Salome was written in French by Wilde, who wrote the language with a classic accuracy but spoke it with an atrocious accent. There is extant a well-authenticated anecdote which may close this chapter. On the occasion of a dinner given in Paris, Émile Zola was to propose the toast of “The Arts” and Oscar Wilde was to reply. Zola spoke, of course, in French, and in coupling the toast with Wilde’s name, said, “Malheureusement Mr Wilde sera obligé de répondre dans sa langue barbare”.
Wilde began his reply in French too. He said, “Je suis Irlandais de naissance, Anglais de race, et comme le dit M. Zola, condamné à parler la langue de Shakespeare!”
CHAPTER VI
1895 a black year — Henry Arthur Jones — The Triumph of the Philistines — Alexander’s domestic life — Offer by Andros de la Rue to back a production of Hamlet — Anthony Hope Hawkins — The Prisoner of Zenda — Great success of the play — A comparison of receipts
WITH THE COLLAPSE of The Importance of Being Earnest, once more in that year, 1895, something had to be done, and quickly. Henry Arthur Jones, who had scored one success at the St. James’ with The Masquerader s, had now another play ready called The Triumph of the Philistines; at the moment an unfortunate title. It was produced on May nth, the night after The Importance of Being Earnest was withdrawn. Henry Arthur Jones was the stormy petrel of the stage. With the appearance and the diction, and indeed the past of a commercial traveller, he had been endowed with a passion for culture and he had educated himself chiefly upon the great poets and the prose writings of Matthew Arnold. He was a man of large ideas violently expressed. Critics like Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm expected his work with eagerness and criticised it with care. Most of the others were repelled by an uncouthness in his style and the untempered vigour of his convictions. He was the most positive man you could meet in a twelvemonth. Causes were tonics to him and he drank of them greedily. The question of the censorship of plays provoked speeches and letters and a pamphlet of forty-six pages. Furious with a system which allowed the actor-manager to dominate the rehearsals and print his name bigger than the author’s, he took the old Avenue Theatre, the home of Dr. Bill, and put on his own play The Crusaders, just to show how things should be done. He staged it beautifully with Morris tapestries and a rose-garden which I remember still as one of the loveliest scenes I ever saw, and had a complete failure. The venture cost him £4000, as his daughter relates in her Life of him, and £4000 lost upon a single play in a small theatre meant in those days a heavy loss indeed. But Henry Arthur Jones had the resilience of a boy, and dropping the iniquities of the actor-manager, he turned his enthusiasms upon the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. When he had done with that, there was still the great battle over Free Trade and Protection; and towards the end of his life he felt that a public duty was laid upon him to annihilate Bernard Shaw. “That man will be the death of me”, he said when he was lunching at the Dramatists’ Club. But in fact that man kept him alive, for he had never learned to idle comfortably. The pamphleteering of Henry Arthur Jones was too rhetorical to annihilate anyone. Reading it one seemed to be listening to a front-bench speech in a Victorian Parliament. What point it had was blunted by his verbosity. There were invocations, there was satire, but the invocations were lost upon the air, and the satire was not sharp enough to hurt. But he had the reward of indomitable old warriors. He kept the good-will of those whom he attacked, and everybody whom he knew liked him well. The courage of his views and his indomitability he carried into his private life. For he suffered at the hands of surgeons the severest of the major operations, and survived them all. He was as tough as rubber and came back like rubber. He was generous in his praise, kind to the beginners in his craft, and the most copious letter-writer of his generation. He wrote ninety-one plays besides, of which The Liars and Mrs Dane’s Defence are probably the most famous; and the plays, like himself, were, as a rule, neither mellifluous nor small.
It can be inferred from this short sketch that Henry Arthur Jones was not a restful element in a theatre. A friend with whom he was lunching at the Garrick Club during the rehearsals of Carnac Sahib at His Majesty’s Theatre asked him, “And how are you getting on this time with Beerbohm Tree?” Jones answered heartily, “Oh, very well indeed! I had to send him my solicitor this morning, otherwise things are smooth!” and the stories were rife of the times when he leaped across the orchestra and stumped out of a theatre, and when he was barred out of the rehearsals of his plays. The following letter, accordingly, written towards the end of the run of The Masqueraders in 1894, bears a valuable testimony to the tact with which the St. James’ Theatre was conducted.
