One of his first real parts—and I doubt if it was even a speaking part—was that of a waiter who had to carry on a basket of refreshments for the guests at a picnic. Harry was determined to make the part “stand out”. He took the script back to his rooms—rooms, did I say? Room, a combined room, at probably eight shillings a week—and thought over it very earnestly. Inspiration came to him—he would make the waiter a very lame man with an elaborate limp; and at rehearsal next day he entered limping. Mr. Fernandez, the producer, shouted from the stalls, “Here, here, my boy, what are you doing?”, and added very seriously, “never fool with a part, take your work seriously. Take it from him, give it to somebody else!” That was the result of Harry’s first attempt at characterisation. You must remember that at this time he was about 15 or 16, very slight and boyish-looking, and he went round the provinces playing heavy villains in The Stranglers of Paris, The Corsican Brothers, Uriah Heep, Oliver Twist, etc. Think of a boy of that age portraying “Bill Sykes”! However, he stuck to the provinces for some time, like many another actor who won his spurs in London after a long and perhaps rather dreary apprenticeship; though I cannot believe that Harry ever found any acting dreary, he loved it too well.
When at last he came to London it was to appear in The Panel Picture, in which he made an amazing success in the part of a boy who was shot on the stage and had a big death scene; and then the round of playing old men began. I have told how, when I first met him, he was playing the part of a villain, and so padded as to be almost unrecognisable. When, many years later, he went to George Alexander, it was to play “Cayley Drummle”, the old man in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and it took George Alexander a long time to believe that Harry could make a success of a part which was suited to his years. This, in spite of the fact that he had already played the boy in Sweet Nancy, when Clement Scott (who disliked his first play so heartily) lifted his hands to the skies and “thanked Heaven for this perfect actor!” When George Alexander produced Much Ado, I remember he sent for Harry and asked him tentatively if he thought he could play “Claudio”. Harry was delighted at the prospect, and I remember, too, his disappointment when he was finally cast for “Verges”. Later came Henry Arthur Jones’s Masqueraders, when at last his chance came; he played a young man, and won not only the heart of George Alexander, but the heart of the public, by his performance.
I hesitate to use the word “genius”; but my excuse, if one is needed, must be that others used it before in referring to Harry. In the old days, when we all used to go holiday-making together, when Harry, Gerald du Maurier, and Charles Hallard were almost inseparable companions, they were known as “The Gent., The Genius, and The Young Greek God”—one of those happy phrases, coined under sunny skies, which, under all the fun that prompts them, have a sub-stratum of truth. The phrase has lived, for only a year ago Gerald du Maurier wrote to me, saying, “And when we meet, I will be the Young Greek God again, and we will talk of the Genius—bless him!” So I use the word in connection with Harry as an actor, and will only modify it by adding that he had one handicap—he was too versatile. As a young man he could play old men, and play them well, even brilliantly. As an older man he could still play young men, who were indeed young, not creatures born of grease paint and wigs, whose only attempt at being young came from affected movements and smart clothes.
His character-studies were real people, not bundles of eccentricities, with amazing and repulsive tricks; they were real old people, treated, where it was demanded, with humour, but a humour which was from the heart and spoke to the heart, and not only apparent to the eye of the beholder. His young men were charming, virile, and obviously enjoying life. He could play devout lovers, rakes (and what delightful rakes, too, they were!), old men, and mad men, and play them all with more than a touch of genius. There you had his handicap: from the very fact of the excellence of all he did, he was never allowed to specialise. He never became definitely associated with any special type of part. It never became a case of “No one can play that except Harry Esmond”, for there was probably a part in almost every play which Harry Esmond could have played, and played with charm and distinction.
Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. [218]
Harry as Major Blencoe
“The Tree of Knowledge”
Consider for a moment some of the parts which he played, and consider the variety of them. There is “Little Billee”, a part which I find many people remember best; “Kean”, the mad musician, in Grierson’s Way; “D’Artagnan” in The Three Musketeers; “Sir Benjamin Backbite” in The School for Scandal; “Touchstone” in As You Like It; old “Jacob Ussher” in Birds of a Feather; and various characters in Dear Brutus, The Times, Lights Out, Chance, The Idol. They were all parts which were as different as could well be imagined, and every one worthy of notice, and played with sympathy and great understanding.
When the Royal Performance of Trilby was given, as far as possible it was attempted to present the original cast. Harry was asked to play the “young and tender Little Billee”. At first he refused, saying that he was too old, but finally he was persuaded to appear. Phyllis Neilson Terry was to play “Trilby”, and I remember hearing of her dismay when she was told who was to be “Billee”. She remembered seeing Harry in the part when she “was a little girl”! At the dress rehearsal her fears vanished. She came up to me and told me what she had feared. “But now,” she said, “well, just look at him; he’s straight from the nursery; my husband says I’m baby-snatching.”
Swing the pendulum to the other side, and recall his “Jacob Ussher” in his own play, Birds of a Feather—the old Jew, the modern Shylock, who sees himself bereft of the only thing he loves in life, his daughter. Ussher is no more ashamed of the way in which he has made his money than Shylock was, but he, with all his pride of race, is very definitely ashamed that his daughter should wish to marry such a poor “aristocratic fish” as “Rupert Herringham”. How the part includes every note in the scale of the emotions; how Ussher alternates between the over-indulgent father and the martinet who rules his women exactly as his forefathers did; how he bullies and cajoles; how he uses persuasion and force; how he raves, rails, and finally weeps; and who, when Harry played him, wept not as an Englishman, but as a Jew who sees, in the ruin of his daughter, the destruction of the Temple and the Holy City by those who “know not the Law and the Prophets”. After seeing the play, a Jew told him that the only disappointment, the only thing which seemed “unreal”, was to find Harry seated in his dressing-room “talking English and not Hebrew”; and yet a critic said of this performance that “as far as characterisation is concerned, Ussher might have been a Gentile”. Let that critic see to it that he knows well the sons of Jacob, and then let him recall the performance at the Globe Theatre, with Harry Esmond as “one of them”.
I have told you how he came to play “D’Artagnan” in the Musketeers, in the place of Lewis Waller, and I remember the doubts which were expressed everywhere as to whether Harry was sufficiently robust and virile to play the part of the Gascon soldier of fortune. How Harry, realising that so far as personal appearance went he was as unlike the traditional hero of Dumas’ romance as well could be imagined, set to work to give such a reading that his slimness, his boyishness, his delicate air of romance, might be changed from handicaps to assets. Lewis Waller was probably more the man Dumas had in his mind; he was outwardly the typical mercenary fire-eater with a love of adventure, and a great-hearted courage behind it all; Harry Esmond was more like the conventional “Athos”, but he made you feel that here was the “soldier in spite of himself”; here was the son of Gascony who might so easily have been made a courtier or even a priest, but for the love of adventure, the romance, the high-spirited courage, which had driven him out to join the King’s Musketeers at any cost. Speaking of this part reminds me that during the run of the play Harry allowed his hair to grow, so that he did not need to wear a full wig. He was riding down the King’s Road one morning on his bicycle, when two small boys caught sight of him. “’Ere, Bill,” shouted one, “’ere’s a poet.” The other gazed at Harry, and returned with scorn, “Garn wiv yer, that ain’t a poet, that’s a bloomin’ b——dy poem.”