by Unknown
I have no intention of recounting my various clubs, but the next was the Reform, out of which, so far as frequenting it was concerned, I was driven by Henry James. I liked him well, but I had discovered another thing you can do in clubs, you can get your hair cut there. I naturally clung to that, but, alas, James, who was a true frequenter, clung to it also, and when one is swaddled in that white cloth one wants no friendly neighbour. At such times he and I conversed amiably from our chairs with raging breasts. Then one day I was in Manchester or Liverpool in a big hotel, and it came to me that now was my chance to get my hair cut in peace. I went downstairs, and just as they enveloped me in the loathly sheet I heard a groan from the adjoining chair and saw that its occupant was Henry James. After a moment, when anything might have happened, we both laughed despairingly, but I think with a plucky sympathy, meaning that fate was too much for us. Later in the day we discussed the matter openly for the first time, but could come to no conclusion for future guidance. Each, however, without making any promise, did something to help. Feeling that I had been driven from society by its greatest ornament I let my hair go its own wild way, and he, though he remained in society, removed his beard, which was what had taken him so often to the salon of the artists. Not that I can claim the beard as a trophy of mine, but he did remove it about that time, and I should have been proud to be the shears, for the result was that at last his full face came into the open, and behold it was fair. One saw at last the lovely smile that had so long lain hidden in the forest.
No man of letters, I suppose, ever had a more disarming smile than his, and smiles, as I have told, are a subject about which I can speak with authority. It was worth losing a train (and sometimes you had to do that) while he rummaged for the right word. During the search the smile was playing about his face, a smile with which he was on such good terms that it was a part of him chuckling at the other parts of him. I remember once meeting him in the street and asking him how he liked a lecture we had both lately attended. I did not specially want to know nor he to tell, and as he sought for the right words it began to rain, and by and by it was raining heavily. In this predicament he signed to a passing growler and we got in and it remained there stationary until he reached the triumphant conclusion, which was that no one could have delivered a lecture with less offence. They certainly were absolutely the right words, but the smile’s enjoyment while he searched for them was what I was watching. It brought one down like Leather-stocking’s Killdeer.
I never was so intimate with any other club as to have my hair cut in it, but in the after-days when I knew for certain that there was no rule compelling you to go to a club though you were a member, I joined a number. The only one I almost go to, however, is still the Savage, where long ago I so knowingly crossed my legs. I am not even a member of it now, but for the last twenty years I have lived in an eyry so near this club that through my windows I can note the Savages going in and out as if I were in a lofty private box. They look so happy and waft such gaiety on stilly Saturday nights that I am sure there is more to it than crossing your legs. They have such a reputation for being Bohemians that never surely could I have the heart to tell them that the real Bohemia begins in Adelphi Terrace after the last of them has departed for the night. Then from my eyry, as the ghosts come out, I look upon the only club whose ways I really know, the club of the Adelphi ghosts.
Very likely the first ghost to emerge is Davy Garrick, so dapper in his knee-breeches. I call to some of them from my perch, but he has never been sufficiently near because he always comes to his home in the Terrace by Adam Street, and I am at the other end. Mrs. Bracegirdle tells me that there is a large room on the first floor of his house, so crammed with the MSS. of plays that you could never get inside if the door did not open outwards. Once, she says, he had a house-cleaning and threw all the MSS. into the river. I ought to explain that after the Savage is locked up for the night there is no Embankment, no gardens, and, as in the old days, the river has drawn very near. The only time she ever saw Garrick in a rage, Mrs. Bracegirdle says, was next day, when kindly wherrymen brought the bundles of MSS. back to him, very wet and muddy.
I see Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell come out of Garrick’s house, and the great lexicographer as usual crosses the road to tap the rails and count them. They are not the rails of to-day, but, as old prints show, three times as high. Johnson often gets confused in his counting and has to begin again. Sometimes this irritates me and I open my window and call out ‘179’ or the like, at which he shakes his staff at me and Boswell looks up in amazement at my hardihood. They march away, nearly running into Peter the Great who is gossiping at my corner with Mr. Pepys and one Rousseau. The brothers Adam patrol the Adelphi still in the small hours, ready to hand over to the watch any one who may be presuming to alter their designs, and they would ascend to my eyry to ask who had dared to put it here were it not that they are frightened at the lift. They look with suspicious eye on three revellers, Mr. Micawber, the Fat Boy and Charles Lamb, who have just left Rowlandson’s corner and are disturbing by their shouts another ghost at a window across the way, who is Gibbon, very busy correcting the proof-sheets of the ‘Decline and Fall.’
Lamb has no qualification to be here. He was never, alas, one of ours, but we who live in the Adelphi were so shamed by not being able to claim him that after a meeting (which took place in the eyry) we went to the Temple in a fog and collared his ghost and brought it along. We had to keep him roped at first (and it is not easy to rope a ghost) because he had heard there was a Scotsman among us, and as he has told us he was convinced that no Scot loved him. Oh, Charles Lamb! Now he has stutteringly apologized for what he once wrote on that subject, and of all my visitors he is the most desired. He delights in the novelty of the lift as much as the Adam brothers detest it, and sometimes he thinks he has called on me when really he has only gone up and down many times in the lift. I never knew any one so sympathetic nor with such a gift for ghostly talk; as when he asks me how my William is getting on in Australia with the pretty young wife, and how fares my Dick on whom the kettle fell, and where that rogue Harry is, and was it Bob who ran off with Charlotte or Charlotte with Bob, and about Jane and Emily and all the rest of that large family he has invented for me.
