Friendships and Grief in England

Though Edinburgh raised little objection now to Charlotte's Romeo--London's approval helped guarantee that--it did not so easily accept the odd clothes she sported. But the matter seemed unimportant; the Combes and their friends were willing to take her as she was. In her man's hat and coat, she delighted again in riding with John Coleman up Calton Hill. The view from its summit encompassed the distant North Sea, the Cheviot Hills ranging to the south, and the rolling green world that made up Scott's Border country. Under the clouds that seemed always to boil up over Edinburgh's skyline, she could agree with Francis Parkman that the expanse around her was one city view that could truly be called sublime.

At rehearsal, she could tuck up her skirts and her petticoats and stride around in her boots while she polished off Tybalt, despite the shocks she might detect in the Edinburgh housewives who wandered in. She could ignore the report that some man had nicknamed her "Charley de Boots," suggesting in her a desire for something indecorous. She would not bother to explain herself. Even Coleman could assume what he pleased: that she had donned her mannish clothes out of pride in her figure.

In Glasgow on May 20, Susan's Juliet was "a quiet, and in some parts a very effective portraiture," but praise for Charlotte's Romeo matched London's: her "fiery energy in bursts of passion"¹ excelled all Glasgow had ever seen in the part.

Offstage, she directed some of her fire to money matters. Macready could mutter about "the woman's perfect inconsistency" in rejecting him, but she now asked for and got the highest salary Liverpool had ever paid any actor except Macready and Edmund Kean. She could keep her own counsel when it came to finances and the need for anyone's patronage. And Susan collected her own share of acclaim for her Marianna in The Wife: "a great performance--the beau ideal of a woman."²

More interestingly for Susan, a love affair with an actor seemed to be brewing, though Geraldine's replies to Charlotte's letters about it brought dire warning. "She will get into a scrape about him if she does not take care. People cannot be so pretty and well dressed as she is, with impunity, down in the provinces." With a moustached sweetheart like this one, "Vesta herself could not stand it!" especially in Liverpool "where the proprieties bite dreadfully."³ Charlotte must use every possible trick to get rid of him.

Sound or not, the advice carried the seeds of a rupture between Charlotte and Susan. In an affair of the heart, no sister ever welcomed another's efforts to "protect" her. Charlotte had made it her business in Edinburgh to clear Susan's name; she assumed that it was now her proper concern to protect it. But she was not long in finding that Susan felt perfectly ready to lead her own life. Charlotte's help at her London debut had been a fine bit of family support. She could appreciate the loyalty in Charlotte that still prompted it, but she had her own life to lead, and it might or might not include Charlotte.

The moustached actor disappeared quickly, but a more eligible suitor, James Sheridan Muspratt, soon took his place. The respectable scion of a Liverpool manufacturing chemist, a founder of the British chemical industry, Sheridan plied them with invitations. Like his father, young Muspratt had a deep interest in all the arts. Dickens and Sheridan Knowles were family friends; Sheridan's name reflected the depth of the latter friendship. The Muspratts delighted in entertaining the best names in British society under their gabled roofs or at garden parties on the lawns of their country estate, Seaforth Hall. Its slopes took in a wide view of the Welsh mountains; the perfection of its lawns and gardens typified the elegance of Liverpool's wealthiest class. With its fogs and the black smoke polluting its skies, Liverpool might leave much to be desired, but flowered estates like Seaforth were "regal paradises."⁴ Meeting Sheridan Muspratt was the shining event of the Liverpool run.

Unbeknown to her, in Birmingham Charlotte unforgettably impressed a fellow actor. At rehearsal, Fred Belton had seen a very plain woman wearing a common brown dress, a black bonnet, and a paisley shawl glide toward him "snake-like," then, swooping like an eagle, pounce upon him with hurried explanations of business in the different scenes. Belton supposed she was the mother of the star--"mother professionals, as a rule, are objectionable when doing duty for their daughters." But he soon discovered his mistake; this Charlotte Cushman was no common metal. The vain creature would never dare, thought Belton, to go on as Julia; still, she had a "devilish deal of stuff about her!" Twelve o'clock at night must come at last; "that's one comfort."

When curtain time came, Belton was standing in the wings ready for his garden scene with Julia when he saw a girlish figure with delicate flowing locks, wearing a broad-brimmed garden hat, white muslin gown, and a pink sash glide to his side. Belton gazed at her, amazed. Mind and makeup had mastered face, form, figure, and voice. Throughout the play Belton was so carried away he barely remembered his cues. And one was especially important. In rehearsal, Charlotte had instructed him to answer an octave above her when she cried, "Can these nuptials be shunned with honour?" During the performance, when Belton reached his proper octave, Charlotte ascended an octave above that, "Then take me!"

