An Epistle to Posterity/Chapter VI
CHAPTER VI
In many visits to Hartford, which beautiful city was the joy of my girlhood, I met Mrs. Sigourney—the sweet, calm Mrs. Barbauld of our early verse, and a dear woman. She was Hartford's first littérateur, to be followed by such eminent stars as Mrs. Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain, and I do not know how many more. Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Anne S. Stephens, and Mrs. Sigourney were the most read and talked of of our authoresses of that day. Mrs. Stephens's Fashion and Famine, in which was pictured Mrs. Coventry Waddell's curious house on the top of Murray Hill, surrounded by unoccupied lots (and which bore the strong and useful suggestion for the subsequent helping of the poor so admirably carried out by Miss Schuyler), was the novel of the day. Miss Sedgwick was a most distinguished woman. Her novel Hope Leslie had been the first New England success, and she was the idol of the most agreeable and successful of all the great brother-and-sister families, the Lenox Sedgwicks, who were to be followed by the Dwights and the Fields, all Berkshire County people of that day. Mrs. Robert Sedgwick was one of the entertainers of the literary and fashionable sets as they commingled when I first came to New York to live. It was there that I first met Bryant and Dr. Bellows and the illuminati generally. Her four charming daughters, her handsome son, Ellery Sedgwick, and their celebrated "Aunt Catharine," with Mrs. Sedgwick's wit and hospitality, drew all around her. It was a home to the somewhat lonely young woman, who had not then found her place. Dr. Lieber, the great philosopher, was there sometimes. Dr. Bellows was the delightful and genial talker of the group. Who could, who ever can, describe his fascinating talk? His sermons were models of pulpit eloquence; the mantle of Channing fell on his shoulders, but it was the every-day charm which was his attraction. Genial, delightful, scholarly, always in a fine Sydney Smith humor, he poured out his deepest, wisest, best thoughts with prodigal lavishness; then would come wild, witty, airy fancies and sweet seriousness, and facts that could scald like tears. Whatever mood he was in, whatever part of your character he wished to impress, his eloquence was always to be depended upon. No one wished to argue any point he had taken; he carried all before him.
His sermons were infinitely inspiring and useful; his talk was a celestial recreation; he was funny as well as witty, and behind all there was a good, hard, New England common-sense. When he and his associates. Dr. Agnew, George T. Strong, etc., took up the Sanitary Commission, this latter qualification made him the superbly successful organizer and useful man that he proved to be. At his house what assemblages of humorists and philanthropists and talkers I have met! — George L. Schuyler, Hoppin, Bryant, Tuckerman, Bancroft, Peter Cooper, Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, George William Curtis, and all the artists. Those delightful daughters of Mr. James A. Hamilton, Mrs. Schuyler and Miss Mary Morris Hamilton, Mrs. Kirkland (the first of our female humoristic writers, author of A New Home, Who'll Follow?), Parke Godwin, Willis Gaylord Clark, Huntington, Frothingham, Lewis Lang, Dr. Osgood, and so on, met at his house; their names escape me, the list is so long.
Dr. Bellows's wit-combats with Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble were kept up twenty years, each giving the other friendly little pats; and no one enjoyed her witty retorts more than he did, although perhaps his ears tingled.
Dr. Bellows's life was a great part of New York, and of the war it was the bright and illuminated page. "Why does not some one write it? What a book it would be! I suppose his administration of the Sanitary Commission would read like a romance now — alas, how much of it I saw! and some of it I was.
I cannot remember when Dr. Bellows began to be a bright star in my life. We were neighbors in the country, and he often took my mother's tea. Many old associations continued to draw us together until his lamented death; and now that he is a brilliant memory I often find myself referring to that excellent example of undying cheerfulness, that patience in which he excelled all his peers. Dr. Bellows was a fortunate man outwardly; he was always first in every circle; he had enjoyed a great deal of the luxurious happiness of travel; the world was full of beautiful places for him to be happy in, for he made every day a holiday for all around him. He found that the bliss of a spirit was in action; he worked hard; but he had a great many grievous trials, for which he wore the armor of a Christian spirit. There could be no enlargement of such a horizon except in eternity. It was a model life.
