Part 2 (2/2)
There is no record of Mrs. Mowatt's appearance in _Fas.h.i.+on_, except on one evening in Philadelphia, when she played Gertrude for the benefit of Mr.
Blake, and once in New York--at the Park, May 15, 1846. She felt that the character gave her no great opportunity, and she never attempted it again.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ANNA CORA MOWATT RITCHIE.]
Mrs. Mowatt's career as an actress was very remarkable. She was one of the few persons of adult years who, going upon the stage without the severe training and long apprentices.h.i.+p so necessary even to indifferent dramatic success, display anything like brilliant dramatic qualities. She was an actress and a ”star” born, not made. Her reasons for adopting the profession were as remarkable as the triumphs she won; her success as a playwright encouraging her, she said, to attempt to achieve like favor as a player. Every one familiar with the history of the theatre since it has had a history knows well how great is the distinction between producer and performer, and how few are the actors who have written clever plays, how few the authors who have become distinguished as actors upon the stage.
The popularity of Miss Elizabeth Thompson's battle pictures would not encourage her to attempt to lead armies in the field; gun-makers are proverbially poor marksmen; and Von Bulow would never succeed were he to attempt the construction of a grand-piano.
Mrs. Mowatt, however, had stronger inducements than those given in her _Autobiography_ for the step she took. In looking back upon her life, she felt that all of her tastes, studies, and pursuits from childhood had combined to make her an actress. She had exhibited a pa.s.sion for theatrical entertainments when she was little more than an infant; she had written plays, such as they were, before she had seen the inside of a theatre, and she had played in an amateur way before she had ever seen a professional performance. Above and beyond all of these things she was a woman of uncommon intelligence and grace, almost a genius. She had, with some success, given public readings. She felt the stage to be her destiny.
She determined that her destiny should be fulfilled, and she became a good actress if not absolutely a great one, and seemingly with little effort and few rebuffs. The pleasant account she has given of her own theatrical experiences, and her touching and beautiful defence of those women who make their living on the stage, have encouraged many ladies who have felt themselves gifted with similar talents, and possessed of like ambitions and aspirations, to make the same attempts, and generally to fail.
There have been _debutantes_ enough in New York since the _debut_ of Mrs.
Mowatt to fill to overflowing the auditorium of any single city theatre, could they be gathered under one roof to witness the first effort of the next aspirant, whoever she may be. During the season of 1876-77 alone, not less than seven ladies--Mrs. Louise M. Pomeroy, Miss Bessie Darling, Miss Anna d.i.c.kinson, Mrs. J. H. Hackett, Miss Minnie c.u.mmings, Miss Marie Wainwright, and Miss Adelaide Lennox--in leading parts made their first bows to metropolitan audiences, without training or experience; and the season was not considered a particularly strong one in _debutantes_ at that. For much of this Mrs. Mowatt, unconsciously and unwittingly, was responsible. Her sudden success turned many heads, while the equally sudden failures, not recorded, but very many in number, have been quite forgotten, and will be still ignored as long as there are new Camilles and new Juliets to achieve greatness at one fell swoop, and as long as there are unwise friends and speculative managers to encourage them. The careers of these candidates for dramatic fame, as they are familiar to the world, are certainly not inspiring to their foolish sisters who would follow them. A few still in the profession are filling, creditably but ingloriously, humble positions; a very small proportion have by the hardest of work become prominent and popular; but the great majority, dispirited and disheartened, have gone back to the private life from which they sprung, without song, without honor, and without tears, except the many tears they have shed themselves.
Mrs. Mowatt was never behind the scenes of a theatre until she was taken to witness a rehearsal of _Fas.h.i.+on_ the day before its first production.
Her second pa.s.sage through a ”stage door” was when she had her single rehearsal of _The Lady of Lyons_, in which she made her _debut_, and she became an actress, and a triumphant one, three weeks after her determination to go upon the stage was formed. Her house was crowded, the applause was genuine and discriminating, and one gentleman, wholly unprejudiced and of great experience, publicly p.r.o.nounced it ”the best first appearance” he ever saw.
The performance took place at the Park Theatre, New York, on the 13th of June, 1845, less than three months after the production of her comedy. The occasion was the benefit of Mr. Crisp, who had given her the little instruction her limited time permitted her to receive, and who played Claude to her Pauline, Mrs. Vernon representing Madame Deschapelles. While she writes candidly in her _Autobiography_ of her hopes, her experiences, and her trials, she modestly says but little of the decided praise from all quarters which she certainly received, the account of her success here given being taken from current journals and from the recollections of old theatre-goers, not from her own story of her theatrical life.
On the 13th of July of the same year (1845) Mrs. Mowatt appeared at Niblo's Garden, playing a very successful engagement of two weeks, supported by Messrs. Crisp, Chippendale, E. L. Davenport, Thomas Placide, Nickinson, John Sefton, and Mrs. Watts, afterwards Mrs. Sefton. Here she a.s.sumed her second _role_, that of Juliana in the _Honeymoon_, and more than strengthened the favorable impression she had made as Pauline.
During the first year she was upon the stage she acted more than two hundred nights, and in almost every important city in the United States, playing Lady Teazle, Mrs. Haller in _The Stranger_, Lucy Ashton in the _Bride of Lammermoor_, Katherine in the _Taming of the Shrew_, Julia, Juliet, and all of the then most popular characters in the line of juvenile tragedy and comedy. The amount of labor, physical and mental, she endured during this period must have been enormous; and the intellectual strain alone was enough to have destroyed the strongest mental const.i.tution. In the history of the stage in all countries there is no single instance of a mere novice playing so many important parts so many nights, before so many different audiences, and winning so much and such merited praise, as did this lady during the first twelve months of her career as an actress.
