ANNA CORA (MOWATT) RITCHIE—EDWARD EVERETT—GOVERNOR WISE—A MEMORABLE
DINNER-PARTY
IN 1854, Anna Cora Mowatt, “American actress, novelist, dramatist, and
poet,” as the cyclopædias catalogue her, left the stage to become the
wife of William Foushee Ritchie, of Richmond, Virginia.
Mrs. Mowatt, _née_ Ogden, was the daughter of a prominent citizen
of New York. She was born in France, and partially educated there.
Returning to America, she married, in her sixteenth year, James Mowatt,
a scholarly and wealthy man, but much the senior of the child-wife.
By a sudden reverse of fortune he was compelled to relinquish the
beautiful country home on Long Island, to which he had taken his wife
soon after their marriage. With the romantic design of saving the home
she loved, Mrs. Mowatt began a series of public readings. Her dramatic
talent was already well known in fashionable private circles. At the
conclusion of the round of readings given in New York and vicinity, she
received a proposal from a theatrical manager to go upon the stage. For
nine years she was a prime favorite with the American theatre-going
public, and almost as popular abroad. She never redeemed “Ravenswood,”
and her husband died while she was in the zenith of her brilliant
success.
Her union with William Ritchie, who had admired her for a long time,
was a love-match on both sides. He brought her to quiet Richmond, and
installed her in a modest cottage on our side of the town, but three
blocks from my father’s house. The Ritchies were one of the best of
our oldest families; Mrs. Mowatt belonged to one as excellent; her
character was irreproachable. I recollect Doctor Haxall insisting upon
this when a very conservative Mrs. Grundy “wondered if we ought to
visit her.”
“You will see, madam, that she will speedily be as popular here as she
has been elsewhere. She is a lovely woman, and as to reputation—hers is
irreproachable—absolutely! No tongue has ever wagged against her.”
I listened with curiosity that had not a tinge of personal concern in
it. It went without saying that an ex-actress was out of my sphere. The
church that condemned dancing was yet more severe upon the theatre.
True, Mrs. Ritchie had left the stage, and, it was soon bruited abroad,
never recited except in her own home and in the fine old colonial
homestead of Brandon, where lived Mr. Ritchie’s sister, Mrs. George
Harrison. But she had trodden the boards for eight or nine years, and
that stamped her as a personage quite unlike the rest of “us.”
So when William Ritchie stopped my father on the street and expressed
a wish that his wife and I should know each other, he had a civil,
non-committal reply, embodying the fact that I was expecting to go
North soon, and would not be at home again before the autumn.
During my absence my father sent me a copy of the _Enquirer_
containing a review of _The Hidden Path_, written by Mrs. Ritchie,
so complimentary, and so replete with frank, cordial interest in the
author, that I could not do less than to call on my return and thank
her.
She was not at home. I recall, with a flush of shame, how relieved I
was that a card should represent me, and that I had “done the decent
thing.” The “decent thing,” in her opinion, was that the call should be
repaid within the week.
No picture of her that I have seen does her even partial justice. In
her youth she was extremely pretty. At thirty-eight, she was more than
handsome. Time had not dimmed her exquisite complexion; her hair had
been cut off during an attack of brain-fever, and grew out again in
short, fair curls; her eyes were soft blue; her teeth dazzlingly white.
Of her smile Edgar Allan Poe had written: “A more radiant gleam could
not be imagined.” In manner, she was as simple as a child. Not with
studied simplicity, but out of genuine self-forgetfulness.
She struck what I was to learn was the keynote to character and motive,
before I had known her ten minutes. I essayed to thank her for what she
had said of my book. She listened in mild surprise:
“Don’t thank me for an act of mere justice. I liked the book. I write
book-reviews for my husband’s paper. I could not do less than say what
I thought.”
And—at my suggestion that adverse criticism was wholesome for the
tyro—“Why should I look for faults when there is so much good to be
seen without searching?”
A woman of an utterly different type sounded the same note a score of
years afterward.
I said to Frances Willard, whose neighbor I was at a luncheon given in
her honor by the wife of the Commandant at Fort Mackinac:
“You know, Miss Willard, that, as General Howard said just now of us,
you and I ‘don’t train in the same band.’”
“No?” The accent and the sweet candor, the ineffable womanliness of the
eyes that sought mine, touched the spring of memory. “Suppose, then,
we talk only of the many points upon which we do agree? Why seek for
opposition when there are so many harmonies close at hand?”
Of such peacelovers and peacemakers is the kingdom of heaven, by
whatsoever name they are called on earth.