TOWNSHEND HOUSE
NORTH GATE,
REGENT’S PARK
MY DEAR ALEC, — .July 19th 19/94
Many thanks for your kind gift of the photograph and many more for the inscription on it.
I have never had so pleasant an association with any theatre as I have lately had with yours. Long may it continue.
Always yours,
HENRY ARTHUR JONES
Henry Arthur Jones wrote three plays for Alexander, of which only the first, The Masqueraders, had any success. The Triumph of the Philistines began as a satire upon the self-righteousness of the British public and ended by becoming too self-righteous itself. He took a village in the Midlands, the home of a shoemaking industry, and invented for its inhabitants such a group of Puritanical rogues as even the most violent of preachers would hesitate to collect together for a series of sermons. Here they were all crowded together in one. The hypocritical Little-Bethelite has been an easy mark for centuries and more. The man who discovered him deserves half the fees of half the authors in the world. Molière made play with him; Dickens used him; every author of an historical novel set in the days of Cromwell has made a target of him; but no playwright put him into so many shapes, and so crudely bedaubed those shapes, and so weighed them with their own false weights, as did Henry Arthur Jones in The Triumph of the Philistines. He was supposed to know the middle-class tradesmen of the provinces and very likely he did, but in this play he let his dislike of them run away with him. Even their names were a caricature — Jorgan, Pote, Blagg, Modlin, Wapes, Skewett. They hadn’t a chance, had they? On the other hand, the brilliant young artist was called Willie Hesselwood and the hero Sir Valentine Fellowes! So heavy-handed a satire could hardly do anything but sting you into revolt against its author. The most mercenary of harlots brought, of course, the chief and most oppressive Puritan to the ground — a French harlot too. Yes, she was French and she spoke with a broken accent and she had not one grace or allurement except those which Miss Juliette Nesville could give her; and M. Augustin Filon of the Revue des Deux Mondes said that her author had penetrated into the état d’âme of another nation! Alexander himself played Sir Valentine Fellowes and the part made no demand upon him and offered him no opportunity. As always, the cast was of the highest’efficiency. Actors of the worth of Herbert Waring, H. V. Esmond, E. M. Robson, Ernest Hendrie, James Welch, and actresses like Lady Monckton and Miss Nesville could do nothing to save a play which fell so far below the high standard of its author. The play had forty performances, cost Alexander a smallish sum, and was replaced by a revival of The Second Mrs Tanqueray. But that great play was restored to the bill too soon, and for the last week of the season it gave way to The Idler.
A tour of ten weeks produced a profit of some four hundred pounds less than either of the two previous tours. But the tour had a compensation. Alexander and his company were commanded to Balmoral, and on September 17th they played Liberty Hall in the presence of Queen Victoria and her Court. A Royal Command was a rare honour, and to a young manager of not yet five years’ standing it meant prestige at the moment and material benefit in the future. For Alexander was gradually gathering a regular band of theatre-goers at his theatre, people who must see the new play at the St. James’ whatever the newspapers said about it; people from the big houses in the suburbs as well as the artists, doctors, judges,
and dwellers in inner London who filled the stalls and the dress-circle during the first performances. The Balmoral Command was bound to increase in a very solid fashion the number of his patrons. Alexander reopened the St. James’ Theatre on November 7th and the short autumn season did not help. Liberty Hall was revived for a fortnight, and then twenty performances exhausted the new comedy by H. V. Esmond, The Divided. Way. Claude Carton, writing to Alexander on November 26th of that year three days after the first night of this play, summarised the general view: “If there is a doubt expressed here and there as to the play — everyone unites in giving the highest possible praise to your individual share in it”. The Divided Way was withdrawn on December 14th and the theatre was closed. Thus the blackest year which the young management had passed through came to an end. Four new plays had been produced, and three old successes revived, and every one of them had lost money. To make matters worse, at the height of the mischance, during the run of The Triumph of the Philistines, the Alexanders fulfilling an arrangement made months before, moved from their small house in Park Row to one a good deal more spacious and costly in Pont Street.
