Records of a Girlhood Part 14

It is very true that, as she said, Garrick acted Macbeth in a full court suit of scarlet,--knee-breeches, powdered wig, pigtail, and all; and Mrs. Siddons acted the Grecian Daughter in piles of powdered curls, with a forest of feathers on the top of them, high-heeled shoes, and a portentous hoop; and both made the audience believe that they looked just as they should do. But for all that, actors and actresses who were neither Garrick nor Mrs. Siddons were not less like the parts they represented by being at least dressed as they should be; and the fine accuracy of the Shakespearean revivals of Mr. Macready and Charles Kean was in itself a great enjoyment; n.o.body was ever told to _omit_ the t.i.thing of mint and c.u.mmin, though other matters were more important; and Kean's Oth.e.l.lo would have been the grand performance it was, even with the advantage of Mr. Fechter's clever and picturesque "getting up"

of the play, as a frame to it; as Mademoiselle Rachel's wonderful fainting exclamation of "Oh, mon cher Curiace!" lost none of its poignant pathos, though she knew how every fold of her drapery fell and rested on the chair on which she sank in apparent unconsciousness.

Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to the painter, "Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire, celui-ci." The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how, while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility, she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress.

"Allez-y-voir," replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille, the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation that she was right, and that there was probably no moment of the piece at which this consummate artist was not aware of the effect produced by every line and fold of the exquisite costume, of which she had studied and prepared every detail as carefully as the wonderful movements of her graceful limbs, the intonations of her awful voice, and the changing expressions of her terribly beautiful countenance.

In later years, after I became the directress of my own stage costumes, I adopted one for Juliet, made after a beautiful design of my friend, Mrs. Jameson, which combined my mother's _sine qua non_ of simplicity with a form and fas.h.i.+on in keeping with the supposed period of the play.

My frame of mind under the preparations that were going forward for my _debut_ appears to me now curious enough. Though I had found out that I could act, and had acted with a sort of frenzy of pa.s.sion and entire self-forgetfulness the first time I ever uttered the wonderful conception I had undertaken to represent, my going on the stage was absolutely an act of duty and conformity to the will of my parents, strengthened by my own conviction that I was bound to help them by every means in my power. The theatrical profession was, however, utterly distasteful to me, though _acting_ itself, that is to say, dramatic personation, was not; and every detail of my future vocation, from the preparations behind the scenes to the representations before the curtain, was more or less repugnant to me. Nor did custom ever render this aversion less; and liking my work so little, and being so devoid of enthusiasm, respect, or love for it, it is wonderful to me that I ever achieved _any_ success in it at all. The dramatic element inherent in my organization must have been very powerful, to have enabled me without either study of or love for my profession to do anything worth anything in it.

But this is the reason why, with an unusual gift and many unusual advantages for it, I did really so little; why my performances were always uneven in themselves and perfectly unequal with each other, never complete as a whole, however striking in occasional parts, and never at the same level two nights together; depending for their effect upon the state of my nerves and spirits, instead of being the result of deliberate thought and consideration,--study, in short, carefully and conscientiously applied to my work; the permanent element which preserves the artist, however inevitably he must feel the influence of moods of mind and body, from ever being at their mercy.

I brought but one half the necessary material to the exercise of my profession, that which nature gave me; and never added the cultivation and labor requisite to produce any fine performance in the right sense of the word; and, coming of a family of _real_ artists, have never felt that I deserved that honorable name.

A letter written at this time to Miss S---- shows how comparatively small a part my approaching ordeal engrossed my thoughts.

