Sidney Lanier and Cushla

On November 14, when the curtain ended her week in Philadelphia, Charlotte was ushered back on stage at the Academy of Music for more flowers and testimonials. Accepting them, she declared that Philadelphia had always occupied a special place in her heart. "Here I experienced privately the greatest kindness and hospitality, publicly the utmost goodness and consideration; and I never come to Philadelphia without the affectionate feeling that I am coming home, and to my family." At that point, sentiment might have caused her to falter; thirty years had taken their toll of the ties that once had made Philadelphia unique in her affections. But she held her poise, and after more fireworks outside, she was ready for Washington.

Reading there, she caught cold, but against Emma's pleas, she determined to fill her dates in the west and end her tour, if her strength held out, in California. Seeing her read, Jamie Fields thought she looked "haggard" but said nothing to try to make her quit now. After the overnight trip to Cincinnati, Charlotte knew she ought to forgo her commitments. A sudden lurch of the train had broken open the scars on her breast, and fever and redness soon spread across her back and down her left arm. Writing Ned, Emma demanded that he and Emma Crow make Charlotte cancel the rest of her season and face facts once and for all. Yet the letter was hardly mailed before Charlotte decided that the pain would really kill her if she did not get on with her schedule.

In a few days she opened as Meg in Cincinnati. Watching her, a fifteen-year-old girl named Mary Anderson could almost believe that Charlotte's terrible shrieks registered real pain--that the ragged old gypsy on stage who looked "like some great withered tree . . . her eyes blazing under her shaggy brows" was no "creature of this world," but "a mad majestic wanderer from the spirit-land"--until the end of the play when Charlotte reappeared, her face washed clean of greasepaint, to take the applause, like "a sweet-faced old lady, with a smile."¹

Next day, after rehearsal, Charlotte found Mary and her mother waiting in the hotel parlor. The girl wanted to be an actress. Would Miss Cushman please let her show what she could do? The trite request had come so often, the efforts were usually so bad that Charlotte was tempted to brush on past toward her bed. But something urgent in the girl's eyes stopped her. When Mary said she could do scenes from Richard III, Hamlet, and Schiller's Maid of Orleans, Charlotte found it a curious selection for such a child. "But begin," she said, "for I am pressed for time."

When Mary had done quick scenes as Joan, she stopped, flushed and excited, waiting for Charlotte's reaction. Watching the girl's beautiful face, the spirit that had enkindled her reading, Charlotte recognized uncommon talent.

"My child," she said slowly, laying her hand on Mary's shoulder, "you have all the attributes to make a fine actress," too much force perhaps at present, "but do not let that trouble you. Better have too much to prune down, than too little to build up."

Hearing the verdict, Mary's mother protested. Surely such a young girl ought not to think about such a difficult and perilous career. "My dear Madam," Charlotte replied gravely, "you will not judge the profession so severely when you know it better. Encourage your child; she is firmly, and rightly, I think, resolved on going upon the stage. If I know anything of character, she will go, with or without your consent."

Saying the words, she felt again an old excitement, the passion that had driven her to prove to Mary Eliza that an ambition this strong must be met. "Be her friend," she said to Mrs. Anderson.

Then she turned to Mary. "My advice to you is not to begin at the bottom of the ladder," enduring the drudgery of small parts in a stock company, under the direction of some coarse nature. Instead, she must get a competent teacher, George Vandenhoff ideally, and "tell him from me that he is to clip and tame you generally. I prophesy a future for you if you continue working earnestly. God be with you."² Charlotte's prophecy paid off in full two years later, when Mary Anderson made a stunning New York debut in one of Charlotte's old roles, Pauline in The Lady of Lyons--"The most beautiful woman I ever saw on the stage, or, for that matter, off,"³ wrote George C. D. Odell.

Charlotte had given Mary a word of advice that she herself carefully pondered as she moved on toward Chicago in December. "Remember, each morning we have a fresh reserve of physical magnetism given to us. Exciting amusement and people take it from us. We must hoard it for our audience."⁴ Keeping herself in bed between her six reading dates at McCormick Hall helped the time pay off in nearly $6,000.⁵ Encouraged by a sudden lift in her energies, she began thinking again of San Francisco. "In California the weather is like our Eastern June!"⁶ she wrote Denis Alward. But shivering in her warm hotel, she soon despaired of the long journey, even by train.

