Nat Goodwin--and Another

by MAX BEERBOHM

1

IN the autumn of 1902 my brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, occupied a house called Jackwood, on the top of Shooter’s Hill, When I returned from my annual holiday in Dieppe to the duties of dramatic critic, he asked me to go there for the coming week-end. On the Saturday there was a “first night" at which I had to be present; so it was arranged that I should travel down, with a suit-case, after the performance. A cab was waiting for me when I arrived at Blackheath; and, while this vehicle climbed slowly, in the dead of night, the long steep hill up past Woolwich, I was filled with a vague sense of romance. To have been so lately in the glare of that theatre, and now to be here in these solitudes under the stars. . . . Life seemed wonderful (though really, of course, it was I who was wonderful in being able to secure romance on such cheap terms). Had I been a conspirator in a strange land, finding my way towards some appointed spot for some fell purpose, I could not have been prouder of myself.

Perhaps the very fact that the hind was not strange to me had something to do with my excitement. There is less romance in coming to it new place than in coming to one which you have known in other days. There is especial romance in coming to a house which you knew well before its present inmates were there in seeing the old place under another dynasty, I had several times stayed at Jackwood when it was tenanted by Nat Goodwin, the American actor, and his wife, the beautiful Maxine Elliott. Always in the spring, when the theatrical season “out there” was over, Nat Goodwin came to his “English home” (as he called it, with a deep fond drawl of the “o”, making the English pronunciation of that word sound very trivial and heartless by comparison). On the stage he was one of the finest comedians I ever saw — the quietest and surest. Off the stage he had lived much in the company of prize-fighters, jockeys, professional card-players, and other folk whose good opinion was not a passport to the higher circles of life in the land of Emerson and Longfellow. But, as one so often finds in the case of men who have lived wildly, he had preserved a flower-like simplicity of soul; and it was always a great joy to him to be at Jackwood, leading there what he believed to be the life of an English country-gentleman of the old school. He knew all about dogs and horses, loved them, had a wonderful way with them, and a fabulously expensive collection of them. One of the horses I remember especially: an enormous brown creature with a flashing eye, driven by Nat Goodwin in a fearsome little vehicle whose name I forget. It was a vehicle which Goodwin had brought over from America, and I think he regarded it as a rather false note in the English scene: he used to say, with a note of apology, that, it was “vurry handy.” It was appallingly handy. It consisted of nothing but two very large thin wheels with a sort of little basket slung low between for Goodwin and one friend to sit in. I was sometimes that one friend. The gigantic horse I regarded as our common enemy. There was nothing between him and the basket, and I think that had he dared he would have killed us both with a couple of well-directed kicks. But he dared not. He was a coward of cowards. There were few things he did not shy at, and from them he bolted. But who am I that I should sneer at him? He had at least the courage of his cowardice; not I of mine. I pretended to be enjoying those drives.

Travelling slowly now up that road which had been wont to flash past like lightning, I thought reverently of those old days — only two or three years old though they were. I reproached myself for coming to Jackwood under other auspices. Though I knew that Goodwin still owned the house, had tired of it, and was very glad to let it, I thought of him as the Old Squire expropriated — driven forth by penury from the house of his forefathers, with a broken heart. There, where generations of simple, brave, God-fearing Goodwins had lived and died, the alien held high revel, the gross Beerbohm junketed . . . My heart was heavy when the cab passed through the old gates, which dated from the days of Victoria. I was glad to see that the house was not brilliantly lit up within — glad when the servant who let me in said that the family had all gone to bed. I passed noiselessly into the diningroom, and there, under the influence of a cold partridge and a bottle of excellent Rhenish wine, gave rein to sentiment. Late the hour, but early in comparison with many hours I had spent in this room. The house had been designed and built for the late Lord Penzance — “President,”Goodwin would say with unction, “of your Court of Arches,”but evidently not a smoker, for the house had no smoking-room. It was in the dining-room, therefore, that Goodwin cultivated, with Rye Whiskey and ice and green cigars, the crescent hours of the morning. Blond and saturnine, he sat at the head of the table, very low down in his chair, staring at the smoke of his cigar, drawling interminable stories. Barring Charles Brookfield, he was the best actor of stories I ever heard; but these two men were of schools so different that it is absurd to compare them. Brookfield dealt in persons, Goodwin in types. Brookfield gave you the person, and the situation, and the point, in three quick flashes. Goodwin gave you the type, and the milieu, and the point if there was one, in a long sequence of minute and inimitable touches. The two men had but one excellence in common: utter lack of strain or effort. Brookfield shone hardly less as a commentator on life than as a portrayer of it. He was socially equipped at all points. Goodwin was a great portrayer merely. As theorist he was primitive and bemused. And here in this dining-room he had not been great in the intervals between his stories of life out West or down South. These intervals would grow longer as the night waned and the smoke thickened and the ice melted and the Rye Whiskey ebbed in its decanter. Goodwin on Theology was not great: and it was to Theology that he most tended in these intervals ... “I once had a book called ‘ Paley’s Evidences.’ Paley was a great Englishman, and you ought to be damned proud of him . . . It’s easy enough to be an Atheist, like Ingersoll . . . Paley knew what he was talking about. Fine . . . Paley convinced me . . . I don’t say every word in the Bible’s true. No, Sir. But the Sermon on the Mount — well, it’s fine.” In some such fashion Nat Goodwin would ramble on, emerging gradually from darkness into the light of another story, while daylight itself crept in through the windows to listen, and our laughter made inaudible the twittering of birds.