Americans, with every virtue except that they are not ghosts, sometimes call to ask me to tell them about the historical interests of the Adelphi, and I find they are less agape for word of those who have lived here than for others who have never lived at all but seem nevertheless to be more alive. These are chiefly people in Dickens’s magic glass, such as David Copperfield, who went to a party given by Steerforth round the corner and was sure somebody was drunk and found in time that it was himself. As I can only show the spot by going on my roof, I am afraid I occasionally show one of my own rooms instead. Some of the inquirers have also gone away under the impression subtly conveyed that it was in the eyry that the maid threw the water on Walter Raleigh, another of our ghosts, when she first saw smoke issuing from his mouth. The real disturbing maid of the Adelphi, however, is Emma Hart, better known as Lady Hamilton. As her ghost strolls the Terrace after Savages are far away in bed she is still just Emma Hart, chambermaid to a famous quack-doctor in the Terrace. I watch her of a moonlit night, posing divinely against area rails, as if she thought some lurking artist might be already painting her. (O luckless I, who craved in my youth to be a painter, and only gave up the calling because I always lost my paints.) She strolls along, twinkling as she passes the darkened club, being amused, I suppose, because the members think they are Bohemians.
I gather from the public prints that our Latin Quarter is now ‘ripe for development,’ which may mean that we are ripe for the development which Garrick gave to the poor MSS. When next I meet the Savages it may be in the water — Bohemians at last. There will be a ghost on the back of every one of us, and I shall try to get Charles Lamb.
CHAPTER XXIII
“ANON AND I”
“Yesterday Mr. Anon p
roduced his first play, and being interested in the fellow I bought the news-sheets this morning to see what they thought of it and him. They agreed that it was among the most hopeless things ever offered to our kind friends in front, and though I was sorry for poor Anon I felt that I should like to see how he took his castigation. So I put the newspapers in my pocket, and set off, as one might say, to call on him. I found the doomed wretch in Grenville Street smoking a cigar which was constantly going out.
‘Seen the papers?’ I asked pleasantly.
‘And you also, Brutus!’ he said, or words to that effect; ‘considering our relationship I think you should be the last to rub it in.’
‘For your good, Anon,’ I said, though not so very harshly. I looked around at the familiar room. ‘After all you seem to have breakfasted well,’ I added.
He shrugged, with an indifference that ill became him.
‘It was not always so in Grenville Street,’ I reminded him; ‘nor once upon a time were there cigars, O Anon.’
‘I am not complaining,’ he retorted, and tried to light the cigar again. It was difficult to know what consolation to give him, but I did my best.
‘I think it plucky of you,’ I said, ‘to take it so calmly. I daresay if I had been slated in that way I should never have been able to hold up my head. Let me light your cigar for you; your hand seems a little shaky this morning.’
‘I notice the same about yours,’ he said, with a funereal laugh.
‘I cannot remember any play’s getting such a slating,’ I assured him thoughtfully, though with some exaggeration. ‘You saw what one paper said about pathos and bathos? Severe certainly, but uncommonly clever. Finlayson and I were much amused by another critic on your ideas of comedy; indeed I think Finlayson is putting the cutting into his scrap-book. How did you feel when you read Jenison? After all, he let you off more lightly than Bertram. If you did not see Bertram on your sense of humour I have it with me.’
‘I have seen them all,’ Anon replied, spilling a boxful of vestas and looking at me reproachfully. Just then we heard a boy shouting the glad news that the evening papers were upon the town.
‘I ‘ll go out and bring them in,’ I said.
‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ he answered. I insisted that it was no trouble, and went out for the papers. I gave him two of them, and read aloud titbits from the others.
‘Well, what does the “Nettle” say?’ I asked as I saw him crumple up the paper. The crumpling was his sufficient reply.
‘Whatever it says,’ I continued, ‘you will find its bludgeoning to be almost balm after the persiflage of the “St. James’s.’”
‘The “St. James’s!”’ he echoed scornfully. He really said that loved word scornfully, did James Anon.
‘Here,’ I said, frowning, ‘is something more palatable. It says the acting was worthy of a better play. That is comforting. Ah, and here is a friend in need who says he saw a more banal piece in the year’82. That is not so long ago.’
‘Well,’ said Anon, ‘I know the worst now.’
‘I question that,’ I said, clapping him on the back. ‘We have not seen the weekly papers yet, and they are sure to be down on you for those historical inaccuracies.’
Anon, I was pleased to see, tried to swagger, but he was white of face. There was also, I doubt not, a craven whiteness on my own.
‘I cannot remember another case (nor can Finlayson),’ I said doggedly, ‘in which the Ibsenite critics and the anti-Ibsenites were so entirely agreed. I should not wonder, young sir, though your play has done some good after all.’