The applause was "rapturous." In his excitement Belton squeezed "like grim death" until Charlotte whispered gruffly in his ear, more "like a coalheaver than a lovelorn damsel": "If you squeeze me so tight, I shan't get breath for my next speech."⁵

Returning to London, she and Susan found that, in April, Gansevoort Melville had died suddenly. His death cast a pall over the Bayswater cottage that only grew worse in the heat of a stifling June, the sultriest month on record. Theatres could hardly stay open as crowds of people fled to the parks and the steamers on the Thames in a vain effort to escape London's "cauldron-heat." Playing to a wilting audience at the Haymarket on the twenty-fifth in Twelfth Night, she and Susan were doubly flattered when the boxes tossed them bouquets.

Clearly, the time had come for a holiday. As for next season's plans, Charlotte had none. To Webster she could only remark, "All novelty of my acting Romeo is rubbed off," which was partly a way of saying she was too exhausted to find excitement in acting at all. The thing to do now was pay a leisurely visit to Geraldine in Manchester and catch her breath. The rest of the summer she could afford to be idle.

Through Geraldine she at last met a woman about whom she had long been curious. "Self-invited to meet me," Jane Welsh Carlyle came at one o'clock and stayed until eight. "And such a day I have not known! Clever, witty, calm, cool, unsmiling, unsparing, a raconteur unparalleled, a manner unimitable, a behavior scrupulous, and a power invincible." Jane Carlyle might be plain, even unattractive, but she was an "unescapable woman,"⁶ a combination rare and strange.

With her hair smoothed tight over her ears, accentuating her sharp nose and black eyes, Jane Carlyle's quick tongue and candor hardly made her a woman to trust; one might not like her at first, but one could not forget her. Jane's intense meeting with Charlotte and the correspondence that followed were a symptom of disturbance at Cheyne Row. Once in 1844 Jane had threatened to leave Thomas. Again the next year she had written him: "Husbands are so obtuse! . . . want always to be 'treated with the respect due to genius,' exact common sense of their poor wives rather than 'the finer sensibilities of the heart,'" and so their marriage had come to "what ye see--if not precisely to 'immortal smash' as yet, at least to within a hair's breadth of it!"⁷

Yet Jane was no angel. She labeled herself "a brimstone of a creature,"⁸ not at all the decorative hostess her lantern-jawed spouse wanted. Once when a strange man had accosted her rudely on a dark London street, Jane sniffed, "Idiot," and calmly moved on. When a visit to a house in the country bored her, she datelined her letters, "Hell."⁹ After twenty years of marriage, she could still tell a friend, "I can't bear to be thought of only as Carlyle's wife."¹⁰ At age forty-four, Jane Welsh Carlyle was a forthright spirit that Charlotte, at thirty, fully approved.

The chance to know Jane better in London remained a bright prospect as Charlotte took her leave and moved on to Malvern in Worcestershire for a long rest and the much-touted "water cure" of its springs. Taking the cure, she read with pleasure Mary Howitt's article about her in The People's Journal for July. Of all the reams about Charlotte Cushman that had appeared in the English press, Mary's article best recognized her as a person, its praise implying an attack on the "shriveled souls" of Edinburgh who had questioned her garb and her morals. "All artist-life, and that of the actor among them, requires for its full perfecting the highest powers of human nature--the resistance of temptation, self-denial, and purity of life." In time to come, these virtues would be recognized as the central strength of the greatest geniuses. "It is because we recognize in Miss Cushman an approach to our ideal of the greatly pure in art that we regard her as one of its noblest representatives." Nobly gifted, Miss Cushman "takes a noble view of her art." Her acting was not merely imitative; it was "action: the very action of nature, and therefore it is always true."¹¹

The routine at Malvern was rigorous--"I hope you had good medical sanction before you ventured yourself upon it,"¹² wrote Geraldine--but it worked. Treatment began before seven, when she stepped into warm water for a regular bath, then onto a slab for a rubbing ("It sets every nerve and pore in your skin on to the full gallop of doing their duty"¹³) and an hour's sleep flat on her stomach. After another bath and a ten-minute rub, "till you are as red as a rose," she went for a walk before breakfast.

