In the fashionable rage for Master Betty, Kemble and Siddons were quite neglected; as the levee of Tom Thumb drew a throng of the nobility and fashion of London while poor Haydon, across the street, watched them with a gnawing heart from the door of his deserted exhibition. Cowper says in his “Task,”—
“For Betty the boy
Did strut and storm and straddle, stamp and stare,
And show the world how Garrick did not act.”
When, with pompous incompetency, Lord Abercorn told Mrs. Siddons that “that boy would yet eclipse everything which had been called acting in England,” she quietly replied, with crushing knowledge, “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more.” Garrick said it was the lot of actors to be alternately petted and pelted. And Kemble, when congratulated on the superb honors given him at his final adieu to the stage, responded, “It was very fine, but then I could not help remembering that without any cause they were once going to burn my house.” Genius and nobility naturally love fame, worship the public, would pour out their very life-blood to gain popular sympathy and admiration; but after such experiences of baseness and wrong and error the fascination flies from the prizes they had adored as so sacred, and never more do their souls leap and burn with the old enthusiasm of their unsophisticated days. The injustice of the world drives from it the love and homage of its noblest children.
Parasites and egotists seek association with a famous man merely to gratify their vanity, though they call it friendship. They fawn on him to share a reflection of his glory, to reap advantage from his influence, or to beg loans of his money; and when circumstances unmask their characters and show how they were preying on his frankness, he is revolted and his confidence in human nature shaken. Many a man of a sweet and loving nature, like the noble Timon, has gone out to the world with throbbing heart and open arms, and, met with selfishness and treachery, reacted into despair and hate. One of the penalties of a great reputation with its personal following is to be annoyed by sycophants, toadies, the impertinent curiosity of a miscellaneous throng who have neither genuine appreciation for talent nor sincere love for excellence, but a pestiferous instinct for boring and preying. Mrs. Siddons, bereaved of her children amidst her great fame, was so annoyed by worrying interruptions, assailed by envy, slandered by enemies, and vexed by parasites, that she breathed the deepest wishes of her soul in these lines:
“Say, what’s the brightest wreath of fame,
But cankered buds that opening close?
Ah, what the world’s most pleasing dream,
But broken fragments of repose?