our day, every shop-window would have been
crowded with photographs of her classically beautiful face, in every pose
and every costume. Mercifully she lived in the days of Gainsborough and
Reynolds, and is, therefore, the original of two of the most beautiful
female portraits ever painted. Sir Joshua is said to have borrowed his
conception from a figure designed by Michael Angelo on the roof of the
Sixtine Chapel. She is seated in a chair of state, with two figures
behind holding the dagger and the bowl. The head is thrown back in an
attitude of dramatic inspiration, the right hand thrown over an arm of
the seat, the left raised, pointing upwards. A tiara, necklace, and
splendid folds of drapery enhance the stateliness of the composition.
It is, undoubtedly, the great painter’s masterpiece. “The picture,”
Northcote says, “kept him in a fever.” The unfavourable reception his
pictures of the year before had met with made him resolved to show
the critics that he was not past his prime, while the grandeur and
magnificence of the sitter stimulated him to the exertion of all his
genius.
Mrs. Siddons was fond, in later years, of describing her sittings.
“Ascend your undisputed throne,” said the painter, leading her to the
platform. “Bestow on me some idea of the tragic muse.” And then, when it
was ended, the great painter insisted on inscribing his name on her robe,
saying that he could not lose the honour of going down to posterity on
the hem of her garment. We, who only know of her greatness from hearsay,
can form some idea of what she must have been from this magnificent
conception.
Very nearly as noble and beautiful is the portrait by Gainsborough. The
delicacy of a refined English complexion has never been so beautifully
painted, while the tone and colour is as exquisite as anything
Gainsborough ever did. The light transparent blue, cool yellow, crimson,
brown, and black, forms an enchanting setting for the lovely head, which
stands out clear and delicate. It is said, that while Gainsborough was
painting her, after working in an absorbed silence for some time, he
suddenly exclaimed, “Damn it, Madam, there is no end to your nose!” And,
indeed, it does stand out a little sharply. But the great feature of
the Kembles was the jaw-bone. The actress herself exclaimed, laughing,
“The Kemble jaw-bone! Why, it is as notorious as Samson’s!” Mrs. Jameson
declares that she saw Mrs. Siddons sitting near Gainsborough’s portrait
two years before her death, and, looking from one to the other, she says,
“It was like her still, at the age of seventy.”
Years after, Fanny Kemble, her grand-daughter, while walking through the
streets of Baltimore, saw an engraving of Reynolds’s “Tragic Muse” and
Lawrence’s picture of John Kemble’s “Hamlet.” “We stopped,” she says,
“before them, and my father looked with a great deal of emotion at these
beautiful representations of his beautiful kindred. It was a sort of sad
surprise to meet them in this other world, where we are wandering aliens
and strangers.”
From the numerous portraits extant of Mrs. Siddons we can form an idea
of her appearance, of which such legendary accounts have been handed
down. She was much above middle height; as a girl she was exceedingly
thin and spare, and this remained her characteristic until she was about
twenty-two or three. “Sarah Kemble would be a fine-looking woman one of
these days,” a friend of her father remarked, “provided she could but add
flesh to her bones, and provided her eyes were as small again.”
This is, in fact, what did occur. Her increasing plumpness rounded off
all angles, making the eyes less prominent; and at the age of twenty-four
or twenty-five she was in the very prime of her marvellous beauty. She
had a singular energy and elasticity of motion. Her head was beautifully
set on her shoulders. Her features were fine and expressive, the nose
a little long, but counterbalanced by the height of the brow, and
firmly-modelled chin. The eye-brows were marked, and ran straight across
the brow; her eyes positively flamed at times. A fixed pallor overspread
her features in later days, which was seldom tinged with colour. It is
difficult, looking at the stately fine lady painted by Gainsborough, to
imagine the bursts of passion that convulsed her on the stage. Her voice,
as years matured its power, was capable of every inflection of feeling;
while her articulation was singularly clear and exact. There was no undue
raising of the voice, no overdoing of action; all was moderate and quiet
until passion was demanded, and then swift and sudden it burst forth.
In Kemble’s manner at times there was a sacrifice of energy to grace.
This observation, Braden tells us, was made by Mrs. Siddons herself,
who admired her brother, in general, as much as she loved him. She
illustrated her meaning by rising and placing herself in the attitude
of one of the old Egyptian statues; the knees joined together, and the
feet turned a little inwards. Placing her elbows close to her sides, she
folded her hands, and held them upright, with the palms pressed to each
other. Having made those present observe that she had assumed one of the
most constrained, and, therefore, most ungraceful positions possible, she
proceeded to recite the curse of King Lear on his undutiful offspring, in
a manner which made _hair rise and flesh creep_, and then called on us to
remark the additional effect which was gained by the concentrated energy
which the unusual and ungraceful posture in itself implied.
It is a characteristic trait, that by the Kemble family John should have
been considered a finer player than Sarah. We know that he continually
gave her directions and instructions, which she accepted with all
humility, and followed, until she had made herself _sure_ of her ground.
No one, however gifted, could then shake her conscientious adherence to
her own views.
The subtle difference that lies between genius and talent separated
the two. Kemble repeated beautiful words suitably; Mrs. Siddons was
magnificent before she spoke, thrilling her audience with a silence more
significant than all else in the development of human emotion. We can see
how grand she was, independently of her author, by the miserable plays
she made famous; when her genius was no longer present to breathe life
and passion into them they passed into oblivion.
The number of indifferent plays she was entreated to appear in were
legion. All her friends seemed to think they could write plays, and that
she was the one and only person who could appear in them. We find her
piteously writing to a friend who had sent her a tragedy:—
“It is impossible for you to conceive how hard it is to say that
_Astarte_ will not do as you and I would have it do. Thank God, it is
over! It has been so bitter a sentence for me to pronounce, that it has
wrung drops of sorrow from the very bottom of my heart. Let me entreat,
if you have any idea that I am too tenacious of your honour, that you
will suffer me to ask the opinion of others, which may be done without
naming the author. I must, however, premise that what is charming in the
closet often ceases to be so when it comes into consideration for the
stage.”
Conceited Fanny Burney must needs write a tragedy, _Edwin and Elgitha_.
Her stumbling-block was “Bishops.” At that time there was a popular drink
called “Bishop,” composed of certain intoxicating ingredients. When,
therefore, in one of the earlier scenes the King gave the order “Bring in
the Bishop,” the audience went into roars of laughter. The dying scene
seemed to have no effect in damping their mirth. A passing stranger, in
a tragic tone, proposed to carry the expiring heroine to the other side
of a hedge. This hedge, though remote from any dwelling, proved to be a
commodious retreat, for, in a few minutes afterwards, the wounded lady
was brought from behind it on an elegant couch, and, after dying in the
presence of her husband, was removed once more to the back of the hedge.
The effect proved too ridiculous for the audience, and Mrs. Siddons was
carried off amidst renewed roars of laughter.
Dr. Whalley must then needs press a tragedy of his own upon her, _The
Castle of Mowal_, which was yawned at for three nights. It is said that
when the author went down to Mr. Peake, the treasurer, to know what
benefit might have accrued to him, it amounted to nothing. “I have
been,” said the doctor, an old picquet-player, “piqued and repiqued”; and
so he retired from the scene of his discomfiture to Bath, where he plumed
himself on the fact of having “run for three nights.”
Her next essay in the cause of friendship was in Bertie Greatheed’s
tragedy of _The Regent_. She writes in reference to it:—
“The plot of the poor young man’s piece, it strikes me, is very lame, and
the characters very—very ill-sustained in general; but more particularly
the lady, for whom the author had me in his eye. This woman is one of
those monsters (I think them) of perfection, who is an angel before her
time, and is so entirely resigned to the will of Heaven, that (to a very
mortal like myself) she appears to be the most provoking piece of still
life one ever had the misfortune to meet. Her struggles and conflicts are
so weakly expressed, that we conclude they do not cost her much pain, and
she is so pious that we are satisfied she looks upon her afflictions as
so many convoys to Heaven, and wish her there, or anywhere else but in
the tragedy. I have said all this, and ten times more, to them both, with
as much delicacy as I am mistress of; but Mr. G. says that it would give
him no great trouble to alter it, provided I will undertake the milksop
lady. I am in a very distressed situation, for, unless he makes her a
totally different character, I cannot possibly have anything to do with
her.”
The piece was eventually performed for twelve nights, and then consigned
to oblivion; but the author was so satisfied that he gave a supper, which
was followed by a drinking-bout at the “Brown Bear” in Bow Street, at
which a subordinate actor named Phillimore was sufficiently tipsy to
have courage enough to fight his lord and master, John Kemble, who was
elevated enough to defend himself, and generous enough to forget the
affair next morning.
Other parts were declined by her for other reasons. Colman had written an
epilogue to Mr. Jephson’s _Julia_, which she refused to speak because she
declared it to be “coarse;” and the part of Cleopatra, she said she never
would act, because “she would hate herself if she were to play it as she
thought it should be played.” And there she was right; the “Serpent of
Old Nile” was not within her range.
One of her admirers tells us that her majestic and imposing person, and
the commanding character of her beauty, militated against the effect she
produced in the part of Mrs. Haller. “No man alive or dead,” said he,
“would have dared to take a liberty with her; wicked she might be, but
weak she could not be, and when she told the story of her ill-conduct in
the play nobody believed her.” Another eye-witness, speaking of “the fair
penitent,” said that it was worth sitting out the piece for her scene
with Romont alone, to see “such a splendid animal in such a magnificent
rage.”
And yet, what a kind heart it was to an erring sister! “Charming and
beautiful Mrs. Robinson,” she writes, referring to Perdita Robinson, “I
pity her from the bottom of my soul.” And what a generous helping hand
she stretched out to her younger colleagues. When Miss Mellon, twenty
years her junior, was acting with her at Liverpool, Mrs. Siddons one
morning at rehearsal turned to an actor, a friend of hers, who had known
her for years, and said:
“There is a young woman here whom I am sure I have seen at Drury Lane.”
He told her it was Miss Mellon, who had just come out.
“She seems a nice, pretty young woman,” returned the great actress, “and
I pity her situation in that hotbed of iniquity, Drury Lane; it is almost
impossible for a young, pretty, and unprotected female to escape. How has
she conducted herself?”
The person she addressed, who relates the story, replied:
“With the greatest propriety.”
“Then please present her to me.”
The young lady, colouring highly and looking very handsome, came forward.
The Queen of Tragedy took her by the hand, and, after a few kind
encouraging words, led her forward among the company and said:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I am told by one I know very well that this
young lady has always conducted herself with the utmost propriety. I,
therefore, introduce her as my young friend.”
This electrified the parties in the green-room, who had not looked for
such a flattering distinction for the young actress; but, of course, they
were all too glad to follow Mrs. Siddons in anything, and Miss Mellon was
overwhelmed with attention. Afterwards, on the return of Mrs. Siddons
and Miss Mellon to their duties in London for the succeeding season, the
former repeated the compliment she had paid her at Liverpool, making the
same statement regarding her excellent conduct; and by thus bringing her
forward under such advantageous circumstances, procured her admission to
the first green-room, where her inferior salary did not entitle her to
be, except on such a recommendation as that of Mrs. Siddons.
In the summer of 1790, being in delicate health, and disgusted at
Sheridan’s treatment of her, she went with her husband to France,
accompanied by Miss Wynn. They first stopped at Calais, where their
daughters, Sarah and Maria, were at a boarding-school, and then went
on to Lisle. The letter she wrote to Lady Harcourt on her return is so
characteristic in its energetic, outspoken sincerity, that it seems
unjust not to quote every word of it:—
“Sandgate, near Folkestone, Kent. August 2nd.
“MY DEAR LADY HARCOURT,
“After so long a silence, your good nature will exalt itself
to hear a long letter full of egotism, and I will begin with
Streatham, where you may remember to have heard me talk
of going with no great degree of pleasurable expectation,
supposing it impossible that I should ever feel much more for
Mrs. P.[2] than admiration of her talents; but, after having
very unexpectedly stayed there more than three weeks, during
which time every moment gave me fresh instances of unremitting
kindness and attention to me, and, indeed, a very extraordinary
degree of benevolence and forbearance towards those who have
not deserved much lenity at her hands (and it is wonderful how
many there are of that description), I left them with great
regret; and between their very great kindness, their wit, and
their music, they made me love, esteem, and admire them very
much. In a few days I set out with Mr. S., Miss Wynn, and her
brother, for Calais, and, after a very rough passage, arrived
at Calais, and found my dear girls quite well and improved
in their persons, and (I am told) in their French. I was very
much struck with the difference of objects and customs when I
reflected how small a space divides one nation from the other,
like true English. We saw all we could, and I thought _of_ my
dear Lord Harcourt, though not _with_ him, in their churches.
I own (though I blame myself at the same time for it) I was
disgusted with all the pomp and magnificence of them, when I
saw the priests ‘playing such fantastic tricks before high
Heaven as (I think) must make the angels weep’; and the people
gabbling over their prayers, even in the _act of gaping_, to
have it over as quick as might be. Alas! said I to myself, in
the pitifulness, and perhaps vanity, of my heart, how sorry I
am for these poor deluded people, and how much more worthy the
Deity (‘who does prefer before all temples the upright heart
and pure’) are the sublime and simple forms of _our_ religion.
Indeed, my dear Madam, I am better satisfied with the ideas and
feelings that have been excited in my heart in _your_ garden at
_Nuneham_, than ever I have been in those fine gewgaw places,
and believe Mr. Haggitt, by his plain and sensible sermons, has
done more good than a legion of these priests would do if they
were to live to the age of Methusalem. I am willing to own that
all this may be prejudice, and that _we_ may not _mean_ better
than our _neighbours_; but _fire_ shall not burn my opinion
out of me, and so _God mend all_. Now, to turn to our _great
selves_. We took our little folks to Lisle; it is a very fine
town, and, though I know nothing of the language, the acting
was so really good that it gave me very great pleasure. The
language of true genius, like that of Nature, is intelligible
to all. We stayed there a few days, and you would have laughed
to have seen my amazement at the valet of the inn assisting
the _femme de chambre_ in the making of our beds. The _beds_
are the best I ever slept upon; but the valet’s kind offices I
could always, I think, dispense with, good heavens! Well, we
returned to Calais, where I would have stayed a few months,
and have employed myself in acquiring a few French phrases
with the dear children, if Mrs. Temple would have taken me
in; but she said she had not room to accommodate me, and I
unwillingly gave up the point. In a day or two we set sail,
after seeing the civic oath administered on the fourteenth.
It was a fine thing even at Calais. I was extremely delighted
and affected, not, indeed, at the _sensible objects_, though a
great multitude is often a grand thing, but the idea of so many
millions throughout that great nation, with one consent, at one
moment (as it were by Divine Inspiration), breaking their bonds
asunder, filled one with sympathetic exultation, good-will,
and tenderness. I rejoiced with them from my heart, and most
sincerely hope they will not abuse the glorious freedom they
have obtained. We were nearly twenty hours on the sea on our
return, and arrived at Dover fatigued and sick to death. Dr.
Wynn was obliged to make the best of his way to London on
account of a sermon he was engaged to preach, and took his
charming sister with him. _We_ made haste here, and it is the
most agreeable sea-place, excepting those on the Devonshire
coast, I ever saw. Perhaps _agreeable_ is a bad word, for the
country is much more sublime than beautiful. We have tremendous
cliffs overhanging and frowning on the foaming sea, which is
very often so saucy and tempestuous as to _deserve_ frowning
on; from whence, when the weather is clear, we see the land
of France, and the vessels cross from the Downs to Calais.
Sometimes, while you _stand_ there, it is amazing with what
velocity they skim along. Here are little neat lodgings,
and good wholesome provisions. Perhaps they would not suit
a great _countess_, as our friend Mr. Mason has it, but a
little great actress is more easily accommodated. I’m afraid
it will grow larger, though, and then adieu to the comforts of
retirement. At present the place cannot contain above twenty
or thirty strangers, I should think. I have bathed four times,
and believe I shall persevere, for Sir Lucas Pepys says my
disease is entirely nervous. I believe I am better, but I get
on so slowly that I cannot speak as yet with much certainty.
I still suffer a good deal. Mr. Siddons leaves me here for a
fortnight while he goes to town upon business, and my spirits
are so bad that I live in terror of being left alone so long.
We have been here nearly three weeks, and I propose staying
here, if possible, till September, when I shall go to town to
my brother’s for some days, and then set off for Mr. Whalley’s
at Bath. I shall hope to see you at Nuneham, though, before you
leave it.
“Now, my dear Lady Harcourt, let me congratulate you upon
having almost got to the end of this interesting epistle and
_myself_, in the honour of your friendship, which has flattered
me into the comfort of believing that you will not be tired of
your prosing, but always very affectionate and faithful servant,
“S. SIDDONS.
“Pray offer my love, and our united compliments, to all.”
Michael Kelly gives an account of the landlady’s opinion of _La grande
actrice Anglaise_ at the hotel at St. Omer, where he stopped shortly
after Mrs. Siddons had been there. She considered her handsome, declared
she was trying to imitate French women, but fell very far short of them.
She was induced to return to Drury Lane about the end of 1790, and in
April we find Horace Walpole writing to tell Miss Berry that he had
supped with Kemble and Mrs. Siddons “t’other night at Miss Farren’s, at
the bow-window house in Green Street, Grosvenor Square.” He pronounces
the actress to be “leaner.” We can see the party: cynical, sneering
Walpole; beautiful Miss Farren, afterwards Countess of Derby, the
hostess; Mrs. Siddons, “august” and matronly; and solemn John, who had
just made a hit as Othello.
It was the last year of old Drury’s existence, and, for her brother’s
sake, she bore her part bravely, acting when called upon; but she soon
flagged, and could only act a few nights. Her reappearance was welcomed
with wild enthusiasm; she seemed as popular as ever. One night over four
hundred pounds was paid by the public to see her in Mrs. Beverley.
About 1792 or 3 she seems to have taken a house at Nuneham, near the
Harcourts—the Rectory, we presume, for we find her writing to Lord
Harcourt, devising little comforts for their summer residence at Nuneham,
thanking him for his “neighbourly” attention; and one or two letters she
writes to John Taylor are dated Nuneham Rectory. One is on the subject of
a Life of herself which he wished to undertake; the other refers to her
modelling, and an accident which happened to her husband and children.
“I am in no danger of being too much occupied by my ‘favorite clay,’
for it is not arriv’d—how provoking and vexatious! particularly as I
am dying to attempt a Bust of my sweet little George, and his Holidays
will be over, I fear, before I am able to finish it. Apropos to George,
the dear little Soul has escapd being dangerously hurt, if not kill’d
(my blood runs cold at the thought), by almost a miracle. Mr. Siddons
and Maria have not been so fortunate, they are both cripples at present
with each a wounded Leg, but I hope they are in a fair way to get better.
The accident (so these things are called, but not by _me_; I know
you’ll deride my _Superstition_, but this kind of Superstition has not
unfrequently afforded me great aid and consolation, and I hate to discard
an old friend because she happens to be a little out of Fashion, so Laugh
on, I dont care) happen’d from their being forcd to jump out of a little
Market Cart which Mr. Siddons had orderd to indulge the children in a
drive. Thank God I did not see it and that they have escapd so well!!!
