'What trade are you?'
'I am a man of letters.'
'What's that?'
'Man of letters. Write it down. Man--of--letters,'
'Are y' educated? Can ye read and write?'
I was flippant enough to say that I could read and write a little, and
the big policeman entered me as being imperfectly educated. That record
stands against me unto this day.
We played all through the principal towns, and then we took to
bush-whacking, setting up one or two night stands in places rarely
visited by a theatrical company; and I believe that the business done in
these small places was almost always highly satisfactory from a monetary
point of view. Some of the villages we visited--for they were nothing
more--yielded fuller houses and realised better profits than we found
always in the capitals. I remember that we played once in a schoolroom
built of corrugated iron and without a vestige of scenery. We put on
'Chums;' and the settler's parlour, the forest scene, and the outer view
of the Otago homestead were each and all represented with the help of
a green baize cloth, which hung at the rear and on either side of the
stage, three upturned petroleum tins, three chairs, a tub, and a little
oblong deal table with red legs. We had a stage space of about four
yards by three. I played Square Jack Furlong; and in the last act my
revolver hung fire and exploded a second or two too late, when it was
unfortunately and accidentally levelled at the back of the leading man's
head. The waxen pellet which packed the powder hit him smartly on the
philoprogenitive bump, and he swore audibly.
A revolver is always a nuisance on the stage and a terror to the actor
who has to use it. You may buy the best weapon in the trade, you may
have your cartridges made with the utmost care; but there will always
be a chance of its missing fire. You may have a double in the wings, of
course, but even that provides no surety. I have known my own revolver
and the double refuse duty at the same instant, and have faced the
moaned inquiry of the leading man, who ought to have been stretched out
in apparent death throes, 'What the devil's going to happen now?' To
make matters better, when I had thrown away the useless weapon with an
improvised execration and was about to hurl myself upon the virtuous
victim, the pistol in the wings obeyed the pressure of the prompter's
finger, and the leading man dropped to a shot from nowhere, to the great
mystification of the audience.
I am really disposed to believe that the illusion of the scene is
very little helped by the most elaborate and realistic works of
scene-painter, carpenter, and upholsterer. I have seen the house drowned
in tears over that lugubrious and hollow 'East Lynne' when the stage
has been enclosed in green baize and there has not been a stick of
respectable furniture on the boards. 'East Lynne,' by the way, is one of
my puzzles. Except that it has once or twice wearied me to the point of
exasperation, it has never moved me in any way; and countless thousands
have cried over it. In the New Zealand back blocks people used to weep
like watering-carts over its tawdry pathos; and when that awful, awful
child, whose business it was to die and who would _not_ do his
business, talked to his mother about his mamma, the handkerchiefs waved
everywhere, and a chorus of sympathetic sniffings and throat clearings
almost drowned the fustian rubbish of the dialogue. I played Lord
Somebody in the piece one night. I forget the unreal wretch's name; but
he will be remembered as taking money to Isabel. He appears in one scene
only and has some twenty or thirty lines to speak; but he contrives
to go further and oftener away from nature than any stage person whose
acquaintance I have practically made. Nothing but the good old-fashioned
'moo-cow' style could possibly have suited him. I believe I can boast
a tolerable imitation of that antiquated elocutionary method, and I
certainly spared no effort.
'And you, Isabel, the daughter of an earl! how have you fallen!'
That is one of the gems of the old humbug's speech, and I mouthed it
as it was made to be mouthed. The house took the burlesque with
perfect seriousness and good faith--chiefly, I suppose, because it was
impossible to make the vulgar rant too clap-trappy and stagy. But as I
was leaving, and as the house was already in a roar of applause, I came
to grief. There was a dreadful draught at the back of the stage, and one
of the ladies had been so careful against it as to pin the green-baize
linings of the stage together so as to leave no place for an exit; and
I was compelled to grope about for a minute or two in search of a way of
escape whilst the applause changed to boisterous laughter.
And the memory of that little incident helps me to a reflection on one
detail of the actor's art which is more effective when fitly used, and
more disastrous when neglected, than any other of the multitudinous
things he has to know and to bear in mind. An exit is half the business
of the most important scene ever written. You may play like an angel,
you may hold the stage for half an hour and thrill your audience; but,
after all, you may kill your supremest efforts by getting off clumsily.
I write, of course, for the ignorant. The actor knows these things,
and more than I can teach him into the bargain. But I had a singular
instance of the fact in my own experience. It came early and gave me
a lesson to be laid to heart. I never played before a more friendly
audience. Good reports had gone ahead, and the house was willing, and
I think was even eager, to be pleased. I had settled to that bright
and happy confidence which is the actor's most blissful experience in
comedy.
