Curiosities of the American Stage

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JUNIUS BRUTUS BOOTH.

CURIOSITIES OF THE
AMERICAN STAGE

BY
LAURENCE HUTTON
AUTHOR OF “PLAYS AND PLAYERS” ETC., ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1891

Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO
BRANDER MATTHEWS
THESE

THE ARGUMENT.

This book, as its name implies, is a series of chapters from the annals of the American Theatre; and it considers Plays and Players more particularly in their less familiar aspects. It does not pretend to be critical; and the greatest care has been taken to verify all the facts it contains (many of them here presented for the first time), in order that it may appeal to the small but select band of specialists known as Dramatic Collectors, as well as to those influential members of the community who are glad to call themselves Old Play-goers.

The chapters upon “The American Stage Negro,” upon “The American Burlesque,” and upon a “A Century of American Hamlets,” appeared originally in Harper’s Magazine; the others have been printed, in part, in other periodicals, but as now published they have all been rewritten, elaborated, and extended.

The portraits with which the volume is enriched are in many instances very rare, and some of them, never engraved before, have been prepared especially for this work. They are from the collections of Mr. J. H. V. Arnold, Dr. B. E. Martin, Mr. Thomas J. McKee, Mr. C. C. Moreau, Mr. Evart Jansen Wendell, and The Players, to all of whom the author here expresses his sincere thanks.

A double Index—personal as well as local—makes the book easily available for reference; and it will lend itself readily to extra illustration. It is intended to instruct as well as to entertain.

Laurence Hutton.

The Players, 1890.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

ACT I.
THE NATIVE AMERICAN DRAMA.

SCENE I.

THE INDIAN DRAMA.

“Do you put tricks upon ’s with savages and men of Inde?”

The Tempest, Act ii. Sc. 2.

The American play is yet to be written. Such is the unanimous verdict of the guild of dramatic critics of America, the gentlemen whom Mr. Phœbus, in Lothair, would describe as having failed to write the American play themselves. Unanimity of any kind among critics is remarkable, but in this instance the critics are probably right. In all of its forms, except the dramatic form, we have a literature which is American, distinctive, and a credit to us. The histories of Motley and of Parkman are standard works throughout the literary world. Washington Irving and Hawthorne are as well known to all English readers, and as dearly loved, as are Thackeray and Charles Lamb. Poems like Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Whittier’s Snow-Bound, Lowell’s The Courtin’, and Bret Harte’s Cicely belong as decidedly to America as do Gray’s Elegy to England, The Cotter’s Saturday Night to Scotland, or the songs of the Minnesingers to the German Fatherland, and they are perhaps to be as enduring as any of these. Mr. Emerson, Mr. Lowell, and Professor John Fiske are essayists and philosophers who reason as well and as clearly, and with as much originality, as do any of the sages of other lands. In our negro melodies we have a national music that has charms to soothe the savage and the civilized breast in both hemispheres. American humor and American humorists are so peculiarly American that they are sui generis, and belong to a distinct school of their own; while in fiction Cooper’s Indian novels, Holmes’s Elsie Venner, Mrs. Stowe’s Oldtown Folk, Howells’s Silas Lapham, and Cable’s Old Creole Days are purely characteristic of the land in which they were written, and of the people and manners and customs of which they treat, and are as charming in their way as are any of the romances of the Old World. Freely acknowledging all this, the dramatic critics are still unable to explain the absence of anything like a standard American drama and the non-existence of a single immortal American play.

The Americans are a theatre-going people. More journals devoted to dramatic affairs are published in New York than in any European capital. Our native actors in many instances are unexcelled on any stage of the world; we have sent to England, to meet with unqualified favor from English audiences, J. H. Hackett, Miss Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Booth, John S. Clarke, Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Forrest, Miss Mary Anderson, Miss Kate Bateman, Augustin Daly’s entire company of comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Florence, Richard Mansfield, and many more; while, with the exception of certain of Bronson Howard’s comedies, “localized” and renamed, how many original American plays are known favorably, or at all, to our British cousins? Rip Van Winkle, although its scenes are American, is not an original American play by any means; it is an adaptation of Irving’s familiar legend; its central figure is a Dutchman whose English is broken, and its adapter is an Irishman. Yet Rip Van Winkle, Joseph K. Emmett’s Fritz, and The Danites are the most popular of the American plays in England, and are considered, no doubt, correct pictures of American life.

That the American dramatists are trying very hard to produce American dramas all theatrical managers on this side of the Atlantic know too well, for shelves and waste-paper baskets are full of them to overflowing. Frequent rejection and evident want of demand have no effect whatever upon the continuous supply. How few of these are successful, or are likely to live beyond one week or one season, all habitual theatre-goers can say. During the single century of the American stage not twoscore plays of any description have appeared which have been truly American, and which at the same time are of any value to dramatic literature or of any credit to the American name.

By an original American play is here meant one which is the original work of an American author, the incidents and scenes and characters of which are purely and entirely American. In this category cannot be included dramas like Mr. Daly’s Pique, or The Big Bonanza, for the one is from an English novel and the other from a German play; nor Mr. Boucicault’s Belle Lamar, or The Octoroon, which are native here, but from the pen of an alien; nor plays like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which are not original, but are drawn largely, if not wholly, from American tales; nor plays like A Brass Monkey or A Bunch of Keys, which are not plays at all.

The first purely American play ever put upon a regular stage by a professional company of actors was The Contrast, performed at the theatre in John Street, New York, on the 16th of April, 1787. It was, as recorded by William Dunlap in his History of the American Theatre, a comedy in five acts, by Royall Tyler, Esq., a Boston gentleman of no great literary pretensions, but in his later life prominent in the history of Vermont, to which State he moved shortly after its admission into the Federal Union in 1791. Mr. Ireland and Mr. Seilhamer preserve the original cast of The Contrast, which, however, as containing no names prominent in histrionic history, is of no particular interest here. Not a very brilliant comedy—it was weak in plot, incident, and dialogue—it is worthy of notice not only because of its distinction as the first-born of American plays, but because of its creation and introduction of the now so familiar stage-Yankee, Jonathan, played by Thomas Wignell, an Englishman who came to this country the preceding year. He was a clever actor, and later, a successful manager in Philadelphia, dying in 1803. Jonathan, no doubt, wore a long tailed blue coat, striped trousers, and short waistcoats, or the costume of the period that nearest approached this; certainly he whittled sticks, and said “Tarnation!” and “I vum,” and called himself “a true-born son of liberty” through his nose, as have the hundreds of stage-Yankees, from Asa Trenchard down, who have come after him, and for whom he and Mr. Wignell and Royall Tyler, Esq., were originally responsible. Jonathan was the chief character in the piece, which was almost a one-part play. Its representations were few.

This Jonathan is not to be confounded with another and a better Jonathan, who figured in The Forest Rose, a domestic opera, by Samuel Woodworth, music by John Davies, produced in 1825, when Tyler’s Jonathan had been dead and buried for many years. Woodworth’s Jonathan was originally played by Alexander Simpson, and later by Henry Placide. It was long a favorite part of the gentleman known as “Yankee Hill.”

The American Drama—such as it is—may be divided into several classes, including the Indian Drama, and the plays of Frontier Life, which are often identical; the Revolutionary and war plays; the Yankee, or character plays, like The Gilded Age, or The Old Homestead; the plays of local life and character, like Mose, or Squatter Sovereignty; and the society plays, of which Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, and Bronson Howard’s Saratoga are fair examples. Of these the Indian drama, as aboriginal, should receive, perhaps, the first attention here.

The earliest Indian play of which there is any record on the American stage was from the pen of an Englishwoman, Anne Kemble (Mrs. Hatton), a member of the great Kemble family, and a sister of John Kemble and of Mrs. Siddons. It is described as an operatic spectacle, and was entitled Tammany. Dedicated to, and brought out under the patronage of, the Tammany Society, it was first presented at the John Street Theatre, New York, on the 3d of March, 1794. Columbus and St. Tammany himself were among the characters represented. The Indians who figured upon the stage were not very favorably received by the braves of that day, a large party of whom witnessed the initial performance of the piece; and Tammany was not a success, notwithstanding the power of the Kemble name, the good-will of the sachems of the Society, and the additional attraction of the stage-settings, which were the first attempts at anything like correct and elaborate scenic effects in this country.

G. W. P. CUSTIS.

At the Park Theatre, June 14, 1808, was presented the next Indian play of any importance, and, as written by a native American, James N. Barker, of Philadelphia, it should take precedence of Tammany, perhaps, in the history of the Indian drama. It was entitled The Indian Princess, was founded on the story of Pocahontas, and, like Tammany, was musical in its character. It was printed in 1808 or 1809; the versification is smooth and clear, the dialogue bright, and the plot well sustained throughout.

Pocahontas has ever been a favorite character in our Indian plays. George Washington Parke Custis wrote a drama of that name, presented at the Park Theatre, New York, December 28, 1830, Mrs. Barnes playing the titular part. James Thorne, an English singer, who died a few years later, was Captain John Smith; Thomas Placide was Lieutenant Percy; Peter Richings, Powhatan; and Edmund Simpson, the manager of the Park for so many years, played Master Rolf. Robert Dale Owen’s Pocahontas was produced at the same house seven years later (February 8, 1838), with Miss Emma Wheatley as Pocahontas; John H. Clarke, the father of Constantia Clarke, the Olympic favorite in later years, as Powhatan; Peter Richings, an Indian character, Maccomac; John A. Fisher, Hans Krabbins; his sister, Jane M. Fisher (Mrs. Vernon), Ann; and Miss Charlotte Cushman, at that time fond of appearing in male parts, Rolf. As these several versions of the story of the Indian maiden are preserved to us, that of Mr. Owen is decidedly the best in a literary point of view. It has not been seen upon the stage in many years. The Pocahontas of John Brougham cannot be claimed as a purely American production, and it must be reserved for future discussion and under a very different head.

EDWIN FORREST.

Unquestionably, Mr. Forrest’s great success with Metamora, a prize drama for which he paid its author, John Augustus Stone, five hundred dollars—a large sum of money for such an effort half a century ago—was the secret of the remarkable run upon Indian plays from which theatre-goers throughout the country suffered between the years 1830 and 1840. Forrest, even at that early period in his career, was the recognized leader of the American stage, the founder of a peculiar school of acting, with a host of imitators and followers. Metamora was one of his strongest and most popular parts; its great effect upon his admirers is still vividly remembered, and, naturally, other actors sought like glory and profit in similar roles.

Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, was produced for the first time on any stage at the Park Theatre, New York, December 15, 1829. Mr. Forrest, Peter Richings, Thomas Placide, John Povey, Thomas Barry, Mrs. Hilson (Ellen Augusta Johnson), and Mrs. Sharpe were in the original cast. As Metamora Mr. Forrest appeared many hundreds of nights, and in almost every city of the American Union. Wemyss, at the time of the first production of the play in Philadelphia (January 22, 1830), wrote of him and of Metamora as follows: “The anxiety to see him crowded the theatre [Arch Street] on each night of the performance, adding to his reputation as an actor as well as to his private fortune as a man. It is a very indifferent play, devoid of interest; but the character of Metamora is beautifully conceived, and will continue to attract so long as Mr. E. Forrest is its representative. It was written for him, and will in all probability die with him.” Mr. Wemyss’s prophecy was certainly fulfilled. No one after Mr. Forrest’s death, with the single exception of John McCullough, and he but seldom, had the hardihood to risk his reputation in a part so well known as one of the best performances of the greatest of American actors; and Metamora and Mr. Forrest have passed away together.

JOHN McCULOUGH.

Metamora owed everything to the playing of Forrest; if it had fallen into the hands of any other actor it would no doubt have been as short-lived as the rest of the Indian dramas generally—a night or two, or a week or two at most, and then oblivion. As a literary production it was inferior to others of its class; not equal to The Ancient Briton, for which Mr. Forrest is said to have paid the same author one thousand dollars; or to Fauntleroy or Tancred, dramas of Mr. Stone’s, which met with but indifferent success. John Augustus Stone’s history is a very sad one; in a fit of insanity he threw himself into the Schuykill, in the summer of 1834, when barely thirty years of age; after life’s fitful fever sleeping quietly now under a neat monument containing the simple inscription that it was “Erected to the Memory of the Author of Metamora by his friend, Edwin Forrest.” With all of his faults and failings, the great tragedian was ever faithful to the men he called his friends.

The Indian of Fenimore Cooper is the father of the stage Indian; and both have been described by Mr. Mark Twain as belonging to “an extinct tribe which never existed.” A full list of the Indian plays more or less successful, known in other days and now quite forgotten, would be one of the curiosities of American dramatic literature. A few of them are here preserved:

Sassacus; or, The Indian Wife, said to have been written by William Wheatley, then a leading young man at the Park Theatre, New York, where Sassacus was produced on the 8th of July, 1836, Wheatley playing an Indian part, Pokota; his sister, Miss Emma Wheatley, then at the height of her popularity, playing Unca, and John R. Scott Sassacus. This latter gentleman, as a “red man of the woods,” was always a great favorite with the gallery, and he created the titular roles in Kairrissah, Oroloosa, Outalassie, and other aboriginal dramas with decided credit to himself. In the course of a few years, while the stage-Indian was still the fashion, were seen in different American theatres The Pawnee Chief; Onylda; or, The Pequot Maid; Ontiata; or, The Indian Heroine; Osceola; Oroonoka; Tuscalomba; Carabasset; Hiawatha; Narramattah; Miautoumah; Outalissi; Wacousta; Tutoona; Yemassie; Wissahickon; Lamorah; The Wigwam; The Manhattoes; Eagle Eye; and many more, not one of which lives to tell its own tale to-day.

The reaction against the Indian drama began to become apparent as early as 1846, when James Rees, a dramatist, author of Charlotte Temple, The Invisible Man, Washington at Valley Forge, but of no Indian plays, wrote that the Indian drama, in his opinion, “had of late become a perfect nuisance,” the italics being his own.

SCENE II.

THE REVOLUTIONARY AND WAR DRAMA.

The first of the purely Revolutionary plays presented in New York was, probably, Bunker Hill; or, the Death of General Warren, and the work of an Irishman, John D. Burke. It was played at the John Street Theatre in 1797; and it was followed the next year by William Dunlap’s André, at the Park. Mr. Brander Matthews, in his introduction to a reprint of André, published by “The Dunlap Society,” for private circulation among its members, enumerates a number of plays written shortly after the Revolution upon the subject of the capture and death of the British spy, many of which, however, were never put upon the stage. André had been dead less than twenty years when Dunlap’s André was first produced, in 1798, and Arnold was still living; and, curiously enough, The Glory of Columbia, also by Dunlap, in which Arnold and André both figured, was played at the old South Street Theatre, Philadelphia, in 1807, with scenes painted by André himself, who had superintended amateur theatricals at that house, and had played upon that very stage.

After Bunker Hill and André came at different periods in New York The Battle of Lake Erie; The Battle of Eutaw Springs; A Tale of Lexington; The Siege of Boston; The Siege of Yorktown; The Seventy-Sixer; The Soldier of ’76; Marion; or, The Hero of Lake George; Washington at Valley Forge; and many more of the same stamp—all of which were popular enough during the first half-century of our history, but during the last half they have entirely disappeared.

MAJOR ANDRÉ.—From a pen-and-ink sketch by himself.

A play of Revolutionary times which deserves more than passing notice here was Love in ’76, by Oliver B. Bunce, produced at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York in September, 1857; Miss Keene playing Rose Elsworth, the heroine; Tom Johnstone Apollo Metcalf, a Yankee school-teacher—a part that suited his eccentric comedy genius to perfection; and J. G. Burnett Colonel Cleveland of the British Army, a wicked old soldier, in love with Rose, and completely foiled by the other two in the last act. Love in ’76 was unique in its way, being the only “parlor play” of the Revolution, the only play of that period which is entirely social in its character; and a charming contrast it was to its blood-and-thunder associates on that account—a pretty, healthy little story of woman’s love and woman’s devotion in the times that tried men’s hearts as well as souls. It was not put upon the stage with the care it deserved, and was too pure in tone to suit a public who craved burlesque and extravaganza. It has not been played in some years. Mr. Bunce was the author of other plays, notably the Morning of Life, written for the Denin Sisters, then clever little girls, which they produced at the Chatham Theatre, New York, in the summer of 1848. George Jordan and John Winans, the latter a very popular low-comedian on the east side of the town, were in the cast. At the same house, two years later, was played Marco Bozzaris, a melodrama in blank verse, with very effective scenes and situations, written by Mr. Bunce, and founded not on Halleck’s poem, but on the story of Bozzaris as related in the histories. James W. Wallack, Jr. (then known as “Young Wallack”), was the hero; Susan Denin was his martyred son; John Gilbert was the villain of the piece; and Mrs. Wallack the hero’s wife. Marco Bozzaris was very popular, and was not withdrawn until the end of the Bowery season.

But to return to the drama particularly devoted to war. The Battle of Tippecanoe related to the Indian wars, as The Battle of New Orleans was founded on the War of 1812, and The Battle of Mexico on our Mexican difficulties some years later. The contemporaneous literature of the stage inspired by the War of the Rebellion was not extensive or worthy of particular notice. It was confined generally to productions like The Federal Spy; or, Pauline of the Potomac, at the New Bowery Theatre, New York, and The Union Prisoners; or, The Patriot’s Daughter, at Barnum’s Museum. During the struggle for national existence war on both sides of the Potomac was too serious a business, and too near home, to attract people to its mimic representations on the stage, and it was not until Held by the Enemy and Shenandoah were produced, a quarter of a century after the establishment of peace, that American play-goers began to find any pleasure in theatrical representations of a subject which had previously been so full of unpleasantness. These later war dramas, however, are so much superior in plot, dialogue, and construction to any of the plays founded upon our earlier wars, so far as these earlier plays have come down to us, that they may encourage the optimist in theatrical novelties to believe that there is some hope for the future of that branch of dramatic literature at least.

SCENE III.

THE FRONTIER DRAMA.

“Here in the skirts of the forest.”

As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 2.

The drama of frontier life in this country may be described as the Indian drama which is not all Indian; and even this variety of stage play is fast disappearing with the scalp-hunter, and with the Indian himself, going farther and farther to the westward every year. It may be said to have been inaugurated by James K. Paulding, a native of the State of New York, who wrote the part of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, in The Lion of the West, for J. H. Hackett, in 1831. Wildfire, afterwards put into a drama called The Kentuckian, by Bayle Bernard, wore buckskin clothes, deer-skin shoes, and a coon-skin hat; and he had many contemporary imitators, who copied his dress, his speech, and his gait, and stalked through the deep tangled wild woods of east-side stages for many years; to the delight of city-bred pits and galleries, who were perfectly assured that Kit, the Arkansas Traveller—and one of the best of his class—was the real thing, until they saw Buffalo Bill with actual cowboys and bona fide Indians in his train, and lost all further interest in The Scouts of the Prairies, or in Nick of the Woods, which hitherto had filled their idea of a life on the plains.

J. H. HACKETT.

Only two modern plays of this character are worthy of serious attention here—Augustin Daly’s Horizon and the Davy Crockett of Frank E. Murdoch. Horizon, one of Mr. Daly’s earliest works, was produced at the Olympic Theatre, March 22, 1871, and ran for two months. In the advertisements it was called “a totally original drama, in five acts, illustrative of a significant phase of New York society, and embodying the varied scenes peculiar to American frontier life of the present day.” It was certainly an American play. In no other part of the world are its characters and its incidents to be met with. Complications of plot and scenery and certain surprises in the action were evidently aimed at by the author rather than literary excellence. A panorama of a Western river and a night surprise of an Indian band upon a company of United States troops were well managed and very effective. The play was suggestive of Bret Harte’s sketches and of dime novels, with its gambler, its Heathen Chinee, its roughs of “Rogues’ Rest” its vigilance committee, its abandoned wife, and its prairie princess. The Indian element did not predominate in Horizon, and was not offensive. The part of Wannamucka, the semi-civilized redskin, very well played by Charles Wheatleigh, was quite an original conception of the traditional untutored savage; he was wild, romantic, treacherous, but with a touch of dry humor about him that made him attractive in the drama, if not according to the nature of his kind. Panther Loder might have stepped out of the story of The Outcasts of Poker Flat—one of those cool, desperate, utterly depraved, but gentlemanly rascals whom Mr. Harte has painted so graphically, and whom John K. Mortimer could represent so perfectly upon the stage. Mortimer, during his long career, never did more artistic work than in this rôle. The stars in Horizon whose names on the bills appeared in the largest type were Miss Agnes Ethel, the White Flower of the Plains, and George L. Fox. The lady was gentle, charming, and very pretty in a part evidently written to fit her; not so great as in Frou Frou, in which she made her first hit, or as Agnes, which was to follow; but it was a pleasant, creditable performance throughout. Poor Fox, as Sundown Bowse, the Territorial Congressman, furnished the comic element in the piece; he was humorous and not impossible—the first of the Bardwell Slotes and Colonel Sellerses and Silas K. Woolcotts who are now the accepted stage-Yankees, and who furnish most of the amusement in the modern American drama. Mr. Fox has not been greatly surpassed by any of his successors in this line. Miss Ada Harland as his daughter, Miss Lulu Prior as the royal Indian maiden, Mrs. Yeamans as the Widow Mullins, and little Jennie Yeamans as the captured pappoose all added to the popularity of the play. Taken as a whole, Horizon is the best native production of its kind seen here in many years, with the single exception of Davy Crockett.

Mr. Frank Murdoch called his Davy Crockett a “backwoods idyl.” It is almost the best American play ever written. A pure sylvan love-story, told in a healthful, dramatic way, it is a poem in four acts; not perfect in form, open to criticism, with faults of construction, failings of plot, slight improbabilities, sensational situations, and literary shortcomings, but so simple and so touching and so pure that it is worthy to rank with any of the creations of the modern stage in any language. The character of Davy Crockett, the central figure, is beautifully and artistically drawn: a strong, brave young hunter of the Far West; bold but unassuming; gentle but with a strong will; skilled in woodcraft but wholly ignorant of the ways of the civilized world he had never seen; capable of great love and of great sacrifices for his love’s sake; shy, sensitive, and proud; unable to read or to write; utterly unconscious of his own physical beauty and of his own heroism; faithful, honest, truthful—in short, a natural gentleman. The story is hardly a new one. Davy seems to be the son of the famous Davy Crockett whose reputation was so great that his very name became a terror to the ’coons of the wild woods, and who left to his children and to posterity the wholesome advice that it is only safe to go ahead when one is sure one is right in going. On this motto the Davy Crockett of the play always acts. He is in love with a young lady who is his superior in station and education. Of his admiration he is not ashamed, but in his simple, honest modesty he never dreams of winning the belle of the county, or that there is anything in him that can attract a refined woman. It is his good fortune to save her life from Indians and from wolves at some risk of his own scalp, and with some damage to his own person. In a forest hut, while she nurses his wounds, she recites to him the story of Young Lochinvar, upholding the course of the borderer of other lands and other days, so faithful in love, so dauntless in war, telling of her own approaching marriage to a laggard in love and a dastard in battle, into which her father would force her. On this hint he speaks, sure he is right at last, and going ahead, like the young hero in Marmion, to win this old man’s daughter. He carries her away from the arms of the man she hates; one touch of her hand and one word in her ear is enough; through all the wide border his steed is the best; there is racing and chasing through Cannobie Lee, behind the footlights and in the wings, but Lochinvar Crockett wins his bride, the curtain falls on proud gallant and happy maiden, and the band plays “Home, Sweet Home.”

All this, of course, is the old, old story so often told on the stage before, and to last forever; but Mr. Murdoch seems to have told it better than any of his fellow-countrymen.

There is no doubt, however, that Davy Crockett, like Metamora, owes much of its success to the actor who plays its titular part. Mr. Frank Mayo’s performance of this backwoods hero is a gem in its way. He is quiet and subdued, he looks and walks and talks the trapper to the life, never overacts, and never forgets the character he represents. He first played Davy Crockett in Rochester in November, 1873, producing it in New York at Niblo’s Garden on the 9th of March, 1874, when he had the support of Miss Rosa Rand as Eleanor Vaughn, the heroine who looked down to blush and who looked up to sigh, with a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye, and who made in the part a very favorable impression. The play has never been properly appreciated by metropolitan audiences. Free from tomahawking and gun-firing, it does not attract the lovers of the sensational; utterly devoid of emotional and harrowing elements, it does not appeal to the admirers of the morbid on the stage; and, giving no scope for richness of toilet, it has no charms for the habitual attendants upon matinée entertainments.

Frank Mayo, as “Davy Crockett.”

Its reception by the press was not cordial or kindly, and the severe things written about it had, it is said, such an effect upon its sensitive author that he literally died of criticism in Philadelphia, November 13, 1872. Frank H. Murdoch was a nephew of James E. Murdoch, the old tragedian, and was himself an actor of some promise. His single play was of so much promise that if there were an American Academy to crown such productions it might have won for him at least one leaf of the laurel.

SCENE IV.

THE STAGE AMERICAN IN THE CHARACTER PLAY.

“What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?”

A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act iii. Sc. 1.

The typical and accepted American of the stage, the most familiar figure in our dramatic literature, is a Jonathan, an Asa Trenchard, a Rip Van Winkle, a Solon Shingle, a Bardwell Slote, a Mulberry Sellers, and a Joshua Whitcomb; and even he does not always figure in the American play as it is here defined.

WILLIAM J. FLORENCE AS BARDWELL SLOTE.

Jonathan, of whom something has already been said, is now extinct and defunct. Asa Trenchard is the creation of an Englishman (Tom Taylor), brought to perfection by the genius of Mr. Jefferson. Rip Van Winkle, as has been said before, is a Dutchman taken from the pages of Irving’s familiar tale, and so accentuated by the genius of this same Jefferson in the present generation, that the fact that he had distinguished predecessors in the same character, but in other dramatizations of the story, is almost forgotten now. Hackett was the original Rip in 1830. Of his performance Sol Smith wrote then: “I should despair of finding a man or a woman in an audience of five hundred who could hear Hackett’s utterance of five words in the second act, ‘But she vas mine vrow,’ without experiencing some moisture in the eyes.” The second Rip Van Winkle was Charles Burke, a half-brother of Mr. Jefferson who considers Burke’s the best Rip Van Winkle of the trio. He was the author of his own version of the play. Concerning his “Are we so soon forgot?” L. Clarke Davis quotes John S. Clarke as saying: “It fell upon the senses like the culmination of all mortal despair, and the actor’s figure, as the low sweet tones died away, symbolized more the ruin of a representative of a race than the sufferings of an individual. His awful loss and loneliness seemed to clothe him with a supernatural dignity and grandeur which commanded the sympathy and awe of his audience.” Mr. Clarke adds that in supporting Mr. Burke in this part night after night, and while perfectly aware of what was coming, and even watching for it, when these lines were spoken his heart seemed to rise in his throat, and his eyes were wet with tears. The Rip Van Winkle which Mr. Jefferson has played so often on both sides of the Atlantic is his own version of the story, somewhat elaborated by Mr. Boucicault; and Mr. Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle is Rip Van Winkle himself.

It was Charles Burke who first discovered the possibilities lying dormant in the character of Solon Shingle, a sort of Yankee juvenile Paul Pry, in a two-act drama called The People’s Lawyer, by Dr. J. S. Jones. “Yankee” Hill and Joshua Silsbee—both admirable representatives of Yankee character parts—played Solon Shingle as a young man, with all of the “Down-East” characteristics which distinguish stage Down-Easters; and it was not until he fell into the hands of Burke that he became the simple-minded, phenomenally shrewd old man from New England, with a soul which soared no higher than the financial value of a bar’l of apple-sass. Until Mr. Owens, the last of the Solon Shingles, died and took Solon Shingle with him, the drivelling old farmer from Massachusetts was as perfect a specimen of his peculiar species as our stage has ever seen.

Judge Bardwell Slote may be called with justice “a humorous satire,” which is the subtitle given by Benjamin Woolf to the play of The Mighty Dollar, in which he is found. He is a politician of the worst stamp, with many amiable and commendable qualities. He is vulgar to an almost impossible degree, personally offensive, and yet entirely delightful to meet—on the stage, where Mr. Florence kept him for many hundreds of successive nights. If he never existed in real life—and it is to be hoped for the sake of our national credit that he did not—Mr. Florence made him not only possible but probable.

JOHN T. RAYMOND.

The Senator, written by David Lloyd, and retouched by Sydney Rosenfeld for Wm. H. Crane, is a native legislator of a somewhat different type. He is an honest politician, who may perhaps be found in the Senate of one of the States of the nation, and even in the Upper House of the nation itself. He is a man of energy and of what is called “snap”; he is full of engagements which he has no time to keep; he is loquacious, of course, for loquacity is part of his business capital; he is loud, self-made, self-educated, self-reliant, and not always refined. His humor is peculiarly American, and in Mr. Crane’s hands he is very human.

Mr. Warner and Mr. Clemens, jointly with John T. Raymond, are responsible for the character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, a stage American from the Southern States. He is quite as much exaggerated as Slote, and quite as amusing. He can be found in part in all sections of the country, perhaps, but as a whole, happily for the country, he does not exist at all, except upon the stage.

The great charm of Joshua Whitcomb is that he is a real man of real New England flesh and blood, so true to the life that when Mr. Thompson took him to Keene, New Hampshire, not very far from Swanzey, his audiences wanted their money back, on the ground that they got nothing for it but what they saw, free of charge, all about them every day. “It warn’t no actin’; it was jest a lot of fellers goin’ around and doin’ things.” The manner in which Mr. Thompson goes about in The Old Homestead, and does things, is the perfection of art; and if he is not the best of his class, it is not because he is the least natural and the least lovable.

It is a curious commentary upon the rarity of typical stage Americans of the gentler sex that only two of any prominence have appeared of late years, and that these are everything but gentle, and are both played by a man. Mrs. Barney Williams and Mrs. Florence were very popular as “Yankee gals” with a previous generation; but to Neil Burgess must we turn now for the only correct picture of the women who are fit to mate (upon the stage) with those heroes of the stage who fill our rural homesteads and our legislative lobbies. The Widow Bedott, and her friend of The County Fair, most assuredly are worthy of equal rights with Joshua Whitcomb and Bardwell Slote.

NEIL BURGESS AS THE WIDOW BEDOTT.

Drawn by Arthur Jule Goodman,
after a photograph by Falk.—From the
collection of Evert Jansen Wendell.

SCENE V.

THE LOCAL NEW YORK DRAMA.

“Like boys unto a muss.”

Antony and Cleopatra, Act iii. Sc. 13.

The number of plays based upon life in New York, all of which are strangely similar in title and in plot, or what must pass for plot, and all of which have been seen upon the New York stage since the first appearance of Mose, will surprise even those most familiar with our theatrical literature. Taken almost at random from various files of old play-bills, and from Mr. Ireland’s Records, there were A Glance at New York; or New York in 1848; New York As it Is; First of May in New York; The Mysteries and Miseries of New York; Burton’s New York Directory; The New York Fireman; Fast Young Men of New York; Young New York; The Poor of New York; New York by Gaslight; New York in Slices; The Streets of New York; The New York Merchant and his Clerks; The Ship-carpenter of New York; The Seamstress of New York; The New York Printer; The Drygoods Clerk of New York, and many more, including Adelle, the New York Saleslady, which last was seen on the Bowery side of the town as late as 1879.

These were nearly all spectacular plays, and they were usually realistic to a degree in their representation of men and things in the lower walks of life. Rich merchants, lovely daughters, wealthy but designing villains, comic waiter-men, and pert chamber-maids with song and dance accompaniment, were placed in impossible uptown parlors; but the poor but honest printer set actual type from actual cases, and cruelly wronged but humble maidens met disinterested detectives by real lamp-posts and real ash-barrels, in front of what really looked like real saloons.

F. S. CHANFRAU AS MOSE.

The original of all these local dramas was New York in 1848, or, as it was called during its long run of twelve weeks at the Olympic in that year, A Glance at New York. It was a play of shreds and patches, hurriedly and carelessly stitched together by Mr. Baker, the prompter of Mitchell’s famous little theatre, in order to cover the nakedness of the programme on the night of his own annual benefit. It had no literary merit, and no pretensions thereto; and it would never have attracted public attention but for the wonderful “B’hoy” of the period, played by F. S. Chanfrau—one of those accidental but complete successes upon the stage which are never anticipated, and which cannot always be explained. He wore the “soap locks” of the period, the “plug hat,” with a narrow black band, the red shirt, the trousers turned up—without which the genus was never seen—and he had a peculiarly sardonic curve of the lip, expressive of more impudence, self-satisfaction, suppressed profanity, and “general cussedness” than Delsarte ever dared to put into any single facial gesture. Mr. Chanfrau’s Mose hit the popular fancy at once, and retained it until the Volunteer Fire Department was disbanded; and A Glance at New York was fol-lowed by Mose in California, Mose in a Muss, and even Mose in China. Mr. Matthews, in an article contributed to one of the magazines a few years ago, records the fact that during one season Mr. Chanfrau played Mose at two New York theatres and in one theatre in Newark on the same night.

The Mulligan Guards, The Skidmores, and their followers were the legitimate descendants of Mose, and they came in with the steam-engines and the salaried firemen, who took away the occupation and the opportunities of Sykesy and Jake. Harrigan and Hart began their theatrical management at the Theatre Comique, opposite the St. Nicholas Hotel, in 1876, and introduced what may be called the Irish-German-Negro-American play, illustrating phases of tenement-house life in New York, and amusing everybody who ever saw them, from the Babies on our Block to Muldoon himself, the Solid Man. Mr. Harrigan wrote his own plays; both he and Mr. Hart were inimitable in their peculiar line as actors, and they were wise and fortunate in their selection of their company, which included Mrs. Annie Yeamans, “Johnny” Wild, and other equally talented artists, for whom “Dave” Braham, the leader of the orchestra, wrote original and catching music, which was sung and whistled and ground out from one end of the country to the other. Mr. Harrigan is a close observer and a born manager, and his productions have been masterpieces in their way. He puts living men and women upon the stage. He has done for a certain phase of city life what Denman Thompson has done for life upon a farm; and he is more to be envied than Mr. Thompson, because no class of theatre-goers enjoy his productions more than do the living men and women whom his company, with real art, represent. But, alas! his plays are not the great American plays for which the American dramatic critic is pining; although, like The Old Homestead, and Shenandoah, and Horizon, and Metamora, and Fashion they approach greatness, if only in the fact that they have introduced, and preserved, a series of purely American types which are as great in their way as are the dramatic characters of other lands, and greater and more enduring than many of the Americans to be found in other branches of American literature.

SCENE VI.

THE SOCIETY DRAMA.

“Full of most excellent differences, of very soft society, and great showing.”—Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 2.

A few extracts from the prologue which Mr. Epes Sargent wrote for Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, in 1845, will give a comparatively correct picture of the feeling which existed between native playwrights and the dramatic critics of this country towards the end of the first half of the present century, and will show how strong was the prejudice then existing against dramatic works of home manufacture. The comedy was purely original; its writer was an American, and a woman; its scenes were laid in the city of New York; and Fashion was emphatically an American play.

At the rising of the curtain on the opening night Mr. Crisp was discovered reading a newspaper; and he spoke as follows, the italics being Mr. Sargent’s own:

“Fashion, a Comedy! I’ll go—but stay—
Now I read farther, ’tis a native play!
Bah! home-made calicoes are well enough,
But home-made dramas must be stupid stuff.
Had it the London stamp ’twould do; but then
For plays we lack the manners and the men!
Thus speaks one critic—hear another’s creed:
Fashion! What’s here? [Reads.] It never can succeed!
What! from a woman’s pen? It takes a man
To write a comedy—no woman can!
******
But, sir—but, gentlemen—you, sir, who think
No comedy can flow from native ink—
Are we such perfect monsters, or such dull,
That wit no traits for ridicule can cull?
Have we no follies here to be redressed?
No vices gibbeted? No crimes confessed?
******
Friends, from these scoffers we appeal to you!
Condemn the false, but, oh, applaud the true!
Grant that some wit may grow on native soil,
And Art’s fair fabric rise from woman’s toil!
While we exhibit but to reprehend
The social vices, ’tis for you to mend!”

EPES SARGENT.

The audience was long and loud in its applause of the prologue, but the play was so well written, so well represented, and so deserving of success that Mrs. Mowatt and Mr. Sargent might have spared themselves their appeal to the sympathy of the general public. The critics, as a rule, were well disposed, although Edgar Allan Poe, one of the sternest of them, said that Fashion resembled The School for Scandal, to which some of its admirers had likened it, as the shell resembles the living locust; a stricture which was hardly just. Fashion created an excitement in the theatrical world that had not been known for years before, and has hardly been equalled since. It was said, and with some truth, to have revived the drama in this country, and to have reawakened a declining taste for dramatic representations of the higher and purer kind. It was almost the first attempt made to exhibit on our stage a correct picture of American society and manners, and although it was a satire on a certain parvenu class, conspicuous then as now in the metropolis, and always likely to exist here, it was a kindly, good-natured satire that did not intend to wound even when it was most pointed. Several familiar New York types were faithfully and cleverly represented: the millionaire merchant, vulgar, self-made, proud of his maker; and his wife, uneducated, pretentious, devoted to dress and display, seeking to marry her daughter to the adventurous foreigner who is not yet obsolete in the “upper circles” of metropolitan society. There were besides these, in the underplot, a rich old Cattaraugus farmer, his granddaughter (a dependant in the merchant’s family), a prying old maid, a black servant, a poet, and a fashionable selfish man of the world. All of these were well drawn and natural. The situations were probable, and had existed and do exist in real life, while the language was bright and pure. The dramatic critic of the Albion, then a leading and influential journal, pronounced Fashion to be “the best American comedy in existence, and one that sufficiently indicated Mrs. Mowatt’s ability to write a play that would rank among the first of the age.” Mrs. Mowatt, however, was the author of but one other successful drama, Armand, the Child of the People. It was first played at the Park Theatre on September 27, 1847; while Fashion itself has not been put upon the stage here in many years, and is almost forgotten, although its influence is still felt. Its popularity endured longer, perhaps, than that of any of its contemporaries; it was played throughout the United States, and was well received by London and English provincial audiences. The oblivion into which it has fallen now should by no means be ascribed to its want of merit, the fashion of the time having changed.

The comedy was produced at the Park Theatre on the 24th of March, 1845. The Herald of the next day said it had one of the best houses ever seen in New York; boxes, pit, and gallery were crowded; all of the literati of the city were present, with a tolerable sprinkling of the élite—the Herald’s distinction between the élite and literati might have suggested another satirical play—and the comedy was enthusiastically received. Its initial cast was a very strong one and worthy of preservation. William Chippendale played Adam Trueman, the farmer; William H. Crisp, the elder, was Count Jolimaitre, the fraudulent nobleman; John Dyott was Colonel Howard, of the United States Army, in love with Gertrude; Thomas Barry was Tiffany, the wealthy merchant; T. B. De Walden, author of Sam, The Baroness, and other plays, was T. Tennyson Twinkle, a modern poet; John Fisher played Snobson, the confidential clerk, and Mr. Skerrett Zeke, a colored servant. None of these gentlemen are known to our stage to-day, but without exception they were as great in the various lines in which they were cast as could then be found in America. In the ladies of its first representations Fashion was equally fortunate, and Mrs. Mowatt herself, in her Autobiography, writes that she felt much of the great success of the play to be justly due to the cleverness of the players. Mrs. Barry—the first Mrs. Barry, who died in 1854—represented the would-be lady of fashion; Miss Kate Horn (Mrs. Buckland), Seraphina Tiffany, her daughter; Miss Clara Ellis, a young Englishwoman, who remained but a few years in this country, was the Gertrude; Mrs. Dyott was Millinette, the French maid; and Mrs. Edward Knight (Mary Ann Povey) played Prudence, the maiden lady of a certain age. The part of Adam Trueman, the blunt, old-fashioned, warm-hearted farmer, with his unfashionable energy and sturdy common-sense, pointing homely morals and bursting social bubbles—“Seventy-two last August, man! Strong as a hickory, and every whit as sound”—was for many years a favorite with the representatives of “character old men” on our stage. Mr. Blake, the original Adam in Philadelphia, was particularly happy in the rôle, playing it many times in New York; and E. L. Davenport made a decided hit as Adam at the Olympic in London, in January, 1850, when the comedy was first produced in England. Mr. Davenport on this occasion had the support of his wife, who played Gertrude, and who was then still billed as Miss Fanny Vining.

There is no record of Mrs. Mowatt’s appearance in Fashion, 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.

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 apprenticeship 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 Bülow 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 passion 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 débutantes enough in New York since the début 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 Dickinson, Mrs. J. H. Hackett, Miss Minnie Cummings, 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 débutantes 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 Fashion the day before its first production. Her second passage through a “stage door” was when she had her single rehearsal of The Lady of Lyons, in which she made her début, 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 pronounced 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 assumed her second rôle, 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 constitution. 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 rôles, and she could not depend upon the social popularity and personal good-will which were so strongly in her favor at home. Her English début 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 establishing 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 dêbut. 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 Institute 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 amusement, 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 personæ 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 fashion 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 worship 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.

EDGAR FAWCETT.

If an American character was drawn at all, he was too apt to be a Solon Shingle or a Mose; if an American play was written at all, its scenes were laid on Sandy Bars, or in the false and unhealthful atmosphere of Saratoga or Long Branch. While London managers presented Orange Blossoms and Two Roses, the managers of New York and Boston set Diamonds and Pearls. The English flowers were fresh and fragrant; the American jewels, although they had a certain sparkle, were too often paste. The exotics flourished and bloomed on our soil for a time, it is true; but if they had been native buds they would have withered in a week, or else, like so many other indigenous plants, have been left to waste their sweetness in the pigeon-holes of managers’ desks. So strong was this unnatural prejudice against the production of an American picture of American home-life upon the American stage, that in one of the brightest American comedies ever taken from the French Mr. Hurlburt was forced to go abroad with his characters, and to place his Americans in Paris.

All this is not so true of the stage of to-day as it was at the beginning of the second century of our national drama. Scores of native writers, during the past decade or two, have presented American plays which have been clean and clever, even if they have not yet become classic. But it is a striking fact that the first three original “society plays” which were in any way successful upon the American stage were from the pens of women—Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, Mrs. Bateman’s Self, and Miss Heron’s The Belle of the Season—and that since their production the name of a woman has very rarely appeared upon the bills as the author of a play.

During the ten years which followed the first performance of Fashion it had a few rivals—comedies and dramas, satirical or otherwise—which treated, or pretended to treat, of that which asserts itself to be “the higher stratum of American society.” Among the longer lived of these were Extremes, a local New York play, which ran for three weeks at the Broadway Theatre in 1850; a dramatization of Mr. Curtis’s Potiphar Papers, brought out at Burton’s Theatre in 1854, in which Charles Fisher made a great hit as Creamcheese; and Mr. De Walden’s Upper Ten and Lower Twenty, also at Burton’s, in 1854, in which Mr. Burton himself, as Christopher Crookpath, a serious part, was a genuine surprise to his audience, and created a profound impression. Extremes, by a Baltimore gentleman, was never repeated here; the version of Mr. Curtis’s work—happily called Our Best Society—was merely an adaptation; Mr. De Walden was not a native writer; and only one of these productions, and that one the least successful, was an original American play.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

“Self, an original New York comedy in three acts,” by Mrs. H. L. Bateman, was seen for the first time in New York at Mr. Burton’s Chambers Street house on the 27th of October, 1856. The plot was slight, and the play was long and a trifle dull. It was the story of a young girl (Mrs. E. L. Davenport) with a few thousands of dollars of her own, which both of her parents were determined to possess. She gave the money to her father (Charles Fisher); the mother (Mrs. Amelia Parker) instigated the son (A. Morton) to forge a check for the amount; the forgery was discovered; the girl, to save her mother and her brother, confessed the crime which she did not commit, and was turned out-of-doors in ignominy and disgrace, Mr. Burton, the traditional stage uncle, rescuing and righting her in the end. All of this was not new, was not cheerful, and, it is to be hoped, was not “society”; but it was received with great praise, and it took its place in popular favor by the side of Mrs. Mowatt’s comedy. Self was frequently repeated in New York, notably at Wallack’s Theatre, now the Star, in the Summer of 1869, when it introduced John E. Owens as Unit, and where it ran for three weeks, Miss Effie Germon playing the heroine, and playing it well. Mr. Owens made of Unit what is called a “star part.” It gave him an opportunity for the display of his peculiar comedy powers, and he presented it with a variety and force of expression which was not always to be seen in his acting. In it he appealed more to the hearts of his audiences than in Solon Shingle; and, next to his Caleb Plummer, his Unit is the pleasantest and most perfect picture he has left in the memory of his friends.

Mrs. Bateman was the daughter of Joseph Cowell, a well-known theatrical manager in the South and West, who came to this country from England in 1821, and whose Thirty Years Among the Players is known to all collectors of dramatic books. She went upon the stage at New Orleans in 1837 or 1838, but did not long remain an actress. She was successful as a manager; and she was the author of Geraldine, a tragedy, and of a dramatization of Longfellow’s Evangeline. For many years she was known only as the mother of the Bateman Children.

At Winter Garden, on the evening of March 12, 1862, Miss Matilda Heron produced for the first time The Belle of the Season, advertised as “a new and original home play,” and as written by Miss Heron herself. Its scenes were laid in the parks of Niagara and in Fifth Avenue drawing-rooms, but it suggested too many familiar plays of The Lady of Lyons school to be altogether free from the suspicion of imitation. That it came from Miss Heron’s own brain and pen, however, there could be little doubt; it had, as a literary effort, many of the faults and virtues and strong characteristics so curiously blended in the acting of its author. The production, as a whole, was what is termed “emotional,” the part of the heroine being peculiarly so. Unquestionably Miss Heron wrote it to fit herself, and unquestionably it did not fit her so well as did Camille, upon which so much of her fame as an actress now rests. She had all of an author’s fondness for the part and for the play. She considered both her greatest works. She produced the comedy many times in many cities of the Union, not always to the benefit of her purse or of her professional reputation, and when urged by her business manager to withdraw it altogether, she is said to have replied, with characteristic determination, that The Belle of the Season she wanted to play, The Belle of the Season she would play, and that when she died she wished nothing placed over her grave but the epitaph, “Here lies The Belle of the Season!”

BRONSON HOWARD.

Matilda Heron was one of the most remarkable actresses our stage has ever produced. With an intensity and passion in her performances which, at times, were magnificent and carried everything before them, she displayed professional shortcomings and infirmities which were often glaring and unpardonable; but she made and held, by the force of her own genius—and genius she certainly possessed—a position which few modern actresses have ever reached. Her personal faults were of the head rather than of the heart, and may they now rest lightly on her!

Miss Heron’s immediate successors as native playwrights of society dramas were Miss Olive Logan, with Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch, at Daly’s Theatre in 1870; Bronson Howard, with Saratoga in 1870-71, with Diamonds in 1873, and with Moorcroft in 1874; James Steele Mackaye, with Marriage in 1873; and Andrew C. Wheeler, with Twins, and Mr. Marsden, with Clouds, in 1876.

Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many, and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being Young Mrs. Winthrop, Old Love Letters, A Gold Mine, Esmeralda, Conscience, and The Charity Ball; but how long these are to live, and how they are to be regarded by the next generation—if the next generation has ever a chance to regard them at all—of course remains to be seen. Fashion, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed form, and the shell of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the locust itself is as much alive as when The School for Scandal was first seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he still twenty years away?

ACT II.
THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

Bottom: “I have a reasonable good ear in music: let’s have the tongs and the bones.”—Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act iv. Sc. 1.

Shakspere’s Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes, as he is one of the best. If the Account of the Revels be not a forgery, he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of April, 1610. Othello is hardly the typical African of the modern drama, although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the tragedy, that he is “black, and has not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have.” Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry cockney watchmen, and altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in Shakspere’s day.