This is the Sweetest Situation in England, I believe. I wish you would
come and see it. If I had a Bed to offer you I should be more pressing,
but I could get you one at the Inn in the Village, if you should be
disposd to go to those fine doings at Oxford, where all the world will
be, except such Stupid Souls as myself. Mr. Combe is at Lord Harcourt’s;
I understand he is writing a History of the Thames, and his Lordships
House is the present Seat of his observations. I have not the pleasure to
know him, but am to Dine with him at Lord H⸺’s to-morrow. [This is the
Combe of Wolverhampton memory, whom Mrs. Kemble had refused as instructor
for her daughter. The stately “I have not the pleasure to know him” is
so like Mrs. Siddons.] Give my kind love to Betsey when you See her, and
I earnestly entreat you (if it be not too much vanity to Suppose you wᵈ
_wish_ to preserve them a moment beyond reading them) that you will burn
all my Letters; tell me Seriously you will do so! for there is nothing
I dread like having all one’s nonsense appear in print by some untoward
accident—not accident neither, but wicked or _interested design_, pray do
me the favʳ to ask at our House why my precious Clay has not been Sent,
and tell me Something about it when you write again. Adieu.”
CHAPTER XI.
SHERIDAN.
The apparition of Sheridan, meteor-like, in the laborious, active,
well-regulated lives of Mrs. Siddons and her brother, and the history of
his professional intercourse with them, is one of the greatest proofs
of the extraordinary glamour exercised by the specious Irishman on all
who came under his personal influence. After Garrick’s retirement from
the management of Drury Lane, the overwhelming success of the _School
for Scandal_, and the engagement of Mrs. Siddons, staved off financial
difficulties for a time; but no amount of receipts were sufficient to
withstand Sheridan’s reckless private expenditure and unbusiness-like
habits. The brilliant Brinsley did not recognise that other qualities
besides the power to write a good play, or make a great speech, were
necessary for the management of such a concern as Garrick’s Drury
Lane. The truth, however, was borne home to him by the utter chaos
that ultimately ensued: actors unpaid, and the treasury repeatedly
emptied by the proprietor himself before the money had been diverted
into its legitimate channels. Yet the receipts at the doors amounted
to nearly sixty thousand pounds a year. Things would have gone better
could he have been persuaded entirely to abstain from management, but
he persistently interfered with his subordinates. When a dramatist was
employed in reading his tragedy to the performers, Brinsley would saunter
in, yawning, at the fifth act, with no other apology than, having sat up
late two nights running, he was unable to appear in time; or he would
arrive drunk, go into the green-room, ask the name of a well-known actor
who was on the stage, and bid them never to allow him to play again. He
was once told, with some spirit, by one of the company, that he rarely
came there, and then never but to find fault.
Things grew worse and worse. It was piteous to hear the complaints of
the actors and staff of the theatre, who found it impossible to obtain
payment of their weekly salaries. The shifts and devices which he
employed to escape from their importunity was a constant subject of jest.
At last he was obliged to let the reins of management fall from his
incapable hands. They were taken up by King; but he in turn soon found
the position intolerable, and the stern and businesslike Kemble was
called in to restore discipline among unruly players whose salaries were
overdue, and amongst upholsterers and decorators who had never been paid
for the pieces they had mounted.
It required the courage and determination of a Kemble to undertake the
clearing out of such an Augean stable. “The public approbation of my
humble endeavours in the discharge of my duties will be the constant
object of my ambition,” he said, in his modest declaration on the
acceptance of the appointment; “and as far as diligence and assiduity
are claims to merit, I trust I shall not be found deficient.” Nor was he
found deficient. Bringing extraordinary determination to the task, he
soon got the theatre into order, with an efficient working company, of
which he and his sister, Mrs. Siddons, were the ruling spirits.
Sheridan had not even the good sense in this critical juncture in his
affairs to propitiate the great actress on whom the fortunes of the
house rested. There is something comic, indeed, in his relations with
the Tragedy Queen. They rather remind us of an incorrigible schoolboy
continually offending those in authority, and yet confident in their
affection and his own powers of persuasion to obtain indulgence and
forgiveness.
Once Mrs. Siddons had declared that she would not act until her salary
was paid, she resisted inflexibly the earnest appeals of her colleagues
and the commands of the manager, and was quietly sewing at home after
the curtain had risen for the piece in which she was expected to
perform. Sheridan appeared, like the magician in a pantomime, courteous,
irresistible; she yielded helplessly, “and suffered herself to be driven
to the theatre like a lamb.”
One night, Mr. Rogers tells us, having heard the story from her own lips,
when she was about to drive away from the theatre, Mr. Sheridan jumped
into the carriage. “Mr. Sheridan,” said the dignified Muse of Tragedy,
“_I trust that you will behave with propriety_; if not, I shall have to
call the footman to show you out of the carriage.” She owned that he
_did_ behave himself. But as soon as the carriage stopped, he leaped out,
and hurried away, as though wishing not to be seen with her. “Provoking
wretch!” she said, with an indulgent smile, which even she, encased in
all her panoply of prudish decorum, could not suppress.
At last even her patience was worn out, and at the close of her brother’s
first year of management she retired from the theatre. Sheridan dared
to boast they could do without her. A scheme was then hatching in
the ever-fertile Irish brain of the proprietor that was destined to
revolutionise the dramatic world of London. He discovered that the taste
of the day, and the requirements of his own pocket, demanded a larger and
more luxurious building than Old Drury; the walls that had re-echoed to
the grand tones of Betterton, the musical love-making of Barry, and the
passionate declamation of Garrick, was to be pulled down to satisfy the
greed and the ambition of Sheridan. Immediate proposals for debentures
amounting to £160,000 were issued, and, wonderful to relate, taken up
in a very short time. But, alas! to cover the interest of this enormous
sum, it was determined to build a house nearly double the size. Neither
Mrs. Siddons nor her brother seems to have considered the disastrous
consequence this would exercise on their art. The perfect acoustics and
compact stage of the old house were to be swept away to give place to an
immense dome-shaped space, and an expanse requiring undignified energy of
motion to traverse. The immediate consequence was evident; recourse had
to be taken to stage artifice to manage the entrance and the exit, while
gesture had to be more violent, expression more exaggerated, and voice
unduly raised to produce an effect.
In Garrick’s Drury, also, the front row of boxes was open like a gallery,
and everyone who occupied them was obliged to appear in full dress.
The row of boxes above these again were given up to the _bourgeoisie_,
while the lattices at the top were the portion destined to those whose
reputation was doubtful, and who by their unseemly behaviour might
disturb the decorum of the audience. Garrick was master of his art, and
knew how to value the criticism and sympathy of the crowd. Under his
management the two-shilling gallery was brought down to a level with
the second row of boxes. By that arrangement a player had the mass of
the audience under his immediate control; and that mass, uninfluenced
by fashion or prejudice, unerring in its judgment, is the dread of an
inferior actor, the delight of a great one.
While the theatre was still in process of erection, the company performed
at the Opera House in the Haymarket, or, as it was called, the King’s
Theatre. The new house was opened on April 21st, 1794, with _Macbeth_.
“I am told,” Mrs. Siddons writes to Lady Harcourt, “that the banquet is
a thing to go and see of itself. The scenes and dresses all new, and as
superb and characteristic as it is possible to make them. You cannot
conceive what I feel at the prospect of playing there. I daresay I shall
be so nervous as scarcely to be able to make myself heard in the first
scene.”
This banquetting scene in _Macbeth_ was made the subject of sarcastic
hints in the daily press on the old score of her avarice:—
“The soul of Mrs. Siddons (Mrs. Siddons whose dinners and suppers are
proverbially numerous) expanded on this occasion. She speaks her joy on
seeing so many guests with an earnestness little short of rapture. Her
address appeared so like reality, that all her hearers about her seized
the wooden fowls”....
The great actress soon felt a great mistake had been made. “I am glad
to see you at Drury Lane,” she said to a colleague, “but you are come
to act in a wilderness of a place, and, God knows, if I had not made my
reputation in a small theatre, I never should have done it.”
It was indeed “a wilderness of a place.” The mere opening for the curtain
was forty-three feet wide, and thirty-eight feet high, or nearly seven
times the height of the performers. Miss Mellon laughingly said she
“felt a mere shrimp” when acting in it. The result might be foreseen.
Had not the great actress indeed made her reputation on a small theatre,
never would she have made it here. We, who only know of Mrs. Siddons by
immediate tradition, are inclined to think that she ranted, and destroyed
her effects by exaggeration of gesture and expression. There is little
doubt we are justified in so thinking, and that the increased size of the
theatre and audience were to blame.
What a world of significance lies also in her words: “The banquet is
a thing to go and see of itself.” A new era had begun; the stage, and
everything belonging to it, ought to be taken out of the domain of
every-day life, and, by appealing to the intellectual comprehension
of the audience, raise them to an understanding of the grandeur of
conception and passion of a Shakespeare. Garrick acted Othello in a
cocked hat and scarlet uniform, and yet impressed his audience with a
pathetic and intense reality. Mrs. Siddons acted Lady Macbeth in black
velvet and point lace, and yet imparted a majesty and grace to the
impersonation never before seen on the English stage. Now we see the
Mephistopheles, Sheridan, inducing her to barter away her reputation and
ideal of great art for the substantial benefits of increased gains and
larger audiences.
A different class of entertainment now invaded the classic boards. We can
see _Timour the Tartar_, _Tekeli, or the Siege of Montgatz_, _The Miller
and His Men_, _Pizarro_, and a host of spectacular pieces, mounted to
draw numerous and uncritical audiences. This first season was a fatiguing
and anxious one for the great actress, more especially also that she was
in delicate health. Her daughter Cecilia was born this year, 1794, on
25th July. Her husband wrote to a friend:—
I have the pleasure to tell you your little god-daughter (for
such she is, myself being your proxy a few days back) is very
well, and as fine a girl as if her father was not more than
one-and-twenty. She is named after Mrs. Piozzi’s youngest
daughter, Cecilia; her sponsors are yourself and Mr. Greatheed,
Mrs. Piozzi and Lady Percival (_ci devant_ Miss B. Wynn); and,
what is better, the mother is well, too, and is just going to
the theatre to perform Mrs. Beverley for the benefit of her
brother’s wife, Mrs. Stephen Kemble.
She never all through life gave herself the rest requisite to
re-establish her health; always before the public, what wonder that
languor and weakness attacked her physically, and despondency and
dissatisfaction mentally.
“My whole family are gone to Margate,” she wrote in September, “whither
I am going also, and nothing would make it tolerable to me, but that my
husband and daughters are delighted with the prospect before them. I wish
they could go and enjoy themselves there, and leave me the comfort and
pleasure of remaining in my own convenient house, and taking care of my
baby. But I am every day more and more convinced that half the world
live for themselves, and the other half for the comfort of the former.
At least this I am sure of, that I have had no will of my own since I
remember; and, indeed, to be just, I fancy I should have little delight
in such an existence.”
She told her friend Mr. Whalley, on the eve of setting out for Edinburgh
to play at her son Henry’s theatre:—“I intend, if it please God, to be at
home again for Passion week. I leave my sweet girl behind me, not daring
to take her so far north this inclement season, and could well wish that
the interests of the best of sons, and most amiable of men, did not so
imperiously call me out of this softer climate just now. But I shall
pack myself up as warmly as I can, trusting that while I run a little
risk, I shall do a great deal of good to my dear Harry, who tells me
all my friends are more eager to see me than ever. It is not impossible
that I may stop a night or two here before I go, which, as I have long
been engaged to act this season after Easter, and cannot in honour or
honesty be off, I think will not be impolitic, lest my enemies, if their
malignity be worth a thought, may think their impotent attempts have
frightened me away. They have done all their malignant treachery could
devise, and have they robbed me of one friend? No, God be praised! But,
on the contrary, have knit them all closer to me. Glad enough should I
be never to appear again, but, while the interests of those so dear and
near as those of son and brother are concerned, one must not let selfish
consideration stand in the way of Christian duties and natural affection.”
The public are inclined to think that the life of an artist spent
continually before the footlights is one eminently conducive to hardening
the sensibilities against calumny; but it is a curious fact that actors
are like children in their craving for applause and praise, and in their
fear of criticism and blame. Garrick wrote a year before his death to the
scoundrel who persecuted him, “Will Curtius take the word of the accused
for his innocence?” and Mrs. Siddons, through her husband, offered one
thousand pounds for the libeller to whom she refers in the following
letter:—
“One would think I had already furnished conjectures and lies sufficient
for public gossip; but now the people here begin again with me. They say
that I am mad, and that _that_ is the reason of my confinement. I should
laugh at this rumour were it not for the sake of my children, to whom
it may not be very advantageous to be supposed to inherit so dreadful a
malady; and this consideration, I am almost ashamed to own, has made me
seriously unhappy. However, I really believe I am in my sober senses,
and most heartily do I now wish myself with you at dear Streatham, where
I could, as usual, forget all the pains and torments of illness and the
world. But I fear I have now no chance for such happiness.”
“Kotzebue and German sausages are the order of the day,” Sheridan said
when he brought out the English adaptation of _The Stranger_. Mrs.
Haller, in Mrs. Siddons’s hands, became pathetic, almost grand; but to
us now-a-days, uninfluenced by the glamour of her presence, the sickly
sentiment and impossible situations of the play make it an untempting
meal for our practical and realistic mental digestions.
Its success was so great as to induce the author of the _School for
Scandal_—who had lost all power of original conception, yet was obliged
to fill his pockets—to adapt another play, _Pizarro_, also by Kotzebue.
Did we not know the history of the celebrated first night of his play,
on unimpeachable evidence, we should be inclined to look upon it as one
of those exaggerated tales that, related by one of the many gossips of
the time, had grown out of all possibility of credence. Sheridan was
up-stairs in the prompter’s room, stimulating his jaded brain by sips
of port, and writing out the last act of the play, while the earlier
parts were acting; every ten minutes he brought down as much of the
dialogue as he had done piecemeal into the green-room, abusing himself
and his negligence, and making a thousand winning and soothing apologies
for having kept the performers so long in such painful suspense. What,
under these circumstances, became of the thorough and elaborate study
declared by the Kembles to be necessary for the perfection of the
dramatic art, we know not. Rolla and Mrs. Siddons’s Elvira must have
been extemporaneous acting. Perhaps the performances gained in vivid
power and effect what they lost in finish from the nervous strain and
excitement of such a mental effort as they were called upon to make. It
is difficult to account for the success of the play unless the acting was
superlatively good. It is overlaid with bombast and claptrap, and, as
Pitt said, was but a second-rate re-echo of his speeches on the Hastings
trial. For no one but the “hapless genius” would the brother and sister
have thus thrown to the winds all their artistic traditions. We hear of
the inflexible John saying, when irritated past bearing: “I know him
thoroughly, all his paltry tricks and artifices”; yet immediately after
we find both him and the great actress submitting to all his whims and
eccentricities. There is an amusing story told by Boaden of a supper at
beautiful Mrs. Crouch’s, when Kemble arrived charged with his grievances,
and full of threats, expecting to meet Sheridan. Presently in came the
culprit, light and airy as usual. The great actor looked unutterable
things, occasionally emitting a humming sound like that of a bee, and
groaning inwardly in spirit. Some little time elapsed, when at last,
like a “pillar of state,” slowly uprose Kemble, and thus addressed the
proprietor:
“I am an eagle whose wings have been bound down by frosts and snows, but
now I shake my pinions and cleave into the genial air into which I am
born.”
After having thus offered his resignation, he solemnly resumed his
seat. Sheridan, however, undaunted, used all his arts of fascination to
mitigate his wrath, and at an early hour of the morning both went away in
perfect harmony.
Then we have Mrs. Siddons’s opinion of him:—
“Here I am,” she writes, “sitting close in a little dark room in a little
wretched inn, in a little poking village called Newport Pagnell. I am on
my way to Manchester, where I am to act for a fortnight, from whence I am
to be whirled to Liverpool, there to do the same. From thence I skim away
to York and Leeds; and then, when Drury Lane opens—who can tell? For it
depends upon Mr. Sheridan, who is uncertainty personified. I have got no
money from him yet, and all my last benefit, a very great one, was swept
into his treasury, nor have I seen a shilling of it. Mr. Siddons has
made an appointment to meet him to-day at Hammersley’s. As I came away
very early, I don’t know the result of the conference; but unless things
are settled to Mr. Siddons’s satisfaction, he is determined to put the
affair into his lawyer’s hands.”
The affair was never put into any lawyer’s hands; she allowed herself to
be mollified, and might well write of Sheridan in 1796:—
“Sheridan is certainly the greatest phenomenon that nature has produced
for centuries. Our theatre is going on, to the astonishment of everybody.
Very few of the actors are paid, and all are vowing to withdraw
themselves; yet still we go on. Sheridan is certainly omnipotent. I
can get no money from the theatre; my precious two thousand pounds are
swallowed up in that drowning gulf, from which no plea of right or
justice can save its victims.”
John Kemble remained manager of Drury Lane for some years, sometimes
withdrawing for a time and refusing to manage the affairs any longer,
and again wheedled back by Sheridan’s powers of persuasion. At last,
wearied out, both brother and sister finally withdrew from Drury Lane in
1802, and took shares with Harris in Covent Garden Theatre. Harris was
the direct opposite of Sheridan, punctual in his payments and honourable
in his dealings. Mrs. Inchbald arranged all the monetary portion of the
affair. The concern was valued at £138,000, of which Harris represented
one half; the remainder being divided among four proprietors, of whom
Lewis, the actor, was one. Lewis after a time became anxious to dispose
of his share, and Kemble purchased it for the sum of £23,000; a friend
of his, a Mr. Heathcote, advancing him a large amount to enable him to
do so. The Kemble family all joined him in this venture. The company
included Mrs. Siddons, Charles Kemble, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Siddons,
and Cooke, the well-known actor. As soon as Kemble had completed his
arrangements, he went abroad for some months, visiting Spain and France.
On his return a dinner was given by the managers of Covent Garden to
their Drury Lane rival, Sheridan, who made a sarcastic speech on the
friendship of fellows who had hated each other all their lives. John
Kemble then went abroad again, for a time, to recruit his strength after
the anxiety and worry of his years of management.
Mrs. Kemble, in a letter written to her husband during his absence,
describes a very smart party at the “Abercorn,” at which the Prince of
Wales, and the Devonshire, Melbourne, Castlereagh, and Westmoreland
families were present, and says significantly at the end: “Mrs. Sheridan
came in a very elegant chariot, four beautiful black horses and two
footmen. The Duchess had only one. Mrs. Sheridan had a fine shawl on,
that he, Sheridan, said he gave forty-five guineas for, a diamond
necklace, ear-rings, cross, cestus, and clasps to her shoulders, and
a double row of fine pearls round her neck.” This was shortly after
Mrs. Siddons’s last benefit, when the brilliant Brinsley had swept the
proceeds into his own pocket.
The very “ravages of fire,” however, which they “scouted” by the help
of “ample reservoirs” that were exhibited on the stage the night of the
inauguration, by a “lake of real water,” and a “cascade tumbling down,”
were the ravages that were destined to destroy the splendours of the
new building. The misfortune of fire that ruined Kemble was destined,
also, to ruin Sheridan, who had staked his all on this one enterprise.
