The Passion and the Power

Nine years later, the New York Tribune voiced a sadness that living drama's vivid sounds and gestures die out the moment they are born, leaving the quiet awareness, "Well this great thing has been, and all that is now left of it is the feeble print upon my brain, mine and my neighbors, and when we pass away the impress of the great artist will vanish from the world."¹ If that sadness explains in part the devotion the crowd lavishes upon the actor while he lives, it explains as well their dumb dismay when an actor who has fired them with his supersense of life forever leaves the stage.

By 10 A.M. on February 21, throngs had gathered outside the Parker House to pass in a slow procession beside Charlotte's casket. "The whole city is pouring through the rooms where dear Cushla is lying with the largest, calmest, most majestical face I ever saw,"² Lanier wrote his wife that morning. The file continued until the pall-bearers carried the bier down and across the frozen street--so jammed that fourteen extra policemen had been called into service--through the portals of King's Chapel.

Once the bearers had placed the coffin at the foot of the pulpit, in front of Charlotte's family and friends and a host of actors representing the profession, flowers were massed upon and around it. The Reverend Henry W. Foote eulogized the woman of genius now lying here who had embodied the highest aims of art. Boston and much of the country had traveled a long road since Charlotte Cushman had first startled her family with the word that she would pursue a career on the stage. In those old days, said the minister, the world had "sneered at the possibility of virtue in dramatic life, and by the sneer and what went with it," had done "its worst to make virtue impossible."

But times had altered; the years had shown in lives like Miss Cushman's that a pure spirit could "go stainless,"³ even in the theatre. Enlightened minds could now see that whatsoever things were true, whatsoever things were lovely, it was a Christian admonition to think on these things, whether one knelt within these hallowed white walls or sat beneath the painted vault of a theatre. By Miss Cushman's efforts, society was purer, the theatre had risen by her example. Let Boston and the world rejoice.

After the Psalm eight students from the Cushman School, at the prompting of Charley Wiggin, placed laurel and pond lilies, forget-me-nots and immortelles on the coffin in tribute to Katharine's famed line, "Saw you not even now a blessed troop invite me to a banquet, whose bright faces Cast a thousand beams upon me, like the sun? They promised me eternal happiness And brought me garlands."

The procession to Mount Auburn wound slowly up Beacon Street to the hill, past the State House where Emma's Horace Mann statue gazed out over Boston Common, past the silent crowds huddling together in the winter wind. A journalist saw the crowd as representative of the many thousands who had formed Charlotte's audience over the years. "No other woman of our day--in America at least--was as well known to so many people."⁴

For two hours the cortege moved through the narrow streets and over the Charles to Cambridge, through the high gates of Mount Auburn where in time the grave stones would read like a cast in Charlotte's play: Mary Devlin and Edwin Booth, James T. and Annie Fields, Harriet Hosmer, Julia Ward Howe, Longfellow and Lowell.

After a prayer, the crowd at the grave stood pondering the life now ended. No one could grieve that Charlotte was now released from suffering, but in her death, what had the country suffered? Winter would write in the Tribune: "The greatness of Charlotte Cushman was that of an exceptional because grand and striking personality, combined with extraordinary power to embody the highest ideals of majesty, pathos, and appalling anguish." An inspirational fire, an opulent intellect, an abounding character and genius "were victorious and imperial in Charlotte Cushman."⁵ In the New York Herald Lawrence Barrett spoke for American actors: "Bigotry itself must stand abashed before the life of our dead Queen, whose every thought and act were given for years to an art which ignorance and envy have battled against in vain for centuries."⁶ The New York Times borrowed a phrase from Browning: Charlotte Cushman, it was true, was "but an actress," yet her fame would be as enduring as any conqueror's. In the English-speaking world there was hardly a place where her name was not a household word.⁷ She had lived and died "a Virgin Queen of the dramatic stage." To the New York Herald, "Neither Ristori, Madame Janauschek, nor even Rachel could equal" Charlotte Cushman "in her own realm."⁸ In dying, said Scribner's, the common run of players could be replaced as books could be reprinted or pictures duplicated. But dramatic genius could be no more repeated than one lightning flash could match another. Charlotte's sleepless Queen of Scotland, her weird Queen of the gypsies, her un-queened Queen of Henry VIII--these Queens uniquely hers--flashed out and passed with her forever. The future would find it difficult to believe, but Charlotte's art had surpassed that of her most eminent contemporaries, George Eliot, George Sand, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "They do not stand as high in their respective professions as she stands on the stage."⁹ Agreeing, James McVicker wrote, "They tasted but gingerly of the world's applause; she drained the brimming goblet."¹⁰

