CHAPTER VI.DUBLIN AND EDINBURGH.

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. Thevice-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 regularhabituéof 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 verymateriallyentertaining. 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 uponthe 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! howtremendous, 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 inIsabella, on the 21st June 1783. The theatre was crowded to suffocation, and guineas and half-guineas were paidfor 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, andthey sit readingThe 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 theirideas 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 ammaking 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 theMourning 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.”

“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 theirideas 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 ammaking 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 theMourning 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.”

“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 mymemory. 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 commandsIsabellato-morrow, and I playJane Shoreon 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.”

“London, October 7th, 1783.

“For God’s sake, my dear friends, pray for mymemory. 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 commandsIsabellato-morrow, and I playJane Shoreon 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 frombeginning 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 brilliantthan her first, and rendered noteworthy both by her first appearance with her brother, John Kemble, inThe Gamester, who from that time frequently acted with her, and by her acting of Isabella inMeasure 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 inMacbethwas 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 hisdaughter to see the great actress inVenice 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 theScot’s Magazinegive 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!”

“From all sides of the house, hark! the cry how it swells,While the boxes are torn with most heart-piercing yells!”

“From all sides of the house, hark! the cry how it swells,While the boxes are torn with most heart-piercing yells!”

“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 thecrowded 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.”

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