Part 21

It was during this engagement he met his future wife, Miss Catherine Sinclair. In the latter part of June, 1837, the marriage took place in St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Forrest soon after embarked for America. The tragedian resumed his American engagements November 15, 1837, at the old Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia. Presented to his friends, his wife at once made a deep and lasting impression. Her native delicacy of mind and refinement of manners enchanted those who hoped for some such influence to be exerted in softening the rough vigor and democratic downrightness of the man. Domestic discord came too soon, however, and in an evil hour for himself, in an evil hour for his art and for the struggling drama in America, Edwin Forrest threw open the doors of his home to the scrutiny of the world, and appealed to the courts to remove the skeleton which was hidden in his closet. With the proceedings of that trial, which resulted in divorce, alimony, and separation, this memoir has nothing to do.

Edwin Forrest, leaving the court-room a defeated man, was instantly raised to a popularity with the masses beyond anything even he had before experienced. He began an engagement soon after at the Broadway Theatre, opening as Damon. The house was crowded to suffocation. The engagement of sixty nights was unparalleled in the history of the American drama for length and profit. But despite the flattering applause of the multitude, life never again had for him the smiling aspect it had so often worn before. The applause which filled his ears, the wealth which flowed in upon him could not improve that temper which had never been amiable, and all the hard stories of his life belong to this period.

On September 20, 1852, he reappeared at the Broadway Theatre, New York. In February, 1853, "Macbeth" was produced in grand style, with new scenery and appointments. The tragedy was played on twenty consecutive nights, then by far the longest run of any Shakespearean play in America. The cast was very strong. It included Conway, Duff, Davenport, Pope, Davidge, Barry, and Madame Ponisi.

On September 17, 1860, after an absence of nearly four years, Edwin Forrest appeared again on the stage. He was engaged by James Nixon, and began his contract of one hundred nights at Niblo's Garden, New York, in the character of Hamlet. The long retirement only increased the curious interest which centred round his historic name. Upon his opening night the seats were sold at auction. His success in Philadelphia rivalled that of New York. In Boston the vast auditorium of the grandest theatre in America was found too small to contain the crowds he drew.

Severe attacks of gout were beginning to tell upon that herculean form, sapping and undermining it; and in 1865, while playing Damon at the Holiday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, the weather being very cold and the theatre open to draughts, he was seized with a sudden illness, which was followed by very serious results. Suffering the most intense agony, he was able to get to the end of the part; but when his robes were laid aside and physicians summoned, it was found to his horror that he had suffered a partial paralysis of the sciatic nerve. In an instant the sturdy gait, the proud tread of the herculean actor was forever gone; for he never regained complete control of his limb, a perceptible hobble being the legacy of the dreadful visitation. His right hand was almost powerless, and he could not hold his sword.

In 1866 he went to California, urged by the manager in San Francisco. His last engagement in New York took place in February, 1871. He played Lear and Richelieu, his two greatest parts. On the night of March 25, 1872, Forrest opened in "Lear" at the Globe Theatre, Boston. "Lear" was played six nights. During the second week he was announced for Richelieu and Virginius; but he caught a violent cold on Sunday, and labored sorely on Monday evening through the part of Richelieu. On Tuesday he repeated the performance, against the advice of friends and physicians. Rare bursts of his old power lighted up the play, but he labored piteously on against his illness and threatened pneumonia. When stimulants were offered he rejected them, declaring "that if he died to-night, he should still be his old royal self."

Announced for Virginius the following evening, he was unable to appear. A severe attack of pneumonia developed itself. He was carried to his hotel, and his last engagement was brought to an abrupt and melancholy end. As soon as he was able to move, he left Boston for his home in Philadelphia, resting on his way only a day in New York. As the summer passed away, the desire for work grew stronger and stronger, and he decided to re-enter public life, but simply as a reader of the great plays in which he had as an actor been so successful. The result was a disappointment. On December 11, 1872, he wrote to Oakes his last letter, saying sadly, but fondly: "God bless you ever, my dear and much-beloved friend."

When the morning of December 12th came, his servant, hearing no sound in his chamber at his general hour of rising, became alarmed, opened his master's door, and found there, cold in death upon his bed, the form of the great tragedian. His arms were crossed upon his bosom, and he seemed to be at rest. The stroke had come suddenly. With little warning, and without pain, he had passed away.

The dead man's will was found to contain several bequests to old friends and servants, and an elaborate scheme by which his fortune, in the hands of trustees, was to be applied to the erection and support of a retreat for aged actors, to be called "The Edwin Forrest Home." The idea had been long in his mind, and careful directions were drawn up for its practical working; but the trustees found themselves powerless to realize fully the hopes and wishes of the testator. A settlement had to be made to the divorced wife, who acted liberally toward the estate; but the amount withdrawn seriously crippled it, as it was deprived at once of a large sum of ready money. Other legal difficulties arose. And thus the great ambition of the tragedian to be a benefactor to his profession was destined to come almost to naught. Of this happily little he recks now. He has parted with all the cares of life, and has at last found rest.