‘In what way, you brute?’
‘Well, it shows that those who plumb the intellectual depths do have points in common. The public were beginning to think that the one set of critics praised everything conventional, and the other set everything unconventional; but all are agreed as to your piece. I believe you have cleared the ether, Anon.’
‘I am glad my play has proved of service if only in that way,’ he answered stiffly.
‘How luxurious,’ I pointed out, ‘to be bitter in the first floor front instead of in the cell at the end of the passage. And I am not at all sure, O — friend of my youth,’ I continued warmly, ‘that this wholesale condemnation is not a better tonic than half-hearted praise. Had alluring things been found in the play some manager might have put it into his evening bill, and had to descend with it to Avernus. Also, you might have been tempted to go on writing dramatic dirges and reading them to your writhing friends. Who knows, Anon, but that, in saving you from this, the enemy may have done the state some service?’
‘Is it yourself you are trying to buoy up or me?’ inquired the shrewd creature.
‘I observe,’ I admitted handsomely, ‘that we occupy the same ditch.’
‘Do you agree with their verdict?’ he asked me presently.
He spoke so wistfully that, remembering what he had been to me, I was loath to deliver the blow. However, if we were to be of any further use to each other it had to be done.
‘On consideration, do you?’ I asked. ‘Come on, Anon, you of the cigar and the first floor; don’t be an ungrateful ass.’
‘There is a certain pleasure in grousing,’ he said with Scottish dourness.
‘But no profit,’ said I with Scottish canniness. Neither of us can smile, but after a struggle he jerked on to his face a look that I understood, because it is the best I can do myself.
‘Heigho,’ we said simultaneously, and then we sauntered forth with pallid cheeriness to Soho and had luncheon for one.”
THE play was the already mentioned ‘Richard Savage,’ and the stubborn cheeriness of the article brought me a well-wisher among the critics, A. B. Walkley of the ‘Times.’ His support in after years was what made me go on writing plays. With him, William Archer of blessed memory, who did as much I think for the drama of his time as Pinero himself or, later, G. B. S., whom I used to see in those old days tearing along the Strand with his coattails in pursuit of him, and wondered who he was, he was so unlike all other men. His coattails pursue him still, but they will never make up on him; no one will ever make up on him. In time I mesmerized Walkley so that he found good in even my poorest efforts, and if he did have to jump on me I felt that his artistic joy in it as a pastime was gone. He and Archer (though Archer sighed over me more than he commended) were the two who made me do my little best in a walk of literature that I at first trod rather contemptuously. I am pleased to know of myself that I was not one who tossed unfavourable criticisms aside, I took my revenge instead in considering them carefully and trying to draw sustenance from them; an ordeal at first, no doubt, but calming to the spirit. Meredith also encouraged me to write plays, and sometimes when I was telling him of my characters, instead of commenting on their feebleness he would slip the paper-knife I have spoken of into my hand to stab them with, and even in great moments retain it and stab himself. There was Irving, too, who said I had such a ‘kind’ way of taking my characters ‘off and on’ that actors would always like to play them. It took me years to find out what this meant, but he at least had a kind way with me and ‘placed’ my first plays. Yet I preferred writing books, and still think they were more my game, and remain uncertain that those good friends did not do me a great disservice. What lured me on was that the writing was in dialogue, which fascinated me from the moment I fell into it and found that I could swim. It is a form that delights me still; to this day I even write many of my letters in it. I would preach in dialogue if I were a clergyman, and write my prescriptions in it if I were a physician.
In my first years, however, I never contemplated becoming a dramatist, and would have thought you harsh had you said it was the thing for me. No one would have been so astonished as Anon. The theatre and the oddities of its life drew me to them, but plays did not. I wrote papers as from an actor, as an actress, as a stage-door keeper, as one who runs tours, as a call-boy, as a dresser, but the playwright was to me the one uninteresting figure of the whole clamjam
fry.
I seldom went to the play, though on the other hand I have always liked to sit alone in an empty theatre. At such times I have not planned scenarios, but I have thought out the novel of the stage I never wrote. At rehearsals, when they were esteeming me as amiable because I sat silent, I was far away in my book. I never knew (and I don’t know now) how plays are written, nor gave stage-craft any conscious thought. It is strange to me to read of dramatists who in their beginnings go a score of times to see some popular play in order to study its construction. Nevertheless I have no doubt from what I hear and read that theirs is the better way. In an introduction I wrote to the plays of one of the best of us, now lying on French soil, I find that I began ‘When I agreed very gladly to write a few words of introduction to this volume, I cautiously bought a book about how to write plays (there are many of them) in order to see whether Mr. Chapin wrote his plays properly; but the book was so learned, and the author knew so much, and the subject when studied grew so difficult that I hurriedly abandoned my inquiry.’ My own plan was simply to make everything clear to myself in the hope that this would clear a way for the spectator. Once or twice I first made my clearing in the middle, as when I wrote the third act of ‘The Admirable Crichton’ before writing acts one and two. I have not the least idea what stage technique is, but this may have been it. Plays should be 42 by 36. Let us admit this and waywardly pass on.