Returning east, Charlotte played one night at a small town in upstate New York--which gave her wreaths in a little farewell ceremony⁷--and then headed on toward Boston. In Baltimore in January 1875, knowing that she was nearing the end of her strength, another's problems suddenly became more important than her own. Through Gibson Peacock, editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, a young Georgia poet came to her attention, a veteran of bitter fighting at Chickahominy and imprisonment at Fort Lookout in Maryland. Now a flutist with the Peabody Symphony in Baltimore, Sidney Lanier had survived the war, but broken in health, he burned to become a recognized poet, despite the fact that most of his thirty-three years had been, as he said, mostly a matter of "not dying." Reading his verses that had come to her hotel, Charlotte recognized immediately that strong talent lay behind them, and an odd excitement suddenly welled up in her.

A poem like "Corn" was clearly more than fly-by-night inspiration. Without delay, Charlotte called Lanier to her. The pale young man with the high intellectual forehead, deep-set eyes, long nose, and full dark beard entered shyly when Sallie opened the door. But Charlotte quickly put him at ease. Unlike the harsh and tasteless "poetry" of a current writer like Walt Whitman, the delicate sensibility in verses like these, she told Lanier, might have sprung from an Elizabethan. When he told her about his theory that poetic effect was mainly a matter of sounds, she recalled an idea she had in 1840 about an article showing how a union of words and music might indicate the sighing of wind through the trees.⁸

In Sidney, she saw a person who had known all the trials and blocked ambitions that she herself had managed to overcome. Like her, he seemed determined to win out. Listening to him describe the fighting he had seen along the James River, the disease and misery in the military prison, Charlotte felt for the first time the real horrors both armies had undergone. As long as she had strength, she told herself now, she would feed the hope that burned in this young poet's eyes.

Though other guests soon joined them, Charlotte kept her attention strictly on him. Seated beside him on a couch, she told him about the Brownings, how she had always liked Elizabeth better than Robert, about Seward's hopes for a more humane Reconstruction, about the Carlyles, about "many fair things of her own art, of herself, and her adventures," as Sidney told his wife later. She made him promise to send her something to read on the platform. Finally, when Sidney felt he should leave, she detained him, pressing his hand, "saying all manner of handsome things to me," and extracted his word that he would send her more poems. Next day, Lanier was back at her door with his photograph and a handwritten copy of "Corn," bearing a "little Shakespearean dedication to Miss Charlotte Cushman":

Oh, what a perilous waste, from low to high,
Must this poor book from me to you o'erleap:
From me, who wander in the nights that lie
About Fame's utmost vague foundations deep,
To you, that sit on Fame's most absolute height,
Distinctly starred, e'en in that awful light!⁹

The correspondence between Charlotte and Sidney Lanier soon grew into a regular exchange, a kind of leaven to Charlotte's spirits as she volleyed from one day to the next between bouts with deepening pain. In Lanier, she sensed true genius. Her pleasure in encouraging him was only heightened by his devotion for her. The letters between the young poet and the actress nearly fifty-nine were an outpouring of artistic sensibility and a recognition of themselves as kindred dispositions.

On another tour in February 1875 to Chicago, her letters to the poet helped focus her thoughts on something outside her pain. She forced herself through the two-week run, explaining in a card in the Chicago Tribune how embarrassed she was that the New York ovation had seemed to imply that she was saying good-bye to all cities.¹⁰

In Cincinnati in March she was glad when the Commercial said that her voice had still "that mellow force in the lower tones with which no other actress has been gifted,"¹¹ that her Queen Katharine still proved her marvelous range, her skill as a creative artist.¹² If other actors took as much care with Shakespeare's words, said the Commercial, the Bard's plays would be almost continuously demanded by audiences, even now. "Her elocution blazes with intelligence."

