Memoirs of an
American Prima Donna

By
Clara Louise Kellogg
(Mme. Strakosch)

With 40 Illustrations

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG STRAKOSCH
The Knickerbocker Press New York

WITH AFFECTION AND DEEPEST APPRECIATION OF HER WORTH
AS BOTH A RARE WOMAN AND A RARER FRIEND
I INSCRIBE THIS RECORD OF MY
PUBLIC LIFE TO
JEANNETTE L. GILDER

FOREWORD

THE name of Clara Louise Kellogg is known to the immediate generation chiefly as an echo of the past. Yet only thirty years ago it was written of her, enthusiastically but truthfully, that "no living singer needs a biography less than Miss Clara Louise Kellogg; and nowhere in the world would a biography of her be so superfluous as in America, where her name is a household word and her illustrious career is familiar in all its triumphant details to the whole people."

The past to which she belongs is therefore recent; it is the past of yesterday only, thought of tenderly by our fathers and mothers, spoken of reverently as a poignant phase of their own ephemeral youth, one of their sweet lavender memories. The pity is (although this is itself part of the evanescent charm), that the singer's best creations can live but in the hearts of a people, and the fame of sound is as fugitive as life itself.

A record of such creations is, however, possible and also enduring; while it is also necessary for a just estimate of the development of civilisations. As such, this record of her musical past—presented by Clara Louise Kellogg herself—will have a place in the annals of the evolution of musical art on the North American continent long after every vestige of fluttering personal reminiscence has vanished down the ages. A word of appreciation with regard to the preparation of this record is due to John Jay Whitehead, Jr., whose diligent chronological labours have materially assisted the editor.

Clara Louise Kellogg came from New England stock of English heritage. She was named after Clara Novello. Her father, George Kellogg, was an inventor of various machines and instruments and, at the time of her birth, was principal of Sumter Academy, Sumterville, S. C. Thus the famous singer was acclaimed in later years not only as the Star of the North (the rôle of Catherine in Meyerbeer's opera of that name being one of her achievements) but also as "the lone star of the South in the operatic world." She first sang publicly in New York in 1861 at an evening party given by Mr. Edward Cooper, the brother of Mrs. Abram Hewitt. This was the year of her début as Gilda in Verdi's opera of Rigoletto at the Academy of Music in New York City. When she came before her countrymen as a singer, she was several decades ahead of her musical public, for she was a lyric artist as well as a singer. America was not then producing either singers or lyric artists; and in fact we were, as a nation, but just getting over the notion that America could not produce great voices. We held a very firm contempt for our own facilities, our knowledge, and our taste in musical matters. If we did discover a rough diamond, we had to send it to Italy to find out if it were of the first water and to have it polished and set. Nothing was so absolutely necessary for our self-respect as that some American woman should arise with sufficient American talent and bravery to prove beyond all cavil that the country was able to produce both singers and artists.

For rather more than twenty-five years, from her appearance as Gilda until she quietly withdrew from public life, when it seemed to her that the appropriate moment for so doing had come, Clara Louise Kellogg filled this need and maintained her contention. She was educated in America, and her career, both in America and abroad, was remarkable in its consistent triumphs. When Gounod's Faust was a musical and an operatic innovation, she broke through the Italian traditions of her training and created the rôle of Marguerite according to her own beliefs; and throughout her later characterisations in Italian opera, she sustained a wonderfully poised attitude of independence and of observance with regard to these same traditions. In London, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna, as well as in the length and breadth of the United States, she gained a recognition and an appreciation in opera, oratorio, and concert, second to none: and when, later, she organised an English Opera Company and successfully piloted it on a course of unprecedented popularity, her personal laurels were equally supreme.

In 1887, Miss Kellogg married Carl Strakosch, who had for some time been her manager. Mr. Strakosch is the nephew of the two well-known impresarios, Maurice and Max Strakosch. After her marriage, the public career of Clara Louise Kellogg virtually ended. The Strakosch home is in New Hartford, Connecticut, and Mrs. Strakosch gave to it the name of "Elpstone" because of a large rock shaped like an elephant that is the most conspicuous feature as one enters the grounds through the poplar-guarded gate. Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch are very fond of their New Hartford home, but, the Litchfield County climate in winter being severe, they usually spend their winters in Rome. They have also travelled largely in Oriental countries.

In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch celebrated their Silver Wedding at Elpstone. On this occasion, the whole village of New Hartford was given up to festivities, and friends came from miles away to offer their congratulations. Perhaps the most pleasant incident of the celebration was the presentation of a silver loving cup to Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch by the people of New Hartford in token of the affectionate esteem in which they are both held.

The woman, Clara Louise Kellogg, is quite as distinct a personality as was the prima donna. So thoroughly, indeed, so fundamentally, is she a musician that her knowledge of life itself is as much a matter of harmony as is her music. She lives her melody; applying the basic principle that Carlyle has expressed so admirably when he says: "See deeply enough and you see musically."

ISABEL MOORE.

WOODSTOCK, N. Y.
August, 1913

Memoirs of
An American Prima Donna

CHAPTER I
MY FIRST NOTES

I was born in Sumterville, South Carolina, and had a negro mammy to take care of me, one of the real old-fashioned kind, of a type now almost gone. She used to hold me in her arms and rock me back and forth, and as she rocked she sang. I don't know the name of the song she crooned; but I still know the melody, and have an impression that the words were:

She used to sing these two lines over and over, so that I slept and waked to them. And my first musical efforts, when I was just ten months old, were to try to sing this ditty in imitation of my negro mammy.

When my mother first heard me she became apprehensive. Yet I kept at it; and by the time I was a year old I could sing it so that it was quite recognisable. I do not remember this period, of course, but my mother often told me about it later, and I am sure she was not telling a fairy story.

There is, after all, nothing incredible or miraculous about the fact, extraordinary as it certainly is. We are not surprised when the young thrush practises a trill. And in some people the need for music and the power to make it are just as instinctive as they are in the birds. What effects I have achieved and what success I have found must be laid to this big, living fact: music was in me, and it had to find expression.

My music was honestly come by, from both sides of the house. When the family moved north to New England and settled in Birmingham, Connecticut,—it is called Derby now—my father and mother played in the little town choir, he a flute and she the organ. They were both thoroughly musical people, and always kept up with musical affairs, making a great many sacrifices all their lives to hear good singers whenever any sort of opportunity offered. As for my maternal grandmother—she was a woman with a man's brain. A widow at twenty-three, with no money and three children, she chose, of all ways to support them, the business of cotton weaving; going about Connecticut and Massachusetts, setting up looms—cotton gins they were called—and being very successful. She was a good musician also, and, in later years, after she had married my grandfather and was comfortably off, people begged her to give lessons; so she taught thorough-base, in that day and generation! Pause for a moment to consider what that meant, in a time when the activity of women was very limited and unrecognised. Is it any wonder that the granddaughter of a woman who could master and teach the science of thorough-base at such a period should be born with music in her blood?

My other grandmother, my father's mother, was musical, too. She had a sweet voice, and was the soprano of the church choir.

Everyone knew I was naturally musical from my constant attempts to sing, and from my deep attention when anyone performed on any instrument, even when I was so little that I could not reach the key-board of the piano on tip-toe. That particular piano, I remember, was very old-fashioned—one of the square box-shaped sort—and stood extremely high.

One day my grandmother said to my mother:

"I do believe, Jane, if we lifted that baby up to the piano, she could play!"

Mother said: "Oh, pshaw!"

But they did lift me up, and I did play. I played not only with my right hand but also with my left hand; and I made harmonies. Probably they were not in any way elaborate chords, but they were chords, and they harmonised. I have known some grown-up musicians whose chords didn't!

I was three then, and a persistent baby, already detesting failure. I never liked to try to do anything, even at that age, in which I might be unsuccessful, and so learned to do what I wanted to do as soon as possible.

My mother was gifted in many ways. She used to paint charmingly; and has told me that when she was a young girl and could not get paint brushes, she made her own of hairs pulled from their old horse's tail.

My maternal grandfather was not at all musical. He used to say that to him the sweetest note on the piano was when the cover went down! Yet it was he who accidentally discovered a fortunate possession of mine—something that has remained in my keeping ever since, and, like many fortunate gifts, has at times troubled as much as it has consoled me.

One day he was standing by the piano in one room and I was playing on the floor in another. He idly struck a note and asked my mother:

"What note is that I am striking? Guess!"

"How can I tell?" said my mother. "No one could tell that."

"Why, mother!" I cried from the next room, "don't you know what note that is?"

"I do not," said my mother, "and neither do you."

"I do, too," I declared. "It's the first of the three black keys going up!"

It was, in fact, F sharp, and in this manner it was discovered that I had what we musicians call "absolute pitch"; the ability to place and name a note the moment it is heard. As I have said, this has often proved to be a very trying gift, for it is, and always has been impossible for me to decipher a song in a different key from that in which it is written. If it is written in C, I hear it in C; and conceive the hideous discord in my brain while the orchestra or the pianist renders it in D flat! When I see a "Do," I want to sing it as a "Do," and not as a "Re."

This episode must have been when I was about five years old, and soon afterward I began taking regular piano lessons. I remember my teacher quite well. He used to come out from New Haven by the Naugatuck railway—that had just been completed and was a great curiosity—for the purpose of instructing a class of which I was a member.

I had the most absurd difficulty in learning my notes. I could play anything by ear, but to read a piece of music and find the notes on the piano was another matter. My teacher struggled with this odd incapacity; but I used to cheat him shockingly.

"Do play this for me!" I would beg. "Just once, so I can tell how it goes."

In spite of this early slowness in music reading, or, perhaps because of it, when I did learn to read, I learned to read thoroughly. I could really play; and I cannot over-estimate the help this has been to me all my life. It is so essential—and so rare—for a prima donna to be not only a fine singer but also a good musician.

