_To William James._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Jan. 9th, 1895.
My dear William,
I never cabled to you on Sunday 6th (about the first night of my play,)
because, as I daresay you will have gathered from some despatches or
newspapers (if there have been any, and you have seen them,) the case
was too complicated. Even now it's a sore trial to me to have to write
about it--weary, bruised, sickened, disgusted as one is left by the
intense, the cruel ordeal of a first night that--after the immense
labour of preparation and the unspeakable tension of suspense--has, in a
few brutal moments, not gone well. In three words the delicate,
picturesque, extremely human and extremely artistic little play was
taken profanely by a brutal and ill-disposed gallery which had shown
signs of malice prepense from the first and which, held in hand till the
end, kicked up an infernal row at the fall of the curtain. There
followed an abominable quarter of an hour during which all the forces of
civilization in the house waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged
and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the
roughs, whose _roars_ (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal
"zoo") were only exacerbated (as it were) by the conflict. It was a
cheering scene, as you may imagine, for a nervous, sensitive, exhausted
author to face--and you must spare my going over again the horrid hour,
or those of disappointment and depression that have followed it; from
which last, however, I am rapidly and resolutely, thank God, emerging.
The "papers" have, into the bargain, been mainly ill-natured and densely
stupid and vulgar; but the only two dramatic critics who count, W.
Archer and Clement Scott, have done me more justice. Meanwhile all
_private_ opinion is apparently one of extreme admiration--I have been
flooded with letters of the warmest protest and assurance.... Everyone
who was there has either written to me or come to see me--I mean every
one I know and many people I don't. Obviously the little play, which I
strove to make as broad, as simple, as clear, as British, in a word, as
possible, is over the heads of the _usual_ vulgar theatre-going London
public--and the chance of its going for a while (which it is too early
to measure) will depend wholly on its holding on long enough to attract
the _unusual_. I was there the second night (Monday, 7th) when, before a
full house--a remarkably good "money" house Alexander told me--it went
singularly well. But it's soon to see or to say, and I'm prepared for
the worst. The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and
brutality of the theatre and its regular public, which God knows I have
had intensely even when working (from motives as "pure" as pecuniary
motives _can_ be) against it; and I feel as if the simple freedom of
mind thus begotten to return to one's legitimate form would be simply by
itself a divine solace for everything. Don't worry about me: I'm a Rock.
If the play has no life on the stage I shall publish it; it's altogether
the best thing I've done. You would understand better the elements of
the case if you had seen the thing it followed (_The Masqueraders_) and
the thing that is now succeeding at the Haymarket--the thing of Oscar
Wilde's. On the basis of _their_ being plays, or successes, my thing is
necessarily neither. Doubtless, moreover, the want of a roaring
actuality, simplified to a few big _familiar_ effects, in my subject--an
episode in the history of an old English Catholic family in the last
century--militates against it, with all usual theatrical people, who
don't want plays (from variety and nimbleness of fancy) of different
_kinds_, like books and stories, but only of one kind, which their
stiff, rudimentary, clumsily-working vision recognizes as the kind
they've had before. And yet I had tried so to meet them! But you can't
make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.--I can't write more--and don't ask
for more details. This week will probably determine the fate of the
piece. If there is increased advance-booking it will go on. If there
isn't, it will be withdrawn, and with it all my little hope of profit.
The time one has given to such an affair from the very first to the very
last represents in all--so inconceivably great, to the uninitiated, is
the amount--a pitiful, tragic bankruptcy of hours that might have been
rendered retroactively golden. But I am not plangent--one must take the
thick with the thin--and I have such possibilities of another and better
sort before me. I am only sorry for your and Alice's having to be so
sorry for yours forever,