But by the end of March, she wrote a Philadelphia manager, "I hope my journeys will not make me ill again, but I seem to have come to the end of work."¹³ Beyond that lay the terrible idleness that she feared now almost as much as pain. When Arthur Cheney, manager of Boston's Globe Theatre, approached her about a Boston farewell similar to New York and Philadelphia's, she consented, grabbing at straws to keep busy. During the week preceding the ceremony, she gave Boston her utmost. Catherine Reignolds-Winslow, who had learned much from her once in New Orleans, saw that the "old fire was as intense as ever," that only Charlotte Cushman had that "ringing voice, the averted head, the magnificent pose, the grandeur of the outstretched arm, the power, even in the pointed finger."¹⁴

Curtis Guild, editor of the Boston Commercial Bulletin, arranged the details of the farewell ceremony. She played an extra matinee on Saturday, May 15, 1875; then that evening after her final Macbeth she was escorted back on for Boston's testimonial. As at Booth's, the stage had been set as a drawing room, with a gilt table at center bearing a flower crown and a laurel wreath. At either side stood bronze figures of Mercury and Fortune some seven feet tall. When Charlotte took her place between the bronzes, Guild delivered his speech.

The retirement of one who had so long been recognized as one of the theatre's most distinguished representatives, said Guild, one who had done so much to elevate art, was an event of more than ordinary moment. But when it occurred in the artist's native city, among those who had followed her from the start with hope and admiration, her friends and well-wishers had determined not to permit the occasion to pass without expressing their feelings. Now that Charlotte Cushman was about to "abdicate, not resign," Boston could not part with the great actress of our time without "emotion and tender regard."¹⁵

Accepting the laurels, Charlotte reminisced a moment about her career, then declared her joy that her season--which might or might not be her last--could conclude in Boston, "which I have always dearly loved, and where I would rather have been born than in any other spot of the habitable globe." Looking back, she could say "without vainglory" that she had never, "by any act of my life, done discredit to the city of my birth." She gestured to right and left and turned full to the audience. "Believe me, I shall carry with me in my retirement no memory sweeter than my associations with Boston and my Boston public. From my full heart, God bless you, and Farewell!"¹⁶

As the curtain descended, Guild whispered his congratulations for her graceful speech, and Charlotte grasped his hand. "Thanks," she said, "and yours, let me say in the words of Polonius 'was well spoken, with good accent and good discretion.'" As the curtain reached eye level, she cautioned him, "We must step back further, take care of your head, here comes the curtain."¹⁷

It was Charlotte Cushman's last curtain. On June 2, she filled a reading date in Easton, Pennsylvania, which, against her every will to keep working, proved her last.

Trying to relax at Newport, she found herself plunged more and more into gloom. The children's cries bothered her, and Ned's idleness bothered her more. Lanier's letter of June 17, however, gladdened her spirits. "It is seldom, dear Miss Cushman, that I can bring myself to such a point of daring as to ask that you will stretch out your tired arm merely to take one of my little roses--you whose hands are already filled with the best flowers this world can grow. Does she not (I say to myself) find them under her feet and wear them about her brows, may she not walk in them by day and lie in them by night, nay, does not her life stand rooted in men's regard like one pistil in a great lily?"¹⁸

Lanier's tone characterized the letters that flourished between them throughout the summer and fall. His very real interest in Charlotte, both as a person and as a judge he respected, flowed through his correspondence. He sent her the manuscript of "The Symphony"; she would be glad to know, he said, that the poem had "met with favor."

Charlotte made her concern about Sidney's health perfectly clear. "I was so glad to hear from you for I had become anxious that perhaps your work had been too much for you and that your enemy had tried to overtake you again," she wrote on June 23. She had hoped to write him "every day on the hour," but "I have been suffering more than I like to tell you of, and--and--shall I confess it--despair seized me and threw me, and for a time I was demoralized to an hourly weeping."

Unable to face her pain any longer, she had sent for a surgeon in Boston and offered "to lie down again under heroic treatment" to escape the terror of this "gnawing fear near my heart." But the time was past when surgery could help. "The way is still long," the doctor told her, "and if you give way so soon, what is to become of those who love you, for the rest of the way?"¹⁹

Couldn't Lanier, Charlotte asked, come to see her sometime in the summer, either at Villa Cushman or later at Emma's new cottage in Lenox? About his new poem: "'The Symphony' reads better every time, and 'The Power of Prayer' is sweet, touching, and strong. No one has ever placed the Southern Negro so faithfully or picturesquely." About his writing dialect poems: "No, a thousand times no, there is no deceit in being able to write such a poem. Only daring to write and publish such a poem so early in your career may make vulgar people wonder, as they always do and will," but he must pursue his own artistic vision and take heart from the fact that already critics like George Calvert in the Golden Age were taking him seriously.