There was then no idea of my becoming a singer. All my time was given to the piano and to perfecting myself in playing it. But my parents made every effort to have me hear fine singing, for the better cultivation of my musical taste, and I am grateful to them for doing so, as I believe that singing is largely imitative and that, while singers need not begin to train their voices very early, they should as soon as possible familiarise themselves with good singing and with good music generally. The wise artist learns from many sources, some of them quite unexpected ones. Patti once told me that she had caught the trick of her best "turn" from listening to Faure, the baritone.

My father and mother went to New York during the Jenny Lind furore and carried me in their arms to hear her big concert. I remember it clearly, and just the way in which she tripped on to the stage that night with her hair, as she always wore it, drawn down close over her ears—a custom that gave rise to the popular report that she had no ears.

That concert is my first musical recollection. I was much amused by the baritone who sang Figaro là Figaro quà from The Barber. I thought him and his song immensely funny; and everyone around us was in a great state over me because I insisted that the drum was out of tune. I was really dreadfully annoyed by that drum, for it was out of tune! I remember Jenny Lind sang:

and one part of it sounded exactly like the call of a bird. Sir Jules Benedict, who was always her accompanist, once told me many years later in London that she had a "hole" in her voice. He said that he had been obliged to play her accompaniments in such a way as to cover up certain notes in her middle register. A curious admission to come from him, I thought, for few people knew of the "hole."

Only once during my childhood did I sing in public, and that was in a little school concert, a song Come Buy My Flowers, dressed up daintily for the part and carrying a small basketful of posies of all kinds. When I had finished singing, a man in the audience stepped down to the footlights and held up a five-dollar bill.

"To buy your flowers!" said he.

That might be called my first professional performance! The local paper said I had talent. As a matter of fact, I don't remember much about the occasion; but I do remember only too well a dreadful incident that occurred immediately afterward between me and the editor of the aforesaid local paper,—Mr. Newson by name.

I had a pet kitten, and it went to sleep in a rolled up rug beside the kitchen door one day, and the cook stepped on it. The kitten was killed, of course, and the affair nearly killed me. I was crying my eyes out over my poor little pet when that editor chanced along. And he made fun of me!

I turned on him in the wildest fury. I really would have killed him if I could.

"Laugh, will you!" I shrieked, beside myself. "Laugh! laugh! laugh!"

He said afterwards that I absolutely frightened him, I was so small and so tragic.

"I knew then," he declared, "that that child had great emotional and dramatic possibilities in her. Why, she nearly burned me up!"

Years later, when I was singing in St. Paul, the Dispatch printed this story in an interview with Mr. Newson himself. He made a heartless jest of the alliteration—"Kellogg's Kitten Killed"—and referred to my "inexpressible expression of sorrow and disgust" as I cried, "Laugh, will you!" Said Mr. Newson in summing up:

"It was a real tragedic act!"

Mr. Newson's description of me as a child is: "A black-eyed little girl, somewhat wayward—as she was an only child—kind-hearted, affectionate, self-reliant, and very independent!"

Well—sight-reading became so easy to me, presently, that I could not realise any difficulty about it. To see a note was to be able to sing it; and I was often puzzled when people expressed surprise at my ability. When I was about eleven, someone took me to Hartford to "show me off" to William Babcock, a teacher and a thorough musician. He got out some of his most difficult German songs; songs far more intricate than anything I had ever before seen, of course, and was frankly amazed to find that I read them just about as readily as the simple airs to which I was accustomed.

My childhood was very quiet and peaceful, rather commonplace in fact, except for music. Reading was a pleasure, too, and, as my father was a student and had a wonderful library, I had all the books I wanted. I was literally brought up on Carlyle and Chaucer. I must have been a rather queer child, in some ways. Even as a little thing I liked clothes. When only nine years old I conceived a wild desire for a pair of kid gloves. Kid gloves were a sign of great elegance in those days. At last my clamours were successful and I was given a pair at Christmas. They were a source of great pride, and I wore them to church, where I did my little singing in the choir with the others. By this time I could read any music at sight and would sit up and chirp and peep away quite happily. As I spread my kid-gloved hands out most conspicuously, what I had not noticed became very noticeable to everyone else: the fingers were nearly two inches too long. And the choir laughed at me. I was dreadfully mortified and sat there crying, until the kind contralto comforted me.

In my young days the negro minstrels were a great diversion. They were amusing because they were so typical. There are none left, but in the old times they were delightful, and it is a thousand pities that they have passed away. All the essence of slavery, and the efforts of the slaves to amuse themselves, were in their quaint performances. The banjo was almost unknown to us in the North, and when it found its way to New England it was a genuine novelty. I was simply fascinated by it as a little girl and used to go to all the minstrel shows, and sit and watch the men play. Their banjos had five strings only and were played with the back of the nail,—not like a guitar. This was the only way to get the real negro twang. There was no refinement about such playing, but I loved it. I said:

"I believe I could play that if I had one!"

My father, the dignified scholar, was horrified.

"When a banjo comes in, I go out," said he.

At last a friend gave me one, and I watched and studied the darkies until I had picked up the trick of playing it, and soon acquired a real negro touch. And I also acquired some genuine darky songs. One, of which I was particularly fond, was called: Hottes' co'n y' ever eat.

I really believe I was the first American girl who ever played a banjo! In a few years along came Lotta, and made the banjo a great feature.

Banjo music has natural syncopation, and its peculiarities undoubtedly originated the "rag-time" of our present-day imitations. There was one song that I learned from hearing a man sing it who had, in turn, caught it from a darky, that has never to my knowledge been published and is not to be found in any collection.

It began:

and remains with me in my répertoire unto this day. I have been known to sing it with certain effect—for when I am asked, now, to sing it, my husband leaves the room! The last time I sang it was only a couple of years ago in Norfolk. Herbert Witherspoon said:

"Listen to that high C!"

"Ah," said I, "that is the last remnant—the very last!"

But this chapter is to be about my first notes, not my last ones.

In 1857, my father failed, the beautiful books were sold and we went to New York to live. Almost directly afterward occurred one of the most important events of my career. Although I was not being trained for a singer, but as a musician in general, I could no more help singing than I could held breathing, or sleeping, or eating; and, one day, Colonel Henry G. Stebbins, a well-known musical amateur, one of the directors of the Academy of Music, was calling on my father and heard me singing to myself in an adjoining room. Then and there he asked to be allowed to have my voice cultivated; and so, when I was fourteen, I began to study singing. The succeeding four years were the hardest worked years of my life.

To young girls who are contemplating vocal study, I always say that it is mostly a question of what one is willing to give up.

If you really are prepared to sacrifice all the fun that your youth is entitled to; to work, and to deny yourself; to eat and sleep, not because you are hungry or sleepy, but because your strength must be conserved for your art; to make your music the whole interest of your existence;—if you are willing to do all this, you may have your reward.

But music will have no half service. It has to be all or nothing.

In Rostand's play, they ask Chanticleer:

"What is your life?"

And he answers:

"My song."

"What is your song?"

"My life."

CHAPTER II
GIRLHOOD

IN taking up vocal study, however, I had no fixed intention of going on the stage. All I decided was to make as much as I could of myself and of my voice. Many girls I knew studied singing merely as an accomplishment. In fact, the girl who aspired professionally was almost unknown.

I first studied under a Frenchman named Millet, a graduate of the Conservatory of Paris, who was teaching the daughters of Colonel Stebbins and, also, the daughter of the Baron de Trobriand. Later, I worked with Manzocchi, Rivarde, Errani and Muzio, who was a great friend of Verdi.

Most of my fellow-students were charming society girls. Ella Porter and President Arthur's wife were with me under Rivarde, and Anna Palmer who married the scientist, Dr. Draper. The idea of my going on the stage would have appalled the families of these girls. In those days the life of the theatre was regarded as altogether outside the pale. One didn't know stage people; one couldn't speak to them, nor shake hands with them, nor even look at them except from a safe distance across the footlights. There were no "decent people on the stage"; how often did I hear that foolish thing said!

It is odd that in that most musical and artistic country, Italy, much the same prejudice exists to this day. I should never think of telling a really great Italian lady that I had been on the stage; she would immediately think that there was something queer about me. Of course in America all that was changed some time ago, after England had established the precedent. People are now pleased not only to meet artists socially, but to lionise them as well. But when I was a girl there was a gulf as deep as the Bottomless Pit between society and people of the theatre; and it was this gulf that I knew would open between myself and the friends of whom I was really fond as, in time, I realised that I was improving sufficiently to justify some definite ambitions. My work was steady and unremitting, and by the time I began study with Muzio my mind was pretty nearly made up.

A queer, nervous, brusque, red-headed man was Muzio, from the north of Italy, where the type always seems so curiously German. Besides being one of the conductors of the Opera, he organised concert tours, and promised to see that I should have my chance. It was said that he had fled from political disturbances in Italy, but this I never heard verified. Certainly he was quite a big man in the New York operatic world of his day, and was a most cultivated musician, with the "Italian traditions" of opera at his fingers' ends. It is to Muzio, incidentally, that I owe my trill.

Oddly enough, I had great difficulty with that trill for three years; but in four weeks' study he taught me the trick,—for it is a trick, like so many other big effects. I believe I got it finally by using my sub-conscious mind. Don't you know how, after striving and straining for something, you at last relax and let some inner part of your brain carry on the battle? And how, often and often, it is then that victory comes? So it was with my trill; and so it has been with many difficult things that I have succeeded in since then.

No account of my education would be complete without a mention of the great singers whom I heard during that receptive period; that is, the years between fourteen and eighteen, before my professional début. The first artist I heard when I was old enough really to appreciate good singing was Louisa Pine, who sang in New York in second-rate English Opera with Harrison, of whom she was deeply enamoured and who usually sang out of tune. We did not then fully understand how well-schooled and well-trained she was; and her really fine qualities were only revealed to me much later in a concert.

Then there was D'Angri, a contralto who sang Rossini to perfection. Italiani in Algeria was produced especially for her. About that same time Mme. de la Grange was appearing, together with Mme. de la Borde, a light and colorature soprano, something very new in America. Mme. de la Borde sang the Queen to Mme. de la Grange's Valentine in Les Huguenots, and had a French voice—if I may so express it—light, and of a strange quality. The French claimed that she sang a scale of commas, that is, a note between each of our chromatic intervals. She may have; but it merely sounded to the listener as if she wasn't singing the scale clearly. Mme. de la Grange was a sort of goddess to me, I remember. I heard her first in Trovatore with Brignoli and Amodio.

