The City Looking Glass
by Robert Montgomery Bird

Introduction
by Arthur Hobson Quinn

ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD is a singularly interesting figure in the history of American drama. In his career he represents not only fine achievement, but also the grim pressure of circumstances which made a career for an American playwright of the eighteen thirties almost an impossibility. But he proves also that, despite the unfavorable circumstances of the time, there were in the United States dramatists of remarkable power who, possessed with an unconquerable desire to create, proved by their work that had they lived today they might have risen to the very first rank.

When Bird began to write plays in 1827, the tentative period of American drama was over. Beginning in 1767 with the production of Thomas Godfrey's romantic tragedy, The Prince of Parthia, at the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia, it had suffered an eclipse during the Revolution, to rise again in 1787 with the performance of the first American comedy, The Contrast, by Royall Tyler, at the John Street Theatre in New York. Fired by the success of The Contrast, which has proved often to modern audiences its sterling qualities, William Dunlap made a brave effort, as playwright and producer, to establish the profession of dramatist in this country. When he gave up the struggle, a bankrupt, he had to his credit at least fifty plays, among them such clever comedies as The Father (1789), and such moving historical tragedies as Andre (1798),but the public would not support him, or indeed any other manager. Undaunted, however, by Dunlap's failure, James Nelson Barker of Philadelphia wrote his social comedy, Tears and Smiles (1807), his romantic play, The Indian Princess (1808),his tragedies, Marmion (1812), and best of all, Superstition (1824), dealing with New England witchcraft. Fortunately for himself, Barker had a career in public life which made him independent of the stage, so when the jealousy of the manager's wife forced the withdrawal of Superstition, he could retire to other fields. His chief rival in the period before 1825, John Howard Payne, was not so fortunate, and, making up his mind that the only way for an American playwright to live was to leave his native country, he wrote in England his tragedy of Brutus (1819), to hold the stage for seventy years, and his comedy, Charles II (1824), almost as popular.

Robert Montgomery Bird had therefore no encouragement in the material circumstances of the American theatre to urge him to write. Foreign competition, the indifference of leading actors, mostly English, to American plays, the insecure and often incompetent management, made the prospect gloomy enough. Yet there was allied in him an imaginative faculty and a tireless industry which had to have an outlet.

Born in Newcastle, Delaware, February 5, 1806, he came on the side of his father, Thomas Bird, from English stock which had settled there about 1700. From his mother, Elizabeth Van Leuvenigh, he inherited perhaps the industry of her Dutch ancestors. On both sides there was a tradition of culture, and both the Birds and the Van Leuvenighs were substantial citizens. When his father died in 1810, Robert Montgomery Bird was brought up by his grandfather, Nicholas Van Dyke, who had been President of the State of Delaware. His education at Germantown Academy in Philadelphia seems to have inspired him to the study not only of Latin and Greek but also of French, Spanish and Italian. He entered the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1824, but, while he came under the influence of such great physicians as Robert Hare, Philip Syng Physick and John Redman Coxe, and graduated in April 1827, his career as a practising physician was brief. The science of medicine rather than the practice attracted him, and in 1841 he became Professor of the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica in a rival school, the Pennsylvania Medical College in Philadelphia. His wife's biographical account [1] tells us that he disliked to take fees from his patients, so that no income was forthcoming, and Bird had to make his living.

The early plays of Bird exist in manuscripts, presented to the Library of the University of Pennsylvania by Robert Montgomery Bird, the grandson of the playwright. The first dated manuscript is that of a comedy of manners, 'Twas All for the Best, written in May, 1827, although some fragments are probably earlier and date from his student days at Pennsylvania. 'Twas All for the Best is laid in England and is concerned with the complications resulting from the adoption by Sir Noel Noselbody of a girl named vaguely Flora, whose adventures remind us of Congreve at his feeblest. The play is negligible except for the fact that upon the manuscript are written the names of William Warren and William Wood, the two managers of the Chestnut Street Theatre, of the first Joseph Jefferson, of Francis C. Wemyss, the light comedian and others. This proves that from the first Bird wrote with his eyes upon the stage, and as a practical playwright.

The Cowled Lover, dated June, 1827, is a tragedy, laid on Lake Como, and is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. Yet there is some power in the conception of the characters and some beauty in the blank verse. In August, Bird had finished another tragedy, Caridorf, laid in Vienna and in Caridorf's castle nearby. This play is more gloomy than The Cowled Lover, ending in the suicide of the hero. They show the effect of the reading of the Elizabethan dramatists and they are simply apprentice work. The uncompleted fragments, Giannone, Isadora; or, The Three Dukes, and The Fanatick, belong to the same category. The last, however, is of interest because it is based upon Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, and shows that Bird was reading American as well as English writers.