Where now were the echoes of that laughter? I wandered out from the silent room into the silent hall. It is always uncanny to be afoot in a house while all the others are sleeping. It is uncannier still to be afoot in a house where you have not yet seen those others who sleep. Slightly shivering, I gazed around the familiar expanse of panelled hall, for some signs of habitation. And the first sign that caught my eye touched every nerve in me to astriction. Rigid, I stared at it across the hall. There it stood, upright and alone, on a long oaken chest that I remembered. Dim though the light was, I had no need to go nearer. I knew the thing. And I thought of Robinson Crusoe and the footprint in the sand. And more than ever did that incident seem to me the most arresting of all incidents in romance. And more than ever, at this moment, do I wonder that Defoe, having conceived it, had the heart to make so little of it. “But now,”said Defoe, “I come to a new scene of my life. It happened one day about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.” It is all very well to talk of classic simplicity and directness; but any one who isn’t a pedant, any one with a touch of dramatic instinct in him, can see how grievously much here was losi by lack of dramatic preparation. The fact that Crusoe saw the thing suddenly doesn’t justify Defoe in springing it on us-. A reader, to feel a shock in its full force, must know that there is some sort of a shock in store for him. “Something,” he must be made to feel, “something what? — is going to happen. Don’t keep me in suspense! I can’t bear it! See, I am quite calm. Tell me!” And then, when the shock comes, the overstrained reader duly collapses, with a piercing shriek, palsied. On the other hand, he feels perfectly all right if, as in the instance here quoted, he has had the awful news before he knew there was any such news to be hack I admit that this business of dramatic suspense may be carried too far. Laurence Sterne’s trick of leading his reader up to some crucial point, and then shunting him off to hear a disquisition about something else, is an amusing enough trick, for once and away. But constant repetition of it palls, and I regard “Tristram Shandy” as for that reason one of the most unreadable books in our or in any other language. And I hasten to tell you, without more ado, that what I saw on the oaken chest in the dim hall of Jackwood was a hat. It was a silk hat, very tall, tapering somewhat from base to crown; and its brim was notably wide and flat. It was rather like the hats which Frenchmen wore in the Second Empire, and still more like the hats proper to the female peasants of Wales. But I was not misled into false hope by these casual resemblances. I knew the hat. I had often caricatured it—it and its wearer. I knew them both well by sight. I knew the wearer’s works, too. I had written, in morethan one of the public prints, very irreverently, very gallingly about some of those works. My caricatures of that worker, that wearer, they too had appeared in the public prints. With all the ribaldry of youth, I had persecuted Hall Caine. And here he was, under this roof. Here was his hat.

I stood as one frozen. Why had not my brother warned me? Nay, why had not I myself foreseen the dire likelihood? I had known that “The Eternal City" was in rehearsal at His Majesty’s; and a manager and an author during the period of rehearsal are always more or less inseparable . . . I looked at the front-door. How easy to shoot back these bolts and flit! And yet I could not do it. Just that cowardice-within-cowardice which had kept me exposed to that great wild horse of Nat Goodwin’s held me now for exposure to this great wild author.

2

NEXT morning I awoke jaded with the sense of having dreamed awful things all through the night. In sleep, where imagination is uncontrolled by reason, what flights are taken by even the most unenterprising, the littlest and least lurid minds! And it occurred to me to wonder, while I bathed, “What must the dreams of a Hall Caine be like?”

The act of shaving is tonic. And Sunday morning, and a flood of September sunshine are sedatives. I reminded myself that Hall Caine could not, in the phrase of the vulgar, eat me, and went downstairs holding my head high.