Piccolomini arrived here a couple of years later and I heard her, too. She was of a distinguished Italian family, and, considering Italy's aristocratic prejudices, it is strange that she should have been an opera singer. She made Traviata, in which she had already captured the British public, first known to us: yet she was an indifferent singer and had a very limited répertoire. She received her adulation partly because people didn't know much then about music. Adulation it was, too. She made $5000 a month, and America had never before imagined such an operatic salary. She looked a little like Lucca; was small and dark, and decidedly clever in comedy. I was fortunate enough to see her in Pergolese's delightful, if archaic, opera, La Serva Padrona—"The Maid as Mistress"—and she proved herself to be an exceptional comédienne. She was excellent in tragedy, too.

Brignoli was the first great tenor I ever heard; and Amodio the first famous baritone. Brignoli—but all the world knows what Brignoli was! As for Amodio; he had a great and beautiful voice; but, poor man, what a disadvantage he suffered under in his appearance. He was so fat that he was grotesque, he was absurdly short, and had absolutely no saving grace as to physique. He played Mazetto to Piccolomini's Zerlina, and the whole house roared when they came on dancing.

I heard nearly all the great singers of my youth; all that were to be heard in New York, at any rate, except Grisi. I missed Grisi, I am sorry to say, because on the one occasion when I was asked to hear her sing, with Mario, I chose to go to a children's party instead. I am much ashamed of this levity, although I was, to be sure, only ten years old at the time.

Adelina Patti I heard the year before my own début. She was a slip of a girl then, when she appeared over here in Lucia, and carried the town by storm. What a voice! I had never dreamed of anything like it. But, for that matter, neither had anyone else.

What histrionic skill I ever developed I attribute to the splendid acting that I saw so constantly during my girlhood. And what actors and actresses we had! As I look back, I wonder if we half appreciated them. It is certainly true that, viewed comparatively, we must cry "there were giants in those days!" Think of Mrs. John Wood and Jefferson at the Winter Garden; of Dion Boucicault and his wife, Agnes Robertson; of Laura Keene—a revelation to us all—and of the French Theatre, which was but a little hole in the wall, but the home of some exquisite art (I was brought up on the Raouls in French pantomime); and all the wonderful old Wallack Stock Company! Think of the elder Sothern, and of John Brougham, and of Charles Walcot, and of Mrs. John Hoey, Mrs. Vernon, and Mary Gannon,—that most beautiful and perfect of all ingénues! Those people would be world-famous stars if they were playing to-day; we have no actors or companies like them left. Not even the Comédie Française ever had such a gathering.

It may be imagined what an education it was for a young girl with stage aspirations to see such work week after week. For I was taken to see everyone in everything, and some of the impressions I received then were permanent. For instance, Matilda Heron in Camille gave me a picture of poor Marguerite Gautier so deep and so vivid that I found it invaluable, years later, when I myself came to play Violetta in Traviata.

I saw both Ristori and Rachel too. The latter I heard recite on her last appearance in America. It was the Marseillaise, and deeply impressive. Personally, I loved best her Moineau de Lesbie. Shall I ever forget her enchanting reading of the little scene with the jewels?—Suis-je belle?

The father of one of my fellow students was, as I have said before, Baron de Trobriand, a very charming man of the old French aristocracy. He came often to the home of Colonel Stebbins and always showed a great deal of interest in my development. He knew Rachel very well; had known her ever since her girlhood indeed, and always declared that I was the image of her. As I look at my early portraits, I can see it myself a little. In all of them I have a desperately serious expression as though life were a tragedy. How well I remember the Baron and his wonderful stories of France! He had some illustrious kindred, among them the Duchesse de Berri, and we were never tired of his tales concerning her.

I find, to-day, as I look through some of my old press notices, that nice things were always said of me as an actress. Once, John Wallack, Lester's father, came to hear me in Fra Diavolo, and exclaimed:

"I wish to God that girl would lose her voice!"

He wanted me to give up singing and go on the dramatic stage; and so did Edwin Booth. I have a letter from Edwin Booth that I am more proud of than almost anything I possess. But these incidents happened, of course, later.

From all I saw and all I heard I tried to learn and to keep on learning. And so I prepared for the time of my own initial bow before the public. As I gradually studied and developed, I began to feel more and more sure that I was destined to be a singer. I felt that it was my life and my heritage; that I was made for it, and that nothing else could ever satisfy me. And Muzio told me that I was right. In another six months I would be ready to make my début. It was a serious time, when I faced the future as a public singer, but I was very happy in the contemplation of it.

That summer I took a rest, preparatory to my first season,—how thrillingly professional that sounded, to be sure!—and it was during that summer that I had one of the most pleasant experiences of my girlhood,—one really delightful and young experience, such as other girls have,—a wonderful change from the hard-working, serious months of study. I went to West Point for a visit. In spite of my sober bringing-up, I was full of the joy of life, and loved the days spent in a place filled with the military glamour that every girl adores.

West Point was more primitive then than it is now. But it was just as much fun. I danced, and watched the drill, and walked about, and made friends with the cadets,—to whom the fact that they were entertaining a budding prima donna was both exciting and interesting—and had about the best time I ever had in my life.

Looking back now, however, I can feel a shadow of sadness lying over the memory of all that happy visit. We were just on the eve of war, little as we young people thought of it, and many of the merry, good-looking boys I danced with that summer fell at the front within the year. Some of them entered the Union Army the following spring when war was declared, and some went South to serve under the Stars and Bars. Among the former was Alec McCook—"Fighting McCook," as he was called. Lieutenant McCreary was Southern, and was killed early in the war. So, also, was the son of General Huger—the General Huger who was then Postmaster General and later became a member of the Cabinet of the Confederacy.

It is interesting to consider that West Point, at the time of which I write, was a veritable hotbed of conspiracy. The Southerners were preparing hard and fast for action; the atmosphere teemed with plotting, so that even I was vaguely conscious that something exceedingly serious was going on. The Commandant of the Post, General Delafield, was an officer of strong Southern sympathies and later went to fight in Dixie land. When the war did finally break out, nearly all the ammunition was down South; and this had been managed from West Point.

Of course, all was done with great circumspection. Buchanan was a Democratic president; and the Democrats of the South sent a delegation to West Point to try to get the commanding officers to use their influence in reducing the military course from four to three years. This at least was their ostensible mission, and it made an excellent excuse as well as offered great opportunities for what we Federal sympathisers would call treason, but which they probably considered was justified by patriotism. Indeed, James Buchanan was allotted a very difficult part in the political affairs of the day; and the censure he received for what is called his "vacillation" was somewhat unjust. He held that the question of slavery and its abolition was not a national, but a local problem; and he never took any firm stand about it. But the conditions were bewilderingly new and complex, and statesmen often suffer from their very ability to look on both sides of a question.

Jefferson Davis was then at West Point; and, as for "Mrs. Jeff"—I always believed she was a spy. She had her niece and son with her at the Point, the latter, "Jeff, Jr.," then a child of five or six years old. He had the worst temper I ever imagined in a boy; and I am ashamed to relate that the officers took a wicked delight in arousing and exhibiting it. He used to sit several steps up on the one narrow stairway of the hotel and swear the most horrible, hot oaths ever heard, getting red in the face with fury. Alec McCook, assistant instructor and a charming fellow of about thirty, would put him on a bucking donkey that was there and say:

"Now then, lad, don't you let him put you off!"

And the "lad" would sit on the donkey, turning the air blue with profanity. But one thing can be said for him: he did stick on!

Lieutenant Horace Porter, who was among my friends of that early summer, was destined to serve with distinction on the Northern side. I met him not long ago, a dignified, distinguished General; and it was difficult to see in him the high-spirited, young lieutenant of the old Point days.

"Do you know," he said, "Mrs. Jeff Davis sent for me to come and see her when she was in New York! Of course I didn't go!"

He had not forgotten. One does not forget the things that happened just before the war. The great struggle burned them too deeply into our memories.

Nothing would satisfy the cadets, who were aware that I was preparing to go on the stage as a professional singer, but that I should sing for them. I was only too delighted to do so, but I didn't want to sing in the hotel. So they turned their "hop-room" into a concert-hall for the occasion and invited the officers and their friends, in spite of Mrs. Jeff Davis, who tried her best to prevent the ball-room from being given to us for our musicale. She did not attend; but the affair made her exceedingly uncomfortable, for she disliked me and was jealous of the kindness and attention I received from everyone. She always referred to me as "that singing girl!"

As I have said, many of those attractive West Point boys and officers were killed in the war so soon to break upon us. Others, like General Porter, have remained my friends. A few I have kept in touch with only by hearsay. But throughout the Civil War I always felt a keener and more personal interest in the battles because, for a brief space, I had come so close to the men who were engaged in them; and the sentiment never passed.

Ever and ever so many years after that visit to West Point, a note came behind the scenes to me during one of my performances, and with it was a mass of exquisite flowers. "Please wear one of these flowers to-night!" the note begged me. It was from one of the cadets to whom I had sung so long before, but whom I had never seen since.

I wore the flower: and I put my whole soul into my singing that night. For that little episode of my girlhood, the meeting with those eager and plucky young spirits just before our great national crisis, has always been close to my heart. As for the three dark years that followed—ah, well,—I never want to read about the war now.

It was almost time for my début, and there was still something I had to do. To my sheltered, puritanically brought up consciousness, there could be no two views among conventional people as to the life I was about to enter upon. I knew all about it. So, a few weeks before I was to make my professional bow to the public, I called my girl friends together, the companions of four years' study, and I said to them:

"Girls, I've made up my mind to go on the stage! I know just how your people feel about it, and I want to tell you now that you needn't know me any more. You needn't speak to me, nor bow to me if you meet me in the street. I shall quite understand, and I shan't feel a bit badly. Because I think the day will come when you will be proud to know me!"

