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."