Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

DRAMATIC WORK AND MANAGEMENT

It must have been somewhere about this period that the first impetus was, funnily enough, given to Joe’s dramatic career by a request from our dear friend, Ellen Terry, that I should make an English adaptation for her from the famous French play of Frou-Frou.

The thing was done, and played in Glasgow and other Northern towns under the title of Butterfly, and great fun we had over our first initiation into the mysteries of dress-rehearsals—not always perhaps quite so funny in the more responsible circumstances of later years, though it is a form of patient work electrified by the gambling spirit, which never lost its attraction for Joe.

My altered version of the French play was a poor one, but it had, I suppose, sufficient merit to obtain me a commission from Mme. Modjeska, the noted Polish actress, for a free translation of the same play, which she performed first in London with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and afterwards throughout the United States.

The “youthful conceit” to which Joe was throughout his life so lenient as even to consider a virtue, led me presently to try my hand at a bigger task—no less than the dramatisation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. I was quite unequal to the attempt, and I only mention it because it proved the beginning of Joe’s dramatic work. He took the play in hand, refashioned the plot, only keeping portions of the dialogue as I had adapted it to stage necessity; and it was produced—with Marion Terry as the wilful and charming Bathsheba—first in the provinces and then in London.

Owing to circumstances needless to recall, the venture was a financial failure; but it served to start Joe on a new road; and it was not long before he scored a big success. He came home one night from a railway journey and gave me a little book which he had bought to read in the train: it was Called Back by Hugh Conway.

“See if you don’t think that an enthralling story?” he said.

There could be no doubt of this and the British public gave its verdict promptly. The book began to sell like “hot cakes” and Joe went down to Clifton, saw its clever author—until then unknown to literature—and arranged with him for its dramatisation.

The play was produced on May 20th, 1884, and I think there are still people who remember its first success and that, in the rÔle of the Italian conspirator—Macari—Sir Herbert Tree scored one of his finest early triumphs; the piece was revived several times in London and the provinces and had the questionable compliment of being also pirated. But I shall not easily forget the dress-rehearsal!

I was comparatively new to such things then and I can well recall the chill of heart with which we got home to Blandford Square in the early hours and my inner conviction that the scenery could not possibly be finished nor, one at least, of the principal actors, know his part by the next night! But nothing could ever quell Joe’s hopeful spirit; he plied his somewhat less optimistic colleague with cold tongue and whisky-and-soda and made merry work of the stupidity of lime-light men and scene-shifters, to say nothing of others of higher degree; and then went to sleep at 6 a.m. and got up and returned to the theatre at 10 a.m. without turning a hair.

I wonder now if he was as strong as he seemed in those days or whether it was only his gay and excitable Celtic temperament that carried him through everything. Anyhow he enjoyed his life to the full and there were never any dull moments, whether he was at work or at play.

The radiant vitality which lasted him so long and so well—and to which there is such frequent testimony in letters from the various friends with whom he laboured in his many walks of life—seems to have had the power of so communicating itself to his fellow-workers that they would share his optimistic hopes and, if these were disappointed, generally be ashamed to utter reproach in the face of his urbane acceptance of failure. But on this occasion there was only rejoicing.

In a letter of his, replying to Hugh Conway’s generous recognition of help, I find these words:

“I want to tell you how much touched I have been by your letters. I say ‘letters’ for my wife read me as much of your note as she thought good for me. Rest assured that I am delighted to have done what I have done—also that the result has been fortunate for us both. I don’t think I could have got through so well with any other man; with you I have never had a shadow of worry or annoyance and I have been able at all points to do my best—as far as I knew how.”

This happy venture led to a friendship which had no let until the untimely death of Hugh Conway in the very zenith of his fame; they were, as dear old Sir Alma Tadema said in his quaint English: “Very fat together—like two hands on one stomach.”

Yet they did much work together, for not only did Joe collaborate again with Hugh Conway in the adaptation of Dark Days for the stage, but he also published that gifted, ghoulish tale Paul Vargus during his editorship of The English Illustrated Magazine, as well as the serial entitled A Family Affair, a humorous and urbane story with a plot so delicately suggesting possible immorality, however, that it drew down upon the editor a sharp reproach from Mrs. Grundy, who declared that, although she believed all would “come right” she could never again allow the magazine to lie on her drawing-room table lest her well-brought-up daughters might open its pages.

