HARRY, THE PLAYWRIGHT
“He used to write of life as it ought to be.”
—_The Law Divine._
The last thing I wish to give you is a list of his plays, with the
comment that they were a success or the reverse, adding what eminent
critics said of them. I want only to tell you how he wrote his plays,
and try to make you understand why he wrote as he did. If I quote what
critics said of his work, it will not be because in this or that extract
I find undiluted praise, but because that critic has—or, at least, so it
seems to me—found truth.
Harry’s first play I have still; it is written in an exercise-book, and
is called _Geraldine, or Victor Cupid, or Love’s Victory_. It is a
highly coloured piece of work, which has never been inflicted upon the
public; written, I imagine, when he was about twelve years old.
Not until we had been married for some years did Harry realise that he
could write plays; he was passionately fond of acting, and wished to
take up nothing that might interfere with his profession, but gradually
the knowledge came to him that he could create characters on paper as
well as on the stage.
He made his plays long before he wrote them; I mean he thought the whole
play out in its entirety, lived for weeks with the characters in his
mind, came to know them intimately and to be absolutely at home with
them, before he began actually to write the play in black and white.
I have known him to write the last act first, simply because he had
planned the play so entirely before he put pen to paper. Often when at
“Apple Porch” he would write for an hour, then go out on the golf
course, knock a ball about for two or three holes, then return to his
desk, and pick up the scene just where he had left it.
_Grierson’s Way_ he wrote straight off in three weeks; there is hardly
an alteration in the manuscript. He was intensely happy when writing;
talked very little about his work, as a rule, but lived in two
worlds—his friends in the play, and his family. He thought sad and
gloomy plays were a mistake, and should not be written, or, if written,
whatever the subject, the author “should be able to let in the sunshine
somewhere”. He never wrote another _Grierson’s Way_.
_The Wilderness_ was written under most difficult circumstances. Jack
was three months old, he was frightfully ill for weeks, and I was up
night after night nursing him. Harry used to sit in the study at the end
of the passage, writing, writing, coming in now and again to see how we
were getting on. Later, when Jack was better, Harry took a table and put
it up in the loft over a wee stable we had, where the car was kept;
there, daily, he and his big dog Diana, which George Alexander had given
him, used to climb up the ladder that was flat up against the wall, and
do his writing. The going up was all right, but the coming down was the
difficulty. Harry put a heap of straw on the ground, and, after he had
got half-way down the ladder, Diana used to put her fore paws on his
shoulders, then Harry would drag her till her hind legs got to the edge
of the trap-door, when she would drop on Harry, and together they would
fall on to the straw; this went on for weeks.
His first play to be produced in London, with the exception of a one-act
play called _Rest_, was _Bogey_; and here I must quote the _Standard_
critic, who wrote of the play: “A fairy tale, if you will, but a fairy
tale which deals with the passions of men and women.” That was so very
true of so many of Harry’s plays; they were “fairy tales”, because that
was how he saw life—as a wonderful fairy tale, with an ending that was
intended to be happy, and, if it failed to be, was so because mortals
had meddled with the story and spoiled it. A playwright should “hold the
mirror up to Nature”, but the result must depend upon what he sees in
the mirror; if he sees stories which have the gold and glitter of
romance, then, in writing his play, which contains both, he is only
depicting truly what he has seen.
_Bogey_ was not the success that it might have been, but it was
sufficient to prove finally to its writer that he had the power to
write, a power which only needed developing. It lacked the concise
beauty of his later work; he had not then learnt his craft; but, as many
of the critics testified, it was the work of “a dramatist, a writer of
plays, born, if as yet not fully made”.
He began to write other plays, and gradually, if you read them, you will
find how he advances in his knowledge of words. He would seek for hours
for the right word. He used to say that a word which was not exactly the
one he wanted, and for which he was seeking, hurt him like a discord on
the piano. From the actor’s point of view, Harry was generous; that is
to say, every part he wrote was “worth playing”, and every part had a
line which would appeal to the audience and stamp the actor on their
minds, no matter how small the part might be. For example, in the first
act of _Eliza_ (a play for which Harry had no very great affection), the
carman who brings in the rocking-horse has two lines to say, and two
only, but one of them will gain a laugh from the audience, and lifts the
part from being nothing but a “one-line part”.
Another point of his writing is that almost all the characters, where it
is possible, have to depict a full range of emotions. Fun and pathos are
in almost every part, every part is worthy of study, for by giving the
time and thought to it the actor can come to realise the character in
full, because behind the actual written word lies so much that may be
found if it is sought for. That is due, I think, to the fact that Harry
could, if necessary, have written the whole life of every character,
because before he began to write he lived with them, as it were, for
weeks.
