sir herbert tree—gordon craig—henry arthur jones—temple thurston—miss janet achurch—miss horniman
sir herbert tree never met a stranger without trying to impress him. he always succeeded. he would take the utmost pains about it: go to any lengths: use his last resource.... i am not now, of course, dealing with him as an actor. we all have our varying opinions of him as an actor. some think he could; some think he couldn’t.... but i am writing of him at the present moment as a man. a showman, if you like. as a man, as a man who “showed off” either as a wit, a mimic, a man of the world, a superman, or what not, he was supreme.
i met him in his private office at his majesty’s in the middle of the run of joseph and his brethren. he had invited me there in order to dictate an article to me, but, as he told me over the ’phone, he hadn’t the remotest notion what the subject of the article was going to be. could i help him with any ideas? his article was for a labour paper. did i know anything about labour? if i didn’t, did i know anybody who did?
in speaking to me over the ’phone, he appeared so anxious that i began to rack my brains for a subject. in the recesses of my meagre intellect i found the remnants of two or three subjects, and at nine o’clock that evening i presented myself at his majesty’s theatre with them on the tip of my tongue.
his room was empty as i entered it. opposite the door 200was a fireplace and above the fireplace a mirror; on the left of the door as you entered it was sir herbert’s large desk. by the side of this, seated on a low chair, i waited. i had not to wait long, for presently i heard a soft, rather pulpy kind of sound coming down the passage and, a moment later, sir herbert entered, wearing a long white beard and the garments of a gentleman of the east. the play was still in the first act, and he had that minute come off the stage.
“got a subject?” he asked, shaking hands. “so have i. the influence of the stage on the masses! what do you think of it? very trite, i know, but there are a few important things i want to say. sit here, will you? here you are—ink and paper.”
and, sitting down, he began immediately to dictate the article. he got along swimmingly, and about a third of the article must have been down on paper when i heard a squeaky voice outside the door. it was the call-boy. sir herbert rose, stroked his beard, adjusted his gown, and walked outside; as he did these things he continued dictating, his voice stopping in the middle of a rather involved sentence when he was out in the passage.
after five or six minutes, i heard the same soft, pulpy sound approaching and, while yet outside the door, he began dictating at the precise point where he had left off, rounding off the sentence most beautifully. it was a remarkable feat of memory. after a very short period, we heard the high-pitched voice a second time, and once more he moved dreamily away, still dictating. again he stopped, purposely as it seemed to me, in the middle of a sentence, and again, when he reappeared, he spoke the waiting word. marvellous! he gave me a cautious, inquiring look, as if to discover if i had noticed his cleverness. i smiled back reassuringly. in a few minutes the article was finished.
201“do you like it?” he asked.
“exactly the thing. the daily citizen readers will be delighted. but what an extraordinary memory you have!”
“ah! you noticed that?” he said, seemingly well pleased.
he began to talk of joseph and his brethren and, in the middle of our conversation, mr temple thurston, looking rather nervous, was shown in. i knew that, at that time, thurston was writing for tree a play on the subject of the wandering jew, and as i guessed they had business to transact, i withdrew as quickly as possible.
i saw sir herbert on another occasion, but whether it was soon before, or soon after, the incident i have just related i cannot recollect.
he was conducting a rehearsal on the stage of his majesty’s, and i stood in the wings, watching him. he had recently produced a play called, i think, the island, by a spanish or a brazilian writer. it was a dead failure and was withdrawn after three or four nights. it was to talk of this play that i had come, and as he advanced to the wings i noticed that he looked rather worried.
“what was wrong with the play?” he asked. “all you critics have tried to tell me, but i’m blessed if i can understand what you are all talking about.”
“to me the fault of the play was quite obvious. the author had got hold of a good idea and the drama had several fine situations; but, whereas the idea was poetical and mysterious and the situations tense and dramatic, the author or the translator had employed the most stilted kind of dialogue, and language as commonplace as that which i am now using. the play should have been translated or rewritten by a poet.”
“ah! it’s very strange you should say that, for i myself had felt strongly disposed to ask john masefield 202to prepare the thing for the stage. i wish i had done; but, of course, it’s too late now. but a manager can never tell beforehand what play will be a success and what won’t.”
“pardon me. that is often said, but i don’t believe it’s true. some people really do know what the public wants. arnold bennett, for example, and hall caine, not to mention others. do they ever make mistakes? has arnold bennett ever been guilty of a failure?”
