Time to Go West

The years that had seen the former choirgirl at Emerson's church become a top star had seen its former minister achieve a success no less dramatic. Freed of his pulpit irritations, Ralph Waldo Emerson had risen to national eminence as a lecturer. Of late, his popularity had prompted his making a second tour of Britain, where his quiet manner but highly charged ideas drew throngs of young men to him. Arthur Clough commented that for many of his followers Emerson completed the vision of life that Carlyle had only promised.

For the Carlyles, the intense Mr. Emerson made a difficult guest at Cheyne Row, "face to face and (over-) soul to (over-) soul!" For two days, Jane lived on the "manna" of his speech, but able to bear no more she escaped to her bedroom "to bathe my head in cold water." To Jane, Emerson was a man with two faces, the one, "young, refined, almost beautiful, radiant with--what shall I say? 'virtue its own reward!'" the other, decidedly old, "hatchet-like, crotchety, inconclusive--like the incarnation of one of his poems."¹ Beaten at his own game, the volcanic Carlyle himself shouted his relief when Emerson finally departed. "I was torn to pieces, talking with him, for his sad Yankee rule seemed to be, that talk should go on incessantly except when sleep interrupted it."²

In Manchester, Charlotte invited Emerson to call. Talking to him, it surprised her to find that, for all she owed him as a source of her early courage, his thoughts and poetry now had little to say to her. She could sense no passion in his lines, no parallel at all between his unconventional views and the goals she had set for herself; she could place little faith in his doubts about "consistency," his disdain for public opinion. Transcendentalism now seemed the notion of naïve young men, whereas maturity had led her, a person dependent upon the crowd, to a certain respect for the crowd's values, however much her dress offstage might seem to say different.

Emerson wrote home his pleasure in the Manchester talk with Charlotte; "an agreeable visit it was,"³ he told Lidian, though the pleasure surely centered more in recalling their years on Hanover Street than in any intellectual excitement they still shared. For Charlotte, the visit measured the long strides she had taken since she first climbed the steps into the choir behind Emerson's pulpit. Views she now held would have astonished her fifteen years earlier. To the question, "My dear Miss Cushman, do you read Emerson?" she could now reply, "No."

"Is it possible you do not admire Emerson?"

"Quite possible."⁴ She did not discount, however, the value she placed on the blue-lined souvenir Emerson left in her hands, a signed holograph of his poem, "Rubies."

Practicalities interested her far more than Emerson's generalities. She kept a close eye on the effects Fanny Kemble was creating, especially in "her" roles,⁵ Lady Macbeth and Queen Katharine. If she felt herself threatened, she could hardly regret Macready's disgust with Fanny as Lady Macbeth. "I have never seen any one so bad, so unnatural, so affected, so conceited" and, he added prophetically, so "disagreeable, but her pride will have yet a deeper fall."⁶ Nor could she grieve sincerely over Geraldine's description of Fanny's Julia: "she looked dreadfully thin and worn and was much agitated when she came on . . . much too roug'd (to look well)."⁷ About March, when Fanny decided to concentrate on platform readings from Shakespeare, Charlotte could not hide her satisfaction; she had no interest in that art herself. When Fanny's new popularity enabled her to buy the small house she had wanted in Lenox, Massachusetts, and leave England, Charlotte shed no tears.

A further highpoint of the spring came March 22, when Susan married Sheridan Muspratt amid high ceremony and Mary Eliza's happy tears in Liverpool. At least one daughter was scrubbed clean of the theatre's doubtful greasepaint, able at last to assume a proper role, secure in a home of her own. When the marriage brought hearty approval from Sheridan's London friends, Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens, no one was surprised. Muspratt had taken a beauteous bride. To the elevated circle Susan now entered, the theatre's loss seemed far less momentous than Liverpool's gain of a new social ornament.⁸ For Charlotte, the wedding occasioned a quiet pride, though it lost her a dependable Juliet.

But there were compensations. Proceeding to Manchester, she relished the flattery when a talented hopeful, Sara Coxin, sought her advice. When Sara swore her determination to be a great actress, Charlotte applauded. She filled her letters to Sara throughout succeeding months with trade secrets. Sara must never despise honest labor. "How many there are who have a horror of my profession! Yet I dearly love the very hard work, the very drudgery of it, which has made me what I am."⁹ She must stand her ground with managers. "Value yourself with managers and they will prize you more. Never oblige them, they easily forget favors. Do always what you engage and no more!"¹⁰

Throughout the months preceding the wedding, Charlotte had pondered the question of replacing Susan. If her Romeo had lost its novelty to London, she knew the provinces still clamored for it. Wisdom said keep it ready, but where could she find a dependable Juliet?