Forrest's greatest Shakespearean parts were Lear, Othello, and Coriolanus. The first grew mellow and rich as the actor grew in years, while it still retained much of its earlier force. His Othello suffered with the decline of his faculties, although his clear conception of all he did was apparent to the end in the acting of every one of his parts. Coriolanus died with him, the last of all the Romans. He was greatest, however, in such parts as Virginius, William Tell, and Spartacus. Here his mannerisms of gait and utterance were less noticeable than in his Shakespearean characters, or were overlooked in the rugged massiveness of the creation. Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth were out of his temperament, and added nothing to his fame; but Richelieu is said to have been one of his noblest and most impressive performances. He was in all things marked and distinctive. His obtrusive personality often destroyed the harmony of the portrait he was painting; but in his inspired moments, which were many, his touches were sublime. He passed over quiet scenes with little elaboration, and dwelt strongly upon the grand features of the characters he represented. His Lear, in the great scenes, rose to a majestic height, but fell in places almost to mediocrity. His art was unequal to his natural gifts. He was totally unlike his great contemporary and rival, Macready, whose attention to detail gave to every performance the harmony of perfect work.

This memoir may fitly close with an illustrative anecdote of the great actor. Toward the end of his professional career he was playing an engagement at St. Louis. He was very feeble in health, and his lameness was a source of great anxiety to him. Sitting at a late supper in his hotel one evening, after a performance of "King Lear," with his friend J. B. McCullough, of the _Globe-Democrat_, that gentleman remarked to him: "Mr. Forrest, I never in my life saw you play Lear so well as you did to-night." Whereupon the veteran almost indignantly replied, rising slowly and laboriously from his chair to his full height: "Play Lear! What do you mean, sir? I do not play Lear! I play Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please, but by God, sir, I _am_ Lear!"

Nor was this wholly imaginative. Ingratitude of the basest kind had rent his soul. Old friends were gone from him; new friends were but half-hearted. His hearthstone was desolate. The public, to whom he had given his best years, was becoming impatient of his infirmities. The royalty of his powers he saw by degrees torn from his decaying form. Other kings had arisen on the stage, to whom his old subjects now showed a reverence once all his own. The mockery of his diadem only remained. A wreck of the once proud man who had despised all weakness, and had ruled his kingdom with imperial sway, he now stood alone. Broken in health and in spirit, deserted, forgotten, unkinged, he might well exclaim, "_I am Lear!_"

CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN

By DUTTON COOK

(1816-1876)

The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedigrees almost as frequently and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the trunk of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried very many heads of houses across the Atlantic. It was not in the Mayflower, however, but in the Fortune, a smaller vessel, of fifty-five tons, that Robert Cushman, Nonconformist, the founder of the Cushman family in America, sailed from England, for the better enjoyment of liberty of conscience and freedom of religion. In the seventh generation from Robert Cushman appeared Elkanah Cushman, who took to wife Mary Eliza, daughter of Erasmus Babbit, Jr., lawyer, musician, and captain in the army. Of this marriage was born Charlotte Saunders Cushman, in Richmond Street, Boston, July 23, 1816, and other children.

Charlotte Cushman says of herself: "I was born a tom-boy." She had a passion for climbing trees and for breaking open dolls' heads. She could not make dolls' clothes, but she could manufacture their furniture--could do anything with tools. "I was very destructive to toys and clothes, tyrannical to brothers and sister, but very social, and a great favorite with other children. Imitation was a prevailing trait." The first play she ever saw was "Coriolanus," with Macready in the leading part; her second play was "The Gamester." She became noted in her school for her skill in reading aloud. Her competitors grumbled: "No wonder she can read; she goes to the theatre!" Until then she had been shy and reserved, not to say stupid, about reading aloud in school, afraid of the sound of her own voice, and unwilling to trust it; but acquaintance with the theatre loosened her tongue, as she describes it, and gave opportunity and expression to a faculty which became the ruling passion of her life. At home, as a child, she took part in an operetta founded upon the story of "Bluebeard," and played Selim, the lover, with great applause, in a large attic chamber of her father's house before an enthusiastic audience of young people.