Drury Lane was destroyed as Covent Garden was rising from its ashes. The
glare of the burning building lit up the Houses of Parliament during a
late sitting. One of the members suggested an adjournment of the House.
With a spice of the highly-flavoured bombast he had lately so frequently
offered his theatrical audiences, Sheridan opposed the idea:—“Whatever
may be the extent of the calamity to me personally, I hope it will not
interfere with the public business of the country,” he said; and quitting
the assembly, he betook himself to one of the coffee-houses in Covent
Garden, where he was found swallowing port by the tumblerful a few hours
later. One of the actors expressed his surprise and disgust at seeing him
there. “Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own
fireside?” was Sheridan’s ready answer.
CHAPTER XII.
HERMIONE.
It sends a pang through our heart as we hear Mrs. Siddons say in later
life, with a sigh, to Rogers the poet: “After I became famous, none of my
sisters loved me so well.” What a price to pay for fame! “Conversation”
Sharp was frequently consulted by her upon private affairs. She wept
to him over the ingratitude her sisters showed her. Money was lent and
never repaid; the prestige of her name was borrowed to obtain theatrical
engagements, but she never was thanked; every obligation seemed only to
cause a feeling of bitterness. Perhaps the fault lay a little on her
side as well as on theirs. Tact and graciousness were not her strong
points. She was absent-minded, all her attention being concentrated on
the study and comprehension of her profession, which gave her a proud,
self-contained manner, alienating unconsciously those who surrounded her
and were dependent on her. Her children adored her, but her brothers
and sisters stood, to a certain extent, in awe of her. All of them,
stimulated by the examples of the two eldest, went on the stage, but
none possessed her genius, or John Kemble’s talent and industry. The
affectionate comradeship in art that existed between Mrs. Siddons and
John Kemble is one of the pleasantest features in both their lives.
He was educated, as we have seen, principally at the Roman Catholic
College at Douay, where he became remarkable for his elocution, every
now and then astonishing his masters and schoolfellows by delivering
speeches in scholastic Latin, and learning with the greatest facility
books of Homer and odes of Horace. We are told that his noble cast of
countenance, his deep melodious voice, and the dignity of his delivery,
impressed his comrades considerably; especially in the scene between
Brutus and Cassius, which he got up for their benefit. It is a curious
proof of his want of facility that, although he was extremely fond of
the study of language, grammar being all his life his favourite _light
reading_, he never was able to master any language but his own. He read
Italian, Spanish, and French, but spoke none of them, in spite of his
education in France and his long residence later at Lausanne. He had no
ear, and it never could have been an easy task to him to learn the rhythm
of Shakespeare. We know the story of old Shaw, conductor of the Covent
Garden orchestra, who vainly endeavoured to teach him the song in the
piece of _Richard Cœur de Lion_, “O Richard—O mon roi!” “Mr. Kemble, Mr.
Kemble, you are murdering the time, Sir!” cried the exasperated musician;
on which Kemble made one of the few jokes ever perpetrated by him: “Very
well, Sir, and you are for ever beating it.”
After six years’ residence at Douay he made up his mind that he was not
suited to the church, and left for England, determined to follow his
father’s profession. He landed at Bristol in that very December, 1775,
that his sister made her unfortunate “first appearance” before the London
public. Dreading his parents’ wrath, he made his way to Wolverhampton,
and there joined a company under the direction of a Mr. Crump and a Mr.
Chamberlain. After going through all the humiliations and privations of
a penniless actor, but also after enjoying the valuable hours of study
and stern discipline of a stroller’s life, we find the future Hamlet,
by the aid of his sister, Mrs. Siddons, enabled to get his foot on
the first round of the ladder. Mr. Younger, manager of the Liverpool
Theatre, gave him an engagement in 1778. We find him afterwards playing
at Wakefield with Tate Wilkinson’s York company, and actually permitted
to act Macbeth at Hull. By the aid of quiet industry and determination he
was working his way to the goal he had in view. He perpetrated a tragedy,
_Belisarius_, that was given on the same occasion at Hull, wrote poetry
which he burnt, gave lectures on oratory, and, in fact, passed through
the curriculum necessary to the full completion of his powers.
On the 30th September 1783, John Kemble first appeared in London, at
Drury Lane, as Hamlet. The fiery criticisms launched against this
performance by the press, show that at least it was distinguished by
originality. Whatever its faults might be, they were unanimous in
declaring his reading to be scholarly and refined. He is said, in
studying the part of Hamlet, to have written it out no less than forty
times. Some time elapsed before he appeared in the same piece as his
sister; other actors had possession of the parts, and he had to bide his
time. That patient waiting on opportunity, however, was one of the great
Kemble gifts; there was no impatience, no complaining, but a steady,
dogged power of perseverance, with the profound conviction of their own
capabilities to make use of fortune when it came. At last he appeared as
Stukeley to his sister’s Mrs. Beverley, in _The Gamester_. Finely as the
part was played, the sister, not the brother, carried away the honours of
the performance.
After this, on several benefit nights they were able to appear together,
Kemble replacing Smith in the character of Macbeth to Mrs. Siddons’s Lady
Macbeth, and both of them acting later in _Othello_, he as the Moor, she
as Desdemona. This was not a distinct success. At last, however, his
power found its legitimate development. On the occasion of his sister’s
benefit in January 1788, he acted Lear to her Cordelia. The town was
electrified, and declared him equal to Garrick. Boaden tells us “that he
never played it so grandly or so touchingly as on that night.”
His really great gift was his large and cultivated understanding, that
enabled him to grasp the spirit of the author he sought to interpret,
giving a new emphasis and truth to scenes that were hackneyed and stale
by a conventional method of rendering. This was particularly the case
with Shakespeare, whose beauties he and his sister first revealed to
their generation. The difference, however, between them was that he
possessed superlative talent, she possessed genius. In speaking to
Reynolds the dramatist, she defined completely the difference between
them, “My brother John, in his most impetuous bursts, is always careful
to avoid any discomposure of his dress or deportment, but in the
whirlwind of passion I lose all thoughts of such matters.”
He is said to have nourished a tender affection for the
“Muse”—beautiful, clever, fascinating, stuttering Mrs. Inchbald.
When her husband died, it was universally said he would marry her.
Fanny Kemble tells an incident that occurred long after Kemble was
married. Mrs. Inchbald and Miss Mellon were sitting by the fire-place
in the green-room, waiting to be called upon the stage. The two were
laughingly discussing their male friends and acquaintances from the
matrimonial point of view. John Kemble, who was standing near, at length
jestingly said to Mrs. Inchbald, who had been comically energetic in her
declarations of whom she could or would or never could or would have
married, “Well, Mrs. Inchbald, would you have had me?” “Dear heart,” said
the stammering beauty, turning her sweet sunny face up to him, “I’d have
j-j-j-jumped at you!”
The lady he did eventually marry was no beauty and no “Muse,” but, much
to the indignation of Mrs. Siddons, as people said at the time, a very
ordinary young woman, daughter of a Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins, prompter and
actress at Drury Lane. Priscilla, however, made him a good wife, and he
never had cause to regret his choice.
The next brother to John, Stephen, although almost born on the stage, had
none of the requisites either of talent or facility to make him a good
actor. Only a few days before John’s first appearance in London, Stephen
appeared before the public as Othello. It was said that the manager had
made a mistake, and had engaged the “big” instead of the “great” Mr.
Kemble. Stephen’s great boast all his life was that he was the only actor
who could play Falstaff “without stuffing.” His qualifications were those
of a boon companion rather than of an actor. He very soon quitted the
London stage and became manager of a provincial theatre.
Frances, the great actress’s second sister, inherited a considerable
portion of the family beauty, but little dramatic power, and what she had
was rendered inoperative by her unconquerable shyness. Mrs. Siddons first
brought her out at Bath. The papers vented their spleen against the elder
sister on the younger. It was natural, they said, that she should wish to
bring her forward, but they hoped she had learned, by the utter failure
of her attempt, not to “cram incapable actresses down the throats of the
public.” One of the theatrical critics, Steevens, fell in love with her;
but his proposals being rejected, he became her bitterest enemy.
Mrs. Siddons writes to tell Dr. Whalley of this love affair:—“My sister
Frances is not married, and, I believe, there is very little reason to
suppose she will be soon. In point of circumstances, I believe, the
gentleman you mention would be a desirable husband; but I hear so much of
his ill-temper, and know so much of his caprice, that, though my sister,
I believe, likes him, I cannot wish her gentle spirit linked with his.”
Mrs. Siddons had judged her sister’s suitor exactly. The engagement
was soon broken off, and the girl married Mr. Twiss, another dramatic
critic, whom Fanny Kemble, in her _Records of a Girlhood_, describes
as a grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman and profound
scholar, who, it was said, at one time nourished a hopeless passion for
Mrs. Siddons. The Twisses later set up a genteel seminary at Bath, where
fashionable young ladies were sent “to be bettered.” Mrs. Twiss died in
October 1822, and Mr. Twiss in 1827. Mrs. Siddons ever kept up the most
affectionate intercourse with them, and their son Horace Twiss was her
favourite nephew.
Her next sister, Elizabeth, though apprenticed to a mantua-maker, was
soon bitten with the dramatic enthusiasm of the family. She obtained an
engagement through the influence of her famous sister, but made no way in
London; and after her marriage with Mr. Whitelock, one of the managers
of the Chester company, in 1785, she went with him to America, where she
seems to have had some success.
Mrs. Whitelock, we are told, was a taller and fairer woman than Mrs.
Siddons. When she returned to England years later, she wore an auburn
wig, which, like the tall cap that surmounted it, was always on one side.
She was a simple-hearted, sweet-tempered woman, but very imperfectly
educated. Her Kemble name, face, figure, and voice helped her in the
United States, but her own qualifications were but meagre. Nothing could
be droller, we are told, than to see her with Mrs. Siddons, of whom she
looked like a clumsy, badly-finished imitation. Her vehement gestures
and violent objurgations contrasted comically with her sister’s majestic
stillness of manner; and when occasionally Mrs. Siddons would interrupt
her with “Elizabeth, your wig is on one side,” and the other replied,
“Oh, is it?” and, giving the offending head-gear a shove, put it quite
as crooked in the other direction, and proceeded with her discourse,
Melpomene herself used to have recourse to her snuff-box to hide the
dawning smile on her face.
Another sister, Jane, appeared in Lady Randolph at Newcastle when
she was nineteen. She had all the Kemble faults in acting carried to
excess. She was, besides, short and fat; and when a character in the
play, describing her death, said, “She ran, she flew, like lightning
up the hill,” the audience roared with laughter. Shortly after this
discouraging attempt she married a Mr. Mason, of Edinburgh, and retired
from the profession. She died in 1834, leaving a husband, five sons,
and a daughter, who almost all went on the stage. With one unfortunate
exception, the Kemble family were remarkable for their decorous,
well-regulated lives. Although all the brothers married actresses, their
children were admirably brought up, and their households models of
propriety. The unfortunate exception we mentioned was Ann Curtis, the
fourth sister. To a woman of Mrs. Siddons’s proud, sensitive temper, the
vagaries of this wretched woman must have been painful beyond expression.
She was said to be lame, which prevented her going on the stage. In
1783, the year of her great triumph in London, the young actress had the
pleasure of reading in all the papers the following advertisement. Under
the guise of charity it is easy to see the motive that prompted it, and
shows the envy and malignity that pursued her during her career.
DONATIONS IN FAVOUR OF MRS. CURTIS, YOUNGEST SISTER OF MRS.
SIDDONS.
A _private_ individual, whose humanity is far more extensive
than her means, having taken the case of the unfortunate MRS.
CURTIS into consideration, pitying her youth, respecting
her talents for the stage, which, unhappily, misfortune has
rendered useless, and desirous to restore a useful member to
Society, earnestly entreats the interference of a generous
public in her behalf, that she may be enabled by the efforts
of humanity to procure such necessaries as may be requisite to
relieve her immediate distress, and for her getting her bread
by needlework, artificial flowers, &c., in which she is well
skilled, and in which she will be happy to be well employed.
Mrs. Curtis is the youngest sister of _Messrs. Kemble_ and
_Mrs. Siddons_, whom she has repeatedly solicited for relief,
which they have flatly refused her; it therefore becomes
necessary to solicit, in her behalf, the benevolent generosity
of that public who have so liberally supported _them_.
Deny not to Affliction Pity’s tear,
For Virtue’s fairest when she aids Distress!
Mrs. Curtis’s _Search After Happiness_.
Donations will be thankfully received at Mr. Ayre’s, Printer of
the Sunday _London Gazette_ and _Weekly Monitor_, &c., No. 5
Bridges Street, opposite Drury Lane Theatre; and at No. 21 King
Street, Covent Garden.
All efforts to reclaim her being unavailing, she gradually descended
lower and lower in the social scale. Rumours were circulated of her
having attempted to poison herself, and again her brother and sister were
accused of undue harshness; but almost everything connected with the case
points to their having done all they could, though she proved perfectly
irreclaimable.
During the latter part of her life she was allowed a small annuity of
twenty pounds a year, which was continued to her in Mrs. Siddons’s will.
She lived until 1838.
Charles, who approached more nearly in intellectual powers to his
celebrated sister and brother than any of the others, was nearly twenty
years younger than Mrs. Siddons. When thirteen years of age, he was
sent by John Kemble to Douay College, where he remained three years. He
appeared at Drury Lane in 1794. He was a gentlemanly, refined actor;
there were certain characters which he made entirely his own. Charles
married, in 1806, an actress of the name of De Camp. Like Mrs. Garrick,
she had been a ballet-dancer, and had come over from Vienna, brought by
Garrick with the rest of the troupe. In consequence of a riot directed
against the employment of foreigners, the greater part of the troupe was
obliged to return to Vienna. Miss De Camp, however, remained, learnt
English, and, by dint of perseverance, achieved a good position at Drury
Lane. They had three children—Adelaide, who sang professionally, but soon
left the stage to marry Mr. Sartoris; Fanny, authoress of the _Record of
a Girlhood_, who became Mrs. Butler; and a son, John Mitchell Kemble.
Charles Kemble suffered much from deafness during the latter years of his
life, and was entirely ruined by his gift of the share in Covent Garden
valued at £50,000. Mrs. Siddons reappeared for his benefit on the 9th
June 1819.
Mrs. Siddons had five children who lived to grow up—Henry, who was
born at Wolverhampton on the 4th October 1774; Sarah Martha, born at
Gloucester, November 5th, 1775; Maria, born at Bath, July 1st, 1779;
George, born in London, December 27th, 1785; and Cecilia, born July 25th,
1794. She sent her son Henry to France to study under Le Kain. He went on
the stage, but had none of the qualifications of a good actor.
Mrs. Siddons, with her usual sensible acceptance of things as they were,
tried to make the best of his powers. On the occasion of his first
appearance, she writes to Mrs. Inchbald from Bannister’s, where she was
stopping with her friend Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“I received your kind letter, and thank you very much for the interest
you have taken in my dear Harry’s success. It gives me great pleasure
to find that Mr. Harris appreciates his talents, which I think highly
of, and which, I believe, will grow to great perfection by fostering, on
the one hand, and care and industry on the other. I have little doubt
of Mr. Harris’s liberality, and none of the laudable ambition of my son
to obtain it. It is so long since I have felt anything like joy, that
it appears like a dream to me, and I believe I shall not be able quite
to convince myself that this is real till I am present ‘to attend the
triumph and partake the gale.’ I am all anxiety and impatience to hear
the effect of Hamlet. It is a tremendous undertaking for so young a
creature, and where so perfect a model has been so long contemplated. I
was frightened when I yesterday received information of it. Oh! I hope to
God he will get well through it. Adieu, dear Muse.”
Henry Siddons soon quitted the stage, married a Miss Murray, daughter
of an actor, and herself an actress, and in 1808 became manager of the
Edinburgh Theatre.
The death of her daughter Maria was the first serious grief Mrs. Siddons
had known. We have touched on Lawrence the painter’s proposal to her,
and the transference of his affection, after a short engagement, to her
sister Sarah. Mrs. Siddons did everything she could to soften the blow
to the poor deserted girl. We find her writing in desperation to her old
friend Tate Wilkinson:—
“My plans for the summer are so arranged that I have no
chance of the pleasure of seeing you. The illness of my
second daughter has deranged all schemes of pleasure as well
as profit. I thank God she is better; but the nature of her
constitution is such that it will be long ere we can reasonably
banish the fear of an approaching consumption. It is dreadful
to see an innocent, lovely young creature daily sinking under
the languor of illness, which may terminate in death at last,
in spite of the most vigilant tenderness. A parent’s misery
under this distress you can more easily imagine than I can
describe; but if you are the man I take you for, you will not
refuse me a favour. It would, _indeed_, be a great comfort to
us all, if you would allow our dear Patty to come to us on our
return to town in the autumn, to stay with us a few months.
I am sure it would do my poor Maria so much good, for the
physician tells me she will require the same confinement and
the same care the next winter; and let it not offend the pride
of my good friend when I beg it to be understood that I wish
to defray the expense of her journey. Do, dear soul, grant my
request. Give my kind compliments to your family, my love to my
own dear Patty, and accept yourself the best and most cordial
wishes of
“S. SIDDONS.”
From this time until Mrs. Siddons’s death, Patty Wilkinson never left her
house, and remained ever the intimate and beloved friend of her and her
daughters.
Maria was taken to Clifton at the doctor’s suggestion, while Mrs. Siddons
went a provincial tour to make money enough to meet the heavy demands
upon her purse. At last even the poor mother saw all efforts were
unavailing, and when, on the 6th October 1798, the blow at last came, she
met it with resignation and courage. To Mrs. Fitzhugh she wrote:—
“Although my mind is not yet sufficiently tranquillised to talk much,
yet the conviction of your undeviating affection impels me to quiet your
anxiety so far as to tell you that I am tolerably well. This sad event
I have been long prepared for, and bow with humble resignation to the
decree of that merciful God who has taken to Himself the dear angel I
must ever tenderly lament. I dare not trust myself further. Oh! that
you were here, that I might talk to you of her death-bed—in dignity of
mind and pious resignation far surpassing the imagination of Rousseau
and Richardson in their Heloïse and Clarissa Harlowe; for hers was, I
believe, from the immediate inspiration of the Divinity.”
Troubles now began to fall thick and heavy. Mr. Siddons, actuated by
a morbid jealousy of his wife’s energy and success, entered into a
connection with Sadler’s Wells Theatre without consulting her, or even
taking her into his confidence. A considerable amount of her savings
were sacrificed to save him from his ill-advised venture. In spite of
ill-health and lassitude, however, we find her unmurmuringly taking up
her burden to make good the loss. On the 14th of July 1801 she writes
again to Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“In about a fortnight I expect to commence my journey to Bath. Mr.
Siddons is there, for he finds no relief from his rheumatism elsewhere.
