Work and Idleness

Charlotte lost no time in contracting with J. B. Buckstone for a January run at the Haymarket. To put herself back in harness as quickly as possible, she hurried out to Liverpool in early December to fill an engagement--and relish again the sound of the heavy curtains sweeping open, the sudden hush that fell over the audience, then the great burst of applause as she came on stage.

Playing all her old roles was like putting on familiar old clothes. Acting was life; she had been foolish ever to doubt it. At her invitation, various Muspratts came backstage to watch her make up. Sheridan's brother Edmund hardly believed her skill in makeup, a skill that turned healthy cheeks and strong arms into those of a gaunt, disheveled, old gypsy. From out front, her singing and acting achieved such naturalness that Edmund scarcely remembered her as "the Charlotte Cushman so familiar to us off the stage."¹

In the hurry that went with all this return to action, Charlotte failed to read carefully a letter that came from her business agent, Louis Harlan, in Philadelphia. Back in October, Harlan had sent her a check for $3,000 and the promise of more when he sold some of her Philadelphia land. Now, Harlan wrote, if the agreement between them was still satisfactory, she must sign the enclosed power of attorney and return it immediately; he could then manage her affairs even more profitably. At the moment, fascinated with her work, Charlotte lightly skimmed the document's wording, then quickly scrawled her name to the bottom of the page. Unaware of its implications, she mailed it--then rushed off to rehearsal.

She spent Christmas with the Muspratts at Rose Hill. Since 1849 Susan and Sheridan had become the parents of two other daughters, and to Charlotte's joy, Susan had named one of them Rosalie. Playing with Ida, Rosalie, and Mabel, Charlotte counted again her blessings, then made it a point to renew an old American acquaintance. Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently become the United States Consul in Liverpool, and at his office the day after Christmas she thanked him for consenting to pose for the portrait, then told him she hoped soon to call on his wife at their quarters in Rock Park across the Mersey. Immediately, Hawthorne insisted she come for dinner on the twenty-ninth and remain overnight.

Hawthorne's stuccoed house stood near the top of a winding wet street, its dooryard filled with dripping shrubbery. At the door, Sophia Hawthorne and the three small children greeted her, their wide eyes shining, awed at the presence that loomed above them. Sophia quickly warmed to her--to her "very untheatrical" manner and bearing, as Sophia described her later, so dignified "that I should never suspect her to be an actress."²

Over dinner, if Hawthorne complained of the irksome chores his job as Consul demanded, if he grumblingly called Liverpool a "black hole," he spent most of his time questioning Charlotte about Rome and gently chiding her about her apparent intent to stay single. Rather saucily, Charlotte invited him to realize that the state of her heart was nobody else's business, but she promised to consider again the "fate matrimonial"³ he recommended. As for Rome, it was paradise compared to the gloomy wet skies and malodorous fog that Liverpool suffered in winter. Recalling her rides out on the sunny Campagna, gathering great bunches of spring anemones and violets, Charlotte realized suddenly that her memories of Rome were becoming almost happy. After dinner, Charlotte let the Hawthorne children--Una, Julian, and Rose--climb up in her lap to finger the tiny gold charms⁴ she wore on her chain--the little enameled palette, the easel holding a tinted landscape, the tragic and comic masks, the tiny dagger, the small opera glass, the little gold harp with strings--then regaled them with stories about how she had gotten them from friends in Florence and Rome and New Orleans and London.

Next morning, Charlotte seated herself at Una's piano and sang one of Lockart's Spanish ballads so well that she made Sophia's blood "tingle." On the seven-year-old Julian she registered her greatest impact, not so much for the entrancing stories she told him and his sisters as for what he called later "her hearty good-will in bending her great and gracious self" to an urchin who leaned "rapt" against her knees. "I had never seen a theatre, and did not know what an actress was, but I loved her."⁵

Late in the day, Julian watched their visitor disappear slowly down the steep street as his father escorted her to the Liverpool ferry. Years later, he would recall the "love madness" that Charlotte had enkindled in him that day. As a grown man, looking at her photograph, he would counter the charge that Charlotte Cushman was a homely woman: "Well, of course a photograph never does one justice." Her nose wasn't classic perhaps. But the power and splendor in her face "took captive your soul."⁶

