And now I come to my own immorality.
My four Testaments, "The Vivisector," "The Man Forbid," "The Empire Builder," and "The Prime Minister," may be likened to statues with subsidiary groups about their feet, and with panels in relief on the four sides of the pedestals. As a fresco in the series of my Testaments, and in order to bring home the matter contained in them by a closer application to life than is possible in dramatic monologue, also desiring to extend the circle of my readers and the effect of my message, I wrote in the autumn of 1904 "The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." My hope was to have this tragedy published and another ready by this time; but like my own Knight of the Phoenix, "delays" are
"the lackeys circumstance Provides abundantly for all my schemes."
On the night I finished "The Theatrocrat," being unable to sleep, I searched about for an anodyne, and fell upon Wordsworth, whom I had not looked into for twenty years. Remembering the tedium and general drowsiness of "The Excursion," I turned to it—to the last book, which I had not come within six of before. The pleasant catalogue of the opening began to operate when suddenly, like one hoist with his own petard, I sat up more than broad awake upon the perusal of the sixteenth line—
"This is the freedom of the Universe."
I had written this line twice in "The Theatrocrat"! My memory is as treacherous as most memories, and although I had never read the last book of "The Excursion," I must in early days have read this line in scholastic writings on Wordsworth. Promptly I turned to my manuscript to change the line: but how could I? It was my meaning. Instead, I retained it; and placed it also on the title-page as my motto. A poet shall use that which belongs to him: it is the first characteristic of his genius that he cannot learn: he can only use; whether it be his own experience or the experience of others, he takes everywhere the matter and form that suit him.
Some account of "The Theatrocrat" and of how I came to write it seems necessary. My relations with the theatre are rather unusual. At a time when I was occupied with ballads and eclogues, Mr. Forbes Robertson, having looked into the volume of plays I wrote in Scotland, surprised me with an invitation to prepare a version of a French poetical play. It is no mere fashion of speech to say "surprised": during the five years I had been in London, I had only once visited a theatre, and although I considered drama my true province, my calling and election had not yet become effectual, and I certainly had never dreamt of entering these regions under a foreign flag. But the proposal gratified me, was also suitable in several ways, and the play interesting. On the production of my adaptation at the Lyceum, the success of Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the parts they played attracted the attention of managers to the adapter, and various proposals for versions were made: but no one as yet thought of giving me a commission for an original play: an adaptation of mine had succeeded, or seemed to succeed: therefore I was to be an adapter. Being somewhat mollified by seeming success—it was, as I said, Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Campbell who had actually succeeded—I began again upon a French play with considerable license of adaptation: but this license I overstepped, and the matter fell through. I then wrote a play of my own, and read it in succession to three managers, who listened politely: I afterwards published this play. Again I made a play of my own, this time upon commission, for the theatre is gallant, and likes perseverance: but the actor-manager for whom I wrote it, deemed it unsuitable, and again I published. Being now under the lash of necessity, and not yet ready to die, having my Testaments and Tragedies to write, I accepted commissions for adaptations, and in due course made versions of five foreign dramatic pieces, and an adaptation of a French novel, besides writing, also upon commission, but at my own urgency, two original plays. This is an unusual record, and the comedy of it lies here:—Not one of these adaptations was in any degree of my own initiation, nor although I prepared them all faithfully and some of them con amore, would I have chosen any of them; yet it is by them my ability as a playwright has been tested: while my own plays, "Godfrida," "Self's the Man," "The Knight of the Maypole," and an unpublished Arthurian play remain unproduced. The dismay of it is this:—That my Testaments and Tragedies—the matter wherewith I propose to change the mood of the world—remain, those that are issued, unknown; and those that should be written, unwritten: whereas the successful production of my four plays, the likeliest poetical plays written for the English stage in these times, would have placed me in an independent and dominant position from which all my writings could have come with that adventitious authority the world is powerless to disregard.
After the playgoing public had failed to appreciate an adaptation of mine, despite Mr. Lewis Waller's greatness in the part he played, and an adorable queen of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's, I discovered, upon various attempts, appeals, and challenges, that the stage would be well pleased to do without me in the meantime, and under these auspices, which I took to be the true evolutionary determinant, I began upon my own tragedies and wrote "The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." This play derives its title from the rank and vocation of the protagonist, Sir Tristram Sumner, proprietor and manager of the Grosvenor Theatre. The meaning of the title will best appear in Sir Tristram's own words addressed to his friend and patron, the Bishop of St. James's. "I," says Sir Tristram,
"Became at last an artist: think of it!
I found myself the master of the mood,
Enchanting folk and playing on their nerves
As though an audience were a zither; made
A name far-sounding; and, by your good will,
Am now—Heaven save the mark! the banal end!—
Am now Sir Tristram Sumner, nominal,
As well as actual, theatrocrat;"
and the significance of the sub-title will come home to the reader in the following extract from the diatribe of an exasperated actor addressed to Sir Tristram himself:—