“no, perhaps not. but i can’t engage bennett as a reader. even if he would consent to do the work, i should not be able to afford his fee.”
“yes, i know. but my contention is that there are people who can and do gauge to a nicety the taste of the public.” and i mentioned the names of two critics who had, on many occasions, foretold most accurately the exact length of time new pieces would run.
tree was called back to the rehearsal, and he glided away for a few moments, fluttering a handful of loose papers as he went. he soon returned, and this time he was cheerfulness itself.
“it’s going very well,” he said, referring to the rehearsal. “it’s only a stop-gap, of course, but it’ll make a little money. i must write to those critics you mentioned,” he added musingly; “or perhaps it would be better if i seemed to run across them accidentally?”
but whether or not he did run across either of the critics accidentally, i do not know, for the war broke out soon after and disrupted everything.
. . . . . . . .
it was when i was staying in guilford street, bloomsbury, six or seven years ago, in a house opposite the foundlings’ hospital, that, one morning, gordon craig came into the room. he was, i think, in search of ernest marriott, a most ingenious and original artist, who at that time and for long after was doing some sort of work for 203craig. marriott and i were staying at the same boarding-house.
when craig’s bulky form filled the doorway i recognised at once, from marriott’s description of him, who he was, and i introduced myself to him, telling him marriott was out.
“yes, i know he is,” said craig; “but i have often wanted to look at one of these fine old houses.”
and he walked round and round the room, with his eyes on the cornice, telling me all sorts of things, which i have long forgotten, that i had never heard before. he seemed to have made a special study of english architecture of the early nineteenth century, and whilst he was in the house talked of nothing else, though i tried to lure him into gossip of the theatre.
he gave me the impression of a large, white man with hair which, if not entirely grey, was very fair. he had, i remember, hands much plumper than one would expect an artist to possess; his face also was rather plump. he seemed to fill the large room and radiate vitality. he left as suddenly and as inconsequently as he had come.
“how like he is to miss ellen terry!” remarked my landlord, not knowing the identity of his visitor.
“yes,” said i, “now you mention it, i notice the extraordinary resemblance. but, after all, the resemblance is not so remarkable, for you see, he is her son.”
. . . . . . . .
on one occasion i was sent to interview mr henry arthur jones. over the telephone i made an appointment with him for the morrow, and when i arrived at his house i found rather elaborate preparations had been made for the occasion. mr h. a. jones was standing in the middle of the drawing-room with outstretched hand, on a table near the open window (it was july, i think) was a tray with what one calls tea-things, a lady shorthand typist (specially engaged for the occasion) was 204waiting with notebook and pencil, and a maid was carrying into the room a teapot, and cress sandwiches.
the presence of the lady typist embarrassed me. she took down in shorthand my questions and mr jones’ replies. thinking it would be foolish to waste any time on preliminary politenesses, i plunged straight into the middle of my subject. the lady typist sipped her tea in the awkward little pauses that came from time to time. it was not an interview; it was a kind of official statement. it was like the proceedings at a police court. i felt i should be held responsible to a higher authority for every word i spoke.
however, at the end of an hour a good deal of excellent matter had been taken down, probably enough for a two-column article. but my news editor did not want a two-column article. he wanted a scrappy little paragraph or, at most, two scrappy little paragraphs. now, in view of the fact that mr jones had gone to the trouble and expense of getting a shorthand typist specially from town, and, more particularly, in view of the fact that it was perfectly clear that he had not contemplated the possibility of an interview with him being used merely and solely for a snappy little paragraph, i felt it incumbent upon me to tell him just how matters stood. but how could i? could you have told him? well, i couldn’t, though i tried and tried hard.
when the interview was over, he arranged that the shorthand typist should return to her office, type out her shorthand, and send the result to me in fleet street early that evening. in due course, ten foolscap sheets of valuable and most interesting matter came along, and i handed it in to the night-editor just as it stood.
next morning, only two snippety paragraphs appeared in the paper, and i have often thought since that mr h. a. jones must have felt disgusted with the paper, a little more disgusted with himself, but most of all 205disgusted with me. after all, it was not entirely my fault, was it?... i mean, he should not have taken himself quite so importantly, should he?