In Clifton Hampden, when a tall young woman of twenty-eight knocked on her door, she found her answer. Would Miss Cushman accept an eager pupil? In Matilda Hays, Charlotte immediately recognized a superabundance of feminine charm. With training she might become a perfect Juliet--far more apt and attractive than any stock actress she could expect to meet in her travels. An agreement was reached between them. Having no ties, Matilda could accompany her on the tour; if she followed Charlotte's coaching, she could appear with her in the fall.

The eager pupil became at last an intimate, a spirit as freely capable of friendship as Rosalie Sully. The bond that ripened between them almost eclipsed Charlotte's forthcoming appearance in July with Macready in a command performance before Queen Victoria.

July 10 would celebrate Macready's departure for another American tour, a step that worried his friends deeply. Dickens confessed that Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes had roiled the waters between the United States and England, that his having inscribed one of his popular novels to Macready might pose his friend problems: "I wish to heaven I could undedicate Nickleby until you come home again."¹¹

Nor did Macready find much assurance in the hostile articles he read in "that detestable heap of filth,"¹² the New York Herald, hinting at possible war between the United States and England, or the rumors he heard in April about Charlotte. "Received an insinuation that Miss Cushman was endeavouring to do me mischief in America!"¹³ If Macready could fear Charlotte's mischief, he could hardly expect her gratitude for earlier "favors." On June 29 he received her note "very cavalierly consenting to act Queen Katharine, if her expenses were paid."¹⁴ After dinner at the home of Charles Dickens, where the guests included Susan and Sheridan Muspratt, Macready ripped off a reply to Charlotte, "willingly" dispensing such aid.

For Charlotte, the command to play for the Queen came late, in a sense, in all her British triumphs. She might have wondered if Victoria's unconcern smacked of England's general disdain toward things American if Punch had not twitted Victoria and Albert openly for years for their disinterest in London theatre.¹⁵ And this performance "bespoken" at Drury Lane had taken contriving. A vast circle of Macready's friends had petitioned him to appear in the Queen's presence "in one of the characters of the national drama" to which he had rendered special service. London's social and literary greats had signed it: Bulwer-Lytton, Browning, Monckton Milnes, Carlyle, Hallam, Tennyson, Count Dorsay, Cobden, Charles Kemble, and the like.¹⁶ John Braham, London's beloved tenor, would come out of retirement to sing "God Save the Queen."

Victoria herself did not record her reactions to Henry VIII, but on Charlotte and Macready permanent scars remained. Snorts and groans from the pit and the galleries repeatedly interrupted the early scenes, totally disregarding the brilliance scattered throughout the house, the presence of the royal family--the Queen and Albert, the Queen Dowager, the Duchess of Kent, the Duchess of Cambridge--seated amid flowers in their velvet box. Macready had anticipated some noise, after his criticism a few weeks before of an audience's rudeness to a visiting French company. Fearing retaliation, he had felt relieved when Dickens, who had arranged the benefit, stationed plainclothesmen in the pit lest a disturbance occur.

When commotion broke out, he begged the Queen's permission to address the crowded house, "understanding they were incommoded for want of room,"¹⁷ to ask them please to receive their money and leave. Not until the noise subsided could the play continue, with Charlotte spelling out, against Macready's arrogant Wolsey, the bitter defeat and slow death of a woman and a queen not at all like the imperious young monarch peering down stiffly at her through her jeweled glass.

After the play, a reception in the greenroom for the friends who had petitioned Macready's performance and a formal presentation to the Queen and her Prince Consort rounded out, rather hollowly, an evening that might have been an artistic triumph, royalty's recognition of queenly acting talent. Instead, perhaps because the occasion had gotten off to such an unruly start, Victoria and Albert stiffly expressed their thanks and departed to deep curtseys and polite applause--recalling not at all the high drama Macready had known in 1839 after his Claude Melnotte, when Victoria had bade him approach, smiled her thanks ("I have been very much pleased"), and permitted him to light her way out of the theatre, backing before, with candles held over head.¹⁸ After Henry VIII Macready did the gentlemanly thing for once and published a card expressing his gratitude to Charlotte and the actors who had suffered the ordeal with him.

When Charlotte received word that Captain Marryat had died at age fifty-six, the remembered compliment of his old flirtation in Detroit caused her to smile. The friendship with Marryat had never grown deep, but she could thank him for his early sponsorship in London.

