XXVIII My First Opera — “Peter Parley” — Rachel as “Camille” — Bayard Taylor — T. B. Aldrich — G. P. Morris — Maria Cummins — Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
The three weeks passed in New York on my way home were thronged with novel and enchanting “sensations.” I saw my first opera—Masaniello, and it was the début of Elise Henssler. The party of which I was a member included Caroline Cheeseboro, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich—“Peter Parley.” To my intense satisfaction, my seat was beside the kindly old gentleman.
Was not Parley’s Magazine the first periodical I had ever read? And had not I devoured every book he had written, down to a set of popular biographies for which my father had subscribed as a gift to me on my eighteenth birthday? That I should, really and truly, be sitting at his side and hearing him speak, was a treat I could hardly wait until to-morrow to dilate upon in my home-diary letter. He was social and amusing, and, withal, intelligently appreciative of the music and actors. He rattled away jovially in the entr’actes of other operas and personal traits of stage celebrities, theatrical, and operatic. He told me, too, of how he had been ridiculed for embarking upon a career his friends thought puerile and contemptible, when he issued the initial number of Parley’s Magazine. If I was secretly disappointed that his affection for his juvenile constituency was more perfunctory than I had supposed from his writings, I smothered the feeling as disloyal, and would be nothing short of charmed.
I wrote to my mother next day that he was “a nice, friendly old gentleman, but impressed me as one who had outlived his enthusiasms.” If I had put the truth into downright English, I should have said that the circumstance that he was enshrined in thousands of young hearts as the aged man with a sore foot propped upon a cushion, and whose big heart was a fountain of love, and his brain a store-house of tales garnered for their delectation—was of minor importance to the profit popularity had brought him. I was yet new to the world’s ways and estimate of values.
The next night I saw Rachel in Les Horaces. I had never seen really great acting before. I had, however, read Charlotte Brontë’s incomparable portraiture, in Villette, of the queen of the modern stage. Having no language of my own that could depict what was done before my eyes, and uttered to my rapt soul, I drew upon obedient memory. Until that moment I had not known how faithful memory could be. In the breathless excitement of the last act of the tragedy, every word was laid ready to my hand. I seemed to read, with my subconscious perceptions, lines of palpitating light, the while my bodily sight lost not a gesture or look of the stricken tigress:
“An inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death; fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood; resisted to the last the rape of every faculty; would see, would hear, would breathe, would live, up to, within, well-nigh beyond the moment when Death says to all sense and all being—‘Thus far and no farther!’”
I saw others—some said as great actors—in after years. Among them, Ristori. I do not think it was because I had seen none of them before the Vashti of Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned periods flashed upon my unaccustomed sight, that I still hold her impersonation of Camille in Les Horaces to be the grandest triumph of the tragedian’s art mine eyes have ever witnessed. Ristori was always the gentlewoman, born and reared, in whatever rôle she assumed. Rachel—and again I betake myself to the weird word-painting:
“Evil forces bore her through the tragedy; kept up her feeble strength.... They wrote ‘Hell’ on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood.”
I fancy that I must have been whispering the words as I gathered up my wraps and followed my companions out of the box. I recollect that one or two persons stared curiously at me. In the foyer I was introduced to some strangers, and went through certain civil forms of speech. I did not recollect names or faces when we got back to the hotel. After I was in bed, I could not sleep for hours. But one other actor has ever wrought so mightily upon nerves and imagination. When I was forty years older I was ill for forty-eight hours after seeing Salvini as Othello.
During this memorable stay in New York I met Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of his first call, I rushed to my desk and wrote to my sister:
“He has a port like Jove.
“‘Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: “‘This is a MAN!’”’”
For once my ideal did not transcend the reality. Would that I could say it of all my dream-heroes and heroines! At his second call, Mr. Taylor was accompanied by Richard Henry Stoddard. At his first, he brought Charles Frederick Briggs, journalist and author, whose best-known book, Harry Franco, I had read and liked. I met him but once. Mr. Taylor honored me with his friendship until his lamented death. My recollections of him are all pleasant.
We met seldom, but our relations were cordial; the renewal of personal association was ever that of friends who liked and understood each other. I reckoned it a favor that honored me, that his widow accepted me as her husband’s old acquaintance, and that his memory has drawn us together in bonds of affectionate regard.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then (in 1855) a mere stripling, yet already famous as the author of Babie Bell and Elsinore, poems that would have immortalized him had he not written another line. I came to know him well during my Northern sojourn. His charming personality won hearts as inevitably as his genius commanded admiration. Halleck’s hackneyed eulogy of his early friend might be applied, and without dissent, to the best-belovéd of our later poets. To know him was to love him. The magnetism of the rarely-sweet smile, the frank sincerity of his greeting, the direct appeal of the clear eyes to the brother-heart which, he took for granted, beat responsive to his, were irresistible, even to the casual acquaintance. His letters were simply bewitching—as when I wrote to him after each of us had grown children, asking if he would give my youngest daughter the autograph she coveted from his hand.
He began by begging me to ask him, the next time I wrote, for something that he could do, not for what was impossible for him to grant. He had laid it down as a rule, not to be broken under any temptation, whatsoever, that he would never give his autograph.
“If I could make an exception in the present case, you know how gladly I would do it, only to prove that I am unalterably your friend,
“Thomas Bailey Aldrich.”
He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the born poet clothed him, as with a garment.
George P. Morris I met again and again. With the frank conceit, so permeated with the amiability and naïveté of the veteran songster, that it offended nobody, he told me how Braham had sung Woodman, Spare That Tree, before Queen Victoria, at her special request, and that Jenny Marsh of Cherry Valley was more of an accepted classic than Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch. He narrated, too, the thrilling effect produced upon an audience in New York or Philadelphia by the singing for the first time in public of Near the Rock Where Drooped the Willow, and smiled benignantly on hearing that it was a favorite ballad in our home. He was then associated with N. P. Willis in the editorship of The New York Mirror, and agreed fully with me that it had not its peer among American literary periodicals.
My mother had taken it for years. We had a shelf full of the bound volumes at home. I have some of them in my own library, and twice or three times in the year, have a rainy afternoon-revel over the yellowed, brittle pages mottled with the mysterious, umber thumbmarks of Time.
Colonel Morris’s partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had not yet taken to writing out the name at full length, was at his country-seat of “Idlewild.” He was ten years older when I saw him last, and under circumstances that took the sting from regret that I had not met him when life was fresh and faiths were easily confirmed.
While in Dorchester I had enjoyed improving my acquaintanceship with Maria Cummins. Encyclopædias register her briefly as “An American novelist. She wrote The Lamplighter.” In 1855, no other woman writer was so prominently before the reading public. The Lamplighter was in every home, and gossip of the personality of the author was seized upon greedily by press and readers. Meeting Augusta Evans, of Rutledge and St. Elmo and Beulah, four years thereafter, I was forcibly reminded of my Dorchester friend, albeit they belonged to totally different schools of literature. Both were quietly refined in manner and speech, and incredibly unspoiled by the flood of popular favor that had taken each by surprise. Alike, too, was the warmth of cordiality with which both greeted me, a stranger, whom they might never meet again.
An amusing incident connected with one of Maria Cummins’s visits broke down any lingering trace of strangerhood. She was to take tea at the house of my cousin, Francis Pierce. I was sitting by the window of the drawing-room, awaiting her arrival and gazing at the panorama of Boston Bay and the intervening hills, when an old lady, a relative-in-law of “Cousin Melissa,” stole in. She was over eighty, and so pathetically alone in the lower world that Melissa—the personation of Charity, which is Love—had granted her home and care for several years. She had donned her best cap and gown; as she crept up to me, she glanced nervously from side to side, and her withered hands chafed one another in agitation she could not conceal.
“I say, dearie,” she began, in a whisper, bending down to my face, “would you mind if I was to sit in the corner over there”—nodding toward the back parlor—“and listen to your talk after Miss Cummins comes? I won’t make the least mite of noise. I am an old woman. I never had a chance to hear two actresses talk before, and I may never have another.”
I consented, laughingly, and she took up her position just in time to escape being seen by the incoming guest. We chatted away cheerily at our far window, watching the sunset as it crimsoned the bay and faded languidly into warm gray.
“Summer sunsets are associated in my mind, in a dreamy way, with the tinkle of cow-bells,” observed my companion, and went on to tell how, as a child, living in Salem, she used to watch the long lines of cows coming in from the meadows at evening, and how musically the tinkle of many bells blended with other sunset sounds.
“I have the same association with my Virginia home,” I answered. “So had Gray with Stoke Pogis. But his herd lowed as it wound slowly over the lea.”
“Perhaps English cows are hungrier than ours,” Miss Cummins followed, in like strain. “I prefer the chiming bells.”
We dropped into more serious talk after that. The unseen listener carried off, up-stairs, when she stole out, like my little gray ghost, but one impression of the “actresses’” confabulation. Cousin Melissa told me of it next day. The old lady was grievously disappointed. We had talked of nothing but cows and cow-bells, and cows coming home hungry for supper, and such stuff. “For all the world as if they had lived on a dairy-farm all their days!”
I supped with Miss Cummins and her widowed mother a day or so later, and we made merry together over the poor crone’s chagrin.
It was rather singular that in our several meetings neither of us spoke of Adeline D. T. Whitney. She had not then written the books that brought for her love and fame in equal portions. But she was Maria Cummins’s dear friend, and a near neighbor of the Pierces. When we, at last, formed an intimacy that ceased only with her life, we wondered why this should have been delayed for a score of years, when we had so nearly touched, during that and other visits to my ancestral home.
At our earliest meeting in her Milton cottage, whither I had gone by special invitation, she hurried down the stairs with outstretched hands and—“I cannot meet you as a stranger. My dear friend, Maria Cummins, has often talked to me of you!”
In the hasty sketch of a few representative members of the Literary Guild of America, as it existed a half-century ago, I have made good what I intimated a few chapters back, in alluding to my introductory experience of professional jealousies, which, if cynics are to be credited, pervade the ranks of authors, as the mysterious, fretting leprosy ate into the condemned garment of the ancient Israelite. In all frankness, and with a swelling of heart that is both proud and thankful, I aver that no other order, or class, of men and women is so informed and permeated and colored with generous and loyal appreciation of whatever is worthy in the work of a fellow-craftsman; so little jealous of his reputation; so ready to make his wrongs common property, and to assist the lowliest member of the Guild in the hour of need.
I make no exception in favor of any profession or calling, in offering this humble passing tribute to the Fraternity of American Authors. I could substantiate my assertion by countless illustrations drawn from personal observation, had I space and time to devote to the task. In my sixty years of literary life, I have known nearly every writer of note in our country. In reviewing the list, I bow in spirit, as the seer of Patmos bent the knee in the presence of the shining ones.