Part 7 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES BURKE AS KAZRAC, IN ”ALADDIN.”]

No history of American burlesque could be complete without some mention of the name of Daniel Setch.e.l.l. His Leah the Forsook, and Mark Smith's Madeline are remembered as pleasantly in New York as his Macbeth and Edwin Adams's Macduff are remembered in Boston. William H. Crane places the Macduff of Adams--he dressed in the volunteer uniform of the first year of the war, and read lines ridiculous beyond measure with all of the magnificent effect his wonderful voice and perfect elocution could give them--as the finest piece of burlesque acting it has ever been his good-fortune to see. But the stories told by the old comedians of the extravagant comedy performances of their contemporaries in other days, if they could be collected here, would extend this chapter far beyond the limits of becoming s.p.a.ce.

[Ill.u.s.tration: N. C. GOODWIN IN ”LITTLE JACK SHEPPARD.”]

[Ill.u.s.tration: DE WOLF HOPPER AS JULIET, AND MARSHALL P. WILDER AS ROMEO.]

Whether the burlesque of the present is comparable with the burlesque of the past is an open question, much debated. Mr. Wilson in the _Oolah_, Mr.

Hopper as Juliet, Mr. Powers in _The Marquis_, Mr. Goodwin in _Little Jack Sheppard_, Mr. Burgess as the Widow Bedott--if she can be considered a burlesque part--and other men and women who burlesque women and men and things to-day, are, without question, very clever performers; the laughs they raise are as hearty and prolonged as any which paid tribute to the talents of the comedians who went before them; and it is unjust, perhaps, to judge them by high standards which live only in the memory, and grow higher as distance lends enchantment to their view. As Lawrence Barrett has said, ”the actor is a sculptor who carves his image in snow.” The burlesque which has melted from our sight seems to us, as we look back at it, to be purer and cleaner than the frozen burlesque upon which the sun as yet has made no impression; and the figure of Pocahontas, gone with the lost arts, seems more beautiful than the Evangeline of the modern school.

When the Adonis of the present counterfeits the deep tragedian he is guilty of imitation, and of clever imitation, but nothing more; when he represents the clerk in the country store he gives an admirable piece of comedy acting; but he never rises to the sublime heights of Columbus, as Columbus is remembered by those who saw him before Hoolah Goolah was born.

If American burlesque did not die with John Brougham, it has hardly yet recovered from the shock of his death; and he certainly deserves a colossal statue in its Pantheon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY E. DIXEY AS THE COUNTRY GIRL, IN ”ADONIS.”]

ACT IV.

INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.

INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.

”So cunning, and so young, is wonderful.”

_Richard III._, Act iii. Sc. 1.

While the ”Grand Spectacle of the _Black Crook_” was enjoying its fourth successful run at Niblo's Garden, New York, in the season of 1873, a precociously bright little musician of some six or seven years of age, so advertised in the bills, and to all appearances no older, preternaturally large in head and small in person, won the affection and the sympathy of all those who witnessed his performances. During his very short career he was one of the chief attractions of that attractive variety show, for the _Black Crook_ in its later years was nothing more than a variety entertainment; and when, so soon after the close of his engagement here, the news of his death came from Boston, few of the established favorites of many years have been so sincerely mourned as was this unfortunate little James G. Speaight.

Scarcely larger than the violin he carried, dressed in a bright court suit of blue satin, with powdered wig and silken hose and buckled shoes, like a prince in a fairy tale, he seemed the slightest mite of a performer who ever stood behind the foot-lights. His hands were scarcely big enough to grasp his instrument; his arms and his legs were not so thick as his bow; a bit of rosin thrown at him would have knocked him down; and he could have been packed away comfortably in the case of his own fiddle. As a musician he certainly was phenomenal. It was said of him that when only four years of age, and after a single hearing, he could play by ear the most difficult and complicated of musical compositions, and that he could remember an air as soon as he could utter an articulate sound. Before he was five years old he was sole performer at concerts given under his father's management in some of the provincial towns of England; and when he first appeared in this country he not only played solos upon his violin, displaying decided genius and technical skill, but he conducted the large orchestra standing on a pile of music-books in the chair of the leader, that he might be seen of the musicians he led.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUNRICO DENGREMONT.]