Living with him at one time were Mr. and Mrs. Octavius B. Frothingham, and they added a great charm to that pretty rectory, corner of Twenty-first Street and Fourth Avenue, of which one of the doctor's witty brothers-in-law, Mr. Fred Nevins, said that it was too handsome for a "dissenting minister." Mr. Frothingham's wit, eloquence, and peculiar belief drew around him a set of worshippers of his own; he had for many years a large following. His excellent compendium Transcendentalism in New England is a most valuable book, being a thoughtful, scholarly history of that strange, mystical liberalizing of religious thought which swept over New England for forty years, doing much good and very little harm. It brought out such men as Theodore Parker, C. A. Bartol, John Weiss, the younger Channing, James Freeman Clarke. Emerson may be said to have been its Luther.
Dr. Washburn used to say of these transcendentalists, "They opened a window and let in a fresh breeze, cleansing the close garret of New England theology." This from a churchman was great praise, but Dr. Washburn could afford it. He was one of the great lights of the Church.
I am amused to remember now how much of my reading, when I was very young, was polemical. It was not intolerant, for I was surrounded by those transcendental philosophers. Articles by Colenso, Arnold, Temple (now Archbishop of Canterbury), Stanley, the Tracts for the Times, Pusey and Newman, elbowed Carlyle, Goethe, and Schleiermacher, Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, and Coleridge, with the oncoming dessert of Thackeray and Dickens, who are not polemical. Fortunately for me, I had a Shakespeare-loving father, and a mother who read poetry aloud with a sweet intonation. I knew all the Lake poets early, and my "polemical" reading was much lightened by Childe Harold and Coleridge and Keats. I miss now very much that love of poetry which was so common among the young girls of fifty years ago. Indeed, I miss also the poets. In fact, we all read very much, beginning with Jane Taylor's Poems for Infant Minds, and including Thalaba and The Ancient Mariner.
And yet so illy directed, so carelessly done, was all this reading that I once shocked Dr. Bellows by telling him I had never read Comus or Milton's prose. How soon he repaired that omission by reading Comus aloud to us in a masterly manner, and following it up by giving us readings from, and almost a lecture on, Wordsworth when he was paying us a visit at Keene! Society is like a Cremona violin; those who play upon it decide that the old ones are incomparable. "A crowd is not company, faces are but galleries of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love." "But there was then love and liking." Where society is founded on the provision that people know each other well and like each other, it certainly follows that there should be more "love," or liking at least, than where it is merely a matter of display. When society is bought it is apt to lose the distinction and the value of the company of such men as Dr. Bellows, if, indeed, there are many such.
Certainly the individual was then of more consequence than his surroundings. There was less luxury and much more conservatism thirty, and even twenty, years ago. Dr. Bellows played his noble part both before and after the war with singular distinction. He had the courage of his convictions. It was not an easy berth which he filled during the war, for the regular army was always against him. General Sherman never spoke well of the Sanitary Commission. He thought the whole business of taking care of a war belonged to the regular army. So it did, if they could have done it; but they could not. So it was well that some outside aid brought a cup of cold water to the dying soldier.
Dr. Bellows was fortunate in having for parishioners Mr. Bryant, Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft, Mr. and Mrs. G. L. Schuyler, Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, and many such people.
Mr. Bryant, unlike most poets, was a rich man, and gave excellent dinners. I remember many a distinguished company in his house in Sixteenth Street, charmingly conducted by his daughter. Miss Julia Bryant, who knew how to mingle the elements which make up a dinner.
I often thought that his dinners might be compared to Rogers's breakfasts in London, so many bright minds conspired to make them eloquent. Mr. Bryant and his son-in-law, Parke Godwin, were kind to actors, then not so often invited into society as they are now; and at their houses I met Edwin Booth and his first lovely wife. Badeau and Booth were very intimate, and the former brought the great tragic actor often to my house. I never saw a more perfect union than that of the Booths.
