II
The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.
He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham. I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.
In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the ‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence. These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes, more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’
Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in 1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’ in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s valet explained, “these are our failures.”
Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:
Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras!
Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.
And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and about to be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head and inquires “Lemon or vanilla?”
These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious. An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one summer afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that Pat Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at once, “That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is his’n.”