Memoirs of an American Prima Donna Part 5

In singing with Brignoli there developed a difficulty to which Ferri's blindness was nothing. Brignoli seriously objected to being touched during his scene! Imagine playing love scenes with a tenor who did not want to be touched, no matter what might be the emotional exigencies of the moment or situation. The ba.s.s part in _Linda_ is that of the Baron, and when I first sang the opera it was taken by Susini, who had been with us on our preparatory _tournee_. His wife was Isabella Hinckley, a good and sweet woman, also a singer with an excellent soprano voice. I found that the big ba.s.so (he was a very large man with a buoyant sense of humour) was a fine actor and had a genuine dramatic gift in singing.

His sense of humour was always bubbling up, in and out of performances.

I once lost a diamond from one of my rings during the first act. My dressing-room and the stage were searched, but with no result. We went on for the last act and, in the scene when I was supposed to be unconscious, Susini caught sight of the stone glittering on the floor and picked it up. As he needed his hands for gesticulations, he popped the diamond into his mouth and when I "came to" he stuck out his tongue at me with the stone on the end of it!

While I was working on the part of Linda myself, I heard Mme. Medori sing it. She gave a fine emotional interpretation, getting great tragic effects in the Paris act, but she did not catch the _nave_ and ingenuous quality of poor, young Linda. It could hardly have been otherwise, for she was at the time a mature woman. There are some parts,--Marguerite is one of them, also,--that can be made too complicated, too subtle, too dramatic. I was criticised for my immaturity and lack of emotional power until I was tired of hearing such criticism; and once had a quaint little argument about my abilities and powers with "Nym Crinkle," the musical critic of _The World_, A. C.

Wheeler. (Later he made a success in literature under the name of "J. P.

Mowbray.")

"What do you expect," I demanded, in my old-fas.h.i.+oned yet childish way, being at the time eighteen, "what do you expect of a person of my age?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Brignoli, 1865=

From a photograph by C. Silvy]

CHAPTER V

LITERARY BOSTON

My friends in New York had given me letters to people in Boston, so I went there with every opportunity for an enjoyable visit. But, naturally, I was much more absorbed in my own _debut_ and in what the public would think of me than I was in meeting new acquaintances and receiving invitations. Now I wish that I had then more clearly realised possibilities, for Boston was at the height of its literary reputation.

All my impressions of that Boston season, however, sink into insignificance compared to that of my first public appearance. I sang Linda; and there were only three hundred people in the house!

If anything in the world could have discouraged me that would have, but, as a matter of fact, I do not believe anything could. At any rate, I worked all the harder just because the conditions were so adverse; and I won my public (such as it was) that night. I may add that I kept it for the remainder of my stay in Boston.

At that period of my life I was very fragile and one big performance would wear me out. Literally, I used myself up in singing, for I put into it every ounce of my strength. I could not save myself when I was actually working, but my way of economising my vitality was to sing only twice a week.

It was after that first performance of _Linda_, some time about midnight, and my mother and I had just returned to our apartment in the Tremont House and had hardly taken off our wraps, when a knock came at the door. Our sitting-room was near a side entrance for the sake of quietness and privacy, but we paid a penalty in the ease with which we could be reached by anyone who knew the way. My mother opened the door; and there stood two ladies who overwhelmed us with gracious speeches.

"They had heard my Linda! They had come because they simply could not help it; because I had moved them so deeply! Now, _would_ we both come the following evening to a little _musicale_; and they would ask that delightful Signor Brignoli too! It would be _such_ a pleasure! etc."

Although I was not singing the following night, I objected to going to the _musicale_ because certain experiences in New York had already bred caution. I said, however, with perfect frankness, that I would go on one condition.

"On _any_ condition, dear Miss Kellogg!"

"You wouldn't expect me to sing?"

"Oh no; no, no!"

Accordingly, the next night my mother and I presented ourselves at the house of the older of the two ladies. The first words our hostess uttered when I entered the room were:

"Why! where's your music?"

"I thought it was understood that I was not to sing," said I.