Othello was followed, in 1696, by Oroonoko, a tragedy in five acts, by Thomas Southerne. The real Oroonoko was an African prince stolen from his native kingdom of Angola during the reign of Charles the Second, and sold as a slave in an English settlement in the West Indies. Aphra Behn saw and became intimate with him at Surinam, when her father was Lieutenant-General of the islands, and made him the hero of the tale upon which the dramatist based his once famous play. With the more humble slaves by whom he was surrounded, the stage Oroonoko spoke in the stilted blank-verse of the dramatic literature of that period, and without any of the accent or phraseology of the original West Indian blacks. Mr. Pope was the creator of Oroonoko; and the part was a favorite one of the elder Kean in England and of the elder Booth in this country. It has not been seen upon either stage in many years. Oroonoko, of course, had a black skin and woolly hair. When Jack Bannister, who began his career as a tragic actor, said to Garrick that he proposed to attempt the hero of Southerne’s drama, he was told by the great little man that, in view of his extraordinarily thin person, he would “look as much like the character as a chimney-sweep in consumption!” It was to Bannister, on this same occasion, that Garrick uttered the well-known aphorism, “Comedy is a very serious thing!”

CHARLES DIBDIN AS MUNGO.

Mungo was a stage negro of a very different stamp, and the first of his race. He figured in The Padlock, a comic opera, words by Isaac Bickerstaffe, music by Charles Dibdin, first presented at Drury Lane in 1768. Mungo was the slave of Don Diego, a West Indian planter. It was written for and at the suggestion of John Moody, who had been in Barbadoes, where he had studied the dialect and the manners of the blacks. He never played the part, however, which was originally assumed by Dibdin himself. Mungo sang:

“Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!
A dog has a better that’s sheltered and fed.
Night and day ’tis the same;
My pain is deir game;
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Whate’er’s to be done
Poor black must run.
Mungo here, Mungo dere,
Mungo everywhere;
Above and below,
Sirrah, come, sirrah, go;
Do so, and do so.
Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!”

This is a style of ballad which has been very popular with Mungo’s descendants ever since. It may be added that Mungo got drunk in the second act, and was very profane throughout.

The great and original Mungo in America was Lewis Hallam, the younger, who first played the part in New York, and for his own benefit, on the 29th of May, 1769, at the theatre in John Street. Dunlap says, “In The Padlock Mr. Hallam was unrivalled to his death, giving Mungo with a truth derived from the study of the negro slave character which Dibdin, the writer, could not have conceived.” Mungo is never seen in the present time. Ira Aldridge, the negro tragedian, played Othello and Mungo occasionally on the same night in his natural skin; but Mungo may be said to have virtually died with Hallam, and to have gone to meet Oroonoko in that land of total oblivion to which Othello is destined to be a stranger for many years to come.

IRA ALDRIDGE AS OTHELLO.

In 1781 a pantomime entitled Robinson Crusoe was presented at Drury Lane. It was believed by the editor of the Biographia Dramatica to have been “contrived by Mr. Sheridan, whose powers, if it really be his performance, do not seem adapted to the production of such kind of entertainments. The scenery, by Loutherbourg, has a very pleasing effect, but, considered in every other light, it is a truly insipid exhibition.” Friday, in coffee-colored tights and blackened face, was naturally a prominent figure. The pantomime was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bath, during the next year, when Mr. Henry Siddons appeared as one of the savages. This gentleman, who played Othello on the same boards a few seasons later, is only remembered now as having given his name to the greatest actress who ever spoke the English tongue. This same Robinson Crusoe and Harlequin Friday was seen at the John Street Theatre, New York, on the 11th of January, 1786; while at the Park Theatre on the 11th of September, 1817, Mr. Bancker played Friday in The Bold Buccaneers; or, The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe, a melodrama which was very popular in its day.

Charles C. Moreau, of New York, possesses a very curious and almost unique bill of “The African Company,” at “The Theatre in Mercer Street, in the rear of the 1 Mile Stone, Broadway.” Tom and Jerry was presented by a number of gentlemen and ladies entirely unknown to dramatic fame, and the performance concluded with the pantomime of Obi: or, Three Finger’d Jack. Unfortunately the bill is not dated. Mr. Ireland believes this to have been a company of negro amateurs who played in New York about 1820 or 1821, but who have left no other mark upon the history of the stage; and the historians know nothing of the “theatre” they occupied. Broadway at Prince Street is one mile from the City Hall, although the stone recording this fact has long since disappeared.

A number of stage negroes will be remembered by habitual theatre-goers, and students of the drama—two very different things, by-the-way, for the man who sees plays rarely reads them, and vice versa: Zeke, in Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion; Pete, in The Octoroon; Uncle Tom; Topsy, whom Charles Reade called “idiopathic”; a cleverly conceived character in Bronson Howard’s Moorcraft; and the delightful band of “Full Moons,” led for many seasons by “Johnny” Wild at Harrigan and Hart’s Theatre, who were so absolutely true to the life of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue.

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In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the African on the stage, each author having his own particular “father of negro song.” Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing his statement upon a copy of Russell’s Boston Gazette of the 30th of December of that year, which contains an advertisement of a performance to be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the end of the second act of Oroonoko, according to Mr. White, Mr. Graupner, in character, sang “The Gay Negro Boy,” accompanying the air with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song. W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his History of the Boston Stage, says that the news of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of December, and that the theatre remained “closed for a week;” and was reopened with “A Monody,” in which “Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero”; but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of “The Gay Negro Boy.”

Mr. White says further that “the next popular negro song was ‘The Battle of Plattsburg,’ sung by an actor vulgarly known as ‘Pig-Pie Herbert,’ at a theatre in Albany, in 1815”; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called The Drama, published in Albany in 1873, credits “a member of the theatrical company of the name of Hop Robinson” as the singer of the song; while “Sol” Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and very different account of it. According to Smith’s Autobiography published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called The Battle of Lake Champlain, the action taking place on real ships floating in real water. “In this piece,” says Smith, “Allen played the character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage).” Two verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith “from memory,” will give a very fair idea of its claims to popularity:

“Backside Albany stan’ Lake Champlain—
Little pond half full of water;
Plat-te-burg dar too, close ’pon de main:
Town small; he grow big, dough, herea’ter.
“On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat,
An’ Massa Macdonough he sail ’em;
While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home,
Wid de army whose courage nebber fail ’em.”

Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to his own statement, as a page in Romeo and Juliet at the theatre in John Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he assumed for years before his death the title of “Father of the American Stage.” He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly to his credit. He was called “Dummy Allen” because he was very deaf and exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both cities. Mr. Phelps, in his Players of a Century (Albany, New York, 1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk’s, nose slightly Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of blue with bright brass buttons, and carried a knobby cane. He spoke in a sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: “From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer.”

ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.

Apropos of Allen’s association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith’s assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger’s Life of Forrest. Speaking of Forrest’s early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is “that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner.” In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of “Sol” Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called The Tailor in Distress, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was “nigger all ober!” Lawrence Barrett, in his Life of Forrest, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of Don Quixote, which closed the evening’s entertainment.

Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. “Sol” Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of Three-fingered Jack with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life.

At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in The Omnibus, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played “darky parts,” such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.

BARNEY WILLIAMS IN DANDY JIM.

In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his début as Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S. Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland. They read selections from Richelieu and The Stranger, as well as the quarrel scene from Julius Cæsar, singing during the evening (with blackened faces) a number of negro melodies, “using appropriate dialogue”—as Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke records in the memoir of her brother—“and accompanying their vocal attempts with the somewhat inharmonious banjo and bones.” Mrs. Clarke reprints the programme of this performance, and pictures the distress of the young tragedians when they discovered, on arriving in the town, that the simon-pure negro they had employed as an advance agent had in every instance posted their bills upsidedown.

Mr. Booth, during his first San Francisco engagement, appeared more than once in the character of what was then termed a “Dandy Nigger;” and he remembers that his father, “some time in the forties,” played Sam Johnson in Bone Squash at the Front Street Theatre, Baltimore, for the benefit of an old theatrical acquaintance, and played it with great applause. Lawrence Barrett’s negro parts, in the beginning of his career, were George Harris and Uncle Tom himself, in a dramatization of Mrs. Stowe’s famous tale.

RALPH KEELER.

Among the stage negroes of later years, whom the world is not accustomed to associate with that profession, Ralph Keeler is one of the most prominent. His “Three Years a Negro Minstrel,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1869, and afterwards elaborated in his Vagabond Adventures, is very entertaining and instructive reading, and gives an excellent idea of the wandering minstrel life of that period. He began his career at Toledo, Ohio, when he was not more than eleven years of age; and under the management of the celebrated Mr. Booker, the subject of the once famous song, “Meet Johnny Booker on the Bowling-green,” he “danced ‘Juba’” in small canton-flannel knee-breeches (familiarly known as pants) cheap lace, tarnished gold tinsel, a corked face, and a woolly wig, to the great gratification of the Toledans, who for several months, with pardonable pride, hailed him as their own particular infant phenomenon. At the close of his first engagement he received what was termed a “rousing benefit,” the entire proceeds of which, as was the custom of the time, going into the pockets of his enterprising managers. During his short although distinguished professional life he was associated with such artists as “Frank” Lynch, “Mike” Mitchell, “Dave” Reed, and “Professor” Lowe, the balloonist, and he was even offered a position in E. P. Christy’s company in New York—the highest compliment which could then be paid to budding talent. Keeler, a brilliant but eccentric writer, whose Vagabond Adventures is too good, in its way, to be forgotten so soon, was a man of decided mark as a journalist. He went to Cuba in 1873 as special correspondent of the New York Tribune, and suddenly and absolutely disappeared. He is supposed to have been murdered and thrown into the sea.

P. T. BARNUM.

Lynch, when Keeler first knew him, had declined into the fat and slippered end man, too gross to dance, who ordinarily played the tambourine and the banjo, but who could, and not infrequently did, perform everything in the orchestra, from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the double-bass. He had been associated as a boy, in 1839 or 1840, under Barnum’s management, with “Jack” Diamond, who was “the best representative of Ethiopian break-downs” in his day, and, according to P. T. Barnum, the prototype of the many performers of that sort who have entertained the public ever since. Lynch asserted that he and Barnum had appeared together in black faces; and Mr. Barnum, in his Autobiography, called Mr. Lynch “an orphan vagabond” whom he had picked up on the road; neither statement seeming to be entirely true. Lynch was his own worst enemy, and, like so many of his kind, he died in poverty and obscurity, his most perfect “break-down” being his own!

