The mention of these last personages reminds me of a domestic circumstance of interest respecting Betterton. He and Mrs. Barry acted the principal characters in "The Provoked Wife;" the part of Lady Fancyfull was played by Mrs. Bowman. This young lady was the adopted child of the Bettertons, and the daughter of a friend (Sir Frederick Watson, Bart.) whose indiscretion or ill-luck had scattered that fortune the laying of the foundation of which is recorded by Pepys. To the sire Betterton had intrusted the bulk of his little wealth as a commercial venture to the East Indies. A ruinous failure ensued, and I know of nothing which puts the private life of the actor in so pleasing a light, as the fact of his adopting the child of the wholly ruined man who had nearly ruined him. He gave her all he had to bestow, careful instruction in his art; and the lady became an actress of merit. This merit, added to considerable personal charms, won for her the homage of Bowman, a player who became, in course of time, the father of the stage, though he never grew, confessedly, old. In after years, he would converse freely enough of his wife and her second father, Betterton; but if you asked the carefully-dressed Mr. Bowman anything with respect to his age, no other reply was to be had from him than—"Sir, it is very well!"
From what has been previously stated, it will be readily believed that the earnestness of Betterton continued to the last. Severely disciplined, as he had been by Davenant, he subjected himself to the same discipline to the very close; and he was not pleased to see it disregarded or relaxed by younger actors whom late and gay "last nights" brought ill and incompetent to rehearsal. Those actors might have reaped valuable instruction out of the harvest of old Thomas's experience and wisdom, had they been so minded.
Young actors of the present time—time when pieces run for months and years; when authors prescribe the extent of the run of their own dramas, and when nothing is "damned" by a patient public—our young actors have little idea of the labours undergone by the great predecessors who gave glory to the stage and dignity to the profession. Not only was Betterton's range of characters unlimited, but the number he "created" was never equalled by any subsequent actor of eminence—namely, about one hundred and thirty! In some single seasons he studied and represented no less than eight original parts—an amount of labour which would shake the nerves of the stoutest among us now.
His brief relaxation was spent on his little Berkshire farm, whence he once took a rustic to Bartholomew Fair for a holiday. The master of the puppet-show declined to take money for admission—"Mr. Betterton," he said, "is a brother actor!" Roger, the rustic, was slow to believe that the puppets were not alive; and so similar in vitality appeared to him, on the same night, at Drury Lane, the Jupiter and Alcmena in "Amphitryon," played by Betterton and Mrs. Barry, that on being asked what he thought of them, Roger, taking them for puppets, answered, "They did wonderfully well for rags and sticks."
Provincial engagements were then unknown. Travelling companies, like that of Watkins, visited Bath, a regular company from town going thither only on royal command; but magistrates ejected strollers from Newbury; and Reading would not tolerate them, even out of respect for Mr. Betterton. At Windsor, however, there was a troop fairly patronised, where, in 1706, a Mistress Carroll, daughter of an old Parliamentarian, was awakening shrill echoes by enacting Alexander the Great. The lady was a friend of Betterton's, who had in the previous year created the part of Lovewell in her comedy of the "Gamester." The powers of Mrs. Carroll had such an effect on Mr. Centlivre, one of the cooks to Queen Anne, that he straightway married her; and when, a few months later, Betterton played Sir Thomas Beaumont, in the lady's comedy, "Love at a Venture,"[31] his friend, a royal cook's wife, furnished but an indifferent part for a royal cook's son.
In other friendships cultivated by the great actor, and in the influences which he exerted over the most intellectual men who were his friends, we may discover proofs of Betterton's moral worth and mental power. Glorious Thomas not only associated with "Glorious John," but became his critic,—one to whom Dryden listened with respect, and to whose suggestions he lent a ready acquiescence. In the poet's "Spanish Friar," there was a passage which spoke of kings' bad titles growing good by time; a supposed fact which was illustrated by the lines—
"So, when clay's burned for a hundred years,
It starts forth china!"
The player fearlessly pronounced this passage "mean," and it was forthwith cancelled by the poet.
Intimate as this incident shows Betterton to have been with Dryden, there are others which indicate a closer intimacy of the player with Tillotson. The divine was a man who placed charity above rubrics, and discarded bigotry as he did perukes. He could extend a friendly hand to the benevolent Arian, Firmin, and welcome, even after he entered the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, such a visitor as the great actor Betterton. Did objection come from the rigid and ultra-orthodox?—the prelate might have reminded them that it was not so long since a bishop was hanged, and that the player was a far more agreeable and, in every respect, a worthier man than the unlucky diocesan of Waterford. However this may be questioned or conceded, it is indisputable that when Tillotson and Betterton met, the greatest preacher and the greatest player of the day were together. I think, too, that the divine was, in the above respect, somewhat indebted to the actor. We all remember the story how Tillotson was puzzled to account for the circumstance that his friend the actor exercised a vaster power over human sympathies and antipathies than he had hitherto done as a preacher. The reason was plain enough to Thomas Betterton. "You, in the pulpit," said he, "only tell a story: I, on the stage, show facts." Observe, too, what a prettier way this was of putting it than that adopted by Garrick when one of his clerical friends was similarly perplexed. "I account for it in this way," said the latter Roscius: "You deal with facts as if they were fictions; I deal with fictions as if I had faith in them as facts." Again, what Betterton thus remarked to Tillotson was a modest comment, which Colley Cibber has rendered perfect in its application, in the words which tell us that "the most a Vandyke can arrive at is to make his Portraits of Great Persons seem to think. A Shakspeare goes farther yet, and tells you what his Pictures thought. A Betterton steps beyond 'em both, and calls them from the grave, to breathe and be themselves again in Feature, Speech, and Motion." That Tillotson profited by the comment of Betterton—more gracefully than Bossuet did by the actors, whom he consigned, as such, to the nethermost Gehenna—is the more easily to be believed, from the fact that he introduced into the pulpit the custom of preaching from notes. Thenceforth, he left off "telling his story," as from a book, and, having action at command, could the nearer approach to the "acting of facts."