His accounts of himself are less favourable than those of anyone who
writes to me about him; but I hope and trust that we shall find him
better than he himself thinks; for I know by sad experience with what
difficulty a mind, weakened by long and uninterrupted suffering, admits
hope, much less assurance. I shall be here till next Saturday, and
after that time at Lancaster till Tuesday, the 28th; thence I shall
go immediately to Bath, where I shall have about a month’s quiet, and
then begin to play at Bristol for a few nights. ‘Such resting finds the
sole of unblest feet!’ _When_ we shall come to London is uncertain,
for nothing is settled by Mr. Sheridan, and I think it not impossible
that _my_ winter may be spent in Dublin; for I must go on _making_ to
secure the few comforts that I have been able to attain for myself and
my family. It is providential for us all that I can do so much; but I
hope it is not wrong to say that I am tired, and should be glad to be at
rest indeed. I hope yet to see the day when I can be quiet. My mouth is
not yet well [she had had an attack of erysipelas, the disease that was
ultimately to kill her], though somewhat less exquisitely painful. I have
become a frightful object with it for some time, and, I believe, this
complaint has robbed me of those poor remains of beauty once admired—at
least, which, in your partial eyes, I once possessed.”
She did not go to Dublin, but returned early in the following year to
Drury Lane, where she performed above forty times.
On the 25th March 1802 she performed for the first time Hermione in the
_Winter’s Tale_. The enacting of this part is to be counted amongst her
great successes. It was more suitable to her age and appearance than
others that she undertook in later life. On the second or third night she
had a narrow escape of being burned to death. We can give the incident as
related in a letter to Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“London, April 1802.
“... Except for a day or two, the weather has been very
favourable to me hitherto. I trust it may continue so, for the
_Winter’s Tale_ promises to be very attractive; and, whilst
it continues so, I am bound in honour and conscience to put
my shoulder to the wheel, for it has been attended with great
expense to the managers, and, if I can keep warm, I trust I
shall continue tolerably well. As to my plans, they are, as
usual, all uncertain, and I am precisely in the situation of
poor Lady Percy, to whom Hotspur comically says: ‘I trust
thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know.’ This must
continue to be the case, in a great measure, whilst I continue
to be the servant of the public, for whom (and let it not be
thought vain) I can never sufficiently exert myself. I really
think they receive me every night with greater and greater
testimonies of approbation. I know it will give you pleasure
to hear this, my dear Friend, and you will not suspect me of
deceiving myself in this particular. The other night had very
nearly terminated _all_ my exertion, for whilst I was standing
for the statue in the _Winter’s Tale_, my drapery flew over the
lamps that were placed behind the pedestal. It caught fire, and
had it not been for one of the scene-men, who most humanely
crept on his knees and extinguished it without my knowing
anything of the matter, I might have been burnt to death, or,
at all events, I should have been frightened out of my senses.
Surrounded as I was with muslin, the flame would have run
like wildfire. The bottom of the train was entirely burned.
But for the man’s promptitude, it would seem as if my fate
would have been inevitable. I have well rewarded the good man,
and I regard my deliverance as a most gracious interposition
of Providence. There is a special providence in the fall of
a sparrow. Here I am safe and well, God be praised! and may
His goodness make me profit, as I ought, by the time that is
vouchsafed me.”
We later find her making every exertion to rescue the son of the man who
had saved her, from punishment for desertion.
“I have written myself almost blind for the last three days, worrying
everybody to get a poor young man, who otherwise bears a most excellent
character, saved from the disgrace and hideous torture of the lash, to
which he has exposed himself. I hope to God I shall succeed. He is the
son of the man—by me ever to be blest—who preserved me from being burned
to death in the _Winter’s Tale_. The business has cost me a great deal
of time, but if I attain my purpose I shall be richly paid. It is twelve
o’clock at night; I am tired very much. To-morrow is my last appearance.
In a few days I shall go to see my dear girl, Cecilia. How I long to see
the darling! Oh! how you would have enjoyed my _entrée_ in Constance last
night. I was received really as if it had been my first appearance in the
season. I have gone about to breakfasts and dinners for this unfortunate
young man, till I am quite worn out with them. You know how pleasure, as
it is called, fatigues.”
CHAPTER XIII.
SORROWS.
Though still suffering from enfeebled health, Mrs. Siddons again made up
her mind to visit Dublin in the spring of 1802. A strange depression,
partly the result of physical weakness, and partly the result of mental
anxiety, came over her courageous spirit, paralysing all energy, and
breaking down her usual calm composure. We find this woman, who to the
outside public presented a cold and hard exterior, weeping hysterically
on taking leave of her friends. She told Mr. Greatheed she felt that
before they met again a great affliction would have fallen on them both.
They never did meet till after the death of his son Bertie and her
daughter Sarah. To Mrs. Piozzi she wrote:—
“May 1802.
“Farewell, my beloved friend—a long, long farewell! Oh, such a
day as this has been! To leave all that is dear to me. I have
been surrounded by my family, and my eyes have dwelt with a
foreboding tenderness, too painful, on the venerable face of
my dear father, that tells me I shall look on it no more. I
commit my children to your friendly protection, with a full and
perfect reliance on the goodness you have always manifested
towards me.
“Your ever faithful and affectionate
“S. SIDDONS.”
The mother’s heart could have hardly had a foreboding of the second
affliction about to fall on her then. A few weeks after she had taken her
departure from Marlborough Street, Sally describes to Patty Wilkinson,
who had accompanied Mrs. Siddons, picnics and parties she and her friend
Dorothy Place had attended, much to their amusement and delight. The girl
gives an account also of her brother Henry’s marriage with Miss Murray,
who, she says, “looked very beautiful in a white chip hat, with a lace
cap under it, her long dark pelisse tied together with purple bows ready
for travelling,” and mentions how she and Dorothy “laughed uproariously”
at a play they had “attended.” Yet death had already laid his hand on
this bright young life.
Mrs. Siddons proceeded on her melancholy journey, stopping to pay a
visit to Shakespeare’s house at Stratford, and thence to North Wales,
where, at Conway Castle and Penman Mawr, they did the tourist business
of gazing at sunsets through ruined windows, and listening to Welsh
harpers harping below. “In that romantic time and place,” Campbell tells
us in his ambiguous way, Mrs. Siddons “honoured the humblest poet of her
acquaintance by remembering him; and, let the reader blame or pardon my
egotism as he may think fit, I cannot help transcribing what the Diarist
adds: Mrs. Siddons said: ‘I wish that Campbell were here.’”
The bathos is complete when, the poet tells us, on Miss Wilkinson’s
authority, that while looking at a magnificent landscape of rocks and
water, a lady within hearing of them exclaimed in ecstasy: “This awful
scenery makes me feel as if I were only a worm, or a grain of dust, on
the face of the earth.” Mrs. Siddons turned round and said, “I feel very
differently!”
She spent two months acting successfully in Dublin; then she went to
Cork, and then to Belfast. On her return to Dublin she received the news
of the death of her father at the ripe age of eighty-two. Although not
unexpected, the severance of this life-long affection, coming, as it did,
at a time when other sorrows and anxieties weighed on her, was a trying
blow, and we find her writing to Dr. Whalley with a certain irritation
that betrays her state of mind, and also betrays her attitude towards her
husband at this time on money matters.
“I thank you for your kind condolence. My dear father died the death
of the righteous; may my last end be like his, without a groan. With
respect to my dear Mrs. Pennington, my heart is too much alive to her
unhappy situation, and my affection for her too lively, to have induced
the necessity of opening a wound which is of itself too apt to bleed.
Indeed, indeed, my dear Sir, there was no occasion to recall those sad
and tender scenes to soften my nature; but let it pass. You need not
be informed, I imagine, that such a sum as £80 is too considerable to
be immediately produced out of a woman’s quarterly allowance; but, as
I have not the least doubt of Mr. Siddons being ready and willing to
offer this testimony of regard and gratitude, I beg you will arrange the
business with him immediately. I will write to him this day, if I can
find a moment’s time. If you can devise any quicker mode of accomplishing
your amiable purpose, rely upon my paying the £80 within the next six
months. For God’s sake do not let it slip through. If I knew how to
send the money from here, I would do it this instant; but, considering
the delay of distance, and the caprice of wind and sea, it will be more
expeditiously done by Mr. Siddons. God bless and restore you to perfect
health and tranquillity.”
We can read between the lines of this letter, as we know that about
this time she received a pressing request from her husband for money to
fit out their son George for India, and to pay debts incurred on the
decoration of the house in Great Marlborough Street, suggesting that
in consequence she had better accept an engagement in Liverpool. She
preferred, however, though harassed by disagreements with Jones the
manager, to remain in Dublin. A report was circulated, as on the occasion
of her first visit to Ireland, that she had refused to play for the
benefit of the Lying-in Hospital, a charity much patronised by the Dublin
ladies. She indignantly refuted this accusation, ending with words that
show her state of mental suffering:—
“It is hard to bear at one and the same time the pressure of domestic
sorrow, the anxiety of business, and the necessity of healing a wounded
reputation; but such is the rude enforcement of the time, and I must
sustain it as I am enabled by that Power who tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb.”
Her son George came and spent a fortnight with her before his departure
for India, and the news from home concerning her daughter still seemed
good. Like a thunderbolt, therefore, from a summer sky, came a letter
from Mr. Siddons addressed to Miss Wilkinson, saying that Sally was very
ill, but begging her not to make Mrs. Siddons anxious by telling her.
Miss Wilkinson, however, felt it to be her duty to show the letter. The
mother’s heart divined all that was not said. She declared her intention
of starting for England without delay. A violent gale had blown for some
days, and no vessel would leave the harbour. Two days later a reassuring
letter came from Siddons addressed to his wife, telling her all was well
again, and advising her to go to Cork. She went, but her miserable state
of mind may be guessed from a letter addressed to Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“Cork, March 21st, 1803.
“MY DEAR FRIEND,
“How shall I sufficiently thank you for all your kindness to
me? You know my heart, and I may spare my words, for, God
knows, my mind is in so distracted a state, that I can hardly
write or speak rationally. Oh! why did not Mr. Siddons tell
me when she was first taken so ill? I should then have got
clear of this engagement, and what a world of wretchedness and
anxiety would have been spared to me! And yet—good God! how
should I have crossed the sea? For a fortnight past it has
been so dangerous, that nothing but wherries have ventured to
the Holy Head; but yet I think I should have put myself into
one of them if I could have known that my poor dear girl was
so ill. Oh! tell me all about her. I am almost broken-hearted,
though the last accounts tell me that she has been mending for
several days. Has she wished for me? But I know—I feel that she
has. The dear creature used to think it weakness in me when
I told her of the possibility of what might be endured from
illness when that tremendous element divides one from one’s
family. Would to God I were at her bedside! It would be for me
then to suffer with resignation what I cannot now support with
any fortitude. If anything could relieve the misery I feel, it
would be that my dear and inestimable Sir Lucas Pepys had her
under his care. Pray tell him this, and ask him to write me a
word of comfort. Will you believe that I must play to-night,
and can you imagine any wretchedness like it in this terrible
state of mind? For a moment I comfort myself by reflecting on
the strength of the dear creature’s constitution, which has so
often rallied, to the astonishment of us all, under similar
serious attacks. Then, again, when I think of the frail tenure
of human existence, my heart fails and sinks into dejection.
God bless you! The suspense that distance keeps me in, you may
imagine, but it cannot be described.”
Meantime, no letters came. The winds raged without, and no vessel could
cross. At the end of the week the news that arrived was not satisfactory.
She made up her mind to throw up her engagement at any cost, and return.
She and Patty Wilkinson set out for Dublin; there they were again
detained, and received no news. Nearly beside herself with anxiety, she
again appealed to Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“Dublin, April 2nd, 1803.
“I am perfectly astonished, my dear Friend, that I have not
heard from you after begging it so earnestly. Good God! what
can be the reason that intelligence must be extorted, as it
were, in circumstances like mine? One would think common
benevolence, setting affection quite aside, might have induced
some of you to alleviate as much as possible such distress as
you know I must feel. The last letter from Mr. Siddons stated
that she was better. Another letter from Mr. Montgomery, at
Oxford, says that George gave him the same account. Why—why am
I to hear this only from a person at that distance from her,
and so ill-informed as the writer must be of the state of her
health? Why should not you or Mr. Siddons have told me this?
I cannot account for your silence at all, for you know how to
feel. I hope to sail to-night, and to reach London the third
day. God knows when that will be. Oh God! what a home to return
to, after all I have been doing! and what a prospect to the end
of my days.”
At last she was able to cross to Holyhead. At Shrewsbury she received a
letter from Mr. Siddons confirming the worst accounts of Sally’s illness,
but begging her to “remember the preciousness of her own life, and not to
endanger it by over-rapid travelling.” As she read, Miss Wilkinson was
called from the room; a messenger had arrived with the news of the girl’s
death. Mrs. Siddons guessed what had happened by the expression of Miss
Wilkinson’s face when she returned, and, sinking back speechless, lay for
a day “cold and torpid as a stone, with scarcely a sign of life.”
Her own family came forward with consolation and help. Her brother John
wrote a letter, which she received at Oxford; her brother Charles came
to meet her, and conducted her on her first visit to her widowed mother.
Every other grief had sunk into insignificance by the side of the death
of her daughter. So worn out was she with misery and overwork, that the
doctors recommended the quiet and bracing air of Cheltenham. We get a
glimpse of her frame of mind in a letter addressed thence to her friend
Mrs. Fitzhugh in June 1803:—
“The serenity of the place, the sweet air and scenery of my cottage, and
the medicinal effect of the waters, have done some good to my shattered
constitution. I am unable at times to reconcile myself to my fate. The
darling being for whom I mourn is assuredly released from a life of
suffering, and numbered among the blessed spirits made perfect. But to be
separated for ever, in spite of reason, and in spite of religion, is at
times too much for me. Give my love to dear Charles Moore, if you chance
to see him. Have you read his beautiful account of my sweet Sally? It is
done with a truth and modesty which has given me the sincerest of all
pleasures that I am now allowed to feel, and assures me still more than
ever that he who could feel and taste such excellence was worthy of the
particular regard she had for him.”
The life out of doors at Birch Farm, reading “under the haystack in
the farm-yard,” rambling in the fields, and “musing in the orchard,”
gradually soothed the poignancy of her grief. “Rising at six and going
to bed at ten, has brought me to my comfortable sleep once more,” she
writes. “The bitterness and anguish of selfish grief begins to subside,
and the tender recollections of excellence and virtues gone to the
blessed place of their eternal reward, are now the sad though sweet
companions of my lonely walks.”
In spite of all her stoicism and resolve, however, the sense of her loss
would come back, carrying away all artificial barriers of restraint.
“If he thinks himself unfortunate,” she wrote of a friend, “let him
look on _me_ and be silent—‘the inscrutable ways of Providence.’ Two
lovely creatures gone, and another is just arrived from school with all
the dazzling frightful sort of beauty that irradiated the countenance
of Maria, and makes me shudder when I look at her. I feel myself like
poor Niobe grasping to her bosom the last and youngest of her children;
and, like her, look every moment for the vengeful arrow of destruction.
Alas! my dear Friend, can it be wondered at that I long for the land
where they are gone to prepare their mother’s place? What have I here?
Yet here, even here, I could be content to linger still in peace and
calmness—content is all I wish. But I must again enter into the bustle
of the world; for though fame and fortune have given me all I wish,
yet while my presence and my exertions here may be useful to others,
I do not think myself at liberty to give myself up to my own selfish
gratification. The second great commandment is ‘Love thy neighbour as
thyself,’ and in this way I shall most probably best make my way to
Heaven.”
How inscrutable, indeed, are the ways of Providence. Sally was her eldest
daughter and her dearest child. She had been born two months before that
terrible period of probation and failure at Drury Lane. Hers were the
baby fingers, hers the baby voice, that had coaxed the poor young mother
back to resignation and courage. She was twenty-seven when she was taken,
and had ever been the sunshine of the home. Yes, she was the dearest.
Strange that, deaf to our anguish and suffering, those are so often they
who are taken. If a heart in such a trial can still believe and trust
and love, then it is faith indeed—heaven-born, sublime. And such, we see,
was the broken-hearted mother’s.
During her stay at Birch Farm, John Kemble, Charles Moore, and Miss
Dorothy Place, her daughter Sally’s particular friend, came to stay
with her. In July they all of them made an excursion along the Wye,
after which she paid a visit to her friend Mr. Fitzhugh at Bannister’s,
and then returned to London, where she made an engagement to act the
following winter at Covent Garden.
Other trials awaited Mrs. Siddons, trials that, to a woman of her proud
and sensitive temper, must have been torture in the extreme. Whatever
her sufferings had been in the course of her professional career, from
scandal and misrepresentation, her character as a wife and mother had
been untouched. Now, when no longer young, and anxious to escape from the
harassing turmoil of the stage into the dignity and calm of a domestic
life, surrounded by her children and friends, a blow fell on her under
which, for the time, she almost sank. The circumstance is not alluded to
either by Campbell or Boaden, but is so interwoven with Mrs. Siddons’s
existence, and so colours her mode of thought at the time, that it can
hardly be passed over.
Mrs. Siddons met Katherine Galindo, author of the libel, at the
theatre in Dublin. She was a subordinate actress, and her husband a
fencing-master. It is difficult to understand how she can have become so
intimate, except that her own perfect sincerity and openness led her to
bestow confidence on a variety of persons, many of them not in any way
worthy of it. Her daughter, Cecilia, who later wrote _Recollections_ of
her mother, says that, instead of being hard and calculating, as the
outside public imagined, her mother was, on the contrary, too easy—too
much disposed to be ruled by people inferior in every way to herself,
credulous to an extraordinary extent, always trusting to appearances,
and never willing to suspect anyone. Perhaps, also, the great actress’s
weakness was a wish to “make use” of people, and a love of flattery—both
dangerous qualities for a woman in her position, laying her open, as
they did, to the machinations of adventurers. Be it as it may, we are
astounded at the girlish sentimentality of the letters she wrote to the
Galindos. Allowing even for the Laura Matilda style of expression of
the period, they show the substratum of romanticism that underlies her
character. The Galindos accompanied her to Cork, and then to Killarney.
Mrs. Siddons used all her influence to induce Harris, of Covent Garden,
to give Mrs. Galindo an engagement; but Kemble, when he arrived from
abroad, refused to ratify it. A letter from Mrs. Inchbald says:—
“When Kemble returned from Spain in 1803, he came to me like a madman,
said Mrs. Siddons had been imposed upon by persons whom it was a disgrace
to her to _know_, and he begged me to explain it so to her. He requested
Harris to withdraw his promise of his engaging Mrs. G. at Mrs. Siddons’s
request. Yet such was his tenderness to his sister’s sensibility, that
he would not undeceive her himself. Mr. Kemble blamed me, and I blamed
him for his reserve, and I have never been so cordial since. Nor,” ends
Mrs. Inchbald, with the prim self-sufficiency quite consistent with what
we know of the “dear Muse,” “have I ever admired Mrs. Siddons so much
since; for, though I can pity a dupe, I must also despise one. Even to be
familiar with such people was a lack of virtue, though not of chastity.”
We read later in Rogers’s _Table Talk_ that, not long before Mrs.
