MY FIRST OPERA—“PETER PARLEY”—RACHEL AS “CAMILLE”—BAYARD
TAYLOR—T. B. ALDRICH—G. P. MORRIS—MARIA CUMMINS—MRS. A. D.
T. WHITNEY
THE three weeks passed in New York on my way home were thronged with
novel and enchanting “sensations.” I saw my first opera—_Masaniello_,
and it was the début of Elise Henssler. The party of which I was a
member included Caroline Cheeseboro, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Samuel
Griswold Goodrich—“Peter Parley.” To my intense satisfaction, my seat
was beside the kindly old gentleman.
Was not _Parley’s Magazine_ the first periodical I had ever read? And
had not I devoured every book he had written, down to a set of popular
biographies for which my father had subscribed as a gift to me on my
eighteenth birthday? That I should, really and truly, be sitting at
his side and hearing him speak, was a treat I could hardly wait until
to-morrow to dilate upon in my home-diary letter. He was social and
amusing, and, withal, intelligently appreciative of the music and
actors. He rattled away jovially in the _entr’actes_ of other operas
and personal traits of stage celebrities, theatrical, and operatic.
He told me, too, of how he had been ridiculed for embarking upon a
career his friends thought puerile and contemptible, when he issued the
initial number of _Parley’s Magazine_. If I was secretly disappointed
that his affection for his juvenile constituency was more perfunctory
than I had supposed from his writings, I smothered the feeling as
disloyal, and would be nothing short of charmed.
I wrote to my mother next day that he was “a nice, friendly old
gentleman, but impressed me as one who had outlived his enthusiasms.”
If I had put the truth into downright English, I should have said that
the circumstance that he was enshrined in thousands of young hearts as
the aged man with a sore foot propped upon a cushion, and whose big
heart was a fountain of love, and his brain a store-house of tales
garnered for their delectation—was of minor importance to the profit
popularity had brought him. I was yet new to the world’s ways and
estimate of values.
The next night I saw Rachel in _Les Horaces_. I had never seen
really great acting before. I had, however, read Charlotte Brontë’s
incomparable portraiture, in _Villette_, of the queen of the modern
stage. Having no language of my own that could depict what was done
before my eyes, and uttered to my rapt soul, I drew upon obedient
memory. Until that moment I had not known how faithful memory could
be. In the breathless excitement of the last act of the tragedy, every
word was laid ready to my hand. I seemed to read, with my subconscious
perceptions, lines of palpitating light, the while my bodily sight lost
not a gesture or look of the stricken tigress:
“An inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to
battle with doom and death; fought every inch of ground, sold every
drop of blood; resisted to the last the rape of every faculty; _would_
see, _would_ hear, _would_ breathe, _would_ live, up to, within,
well-nigh _beyond_ the moment when Death says to all sense and all
being—‘Thus far and no farther!’”
I saw others—some said as great actors—in after years. Among them,
Ristori. I do not think it was because I had seen none of them before
the _Vashti_ of Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned periods flashed upon my
unaccustomed sight, that I still hold her impersonation of Camille in
_Les Horaces_ to be the grandest triumph of the tragedian’s art mine
eyes have ever witnessed. Ristori was always the gentlewoman, born and
reared, in whatever rôle she assumed. Rachel—and again I betake myself
to the weird word-painting:
“Evil forces bore her through the tragedy; kept up her feeble
strength.... They wrote ‘HELL’ on her straight, haughty brow. They
tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to
a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood.”
I fancy that I must have been whispering the words as I gathered up my
wraps and followed my companions out of the box. I recollect that one
or two persons stared curiously at me. In the _foyer_ I was introduced
to some strangers, and went through certain civil forms of speech. I
did not recollect names or faces when we got back to the hotel. After I
was in bed, I could not sleep for hours. But one other actor has ever
wrought so mightily upon nerves and imagination. When I was forty years
older I was ill for forty-eight hours after seeing Salvini as Othello.
