A different class of entertainment now invaded the classic boards. We can see Timour the Tartar, Tekeli, or the Siege of Montgatz, The Miller and His Men, Pizarro, and a host of spectacular pieces, mounted to draw numerous and uncritical audiences. This first season was a fatiguing and anxious one for the great actress, more especially also that she was in delicate health. Her daughter Cecilia was born this year, 1794, on 25th July. Her husband wrote to a friend:—
I have the pleasure to tell you your little god-daughter (for such she is, myself being your proxy a few days back) is very well, and as fine a girl as if her father was not more than one-and-twenty. She is named after Mrs. Piozzi’s youngest daughter, Cecilia; her sponsors are yourself and Mr. Greatheed, Mrs. Piozzi and Lady Percival (ci devant Miss B. Wynn); and, what is better, the mother is well, too, and is just going to the theatre to perform Mrs. Beverley for the benefit of her brother’s wife, Mrs. Stephen Kemble.
She never all through life gave herself the rest requisite to re-establish her health; always before the public, what wonder that languor and weakness attacked her physically, and despondency and dissatisfaction mentally.
“My whole family are gone to Margate,” she wrote in September, “whither I am going also, and nothing would make it tolerable to me, but that my husband and daughters are delighted with the prospect before them. I wish they could go and enjoy themselves there, and leave me the comfort and pleasure of remaining in my own convenient house, and taking care of my baby. But I am every day more and more convinced that half the world live for themselves, and the other half for the comfort of the former. At least this I am sure of, that I have had no will of my own since I remember; and, indeed, to be just, I fancy I should have little delight in such an existence.”
She told her friend Mr. Whalley, on the eve of setting out for Edinburgh to play at her son Henry’s theatre:—“I intend, if it please God, to be at home again for Passion week. I leave my sweet girl behind me, not daring to take her so far north this inclement season, and could well wish that the interests of the best of sons, and most amiable of men, did not so imperiously call me out of this softer climate just now. But I shall pack myself up as warmly as I can, trusting that while I run a little risk, I shall do a great deal of good to my dear Harry, who tells me all my friends are more eager to see me than ever. It is not impossible that I may stop a night or two here before I go, which, as I have long been engaged to act this season after Easter, and cannot in honour or honesty be off, I think will not be impolitic, lest my enemies, if their malignity be worth a thought, may think their impotent attempts have frightened me away. They have done all their malignant treachery could devise, and have they robbed me of one friend? No, God be praised! But, on the contrary, have knit them all closer to me. Glad enough should I be never to appear again, but, while the interests of those so dear and near as those of son and brother are concerned, one must not let selfish consideration stand in the way of Christian duties and natural affection.”
The public are inclined to think that the life of an artist spent continually before the footlights is one eminently conducive to hardening the sensibilities against calumny; but it is a curious fact that actors are like children in their craving for applause and praise, and in their fear of criticism and blame. Garrick wrote a year before his death to the scoundrel who persecuted him, “Will Curtius take the word of the accused for his innocence?” and Mrs. Siddons, through her husband, offered one thousand pounds for the libeller to whom she refers in the following letter:—
“One would think I had already furnished conjectures and lies sufficient for public gossip; but now the people here begin again with me. They say that I am mad, and that that is the reason of my confinement. I should laugh at this rumour were it not for the sake of my children, to whom it may not be very advantageous to be supposed to inherit so dreadful a malady; and this consideration, I am almost ashamed to own, has made me seriously unhappy. However, I really believe I am in my sober senses, and most heartily do I now wish myself with you at dear Streatham, where I could, as usual, forget all the pains and torments of illness and the world. But I fear I have now no chance for such happiness.”
“Kotzebue and German sausages are the order of the day,” Sheridan said when he brought out the English adaptation of The Stranger. Mrs. Haller, in Mrs. Siddons’s hands, became pathetic, almost grand; but to us now-a-days, uninfluenced by the glamour of her presence, the sickly sentiment and impossible situations of the play make it an untempting meal for our practical and realistic mental digestions.
Its success was so great as to induce the author of the School for Scandal—who had lost all power of original conception, yet was obliged to fill his pockets—to adapt another play, Pizarro, also by Kotzebue. Did we not know the history of the celebrated first night of his play, on unimpeachable evidence, we should be inclined to look upon it as one of those exaggerated tales that, related by one of the many gossips of the time, had grown out of all possibility of credence. Sheridan was up-stairs in the prompter’s room, stimulating his jaded brain by sips of port, and writing out the last act of the play, while the earlier parts were acting; every ten minutes he brought down as much of the dialogue as he had done piecemeal into the green-room, abusing himself and his negligence, and making a thousand winning and soothing apologies for having kept the performers so long in such painful suspense. What, under these circumstances, became of the thorough and elaborate study declared by the Kembles to be necessary for the perfection of the dramatic art, we know not. Rolla and Mrs. Siddons’s Elvira must have been extemporaneous acting. Perhaps the performances gained in vivid power and effect what they lost in finish from the nervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as they were called upon to make. It is difficult to account for the success of the play unless the acting was superlatively good. It is overlaid with bombast and claptrap, and, as Pitt said, was but a second-rate re-echo of his speeches on the Hastings trial. For no one but the “hapless genius” would the brother and sister have thus thrown to the winds all their artistic traditions. We hear of the inflexible John saying, when irritated past bearing: “I know him thoroughly, all his paltry tricks and artifices”; yet immediately after we find both him and the great actress submitting to all his whims and eccentricities. There is an amusing story told by Boaden of a supper at beautiful Mrs. Crouch’s, when Kemble arrived charged with his grievances, and full of threats, expecting to meet Sheridan. Presently in came the culprit, light and airy as usual. The great actor looked unutterable things, occasionally emitting a humming sound like that of a bee, and groaning inwardly in spirit. Some little time elapsed, when at last, like a “pillar of state,” slowly uprose Kemble, and thus addressed the proprietor:
“I am an eagle whose wings have been bound down by frosts and snows, but now I shake my pinions and cleave into the genial air into which I am born.”