CHAPTER III
"LIKE A PICKED CHICKEN"

BEFORE my début in opera, Muzio took me out on a concert tour for a few weeks. Colson was the prima donna, Brignoli the tenor, Ferri the baritone, and Susini the basso. Susini had, I believe, distinguished himself in the Italian Revolution. His name means plums in Italian, and his voice as well as his name was rich and luscious.

I was a general utility member of the company, and sang to fill in the chinks. We sang four times a week, and I received twenty-five dollars each time—that is, one hundred dollars a week—not bad for inexperienced seventeen, although Muzio regarded the tour for me as merely educational and part of my training.

My mother travelled with me, for she never let me out of her sight. Yet, even with her along, the experience was very strange and new and rather terrifying. I had no knowledge of stage life, and that first tournée was comprised of a series of shocks and surprises, most of them disillusioning.

We opened in Pittsburg, and it was there, at the old Monongahela House, that I had my first exhibition of Italian temperament, or, rather, temper!

When we arrived, we found that the dining-room was officially closed. We were tired out after a long hard trip of twenty-four hours, and, of course, almost starved. We got as far as the door, where we could look in hungrily, but it was empty and dark. There were no waiters; there was nothing, indeed, except the rows of neatly set tables for the next meal.

Brignoli demanded food. He was very fond of eating, I recall. And, in those days, he was a sort of little god in New York, where he lived in much luxury. When affairs went well with him, he was not an unamiable man; but he was a selfish egotist, with the devil's own temper on occasion.

The landlord approached and told us that the dinner hour was past, and that we could not get anything to eat until the next meal, which would be supper. And oh! if you only knew what supper was like in the provincial hotel of that day!

Brignoli was wild with wrath. He would start to storm and shout in his rage, and would then suddenly remember his voice and subside, only to begin again as his anger rose in spite of himself. It was really amusing, though I doubt if anyone appreciated the joke at the moment.

At last, as the landlord remained quite unmoved, Brignoli dashed into the room, grabbed the cloth on one of the tables near the door and pulled it off—dishes, silver, and all! The crash was terrific, and naturally the china was smashed to bits.

"You'll have to pay for that!" cried the landlord, indignantly.

"Pay for it!" gasped Brignoli, waving his arms and fairly dancing with rage, "of course I'll pay for it—just as I'll pay for the dinner, if——"

"What!" exclaimed the landlord, in a new tone, "you will pay extra for the dinner, if we are willing to serve it for you now?"

"Dio mio, yes!" cried Brignoli.

The landlord stood and gaped at him.

"Why didn't you say so in the first place?" he asked with a sort of contemptuous pity, and went off to order the dinner.

When will the American and the Italian temperaments begin to understand each other!

Brignoli was not only a fine singer but a really good musician. He told me that he had given piano lessons in Paris before he began to sing at all. But of his absolute origin he would never speak. He was a handsome man, with ears that had been pierced for ear-rings. This led me to infer that he had at some time been a sailor, although he would never let anyone mention the subject. Anyhow, I always thought of Naples when I looked at him.

Most stage people have their pet superstitions. There seems to be something in their make-up that lends itself to an interest in signs. But Brignoli had a greater number of singular ones than any person I ever met. He had, among other things, a mascot that he carried all over the country. This was a stuffed deer's head, and it was always installed in his dressing-room wherever he might be singing. When he sang well, he would come back to the room and pat the deer's head approvingly. When he was not in voice, he would pound it and swear at it in Italian.

Brignoli lived for his voice. He adored it as if it were some phenomenon for which he was in no sense responsible. And I am not at all sure that this is not the right point of view for a singer. He always took tremendous pains with his voice and the greatest possible care of himself in every way, always eating huge quantities of raw oysters each night before he sang. The story is told of him that one day he fell off a train. People rushed to pick him up, solicitous lest the great tenor's bones were broken. But Brignoli had only one fear. Without waiting even to rise to his feet, he sat up, on the ground where he had fallen, and solemnly sang a bar or two. Finding his voice uninjured, he burst into heartfelt prayers of thanks-giving, and climbed back into the car.

Brignoli only just missed being very great. But he had the indolence of the Neapolitan sailor, and he was, of course, sadly spoiled. Women were always crazy about him, and he posed as an élégante. Years afterward, when I heard of his death, I never felt the loss of any beautiful thing as I did the loss of his voice. The thought came to me:—"and he hasn't been able to leave it to anyone as a legacy—"

But to return to our concert tour.

I remember that the concert room in Pittsburg was over the town market. That was what we had to contend with in those primitive days! Imagine our little company of devoted and ambitious artists trying to create a musical atmosphere one flight up, while they sold cabbages and fish downstairs!

The first evening was an important event for me, my initial public appearance, and I recall quite distinctly that I sang the Cavatina from Linda di Chamounix—which I was soon to sing operatically—and that I wore a green dress. Green was an unusual colour in gowns then. Our young singers generally chose white or blue or pink or something insipid; but I had a very definite taste in clothes, and liked effects that were not only pretty but also individual and becoming.

Speaking of clothes, I learned on that first experimental tour the horrors of travel when it comes to keeping one's gowns fresh. I speedily acquired the habit, practised ever since, of carrying a big crash cloth about with me to spread on stages where I was to sing. This was not entirely to keep my clothes clean, important as that was. It was also for the sake of my voice and its effect. Few people know that the floor-covering on which a singer stands makes a very great difference. On carpets, for instance, one simply cannot get a good tone.

Just before I went on for that first concert, Madame Colson stopped me to put a rose in my hair, and said to me:

"Smile much, and show your teeth!"

After the concert she supplemented this counsel with the words:

"Always dress your best, and always smile, and always be gracious!"

I never forgot the advice.

The idea of pretty clothes and a pretty smile is not merely a pose nor an artificiality. It is likewise carrying out a spirit of courtesy. Just as a hostess greets a guest cordially and tries to make her feel at ease, so the tactful singer tries to show the people who have come to hear her that she is glad to see them.

Pauline Colson was a charming artist, a French soprano of distinction in her own country and always delightful in her work. She had first come to America to sing in the French Opera in New Orleans where, for many years, there had been a splendid opera season each winter. She had just finished her winter's work there when some northern impresario engaged her for a brief season of opera in New York; and it was at the termination of this that Muzio engaged her for our concert tour. She was one of the few artists who rebelled against the bad costuming then prevalent; and it was said that for more than one of her rôles she made her gowns herself, to be sure that they were correct. It was her example that fired me in the revolutionary steps I was to take later with regard to my own costumes.

Our next stop was Cincinnati—Cincinnata, as it was called! I had there one of the shocks of my life. The leading newspaper of the city, in commenting on our concert, said of me that "this young girl's parents ought to remove her from public view, do her up in cotton wool, nourish her well, and not allow her to appear again until she looks less like a picked chicken"!

No one said anything about my voice! Indeed, I got almost no encouragement before we reached Detroit, and I recall that I cried a good part of the way between the two cities over my failure in Cincinnati. But in Detroit Colson was taken ill, so I had a chance to do the prima donna work of the occasion. And I profited by the chance, for it was in Detroit that an audience first discovered that I had some nascent ability.

I must have been an odd, young creature—just five feet and four inches tall, and weighing only one hundred and four pounds. I was frail and big-eyed, and wrapped up in music (not cotton wool), and exceedingly childlike for my age. I knew nothing of life, for my puritanical surroundings and the way in which I had been brought up were developing my personality very slowly.

That was a hard tour. Indeed, all tours were hard in those days. Travelling accommodations were limited and uncomfortable, and most of the hotels were very bad. Trains were slow, and connections uncertain, and of course there was no such thing as a Pullman or, much less, a dining-car. Sometimes we had to sit up all night and were not able to get anything to eat, not infrequently arriving too late for the meal hour of the hotel where we were to stop. The journeys were so long and so difficult that they used to say Pauline Lucca always travelled in her nightgown and a black velvet wrapper.

All through that tour, as during every period of my life, I was working and studying and practising and learning: trying to improve my voice, trying to develop my artistic consciousness, trying to fit myself in a hundred ways for my career. Work never frightened me; there was always in me the desire to express myself—and to express that self as fully and as variously as I might have opportunity for doing.

It sometimes seems to me that one of the strangest things in this world is the realisation that there is never time to perfect everything in us; that we carry seeds in our souls that cannot flower in one short life. Perhaps Paradise will be a place where we can develop every possibility and become our complete selves.

In one's brain and one's soul lies the power to do almost anything. I believe that the psychological phenomena we hear so much about are nothing but undiscovered forces in ourselves. I am not a spiritualist. I do not care for so-called supernatural manifestations. Many of my friends have been interested in such matters, and I was taken to the celebrated "Stratford Knockings" and other mediumistic demonstrations when I was a mere child; but it has never seemed to me that the marvels I encountered came from an outside spiritual agency. I believe, profoundly, that, one and all, they are the workings of forces in us that we have not yet learned to develop fully nor to use wisely.

I never did anything in my life without study. The ancient axiom that "what is worth doing at all is worth doing well" is more of a truth than most people understand. The thing that one has chosen for one's life work in the world:—what labour could be too great for it, or what too minute?

When I knew that I was to make my début as Gilda, in Verdi's opera of Rigoletto, I settled down to put myself into that part. I studied for nine months, until I was not certain whether I was really Gilda—or only myself!

I was taking lessons in acting with Scola then, in addition to my musical study. And, besides Scola's regular course, I closely observed the methods of individuals, actors, and singers. I remember seeing Brignoli in I Puritani, during that "incubating period" before my first appearance in opera. I was studying gesture then,—the free, simple, inevitable gesture that is so necessary to a natural effect in dramatic singing; and during the beautiful melody, A te, o cara, which he sang in the first act, Brignoli stood still in one spot and thrust first one arm out, and then the other, at right angles from his body, twenty-three consecutive times. I counted them, and I don't know how many times he had done it before I began to count!

"Heavens!" I said, "that's one thing not to do, anyway!"

