In the eyes of the playwright Sir Ralph Incledon, as in the eyes of the early Spaniards, the Americans were savages with unlimited gold to exchange for glass beads. He had a noble contempt for all of us except our dollars, and he was almost ashamed to take those; their very nomenclature was vulgar and the decimal system was French.
The London success of his piece following upon his arrival at knighthood had completely spoiled him. Other great writers and actors who had received the accolade had been rendered a little meeker and more knightly as knights, but Incledon became almost unendurably offensive, even to his fellows in London. The decent English in New York who had to meet him abominated him as civilized Americans abroad abominate the noisy specimens of Yankee insolence who go twanging their illiterate contempt through the palaces and galleries and restaurants of Europe.
Sir Ralph was greatly distressed with the company Reben had proudly mustered for him. Tom Brereton was English born and bred, but Sir Ralph accused him of “an extraord’n’r’ly atrowcious Amayric’n acs’nt.” Americans who had seen the London performance had been amazed not only at the success of Miss Berkshire, but at her very tolerance on the stage; they said she looked like a giraffe and talked like a cow. But she pleased her own public somehow. When Sir Ralph saw Sheila he was not impressed; he said that she was “even wahss” than Brereton and under “absolutely neigh-o sec’mst’nces could he permit hah to deviate from the p’fawm’nce of d’yah aold Bahkshah.”
Sheila had flattered herself that she knew something of England and English; she had visited the island enough, and some of its stateliest homes; and she had had some of the worst young peers making love to her. But Sir Ralph, she wrote her aunt, evidently regarded her “as something between a squaw and a pork-packer’s daughter.”
Sir Ralph threw her into such a bog of humiliation that she floundered at every step. How could she give an intelligent reading to a line when he wanted every word sung according to the idiom of another woman of another race? How could she embody a rôle in its entirety when every utterance and motion was to be patterned on Sir Ralph’s wretched imitations of a woman she had never seen?
Sir Ralph not only threw his company into a panic, but he revealed a positive genius for offending the reporters, the critics, the public. Before the first curtain rose there was a feeling of hostility, against which the disaffected and disorganized players struggled in vain.
His play was a beautiful structure, full of beautiful thoughts expertly wrought into form. But Sir Ralph, like so many authors, seemed to contradict in his person everything worth while in his work.
His wife, Lady Incledon, knew him to be earnest, hard-working, emotional, timorous. His anxiety and modesty when at bay before the public gave the impression of conceit, contempt, and insolence. If he had been more cocksure of his play he would not have been so critical of its interpreters. If he had not been so afraid of the Americans he would not have tried to make them afraid of him. No tenderer-hearted novelist ever wrote than Dickens, yet he had the knack of infuriating mobs of people into a warm desire to lynch him. No sweeter-souled poet ever sang than Keats, yet Byron said he never saw him but he wanted to kick him.
Sir Ralph Incledon had the misfortune to belong to this class. He was not popular at home and he was maddening abroad. He made Americans remember Bunker Hill and long to avenge Nathan Hale. The critics felt it their patriotic duty to make reprisals for all the Americans who had failed in London and to send this Piccadillian back with his coat-tails between his legs.
The opening performance in New York was a first-class disaster. The audience did not follow the London custom of calling the author out and booing him. It left him in the wings, excruciated with ingrowing speech. He had drawn up one of the most tactless orations ever prepared in advance by a well-meaning author. He was not permitted to deliver it. He had a cablegram written out to send his anxious wife overseas. He did not send it. When he read the next morning’s papers he was simply dazed. He had come as a missionary direct from the capital to a benighted province and he was received with jeers—or “jahs,” as his dialect would be spelled in our dialect.