We will relate the story, however, in her own words, taken from Recollections written many years after, but full of as much bitterness as though penned while still smarting under her reverse.
“Happy to be placed where I presumptuously augured that I should do all that I have since achieved, if I could but once gain the opportunity, I instantly paid my respects to the great man. I was at that time good-looking; and certainly, all things considered, an actress well worth my poor five pounds a week. His praises were most liberally conferred upon me.” We are told by Campbell that he complimented her in this interview for not having the regular “tie-tum-tie” or sing-song of the provincial actress. “But,” she goes on, “his attentions, great and unremitting as they were, ended in worse than nothing. How was all this admiration to be accounted for consistently with his subsequent conduct? Why, thus, I believe: he was retiring from the management of Drury Lane, and, I suppose, at that time wished to wash his hands of all its concerns and details. However this may be, he always objected to my appearance in any very prominent character, telling me that Mrs. Yates and Miss Young would poison me if I did. I, of course, thought him not only an oracle but my friend; and, in consequence of his advice, Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, was fixed upon for my début, a character in which it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation. I was, therefore, merely tolerated.”
We here beg to mention that it can hardly be correct that Mrs. Siddons thought she would make no impression in Portia, as she had underlined Portia in the list she gave Mr. Bate of her favourite parts, and we find her choosing it later as the character in which to appear before Horace Walpole when desirous of propitiating the pitiless critic. But we will continue to relate the unfortunate story of this period in her own words.
“The fulsome adulation that courted Garrick in the theatre cannot be imagined; and whosoever was the luckless wight who should be honoured by his distinguished and envied smiles, of course, became an object of spite and malevolence. Little did I imagine that I myself was now that wretched victim. He would sometimes hand me from my own seat in the green-room to place me next to his own.... He also,” she goes on, “selected me to personate Venus at the revival of the Jubilee. This gained me the malicious appellation of Garrick’s ‘Venus,’ and the ladies who so kindly bestowed it on me rushed before me in the last scene, so that if he (Mr. Garrick) had not brought us forward with him with his own hands, my little Cupid and myself, whose appointed situations were in the very front of the stage, might have as well been in the Island of Paphos at that moment.”
Thomas Dibdin, the Cupid on this occasion, afterwards told Campbell that, as it was necessary for him to smile in the part of his godship, Mrs. Siddons kept him in good humour by asking him what sort of sugar-plums he liked best, and promising him a large supply of them. After the performance she kept her word. This is a characteristic trait; most young actresses under the circumstances would have been rather occupied with the effect of their own beauty on the audience than of the smiles of their Cupids.
At last the day came on which her fate was to be decided. It fell in Christmas week, 1775, and the audience present is described as “numerous and splendid.”
The following is a copy of the play-bill:—
(Not acted these two years.)
By Her Majesty’s Company at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
This day will be performed
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.