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 theSchool 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 thousandpounds 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 assiduityare 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 hedidbehave 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 themwas obliged to appear in full dress. The row of boxes above these again were given up to thebourgeoisie, 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, withMacbeth.
“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 inMacbethwas 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 impersonationnever 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 seeTimour 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 devantMiss 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.
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 devantMiss 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 moreconvinced 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 sensibilitiesagainst 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 thatthatis 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 ofThe 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 theSchool for Scandal—who had lost all power of original conception, yet was obliged to fill his pockets—toadapt 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-knownactor. 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 latesitting. 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.