Disappointed and chagrined, but not humiliated, he returned back to London, more determinately than ever resolved to persevere till he had mastered fortune and established a footing on the stage—exhibiting a degree of confidence which generally inheres in genius, and which his ultimate success well justified. Far from being depressed or obscured by his Edinburgh adventure, his talents had so much unfolded themselves and been so visibly improved, that his friends Godwin and Holcroft felt convinced he had not mistaken or overrated his powers; but, on the contrary, possessed qualifications, which, if diligently and judiciously cultivated, would raise him to a rank with the most eminent actors then living. The great bar to his advancement was that diffidence which occasioned his discomfiture in Edinburgh: but his friends knew enough of the human heart and powers to be assured that that very diffidence is so universally the concomitant of sterling merit, that where it superabounds wise men give credit for much excellence, and bestow their partiality with a liberal hand; while the want of it is generally suspected of denoting a great deficiency in merit: and they were right; for the young person who wants modesty wants every thing. Fraught with these considerations, those discerning men and steady friends thought that they would best consult their protegé’s interest by putting him into training in some obscure company, and took measures to introduce him into a routine of acting in the country theatres, from which novitiate they expected he would soon emerge well practised in stage business, and fully qualified to give out the whole force of his natural powers on some of the stages of the metropolis.
The country managers, however, seemed to think very differently from Messrs. Godwin and Holcroft of Mr. Cooper’s capabilities. If they had not the genius, the discernment, or the “spirits learned in human dealings” of our hero’s patrons, they had self-sufficiency and obstinacy in abundance, and what was more unfortunate, they had the power in their hands; a power which in such persons is rarely softened in its exercise by liberality or candor. These, notwithstanding the authority of Godwin and Holcroft’s opinion, considered or affected to consider Mr. Cooper as a poor juvenile adventurer, who had no one requisite for the profession. “Their hands, they said, were already full—(of trash no doubt they were) every character even the lowest was engaged. To show their deference, however, to the high opinion of the young man’s friends, they would endeavour to think of something for him to perform.” In conformity to the dictates of this generous spirit, they vouchsafed him some inferior parts: but every one knows, who knows any thing at all of theatrical affairs, that the coldness of a manager to a young performer, creates at least, distrust in the audience—that the young candidate who is set forward in humiliation, is forbidden to rise; as he who is thrust into characters far beyond the reach of his powers will, for a time, get credit for talents which he does not possess: for discerning and despotic as the multitude think themselves, they are still the dupes or the submissive slaves of dexterous leaders in every department of life. By the error, the ignorance, or the churlishness of the country managers, Mr. Cooper was excluded from any fair opportunity to redeem the credit he had lost in Edinburgh—they considered, or affected to consider him as wholly incompetent to any character of consequence: those which were vouchsafed him were of so inferior a rank that they denied scope to the exercise of his yet latent powers; for such a genius as that of Cooper could no more dilate in a meagre character, than Eclipse or Flying Childers could lay themselves out at full speed in a city building lot; and it is reasonable to suppose that, notwithstanding all his fortitude, the spirits of the youth were depressed, and his faculties chilled by such humiliating neglect, and such reiterated disappointments. Who is he that would not, under such circumstances, sink into languor? It cannot be doubted that dejection every day detracted from his powers, and that by a kind of irresistible gravitation, he descended like a falling body in the physical world, with accelerated velocity, till at last he reached the very bottom of the profession. Reader, behold—and refrain from regret if you can—behold Cooper, on whom crowded theatres have since gazed with astonishment and delight, reduced to the condition of a mere deliverer of letters and messages upon the stage of a low country theatre. The writer of this cannot help picturing to himself the feelings of a multitude of great and worthy personages in Great Britain and India, and particularly the feelings of a sister, the lovely inheritress of her family’s virtues, if they had known at the time, that which our hero’s manly pride concealed, that the son of doctor Cooper, whose goodness of heart had often been the refuge of the distressed, was for months languishing under the chill of public neglect, and dragging on existence upon a miserable pittance which scarcely afforded him physical support; or if they had seen him in his unaccommodated removal from that situation, walking on foot to the metropolis.
