USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 16
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From 1879 on Henry Clay Barnabee is as- sociated with the history of comic opera at this house, first as a member of the Boston Ideal Opera Company and later (after 1887) as one of the newly formed company long known as the Bostonians.
It was at the Boston Theatre, in 1857, that Edwin Booth first met sweet Mary Devlin, herself then a member of the stock company, whom he soon made his wife; and it was during Booth's engagement here, in the spring of 1865, that the assassination of Lincoln took place at the hands of the tragedian's brother. On that historic evening Mr. Booth was seen in "The Iron Chest " and " Don Cæsar de Bazan," and, without having heard of the sad tragedy, retired for the night at the home of his friend Dr. Orlando Tompkins in Franklin Square, where he was visiting. "On the following morning," writes the son of his host 1 " an old family servant, his colored valet, 1 In The History of the Boston Theatre.
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greeted him with, 'Have you heard the news, Massa Edwin? President Lincoln done been shot and killed.' 'Great God,' said the horrified tragedian, 'who did that?' 'Well,' replied the negro, ' they done say Massa John did it.'" It was Dr. Tompkins, then proprietor of the Boston Theatre, who hastened to New York with Booth to comfort the grief-stricken mother. Several seasons passed before Boston again saw Booth on the stage. Then he became identified, in the public mind, with that Prince of Denmark who, like himself, had drunk the bitter water of affliction.
Another Hamlet who greatly delighted Boston Theatre patrons was Charles Fechter (pro- nounced Fayshtair by the person chiefly con- cerned) who played the rôle here in March, 1870. Clapp pronounces 1 Fechter's love- making to have been the best he ever saw on the stage, but he did not at all agree, none the less, with the foreigner's interpretation of the Danish prince, and was one day trying to make his criticisms understood by the actor only to discover that Fechter really did not know the meaning of some of the English words upon which his conception of the part turned! The prince, said Fechter, did not procrastinate but pursued his task with vigor. "Do you not recall," he urged, "the words of Hamlet's 1 In Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic.
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father in the Queen's closet, 'I come to wet thy almost blunted purpose? ' It was thus made plain that Fechter had never distinguished ' whet ' from ' wet ' and that he had no notion of the force of ' blunted.' His idea was that the Ghost's declared purpose was to 'wet' down and so reduce the excessive flame of Hamlet's zeal."
Fechter was financially interested for a time in Selwyn's Theatre, which he renamed the Globe and of which he announced himself " sole manager " September 12, 1870. This house had then been in existence only three years and it survived less than three years longer, burning down May 30, 1873, in the same fire which consumed Chickering's pianoforte ware- rooms, the Chauncy Hall School and several other buildings in that vicinity. It was, how- ever, soon rebuilt by Arthur Cheney, who kept control of it until, in September, 1877, it passed into the management of John Stetson. To us the house is of interest as the scene, on May 15, 1875, of Charlotte Cushman's farewell appear- ance in the city of her birth.
Henry Austin Clapp characterizes Charlotte Cushman as " the only actress native to our soil to whom the adjective ' great ' can fitly be applied." By birth, kindred and education she was Bostonian but she played her first part, that of Lady Macbeth, in New Orleans.
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Nearly forty years later, when she acted for the last time at the Globe Theatre in Boston, her rôle was again - Lady Macbeth. It would be very interesting to know how far and in what manner Miss Cushman's early conception of this great part differed from her later view of it, but all that we are sure of is that she pleased the audience, the managers and the members of the company on both occasions. Clapp speaks especially of the way in which Miss Cushman's voice was " saturated with anguish " in this part during the soliloquy near the opening of the second scene of the third act: -
" Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content: 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."
The words, he says, " were accompanied by the wringing of her hands; and through the first couplet, as she gave it, the listener was made to gaze into the depths of a soul, soon to enter the night of madness, already enduring the torments of hell."
Yet this Lady Macbeth was a gaunt, stockily- built woman of nearly sixty in the throes of a mortal disease! Her return to the stage and to the readings which marked her later life were by the advice of her physicians, who thought she might so bear with less anguish (her mind
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HENRY CLAY BARNABEE. Page 271.