I remember Booth was then playing Othello and Iago on alternate nights. A select few of us preferred his Othello. It was so intensely Venice in all its belongings that it fitted his romantic Eastern beauty. I remember no picture more vividly than his as he sat on a couch reading over his military orders, the great captain Othello, in an Oriental robe and sash. And then, as Iago begins subtly to instil the poison, the carelessness with which Othello heard the first suggestion that Cassio had played him false; how, half sighing, and turning over his despatches as if he wished those lazy days to return, he said, "Oh yes, he went between us very often." The temperament of the actor, the dress, all fitted him nobly in this part; but his Iago continued to be the world's favorite, and I once asked him the reason.
"Oh," said he, "my wife dressed me so well for that part; she composed and made that dress." It was a superb dress of scarlet with pearl buttons running down the jacket. They looked like bullets; there was a hidden ferocity in that dress. Thomas Hicks painted a great picture of him in it.
Booth's rare smile was most effective in Othello. As he heard Desdemona tell her love, it broke over his face like a gleam of sunshine on a dark day. I saw his Hamlet many times. It was almost our only amusement in the first days of the war (he played it a hundred times in one season). He was the ideal mad prince. As some one said afterwards of Irving's Hamlet, "You forgot the player and thought only of the prince." His reading in this part was the best thing he did. He was again most wonderful with Barrett and Bangs in Julius Cæsar. He was the very best Cardinal Wolsey I have ever seen; how grand and old he was! But oh! his King Lear! To have heard Mrs. Kemble read that play and to see Booth play it was the very poetry of despair.
Like all geniuses, he did things of which he was unaware himself. The expression on Lear's face in his last wild moments, the gleam of recognition, the pleased memory, the joy of being still loved, the gratitude — to be immediately chased away by the wild torments of insanity — I declare I never could see that expression that the tears did not rain down my face.
And yet, like his fellow-genius General Grant, who at that same moment was playing his role so extremely well on a distant battle-field, he was no talker and no orator; he could not, or he would not, talk about his parts or about Shakespeare.
He said of his Othello that it was only a sketch, and he rather laughed at its being a good one. He liked later on to be praised for his Hamlet and his Cardinal "Wolsey and his Petruchio; he said he was satisfied with those impersonations.
He failed utterly as Romeo; and when his theatre burned down and he was temporarily ruined, of all his wardrobe nothing was left but one shoe of Romeo's, "left for me to kick myself with," he said.
I never met him after those days of his youth and beauty in society. He became more famous, and was always much liked and respected; but I am glad to keep apart my little vision of him at this period when he was a dream, the realization of what Shakespeare might have seen with his mind's eye. He was an exquisitely refined person, and had an air of sadness and preoccupation even then. The sadness of those days, the misery which the assassination of Lincoln brought upon us all, my own private grief at the time, induce me to skip much that would be historical. It has, however, had the advantage of a thousand pens — that dreadful epoch during and just after the war.
I must notice one little book. I dare say the gifted author has forgotten that he ever wrote it.
It was Whitelaw Reid's account of a Tour in the South with Chief-Justice Chase in 1866. The learned author, destined later on to become an editor and a foreign minister, was then favorably known as "Agate," a correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial. The vigor and vivacity of his style had already made him a great favorite, but this little brochure probably answered more questions and satisfied more people at the North than many a more ambitious volume. He travelled with the Chief-Justice to New Orleans and across to Charleston, saw the returned Confederate officers, all of whom said "they were going to get some new clothes"; questioned the negro, and found out what every one at the North wished to know (it had been a terrible dread), that there was no danger of a negro insurrection; in fact, he opened for us the long-closed South. This rare pamphlet is, perhaps, as important historically as it was useful at the time.
Chief-Justice Chase was born in New Hampshire, and my father had bought the ground on which our home was built of his grandmother, old Mrs. Janet Ralston, who lived in Keene, a shrewd Scotchwoman. When my father said to her, "Mrs. Ralston, you ask too much for this land," she answered, wittily, "Ah, Mr. Wilson, I notice no people gits enough for their land but those who asks enough for it"; and she got her price.
