“Have you ever heard,” asked Garrick, in an unpublished letter to Moody, then at Liverpool, “of a woman Siddons, who is strolling about somewhere near you?” Four months later, by the help of the Rev. Henry Bate’s favourable report of her powers, she made her first appearance at Drury Lane. The Golden Gates of the Temple of Fame were thrown open. The young priestess had but to enter, one would have thought, and light the sacred flame; but genius is not to be bound by expediency or opportunity.
It was in 1775, the year when Garrick gave up the management, that Mrs. Siddons appeared on the boards of Drury Lane. She had reached the highest point of her ambition—she was to act with the greatest actor of his time before a dramatic audience rendered fastidious and critical by great traditions.
This is the most unfortunate portion of her life to recount. Failure and disappointment attended every step she made; and this failure and disappointment, although it did not in the least discourage her in the prosecution of her art, hurried her into bitterness and an unjust feeling of rancour against Garrick, which an examination of the circumstances of the case in no way warrants. One of the Kemble weaknesses was a proud sensitiveness to anything like slight or neglect, and these slights were as often as not phantoms of their own imaginations.
It gives one a mournful sense of injustice to see the charge of jealousy she openly brings repeated by the earlier biographer who wrote about her—when we, who have fuller light thrown upon the great actor’s life by the publication of his correspondence, know how free he was from the besetting sins of his craft. To be popular, a man must have the faults of those among whom he is placed. Garrick was called stingy because he did not throw away his money like his colleagues; stiff, because he was a moral man amidst a laxity of manners that has become proverbial; jealous, because he placed the honour of his art and his theatre above personal considerations. He was an object of envy because of his unparalleled success. The two clouds which veiled the nobility of his character—love of money and love of fine friends—vanished like mists in the sunshine if he were really called upon to help a case of distress or take notice of an old friend. These faults were harped upon, however, by Johnson, Foote, and hosts of others. Well might Garrick, in the evening of his days, sitting on the terrace of his house at Twickenham, make the, for him, bitter observation, “I have not always met gratitude in a play-house.”
It was at the time, no doubt, a salve to Mrs. Siddons’s disappointment to listen to the specious Mr. Sheridan’s insinuation of Garrick’s jealousy; but it is a curious fact, if Sheridan were sincere in his statements, that when he succeeded Garrick as manager he never endeavoured to re-engage her; indeed, on the contrary, abruptly and discourteously closed all negotiations and cancelled all agreements made both with the actress and her husband for a reappearance at Drury Lane.
We will allow the reader, however, to judge the story upon its own merits.
After the favourable reports of King and Bate, Garrick, as we have seen by the Bate letters, engaged Mrs. Siddons and her husband. The energy that afterwards distinguished her to such an extraordinary extent was now exhibited.
Although not at all strong—her eldest girl, and second child, as we have seen, having only been born on the 5th of November 1775—in the beginning of December she began making preparations for her journey to London, no joke in those days when, “starting two hours before day, or as late at night,” it took three days to reach Bristol.
Five days, Mrs. Delaney tells us, travelling over the same road the Siddons had now to face, it took to reach her father’s place in Gloucestershire. “Every half hour flop we went into a slough, not overturned, but stuck. Out we were hauled, and the coach with much difficulty was set up again.”
Full of hope and excitement, however, the young actress, accompanied by husband and babies, prepared for their expedition. No pilgrim approaching the shrine of Mecca was ever more enthusiastic than she approaching the bourne of all actors of that day, Drury Lane. Yet already, through all her delight, we hear a note of dissatisfaction that is displeasing. Garrick had arranged to give her five pounds a week, a munificent salary for a beginner in those days. Mrs. Abington and Mrs. Yates only received ten. She had heard the charge of stinginess made against him, and, parrot-like, repeated it, without really considering if in her own case it were true.