Does that Mrs. Grundy still live to-day?

Dark Days was Joe’s last bit of work with his poor friend but by no means the last of his adaptations for the stage, the chief of which number Madame Sans GÊne for Sir Henry Irving; My Lady of Rosedale for Sir Charles Wyndham; Nerves which ran with success for some time at the Comedy Theatre, and last, but not at all least, his fine play fashioned on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and followed by one on Edwin Drood.

The former, with Sir Herbert Tree as Fagin, Constance Collier as Nancy and Lyn Harding as Sikes, held the public for many months both in London and the United States.

At the height of its London success, a flaw in the architecture of the central proscenium arch of His Majesty’s Theatre necessitated the temporary transference of the play to another house. Joe was naturally in despair, but the untoward incident in no way interfered with the run of the piece which—in the words of the stage manager—had been kicked up and down the Strand and only gathered force as it rolled.

But although I have spoken first of his adaptations, it is of his original plays that I hold the dearest memories; and first and foremost of King Arthur which contains some of the best of the lyrics and blank verse for which Theodore Watts Dunton held him to be a “true poet.” The May Song and Song of the Grail he placed himself among his best verse and they were well appreciated.

As the book was published by Messrs. Macmillan, it belongs to the public.

The production of King Arthur was one of the most beautiful of Henry Irving’s many Lyceum triumphs. Even in those far-removed days Sir Edward Burne Jones’ exquisite designs for the armour and dresses, as well as for the scenery, will be remembered by some, and I am proud to think that I was allowed the privilege of carrying out some of them in detail. It was a hard six months’ work but it was well rewarded and I think Joe had no happier hours than those he spent in the writing and in the producing of his two finest efforts—King Arthur and Tristram and Iseult.

I cannot leave this subject without mention of the tender and lovely impersonation of Guinevere by Ellen Terry, and the touching tribute to her which Joe himself gives in the following dedication, written on the fly-leaf of the copy he presented to her.

“To Guinevere herself from one who, after years of closest friendship, looks to her now as always, for the vindication of what is highest and gentlest in womanhood; and who would count this not too poor a gift for her to take, could he but hope that some part of the grace and charm of her spirit had found its way into the portrait of Arthur’s Queen.”

Following on this it would seem incongruous in connection with anyone else but Joe to quote a funny tale bearing on the above; but Joe loved the tale himself and often told it merrily and so will I.

On his being presented to a newly-arrived prominent American at a public dinner, this gentleman opened the conversation by saying that he had been privileged, on the voyage with Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, to read King Arthur in the lady’s own copy containing the author’s charming dedication. A pause ensued, when Joe—thinking himself on solid ground—said: “Well, sir, I hope you liked the play?” What was his astonishment at the Yankee’s gentle reply! “Well, not very much!” said he, “You see I had Lord Tennyson in my mind.”Silence ensued but I think Joe explained with urbanity that he had taken an entirely different view of the old legend, founded in a measure on Sir Thomas Malory’s version.

A propos of this old name, Joe has himself told of the arrival at the theatre of a batch of press cuttings addressed to that knight of the days of chivalry, the title tactfully supplemented by the affix of “Bart.”

Perhaps scarcely less funny and more unpardonable was the question of the Society lady who asked him, in the case of Tristram and Iseult, how he had obtained Mme. Wagner’s consent to tamper with her husband’s book.

A play—The Lonely Queen—on which he spent much care, still remains to be performed when a suitable actress shall present herself for the strong and sympathetic part of the girlish ruler over a wild land.

The piece opens on a hillside overlooking an Eastern city—a scene shewn again later on in sinister circumstances; and with dance and laughter, a group of girls crown their wayward young mistress with a wreath of flowers in merry mimicry of the weightier diadem she will soon be called to wear. And presently, in a lonely mood of apprehension, she meets as a stranger, the patriot-poet who is to be both her bane and her salvation in the future.

He enjoyed writing this play and was pleased with the following lyric, which he read to me—as I am proud to think, he generally read anything with which he was satisfied or on which he wanted such criticism as I could give—on the very morning when he had written it.

