“The dearest, bravest, truest chap that ever stepped in shoe leather.”—When We Were Twenty-One.

“He’s such an odd sort of chap, always doing such rum things.”—The Wilderness.

If I was asked to describe Harry in one word, the one I should instinctively use would be “Youth”; youth with its happy joy in the simple things of life, youth with its hope and ambition, youth with its intolerance, feeling disappointment and unkindness so deeply, and yet with its tears so quickly dried by the laughter that was never very far away. That was Harry Esmond, who found the world a giant playroom full of toys of which he never tired.

An Irishman, with the true Irishman’s imagination, living so much in dreams that dreams became more real than reality. He saw everything in pictures, vividly and full of life. It would seem that the ideas, which were born in dreams, became the living things of reality. Once, I remember, when he told Charles Hallard, very excitedly, that something he said or did was “foul”, poor Charles protested, “My God! and in the morning he’ll believe it’s true!” We all laughed, Harry with the rest, but I realise how very truly he had judged Harry’s character. Not that he believed it in this particular instance, but, through life, what he said on impulse to-day became conviction to-morrow.

And with all his imagination his love of the fantastic went hand in hand. As little children love to play games in which there is a certain element of “fear”, so Harry loved the fantastic which bordered on terror.

I can see him, seated at dinner at Whiteheads Grove, arguing on the comparative merits of William Morris and Tennyson—he, and those who listened to him, utterly oblivious of the fact that the dinner was rapidly growing cold. To point his argument, he began to quote the Idylls of the King—Arthur’s return:

I shall never forget the horror he put into the words “a thing fell at his feet”, and how the whole tragedy was unrolled in two lines of verse.

Once, too, someone asked him to tell some spiritualistic experience, or some story he had heard from someone who had “seen a spirit”. “Tell us about it,” they asked. Harry, loving the terror which he felt the story would bring, answered in almost a whisper, “No, no, I daren’t; it terrifies me!”, and promptly went on to tell the whole story, enjoying the horror of it all, as children love a ghost story.

The very people he knew were either, in his eyes, wonderful compounds of every virtue or there was “no health in them”. He would meet some individual who, in the first five minutes of their acquaintance, would say or do something which appealed to him: that person became for ever “a splendid chap”; while, on the other hand, some harmless individual who struck a “wrong note” (probably quite unwittingly) was referred to for months as “a terrible fellow”.

The name he took for the stage—Harry Vernon Esmond—was a tribute to romance and imagination. He was young—young in years, I mean—and he loved a wonderful lady, to whom he never addressed a single word. She was Harriet Vernon, who, attired as Gainsborough’s “Duchess of Devonshire”, used to thrill the hearts of the young men of the day every evening at the Tivoli, the Old Oxford, and other Temples of Variety. Harry, with others, worshipped at the shrine of Harriet Vernon. He never spoke to her; I doubt if he ever wanted to: it was simply the adoration of a very young man for a beautiful woman, whose life to him was wrapped in wonderful mystery. Night after night he watched her, and, when he took up the stage as a career, he, being a nineteenth century knight and so unable to “bind her gage about his helm”, openly avowed his admiration and allegiance by taking her name, and so became Harry Vernon Esmond.

Foolish? Ridiculous? I don’t think so; and it was rather typical of Harry’s feelings with regard to women all his life. He loved beautiful women as he loved the beautiful pictures, the beautiful books, and beautiful places of the world. Women, individually, he might—and often did—dislike; but women as women, en masse, he idealised. In all his plays he never drew a woman who was wholly unkind or entirely worthless. He might set out to draw a vampire, a heartless creature without any moral sense; but before the end of the play, the fact that she was a woman would be too strong for him, and in one sentence—perhaps only half a dozen words—he would make you feel that “she so easily might have been different, had fate been kinder”.

Perhaps you remember “Vera Lawrence” in Eliza Comes to Stay. She is mercenary, heartless, and throws over Sandy so that she may marry his rich uncle; but Harry Esmond could not give her to the world as nothing more than that—she was a woman, and a beautiful woman. Listen to the extenuating clause. She is showing Sandy a new umbrella, and says, “It isn’t meant for rain; once it was opened to the rain it would never go back and be slim and elegant again. Oh! Sandy, they opened me to the rain too soon!” That is the echo of some half-forgotten tragedy which had made Vera Lawrence what she was, instead of the woman “she might have been”.

He began to write when he was very young, and I have a manuscript at home of his first play, entitled Geraldine, or Victor Cupid. It is a rather highly coloured work, which has never been inflicted on the public, written in an exercise-book when he was fourteen.

He used to recite, too, when he was a very small boy, and a man who knew him then described him as “a tiresome little boy who would recite long poems to which no one wanted to listen”. The tragedy of the prophet without honour!

We were very young when we married, and it was perhaps due to that fact that Harry was really a very casual lover. I have told elsewhere how his friend was sent to escort me home from the theatre, and there were many other instances which I could quote. After our marriage he changed entirely; he was the most perfect lover any woman ever had, and his letters to me, written when he was on tour and in America, are as beautiful, as full of tenderness and imagery, as anything he ever wrote.

