In the year 1851, the Countess of Landsfeld might well have reflected, with Byron—
“Through Life’s dull road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing—except thirty-three.”
She had practically exhausted the possibilities of the old world. In Paris she met with an American agent, named Edward Willis, who made her an offer (in theatrical parlance) for New York. Such a proposal appealed at once to this restless woman, in whom no series of misfortunes could extinguish the thirst for novelty and adventure. Other and more distinguished exiles who had been worsted in the fight with Europe’s archaic traditions were also turning their faces westward. The Humboldt, in which Lola sailed from Southampton on 20th November 1851, bore, as its most illustrious passenger, the patriot Kossuth. Of this great Magyar our adventuress saw little, for he was confined to his cabin during the greater part of the voyage with seasickness; what she did see she seems to have liked little. She thought him (so she told the reporter of the New York Tribune) sinister and distant. She, on an element with which she had been familiar since childhood, was brilliant and sprightly.
The Humboldt arrived at New York on Friday, 5th December 1851, and was received with a salute of thirty-one guns—in honour, it need hardly be said, of Kossuth, not of the Countess of Landsfeld. She was not altogether overlooked in the transports of enthusiasm and public rejoicings with which the American people hailed the exiled hero. She was promptly interviewed by the newspaper men, who were surprised to find that she was not a masculine woman, but rather slim in her stature.
“She has,” continues the report, “a face of great beauty, and a pair of black [sic] Spanish eyes, which flash fire when she is speaking, and make her, with the sparkling wit of her conversation, a great favourite in company. She has black hair, which curls in ringlets by the sides of her face, and her nose is of a pure Grecian cast, while her cheek bones are high, and give a Moorish appearance to her face.
“She states that many bad things have been said of her by the American Press, yet she is not the woman she has been represented to be: if she were, her admirers, she believes, would be still more numerous. She expresses herself fearful that she will not be properly considered in New York, but hopes that a discriminating public will judge of her after having seen her, and not before.”[24]
New York and its people in the middle of the last century have been portrayed unkindly, but I do not think unfairly, by Charles Dickens. That great novelist visited the country for the first time only seven years before Lola landed, and his impressions are largely embodied in “Martin Chuzzlewit.” With the type of American delineated therein, it is evident that the Countess of Landsfeld knew exactly how to deal. She succeeded at once in disarming an intensely puritanical people by enthusiastic appeals to their childlike national vanity, by delighted acquiescence in their laughable self-righteousness. Colonel Diver and General Choke could with difficulty have bettered her allusion to their Great Country as “this stupendous asylum of the world’s unfortunates, and last refuge of the victims of the tyranny and wrongs of the Old World! God grant,” devoutly prays the Countess, “that it may ever stand as it is now, the noblest column of liberty that was ever reared beneath the arch of heaven!” At the conclusion of her autobiography the American people are told that the pilgrim from the effete forms of Europe must look upon their great Republic with as happy an eye as the storm-tossed and shipwrecked mariner looks upon the first star that shines beneath the receding tempest. These words, indeed, are Mr. Chauncy Burr’s, but the sentiments beyond doubt are those that Lola constantly affected. Her mastery over men, as is always the case, was due not so much to her physical charms as to her skill in detecting their weakest sides. It says much for her shrewdness that she who had hitherto found it safest to appeal to men through their passions, perceived that the cold Yankee was most vulnerable through so artificial and dispassionate a sentiment as patriotism. Every other woman of her experience would have assumed that the animal predominated in all men, of whatever race or country.
LOLA MONTEZ. (After Jules Laure).
No amount of judicious flattery could, however, blind the Great and Critical American Public to the fair stranger’s imperfections as an actress and a dancer. On 27th December she appeared in the title rôle of Betly, the Tyrolean, a musical comedy written especially for her, at the Broadway Theatre. It was expected that she would prove a powerful attraction, and seats for the first performance were put up to public auction on the preceding Saturday. But the piece was withdrawn on 19th January 1852, public curiosity having by then been satisfied, and what taste there was in New York not much gratified. Lola, however, secured an engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre, at Philadelphia, that dull, colourless city, which formed the most incongruous of all possible settings for her personality. In May, when a faint breath of romance seems to rustle the trees even in Union Square, she went back to New York. On the 18th she appeared again at the Broadway Theatre in a dramatised version of her career in Munich, written by C. P. T. Ware. She appeared as herself, in the characters of the Danseuse, the Politician, the Countess, the Revolutionist, and the Fugitive. The part of King Louis was sustained by Mr. Barry, and Abel—the villain of the piece—by F. Conway. The play ran five nights only. Even during these brief runs, and though the prices at New York theatres did not exceed a dollar in those days, Lola had amassed a considerable sum of money; but she was by nature prodigal, and easily outpaced the swiftest current of Pactolus. She now hit on a somewhat original scheme, which quickly replenished her exchequer. She organised receptions, to which any one paying a dollar was admitted for the space of a quarter of an hour, to shake her by the hand, gaze upon her in all the splendour of her beauty, and converse with her in English, French, German, or Spanish. The function was hardly consistent with the Countess’s dignity, but it revealed in a striking manner her knowledge of the American character. To shake hands with a well-known personage is esteemed by your average Yankee a greater privilege than visiting the Acropolis or wading in the Jordan.