i retain a very clear impression of his personality. he was short, rather dapper, and very deliberate. he always thought briefly before he answered a question, but when he did answer it he did so without hesitation, going straight into the middle of the matter. he struck me, as he sat on a rather low chair opposite the window, as essentially earnest, essentially honest-minded, essentially clear-headed. his manner was a little important. he may be said to have “pronounced” things rather than to have spoken them. he was formally courteous. i do not think one could justly say that he has the “artistic” temperament, and i imagine he possesses no particularly acute perception of beauty. there is no emotional enthusiasm about him; he has no unreliable “moods”; he does not think or feel one thing to-day and another to-morrow. by no means typically a man of this generation, and yet not a man who has outlived his own time. it appeared to me that he had little intuition; his very considerable knowledge of human nature is probably based on close observation and most careful deduction.
when we parted he gave me copies of two of his plays.
he was a man of considerable personal charm and no little intellectual weight: a man both kindly and stern: a man who could at all times be trusted to see the humour of things and who, on occasion, could be cruel to be kind.
. . . . . . . .
not so very long before the war, my journalistic duties took me to the first night of mr temple thurston’s the greatest wish in the world, a rather weak but quite innocuous play given by mr bourchier. if the play “succeeded,” the audience assuredly didn’t. when the curtain went down on the last act, there was a good deal 206of applause, chiefly from the gallery, and we who were seated in the stalls waited a moment to discover what the verdict of the house was going to be.
now, every close observer of theatre audiences knows well enough that among the many different kinds of applause there is one kind that is very sinister: it is a kind difficult to describe, but unmistakable enough when heard: to the uninterested listener it sounds sincere and hearty, but if you listen carefully you will catch, beneath the heartiness, a derisive note—something viciously eager in the shouts, something malicious in the whistles. there was this sinister sound, a kind of ground-bass, in the applause that followed the last fall of the curtain at the first production of mr temple thurston’s play. the mimes had walked on and bowed their acknowledgments when, suddenly, there arose loud cries of “author! author!” well did i know what those cries meant, and i told myself that the play had failed pitifully. i was edging my way out of the stalls when, to my amazement, i saw the curtain rise once more and disclose the nervous figure of mr temple thurston. instantly there went up from a section of the audience hisses and boos and cries of half-angry disappointment. mr thurston shrank and winced as though he had been struck in the face, and his exit was confused and awkward. it was as wanton an act of cruelty as i have ever witnessed: deliberate, heartless, stupid. this is not the place to discuss the propriety or otherwise of an audience insulting a writer who has failed to please it, but it is certain that in no other profession, in no other walk of life, do such savage traditions prevail as in the enticing and intoxicating world of the theatre.
not long after this incident i was received by mr temple thurston at his flat. i found him writing, and almost at once he began to talk most intimately about himself.
207“never again,” said he, apropos of the episode i have just related, “shall i ‘take a call.’ i cannot even now think of those awful few moments on the stage without a shudder. it is distressing enough for an author to fail—distressing: not only because of his own disappointment, but chiefly because of the disappointment he brings to the actors who have done their best for his play—without having his failure hurled in his face, so to speak. but though i shall never again take a call, i shall continue writing plays. i have never yet written a really successful play, and no work of mine has had a longer run than sixty performances. i have had many chances, of course, but i shall have more.”
he then told me of his early attempts to win fame. like many other successful writers, he began in fleet street. the work there did not suit him, and he soon abandoned it. he married early, lived with his wife in a couple of rooms in chancery lane, and for a little time picked up a living as best he could. the story of his first wife’s extraordinary success with john chilcote, m.p., is common knowledge. that success preceded his own by two or three years, but he had not long to wait before his own work found and pleased the public.
i saw thurston on two or three other occasions, and found him a man avid of enjoyment, frank, a little bitter, combative, kindly, strong, sensitive, independent. he has a nature at once contradictory and baffling.
