In a letter of his, replying to Hugh Conway’s generous recognition of help, I find these words:
“I want to tell you how much touched I have been by your letters. I say ‘letters’ for my wife read me as much of your note as she thought good for me. Rest assured that I am delighted to have done what I have done—also that the result has been fortunate for us both. I don’t think I could have got through so well with any other man; with you I have never had a shadow of worry or annoyance and I have been able at all points to do my best—as far as I knew how.”
This happy venture led to a friendship which had no let until the untimely death of Hugh Conway in the very zenith of his fame; they were, as dear old Sir Alma Tadema said in his quaint English: “Very fat together—like two hands on one stomach.”
Yet they did much work together, for not only did Joe collaborate again with Hugh Conway in the adaptation of Dark Days for the stage, but he also published that gifted, ghoulish tale Paul Vargus during his editorship of The English Illustrated Magazine, as well as the serial entitled A Family Affair, a humorous and urbane story with a plot so delicately suggesting possible immorality, however, that it drew down upon the editor a sharp reproach from Mrs. Grundy, who declared that, although she believed all would “come right” she could never again allow the magazine to lie on her drawing-room table lest her well-brought-up daughters might open its pages.
Does that Mrs. Grundy still live to-day?
Dark Days was Joe’s last bit of work with his poor friend but by no means the last of his adaptations for the stage, the chief of which number Madame Sans Gêne for Sir Henry Irving; My Lady of Rosedale for Sir Charles Wyndham; Nerves which ran with success for some time at the Comedy Theatre, and last, but not at all least, his fine play fashioned on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and followed by one on Edwin Drood.
The former, with Sir Herbert Tree as Fagin, Constance Collier as Nancy and Lyn Harding as Sikes, held the public for many months both in London and the United States.
At the height of its London success, a flaw in the architecture of the central proscenium arch of His Majesty’s Theatre necessitated the temporary transference of the play to another house. Joe was naturally in despair, but the untoward incident in no way interfered with the run of the piece which—in the words of the stage manager—had been kicked up and down the Strand and only gathered force as it rolled.
But although I have spoken first of his adaptations, it is of his original plays that I hold the dearest memories; and first and foremost of King Arthur which contains some of the best of the lyrics and blank verse for which Theodore Watts Dunton held him to be a “true poet.” The May Song and Song of the Grail he placed himself among his best verse and they were well appreciated.