Among the unpublished manuscripts there are two comedies of particular interest. News of the Night; or, A Trip to Niagara, written in 1827, has the distinction of being the first of the early plays to be performed on the stage. This play, laid in Philadelphia, was put on by the Columbia Laboratory Players at the McMillin Theatre, New York City, November 2,1929, under the direction of Mrs. Estelle Davis. It is a farcecomedy, concerning Peter Agony, an old miser, who is hoodwinked by his two nieces, Margaret Agony and Anne Coy, and bullied by his housekeeper, Mrs. Goodbody. The complications, including the orthodox escapes and misunderstandings between lovers, are tied together cleverly by the actions of Peter Hapenny, the penniless adventurer. The play was received with great applause by a modern audience, and it met the test of drama, that it acts better than it reads. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the performance in 1929 was the adaptability of the numerous scenes to the so- called modern technique of stage management. The scenes were built upon the foundation of one room which was easily modified by the skilled direction, so that the performance moved quickly. The point is, of course, that Bird could write a play in 1827 which adapted itself to the stage management of 1929.

The City Looking Glass, printed here for the first time, was written in July, 1828. It is a comedy in which life in Philadelphia is portrayed with a reality that is ahead of its day, at least in the American drama. Twenty years before Benjamin Baker wrote, for Mitchell's Olympic Theatre, his Glance New York, which is usually credited with beginning our drama that represents city life on its seamy side, Bird had realized its possibilities. A Glance at New York was produced in 1848, while A City Looking Glass remained in manuscript for over a century. But it was written for the stage, and the main characters are distinctly individualized. Ravin, the gentleman swindler who has an ambition above the counterfeiting and pocket picking with which his brother Ringfinger is content, is an intriguing rascal. He is not, as is usual with stage villains, the same at all times. To Diana Headstrong, the heiress he wishes to marry, he is politeness itself. To Mrs. Gall, the bawd who is in his power on account of her earlier misdeeds, he is domineering and heartless. He is not without courage in his encounters with Roslin, Diana's cousin, who interferes with his plans to marry Diana for her money, nor without skill in his efforts by slandering Emma to prevent her marriage with Roslin. Young Raleigh is a good picture of a Virginian and is probably drawn from one or more of the many students from the South whom Bird had met in the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. If he seems too much of a fire eater for modern tastes, he is quite true to a generation concerning whose doings in the early days of the University tradition is still fragrant in Philadelphia. Thirty years later than Bird's time, a college student from Tennessee laid on the reading desk of the Zelosophic Literary Society, preparatory to a debate on Abolition, a revolver which he felt would secure him at least a respectful hearing. "Raleigh, Junior" is a good stage figure, as is his father, who is of course reminiscent of Sir Anthony Absolute.

The controversy in the fourth act between Headstrong and the elder Raleigh over slavery, the tariffand states rights, brings the period vividly before us. Bird's Whig sympathies are indicated clearly, and there is a note of prophecy in one of Headstrong's utterances:

I think the majesty of State Rights a very ridiculous subject, of which fools of the present day make a bone of contention, and which knaves of a future may make the apple of discord.

The women are not so well drawn as the men, but Diana Headstrong is a young person who knows her own mind, and Mrs. Gall, while conventional, is not a lay figure. Emma Raleigh is, of course, the typical romantic heroine who has been lost in infancy. How could the play or the novel of that day have proceeded without her? But it is in her scene with Roslin, in the climax of the third act and of the play, that Bird showed his ability to write that flexible, blank verse, so eminently fitting for the stage, which was a promise to be fulfilled in The Gladiator and The Broker of Bogota. One reason that so many of the great English poets who tried to write plays in the nineteenth century failed to produce satisfactory vehicles for an actor, lay in their ignorance of the difference between epic and dramatic blank verse. Bird came to that knowledge instinctively. He understood well the importance of the cadence of the individual line, like

The pride that made me delicate of honour;

The City Looking Glass was produced for the first time by the Zelosophic Society of the University of Pennsylvania, at Irvine Hall, Philadelphia, January 20,1933, under the direction of Mrs. Sara F. T. Price. Since the Zelosophic Society is composed entirely of undergraduates, while the Columbia Laboratory Players contain both undergraduates and alumni, almost professional in their ability, it is difficult to compare the productions. Owing to a greater variety of scenes in The City Looking Glass, the play had to move more slowly, but the production proved once again that Bird, even in his early work, had a keen sense of stage requirements. Raleigh, Jr., Roslin, Ravin, Nathan Nobody, Diana, and even minor characters such as Bolt stood out as individuals, and established conclusively that She City Looking Glass has more dramatic substance than any other of the early plays.

By a curious paradox, it was Edwin Forrest who gave Bird his first opportunity, and it was Forrest whose conduct caused him to abandon the profession of the playwright. Bird turned, in 1830, to the field of historical drama for his next play, Pelopidas. It is one of the best he wrote, but it has never seen the stage. Against a background of Spartan tyranny in Thebes, which he derived from Plutarch's account of Pelopidas, he built up the characters not only of the hero who redeems his country by force of arms, but also that of Philidas, the Theban secretary of the Spartan rulers, whose apparent apostasy covers the soul of a patriot, and of Sibylla, the wife of Pelopidas, who dominates some of the finest scenes of the play.

Bird proved in Pelopidas that he had found his proper field, which in the hands of Victor Hugo and Dumas in France, and in those of Bird and Boker in America, rose in the next thirty years to greatness. Bird took the history of Plutarch, modified it to produce sharper contrasts of character and more striking situations, and animated it by a love of liberty which represented just as truly the spirit of America in 1830 as it did that of ancient Thebes. It is the usual commonplace of criticism to speak of this school of play writing as "exotic." But to those who read Bird's historical dramas in the light of what was going on in both North and South America, it is apparent that his selection of heroes was based quite as much upon his hatred of political tyranny and his love of popular government as upon his interest in classical history. He wrote in a literary fashion, which placed its scenes and characters in the heroic play at a distance from home, in order that the playwright might have freedom in the treatment of his themes. He knew, too, that the critical stupidity which would limit an American artist to native material had never been applied to the drama of any other race or time, for if it had been, we should not have Othello, or Julius Caesar, or The Merchant of Venice. With comedy it was a different matter, as he had shown in The City Looking Glass. The very excellence of the characters in Pelopidas prevented Forrest from putting it on the stage. The part of Pelopidas does not overshadow all the rest, and the manuscript in the Bird Collection contains definite hints on Forrest's part looking toward a greater emphasis upon the star's share of the lines. But Bird was too much of an artist to ruin Pelopidas. Perhaps he hoped, as a young man might, that some day he could see it upon the stage in its best form. Certainly he must have been proud of the magnificent banquet scene, when one by one Philidas baffles the efforts of those outside to warn Archias, the tyrant, of his danger, until finally Pelopidas enters, and the swords of the exiles restore Thebes to herself.

Instead of altering Pelopidas,Bird wrote The Gladiator definitely for Forrest, who produced it with tumultuous success on September 26, 1831, at the Park Theatre in New York. Rarely has an actor been given a vehicle so exactly suited to him. Forrest belonged to the robust style of the stage, and the figure of the Thracian warrior, made a slave by the Romans, and forced to fight in the arena to win back his wife and child, gave him his most popular part. Again Bird used Plutarch and also Appian and the histories of Ferguson and Hooke, but simply for inspiration. The entire first act of The Gladiator is based upon the degradation of slavery, and those who remember that it was in the same year that Garrison established The Liberator will not think of Bird's play as "exotic."

The greatest scene, that in which Spartacus recognizes his brother, Phasarius, in the gladiator he is about to fight, and the consequent revolt of the gladiators in the arena, moved the audience in the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia to continued cheers. More significant, perhaps, is the tribute paid by that English light comedian, Francis Courtney Wemyss, who was nothing if not critical of the American theatre. "Accustomed as an actor is to striking scenes," he tells us in his fascinating autobiography, [2] "I was taken by surprise, at the effect produced at the closing of the second act. The rising of the Gladiators in the arena, and the disposition of the characters as the act drop fell, I do not believe was ever surpassed in any theatre in the world." Forrest chose The Gladiator when he opened at Drury Lane in October, 1836, and he played while abroad in a repertory which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare and Bird. It would have been a severe test for any dramatist, yet the young Philadelphia playwright met it successfully.

Having drawn a rebel against the tyranny of Rome, Bird next wrote for Forrest the tragedy of Oralloossa, Son of the Incas, in which the hero fought against the power of Spain. It was first put on at the Arch Street Theatre, October 10, 1832. Compared with The Gladiator it was not a success, but Forrest kept it in his repertory until 1847. Oralloossa remains too much of an abstraction, but there are fine moments in the play. Wemyss did not like it, but perhaps he may be pardoned, for he lost two of his front teeth while playing Don Christoval. Forrest, who always threw himself vigorously into his part, gave him a sword thrust which was unusually effective.

Bird did his finest work in The Broker of Bogota, a domestic tragedy laid in this South American city in the eighteenth century. On February 12, 1834, it began at the Bowery Theatre, New York, its long stage career. The character of Febro, the money lender who is brought to his ruin by the weakness of his best loved son, gave Forrest an opportunity for more subtle acting than Spartacus or Oralloossa. Bird had learned how to provide other characters who would not disturb the serenity of the star, and in Cabarero, the dissolute hidalgo, and in Pablo, the innkeeper, who drag Ramon, Febro's son, down to ruin, he provided two of the best character parts in our dramatic literature.

Forrest played in it regularly until the last year of his stage career. When the play was revived by the Zelosophic Society of the University of Pennsylvania in 1920, its merits were apparent, and curiously enough, the scene which pleased a modern audience best was that in which Juana, who loves Ramon, leads him to confess that he has sworn falsely at the trial of his father, Febro, and ruins her own happiness for the sake of justice. Forrest would not have been on the stage in this scene! [3]

After one more commission, the rewriting of Stone's Metamora, Bird and Forrest parted company and Bird, disgusted with his association with the theatre, ceased to write plays. That he did so after the great success of The Gladiator and The Broker of Bogota is explained very simply. A young man, flattered naturally by the interest of Edwin Forrest, he had trusted to an oral agreement by which he was to receive one thousand dollars for each play and two thousand more if it proved successful. Forrest made a fortune from The Gladiator alone, but he paid Bird only one thousand dollars for it, and the same amount for Oralloossa, and for The Broker of Bogota, which held the stage for nearly forty years. He paid nothing for Pelopidas, though he had agreed to do so. Unable to support himself by play writing, Bird turned to fiction and wrote Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest and The Infidel, historical novels laid in Mexico at the time of Cortes, The Hawks of Hawk Hollow, a romance of the Revolution, and Nick of the Woods, an extremely popular novel of Kentucky, in which the Indians are depicted realistically. Curiously enough, all of these novels, except Calavar, were dramatized, but by other hands.

The selfishness of Forrest showed even more clearly in his successful efforts to keep the plays from being published. In his opinion, a play was not the property of the playwright, but of the actor-manager. For Bird's literary reputation he cared apparently nothing Forrest was, of course, afraid that if the plays were published, another actor would produce them, and in the days before any copyright protection existed he presumably felt justified Even in 1869, when Dr. Bird's son, Frederick, wrote to Forrest asking his views upon the matter, Forrest curtly replied, "The heirs of the late Dr. R. M. Bird have neither right, title nor any legal interest whatever in the plays written by him for me. These plays are my exclusive property, by the right of purchase and for many years by the law of copyright." So even when the publication of the dramas could no longer have harmed him, his memory of the quarrel between Bird and himself over the financial returns for the plays seems to have rankled. The grim joke in the matter lies in the fact that, according to the Records in the Copyright Office at Washington, Forrest never copyrighted the plays at all.

No play of Robert Montgomery Bird was published until 1917. In that year I printed The Broker of Bogota, [4] which I had found in the safe at the Forrest Home in Philadelphia. Finding that Mr. Clement E. Foust, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania, had become interested in Bird, I suggested that he write his thesis upon the playwright. He discovered that Mr. Robert Montgomery Bird, grandson of the dramatist, had complete manuscripts of all the plays, and through Mr. Bird's generosity it became possible for Dr. Foust to publish in 1919 his Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird, which contains Pelopidas, The Gladiator, Oralloossa and The Broker of Bogota. Besides the plays, there is a remarkable collection of the lyrics, scientific papers and correspondence of Dr. Bird in the manuscript collection.

This correspondence reveals his wide interest in politics and public affairs. Upon this phase of his later activities or his editorship of The North American in Philadelphia it is perhaps unnecessary here to dwell. He was a man vitally active, and his character shines through his manuscripts as an upright, courageous, cultivated American, whose existence and whose accomplishments can be viewed with satisfaction by any of his countrymen.

When he died, January 23,1854, he had accomplished much, but if he had lived in a day when the American man of letters, and especially the American playwright, received encouragement and support, it is hard to set a limit to his possible achievement. Without such encouragement, without copyright protection, he had, before he was twenty-nine years old, written the finest tragedies composed in the English language since Congreve had ceased to write. His power to derive inspiration from history and to create lofty characters, through whom his own love of liberty shines, was little short of genius. Like Payne, Hugo, Dumas, and the other great romantic playwrights of that day, he preferred noble souls to petty ones, and he did not share the literary heresy which believes that it makes no difference what one writes about. If he had not left the theatre in 1834, it is quite possible that he might have portrayed the heroes of his own country in plays that would have been fitting to the theme. In their absence, The City Looking Glass gives us a picture of both gallant and depraved, of fortunate and unfortunate characters, as they lived in Philadelphia over a century ago.

ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN.

Notes

[1] Manuscript Life of Robert Montgomery Bird, by Mary Mayer Bird. [Return to text]

[2] Twenty-six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager,1847, Vol. II, p-194. [Return to text]

[3] This production verified Forrest's prophecy in his letter to Bird, on the evening of its first performance, "The Broker of Bogota will live when our vile trunks are rotten." [Return to text]

[4] In Representative American Plays. [Return to text]

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