But the two people who alone were really concerned in the affair, the author and the manager who was to produce it, ware not left to themselves at all. There was an enthusiast in the background — one of the tremendous enthusiasts, greater than Trelawney, less than Forster, but busier than either of them: Sidney Colvin, the distinguished Librarian of the British Museum. No less enthusiastic was Mrs Colvin, his wife. It was the most genuine, overpowering enthusiasm that ever was known, and it had twice possessed them in the course of their lives; and on each occasion for someone alien from their ways. There was nothing Bohemian in the composition of Sidney Colvin. He was the courteous, cultured official, a little academic, almost a little prim. But the two men whose fortunes and fames he laboured to promote were Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Robert Louis Stevenson, when asked by Andrew Lang to lunch with him at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, turned up to Lang’s delight in a brigand’s Inverness cape, a velvet coat, and a black-and-white striped shirt. Stephen Phillips was at his most comfortable in a public-house. And both these men, in turn, by the greatness of their gifts took the Colvins by storm. The Colvins worked for them, even pestered for them. Colvin looked after Stevenson’s business arrangements when that great writer lived under the shadow of death in Samoa. He persuaded the Royal Academy to invite Phillips to reply to the toast of Literature at its annual banquet, and I should think Phillips is the only author who ever turned that invitation down. But there came with the enthusiasm a kind of jealousy, a sense of proprietorship. The Colvins must be the only advisers. Leave it to them and their blue-bird shall soar — the world’s kingfisher. Paolo and Francesca was Phillips’ finest work, limpid in its verse, strong and simple in its action. Sidney Colvin knew exactly how it ought to be cast, who should be responsible for the scenery, how it should be acted.
“Remember, I have never put my money on the wrong horse yet in any of the arts”, he wrote to Alexander, when pressing for the engagement of a young actress for Francesca.
He had discovered that young actress, or thought he had. As a matter of fact she had already taken two or three of the less important parts in plays at the St. James’ Theatre. She was Margaret Halstan. Sidney Colvin went to see her, whether in a play or not he does not say, and he found her “of the right poetical appearance, strikingly handsome and radiant and at the same time slender and girlish”. He got her to read the part of Francesca to him. She could express poetry and passion. She was quick to make use of criticisms. He carried her off to Stephen Phillips. She read the part again to both of them. Sidney Colvin dashed off a letter to Alexander.
BRITISH MUSEUM
MY DEAR ALEXANDER, —
July 6
I want to tell you at once how much impressed both Phillips and I have been with Miss Halstan. I am quite sure she would make not only a thoroughly satisfactory but almost an ideal Francesca.
No one else would do. In most ways Margaret Halstan would be far better than Mrs Patrick Campbell. As for another suggested lady, her nose was too short for a heroine of romance; as for yet a third, she played modern comedy with a very pretty grace, pathos, and finish, but was not of the poetical cast and would be fatal to this play. Alexander meekly replied that he had engaged Margaret Halstan, and seems not to have explained that he had already with Stephen Phillips’ entire agreement contracted that Evelyn Millard should play the part of Francesca. Margaret Halstan actually played the short but effective part of Tessa, the daughter of Pulci the drug-seller, and played it delightfully. One can read between the lines that when the truth came out poor Phillips was put in the corner for a bit. There had been, and I suppose as long as theatres exist often will be, a trifle of trouble over an inaccurate paragraph in this and that newspaper. Stephen Phillips wrote in haste and heat to Alexander, was reassured with a little acerbity, and replied contritely:
Believe me I should allow no one to come between you and me for a moment. Certain of my friends have made themselves rather disagreeable to me over the proposed casting of the play, but I stood to you as you know, and having agreed with you did not withdraw a step. Please don’t imagine that I could, and rely on me in every way.
But Colvin was too sincere an enthusiast, too eager to see justice done to the poet and his work to sulk for more than five minutes. As he had helped others — Stevenson and Phillips were perhaps his chief debtors, but they were chiefs of a lengthy regiment — so he put all his great knowledge and all his judgment at the disposition of the St. James’ Theatre. Telbin, the scene-painter, and E. V. Reynolds, the stage manager who could not only stage-manage but could give the most complete little miniature performances of the small character parts which his other duties allowed him to undertake, were both sent off to Italy. Colvin was anxious that the scenery and decorations should be characteristically thirteenth century and not Renaissance. They would find their best suggestions not at Rimini but in the architectural backgrounds to the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto in the upper Church of Assisi, and in the old ruined castello of Assisi. Colvin might also be of use to Percy Macquoid “with some material for the period which may be new to him”. He attended rehearsals, was soon reconciled to the Francesca of Evelyn Millard, and contributed some practical criticisms.
