Nina H. Kennard

“ Garrick was master of his art, and knew how to value the criticism and sympathy of the crowd. Under his management the two-shilling gallery was brought down to a level with the second row of boxes. By that arrangement a player had the mass of the audience under his immediate control; and that mass, uninfluenced by fashion or prejudice, unerring in its judgment, is the dread of an inferior actor, the delight of a great one. ”

“ Loveliest of women! In Belvidera, Isabella, Juliet, and Calista, I have admired you until my fancy threatened to burst, and the strings of my imagination were ready to crack to pieces; but, as Mrs. Siddons, I love you to madness, and until my heart and soul are overwhelmed with fondness and desire. Say not that time has placed any difference in years between you and me. The youths of her day saw no wrinkles upon the brow of Ninon de l’Enclos. It is for vulgar souls alone to grow old; but you shall flourish in eternal youth, amidst the war of elements, and the crash of worlds. ”

“ A strange capricious master is the public. However, one consolation greater than any other, except one’s own approbation, has been that those whose suffrages I esteemed most have, through all my troubles, clasped me closer to their hearts; they have been the touchstone to prove who were really my friends. You will believe me when I affirm that your friendship, and my dear Mrs. Whalley’s, is an honour and a happiness I would not forego for any earthly consideration. ”

“ Siddons was magnificent before she spoke, thrilling her audience with a silence more significant than all else in the development of human emotion. We can see how grand she was, independently of her author, by the miserable plays she made famous; when her genius was no longer present to breathe life and passion into them they passed into oblivion. ”

“ It was a world strangely at issue with her own ideas into which she had stepped—a dandified, ceremonious world, full of witty and wicked ladies and gentlemen, who played cards and backed horses; but, mercifully for her, a world at the same time full of childish enthusiasm, an age of pallor and fainting and hysterics. Grown men and women sitting up at night weeping and laughing over the woes and escapades of Clarissa Harlowe and Evelina; ladies writing to Richardson: “Pray, Sir, make Lovelace happy; you can so easily do it. Pray reform him! Will you not save a soul?” ”

“ Justly are the memories of David Garrick and Sarah Siddons revered by Englishmen, not only because they devoted their genius to the reinstatement of England’s greatest dramatist, but that, also, by their strict adherence to an almost rigid decorum in public behaviour and private life, they raised a profession that had hitherto been despised and looked upon as one unbefitting a modest woman, or an honourable man, into a position of respectability and consideration. ”

“ Some people place the whole happiness of life in the pleasures of imagination, in building castles; for my part, I am not one that builds very magnificent ones. Nay; I don’t build any castles, but cottages without end. May the great Disposer of all events but permit me to spend the evening of my toilsome, bustling day in a cottage, where I may sometimes have the converse and society which will make me more worthy those imperishable habitations which are prepared for the spirits of just men made perfect! ”

“ Haggitt, by his plain and sensible sermons, has done more good than a legion of these priests would do if they were to live to the age of Methusalem. I am willing to own that all this may be prejudice, and that we may not mean better than our neighbours; but fire shall not burn my opinion out of me, and so God mend all. Now, to turn to our great selves. We took our little folks to Lisle; it is a very fine town, and, though I know nothing of the language, the acting was so really good that it gave me very great pleasure. The language of true genius, like that of Nature, is intelligible to all. ”

“ Siddons, after the play, sent to me to say, when I was dressed, she would be glad to see me in her room. On going in, she “wished,” she said, “to give me a few words of advice before taking leave of me. You are in the right way,” she said, “but remember what I say—study, study, study, and do not marry till you are thirty. I remember what it was to be obliged to study at nearly your age with a young family about me. Beware of that: keep your mind on your art, do not remit your study, and you are certain to succeed. ”

“ I shall be here till next Saturday, and after that time at Lancaster till Tuesday, the 28th; thence I shall go immediately to Bath, where I shall have about a month’s quiet, and then begin to play at Bristol for a few nights. ‘Such resting finds the sole of unblest feet!’ When we shall come to London is uncertain, for nothing is settled by Mr. Sheridan, and I think it not impossible that my winter may be spent in Dublin; for I must go on making to secure the few comforts that I have been able to attain for myself and my family. ”

“ In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion, how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure.
Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. ”