Languages were a very important part of my training. I had studied French when I was nine years old, in the country, and as soon as I began taking singing lessons I began Italian also. Much later, when I sang in Les Noces de Jeannette, people would speak of my French and ask where I had studied. But it was all learned at home.

I never studied German. There was less demand for it in music than there is now. America practically had no "German opera;" and Italian was the accepted tongue of dramatic and tragic music, as French was the language of lighter and more popular operas. Besides, German always confused me; and I never liked it.

Many years later than the time of which I am now writing, I was charmed to be confirmed in my anti-German prejudices when I went to Paris. After the Franco-Prussian War the signs and warnings in that city were put up in every language in the world except German! The German way of putting things was too long; and, furthermore, the French people didn't care if Germans did break their legs or get run over.

Of course, all this is changed—and in music most of all. For example, there could be no greater convert to Wagnerism than I!

My mother hated the atmosphere of the theatre even though she had wished me to become a singer, and always gloried in my successes. To her rigid and delicate instinct there was something dreadful in the free and easy artistic attitude, and she always stood between me and any possible intimacy with my fellow-singers. I believe this to have been a mistake. Many traditions of the stage come to one naturally and easily through others; but I had to wait and learn them all by experience. I was always working as an outsider, and, naturally, this attitude of ours antagonised singers with whom we appeared.

Not only that. My brain would have developed much more rapidly if I had been allowed—no, if I had been obliged to be more self-reliant. To profit by one's own mistakes;—all the world's history goes to show that is the only way to learn. By protecting me, my mother really robbed me of much precious experience. For how many years after I had made my début would she wait for me in the coulisses, ready to whisk me off to my dressing-room before any horrible opera singer had a chance to talk with me!

Yet she grieved for my forfeited youth—did my dear mother. She always felt that I was being sacrificed to my work, and just at the time when I would have most delighted in my girlhood. Of course, I was obliged to live a life of labour and self-denial, but it was not quite so difficult for me as she felt it to be, or as other people sometimes thought it was. Not only did I adore my music, and look forward to my work as an artist, but I literally never had any other life. I knew nothing of what I had given up; and so was happy in what I had undertaken, as no girl could have been happy who had lived a less restricted, hard-working and yet dream-filled existence.

My mother was very strait-laced and puritanical, as I have said, and, naturally, by reflection and association, I was the same. I lay stress on this because I want one little act of mine to be appreciated as a sign of my ineradicable girlishness and love of beauty. When I earned my first money, I went to Mme. Percival's, the smart lingerie shop of New York, and bought the three most exquisite chemises I could find, imported and trimmed with real lace!

I daresay this harmless ebullition of youthful daintiness would have proved the last straw to some of my Psalm-singing New England relatives. There was one uncle of mine who vastly disapproved of my going on the stage at all, saying that it would have been much better if I had been a good, honest milliner. He used to sing:

in a minor key, with the true, God-fearing, nasal twang in it.

How I detested that old man! And I had to bury him, too, at the last. I wonder whether I should have been able to do so if I had gone into the millinery business!

CHAPTER IV
A YOUTHFUL REALIST

AS I have said, I studied Gilda for nine months. At the end of that time I was so imbued with the part as to be thoroughly at ease. Present-day actors call this condition "getting inside the skin" of a rôle. I simply could not make a mistake, and could do everything connected with the characterisation with entire unconsciousness. Yet I want to add that I had little idea of what the opera really meant.

My début was in New York at the old Academy of Music, and Rigoletto was the famous Ferri. He was blind in one eye and I had always to be on his seeing side,—else he couldn't act. Stigelli was the tenor. Stiegel was his real name. He was a German and a really fine artist. But I had then had no experience with stage heroes and thought they were all going to be exactly as they appeared in my romantic dreams, and—poor man, he is dead now, so I can say this!—it was a dreadful blow to me to be obliged to sing a love duet with a man smelling of lager beer and cheese!

Charlotte Cushman—who was a great friend of Miss Emma Stebbins, the sister of Colonel Stebbins—had always been interested in me; so when she knew that I was to make my début on February 26 (1861), she put on Meg Merrilies for that night because she could get through with it early enough for her to see part of my first performance. She reached the Academy in time for the last act of Rigoletto; and I felt that I had been highly praised when, as I came out and began to sing, she cried:

"The girl doesn't seem to know that she has any arms!"

My freedom of gesture and action came from nothing but the most complete familiarity with the part and with the detail of everything I had to do. In opera one cannot be too temperamental in one's acting. One cannot make pauses when one thinks it effective, nor alter the stage business to fit one's mood, nor work oneself up to an emotional crescendo one night and not do it the next. Everything has to be timed to a second and a fraction of a second. One cannot wait for unusual effects. The orchestra does not consider one's temperament, and this fact cannot be lost sight of for a moment. This is why I believe in rehearsing and studying and working over a rôle so exhaustively—and exhaustingly. For it is only in that most rigidly studied accuracy of action that any freedom can be attained. When one becomes so trained that one cannot conceivably retard a bar, and cannot undertime a stage cross nor fail to come in promptly in an ensemble, then, and only then, can one reach some emotional liberty and inspiration.

If I had not worked so hard at Gilda I should never have got through that first performance. I was not consciously nervous, but my throat—it is quite impossible to tell in words how my throat felt. I have heard singers describe the first-night sensation variously,—a tongue that felt stiff, a palate like a hot griddle, and so on. My throat and my tongue were dry and thick and woolly, like an Oriental rug with a "pile" so deep and heavy that, if water is spilled on it, the water does not soak in, but lies about the surface in globules,—just a dry and unabsorbing carpet.

My mother was with me behind the scenes; and my grandmother was in front to see me in all my stage grandeur. I am afraid I did not care particularly where either of them were. Certainly I had no thought for anyone who might be seated out in the Great Beyond on the far side of the footlights. I sang the second act in a dream, unconscious of any audience:—hardly conscious of the music or of myself—going through it all mechanically. But the sub-conscious mind had been at work all the time. As I was changing my costume after the second act, my mother said to me:

"I cannot find your grandmother anywhere. I have been looking and peeping through the hole in the curtain and from the wings, but I cannot seem to discover where she is sitting."

Hardly thinking of the words, I answered at once:

"She is over there to the left, about three rows back, near a pillar."

The criticisms of the press next day said that my most marked specialty was my ability to strike a tone with energy. I liked better, however, one kindly reviewer who observed that my voice was "cordial to the heart!" The newspapers found my stage appearance peculiar. There was about it "a marked development of the intellectual at the expense of the physical to which her New England birth may afford a key." The man who wrote this was quite correct. He had discovered the Puritan maid behind the stage trappings of Gilda.

If omens count for anything I ought to have had a disastrous first season, for everything went wrong during that opening week. I lost a bracelet of which I was particularly fond; I fell over a stick in making an entrance and nearly went on my head; and at the end of the third act of the second performance of Rigoletto the curtain failed to come down, and I was obliged to stay in a crouching attitude until it could be put into working order again. But these trying experiences were not auguries of failure or of disaster. In fact my public grew steadily kinder to me, although it hung back a little until after Marguerite. Audiences were not very cordial to new singers. They distrusted their own judgment; and I don't altogether wonder that they did.

The week after my début we went to Boston to sing. Boston would not have Rigoletto. It was considered objectionable, particularly the ending. For some inexplicable reason Linda di Chamounix was expected to be more acceptable to the Bostonian public, and so I was to sing the part of Linda instead of that of Gilda. I had been working on Linda during a part of the year in which I studied Gilda, and was quite equal to it. The others of the company went to Boston ahead of me, and I played Linda at a matinée in New York before following them. This was the first time I sang in opera with Brignoli. I went on in the part with only one rehearsal. Opera-goers do not hear Linda any more, but it is a graceful little opera with some pretty music and a really charmingly poetic story. It was taken from the French play, La Grâce de Dieu, and Rigoletto was taken from Victor Hugo's Le Roi S'Amuse. The story of Linda is that of a Swiss peasant girl of Chamounix who falls in love with a French noble whom she has met as a strolling painter in her village. He returns to Paris and she follows him there, walking all the way and accompanied by a faithful rustic, Pierotto, who loves her humbly. He plays a hurdy-gurdy and Linda sings, and so the poor young vagrants pay their way. In Paris the nobleman finds her and lavishes all manner of jewels and luxuries upon little Linda, but at last abandons her to make a rich marriage. On the same day that she hears the news of her lover's wedding her father comes to her house in Paris and denounces her. She goes mad, of course. Most operatic heroines did go mad in those days. And, in the last act, the peasant lover with the hurdy-gurdy takes her back to Chamounix among the hills. On the lengthy journey he can lure her along only by playing a melody that she knows and loves. It is a dear little story; but I never could comprehend how Boston was induced to accept the second act since they drew the line at Rigoletto!

I liked Linda and wanted to give a truthful and appealing impersonation of her. But the handicaps of those days of crude and primitive theatre conditions were really almost insurmountable. Now, with every assistance of wonderful staging, exquisite costuming, and magical lighting, the artist may rest upon his or her surroundings and accessories and know that everything possible to art has been brought together to enhance the convincing effect. In the old days at the Academy, however, we had no system of lighting except glaring footlights and perhaps a single, unimaginative calcium. We had no scenery worthy the name; and as for costumes, there were just three sets called by the theatre costumier "Paysannes" (peasant dress); "Norma" (they did not know enough even to call it "classic"); and "Rich!" The last were more or less of the Louis XIV period and could be slightly modified for various operas. These three sets were combined and altered as required. Yet, of course, the audiences were correspondingly unexacting. They were so accustomed to nothing but primitive effects that the simplest touch of true realism surprised and delighted them. Once during a performance of Il Barbiere the man who was playing the part of Don Basilio sent his hat out of doors to be snowed on. It was one of those Spanish shovel hats, long and square-edged, like a plank. When he wore it in the next act, all white with snowflakes from the blizzard outside, the audience was so simple and childlike that it roared with pleasure, "Why, it's real snow!"

