"My boy," he said, "I have just been with the prettiest girl in London, and had a great time."
"Come, come, Marix," I said, "you are too old to brag."
"Oh, you unbeliever," he said, "don't you know the English proverb: 'Many a good tune comes from an old fiddle?' "
"That's true," I said, "but even the English have never been foolish enough to say that the good tune comes from an old bow (beau)."
In one of these talks, Oscar told me a scene from a play he had thought of writing, in which the wife, who was also the mistress of the house, has gone up to her private sitting-room to rest: she is lying down behind the screen with a "migraine," when her husband comes in with the woman he is in love with at the moment. In the middle of their love-making, which the wife can't help overhearing, a knock comes at the door and they hear outside the voice of the husband of the lady, who demands admission. The scene is resolved by the lady of the house getting up from behind the screen and opening the door, and thus saving the guilty couple.
It occurred to me that I had a story about a Mr. and Mrs. Daventry in my head, which would suit this scene. I finally bought the right to use it for a hundred pounds from Oscar. He asked me fifty pounds for the scene and I gave it to him, and I told him I would give him fifty pounds more if he would write the first act. He promised, but did not keep his word. I went back to London and wrote the play, Mr. and Mrs. Daventry, in four or five days, and took it to Mrs.
Patrick Campbell, who accepted it at once. I only made one condition-that Mr. Daventry should be played by Fred Kerr, whom I regarded as one of the best character actors on the English stage.
As Oscar would not write the first act, I wrote it and did it badly, and I rewrote it for the fiftieth night when I had had a little stage experience.
Afterwards Oscar twitted me about my purchase, saying I had bought the great scene from the Lady Teazle of Sheridan without recognizing it.
When the play was put on at first, it had a very bad press: the London papers all told me that I had written a French play better suited for Paris than for London; and I found Mrs. Campbell, the next day, in despair because of the unfavorable notices. I cheered her up by telling her that I would pay all the expenses of the play for a half-share in it.
"If you can afford to do that," she said, "I can afford to risk it."
"This bad press," I said, "will make the play."
Clement Scott, the most influential critic of the tune, tried to damn the play out of personal dislike for me and gave one phrase in the play astonishing notoriety. People talked in the play of the "English vice" till at length the protagonist, Mr. Daventry, turns round and asks: "Is there such a thing, Lady Hillington, as an English vice? What is the peculiarly English vice?"
"Oh," retorted the clever woman, "I thought every one knew that, Mr.
Daventry; the English vice is adultery with home comforts."
That brought all the best class of London society in streams to the theatre, and created such an excitement that about the fiftieth night the censor interfered and cut the phrase out. I went to see him. "Why do this?" I asked.
"Surely the phrase is harmless enough, and true to boot."
"Oh, I am delighted with it" he replied, "I tell it every night. I wish you could tell me as good a one about the French. Couldn't you tell me what the French vice is?"
"Quite easily," I replied. "You know that in all the apartment houses in Paris they have a notice 'eau et gaz a tous les Stages' (water and gas on every floor).
Well, you know the word garce, meaning a naughty flapper, is pronounced very much like gaz, so I say 'eau et garces a tous les etages' that is the French vice."
He roared with laughter and thanked me, and this word of mine had almost as great a success, told by him in private, as anything in the play: but in the middle of the success, when I was receiving some hundreds of pounds a week from the play, Queen Victoria died, and the period of mourning stopped all plays in London for a fortnight; but after the period of mourning had passed my play was the only play, I believe, revived in that season, and it ran for fifty or sixty more nights-until Mrs. Patrick Campbell got rid of Fred Kerr, whom I had picked to play the protagonist, Mr. Daventry, and so spoilt the whole cast.
The success emboldened me to write other plays and I wrote three or four, notably one Shakespeare and His Love, and one entitled The Bucket Shop.
The one on Shakespeare was immediately taken by Beerbohm Tree, who gave me five hundred pounds in advance for it and promised to open his season with it; but in the meantime he found that his daughter Viola had some talent and wished to go on the stage; and he therefore rejected my play for another because, as he said, he couldn't make love to his own daughter on the stage, whereas Shakespeare in my play was the lover personified. So I withdrew the play and it was never given in London. A year or so later I wrote The Bucket Shop and the Stage Society asked me to allow them to give a representation of it. The success was so great that the society, with my consent, put it on for a second performance, when again the house was crowded.
I found such difficulty, however, with actors and actresses that I resolved to return to writing stories: each actor and actress seems to be firmly convinced that his or her part is greater than the whole, and they will deform the whole at any moment for a personal success in the part. Besides, I made more money on the stock exchange than I could make at either play-writing or bookwriting, and so I resolved to write merely the books that pleased me, careless of what the monetary outcome might be.
When I had done a number of short stories, some which later appeared in my book The Veils of Isis, I began to see that the art of narration was still in its infancy. I saw that though the French were masters of the art of story-writing, there wasn't a single story in French, long or short, which I considered at all perfectly designed.
My practice taught me that the most important thing in a story is the speed of narration; no one wants his reader to skip passages or to feel that this or that part is too long. Most writers think that they can avoid being tedious by jumping from one part of the story to another; but this habit is apt to distract attention. The true art consists in so graduating the speed of the narration that the reader feels that he is being carried along faster and faster to an inevitable conclusion, much as if he were caught in the rapids of Niagara above the falls. And in order to be able to graduate the speed, the introduction of the characters should be deliberate and slow in exact proportion to the length of the story. For as soon as the characters are all known to the readers and the trend of the story is indicated, then the pace should begin to quicken, and chapter by chapter the speed should increase and should be felt to be increasing, so that skipping or tedium should be absolutely impossible. I can understand using telegraphese at the end of a story to prevent any suspicion of dragging.
In time, with a great deal of practice, I learned many things about the art of story-writing, which I shall perhaps tell about in a future volume.
In the meantime, I had no journal; the South African war was going on, English defeats growing more and more frequent, every one disappointed and dejected. A sad close to a wonderful period! My old enemy, bronchitis, had seized me in October and I couldn't shake it off. I was in bed with it in a little country house I had outside London when I read of Oscar Wilde's death.
The world went greyer to me.
The news from the front continued to get worse and worse. It seemed to me that the South African war marked the decadence of England. I thought and said it showed a lack of understanding, a lack of all high qualities of heart as well as of head, so grave that I couldn't see any possibility of England standing in the future side by side with the United States. The English had spent a thousand millions of money on that unspeakably silly South African war, whereas, if they had spent half that sum in settling up the central plateau of Africa, even from the north of the Transvaal to the Zambesi with their own unemployed, they might have laid the foundations of a greater empire than even the one they had lost in North America.