The very important part of Lucrezia was in the end taken by Elizabeth Robins, and H. R. Hignett made his London debut as Pulci, the old apothecary; Lilian Braithwaite was the Nita, a rather conventional figure who had stepped out of an eighteenth-century comedy of intrigue into blank verse; Arthur Machen represented Giovanni’s servant; and a young and unknown actor borrowed from F. R. Benson’s famous Shakespearian Company was brought up to London to play the ill-fated lover Paolo.
This last was no accidental engagement. A couple of years before, in a town of the North of England, Henry Ainley, a local amateur, had walked on, as the saying is, during the week of Alexander’s engagement. He had sought Alexander’s advice, since he was on fire to exchange the ledgers of a bank-clerk for the entrancing chances of the stage. Alexander, always a good and helpful judge of young actors, was quick to recognise Ainley’s matchless aptitude for a theatrical career. But Ainley was a boy and his father looked upon the stage as the pit of Erebus. If Henry Ainley could persuade his father to let him go, something might be done. Ainley did in the end persuade his father, he was recommended to gain experience and flexibility of voice in the wide repertoire of Frank Benson; and from the first mooting of this play of Paolo and Francesca between Phillips and Alexander, Alexander carried in his mind the possibility that in this youth he was to find such a representation of Paolo as only a painter could imagine. He went down to Croydon where the Benson Company was acting, and after watching the performance of The Merchant of Venice in which Ainley played Lorenzo, he induced Benson to release him.
Henry Ainley had youth, grace, beauty of face, beauty of voice, and these native gifts won for him a popular success. But it was the success of a pet. Of the power and the command which were afterwards again and again to throw open to him the very throne-room of the actors’ kingdom there was at present no real sign. There was a want of fire. He looked to be too spiritual. He was too tame. The passion, the resistance which sought in action the strength to continue to resist, the despair which looked for its reprieve in suicide, the final submission to an overwhelming love — for the vivid realisation of these emotions he was not yet ripe. There was a speech at the end of the second act where so swift and so clear a transition from argument to argument was needed as would have taxed the resources of Henry Irving himself. He had escaped:
I have fled from her; have refused the rose,
Although my brain was reeling at the scent.
I have come hither as through pains of death;
I have died, and I am gazing back at life.
Yet it was not too late to return. The white road to Rimini was still in view and at the end of it the towers upon the walls shone red with the setting of the sun:
And might I not return? Those battlements
Are burning. They catch fire, those parapets!
And through the blaze doth her white face look out
Like one forgot, yet possible to save.
Might I not then return? Ah, no! no! no!
For I should tremble to be touched by her,
And dread the music of her mere good-night.
Howe’er I sentinelled my bosom, yet
That moment would arrive when instantly
Our souls would flash together in one flame,
And I should pour this torrent in her ear
And suddenly catch her to my heart.
But at the moment when he is on the point of hurrying back, a drum is heard. His brother’s soldiers, his command, are marching upon Florence. Paolo’s salvation lies there:
A drum!
It should be, of course, a loud cry ringing with hope:
I’ll lose her face in flashing brands, her voice In charging cries....
But he stands stock-still whilst the soldiers march past him cheering him, their captain, calling upon him. He follows for a step or two. Then his old irresolution catches him up again:
I cannot go; thrilling from Rimini,
A tender voice makes all the trumpets mute.
I cannot go from her: may not return.
O God! what is Thy will upon me? Ah!
One path there is, a straight path to the dark.
There, in the ground, I can betray no more,
And there for ever am I pure and cold.
The means! No dagger blow, nor violence shown
Upon my body to distress her eyes.
Under some potion gently will I die;
And they that find me dead shall lay me down
Beautiful as a sleeper at her feet.
And upon that line the curtain descended. It was a dramatic scene and it taxed too strenuously the inexperience of the young actor. Emotional power was there — enough of it and to spare as after years from time to time disclosed. But it was locked up and Ainley had not yet found the key. It did not break through the screen of flesh, it was not audible in the level music of the voice. His Paolo was the Prince Charming of a fairy story, not the young living Italian with the hot sun in his blood.
The great performance, indeed, on that opening night of March 6th, 1902, and on each of the hundred and thirty-three performances which followed, was, in the judgment of all the spectators, given by George Alexander himself. The war-scarred imperious veteran who had married out of policy in the grey of his life a girl from a convent; the man “of savage courage and deliberate force” whose love for his young brother was the one gentle element in his nature — and there was a fierceness even in that; this man bewildered, desperately hurt by the sudden inrush of a tormenting passion for his child-wife:
How beautiful you seem, Francesca, now,
As though new-risen with the bloom of dreams!
More difficult it grows to leave your side.
I, like a miser, run my fingers through
Your hair: yet tears are lately in your eyes!
What little grief perplexes you, my child? —
the veteran discovering that his beloved Paolo was wooing her in his own despite, that his love was returned by her, rushing in a frenzy of despair to a squalid compounder of philtres; and in the end driven on to kill the only two people who had lit up his stormy and indefatigable life with tenderness:
Now like a thief he creeps back to the house!