We married with Hope as a banking account, and lived in a little studio flat in Chelsea. In the flat below us (and this is “by the way”, and has nothing to do with Harry as I am trying to depict him to you) lived another young married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Shortt. He became, as all the world knows, the “Right Hon.”, and I wonder if he held as harsh views on the subject of Women’s Suffrage then as he did later.

It was not for some time that Harry realised that he could write. He loved acting passionately, and in his plays you will find all the fire and life which he put into his spoken work. It was perhaps to him, as it has been to many, something of a disadvantage that he could do two things well, for it divided his powers, and he was torn between his desire to act and his desire to create characters which others should portray. Acting was his first love, and the knowledge that he had the power to write, and write well, came to him slowly; I think perhaps he almost distrusted it, as a possible menace to his career as an actor.

They were good days in the little flat, they were indeed “the brave days when we were twenty-one”. Troubles came and we shouldered them, hardly feeling their weight. The small happenings, which then were almost tragedies we were able soon after to look back upon as comedies, because we were young, and happy, and very much in love with each other. The dreadful day came when Harry, who wanted a new bicycle very badly, went to the bank and asked for an advance of eight pounds, which was refused by the manager—the day when our worldly wealth was represented by eighteen shillings, and two pounds in the bank (which we dare not touch, for it would have “closed our account”). Then Cissie Graham (now Mrs. Allen) played the part of the Good Fairy and saved us, though she does not know it. She offered me a special week at Bristol. In the nick of time I was engaged to play in Justin Huntly McCarthy’s Highwayman, and soon after Harry went to George Alexander on contract; and so fate smiled on us again!

Then came his first play—a one-act curtain-raiser called Rest. I suppose all young authors are excited when the first child of their brain is given to the world. I have never seen Harry so excited over any play as he was over Rest. It was played at a matinÉe for Mr. Henry Dana, who was with Sir Herbert Tree for so long, and died not long ago, to the deep regret of all who knew him.

When I speak of Harry’s excitement over this play, I do not want you to think that excitement was unusual with him. He was often roused to a great pitch of excitement by the small, pleasant things of life, because he loved them. He was the embodiment of Rupert Brooke’s “Great Lover”: for him “books and his food and summer rain” never ceased to bring joy and delight. To be blasÉ or bored were things unknown to him. No man ever needed less the Celestial Surgeon to “stab his spirit wide awake”! His joy in the lovely, small things of life was as keen at fifty as it had been at fifteen.

Once, after great difficulty, I persuaded him to go for a holiday on the Continent—for he hated to go far away from his own roof-tree. I always remember the effect the first sight of the Swiss mountains had on him. Do you remember the story of the great Victorian poet who, travelling to Switzerland with his friend, was reading The Channings?—how, when his friend touched him on the arm and said, “Look, the Alps”, he replied, without raising his eyes from his book, “Hush, Harry is going to be confirmed”! This is how differently the sight affected Harry: He had been sitting in the corner of the carriage, dreaming dreams; at last I saw the snow-covered Alps. “Look, Harry,” I said, “the mountains!” He woke from his dreams and looked out; there was a long silence, which I broke to ask if they impressed him very much. All his reply was, “Hush! don’t speak!”

Three things never ceased to make an appeal to him—old people, young children, and animals. I shall never forget his beautiful courtesy to my mother, and in fact to anyone who was old and needed care. Children all loved him, and his relations with his own children were wonderful. Our first baby, Lynette, died when she was only a few days old, and Harry’s first experience of having a child was really when Decima’s little boy Bill came to live with us. When later Jack, and still later Jill, were born, the three were to all intents and purposes one family. Harry was never too busy or too tired to tell them wonderful stories—stories which were continued from night to night, year by year. He used to tell the most exciting adventures of imaginary people, always leaving them in the very middle of some terrible predicament, from which he would extricate them the next evening. I can remember him coming down one evening, after telling one of these adventures to Jill, with a frown of very real worry on his forehead, and rumpling his hair in distress, saying, as he did so, “I’ve left them on the edge of a precipice, and God only knows how I’m going to save them to-morrow night!”—“them” being the characters in the story.

His dogs! In Harry’s eyes, none of them could really do wrong. One I remember, a great Harlequin china-eyed Dane. She was a huge beast, and suffered from the delusion that she was a “lap dog”, and as Harry was the only person who existed in the world, so far as she was concerned, so his was the only lap on which she ever wished to sit. At those moments he was totally extinguished under the mass of dog.

But his best-loved dog was “Buggins”, who was an animal of doubtful ancestry, called out of courtesy by Harry an “Australian Linger”. He originally belonged to the Philip Cunninghams, and Harry, calling there one day and finding Buggins in deep disgrace for some misdemeanour, decided that our flat would be the ideal home for the dog. From that moment, until he died from eating another dog’s meal as well as his own (for, be it said frankly, Buggins was greedy), his life was as gorgeous as Harry could make it. He had a state funeral and lies at “Apple Porch”—the place which he, as well as his master, loved so dearly.

