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 the _School
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 thousand pounds 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 assiduity
are 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 he
_did_ behave 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 them was obliged to appear in full dress.
The row of boxes above these again were given up to the _bourgeoisie_,
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, with _Macbeth_.
“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 in _Macbeth_ was 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
impersonation never 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
see _Timour 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 devant_ Miss 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 more convinced 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 sensibilities against 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 that _that_ is 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 of _The 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 the _School for
Scandal_—who had lost all power of original conception, yet was obliged
to fill his pockets—to adapt 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-known actor. 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
late sitting. 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.