JAMES STREET, September 24, 1829, MY DEAREST H----,

Your letter grieved me very much, but it did not surprise me; of your brother's serious illness I had heard from my cousin, Horace Twiss. But is there indeed cause for the terrible anxiety you express? I know how impossible it is to argue with the apprehensions of affection, and should have forborne this letter altogether, but that I felt very deeply your kindness in writing to me at such a time, and that I would fain a.s.sure you of my heart-felt sympathy, however unavailing it may be. To you who have a steadfast anchor for your hopes, I ought not, perhaps, to say, "Do not despond." Yet, dearest H----, do not despond: is there _any_ occasion when despair is justified? I know how lightly all soothing counsel must be held, in a case of such sorrow as yours, but among fellow-Christians such words still have some significance; for the most unworthy of that holy profession may point unfalteringly to the only consolations adequate to the need of those far above them in every endowment of mind and heart and religious attainment. Dear H----, I hardly know how to tell you how much I feel for you, how sincerely I hope your fears may prove groundless, and how earnestly I pray that, should they prove prophetic, you may be enabled to bear the affliction, to meet which I doubt not strength will be given you. This is all I dare say; those who love you best will hardly venture to say more. To put away entirely the idea of an evil which one may be called upon at any moment to encounter would hardly be wise, even if it were possible, in this world where every happiness one enjoys is but a loan, the repayment of which may be exacted at the very moment, perhaps, when we are forgetting in its possession the precarious tenure by which alone it is ours.

My dear father and mother have both been very unwell; the former is a little recovered, but the latter is still in a sad state of bodily suffering and mental anxiety. Our two boys are well and happy, and I am very well and not otherwise than happy. I regret to say Mrs. Henry Siddons will leave London in a very short time; this is a great loss to me. I owe more to her than I can ever repay; for though abundant pains had been bestowed upon me previously to my going to her, it was she who caused to spring whatever scattered seeds of good were in me, which almost seemed as if they had been cast into the soil in vain.

My dear H----, I am going on the stage: the nearest period talked of for my _debut_ is the first of October, at the opening of the theater; the furthest, November; but I almost think I should prefer the nearest, for it is a very serious trial to look forward to, and I wish it were over. Juliet is to be my opening part, but not to my father's Romeo; there would be many objections to that; he will do Mercutio for me. I do not enter more fully upon this, because I know how few things can be of interest to you in your present state of feeling, but I wished you not to find the first notice of my entrance on the stage of life in a newspaper. G.o.d bless you, dearest H----, and grant you better hopes.

Your most affectionate f.a.n.n.y.

My father not acting Romeo with me deprived me of the most poetical and graceful stage lover of his day; but the public, who had long been familiar with his rendering of the part of Romeo, gained as much as I lost, by his taking that of Mercutio, which has never since been so admirably represented, and I dare affirm will never be given more perfectly. The graceful ease, and airy sparkling brilliancy of his delivery of the witty fancies of that merry gentleman, the gallant defiance of his bearing toward the enemies of his house, and his heroically pathetic and humorous death-scene, were beyond description charming. He was one of the best Romeos, and incomparably _the_ best Mercutio, that ever trod the English stage.

My father was Miss O'Neill's Romeo throughout her whole theatrical career, during which no other Juliet was tolerated by the English public. This amiable and excellent woman was always an attached friend of our family, and one day, when she was about to take leave of me, at the end of a morning visit, I begged her to let my father have the pleasure of seeing her, and ran to his study to tell him whom I had with me. He followed me hastily to the drawing-room, and stopping at the door, extended his arms towards her, exclaiming, "Ah, Juliet!" Lady Becher ran to him and embraced him with a pretty, affectionate grace, and the scene was pathetical as well as comical, for they were both white-haired, she being considerably upward of sixty and he of seventy years old; but she still retained the slender elegance of her exquisite figure, and he some traces of his pre-eminent personal beauty.

My mother had a great admiration and personal regard for Lady Becher, and told me an anecdote of her early life which transmitted those feelings of hers to me. Lord F----, eldest son of the Earl of E----, a personally and mentally attractive young man, fell desperately in love with Miss O'Neill, who was (what the popular theatrical heroine of the day always is) the realization of their ideal to the youth, male and female, of her time, the stage star of her contemporaries. Lord F----'s family had nothing to say against the character, conduct, or personal endowments of the beautiful, actress who had enchanted, to such serious purpose as marriage, the heir of their house; but much, reasonably and rightly enough, against marriages disproportionate to such a degree as that, and the objectionable nature of the young woman's peculiar circ.u.mstances and public calling. Both Miss O'Neill, however, and Lord F---- were enough in earnest in their mutual regard to accept the test of a year's separation and suspension of all intercourse. She remained to utter herself in Juliet to the English public, and her lover went and travelled abroad, both believing in themselves and each other. No letters or communication pa.s.sed between them; but toward the end of their year of probation vague rumors came flying to England of the life of dissipation led by the young man, and of the unworthy companions with whom he entertained the most intimate relations. After this came more explicit tales of positive entanglement with one particular person, and reports of an entire devotion to one object quite incompatible with the constancy professed and promised to his English mistress.

