“N. Y. Hotel, N. Y., U. S. A., Feb. 11, 1879.
“My Dear Mr. Byers:--I remember you with pleasure, remember the compliment you paid me in preferring a visit to me before the good Pope.
“I have read your pretty play with pleasure, and have the opinion of able managers. And I am bound to say, my dear boy, that it is for the leisure, not for the stage. Like all your work, it is well done, verses especially, but how on earth do you expect to present five scenes in one act in this swift modern day? All modern plays have, as a rule, but one scene to the act. Then you have almost altogether omitted humor. Try again. By the by, I last night brought forth a play. See enclosed bill. It was most emphatically damned. Write me if I can do ought for you, and believe me
Truly yours,
J. W. Miller.”
My libretto and the music had pleased Minnie Hauk, the singer, and she herself thought of using it, but the objection to the Wagner kind of music came up. Her husband, Count Wartegg, wrote me from Paris: “The libretto is very interesting, so original, and so well written that its success is assured.”
Minnie Hauk.--[Page 107.]
Minnie Hauk was just now at the height of her fame. In Scotland and England she was very popular. At Edinburg the college students one night, at the close of the opera, unhitched the horses from her carriage and pulled her to the hotel themselves. I knew her quite well in Switzerland. In fact, her secret marriage with Count Wartegg had taken place in my office, and I had been a part of the little adventure. She was a wife for years before the public found it out. Her husband had an historic old castle over in the mountains of the Tyrol.
In the meantime I had prepared another little play, and Miss Kate Field had given them both to Genevieve Ward, who sent me this about them:
“232 Rue de Rivoli, Paris, 26 Dec., 1875.
“Dear Sir:--I received the plays you confided to Miss Field, and read them with much pleasure. Pocahontas should be very popular in America, and I trust you will be fortunate in having it well produced. The sympathies of the public should also be warmly enlisted for the ‘Princess Tula,’ a charming character, which requires delicate handling. Miss Clara Morris would personate it most charmingly. I regret that they are both lighter than my line of business, which is the heaviest. I feel none the less honored that you should have sent them to me, and again thanking you, and wishing you every success, I remain
Yours truly,
“Genevieve Ward.”
The second drama was not offered to the managers at all, and the two plays were laid away forever.
While on the Rhine I also visited Speyer, “The City of Dead Kings.” In one crypt seven German monarchs lie side by side. Next to Westminster Abbey in London, and the Capuchin Church in Vienna, no one spot can show so much royal dust, and nowhere on earth can one feel so much the fleeting littleness of man as in these three places.