It was also the time when hoop skirts were universally fashionable, so we all wore hoops, no matter what the period we were supposed to be representing. Scola first showed me how to fall gracefully in a hoop skirt, not in the least an easy feat to accomplish; and I shall always remember seeing Mme. de la Grange go to bed in one, in her sleep-walking scene in Sonnambula. Indeed, there was no illusion nor enchantment to help one in those elementary days. One had to conquer one's public alone and unaided.

I confided myself at first to the hands of the costumier with characteristic truthfulness. I had considered the musical and dramatic aspects of the part; it did not occur to me that the clothes would become my responsibility as well. That theatre costumier at the Academy, I found, could not even cut a skirt. Linda's was a strange affair, very long on the sides, and startlingly short in front. But this was the least of my troubles on the afternoon of that first matinée in New York. When it came to the last act—there having been no rehearsals, and my experience being next to nothing—I asked innocently for my costume, and was told that I would have to wear the same dress I had worn in the first act.

"But, I can't!" I gasped. "That fresh, new gown, after months are supposed to have gone by!—when Linda has walked and slept in it during the whole journey!"

"No one will think of that," I was assured.

But I thought of it and simply could not put on that clean dress for poor Linda's travel-worn last act. I sent for an old shawl from the chorus and ripped my costume into rags. By this time the orchestra was almost at the opening bars of the third act and there was not a moment to lose. Suddenly I looked at my shoes and nearly collapsed with despair. One always provided one's own foot-gear and the shoes I had on were absolutely the only pair of the sort required that I possessed; neat little slippers, painfully new and clean. We had not gone to any extra expense, in case I did not happen to make a success that would justify it, and that was the reason I had only the one pair. Well—there was a moment's struggle before I attacked my pretty shoes—but my passion for realism triumphed. I sent a man out into Fourteenth Street at the stage door of the Academy and had him rub those immaculate slippers in the gutter until they were thoroughly dirty, so that when I wore them onto the stage three minutes later they looked as if I had really walked to Paris and back in them.

The next day the newspapers said that the part of Linda had never before been sung with so much pathos.

"Aha!" said I, "that's my old clothes! That's my dirt!"

I had learned that the more you look your part the less you have to act. The observance of this truth was always Henry Irving's great strength. The more completely you get inside a character the less, also, are you obliged to depend on brilliant vocalism. Mary Garden is a case in point. She is not a great singer, although she sings better than she is credited with doing or her voice could not endure as much as it does, but above all she is intelligent and an artistic realist, taking care never to lose the spirit of her rôle. Renaud is one of the few men I have ever seen in opera who was willing to wear dirty clothes if they chanced to be in character. I shall never forget Jean de Reszke in L'Africaine. In the Madagascar scene, just after the rescue from the foundered vessel, he appeared in the most beautiful fresh tights imaginable and a pair of superb light leather boots. Indeed, the most distinguished performance becomes weak and valueless if the note of truth is lacking.

Theodore Thomas was the first violin in the Academy at the time of which I am writing, and not a very good one either. The director was Maretzek—"Maretzek the Magnificent" as he was always called, for he was very handsome and had a vivid and compelling personality—on whom be benisons, for it was he who, later, suggested the giving of Faust, and me for the leading rôle.

I was not popular with my fellow-artists and did not have a very pleasant time preparing and rehearsing for my first parts. The chorus was made up of Italians who never studied their music, merely learned it at rehearsal, and the rehearsals themselves were often farcical. The Italians of the chorus were always bitter against me for, up to that time, Italians had had the monopoly of music. It was not generally conceded that Americans could appreciate, much less interpret opera; and I, as the first American prima donna, was in the position of a foreigner in my own country. The chorus, indeed, could sometimes hardly contain themselves. "Who is she," they would demand indignantly, "to come and take the bread out of our mouths?"

One other person in the company who never gave me a kind word (although she was not an Italian) was Adelaide Phillips, the contralto. She was a fine artist and had been singing for many years, so, perhaps, it galled her to have to "support" a younger countrywoman. When it came to dividing the honours she was not at all pleased. As Maddalena in Rigoletto she was very plain; but when she did Pierotto, the boyish, rustic lover in Linda, she looked well. She had the most perfectly formed pair of legs—ankles, feet and all—that I ever saw on a woman.

In singing with Brignoli there developed a difficulty to which Ferri's blindness was nothing. Brignoli seriously objected to being touched during his scene! Imagine playing love scenes with a tenor who did not want to be touched, no matter what might be the emotional exigencies of the moment or situation. The bass part in Linda is that of the Baron, and when I first sang the opera it was taken by Susini, who had been with us on our preparatory tournée. His wife was Isabella Hinckley, a good and sweet woman, also a singer with an excellent soprano voice. I found that the big basso (he was a very large man with a buoyant sense of humour) was a fine actor and had a genuine dramatic gift in singing. His sense of humour was always bubbling up, in and out of performances. I once lost a diamond from one of my rings during the first act. My dressing-room and the stage were searched, but with no result. We went on for the last act and, in the scene when I was supposed to be unconscious, Susini caught sight of the stone glittering on the floor and picked it up. As he needed his hands for gesticulations, he popped the diamond into his mouth and when I "came to" he stuck out his tongue at me with the stone on the end of it!

While I was working on the part of Linda myself, I heard Mme. Medori sing it. She gave a fine emotional interpretation, getting great tragic effects in the Paris act, but she did not catch the naïve and ingenuous quality of poor, young Linda. It could hardly have been otherwise, for she was at the time a mature woman. There are some parts,—Marguerite is one of them, also,—that can be made too complicated, too subtle, too dramatic. I was criticised for my immaturity and lack of emotional power until I was tired of hearing such criticism; and once had a quaint little argument about my abilities and powers with "Nym Crinkle," the musical critic of The World, A. C. Wheeler. (Later he made a success in literature under the name of "J. P. Mowbray.")

"What do you expect," I demanded, in my old-fashioned yet childish way, being at the time eighteen, "what do you expect of a person of my age?"

CHAPTER V
LITERARY BOSTON

MY friends in New York had given me letters to people in Boston, so I went there with every opportunity for an enjoyable visit. But, naturally, I was much more absorbed in my own début and in what the public would think of me than I was in meeting new acquaintances and receiving invitations. Now I wish that I had then more clearly realised possibilities, for Boston was at the height of its literary reputation. All my impressions of that Boston season, however, sink into insignificance compared to that of my first public appearance. I sang Linda; and there were only three hundred people in the house!

If anything in the world could have discouraged me that would have, but, as a matter of fact, I do not believe anything could. At any rate, I worked all the harder just because the conditions were so adverse; and I won my public (such as it was) that night. I may add that I kept it for the remainder of my stay in Boston.

At that period of my life I was very fragile and one big performance would wear me out. Literally, I used myself up in singing, for I put into it every ounce of my strength. I could not save myself when I was actually working, but my way of economising my vitality was to sing only twice a week.

It was after that first performance of Linda, some time about midnight, and my mother and I had just returned to our apartment in the Tremont House and had hardly taken off our wraps, when a knock came at the door. Our sitting-room was near a side entrance for the sake of quietness and privacy, but we paid a penalty in the ease with which we could be reached by anyone who knew the way. My mother opened the door; and there stood two ladies who overwhelmed us with gracious speeches. "They had heard my Linda! They had come because they simply could not help it; because I had moved them so deeply! Now, would we both come the following evening to a little musicale; and they would ask that delightful Signor Brignoli too! It would be such a pleasure! etc."

Although I was not singing the following night, I objected to going to the musicale because certain experiences in New York had already bred caution. I said, however, with perfect frankness, that I would go on one condition.

"On any condition, dear Miss Kellogg!"

"You wouldn't expect me to sing?"

"Oh no; no, no!"

Accordingly, the next night my mother and I presented ourselves at the house of the older of the two ladies. The first words our hostess uttered when I entered the room were:

"Why! where's your music?"

"I thought it was understood that I was not to sing," said I.

But, in spite of their previous earnest disclaimers on this point, they became so insistent that, after resisting their importunities for a few moments, I finally consented to satisfy them. I asked Brignoli to play for me, and I sang the Cavatina from Linda. Then I turned on my heel and went back to my hotel; and I never again entered that woman's house. After so many years there is no harm in saying that the hostess who was guilty of this breach of tact, good taste, and consideration, was Mrs. Paran Stevens, and the other lady was her sister, Miss Fanny Reed, one of the talented amateurs of the day. They were struggling hard for social recognition in Boston and every drawing card was of value, even a new, young singer who might become famous. Later, of course, Mrs. Stevens did "arrive" in New York; but she travelled some difficult roads first.

This was by no means the first time that I had contended with a lack of consideration in the American hostess, especially toward artists. Her sisters across the Atlantic have better taste and breeding, never subjecting an artist who is their guest to the annoyance and indignity of having to "sing for her supper." But whenever I was invited anywhere by an American woman, I always knew that I would be expected to bring my music and to contribute toward the entertainment of the other guests. An Englishwoman I once met when travelling on the Continent hit the nail on the head, although in quite another connection.

"You Americans are so queer," she remarked. "I heard a woman from the States ask a perfectly strange man recently to stop in at a shop and match her some silk while he was out! I imagine it is because you don't mind putting yourselves under obligations, isn't it?"

Literary Boston of that day revolved around Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, at whose house often assembled such distinguished men and women as Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe. Mr. Fields was the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his sense of humour was always a delight.

"A lady came in from the suburbs to see me this morning," he once remarked to me. "'Well, Mr. Fields,' she said, with great impressiveness, 'what have you new in literature to-day? I'm just thusty for knowledge!'"

Your true New Englander always says "thust" and "fust" and "wust," and Mr. Fields had just the intonation—which reminds me somehow—in a roundabout fashion—of a strange woman who battered on my door once after I had appeared in Faust, in Boston, to tell me that "that man Mephisto-fleas was just great!"

It was a wonderful privilege to meet Longfellow. He was never gay, never effusive, leaving these attributes to his talkative brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, who was a wit and a humourist. Indeed, Longfellow was rather noted for his cold exterior, and it took a little time and trouble to break the ice, but, though so unexpressive outwardly, his nature was most winning when one was once in touch with it. His first wife was burned to death and the tragedy affected him permanently, although he made a second and a very successful marriage with Tom Appleton's sister. The brothers-in-law were often together and formed the oddest possible contrast to each other.