The eager walkers and runners who passed her might have escaped from a Dickens novel. Dickens was no believer in the Malvern treatment, but he could describe those who were: "O Heaven, to meet the Cold Waterers dashing down the hills, with severe expressions on their countenances, like men doing matches and not exactly winning! Then, a young lady in a grey polka going up the hills regardless of legs; . . . [and] an old man who ran over a milk-child, rather than stop!--with no neckcloth, on principle; and with his mouth wide open, to catch the morning air."¹⁴

After lunch came more bathing, a cold-water wash of the spine for four minutes ("making your brain feel as suddenly fine and clear as if it had been changed in a second from curds to spun glass"), then a "lamp bath" seated on a wooden chair, more scrubbing and rubbing, and a cold shower. After a sitz bath at 5:30 she had dinner and went early to bed. When Carlyle tried it, he grumbled, "I found water taken as a medicine to be the most destructive drug I ever tried."¹⁵ But for Charlotte, Malvern's "electric" air and its springs amid the elaborate gardens and climbing roses brought peace to the flesh, bliss to the nerves.

A jaunt up to Yorkshire with Eliza Cook rounded out the summer interim. When their host, William Forster, gave Charlotte a bolt of steel-blue alpaca from his textile mill, she had it made into identical dresses for herself and Eliza in "masculine style, tight-fitting bodice, lapelled, showing shirt front and ruffles."¹⁶ She regaled her hosts with the Irish stories she had picked up in Dublin, and, seated at Forster's piano, she half-sang, half-uttered her way through the collection of songs that always delighted her London guests.

Throughout her months in England, a few verbal supporters at home watched Charlotte's career take shape. To the Brooklyn Eagle's editor, Walt Whitman, Charlotte Cushman was the actress of all his hopes. Totally American, the product of pioneer stock that had braved the hostile Atlantic, she fulfilled Whitman's vision of the nation's artistic potential. Standing up against all adversity, she had declared to the world her intention to become truly herself. She carried her own destiny as she saw it. To Whitman, in her success there was a message uniquely American.

A comment in the New York News had touched off his cries: "What an idea" placing Charlotte Cushman second to Mrs. Kean in the scale of talent in the dramatic art. "Mrs. K. is a pleasing actress; but C. C. is probably the greatest performer on the stage 'in any hemisphere.'"¹⁷ Next day he was still outraged: Not only was Charlotte Cushman vastly superior to Ellen Tree Kean, but it was an insult to compare her with anyone. "Charlotte Cushman is no 'second Siddons': she is herself, and that is far, far better! From what we have seen and heard . . . C. C. is ahead of any player that ever trod the stage." Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree, Macready, Kean, Kemble--all had, or had had, their merits; their acting had afforded many a rich treat for an audience. But Miss Cushman "bears away the palm from them all."

"We don't know how others may think; but we consider it a shame," wrote Whitman, "that such a woman as Charlotte Cushman should ever have been allowed to be superseded by the fifth rate artistic? trash that comes over to us from the Old World." In his judgment, New York had seen Charlotte Cushman throw more genius into the Widow Melnotte than had any number of stars from England's tired "Theatre Royals."¹⁸

Charlotte pondered such American comments. Had the time come to go home? London fame had already paid off in Britain's provinces. Who could predict how well it might pay off on American boards? She filled her letters to Rosalie with speculations. In the end, in spite of her temptation to return without anymore agonizing delay to Rosalie, she knew that remaining in England held the greater wisdom.

Macready's diary gives a clue to further matters on Charlotte's mind this fall of 1846. "Note from Miss Susan Cushman, wanting to separate from her sister, and ally herself professionally with me!"¹⁹ During the interview that followed, Macready endeavoured "to persuade her of the mutual folly of herself and sister separating, but urging her to conciliate and succumb rather than part."

Susan had reasons for wishing to be independent. In America, she had made a name independent of Charlotte's. She had acted a roster of parts that New York and Philadelphia had applauded. Tyrone Power had praised her "racy humor and love of fun," her clever support in his comedy pieces. The London Sun's homage to her Juliet now was surely a matter to note: "the most lady-like representation of the most lady-like character that Shakespeare ever drew."²⁰

To be known in England as "Miss Cushman's sister" was hardly her idea of proper success. When the matter came to open discussion, Charlotte could not dispute the logic. Nor could she honestly encourage Susan to go her own way. Success had crowned them together; could they hope to do better apart? Why not let time make the decision? In the meantime, steady letters from James Sheridan Muspratt indicated that time might have an ally.