And seeing Charlotte safely aboard, Hawthorne himself began planning the letter he would write George Ticknor in Boston about "the night Miss Cushman dined and spent the night with me (that is, in my house)."⁷

When she opened in London in January 1854, Charlotte felt a double joy that she had never foolishly told England good-bye. Shrewdly, she appeared now, after an absence of five years, in the old vehicle that had first caused London to welcome her into its arms. Bianca in Fazio served her splendidly. The Illustrated London News greeted her with the fervid words she was used to: "We welcome most heartily this reappearance of Miss Cushman, with powers evidently not diminished, but, as its strikes us, increased."⁸ If some critics praised her "power of will," her "intense strength," while lamenting her "lack of womanliness," Charlotte told herself that it was her womanly heart that had prompted her return to acting at all. And for all her "lack of womanliness" Buckstone extended her contracted twelve nights to the forty the public demanded.

Acting three nights a week--sometimes as Meg, sometimes as Romeo, sometimes as Queen Katharine--at a fee that made Buckstone wince, she had regained by the end of the run her strong sense of purpose. The top critics had crowned her Katharine the best "I had ever done in the way of artistic excellence."⁹ In that role at least, she had been everything "womanly, queenly, pathetic, and gentle." The Times found her Meg elevated by genius "into the highest rank of tragedy"¹⁰; another paper had seen "what the unassisted resources of acting may achieve with the mere idea of a fine part." In Miss Cushman's acting, said its critic, human tenderness blended with an "Eastern picturesqueness of gesture." She made the refined sentiment beneath Meg's heavy feebleness and clumsy old age "wonderfully startling."¹¹

Acting again, reading the critics, Charlotte felt quietly happy, in spite of the fickle Matilda. As if to fill that emptiness, she found herself the toast of a circle that now included, not merely fashionable people, but clever artists and scholars. Composers, singers, and creative intellects flocked to the Tuesday receptions with which she filled her beautiful rooms at 4 Earl Terrace in Kensington. Greeting them at her door, it gratified her to hear that her coming again to the London stage brightened the gloom that had settled upon them in February over the approach of war in the Crimea. After one especially brilliant Macbeth, the Duke of Devonshire presented her with a gold and onyx dagger to use whenever she played in London.

Later, when Matilda returned to London, contrite and sorrowful, Charlotte received her coldly; then reading the questioning fear in Matilda's eyes, she held out her hands. Strength could forgive a weakling. Now that she had found again her own purpose, Charlotte felt only compassion for anyone who found life such a constant loss. Matilda had come back--"never again perhaps to be what she once was to me, but still, perhaps, better for us both that I am not so dependent upon her."¹²

Matured and wiser, paying calls with Matilda, finding Matilda waiting up for her on the nights she came home tired from acting, Charlotte felt easy again. Now she could devote her leftover energies to riding or driving her elegant new phaeton along the curving ways in Hyde Park.

And she remembered her promise to Henry Chorley. When the timid little playwright screwed up his courage again and asked her to bring out his Duchess Eleanour, the eagerness in his deep-set eyes, the gentleness in his small hands, challenged her sympathy. Rereading the play, she found the story of medieval intrigue impressive enough, and its central character, driven by mental torture to the brink of suicide, offered strong possibilities. Rehearsals and Browning's recent letter to Chorley saying he "confidently" expected to see it succeed deepened her hopes. But after playing it only two nights in early March, she and Chorley knew that Duchess Eleanour had failed. The Times critic blamed its muddy development of character, though Miss Cushman, he said, had played "finely."¹³ Reading the verdict, Charlotte was left with a puzzling thought. No role she had ever "created" had struck fire.