Mrs. Ritchie was a Swedenborgian. I had learned that in her
_Autobiography of an Actress_. All denominations—including some whose
adherents would not sit down to the Lord’s Supper with certain others,
and those who would not partake of the consecrated “elements” if
administered by non-prelatic hands—united in shutting and bolting the
door of heaven in her face.
In the intimate companionship, unbroken by these and other admonitions,
I never heard from Mrs. Ritchie’s lips a syllable that was not redolent
with the law of kindness. I learned to love her fondly and to revere
her with fervor I would not have believed possible, six months earlier.
It was not her fascination of manner alone that attracted me, or the
unceasing acts of sisterly kindness she poured upon me, that deepened
my devotion. She opened to me the doors of a new world: broadened and
deepened and sweetened my whole nature. We never spoke of doctrines. We
rarely had a talk—and henceforward our meetings were almost daily—in
which she did not drop into my mind some precious grain of faith in
the All-Father; of love for the good and noble in my fellow-man and of
compassion, rather than blame, for the erring. Of her own church she
did not talk. She assumed, rather, that we were “one family, above,
beneath,” and bound by the sacred tie of kinship, to “do good and to
communicate.” She had a helpful hand, as well as a comforting word,
for the sorrowing and the needy. As to her benefactions, I heard of
them, now and again, from others. Now it was an aged gentlewoman, worn
down to the verge of nervous prostration, and too poor to seek the
change of air she ought to have, who was sent at the Ritchies’ expense
to Old Point Comfort for a month; or a struggling music-mistress,
for whom Mrs. Ritchie exerted herself quietly to secure pupils; or a
girl whose talent for elocution was developed by private lessons from
the ex-actress; or a bedridden matron, who had quieter nights after
Mrs. Ritchie ran in, two or three evenings in a week, to read to her
for half an hour in the rich, thrilling voice that had held hundreds
enchanted in bygone days.
To me she was a revelation of good-will to men. She lectured me
sometimes, as a mother might and ought, always in infinite tenderness.
“I cannot have you say that, my child!” she said once, when I broke
into a tirade against the hypocrisy and general selfishness of
humankind at large, and certain offenders in particular. “Nobody is
all-wicked. There is more unconquered evil in some natures than in
others. There is good—a spark of divine fire—in every soul God has
made. Look for it, and you will find it. Encourage it, and it will
shine.”
And in reply to a murmur during the trial-experiences of parish work,
when I “deplored the effect of these belittling cares and petty
commonplaces upon my intellectual growth,” the caressing hand was laid
against my hot cheek.
“Dear! you are the wife of the man of God! It is a sacred trust
committed to you as his helpmate. To shirk anything that helps him
would be a sin. And we climb one step at a time, you know—not by bold
leaps. Nothing is belittling that God sets for us to do.”
She, and some other things, gave me a royal winter.
Another good friend, Mrs. Stanard, had notified me that Edward Everett,
then lecturing in behalf of the Mount Vernon Association, was to be
her guest while in Richmond, and raised me to the seventh heaven of
delighted anticipation by inviting me to meet him at a dinner-party she
would give him. Mrs. Ritchie forestalled the introduction to the great
man by writing a wee note to me on the morning of the day on which the
dinner was to be.
The Mount Vernon Association had for its express object the purchase
of Washington’s home and burial-place, to be held by the Nation, and
not by the remote descendant of Mary and Augustine Washington, who had
inherited it. Mrs. Ritchie was the secretary of the organization.
Her note said:
“A committee of our Association will wait upon Mr. Everett
at the Governor’s house this forenoon. I will smuggle you
in, if you will go with us. I shall call for you at eleven.”
When we four who had come together were ushered into the spacious
drawing-room of the gubernatorial mansion, we had it to ourselves. Mrs.
Ritchie, with a pretty gesture that reminded one of her French birth,
fell to arranging five or six chairs near the middle of the room, into
a seemingly careless group. One faced the rest at a conversational
angle.
“Now!” she uttered, with a playful pretence of secrecy; “you will see
Mr. Everett seat himself just there! He can do nothing else. Call it a
stage trick, if you like. But he _must_ sit there!”
The words had hardly left her lips when Mr. Everett entered,
accompanied by a younger man, erect in carriage and bronzed in
complexion, whom he presented to us as “My son-in-law, Lieutenant Wise.”
To our secret amusement, Mr. Everett took the chair set for him, and
this, when three remained vacant after the ladies were all seated.
Lieutenant Wise and I, as the non-attached personages present, drifted
to the other side of the room while official talk went on between the
orator-statesman and the committee.
The retentive memory, which has, from my babyhood, been both bane and
blessing, speedily identified my companion with the author of _Los
Gringos_ (The Yankees), a satirical and very clever work that had
fallen in my way a couple of years before. He was a cousin of the
Governor. I learned to-day of his connection with the Everetts.