In his plays—or, rather, in every act of his plays—you will find a great
sense of completeness, not only in the actual “curtains” themselves, but
in the construction of the act. As he says in _The Wilderness_, which
George Alexander produced at the St. James’s Theatre, “the wheel has
come full circle”. Take the second act of that particular play, which
begins with Sir Harry Milanor bringing his uncle to the place in the
woods where he, Sir Harry, played as a child. He begins to create an
atmosphere of fairyland; he tells of how he stormed the pass, fought the
elephants, killed the giants, and so won his kingdom. Then come the two
children, who bring with them food for the fairies, and Sir Harry and
his old uncle creep away. As the act goes on, mundane things come into
the scene, but the curtain falls with the children again in the fairy
ring, looking for the food which they brought the “good people”; it has
gone, and the curtain falls with the children stating firmly, “I knowed
they was hungry”. So, perhaps subconsciously, you wait for the next act
with the spirit of fairyland and all that it means still with you. You
have your belief in the good, simple, unquestioned things of life
established, which is the author’s way of setting for his next scene.
Again, in the second act of _Eliza_, Monty Jordan sits reading plays for
Vera Lawrence, whom Sandy is going to marry, and find her a theatre and
a play to make her name, for she is an actress. You see Vera Lawrence as
the centre of Sandy’s world; even his best friend is dragged in to work
for her. So at the end of the act you find Vera Lawrence, her hair
falling round her shoulders, to prove to Eliza that it is not a wig,
while the latter stands nonplussed and dismayed. Vera is the “top note”
all through the act, at the end as at the beginning; so your mind,
holding the picture of the triumphant Vera, feels the same surprise as
does Lady Pennybroke when in Act 3 Eliza enters, looking no longer a
“sight, sticking in at the front and out at the back”, but quite
charming, ready to conquer not only Monty Jordan, but Sandy Verrall. Act
2 has made the audience not only laugh at Eliza for what she is, but
makes them contrast her with Vera, and realise how unlikely it is that
she can ever enter successfully into the lists for Sandy’s affections,
as she does eventually.
I suppose all playwrights have their favourite methods of gaining mental
effects, and the “full circle” was one of Harry’s. He loved to have what
are known as “good curtains”—that is, he loved a scene or act to end on
a very high, strong note. Time after time you will find the act ends
with some short sentence, but which is really the concentration of a
long speech, so written that in a few words you get all the energy and
determination, or all the pathos and tragedy, that a speech of many
lines might have made less vivid.
For example, take the last act of _Love and the Man_ (played by Forbes
Robertson and Miss Kate Rorke), when Wagoneur comes to ask Lord
Gaudminster if he may see his wife (who lies dead upstairs) and whom
Wagoneur has loved.
“You won’t let me see her?” he asks, and Gaudminster answer simply “No.”
Wagoneur turns and, half-blind with grief, gropes his way from the room.
That is all! But could a speech of many pages be more eloquent?
Again, the last lines of the second act of _The Dangerous Age_ (played
by Harry and myself). Jack lies hurt, perhaps dying, after an accident;
Bill, his brother, sits with Egbert Inglefield waiting for news. His
mother, Betty Dunbar, has gone to London to say good-bye to her lover.
Egbert Inglefield, who also loves her, knows this, though of course
Bill, her son, does not. Bill comes to Egbert and says, “Oh, Eggy, I
feel rotten”; Egbert, knowing that all his hopes are falling in ruins,
says “So do I, old man!” Very simple, but the tragedy of his answer
touches you far more than a noble speech would do at that particular
juncture.
With regard to the plays themselves, and again I do not want to give a
long list of them, but only to touch one or two which seems to me
particularly typical of the writer’s philosophy. I remember that after
his death one paper spoke of him as the “gay philosopher”, and I should
seek long before I found a better phrase in which to express his
outlook. His own attitude was “valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck”,
and so he drew his men and women. They may suffer, and you suffer with
them; but it is healthy pain, which looks towards the east for the
sunshine of to-morrow which will bring alleviation. There is no feeling
in your mind, as you watch them, that “things can never be better”, that
misfortune is inevitable; except in _Grierson’s Way_, which was one of
his earlier works, when the critics were still waiting for “him to grow
old, and sensible, and happy”, as one of them said after the production
of _My Lady Virtue_, which Arthur Bourchier, Violet Vanbrugh, and myself
played at the Garrick.
He calls certainly 75 per cent. of his plays “Comedies”, but they are
comedies which touch very often on tragedy. And in a sense he was right
in so calling them, for comedy, properly speaking, is a comment on the
imperfections of human nature, which causes amusement to those who
understand men and manners. So most of his plays are comedies, though
some of them rely on tragic incidents for their story.