From time to time word reached her of Hattie Hosmer's growing success in Rome, a matter of friendship as much as art. On a recent trip south, the Brownings had taken a shine to Hattie; Elizabeth called her "a great pet of mine and of Robert's," in spite of the eccentric life this perfectly "emancipated female" led, dining alone at the cafes "precisely as a young man would."¹⁴ It pleased Charlotte to hear that another friend had impressed Browning. Writing John Forster ("Do you know,--you must,--Miss Cushman?"), Browning insisted that he call on the actress to see her pictures by William Page--"as noble a fellow as his works show him."¹⁵

In May, Charlotte left London for a run through Birmingham and Sheffield as far north as Yorkshire, where in sudden disgust with the local talent, she let herself assume for a moment the haughty air of a London star. When she learned at rehearsal that an actor barely out of his teens would play Henry VIII to her Katharine, she stopped the business immediately: "What! This youth, this slip of a man play Henry the Eighth!"

When the manager explained that this actor was the only man available, Charlotte went along with the plan only after she made it clear that such a Henry doomed the play to laughable failure. But during the performance, when Henry proved himself more than adequate, even skilled in some scenes, she regretted that she had been hostile toward him. Next morning she stopped the rehearsal, then looked across to the young man. "Mr. Hamilton," she called, "I was guilty of a great rudeness to you yesterday, and more than that I was as unjust as I was impolite. You held your tongue like a gentleman. I should not feel easy in conscience if I did not make my apology to you in as open a manner as possible."¹⁶

In June, sad word from Liverpool rekindled other dark memories. Susan had hoped to join her in Paris for a round of classical French theatre and dress fittings, but when Ida died suddenly, Charlotte cut short her Paris holiday and rushed to Liverpool. She added her tears to the family's, then helpless and filled again with the wave of grief that Augustus' death had left her, she went back to London and poured out her sympathy in long letters. "I grieve from my heart, dear Sue, for all your sadness and depression; but can you not think that God's will is best . . . that the taking away of this lovely child was for some good and wise purpose, though through our earthly eyes we cannot recognize it?"

In 1837, she would have read such words with shudders of disbelief, yet now she could look back at that distant April, calm in the knowledge that out of Augustus' death and later ones she had created a life and an art. If Susan suffered Ida's death to be "a means of bringing you nearer to God and heaven, you will find in time that it will prove a tender rather than harrowing sorrow, and you will be indeed saying, 'Thy will be done.'"¹⁷

One happy note had brightened the dark days with Susan. A Liverpool friend who had recently visited Ned in Annapolis had found him a stunningly handsome young man, completely happy in his studies. Reading Ned's recent letters to Susan, leafing through the pictures in Susan's fat albums, Charlotte regretted again that she could not be vitally involved in Ned's life--that however much she filled her days with good work and silly females and the praise of strangers, she could not replace a hunger for family.

In the fall, after filling commitments in Dublin and the provinces, she engulfed herself again in London's social whirl. When she visited Brighton, the guest of the Duke of Devonshire, she read for his large assembly the whole of Henry VIII and became excited with the idea that someday, if she ever thoroughly tired of playing with local actors, she might follow Fanny Kemble's lead and make a career on the reading platform. But just now, a greater interest concerned the home she wanted in London. To be an active hostess again, however much she privately confessed that society's heart was hollow, she needed a proper house.

The four-story Georgian structure she finally bought in Mayfair stood at 1 Bolton Row, on the corner of Piccadilly across from the Green Park. The house was convenient to the theatres where she would be working, as well as to the homes and clubs of people she expected to entertain. On its high paneled walls, she could already envision the paintings she would bring from Rome, among them the Page portrait, his "Venus," and his copy of Raphael's "Madonna of the Chair." From her high windows overlooking the park, she could imagine herself in some wild stretch of the Adirondacks--except that these trees were so neatly grand and aloof, with fat lambs frolicking over the velvet grass. In the distance the Gothic towers of Parliament and Westminster Abbey were proof enough that this was really the heart of London. Once she finished hiring a staff to supplement Sallie, she set herself to writing her invitations.