But, in spite of their previous earnest disclaimers on this point, they became so insistent that, after resisting their importunities for a few moments, I finally consented to satisfy them. I asked Brignoli to play for me, and I sang the Cavatina from _Linda_. Then I turned on my heel and went back to my hotel; and I never again entered that woman's house.

After so many years there is no harm in saying that the hostess who was guilty of this breach of tact, good taste, and consideration, was Mrs.

Paran Stevens, and the other lady was her sister, Miss f.a.n.n.y Reed, one of the talented amateurs of the day. They were struggling hard for social recognition in Boston and every drawing card was of value, even a new, young singer who might become famous. Later, of course, Mrs.

Stevens did "arrive" in New York; but she travelled some difficult roads first.

This was by no means the first time that I had contended with a lack of consideration in the American hostess, especially toward artists. Her sisters across the Atlantic have better taste and breeding, never subjecting an artist who is their guest to the annoyance and indignity of having to "sing for her supper." But whenever I was invited anywhere by an American woman, I always knew that I would be expected to bring my music and to contribute toward the entertainment of the other guests. An Englishwoman I once met when travelling on the Continent hit the nail on the head, although in quite another connection.

"You Americans are so queer," she remarked. "I heard a woman from the States ask a perfectly strange man recently to stop in at a shop and match her some silk while he was out! I imagine it is because you don't mind putting yourselves under obligations, isn't it?"

Literary Boston of that day revolved around Mr. and Mrs. James T.

Fields, at whose house often a.s.sembled such distinguished men and women as Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe. Mr. Fields was the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and his sense of humour was always a delight.

"A lady came in from the suburbs to see me this morning," he once remarked to me. "'Well, Mr. Fields,' she said, with great impressiveness, 'what have you new in literature to-day? I'm just _thusty_ for knowledge!'"

Your true New Englander always says "thust" and "fust" and "wust," and Mr. Fields had just the intonation--which reminds me somehow--in a roundabout fas.h.i.+on--of a strange woman who battered on my door once after I had appeared in _Faust_, in Boston, to tell me that "that man Mephisto-fleas was just great!"

It was a wonderful privilege to meet Longfellow. He was never gay, never effusive, leaving these attributes to his talkative brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, who was a wit and a humourist. Indeed, Longfellow was rather noted for his cold exterior, and it took a little time and trouble to break the ice, but, though so unexpressive outwardly, his nature was most winning when one was once in touch with it. His first wife was burned to death and the tragedy affected him permanently, although he made a second and a very successful marriage with Tom Appleton's sister.

The brothers-in-law were often together and formed the oddest possible contrast to each other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =James Russell Lowell in 1861=

From a photograph by Brady]

Longfellow and I became good friends. I saw him many times and often went to his house to sing to him. He greatly enjoyed my singing of his own _Beware_. It was always one of my successful _encore_ songs, although it certainly is not Longfellow at his best. But he liked me to sit at the piano and wander from one song to another. The older the melodies, the sweeter he found them. Longfellow's verses have much in common with simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned songs. They always touched the common people, particularly the common people of England. They were so simple and so true that those folk who lived and laboured close to the earth found much that moved them in the American writer's unaffected and elemental poetry. Yet it seems a bit strange that his poems are more loved and appreciated in England than in America, much as Tennyson's are more familiar to us than to his own people. Some years later, when I was singing in London, I heard that Longfellow was in town and sent him a box. He and Tom Appleton, who was with him, came behind the scenes between the acts to see me and, my mother being with me, both were invited into my dressing-room. In the London theatres there are women, generally advanced in years, who a.s.sist the _prima donna_ or actress to dress. These do not exist in American theatres. I had a maid, of course, but there was this woman of the theatre, also, a particularly ordinary creature who contributed nothing to the gaiety of nations and who, indeed, rarely showed feeling of any sort. I happened to say to her:

"Perkins, I am going to see Mr. Longfellow."

Her face became absolutely transfigured.

"Oh, Miss," she cried in a tone of awe and curtseying to his name, "you don't mean 'im that wrote _Tell me not in mournful numbers_? Oh, Miss!