Mrs. Mowatt went to England in the autumn of 1847, where her success was as marked as in her own country, and more, perhaps, to her professional credit. She had to contend with a certain prejudice against her nationality, which still existed in Britain; she was compared with the leading English actresses of long experience in their own familiar _roles_, and she could not depend upon the social popularity and personal good-will which were so strongly in her favor at home. Her English _debut_ was made in Manchester a few weeks after her arrival. Her first appearance in London was at the Princess's Theatre on the 5th of January, 1848; Mr.
Davenport, who had played opposite characters to her during her American tours, giving her excellent support during her English engagements. She returned to America in the summer of 1851, greatly improved in her personal appearance and in her art. Her subsequent career here, as long as she remained upon the stage, was marked with uniform success, the reputation she had acquired on the other side of the water establis.h.i.+ng even more strongly her claims on this.
Mrs. Mowatt, after nine years of experience as an actress, took her farewell of the stage at Niblo's Garden on the evening of the 3d of June, 1854. As her _Autobiography_ was published during the preceding year her reason for this step is not given, unless it was her marriage to Mr.
Ritchie a few days later. The occasion was very interesting. A testimonial signed by many of the leading citizens, and highly eulogistic, was presented to her, and her last appearance created as great an excitement in the dramatic and social world as did her first. The play selected was _The Lady of Lyons_, the same in which she made her _debut_.
Old play-goers who still remember her consider her one of the most satisfactory Paulines who have been seen in this country, and the part was always a favorite of her own. On the last play-bill which contains her name are found as her support the names of Walter G. Keeble, who played Claude; of George H. Andrews, then a favorite ”old man,” who played Colonel Damas; of T. B. De Walden, who played Glavis; and of Mrs. Mann, who played Madame Deschapelles. Mrs. Mowatt never again appeared here, or elsewhere, in any public capacity.
Anna Cora Ogden was born in Bordeaux, France, during a visit of her parents to that country in 1819. She married James Mowatt, a young lawyer of New York, when she was only fifteen years of age. Her first appearance as a public reader was made in Boston in 1841--Mr. Mowatt's financial troubles leading her to seek that means of contributing to her own support. During this same year she gave readings in the hall of the old Stuyvesant Inst.i.tute in New York. In 1845, as has been shown above, she became an actress. Mr. Mowatt died in London in the spring of 1851. On the 7th of June, 1854, she was married (on Staten Island) to William F.
Ritchie, of the Richmond _Enquirer_, and she died in the little English village of Henley-on-the-Thames in the month of July, 1870, Mr. Ritchie surviving her some years, and dying in Lower Brandon, Virginia, on the 24th of April, 1877.
Mrs. Mowatt is described, by those who remember her in the first flush of her youth and her success, as ”a fascinating actress and accomplished lady; in person fragile and exquisitely delicate, with a face in whose calm depths the beautiful and pure alone were mirrored, a voice ever soft, gentle, and low, a subdued earnestness of manner, a winning witchery of enunciation, and a grace and refinement in every action”; and it was felt by her admirers that she would have become, had she remained longer in the profession, a consummate artist--one of the greatest this country has ever produced.
After her retirement, and until the breaking out of the civil war, her home in Richmond, Virginia, was the centre of all that was refined and cultured in the Southern capital. She devoted herself to literature and to her social and family cares, writing during this period her _Mimic Life; or, Before and Behind the Curtain_, in which she spoke so many kind and encouraging words of her sisters in the profession, particularly of the ballet girls and the representatives of small and thankless parts, who contribute in their quiet way so much to the public amus.e.m.e.nt, and who too often, by authors and public, are entirely ignored. Among her more important works, other than those already mentioned here, written in her youth and later life, was _Gulzara; or, The Persian Slave_, a play without heroes, the scenes of which were laid within the walls of a Turkish harem, and which was chiefly remarkable from the fact that the only male character in the _dramatis personae_ was a boy of ten years.
Marion Harland, in her _Recollections of a Christian Actress_, printed a few years ago, has paid the highest tribute to the personal worth of Mrs.
Mowatt. What she accomplished during her professional life has, in a manner, been shown here. She was a representative American woman of whom American women have every reason to be proud; and as the writer of the first absolutely American society play, she must be forgiven the harm her brilliant and easy success as an actress has, by its example, since done to the American stage.
Very few of our earlier native dramatists followed the fas.h.i.+on set by Mrs.
Mowatt in writing original plays of American social life. ”Plays of contemporaneous society,” as they were called, were popular and fairly successful here; but they were the charming home comedies of men like Byron or Robertson, thoroughly English in character and tone, or they were taken from the French and the German, with purely foreign incidents and scenes. Some of these were ”localized,” and thus became cruel libels upon American men and manners, except upon such Americans as are influenced by the wors.h.i.+p of _The Mighty Dollar_, or such as are to be found only in _Our Boarding-houses_, and _Under the Gas-light_. The New York play-goer of thirty years since looked in vain upon the stage for the domestic stories of American city and country life which he found in the then new novels of Theodore Winthrop, or in the then familiar poems of Dr. Holland.
Until Joshua Whitcomb appeared we saw no American Peter Probity in an American _Chimney Corner_; and until Bronson Howard and David Lloyd and Brander Matthews and Edgar Fawcett began to write American plays we saw no American Haversack in an American _Old Guard_--not even an American Peter Teazle or an American John Mildmay; while we could not help feeling that _Still Waters Run as Deep_ in this country as they run in the old, and that the _School for Scandal_ in real life has as many graduates and undergraduates in the United States as it has anywhere else.
[Ill.u.s.tration: EDGAR FAWCETT.]
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