Throughout the spring and summer, she happily shared a portion of Geraldine's fame. Geraldine had made her the prototype for the main character in her new novel, The Half Sisters, a defense of women's rights to love freely, once women proved themselves capable of something more than "simple wifehood." "We are touching on better days when women will have a genuine normal life of their own to lead," cried Geraldine, "no longer feeling their destiny manqué if they remain single." Assertive women like Charlotte Cushman, Jane Carlyle, and herself owed the world no apology: the three, said Geraldine, were actually indications of a development of womanhood, as yet not fully recognized, "of certain higher qualities and possibilities that lie in women." Whatever eccentricities people might see in their ilk were mere "consequences of imperfect formation, immature growth."¹⁹

Though Jane Carlyle protested the book's dedication to herself, decrying it "unfit for circulation in families,"²⁰ Charlotte as the character embodying the novel's main theme accepted the flattery.

She accepted a crested invitation from the Duke of Devonshire to visit his Yorkshire estate near Skipton, to join him for dinner and conversation at his hunting lodge, for long carriage rides past the hedgerows crisscrossing his fields. In the quiet house he turned over to them, she and Matilda spent long hours, "anxious and full of labour," preparing for Matilda's October debut. To mark his pleasure in their visit, the Duke presented Charlotte with a cameo ring and a carved set of chessmen.²¹

Despite her obvious "nerves," Matilda's debut with Charlotte in Bristol on October 16 came off well enough; Matilda's "great nature and force of expression" promised even happier nights ahead. When a London paper declared its certainty that Matilda's fine figure and expressive face would realize her "utmost" hopes, perhaps even "eminence,"²² Charlotte acknowledged a bounding satisfaction; in the long series of engagements that now could follow, who could predict the range of this new friendship?

The friendship ripened into deep attachment. To the dismay of some--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance--she and Matilda soon arranged a bond of permanent affection. As Elizabeth saw it the bond was a "female marriage." "She and Miss Hays have made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other--they live together, dress alike." Wherever Charlotte would go, Matilda would follow. When Elizabeth later remarked to a friend that she found the arrangement strange, the friend assured her, "Oh, it is by no means uncommon."²³ Even Boston had "Boston marriages."

Uncommon or not, Charlotte found within the arrangement a pattern for life that had struggled in the back of her mind ever since her friendships with Charles Spalding and Charley Wiggin in Boston. If it could scarcely offer the intimate rewards of marriage, it supplied a release at last from loneliness. Charlotte's photographs reflected her confidence in the new personal role she had chosen. Posed in a wide bow tie and stiff white shirt buttoned from collar to waist, she heightened the "masculinity" of her manner by the forthright, tailored air of her clothes. When Mary Eliza and the family raised eyebrows, Charlotte stood her ground. Everyone had his own life to lead. Within her code of values, the bond with Matilda made perfect sense and would prevail.

After New Year's, Dublin cheered the new team in The Lady of Lyons. To Charlotte's Claude Melnotte, Matilda was the ideal Pauline. For Miss Hays "we do predict . . . a lofty position,"²⁴ wrote the Theatrical Times in January 1849. Throughout the remaining months of the season, as Charlotte came more and more to relish the new friendship, she and Matilda carried their careers to new acclaim in the provinces. Hull could hardly find words for Meg Merrilies. "It was perfection."²⁵

Aided in her work, companioned in her sympathies, she could bring herself in the spring of 1849 to face again a difficult question. She had succeeded on every British stage that mattered; she could probably repeat her successes endlessly. But with victory behind her, had the time come now to confront new challenges, to attempt further triumphs at home? With Matilda, she could brave at last a return to Philadelphia and the empty chair she would find at Sully's. When she met an able young actor in Liverpool, C. W. Couldock, eager to tour with her in America, perfectly willing as Macbeth and Fazio to pattern his business on hers, she faced the compelling evidence. The time to go home had arrived.

Before she completed her plans, disturbing word reached London the middle of May--Macready's tour through the States had met violence. Throughout the months of the tour, Forrest had busied himself in efforts to embarrass his English rival, broadcasting reports that Macready had created all manner of rudeness against him in England in 1845, that the British press had attacked him repeatedly, had blamed him solely and unfairly for a hiss in Edinburgh that was only one of many that had rained down on Macready. Consequently, when hisses and tossed pennies and a rotten egg greeted Macready in Philadelphia on October 20, the actor had waited until the noise abated, then assured the crowd that he had never shown hostility toward the popular American, even though Forrest had hissed him publicly in Edinburgh, behavior which no American, surely, would condone between artists. Though the booing continued, somebody's shouted "Nine cheers for Macready!" set off a comforting round that had petered out in a few feeble cheers for "Ned Forrest."