I wish I could tell you adequately of Harry’s humour, but the things he said were funny because he said them and because of the way in which he said them. Put down in black and white, they seem nothing, they might even seem rather pointless; but the memory of Bill sitting with his mouth open, ready to laugh at “Pop’s” jokes, and never waiting in vain, the memory of the roars of laughter which were the accompaniment of every meal—that has lasted while the jokes themselves are forgotten.

The jokes are forgotten, and the laughter remains! That is how Harry lives always for us, who knew and loved him; that is how he lives for Bill, and Jack, and Jill: as the finest playmate they ever had; the man who, though he might treat life as a jest, was desperately serious over games and the things of “make-believe”; who might laugh at the faults which the world thinks grave, and was grave over the faults at which the world too often laughs.

And the sound of his laughter, and of the children laughing with him, brings me to the last picture; brings me to a scene in which Harry, though he did not appear, was the most actual personality in the memory. It was in the restaurant of the Gare du Nord in Paris, in the April of 1922. It was a perfect spring day, the sun was shining, birds were singing, all the trees were full of budding leaf and flowers. We had given his “body to the pleasant earth”; not, I felt, sleeping there alone, for France had become the resting-place of so many Englishmen who had been young, and brave, and beautiful. We had come back to Paris from St. Germain, the children and I. The restaurant was empty, and anyone entering would never have imagined from where we had come and what had been our errand that morning. The children spoke all the time of Harry, and spoke of him with laughter and smiles. It was “Do you remember what Pops said?”, and “What a joke it was that day when Pops did this, that, or the other”, until I realised that, though he had finished his work here, he would always live for the children and for me in the “laughter that remained”.

Graves are kept as green with laughter as with tears; but in our minds there is no feeling of “graves” or death, only the joy of looking back on the sunny days, which had been more full of sunshine because the figure which stood in the midst of the sunlight had been Harry.

Harry would have hated, almost resented, another illness, with all the attendant weariness; would have dreaded a repetition of all he went through in Canada. He, who loved to live every moment of his life to the full, always felt that “to pass out quickly” was the only way to hope to die. His wish was fulfilled when he died so suddenly in Paris. And yet, though he had loved his friends, loved his work, and loved, too, the public life which was the outcome of it, he loved best of all the quiet of his home; there, within its four walls, he would have, had it been possible, done all his work, and had all his friends gather round him.

A last token of the love which those friends bore him is being made to him now by “His Fellow-Craftsmen”; it is a bronze medallion, made by the sculptor, Mr. Albert Toft, and will be placed where Harry’s body lies, at the Cemetery at St. Germain-en-Laye. The beautiful thought originated with Mr. Cyril Harcourt and Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop, and many who loved Harry have joined hands with them. As I write, a letter has just come to me from Mr. Harcourt, saying: “It is done, and we think beautifully. The face and hand, with the cigarette smoke curling up, are wonderful.” I can fancy that Harry sees it too, and says in that beautiful voice of his, full of all the tones and music I know so well:

Of his wonderful charm it is almost impossible to write, and yet it was essentially part of him, and a feature of his personality. Whatever his faults may have been—and he had them, as have all of us—it was his wonderful charm which made them so easy to forgive. As Fred Grove used to say of him:

His friends know, as I do, his generosity; that keen anxiety to help, either by money or kindness, anyone who was unfortunate. Harry never waited to wonder if his help was wise or judicious; a man or woman was poor, underfed, or unhappy, that was enough for him, and any help he could give was at once forthcoming, and given with such unfeigned pleasure at being able to help that I am convinced many of those who asked him for money went away feeling they had conferred a favour on Harry Esmond by borrowing his money.

On his work, both as a writer and an actor, I shall try to touch later. I have tried here to give you the man as I knew him: A boy with the soul of a poet; a man who always in his heart of hearts believed that most men were brave, and, unless life had been unkind, all women good; who evolved a philosophy which, though it may not have been very deep, was always gay; to whom life was full of small excitements, wonderful adventures, and splendid friends; who remained, after thirty years of married life, still a very perfect lover; and who understood his children and was their most loved playmate, because he never ceased himself to be a child; complex, as all artistic natures must be, and sometimes, if he seemed too ready to sacrifice the real to the imaginary, it was because the imaginary to him seemed so much more “worth while”.

Perhaps the best summing-up of Harry that can be given is to quote Henley’s lines on Robert Louis Stevenson:

There, then, is the picture I have tried to make for you: Harry elated over the success of a play; Harry cast down over some unkind cut, grave for a moment, with his gravity turned to smiles at some happy thought which suddenly struck him; our hopes and fears; our good and bad times together; and over all, drowning all other sounds, comes the noise of Harry’s laughter and that of three happy children laughing with him.