In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the ‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence. These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes, more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’
Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in 1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’ in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s valet explained, “these are our failures.”
Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:
Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras!
Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.
And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and about to be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head and inquires “Lemon or vanilla?”
These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious. An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one summer afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that Pat Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at once, “That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is his’n.”
III
It was also at the Lotos that I got to know John T. Raymond. This was probably in the fall of 1874, when he was appearing as Colonel Sellers in Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age.’ The actor and the author quarreled after a while, quarreled bitterly and never made up their quarrel. No doubt, Mark knew his own creature better than any one else and certainly better than the rather shallow Raymond. But Raymond gave us at least all the external characteristics of the inspired visionary with his inexpugnable optimism, always about to acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and yet for the moment reduced to a frugal dinner of turnips and water, with only a candle to light up his modest store. I have an impression that the cause of the breach with Mark was Raymond’s unwillingness to forego two or three easy effects which were always rewarded with thoughtless laughter but which were not really in keeping with the character. Raymond was unduly inclined to skylark even on the stage; I have seen him, in the last act of the ‘Gilded Age,’ match silver dollars with a friend he had recognized in the audience. Of course, he chose a moment for the flip of his coin when the attention of the spectators was bestowed upon some other performer, and only a few of them detected his inexcusable pantomime. These lapses from the standard of propriety may not have been frequent, but they occurred far too often; and they could not but be offensive to the author of the play in which the actor was appearing.
When Raymond indulged in tricks of this sort he displayed a lack of respect alike for his audience and for his art. The art had to suffer in silence; but the audience might at any time be moved to protest. I recall that when Raymond was playing Ichabod Crane in 1879 he sent me a box, to which my wife invited three or four of her young friends. In the last act Ichabod comes out into the garden to ask Katrina into the house, where there was merrymaking. To the startled astonishment of our party, Raymond said “Come on in, Katrina! There’s lots of fun! Brander Matthews has brought a whole boxful of pretty girls!”—a speech which nobody in the house—except the boxful—seemed to hear or at least to apprehend, probably because it had no relation to the story being acted on the stage.