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.
COLISEUM IN WHICH THE PEACE JUBILEE OF 1869 WAS HELD. Page 295.
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FITCHBURG STATION, IN THE HALL OF WHICH JENNY LIND GAVE TILD WTATAT DOSMON CONTANDO
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being occupied) the inevitable suffering imposed by her disease.
" I was born a tomboy," is the opening sen- tence of the autobiographical fragment once written by Miss Cushman at the request of her friends. In those days "tomboy " was the epithet bestowed upon all girls who preferred games and movement to sewing a seam, in a quiet chimney corner, and the needle was never a favorite implement with the great tragedian. Though Charlotte was an apt scholar the family circumstances were such that she left school and began to help towards her support when she was only thirteen. At this time her home was in Charlestown, not in the North End, where she had been born on the site now given over to a schoolhouse bearing her name. Pov- erty was her lot for a long time, even after she had begun to do well in her profession. For as soon as she had secured a good position at the Park Theatre, New York, she brought her mother on from Boston and made her care and that of the four other children the business of her life. Then her dearly cherished brother, Charley, was killed by a fall from a horse she had given him - a blow from which she never quite recovered. "The jacket he wore at the time was always preserved," says Miss Stebbins, her friend and biographer, " and went with them from place to place through all her wanderings."
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This loss was particularly hard for Charlotte Cushman to bear because hers was an ardently affectionate nature and she had just struggled through "the very hardest thing that can come to a woman." Yet because she had lived through this and once and for all gave over " casting about for the 'counterpart '" she was able to give her entire self to her work.
In this and in the nobility of her character lies the secret of her success. Moreover, she had enormous courage. The story of her setting forth at twenty-eight, to conquer London, all by herself, is astounding. One very interesting rôle undertaken by Miss Cushman, while in London, - and in this country also, later, - was that of "Romeo " to her sister Susan's " Juliet." This was such a triumph of act- ing that James Sheridan Knowles, the great dramatist and critic, was completely carried away by it. Of her acting of the passage where Romeo flings himself upon the ground, " taking the measure of an unmade grave," he says: " It was a scene of topmost passion - not simulated passion; no such thing - real, palpably real; the genuine heart-storm was on in its wildest fitfulness of fury, and I listened and gazed and held my breath, while my blood ran hot and cold. I am sure it must have been the case with every one in the house, but I was all absorbed in Romeo till a thunder of applause
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recalled me to myself." And of her assumption of the difficult part of Claude Melnotte in " The Lady of Lyons " Justin McCarthy says: " I have seen Claude Melnotte played by many great actors, from Macready to Irving, but Miss Cushman eclipsed them all. She created for me the only human, the only possible, and the only endurable Claude Melnotte I have ever seen."
It is, however, for her work in Meg Merrilies that Miss Cushman will be longest remembered. For this was the most famous and popular of her efforts and it was, also, the only thing she did which could deservedly be called a " crea- tion." Scott's character was nothing but the germ of the part as she played it.
Much of Miss Cushman's life, after she had made her success, was passed in Rome, where she had a pleasant home and exercised delightful hospitality. Theodore Parker was one of the Bostonians whose last days in the Eternal City she sought to cheer. Two notes from him give a pleasant insight into the sweet domestic side of this great woman:
"MY DEAR MISS CUSHMAN: - Many thanks for all your favors, - the drive the other day, the old fashioned chicken pie this day. Alas! I have no coach, no oven; but as you have often taken a kindly interest in me, I think
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you may like to read some of my latest publica- tions, so I send a couple of little things which came by mail and are the only copies in Europe."
. Another note says, " I thank you heartily for the great loaf of Indian corn bread. It is like the song of Zion sung in a strange land and ; among the willows. It carries me back to dear old Boston once more."