Probably aware that every effort would, till the last, be made by Lord F----'s family to detach them from each other, bound by her promise to hold no intercourse with him, but determined to take the verdict of her fate from no one but himself, Miss O'Neill obtained a brief leave of absence from her theatrical duties, went with her brother and sister to Calais, whence she travelled alone to Paris (poor, fair Juliet! when I think of her, not as I ever knew her, but such as I know she must then have been, no more pathetic image presents itself to my mind), and took effectual measures to ascertain beyond all shadow of doubt the bitter truth of the evil reports of her fickle lover's mode of life. His devotion to one lady, the more respectable form of infidelity which must inevitably have canceled their contract of love, was not indeed true, and probably the story had been fabricated because the mere general accusation of profligacy might easily have been turned into an appeal to her mercy, as the result of reckless despondency and of his utter separation from her; and a woman in her circ.u.mstances might not have been hard to find who would have persuaded herself that she might overlook "all that," reclaim her lover, and be an Earl's wife. Miss O'Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F----'s father, the Earl of E----, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son's suit, fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some s.p.a.ce between life and death for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered, resumed her work,--her sway over thousands of human hearts,--and, after lapse of healing and forgiving and forgetting time, married Sir William Wrixon Becher.

The peculiar excellence of her acting lay in the expression of pathos, sorrow, anguish,--the sentimental and suffering element of tragedy. She was expressly devised for a representative victim; she had, too, a rare endowment for her special range of characters, in an easily excited, superficial sensibility, which caused her to cry, as she once said to me, "buckets full," and enabled her to exercise the (to most men) irresistible influence of a beautiful woman in tears. The power (or weakness) of abundant weeping without disfigurement is an attribute of deficient rather than excessive feeling. In such persons the tears are poured from their crystal cups without muscular distortion of the rest of the face. In proportion to the violence or depth of emotion, and the acute or profound sensibility of the temperament, is the disturbance of the countenance. In sensitive organizations, the muscles round the nostrils and lips quiver and are distorted, the throat and temples swell, and a grimace, which but for its miserable significance would be grotesque, convulses the whole face. Men's tears always seem to me as if they were pumped up from their heels, and strained through every drop of blood in their veins; women's, to start as under a knife stroke, direct with a gush from their heart, abundant and beneficent; but again, women of the temperament I have alluded to above have fountains of lovely tears behind their lovely eyes, and their weeping, which is indescribably beautiful, is comparatively painless, and yet pathetic enough to challenge tender compa.s.sion. I have twice seen such tears shed, and never forgotten them: once from heaven-blue eyes, and the face looked like a flower with pearly dewdrops sliding over it; and again, once from magnificent, dark, uplifted orbs, from which the falling tears looked like diamond rain-drops by moonlight.

Miss O'Neill was a supremely touching, but neither a powerful nor a pa.s.sionate actress. Personally, she was the very beau ideal of feminine weakness in its most attractive form--delicacy. She was tall, slender, elegantly formed, and extremely graceful; her features were regular and finely chiseled, and her hair beautiful; her eyes were too light, and her eyebrows and eyelashes too pale for expression; her voice wanted variety and brilliancy for comic intonation, but was deep and sonorous, and of a fine pathetic and tragic quality.

It was not an easy matter to find a Romeo for me, and in the emergency my father and mother even thought of my brother Henry's trying the part.

He was in the first bloom of youth, and really might be called beautiful; and certainly, a few years later, might have been the very ideal of a Romeo. But he looked too young for the part, as indeed he was, being three years my junior. The overwhelming objection, however, was his own insuperable dislike to the idea of acting, and his ludicrous incapacity for a.s.suming the faintest appearance of any sentiment.