_'im!_"

Lowell I knew only slightly, yet his distinguished and distinctive personality made a great impression on me. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a blond, curly-headed young man, whose later prosperity greatly interfered with his ability, I first met about this same time. He was too successful too young, and it stultified his gifts, as being successful too young usually does stultify the natural gifts of anybody.

On one occasion I met Anthony Trollope at the Fields', the English novelist whose works were then more or less in vogue. He had just come from England and was filled with conceit. English people of that time were incredibly insular and uninformed about us, and Mr. Trollope knew nothing of America, and did not seem to want to know anything.

Certainly, English people when they are not thoroughbred can be very common! Trollope was full of himself and wrote only for what he could get out of it. I never, before or since, met a literary person who was so frankly "on the make." The discussion that afternoon was about the recompense of authors, and Trollope said that he had reduced his literary efforts to a working basis and wrote so many words to a page and so many pages to a chapter. He refrained from using the actual word "money"--the English shrink from the word "money"--but he managed to convey to his hearers the fact that a considerable consideration was the main incentive to his literary labour, and put the matter more specifically later, to my mother, by telling her that he always _chose the words that would fill up the pages quickest_.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, though he was one of the Fields' circle, I never met at all. He was tragically shy, and more than once escaped from the house when we went in rather than meet two strange women.

"Hawthorne has just gone out the other way," Mrs. Fields would whisper, smiling. "He's too frightened to meet you!"

I met his boy Julian, however, who was about twelve years old. He was a nice lad and I kissed him--to his great annoyance, for he was shy too, although not so much so as his father. Not so very long ago Julian Hawthorne reminded me of this episode.

"Do you remember," he said, laughing, "how embarra.s.sed I was when you kissed me? 'Never you mind' you said to me then, 'the time will come, my boy, when you'll be glad to remember that I kissed you!' And it certainly did come!"

All Boston that winter was stirred by the approaching agitations of war; and those two remarkable women, Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Howe were using their pens to excite the community into a species of splendid rage. I first met them both at the Fields' and always admired Julia Ward Howe as a representative type of the highest Boston culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe had just finished _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Many people believed that it and the disturbance it made were partly responsible for the war itself. Mr. Fields told me that her "copy" was the most remarkable "stuff" that the publishers had ever encountered. It was written quite roughly and disconnectedly on whatever sc.r.a.ps of paper she had at hand.

I suppose she wrote it when the spirit moved her. At any rate, Mr.

Fields said it was the most difficult task imaginable to fit it into any form that the printers could understand. Mrs. Stowe was a quiet, elderly woman, and talked very little. I had an odd sort of feeling that she had put so much of herself into her book that she had nothing left to offer socially.

I did not realise until years afterwards what a precious privilege it was to meet in such a charming _intime_ way the men and women who really "made" American literature. The Fields literally kept open house. They were the most hospitable of people, and I loved them and spent some happy hours with them. I cannot begin to enumerate or even to remember all the literary lights I met in their drawing-room. Of that number there were James Freeman Clarke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, whom I knew later in Was.h.i.+ngton, and Gail Hamilton who was just budding into literary prominence; and Sidney Lanier. But, as I look back on that first Boston engagement, I see plainly that the most striking impression made upon my youthful mind during the entire season was the opening night of _Linda di Chamounix_ and the three hundred auditors!

It was long, long after that first season that I had some of my pleasantest times in Boston with Sidney Lanier. This may not be the right place to mention them, but they certainly belong under the heading of this chapter.

The evening that stands out most clearly in my memory was one, in the 'seventies, that I spent at the house of dear Charlotte Cushman who was then very ill and who died almost immediately after. Sidney Lanier was there with his flute, which he played charmingly. Indeed, he was as much musician as poet, as anyone who knows his verse must realise. He was poor then, and Miss Cushman was interested in him and anxious to help him in every way she could. There were two dried-up, little, Boston old maids there too--queer creatures--who were much impressed with High Art without knowing anything about it. One composition that Lanier played somewhat puzzled me--my impertinent absolute pitch was, as usual, hard at work--and at the end I exclaimed: