I have said that with his young wife Mr. Betty took to Ireland their son. Their boy was, and remained, their only child. He was born at Shrewsbury, which place is also proud of having given birth to famous Admiral Benbow, also to Orton, the eminent Nonconformist. Master Betty was English born and Irish bred; half-bred, however; for his English mother was his nurse, his companion, his friend—in other words, his true mother. Such an only child used to be called ‘a parlour child,’ to denote that there was more intercourse between child and parent than exists in a ‘nursery child,’ to whom the nurse seems his natural guide and ruler.
The English lady happened to be a lady well endowed as to her mind, her tastes, and her accomplishments. She was exactly the mother for such a boy. She was not only excessively fond of reading the best poets, but of reading passages aloud, or reciting them from memory. Her audience was her boy. His tastes were in sympathy with his mother’s, and he was never more delighted than when he sat listening to her reading or reciting, except when he was reciting passages to her. It was a peculiar training; it really shaped the boy’s life—and it was no ill shape which the life took. The father had his share, however, in clearing the path for the bright, though brief, career. One day the father, whose intellectual tastes responded to his wife’s, repeated to his son the speech of Cardinal Wolsey, beginning, ‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness.’ In doing this, he suited the action to the word. Young Betty had never seen this before, and he asked the meaning of it. ‘It is what is called acting,’ said the father. The boy thought over it, tried by himself action and motion with elocution, and he spoke and acted the cardinal’s soliloquy before his mother with an effect that excited in her the greatest surprise and admiration.
Not the faintest idea of the stage had, at this time, entered the minds of any of the family. The eager young lad himself was satisfied with reading plays, learning passages from them, and reciting speeches from ‘Douglas’ and ‘Zara,’ from ‘Pizarro’ and the ‘Stranger.’ He also repeated the episodical tales from Thomson’s ‘Seasons.’ Only the above trace of his learning anything from Shakespeare is to be found, but he listened to readings from the national poet by one or other of his parents. This course had its natural results. By degrees the boy took to rude attempts, from domestic materials, of dress. ‘Properties’ were created out of anything that could be turned to the purpose; a screen was adopted for scenery; audiences of ones and twos were pressed by the stage-struck youth to tarry and see him act; and finally his father, well qualified, taught him fencing, the son proving an apt pupil, and becoming a swordsman as perfect and graceful as Edmund Kean himself.
His reputation spread beyond home into distant branches of the family. Those branches shook with disgust. The parents were warned that if they did not take care the boy would come to the evil end of being a play-actor! They were alarmed. The domestic stage was suppressed; silence reigned where the echoes of the dramatic poets once pleasantly rang, and the heir of Hopton Court and Hopton Wafers was ignominiously packed off to school. When I say ‘the heir,’ it is because Master Betty was so called; but it really seems as if his claim resembled that of the Irish gentleman who was kept out of his property by the rightful owner.
There is no record of Master Betty’s school life. We only know that it did not suppress his taste for dramatic poetry and dramatic action. At this time, 1802, Mrs. Siddons, who had been acting with her brother, John Kemble, to empty houses at Drury Lane, left England, in disgust at the so-called ‘Drury treasury,’ for Ireland. It was the journey on which she set out with such morbid feelings of despair, as if she were assured of the trip ending by some catastrophe. It was, in fact, all triumph, and in the course of her triumphant career she arrived in Belfast, where, with other parts, she acted Elvira in ‘Pizarro.’ She had not thought much of the part of the camp-follower when she was first cast for it, and Sheridan was so dilatory that she had to learn the last portion of the character after the curtain had risen for the first acting of the piece. But Sarah Siddons was a true artist. She ever made the best of the very worst materials; she invested Elvira with dignity, and it became by far the most popular of the characters of which she was the original representative. Young Betty entered a theatre for the first time to see Sheridan’s ‘Pizarro’ acted at the Belfast theatre, and Mrs. Siddons as Elvira. The boy’s tastes were in the right direction. He had neither eyes, nor ears, nor senses, but for her. He was, so to speak, ‘stricken’ by her majestic march, her awful brow, her graceful action, and her incomparable delivery. He drank at a fresh fountain; he beheld a new guiding light; he went home in a trance; he now knew what was meant by ‘the stage,’ what acting was, what appropriate speech meant, what it was to be an actor, and what a delicious reward there was for an inspired artist in the music of tumultuous applause. When Master Betty awoke from his dream it was to announce to his parents that he should certainly die if he were not allowed to be a play-actor!
He was only eleven years old, and those parents did not wish to lose him. They at first humoured his bent, and listened smilingly to his rehearsal of the whole part of Elvira. They had to listen to other parts, and still had to hear his impressive iteration of his resolution to die if he were thwarted in his views. At length they yielded. The father addressed himself to Mr. Atkins, the proprietor and manager of the Belfast theatre, who consented that the boy should give him a taste of his quality. When this was done, Atkins was sufficiently struck by its novelty not to know exactly what to make of it. He called into council Hough, the prompter, who was warm in his approval. ‘You are my guardian angel!’ exclaimed the excited boy to the old prompter. Atkins, with full faith in Hough’s verdict, observed, when the lad had left, ‘I never expected to see another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Master Betty!’
After some preliminary bargaining, Atkins would not go further than engage the promising ‘infant’ for four nights. The terms were that, after deducting twelve pounds for the expenses of the house, the rest was to be divided between the manager and the débutant. The tragedy of ‘Zara’ was accordingly announced for August 16, 1803, ‘Osman (Sultan of Jerusalem) by a Young Gentleman.’ Now, that year (and several before and after it) was a troubled year, part of a perilous time, for Ireland. Sedition was abroad, and everybody, true man or not, was required to be at home early. The manager could not have got his tragedy and farce ended and his audience dismissed to their homes within the legal time but for the order which he obtained from the military commander of the district that (as printed in the bill), ‘At the request of the manager the drums have been ordered to beat an hour later at night.’ The performance was further advertised ‘to begin precisely at six o’clock, that the theatre may be closed by nine.’ The prices were reckoned by the Irish equivalent of English shillings—‘Boxes, 3s. 3d.; Pit, 2s. 2d.; Gallery, 1s. 1d.’ In return for the military courtesy, if not as a regular manifestation of loyalty, it was also stated in the bill, ‘God save the King’ (in capital letters!) ‘will be played at the end of the second act, and Rule Britannia at the end of the play.’
Belfast was, as it is, an intellectual town. The audience assembled were not likely to be carried away by a mere phenomenon. They listened, became interested, then deeply stirred, and at last enthusiastic. The next day the whole town was talking of the almost perfection with which this boy represented the rage, jealousy, and despair of Osman. In truth, there was something more than cleverness in this representation. Let anyone, if he can, read Aaron Hill’s adaptation of Voltaire’s ‘Zaire’ through. He will see of what dry bones it is made. Those heavy lines, long speeches, dull movement of dull plot, stirred now and then by a rant or a roar, require a great deal more than cleverness to make them endurable. No human being could live out five acts of such stuff if genius did not uphold the stuff itself. It was exquisite Mrs. Cibber who gave ‘Zara’ life when she made her début on the stage, when the tragedy was first played in 1736. Spranger Barry added fresh vigour to that life when he acted Osman in 1751. Garrick’s genius in Lusignan galvanised the dead heap into living beauty, never more so than in his last performance in 1776; but the great genius was Mrs. Cibber; neither Mrs. Bellamy, nor Mrs. Barry, nor Miss Younge, equalled her. Mrs. Siddons, after them, made Zara live again, and was nearly equal to Mrs. Cibber. Since her time there has been neither a Zara, nor Lusignan, nor grown-up Osman, of any note; and nothing short of genius could make the dry bones live. Voltaire’s ‘Zaire’ is as dull as Hill’s, but it has revived, and been played at the Théâtre Français. But every character is well played, from Mounet Sully, who acts Orosmane, to Dupont Vernon, in Corasmin. The accomplished Berton plays Nerestan; and it is a lesson to actors only to hear Maubant deliver the famous lines beginning with ‘Mon Dieu, j’ai combattu.’
Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt is the Zaire, and I can fancy her a French Cibber. She dies, however, on the stage too much in the horrible fashion of the ‘Sphinx’; but what attracts French audience is, that the piece abounds in passages which such audiences may hail in ecstasy or denounce in disgust. The passages are political, religious, and cunningly framed free-thinking passages. For these the audience waits, and signalises their coming by an enthusiasm of delight or an excess of displeasure.
At Belfast there was only the eleven-years-old Osman to enthral an audience. The rest were respectable players. It is not to be believed that such an audience would have been stirred as they were on that August night had there not been some mind behind the voice of the young débutant. He had never been on a stage before, had only once seen a play acted, had received only a few hints from the old prompter, yet he seemed to be the very part he represented. There were many doubters and disbelievers in Belfast, but they, for the most part, went to the theatre and were convinced. The three other parts he played were Douglas, Rolla, and, for his benefit on August 29, Romeo. From that moment he was ‘renowned,’ and his career certain of success.