He was social, and a witty talker. I had time to discover this before
the Governor appeared with his daughter, a charming girl of seventeen,
who did the honors of the house with unaffected grace and ease.
I had met her before, and I knew her father quite well. Mrs. Ritchie
had taken herself severely to task that very week for speaking of him
as “our warm-hearted, hot-headed Governor.”
The characterization was just. We all knew him to be both, and loved
him none the less for the warm temper that had hurried him into
many a scrape, political and personal. We were rather proud of his
belligerency, and took real pride in wondering what “he would do next.”
He was eloquent in debate, a bitter partisan, a warrior who would fight
to the death for friend, country or principle. Virginia never had a
Governor whom she loved more, and of whom she was more justly proud.
This was early in the year 1856. I do not recollect that I ever visited
the state drawing-room of the mansion again, until I stood upon a
dais erected on the very spot where Lieutenant Wise and I had chatted
together that brilliant winter day, and I lectured to crowded parlors
in behalf of the Mary Washington Monument Association. Another Governor
reigned in the stead of our warm-hearted and hot-headed soldier.
Another generation of women than that which had saved the son’s tomb to
the Nation was now working to erect a monument over the neglected grave
of the mother.
When the throng had dispersed, “Annie” Wise, now Mrs. Hobson—and still
of a most winsome presence—and I withdrew into a corner to speak of
that five-and-forty-year-old episode, and said: “The fathers, where are
they? And the prophets—they do live forever!”
Of the group collected about Mr. Everett, on the noon preceding the
delivery of his celebrated oration, but we two were left alive upon the
earth.
Of the Stanard dinner I retain a lively recollection. Among the
guests were Lieutenant Wise; Mr. Corcoran, the Washington banker
and philanthropist; his slim, engaging young daughter (afterward
Mrs. Eustis), and Mr. Everett’s son, Sidney. Mrs. Stanard was the
most judicious and gracious of hostesses. “A fashionable leader of
fashionable society!” sneered somebody in my hearing, one day.
Mrs. Ritchie took up the word promptly. Detraction never passed
unchallenged in her presence.
“Fashionable, if you will. But sincere. She is a true-hearted woman.”
In subscribing heartily to the truth of the statement, I append what I
had abundant reason to know and believe. She was a firm friend to those
she loved, steadfast in affection that outlasted youth and prosperity.
She made life smooth for everybody within her reach whenever she could
do it. She had the inestimable talent of divining what would best
please each of her guests, and ministered to weakness and desire.
On this night, she did not need to be told that a personal talk with
the chief guest would be an event to me. She lured me adroitly into a
nook adjoining the drawing-room, and as Mr. Everett, who was staying
in the house, passed the door, she called him in, and presently left
me on his hands for half an hour. He was always my _beau ideal_ of
the perfect gentleman. He talked quietly, in refined modulations and
chaste English that betokened the scholar. Like all really great men,
he bore himself with modest dignity, with never a touch of bluster
or self-consciousness. In five minutes I found myself listening and
replying, as to an old acquaintance. His voice was low, and so musical
as to fasten upon him the sobriquet of the “silver-tongued orator.” I
could repeat, almost verbatim, his part of our talk on that occasion. I
give the substance of one section that impressed me particularly.
We spoke of _Hiawatha_, then a recent publication. Mr. Everett thought
that Longfellow transgressed artistic rules, and was disobedient
to literary precedent in translating Indian names in the text of
the poem. The repetition of “Minnehaha—Laughing Water,” “The West
Wind—Mudjekeewis,” “Ishkooda—the Comet,” etcetera, was affected and
tedious.
“Moreover,” he continued, smiling, “I have serious doubts respecting
the florid metaphors and highly figurative speech which Cooper and
other writers of North American Indian stories have put into the
mouths of their dusky heroes.” He went on to say that, when Governor
of Massachusetts, he received a deputation of aborigines from the Far
West. In anticipation of the visit, he primed himself with an ornate
address of welcome, couched in the figurative language he imagined
would be familiar and agreeable to the chiefs. This was delivered
through an interpreter, and received in blank silence. Then the
principal sachem replied in curt platitudes, with never a trope or
allegorical allusion. Mr. Everett added that he had learned since
that the vocabulary of the modern Indian is meagre and prosaic in the
extreme.
The justice of the observation was borne in upon me when I sat in James
Redpath’s box at the Indian Exhibition I have spoken of in another
chapter, and heard snatches of alleged oratory as transmitted by a
fluent interpreter to the Newark audience. Anything more tame and bare
it would be hard to imagine.