My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  I'd love to see you in it; and there's something in the Antony and Cleopatra that appeals to me peculiarly. Do you ever play it?' "'It's a little difficult to stage,' I answered, and while explaining we took our seats at the table and I found him a first-rate host.

  "Lord Randolph made a profound impression on me," Irving went on. "As soon as I realized that he was not posing I said to myself, "This is a great man, too; unconsciously he thinks that even Shakespeare needs his approval! He makes himself instinctively the measure of all things and of all men and doesn't trouble himself about the opinions or estimates of others.' Afterwards, when they made fun of him in Parliament, as they did at first with silly caricatures of him as an impudent boy, I knew the day would come when they'd have to take him seriously."

  I was delighted with the story and with the simple, sincere way Irving told it. I think still it shows intellect in him and an appreciation of greatness that I did not at all expect.

  Sometime later Arthur Bourchier, the actor, told me an amusing story that shows Henry Irving in another light.

  "When Benson at Oxford was drilling his amateur company in Shakespeare and Aeschylus, he asked Irving down once for the opening night of the Agamemnon. I was in Benson's company and delighted when he showed me Irving's charming letter of acceptance. He was flattered, he said, by the invitation and would come gladly. We were all on the alert, as you may imagine, on the great night. Well, the performance went without a hitch and afterwards Irving came round on the stage and congratulated Benson in the handsomest way. "A great play," he said, "and a very great actor. I'm delighted to feel, Mr. Benson, that the University, too, has come to enrich the stage. I think you gave the chief things superbly"; and he really spoke simply, as if he meant every word of it, and we drank it all in greedily, as young men do. His praise affected Benson so much that shortly afterwards he confessed,

  "Your appreciation, Sir, gives me courage"-he began-"I think I shall give the Trilogy."

  "Do, my dear fellow," cried Irving, clapping him on the shoulder, "do. It's a part that'll suit you admirably."

  "After that," said Bourchier, grinning, "the curtain came down of itself."

  I have given this story as well as the others because it illustrates a side of the actor; and now I'll make a further personal confession that tells against myself and puts a certain nobility of Irving in a fair light. In my later years in London I seldom went to the Lyceum and took little stock in Irving's later achievements, though right up to the end of the century his "first nights" were something more than social events.

  Irving always gave the impression of being more than an actor: he had a great personality; his marked peculiarities of figure, face and speech set him apart and gave him unique place and distinction. Of the three or four chief personages of the eighties, he was the most singular-more arresting even than Parnell. Randolph Churchill and Gladstone had to be seen in the House of Commons to win full recognition, but Irving, like Disraeli, took the eye everywhere and excited the imagination. As Shylock, even, Irving made everyone else upon the stage appear common, an effect surely not contemplated by the creator of the "Ebrew Jew"! There can be no doubt that his peculiar enunciation and accent on the stage were deliberately adopted in order to increase the effect of his appearance, for in private life he spoke almost like anyone else. His "make-up," in fact, went so far as to include his speech and voice. If we are to believe tradition, Garrick in this was his exact opposite: he was always simple and natural on the stage, we are told, but in private was always acting, always playing a part.

  With Goethe, I felt that the admission of young girls had a more laming effect on the theatre than it had even upon books. "Young girls," said the great German, "have no business in the theatre; they belong to the cloister and the theatre is for men and women only and the elemental human passions. But as it is impossible to get the maidens and their emasculating influence out of the theatre, I have stopped going to it. I would have to shut my eyes to all the feebleness and foolery, or accept it all, without even trying to improve it, and that's not my role."

  In those first years in London, I had a paltry little spite against Irving: he denied me the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre on the ground that the Evening News was a ha'penny paper; and I thought it mean and shabby of him, and Stoker put the blame on Irving himself. About the same time, I discovered Wilson Barrett's inordinate ambition to oust Irving from his pride of place. After the Fortescue triumph, I had been introduced to Miss Terry and had flattered her to the top of her bent; and, indeed, I admired her hugely: I thought her far and away the best English actress. Somewhere or other I heard now that Miss Terry's engagement with Irving had run out and that he did not want to increase her salary. At once I flew to Wilson Barrett and induced him to give me a letter offering Ellen Terry double what she was getting with Irving and a percentage in the profits of the Princess's Theatre to boot. I took it to Miss Terry and after reading it she laughed.

  "May I keep it?"

  "Certainly," I replied. "You would be the chief person in the Princess's."

  She laughed again. "You tempt cleverly; why?"

  "Frankly, because I don't think Irving appreciates you properly." Miss Terry smiled but would not commit herself.

  When I announced in the Evening News that it was just possible that Miss Terry would soon go to help Wilson Barrett at the Princess's, I had my revenge. In half an hour Bram Stoker was at my office with a flaming contradiction which I refused to insert, saying I had reason to believe that Miss Terry might change her "leading man." I thought Stoker would have had a fit. Away he rushed and in a short while brought Irving back with him, who assured me that Miss Terry had renewed her engagement with him. "It was signed, sealed and delivered."

  "I am very glad for your sake," I said, "and will give the news in tomorrow morning's edition," and, I added, "though you may not care for the announcement in a ha'penny paper." Bram Stoker, I saw, understood what I meant, for afterwards the Lyceum advertisement was sent to the Evening News without being asked for.

  It was a mean and paltry revenge to take, but Bram Stoker had been needlessly curt and disdainful in his initial refusal, and consequently I had no idea how wrong I had been till some years afterwards, when I assisted at Irving's bankruptcy and the first meeting of his creditors, and learned to my amazement that he had nearly thirty old actresses and actors on his civil list, to whom he gave weekly pensions of from thirty shillings to five pounds. To all the weaker members of his craft that had ever played with him he behaved with a princely generosity: he had filled his great position nobly and I had made it more difficult for him. I was ashamed of myself to suffering.

  From that time on I tried to atone to Irving for my forgotten meanness, but I wish to record it here simply as showing that some of our worst deeds are due to want of knowledge and to a too low estimate of our fellow men.

  What judges of literature these journalists are! Froude has just published his Life of Carlyle and The Times compares it with Boswell's Johnson. "Carlyle," says The Times, "is a greater person than Johnson," and, it adds, "all the reading world will allow that there can be no comparison between Mr.

  Froude and Boswell"; all of which might be true without establishing the conclusion. The great portraits of the world are not of the greatest persons, nor written by the greatest men, of what life-history would compare with Plato's pictures of Socrates? If the great master of prose and thought had only written one dialogue between Socrates and Xanthippe, telling us of their intimate relations and reactions and giving us the woman's and wife's point of view, he might have painted a companion portrait to the Crito and the Phaedo that would have completed his work.

  Carlyle was not as human as Johnson. Let us take one phrase of the great Doctor: he has visited Garrick behind the scenes and breaks out with the confession that "the black legs and snowy bosoms of your actresses, David, excite my amorous propensities." Has he not here painted himself to the life?

  And then
Froude: a better stylist perhaps than Boswell, but without Boswell's intense interest in his subject. What weaknesses has Froude discovered in Carlyle? Why he doesn't even tell us how Carlyle managed to save?. 30,000. Why didn't Carlyle go to visit Goethe in Weimar? That would have been better than putting bawbee to bawbee; and when he made his wife jealous, how did he console her and win forgiveness? Froude is interested in literature rather than life, and not in this spirit are great biographies written, or indeed great anything else.

  Erdachtes mag zu denken geben

  Doch nur Erlebtes wird beleben.

  But already everyone was talking of Joseph Chamberlain and his "Unauthorized Programme" in the Fortnightly Review, and of Gladstone and the mess he had got himself and his government into, partly through his dislike of Chamberlain and of Parnell, who, since the Kilmainham business, and because of the perpetual unfair attacks in The Times, was coming more and more into prominence.

  It was in reference to Parnell and his rise that I first said to myself, "Great men, like kites, go up against the wind." But Parnell, thoroughly English as he was and magnificently handsome to boot, certainly the handsomest man in my time in the House of Commons, never succeeded in England, though towards the end he was on the point of succeeding in the House of Commons, a fact which to me deepens the tragedy of his untimely death.

  But Chamberlain was the central figure on the political stage. I measured him perhaps harshly on our first meetings. I've told how surprised I was at the noble way Lord Salisbury acted in regard to his tenants' houses at Hatfield, rebuilding as many as he could, year by year, and then fixing a rental not to exceed three per cent on the cost of the building; and above all refusing from the outset to accept any rent at all on the houses he regarded as unfit for habitation.

  "Are you sure?" Chamberlain asked me peevishly when I brought him my report. "Can it be that this whole detailed indictment of Archibald Forbes is wrong with any justification?"

  Time and again he returned to the charge: "Forbes had no motive, no reason to be unfair: he's supposed to be a great reporter. It's extraordinary, you'll admit that, most extraordinary."

  At length I could stand it no longer: he was so petty, so ungenerous to his rival. "It's Salisbury's nobility," I said, "that strikes me as extraordinary. If the Liberal manufacturers and industrial monopolists of England had behaved as well to their workmen as this great landlord had behaved to his tenants, there would be no strikes in England, no trade unions either, no industrial discontent." Chamberlain looked at me with undisguised antagonism in his eyes but said nothing, and soon afterwards I took my leave. One day I waited for him in his dining-room, where there were several Leighton pictures, and he introduced them to me pompously as, "All by Leigh ton, the President, you know of our Academy." I nodded and Chamberlain went on, "I gave 2000 pounds for that one."

  "Really?" I gasped.

  "Yes," he replied, "what do you think it's worth?"

  I could not help it; I replied, "I don't know the value of the frame."

  It's hardly necessary to say that he didn't want to see me again for many a day. But another incident occurred some time later which explains, I think, my early misjudgement of the man. The gist of Forbes's article appeared in Truth, Labouchere's weekly paper. I asked Escott had he given it to Labouchere but he denied it, saying that it must have been given by Chamberlain himself. I wrote of it as false and foolish and made fun of it in the Evening News and Lord Salisbury's agent wrote thanking me for my defence, at the same time telling me that Lord Salisbury had forbidden him to write any correction to the press; and had added finely, "It's impossible for us to praise each other." But my defence of the truth stood me in good stead with Lord Salisbury much later, as I may tell when I come to the Venezuelan difficulty.

  Now I had to read Chamberlain's "Unauthorized Programme" as it appeared month by month in the Fortnightly Review, for all this time I was in close touch with Escott and his family. I found it difficult to explain Chamberlain's extraordinary success. He had no idea that Bismarck's work in nationalizing the German railways was the best way of lifting the labouring classes to a higher level; he preferred the old individualistic lenitives: for years he believed in unrestricted free trade; he didn't even know that joint-stock management of industry had every fault of state management and none of its virtues; from a continental point of view he was extraordinarily ignorant; he had read practically nothing and was curiously uneducated.

  He had driving force of will and for years I saw little more in him. All this, I think, accounts for Gladstone's dislike of the man, as was shown by the low position he gave the Radical leader when forming his Cabinet in 1886, though Chamberlain was even then absolute master of six seats in Birmingham alone.

  Kimberley and Granville, old worn out war horses, became Indian and Colonial Ministers respectively, whereas Chamberlain had only a minor appointment as head of the Local Government Board. This Ministry showed curious weaknesses and justified my sneer that there was "a screw loose in the Cabinet." Everyone knew of course that Chamberlain's great fortune lay in his monopoly of the trade in screws. But Gladstone should have taken him into his confidence and given him whatever place he wanted, for he was undoubtedly at this time the head of the Radical party and the most influential member of the majority after Gladstone himself. When the Home Rule Bill came before the House, pressed forward, as Randolph Churchill said aptly, by "an old man in a hurry," Gladstone must have realized his blunder in underrating Chamberlain, for Chamberlain and Hartington both resigned, and their resignation, or rather Chamberlain's, made the bill Impossible. Gladstone nicknamed the rebels "dissentient Liberals," but the name didn't stick; they soon came to be known as "Liberal-Unionists," and no one could deny that Chamberlain had given up the succession to the leadership of the party rather than sacrifice his principles. But if Gladstone had handled him to the height of his deserving in 1886, some Home Rule Bill would have passed the House and the history of "the distressful country" would have been different.

  I could not even account for Chamberlain's extraordinary influence in Birmingham till I made up my mind to go and visit it. Then I was soon convinced; everyone in Birmingham knew his work and spoke in warmest admiration of him. In the very first year he was Mayor, in 1874, he bought up the gas works on behalf of the Corporation; he increased the efficiency of the services public and private in the most extraordinary way and transferred the growing profits into the pockets of the taxpayers. A year or so later he dealt with the water supply in the same spirit and with even more wonderful results, while showing himself a really democratic English statesman of the best. In the gas business he used all the growth of revenue in relief of the rates, while in the water service he ordained a minimum of profit in order that the continually growing supply should be distributed throughout the community and should especially benefit the poorest classes. In his third term he did even better at a greater personal cost. There were slums in Birmingham of unimaginable foulness, where long continued poverty had festered into disease. One or two facts will give some idea of the situation: infant mortality in the slum was three times as high as in the more decent quarters, the length of life was not one half as long, and the ratio of crime was tenfold higher. Chamberlain conceived the idea of cleansing this Augean stable, and in order to judge him fairly, it must be remembered that his powers were severely limited; and a certain resentment, based on the overgrown love of Englishmen for individual liberty, and hatred of authoritative interference or molly-coddling, made itself felt unpleasantly from the beginning. Yet he triumphed over every difficulty: bolder than Haussmann in Paris, he drove a great boulevard through the heart of slumland and called it Corporation Street. Today Corporation Street has the best shops in Birmingham, and he leased out the sites for only seventy years, so that when the leases fall in before the middle of this century, the Birmingham rates will be relieved to the tune of over?. 100,000 a year.

  On my return from Birmingham I couldn't help asking Chambe
rlain one day how he had managed it. "Your gas and water improvements were easy," I began. "Indeed, in Germany they would be merely usual, but how did you manage your street through slum-land? Didn't some slum owners object to selling and ask extortionate, extravagant prices for their houses?"

  "Some," he replied laughing. "Dozens held me up as boldly resolved as highway robbers. But I had various ways of dealing with them. I had obtained powers over more than the slum area, so, if they were determined, I said, 'All right, my friend, I'll alter the direction of my avenue and leave you in the slum you prefer. You'll not profit by my improvement, that's all.' To another I'd say, 'Look here, if you won't come in, I'll leave your tumbled down old shack in the middle of my avenue and I'll take care you don't get permission from the Corporation to rebuild on the site for many a year.' And yet another I'd influence by an appeal to his sense of fair play, and that's very