However, he learned the words, and never shall I forget the explosion of laughter which shook my father, my mother, and myself, when, after hearing him recite the balcony scene with the most indescribable mixture of shy terror and nervous convulsions of suppressed giggling, my father threw down the book, and Henry gave vent to his feelings by clapping his elbows against his sides and bursting into a series of triumphant c.o.c.k-crows--an expression of mental relief so ludicrously in contrast with his sweet, sentimental face, and the part he had just been pretending to a.s.sume, that I thought we never should have recovered from the fits it sent us into. We were literally all crying with laughter, and a more farcical scene cannot be imagined. This, of course, ended all idea of that young chanticleer being my Romeo; and yet the young rascal was, or fancied he was, over head and ears in love at this very time, and an exquisite sketch Hayter had just made of him might with the utmost propriety have been sent to the exhibition with no other t.i.tle than "Portrait of a Lover."

The part of Romeo was given to Mr. Abbot, an old-established favorite with the public, a very amiable and worthy man, old enough to have been my father, whose performance, not certainly of the highest order, was nevertheless not below inoffensive mediocrity. But the public, who were bent upon doing more than justice to me, were less than just to him; and the abuse showered upon his Romeo, especially by my more enthusiastic admirers of the male s.e.x, might, I should think, have embittered his stage relations with me to the point of making me an object of detestation to him, all through our theatrical lives. A tragicomic incident was related to me by one of the parties concerned in it, which certainly proved that poor Mr. Abbot was quite aware of the little favor his Romeo found with my particular friends. One of them, the son of our kind and valued friends the G----s, an excellent, good-hearted, but not very wise young fellow, invariably occupied a certain favorite and favorable position in the midst of the third row of the pit every night that I acted. There were no stalls or reserved seats then, though not long after I came out the majority of the seats in the orchestra were let to spectators, and generally occupied by a set of young gentlemen whom Sir Thomas Lawrence always designated as my "body guard." This, however, had not yet been inst.i.tuted, and my friend G---- had often to wait long hours, and even to fight for the privilege of his peculiar seat, where he rendered himself, I am sorry to say, not a little ludicrous, and not seldom rather obnoxious to everybody in his vicinity, by the vehement demonstrations of his enthusiasm--his frantic cries of "bravo," his furious applause, and his irrepressible exclamations of ecstasy and agony during the whole play. He became as familiar to the public as the stage lamps themselves, and some of his immediate neighbors complained rather bitterly of the incessant din and clatter of his approbation, and the bruises, thumps, contusions, and constant fears which his lively sentiments inflicted upon them. This _fanatico_ of mine, walking home from the theater one night with two other like-minded individuals, indulged himself in obstreperous abuse of poor Mr. Abbot, in which he was heartily joined by his companions. Toward Cavendish Square the broad, quiet streets rang with the uproarious mirth with which they recapitulated his "d.a.m.nable faces," "strange postures,"

uncouth gestures, and ungainly deportment; imitation followed imitation of the poor actor's peculiar declamation, and the night became noisy with the shouts of mingled derision and execration of his critics; when suddenly, as they came to a gas-light at the corner of a crossing, a solitary figure which had been preceding them, without possibility of escape, down the long avenue of Harley Street, where G---- lived, turned abruptly round, and confronted them with Mr. Abbot's unimpressive countenance. "Gentlemen," he said, "no one can be more aware than myself of the defects of my performance of Romeo, no one more conscious of its entire unworthiness of Miss Kemble's Juliet; but all I can say is, that I do not act the part by my own choice, and shall be delighted to resign it to either of you who may feel more capable than I am of doing it justice." The young gentlemen, though admiring me "not wisely, but too well," were good-hearted fellows, and were struck with the manly and moderate tone of Mr. Abbot's rebuke, and shocked at having unintentionally wounded the feelings of a person who (except as Romeo), was every way deserving of their respect. Of course they could not swallow all their foolish words, and Abbot bowed and was gone before they could stutter an apology. I have no doubt that his next appearance as Romeo was hailed with some very cordial, remorseful applause, addressed to him personally as some relief to their feelings, by my indiscreet partisans. My friend G----, not very long after this theatrical pa.s.sion of his, became what is sometimes called "religious,"

and had thoughts of going into the Church, and giving up the play-house.

He confided to my mother, who was his mother's intimate friend, and of whom he was very fond, his conscientious scruples, which she in no wise combated; though she probably thought more moderation in going to the theater, and a little more self-control when there, might not, in any event, be undesirable changes in his practice, whether his taking holy orders cut him off entirely from what was then his princ.i.p.al pleasure, or not. One night, when the venerable Prebend of St. Paul's, her old friend, Dr. Hughes, was in her box with her, witnessing my performance (which my mother never failed to attend), she pointed out G----, _scrimmaging_ about, as usual, in his wonted place in the pit, and said, "There is a poor lad who is terribly disturbed in his own mind about the very thing he is doing at this moment. He is thinking of going into the Church, and more than half believes that he ought to give up coming to the play." "That depends, I should say," replied dear old Dr. Hughes, "upon his own conviction in the matter, and nothing else; meantime, pray give him my compliments, and tell him _I_ have enjoyed the performance to-night extremely."

Mr. Abbot was in truth not a bad actor, though a perfectly uninteresting one in tragedy; he had a good figure, face, and voice, the carriage and appearance of a well-bred person, and, in what is called genteel comedy, precisely the air and manner which it is most difficult to a.s.sume, that of a gentleman. He had been in the army, and had left it for the stage, where his performances were always respectable, though seldom anything more. Wanting pa.s.sion and expression in tragedy, he naturally resorted to vehemence to supply their place, and was exaggerated and violent from the absence of all dramatic feeling and imagination. Moreover, in moments of powerful emotion he was apt to become unsteady on his legs, and always filled me with terror lest in some of his headlong runs and rushes about the stage he should lose his balance and fall; as indeed he once did, to my unspeakable distress, in the play of "The Grecian Daughter," in which he enacted my husband, Phocion, and flying to embrace me, after a period of painful and eventful separation, he completely overbalanced himself, and swinging round with me in his arms, we both came to the ground together. "Oh, Mr. Abbot!" was all I could e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e; he, poor man, literally pale green with dismay, picked me up in profound silence, and the audience kindly covered our confusion, and comforted us by vehement applause, not, indeed, unmixed with laughter.

But my friends and admirers were none the more his after that exploit; and I remained in mortal dread of his stage embraces for ever after, steadying myself carefully on my feet, and bracing my whole figure to "stand fast," whenever he made the smallest affectionate approach toward me. It is not often that such a piece of awkwardness as this is perpetrated on the stage, but dramatic heroines are nevertheless liable to sundry disagreeable difficulties of a very unromantic nature. If a gentleman in a ball-room places his hand round a lady's waist to waltz with her, she can, without any shock to the "situation," beg him to release the end spray of her flowery garland, or the floating ribbons of her head-dress, which he may have imprisoned; but in the middle of a scene of tragedy grief or horror, of the unreality of which, by dint of the effort of your imagination, you are no longer conscious, to be obliged to say, in your distraction, to your distracted partner in woe, "Please lift your arm from my waist, you are pulling my head down backwards," is a distraction, too, of its kind.

The only occasion on which I ever acted Juliet to a Romeo who looked the part was one when Miss Ellen Tree sustained it. The acting of Romeo, or any other man's part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons's Hamlet), is, in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps natural propriety, but I cannot deny that the stature "more than common tall,"

and the beautiful face, of which the fine features were too marked in their cla.s.sical regularity to look feeble or even effeminate, of my fair female lover made her physically an appropriate representative of Romeo.

