Harry was accused of writing “sugary” plays, sentimental plays, plays which were thin, and the like; but, in answer to these accusations, I can only quote two critics and give my own opinion afterwards. One of them says: “This is what they call pinchbeck sentiment. I don’t know. It convinced me, and that was quite enough. This is the kind of human story that has elicited the art of a Frederic Robson, a Johnnie Toole, and a Henry Irving in England.” And the other: “Do you know what personal charm is? It is the effect produced by a man or a woman who enters a room, makes a few graceful remarks, says a few words very much to the point in an agreeable voice, and suddenly creates an atmosphere which wins everybody around. Mr. Esmond as a playwright possesses it.” And my own opinion, which is that, if Harry wrote of charming, simple, loving, and lovable people, it was because that was how he found his fellow-men; that his characters who go through three acts lightly, bravely, and gallantly, are just as real as the characters in those rather depressing plays which are hailed as “slices of life”—and much more entertaining.
He filled his plays with beautiful things about life, because he honestly thought life itself was beautiful; he made his men and women “straight” and with decent impulses, because he was convinced that was how God made real people; and he gave his plays, or nearly all of them, “happy endings”, because he thought that “those who were good shall be happy”. That was how Harry “held the mirror up to Nature”, and how he tried to do what no artist can do more than succeed in doing:
“Draw the thing as he sees it.”
CHAPTER XV
HARRY, THE ACTOR
“There comes a time in every man’s life when his own judgment is of greater use to him than other people’s.”
—When We Were Twenty-One.
“I have been lectured a good deal during my career.”
—Fools of Nature.
No man in his time played more parts than Harry. To begin with, he started very young, started off from the bosom of a family which had no knowledge of the stage. So innocent were they of the life on which he was embarking, that his mother, hearing that he had joined a company of touring actors, asked, in all seriousness, “What time is the caravan calling for you, my dear?”
He started his career with a salary of ten shillings a week, and played anything and everything that was offered. He used to tell the story of “how he played a wave”—lying underneath a very dusty floor cloth, “billowing up and down”—and a nasty, stuffy business it must have been, too! Imagine the horror of the modern young actor, touring the provinces, if he were asked to lie on the stage and give an impersonation of that element which Britain is popularly reputed to rule!