The repulses of a mistaken and unworthy few, and the neglect of a world very little better, had no other effect upon Mr. Cooper’s friends Godwin and Holcroft, than to quicken their sensibility and inflame their ardour to serve him. It is more than probable those mortifications tended to increase the conviction of the former that his eleve had made a deplorable choice of profession, but did not at all shake the opinion which both, and particularly the latter, entertained that he had great capabilities for the profession. The youth had now waded in so far, that to go back might be worse than to go forward; Mr. Holcroft therefore again took him in hand; read Shakspeare with him, and accompanied their reading with practical commentaries upon the force of that author’s meaning, marked out to him those parts where the character was to depend for its interest and impression, on the actor’s exertions; heard him over and over again repeat the most difficult speeches, and instructed him how to adapt his action, looks, and utterance to the passion which the author designed to exhibit, so as to excite appropriate feelings in the auditor. Though Shakspeare is above all others the poet of Nature, his meaning frequently eludes the dim or vulgar mind, and to be intelligibly elicited from the stiffness and obscurity which sometimes injures his language, requires profound consideration. For the minute investigation requisite for this purpose few men were better qualified than Mr. Holcroft—few men much more equal to the task of bringing forth from the rich mine where they lay and purify of their dross the talents of Mr. Cooper. With an earnestness and indefatigable zeal proportioned to the object, and which nothing but the most generous friendship could impel him to employ, Mr. Holcroft gave those powers to the instruction of our hero, and with such speedy and felicitous effect, that the young gentleman was, in the course of a few months, considered by his two friends as perfectly qualified to appear before a London audience in some of Shakspeare’s most important characters. Having been for some time a successful dramatic writer, Mr. H. enjoyed the ear and confidence of the managers, and arranged with those of Covent Garden for his pupil’s appearance on that stage. And now the time arrived when his fortitude was to be rewarded, his sufferings compensated, and his talents to find their proper levels. His first appearance was in Hamlet, in which he received unbounded applause. In two or three nights after he performed the very arduous part of Macbeth to a house so very full as to occasion an overflow. It is but justice to the Edinburgh and other provincial managers to observe, that when Mr. Cooper appeared on the London boards he was greatly improved in his externals. His person had grown more into masculine bulk and manly shape; his face had become more marked and expressive, and his voice had swelled into a more full deep tenor.
The friendship of Mr. Holcroft caused Mr. Cooper to be universally misjudged. The opposition prints represented him in the most extravagant terms of eulogy. The government prints ran into the opposite extreme, and he became at once the idol and the victim of party spirit. Yet such a reception, by a London audience, was a sufficient pledge of future success. He was still young, had much to learn in order to reach the first rank of that profession, and if a real, well-grounded, just fame had been his object, he ought to have felt that it could only be attained by perseverance, and by the customary natural gradations. The London managers offered him an engagement, which, though allowed to have been liberal, seems not to have come up to his own estimate of his deserts. Playing two or three or four characters well is a very different thing from sustaining a whole line of acting, to which long practice and great constitutional force are as necessary as any other requisite. In this view of the matter, as well as because managers neither desire nor will be permitted in England to supersede established favourite servants of the public, it will not appear surprising that the first rate rank of characters to which Mr. Cooper aspired, was refused to him by the managers, who thought that they better consulted the public feeling, their own interest, and even the young gentleman’s fame and ultimate prosperity, by placing him in a secondary general line, in which he might improve himself by playing with and observing the best models, and in regular gradation make his way to the first, as Kemble, Cooke, and others had done before him. This however was too unpalatable for his ambition to swallow. The first he would be, or none. There is not a sentiment of Julius Cæsar’s that is thought so censurable and unworthy of his great mind as that which he uttered when, pointing to a small town, he said, “I would rather be the first man in that village than the second in Rome.” This has been justly called perverted ambition, and Milton stamped it with terrible condemnation when he put into the mouth of his arch fiend the sentiment—“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” The passions of youth extenuate those errors which in ripened manhood are criminal; and it is not improbable that Mr. Cooper’s own opinion at this day concurs with ours when we say that his refusal of the manager’s offer seems to us to have been very injudicious. From Plautus, with whom we dare say he had long before had an intimacy, he might have taken this profitable lesson,
Viam qui nescit quâ deveniat ad mare
Eum oportet amnem quærere comitem sibi.
Had he not rejected that offer he would long ere this have had permanent possession of the rank to which he too prematurely aspired. His refusal was followed by a retreat into the country, where, with the perseverance of Demosthenes, he laboured in fitting himself for a more successful effort; resolved to force his way if possible to the high object of his ambition.
