Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

Lucian began to think things over. He remembered how his earlier work had been written—he recalled the free, joyous flush of thought, the impulse to write, the fertility and fecundity which had been his in those days, and he contrasted it all with the infinite pains which he had taken in polishing and revising the epic. It must have been the process of revision, he thought, which had sifted the fire and life out of the poem. He read and re-read passages of it—in spite of all that the critics said, they pleased him. He remembered the labour he had gone through, and valued the results by it. And finally, he put the whole affair away from him, feeling that he and his world were not in accord, and that he had better wrap himself in his cloak for a while. He spoke of the epic no more. But unfortunately for Lucian, there were monetary considerations at the back of the new volume, and when he discovered at the end of a month that the sales were small and already at a standstill, he felt a sudden, strange sinking at the heart. He looked at Mr. Robertson, who communicated this news to him, in a fashion which showed the publisher that he did not quite understand this apparently capricious neglect on the part of the public. Mr. Robertson endeavoured to explain matters to him.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘there is such a thing as a vogue, and the best man may lose it. I don’t say that you have lost yours, but here’s the fact that the book is at a standstill. The faithful bought as a religious duty as soon as we published; those of the outer courts won’t buy. For one thing, your poem is not quite in the fashion—what people are buying just now in poetry is patriotism up-to-date, with extension of the Empire, and Maxim-guns, and deification of the soldier and sailor, and so on.’

‘You talk as if there were fashions in poetry as there are in clothes,’ said Lucian, with some show of scornful indignation.

‘So there are, my dear sir!’ replied the publisher. ‘If you lived less in the clouds and more in the world of plain fact you would know it. You, for instance, would think it strange, if you had ever read it, to find Pollok’s poem, The Course of Time, selling to the extent of thousands and tens of thousands, or of Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy making almost as prominent a figure in the middle-class household as the Bible itself. Of course there’s a fashion in poetry, as there is in everything else. Byron was once the fashion; Mrs. Hemans was once the fashion; even Robert Montgomery was once fashionable. You yourself were very fashionable for three years—you see, if you’ll pardon me for speaking plainly, you were an interesting young man. You had a beautiful face; you were what the women call “interesting”; you aroused all the town by your romantic marriage—you became a personality. I think you’ve had a big run of it,’ concluded Mr. Robertson. ‘Why, lots of men come up and go down within two years—you’ve had four already.’

Lucian regarded him with grave eyes.

‘Do you think of me as of a rocket or a comet?’ he said. ‘If things are what you say they are, I wish I had never published anything. But I think you are wrong,’ and he went away to consider all that had been said to him. He decided, after some thought and reflection, that his publisher was not arguing on sound lines, and he assured himself for the hundredth time that the production of the tragedy would put everything right.

It was now very near to the day on which the tragedy was to be produced at the Athenæum, and both Lucian and Mr. Harcourt had been worried to the point of death by pressmen who wanted to know all about it. Chiefly owing to their persistency the public were now in possession of a considerable amount of information as to what it might expect to hear and see. It was to witness—that portion of it, at any rate, which was lucky enough to secure seats for the first night—an attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek art. As this attempt was being made at the close of the nineteenth century, it was quite in accordance with everything that vast sums of money should be laid out on costumes, scenery, and accessories, and it was well known to the readers of the halfpenny newspapers that the production involved the employment of so many hundreds of supernumeraries, that so many thousands of pounds had been spent on the scenery, that certain realistic effects had been worked up at enormous cost, and that the whole affair, to put it in plain language, was a gigantic business speculation—nothing more nor less, indeed, than the provision of a gorgeous spectacular drama, full of life and colour and modern stage effects, which should be enthralling and commanding enough to attract the public until a handsome profit had been made on the outlay. But the words ‘an attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art’ looked well in print, and had a highly respectable sound, and the production of Lucian’s second tribute to the tragic muse was looked forward to with much interest by many people who ignored the fact that many thousands of pounds were being expended in placing it upon the stage.

CHAPTER XXI

At twelve o’clock on the night that witnessed the production of the tragedy, Lucian found himself one of a group of six men which had gathered together in Harcourt’s dressing-room. There was a blue haze of cigarette smoke all over the room; a decanter of whisky with syphons and glasses stood on a table in the centre; most of the men had already helped themselves to a drink. Lucian found a glass in his own hand, and sipped the mixture in it he recognised the taste of soda, and remembered in a vague fashion that he much preferred Apollinaris, but he said to himself, or something said to him, that it didn’t matter. His brain was whirling with the events of the night; he still saw, as in a dream, the misty auditorium as he had seen it from a box; the stage as he had seen it during a momentary excursion to the back of the dress-circle; the busy world behind the scenes where stage-carpenters sweated and swore, and the dust made one’s throat tickle. He recalled particular faces and heard particular voices; all the world and his wife had been there, and all the first-nighters, and all his friends, and he had spoken to a great many people. They all seemed to swim before him as in a dream, and the sound of their voices came, as it were, from the cylinder of a phonograph. He remembered seeing Mr. Chilverstone and his wife in the stalls—their faces were rapt and eloquent; in the stalls, too, he had seen Sprats and Lord Saxonstowe and Mrs. Berenson; he himself had spent some of the time with Haidee and Darlington and other people of their set in a box, but he had also wandered in and out of Harcourt’s dressing-room a good deal, and had sometimes spoken to Harcourt, and sometimes to his business manager. He had a vague recollection that he had faced the house himself at the end of everything, and had bowed several times in response to cheering which was still buzzing in his ears. The night was over.

He took another drink from the glass in his hand and looked about him; there was a curious feeling in his brain that he himself was not there, that he had gone away, or been left behind somewhere in the world’s mad rush, and that he was something else, watching a semblance of himself and the semblance’s surroundings. The scene interested and amused whatever it was that was looking on from his brain. Harcourt, free of his Greek draperies, now appeared in a shirt and trousers; he stood before the mirror on his dressing-table, brushing his hair—Lucian wondered where he bought his braces, which, looked at closely, revealed a peculiarly dainty pattern worked by hand. All the time that he was manipulating the brushes he was talking in disconnected sentences. Lucian caught some of them: ‘Little cutting here and there—that bit dragged—I’m told that was a fine effect—very favourable indeed—we shall see, we shall see!’—and he wondered what Harcourt was talking about. Near the actor-manager, in an easy-chair, sat an old gentleman of benevolent aspect, white-bearded, white-moustached, who wore a fur-lined cloak over his evening-dress. He was sucking at a cigar, and his hand, very fat and very white, held a glass at which he kept looking from time to time as if he were not quite certain what to do with it. He was reported to be at the back of Harcourt in financial matters, and he blinked and nodded at every sentence rapidly spoken by the actor-manager, but said nothing. Near him stood two men in cloaks and opera-hats, also holding glasses in their hands and smoking cigarettes—one of them Lucian recognised as a great critic, the other as a famous actor. At his own side, talking very rapidly, was the sixth man, Harcourt’s business-manager. Lucian suddenly realised that he was nodding his head at this man as if in intelligent comprehension of what he was saying, whereas he had not understood one word. He shook himself together as a man does who throws drowsiness aside.