In response, Lanier poured out his concern for her pain: "If tender wishes were but medicinal, if fervent aspirations could but cure, if my daily upward breathings in your behalf were but as powerful as they are earnest--how perfect would be your state!" He would visit her, though his trips back and forth to Florida in connection with a guidebook he was writing made it hard to predict just when. "As for you, my dear Queen Catherine, may this velvety night be spread under your feet as Raleigh's cloak was spread for his Queen's, so that you may walk dry-shod as to all pain over to the morning--prays your faithful, Sidney Lanier."²⁰

Writing Lanier after her birthday on July 23--"many flowers had come from the florists"--Charlotte tried to play down her suffering, but it had been so intense "ever since I stopped work that I have hardly been able to walk beyond my own door." She urged him to guard his own health: "I heard through Peacock that you had been suffering again from hemorrhage. You say nothing of this, let me know how all is with you."²¹ She had been turning in her mind the best means she might use to bring Lanier critical attention in England. Struggling to hold firm, she could not help writing her recurring wish to him. "O, if the end could only be any night that I go to sleep," anything to avoid "the sight of my pain to those I love."

In late September, she wrote Lanier from Lenox that "the balmy balsam of this high and dry air" had given her fresh vigor to take hope that "I may weather in some small degree the stone which has torn at me." En route from Newport, she had consulted a young English physician in Boston who, at age twenty-nine, was known already to have done remarkable things "for persons afflicted as I have been." Thornton's manner had given her courage. She would return in mid-October for four or five months of his treatment. Couldn't Lanier come to Boston in the fall? "I feel somehow that we shall be fast friends to the last."²²

Riding among Lenox's hills in autumn when the maples and birches glowed red and gold in every direction, taking tea on the verandah of the rambling hotel, Charlotte relaxed for long moments. No wonder the Hawthornes had revelled in the Berkshire fall at Tanglewood Cottage. No wonder Fanny Kemble had found such delight among these genial hills when, clad in red riding clothes, she had streaked up the roads like a cardinal flying.

Back in Boston, the Parker House seemed the best place to spend the months her treatments would take. Ushered through the hotel's white marble lobby and corridors, Charlotte was relieved that the large, comfortable rooms Charles Dickens had occupied in 1867 and 1868 were available, that Harvey Parker had preserved them exactly as Dickens had known them,²³ with their heavy dark bedsteads, damask chairs, marble mantel and pictures, and tall pier glass.

Each morning, with the sun rising out of Boston Harbor, she could look out past the gabled end of King's Chapel and its cemetery where Hawthorne had buried Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter. Farther along Tremont Street, she could see directly over the spot where she had made her Boston debut, those decades ago. Farther east and north, she could glimpse the slender tall spire of Second Church. If she had to be ill, there were worse places.

When Lanier arrived in early November, Charlotte had added her own touches to the rooms: her writing table in one corner, her collection of photographs mounted on a purple tack board on the wall, small sculptured pieces, china, glass, and flowers on the mantel. She had had her large easy chair placed by the window where she sat through the day, her swollen left arm strapped to a board, except when she rested in bed in late afternoon.

The morning Lanier sent up a note to say he had arrived, he was in his bath when he heard a tap at his door. Wrapped in a towel, he opened the door to find "the bright face of my good Charlotte Cushman, shining with sweetness and welcome."²⁴ Too startled to do more than promise to join her for breakfast upstairs, Lanier was dressed before he comprehended fully that Charlotte was up and walking, when he had expected to find her propped weakly on pillows.

But Lanier soon learned that Charlotte's high spirits came and went between sudden periods when, rubbing her aching arm, she must excuse herself and suggest some place of interest Lanier ought to see in town. Every day, she invited people to meet him and hear him play his flute, or she sent him with notes to men who could further his career. Twice, he brought back happy reports from Longfellow and Lowell; both poets had liked his work and encouraged him. Lowell had found him a "shining presence," a man of "genius with a rare gift for the happy word."²⁵

Talking with Dr. Thornton, Lanier concluded that the man might really cure her. "I find him not at all a quack," he wrote Peacock, "at least not an ignorant one."²⁶ At the end of ten days, when Lanier had to return to his work in Baltimore, Charlotte stretched out her good hand. To register his features once and for all, to assure him of her undying regard, she looked at him a long moment. Back at home, Lanier recalled that look and his joy in the visit. It was of "inexpressible value to me as an artist," he wrote later, "besides the pleasure it gave me as a friend."²⁷