"The last things I saw in England," I told Mrs. Wylton, "were The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and A Woman of No Importance."
Dramatic history has developed apace since those days. I recollect we thought Pinero the most daring dramatist since Ibsen; we talked sagely of a revolution in the English theatre. There must have been many revolutions since then! Even the wit of Wilde has grown a little out-moded since '93. As we drove down to the Cornmarket I was given to understand that the dramatic firmament had been many times disturbed in twenty years; Shaw had followed a meteoric path, Barker burned with fitful brilliance, while aloft in splendid isolation shone the inexorable cold light of Galsworthy....
"Who's the new man you're taking us to see?" Joyce asked the Seraph.
"Gordon Tremayne," he answered.
"The man who wrote 'The Child of Misery'? I didn't know he wrote plays."
"I believe this is his first. Do you know his books?"
"Forward and backward and upside down," I answered. "He's one of the coming men."
I am not a great novel reader, and have no idea how I came across Tremayne's first book, "The Marriage of Gretchen," but when once I had read it, I watched the publisher's announcements for other books from the same pen. The second one belonged still to the experimental stage: then the whole literary world was convulsed by the first volume of his "Child of Misery."
I suppose by now it is as well-known as that other strange masterpiece of self-revelation—"Jean Christophe"—which in many ways it so closely resembles. In one respect it shared the same immortality, and "Jean Christophe's" future was not more eagerly watched in France than "Rupert Chevasse's" in England. The hero—for want of a better name—was torn from the pages of the book and invested by his readers with flesh and blood reality. We all wanted to know how the theme would develop, and none of us could guess. The first volume gave you the childhood and upbringing of Rupert—and incidentally revealed to my unimaginative mind what a hell life must be for an over-sensitive boy at an English public school. The second opened with his marriage to Kathleen, went on to her death and ended with the appalling mental prostration of Rupert. I suppose every one had a different theory how the third volume would shape....
"What sort of a fellow is this Tremayne?" I asked the Seraph.