Henry Arthur Jones’s family I have known since they were children. Mrs. Jones used to come to our parties before the eldest of her children was out of the schoolroom, and we spent one summer in the same house at Ostend, so we have watched the elder girls coming to the front on the stage with interest. Of the great dramatist himself I have spoken elsewhere. If he had chosen, he could have been equally famous as a writer of books. He has a profound mind, and a popular method of statement.
Olga Nethersole could not come in the evenings to our at-homes, because she was generally acting, but she came for long talks in the afternoons. I found her remarkable, not only as an actress of a singularly emotional type, but from the interest which she takes in the social problems of the day, such as criminology and emigration. A year ago, at a party given by the C. N. Williamsons at the Savoy, when we were comparing notes on the Canadian North-West, from which she had just returned, and which I knew twenty years ago, I was much struck by her grasp of the subject.
I cannot remember whether it was at the Idler or at “John Strange Winter’s” that I first met Martin Harvey, who, like Forbes-Robertson, is a painter in his leisure moments. He was with Irving in those days, recognised already as the most capable all-round actor in the company, and for his wonderful conscientiousness and finish. Harvey had the good sense to bide his time, and when he did launch on his own account in The Only Way, which Frederick Langbridge, the poet, dramatised in collaboration from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, he made an instantaneous and gigantic success. In the days when he used to come to us, he was singularly boyish-looking, and delightfully modest about his powers, though all his friends knew that he was a genius.
It was certainly “John Strange Winter” who introduced us to Mary Ansell, at that time one of the twin stars of Barrie’s first play, Walker, London.
It may have been Mary Ansell, who was noted for her beauty, who introduced us to the other star of the play, Irene Vanbrugh, equally noted for her prettiness and her archness, who continues to this day to interpret the whimsicalities of Barrie with such delightful espièglerie. She was a Miss Barnes, daughter of a Prebendary of Exeter—there were four daughters living with their mother in Earl’s Court Road. Violet, the eldest, and Irene, the youngest, then unmarried, were on the stage, Angela was a violinist or violoncellist—I never remember which of these instruments my friends play—and Edith, the fair one of the family, frowned on the stage, and married somebody of importance in India. Angela came to us oftenest. A little later Violet Vanbrugh married Arthur Bourchier, whom I had met long before when he was at Christchurch, Oxford, and the leading light of the Oxford A.D.C., of which Alan MacKinnon, an old friend of mine at Trinity, who introduced us, was another leading light.
Bourchier, the inimitable, is, I fancy, the only professional Shakesperian actor who could have the chance of taking the part of one of his own family in Shakespeare. For Cardinal Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a character in Shakespeare’s Richard III. He was also Henry VI’s Chancellor, as Sir Robert de Bourchier was to Edward III in 1340—the first of the lay-Chancellors of England.
The first time I saw Bourchier act was when he was an undergraduate at Oxford—the part was Harry Hotspur, and he was superb in it, because this was a part in which he could use his art and his personality in equal proportions. Since then I have seen him blend his two great qualifications of character-acting and potent personality, in many parts, in Henry VIII pre-eminently, and I have seen him exercise the two qualifications separately in many parts, now as an old seventeenth-century Bishop, overflowing with goodness, now as a bluff, practical joker in boisterous farce with Weedon Grossmith. He is certainly one of the finest actors on the stage, when you consider him from the double standpoint of his tremendous personality, and his power to disguise it in parts entirely foreign to one’s idea of Bourchier. I cannot help liking him best as himself on the stage, because to me there is nothing so interesting as personality, and he has such an inexhaustible flow of wit and high spirits.
If Bourchier had had no success on the professional stage, his name would have been immortalised in its annals, for it was he who persuaded Jowett, of Balliol, the then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, to abolish the statute of the University against Oxford having a theatre, and he actually enlisted Jowett’s services into raising the money for building one.
When I first went to Oxford, we had no theatre on account of the famous statute. Our ancestors regarded actors as “rogues and vagabonds,” and only a year ago a well-known actor got off serving on a jury on the grounds that he was legally a rogue. But though the town might not have a theatre, it might have as many low music-halls as it liked, because the University did not consider what went on in “the halls” as acting at all. The real point at issue—would the ladies of a caste like Irving’s or Tree’s be as likely to tempt the St. Anthonys of Oxford out of their hermitages in the deserts of learning—was entirely lost sight of.
With Bourchier one naturally thinks of Aubrey Smith, who had to play Sir Marcus Ordeyne in Bourchier’s theatre—Smith, who was the chief light of the Cambridge A.D.C., and the crack Cambridge bowler of his time in the ’Varsity matches.