During this memorable stay in New York I met Bayard Taylor. At the
conclusion of his first call, I rushed to my desk and wrote to my
sister:
“He has a port like Jove.
“‘Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: “‘This is a MAN!’”’”
For once my ideal did not transcend the reality. Would that I could say
it of all my dream-heroes and heroines! At his second call, Mr. Taylor
was accompanied by Richard Henry Stoddard. At his first, he brought
Charles Frederick Briggs, journalist and author, whose best-known
book, _Harry Franco_, I had read and liked. I met him but once. Mr.
Taylor honored me with his friendship until his lamented death. My
recollections of him are all pleasant.
We met seldom, but our relations were cordial; the renewal of personal
association was ever that of friends who liked and understood each
other. I reckoned it a favor that honored me, that his widow accepted
me as her husband’s old acquaintance, and that his memory has drawn us
together in bonds of affectionate regard.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then (in 1855) a mere stripling, yet already
famous as the author of _Babie Bell_ and _Elsinore_, poems that would
have immortalized him had he not written another line. I came to know
him well during my Northern sojourn. His charming personality won
hearts as inevitably as his genius commanded admiration. Halleck’s
hackneyed eulogy of his early friend might be applied, and without
dissent, to the best-belovéd of our later poets. To know him was
to love him. The magnetism of the rarely-sweet smile, the frank
sincerity of his greeting, the direct appeal of the clear eyes to the
brother-heart which, he took for granted, beat responsive to his, were
irresistible, even to the casual acquaintance. His letters were simply
bewitching—as when I wrote to him after each of us had grown children,
asking if he would give my youngest daughter the autograph she coveted
from his hand.
He began by begging me to ask him, the next time I wrote, for something
that he _could_ do, not for what was impossible for him to grant. He
had laid it down as a rule, not to be broken under any temptation,
whatsoever, that he would never give his autograph.
“If I could make an exception in the present case, you
know how gladly I would do it, only to prove that I am
unalterably your friend,
“THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.”
He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The
ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in
which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the
born poet clothed him, as with a garment.
George P. Morris I met again and again. With the frank conceit, so
permeated with the amiability and naïveté of the veteran songster, that
it offended nobody, he told me how Braham had sung _Woodman, Spare That
Tree_, before Queen Victoria, at her special request, and that _Jenny
Marsh of Cherry Valley_ was more of an accepted classic than _Roy’s
Wife of Aldivalloch_. He narrated, too, the thrilling effect produced
upon an audience in New York or Philadelphia by the singing for the
first time in public of _Near the Rock Where Drooped the Willow_, and
smiled benignantly on hearing that it was a favorite ballad in our
home. He was then associated with N. P. Willis in the editorship of
_The New York Mirror_, and agreed fully with me that it had not its
peer among American literary periodicals.
My mother had taken it for years. We had a shelf full of the bound
volumes at home. I have some of them in my own library, and twice
or three times in the year, have a rainy afternoon-revel over the
yellowed, brittle pages mottled with the mysterious, umber thumbmarks
of Time.
Colonel Morris’s partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had not yet
taken to writing out the name at full length, was at his country-seat
of “Idlewild.” He was ten years older when I saw him last, and under
circumstances that took the sting from regret that I had not met him
when life was fresh and faiths were easily confirmed.
While in Dorchester I had enjoyed improving my acquaintanceship with
Maria Cummins. Encyclopædias register her briefly as “An American
novelist. She wrote _The Lamplighter_.” In 1855, no other woman writer
was so prominently before the reading public. _The Lamplighter_ was in
every home, and gossip of the personality of the author was seized upon
greedily by press and readers. Meeting Augusta Evans, of _Rutledge_ and
_St. Elmo_ and _Beulah_, four years thereafter, I was forcibly reminded
of my Dorchester friend, albeit they belonged to totally different
schools of literature. Both were quietly refined in manner and speech,
and incredibly unspoiled by the flood of popular favor that had taken
each by surprise. Alike, too, was the warmth of cordiality with which
both greeted me, a stranger, whom they might never meet again.