The set-back would have been more serious but for the prudence with which the theatre was administered. Alexander had had his warning when his manager bolted with the profits of Dr. Bill. There was no parsimony in the conduct of the business but all the care proper to a great undertaking in which from its very nature heavy losses must from time to time occur. What was wanted was paid for and got, but without extravagance. There were producers of plays in those days and, for all I know, there may be now, who would buy the rarest old carpets from Turkestan to cover the floor of a corridor which was seen two or three times for a second when a door was opened. But no such follies were committed at the St. James’ Theatre. He paid high salaries, after a discussion, for he wanted the characters in his plays to be well acted; he paid high royalties, for he wanted the best plays on the market; and he practised a careful and reasonable economy, for he wanted his management to continue. He whipped a play off quickly when the receipts fell — it was said, sometimes too quickly. But when a play failed the loss amounted to the least possible sum, often little more than the cost of the scenery and the dresses; and both scenery and dresses went into store for future use. The losses on these four productions and three revivals, set out in detail, ran thus:
A few small items alter this sum. He lost £97 on a company touring The Triumph of the Philistines and he made £35: 15: 2 in the same way from Guy Domville. So the actual loss upon the twelvemonth’s work amounted to a sum a little short of £1900. But he had thrown into the scales a year’s hard work.
It was a distressing experience for anyone, and for a man of moods a serious discouragement. Alexander like most rather shy, reticent, and sensitive men had armoured himself with a mask of indifference. He seemed to some difficult of approach, aloof. It was all armour. He was within the armour a man of an intense sensibility. He was in the clouds one moment, in the lowest caverns of gloom the next. Were there empty benches in the Upper Circle and the Pit, at once he cried, “The cheaper parts are the backbone of the theatre”. If the returns warned him to reduce the number of the stalls and widen the spaces between the tiers, at once he argued, “At the St. James’, we live upon our stalls. Unless they are full, we must move into a third floor back.”
He was blessed, however, in that he had throughout his life a devoted wife at his side. Lady Alexander took a very notable part in such practical matters as the dresses and the decoration of the stage. But the aid and sustainment she brought to him in their private lives were tremendous factors in the success of his management. When he was at his moodiest, she was at her cheerful best. It was not that she pretended that a failure was a triumph. That would have been of no use. Figures are figures, and Alexander had been trained to value them at their due worth. But when he began to contemplate his calamities under a magnifying-glass, she took the magnifying-glass out of his hands, and showed them to be just such rebuffs and misadventures as it is the common lot of striving men to encounter. He was indeed sufficiently enheartened to contemplate during this disastrous autumn a production of Hamlet. He was ambitious as an actor; he was still young enough to look the part; his long experience at the Lyceum had given him a freedom in the clothes of an older period than his own which few actors possessed; and if his voice was no cathedral organ it had as much range and flexibility as others which had been heard in that part. On the other hand, the stage of the theatre had to be reckoned with. This was the year 1895 and the St. James’ was not remodelled until 1900. Was there depth enough not merely for the changes of scene but for the dignity of the tragedy itself? He had accustomed his audiences to expect his plays in an appropriate environment. They looked for “the confederate season and all things agreeing”. Hamlet made puny would have cancelled a portion of his good-will. Alexander talked of his project amongst his friends and — I call it one of the consolations of that year — one morning came a letter from an old friend, T. Andros de la Rue, then Mr Andros de la Rue. He was made a baronet in 1898 and died in 1911. His letter encouraged Alexander to be “on the move”, and backed the encouragement in the most practical form:
I am doubtful whether “St. James’s” holds money enough for it to be a financial success here. In America you will doubtless coin money over it. I shall be delighted to lend you three thousand pounds without interest to be repaid just when and how you like. Let me know when you are likely to want the money — I suppose early next year.
This very year with its tragedy and its losses must have confirmed Alexander’s knowledge that he had chosen in Mr MacDougall’s words a profession which was precarious as well as laborious. A production of Hamlet at his own cost must have made a serious inroad into his savings, and if unsuccessful, have hampered his activities in the immediate future. Mr de la Rue’s offer, therefore, was of a singularly persuasive kind. But just at this time a play came to his hand which, if it was to be produced at all, ought to be produced at once.