To Miss Cushman, as well as to Parker, Boston was very dear. Three years after the famous Radical's death she helped dedicate the Great Organ (November 2, 1863) in the Music Hall with which his fame is bound up. Yet the triumph of her career, so far as Boston's. civic festivals go, undoubtedly came when the schoolhouse which had been built on the site of her birth and named for her was dedicated. On this occasion she made what was called her " maiden speech " to a thousand girls assembled in the upper hall. She sat radiant upon the platform, amidst teachers and dignitaries, a flush of joy illuminating her face, already pale with the inroads of the insidious cancer which ended her life in five short years. She said she had walked those streets as poor as any girl within the sound of her voice. They knew something of the niche she filled in the pantheon of culture and art; but she assured them she
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had gained this altitude by unflagging industry, unswerving principle, unfaltering persistence, untiring patience - by giving herself outright to her work; for she ranked painstaking above ability and genius.
Miss Cushman's delight in this school event was profound. In a letter written to a friend in England, we read: "When I went to my native city, where they never believed in me as much as they did elsewhere, I came to have such praise as made my heart satisfied. . . . I was proud, first, that an actress had won this favor; next, that for the first time it had been bestowed upon a woman; and then came the civic pride, in knowing that my townspeople should care that I ever was born. Nothing in all my life has so pleased me."
The last winter of Miss Cushman's life was passed at the Parker House in Boston. And there, surrounded by loving friends, she died February 18, 1876. She was buried in Mount Auburn after a funeral service in King's Chapel. From among the many contemporary tributes of pulpit and press I have selected the following by Rev. Henry W. Foote, then the minister at this historic church, because it does justice to the possibilities of the dramatic profession as well as because it memorializes Miss Cushman: " There was a time when the world sneered at the possibility of virtue in dramatic life, and by
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the sneer, and what went with it, did its worst to make virtue impossible. But it has been given to our generation to show in lives, among which happily our noble townswoman does not stand alone, that a pure spirit can go stainless, as the lady in Milton's ' Comus,' through corruptions."
CHAPTER IX
SOME ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS WHO MADE THE CITY FAMOUS
J UST as Benjamin West had been of immense service to Copley at a crucial point in his (Copley's) career 1 so the Pennsylvanian greatly helped Gilbert Stuart when that gifted young American presented himself, without any kind of introduction, at his London studio and besought his good offices. Gilbert Stuart, generally acknowledged to be our best portrait painter, was born in Rhode Island (in 1755), but inasmuch as he passed the last twenty years of his life in Boston, - where he died, July 27, 1828, - he comes properly within the scope of this book.
Almost in his cradle this born painter began his life work, and by the time he was thirteen he had taught himself so much that he had no difficulty in getting portrait orders which would have enabled him to at least live by his brush. But, just then, Cosmo Alexander, who was in this country on a visit, saw some of his work and was so struck with his talent that he took 1 See Old Boston Days and Ways, p. 190.
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him back to England with him, promising to put him there in the way of good instruction. Unhappily, however, Alexander died as soon as he reached home and poor Stuart was left, friendless and penniless, in a strange and hostile land. For two years he struggled manfully to educate himself at Glasgow University and then he returned to America in the hope of finding Fortune once more favorable to his talents. But this was at a time when men's souls were so tried by anxieties that they were not having their portraits painted, and in 1775 Stuart again sailed for England in the last vessel that left Boston harbor before the blockade.
It was at this juncture that he sought out West, who, seeing his promise of genius, taught him gladly and gave him a home in his family. In ten years he had made such progress that he was able to set up a studio for himself. With immediate success, too! No one but Reynolds and Gainsborough charged and re- ceived such large prices for their pictures as Stuart at this time commanded.
Then (in 1792) he grew suddenly desirous of seeing his native land again and, abandoning all his old friends, he sailed for New York. Two years there, followed by a sojourn in Phila- delphia and another in Washington, intervened before he came to Boston. But when he did come he stayed the rest of his life, as has been
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said; and in Boston may be found today his greatest work, the famous portrait of Wash- ington, for which, with that of Mrs. Washington, the Athenaeum paid $1500 after Stuart's death.
For many years Stuart's home and painting- room was in Washington Place, Fort Hill, where his geniality and charm as a conver- sationalist drew many sitters, all of whom soon assumed in his presence their most characteristic expressions and so met half way the artist's determination to get a faithful portrait. Wash- ington Allston has said of him that " he seemed to dive into the thoughts of men; for they were made to rise and speak on the surface." His task, as he himself put it, was " copying the works of God and leaving clothes to the tailors and mantua-makers," an interesting variation, surely, from the manner of Copley, who pre- ceded him in the painting of all Boston's " best people."