It is a melancholy fact that George Holland joined Christy and Wood’s minstrels in 1857, playing female characters in a blackened face, and dividing with George Christy the honors of a short season. He returned to Wallack’s Theatre in 1858. This is a page in dramatic history which old play-goers do not like to read.

The name of John B. Gough, the temperance orator, occurs occasionally in the reminiscences of old minstrels. He certainly did appear upon the stage as a comic singer in New York and elsewhere during his early and dissipated youth, and even gave exhibitions of ventriloquism and the like in low bar-rooms for the sake of the few pennies he could gather to keep himself in liquor, as he himself describes; but there is no hint in his Autobiography of his ever having appeared in a blackened face, and his theatrical life, if it may be so called, was very short.

Joseph Jefferson, the third and present bearer of that honored name, was unquestionably the youngest actor who ever made his mark with a piece of burnt cork. The story of his first appearance is told by William Winter in his volume entitled The Jeffersons. Coming from a family of actors, the boy, as was natural, was reared amid theatrical surroundings, and when only four years of age—in 1833—he was brought upon the stage by Thomas D. Rice himself, on a benefit occasion at the Washington Theatre. Little Joe, blackened and arrayed precisely like his senior, was carried onto the stage in a bag upon the shoulders of the shambling Ethiopian, and emptied from it with the appropriate couplet,

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d have you for to know
I’s got a little darky here to jump Jim Crow.”

Mrs. John Drew, who was present, says that the boy instantly assumed the exact attitude of Jim Crow Rice, and sang and danced in imitation of his sable companion, a perfect miniature likeness of that long, ungainly, grotesque, and exceedingly droll comedian.

JOHN B. GOUGH.

Thomas D. Rice is generally conceded to have been the founder of Ethiopian minstrelsy. Although, as has been seen, it did not originate with him, he made it popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his image deserves an honored niche in its cathedral. The history of “Jim Crow” Rice, as he was affectionately called for many years, has been written by many scribes and in many different ways, the most complete and most truthful account, perhaps, being that of Edmon S. Conner, who described in the columns of the New York Times, June 5, 1881, what he saw and remembered of the birth of Jim Crow. Mr. Conner was a member of the company at the Columbia Street Theatre, Cincinnati, in 1828-29, when he first met Rice, “doing little negro bits” between the acts at that house, notably a sketch he had studied from life in Louisville the preceding summer. Back of the Louisville theatre was a livery-stable kept by a man named Crow. The actors could look into the stable-yard from the windows of their dressing-rooms, and were fond of watching the movements of an old and decrepit slave who was employed by the proprietor to do all sorts of odd jobs. As was the custom among the negroes, he had assumed his master’s name, and called himself Jim Crow. He was very much deformed—the right shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the knee, which gave him a painful but at the same time ludicrous limp. He was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied words of his own. At the end of each verse he gave a peculiar step, “rocking de heel” in the manner since so general among the many generations of his imitators; and these were the words of his refrain:

“Wheel about, turn about,
Do jis so,
An’ ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow.”

RICE AS JIM CROW.

Rice closely watched this unconscious performer, and recognized in him a character entirely new to the stage. He wrote a number of verses, quickened and slightly changed the air, made up exactly like the original, and appeared before a Louisville audience, which, as Mr. Conner says, “went mad with delight,” recalling him on the first night at least twenty times. And so Jim Crow jumped into fame and something that looks almost like immortality. “Sol” Smith says that the character was first seen in a piece by Solon Robinson, called The Rifle, and that he, Smith, “helped Rice a little in fixing the tune.”

Other cities besides Louisville claim Jim Crow. Francis Courtney Wemyss, in his Autobiography, says he was a native of Pittsburg, whose name was Jim Cuff; while Robert P. Nevin, in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1867, declares that the original was a negro stage-driver of Cincinnati, and that Pittsburg was the scene of Rice’s first appearance in the part—a local negro there, whose professional career was confined to holding his mouth open for pennies thrown to him on the docks and the streets, furnishing the wardrobe for the initial performance.

THOMAS D. RICE.

Rice was born in the Seventh Ward of New York in 1808. He was a supernumerary at the Park Theatre, where “Sam” Cowell remembered him in Bombastes Furioso attracting so much attention by his eccentricities that Hilson and Barnes, the leading characters in the cast, made a formal complaint, and had him dismissed from the company Cowell; adding that this man, whose name did not even appear in the bills, was the only actor on the stage whom the audience seemed to notice. Cowell also describes him in Cincinnati, in 1829, as a very unassuming modest young man, who wore “a very queer hat, very much pointed down before and behind, and very much cocked on one side.” He went to England in 1836, where he met with great success, laid the foundation of a very comfortable fortune, and professionally he was the Buffalo Bill of the London of half a century ago. Mr. Ireland, speaking of his popularity in this country, says that he drew more money to the Bowery Theatre than any other performer in the same period of time.

Rice was the author of many of his own farces, notably Bone Squash and The Virginia Mummy, and he was the veritable originator of the genus known to the stage as the “dandy darky,” represented particularly in his creations of “Dandy Jim of Caroline” and “Spruce Pink.” He died in 1860, never having forfeited the respect of the public or the good-will of his fellow-men.

JAMES ROBERTS.

There were many lithographed and a few engraved portraits of Rice made during the years of his great popularity, a number of which are still preserved. In Mr. McKee’s collection he is to be seen dancing “Jim Crow” in English as well as in American prints—as “Gumbo Chaff,” on a flat-boat, and, in character, singing the songs “A Long Time Ago” and “Such a Gettin’ Up-stairs.” In the same collection, among prints of George Dimond and other half-remembered clog-dancers and singers, is a portrait of John N. Smith as “Jim Along Josey,” on a sheet of music published by Firth & Hall in 1840; and, more curious and rare than any of these, upon a musical composition, “on which copyright was secured according to law October 7, 1824,” is a picture of Mr. Roberts singing “Massa George Washington and Massa Lafayette” in a Continental uniform and with a blackened face. This would make James Roberts, a Scottish vocalist, who died in 1833, the senior of Jim Crow by a number of years.

GEORGE WASHINGTON DIXON.

George Washington Dixon, whose very name is now almost forgotten, also preceded Rice in this class of entertainment, but without Rice’s talent, and with nothing like Rice’s success. He sang “Coal Black Rose” and “The Long-tailed Blue” at the old amphitheatre in North Pearl Street, Albany, as early as 1827, and he claimed to have been the author of “Old Zip Coon,” which he sang for Allen’s benefit in Philadelphia in 1834. He became notorious as a “filibuster” at the time of the troubles in Yucatan, and he made himself particularly offensive to a large portion of the community as the editor of a scurrilous paper called the Polyanthus, published in New York. He was caned, shot at, imprisoned for libel, and finally forced to leave the city. He died in the Charity Hospital, New Orleans, in 1861.

Mr. White says that in early days negro songs were sung from the backs of horses in the sawdust ring; that Robert Farrell, “a circus actor,” was the original “Zip Coon,” and that the first colored gentleman to wear “The Long-tailed Blue” was Barney Burns, who broke his neck on a vaulting board in Cincinnati in 1838. When the historians disagree in this confusing way, who can possibly decide?

MR. DIXON AS ZIP COON.

Rice very naturally had many imitators, and Jim Crow wheeled about the country with considerable success, particularly when the original was in other lands. In the collection of Mr. Moreau is a bill of “The Theatre” (the Park), dated May 4, 1833, in which Mr. Blakeley was announced to sing the “Comic Extravaganza of Jim Crow” between the comedy of Laugh When You Can, in which he played Costly, and the melodrama of The Floating Beacon, and preceded by “Signora Adelaide Ferrero in a new ballet dance entitled ‘The Festival of Bacchus’;” the entertainments in those days being varied and long. Thomas H. Blakeley was a popular representative of what are called “second old men,” Mr. Ireland pronouncing him the best Sulky, Rowley, and Humphrey Dobbin ever seen on the New York stage: and the fact that such a man should have appeared at a leading theatre, between the acts, in plantation dress and with blackened face, shows better than anything else, perhaps, the respectable position held by the negro minstrel half a century ago.

Mr. White, so frequently quoted here, is an old minstrel who was part and parcel of what he has more than once described in the public press, and upon his authority the following account of the first band of negro minstrels is given. It was organized in the boarding-house of a Mrs. Brooks, in Catherine Street, New York, late in the winter of 1842, and it consisted of “Dan” Emmett, “Frank” Brower, “Billy” Whitlock, and “Dick” Pelham—the name of the really great negro minstrel being always shortened in this familiar way. According to Mr. White, they made their first appearance in public, for Pelham’s benefit, at the Chatham Theatre, New York, on the 17th of February, 1843; later they went to other cities, and even to Europe. This statement was verified by a fragment of autobiography of William Whitlock, given to the New York Clipper by his daughter, Mrs. Edwin Adams, at the time of Whitlock’s death. It is worth quoting here in full, although it contains no dates: “The organization of the minstrels I claim to be my own idea, and it cannot be blotted out. One day I asked Dan Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practise the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practised Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul[!]. I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine, and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practising for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd—the ‘Branch,’ in the Bowery—with our instruments, and in Bartlett’s billiard-room performed for the first time as the Virginia Minstrels. A programme was made out, and the first time we appeared upon the stage before an audience was for the benefit of Pelham at the Chatham Theatre. The house was crammed and jammed with our friends; and Dick, of course, put ducats in his purse.”

DANIEL EMMETT.