With Sallie to see to her needs, with an English butler--a haughty sort named Wilmot--to direct the household, she could fake worry about the cost of it all, though part of the fun of this life was the knowledge that she could afford it. "I am as tired as I should be if I had--nothing to do," she wrote a friend. "I have made up the housebills each week in ten minutes, but have no money left to pay them with, my fortune is exhausted, all my trinkets up the spout, and I expect every day to be arrested for debt. . . . Wilmot finds me 'the easiest, but the most forgetfullest of missusses.' I go out and forget to order the dinner, and am followed to the carriage door for 'Horders, please, mem.'"¹⁸

She tore herself away from the joy of equipping her house long enough to play another brief run through the provinces. In Sunderland, she gave a quick acting lesson to a talent that was clearly not run-of-the-mill. Rehearsing Guy Mannering, she was struck by Bertram, played by a young man named Henry Irving, and she passed on to him a trick she had learned from Macready. Irving must learn to let his thoughts show plainly before he put them into words. After the performance, she gave him further advice. His handing Meg a purse filled with broken crockery was all wrong. True, it would clink like gold when she flung it in disgust to the ground, but the scene could be played with deeper meaning. "Instead of giving me that purse, don't you think it would be much more natural if you had taken a number of coins from your pocket and had given me the smallest? This is the way one gives alms to a beggar and it would have added greatly to the realism of the scene."¹⁹ When Henry Irving later became the acknowledged heir to Macready's crown in England, he paid full tribute to the early lead he had gotten from Charlotte Cushman.

At Buckstone's behest, in December 1855, Charlotte played another run at the Haymarket as Queen Katharine and Romeo, "always an event on which to congratulate the playgoer," said the Illustrated London News, but other critics were less complimentary. Douglas Jerrold in Lloyd's cried that if Charlotte's Romeo was "full of flame, it is the flame of phosphor--it shines but it does not burn. We could as soon warm our hands at a painted fire."²⁰ A visiting German was impressed even less. In town to conduct the London Philharmonic, Richard Wagner liked the play's setting and costumes, but Romeo himself seemed a "curious illusion." After the first act he told his companion how surprised he was at "their giving the part of Romeo to an old man, whose age must be at least sixty, and who seemed anxious to retrieve his long-lost youth by laboriously adopting a sickly-sweet, feminine air." When his companion checked the names in the cast, he cried, "Donnerwetter, it's a woman!"²¹

If Charlotte ever learned Wagner's reaction, she recalled one of her early reasons for doing Romeo in London when no able actor looked young enough for the part. Reading Jerrold, she asked herself now, at age thirty-eight, if pretending to be young Romeo was not crowding her luck a little. Yet time had given her a point to stand on when she pondered such questions. She had no wish or intention to look ridiculous, but if crowds could applaud her Romeo, she would take her cues from the crowd.

Charlotte's life in London now was more than working to please critics. For all her pleasure in the crowd's applause, she lived now for other sounds, just as happy. The thud of the brass knocker on her door, the swish of the door opening to admit old friends and callers on reception afternoons, the bright conversation that took its lead from some idea she injected--such sounds filled her needs no less surely. To each of her guests she tried to leave the impression that he was special, that however much others might question his statements, she herself was charmed by such fresh information. If children were present, she leveled her talk to them without ever cutting herself off from the adult debate around her.

One of her keenest delights, as she had expected, was showing her art collection, especially the Page portrait, then standing back and savoring her visitors' comments. "Your picture of me is more admired," she wrote Page, "than I can describe to you."²² His technique of painting flesh tints as a transparent overcoating delighted every person who looked at it. Even John Ruskin wanted to see it. Unfortunately, old Sam Rogers was too senile now to invite to her own breakfast table. Recently, when Jane Carlyle had been especially bright at his table, he had turned tired, rheumy eyes to another guest and cried, "Who is she?" Charlotte could have basked in old Sam's comments about her Venus picture, a work which James Russell Lowell told Page "all the galleries in Europe would contend for if it were by Titian."²³

When her Page pictures began to turn dark, she blamed the heavy coal smoke in the air. "Unless you build a gallery in London you never get a decent light in which to hang a picture," she wrote Page reassuringly, "and unless they are taken down and washed every month they will get dark." To make certain they received gentle treatment, she reserved that task for herself. Yet she had been warned that Page had odd ideas about toning his pictures, that mixing his paint he used too much boiled oil, and that his pictures must grow black in time. Some Lowell had seen had reached "a mulatto stage . . . which, considering the prejudice of color, is a pity." Happily, Charlotte could see no such permanent trouble in her own pictures. She was on a trip to the Lake District when she heard that the Hawthornes planned to visit London, but she wrote that she hoped they would come again later when she could show them her "little store of art."²⁴

Thinking about her treasures, she confessed in a letter to Page from Malvern that she might come back to Rome now that she and Matilda had put their troubles behind them. "I am in so much better state mental and physical than I was while there that I long to see what the effect would be upon me to see it under happier influences."²⁵ It might be sometime within the next year, if she did not make a trip to America--perhaps even California.