Back in London, Charlotte pursued all the civilized delights the city could offer. Invitations soon guided her to the nearby village of Chelsea, to the Cheyne Row house of the Carlyles, "a right old strong roomy brick house," Carlyle called it, with a heavy front door that had opened to most of the literary and artistic greats of the age.

Being Jane's guest was not easy. Actresses did not often enter her doors. Fanny Kemble, for one, was much "too green room all over"²¹ to suit Jane's taste, and while Macready came frequently, there was less interest in him as actor than in his wide-ranging conversational powers. Almost in spite of himself, Carlyle demanded the lead in any group; he had long ago set Jane straight on that point--"I must not and I cannot live in a house of which I am not head"²²--though in his more genial moments he confessed a sympathy for Jane. Beside him "any other woman might have gone mad."²³

Firmly set in his mahogany chair, his blue eyes flashing, Carlyle held court, and the visitor who hoped to utter a word soon learned he must squeeze it into one of the rare pauses in Carlyle's verbal torrents. Emerson ranked Carlyle with "immense" talkers like Samuel Johnson. "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt-end."²⁴

Browning had brushed against Carlyle's monologues. At tea, when the kettle boiled and Carlyle talked on and on, making no move to hand it to Jane, Browning had fetched it himself and filled the teapot for her, then stood by her table, holding the smoking kettle. "Can't you put it down?" asked Jane suddenly. Confused, Browning had popped it down on the carpet. When Jane exclaimed, horrified, Browning snatched it up quickly; a brown oval mark was burned in the new rug. At last, Carlyle stopped long enough to rescue him. "Ye should have been more explicit,"²⁵ he told Jane.

"No mortal in America could pretend to talk with Carlyle,"²⁶ said Emerson. Nor did Charlotte seriously try. The real point of her visits was the woman who quietly managed on the edge of her husband's tempests to attract no little attention to herself. When Margaret Fuller visited Jane in November, she sympathized. "She is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and charming," but "Who can speak while her husband is there?"²⁷ Leigh Hunt appreciated her; their neighbor had made her forever young and charming in "Jenny Kissed Me."

Jane held her own court in her drawing room overlooking the street. In time, friends who came to visit Carlyle often remained, as Charlotte said of herself, to worship at the feet of his wife. And unlike her thundering husband, Jane could listen as well as speak--uttering her satirical stabs in a soft Scottish voice, telling witty stories, falling into a sort of "creative silence" when she sensed another voice wished to be heard. Her upbringing had prepared her to meet a man's conversation point for point.

One of Jane's regular guests, whom Charlotte often met, was the Italian revolutionary, Giuseppe Mazzini, a slim dark man in his early forties, with a "spiritual" face, a noble forehead, and sad eyes, who talked intently of the bright days ahead when Italy would at last be unified, free of the foreign yokes it still struggled under. Carlyle dismissed his hopes as "rose water imbecilities,"²⁸ but Jane took his defense. "These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death."²⁹

Other political figures found their way to Jane's door and into Charlotte's friendship. Louis Blanc, the French revolutionary, remembered Charlotte's Mrs. Haller from the year before but lacked enough English to tell her about it.

Away from the excitement at the Carlyles', Charlotte relaxed with her red-headed friend, Henry Chorley. An "irritable, nervous" creature at times, Chorley could be kind and affectionate to his friends, though Edward Fitzgerald was certain that when Chorley died, "the Angels must take care to keep in tune when he gets among them."³⁰ Chorley could pen memorable lines. His hymn "God the Omnipotent, King Who Ordainest," written in 1842, would soon find itself in the Anglican hymnal; one day its phrase "God give us peace in our time" would gain fame in another context. Together, he and Charlotte spent rare leisure hours rummaging through London shops or sat, inconspicuous in the shadows, observing another actor's efforts--even if doing so filled Charlotte at times with doubts about her own talent.

Watching the great French tragedienne Rachel in July filled her with wonder, even if she could not follow the language. No actress she had ever seen could delineate the darker passions--hatred, revenge, seething jealousy--with a force comparable to Rachel's. While her Jewish face lacked ordinary beauty and sweetness, it held the appeal of a wondrous sadness. If she did not melt an audience to tears, she could suggest profoundest truth, rising simply and austerely above lesser elements around her. Her magnificent voice conjured up Greek poetry and sculpture, "the spirit of antiquity made manifest in the flesh," the vision Praxiteles captured in marble.³¹ As Phedre, Browning called her "exquisite." After she had taken the poison, exhaustion and paralysis slowly enveloped her; sadly, coldly, calmly, she submitted to Fate. Her force and terrible naturalness almost suffocated her audience.