To this, Forrest replied with a card in the Philadelphia Public Ledger calling Macready "a superannuated driveller" who had connived on the night of Forrest's first appearance in London with Charlotte Cushman to "hiss me, and did hiss me, with the purpose of driving me from the stage,"²⁶ all of this months before the affair in Edinburgh.

By the time Macready had completed his swing through the South and had arrived in New York, he had become in many American eyes more than an actor, more than a reminder of excellence investing the British stage. He had left New Orleans filled with hatred "for this odious country," where only a helpless minority understood anything about taste, high feeling, or gentlemanly spirit. A drunken ruffian in Cincinnati had hurled half a dead sheep at him. Macready had made new friends, his acting had brought him more than 20,000 pounds, but around him clustered a seething hostility toward England. By May 1849, Forrest's own name had become a battle cry; Macready's, the focal point for many Americans determined to heap on him all their resentment of England, her arrogance, her difficulties over Oregon.

Macready's opening as Macbeth at the new Astor Place Opera House in New York on May 7 foreshadowed events to come. As if to draw the ugly affair to a head, Forrest had engaged to play the same part the same night at another house. A faction of his supporters, organized as a party to attend Macready's performance, set up an abusive cry when he appeared, showered the stage with rotten eggs, asafetida, groans, screams, and catcalls ("Off! Off!") and displayed a banner, "You have ever proved a liar!"²⁷ A rain of apples, lemons, bits of wood, and potatoes accompanied further shouts, "Down with the English hog!"²⁸ A chair from the gallery crashed down on stage; another fell into the orchestra. More followed.

Macready would have dropped his engagement then, had not a group of New Yorkers--among them Herman Melville and Washington Irving²⁹--sent him a long note next day, deploring the riot and "praying him to remain."³⁰ When Macready agreed reluctantly to reappear on May 10, Forrest again posted the same play for the same night and did nothing to stop his fans from issuing notices, organizing meetings, and attempting to buy out the house. Though the Astor Place manager, James H. Hackett, tried to block them, a few still managed to get in.

The performance had hardly begun before the toughs set up a howl--"Get off the stage! Clear out, God damn your English soul! Hoo! Hiss-s-s-s! Three cheers for Ned Forrest!"³¹--and began hurling missiles onto the stage. When police ejected the ringleaders, pandemonium broke loose outside, where 20,000 people had congregated. Fighting the police, picking up loose paving stones in the street, they battered the theatre's doors and broke windows, one rioter shouting, "Burn the damn den of the aristocracy!"³² At this point, the Seventh Regiment and a cavalry troop marched in to take over. In the wild scene that followed, horses panicked, and the New York City Sheriff ordered a volley of shot to be fired over the rioters' heads. Misunderstanding the order to fire over the heads, the soldiers blasted straight into the crowd. When order was at last established, Macready had escaped in disguise into the darkness of Eighth Street, a theatre stood almost wrecked, a city square had been almost denuded of paving stones, an unknown number of men had been injured, and some twenty people lay dead.³³

Reporting the news, the London Times opined that England, proudly, was not so viciously nationalistic; it was gratifying to know that England had applauded Charlotte Cushman to the very echoes, when it might have jeered her for the hotheaded land she came from.³⁴ And the Illustrated London News complimented its readers for separating art and politics, for recognizing the fact that "genius" in Charlotte Cushman was "genius, just as mediocrity in the case of Mr. Forrest"³⁵ was nothing more. Dickens wrote his sentiments to Sheridan Muspratt: "Forrest I take to be a raving madman."³⁶

When the dust finally settled and Macready had sailed for home ("I thank His goodness that I am safe and unharmed"³⁷), Charlotte was left with some open questions. Could she safely brandish the triumph she had achieved on the British stage in the face of such anti-British feelings? Would the frenzied mind of the public abuse her as Macready's protégée? And what about Forrest? What mischief could she expect from him, knowing how deep his resentment of her extended? Could she predict at all the reception she might encounter?

In the end, she knew that running a risk was the only way to an answer. Through Mary Eliza's tears, she tried to explain the factors involved, emphasizing the economics. Surely, if America accepted her at all, it would value her English fame and weight her pockets accordingly. Reassuring Sallie that the summer seas must surely be calmer than the waves they had crossed five years before, she set her course toward home.

A friend and critic shored up her courage for the expected ordeal ahead. Westland Marston looked at her departure as an artistic completion: "She came from America an actress of promise; she returned there one of the leading actresses of her time."³⁸