THE POET TO A GIRL-QUEEN UNKNOWN.

Oh Lady of the Lily Hand!

Whose face unseen we long to greet,

At whose command this desert land

Springs into flower about thy feet.

Fair maiden whom we know not yet,

Yet know thy heart can know no fear,

Queen, who shalt teach us to forget

The wounds of many a wasted year.

The curtains of the night are drawn,

Its shadows all have fled away,

For in thine eyes there dwells the dawn

And in thy smile the new born day.

A people’s love that waits thee now

Is thine to take and thine to hold,

Till God shall set upon thy brow

A crown that is not forged of gold.

Twixt Right and Wrong He yields thee choice,

Heed not the worship of the weak,

That in a maiden’s fearless voice

The clarion voice of God may speak.

Be swift to strike and strong to save,

Steadfast in all! Till all the land

Shall hail thee ‘Bravest of the Brave’

Oh Lady of the Lily Hand.

It was a fair scene in which it was written—a hill-top under Monte Rosa overlooking the lovely shores of Lugano—and, though he always said that actual surroundings were never proper to be described in the work of the moment but must be digested and crystallized in the hidden corners of remembrance, I think that the spirit of a place did influence him, so that the sun shone on the hillside of the first Act of The Lonely Queen as the lowering brow of the Black Mount, at Rannoch, seemed to overshadow the halls of Camelot; he even said himself that he could see the barge with Elaine’s body float down the Hertfordshire stream where he was wont to fish after his day’s labour.

His poetical work was always that which lay nearest his heart, though his friends often deplored that he did not devote himself more to comedy; but strange to say, his humour, which was so inexhaustible in colloquial intercourse, did not strike home so surely in his stage dialogue: he needed the stimulus of conversation. Possibly he felt this, which made him shyer of comedy-writing than he would have been; in Nerves he was witty enough and there is a very deft comedy scene for two old ladies in Forgiveness, produced at the “St. James’” Theatre by Sir George Alexander. His first attempts at dramatic work, made on the tiny stage of German Reed’s, were entirely in quaint comedy.

I think a free rendering of a fancy of Hugh Conway’s on the Blue-and-White China Craze was one of the first things he did for the stage and it contained some charming lyrics after the Elizabethan manner which won instant recognition.

I quote three of them, for they were never printed for the public.

From The United Pair.

DUET: SONG OF THE TWO CHINA-COLLECTORS.

Sextus.

A love like mine is far above

The thing that we are told is love,

In Shakespeare or in Chaucer.

For while they are content to praise

The famous forms of classic days,

I revel in the form and glaze,

Of one unrivalled saucer.

Virginia.

Ah sir, I know the thought is vain,

Yet if a man were porcelain,

Then love would be the master;

If only in a single night

Your face could change to blue and white,

I think at such a glorious sight

My heart would beat the faster.

Virginia and Sextus.

And such a love were far above

The thing that we are told is love,

In Shakespeare or in Chaucer;

For while they are content to praise

The famous forms of classic days,

We revel in the form and glaze,

Of every cup and saucer.

Sextus.

Ah madam, if that dream were true,

How easy would it be to woo,

And never fear the winning;

If woman also could be graced

With all the silent charms of paste,

Then love could never be misplaced,

And hate have no beginning.

Virginia.

Then every vase would find its mate,

Each dish would woo a neighbouring plate,

Each bowl would wed a beaker;

And if perchance, through pride or pique,

Some youth or maid should fail to speak,

Each bachelor would be unique,

And each old maid uniquer.

Virginia and Sextus.

And such a love were far above

The thing that we are told is love,

In Shakespeare or in Chaucer;

For while they are content to praise

The famous forms of classic days,

We revel in the form and glaze,

Of every cup and saucer.

The following duet bore a charming promise of the maturer work that was to follow in wider spheres.

From The United Pair.

Played at Mr. and Mrs. German Reed’s about 1880.

From The Naturalist.

A SONG OF PROVERBS.

These little pieces were admirably rendered by Mr. Alfred Reed and his company, and they won instant success.

I can see Mr. Clement Scott’s delighted face just under my box on the first night of The United Pair and hear his burst of laughter at the concluding line of the “Song of the China Collectors.”