An amusing incident connected with one of Maria Cummins’s visits broke
down any lingering trace of strangerhood. She was to take tea at the
house of my cousin, Francis Pierce. I was sitting by the window of the
drawing-room, awaiting her arrival and gazing at the panorama of Boston
Bay and the intervening hills, when an old lady, a relative-in-law of
“Cousin Melissa,” stole in. She was over eighty, and so pathetically
alone in the lower world that Melissa—the personation of Charity,
which is Love—had granted her home and care for several years. She
had donned her best cap and gown; as she crept up to me, she glanced
nervously from side to side, and her withered hands chafed one another
in agitation she could not conceal.
“I say, dearie,” she began, in a whisper, bending down to my face,
“would you mind if I was to sit in the corner over there”—nodding
toward the back parlor—“and listen to your talk after Miss Cummins
comes? I won’t make the least mite of noise. I am an old woman. I never
had a chance to hear two _actresses_ talk before, and I may never have
another.”
I consented, laughingly, and she took up her position just in time to
escape being seen by the incoming guest. We chatted away cheerily at
our far window, watching the sunset as it crimsoned the bay and faded
languidly into warm gray.
“Summer sunsets are associated in my mind, in a dreamy way, with the
tinkle of cow-bells,” observed my companion, and went on to tell how,
as a child, living in Salem, she used to watch the long lines of cows
coming in from the meadows at evening, and how musically the tinkle of
many bells blended with other sunset sounds.
“I have the same association with my Virginia home,” I answered. “So
had Gray with Stoke Pogis. But _his_ herd lowed as it wound slowly over
the lea.”
“Perhaps English cows are hungrier than ours,” Miss Cummins followed,
in like strain. “I prefer the chiming bells.”
We dropped into more serious talk after that. The unseen listener
carried off, up-stairs, when she stole out, like my little gray ghost,
but one impression of the “actresses’” confabulation. Cousin Melissa
told me of it next day. The old lady was grievously disappointed. We
had talked of nothing but cows and cow-bells, and cows coming home
hungry for supper, and such stuff. “For all the world as if they had
lived on a dairy-farm all their days!”
I supped with Miss Cummins and her widowed mother a day or so later,
and we made merry together over the poor crone’s chagrin.
It was rather singular that in our several meetings neither of us spoke
of Adeline D. T. Whitney. She had not then written the books that
brought for her love and fame in equal portions. But she was Maria
Cummins’s dear friend, and a near neighbor of the Pierces. When we, at
last, formed an intimacy that ceased only with her life, we wondered
why this should have been delayed for a score of years, when we had so
nearly touched, during that and other visits to my ancestral home.
At our earliest meeting in her Milton cottage, whither I had gone by
special invitation, she hurried down the stairs with outstretched hands
and—“I cannot meet you as a stranger. My dear friend, Maria Cummins,
has often talked to me of you!”
In the hasty sketch of a few representative members of the Literary
Guild of America, as it existed a half-century ago, I have made good
what I intimated a few chapters back, in alluding to my introductory
experience of professional jealousies, which, if cynics are to be
credited, pervade the ranks of authors, as the mysterious, fretting
leprosy ate into the condemned garment of the ancient Israelite. In
all frankness, and with a swelling of heart that is both proud and
thankful, I aver that no other order, or class, of men and women is so
informed and permeated and colored with generous and loyal appreciation
of whatever is worthy in the work of a fellow-craftsman; so little
jealous of his reputation; so ready to make his wrongs common property,
and to assist the lowliest member of the Guild in the hour of need.
I make no exception in favor of any profession or calling, in offering
this humble passing tribute to the Fraternity of American Authors. I
could substantiate my assertion by countless illustrations drawn from
personal observation, had I space and time to devote to the task. In my
sixty years of literary life, I have known nearly every writer of note
in our country. In reviewing the list, I bow in spirit, as the seer of
Patmos bent the knee in the presence of the shining ones.