During the last ten years of Stuart's life Washington Allston was his near neighbor, living and working in a barn on the Prince Estate, near the corner of Pearl and High Streets. Allston was born in South Carolina in 1779 and, after being educated at Newport and at Harvard College, sailed for England in 1801. There and on the Continent he enjoyed a period of study, but the richest years of his life were four which he passed in Rome living on
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terms of close friendship with Coleridge, Turner, Fenimore Cooper and Irving. He declared that he owed more, intellectually, to Coleridge than to anybody else, and Coleridge, in turn, pronounced him "the first genius produced by the Western world." It was generally con- ceded that, for two hundred years, no artist's coloring had so closely resembled that of Titian as did Allston's, and there was certainly very much of poetry in the conception of many of his pictures.
Allston's first period of residence in Boston was during the years 1809-10. At this time he married Miss Ann Channing, sister of William Ellery Channing, to whom he had long been engaged, and kept a studio in Court Street, between Brattle Street and Cornhill, where he executed several portraits at good prices. The early death of Mrs. Allston in England was so great a blow to him that for a long time he was nearly frantic with grief; but eventually his mind regained its tone and, in 1818, he again came to Boston believing that he ought now to give his own country the benefit of such talent as he possessed. In 1830 he was married for a second time to a sister of Richard Henry Dana and the next year he built himself a studio in Cambridgeport which was to be his home for the rest of his life. Here he worked, off and on, for years, - until his
WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT.
From the painting by himself in the possession of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON.
OLE BULL ON HIS FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA. From a drawing by F. O. C. Darley. Page 304.
JENNY LIND. Page 289.
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death in 1843, indeed, - at the " Belshazzar," on which several liberal Bostonians had ad- vanced part of the purchase price of ten thou- sand dollars demanded for it. Worry over his inability to complete this work is believed to have hastened Allston's death. The picture is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
The next Boston painter of genius - for neither Chester Harding nor Joseph Ames, who were popular portrait painters of the nineteenth century, deserve this appellation - was William Morris Hunt, who made his home in our city from 1862 until his death in 1879. Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1824 and he entered Harvard College in 1840. But he quitted Cambridge without taking his degree and, after studying at Düsseldorf and in Cou- ture's atelier in Paris, fell under the spell of Millet, through whose influence his work grew notably in depth and power. “When I came to know Millet," he has said, " I took broader views of humanity, of the world, of life. His subjects were real people who had work to do. He is the only man since the Bible was written who has expressed things in a Biblical way." Millet's work is now so highly regarded that it is interesting to note that this Boston artist had much to do with bringing to him the success he deserved, - and that the first hun- dred dollar bill Millet ever had came from
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Martin Brimmer, to whom, through Hunt's good offices, one of the master's pictures was sold.
In 1855 Hunt returned to America and, by his marriage to Miss Louisa Dumeresq Perkins, became a member of Boston's inner circle. What " Hunt said," for he was a great wit, was soon quoted at every dinner-party. His home at this time was on Beacon Street, but he did his painting in a small room at the corner of Sum- mer and Hawley Streets. There he painted his first great portrait, that of Chief Justice Shaw, which now hangs in the Court House at Salem, Massachusetts, and has justly been likened, for its wonderful rendering of character, to the portraits of Velasquez. Hunt had studied sculpture in his youth and there is in this portrait (as well as in that of John A. Andrew, reproduced in this book) much that suggests the sculptor's treatment of his subject. When the Shaw portrait was completed it was ex- hibited in the gallery of Williams and Everett, and while there, says Helen M. Knowlton, who was a pupil of Hunt and has written a sympa- thetic life of him, " excited more derision than any other portrait that had even been shown in Boston." Yet after Hammatt Billings had declared it "the greatest portrait that was ever painted in this country " the rule-of- thumb critics were so disconcerted that they
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quickly subsided. This portrait has in it some of the qualities which have made Sargent's Wertheimer the wonder of our own time.