Transfixed in the presence of such grandeur, such genius, Charlotte could only think of her own efforts as mere posturing, mere sketches compared to Rachel's "unapproachable art." Leaving the theatre, the enchantment left her. Doubts of her talent engulfed her. "Despair took possession of me, and a mad impulse to end life and effort together."³²

Talk at the Carlyles' during the autumn of 1846 centered on Browning's Wimpole Street coup. Speaking of Barrett's tyranny over his daughter Elizabeth, Anna Jameson herself may have planted the seed of action. "Can nothing be done to rescue her from this?"³³ she had asked Robert. Browning's taking the reins and rescuing Elizabeth, marrying her, and, after Mrs. Jameson joined them in Paris, taking her to the restorative climate of Italy had brought a happy glow to the Cheyne Row regulars. Elizabeth reported the "delightful" letter that had come from Carlyle; not for years had a marriage occurred in his circle in which he so heartily "rejoiced."³⁴

When Charlotte and Susan took Romeo and Juliet on tour in September, the London Theatrical Times cheered them forward with words that rang "the miraculous success" Charlotte had made in England. "Mentally and physically in the present day, we have no English performer able to compete with her."³⁵

In late December the tour took them again to Liverpool. For New Year's, Sheridan Muspratt invited them to Seaforth Hall for a fancy dress ball. Beginning at nine, a line of carriages began rolling slowly up to the Hall's wide doors and, in the light of tall flares, disgorging their passengers. By ten, more than 180 guests had gathered in rooms lit with wax candles and decorated, amid the statuary and paintings, with Christmas greens and mistletoe. Costumes followed the wildest whims; some of the guests, like Charlotte, even came prepared to change several times.

In the Liverpool Journal's account, Charlotte's name and a description of her garb headed the list. As Claude Melnotte, her "gallant bearing attracted much notice and many jests." Later, she appeared costumed for two other roles, while "the beautiful Miss Susan Cushman" came dressed as a French marchioness, "her dress being of the most recherché kind." Another prominent guest, Geraldine Jewsbury, came as a Spanish Lady, and various Muspratt women were Turks, Greeks, Cracovians, and flower girls. Several "old English gentlemen" sported buckled shoes, powdered wigs, and cocked hats.

During the dancing, "an obstinate bachelor of our acquaintance," remarked the Journal, "declared he never felt himself in so much 'danger' before."³⁶ If the obstinate bachelor was Sheridan Muspratt, his defenses were down before the evening was over. If his engagement to Susan was not accomplished that night, it was formally sealed soon after.

During her run at the Adelphi, Charlotte Cushman could give the swains of Liverpool food for thought, said the Mercury. As the love-impassioned Claude Melnotte, she made "love-making, as practiced by the other sex, appear a very stale, flat, and unprofitable affair."³⁷ As for Susan's Pauline, the pride with which she surveyed her prince, her burst of rage, scorn, and despair on discovering his terrible trick was given "with beautiful effect."

Before leaving Liverpool, Charlotte enjoyed a reunion that eleven years before would have seemed like the wildest dream. Mary Ann Wood had come out of retirement to sing at a concert, and Charlotte's meeting with her at the concert hall rekindled their old friendship and gave her a long-awaited opportunity to say thank you for the early confidence and advice to keep "practicing steadily,"³⁸ those distant years in Boston. And she took a fiendish delight in rejecting another offer from Macready, who had expressed "a very great desire"³⁹ to have her play with him at the Princess's.

But in the midst of her joys, a letter from Philadelphia brought the news that Rosalie Sully was dead. At twenty-five, her friend of all friends was suddenly gone and with her had vanished her dearest dream. Without Rosalie's delight at her success, without Rosalie's smile to welcome her home, what good was victory? Rereading the terrible words, she withdrew into long silence. Locked in grief, she recalled the day Augustus' death had "sent the waters" over her soul. But by now, Charlotte had proved to herself that she could master her tears. The lesson learned in Albany must rescue her now.

She threw herself into another six weeks of work in Dublin, then into a tour of Limerick, Cork, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Dundee, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield, Hull, Birmingham, and Manchester. When she closed in Liverpool, she and Susan rested a week at Seaforth Hall. Then she persuaded Susan to tear herself away from Sheridan and go with her to Paris. But back in England, she dropped her guard and let herself be heartsick at last. Collapsed at Malvern, she would bide her time until reason or faith should tell her to think about acting again.