I think I never played so well in my life as in that first act of 'Jim
the Penman;' but the stage was vast in comparison with any on which
I had until then appeared, and my customary business brought me only
within half a dozen paces of the door-way by which I should have
vanished. A sudden sense of strangeness and constraint came down upon
me like a cloud. The happy feeling of confidence vanished in a whiff
of chill spiritual wind. The last line was spoken before that unhappy
half-dozen of paces was achieved; and I left the stage in a dead
silence, which was as eloquent of failure as it had been one brief
minute earlier of success. I played half as well next night, but
disappeared with _aplomb_, with an effect as encouraging as the most
exigent artist could demand. So painful a thing is it to learn a new
trade! 'So much to learn, so much to do!'
I am ready to propound a novel theory, and I am insolent enough
to believe that I illustrate it in my own person. The time of full
middle-age is that at which a man most readily adapts himself to a
new art. It is at that time most assuredly necessary to accept certain
physical limitations. I advise no hitherto unpractised person to seek
excellence as a ground and lofty tumbler after five-and-forty. No
sensible person who has attained that respectable altitude of years will
try to make a _début_ as Romeo. But supposing that a lad of fifteen
and a man of five-and-forty begin on the same day to study
landscape-painting, which of the two do you think will get nearer
Nature's secret in five years' time? Personally I shall back--_coteris
paribus_--the man of middle age. Or if it come to acting, who is likely
(physical limitations on both sides duly considered, of course) to offer
you the better study of a bit of human nature--the matured observer
or the unpractised un-regarding youth? I back the middle-aged man once
more.
My friendly critics of the London press told me that a middle-aged man
had taken to the stage as a duck takes to water. It was a bit of kindly
nonsense. I had worked like a galley-slave for nine months, and the nine
months of a man of the world is worth the nine years of a boy. And do I
profess to be an actor now? Not a bit of it, my friendly critic--not
a bit of it, in all honesty. But I mean to be. There is no art so
difficult--granted; but there is none so enchanting, so inspiring. Night
after night for a whole week, bar Saturday, when Nature took a late
revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and
pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and
manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching
time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid
all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now,
or a speech on politics--and no man loves that kind of exercise more
than I--the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and
beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether.
It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer
anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than
champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And
to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid
truth!
But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this
accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of
petty _contretemps_. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own
writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or
a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions
a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire.
What else but faith in himself should bring him there? 'Que diable
faisait-il dans _cette_ galère?' Yet the bold amateur intruding is
conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy
Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.
The night of the tentative production of 'Ned's Chum' at the Globe
Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for
my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and
I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all
the agonies of _mal de mer_. The call-boy's warning cry slew one keen
anguish with another, and the wretch who had been physically sick with
fear a minute before was, under fire, as cool as a cucumber. But there
came one moment more of heroic trial before the play was over. I keep
religiously the notices of that first night, and I have laughed more
than once at the gentle trouncing I got at the hands of Mr. William
Archer in the columns of the _World_. My critic complained, tenderly
enough, that at one point I took the stage with an obvious effort, as if
determined to show that thus and thus should a man behave under sudden
news of irreparable ruin. I cannot quite tell, said Mr. Archer in
effect, why it was not admirable acting, and yet it was not If he could
have told, he went on to say, he might himself have been an excellent
actor, and not a critic. But he wanted something--something was missing.
The miserable fact was this. I had never worn a wig in the part until
that night, and I had forgotten for a mere instant that I wore one then.
It was a part of the stage business to dash my wideawake hat to the
ground, and--the wig came with it. For two or three dreadful seconds I
stood frozen, expectant of the howl of laughter which generally
follows such an accident. But the fates were kind, and the thing passed
unnoticed save by two or three. My natural hair was much of the length
and colour of the wig, and no derisive roar sounded in my ears. But I
shall never forget the horror of those few waiting seconds; and I should
like to ask Mr. Archer how far in his judgment such an occurrence might
excuse an actor's momentary absence from pure nature.
I was once hit in the eye by a fragment of half-sodden turf thrown up by
the explosion of a shell, and had time to think myself a dead man before
I realised what had happened. On one occasion, his Excellency Ibrahim
Pasha threatened to hang me out of hand; and I believed he meant to do
it. I have been in many awkward corners in my time; but my inward forces
were never more thoroughly routed than by that episode of the lost wig
on the stage of the Globe Theatre.