Inchbald’s death he met her walking near Charing Cross, and we are not
astonished to be told that she had been calling on several old friends,
but had seen none of them—some being really not at home, and others
denying themselves to her. “I called,” she said, “on Mrs. Siddons. I knew
_she_ was at home, yet I was not admitted.”
To return, however, to the Galindos. The wretched woman was stung to the
quick by the withdrawal of her engagement at Covent Garden, and although
Mrs. Siddons advanced a thousand pounds to the husband to buy a share
in a provincial theatre, and showed them much kindness, the jealous and
infuriated wife published in pamphlet form a wild and libellous attack on
the great actress, to which she added the letters that had passed between
them in their days of intimacy. By artfully turning and suppressing
sentences here and there, she succeeded in giving a significance never
intended in the originals. Although she said she had advanced nothing
but what she could substantiate by the most certain evidence, if called
upon to do so, she gave no proof whatever except of her own wild jealousy
and unreasoning disappointment at being refused an engagement at Covent
Garden.
It seems incredible that a woman of Mrs. Siddons’s social knowledge can
have been so imprudent as to enter into such an intimacy, and to write in
such a strain of deep affection to people she had known only so short a
time. The following is a specimen:—
“Holyhead, Sunday, 12 o’clock.
“For some hours we had scarce a breath of wind, and the vessel
seemed to leave your coast as unwillingly as your poor friend.
About six o’clock this morning the snowy tops of the mountains
appeared; they chilled my heart, for I felt that they were
emblematic of the cold and dreary prospect before me. Mr. ⸺ has
been very obliging; he has just left us, but it is probable
we shall meet again upon the road. I thought you would be
glad to know we were safely landed. I will hope, my beloved
friends, for a renewal of the days we have known, and in the
meantime endeavour to amuse and cheer my melancholy with the
recollection of _past joys_, though they be ‘sweet and mournful
to the soul.’
“God bless you all, and do not forget
“Your faithful, affectionate,
“S. SIDDONS.”
A little later she writes:—
“Pray ask Mr. G⸺ to send me those sweet lines ‘To Hope’—that
which he gave me is almost effaced by my tears—and let it be
written by the same hand. I could never describe what I have
lost in you, my beloved friends, and the sweet angel that is
gone for ever! Good God! what a deprivation in a few days.
Adieu! Adieu!”
Needless to say, this “screeching” friendship ended as one might expect.
As we have said, she failed to obtain an engagement for Mrs. Galindo
at Covent Garden, and lent Galindo a thousand pounds to help him to
take shares in a theatrical company at Manchester. He never repaid
the thousand pounds, and became abusive when she asked for it. She
accused him, in a letter addressed to Miss Wilkinson, of “hypocrisy and
ingratitude,” and the wife accused her of having nourished an affection
passing the bounds of propriety for her husband. All her real friends
mustered round her, but she suffered terribly.
She wrote to Dr. Whalley:—
“Among all the kind attentions I have received, none has comforted me
more, my dear friend, than your invaluable letter. I thank God all
my friends are exactly of your opinion with respect to the manner of
treating this diabolical business. To a delicate mind publicity is in
itself painful, and I trust that a life of tolerable rectitude will
justify my conduct to my friends. I have been dreadfully shaken, but I
trust that the natural disposition to be well will shortly restore me. My
dear Cecilia is, indeed, all a fond mother can wish.”
CHAPTER XIV.
WESTBOURNE FARM.
John Kemble was now both actor and manager at Covent Garden, and the
results were much more satisfactory in every way to Mrs. Siddons. Harris
the proprietor was strictly punctual in his payments, and the Kemble
family, who numbered Charles Kemble in their ranks, were sufficient to
make the performances attractive enough to the public. Mrs. Siddons
appeared in several of her old parts; amongst others in Elvira, when
the actor Cooke came on so drunk as to be unable to act his part. He
did not improve matters by attempting to excuse himself. He could only
articulate, “Ladies and Gentlemen, my old complaint,” when he was
removed, and Henry Siddons had to read his part. Fit pendant to the night
when he appeared as Sir Archy Macsarcasm with Johnstone, who was playing
Sir Calaghan. There was a dead pause. At last Johnstone, advancing to the
footlights, said with a strong brogue, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Cooke
_says_ he can’t spake,” which bull was received with roars of laughter
and hisses.
The great actress performed sixty times that season. At its conclusion
she went on a visit to Mrs. Damer at Strawberry Hill, where she met
Louis Philippe, afterwards King of France, and the Prince Regent. The
two ladies, whenever they were together, indulged their passion for
sculpture. As winter approached she suffered much from rheumatism, and,
for the sake of country air, removed from Great Marlborough Street to a
cottage at Hampstead for a few weeks. Mr. Siddons, who was also a martyr
to rheumatism, had advocated the change, and the old gentleman was much
delighted with his new abode. He ate his dinner, and, looking out at
the beautiful view that stretched before the windows, observed, “Sally,
this will cure all our ailments.” In spite of his hopes, however, Mrs.
Siddons was confined to bed for weeks with acute rheumatism. She tried
electricity with some beneficial effect, but suffered anguish while
undergoing the treatment.
As the winter advanced they returned to town; but Mr. Siddons grew so
much worse that he resolved to try the waters of Bath. Mrs. Siddons
parted, therefore, with her house in Marlborough Street, and took
lodgings for herself and Miss Wilkinson in Princes Street, Hanover
Square. Her landlord there was an upholsterer of the name of Nixon. He
and his wife always talked afterwards with the deepest affection of Mrs.
Siddons. One day, looking at Nixon’s card, she found that he was also an
undertaker, and said laughingly, “I engage your services to bury me, Mr.
Nixon.” Twenty-seven years afterwards Nixon did so.
During the winter and spring of 1804 and 1805 Mrs. Siddons only performed
twice at Covent Garden, partly in consequence of delicate health, partly
in consequence of the appearance of Master Betty, the “young Roscius,”
a prodigy whom the public ran after with an enthusiasm that seems
inexplicable. Managers gave him sums that a Garrick or a Siddons were
unable to obtain; his bust was done by the best sculptors; his portrait
painted by the best artists, and verses written in a style of idolatrous
adulation were poured upon this boy of thirteen. Actors and actresses
were obliged to appear on the stage with him to avoid giving offence.
Mrs. Siddons and Kemble, with praiseworthy dignity, retired while the
infatuation lasted. She went to see him, however, and gave him what
praise she thought his due. Lord Abercorn came into her box, declaring it
was the finest acting he had ever seen. “My lord,” she answered, “he is a
very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more.”
Independently of the boy Betty, or any other trials in her profession,
Mrs. Siddons now began to long for rest. We have seen how years before,
when in Dublin, she had expressed herself to Dr. Whalley: “I don’t build
any castles, but cottages without end. May the great Disposer of all
events but permit me to spend the evening of my toilsome, bustling day in
a cottage where I may sometimes have the converse and society which will
make me more worthy those imperishable habitations which are prepared for
the spirits of just men made perfect!”
In the April of 1805 she satisfied this wish by taking a cottage at
Westbourne, near Paddington. With the help of Nixon she fitted it up
luxuriously, built an additional room behind for a studio, and laid
out the shrubbery and garden. Westbourne was then, we are told, one of
those delightful rural spots for which Paddington was distinguished. It
occupied a rising ground, and commanded a lovely view of Hampstead,
Highgate and the distant city. Mrs. Siddons’s was a small retired house,
in a garden screened with poplars and evergreens, resembling a modest
rural vicarage, standing, it is said, on the site now levelled for the
Great Western Railway Station. She loved, she said, to escape from “the
noise and din of London” to the green fields surrounding her new home.
Here her friends congregated round her also. Miss Berry and Madame
D’Arblay both mention, in their diaries, having spent an afternoon and
met many people at Mrs. Siddons’s country retreat.
“I spoke in terms of rapture of Mrs. Siddons to Incledon,” Crabb Robinson
tells us. “He replied, ‘Ah! Sally’s a fine creature. She has a charming
place on the Edgware Road. I dined with her last year, and she paid me
one of the finest compliments I ever received. I sang _The Storm_ after
dinner. She cried and sobbed like a child. Taking both of my hands she
said, “All that I and my brother ever did is nothing compared with the
effect you produce.”’”
The following lines were written by Mr. Siddons, describing his wife’s
country retreat, during the last visit he ever paid to it:—
1.
Would you I’d Westbourne Farm describe;
I’ll do it then, and free from gall,
For sure it would be sin to gibe
A thing so pretty and so small.
2.
The poplar walk, if you have strength,
Will take a minute’s time to step it;
Nay, certes, ’tis of such a length,
’Twould almost tire a frog to leap it.
3.
But when the pleasure-ground is seen,
Then what a burst comes on the view;
Its level walk, its shaven green,
For which a razor’s stroke would do.
4.
Now, pray be cautious when you enter,
And curb your strides from much expansion;
Three paces take you to the centre,
Three more, you’re close against the mansion.
5.
The mansion, cottage, house, or hut,
Call’t what you will, has room within
To lodge the King of Lilliput,
But not his court, nor yet his queen.
6.
The kitchen-garden, true to keeping,
Has length and breadth and width so plenty;
A snail, if fairly set a-creeping,
Could scarce go round while you told twenty.
7.
Perhaps you’ll cry, on hearing this,
What! everything so very small?
No; she that made it what it is
Has greatness that makes up for all.
Mr. Siddons passed some weeks at Westbourne, but, finding the rheumatism
from which he suffered only relieved at Bath, he was obliged to reside
there almost permanently. Bath did not agree with Mrs. Siddons, and
the exigencies of her profession obliged her to live in London. This
difference in their place of abode caused a rumour to get abroad that a
formal separation had taken place. Mr. Boaden, indeed, states explicitly
that Siddons became at this time somewhat impatient of the “crown
matrimonial,” while Campbell declares the report to be “absolutely
unfounded.”
In judging the case we think, perhaps, a medium course would be the best
to take. We can imagine a decided incompatibility in the husband’s and
wife’s mode of seeing things. She was ever impatient towards want of
energy and practical capacity, while he, all his life having to play
second to her, was jealous of the disposal of her earnings, and rushed
into ill-judged investments and speculations.
The following letter of good-humoured banter, written to him on the
16th December 1804, reveals the manner in which she turned off his weak
ebullitions of temper:—
“MY DEAR SID.,
“I am really sorry that my little flash of merriment should
have been taken so seriously, for I am sure, however we may
differ in trifles, _we can never cease to love each other_. You
wish me to say what I expect to have done. I can expect nothing
more than you yourself have designed me in your will. Be (as
you ought to be) the master of all while God permits; but, in
case of your death, only let me be put out of the power of any
person living. This is all that I desire; and I think that you
cannot but be convinced that it is reasonable and proper.
“Your ever affectionate and faithful,
“S. S.”
The wife’s was the stronger, more powerful mind, and with her sincerity
and openness of disposition which impelled her to show everything she
thought or felt, we have no doubt she often offended the irritable vanity
of a man who, in small things, had a painful sense of his own dignity.
Hers was too big a nature to nag and fight about trifles, and at the
same time often too self-absorbed to remember how she offended the
susceptibilities of others.
“To live in a state of contention,” she writes, “with a brother I so
tenderly love, and with a husband with whom I am to spend what remains
of life, would be more than my subdued spirit and almost broken heart
would be able to endure. In answer to the second, I can only say that the
testimony of the wisdom of all ages, from the foundation of the world to
this day, is childishness and folly, if happiness be anything more than a
_name_; and, I am assured, our own experience will not allow us to refute
the opinion. No, no, it is the inhabitant of a better world. Content,
the offspring of Moderation, is all we ought to aspire to _here_, and
Moderation will be our best and surest guide to that happiness to which
she will most assuredly conduct us.”
In the season of 1806-7, at Covent Garden, she played Queen Katherine
seven times, Lady Macbeth (to Cooke’s Macbeth) five times, Isabella
(_Fatal Marriage_) twice, Elvira twice, Lady Randolph once, Mrs. Beverley
once, Euphrasia once, and Volumnia fifteen times. We see by this
enumeration of her parts how she, and she alone, achieved popularity for
Shakespeare.
The subsequent season at Covent Garden was uncommonly short, and extended
only to the 11th of December 1807, when the _Winter’s Tale_ was announced
for her last appearance before Easter. As events turned out, it proved to
be her last for the season. Immediately after the performance she went to
Bath, where she spent six weeks with Mr. Siddons. He was so much improved
in health as to make plans for the future, and declared his intention
of spending a part of the summer at Westbourne. She left him, therefore,
comparatively free from anxiety in February 1808. Within a month of her
departure, however, he was seized with a violent attack of illness, and
on the 11th of March expired. She immediately threw up her engagement in
Edinburgh, and left for her London home. Thence, on the 29th March 1808,
she wrote to Mrs. Piozzi:—
“How unwearied is your goodness to me, my dear friend. There is something
so awful in this sudden dissolution of so long a connexion, that I shall
feel it longer than I shall speak of it. May I die the death of my
honest, worthy husband; and may those to whom I am dear remember me when
I am gone, as I remember him, forgetting and forgiving all my errors,
and recollecting only my quietness of spirit and singleness of heart.
Remember me to your dear Mr. Piozzi. My head is still so dull with this
stunning surprise that I cannot see what I write. Adieu! dear soul; do
not cease to love your friend.—S. S.”
So ended the love story begun thirty-three years before.
Before the end of the year she resumed her cap and bells again, but had
only acted on one or two nights at Covent Garden before it was burnt to
the ground. How the fire originated is a mystery. Some said that the
wadding of a gun, in the performance of _Pizarro_, must have lodged
unperceived in the crevice of the scenery. Miss Wilkinson declared
afterwards, that before the audience left the house she perceived a
strong smell of fire while sitting in Mr. Kemble’s box, and on her way to
Mrs. Siddons’s dressing-room mentioned it to some of the servants; they
declared it to be the smell of the footlights. How complete and rapid
the destruction was we learn by the following letter written by Mrs.
Siddons to her friend James Ballantyne.
“MY DEAR AND ESTIMABLE FRIEND,
“You have by this time, I am confident, felt many a humane
pang, for the wretched sufferers in the dreadful calamity which
has been visited on me and those most dear to me. The losses to
the Proprietors are incalculable, irreparable, and of all the
precious and curious dresses and lace and jewels which _I_ have
been collecting for these thirty years—not one, no, not one
article has escap’d! The most grievous of these _my_ losses is
a piece of Lace which had been a Toilette of the poor Queen of
France; it was upwards of four yards long, and more than a yard
wide. It never could have been bought for a thousand pounds,
but that’s the least regret. It was _so_ interesting!! But oh!
let me not suffer myself in the ingratitude of _repining_,
while there are so many reasons for thankful acknowledgment.
My Brothers, God be praised! did not hear of the fire till
ev’ry personal exertion would have been utterly useless. It is
as true as it is strange and awful, that everything appear’d
to be in perfect Security at _Two_ o’clock, and that at _six_
(the time my poor brother saw it) the whole structure was as
completely swept from the face of the earth as if such a thing
had never existed. Thank God that it _was_ so, since had it
been otherwise, he wou’d probably have perished in exertions
to preserve something from the terrible wreck of his property.
This is comfort. And you, my noble-minded friend, wou’d, I am
confident, participate the joy I feel, in beholding this ador’d
brother, Stemming this torrent of adversity with a manly
fortitude, Serenity, and even _hope_, that almost bursts my
heart with an admiration too big to bear, and blinds my eyes
with the most delicious tears that ever fell from my eyes. Oh!
he is a glorious creature! did not I always _tell_ you so?
Yes, yes, and all will go well with him again! _She_ bears it
like an Angel too. Lord Guilford and Lord Mountjoy have nobly
offer’d to raise him any sum of money—and a thousand instances
of generous feeling have already offer’d that evince the
goodness of human nature, and its Sense of his worth. All this
is so honorable to him, that I shall soon feel little regret
except for the poor beings who perished in the devouring fire.
“James Ballantyne—God bless and prosper all the desires and
designs of a heart so amiable, a head so sound! prays most
fervently his truly affectionate friend,
“S. SIDDONS.”
“My head is so confused I scarce know what I have written; but
you wish’d me to answer your kind letter immediately, therefore
excuse all defects.”
The result of John Kemble’s thirty years of hard service was swept away
in the flames that destroyed Covent Garden. Mr. Heathcote’s loan was
still unpaid. Boaden gives us a tragi-comic account of a visit he paid
at the Kembles’ house the morning after the fire. Mrs. Kemble loudly
expressing her sorrow. Charles Kemble sitting listening, a tragic
expression on his naturally melancholy face; John shaving himself before
the glass. “Yes,” he said to his visitor in the intervals of this
operation, “it has perished—that magnificent theatre! It is gone, with
all its treasures of every description; that library, which contained all
those immortal productions of our countrymen; that wardrobe; the scenery.
Of all this vast treasure, nothing now remains but the arms of England
over the entrance of the theatre, and the Roman eagle standing solitary
in the market-place.”
All differences which were said to have arisen between brother and sister
were sunk and forgotten in this crisis. Though she may have smiled at his
sententiousness, and snubbed Mrs. Kemble’s loud-voiced expressions of
grief, she now gave him efficient help in reconstituting the theatre. The
performances of the company were transferred first to the Opera House,
and afterwards to the Haymarket Theatre. Between September 12th, 1808,
and May 6th, 1809, she acted forty times. The wear and tear of this on a
woman of her years—she was now over fifty—must have been great indeed.
All seemed to turn to her, to depend on her masculine strength of will
and energy.
Beside the anxiety of her profession, we find her occupied with the
future of her children. Letter after letter could be quoted, showing
the affectionate and practical interest she took in their welfare, in
spite of the statement circulated, and believed in, that she bargained
and haggled with her son Henry as though he were some manager with whom
she was doing business. She wrote on November 26th, 1808, to Mr. Ingles
on the subject of an expedition to Edinburgh, to help her son in his
theatrical venture there:—
“Independently of any other consideration, it is a great object to me
to have a reasonable excuse for spending much of my remaining life in
the admired and beloved society of Scotland; I am therefore, on my _own_
account as _well_ as his, naturally anxious for the Success of my Son in
the Theatre, and I think I may without arrogance aver that you cou’d not
chuse better. He has great qualifications and wou’d not be the worse,
I apprehend, for my advice in respect to Dramatic business, or for the
pecuniary aid which I should be proud to afford in order to amplify the
costume of The Stage. His abilities as an Actor need not my eulogium, and
his private respectability is so universally acknowledged as to spare his
mother the pain of boasting. I have done my part, and trust the rest to
heaven! I have written to all you advis’d me to write to, and now in one
word let me thank you for your good counsel and assure you that whatever
be the result I shall for ever consider myself exceedingly oblig’d to
you. So much ambiguity and darkness seems to envelop the business (the
Galindo embroglio), however, that I know not what to wish—but that there
was an _end_ of both hopes and fears; since nothing is so insupportable
as Suspense.”
Those who serve the public have much to suffer from the caprices of
the crowd, but they also experience many proofs of the appreciation of
their genius by individuals. The Kembles met with instances of kindness
and friendliness at the moment of their need that strike one as almost
fabulous in their generosity. The Duke of Northumberland offered Kemble a
loan of ten thousand pounds on his simple bond. He hesitated to accept,
fearing his inability to pay the interest. The Duke promised he should
never be pressed for it, and on the day of the laying the first stone he
cancelled the bond, and made him a present of the whole sum.
