An Irishman, with the true Irishman’s imagination, living so much in dreams that dreams became more real than reality. He saw everything in pictures, vividly and full of life. It would seem that the ideas, which were born in dreams, became the living things of reality. Once, I remember, when he told Charles Hallard, very excitedly, that something he said or did was “foul”, poor Charles protested, “My God! and in the morning he’ll believe it’s true!” We all laughed, Harry with the rest, but I realise how very truly he had judged Harry’s character. Not that he believed it in this particular instance, but, through life, what he said on impulse to-day became conviction to-morrow.
And with all his imagination his love of the fantastic went hand in hand. As little children love to play games in which there is a certain element of “fear”, so Harry loved the fantastic which bordered on terror.
I can see him, seated at dinner at Whiteheads Grove, arguing on the comparative merits of William Morris and Tennyson—he, and those who listened to him, utterly oblivious of the fact that the dinner was rapidly growing cold. To point his argument, he began to quote the Idylls of the King—Arthur’s return:
“And as he climbed the castle stair, a thing fell at his feet,
And cried ‘I am thy fool, and I shall never make thee smile again’.”
I shall never forget the horror he put into the words “a thing fell at his feet”, and how the whole tragedy was unrolled in two lines of verse.
Once, too, someone asked him to tell some spiritualistic experience, or some story he had heard from someone who had “seen a spirit”. “Tell us about it,” they asked. Harry, loving the terror which he felt the story would bring, answered in almost a whisper, “No, no, I daren’t; it terrifies me!”, and promptly went on to tell the whole story, enjoying the horror of it all, as children love a ghost story.
The very people he knew were either, in his eyes, wonderful compounds of every virtue or there was “no health in them”. He would meet some individual who, in the first five minutes of their acquaintance, would say or do something which appealed to him: that person became for ever “a splendid chap”; while, on the other hand, some harmless individual who struck a “wrong note” (probably quite unwittingly) was referred to for months as “a terrible fellow”.
The name he took for the stage—Harry Vernon Esmond—was a tribute to romance and imagination. He was young—young in years, I mean—and he loved a wonderful lady, to whom he never addressed a single word. She was Harriet Vernon, who, attired as Gainsborough’s “Duchess of Devonshire”, used to thrill the hearts of the young men of the day every evening at the Tivoli, the Old Oxford, and other Temples of Variety. Harry, with others, worshipped at the shrine of Harriet Vernon. He never spoke to her; I doubt if he ever wanted to: it was simply the adoration of a very young man for a beautiful woman, whose life to him was wrapped in wonderful mystery. Night after night he watched her, and, when he took up the stage as a career, he, being a nineteenth century knight and so unable to “bind her gage about his helm”, openly avowed his admiration and allegiance by taking her name, and so became Harry Vernon Esmond.
Foolish? Ridiculous? I don’t think so; and it was rather typical of Harry’s feelings with regard to women all his life. He loved beautiful women as he loved the beautiful pictures, the beautiful books, and beautiful places of the world. Women, individually, he might—and often did—dislike; but women as women, en masse, he idealised. In all his plays he never drew a woman who was wholly unkind or entirely worthless. He might set out to draw a vampire, a heartless creature without any moral sense; but before the end of the play, the fact that she was a woman would be too strong for him, and in one sentence—perhaps only half a dozen words—he would make you feel that “she so easily might have been different, had fate been kinder”.