But the one of the three comediettas upon which Joe spent the most pleasant care was The Friar—a little thirteenth century fancy of his own invention and for which he wrote the following verses, giving charming expression to the pique of a high-born damsel towards her proud lover and the sorrow of the shepherd swain who becomes the favourite of an hour.

THE LADY ISOBEL’S SONG.

THE SHEPHERD AND THE LADY.

THE SHEPHERD’S SONG.

The Shepherd’s Song I have heard him say he was as well pleased with as with any of his later and more ambitious verse; but it is curious to note that, quite unconsciously, he repeated the line “But now the strings have all one tone” in the Lute Song, written nearly thirty years after, for The Beauty Stone, an opera done in conjunction with Sir Arthur Pinero to Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music.

The book of The Beauty Stone was published, but I quote the Lute Song for those who did not know it.

THE LUTE’S SONG.

But dainty as is this little song, it does not to my mind equal in charm the duet of the two old lovers in the same opera.

THE OLD LOVERS OFFERING ONE ANOTHER THE BEAUTY STONE.

In the Beauty-Stone Joe was only responsible for the lyrics and parts of the plot. But I know that his idea of the man’s true love being first awakened after he became blind was dear to him, and he used it again in his adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde for H. B. Irving; but there it is the wife whose blindness hides from her all but the beautiful side of her husband.

Such were the chief of Joe’s plays. Tireless energy was given to the production of them all, for I think it was universally admitted that no one bore the strain of rehearsals as cheerily and patiently as Joe. But these attributes shone equally in his work upon the plays of others produced during his many years of management at the Comedy Theatre, at the Lyceum, after it was taken over by a company, at His Majesty’s when producing plays for Sir Herbert Tree, and lastly at Covent Garden, where he arranged the mise en scÈne for Parsifal at a time when he was already stricken by failing health.

Many strenuous hours were spent over each of these ventures in the most arduous of professions; but what I prefer to recall are the gay ones—the merry moments—the unfailing good humour, wit and pleasant jest by which my husband lightened the weary waits with which all who have laboured for the stage are familiar.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I can hear him retort cheerfully to some impatient spectator who was grumbling at the long waits during the last rehearsal of Julius CÆsar at His Majesty’s Theatre; and none was so ready as his friend the actor-manager, with the appreciative laugh.

Lady Tree—Maud, to us—reminds me of his favourite attitude as he would stand watching the effects of the lighting of his scenes from the empty stalls with his stick passed through his arms behind his back, and his cheery tones uttering the most fearful anathemas against lime-light men and scene-shifters.

One day I said to him: “Don’t get so angry, Joe, it must tire you out.”

To which he replied with his usual promptness, “Angry, my dear! Why, I’m only using the language proper to lime-light men: they understand no other.”

Once at a Christmas rehearsal, when the stage-hands were all rather more tipsy than was generally allowable, he came from the stage, and as he sat down beside me in the stalls he said with a whimsical smile: “Poor old Burnaby! He keeps muttering, ‘Buried a wife o’ Toosday and now, s’elp me, can’t lay my ’and on a hammer.’”

He was held in firm affection by his stage-hands just as he was by his New Gallery staff, not forgetting the decorators, and those superior frame-gilders who were only induced by regard for “the boss” to work together in completing the balustrade of the balcony during the strenuous last days before the opening of that “Aladdin’s palace.”

I recollect one of the scene-shifters at His Majesty’s Theatre putting his shoulder out at a rehearsal and Joe taking him to hospital himself; I should never have known of it but that the man’s quaint expression of gratitude—“Your gentlemanly conduct, sir, I never shall forget”—so pleased Joe that he had to repeat it to me.

The humours of these people always delighted him, and I can see his mock-grave face as he told me of the head stage-carpenter’s refusal to carry out an order because it was the day upon which: “We’re all subservient to Mr. Telbin”—an excuse which Joe, knowing that irascible scene-painter’s peculiarities—found sufficient.