Elkanah Cushman had been for some years a successful merchant, a member of the firm of Topliffe & Cushman, Long Wharf, Boston. But failure befell him, "attributable," writes Charlotte Cushman's biographer, Miss Stebbins, "to the infidelity of those whom he trusted as supercargoes." The family removed from Boston to Charlestown. Charlotte was placed at a public school, remaining there until she was thirteen only. Elkanah Cushman died, leaving his widow and five children with very slender means. Mrs. Cushman opened a boarding-house in Boston, and struggled hard to ward off further misfortune. It was discovered that Charlotte possessed a noble voice of almost two registers, "a full contralto and almost a full soprano; but the low voice was the natural one." The fortunes of the family seemed to rest upon the due cultivation of Charlotte's voice and upon her future as a singer. "My mother," she writes, "at great self-sacrifice gave me what opportunities for instruction she could obtain for me; and then my father's friend, Mr. R. D. Shepherd, of Shepherdstown, Va., gave me two years of the best culture that could be obtained in Boston at that time, under John Paddon, an English organist and teacher of singing." When the English singer, Mrs. Wood--better known, perhaps, as Miss Paton--visited Boston in 1835 or 1836, she needed the support of a contralto voice. Charlotte Cushman was sent for, and rehearsed duets with Mrs. Wood. The young beginner was advised to prepare herself for the operatic stage; she was assured that such a voice would "lead her to any height of fortune she coveted." She became the articled pupil of Mr. Maeder, the husband of Clara Fisher, actress and vocalist, and the musical director of Mr. and Mrs. Wood. Instructed by Maeder, Miss Cushman undertook the parts of the Countess in "The Marriage of Figaro" and Lucy Bertram in the opera of "Guy Mannering." These were her first appearances upon the stage.

Mrs. Maeder's voice was a contralto; it became necessary, therefore, to assign soprano parts to Miss Cushman. Undue stress was thus laid upon her upper notes. She was very young, and she felt the change of climate when she went on with the Maeders to New Orleans. It is likely that her powers as a singer had been tried too soon and too severely; her operatic career was brought to a sudden close. Her voice failed her; her upper notes departed, never to return; she was left with a weakened and limited contralto register. Alarmed and wretched, she sought counsel of Mr. Caldwell, the manager of the chief New Orleans theatre. "You ought to be an actress, and not a singer," he said, and advised her to take lessons of Mr. Barton, his leading tragedian. Her articles of apprenticeship to Maeder were cancelled. Soon she was ready to appear as Lady Macbeth on the occasion of Barton's benefit.

The season ended, she sailed for Philadelphia on her way to New York. Presently she had entered into a three years' engagement with Mr. Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery Theatre, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week for the first year, thirty-five for the second year, and forty-five for the third. Mr. Hamblin had received excellent accounts of the actress from his friend, Mr. Barton, of New Orleans, and had heard her rehearse scenes from "Macbeth," "Jane Shore," "Venice Preserved," "The Stranger," etc. To enable her to obtain a suitable wardrobe, he became security for her with his tradespeople, deducting five dollars a week from her salary until the debt was satisfied. All promised well; independence seemed secure at last. Mrs. Cushman was sent for from Boston; she gave up her boarding-house and hastened to her daughter. Miss Cushman writes: "I got a situation for my eldest brother in a store in New York. I left my only sister in charge of a half-sister in Boston, and I took my youngest brother with me." But rheumatic fever seized the actress; she was able to act for a few nights only, and her dream of good fortune came to a disastrous close. "The Bowery Theatre was burned to the ground, with all my wardrobe, all my debt upon it, and my three years' contract ending in smoke." Grievously distressed, but not disheartened, with her family dependent upon her exertions, she accepted an engagement at the principal theatre in Albany, where she remained five months, acting all the leading characters. In September, 1837, she entered into an engagement, which endured for three years, with the manager of the Park Theatre, New York. She was required to fulfil the duties of "walking lady" and "general utility" at a salary of twenty dollars a week.

During this period of her career she performed very many characters, and toiled assiduously at her profession. It was then the custom to afford the public a great variety of performances, to change the plays nightly, and to present two and sometimes three plays upon the same evening. The actors were forever busy studying new parts, and, when they were not performing, they were rehearsing. "It was a time of hard work," writes Miss Stebbins, "of ceaseless activity, and of hard-won and scantily accorded appreciation." Miss Cushman had no choice of parts; she was not the chief actress of the company; she sustained without question all the characters the management assigned to her. Her appearance as Meg Merrilies (she acquired subsequently great favor by her performance of this character) was due to an incident--the illness of Mrs. Chippendale, the actress who usually supported the part. It was in the year 1840; the veteran Braham was to appear as Henry Bertram. A Meg Merrilies had to be improvised. The obscure "utility" actress was called upon to take Mrs. Chippendale's place. She might read the part if she could not commit it to memory but personate Meg Merrilies after some sort she must. She had never especially noticed the part; but as she stood at the side scene, book in hand, awaiting her moment of entrance, her ear caught the dialogue going on upon the stage between two of the gypsies, "conveying the impression that Meg was no longer to be feared or respected--that she was no longer in her right mind." This furnished her with a clew to the character, and led her to present it upon the stage as the weird and startling figure which afterward became so famous. Of course, the first performance was but a sketch of her later portrayals of Meg Merrilies, yet she made a profound impression. "I had not thought that I had done anything remarkable," she wrote, "and when a knock came at my dressing-room door, and I heard Braham's voice, my first thought was, 'Now what have I done? He is surely displeased with me about something.' Imagine my gratification, when Mr. Braham said, 'Miss Cushman, I have come to thank you for the most veritable sensation I have experienced for a long time. I give you my word, when I saw you in that first scene I felt a cold chill run all over me. Where have you learned to do anything like that?'"