Anthony Hope Hawkins, after a distinguished career at Oxford — he was an Exhibitioner of Balliol, became President of the Union, and took a First in Greats — was admitted to the Bar, and during the early nineties was devilling in the chambers of H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister to be. There was no young man then living of whom a great legal career could have been more confidently prophesied. He was an eloquent and witty speaker; he had a beautiful voice, a very exact knowledge of what he knew, and a great charm of manner. His curious deep gurgling laugh made him your friend, above all if it was what you said that provoked the laugh. In politics he was a keen and sensible Liberal. It seemed, taking it all in all, that the way to high office in the House of Commons would be straight for him and not too difficult. He had already in 1893 a practice in railway work, and at the General Election of 1892 he had contested the Tory stronghold of South Bucks. Meanwhile he had in his spare hours been writing fiction, treating large subjects with a light and urbane touch. Four novels had been published, and although none of them had been definitely successful, they were recognised as heralds of success. In November of the year 1893 — he tells the story in his Memories and Notes — as he walked from the Westminster County Court, where he had conducted and won a case, back to the Temple, the story of The Prisoner of Zenda came into his mind. The book was written off at white heat, sometimes a chapter in the morning and another chapter at night. It was finished before the year was out. Immediately afterwards he wrote a series of sketches in dialogue which during the spring of 1894 appeared in the Westminster Gazette.
The Dolly Dialogues and The Prisoner of Zenda were published within a few weeks of one another, The Prisoner of Zenda in April; and between them they swept the reading public off its feet. Anthony Hawkins had now to make his choice. If he were to continue at the Bar and share out his life between legal work and politics, he must shut the door on Anthony Hope. He might drive a tandem, he couldn’t drive a Roman chariot. He couldn’t be, like Mrs
Malaprop’s Cerberus, three gentlemen in one. He decided to be Anthony Hope. In after years I think that he regretted his choice, but there were more early primroses on the path of literature. He abandoned his practice in the Law Courts and, taking a couple of rooms in Buckingham Street, Strand, close to the Watergate, as a workshop, he sat down to write.
I did not know him until three years later, but he quickly became one of my greatest friends and remained so until his death. He was the pleasantest of companions, sane in his judgments, witty in his talk, kindly but with just enough formalin in the milk to keep it sound, and altogether too diffident about himself. He added a word to the English language, and that is more than most novelists can claim.
The Prisoner of Zenda was dramatised for him by Edward Rose, one of Anthony’s many friends amongst the actors. Rose had adapted already Anstey Guthrie’s Vice-Versa with a certain amount of efficiency. But his version of Anthony Hope’s romance excited little expectation amongst the managers of theatres. The play went the round. There was a quite justified disinclination to present adaptations of novels; partly through the fault of the adaptors, and still more because the novel is a leisurely affair and much more akin to the film with the film’s facility for transition than it is to the play. When a novel is transferred to the stage, what is required is rather a transmutation than an adaptation. It has to be stripped to its skeleton, and then built up again in its new shape. To transfer wedges of dialogue, to compress scenes which were written to be read, to select incidents which happened in different places and force them to happen in one, to thin out characters which have become famous through their elaboration, so that they may at all events bear their names and wear their clothes before an audience, is to fall between two stools. And this is what usually happens. The quality of the book is lost, and a poor thing with ragged edges vainly pretends that it is a play. The Prisoner of Zenda, therefore, went round and round. It tarried for a while in the hands of Forbes-Robertson. But in 1895 it was produced in New York by Edward Sothern, who held in America a position parallel to that which Alexander held in England. To what extent it was altered during the course of the rehearsals I have no knowledge. But with the parts of Rudolf Rassendyll and Rudolph the Fifth, King of Ruritania, acted by the greatest romantic actor in America, the play took the New York public by storm. It was no longer negligible in England. Alexander sent an emissary across the Atlantic to see it, secured it, and on January 7th, 1896, produced it at the St. James’ Theatre.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 845