My father, when rusticated from Middlebury College for some boyish pranks, kept the village school in Keene for one winter, and used to carry a little light-haired boy on his shoulder to school through the snow. This boy's name was Salmon P. Chase. He wrote it largely on the history of his times, and when in after-days we used to meet at Washington, and he was everything that was distinguished, he always remembered this early friendship and treated me almost as if I were a relative.
As Mr. Evarts said of him, "he was always one of the first three." A very sweet-natured man, I think he never was happy as Chief-Justice. He would have preferred to be President, as we all hoped he would be. With his two beautiful and gifted daughters, Mr. Chase, whether Minister, Secretary, or Chief-Justice, always kept open a delightful house, and until his health failed he was a great pleasure to meet. He had the canny Scot in him, as his grandmother had. It gave a unique flavor to his wit, and shone in and out behind his remarkable genius for affairs in that public service for which he was so essentially suited.
I went to see him in his last days in New York, where he was under treatment for some nervous malady, and he talked of Keene as if nothing had intervened. "My tall schoolmaster," he said, "was the most fascinating person I have ever met. I felt a great confidence that he would not drop me into the snow. I have not always felt that same confidence in men since."
I suppose that this great man tasted the insincerity of human friendship and the ups and downs of fortune and the instability of fame as few men ever did, unless we may except James G. Blaine, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Samuel J. Tilden, all of whom had the Presidency within their grasp, but it slipped away. And yet how often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House (General Grant alone excepted)! But, then, his fame was kept dear by the people. He could not travel through the remotest village that the farmer would not leave the plough in the furrow, and run for wife and children to come and see the man who had saved the nation. Even to touch his hand was distinction.Indeed, even after the war was over, the most interesting personage to us all was General Grant, who, of all people, hated to be interviewed, and who would not be exploited. He was no talker, and unless he was strongly interested in or excited about his subject, he was deficient in fluency; and yet every new acquaintance found him remarkable for the transparent lucidity of his explanations, and he had a good command of nervous English; so, as we all knew that he had talent enough, the natural inference was that General Grant did not wish to talk. When he did talk it was therefore taken as a great compliment to the listener.
What a contrast to him was General Sherman, one of the most renowned talkers that ever lived! He had an immense command of words, almost volubility, and the most friendly willingness to talk of his campaigns. This soldier by nature, who had an entire scorn of luxury or even comfort on the field, slept in a tente d'abri, or in the open air, and had no cumbrous baggage. His ménage was a roll of blankets and a haversack full of hardtack. He declared that he could fall asleep on the hard floor or wet ground, or when a battle was raging near him. Attention to detail, promptitude, decision, order, and unfailing punctuality were part of him, and yet his rugged face could unbend in society, wear a most winning expression; and he loved the theatre, all amusements, and a good dinner. I never knew any carpet-knight who could wait for a tardy lady who had forgotten her fan so patiently as he could. He was a many-sided man and a perfect gentleman.
He became renowned as an orator, and his speeches at West Point were the most perfect specimens of that difficult art — the talking to young men without patronage.These two great friends, great military geniuses, who were so true to each other and so free from any jealousy that they could write two such letters to each other as those of March 4, 1864, from Grant to Sherman, dated Nashville, Tennessee, and answered by Sherman March 10, 1864 (every school-boy should learn them by heart); these two great men, of all our heroes — one a President, the other a lieutenant-general — seem to have escaped that almost universal concomitant of greatness, ingratitude and lack of constancy on the part of the fickle public.
General Grant's tour around the world made him so replete with delightful reminiscence that he talked more when he came home. I remember dining with him at Governor Cornell's in New York, and it was a very distinguished dinner. I told him that an English officer who had been present at the dinner given him by the Duke of Wellington in the Waterloo Chamber told me in London that he thought him a very learned soldier. "Well, I am not," said Grant. "I had neither the genius of Sherman nor the learning of Lee or Macpherson. I only meant to get there."
But the fountain of talk was unsealed on this occasion, and he told me of his travels in China and Japan, of the wonderful men he had met everywhere, and the dinner with the Queen, of which he said, "I did not sit next to her, as I expected to; she had a prince and a princess between us, but she was very agreeable, and talked across. Better than all," said he, "I had Fred with me everywhere." The affectionate tone of this delightful character, the simplicity mingled with greatness, made General Grant the idol of the people. His entrance into a city made a gala day. "Celebrity is the chastisement of talent and the punishment of genius." I think he never liked it."I can't talk like Sherman," he used to say, with his rare smile; and, indeed, nobody could.
