Mary Siddons

“ Henry Bate’s favourable report of her powers, she made her first appearance at Drury Lane. The Golden Gates of the Temple of Fame were thrown open. The young priestess had but to enter, one would have thought, and light the sacred flame; but genius is not to be bound by expediency or opportunity.
It was in 1775, the year when Garrick gave up the management, that Mrs. Siddons appeared on the boards of Drury Lane. She had reached the highest point of her ambition—she was to act with the greatest actor of his time before a dramatic audience rendered fastidious and critical by great traditions. ”

“ She looked the novice of St. Clare to perfection. In the spring she made her way northwards to keep her engagement with the Edinburgh manager, and on Saturday, 22nd May, 1784, she appeared on the stage of the Royalty Theatre, in Belvidera. The well-known impassibility of the Edinburgh audience affected Mrs. Siddons with an intolerable sense of depression.
After some of her grandest outbursts of passion, to which no expression of applause had responded, exhausted and breathless, she would pant out in despair, under her breath, “Stupid people, stupid people!” ”

“ The circumstance is not alluded to either by Campbell or Boaden, but is so interwoven with Mrs. Siddons’s existence, and so colours her mode of thought at the time, that it can hardly be passed over.
Mrs. Siddons met Katherine Galindo, author of the libel, at the theatre in Dublin. She was a subordinate actress, and her husband a fencing-master. It is difficult to understand how she can have become so intimate, except that her own perfect sincerity and openness led her to bestow confidence on a variety of persons, many of them not in any way [212] worthy of it. ”

“ I dare not trust myself further. Oh! that you were here, that I might talk to you of [198] her death-bed—in dignity of mind and pious resignation far surpassing the imagination of Rousseau and Richardson in their Heloïse and Clarissa Harlowe; for hers was, I believe, from the immediate inspiration of the Divinity.”
Troubles now began to fall thick and heavy. Mr. Siddons, actuated by a morbid jealousy of his wife’s energy and success, entered into a connection with Sadler’s Wells Theatre without consulting her, or even taking her into his confidence. ”

“ No reformation was ever yet accomplished by the flaccid-minded ones, and we must remember that many of the stories told of his vanity and meanness and her hardness and reserve, were circulated by their enemies on and off the stage, because of their very rigidity and morality. In spite, however, of some passing clouds, never was there a career so [4] admired, a personality so adored in public life, as that of Mrs. Siddons. Whenever she appeared, enthusiastic applause rang through the house, not only on account of her pre-eminent genius, but because of her untarnished private character. ”

“ The nightly stimulus, the mental habit of studying for a certain object, the production of evanescent emotions and transitory effects, must have a deteriorating effect on the noblest disposition. Shrewd Miss Berry, in her Journal, dated February 24th, 1811, mentions a visit she paid at Westbourne. “Mrs. Siddons received me, as she always does, in a manner that flattered my internal vanity, for she has the germ of a superior nature in her, though burnt up by the long-continued brand of popular applause”; and Fanny Kemble writes: “What a price my Aunt Siddons has paid for her great celebrity! ”

“ Conventionality and hardness replaced the old spontaneity and pathos; the action of the arms was more pronounced, the voice was unduly raised, and the deficiency in beauty and charm was supplied by energy and rant. Mrs. Siddons was only two years older than her brother, but her physical and mental gifts had deteriorated much more rapidly. The fact of the sister’s dramatic power having been a natural gift, and his the result of industry and hard work, made hers fail more completely with waning strength. ”

“ From her first burst of indignation when she objects to the Cardinal as her judge, to her last expiring scene, was all so perfectly natural and so touching, we could give no applause but tears. Mrs. Siddons is beautiful even at this moment. Some who had seen her on the stage in this part assured me that it had a much greater effect upon them in a private room, because they were near enough to see the changes of her countenance, and to hear the pathos of her half-suppressed voice. Some one said that, in the dying scene, her very pillow seemed sick. ”

“ It is a tremendous undertaking for so young a creature, and where so perfect a model has been so long contemplated. I was frightened when I yesterday received information of it. Oh! I hope to God he will get well through it. Adieu, dear Muse.”
Henry Siddons soon quitted the stage, married a Miss Murray, daughter of an actor, and herself an actress, and in 1808 became manager of the Edinburgh Theatre. ”

“ The death of her daughter Maria was the first serious grief Mrs. Siddons had known. We have touched on Lawrence the painter’s proposal to her, and the transference of his affection, after a short engagement, to her sister Sarah. Mrs. Siddons did everything she could to soften the blow to the poor deserted girl. We find her writing in desperation to her old friend Tate Wilkinson:—
“My plans for the summer are so arranged that I have no chance of the pleasure of seeing you. ”

“ Siddons continues to be the mode,” Horace Walpole writes, “and to be modest and sensible. She declines great dinners, and says the business and cares of her family take her whole time. When Lord Carlisle carried her the tribute money from Brookes’s, he said she was not maniérée enough. ‘I suppose she was grateful?’ said my niece, Lady Maria.”
It is easy to imagine the difficulty she experienced in keeping her fame untarnished amidst that hotbed of vice, Covent Garden, and amidst all the adulation lavished on her. ”

“ On enquiring in a whisper and with a confidential smirk for Mrs. Siddons, he learned from the maid servant that the lady was in her room, and that Mr. Siddons had not returned from his morning visit to the theatre. The servant stated, however, that Mrs. Siddons had given the strictest orders to admit no one into her presence.
“Ah, discreet as one might have expected,” murmured Dionysius. “She does not mean to run the chance of disappointing me. Which is her parlour, child?”
“It's the first front, yer honour,” said the girl; “but, Lord save yer honour, she'd murther me if I let ye go up. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the ingredients of terror, ambition, and wifely and maternal love, were the uncomplex emotions at first impressed on Mrs. Siddons’s brain by the study of the part; and those were the predominating influences by which she swayed her audience to the last day she acted it.
Many are the records that we have of this great performance—all the world has heard of the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons—but, alas! how insufficient are they to give us an idea of the wondrous reality. ”

“ She was said to be lame, which prevented her going on the stage. In 1783, the year of her great triumph in London, the young actress had the pleasure of reading in all the papers the following advertisement. Under the guise of charity it is easy to see the motive that prompted it, and shows the envy and malignity that pursued her during her career.
Donations in favour of Mrs. Curtis, youngest Sister of Mrs. Siddons.
A private individual, whose humanity is far more extensive than her means, having taken the case of the unfortunate Mrs. ”

“ Siddons's letters do not contain much, but it is generally epigrammatic; "Miss Younge," she writes to Dr. Whalley, "is married to Mr. Pope, a very boy, and the only one she will have by her marriage." In 1786, she says, "We have a great comic actress now, called Mrs. Jordan. She has a vast deal of merit, but, in my mind, is not perfection." What Mrs. Siddons had acquired already by the stage, we learn from her own words: "I have at last, my friend, attained the ten thousand pounds which I set my heart upon, and am now perfectly at ease with respect to fortune." ”

“ The audience certainly gave three rounds of applause, in recognition of her personal character, when Young Norval asked:
But did my sire surpass the rest of men
As thou excellest all of woman kind? But this was a poor substitute for the breathless thrill, the agony of emotion, with which she shook her audience in the old days.
Unfortunately for us and them, players are not immortal. Health, strength, beauty, voice, fail them, and without these adventitious aids genius is of no avail on the stage. Any loss of reputation to an actress like Mrs. Siddons was a loss to the world ”

“ 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. ”

“ Siddons’s noble form seemed to be only the natural mould and receptacle. Her nature seemed always above the circumstances with which she had to struggle: her soul to be greater than the passion labouring in her breast. ”

“ Her husband, William Siddons, died on 11 March 1808 at Bath, where, on account of failing health, he had long dwelt. He was a handsome man, and an actor of some versatility but little talent, who finally abandoned the stage. He is said to have been a good judge of acting, and to have given his wife serviceable advice. They had for some years lived apart without apparently a formal separation. She spoke of Siddons to the last with a certain amount of regard and even of affection, visited him in the winter before his death, and after it took place interrupted her performances for a fortnight. ”

“ Garrick was at this time employed in mounting an abridgment by Colman of Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, and trusting, we conclude, to the statement of his friend Mr. Bate, that the débutante had “a very good breeches-figure,” he selected her for the heroine’s part. The result was a failure. Critics complained of “the confusion, when Mrs. Siddons, disguised in the piece as a woman, revealed herself at the end as a boy.” The Morning Post, edited by Parson Bate, was the only paper that spoke in favour of the attempt. ”

“ It is clear that the anxiety of the Covent Garden managers for her assistance was extinguished by her performance; those talents which they were ready before her appearance to contest with Garrick, they subsequently resigned without an effort to the obscurity of a strolling company. We have a curious corollary to her statement, “that Mrs. Abington told them they were all acting like fools,” in the lately published Memoirs of Crabbe Robinson, in which he relates a conversation he held in 1811 with Mrs. Abington on the subject of Mrs. Siddons. She was by no means warm, he says, in her praise. ”

“ The wretched woman was stung to the quick by the withdrawal of her engagement at Covent Garden, and although Mrs. Siddons advanced a thousand pounds to the husband to buy a share in a provincial theatre, and showed them much kindness, the jealous and infuriated wife published in pamphlet form a wild and libellous attack on the great actress, to which she added the letters that had passed between them in their days of intimacy. ”

“ We have already seen the name of Siddons figuring on the Kemble play-bills, when Sarah was only thirteen years of age. We can imagine, therefore, all the opportunities that the young people had of falling in love, rehearsing together, acting together, with the continual communion of interest brought about by their profession. ”

“ Siddons, with all her graces of form and feature, her magnificence of deportment, her deep-toned, measured voice, and impressive enunciation, was in reality a softened reflection of her more stern, stately, majestic mother, whose genuine loftiness of spirit and of bearing, whose rare beauty, and imperious despotism of character, have often been described to me as absolutely awful,—even her children trembled in her presence.
"All the Kembles," said Sir Thomas Lawrence, "have historical faces;" and for several generations their minds seem to have been cast in a poetical mould. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It must be brought down into the regions of ordinary life, and the only way to accomplish this is to transcribe her actual words and expressions written without thought of publication. We must therefore ask our readers to forgive us for quoting so many of her letters in full. When we attempt to shorten or interpolate, all their easy charm and freshness seems to evaporate.
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in his Lives of the Kembles, has incorporated Mrs. Siddons’s history with that of her brother, John Kemble, and written by far the best biography yet done of the great actress. ”