The grace and ease of the little artist, his enthusiasm and vivacity, could not fail to interest and amuse his audiences, while at the same time it saddened the most thoughtful of them, who realized how unnatural and how cruel to the child the whole proceeding must of necessity be. That he was pa.s.sionately fond of his art there could be no doubt, or that he lived only in and for it, and in the excitement and applause his public appearances brought him; but that his indulgence of his pa.s.sion without proper restraint was the cause of the snapping of the strings of his little life, and of the wreck of what might have been a brilliant professional career, was plainly manifest to every physician, and to every mother who saw and heard and pitied him.

Until within a very few months of his death he played only by ear. When he began to learn his notes, and to comprehend the immensity of music as a science, and the magnificent future it promised him, his devotion to study, his ambition, and his own active mind were more than his feeble frame could endure, and his brief candle was suddenly extinguished. At the close of this run of the _Black Crook_, December 6, 1873, he was taken to Boston, where he played in the _Naiad Queen_, and led the orchestra of the Boston Theatre until the night of the 11th of January, 1874. After the _matinee_ and evening performance of that date he was heard by his father to murmur in his troubled sleep, ”O G.o.d, can you make room for a little fellow like me?” and he was found dead by his father at daybreak. With no sins of his own to answer for, surely the prayer was heard; and the coming of that little child was not forbidden.

The few musical prodigies who have succeeded Master Speaight in this country have been blessed, happily, with stronger const.i.tutions or with wiser guardians; and Munrico Dengremont, Josef Hofman, and Otto Hegner, so far at least, have found the rest they need before it is too late. The little Dengremont, a violinist, began his professional life at the age of eight, and in 1875. He came of musical people, he had studied hard, and as a phenomenon he was very successful. He first appeared in New York in 1881, when he was fourteen years of age, but he seems to have produced nothing, and to have done nothing since he went back to Europe some years ago.

The infant musician who of late years attracted the greatest attention in this country, next to the ”Child Violinist” noticed in the opening of this chapter, was unquestionably Josef Hofman; and he appealed particularly to a cla.s.s of the community so high in the social scale, according to its own ideas, that it repudiated Niblo's Garden and the _Black Crook_ as vulgar.

It never heard of little Speaight until it heard of his death, and it knows nothing of him now, perhaps, except as the mythical hero of charming and sympathetic poems written in his memory by Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Austin Dobson.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOSEF HOFMAN.]

Hofman was born in Cracow, in 1877. His mother was an opera-singer, his father a teacher of music. The child had a piano of his own before he was five years of age, and in six months he had acquired the principles of musical composition, and had written an original mazourka. He made his first public appearance at a charity concert when he was six; at eight he played at a public concert at Berlin; and at ten he was drawing enormous crowds to the largest theatre in New York. He was the subject of more attention and of more newspaper notice, perhaps, than any musical child who ever lived. Saint-Saens, the French composer, is said to have declared that he had nothing more to learn in music, that everything in him was music; and Rubinstein is said to have p.r.o.nounced him the greatest wonder of the present age. All of this would have turned a bigger head than his; but notwithstanding his remarkable genius he was always a boy, who found relief in toy steamers and in tin soldiers; and his parents were sensible enough and humane enough to shut up his piano, and to sacrifice their ambition for the good of their son. He is devoting his youth to natural study, and his public career is still before him.

The little Hegner, the latest prodigy, made his first appearance in America in 1889, when he was twelve years of age; and he, too, came of a musical family. Like the Hofman infant, the piano is his instrument, and those who know music speak enthusiastically of his ”phrasing,” of his ”interpretations,” of his ”striking perceptions of musical form,” and the like. All of these children have been compared with Mozart and Liszt, who are, no doubt, innocently responsible for most of the infant musical wonders who have been born since they themselves began, as babies, to perform marvels. There has been but one Mozart, and but one Liszt; and the yet unwritten history of their lives will show whether these lads of the present would not have grown up to be greater artists and happier men if they had in their youth played foot-ball instead of fiddles, and had paid more attention to muscle than to music.

Between the musical wonder and the theatrical wonder there is this distinction: the baby musician never plays baby tunes, the infant actor almost always plays child's parts. Little Cordelia Howard, as Eva, many years ago, and Elsie Leslie and Thomas Russell, alternating in the character of Little Lord Fauntleroy last season, were doing very remarkable things in a charmingly natural way; but if they had attempted to play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth they would only have done what the musical prodigies are doing when they attempt Mendelssohn's D Minor Concerto or a mazourka by Chopin. The little actors are certainly the more rational, the more tolerable, and the more patiently to be endured.