Longfellow and I became good friends. I saw him many times and often went to his house to sing to him. He greatly enjoyed my singing of his own Beware. It was always one of my successful encore songs, although it certainly is not Longfellow at his best. But he liked me to sit at the piano and wander from one song to another. The older the melodies, the sweeter he found them. Longfellow's verses have much in common with simple, old-fashioned songs. They always touched the common people, particularly the common people of England. They were so simple and so true that those folk who lived and laboured close to the earth found much that moved them in the American writer's unaffected and elemental poetry. Yet it seems a bit strange that his poems are more loved and appreciated in England than in America, much as Tennyson's are more familiar to us than to his own people. Some years later, when I was singing in London, I heard that Longfellow was in town and sent him a box. He and Tom Appleton, who was with him, came behind the scenes between the acts to see me and, my mother being with me, both were invited into my dressing-room. In the London theatres there are women, generally advanced in years, who assist the prima donna or actress to dress. These do not exist in American theatres. I had a maid, of course, but there was this woman of the theatre, also, a particularly ordinary creature who contributed nothing to the gaiety of nations and who, indeed, rarely showed feeling of any sort. I happened to say to her:

"Perkins, I am going to see Mr. Longfellow."

Her face became absolutely transfigured.

"Oh, Miss," she cried in a tone of awe and curtseying to his name, "you don't mean 'im that wrote Tell me not in mournful numbers? Oh, Miss! 'im!"

Lowell I knew only slightly, yet his distinguished and distinctive personality made a great impression on me. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a blond, curly-headed young man, whose later prosperity greatly interfered with his ability, I first met about this same time. He was too successful too young, and it stultified his gifts, as being successful too young usually does stultify the natural gifts of anybody. On one occasion I met Anthony Trollope at the Fields', the English novelist whose works were then more or less in vogue. He had just come from England and was filled with conceit. English people of that time were incredibly insular and uninformed about us, and Mr. Trollope knew nothing of America, and did not seem to want to know anything. Certainly, English people when they are not thoroughbred can be very common! Trollope was full of himself and wrote only for what he could get out of it. I never, before or since, met a literary person who was so frankly "on the make." The discussion that afternoon was about the recompense of authors, and Trollope said that he had reduced his literary efforts to a working basis and wrote so many words to a page and so many pages to a chapter. He refrained from using the actual word "money"—the English shrink from the word "money"—but he managed to convey to his hearers the fact that a considerable consideration was the main incentive to his literary labour, and put the matter more specifically later, to my mother, by telling her that he always chose the words that would fill up the pages quickest.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, though he was one of the Fields' circle, I never met at all. He was tragically shy, and more than once escaped from the house when we went in rather than meet two strange women.

"Hawthorne has just gone out the other way," Mrs. Fields would whisper, smiling. "He's too frightened to meet you!"

I met his boy Julian, however, who was about twelve years old. He was a nice lad and I kissed him—to his great annoyance, for he was shy too, although not so much so as his father. Not so very long ago Julian Hawthorne reminded me of this episode.

"Do you remember," he said, laughing, "how embarrassed I was when you kissed me? 'Never you mind' you said to me then, 'the time will come, my boy, when you'll be glad to remember that I kissed you!' And it certainly did come!"

All Boston that winter was stirred by the approaching agitations of war; and those two remarkable women, Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Howe were using their pens to excite the community into a species of splendid rage. I first met them both at the Fields' and always admired Julia Ward Howe as a representative type of the highest Boston culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe had just finished Uncle Tom's Cabin. Many people believed that it and the disturbance it made were partly responsible for the war itself. Mr. Fields told me that her "copy" was the most remarkable "stuff" that the publishers had ever encountered. It was written quite roughly and disconnectedly on whatever scraps of paper she had at hand. I suppose she wrote it when the spirit moved her. At any rate, Mr. Fields said it was the most difficult task imaginable to fit it into any form that the printers could understand. Mrs. Stowe was a quiet, elderly woman, and talked very little. I had an odd sort of feeling that she had put so much of herself into her book that she had nothing left to offer socially.

I did not realise until years afterwards what a precious privilege it was to meet in such a charming intime way the men and women who really "made" American literature. The Fields literally kept open house. They were the most hospitable of people, and I loved them and spent some happy hours with them. I cannot begin to enumerate or even to remember all the literary lights I met in their drawing-room. Of that number there were James Freeman Clarke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, whom I knew later in Washington, and Gail Hamilton who was just budding into literary prominence; and Sidney Lanier. But, as I look back on that first Boston engagement, I see plainly that the most striking impression made upon my youthful mind during the entire season was the opening night of Linda di Chamounix and the three hundred auditors!

It was long, long after that first season that I had some of my pleasantest times in Boston with Sidney Lanier. This may not be the right place to mention them, but they certainly belong under the heading of this chapter.

The evening that stands out most clearly in my memory was one, in the 'seventies, that I spent at the house of dear Charlotte Cushman who was then very ill and who died almost immediately after. Sidney Lanier was there with his flute, which he played charmingly. Indeed, he was as much musician as poet, as anyone who knows his verse must realise. He was poor then, and Miss Cushman was interested in him and anxious to help him in every way she could. There were two dried-up, little, Boston old maids there too—queer creatures—who were much impressed with High Art without knowing anything about it. One composition that Lanier played somewhat puzzled me—my impertinent absolute pitch was, as usual, hard at work—and at the end I exclaimed:

"That piece doesn't end in the same key in which it begins!"

Lanier looked surprised and said:

"No, it doesn't. It is one of my own compositions."

He thought it remarkable that I could catch the change of key in such a long and intricately modulated piece of music. The little old maids of Boston were somewhat scandalised by my effrontery; but there was even more to come. After another lovely thing which he played for us, I was so impressed by the rare tone of his instrument that I asked:

"Is that a Böhm flute?"

He, being a musician, was delighted with the implied compliment; but the old ladies saw in my question only a shocking slight upon his execution. Turning to one another they ejaculated with one voice, and that one filled with scorn and pity:

"She thinks it's the flute!"

This difference between professionals and the laity is odd. The more enchanted a professional is with another artist's performance, the more technical interest and curiosity he feels. The amateur only knows how to rhapsodise. This seems to be so in everything. When someone rides in an automobile for the first time he only thinks how exciting it is and how fast he is going. The experienced motorist immediately wants to know what sort of engine the machine has, and how many cylinders.

I have always loved a flute. It is a difficult instrument to play with colour and variety. It is not like the violin, on which one can get thirds, and sixths, and sevenths, by using the arpeggio: it is a single, thin tone and can easily become monotonous if not played skilfully. Furthermore, there are only certain pieces of music that ever ought to be played on it. Wagner uses the flute wonderfully. He never lets it bore his audience. The Orientals have brought flute playing and flute music to a fine art, and it is one of the oldest of instruments, but, unlike the violin and other instruments, it is more perfectly manufactured to-day than it was in the past. The modern flutes have a far more mellow and sympathetic tone than the old ones.

That whole evening at Miss Cushman's was complete in its fulness of experience, as I recall it, looking back across the years. How many people know that Miss Cushman had studied singing and had a very fine baritone contralto voice? Two of her songs were The Sands o' Dee and Low I Breathe my Passion. That night, the last time I ever heard her sing, I recalled how often before I had seen her seating herself at the piano to play her own accompaniments, always a difficult thing to do. Again I can see her, at this late day, turning on the stool to talk to us between songs, emphasising her points with that odd, inevitable gesture of the forefinger that was so characteristic of her, and then wheeling back to the instrument to let that deep voice of hers roll through the room in

"Will she wake and say good night?"...

During that first Boston season of mine, my mother and I used to give breakfasts at the Parker House. We were somewhat noted characters there as we were the first women to stop at it, the Parker House being originally a man's restaurant exclusively; and breakfast was a meal of ceremony. The chef of the Parker House used to surpass himself at our breakfast entertainments for he knew that such an epicure as Oliver Wendell Holmes might be there at any time. This chef, by the way, was the first man to put up soups in cans and, after he left the Parker House kitchens, he made name and money for himself in establishing the canned goods trade.

Dear Dr. Holmes! What a delightful, warm spontaneous nature was his, and what a fine mind! We were always good friends and I am proud of the fact. Shall I ever forget the dignity and impressiveness of his bearing as, after the fourth course of one of my breakfasts, he glanced up, saw the waiter approaching, arose solemnly as if he were about to make a speech, went behind his chair,—we all thought he was about to give us one of his brilliant addresses—shook out one leg and then the other, all most seriously and without a word, so as to make room for the next course!

Years later Dr. Holmes and I crossed from England on the same steamer. He had been fêted and made much of in England and we discussed the relative brilliancy of American and English women. I contended that Americans were the brighter and more sparkling, while English women had twice as much real education and mental training. Dr. Holmes agreed, but with reservations. He professed himself to be still dazzled with British feminine wit.

"I'm tired to death," he declared. "At every dinner party I went to they had picked out the cleverest women in London to sit on each side of me. I'm utterly exhausted trying to keep up with them!"

This was the voyage when the benefit for the sailors was given—for the English sailors, that is. It was well arranged so that the American seamen could get nothing out of it. Dr. Holmes was asked to speak and I was asked to sing; but we declined to perform. We did write our names on the programmes, however, and as these sold for a considerable price, we added to the fund in spite of our intentions.

My first season in Boston—from which I have strayed so far so many times—was destined to be a brief one, but also very strenuous, due to the fact that in the beginning I had only two operas in my répertoire, one of which Boston did not approve. After Linda, I was rushed on in Bellini's I Puritani and had to "get up in it" in three days. It went very well, and was followed with La Sonnambula by the same composer and after only one week's rehearsal. I was a busy girl in those weeks; and I should have been still busier if opera in America had not received a sudden and tragic blow.