Aided by the munificence of patrons, fifty thousand pounds was soon
subscribed; nearly the same amount was received from the insurance
companies, and on December 30th, 1808, the first stone was laid with
Masonic honours. John Kemble was not a person to do away with the pomp of
a ceremonial. All the actors and actresses were assembled; Mrs. Siddons,
wearing a nodding plume of ominous black feathers, while her brother, who
had risen from his sick bed, stood under the torrents of rain in white
silk stockings and pumps.
In less than a twelvemonth from the time of its destruction the new
theatre arose from the ashes of its predecessor. While it was building,
Drury Lane, the opposition house, under Sheridan’s management, was also
burnt to the ground, bringing down Sheridan with it in its ruin.
The new Covent Garden was a much more magnificent building than its
predecessor; but the system of private boxes, which had been introduced
first of all in Drury Lane, was now carried to an extreme extent, and
the third circle of the theatre was entirely given over to them. This
invasion of the privileges of the people by the aristocracy was not to
be borne. The “liberty of the subject” had been talked into fashion by
Fox and Burke, and the populace were determined to put their doctrines
into practice in every department of life. They would not submit, because
the new house had the monopoly of catering for their amusement, to be
slighted and thrust away in a dark gallery where they could neither see
nor hear, while a “bloated aristocracy” lounged in commodious boxes
with ante-rooms behind. We who deplore the radicalism of the age, and
the licence permitted to free speech, should read the account of the
outrageous O. P. (old prices) riots, and congratulate ourselves on the
improved decorum that reigns now-a-days.
The New House was opened on the 18th September 1809. Crowded to the roof
with a resplendent audience, on whom shone the light shed by thousands of
wax candles, with Kemble and Mrs. Siddons to act the parts of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth, a brilliant inauguration might have been expected.
The National Anthem was sung, and then Kemble was to speak a poetical
address. But the moment he made his appearance, dressed for Macbeth, a
yell of defiance greeted him, while the mob in the pit stood up with
their hats on and their backs to the stage. Kemble begged a hearing in
vain. His sister then appeared, pale but determined, and both of them
went through their parts to the end. Whenever for an instant there was a
lull in the yelling and hissing, the musical voice of the great actress
was heard steadily going through her part.
Two magistrates appeared on the stage and read the Riot Act; soldiers
rushed in to capture the rioters, who let themselves down by the pillars
into the lower gallery. The sight of the soldiery, indeed, only increased
the Babel. “Why were prices raised,” the mob vociferated, “while
exorbitant salaries were paid to the actors and actresses? The money
received by the Kembles and Madame Catalani amounted for the season to
£25,575. There was Mrs. Siddons with £50 a night! The Lord Chief Justice
sat every day in Westminster Hall from 9 to 4 for half the sum!” “She and
her brother also appeared frequently on the stage with clothes worth
£500.[3] All this was to be screwed out of the pockets of the public.”
The whole state of the popular mind at the time was suffering from the
reflux of the revolutionary tide that had swept over France some years
before. The way, indeed, in which the authorities behaved during the
seventy nights the riots lasted, leads us to think that they were aware
of the undercurrent of political excitement, and were glad to see it
diverted into a channel that did not menace Church and State. In no other
country in the world would such a state of things have been allowed to
go on night after night. A magistrate now and then feebly appeared on
the stage, and read inaudibly the Riot Act. On one occasion the public
climbed the stage, and were only deterred from personally attacking the
actors by the sudden opening of all the traps. A lady received an ovation
for lending a pin to fasten a manifesto to one of the boxes, and the
whole house was placarded with offensive mottoes. The proprietors had
recourse to giving away orders to admit their own partisans. This led
to furious fighting and scuffling. Pigeons were let loose, as symbols
that the public were pigeoned; aspersions were cast on the morality of
the private boxes; the leaders of the riot incited the crowd to further
excesses by inflammatory speeches. On the sixth night Kemble came forward
to announce that Catalani’s engagement, one of the great grievances,
was cancelled, and that the business books of the proprietors would be
examined by competent gentlemen to prove that the theatre was not a
paying concern. The report appeared, proving that if any reduction were
made in prices, the proprietors would lose three-fourths per cent. on
their capital. This statement had no effect on the unreasoning mob.
On the reopening of the house on the 4th October, the riot began more
furiously than ever. Cooke, unfortunately, in a prologue alluded to
the late “hostile rage.” The expression was like throwing a match into
gunpowder. The people lashed themselves into a frenzy; they assailed
the boxes, and ran up and down the pit benches during the play. Then,
too, was introduced, we are told, the famous O. P. war-dance in the
pit, which seems to have resembled the French _Carmagnole_, “with its
calm beginning, its swelling into noise and rapidity, and its finale
of demoniacal uproar and confusion.” Princes of the Blood visited the
boxes, and having beheld the spectacle, and heard the Babel of roaring
throats, laughed and went home! Afterwards the crowd marched to Kemble’s
house, 89 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and continued the riot there.
At last arrests were made of the leaders, but they were acquitted, and
Kemble consented to appear at the dinner given in their honour. This
was a hauling down of the flag, but in reality the proprietors came
off victors. The rate of admission to the pit was reduced by sixpence,
but the half-price remained at two shillings. The private boxes were
diminished, but the new price of admission was maintained. It must have
been a bitter probation for proud tempers like the Kembles to go through.
“My appearance of illness was occasioned entirely,” Mrs.
Siddons writes about this time to a friend, “by an agitating
visit that morning from poor Mr. John Kemble, on account
of the giving up of the private boxes, which, I fear, must
be at last complied with. Surely nothing ever equalled the
domineering of the mob in these days. It is to me inconceivable
how the public at large submits to be thus dictated to,
against their better judgment, by a handful of imperious and
intoxicated men. In the meantime, what can the poor proprietors
do but yield to overwhelming necessity? Could I once feel that
my poor brother’s anxiety about the theatre was at an end, I
should be, marvellous to say, as well as I ever was in my life.
But only conceive what a state he must have been in, however
good a face he might put upon the business, for upwards of
three months; and think what his poor wife and I must have
suffered, when, for weeks together, such were the outrages
committed on his house and otherwise, that I trembled for even
his personal safety; she, poor soul! living with ladders at
her windows in order to make her escape through the garden in
case of an attack. Mr. Kemble tells me his nerves are much
shaken. What a time it has been with us all—beginning with fire
and continued with fury! Yet sweet sometimes are the uses of
adversity. They not only strengthen family affection, but teach
us all to walk humbly with our God,
“Yours,
“S. S.”
The fury of the rioters was principally directed against John Kemble,
“Black Jack,” as he was called. They never lost a certain respect for
the great actress who had served them so long and so faithfully. We know
the story of her appealing through the windows of her sedan-chair to the
riotous crowds assembled round the theatre, “Good people, let me pass;
I am Sarah Siddons,” and of the mob immediately falling back to make way
for the dignified Queen of Tragedy. The whole business disheartened and
saddened her, however. “I have not always met gratitude in a play-house,”
Garrick said, and she but repeated his words with a sigh. She wrote to
her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Siddons:—
“Octr. Jubilee Day, Westbourne Farm, Paddington.
“MY DEAR HARRIET,
“Mrs. Sterling has kindly undertaken to deliver a parcel to
you, which consists of a Book directed to you at Westbourne,
and a little Toy apiece for my dear little Girls. I would give
you an account of our Theatrical Situation if my right hand
were not so weak that it is with difficulty that I hold my
pen—I believe you saw it blistered at Liverpool, and I am sorry
to say it is but little better for everything I have try’d to
strengthen it. However, the papers give, as I understand, a
tolerably accurate account of this barbarous outrage to decency
and reason, which is a National disgrace: where it will end,
Heaven knows, and it is now generally thought, I believe, that
it _will not_ end without the interference of Government,
and, if they have any recollection of the riots of the year
’80, it is wonderful they have let it go thus far. I think it
very likely that I shall not appear any more this season, for
nothing shall induce me to place myself again in so painful and
so degrading a situation. Oh, how glad am I that you and my
dear Harry are out of it all! I long to hear how you are going
on; tell me very soon that you are all well and prosperous,
and happy. I find Mr. Harris is going to leave his house in
Marlbro’ Street, and you will have to let it to some other
tenant at the end of his term—I forget how long he took it
for. There is a Print of Mrs. Fitzhugh’s Picture coming out
very soon; I am told it will be the finest thing that has been
seen for many years. The Picture is more really like me than
anything that has been done, and I shall get one for you and
send it by the first opportunity. I have been amusing myself
with making a model of Mrs. Fitzhugh, which everybody says is
liker than anything that ever yet was seen of that kind. I
hope there is modelling Clay to be had in Edinburgh, for, if
it be possible, I will model a head of my dear Harry when I
go there. Give him my love and my blessing. Accept the same
for yourself and the darling children. Remember me kindly to
all our friends, but most afftly. to dear Miss Dallas and the
family of Hume. Patty will write to you by Mrs. Sterling; _her_
letter will, I hope, be better written and more entertaining
than mine. God bless you my dearest Harriet.
“Comps. whether it was his _Waft_, or himself.
“To MRS. H. SIDDONS.”
The riots were renewed on various occasions again, and though the
frightened managers, by the aid of apologies and humiliations of all
sorts, staved off a repetition of violence, the fate of the new house
as a paying concern was sealed; it had been a mistake artistically and
financially from the first, and soon ceased to be used as a theatre.
A poodle drove Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays from the stage of the
Weimar Theatre, the “dog Carlo” and Master Betty drove _Macbeth_ and
_Coriolanus_ from Covent Garden; in both instances, the public was
justified in its conclusions, but not in the manner in which it expressed
them. By their suppression of all applause and the restrictions they
laid on their audience, the potentates of Weimar stopped all dramatic
spontaneity; by the size and unwieldiness of the theatre they built,
and the banishment of the lower part of the audience to a distance
from the stage, the proprietors of Covent Garden deprived their art of
the indispensable verdict of the ordinary public. The Kembles’ school
of dramatic art also was passing away. They had substituted for the
naturalness and variety of Garrick’s style a measured and stately
dignity. This stateliness was now destined to be succeeded by the
impetuosity and spontaneous passion of Kean.
We have seen that one of the boys introduced by John Kemble into
the Witches’ Scene in _Macbeth_, and subsequently turned away for
disobedience, was named Edmund Kean. This little imp, undeterred by
hardship, degradation, and misery, had developed into one of the greatest
geniuses that ever trod the English stage. Many are the stories given
of Mrs. Siddons’s first meeting with Kean, but all are unanimous that
it was by no means a creditable performance so far as the young actor
was concerned. It was in Ireland, either at Belfast or Cork. Kean had
been engaged to act with her. As usual, instead of learning his part,
he employed the interim between her arrival and the play in drinking
with some friends, with such success that when he came upon the stage
the whole of his part had vanished from his memory; he was, therefore,
obliged to improvise as he went on. Needless to say, his performance was
a tissue of nonsense, sentences without meaning, drunken absurdities
of all sorts. The audience was not a critical one, but Mrs. Siddons’s
disgust may be imagined. The next play to be performed was _Douglas_,
and in this Kean played Young Norval. Whether he was ashamed, and wished
to show the great actress that he, too, was an actor, it is impossible
to say, but he imparted such pathos and spirit to the part, that she was
surprised into admiration. After the play (Kean himself tells us) she
came to him, and patting him on the head, said: “You have played well,
Sir. It’s a pity, but there’s too little of you to do anything.”
When the “little man” arrived in London, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons
announced their intention of honouring with their presence the new
actor’s performance of Othello. A relative of Kean, who was very
anxious about the result of the Kemble decision, placed herself in a
box opposite, to observe the effect the performance produced on them.
The Queen of Tragedy sat erect and looked cold; Mr. Kemble gave a grave
attention. But as the young actor warmed to his part, Mrs. Siddons
showed a pleased surprise, and at last leaned forward, her fine head on
her arm, quite engrossed in the scene, while Kemble expressed continual
approbation, turning to his sister as each point told. At the triumphant
close of the performance, Kean’s friend approached the Kembles’ box. Mrs.
Siddons would not allow that this extraordinary genius was the lad that
had acted with her before. “Perhaps,” she said, “he had assumed the name
of Kean.” “Then the present one has every right to drop it,” said Kemble;
“he is not Kean, but the real Othello.” Yet Kemble must have known that
night that a greater than he had arisen. It must have been a noteworthy
scene, those two remarkable figures of a by-gone age, sitting in judgment
on “the little gentleman who,” as Kemble said, “was always so terribly
in earnest,” while he fretted and fumed on that stage, where he was
destined to initiate a new ideal of dramatic art.
Macready gives an interesting account of his first meeting the great
actress whom every young aspirant looked up to with such awe. It was at
Newcastle; the _Gamester_ and _Douglas_ were the plays selected, and the
young actor received the appalling information that he was to act with
her. With doubt, anxiety, and trepidation he set about his work, the
thought of standing by the side of the great mistress of her Art hanging
over him _in terrorem_. At last she arrived, and he received orders to go
to the Queen’s Head Hotel to rehearse. The impression, he says, the first
sight of her made on him recalled the page’s description of the effect of
Jane de Montfort’s appearance on him in Joanna Baillie’s tragedy. It was
So queenly, so commanding, and so noble.
In her grand, but good-natured manner, having seen his nervousness, she
said, “I hope, Mr. Macready, you have brought some hartshorn and water
with you, as I am told you are terribly frightened at me,” and she made
some remarks about his being a very young husband. Her daughter Cecilia
went smiling out of the room, and left them to the business of the
morning.
Her instructions were vividly impressed on the young actor’s memory,
and he took his leave with fear and trembling. The audience were, as
usual, encouraging, and the first scene passed with applause; but in the
next—his first with Mrs. Beverley—his fear overcame him to that degree,
that for a minute his presence of mind forsook him; his memory seemed to
have gone, and he stood bewildered. She kindly whispered the word to him,
and the scene proceeded.
The enthusiastic young actor goes on:—
She stood alone on her height of excellence. Her acting was
perfect, and, as I recall it, I do not wonder, novice as I
was, at my perturbation when on the stage with her. But in the
progress of the play I gradually regained more and more my
self-possession, and in the last scene, as she stood by the
side wing, waiting for the cue of her entrance, on my utterance
of the words, “My wife and sister! Well, well! there is but
one pang more, and then farewell world!” she raised her hands,
clapping loudly and calling out: “Bravo, Sir, bravo!” in sight
of part of the audience, who joined in her applause.
On that evening I was engaged to a ball, “where all the
beauties”—not of Verona, but of Newcastle—were to meet. Mrs.
Siddons, after the play, sent to me to say, when I was dressed,
she would be glad to see me in her room. On going in, she
“wished,” she said, “to give me a few words of advice before
taking leave of me. You are in the right way,” she said, “but
remember what I say—study, study, study, and do not marry
till you are thirty. I remember what it was to be obliged to
study at nearly your age with a young family about me. Beware
of that: keep your mind on your art, do not remit your study,
and you are certain to succeed. I know you are expected at a
ball to-night, so I will not detain you, but do not forget my
words—study well, and God bless you.” Her words lived with me,
and often in moments of despondency have come to cheer me.
Her acting was a revelation to me, which ever after had its
influence on me in the study of my art. Ease, grace, untiring
energy through all the variations of human passion, blended
into that grand and massive style, had been with her the result
of patient application. On first witnessing her wonderful
impersonations I may say with the poet:
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.”
And I can only liken the effect they produced on me, in
developing new trains of thought, to the awakening power that
Michael Angelo’s sketch of the Colossal head in the Farnesina
is said to have had on the mind of Raphael.
CHAPTER XV.
RETIREMENT.
What wonder that Mrs. Siddons now seriously began to think of retirement.
Already, in 1805, she had written to a friend: “It is better to work
hard and have done with it. If I can but add three hundred a year to my
present income, I shall be perfectly well provided for; and I am resolved
when that is accomplished to make no more positive engagements in summer.
I trust that God in His great mercy will enable me to do it; and then,
oh, how lazy, and saucy, and happy will I be! You will have something
to do, I can tell you, my dear, to keep me in order.” This longing now
became a distinct determination.
In two letters written some time before, one to James Ballantyne and one
to Lady Harcourt, she gave expression to this determination. To Lady
Harcourt she wrote:—
“You see where I am, and must know the place by representations as well
as reports, I daresay, at least my lord does, yea, ‘every coigne and
vantage’ of this venerable pile, and envies me the view of it just before
me where I am writing. This is an inn. I set myself down here for the
advantage of pure air and perfect quiet, rather than lodge in Leeds,
most disagreeable town in His Majesty’s dominions, God bless him. This
day my task finishes. I have played there four nights, and am very tired
of Kirkstall Abbey. It is too sombre for a person of my age, and I am
no antiquarian. It is, however, extremely beautiful. I am going to York
for a week, and I hope while I am there to hear from you, my ever dear
Lady Harcourt. I must work a little while longer to realise the blessed
prospect (almost, I thank God, within my view) of sitting down in peace
and quiet for the remainder of my life. About £250 more a year will
secure to me the comfort of a carriage, and, believe me, it is one of
the favourite objects in that prospect that I shall have the happiness
of seeing you and my dear Lord Harcourt often, very often; for though
time and circumstances, and that proud barrier of high birth, have all
combined to separate our persons, yet allow me the modest ambition to
think our minds are kindred ones, and, on my part, united ever since
I had the honour and good fortune to be known to you. How could it be
otherwise, since to know you both is to esteem and love you? And now, my
dear Lady Harcourt, I must leave you to dress for Belvidera. It is very
sulky weather, and I am not i’ the mood for acting, but I must play yet a
little while longer, and then! how peaceful, how comfortable shall I be,
after the storms, the tempests, and afflictions of my laborious life! God
bless and preserve you, who are to make a large share of my happiness in
that hour of peace.”
To James Ballantyne she expresses herself in the same tenor:—
“I am wandering about the world to get a little more money. I am trying
to Secure to myself the comfort of a Carriage, which is now an absolute
necessary to me, and then—then will I sit down in quiet to the end of
my days. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that I am not abundantly
rich, but you know not the expences I have incurred in times past and
the losses I have Sustain’d; they drain ones purse beyond imagination.