I have spoken before of Harry’s fondness for the “redeeming feature” in
even his worst characters, and how few really bad people he ever tried
to draw! I think as he wrote, or earlier still, when he began to think
about his characters, he acquired a certain affection for them, which
made him wish to make them something less than the villains he had at
first intended. Added to that, his dislike of unpleasant things, and you
get some idea of why he wrote the type of plays he did. Even Mr. Clement
Scott, who disliked his first play, _Bogey_, so intensely, wrote of him
later: “Believe me, his two last plays, _When We Were Twenty-One_ and
_The Wilderness_, will be English classics when all the mock Ibsenism
and sham exercise in society salacity are buried in the dust of
oblivion.” So he gave the world what I think are not only beautiful
plays, but essentially kindly plays.
_Eliza Comes to Stay_ he never liked very much; he thought it below the
level of the rest of his work; and though this evergreen play has
certainly been a very valuable property, yet I think Harry would have
been better pleased by the same success of one of his other plays. Yet
Eliza is lovable, even before she becomes “the new me”, even when she is
still dressed to look “dreadfully respectable”. And what a part it is,
too! what is called “an actress-proof” part—which means, in the
vernacular of the stage, “it will play itself”; so it may, but what a
difference when it is played—well, as it can be played by anyone who
will take the trouble to study Eliza, and then, by the grace of God, is
able to give her to the audience as, not a freak, but a very human,
affectionate girl, standing rather breathless on the threshold of a
world she does not know.
Perhaps his favourite play was _The Dangerous Age_, which we first
played in America, where the audiences liked it enormously, and which,
when we brought it to London, was not a great success. There is no
character to which Harry has been more kind than to Betty Dunbar; she
does ugly things, but you are never allowed to feel they have really
touched her; she remains, after her indiscretions, still the same
delightful and charming person; you are made to feel that the agony
which she suffers, when she waits to hear if her little son will live or
die, has wiped out all her foolishness—to give it no harsher name.
It was during a performance of this play that a young man turned to a
friend who sat with him, and said “I can’t watch it; it’s terrible to
see a woman’s soul stripped naked”; and a story he told later is of
value here, because I think it gauges so correctly Harry’s attitude
towards women. This man had been a sailor, and, talking over the play
with a friend later, he took exception to his remark that “Betty Dunbar
was a pretty worthless woman”, and to account for his defence of the
character he told this story:—“I was once doing a Western Ocean trip, on
a tramp steamer, in November. We struck a bad gale, and the Atlantic
rollers stripped her of everything. Next morning I stood with the
skipper on deck. There she was, rolling about, not rising to the
rollers, but just lying there—down and out. I said to the skipper, ‘She
looks what she is—a slut.’ He turned on me sharply and said, ‘Don’t you
ever say that about a ship or a woman. If some man hadn’t scamped his
job, and not done his best, she wouldn’t be looking as she does this
morning’.” I think that was Harry’s feeling about women like his heroine
in _The Dangerous Age_—that it was probably the fault of a very definite
“someone” that they had not made a greater success of life.
He loved to write of children, and wrote of them with almost singular
understanding and reality. The children in _The Wilderness_, the two
boys in _The Dangerous Age_, the “Tommy” and the Midshipman in _The Law
Divine_, the small caddie in _A Kiss or Two_, are all real children,
full of humour and wonderful high spirits, who never—as do so many
“stage children”—become tedious or boring.
_A Kiss or Two_ was produced at the London Pavilion—a legitimate venture
which followed years of variety. It was a charming play, and one speech
from it—the legend—is one of the most delightful things Harry ever
wrote. The character was an Irish soldier, Captain Patrick Delaney, and
was played by Harry. I give part of it here:
“It’s a legend I’m tellin’ ye, an’ all true legends begin with ‘My Dear
and My Judy.’ Well, My Dear and My Judy, one fine day Mother Nature,
havin’ nothin’ better to do, she made a man. You know what a man is?
