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There came a day when a new one-act play by Houghton was given at the Manchester Gaiety—a play I subsequently saw at a London music hall, its fit home; but I remember neither the play’s title nor its plot. I recollect, however, that three or four men and women met in the corridor of a London hotel and talked or suggested risky things. Rather stupid, I thought it, and it certainly never occurred [65] ]to me that it was immoral or nasty; it was merely a dramatic experiment that did not quite come off. But the dramatic critic of The Manchester Guardian—either Mr A. N. Monkhouse or Mr C. E. Montague (I think the former)—“went for” it tooth and nail on the score of its alleged immorality. The criticism was scathing: it made a wound and then poured acid into the wound. Houghton must have felt the criticism sorely, but when I met him next day he pluckily treated it as a matter of no consequence whatever.
“A reasonable man cannot expect always to be understood,” said he, “and I suppose The Manchester Guardian, which has always been very good to me in the past, has a right to scold me if it thinks fit.”
“A scolding, Houghton? Why, you were thrashed.”
“Well, I s’pose I was. But I can stand it.”
Vain men are invariably supersensitive, and for that reason I think Houghton felt every word and act of hostility; but he never showed weakness under opposition, and he could hit back when he thought it worth while.
I once witnessed a physical assault upon him after a rather rowdy dinner, when we all took to ragging each other. There was no excuse for the assault, except what excuse may be found in bitter feeling and enmity, but Houghton received the blow without a word, and we who witnessed it neither expostulated with his assailant nor expressed sympathy with his victim. Houghton paled and his large eyes gleamed, and I have no doubt that on a subsequent occasion he settled the matter with the man who was responsible for his humiliation.
Only a very few men really understood Houghton, and those were men who, like Walter Mudie, had known him intimately in boyhood. Mudie swore by him and would hear no word against him. But there was something forbidding in Houghton’s nature—a barricade of reserve that [66] ]he himself had not wilfully erected, but which had been placed there by Nature. It was impossible for people who met him casually a few times to form a high opinion either of his intellect or of his personality. I remember Captain James E. Agate, a most original and brilliant colleague of Houghton’s on The Manchester Guardian, once saying to a group of people: “Don’t you make any mistake about Houghton. He’s not such a fool as he appears.” But it is a very incomplete man who requires such a double-edged defence as that.
Though the contrary has often been stated, Houghton did not, I believe, take much interest in anybody’s work except his own. He patronised a young bank clerk, Charles Forrest, who had written a promising little play that was subsequently, by Houghton’s recommendation, I believe, given in Manchester and Liverpool; but when he came in contact with work that was, in many respects, superior to his own, he was airily superior and supercilious. He once asked to see a blank-verse play of my own that was given at the Manchester Gaiety, but as I was aware that he knew as much of blank verse as I do of conic sections—which is nothing at all—I refrained from passing on my MS. to him. In other men’s work he looked for faults; in his own he found perfection.
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