To her for whom I had begun to long
So late in life that now I may not cease From longing!...
I will be wary of this creeping thing... And I am grown
The accomplice and the instrument of Fate,
A blade! A knife! — no more — and when the deed was accomplished, speaking with a simple dignity of despair:
Carlo, go through the curtains, and pass in
To the great sleeping-chamber: you shall find
Two there together lying: place them, then,
Upon some litter and have them hither brought
With ceremony. [Exeunt CARLO and FOUR SERVANTS.
GIOVANNI paces to and fro. The curse, the curse of Cain!
A restlessness has come into my blood,
And I begin to wander from this hour
Alone for evermore. LUC. (rushing to him): Giovanni, say
Quickly some light thing, lest we both go mad!
Gio. Be still! A second wedding here begins,
And I would have all reverent and seemly:
For they were nobly born, and deep in love ——
and moving to the litter where Paolo and Francesca lie dead:
Not easily have we three come to this —
We three who now are dead. Unwillingly
They loved, unwillingly I slew them.
Now I kiss them on the forehead quietly.
[He bends over the bodies and kisses them on the forehead.
He is shaken. LUC. What ails you now?
GIO. She takes away my strength.
I did not know the dead could have such hair.
Hide them. They look like children fast asleep!
Giovanni Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini, required for his portrayal an actor with a subtle grasp of character, a quiet intensity, and the grand manner of the elder tragedians; an actor, made free by his experience and study and by his command of that necessary addition his own self and personality, to carry over the footlights into the consciousness of his audience the pitiful sense of a great man caught hopelessly in the nets of disaster.
The drama no longer had its votaries with the life-histories of their favourite players at their fingers’ ends. There were many present on that opening night who remembered George Alexander as the patient husband of Mrs Tanqueray, as the gay and high-spirited Rudolf Rassendyll, and as the irresistible Jack Worthing with his mourning suit, his black gloves, and his black-bordered handkerchief. But there were many too who were unfamiliar with the record of his years in the company of Sir Henry Irving. To them he was the jeune premier of the modern stage, faultless in the fit of his clothes, nice in the adjustment of his cravat. To them the tormented figure of Giovanni Malatesta must have — nay did — come as a startling revelation. Those who had seen the character grow from rehearsal to rehearsal were grateful rather than surprised. Addison Bright, the author and Phillips’ agent, wrote:
A thousand thanks for a thing of great, great beauty which does you honour, and thanks again for the pleasure it has been to stand with you in however modest a way over something we can all be proud of. Nothing but glory can come of it, I’m sure; and for your own share in the shouldering of the acting burden, nothing but a clamour of praise.
Sidney Colvin wrote:
Your performance struck me enormously, especially in Acts II and IV, and will give people quite a new idea of your powers.
And Stephen Phillips sent thanks:
From the bottom of my heart for the splendid courage and skill you have shown right through the whole production.... As to the artistic success there is luckily no need to speak of it — the general verdict being “the most beautiful production ever seen on the English stage”. Personally, while I take great pride in all this, I am also sure that you yourself have made a very deep and real impression in Giovanni. People were growing only too accustomed to see you in a certain part, and now you have come out absolutely strong and big in a totally different way. So far then as I am concerned may I have the proud feeling that the play has been, to put it mildly, “good for you” and good for the theatre, which by this splendid production has taken a different position in the eyes of the world. I should like to feel this at any rate, as some return for all you have done for the play and myself. I only wish I could have been of more help but I was “done” when we rehearsed.
Paolo and Francesca, after a hundred and thirty-four memorable performances, ended with the season. Laurence Irving took it to the United States, but it secured there no more than a success of esteem. Nor has it since
been revived in England. There was no relief to its doomfulness. The one scene with the soldiers at the inn on the road to Rimini which should have been light-hearted was written with too heavy a hand, and but for the beauty of the production and the acting it would hardly have held the boards as long as it did at the St. James’. Poetry, if it is to live, must be superlative. Essays, histories, fiction, may continue if they are very good or at times even if they are only good. We have it on the authority of Conrad that the turgid works of Bulwer
Lytton are to this day the favourite reading of the fo’c’sles of sailing-ships. But with poetry good and very good won’t do. Who knows his Akenside? or Thomson’s Seasons? or Dr. Young’s Night Thoughts? Who acts in Orinoko? Phillips’ best work — and without a doubt it is Paolo and Francesca — was poetry more human, more appealing, and had exquisite moments. But it ran in a narrow channel and it may well be that the brevity of its life was due in a measure to the hysteria of praise which acclaimed it. Phillips was raised to the company of Milton and Marlowe. He was the comet of his age. The laudations were too loud and he suffers now the penalty of too disdainful a neglect.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 850