“ The power of fresh comprehension passed away, and with it the elasticity and variety of her earlier effects; and from being singularly simple and direct, she became stagey and artificial. An artist gets certain words to utter; he gets the skeleton sketch, as it were, of the character he has to portray, but the emphasis and passion he puts into them, which go direct from his heart to the heart of his audience, must be his, and his alone, and must be as little as possible the effect of study or deliberation. ”

“ Besides all the disabilities of advancing age, that terrible fear of being supplanted was ever before her eyes. Mrs. Jordan had some years before snatched the laurels from her brow in Rosalind; now rumours were wafted across the Channel of a young and lovely actress, Miss O’Neill, who had taken all hearts captive as Juliet (a part Mrs. Siddons could never personate satisfactorily) ; the matchless beauty of form of the young aspirant, her sensibility and tenderness were the theme of every tongue. ”

“ I have played for one charity since I have been here (I am at Cork, I should tell you) , and am to play for another to-morrow—your favourite Zara, in the Mourning Bride. I am extremely happy that you like your little companion so well [alluding to a miniature of herself she had sent him] . I have sat to a young man in this place, who has made a small full-length of me in Isabella, upon the first entrance of Biron. You will think this an arduous undertaking, but he has succeeded to admiration. I think it more like me than any I have ever yet seen. ”

“ In one town the theatre was said to have been built, the stage in Sussex, the audience in Kent, the two being divided by a ditch, so as to enable the players to evade their bailiffs by escaping into another county. There is a certain humour and tragedy running through all these theatrical histories, that makes us laugh at one moment at the comical incidents related, and makes us sad the next to think of men of talent—often men of genius—being subjected to such degradation. ”

“ Step by step we propose to trace the career of this wonderful woman, who, dowered with singular beauty and genius, and placed amid all the temptations of a profession in which so few of her sex remain pure, has shown an example of unswerving rectitude and religious fervour, unusual in any walk of life, keeping her to the last a “great simple being,” direct and truthful, noble and industrious. ”

“ Our theatre is going on, to the astonishment of everybody. Very few of the actors are paid, and all are vowing to withdraw themselves; yet still we go on. Sheridan is certainly omnipotent. I can get no money from the theatre; my precious two thousand pounds are swallowed up in that drowning gulf, from which no plea of right or justice can save its victims.”
John Kemble remained manager of Drury Lane for some years, sometimes withdrawing for a time and refusing to manage the affairs any longer, and again wheedled back by Sheridan’s powers of persuasion. ”

“ She is not yet the tragic muse of Reynolds, nor the full-orbed, fashionable beauty of Gainsborough, but a lovely young Diana, with frank, large, out-looking eyes, and a pretty air of defiance and resolution, the brightness undimmed by the anxiety and hard work of later days; the young beauty is evidently determined to conquer the universe. ”

“ Kemble, on account of the giving up of the private boxes, which, I fear, must be at last complied with. Surely nothing ever equalled the domineering of the mob in these days. It is to me inconceivable how the public at large submits to be thus dictated to, against their better judgment, by a handful of imperious and intoxicated men. In the meantime, what can the poor proprietors do but yield to overwhelming necessity? Could I once feel that my poor brother’s anxiety about the theatre was at an end, I should be, marvellous to say, as well as I ever was in my life. ”

“ When a dramatist was employed in reading his tragedy to the performers, Brinsley would saunter in, yawning, at the fifth act, with no other apology than, having sat up late two nights running, he was unable to appear in time; or he would arrive drunk, go into the green-room, ask the name of a well-known actor who was on the stage, and bid them never to allow him to play again. He was once told, with some spirit, by one of the company, that he rarely came there, and then never but to find fault.
Things grew worse and worse. ”

“ Johnson declaring he had sat up all night to read it, much to Fanny Burney’s delight, who, thirsting for flattery, sits with observant eyes and sarcastic little mouth, that belies the prudishly-folded hands and prim air. Moving about from group to group is the brilliant Sheridan, walking with his father and wife, and surrounded by the Linley family, to whom the lovely Cecilia is recounting the honours heaped on them in London.
Unnoticed among all these great people is a little lame Scottish boy, destined to be the greatest of them all. ”