During her visits to England, Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies more often than any other character. In America she was also famous for her performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver Twist;" but this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic. She had first played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the Park Theatre, when the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully affected her audience, and the tradition of her success in the part long "lingered in the memory of managers, and caused them, ever and anon, as their business interests prompted, to bring great pressure to bear upon her for a reproduction of it." Mr. George Vandenhoff describes Nancy as Miss Cushman's "greatest part; fearfully natural, dreadfully intense, horribly real."

In the winter of 1842 Miss Cushman undertook the management of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, which was then in rather a fallen state. Under her energetic rule, however, the establishment recovered its popularity. "She displayed at that day," writes Mr. George Vandenhoff--who "starred at the Walnut Street Theatre for six nights to small audiences"--"a rude, strong, uncultivated talent. It was not till after she had seen and acted with Mr. Macready--which she did the next season--that she really brought artistic study and finish to her performances." Macready arrived in New York in the autumn of 1843. He notes: "The Miss Cushman, who acted Lady Macbeth, interested me much. She has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me--a novelty so refreshing to me on the stage." She discerned the opportunity for study and improvement presented by Macready's visit, and underwent the fatigue of acting on alternate nights in Philadelphia and New York during the term of his engagement at the Park Theatre. Her own success was very great. She wrote to her mother of her great reception: of her being called out after the play; of the "hats and handkerchiefs waved to me; flowers sent to me," etc. In October, 1844, she sailed for England in the packet-ship Garrick. She had little money with her. A farewell benefit taken in Boston, her native city, had not proved very productive, and she had been obliged "to make arrangements for the maintenance of her family during her absence." And with characteristic prudence she left behind her a certain sum, to be in readiness for her, in case failure in England should drive her promptly back to America.

No engagement in London had been offered her; but she received, upon her arrival, a letter from Macready, proposing that she should join a company then being formed to give representations in Paris. She thought it prudent to decline this proposal, however, so as to avoid entering into anything like rivalry with Miss Helen Faucit, the leading actress of the troupe. She visited Paris for a few days, but only to sit with the audience of the best French theatres. She returned to her dull lodgings in Covent Garden, "awaiting her destiny." She was fond, in after years, of referring to the struggles and poverty, the hopes and the despair, of her first sojourn in London. Her means were nearly exhausted. Sally, the dresser, used to relate: "Miss Cushman lived on a mutton-chop a day, and I always bought the baker's dozen of muffins for the sake of the extra one, and we ate them all, no matter how stale they were, and we never suffered from want of appetite in those days." She found herself reduced to her last sovereign, when Mr. Maddox, the manager of the Princess's Theatre, came to her with a proposal. The watchful Sally reported that he had been walking up and down the street for some time early in the morning, too early for a visit. "He is anxious," said Miss Cushman. "I can make my own terms." He wished her to appear with Forrest, the American tragedian, then visiting the London stage for the second and last time. She stipulated that she should have her opportunity first, and "alone." If successful, she was willing to appear in support of Forrest. So it was agreed.

Her first appearance upon the English stage was made on February 14, 1845; she assumed the character of Bianca, in Dean Milman's rather dull tragedy of "Fazio." Her triumph was indisputable. Her intensity and vehemence completely carried away the house. As the pit rose at Kean's Shylock, so it rose at Charlotte Cushman's Bianca. She wrote to her mother in America: "All my success put together, since I have been upon the stage, would not come near my success in London." The critics described, as the crowning effort of her performance, the energy and pathos and abandonment of her appeal to Aldabella, when the wife sacrifices her pride, and sinks, "huddled into a heap," at the feet of her rival, imploring her to save the life of Fazio. Miss Cushman, speaking of her first performance in London, was wont to relate how she was so completely overcome, not only by the excitement of the scene, but by the nervous agitation of the occasion, that she lost for the moment her self-command, and was especially grateful for the long-continued applause which gave her time to recover herself. When she slowly rose at last and faced the house again, the spectacle of its enthusiasm thrilled and impressed her in a manner she could never forget. The audience were standing; some had mounted on the benches; there was wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs, a storm of cheering, great showering of bouquets.