“It is quite true, Irving,” I answered. “And I will tell you why. I do not think any one has a higher appreciation of your genius as an actor than I have, and if I could have found the occasion to praise this particular performance I would gladly have seized it, but I thought it, rightly or wrongly, a bad performance, and, out of a spirit of loyalty to my larger admiration of your talent, I refrained from saying so. But I see now that I was wrong. In view of what you have said to-night I feel it would have been better to have said what I thought. You may however be assured, after what has occurred, that I shall not commit that blunder again.”
My defence was absolutely sincere, and I think Irving realised it. At any rate, I know that this little incident, which occurred upon the threshold of our friendship, did not hinder the formation of a close fellowship which endured and strengthened during the greater part of his career.
Bret Harte was an occasional visitor to the Savile, but I saw him more often and more intimately at the delightful meetings of the Kinsmen Club, a society that was designedly founded to bring together men of kindred interest in Art and Letters from both sides of the Atlantic. It has often been something of a puzzle to me that Bret Harte should not have ranked higher as an author among his own compatriots. In his own realm as a story-teller it seems to me hardly possible to rank him too high. That he owed much to Dickens he himself, I believe, would have been the first to acknowledge; but that his own individuality, both in humour and pathos, outstripped any reproach of imitation cannot, I think, be questioned by those to whom his work makes any strong appeal.
Socially he never made any endeavour to press for consideration of his literary claims. He was willing to speak of his work on the invitation of others, and always with modesty. In converse you would hardly have guessed he was a writer, nor did he often lead conversation on to the subject of literature, but I found in him, what I have always found in his writings, a certain reticent delicacy of perception, touched and fired now and again with a quick chivalry of feeling in all that concerned the relation of the sexes.
To his own countrymen I suppose he belonged to a past era in literary art, an era which preceded that elaborate analysis of the feminine temperament as distinguished from feminine character which to the mind of so many modern novelists appears to rank as the final victory of fiction.
CHAPTER XVI
MEN OF THE THEATRE
My association with the theatre began somewhat disastrously. It was my father’s kindly thought, while we were still children, to afford us an annual visit to the pantomime, a visit that was accomplished for our large family by means of two hired flies, which transported us from our house at Barnes to the chosen place of amusement.
But my particular enjoyment of this long-desired entertainment was mitigated by circumstances both moral and physical. We had at that time a nurse who, though by nature endowed with most affectionate impulses, strongly disapproved of all dramatic entertainment, and who, for some weeks before this annually projected tampering with the forces of evil, tormented my spirit by a somewhat vivid picture of the eternal perils which I was destined to encounter.
On the first of these theatre parties that I can recollect, when she was coerced by my mother to form one of the party, in order that her numerous flock should have proper protection, her original antipathy to all things theatrical was strongly enforced and confirmed from the fact that, in the first piece which preceded the pantomime, one of the actors, shipwrecked upon a desert shore, gave utterance to a sentiment which to her mind seemed profoundly impious—that “what man could do he had done, and that God must do the rest.” As she explained to me the next evening, when I lay tucked up in bed, the mere mention of God within the four walls of a theatre was an act of profanity altogether unpardonable, and from that time forward she would never consent to take any part in these annual orgies.
But her manifest disapproval, as the recurring season of Christmas approached, set my spirit in terrible debate between the pleasure I longed for and the sin I knew I was about to commit. That internal struggle, fierce as it seemed to me at the time, must, I suppose, have been conducted with insufficient force on her side, for the issue left me always eager and ready for the adventure of sin. Indeed, so eager was our anticipation of the treat in store for us, that for many days beforehand we could think of nothing else; and so great our excitement as the appointed day approached, that the long-looked-for pleasure nearly always ended in disaster. Excitement in our family always revealed itself in an overmastering tendency to sickness, and from the age of five till the age of ten my vision of the splendours of the pantomime was intermittent, such glimpses of its glory as I derived being for the most part only obtained through the small lunette at the back of the dress-circle, the remainder of the evening being nearly always passed in a state of utter prostration in the ladies’ cloak-room. I neither claim nor profess any isolated distinction in this recurring malady, it was the abiding characteristic of our family; and I have often since, looking back on those days, reflected with admiration upon the dauntless courage of my father and mother to whom these occasions, repeated again and again, in spite of all example, must have been fraught with nothing short of misery.