The "vacillating" Buchanan's reign was over. On March 4th Lincoln was inaugurated. A hush of suspense was in the air:—a hush broken on April 12th by the shot fired by South Carolina upon Fort Sumter. On April 14th Sumter capitulated and Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers. The Civil War had begun.

CHAPTER VI
WAR TIMES

AT first the tremendous crisis filled everyone with a purely impersonal excitement and concern; but one fine morning we awoke to the fact that our opera season was paralysed.

The American people found the actual dramas of Bull Run, Big Bethel and Harpers Ferry more absorbing than any play or opera ever put upon the boards, and the airs of Yankee Doodle and The Girl I Left Behind Me more inspiring than the finest operatic arias in the world. They did not want to go to the theatres in the evening. They wanted to read the bulletin boards. Every move in the big game of war that was being played by the ruling powers of our country was of thrilling interest, and as fast as things happened they were "posted."

Maretzek "the Magnificent," so obstinate that he simply did not know how to give up a project merely because it was impossible, packed a few of us off to Philadelphia to produce the Ballo in Maschera. We hoped against hope that it would be light enough to divert the public, at even that tragic moment. But the public refused to be diverted. Why I ever sang in it I cannot imagine. I weighed barely one hundred and four pounds and was about as well suited to the part of Amelia as a sparrow would have been. I never liked the rôle; it is heavy and uncongenial and altogether out of my line. I should never have been permitted to do it, and I have always suspected that there might have been something of a plot against me on the part of the Italians. But all this made no difference, for we abandoned the idea of taking the opera out on a short tour. We could plainly see that opera was doomed for the time being in America.

Then Maretzek bethought himself of La Figlia del Reggimento, a military opera, very light and infectious, that might easily catch the wave of public sentiment at the moment. We put it on in a rush. I played the Daughter and we crowded into the performance every bit of martial feeling we could muster. I learned to play the drum, and we introduced all sorts of military business and bugle calls, and altogether contrived to create a warlike atmosphere. We were determined to make a success of it; but we were also genuinely moved by the contagious glow that pervaded the country and the times, and to this combined mood of patriotism and expediency we sacrificed many artistic details. For example, we were barbarous enough to put in sundry American national airs and we had the assistance of real Zouaves to lend colour; and this reminds me that about the same period Isabella Hinckley even sang The Star Spangled Banner in the middle of a performance of Il Barbiere.

Our attempt was a great success. We played Donizetti's little opera to houses of frantic enthusiasm, first in Baltimore, then in Washington on May the third, where naturally the war fever was at its highest heat. The audiences cheered and cried and let themselves go in the hysterical manner of people wrought up by great national excitements. Even on the stage we caught the feeling. I sang the Figlia better than I had ever sung anything yet, and I found myself wondering, as I sang, how many of my cadet friends of a few months earlier were already at the front.

I felt very proud of these friends when I read the despatches from the front. They all distinguished themselves, some on one side and some on the other. Alec McCook was Colonel of the 1st Ohio Volunteers, being an Ohio man by birth, and did splendid service in the first big battle of the war, Bull Run. He was made Major-General of Volunteers later, I believe, and always held a prominent position in American military affairs. From Fort Pulaski came word of Lieutenant Horace Porter who, though only recently graduated, was in command of the battlements there. He was speedily brevetted Captain for "distinguished gallantry under fire," and after Antietam he was sent to join the Army of the Ohio. He was everywhere and did everything imaginable during the war—Chattanooga, Chickamauga, the Battle of the Wilderness—and was General Grant's aide-de-camp in some of the big conflicts. McCreary and young Huger I heard less of because they were on the other side; but they were both brave fellows and did finely according to their convictions. It is odd to recall that Huger's father, General Isaac Huger, had fought for the Union in the early wars and yet turned against her in the civil struggle between the blues and the greys. The Hugers were South Carolinians though, and therefore rabid Confederates.

With the war and its many memories, ghosts will always rise up in my recollection of Custer, the "Golden Haired Laddie,"—as his friends called him. He was a good friend of mine, and after the war was over he used to come frequently to see me and tell me the most wonderful, thrilling stories about it, and of his earliest fights with the Indians. He was a most vivid creature; one felt a sense of vigour and energy and eagerness about him; and he was so brave and zealous as to make one know that he would always come up to the mark. I never saw more magnificent enthusiasm. He was not thirty at that time and when on horseback, riding hard, with his long yellow hair blowing back in the wind, he was a marvellously striking figure. He was not really a tall man, but looked so, being a soldier. Oh, if I could only remember those stories of his—stories of pluck and of danger and of excitement!

It has always been a matter of secret pride with me that, in my small way, I did something for the Union too. I heard that our patriotic and inartistic Daughter of the Regiment caused several lads to enlist. I do not know if this were true, but I hoped so at the time, and it might well have been so.

I had a dresser, Ellen Conklin, who had some strange and rather ghastly tales to tell of the slave trade in the days before the war. She had been in other opera companies, small troupes, that sang their way from the far South, and the primitive and casual manner of their travel had offered many opportunities for her to visit any number of slave markets. She frequently had been harrowed to the breaking point by the sight of mothers separated from their children, and men and women who loved each other being parted for life. The worst horror of it all had been to her the examining of the female slaves as to their physical equipment, in which the buyers were more often brutal than not. Ellen was Irish and emotional; and it tore her heart out to see such things; but she kept on going to the slave sales just the same.

"They nearly killed me, Miss," she declared to me with tears in her eyes, "but I could never resist one!"

Though I quite understood Ellen's emotions, I found it a little difficult to understand why she invited them so persistently. But I have learned that this is a very common human weakness—luckily for managers who put on harrowing plays. Many people go to the theatre to cry. When I sang Mignon the audience always cried and wiped its eyes; and I felt convinced that many had come for exactly that purpose. Two women I know once went to see Helena Modjeska in Adrienne Lecouvreur and, when the curtain fell, one of them turned to the other with streaming eyes and gasped between her choking sobs:

"L—l—let's come—(sob)—again—(sob)—t—t—to-morrow night! (sob, sob)."

Personally, I think there are occasions enough for tears in this life, bitter or consoling, without having somebody on the stage draw them out over fictitious joys and sorrows.

In the beginning of the war the feeling against the negroes was really more bitter in the North than in the South. The riots in New York were a scandal and a disgrace, although very few people have any idea how bad they actually were. The Irish Catholics were particularly rabid and asserted openly, right and left, that the freeing of the slaves would mean an influx of cheap labour that would become a drug on the market. It was an Irish mob that burned a coloured orphan asylum, after which taste of blood the most innocent black was not safe. Perfectly harmless coloured people were hanged to lamp-posts with impunity. No one ever seemed to be punished for such outrages. The time was one of open lawlessness in New York City. The Irish seem sometimes to be peculiarly possessed by this unreasoning and hysterical mob spirit which, as Ruskin once pointed out, they always manage to justify to themselves by some high abstract principle or sentiment. A story that has always seemed to me illustrative of this is that of the Hibernian contingent that hanged an unfortunate Jew because his people had killed Jesus Christ and, when reminded that it had all happened some time before, replied that "that might be, but they had only just heard of it!" It is a singularly significant story, with much more truth than jest in it. Years later, I recollect that those Irish riots in New York over the negro question served as the basis for some exceedingly heated arguments between an English friend of mine at Aix-les-Bains and a Catholic priest living there. The priest sought to justify them, but his reasonings have escaped me.

At the time of these riots our New York home was on Twenty-second Street where Stern's shop now stands. We rented it from the Bryces, Southerners, who had a coloured coachman, a fact that made our residence a target for the animosity of our more ignorant neighbours who lived in the rear. The house was built with a foreign porte-cochère; and, time and again, small mobs would throng under that porte-cochère, battering on the door and trying to break in to get the coachman. The hanging of a negro near St. John's Chapel was an occasion for rejoicing and festivity, and the lower class Irish considered it a time for their best clothes. One hears of bear-baiting and bull-fights. But think of the barbarity of all this!

Once, when we went away for a day or two, we left Irish servants in the house and, on returning, I found that the maids had been wearing my smartest gowns to view the riots and lynchings. A common lace collar was pinned to one of my French dresses and I had little difficulty in getting the waitress to admit that she had worn it. She explained naïvely that the riots were gala occasions, "a great time for the Irish." She added that she had met my father on the stairs and had been afraid that he would recognise the dress; but, although she was penitent enough about "borrowing" the finery, she did not in the least see anything odd in her desire to dress up for the tormenting of an unfortunate fellow-creature.

Everybody went about singing Mrs. Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic and it was then that I first learned that the air—the simple but rousing little melody of John Brown's Body—was in reality a melody by Felix Mendelssohn. Martial songs of all kinds were the order of the day and all more classic music was relegated to the background for the time being. It was not until the following winter that public sentiment subsided sufficiently for us to really consider another musical season.

CHAPTER VII
STEPS OF THE LADDER

IN the three years between my début and my appearance in Faust I sang, in all, a dozen operas:—Rigoletto, Linda, I Puritani, Sonnambula, Ballo in Maschera, Figlia del Reggimento, Les Noces de Jeannette, Lucia, Don Giovanni, Poliuto, Marta, and Traviata. Besides these, I sang a good deal in concert, but I never cared for either concert or oratorio work as much as for opera. My real growth and development came from big parts in which both musical and dramatic accomplishment were necessary.

Like all artists, I look back upon many fluctuations in my artistic achievements. Sometimes I was good, and often not so good; and, curiously enough, I was usually best, according to my friends and critics, when most dissatisfied with myself. But of one thing I am fairly confident:—I never really went backward, never seriously retrograded artistically. Each rôle was a step further and higher. To each I brought a clearer vision, a surer touch, a more flexible method, a finer (how shall I say it in English?) attaque is nearest what I mean. This I say without vanity, for the artist who does not grow and improve with each succeeding part is deteriorating. There is no standing still in any life work; or, if there is, it is the standing still of successful effort, the hard-won tenure of a difficult place from which most people slip back. The Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass expressed it rightly when she told Alice that "you have to run just as hard as you can to stay where you are."