Emmett, describing this scene, places the time “in the spring of 1843,” and says that they were all of them “end men, and all interlocutors.” They sang songs, played their instruments, danced jigs, singly and doubly, and “did ‘The Essence of Old Virginia’ and the ‘Lucy Long Walk Around.’” Emmett remained upon the minstrel stage for many years; he was a member of the Bryant troupe from 1858 to 1865, and he was the composer of many popular songs, including “Old Dan Tucker,” “Boatman’s Dance,” “Walk Along, John,” “Early in the Mornin’,” and, according to some authorities, he was the author of “Dixie,” which afterwards became the war-song of the South.

CHARLES WHITE.

Mr. White, according to a biographical sketch published in the New York Clipper, was born in 1821. He played the accordion—when he was too young to be held responsible for the offence—at Thalian Hall, in Grand Street, New York, as long ago as 1843, and the next year organized what he called “‘The Kitchen Minstrels’ on the second floor of the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The first floor was occupied by Tiffany, Young & Ellis, jewellers; the third by the renowned Ottignon as a gymnasium. Here, where the venerable Palmo had introduced to delighted audiences the Italian opera, and regaled them with fragrant Mocha coffee handed around by obsequious waiters, he first came most prominently before the public.... In 1846 he opened the Melodeon at 53 Bowery.” Here, as usual, there is a decided confusion of dates and of facts. Valentine’s Manual for 1865 says, “Palmo’s café, on the corner of Reade Street and Broadway, was a popular resort from 1835 to 1840, at which later period he abandoned his former occupation and erected the opera-house in Chambers Street, afterwards Burton’s Theatre.” Joseph N. Ireland, in his Records of the New York Stage, published in 1867, says—and Mr. Ireland is usually correct—“The fourth attempt to introduce the Italian opera in New York, and the second to give it an individual local habitation, was this season [1843-44], made by Ferdinand Palmo, on the site long previously occupied by Stoppani’s Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street (Nos. 39 and 41), and nearly opposite the centre of the building on the north end of the Park originally erected for the city almshouse, and afterwards used for various public offices.... Signor Palmo had been a popular and successful restaurateur in Broadway between the hospital and Duane Street.... Palmo’s Opera-house was first opened by its proprietor on the 3d of February, 1844”; while Charles T. Cook, of Tiffany & Co., who has been connected with that house for over forty years, shows by its records that Tiffany, Young & Ellis did not move to 271 Broadway, on the southwest corner of Chambers Street, until 1847, when they occupied the second floor as well as the first. That Sir Walter Raleigh, losing all confidence in the infallibility of human testimony, should have thrown the second part of his History of the World into the flames is not to be wondered at!

Mr. White, nevertheless, was prominently before the public for many years as manager and performer; he was associated with the “Virginia Serenaders,” with “The Ethiopian Operatic Brothers” (Operatic Brother Barney Williams playing the tambourine at one end of the line); with “The Sable Sisters and Ethiopian Minstrels;” with “The New York Minstrels,” etc. He introduced “Dan” Bryant to the public, and has done other good services in contributing to the healthful, harmless amusement of his fellow-men.

EDWIN P. CHRISTY.

“Christy’s Minstrels, organized in 1842,” was the legend for a number of years upon the bills and advertisements of the company of E. P. Christy. This would give it precedence of the “Virginia Minstrels” by a few months at least. When the matter was called to the attention of Mr. Emmett, many years later, he wrote from Chicago on the 1st of May, 1877, that after his own band had gone to Europe a number of similar entertainments were given in all parts of the country, and that Enam Dickinson, who had had some experience in that line in other companies, had trained Christy’s troupe in Buffalo in all the business of the scenes, Mr. Emmett believing that Mr. Christy simply claimed, and with truth, that he was “the first to harmonize and originate the present style of negro minstrelsy,” meaning the singing in concert and the introduction of the various acts, which were universally followed by other bands on both sides of the Atlantic, and which have led our English brethren to give to all Ethiopian entertainments the generic name of “Christy Minstrels,” as they call all top-boots “Wellingtons” and all policemen “Bobbies.”

Christy’s Minstrels proper began their metropolitan career at the hall of the Mechanics’ Society, 472 Broadway, near Grand Street, early in 1846, and remained there until the summer of 1854, when Edwin P. Christy, the leader and founder of the company, retired from business. George Christy, who the year before had joined forces with Henry Wood at 444 Broadway, formerly Mitchell’s Olympic, took both halls after the abdication of the elder Christy, and rattled the bones at one establishment, “Billy” Birch, afterwards so popular in San Francisco and New York, cutting similar capers at the other, and each performer appearing at both houses on the same evening.

GEORGE CHRISTY.

Edwin P. Christy died in May, 1862. George Harrington, known to the stage as George Christy, died in May, 1868; while in April of the latter year Mechanics’ Hall, with which in the minds of so many old New-Yorkers they are both so pleasantly associated, was entirely destroyed by fire, never to be rebuilt for minstrel uses.

The contemporaries and successors of the Christys were numerous and various. The air was full of their music, and dozens of halls in the city of New York alone echoed the patter of their clogged feet for years. Among the more famous of them the following may briefly be mentioned: Buckley’s “New Orleans Serenaders” were organized in 1843; they consisted of George Swayne, Frederick, and R. Bishop Buckley, and were very popular throughout the country. “White’s Serenaders” were at the Melodeon, 53 Bowery, perhaps as early as 1846, and certainly at White’s Athenæum, 585 Broadway, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, as late as 1872. The Harrington Minstrels were at Palmo’s Opera-house in 1847 or 1848. Bryant’s Minstrels, as their old play-bills show, were organized in 1857, when they occupied Mechanics’ Hall; they went to the Tammany Building on Fourteenth Street in 1868, were at 730 Broadway the next year, and opened the hall on Twenty-third Street near Sixth Avenue in 1870, where they remained until Dan Bryant, the last of his race, died in 1875. Wood’s Minstrels were at 514 Broadway, opposite the St. Nicholas Hotel, in 1862 and later. “Sam” Sharpley’s Minstrels were at 201 Bowery in 1864. “Tony” Pastor’s troupe were in the same building in 1865, where they remained two years; they were upon the site of the Metropolitan Theatre—later Winter Garden—for a few seasons, and until they removed to their present cosey home near Tammany Hall. The San Francisco Minstrels were at 585 Broadway in 1865, and in 1874 went to the more familiar hall on Broadway, opposite the Sturtevant House, Budworth’s Minstrels opened the Fifth Avenue Hall, where the Madison Square Theatre now stands, in 1866. Kelly and Leon, who were on Broadway on the site of Hope Chapel in 1867, where they were credited with having “Africanized opéra bouffe,” followed Budworth to the Twenty-fourth Street house. Besides these were the companies of Morris Brothers, of Cotton and Murphy and Cotton and Reed, of Hooley, of Haverly, of Dockstader, of Pelham, of Pierce, of Campbell, of Pell and Trowbridge, of Thatcher, Primrose and West, of Huntley, and of very many more, to say nothing of the bands of veritable negroes who have endeavored to imitate themselves in imitation of their white brethren in all parts of the land. Brander Matthews, in an article on “Negro Minstrelsy,” printed in the London Saturday Review in 1884, and afterwards published as one of the chapters of a volume of Saturday Review essays, entitled The New Book of Sports (London, 1885), describes a “minstrel show” given by the negro waiters of one of the large summer hotels in Saratoga a few summers before, in which, “when the curtains were drawn aside, discovering a row of sable performers, it was perceived, to the great and abiding joy of the spectators, that the musicians were all of a uniform darkness of hue, and that they, genuine negroes as they were, had ‘blackened up,’ the more closely to resemble the professional negro minstrel.”

GEORGE SWAYNE BUCKLEY.

The dignified and imposing Mr. Johnston has sat during all these years in the centre of a long line of black comedians, which includes such artists as “Eph” Horn, “Dan” Neil, and “Jerry” Bryant—whose real name was O’Brien—Charles H. Fox, “Charley” White, George Christy, “Nelse” Seymour—Thomas Nelson Sanderson—the Buckleys, J. W. Raynor, Birch, Bernard, Wambold, Backus, “Pony” Moore, “Dan” Cotton, “Bob” Hart, “Cool” White, “Dan” Emmett, “Dave” Reed, “Matt” Peel, “Ben” Gardner, Luke Schoolcraft, James H. Budworth, Kelly, Leon, “Frank” Brower, S. C. Campbell, “Gus” Howard, “Billy” Newcomb, “Billy” Gray, Aynsley Cooke, “Hughey” Dougherty, “Tony” Hart, Unsworth, W. H. Delehanty, “Sam” Devere, “Add” Ryman, George Thatcher, “Master Eugene,” “Ricardo,” “Andy” Leavitt, “Sam” Sanford, “Lew” Benedict, “Harry” Bloodgood, “Cal” Wagner, “Ben” Collins, and “Little Mac.”

EPH. HORN.

Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of their names.

JERRY BRYANT.

NELSE SEYMOUR.

How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: “I heard a humorous balladist not long since, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity.”

DAN. BRYANT.

This ballad perhaps was “Nelly Bly,” or “Nelly was a Lady,” or “Lucy Long,” or “Oh, Susanna,” or “Nancy Till,” or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster’s “Way Down upon the Swanee River,” a song that has touched more hearts than “Annie Laurie” itself; for, after all, “The Girl We Left Behind Us” is not more precious in our eyes than “The Old Folks at Home;” and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that “he never shook his mother.” Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” “Old Dog Tray,” “Old Uncle Ned,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Kentucky Home,” “Willie, We have Missed You,” and “Come where My Love lies Dreaming.” He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his “Hard Times Will Come Again No More.”

Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the Critic, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played passably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot “pick” the banjo, and never even heard it “picked,” seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which “Musieu Bainjo” is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, printed in 1784, the following statement: “In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch.” In a foot-note Jefferson adds, “The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.”