“Now do you call that business? Would a dressmaker give material gratis and entertain a customer to supper? We have never given free seats. Why should one? If the house does not fill, change the piece, but don’t pretend it’s a success by paper. Yes—I’m retiring; the public doesn’t want an actress to-day. It wants a pretty girl. If I was beginning now, instead of ending, I should be a failure. I was never really pretty. “Men and women who have never studied acting as an art are wanted now, young, pretty, well built. But as to acting!—the old school of acting is a thing of the past, my dear.”
From Stageland to Shakespeare-land is a natural transit. Besides, there is no space left in this book to describe afresh the many valued and gifted theatrical friends to whom I devoted an entire volume in 1904, for which a second edition was called two months after publication.
This book was Behind the Footlights, and it occurred to me to write in it that “Mrs. Kendal was the most loved and most hated woman on the stage.” These words might apply almost to Marie Corelli in literature.
Who could help loving her who saw her as I did on October 6th, 1909, at the opening of Harvard House in Stratford-on-Avon?
It was a wonderful day.
A private train with bowls of flowers on every table, and smilax hanging in long tendrils from the roof (all this being the offering of the Railway Company), took us to Stratford at sixty-eight miles an hour. Our engine was also gaily decked with flags and flowers and had “HARVARD” painted across its front in big letters.
The sun shone brilliantly on that early autumn day, bestowing, as it were, his blessing on this scholarly alliance of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.
A gracious little lady bade us welcome; short and “comely,” with fluffy brown hair above a round face. As a girl our hostess must have been a pretty little blonde English type—she owns the sweetest voice imaginable, a voice to love, to coo a child to sleep, the most gracious manners, and a delightful smile.
This was Marie Corelli, to whom the work of restoration of Harvard House had been entrusted; and her guests that day saw it just as John Harvard himself saw it as a child. In that house where this most modern of twentieth-century novelists awaited her guests, the sixteenth-century maiden Katherine Rogers, passed her early days, and in 1605 went thence as the bride of Robert Harvard the merchant, to his home in Southwark. Between that place and the small country town on the Avon their little son spent his childish years. And just as the river deepened and widened as it joined the infinity of the ocean, so John Harvard’s youthful intelligence deepened and widened in the great ocean of learning. Far, far away it bore fruit—not only in his own generation, but the waves of scholarly influence have rippled down through successive decades to the present day, when the College he founded in America—the first established in the New World—sends forth her men in thousands to all parts of the globe, and the name of Harvard is an honoured household word through the length and breadth of the world.