I happened to see him twice when his character shone out free of adventitious circumstances. The first time was at West Point, just after the war was ended, in 1865. He came to his old Alma Mater, bringing Mrs. Grant, without whom life had no charm for him. We were in the library. The examination was going on, and Professor Bartlett left the room, coming back with Grant on his arm. What an intense moment it was to us all! The professors rose to receive him. I think poor General Grant nearly sank through the floor; he winced as he never had done in the face of the enemy. "Those dreaded professors rising to do me honor! Why, I felt all the cadet terror all over me," he afterwards said. He was more comfortable when he got outside and commenced shaking hands with all mankind and womankind, but no one who saw that notable scene can forget his modesty.
Again I happened to be in Washington during his second term of office, and with my husband and son took the boat for Mount Vernon. To our delight and surprise, General and Mrs. Grant, Miss Nellie Grant, and Miss Edith Fish were on board, the two latter young school-girls of seventeen.
When we reached Mount Vernon, finding the President was expected, we tried to efface ourselves, but General Grant asked us to dine with him, and especially drank wine with my young son, the youngest member of the party. Nothing could be so kind as he was, and after dinner, as we sat looking at the Potomac, Mrs. Grant said, "Oh! I wish I had a house on the Potomac!" "Do you?" said he. "Well, I can buy one cheap." Then they had their little badinage about the improbability of their paying for their purchase out of their crops, etc. We came home together, of course, and although I saw him often, both at the White House and at great dinners, and much in private life after, I remember General Grant best on these two occasions. He was gifted by nature with a genius for military command, but he had also the unmetaphysical character of the Roman intellect, and in his private life he was all that was sweetest. While Sherman was a Greek, with the wit, tact, quickness, and elegance of the Greek mind, yet these two great captains loved each other and understood each other, and were alike heroes worthy to save the sinking ship of State, good husbands, fond fathers, and citizens of high renown. Sherman's sensitive and impressionable mind got him into trouble occasionally, and he never wished to be President. It was fortunate for him that he did not have that "bee in his bonnet," as old General Greene, of Rhode Island, used to call the desire for the Presidency.
Adelaide Ristori brought letters to me when she came to New York (in 1866 I think it was) from my friend Charles Hale, then our Minister to Egypt.
Virtue, beauty, and genius were this woman's title-deeds to fame, and, as one of her poetical biographers said justly, "Romance presided over her birth, and her path was strewn with as many incidents as flowers."
She brought her noble husband, Capranica, and her two children, the beautiful Bianca and her son, with her; and she also brought us Myrrha, Gamma, Medea, Lady Macbeth, Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Pia dei Tolomei, and Adrienne Lecouvreur. When first asked to add Medea to her repertoire, she at first said no; that she could understand all passions but that which led to the murder of one's offspring. In the original, Medea murders her children savagely before the audience, but, owing to Ristori's reluctance, Legouve, the author, altered his situations so that the murder is implied rather than consummated, and she made the great tragedy one of her successes.
She was a beautiful woman, of the dark-eyed Italian type, a large nose, and the most perfect figure. I remember her dancing the german at a ball at Mrs. Roosevelt's (who was one of the most distinguished hostesses of the period) quite as well as the youngest debutante, and a most serene and unaffected person she was, fond of talking and disposed to be communicative about herself. She told me that she was the daughter of poor actors, who happened to be at a little Venetian city, Cividale del Friuli, when she entered on the responsibilities of life; and at two months of age she was brought on the stage in a basket in the play The New Year's Gift, while at four years of age "La Piccola Ristori" appeared in a child's part as an infant phenomenon. Even then her salary was greater than that of her parents. As a girl she inherited from her father a great love of music, and Nature gave her a mezzo-soprano voice of the finest quality. She was good enough to sit down to the piano and accompany herself while singing me some of the very interesting Italian popular songs of the people. But her grandmother, a fine old tragic actress, probably seeing the genius for acting strong in the child, used to take away her guitar and shut her up in a trunk, "à la Ginevra," when she sang; so she was quietly ruled out from being a singer. This threw her into a deep melancholy, and she would only play with her dolls as dead bodies, laying them out and surrounding them with candles. This gloomy amusement she followed up by a passionate attachment to burying-grounds, and she ascribed some of her deep and tragic powers to this early heart-break.