No memories are pleasanter to me than those of presentations to us by these working folk. I have a little Old English silver waiter, an inscribed gift from the employÉs at the Comedy Theatre for our silver wedding; and a ponderous marble clock, also touchingly inscribed, which the foreman of the stage-hands in the Lyceum Company presented to Joe in the library of our Kensington house. The man stood in the centre of the room making a speech, but before it was ended nature prevailed and he concluded hastily: “If I don’t set it down somewhere I shall let it drop.”

Joe had given instructions to our maid to pay the donor’s cab, and when he retired and found it gone, we were all in dismay upon learning that he had left his overcoat in it.

Anecdotes of entertainments in the higher circles of the stage Joe has told himself in his two books of Reminiscences, the most notable of them being Henry Irving’s splendid reception to the Rajahs, when the stage and stalls of the Lyceum were transformed into one vast flower-garden in half an hour after the fall of the curtain. But I can add my testimony as to memorable evenings spent at His Majesty’s Theatre and at Sir Henry Irving’s supper-table in the “Old Beefsteak Room” of the Lyceum Theatre, when I listened proudly to Joe’s brilliant talk or speeches, and was sometimes privileged to act as interpreter between the host and the many distinguished foreigners who graced that board. Liszt, Joachim, Sarasate are names which recur to me among them as musicians; but, of course, the guests were chiefly actors and actresses, flattered, I think, at the fine welcome from the foremost English Manager.

Booth, Mary Anderson, Mansfield were the foremost Americans, to the latter of whom I remember Irving’s grim advice À propos of the fatigue of a ventriloquist-voice in a gruesome part: “If it’s unwholesome I should do it some other way.” Jane Hading, Coquelin, RÉjane and, of course, the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt represented the French; and I think Salvini was the only one from the stage of Italy.

Sarah and our dear Ellen Terry were always great friends, and I call to mind a pretty little passage when they were sitting opposite to one another and Sarah, leaning forward, cried, in response to some gracious word of Nell’s: “My dearling, there are two peoples who shall never be old—you and me.”

The words are still, happily, true at the hour when I write.

Relating to members of the German stage entertained by Sir Henry, the most amusing incident is that related by Joe himself in detail: of the great actor’s grim humour in calling upon him suddenly to speak in praise of the Sax-Meiningen Company, when Joe had innocently told him an hour before that he had been unable to go to any of their performances. Ladies were not present on that occasion, but I was told that Joe’s speech was one of the wittiest he ever delivered: there was nothing that so sharpened his rapier as being apparently put at a disadvantage.

I find no mention by himself of a similar occurrence on a different issue. This time Irving had invited the Oxford and Cambridge crews to supper and, being suddenly indisposed, was unable to propose their health. Without even waiting to be asked Joe rose to his feet and, anxious to divert the young men’s attention from their host, surpassed himself in exuberant fun, keeping them in a roar of laughter for a quarter of an hour over his alleged uncertainty as to which of the two ’Varsities had secured the honours of the boat-race.

I am told that Joe again acquitted himself well at a dinner given to Arthur Balfour, when Anthony Hope called upon him without notice from the chair to return thanks for his proposed health. I don’t know why or how the inspiration came, but “Love” was Joe’s topic, and it is easy to imagine what a gracious and merry time he made with the various aspects of this subject.

Of his meetings with Italian actors and actresses Joe does not speak save in the instance of Madame Ristori, for whose genius he had an unsurpassed veneration.

His Eminent Victorians contains the tale of an afternoon at her house when she had invited him and one or two of the dramatic critics to hear her speak Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene in English with a view to doing it before a British audience.

Her large and sonorous rendering of the line “All the perfumes of ArÂbia” delighted him, though he tried to teach her our own insular pronunciation; he was loudly in favour of the public performance in English, which she finally gave, and I shall never forget the awe-inspiring effect of the slow and gentle snoring which she kept running through the whole of the speech.

Joe never admired even Salvini as much, though he revelled in his great voice on the resounding Roman tongue. He made us all laugh one day by mimicking the mincing tones of a Cockney interpreter translating the Italian tragedian’s sonorous language when returning thanks for his London welcome at a public dinner.