“ No wonder that even Mr. Evans, a Welsh squire, with three hundred a year, who, enslaved by Sarah’s singing of Robin, Sweet Robin, offered her his hand, was ignominiously refused. Her parents, however, took a different view, and, allured by the splendour of Mr. Evans’s offer, revoked the unwilling consent they had given to their daughter’s engagement to Siddons, and summarily dismissed him from the company.
The indignant lover had recourse to a method of revenge that seems as novel as it was ungentlemanly. ”

“ Siddons coming off the stage in the full flush of triumph—having harrowed her audience with emotion—and walking up to the mirror in the green room to survey herself with perfect composure.
We imagine there is no law to be laid down on the subject of the amount of feeling an actor really puts into the part he is enacting. It must vary. Conventionality must, with the greatest of them, now and then take the place of emotion ”

“ Her daughter, Cecilia, who later wrote Recollections of her mother, says that, instead of being hard and calculating, as the outside public imagined, her mother was, on the contrary, too easy—too much disposed to be ruled by people inferior in every way to herself, credulous to an extraordinary extent, always trusting to appearances, and never willing to suspect anyone. Perhaps, also, the great actress’s weakness was a wish to “make use” of people, and a love of flattery—both dangerous qualities for a woman in her position, laying her open, as they did, to the machinations of adventurers. ”

“ It is very remarkable that Macbeth is frequent in expressions of tenderness to his wife, while she never betrays one symptom of affection towards him, till, in the fiery furnace of affliction, her iron heart is melted down to softness.” This was the side by which Mrs. Siddons had taken such a grasp of the character of Lady Macbeth. It was by bringing into prominence this softer side of her character that, while thrilling her audience with horror, she at the same time brought tears to their eyes with an immense awe-struck pity. ”

“ Tormented by the jealousies, insolence, and greed of his leading ladies, disheartened by the envy and treachery of his oldest friends, he must have been glad to contemplate retirement from the turmoil, to enjoy undisturbed the competency he had been able to save from a long life spent in the service of his art and the public. ”

“ They never lost a certain respect for the great actress who had served them so long and so faithfully. We know the story of her appealing through the windows of her sedan-chair to the riotous crowds assembled [233] round the theatre, “Good people, let me pass; I am Sarah Siddons,” and of the mob immediately falling back to make way for the dignified Queen of Tragedy. The whole business disheartened and saddened her, however. “I have not always met gratitude in a play-house,” Garrick said, and she but repeated his words with a sigh. ”

“ Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and comely person, for the first time, in the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley. The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators that went away without a sight. She was nature itself; she was the most exquisite work of art. Several fainted, even before the curtain drew up. The fiddlers in the orchestra blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter ”

“ One of the Kemble weaknesses was a proud sensitiveness to anything like slight or neglect, and these slights were as often as not phantoms of their own imaginations.
It gives one a mournful sense of injustice to see the charge of jealousy she openly brings repeated by the earlier biographer who wrote about her—when we, who have fuller light thrown upon the great actor’s life by the publication of his correspondence, know how free he was from the besetting sins of his craft. To be popular, a man must have the faults of those among whom he is placed. ”

“ As early as three o’clock in the afternoon people began to assemble about the pit and gallery doors, and at half-past four the mob was so great, that those who had come early, in the hope of getting a good place, were carried away by the rush of the increasing crowd under the arches. So great was the concourse of people, that not more than twenty of the weaker sex obtained places in the pit, and the house was crammed in every part. The play was Lady Macbeth. When the great actress made her appearance, she was received with thunders of applause ”

“ Your letter Surpris’d me in my Garden of Eden, where it found me, ‘chewing the Cud of Sweet and bitter fancy,’ you making that very moment the principal person in the Drama of my musings—and ‘I said in my haste all men are liars.’ It was more than probable that business, pleasure, illness and persons perhaps less deserving your regard, might have diverted recollection from one So distant So incapable of heightening the joys, alleviating the Sorrows of this ‘working day world’ and our hearts naturally yearn to those who Share our weal and woe. ”

“ They had all come with powdered heads, gold-laced coats, and diamond-encircled throats to see a pretty woman act an affecting play; but they were hardly prepared for the passion and pathos that for the time being shook them out of their artificial lace handkerchief grief and bowed the powdered heads with genuine emotion. She was well supported—Smith, Palmer, Farren, Packer, and Mrs. Love acting with her, to say nothing of the veteran Roger Kemble, her father, who was, she tells us, little less agitated than herself. ”