Within a week from the end of the play's run a curious thing happened. A visiting English dramatist and critic, a confirmed self-advertiser, but a writer and thinker of unquestioned brilliancy, and a wit, withal, of international reputation, was greatly struck by the play and wrote an unsolicited letter about it which appeared in the pages of a leading daily.
"No more striking proof," wrote this self-appointed defender of Harry, "could be offered of the consanguinal intellectual stupidity of the Anglo-Saxon race than I received at a performance of Mr. Harold Wimbourne's play 'Chances' at the —— Theater last night. For the first time during my stay in this country as I looked over the almost empty stalls and realized that this, incomparably the best play running in New York, was also the worst attended, I could have fancied myself actually in my own country.
"What are the lessons or qualities in Mr. Wimbourne's play which the American people cannot stomach? I suppose, when all is said and done, he has committed the unpardonable offense of giving them a little of their own medicine. He has rammed down their throats some few corollaries of the Calvinistic doctrines for which the ancestors of the very people who stay away from his play sailed an uncharted sea, conquered a wilderness, and spilt their blood to champion against a usurping power. The Pilgrim fathers founded the United States of America in order to publish the greatness of God and the littleness of man. Their descendants either ignore or condemn one of their number because he does not extol the greatness of man and the littleness of God. Because Mr. Wimbourne ventures to show, in a very mild—if very artistic and compelling way—how slight a hold man has on the moving force of life, God, the universe, a group of atoms—whatever you choose to call the world—he becomes a pariah. He has escaped easily after his first offense, but it will go hard with the Anglo-Saxon character if he is not stoned in the streets after the next one. America is a great and rich country; what does it care about religion or philosophy or art or any of that poppycock? Serious and devout thinking simply are not done; it has become as great a solecism to mention the name of the Deity in society—except as the hero of a humorous story—as to talk about Kant or Hegel. Americans have lost interest in that sort of stuff; they do not need it. Why, now that they have become physically strong, should they bother about the unsubstantial kind of strength known as moral to which they were forced to resort when they were physically weak? Why, having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what upheld them when they were fieldmice?
"Of course I should not have made such a point in favor of a play if it were not, technically and artistically speaking, a very good play. The truth when it is badly spoken hardly merits more attention than if it were not spoken at all. But 'Chances' is as beautifully constructed as it was conceived; it is a play that I should be proud to have written myself. Its technical perfections have already been praised, even by that class of people least calculated to appreciate them; I mean the critics. I will, therefore, mention but one small example, which I believe, in the presence of so many greater beauties, has been overlooked; namely, the short dialogue near the end of the first act in which Frances, in perhaps half a page of conversation with the man to whom she is then engaged, realizes that her engagement is empty, that she has no heart for the man, that a new way of looking at love has transcended her life;—realizes all this, and betrays it to the audience without in the smallest degree giving herself away to the man with whom she is talking or saying a word in violation of the probability of their conversation. Such a feat in dramaturgy is, perhaps, appreciable only to those who have tried to write plays themselves. Still, whom does that not include?
"But I do not expect Americans to appreciate artistic perfection any more than I expect Englishmen to. The shame, the disgrace to Americans in not appreciating this play lies in the fact that it is fundamentally American; American in its characters, in its setting, and above all in its motive principles, which are the principles to which America owes its very existence."
Such opinions, appearing over a famous signature, could not but revive interest and talk about its subject, and the play experienced a slight boom during the last few days of its existence. Its run, indeed, would have been extended but for the fact that Bachmann had made all the arrangements for its successor and advertised the date of its appearance. Altogether the incident tended to show that if the play was a failure it was at least a dynamic failure, indicative of future success.
Harry was as little elated by the praise of the foreigner as he was cast down by the condemnation of his countrymen. His demeanor all along, ever since the day of his interview with Miss Bensel, had been characterized by an observant calmness. He dissuaded as many of his relations and friends as he could from being present at the first performance of the play and ignored those who insisted on being there. He himself occupied an obscure seat in the gallery and listened with the greatest attention to the comments of those about him. He thereby began to form an idea of what the general public thought of his work; knowledge which, as he himself realized, would be of inestimable value if he could put it to use in his next play.
A letter Harry wrote to his Uncle Giles just after the play was taken off expresses his state of mind at this time. "'Chances' has gone by the board," he wrote; "that splendid American institution, the Tired Business Man, would have none of it, and it has ceased to be Drama and has become merely Literature. But I have learned a lot during its brief existence, and this knowledge I shall, please God, make use of if I ever write another play. Which is a mere figure of speech, as I have started one already.
"I have learned the point of view of the Tired Business Man. That was what I wanted to know from the very first—not what the critics thought. They could do no more than say it was good, and I knew that already. And what the T. B. M. said was substantially, that my play was nice enough, but that it had no punch. I don't know whether you recognize that expression or not; it is one of those vivid American slang words that English people are so fascinated by. People thought the play wasn't interesting enough, and that is the simple truth about it. Therefore it wasn't a good play. For my idea is that to be really good a play must hold the stage, at least at the time it is written. And if we are ever going to build up such a thing as the 'American drama' our critics are continually bellowing about, we've got to begin with our foundations. We can't create a full-fledged literary drama and then go to work and make the people like it; we've got to begin with what the people like and build up our drama on that. That's the way all the great 'dramas' of history have grown up—the Greek, the French, the Spanish and the Elizabethan; and it is interesting to notice that the drama that came nearest to being the product of a mere literary class, the French, is the weakest of the lot and is standing the test of time worst of them all.
"I may never write a more successful play than 'Chances'; I may never get another play on the stage at all. But one thing I am sure of; I shall never offer another play to the public without being convinced that it is a better stage play than 'Chances.'"