I shall be at York till the 15th inst., from thence I go to Birmingham
where I shall remain till the 4th of August, from the 25th of August
till the 1st of Septr. I shall be at Manchester and then return ‘to that
dear Hut my home.’ You would scarcely know that Sweet little Spot it is
so improv’d Since you Saw it. I believe tho’ I wrote you about my new
dining Room and the pretty Bedchamber at the end of it, where you are
to sleep unannoyd by your former neighbours in their mangers, Stalls,
I _shou’d_ say, I believe. All the Lawrells are green and flourishing,
all the wooden garden pales, hidden by Sweet Shrubs and flow’rs that
form a verdant wall all round me: oh! it is the prettiest little nook
in all the world, and I do hope you will Soon come and Say you _think_
so. Your letter Surpris’d me in my _Garden of Eden_, where it found me,
‘chewing the Cud of Sweet and bitter fancy,’ you making that very moment
the principal person in the Drama of my musings—and ‘I said in my haste
all men are liars.’ It was more than probable that business, pleasure,
illness and persons perhaps less deserving your regard, might have
diverted recollection from one So distant So incapable of heightening the
joys, alleviating the Sorrows of this ‘working day world’ and our hearts
naturally yearn to those who Share our weal and woe. Yes, said I, his
taste and feelings are alive to my talents; but he does not know me well
enough to value me for Some qualities of greater worth, which in the
honest pride of my heart I will not blush to say I possess—he admires me
for my Celebrity which is all he knows of me. No blame therefore attaches
to him: he is ignorant of my real character, which if he knew he would
also approve; at least if I am not much mistaken in myself and him—in
myself I’m sure I am not mistaken. It is a vulgar error to say we are
ignorant of ourselves, for I am quite Sure that those who think at all
Seriously _must know themselves_ better than any other individual _can_.”
She had served the public for over thirty-five years, and was now in
her fifty-sixth year. Long since the ten thousand pounds, which was the
original sum with which in the heyday of her prosperity she said she
would rest content, had been doubled. Some of this had been unfortunately
invested by Mr. Siddons, and some had been lost in Sheridan’s bankruptcy;
but still, for a person who had no very expensive personal tastes, whose
children were all provided for, it was a handsome provision.
Physical disabilities also began now to interfere with her dramatic
effects. Alas! for the days when an “exquisite, fragile, creature” acted
Venus in Garrick’s procession, and with her rosy lips whispered promises
of sweetmeats into little Tommy Dibdin’s ear. The actress had grown stout
and unwieldy in person. When she acted Isabella, and knelt to the Duke,
imploring mercy for her brother, two attendants had to come forward to
help her to rise; and to make this appear correct, the same ceremony was
gone through with a young actress who performed the same part and did not
need any assistance whatever. By caricatures and portraits done of her at
the time we can see how unshapely she had become. Conventionality and
hardness replaced the old spontaneity and pathos; the action of the arms
was more pronounced, the voice was unduly raised, and the deficiency in
beauty and charm was supplied by energy and rant. Mrs. Siddons was only
two years older than her brother, but her physical and mental gifts had
deteriorated much more rapidly. The fact of the sister’s dramatic power
having been a natural gift, and his the result of industry and hard work,
made hers fail more completely with waning strength. Besides all the
disabilities of advancing age, that terrible fear of being supplanted
was ever before her eyes. Mrs. Jordan had some years before snatched
the laurels from her brow in Rosalind; now rumours were wafted across
the Channel of a young and lovely actress, Miss O’Neill, who had taken
all hearts captive as Juliet (a part Mrs. Siddons could never personate
satisfactorily); the matchless beauty of form of the young aspirant, her
sensibility and tenderness were the theme of every tongue. “To hear these
people talk, one would think _I_ had never drawn a tear,” she said sadly.
The old sensitiveness and pride remained. She accused the public of
taking pleasure in mortifying their old favourites by setting up new
idols; “I have been three times threatened with eclipse, first by means
of Miss Brunton (afterwards Lady Craven), next by means of Miss Smith,
and lastly by means of Miss O’Neill; nevertheless,” she added, “I am not
yet extinguished.” Mrs. Siddons had no right to complain. She had drunk
fully the draught of success and appreciation, and had been singularly
exempt from rivalry in her own particular walk. No public, however
indulgent, can save an actress from the penalties of old age. She
herself had supplanted Mrs. Crawford, and not very gently. The transition
point—the last in her life—had been reached, the chapter of active
professional life was closed for ever, yet she could not resign herself
to accept the decrepitude and inactivity of old age. “I feel as if I were
mounting the first steps of a ladder conducting me to another world,” she
sighed. Moore mentions meeting her at the house of Rogers:
“Mrs. Siddons came in the evening; had a good deal of conversation with
her, and was, for the first time in my life, interested by her off the
stage. She talked of the loss of friends, and mentioned herself as having
lost twenty-six friends in the course of the last six years. It is
something to _have had_ so many. Among other reasons for her regret at
leaving the stage was, that she always found in it a vent for her private
sorrows, which enabled her to bear them better; and often she has got
credit for the truth and feeling of her acting when she was doing nothing
more than relieving her own heart of its grief.”
She took her professional farewell of the stage on the 29th of June 1812.
As early as three o’clock in the afternoon people began to assemble
about the pit and gallery doors, and at half-past four the mob was so
great, that those who had come early, in the hope of getting a good
place, were carried away by the rush of the increasing crowd under the
arches. So great was the concourse of people, that not more than twenty
of the weaker sex obtained places in the pit, and the house was crammed
in every part. The play was _Lady Macbeth_. When the great actress made
her appearance, she was received with thunders of applause; for a moment
emotion overcame her, but, collecting herself, she went through her
part as magnificently as in the early days. Often have old play-goers
described the scene on that night. The grand pale face; the pathetic
voice on the stage, speaking its last to those whom it had delighted and
thrilled for so many years. While among the audience, the heart-felt
sorrow, the deep silence, only broken by smothered sobs; then the
irrepressible burst of feeling when the scene, in which she appears for
the last time in _Lady Macbeth_ was over, for the audience could bear it
no longer. The applause continued from the time of her going off till
she again appeared, to speak her address. When silence was restored, she
began the following farewell, written by her nephew Horace Twiss:—
Who has not felt how growing use endears
The fond remembrance of our former years?
Who has not sigh’d, when doom’d to leave at last
The hopes of youth, the habits of the past,
Ten thousand ties and interests, that impart
A second nature to the human heart,
And wreathing round it close, like tendrils, climb,
Blooming in age, and sanctified by time!
Yes! at this moment crowd upon my mind
Scenes of bright days for ever left behind,
Bewildering visions of enraptured youth,
When hope and fancy wore the hues of truth,
And long forgotten years, that almost seem
The faded traces of a morning dream!
Sweet are those mournful thoughts: for they renew
The pleasing sense of all I owe to you,
For each inspiring smile, and soothing tear—
For those full honours of my long career,
That cheer’d my earliest hope and chased my latest fear.
And though for me those tears shall flow no more,
And the warm sunshine of your smile is o’er;
Though the bright beams are fading fast away
That shone unclouded through my summer day;
Yet grateful memory shall reflect their light
O’er the dim shadows of the coming night,
And lend to later life a softer tone,
A moonlight tint—a lustre of her own.
Judges and Friends! to whom the magic strain
Of nature’s feeling never spoke in vain,
Perhaps your hearts, when years have glided by,
And past emotions wake a fleeting sigh,
May think on her whose lips have poured so long
The charm’d sorrows of your Shakespeare’s song:
On her, who, parting to return no more,
Is now the mourner she but seemed before;
Herself subdued, resigns the melting spell,
And breathes, with swelling heart, her long,
Her last Farewell.
As she reached the end, all stage exigency and restraint was forgotten,
her voice was broken by real sobs. As soon as the hush of emotion had
passed, the audience seemed suddenly to awake to the fact that it really
was the last time they would ever see the marvellous actress, whom at
one time they had almost idolised. Not satisfied with their usual method
of expressing their feelings, they stood upon the seats, and cheered
her, waving their hats for several minutes. It appeared to be the wish
of the majority of the audience that the play should conclude with this
scene, the curtain was therefore dropped; but Kemble came forward, and
announced that, if it was the wish of the house, the play should proceed.
The audience was divided, and the farce of _The Spoilt Child_ began,
amidst loud acclamation from one side and disappointment from the other.
This continued during the whole of the first act, with constant cries of
“The fifth act! the fifth act!” It was found impossible to allay popular
excitement; the house was all noise and confusion, and the voices on the
stage were totally inaudible. The curtain was, therefore, again dropped;
and the audience, shortly after, quietly dispersed.
So vanished from her sight that world over which, for the space of
thirty-five years, she had reigned supreme, that world that made her joy
and sorrow; before which, in spite of the many temptations that had beset
her, she could feel with pride she had never degraded the supreme gift
of genius. Amidst her poignant regrets, at least she had nothing tragic,
nothing irremediable, to mourn, like so many of her sisters in the same
profession. Differences of opinion had come between her and them, but all
that was forgotten now in the anguish of “Farewell.” She only remembered
that first night of triumph, its terrors, and its delicious ecstasy; the
weeks, months, and years of appreciated happy work, dreams fulfilled;
parts she had studied and conned as a young girl, unconscious of the
future in store for her, acted with overwhelming success. No Arabian
Night’s Dream of good fortune could have been more brilliant or more
complete; but, as in all things human, the reaction had set in. She had
touched such heights, that there must necessarily be a reflux.
She had loved her profession, not only for the measure of applause,
but for the daily bustle and work, which, to a woman of her energetic
temperament, was enjoyable in itself.
Rogers tells us that, sitting with her of an afternoon, years after the
curtain had dropped on her farewell performance, she would vividly recall
every moment of her stage life. “This is the time I used to be thinking
of going to the theatre: first came the pleasure of dressing for my part;
and then, the pleasure of acting it; but that is all over now.” In her
early days even, she always confessed that her spirits were not equal,
and her internal resources were too few for a life of solitude.
After long years spent amidst the intoxication of applause, to withdraw
into the twilight of private life must always be a great trial. The
nightly stimulus, the mental habit of studying for a certain object,
the production of evanescent emotions and transitory effects, must have
a deteriorating effect on the noblest disposition. Shrewd Miss Berry,
in her Journal, dated February 24th, 1811, mentions a visit she paid at
Westbourne. “Mrs. Siddons received me, as she always does, in a manner
that flattered my internal vanity, for she has the germ of a superior
nature in her, though burnt up by the long-continued brand of popular
applause”; and Fanny Kemble writes: “What a price my Aunt Siddons has
paid for her great celebrity! Weariness, vacuity, and utter deadness of
spirit. The cup has been so highly flavoured, that life is absolutely
without sorrow or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity.
She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and
dreary; mere shapeless, colourless, level monotony to her. Poor woman!
What a fate to be condemned to! and yet how she has been envied as well
as admired!”
We doubt if the weariness and vacuity was as great as her niece was
inclined to think. Advanced age and impaired powers always bring a
certain deadness and indifference; but she had mental resources the young
girl did not take into consideration. She kept a large circle of firm and
attached friends. She was not without intellectual pursuits. Although
showing no particular genius in any other department of life but the
stage, she had a fine cultivated taste for artistic and beautiful things.
She employed much of her time in modelling, and executed many respectable
pieces of work. Her childish love of Milton revived again now, and after
her retirement she published a small volume of extracts from his poems.
Above all, she had the support and consolation of a pure unswerving
religious faith; through her chequered life of triumph and bereavement,
joy and sorrow, Sarah Siddons had ever kept that alive in her heart. It
saved her in many a crisis, and illumined the darkened road that lay
before her.
The following verses, written by her at this time, are a truer indication
of her frame of mind than any conclusions drawn from external observation
by outsiders:—
Say, what’s the brightest wreath of fame,
But canker’d buds, that opening close;
Ah! what’s the world’s most pleasing dream,
But broken fragments of repose?
Lead me where peace with steady hand
The mingled cup of life shall hold;
Where Time shall smoothly pour his sand,
And Wisdom turn that sand to gold.
Then haply at Religion’s shrine
This weary heart its load shall lay,
Each _wish_ my fatal love resign,
And passion melt in tears away.
She had now leisure for journeys abroad and the enjoyment of intellectual
pleasure outside her profession which she had never had before. In the
autumn of 1814 she made an excursion to Paris in company with her
brother John, her youngest daughter, Cecilia, and Miss Wilkinson. A
short interval of peace then reigned, and all interested in art flocked
from England to see the treasures that Napoleon had plundered from every
European capital. The Apollo Belvidere, amongst others, had been set up
in the statuary hall of the Louvre; and Campbell tells us how, giving
his arm to Mrs. Siddons, they walked down the hall towards it, and stood
gazing rapt in its divine beauty. “I could not forget the honour,”
Campbell tells us, quaintly, “of being before him in the company of _so
august a worshipper_; and it certainly increased my enjoyment to see the
first interview between the paragon of Art and that of Nature.”
The “paragon of Nature” was evidently much struck, and remained standing
silently gazing for some time; then she said, solemnly, “What a great
idea it gives us of God, to think that He has made a human being capable
of fashioning so divine a form!”
As they walked round the hall, Campbell tells us, he saw every eye fixed
upon her. Her stately bearing, her noble expression, made a sensation,
though the crowd evidently did not know who she was, as he heard whispers
of “Who is she? Is she not an Englishwoman?”
Crabb Robinson, in his _Memoirs_, also tells us that he heard someone say
in the Louvre, “Mrs. Siddons is below.” He instantly left the Raphaels
and Titians and went in search of her. She was walking with her sister,
Mrs. Twiss. He noticed her grand air and fascinating smile, but he was
disturbed that so glorious a head should have been covered with a small
chip hat. She knit her brows, also, to look at the pictures, as if her
sight were not good; and he remarked a line or two about her mouth, and
a little coarseness of expression. She remained two months in Paris, and
we hear of her going to a review held by the King. She was seen toiling
along towards the Champs de Mars, heated and flushed, and in clouds of
dust; and a joke is made on the subject of her “saving.”
Further suffering was in store for her in the death of her son Henry. He
died of consumption, like his sisters. Manager of the Edinburgh Theatre,
and in the prime of life, his loss was a great one both to his family and
the Edinburgh public. His poor mother wrote:—
“Westbourne, 1815.
“This third shock has, indeed, sadly shaken me, and, although
in the very depths of affliction, I agree with you that
consolation may be found, yet the voice of nature will for a
time overpower that of reason; and I cannot but remember ‘that
such things were, and were most dear to me.’
“I am tolerably well, but have no voice. This is entirely
nervousness, and fine weather will bring it back to me. Write
to me, and let me receive consolation in a better account of
your precious health. My brother and Mrs. Kemble have been very
kind and attentive, as indeed they always were in all events
of sickness or of sorrow. The little that was left of my poor
sight is almost washed away by tears, so that I fear I write
scarce legibly. God’s will be done!”
Later, she complained:—
“I don’t know why, unless that I am older and feebler, or that I am
now without a profession, which forced me out of myself in my former
afflictions, but the loss of my poor dear Henry seems to have laid a
heavier hand upon my mind than any I have sustained. I drive out to
recover my voice and my spirits, and am better while abroad; but I come
home and lose them both in an hour. I cannot read or do anything else
but puddle with my clay. I have begun a full-length figure of Cecilia;
and this is a resource which fortunately never fails me. Mr. Fitzhugh
approves of it, and that is good encouragement. I have little to complain
of, except a low voice and lower spirits.”
All these letters do not look like the proud, hard, self-sufficient woman
so often described. We see her sorrowing sincerely, but not giving way to
unreasoning, despairing grief; recognising that all the brightness and
elasticity of life had gone, but doing, nobly and practically, what she
could to help those that were left.
Before the end of the year she had arranged with Mr. James Ballantyne to
act ten nights for the benefit of her son’s family:—
“A thousand thousand thanks to you my kind and good friend for your
most delightful and gratifying letter. You do me justice in believing
that whatever conduces to your happiness, or that operates against it,
must ever be interesting to me; and as the happiness and health of your
excellent and most respectable mother is, I know, the first object of
Satisfaction which this world contains for your duteous mind, I am,
indeed, most truly happy, for both your sakes, to receive so comfortable
an account of her. I can conceive no blessing comparable to that of
having such a Son, and such a one was my own dear and lamented Henry.
This last blow lay, indeed, for some time most heavily upon me; but
when I recollect that his pure Spirit has exchang’d a Sphere of painful
and anxious existence, with which he was ill-calculated to Struggle,
for the regions of everlasting peace and joy, I feel the Selfishness of
my Sorrow, and repeat those words, which as often as repeated seem to
tranquilize my mind, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be
the name of the Lord.’ I hope my visit to Edinborough will be beneficial
to my dear Son’s family; at least, it will evince the greatest proof of
respect for that Public on whom they depend, which it is in my power to
give. I have some doubts whether the motives which induce me to return
to the Public after So long an absence, will Shield me from the darts
of malignity; and when I think of what I have undertaken, altho’ I feel
courageous as to my intentions, I own myself doubtful and weak with
respect to the performance of the Task which I have undertaken. It is
a great disadvantage to have been so long disused to the exertions I
am call’d on to make, but I will not Suffer myself to think of it any
longer. As to the arrangement of the Plays, it must be left entirely to
Mrs. H. Siddons, whose judgment I have always found to be as Strong as
her disposition is amiable, and I can give her no higher praise. She is
indeed ‘wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best, &c.,’ but I fear I shall
never be able to present myself in Mrs. Beverley, who Should be not only
handsome, but _young_ also. Believe me, my truly estimable friend, I look
forward with the greatest satisfaction to the moment of Seeing you again;
in the meantime do not exalt me too much! You Seem to be in an error,
on the Subject of my engagement, which I must rectify. The necessary
expenses of Clothes, Ornaments, Travelling, &c., are more than my limited
Income wou’d afford, without a chance, _at least_, of being able to
_cover_ these expenses, which is all I desire! and therefore I am to
fulfil my Engagement on my brother’s Terms.”
In November, therefore, we find her making her way by slow stages to
Edinburgh. She stopped for several days at Kirby Moorside, with Sir Ralph
and Lady Noel, and Lady Byron. In spite of nervousness and fatigue, she
delighted her Edinburgh audiences. She had no reason to make a charge
against her northern friends of unfaithfulness.
CHAPTER XVI.
OLD AGE.
In 1817 Mrs. Siddons, anxious, for the sake of her daughter Cecilia, to
see more society, left her Country retreat, Westbourne Farm, where so
many hours of repose snatched from the turmoil of her professional life
had been passed, and took a house in Upper Baker Street. It is the last
house on the east side overlooking the Regent’s Park, and has a small
lawn and garden behind.
On the front, over the doorway, is a medallion stating that “Here
Mrs. Siddons, the actress, lived from 1817 to 1831.” When the houses
in Cornwall Terrace were about to be brought close to the gate of the
park, Mrs. Siddons appealed to the Prince Regent, who had ever remained
her firm and courteous friend. He immediately gave orders that her
view over the Park should not be shut off. The house, which is still
unchanged in its internal arrangements, is now used as the estate
office of the Portman property. The room she built out as a studio
for modelling is screened off into compartments with desks for the
transaction of business. That is really the only change that has been
made. It is an old-fashioned, comfortable house, panelled in dark oak.
The approach to the staircase has steps ascending and descending, and
the stairs themselves twist round corners, off which branch unexpected
passages, until they reach the first floor, where to the right opens the
dining-room, looking on the little garden, and beyond to the Park. There,
between the Grecian pillars with their honey-suckle pediment, once hung
the portrait of her brother John as Hotspur; now the space looks desolate
and bare.
Here she lived with her daughter Cecilia and Patty Wilkinson, her
attached friend and companion. Some among us are old enough to remember
having heard of her pleasant parties where all that was intellectual
and delightful in the London of her day was assembled. There she would
sometimes, to her intimate friends, give recitations of her favourite
parts, having by this time relinquished doing so in public. Miss
Edgeworth describes one of these readings:—
I heard Mrs. Siddons read at her town-house a portion of _Henry
VIII_. I was more struck and delighted than I ever was with any
reading in my life. This is feebly expressing what I felt. I
felt that I had never before fully understood, or sufficiently
admired, Shakespeare, or known the full powers of the human
voice and the English language. Queen Katherine was a character
peculiarly suited to her time of life and to reading. There
was nothing that required gesture or vehemence incompatible
with the sitting attitude. The composure and dignity, and
the sort of suppressed feeling, and touches, not bursts of
tenderness, of matronly, not youthful tenderness, were all
favourable to the general effect. I quite forgot to applaud—I
thought she was what she appeared. The illusion was perfect,
till it was interrupted by a hint from her daughter or niece, I
forget which, that Mrs. Siddons would be encouraged by having
some demonstration given of our feelings. I then expressed my
admiration, but the charm was broken.
Maria Edgeworth seems to have remained friends with Mrs. Siddons, but her
father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, hopelessly offended her the first time
he met her:—
“Madam,” he said, “I think I saw you perform Millamant five-and-thirty
years ago.”
“Pardon me, Sir.”
“Oh, then it was forty years ago. I recollect it.”
“You will excuse me, Sir, I never played Millamant.”
“Oh, but I recollect it.”’
“I think,” she said, stiffly turning to Rogers, “it is time for me to
change my place,” and rising with much haughtiness she moved away.
Many amusing stories were current of the dramatic manner which she
imported into daily life. Her question, in the tragic tones of Lady
Macbeth, to the over-awed draper as she bought a piece of coloured print,
“Will it wash?” The solemn reply to the Scotch provost, “Beef cannot be
too salt for me, my Lord”; and “I asked for water, Boy; you’ve brought
me beer.” Lord Beaconsfield told a story of his father, Isaac Disraeli,
returning home after a visit to London, and declaring that the event
that had made most impression on him was hearing Mrs. Siddons say,
“The Ripstone Pippin is the finest apple in the world.” Moore says he
remembered how proud he was of going to Lady Mount Edgcumbe’s suppers
after the opera. It was at one of these, sitting between Mrs. Siddons and
Lady Castlereagh, he heard for the first time the voice of the former
(never having met her before) transferred to the ordinary things of the
world, and the solemn words in her most tragic tone, “I do love ale
dearly.” Sidney Smith also describes her as “stabbing the potatoes”; and
it is said that on hearing of the sudden death of an acquaintance, who
had been “found dead in his bureau,” she understood the latter word to
mean a piece of furniture, and exclaimed, “Poor man! How gat he there?”
She was, as a rule, perfectly impervious to external influences, ignoring
them in her self-abstraction. She lived through the most marvellous
period of English and European history, yet no incident seems to have
made an impression on her mode of thought or life. She never entered
into political interests, though the friend of Fox, Burke, and Sheridan.
Her dramatic world of romance was all-sufficient for her. Hers was not a
ready intelligence; she required time for everything, time to comprehend,
time to speak; there was nothing superficial about her, no vivacity of
manner. To petty gossip she could not condescend, and evil-speaking
she abhorred. She cared not to shine in general conversation. Ask her
her opinion, she could not give it until she had studied every side of
the subject; then you might trust to it without appeal. This slowness
of mental action led to a regal, stately, and majestic bearing, that
gradually overlaid her genius to its detriment. As early as 1817, Fanny
Burney describes her as—
The heroine of a tragedy, sublime, elevated and solemn, in face
and person truly noble and commanding, in manners quiet and
stiff, in voice deep and dragging, and in conversation formal,
sententious, calm, and dry. I expected her to have been all
that is interesting; the delicacy and sweetness with which
she seizes every opportunity to strike and to captivate upon
the stage had persuaded me that her mind was formed with that
peculiar susceptibility which, in different modes, must give
equal powers to attract and delight in common life. But I was
very much mistaken. As a stranger I must have admired her noble
appearance and beautiful countenance, and have regretted that
nothing in her conversation kept pace with their promise.
We read in 1801 of Campbell meeting her walking on the banks of
Paddington Canal when she was living at Westbourne, and in a perfect
agony of fear “whipping on his great-coat,” and preparing himself for an
interview with the “great woman.”
Washington Irving gives a characteristic sketch of her:—
It was a rare gratification to see the Queen of Tragedy thus
out of her robes. Yet her manner, even at the social board,
still partakes of the state and gravity of tragedy. Not that
there is an unwillingness to unbend, but that there is a
difficulty in throwing aside the solemnity of long-acquired
habit. She reminded me of Walter Scott’s knights, “who carved
the meat with their gloves of steel, and drank the red wine
through their helmets barred.” There was, however, entirely
the disposition to be gracious, and to play her part like
herself in conversation. She, therefore, exchanged anecdote
and incident, in the course of which she detailed her feelings
and reflections while wandering among the sublime and romantic
scenery of North Wales, and on the summit of Penmaennmawr.
As she did this her eye kindled and her features beamed, and
in her countenance, which is indeed a volume where one may
read strange matters, you might trace the varying emotions of
her soul. I was surprised to find her face, even at the near
approach of sitting by her side, absolutely handsome, and
unmarked with any of those wrinkles which generally attend
advanced life. Her form is at present becoming unwieldy,
but not shapeless, and is full of dignity. Her gestures and
movements are eminently graceful. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell say
that I was quite fortunate, and might flatter myself on her
being so conversible, for that she is very apt to be on the
reserve towards strangers.
Mr. and Mrs. Campbell had every reason to say so, for only that very year
she proposed dining with them one day, requesting, as she always did,
that it was only to be a family party. About noon Washington Irving’s
brother and a friend, who had brought letters of introduction from
Sir Walter Scott, arrived. During their visit a servant unfortunately
came into the room and disclosed the fact that Mrs. Siddons was dining
there. Immediately the Americans made up their minds to stay and see
her. Campbell told them how annoyed Mrs. Siddons would be at meeting
strangers; they were not to be gainsaid:—
When the carriage approached the house, Campbell goes on, I
went out to conduct her over a short pathway on the common,
as well as to prepare her for a sight of the strangers. It
was the only time, during a friendly acquaintance of so many
years, that I ever saw a cloud upon her brow. She received
my apology very coldly, and walked into my house with tragic
dignity. At first she kept the gentlemen of the New World at a
transatlantic distance; and they made the matter worse, as I
thought, for a time, by the most extravagant flattery. But my
Columbian friends had more address than I supposed, and they
told her so many interesting anecdotes about their native stage
and the enthusiasm of their countrymen respecting herself that
she grew frank and agreeable, and shook hands with both of them
at parting.
Many were the honours heaped on her during these last years. She received
a formal invitation to visit the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Her daughter writes to Miss Wilkinson, expressing their delight with the
visit:—
I over and over wished for you, who would have enjoyed as much
as I did the attention and admiration shown to our Darling.
We had sights to see, colleges and libraries to examine, and
at every one of them there was a principal inhabitant, eager
to show and proud to entertain Mrs. Siddons. In the public
library, my mother received the honour of an address from
Professor Clarke, who presented her with a handsome Bible from
the Stereotype press. After which she read to almost all the
members of the University at present there the trial scene
in the _Merchant of Venice_, and more finely she never did
it in her life. Everyone was, or seemed to be, enchanted and
enthusiastic.
After her retirement from the stage, she gave public readings at
the Argyll Rooms in London. The arrangements were most simple. A
reading-desk with lights, on which lay her book, a quarto volume,
printed in large letters. When her memory failed her, she assisted her
sight by spectacles, which in the intervals she handled and used so
gracefully, that it was impossible to wish her without them. A large
red screen formed an harmonious background to her white dress, and
classically-shaped head, round which her dark hair was rolled in loose
coils. All her former dignity and grace seemed to return in these
readings. The effect she produced was marvellous, considering it was
without the aid of stage illusion or scenery.
The attention shown her by the Royal Family was a source of much
gratification. Her letters written, after a visit to Windsor, in January
1813, are almost girlish in their emphasis and expressions of delight.
She was in the middle of dressing to go and dine at Mrs. Damer’s, when an
especial messenger arrived in the dusk, from Lady Stewart, intimating the
Queen’s desires. Everything was rose colour. “The charming accomplished
Princesses, so _sweetly_ and _graciously_ acknowledge the amusement I
was so happy as to afford them. To have been able to amuse a little
a few of the heavy mournful hours, the weight of which those royal
amiable sufferers must so often feel, has been to me the _greatest_, the
_proudest gratification_.”
A magnificent gold chain, with a cross of many coloured jewels, was
presented to her by the Queen, and a “silken quilt for my bed, which she
sewed with her own hands.”
On the 9th of June 1819, when past sixty, Mrs. Siddons was induced to
appear for the benefit of her brother, Charles Kemble, at Covent Garden.
She had done so before, at the command of the Princess Charlotte, who
at the last moment had been unable to come. All the best critics were
of opinion it was a mistake. The part chosen, too, Lady Randolph, was
injudicious, with its lengthy speeches and continual movement. The
audience certainly gave three rounds of applause, in recognition of her
personal character, when Young Norval asked:
But did my sire surpass the rest of men
As thou excellest all of woman kind?
But this was a poor substitute for the breathless thrill, the agony of
emotion, with which she shook her audience in the old days.
Unfortunately for us and them, players are not immortal. Health,
strength, beauty, voice, fail them, and without these adventitious aids
genius is of no avail on the stage. Any loss of reputation to an actress
like Mrs. Siddons was a loss to the world; these reappearances, when age
and infirmity had weakened her powers, were much to be deplored. Let us,
however, turn from this subject to more pleasant ones; and there were so
many pleasant incidents and so few mistakes in Mrs. Siddons’s dignified
and decorous life, that we can afford to be lenient.
In Fanny Kemble’s _Record of a Girlhood_, we get glimpses of Aunt
Siddons, stately and gentle, surrounded by children and grandchildren.
You know we were to spend Christmas Eve at my Aunt Siddons’s;
we had a delightful evening, and I was very happy. My aunt came
down from the drawing-room (for we danced in the dining-room
on the ground-floor) and sat among us, and you cannot think
how nice and pretty it was to see her surrounded by her clan,
more than three dozen strong; some of them so handsome, and
many with a striking likeness to herself, either in feature or
expression. Mrs. Harry and Cecy danced with us, and we enjoyed
ourselves very much.
The younger sons of her son George Siddons (who had obtained a Government
post at Calcutta), were being educated with their sisters in England, and
always spent their holidays with their grandmother, Mrs. Siddons. The
youngest of these three school-boys was the father of the beautiful Mrs.
Scott Siddons of the present day.
Mrs. Siddons was very fond of children. Campbell tells a story of his
once leaving his little boy, aged six, with her, when she was stopping in
Paris. When he returned, he found them both in animated conversation. She
had been amusing him with all sorts of stories, which she told admirably.
The evening before she had been to a fashionable party and offended
everyone by the austerity of her manners.
Her letters about her grandchildren are full of simple grandmotherly
love, naturally expressed. She wrote from Broadstairs in 1806:—
“My dear Harry, I have very great pleasure in telling you that your dear
little ones are quite well. The bathing agrees with them perfectly. They
are exceedingly improved in looks and appetite, though their stomachs
turn a little, poor dears, at the sight of the machines; but, indeed,
upon the whole, the dipping is pretty well got over, and they look so
beautiful after it, it would do your heart good to see them. I assure you
they are the belles of Broadstairs. Their nurse is very good-humoured to
them. She is certainly not a beauty, but they like her as well as if she
were a Venus. Never were little souls so easily managed, or so little
troublesome.”
The great actress would boast with more pride of the effect she produced
on a little girl during the performance of _Jane Shore_, than of her
greatest triumphs. In the last scenes of the play, when the unfortunate
heroine, destitute and starving, exclaims in an agony of suffering, “I
have not tasted bread for three days,” a little voice was heard, broken
by sobs, exclaiming, “Madam, madam! do take my orange, if you please,”
and the audience and the actress beheld, in one of the stage boxes, a
little girl holding her out an orange.
A lady, now alive, recalls to mind, when she was very young, being taken
to pay a visit to “the great Mrs. Siddons.” She long after remembered
those wonderful eyes, and particularly the long silky eye-lashes, which
she noticed were of extraordinary length, and curled upwards in a
beautiful curve. On being told that the child was obliged to go away to
the country, and would have no opportunity of hearing her on the stage,
she kindly said she would recite for her, and did so there and then.
One of her grandchildren has described the interest of her visits
to her. Frequently her grandmother would read to them, giving them
the choice of the play. One evening in particular she recalled the
reading of _Othello_. “It was a stormy night, and the thunder was heard
occasionally, and she so grand and impressive; her look! her voice, her
magnificent eyes, still clear and brilliant. It was real reading, not
declamation, and yet the effect,” she says, “was beyond anything I could
conceive of the finest acting.” This was only the winter before her death.
We find her now suffering all the fluctuations in spirits old age is
subject to, sometimes complaining of feebleness and suffering, at others
returning to all the girlish playfulness of her younger days. On July
12th, 1819, she writes to her friend Mrs. Fitzhugh:—
“Well, my dear friend, though I am not of rank and condition to be myself
at the Prince’s ball, my fine clothes, at any rate, will have that
honour. Lady B⸺ has borrowed my Lady Macbeth’s finest banquet dress,
and I wish her ladyship joy in wearing it, for I found the weight of it
almost too much for endurance for half an hour. How will she be able to
carry it for such a length of time? But young and old are expected to
appear, upon that ‘high solemnity’ in splendid and fanciful apparel, and
many of these beauties will appear in my stage finery. Lady C⸺ at first
intended to present herself (as she said very drolly) as a vestal virgin,
but has now decided upon the dress of a fair Circassian. I should like
to see this gorgeous assembly, and I have some thoughts of walking in in
the last dress of Lady Macbeth, and swear I came there in my sleep. But
enough of this nonsense.”
Her brother John, sharer of most of her trials and triumphs, settled at
Lausanne towards the end of his life. The loss of his society was a sad
deprivation, and in 1821 she paid him a visit. Her daughter Cecilia, in
a letter home, described the delights of the villa the Kembles lived in,
and the beauty of the surrounding scenery.
Mrs. Siddons meditated an expedition to Chamounix but for some reason it
was given up, and they went to Berne; the weather was wet, however, and
they were obliged to return sooner than they expected. They ate chamois,
crossed a lake, mounted a glacier with two men, cutting steps in the ice
with a hatchet, and did all that was required of them as travellers. “My
mother bore all the fatigues much more wonderfully than any of us,” the
letter ends.
In spite of her wonderful energy, old age was creeping on her apace.
Erysipelas, which was ultimately fatal, frequently attacked her with
a burning soreness in her mouth, or with headaches that were equally
painful. She had to submit to that worst penalty of advancing years, the
death of friends; those of Mrs. Damer and of Mrs. Piozzi were a great
loss. In February 1823, John Kemble died at Lausanne. On the 9th he dined
out, and it was remarked that he was in very good spirits; the next
evening a few friends dropped in for a rubber of whist. The following
Sunday he was out in his garden; but while he was sitting reading the
paper, it fell from his hands. His wife rushed to him; he only faltered
a few words, begging her not to be alarmed. The doctor was sent for, but
one stroke after another seized him, and he died on the 20th. This was a
sad blow to Mrs. Siddons.
In her seventy-third year she wrote to Mrs. Fitzhugh from Cobham Hall,
the seat of Lord Darnley:—
“I have brought myself to see whether change of scene, and the
cordial kindness of my noble host and hostess, will not at
least do something to divert my torment. But real evils will
not give way to such applications, gratifying though they may
be. I have had the honour, however, of conversing with Prince
Leopold; he is a very agreeable and sensible converser, and Her
Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent seems to justify all the
opinions of her amiability. I have begun to recover the loss of
my dear little girls, George’s daughters. How I long to hear
they are safe in the arms of their anxious parents. In this
magnificent place, I assure you, my seventy-second birthday was
celebrated with the most gratifying and flattering cordiality.
We had music and Shakespeare, which Lord Darnley has at his
finger’s ends. I should have enjoyed the party more if it had
not been so large; but twenty-three people at dinner is rather
too much of a good thing.... Talking of the arts, I cannot help
thinking with sorrow of the statue of my poor brother. It is
an absolute libel on his noble person and air. I should like to
pound it into dust, and scatter it to the winds.
“Yours,
“S. S.”
A statue of the great actress, by Chantry, was put up later, by Macready,
beside her brother’s in Westminster Abbey.
In April 1831 she was attacked with the illness that was to prove fatal.
The appearance of the erysipelas in one of her ancles alarmed the
doctor, but she got better, and before the end of the month felt so far
recovered, that she laughingly told him that he need not come to see her
any more, for “she had health to sell.”
Unfortunately, she ventured out driving soon afterwards, the day was
cold, and a chill seemed to have developed the erysipelas internally. On
the 31st May she was seized with sickness and ague, and in the course of
the evening both her legs were attacked with erysipelas inflammation.
This increased during the night, and was accompanied by much fever. In
the course of the following day there was a consultation of doctors. They
pronounced the case hopeless, mortification supervened, and about nine on
the morning of the 8th June she expired, after a week of acute suffering.
On the 15th June she was buried in the New Ground of Paddington Church,
followed to the grave by her brother Charles Kemble, two sons of Henry
Siddons, and many others. Alas! of her own immediate family few were
left, and her eldest son was in India. In the procession were eleven
mourning coaches, with the performers of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
and Covent Garden. When the burial service had been read, a young woman,
Campbell tells us, knelt down beside the coffin with demonstrations of
the wildest grief. She came veiled, and her name was never discovered.
Why go into the items of the will Mrs. Siddons left, and the articles
she assigned to her heirs? To us she has bequeathed the memory of one of
the greatest dramatic artists that ever graced our stage, and of one of
the noblest of the long list of noble women enrolled in the annals of
our country. Time goes on whirling away all memories in its relentless
rush. A new generation is ever ready to depreciate the enthusiasms of
their grandfathers, and ours is incredulous when told of the powers of a
Garrick or a Siddons.
It was with a feeling of pain that, while standing the other day by the
great actress’s grave where it lies lonely and untended in Paddington
churchyard, we heard that our cousins across the Atlantic set more
store on the memory of Sarah Siddons than we do. Miss Mary Anderson,
the custodian told us, whenever she is in London, comes up on Sunday
afternoons, with parties of her countrymen, to lay fresh flowers on the
grave, and has undertaken, at her own expense, to execute all necessary
repairs to the railings and tombstone. Let us, before it is too late,
anticipate this high-minded and generous offer.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It was the same Lady Lucan who was said once to have asked the
actress: “Pray, Madam, when you are to prepare yourself in a character,
what is your _primary object_ of attention, the _superstructure_, as it
may be called, or the ‘foundation’ of the part?”
[2] Mrs. Piozzi, who, after Mr. Thrale’s death, had married again, much
to the disgust of the Johnsonian band.
[3] On the first night of the O. P. riots, we are told the actress wore
a costume fashioned after the bridal suit of the unfortunate Queen of
Scots, and was a perfect blaze with the jewels in the stomacher of the
dress, as well as upon her hair and around her neck.
London: Printed by W. H. Allen & Co., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W.
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