Miss Ellen Tree looked beautiful and not unmanly in the part; she was broad-shouldered as well as tall, and her long limbs had the fine proportions of the huntress Diana; altogether, she made a very "pretty fellow," as the saying was formerly, as all who saw her in her graceful performance of Talfourd's "Ion" will testify; but a.s.sumption of that character, which in its ideal cla.s.sical purity is almost without s.e.x, was less open to objection than that of the fighting young Veronese n.o.ble of the fourteenth century. She fenced very well, however, and acquitted herself quite manfully in her duel with Tybalt; the only hitch in the usual "business" of the part was between herself and me, and I do not imagine the public, for one night, were much aggrieved by the omission of the usual clap-trap performance (part of Garrick's interpolation, which indeed belongs to the original story, but which Shakespeare's true poet's sense had discarded) of Romeo's plucking Juliet up from her bier and rus.h.i.+ng with her, still stiff and motionless in her death-trance, down to the foot-lights. This feat Miss Tree insisted upon attempting with me, and I as stoutly resisted all her entreaties to let her do so. I was a very slender-looking girl, but very heavy for all that. (A friend of mine, on my first voyage to America, lifting me from a small height, set me down upon the deck, exclaiming, "Oh, you solid little lady!" and my cousin, John Mason, the first time he acted Romeo with me, though a very powerful, muscular young man, whispered to me as he carried my corpse down the stage with a fine semblance of frenzy, "Jove, f.a.n.n.y, you are a lift!") Finding that all argument and remonstrance was unavailing, and that Miss Tree, though by no means other than a good friend and fellow-worker of mine, was bent upon performing this gymnastic feat, I said at last, "If you attempt to lift or carry me down the stage, I will kick and scream till you set me down," which ended the controversy. I do not know whether she believed me, but she did not venture upon the experiment.

I am reminded by this recollection of my pleasant professional fellows.h.i.+p with Miss Ellen Tree of a curious instance of the unprincipled, flagrant recklessness with which scandalous gossip is received and circulated in what calls itself the best English society.

In Mr. Charles Greville's "Memoirs," he makes a statement that Miss Tree was never engaged at Covent Garden. The play-bills and the newspapers of the day abundantly contradicted this a.s.sertion (at the time he entered it in his diary), and, of course, the discreditable motive a.s.signed for the _fact_.

I cannot help thinking that, had Mr. Greville lived, much of the voluminous record he kept of persons and events would have been withheld from publication. He told me, not long before his death, that he had no recollection whatever of the contents of the earlier volumes of his MS.

journal which he had lent me to read; and it is infinitely to be regretted, if he did not look over them before they were published, that the discretion he exercised (or delegated) in the omission of certain pa.s.sages was not allowed to prevail to the exclusion of others. Such partial omissions would not indeed alter the whole tone and character of the book, but might have mitigated the shock of painful surprise with which it was received by the society he described, and by no one more than some of those who had been on terms of the friendliest intimacy with him and who had repeatedly heard him a.s.sert that his journal would never be published in the lifetime of any one mentioned in it.

I consider that I was quite justified in using even this naughty child's threat to prevent Miss Tree from doing what might very well have ended in some dangerous and ludicrous accident; nor did I feel at all guilty toward her of the species of malice prepense which Malibran exhibited toward Sontag, when they sang in the opera of "Romeo and Juliet," on the first occasion of their appearing together during their brilliant public career in England. Malibran's mischievousness partook of the force and versatility of her extraordinary genius, and having tormented poor Mademoiselle Sontag with every inconceivable freak and caprice during the whole rehearsal of the opera, at length, when requested by her to say in what part of the stage she intended to fall in the last scene, she, Malibran, replied that she "really didn't know," that she "really couldn't tell;" sometimes she "died in one place, sometimes in another, just as it happened, or the humor took her at the moment." As Sontag was bound to expire in loving proximity to her, and was, I take it, much less liable to spontaneous inspiration than her fiery rival, this was by no means satisfactory. She had nothing like the original genius of the other woman, but was nevertheless a more perfect artist. Wanting weight and power and pa.s.sion for such parts as Norma, Medea, Semiramide, etc., she was perfect in the tenderer and more pathetic parts of Amina, Lucia di Lammermoor, Linda di Chamouni; exquisite in the Rosina and Carolina of the "Barbiere" and "Matrimonio Segreto;" and, in my opinion, quite unrivaled in her Countess, in the "Nozze," and, indeed, in all rendering of Mozart's music, to whose peculiar and pre-eminent genius hers seemed to me in some degree allied, and of whose works she was the only interpreter I ever heard, gifted alike with the profound German understanding of music and the enchanting Italian power of rendering it.

Her mode of uttering sound, of putting forth her voice (the test which all but Italians, or most carefully Italian-trained singers, fail in), was as purely unteutonic as possible. She was one of the most perfect singers I ever heard, and suggests to my memory the quaint praise of the gypsy vocal performance in the ballad of "Johnny Faa"--

"They sang so sweet, So very _complete_,"

She was the first Rosina I ever heard who introduced into the scene of the music-lesson "Rhodes Air," with the famous violin variations, which she performed by way of a _vocalise_, to the utter amazement of her n.o.ble music-master, I should think, as well as her audience.