From the manuscripts of Kate Field Miss Knowlton quotes the following vivid description of Hunt in his studio: " You like real artists and specimens of real art, so come with me to Summer Street, mount to the top of Mercantile Building, pause before the name of Hunt and knock. The door is opened by a tall thin
man . . crowned with a round hat and re- sembling Titian as painted by himself. You know that you are standing before an original man, before one who answers his own questions. Hunt has genius, not fully developed, per- haps (he calls himself a student), but still genius, and is possessed of all the charming simplicity of character peculiar to it. Cordial in manner and tremendously in earnest while conversing upon real things, you thank the good stars that have led you to one of the elect, one of the few who make life interesting, who furnish the seasoning for the social pudding, a man with whom you can sit down and have a royal good talk, from which you arise ex- hilarated and refreshed, . for William Hunt hates sham in all its forms."
The great fire of 1872 destroyed almost all Hunt's drawings and sketches, - the work of more than twenty years. But he rallied from
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the blow with characteristic pluck and, five years later, was exhibiting in his new studio at 1 Park Square a very large and varied collection of works done since the fire. In the spring of 1878 he spent some time at Niagara and made several views of the Falls. From this work he was called to fill two large spaces above the windows of the Senate Chamber at Albany, which he did with great success. But his health had not for some years been rugged and he had overtaxed it. The following July he went to the Isles of Shoals to rest under the care of his friends, the Thaxters, and there, in September, the end came. His lifeless body was found floating in a small reservoir among the low hills, having fallen from the adjacent ledge during an attack of the vertigo to which he was subject. Mrs. S. W. Whitman, who was one of Hunt's foremost pupils, wrote of him, "Happily for us his works remain; and to those among whom he lived there remains, also, the glowing re- membrance of a nature high, generous and true, - of gifts so noble and of a presence so inspiring that the very memory seems still, even as he seemed, 'a splendor among shadows.'"
What is generally regarded as Hunt's master- piece, "The Bathers," has been acquired by the Worcester Art Museum for $10,000, the record price for a work of his. The picture represents a group of nude boys disporting
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themselves in a secluded pool overhung by luxuriant green foliage. The trees, the gray tones of the water, and the flesh tones of the figures, which are partly under water, combine to make a beautiful color scheme while the figure of one lad, who is poised on his com- panions' shoulders, ready to dive, is a superb piece of modelling.
And now we come to the musicians whom "fond memory recalls " in connection with nineteenth century Boston: Jenny Lind, who was married here, Ole Bull, who had a residence in nearby Cambridge, and Adelaide Phillips, whose early years were passed in Boston and who always called the city " home."
Let us then begin with Jenny Lind, whom Phineas T. Barnum brought to America in 1850 and who seems in every way to have been one of the few among that showman's offerings who was " worth the price of admission." It was a high price, too; $640 was paid in Boston for the first choice of seats at her initial concert in the Old Tremont Temple. Thomas Ryan, to whose Recollections of An Old Musician I am indebted for much of my information concerning the concerts of this period, records that he himself paid fifteen dollars apiece for three good seats on this occasion. And when Mlle. Lind gave her final concert in Boston, in the hall of the then just-finished Fitchburg
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Depot, one thousand people paid a dollar each for standing room.
Whatever Jenny Lind did as a singer pales before what Barnum accomplished for her as a press agent. Probably a year in advance of the young woman's arrival in America he began to spread broadcast, through the papers of the day, tales of "the Swedish Nightingale," the " musical saint," the " angel of the stage " and the rest. A regular system of short paragraphs and lengthy histories was sent out from his offices and published far and wide, the reason being that he had agreed, without ever having seen or heard Jenny Lind, to pay her $1000 each for one hundred and fifty concerts in addi- tion to paying all the expenses of herself, her secretary and her companion. Her pianist was to be given $25,000, her baritone $12,500 and both were to be free of all expense. Before the singer's departure from Europe the entire amount had to be satisfactorily secured and in order to do this - the sum necessary came to $187,000 - Barnum nearly bankrupted himself. No wonder he made it the object of his life to create an overwhelming interest in his " star."
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