. . . . . . . .
twenty years must have passed since miss janet achurch gave her astounding performance in manchester of cleopatra in shakespeare’s antony and cleopatra. it was a performance so remarkable, so electrifying, that the old queen’s theatre in quay street became, for a time, the centre of theatrical interest for the whole of england. what london critic nowadays goes to manchester, or anywhere else more than five miles from 208home, to witness a shakespeare play? yet they all went to see miss achurch. i remember a cheeky and brilliant article by bernard shaw in the saturday review on miss achurch, another by clement scott in the daily telegraph, a third by william archer in (i think) the world.
for myself, i saw the play seventeen times, and though i have seen many other actresses interpret cleopatra, i have not known one whose performance could rank with the gorgeous presentation by miss achurch.
all my visits to the queen’s were surreptitious, for i was brought up in a family that not only hated the theatre as an evil place but feared it also. though i was but a boy i had a certain amount of freedom, for i was studying medicine at the victoria university, and many afternoons that should have been spent in dissecting human feet and eyes were passed in the gallery of flanagan’s theatre.
i suppose i must have been in love with miss achurch, though the kind of feeling that a boy sometimes has for a great emotional actress is more akin to worship than love. i longed to approach my divinity, but feared to do so. i wrote about her in local papers, and i remember a curious weekly called northern finance which, for some dark reason or other, printed, among its news of stocks and shares, a crude, bubbling article of mine on miss achurch. i sent all my articles to her and, with the colossal impudence of youth, and driven by a schoolboy curiosity, asked for an interview.
she wrote to me. reader, are you young enough to remember how you felt when you first saw miss ellen terry? can you recall your adoration, your devotion?... those days of young worship, how fine they are! novelists always laugh at calf love because they cannot write about it and make it as beautiful as it really is. like many other things that are human, calf love is 209absurd and beautiful, noble and silly, profound and superficial. but, unlike so many things that are human, there is nothing about it that is mean and selfish, nothing that is not proud and good.
yes, she wrote to me and invited me to visit her. she was kind and gracious.... amused? oh, i have no doubt she was amused, but she never betrayed it.
i used to hang about the stage door in the dark to watch her go into the theatre or come out of it. i scraped up an acquaintance with several members of the orchestra, for i thought i saw in them a kind of magic borrowed from her. her hotel was a castle.
those of my readers who never saw miss achurch in what theatrical writers call her “palmy” days can have only a very faint conception of her genius. she became ill: her beauty faded. only rarely did one see her on the stage.
years later i saw her in ibsen’s ghosts and, again much later, in a small part in masefield’s adaptation of wiers-jennsen’s the witch. she was wonderful in both plays, but the grandeur had departed, the glory almost gone.
it is most sadly true that actors live only in their own generation. janet achurch ought to have lived for ever. she will not be forgotten while we who saw her live; but we cannot communicate to others the genius we witnessed and worshipped.
. . . . . . . .
miss horniman is one of the many people i have never met. “then why write about her?” you ask. i really don’t know, except that i want to. she was (and, for all i know to the contrary, still is) something of a personality in manchester, and she was so for a considerable period, she producing quite a few plays at the gaiety theatre that were well worth seeing.
but she was ridiculously overpraised. she was petted and spoiled by the manchester guardian, the victoria 210university gave her an honorary master of art’s degree, many literary and dramatic societies went down on their knees to her and implored her to come and speak to them, and she was regarded by the entire community as a woman of daring originality, great wisdom and vast experience. she could do nothing wrong. no play she produced, no matter how sour and mancunian, was ever condemned by the local press. miss horniman had given it, therefore it was “the right stuff.” she knew about it all: she knew: she knew. many manchester dramatic critics were themselves writing plays, and miss horniman smiled upon them. she smiled upon stanley houghton, harold brighouse, allan monkhouse, all critics of the manchester guardian. she would have smiled upon the plays of j. e. agate and c. e. montague if they had written any. she was our benefactress, and we used to sit and watch her in her embroidered gown as she rather self-consciously queened it in a box at her own theatre.
yet, after all, she had a rather depressing effect upon the city. she gave no new play that was perfectly beautiful. she appeared to detest romance and had little understanding of blank verse. starting her public life as a patron of bernard shaw, she declined upon shaw’s fevered disciples. she spoke in public very frequently, and always said the same things. she had all the enthusiasm of a clever business woman. wishing very much to make money (so she told us), she understood all the arts of self-advertisement. but, really, manchester was not the place for her; it was sufficiently hard and provincial before she came——
but perhaps i am allowing myself to run away with myself in writing down all these disagreeable things. yet i believe them to be true, and they must stand. her plays gave me several enjoyable evenings which, but for her, i should never have had, and i can never be 211too grateful to her for restoring to the gaiety theatre the drink licence that the watch committee had taken away some years before she came. that act, at all events, did in some degree help to make the manchester plays a little less like manchester plays.