From the dining-room came a pretty sound of children in song — a sound as of some little hymn being learned. My vision, as I went in, included napery and cutlery, and ham and eggs, and Hall Caine himself, and two little nieces of mine, one on either side of their father’s chair, a paternal arm encircling each of them. The singing broke off at the uncle’s entry. There was a brotherly greeting, an avuncular kiss was bestowed on two small cool brows, Hall Caine’s hand gripped mine, mine Hall Caine’s. “Now,” said father to children, “try again, my darlings. A little more together, this time . . . Now!”

“There! That was much better,” Herbert admitted. “But not quite so good, my darlings, as it might be. Once again!” Hall Caine flung back his head and hands, with a glance at me and a facetious groan. I saw that he was blushing—had been blushing before I came into the room. And that very human blush endeared him to me ever after. Mere fun though the hymn was, mere chaff, yet it was a sort of tribute, too. He liked it. It was a laughing tribute to fame. It was also and more directly a tribute to good-nature. “What a fellow it is!” his glance said to me of my brother; but his blush said more to me of himself. He may not have known I knew — may not himself have known — just what his feelings were while those two little girls carolled. But he knew that somehow he and I were in sympalhy. Something was established between us.

Of course, the past could not be undone. But gone was any resentment he may have had, and gone any little hostility that may have been in me. And it was not to relieve tension, but because the topic came pat, that he talked now to me, across the breakfast-table, of the sufferings caused him by one of my drawings especially. This was a crude and unpretentious little design which I had almost forgotten. It showed Hall Caine, with frenzied eyes and hair, bearing a sandwich-board on which his name was inscribed in lavish capitals. It had been reproduced on a small scale in one of the English weekly papers. But not there, l now learned from Hall Caine, was an end of it. He went to lecture in America, and, into whatsoever city he entered, always that presentment stared him in the face. It cropped up, with nerve-shattering iteration, in every local paper, often magnified to the scale of a full page. If it wasn’t on the front page, there it was on the middle page. His impresario suggested that it might make a good poster. It pursued him, it wore him down . . .

I said how sorry I was. I assured him that the drawing, in so far as I could remember it, was a failure. I pleaded that I had but seen him casually in theatres and other public places. Henceforth, having met him at close quarters, I should be able to do something more nearly like. A caricature done at sight was mere hit-or-miss — usually miss. At best it could only be superficial. True, one didn’t have to know a man well before one could do a good caricature of him. On the contrary, as soon as one knew a man really well, one ceased to have a clear vision of him -took him rather as a matter of course. But acquaintance (said I, envisaging Hall Caine) was a necessity. A man’s gestures, the movements of his face, the very tone of his voice — to say nothing of the tone of his mind—all these things the caricaturist needed to know before he could make a proper synthesis.

Yes, I used the word synthesis. I remember, because one of my little nieces asked the meaning of the word. I seldom used such words except in writing. But I was fluent enough in them when I spoke with authority; and, as caricature was one of the very few subjects about which I really did know something, “synthesis” said I. I tried to go even further. “Henceforth,” I said to Hall Caine, “I shall be able to — to” — I wavered between synthesise and syntheticise — “to make a proper synthesis of you, you know.”

I forget whether Hall Caine seemed as glad of this as I was. But — like to like — I think my earnestness pleased him. Certainly the caricatures I did of him in the future were much better than the old ones. I got the expression of his face, whereas previously I had got only the form. Familiar to me already was that great red river of hair which, from its tiny source on the mountainous brow, spread out so quickly and flowed down so strongly and gushed at last in such torrents over the coat-collar. Viewing these rapids from a practical standpoint, I had often thought it a pity that so much force should not be utilised somehow — for turning a millwheel, say, or working an electrical plant. But in the course of this Sunday at Jackwood I began to suspect that the great light of Hall Caine’s eyes was indeed worked by this means; also the great and (so slight was his chest) astonishing resonance of his voice. His eyes, in their two deep caverns beneath the lower slopes of Mt. Brow, shone wondrously when he talked. His whole body seemed to quiver as though too frail for the powerful engines installed in it. I think it was this very frailty that gave to his talk, when he was in full swing, the peculiar effectiveness that it had. When a large, robust man talks loudly and well to you from the bottom of his soul, you are stirred, but not so much as when you are thus addressed by one whose body counts for so little that you seem to see as an almost physical thing the soul itself. The sight of an Atlantic liner in motion is grand; but you get a greater thrill from looking down through a hatch into the engine-room and seeing with your own eyes the monstrous forces of leaping and writhing steel there. Such a hatch — if I may say so without straining metaphor too far — was available on the surface of Hall Caine.