In May 1856, Charlotte was in Paris, shopping, when Ned arrived in France as part of a graduation cruise from the Navy. Pleased by his gentlemanly grace in his Navy whites and his fresh reports from America, she realized suddenly that she wanted desperately to make a trip home. Besides, word from Philadelphia was none too comforting. Earnings from her Philadelphia property were down, and when Ned suggested that Harlan might be cheating her, she berated herself for ever signing the paper that gave him power of attorney. Might it not be smart to go to America to check on the matter? While there, she might test her name again at the box office.

Seeing Adelaide Ristori acting in Paris only confirmed her intentions. For weeks, the fabled Venetian actress had rocked Paris with her efforts to challenge France's beloved Rachel, first as Phedre, then as Medea. With her stately figure, shining chestnut hair, and luminous eyes, Ristori had a natural power and warmth as an actress that seemed to melt all the rules. Alexander Dumas, the elder, had knelt at her feet and kissed her skirt after one performance, and after seeing Ristori's Medea, Charlotte was no less ecstatic. At the breakfast table in her hotel the next morning, Charlotte declared firmly that Ristori clearly outshone all competition: "Rachel is a great artist and is almost faultless, but Rachel is a machine; Ristori is a woman."²⁶ Before she left Paris, Charlotte called on the grand Italian and, through an interpreter, showered her with all the praise one artist could give another.

When Ristori came later to London to repeat her triumph, Charlotte honored her at a lavish dinner at 1 Bolton Row, where everything--menu, costumes, the special waiters she had hired--was Italian. The table was decorated with the Italian tricolors, and Charlotte wore a white dress that combined the red, white, and green in its ribbons. Even the cook, eager to glimpse the legendary Ristori, disguised himself as a waiter long enough to come in and place a dish grandly before her.

Much as Charlotte worried about her American income this autumn of 1856, entertaining the Italian actress made her hunger again for another winter under Rome's "summer skies." She told herself now that the old irritations in Rome had been partly her own fault. Returning there, she could invest her time more wisely--and ignore whatever seemed a direct slap at her heart. By late November she and Matilda had completed their plans, and she penned a quick note to T. H. Carrick about the miniature he had recently made of her. "My friends all think it pale--but when it was painted I was overhurried and you were very unwell."²⁷ In spite of her face's shortcomings, surely a painter could help that somber countenance to a little more color and charm. Leaving Wilmot in charge of 1 Bolton Row, she and Matilda took the train for Dover.

In Rome, she found Hattie delighted to see her, not at all abashed that Matilda had come along. Seeing Hattie again, Charlotte was still not sure what to make of this impudent little American who dressed and behaved like nobody else. The Prince of Wales had recently bought one of Hattie's statues, a sprightly Puck like the one she had made for Charlotte, and now she kept her stonecutters busy turning out copies for $1,000 a piece. The Brownings were back in town, and Elizabeth was delighted when Charlotte agreed to read her new poem, "Aurora Leigh," at a gathering of forestieri. In her rented quarters, Charlotte quickly established her own routine: she was always "at home" on Saturday evenings.

If the return to Rome had been partly to test Matilda, the question answered itself soon enough. One morning Matilda appeared at Charlotte's bedroom door, her bags all packed, to announce that she was returning to London. A friend, Bessie Parkes, had offered her a writing job on a new magazine, The English Woman's Journal. Hearing the news, Charlotte could muster no grief. The friendship that had made them occupants under one roof for nearly ten years had come at last to mean little. Each of them said the right things. They smiled and embraced, yet both knew that this was the final parting.

