Corbell was anxious to see her play, but she would not let him see her as Meg Merrilies.
"No Meg Merrilies must ever come into the life of a child like that," she said. "Of all the people I have ever known, he would be the most deeply impressed by Meg Merrilies."
A friend had sent in some birds for Corbell, and he said to Miss Cushman:
"I wasn't brought up thinking it any wrong to shoot birds or any wrong to eat birds, and all the good people I know shoot them and eat them. But things that have such pretty feathers and such pretty talk in their throats must have souls, and so I don't know for sure about shooting them and eating them, not for really, truly sure, you know."
"I think you are right, my child, about the birds having souls, and I believe horses and dogs have souls, too. You know, dear, I believe in reincarnation. We eat the body of the bird, the feathers we put in our cap, and the soul is the voice that must sing in another bird."
After that Corbell did not feel so bad about the shooting of the birds. "The soul goes out and another bird catches it and sings."
Charlotte Cushman told me how her idea of Meg Merrilies had come to her. On the evening of the day that she had been unexpectedly called upon to play the character she was standing in the wing awaiting her cue, book in hand, when she heard one of the gypsies say, "Meg—why, she is no longer what she was; she doats." In a flash there came to her the conception of the character in which she was to make her greatest success.
I never saw her Lady Macbeth on the stage, but retain a vivid impression of the awesome personation when she showed me in my own room how she had played the sleep-walking scene upon her first appearance in drama when she was nineteen. I still see her tragic face with the dawning horror creeping over it as she looked at the stain on her hand. With the sudden impulse of a frightened woman, she hurriedly took up a fold of her dress to rub it off. The futility of the effort flashing upon her, she removed her clutch from her dress and a deeper terror gloomed into her face. She caught up her long hanging hair and tried to rub away the stain. With her great awe-compelling eyes fixed upon her hand she uttered the words, "Out, damned spot!" in a tone of anguished despair that thrilled me with terror. She did not act Lady Macbeth; she was Lady Macbeth in all her pride, all her ambition, all her determination, all her despair. She said that she did not like to play the character because it exhausted her. It is easy to understand that a woman of cold and unscrupulous ambition would drain the life of one so gentle and sweet-natured as Charlotte Cushman.
In this engagement she did not play Nancy Sikes, but she gave us her characterization of the part because my Soldier wanted to see it. Lawrence Barrett described it accurately when he said: "It sounded as if she spoke through blood." She was one of the few to whom a set stage with scenery and music and costumes and an audience are not necessary in the production of artistic effects. A private room, or a grassy plot under a tree, or an open space in the sunshine, was all the stage she required, one soul that understood her was audience enough, and when she threw herself into the character she represented no one would have known whether she wore the garb of a beggar or a queen.
I told her of having met Ellen Tree in Canada.