During his retirement intimations of his success crossed the Atlantic. Mr. Tyler, some time since the manager of the New-York theatre, received the intelligence from a friend in England: “Prepare yourself for astonishment,” said his correspondent, “that identical Mr. Cooper who, a few months ago, was playing the very underling characters at our theatre, and who appeared so extremely incompetent, is now performing Hamlet with applause in London.” Sometime after this the agent of the Philadelphia manager in England made proposals to Mr. Cooper, who exulting in the thoughts of obtaining in America that rank which he was refused in London, closed with the offer, and soon after passed over to America. In Philadelphia, however, he found that his object was not altogether so attainable as he imagined. In no place does favouritism flourish with much more rank luxuriance than in that city—in no place do personal prepossessions more frequently operate to the overthrow of judgment, to the exclusion of merit, and to the fostering of incapacity. The multitude had their favourites whose merit touched the highest standard of their conceptions—any thing beyond that was hid in an intellectual mist. The taste of the many was formed upon the kind of merit which they so much admired in their favourites, and little did it relish that of Mr. Cooper. It is astonishing how constantly fond overweening prejudice deceives itself. The philosopher who told the powerful despot, his sovereign, that there was no royal way to mathematics, was believed, because the despot had common sense—but a headstrong multitude can never be persuaded that a person can be incompetent to any one thing, if they only will him to be great in it: and thus it has happened not infrequently, in all cities as well as Philadelphia, that splendid talents have stood behind as lackeys, while doleful incapacity has feasted upon public favour.
The abilities of Mr. Cooper gave great uneasiness, for they every day forced a passage for themselves to some share of approbation, in the very teeth of favouritism and prejudice. Some there were who could discern no merit at all in him; some who industriously employed themselves in depreciating and denying the little which others allowed him. At last his vigorous struggles made it necessary to call in a corps de reserve which he little suspected; his private life was impeached, and the careless, irregular habits of youth—habits, by the by, in which no youth indulge more than our own, were arrayed against him. Unjust as this was, it produced the desired effect; for when his benefit was announced, very few seats were taken in the boxes. And here we have to record a feature in that gentleman’s character which marks his honest pride and magnanimity in deep impression. The manager was bound by his contract to make up to a certain stated amount, the proceeds of Mr. C.’s benefit. To such an advantage Mr. C. disdained to have recourse. At the same time his pride shrunk from the thoughts of playing to empty boxes at his benefit. He resolved to have a full house, and hit upon an expedient which showed that, young as he was, he knew something of the human heart, and that, though a stranger, he had made a very shrewd estimate of the public taste, for which he had the skill to cater more appropriately and successfully than he could by merely dishing up a play of Shakspeare’s in his own rough cookery. Fortunately for his purpose there had lately arrived in Philadelphia an actor of great weight and merit, a native of India, of whose immense and popular talents he resolved to avail himself; this was an elephant, which for the trifling douceur of sixty dollars, that is, near twice as much as the best actor in the city now gets for one week’s labour, he prevailed upon to press the boards of the theatre for that one time only, and be the chief performer and great attraction of the night. This was what a seaman would call hitting the public between wind and water: Mr. Cooper therefore poured in a whole broadside of printed notices, which were put into every hand, and a huge playbill, which glared at the corner of every street in letters of elephantine size, informing the public that the distinguished performer already mentioned, had kindly consented to act a principal part in the entertainment of the evening. No sooner was this announced than the whole city was in one hubbub of curiosity—one twitter of delight; and Mr. Cooper had so many friends who were all at once intent upon giving him their dollar at his benefit, that the house was crammed, and there was as great an overflow from every part of it as if the renowned master Betty himself were to have occupied the place of the elephant.
Very different was Mr. Cooper’s reception at New-York, whither he went when the theatre of Philadelphia closed for the season. On his very first appearance he established himself in the public opinion as a first rate actor. The New-York stage might about that time vie for actors in number and quality with the best provincial company that ever played in England. Hodgkinson, Cooper, Fennell, Jefferson, Harwood, Bernard, Mrs. Morris, and Mrs. Hodgkinson, besides two or three admirable comedians. Pierre is well adapted to Mr. Cooper’s talents and style of acting, and he evinced his judgment in selecting it for his first appearance. Through the whole play the ball was well tossed to him by the other actors; the consequence was that the impression he made has never been erased. The opinion entertained of him was more substantially evinced than by mere applause. There was a unanimous desire that he should leave the Philadelphia theatre and engage at New-York; but to this it was objected, that he was bound by his contract with the manager of the former, to play for a certain time under a penalty of two thousand dollars; this objection, however, was soon superseded by a subscription raised among the gentlemen of New-York to pay off that sum if the manager should be able to enforce it. Thus honourably was Mr. Cooper planted in the city which he contrived to make his head-quarters till the beginning of the year 1803, when he passed over to England. During that period he paid a professional visit to Philadelphia, where he was so justly appreciated that he had no further occasion for the aid of the elephant.