That’s all right then—well, she made a man, and this mighty fine piece
of work tickled her to death, it did, and so she went to bed devilish
pleased with herself, had a beautiful dream, woke up next morning, went
one better than the day before—she made a woman. Ye can’t say you know
what a woman is, for she’s a mystery to the lot of us. Well, she made a
woman, and then she sat down and looked at the pair of them, and the
pair of them looked at each other, and mighty uneasy they felt,
wondering what the devil it was all about. At last, after them two had
been looking at each other till the perspiration was breaking out upon
their foreheads, Mother Nature breaks the awful silence, and pointing to
the woman, who was standing all of a quiver, with her eyes lookin’
anywhere except at the man, yet seein’ him all the time, Mother Nature
pointin’ to the woman, say to the man, ‘That sweet lookin’ thing’s all
yours,’ says she. ‘I can’t believe it,’ says the man with a gulp. Then
Mother Nature, pointing to the man, who was looking at the woman as if
there was nothin’ else in the wide, wide world worth looking at which
there wasn’t—Mother Nature, pointing to the man, says to the woman, ‘An’
that fine looking thing’s all yours,’ says she. ‘Sure I know it,’ says
the woman, bold as brass, and the fat was in the fire. But that’s only
the beginning: it’s now that the trouble comes. At last, when everything
had settled into its proper place between these two, the man came home
one day and couldn’t find his collar stud. ‘Where’s that woman?’ says
he. ‘Out walkin’ with another man,’ says they. ‘That won’t do at all,’
says he. ‘How’ll you stop it?’ says they. ‘I’ll make a law,’ says he,
and that’s where the trouble began.... He sent for all the stuffy old
men of his acquaintance, and they had a meeting by candle-light in the
Old Town Hall. And he up an’ spoke to them: ‘Now all you gentlemen,’
says he, ‘have been casting sheep’s eyes at the girls. I’ve been
watchin’ you at it the times I haven’t been busy doin’ it myself,’ says
he. ‘Them girls have been casting them same sheep’s eyes back at you
with interest,’ says he. ‘Can’t help it,’ says the old men. ‘It’s
Nature,’ says they. ‘Nature is it?’ says he, ‘then there’s too much of
this Nature about,’ says he, ‘and I’m goin’ to stop it.’ With that his
eloquence carried the meeting, and they started in to make laws. Oh,
them laws that they made, sure they forgot all about the days of their
youth, when their blood was warm, and the sunshine was singin’ in their
hearts. They just sat there on them cold stones in that old Town Hall,
chilled to the marrow, and made them laws to stop love-making. And while
they were at it, there came a tap at the door, and they all gave a jump
which showed you they were doin’ something they were ashamed of. ‘What’s
that?’ says they, and they all looked round and then there came another
little tap, and the door slowly opened, and there in the sunlight stood
a beautiful young woman, lookin’ in at them, her eyes all agog with
wonder. ‘What the divil are you doin’?’ says she. ‘None of your
business,’ says they. ‘True for you,’ says she. An’ she took them at
their word, and slammed the door, an’ she’s been slamming the door on
them same laws ever since!”
I have given that speech fully, because it seems to me to be so very
much the spirit in which Harry wrote and to show so well his attitude
towards life—fantastic, ideal, almost but not quite a fairy tale.
You will find it, too, in _The Law Divine_ (which Harry played at
Wyndham’s Theatre for so long with Miss Jessie Winter), when Edie tells
her son about her honeymoon, when she says: “Ordinary people! We were
the children of the moon, we were the spirits of sea mist and soft night
air—Dads said we were.” The whole scene is full of that imagery which
was so much part of the writer’s mental composition.
In _Bad Hats_, which play he renamed, having first called it _The Rotten
Brigade_, and which at the production was called _Birds of a Feather_,
he wrote another of those plays which, though called by the author “a
comedy”, had all the elements of a tragedy. Harry intended to write
another First Act, making the First Act the Second, in order that the
existing circumstances would be more easy for the audience to grasp. It
was, and is, a great play, and Jacob Ussher is one of the finest
character-studies he ever created.
I should have liked to have dealt more fully with many of his
less-well-known plays; with _One Summer’s Day_, which Charles Hawtrey
produced, and which was the first emotional part he had ever played, and
of which I am asked so often, “When are you going to revive it?”; with
_Grierson’s Way_, which caused so much comment when it was produced;
with _The Sentimentalist_, with its wonderful first act, the play being
the story of a man’s life, which was praised for its beauty and
imagination by some, while others asked, “What’s it all about?”
Harry was accused of writing “sugary” plays, sentimental plays, plays
which were thin, and the like; but, in answer to these accusations, I
can only quote two critics and give my own opinion afterwards. One of
them says: “This is what they call pinchbeck sentiment. I don’t know. It
convinced me, and that was quite enough. This is the kind of human story
that has elicited the art of a Frederic Robson, a Johnnie Toole, and a
Henry Irving in England.” And the other: “Do you know what personal
charm is? It is the effect produced by a man or a woman who enters a
room, makes a few graceful remarks, says a few words very much to the
point in an agreeable voice, and suddenly creates an atmosphere which
wins everybody around. Mr. Esmond as a playwright possesses it.” And my
own opinion, which is that, if Harry wrote of charming, simple, loving,
and lovable people, it was because that was how he found his fellow-men;
that his characters who go through three acts lightly, bravely, and
gallantly, are just as real as the characters in those rather depressing
plays which are hailed as “slices of life”—and much more entertaining.
He filled his plays with beautiful things about life, because he
honestly thought life itself was beautiful; he made his men and women
“straight” and with decent impulses, because he was convinced that was
how God made real people; and he gave his plays, or nearly all of them,
“happy endings”, because he thought that “those who were good shall be
happy”. That was how Harry “held the mirror up to Nature”, and how he
tried to do what no artist can do more than succeed in doing:
“Draw the thing as he sees it.”