The most critical local censors were lavish in their praise, though all remarked “how ill and pale she was, and wondered how she got through her parts.” She acted the round of her characters. Her attitudes and figure were vastly admired; she was thought “so elegant.” Wilkinson endeavoured to secure her permanently as a member of his company, and in his Memoirs tells how he endeavoured to tempt her by fine clothes, providing for one of her parts a most “elegant sack-back, all over silver trimmings.” He did not understand any more than Garrick the nature of the woman with whom he had to deal. On the 17th May she acted Semiramis for her benefit, and the York season closed. Palmer, of the Bath Theatre, had not forgotten Henderson’s strong recommendation, and, finding at last an opening, he concluded an engagement with her.
Bath was first in importance among the provincial theatres. The audience, indeed, was very largely composed of the London “fashionables,” who came to drink the waters; no “sack-backs,” therefore, “all over silver trimmings,” were allowed to interfere with her determination, for, although in her petulant moments she was wont to declare that she preferred the country, and had been treated so cruelly in London she never would play there again, in her heart she was resolved to rule supreme on those boards she had once trod with Garrick.
“I now made an engagement at Bath,” she says in her Memoranda. “There my talents and industry were encouraged by the greatest indulgence, and, I may say, with some admiration. Tragedies which had been almost banished, again resumed their proper interest; but still I had the mortification of being obliged to personate many subordinate characters in comedy, the first being, by contract, in the possession of another lady. To this I was obliged to submit, or to forfeit a portion of my salary, which was only three pounds a week. Tragedies were now becoming more and more fashionable. This was favourable to my cast of powers; and, whilst I laboured hard, I began to earn a distinct and flattering reputation. Hard labour, indeed, it was! for, after the rehearsal at Bath, and on a Monday morning, I had to go and act at Bristol on the evening of the same day, and reaching Bath again, after a drive of twelve miles, I was obliged to represent some fatiguing part there on the Tuesday evening. When I recollect all this labour of mind and body, I wonder that I had strength and courage to support it, interrupted as I was by the care of a mother, and by the childish sports of my little ones, who were often most unwillingly hushed to silence for interrupting their mother’s studies.”
From the pages of Horace Walpole, Mrs. Montagu, and Fanny Burney, we can bring the Pan-tiles of Tunbridge Wells or the parade at Bath, with their periwigs, powder-patches, and scandal, distinctly before us. Let us stand for a moment on the parade, and watch the noteworthy people, muses, poets, statesmen, who have assembled there, in 1778, to drink the water. Royal dukes and princesses might be seen sauntering about, playing whist and E. O. in the evening, and taking “three glasses of water, a toasted roll, a Bath cake, and a cold walk in the mornings.” Next to them, the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, loveliest of the lovely, gayest of the gay, attracts most notice. Her dazzling beauty, and those eyes the Irish labourer at the Fox Election said he could light his pipe at, are said to have taken away the readiness of hand and happiness of touch of the young painter “reported to have some talent,” named Gainsborough, while painting her this year at Bath.
After the Queen of Beauty comes the Queen of the Blues, Mrs. Montagu, “brilliant in clothes, solid in judgment, critical in talk, with the air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished and of great parts.” She writes in her letters of hating “ye higgledy-piggledy of the watering-places,” but seems happy enough combating for precedence “with the only other candidate for colloquial eminence” she thought worthy to be her peer—short, plump, brisk Mrs. Thrale; on the one side a placid, high-strained intellectual exertion, on the other an exuberant pleasantry, without the smallest malice in either. All the “Johnsonhood,” as Horace Walpole calls the circle, musters round the two brilliant ladies, the Great Bear in the centre, for he and Boswell are stopping at the Pelican Inn. The conversation turns on Evelina, the universal topic of the day; Johnson declaring he had sat up all night to read it, much to Fanny Burney’s delight, who, thirsting for flattery, sits with observant eyes and sarcastic little mouth, that belies the prudishly-folded hands and prim air. Moving about from group to group is the brilliant Sheridan, walking with his father and wife, and surrounded by the Linley family, to whom the lovely Cecilia is recounting the honours heaped on them in London.
Unnoticed among all these great people is a little lame Scottish boy, destined to be the greatest of them all. Mrs. Siddons most likely saw and knew the little fellow then, who afterwards became so true a friend, for Walter Scott, in his autobiography, tells us he was frequently taken to Bath for his lameness, and, after he had bathed in the morning, got through a reading-lesson at the old dame’s near the parade, and had had a drive over the downs, his uncle would sometimes take him to the old theatre. On one occasion, witnessing As You Like It, his interest was so great that, in the middle of the wrestling scene in the first act, he screamed out, “A’n’t they brothers?”
Amongst this “higgledy-piggledy,” we are suddenly struck by a beautiful young creature, whose arrival seems to cause a flutter among the fashionables. She is accompanied by a handsome fair man and two beautiful children. This is the new actress who is turning every head. From Lawrence’s coloured crayon drawing, done of her during this stay at Bath, we can form a distinct idea of what she was like. He has drawn her three-quarter face, black velvet hat and plume, white muslin cavalier tie, brown riding spencer with big buttons and lappels turned back. Under the shadow of the hat is the refined, noble face, with delicate, arched eye-brows, aquiline nose, finely modelled mouth, and round cleft chin. She is not yet the tragic muse of Reynolds, nor the full-orbed, fashionable beauty of Gainsborough, but a lovely young Diana, with frank, large, out-looking eyes, and a pretty air of defiance and resolution, the brightness undimmed by the anxiety and hard work of later days; the young beauty is evidently determined to conquer the universe.
It was a world strangely at issue with her own ideas into which she had stepped—a dandified, ceremonious world, full of witty and wicked ladies and gentlemen, who played cards and backed horses; but, mercifully for her, a world at the same time full of childish enthusiasm, an age of pallor and fainting and hysterics. Grown men and women sitting up at night weeping and laughing over the woes and escapades of Clarissa Harlowe and Evelina; ladies writing to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, make Lovelace happy; you can so easily do it. Pray reform him! Will you not save a soul?”
The same vivid interest was taken in dramatic situations. It was a common thing for women—and, indeed, men also—to be carried out fainting; and as to the crying and sobbing, it was generally audible all over the house. In a pathetic piece, Miss Burney describes two young ladies, who sat in a box above her, being both so much shocked at the death of Douglas that “they both burst into a loud fit of roaring, and sobbed on afterwards for almost half the farce.” Needless to say, therefore, the enthusiasm a beautiful young actress like Mrs. Siddons would create. It was not, however, immediate; she was obliged, as we have seen, to personate subordinate characters, and was obliged to act in comedy that did not suit her.