Thus, without the delicate Miss Hays, life was easier; friendships were Charlotte's free choice again. Later, when word of George Eliot's reaction to Matilda reached her, she offered no argument. For the new journal, Bessie Parkes had "talent and real ardor for all goodness, but," said the novelist, "I fear Miss Hays has been chosen on the charitable grounds that she had nothing else to do in the world."²⁸

As the winter unfolded, Rome's skies stayed sunny. Hattie would never grow up, yet watching the girl's fame and popularity spread, Charlotte took pride in the fact that she herself had matured enough to expect no credit. Almost daily, Hattie bounded around at midafternoon to persuade her to come for a ride on the Campagna or on Saturday mornings to join the English hunt she had organized. Such interludes with Hattie were hardly the stones of a friendship, but then it was good to know that neither heart was involved. And once in a while, Hattie even managed to seem grateful. Charlotte Cushman "is like a mother to me," she wrote Wayman Crow, her benefactor in St. Louis, and "spoils me utterly. How good and thoughtful she is."²⁹ Consequently, Charlotte's affections were uncommitted when a would-be sculptress arrived from New York. Emma Stebbins had studied art in various American studios, but she had only lately concluded, at forty-one, that if an American woman hoped for any success in the arts, she must first make a name for herself in Rome, where the best teachers and the best markets centered. In Emma, Charlotte recognized the talent and character that could win out. When Gibson declared his belief in her talent, when Paul Akers, the American sculptor, accepted her in his studio, Charlotte found herself ready to champion Miss Stebbins' career. Within weeks, she and Emma were friends.

With energy to back up her gifts, Emma was soon skilled enough to accept commissions from the touring Americans whom Charlotte steered to her door. Emma was no timid violet, no Matilda Hays shrinking into the shade. Yet she had a feminine gentleness, a sweetness Charlotte had longed to find in a friend. The friendship that grew between them was a bond between two aggressive talents, creative minds and sensibilities that fully knew the scope of their powers. By the time they returned from an Easter excursion to Naples, Charlotte and Emma knew they would plan their lives together. They donned black bowler hats for their daily rides in the Borghese, for picnics of red wine and cheese under the pines; often at night they went with other Americans to view the sculptures in the Vatican Museum by flickering torchlight, a trick that made the antique carvings come luminously alive.

When Charlotte learned for certain that Louis Harlan was an out-and-out fraud, that he had falsified the records of interest due her on some $70,000, she asked Emma Stebbins to make the trip to America with her. It would be embarrassing, perhaps, to go back to America and take back her farewell under the pressure of financial losses, but this blissful winter in Rome had clarified her ambitions. Rome had attractions now that London, for all its intellect, could not match. Rome was where Emma, the sculptress, needed to be. Yet, with the approach of summer and the brick-oven heat Rome exuded from June through September, it was fully clear that they must get away. When Emma agreed to go with her, Charlotte determined at last to make another onslaught on the American stage.

Packing, Charlotte pondered the advice Hattie had given her. Why not rid herself of the wily Harlan and take on a business counsel who could be trusted? Wayman Crow was a flourishing businessman in St. Louis, an investor with his thumb on the money pulse of the country. As Hattie's benefactor, Charlotte could expect a ready welcome from Crow. Hattie dashed off a quick note for Charlotte to take to St. Louis.

Against the day when she and Emma returned, Charlotte scouted all the available apartments in Rome. The location she contracted at last, a tall apartment at 38 Via Gregoriana, had one of Rome's noblest views at the head of the Spanish Steps above the Piazza di Spagna, near the beautiful pink church of Trinita dei Monti. From its windows, Rome stretched clear and sparkling way past the soaring dome of St. Peter's. It would be a perfect winter home.

Heading for America, Charlotte touched base with Mary Eliza and Susan; then with Emma beside her at the rail, she sailed from Liverpool. W. H. Chippendale wanted to manage her forthcoming tour. She might act one month in New York; she might act two; it was too early to tell. As for Chip's wish to book her for California and Australia, that could only be done after many details came clear. "I must have a large sum in both places to induce me to lose so much time and take so much risk,"³⁰ she had written him.

Yet about one possible risk, Chip's letters had reassured her. Nobody in America had really believed that she meant her "farewell" to be permanent. With audiences eager to see her again, it would be foolish to stand on a word. Women changed their minds every day. With the elaborate plans she now had for Rome, it was good to know that she still had access to big money.