She became very religious, and while performing in Faenza, in 1841, she was so devout that the people thought her a budding angel or an incipient saint; they mounted a ladder and looked in on her midnight vigils, but only found that she had thrown herself on her bed in her clothes. However, they felt such faith in her future canonization that they divided one of her dresses, which she had left behind her, as a relic. At fourteen she was playing Francesca da Rimini, so tall and thin that she had to be padded — "cotonnée," as she said — to look like a woman. She worked incessantly under a fine old actress, who was most severe with her. She worked until she broke down. She got well, however, and in 1842 began to create parts as a comedienne. As a delineator of the romantic drama, in Goldoni's masterpieces, she held the stage until 1848 in all the great cities of Italy. Mr. Lowell saw her in one of these years, and could never forget the charm of her comedy, especially in Gli Innamorati.
But she went to Rome, and the young Giuliano del Grillo, son and heir to the old Marchese Capranica, fell in love with her, and her own tragedy began. She was of humble origin and an actress, so the old marchese would have none of her. It was most amusing to hear her describe her beautiful youthful lover, and then turn to look at the fat, elderly, exceedingly comfortable Del Grillo husband by her side.
Rome was beside itself with revolutionary ideas in 1846. The young Giulano was watched; the spies were thick; but love laughs at locksmiths. They met and were married at Cascina, whither Del Grillo went as a Papal envoy.She could play in I Promessi Sposi with a vim after this. They remained faithful to each other until death.
The young wife retired from the stage for a year to please her husband and placate his mother, but art reclaimed her child, and in 1848, while French bombs threatened Rome, she gave three representations to help Piscenti, one of her former managers, who had been imprisoned for debt, I have forgotten what play she appeared in, but I think it was in Cuores ad Aeti, by Forti. At any rate, her father-in-law went to see her, was completely swamped by her greatness, forgot his prejudices in his enthusiasm, and, in fact, took her to his heart as the Marchesa del Grillo, but allowed her to become once more and forever " Adelaide Ristori" to the public.
Then she began her faithful study of high tragedy. She made her début in Alfieri's masterpiece of Myrrha, and unluckily failed; but she afterwards surpassed all other actresses in this part. She became triumphant through all Italy, and sighed for Paris, which is now, as in antiquity, alone entitled to throw the apple. It is the world's tribunal for art. In 1852 Rachel had visited Italy; why should not Ristori visit Paris? The actress was determined, and in 1855 she was playing Francesca da Rimini to a pit full of kings, with Rossi as Paolo, and in Paris! What a triumph!
Dumas père was her first conquest. Scribe paid court to the new favorite, and Jules Janin, the clever Figaro of the Journal des Débats, sealed her fate by his clever praises. Myrrha followed, la sublime actrice had a furious success, and her triumph was celebrated in verse, marble, prose, and music.
She was most astonished herself. "Why," said she," I played Myrrha to empty benches at Turin, at eighty centimes a ticket, while here in Paris they will pay ten francs and crowd the theatre to see me. Why is that?"
Rachel resigned her position as a societaire of the Théâtre Français, and the throne was offered to Ristori by the director, Arsène Houssaye. The Emperor sent M. Fould as his advocate, begging her to accept.
But the Italian tragedienne was true to her flag; she would not desert the Italian language and drama. She won, and received the imperial decree, authorizing her to play at the Théâtre Italien for four months. Her first season brought her a half-million of francs.
To see this illustrious woman first play Marie Antoinette and Maria Stuarda, and then to hear her tell these facts with flashing eye was a most dramatic experience.