Mademoiselle Nilsson is the only prima donna since her day who has at all reminded me of Sontag, who was lovely to look at, delightful to listen to, good, amiable, and charming, and, compared with Malibran, like the evening star to a comet.

Defeated by Malibran's viciousness in rehearsing her death-scene, she resigned herself to the impromptu imposed upon her, and prepared to follow her Romeo, wherever _she_ might choose to die; but when the evening came, Malibran contrived to die close to the foot-lights and in front of the curtain; Sontag of necessity followed, and fell beside her there; the drop came down, and there lay the two fair corpses in full view of the audience, of course unable to rise or move, till a couple of stage footmen, in red plush breeches, ran in to the rescue, took the dead Capulet and Montague each by the shoulders, and dragged them off at the side scenes; the Spanish woman in the heroism of her maliciousness submitting to this ignominy for the pleasure of subjecting her gentle German rival to it.

Madame Malibran was always an object of the greatest interest to me, not only on account of her extraordinary genius, and great and various gifts, but because of the many details I heard of her youth from M. de la Forest, the French consul in New York, who knew her as Marie Garcia, a wild and wayward but most wonderful girl, under her father's tyrannical and harsh rule during the time they spent in the United States. He said that there was not a piece of furniture in their apartment that had not been thrown by the father at the daughter's head, in the course of the moral and artistic training he bestowed upon her: it is perhaps wonderful that success in either direction should have been the result of such a system; but, upon the whole, the singer seems to have profited more than the woman from it, as might have been expected. Garcia was an incomparable artist, actor, and singer (no such Don Giovanni has ever been heard or seen since), and bestowed upon all his children the finest musical education that ever made great natural gifts available to the utmost to their possessors. I suppose it was from him, too, that Marie derived with her Spanish blood the vehement, uncontrollable nature of which M. de la Forest told me he had witnessed such extraordinary exhibitions in her girlhood. He said she would fly into pa.s.sions of rage, in which she would set her teeth in the sleeve of her silk gown, and tear and rend great pieces out of the thick texture as if it were muslin; a test of the strength of those beautiful teeth, as well as of the fury of her pa.s.sion. She then would fall rigid on the floor, without motion, breath, pulse, or color, though not fainting, in a sort of catalepsy of rage.

Her marriage with the old French merchant Malibran was speedily followed by their separation; he went to France, leaving his divine devil of a wife in New York, and during his absence she used to write letters to him, which she frequently showed to M. de la Forest, who was her intimate friend and adviser, and took a paternal interest in all her affairs. These epistles often expressed so much cordial kindness and warmth of feeling toward her husband, that M. de la Forest, who knew her separation from him to have been entirely her own act and choice, and any decent agreement and harmonious life between them absolutely impossible, was completely puzzled by such professions toward a man with whom she was determined never to live, and occasionally said to her, "What do you mean? Do you wish your husband to come here to you? or do you contemplate going to him? In short, what is your intention in writing with all this affection to a man from whom you have separated yourself?" Upon this view of her epistle, which did not appear to have struck her, M. de la Forest said, she would (instead of rewriting it) tack on to it, with the most ludicrous inconsistency, a sort of revocatory codicil, in the shape of a postscript, expressing her decided desire that her husband should remain where he was, and her own explicit determination never again to enter into any more intimate relations with him than were compatible with a correspondence from opposite sides of the Atlantic, whatever personal regard or affection for him her letter might appear to express to the contrary notwithstanding.

To my great regret I only saw her act once, though I heard her sing at concerts and in private repeatedly. My only personal encounter with her took place in a curious fas.h.i.+on. My father and myself were acting at Manchester, and had just finished performing the parts of Mr. and Mrs.