Eleonora Duse, for whom our Nell had the most ardent admiration, was rarely able, by reason of her frail health, to grace festive occasions after her work; but Joe had one or two interesting meetings with her during the season that she rented one of the theatres that he managed and we were all present together at her pathetic performance of the Dame aux Camelias; the next night we witnessed Sarah Bernhardt in the same rÔle, and Joe gives an able comparison of the two performances in Coasting Bohemia. On the latter occasion a note came round to Nell from the stage saying: “To-night I play for you.” And the promise was well kept.

Speaking of Sarah Bernhardt, I recall a happening of the days before Joe was entitled to the consideration due to a theatrical manager; he had obtained a promise from the famous lady that she would lunch with us in our quiet home and we bade to meet her not by any means our “second-best” friends—to quote a huffed English actor regarding the guests of another evening. We waited an hour with a patient party and then Joe hastened with a cab to fetch the lady, only to be told that she had forgotten the engagement and was in her bath preparing to keep another. I need not perhaps record that Joe’s wit was equal to the occasion in pacifying our outraged guests.

He and Sarah became firm friends later, and she had Joe’s King Arthur translated into French with a view to playing the part of Lancelot; but this intention was never carried out.

So many and various are the memories which crowd upon me connected with the stage that it is quite impossible for me to sift and record them without undue risk of boring any readers I may have. Suffice it to say that I think, of his many occupations, the theatre, whether in writing for it or in labouring at productions upon it, was the one which most entranced and held Joe. Not only did he love every detail of the work, but it brought him in daily contact with all sorts and conditions of men and women, taxed his powers as a leader of them and gave him hourly opportunity for the exercise of his humanizing and inspiring gift: that highest kind of humour which needs no preparation, but is evoked by every little passing incident and has its real might in the love of mankind.

Perhaps I may here quote a portion of an American interviewer’s account of a talk with Henry Irving, sent to Joe by J. L. Toole during one of his old friend’s long tours in the United States.

“The Wittiest Man in England.”

“Whom do you consider the wittiest man in England to-day?”

“Well, in my opinion, the greatest of our wits is a man of whom very little is known out here. He is Comyns Carr, who wrote King Arthur for me.”

“He is a theatrical manager in London, is he not?”

“Yes, at the present he is, but he is a distinguished man in literature as well. A polished essayist and the most sparkling man I have ever met. As an extemporaneous speaker he is delightful.”

“Is he an Irishman?”

“Perhaps he is, originally. Now you speak of it. Do you know if Carr is an Irish name? Comyns is at any rate and then most of our celebrated wits have been Irishmen—our Sheridans and our Goldsmiths?”

With this pleasing tribute to my husband I may fitly close these theatrical reminiscences, though I like to recall that Joe and Henry Irving had appreciations of one another on a graver side to which some pages in Eminent Victorians testify, and many are the pleasant holiday hours we spent as his guests both abroad and at home. He used to visit the old-world village of Winchelsea by Rye, where we had a cottage close to the ancient gateway of the town—afterwards sold to Ellen Terry.

But the most notable of our joint trips was that to Nuremberg in search of material for the production of Faust. This was the first occasion on which I made a hit with my designing of Ellen Terry’s dresses, which I afterwards did for nearly twenty years. Being the only one of the party speaking German, I made many bargains in the shops and on the old market-place chiefly under Joe’s direction but also by request of Henry or Nell. She bought me a solid housewife’s copper jug in the market, and Joe and I secured an old ivory casket which she accepted from us and in which she kept the gew-gaws in the “Jewel Scene.”

She and I had a delightful evening in the old Castle, I having persuaded a little girl-custodian to let us in after hours so that we saw the place in solemn loneliness with the sunset glow reddening the red roofs of the city far below us.

I won the admission by a highly coloured description of the actress in Shakespeare, which the child actually had seen in her own town; and Nell promised her a signed photograph—punctually posted on our return.

This excursion was made while Joe and Henry were away at Rothenburg, which my husband had insisted that Irving must see on account of its unique preservation of untouched city-wall and battlements.

It was a memorable tour, of which Joe tells some interesting anecdotes in Coasting Bohemia.

In speaking of the long drives which his host loved and so greatly preferred to any kind of exercise, Joe does not confess, however, how impossible he found it to keep himself awake. “We sit side by side and sleep for hours!” he would tell me regretfully when he came home. And I don’t suppose it occurred to any of us then that it was the best rest that tired theatrical managers could have.