by Frank Harris
I know you are more clement than vile men, Who of their broken debtors, take a third, A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again On their abatement: that's not my desire…
"What would Shakespeare have said to Chamberlain's Bankruptcy Act, which is the law of England today and for many a year to come? You now take everything from the broken debtor and do not then discharge him, but keep his failure hung over him for years in order to force him to the prison, which the beggared seldom escape. In this we are infinitely viler than Shakespeare's 'vile men.' Shakespeare not a social reformer! If your laws were conceived in the spirit of his maturity, the millennium would be realized. I always put him with Jesus as a thinker." Mallock laughed as at an enormity and I didn't pursue the theme. I had given them pause, which was enough.
We adjourned to the drawing-room for coffee, which was excellent, as the whole meal had been. Beckett ate with the keenest enjoyment, but in strict moderation, and all of us cultivated a similar control. While drinking the coffee Dowden said he hoped I'd write on Shakespeare. "You've certainly given me food for thought," he added courteously.
"And me too," cried Mallock.
When they went away, Beckett kept me and for the life of me I could not understand why, till he suddenly blurted out, "Tant pis if you think worse of me, but I think I owe it to you to tell you the truth. I was talking to Mallock the other day about you, praising your extraordinary scholarship and knowledge of Shakespeare and your genius. He said that genius was difficult to measure, but knowledge was easy; why not let him test your knowledge of Shakespeare; and so I arranged this dinner. If you had come to grief I'd have said nothing, but you came through so brilliantly that I think you ought to know. I hope you're not angry with me?"
"No, no," I replied. "How could I be?"
"I want to be friends," rejoined Beckett warmly. "I want you to regard me as a friend and as a sign of it I wish you'd call me Ernest and let me call you Frank."
"That's dear of you," I responded, and gave him my hand. From that day on Ernest Beckett was a true friend of mine and my affection for him grew till he passed-alas! all too soon, into the eternal silence.
One word more on the freedom of speech used in good society in London in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. It was not so outspoken as the best French or German society, but its rule was very much like the rule of the best Italian or Spanish society: anything was permitted if it was sufficiently funny or witty. In the Prince of Wales' set in especial, it was possible to tell the most risque story, provided always that it was really humorous. And the Pink 'Un, or chief sporting paper of the day, edited by John Corlett and printed on pink paper once a week, certainly set a broad example. One instance will prove this. Just before I returned to London the Baroness Burdett Coutts, a great favorite of the Prince and the Queen for her goodness of heart and many benefactions, though well over sixty years of age, married young Mr. Bartlett, an American, a good-looking man of six or seven and twenty, and five feet ten in height. Prince Edward, it was said, was asked by the Queen to remonstrate with the old lady. But she met him by saying that she could not make her dear boy unhappy. "He is head over ears in love with me, you know," she said. The Prince could only smile and perhaps repeat the British saying under his breath: "No fool like an old fool."
The week after the marriage Corlett published the announcement in the Pink 'Un, and underneath in large letters, this:
AN ARITHMETICAL PROBLEM:
How many times does twenty-seven go into sixty-eight and what is there over?
Perhaps nothing except the famous naughty blunder in The Times some years later ever caused such widespread merriment.
The tone of English society is the tone of a well-bred man of the world, whereas the tone of American society is the tone of a Puritan grocer.
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CHAPTER XIV
Charles Reade; Mary Anderson; Irving; chamberlain; Hyndman and Burns
In my early days in London one event moved me profoundly, the death and burial of Charles Reade. Somehow or other he had got the name of being bad tempered and quarrelsome and his lovable and great qualities were almost forgotten. Indeed, were it not for the fact that a prominent journalist, George Augustus Sala, took up the cudgels for his private character and wrote of him as kind-hearted as well as noble-minded, judgment against him would have gone by default. Of course, like all the younger ones, I measured him wholly as a writer and accepted at once every word of Sala's eulogy and went far beyond it. Unlike most Englishmen, I regarded Reade as a far greater writer than Dickens, and indeed had no hesitation in putting The Cloister and the Hearth side by side with Vanity Fair in my admiration, and perhaps a little higher in my love. Again and again I talked of Reade's masterpiece as the greatest English novel, though the spirit of opposition may have added a tinge of challenge to my passionate superlative.