Beverley, one night, in "The Gamester." On our return from the theater, as I was slowly and in considerable exhaustion following my father up the hotel stairs, as we reached the landing by our sitting-room, a door immediately opposite to it flew open, and a lady dressed like Tilburina's Confidante, all in white muslin, rushed out of it, and fell upon my father's breast, sobbing out hysterically, "Oh, Mr. Kembel, my deare, deare Mr. Kembel!" This was Madame Malibran, under the effect of my father's performance of the Gamester, which she had just witnessed.

"Come, come," quoth my father (who was old enough to have been hers, and knew her very well), patting her consolingly on the back, "Come now, my dear Madame Malibran, compose yourself; don't now, Marie, don't, my dear child!" all which was taking place on the public staircase, while I looked on in wide-eyed amazement behind. Madame Malibran, having suffered herself to be led into our room, gradually composed herself, ate her supper with us, expressed herself with much kind enthusiasm about my performance, and gave me a word of advice as to not losing any of my height (of which I had none to spare) by stooping, saying very amiably that, being at a disadvantage as to her own stature, she had never wasted a quarter of an inch of it. This little reflection upon her own proportions must have been meant as a panacea to my vanity for her criticism of my deportment. My person was indeed of the shortest; but she had the figure of a nymph, and was rather above than below middle height. There was in other respects some likeness between us; she was certainly not really handsome, but her eyes were magnificent, and her whole countenance was very striking.

The first time I ever saw her sister, Madame Viardot, she was sitting with mine, who introduced me to her; Pauline Viardot continued talking, now and then, however, stopping to look fixedly at me, and at last exclaimed, "Mais comme elle ressemble a ma Marie!" and one evening at a private concert in London, having arrived late, I remained standing by the folding-doors of the drawing-room, while Lablache finished a song which he had begun before I came in, at the end of which he came up to me and said, "You cannot think how you frightened me, when first I saw you standing in that doorway; you looked so absolutely like Malibran, que je ne savais en verite pas ce que c'etait." Malibran's appearance was a memorable event in the whole musical world of Europe, throughout which her progress from capital to capital was one uninterrupted triumph; the enthusiasm, as is general in such cases, growing with its further and wider spread, so that at Venice she was allowed, in spite of old-established law and custom, to go about in a gold and crimson gondola, as fine as the Bucentaur itself, instead of the floating hea.r.s.es that haunt the sea-paved thoroughfares, and that did not please her gay and magnificent taste.

Her _debut_ in England was an absolute conquest of the nation; and when it was shocked by the news of her untimely death, hundreds of those unsympathetic, unaesthetic, unenthusiastic English people put mourning on for the wonderfully gifted young woman, s.n.a.t.c.hed away in the midst of her brilliant career. Madame Malibran composed some charming songs, but her great reputation derives little of its l.u.s.ter from them,--that great reputation already a mere tradition.

At a challenge I would not decline, I ventured upon the following harsh and ungraceful but literal translation of some of the stanzas from Alfred de Musset's fine lament for Malibran. My poetical compet.i.tor produced an admirable version of them, and has achieved translations of other of his verses, as perfect as translations can be; a literary feat of extraordinary difficulty, with the works of so essentially national a writer, a genius so peculiarly French, as De Musset.

"Oh, Maria Felicia! the painter and bard Behind them, in dying, leave undying heirs.

The night of oblivion their memory spares, And their great eager souls, other action debarred, Against death, against time, having valiantly warred, Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs.

"In the iron engraved, one his thought leaves enshrined; With a golden-sweet cadence another's entwined Makes for ever all those who shall hear it his friends.

Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael's mind; And from death's darkest doom till this world of ours ends, The mother-clasped infant his glory defends.

"As the lamp guards the flame, so the bare, marble halls Of the Parthenon keep, in their desolate s.p.a.ce, The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls.

And Praxiteles' child, the young Venus, yet calls From the altar, where, smiling, she still holds her place, The centuries conquered to wors.h.i.+p her grace.

"Thus from age after age, while new life they receive, To rest at G.o.d's feet the old glories are gone; And the accents of genius their echoes still weave With the great human voice, till their speech is but one.

And of thee, dead but yesterday, all thy fame leaves But a cross in the dim chapel's darkness, alone.

"A cross and oblivion, silence, and death!

Hark! the wind's softest sob; hark! the ocean's deep breath!

Hark! the fisher boy singing his way o'er the plains!