The Emperor sent her a beautiful bracelet in form of a serpent, the head sparkling with diamonds, which she was fond of wearing. Medals were struck in her honor, and all the world acknowledged her greatness as a tragedienne. The King of Prussia decorated her with the Order of Merit for her Deborah.
She had been emphatically a queen's favorite in Spain, and always spoke well of poor Isabella. She saved the life of a Spanish soldier, Nicolas Chapado, by her eloquence, kneeling first to Narvaez, then to the queen — a story she was fond of telling.
She played, in French, Beatrix at the Odeon; it proved a great success. Then she took Shakespeare to London! She played Lady Macbeth and Elizabeth, and was called the second Siddons. In 1864, she sailed for Egypt and played in Cairo, Athens, Constantinople, giving the tragedies of Alfieri beneath the shadow of the Pyramids.
She came to America with all this glory behind her, and was received, both as an actress and as a woman, with most enthusiastic welcome. She was an intelligent, industrious, earnest, good woman, with great sensibility and most wonderful talents; but as a successor to Rachel she never seemed to me a genius. She rose early; she attended and managed every rehearsal; she had a most excellent company; she was the strongest and most indefatigable person ever heard of. She used her needle cleverly, took care of her theatrical wardrobe; she was reading, writing letters, attending to her daughter (a beautiful girl), making calls, going to dinners and balls; yet all her excitements were so reduced to a system that she never seemed fatigued. The only woman whom I have met who seemed at all like her is Mrs. Potter Palmer, of Chicago, and she is very like her. The practical was not swallowed up in the ideal in this extraordinary woman, whom I am happy to have known. She never broke an engagement; she was always punctual; her people adored her.
Of her parts I liked best her Marie Antoinette. It was infinitely affecting, tender, and true. Her beauty in it was something astonishing. She must have been fifty years of age; she did not look thirty. And the support was admirable. The king was played by an actor so good that he is always before me when I read of Louis XVI. She told me that she always cried an hour or two after playing this part, which shows that she was an actress at heart; but she declared that hard work had done more for her than inspiration. She was grateful to her father, her grandmother, and her early teachers because they were so severe. She never spoke of Madalena Pomatelli except as "a great beauty." This was her mother; I suppose a very mediocre actress. But she must have been a good woman to have had so serious and so good a daughter. Ristori had the temperament of virtue. She was naturally religious, firm, temperate, and judicious; and if not a genius, she certainly had incomparable talent. Her dresses were studies from all that history and art could do for the drama; she redeemed the honor of the Italian stage, and opened the door for Salvini, the greatest Othello and Hamlet and Samson that the world has seen.
She made a very large fortune and left her children rich. What a fortune to inherit the memory of such a mother! A woman who could not be moved from her sublime pedestal of devotion to art, to duty, to religion; who could pass through all the temptations of youth, beauty, celebrity, and triumph utterly unscathed! She was nobly patriotic, true to her friend Cavour, kindhearted and philanthropic to a degree. It is hard to say which to admire the most: the talent of the actress, making famous the woman, or the character of the woman, giving depth, solidity, and enduring strength to the fame of the actress.
I cannot leave this celebrated memory without referring to her Queen Elizabeth, The play gave us forty years of that stormy life. Ristori, coming on as a young girl, the pretty auburn - haired princess, adroitly grew ten years older at every decade by putting on more clothes, more jewels, and more paint and whitewash, until the lion woman, sinking down to die on the stage, was the old Elizabeth who shook the dying countess for having deceived her about Leicester's ring. It was a superb study. I cannot forget her startling scream as she heard of the success of Francis Drake and the destruction of the Spanish Armada. "Drak!" said she, throwing out a long forefinger, as if she would touch the absent commander and give him the accolade. It seemed that "Drak" could hear that cry; it had in it all the uncontrollable emotion of the red-haired daughter of Henry VIII.
It is a curious fact that the two greatest actresses who came to the United States played in French and in Italian to audiences not half of whom understood either language. But the genius of artistic and dramatic representation confounded the Tower of Babel. Rachel, Ristori, Sara Bernhardt, and Duse would be understood in the Choctaw. For them, and such as they, the Tower of Babel does not exist.