He Failed to Earn a Livelihood as a
Painter, and Was Graduated from
Comic Opera to the Drama.
Although Richard Mansfield's mother was Mme. Rudersdorf, the prima donna, he was in no sense cradled in the theater. His infant eyes first looked on the light in Heligoland, an island in the North Sea that then belonged to England. This was in the year 1857, and he was brought up with the idea that one day he should become a painter. It was while he was a schoolboy at Derby, England, that he received the first lift toward the career which has placed him at the head of his fellows on the American boards.
The boys arranged to act "The Merchant of Venice" on a certain grand occasion known as "Speech Day," and young Mansfield was cast for Shylock. So well did he acquit himself then that no less exalted a personage than a bishop shook him by the hand with the words that must still ring in the now mighty Richard's ears: "Heaven forbid that I should encourage you to become an actor; but should you, if I mistake not, you will be a great one."
Preparatory schooling over, his art studies at South Kensington were broken in upon by failing family fortunes, and the necessity of earning money in the present rather than waiting to gather in perhaps greater amounts in the future. So, through the agency of friends of his father, he set sail for Boston, where an opening had been made for him in the big dry-goods house of Jordan, Marsh & Co.
But business was not his forte. He spent all his leisure time in painting pictures, which he found, moreover, he could sell very readily. He burned for the more artistic atmosphere of the city by the Thames, and, encouraged by his success in disposing of his paintings, he threw up his mercantile job and departed for London.
And now began for him seven memorable years—years of keen disappointment, of deep bitterness, of hope deferred, of actual suffering in body as well as mind. The kind of pictures he had been able to sell with ease in Boston found no buyers in England, and matters went speedily with him from bad to worse.
The incident he had used in his play "Monsieur," of his hero's engagement to play the piano and toppling from the stool through weakness induced by hunger, is drawn from his own experience. The episode occurred at a concert-hall, when he was possessed of only one suit of clothes and no home.
Mansfield Meets W.S. Gilbert.
It was his ability to play and sing that really kept his body and soul together in these awful days and nights, for once in a while, by a clutch at the fringe of friendships left him from the old days, he could obtain an engagement to entertain a company of literary or stage folk. He fell in with W.S. Gilbert on one of these occasions. "Pinafore" had just taken the public by storm, and the makers thereof were hastening to utilize the wave of popular favor by thrusting all of their available wares to a ride upon its crest.
"I think that young man will do for Wellington Wells in 'The Sorcerer,'" Gilbert remarked to his manager, R. D'Oyly Carte.