The announcement of his death reminded me that I might have known him, had I wished. Rossetti's passing some two years before, my regret was keen and lasting. But I went to his burial and from it learned how careless, or rather how chanceful, is England's sympathy with her great men. True, that Easter Tuesday was a vile day: it rained and the air was raw. He was to be buried too at Willesden, miles away from the centre, but there was not a great crowd even at Shepherd's Bush, whence the funeral procession started.
A more dismal burial would be hard to imagine. And so I resented even Sala's praise of It is never too late to mend as a "magnificent work," and his comparison of Hawes, the governor of the gaol, and Eden the chaplain, as "distinctly original and dramatic characters," with the Faust and Mephistopheles and the Gretchen of Goethe. Such over praise seemed as impertinent-odious as his talking of two Charles Reades: "One a very pugnacious and vituperative old gentleman, always shaking his fist in somebody's face and not infrequently hitting somebody over the head," and "the other Charles Reade I knew and revered as a valiant, upright and withal a charitable and compassionate Christian man, inexhaustible in his pity for suffering, implacable only in his hatred of things shameful and cruel and mean. He was throughout his life a militant man; but his soldiering is over now; there he rests in a peaceful tomb by the side of the Friend whom he loved so long and so deeply."
Only three months before, Tennyson had been made a peer amid universal eulogy; yet here was as great a man put away forever without pomp or circumstance; the ordinary English reader thought more of Maud or The May Queen than The Cloister and the Hearth; still what did it matter? I for one walked through the rain and slush while the gallant Denys, with his "the Devil is dead", went with me and Gerard and Catherine and the rest of the glorious and ever-living company; and perchance one man's understanding and admiring, passionate love is more than most of us get in this earthly pilgrimage. Surely it is well with dear Charles Reade: I saw his coffin lowered into the grave, but I find it hard to forgive myself. I ought to have seen and known him in order at least to have thanked him for his deathless gift to humanity and the many hours of pure delight I had had with his brave heart and noble spirit.
But now I must say a word or two of other occurrences that throw a certain light on English character and conditions. An American actress, Mary Anderson, took London by storm. It was said that Lord Lytton bought a row of the stalls night after night and filled the seats with chosen guests; his admiration surprised everyone who knew him, because he was regarded as an avowed admirer of the ephebos, rather than of woman's beauty; but he certainly fell for "our Mary," as some tried to nickname her. This was the Lord Lytton, who in The New Timon sneered at Tennyson:
The jingling medley of purloined conceits, Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats.
And Tennyson's answer was even more savage:
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot, a little hand,
If half the little soul is dirt?
Before Mary Anderson appeared I had called on her and done a sketch of her
career for the Evening News. She was a tall, graceful, good-looking blonde, but I never dreamed of her huge success. Her mind was as commonplace as her voice. She had no special gift, but on the stage she was beautiful: the foot-lights set her off peculiarly, though she could not act for nuts. To compare her as an actress with Ellen Terry or even with Ada Rehan would be ridiculous: she was comparatively inarticulate. Yet her appearances were events; she went from triumph to triumph. Through her success I realized that there are special scenic qualities demanded by the stage. She was very tall and when she came down the stage in white, she dominated it and dwarfed all the other women; in talking she had a slight American accent that would have ruined her as a Shakespearean actress, but by the time she played in The Winter's Tale she had shed her twang and spoke fairly; her eyes were a little deep set, her nose perfectly cut: in a room she was just pretty, on the stage a goddess. How much of her success was due to her statuesque grace and how much to Lytton's passionate advocacy can never be known.
Her career taught me how susceptible the English are to mere physical beauty. They rate it in all animals higher than any other race and study it more intimately: shorthorn bull or Berkshire sow, bulldog or greyhound, terrier or mastiff, Southdown ram or Welsh sheep, race-horse or hunter- all are admired for their perfect conformity to type, which argues a most passionate and imaginative understanding of what type is or should be.
Were it not for their idiotic Puritanism the English would be the greatest sculptors in the world and world-renowned besides for their extraordinary understanding of every form and type of bodily beauty.
I visited the British Museum with Rodin later to study the figures from the Parthenon. He went into ecstasies over them; they were as sensuous, he declared, as any figures in all plastic art. George Wyndham went with me at another time but he would not be seduced. The Greek feet and ankles were too large and ill-shaped, he argued; the womens' necks, too, and breasts were coarse. He preferred the figures from the Temple of Nike Apteros, and even they had bad faults. At length he asserted that the facial type was too wooden: the nose in a straight line from the forehead was ugly. In fine, the best English type, he insisted, was far finer, lovelier at once and more spiritual than the Greek ideal, and I agreed with him.
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year.
Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely.
There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany.
And as the trees, so are the men and women: one can find more types of exquisite girlhood and splendid manhood in an hour in New York than one can find in a day in London or a week in Paris or Berlin or Moscow. How is it that American athletes hold all the records? How is it that they can run faster and jump higher than any of the English athletes, though the other day the English were supposed to be supreme in all forms of sport and athletics?
In forty years there has not been a single English heavyweight boxer of the first class simply because the mass of the people have been impoverished to a degree that is not yet realized even in England. The physical manhood of the race has been dwarfed by destitution.
But this argument had led me away from my theme. Shortly after my first meeting with Mary Anderson, I saw Tommaso Salvini as Othello. Salvini had every personal qualification: fine presence and in especial a magnificent and perfectly trained voice, now splendidly sonorous, now sweet, always grateful to the ear. The speech containing the lament, "Othello's occupation gone," was never so superbly rendered: the breaking voice, the tears falling from the convulsed face, the hands even knitting and relaxing, formed an unforgettable picture. Salvini at that moment was Othello and when he suddenly turned on Iago he was terrific; but the famous soliloquy in the bed376 chamber before he murders Desdemona was given in far too loud a voice: he would have waked the dead. He had no conception of the complex English passion, that a man can admire, love, even, what he's resolved to destroy, lest "she should sting more men": Shakespeare's own passion, far too complex for the Italian nature. And in Macbeth Salvini had no inkling that he was acting the thought-plagued Hamlet. His Macbeth never hesitates, never falters: he has not the "if 'twere done, when 'tis done," and so forth. Yet he was the best Othello I've ever seen.
Why are actors, like politicians, always over praised? It would take a dozen of the best of them to portray Hamlet to my satisfaction. I should want Irving to look the part, and Forbes-Robertson to recite some of the soliloquies, and Terriss to stab Polonius, and Sarah Bernhardt to send Ophelia to a nunnery with ineffable tenderness; and even then, whom should I get to show the passion of Hamlet's jealousy or the contempt he felt for Kemp, the clown, who gagged probably and did not say the lines set down for him because he was lifted out of himself by the applause of the groundlings; and worst omission of all, who would impersonate the supreme poet who sings of "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns," though he has just been talking to his father's ghost?
It was at a dinner that Arthur Walter gave in his house off Queen's Gate, that I got to know Henry Irving. I had met him before, notably at a supper given by Beerbohm Tree in the Garrick Club after he had played Shylock at the Lyceum.
I had come from Munich to see his Shylock and compare it with the best Shylock I had ever seen, that of Ernst Possart Irving, having been told by Tree that I had come a thousand miles to see him play, was very gracious and hoped I had liked his impersonation. Naturally, I said, "It was very wonderful, but not Shakespeare's-quite!" Irving insisted on knowing what I meant.
Everyone who saw him will remember the scene when Shylock prays to be allowed to go home as a beaten and broken man:
Shy. I pray you give me leave to go from hence I am not well; send the deed after me, And I will sign it.
Duke. Get thee gone, but do it.
Or. In christening shall thou have two godfathers:
Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not the font: (Exit Shylock) It is the only case, I think, in which our gentle Shakespeare allows a gentleman to insult a beaten man. I was therefore outraged by Irving's conception: he was near the door when Gratiano spoke; at once he turned, walked back to Gratiano, drew himself up, crossing his arms, and scanned him contemptuously from head to foot amid the wild applause of the whole house. When Irving challenged me to explain, I said it seemed to me that if Shylock had treated Gratiano in this way, Gratiano would probably have spat in his face and kicked him off the stage.
"I can't agree with you," retorted Irving dryly. "I think the applause showed I was right in my conception of Shylock as a great tragic figure."
"But Shylock himself tells us," I replied, "that the hero Antonio spat upon his Jewish gabardine."
Irving turned away and began talking to someone else. His rudeness annoyed the more because I was reproaching myself for having been too frank.
Long afterwards, when Mounet-Sully played Hamlet in Paris and Lemaitre, the great French critic, wanted to know how he compared with Irving, I could not help telling the truth. "Irving," I said, "is the ideal Hamlet for the deaf and Mounet-Sully for the blind!"
But in 1884-85,1 met Irving frequently, and Bram Stoker, his manager, always sent me tickets for the Lyceum when I asked for them.
One night I gave a supper party and had Lord Lytton and Harold Frederic, both passionate admirers of Irving; and when we drew together to smoke with the Turkish coffee, Irving talked better than I had ever heard him talk; indeed, till then I h
ad thought him rather inarticulate. I had mentioned, I remember, that Lord Randolph Churchill had promised to come to "the apotheosis of the God," as he phrased it, but at the last moment had to excuse himself because of an important debate in the House. "Please tell Mr. Irving," he added in his letter, "how I should have liked to describe the prodigious effect of his Mephistopheles made upon me." Of course Irving was delighted and went off at score, speaking in his natural voice and with no trace of his stage mannerisms and mumblings, which I found so insupportable.
"I met Lord Randolph first in 1880 in Dublin," he began. "His father was there as Viceroy and Lord Randolph had gone to live in Dublin. We went across to play a week of Shakespeare and the first night we opened with Hamlet. To my surprise, there was no great reception, no special recognition. At the end of the first act Bram Stoker came to me. "There's someone in the Vice regal box,' he said. 'I think it's Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke.'
Now Blandford, his elder brother, had made himself notorious a little while before through a very ugly divorce case; but after all, those affairs are private. I shrugged my shoulders therefore. At the end of the next act Bram Stoker came to say that Lord Randolph would like to make my acquaintance and thank me for my wonderful acting, etc. I told him to bring him round, and at the end of the act he brought Lord Randolph to me in my dressing room.
He came to me at once with outstretched hands. 'I have to thank you, Mr.
Irving,' he began, 'for one of the greatest pleasures of my life, an incomparable evening!' I bowed of course, but he went on. 'I had no idea that Hamlet was such a great play.' "I stared at him: was he trying to be humorous? I replied dryly: ' Hamlet is usually supposed to be a great play.' "'Really!' he said, 'I hadn't heard of it.' This was too much for me: he was either a fool or trying to pull my leg. I turned away. At once Randolph added in a very courtly way, 'I mustn't take up your time by exposing my ignorances; you are no doubt busy.' "'No,' I replied, 'this act is chiefly taken up by the fair Ophelia.' "'Really!' he burst out again. 'I think Miss Terry too is wonderful. I mustn't lose a word of what she says.' I smiled and he added, 'I can't go without hoping to meet you again; won't you dine with me on Sunday next in the lodge in Phoenix Park, which my father has been good enough to place at my disposal?' "His manner, something ingenuous and enthusiastic in his youth, pleased me, and I accepted at once, conscious of a certain sympathy. During the week I was told that he had been in the Vice regal box every night. On the Sunday I went to dine with him a little intrigued: what would he say? He met me in the hall: 'Oh, Mr. Irving,' he began, 'I can't reckon what I owe you: through you I've come to know Shakespeare; what a man he was! Half a dozen of his plays are great plays, and interesting-' "'But surely you must have known them before?' I asked. 'Surely at Oxford you must have read some of them, even if in our schooldays the great things get neglected?' "'No, no, I assure you,' he replied. 'I never read him at school nor at Oxford. I'm afraid I was very lazy and idle all through, but his Lear is a great, great play: