But the studio, where I had been working for the last three or four
months so diligently, became wearisome to me, and for two reasons.
First, because it deprived me of many hours of Marshall's company.
Secondly--and the second reason was the graver--because I was beginning
to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very
narrow channel to carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought.
For now thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were
in active fermentation within me and sought for utterance with a strange
persistency of appeal. I yearned merely to give direct expression to my
pain. Life was then in its springtide; every thought was new to me, and
it would have seemed a pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any
garment when it was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The
creatures whom I met in the ways and byeways of Parisian life, whose
gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I
hungered to know, awoke in me a tense, irresponsible curiosity, but that
was all,--I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to
select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might
never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct
to me from the outside.
At the time of which I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on
the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was
endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to
its ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who,
for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified
days at the _table d'hôte_. Fifteen years have passed away, and these
old people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them
still sitting in that _salle à manger_, the _buffets en vieux chéne,_
the opulent candelabra _en style d'empire_, the waiter lighting the gas
in the pale Parisian evening. That white-haired man, that tall, thin,
hatchet-faced American, has dined at this _table d'hôte_ for the last
thirty years--he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. The
clean, neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by him, looking so much
like a French gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain.
With that piece of news, and its subsequent developments, your
acquaintance with him begins and ends; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla,
how it began, how it was broken off, and how it began again. Opposite
sits another French gentleman, with beard and bristly hair. He spent
twenty years of his life in India, and he talks of his son who has been
out there for the last ten, and who has just returned home. There is the
Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses like a girl of sixteen
and smokes a cigar after dinner,--if there are not too many strangers in
the room. A stranger she calls any one whom she has not seen at least
once before. The little fat, neckless man, with the great bald head,
fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic author,
the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not intrude himself on
your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he fixes a
pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his
collaborateurs.
I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I invited him to come to
the _café_ after dinner. I paid for his coffee and liqueurs, I offered
him a choice cigar. He did not smoke; I did. It was, of course,
inevitable that I should find out that he had not had a play produced
for the last twenty years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty
was about his poor bald head. I thought of the chances of life, he
alluded to the war; and so this unpleasantness was passed over, and we
entered on more genial subjects of conversation. He had written plays
with everybody; his list of collaborateurs was longer than any list of
lady patronesses for an English county ball; there was no literary
kitchen in which he had not helped to dish up. I was at once amazed and
delighted. Had M. Duval written his hundred and sixty plays in the
seclusion of his own rooms, I should have been less surprised; it was
the mystery of the _séances_ of collaboration, the rendezvous, the
discussion, the illustrious company, that overwhelmed me in a rapture of
wonder and respectful admiration. Then came the anecdotes. They were of
all sorts. Here are a few specimens: He, Duval, had written a one-act
piece with Dumas _père_; it had been refused at the Français, and then
it had been about, here, there, and everywhere; finally the _Variétés_
had asked for some alterations, and _c'était une affaire entendue_. "I
made the alterations one afternoon, and wrote to Dumas, and what do you
think,--by return of post I had a letter from him saying he could not
consent to the production of a one-act piece, signed by him, at the
_Variétés,_ because his son was then giving a five-act piece at the
Gymnase." Then came a string of indecent witticisms by Suzanne Lagier
and Dejazet. They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and
I was amused and astonished. These _bon-mots_ were followed by an
account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday feuilleton, and how he and
Balzac had once nearly come to blows. They had agreed to collaborate.
Balzac was to contribute the scenario, Gautier the dialogue. One morning
Balzac came with the scenario of the first act. "Here it is, Gautier! I
suppose you can let me have it back finished by to-morrow afternoon?"
And the old gentleman would chirp along in this fashion till midnight. I
would then accompany him to his rooms in the Quartier Montmartre--rooms
high up on the fifth floor--where, between two pictures, supposed to be
by Angelica Kauffmann, M. Duval had written unactable plays for the
last twenty years, and where he would continue to write unactable plays
until God called him to a world, perhaps, of eternal cantatas, but
where, by all accounts, _l'exposition de la pièce selon la formule de M.
Scribe_ is still unknown.
How I used to enjoy these conversations! I remember how I used to stand
on the pavement after having bid the old gentleman good-night,
regretting I had not asked for some further explanation regarding _le
mouvement Romantique_, or _la façon de M. Scribe de ménager la
situation_.
Why not write a comedy? So the thought came. I had never written
anything save a few ill-spelt letters; but no matter. To find a plot was
the first thing. Take Marshall for hero and Alice for heroine, surround
them with the old gentlemen who dined at the _table d'hôte,_ flavour
with the Italian countess who smoked cigars when there were not too many
strangers present. After three weeks of industrious stirring, the
ingredients did begin to simmer into something resembling a plot. Put it
upon paper. Ah! there was my difficulty. I remembered suddenly that I
had read "Cain," "Manfred," "The Cenci," as poems, without ever
thinking of how the dialogue looked upon paper; besides, they were in
blank verse. I hadn't a notion how prose dialogue would look upon paper.
Shakespeare I had never opened; no instinctive want had urged me to read
him. He had remained, therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy a
copy? No; the name repelled me--as all popular names repelled me. In
preference I went to the Gymnase, and listened attentively to a comedy
by M. Dumas _fils_. But strain my imagination as I would, I could not
see the spoken words in their written form. Oh, for a look at the
prompter's copy, the corner of which I could see when I leaned forward!
At last I discovered in Galignani's library a copy of Leigh Hunt's
edition of the old dramatists, and after a month's study of Congreve,
Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, I completed a comedy in three acts,
which I entitled "Worldliness." It was, of course, very bad; but, if my
memory serves me well, I do not think it was nearly so bad as might be
imagined.
No sooner was the last scene written than I started at once for London,
confident I should find no difficulty in getting my play produced.