On the white slopes of Mount Auburn, however, eloquence and grief did not go hand in hand. At the edge of the crowd, Lanier stood fingering the jacinth ring Emma had given him Saturday. Since Charlotte's death, said Lanier, he was "as one who has lost the half of his possessions."¹¹ "I had put out so many leaves and fresh shoots which only lived in the climate of her, that her withdrawal leaves a sort of winter all in that side of me."¹²

When Emma Stebbins later found her own words, they would form the first attempt at a Cushman biography, the book that Lanier and Helen Hunt Jackson both wanted to do. Eight years after the funeral, Sallie wrote Denis Alward, "the loss of dear Miss Cushman" only those could comprehend who had lived under the shelter of her wings. "One of the greatest comforts I have is the belief that she is near me sometimes and helping me."¹³ For Charlotte, a remembering nation would unveil a laurel-crowned bust in 1925 at New York's Hall of Fame for Great Americans, making her one of the seven women, and the only actress, yet awarded such acclaim. * But even that bronze, along with the words it carried, would weather: "To be thoroughly in earnest, intensely in earnest in all my thoughts and all my actions, whether in my profession or out of it, became my single idea."

* Charlotte Cushman had been voted into the Hall of Fame in 1915, partly at the urging of actresses Jane Cowl, Katherine Cornell, and Minnie Maddern Fiske, but the ceremony did not occur until May 21, 1925, when busts of John Marshall, William T. Sherman, Asa Grey, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were also unveiled. The Cushman bust, by Francis Grimes, had been financed by popular subscription. Otis Skinner delivered the address; John Drew as President of the Players Club presented the bust; and Dr. Allerton Seward Cushman unveiled it. (Printed program of the ceremony.)

Fully aware of this, Charlotte had never tried to delay the process of time. She had founded no theatre school to perpetuate her techniques; she had written no words to defend her creed. She might have devoted more effort to putting herself on record, to inscribing her art in the print that would survive her, but she had made her choice decades before the matter occurred to anyone else. Words about Charlotte Cushman were not and never could be the woman who had breathed fire into Shakespeare's titanic figures. Corrosive time would win out, and she knew it.

An anonymous sonneteer said it for her immediately after her death:

For thee of earnest spirit and great heart,
In a fair time a fair and kindly death
Rounds a life nobly consecrate to art,
Nor lacking praiseful tributes of man's breath
For us, like music ended; a dead voice
That sounded sweet in our ears of yesternight,
The passion and the power wherein men's souls rejoice
Are with the player buried out of sight.
Within our ears an unreturning tone
Of calm, majestic dignity still rings;
A reverent memory remains alone,
Sad sense of loss in sorrowful words that sings.
Yet, even as Art to Death her daughter gives,
Death bows to Art, for Art eternal lives.¹⁴

With pen in hand, the best Charlotte could do was record in a lifelong correspondence her ranging curiosities, the flashes of a mind enlivened by her period's concerns, the dictates of a heart athirst for love. Her life was her spokesman. In the end, her stardom in it was more than talent, more than strength and self-knowledge, integrity and courage. She rose a star out of the darkness of her time, sailed across the heavens through her bright particular orbit, and at its end, sank slowly down.

One summer day years after her death, William Winter stood recollecting the vivid impressions which the name on the grave's tall obelisk rekindled. A gardener looked up from clipping the grass and, pointing to the stone, voiced a comment that might serve for Charlotte Cushman's epitaph and measure.

"She was considerable of a woman, for a play-actress."¹⁵