Читать книгу The Lady of Fashion - Eric Wollencott Barnes - Страница 3

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The Park Theatre on the evening of June 6, 1845, presented a spectacle unparalleled in the history of that venerable institution. From pit to dome the house was packed—not with the raucous miscellany that usually composed a New York theatre audience in those days, but with the beauty and fashion and wealth of highest society. Ladies in full décolletage, in diamonds and plumes, and gentlemen in frilled shirts and brocaded waistcoats filled pit, boxes and galleries to overflowing. Such a glittering assemblage had never before been seen in a New York theatre.

The evening was memorable also for the heat. It still rises in faint waves from yellowed newspaper clippings and the faded pages of diaries describing the occasion. Even on the Battery not a breath of air stirred, while within the theatre the frantic agitation of lace and mother-of-pearl fans merely sent the temperature higher. Only the cupids on Manager Simpson’s newly decorated ceiling were oblivious to the torrid atmosphere, and more than one upward glance from the auditorium showed envy of their happy position in the empyrean, and their sensible garb of clouds. But there was nothing anyone could do about it. Long before the curtain rose, curls were coming out and collars wilting as perspiration poured from the faces of stately dowagers, elegant maidens, beaux, merchant princes and statesmen.

Yet neither heat nor the discomfort of the Park’s hard moreen-covered seats diminished in any way the enthusiasm of the audience as it waited with mounting excitement for the performance to begin. For everyone in the theatre, as well as hundreds who had failed to get in, knew that what was about to take place was of historic importance.

The attraction which had brought together this dazzling throng was the début of a new actress—Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt. As a rule such occurrences created no great stir in the city, though some deluded managers still believed that the announcement “first time on any stage” could stimulate flagging box-office receipts. But this particular appearance had a special significance because of the lady involved. Mrs. Mowatt had already attracted wide attention. She was known as the writer of lively articles for Godey’s and Graham’s and other magazines; as the composer of touching verses for the annuals; as an author with two entertaining novels to her credit; and most recently as the creator of Fashion, an epoch-making play. But this was not all. Mrs. Mowatt’s talents had carried her in other directions. Four years ago she had achieved success—and notoriety—by appearing alone on a public platform as a reader of poetry, something no woman, at least in America, had ever done before. The venture had caused considerable lifting of eyebrows at the time. But this reaction was as nothing compared to the effect created by the announcement that Mrs. Mowatt was about to become an actress. For the public and for her extensive circle of acquaintances, the fact that a respectable married woman of mature years—Mrs. Mowatt was twenty-six—should elect to go on the stage professionally was something the imagination could scarcely grasp. Yet the truly sensational aspect of this present instance of her hardihood has not been mentioned. Mrs. Mowatt was not only a woman venturing into ways at which most tenderly bred females of the period shuddered. She was a lady. Furthermore she was a lady of position. She came in fact from the best and oldest New York society. As the daughter of Samuel Ogden she had been nourished in the very bosom of the Knickerbocracy, as N. P. Willis termed it. Her antecedents were of the highest Revolutionary and Federalist respectability. Now she was about to ally herself with a world in which social position was meaningless, where (so one heard) even the elemental proprieties were non-existent. Small wonder that the sudden announcement in the papers that Mrs. Mowatt would appear at the Park Theatre in the stellar rôle of Bulwer’s Lady of Lyons should have sent a shock through New York’s Upper-Tendom. Yet this was almost at once replaced by a feeling of delightful titillation. Though Anna Mowatt’s newest exploit threatened to shake the order of things to the very foundations, the spectacle would be well worth seeing. With this idea Society stampeded the box-office of the Park.

Five minutes after the curtain had risen on the first act of The Lady of Lyons, all these things were forgotten. Even those members of the audience who had witnessed half a dozen performances of the already-hackneyed play were lost in the enchantment of the new actress as she recreated Bulwer’s heroine. By the end of the act there was no mistaking the audience’s reaction. The applause was not for a plucky beginner struggling against great odds; it was the tumultuous expression of thrilled delight. By the middle of the third act, where the climactic emotional scene of the play occurs, it was evident that the débutante was an artist of high order. Without experience save for a few amateur performances, without training so far as anyone knew, and with only two rehearsals, Anna Cora Mowatt had demonstrated the powers of a veteran. In a part which the finest actresses of the time regarded as a supreme test of ability, this newcomer suddenly appeared as a rival to them all.

At the final curtain the demonstration was overwhelming. A few of the more conservative judges compared it with the ovation which had greeted Fanny Kemble’s first appearance on the New York stage, or with the welcome given Forrest upon his return from England. But in the minds of the majority of those present at the Park that evening, Anna Mowatt’s triumph was the most complete which the American stage had ever witnessed. Old men recalling the occasion forty or fifty years later could still hear the shouts thundering in their ears.

Thus began one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of the American theatre. Indeed, in the entire history of the stage there is perhaps no other instance of an actress starting at the top and maintaining that position throughout her professional life. In Anna Mowatt’s case this life was brief. After eight years of unqualified success she turned her back to that public upon which she had (in the words of Edgar Allan Poe) “undoubtedly wrought a deeper impression ... than any one of her sex in America.” In a generation she was all but forgotten, except as the author of the one durable American play written before the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet her effects on the theatre were permanent and far-reaching. After 1850 the actor ceased to be regarded as a social and moral vagabond, and the drama as one of the arts of the devil. By that time the American theatre was well on the way to becoming respectable. This was largely the doing of Anna Cora Mowatt, who in addition to genius possessed boundless courage, an uncompromising moral sense, and—superlatively—what the modern world calls glamor.

Such a personality, in such an age, must have had a “history.” In the attempt to reconstruct that history, some light may be thrown on odd facets of our great-grandfathers’ times, particularly on the little-known theatre of their day. But this is of secondary importance. The real motive for the story is the lady herself.