It was the fashion to decry him. I never, thank Heaven for self-respect! went to tea-parties. But I know that at tea-parties it was always possible to raise a titter by the mere mention of Hall Caine’s name. More or less it was everywhere so. And there is no denying that Hall Caine had rather brought this on himself. There had come a time when he got himself interviewed too much, photographed too much, seen too much, advertised in every conceivable way too much. I think this lust for publicity may have been a result of residence with Rossetti. Conceive, a raw and excitable stripling, caught suddenly from Liverpool into still more vital London, to live incessantly apart for almost two years with a man of genius who suffered from agoraphobia in an acute form. It was thought that Hall Caine lost too little time after Rossetti’s death in bringing out a book about him. Poor young man!— I think it was natural that he should desire to lose not a moment. Light! air! publicity at any price and at once! — such was the quite inevitable and excusable reaction. Then followed years of steady, quiet work, of publication in the normal manner. “See,” said the Muses to the Graces, “he has settled down. He will always he all right now.” And Nature, overhearing them, smiled to herself grimly. All right — he? That one little bout enough to counteract for ever all those long months at 16. Cheyne Walk? And, sure enough, suddenly one fine morning, out rushed Hall Caine into the market-place and chartered a cart and a trumpet and the biggest, big drum that ever was made, and blew a blast on that trumpet, and in that cart, in that by-his-earlyMaster-too-much-abhorred market-place, beating that drum with his left hand, wrote “The Christian.” Had he presently fled away to the top of an ivory tower in the desert, and there hurled stones down at any one who dared come within a stone’s throw, he could not have appeased the wrath of us superior persons. But he did not flee. He stayed where he was, abiding by his later manner. His popularity was enormous; but he had cheapened his work as well as his reputation. In his earlier work there was — is — imagination, a strong dramatic sense, a very genuine humanity; not. beauty; not restraint; but qualities enough for much admiration and gratitude. Nor from the later works were these qualities gone; but all smothered and bedevilled and annulled they were by the author’s desire to spread himself out and be panoramic and a preacher and a prophet. Simple and strong dramatic crises of simple and strong human beings, with the Isle of Man for background — this was the prescription he ought to have stuck to and, but for Rossetti, would probably have stuck to. However, there is no use in repining. Greater joy was given to a greater number of people by Hall Caine’s later than by his earlier manner. Let us others take comfort. I have already the special comfort I took, that morning at Jackwood, in the discovery that Hall Caine himself belonged to his earlier manner: human and direct, unassuming (though so very effective) and unspoiled,

3

AFTER luncheon he was closeted with my brother; for he had come specially to discuss those various “cuts” and amplifications which in course of a play’s rehearsal often do seem desirable, even to the author. But, removed though he thus was from sight and hearing, I seemed to be aware of him all over the house. It was as though he sent wide vibrations, like the screw of a vessel; and as the effect was to make me feel rather uncomfortable I was glad when, at tea-time, he reappeared in person. He showed signs of fatigue, and it is not unlikely that the confabulation had been rather a trial. My brother was always liked by any one who worked with him. He was intuitive, easy, eager, and generous-minded. But his sense of humor was not under control; and I think Hall Caine had often a rather difficult time with him. “A little tomfoolery in our hours of relaxation is most wholesome” — I can imagine that sentiment cherished by Hall Caine. But my brother was apt to gambol at the most inauspicious moments; and the very sublimity of Hall Caine’s earnestness was a standing temptation. I think there may have been gambols on this Sunday afternoon. But after a cup of tea Hall Caine was himself again and talking as well as ever. He complained that in one respect the critics were hardly just to him. I noticed that he did not call them the critics, but the Gentlemen of the Press. This phrase, usual and null though it is at a Public Dinner, seemed to take on an extraordinary significance, an awe-inspiring “value,” in private life. There mysteriously it implied at once a compliment and an indictment. I was dramatic critic of “The Saturday Review.” It was borne in on me that I was a Gentleman of the Press. I had never thought of myself in that light — or was it that darkness? It was both; and I experienced pride and shame. “The Gentlemen of the Press,” I heard Hall Caine saying, “twit me with being melodramatic.” His argument was that if what they deemed to be melodrama was melodrama and nothing else, then all the serious dramatists since the world began had abounded in melodrama. He gave examples. I saw that if we Gentlemen of the Press were right in our first principles, then was Shakespeare essentially a melodramatist. My newfound esprit de corps forbade me to abandon those principles, and I knew that Shakespeare wasn’t melodramatic, but — well, what were our first principles exactly? I never had any presence of mind in argument. With men of my own age, I usually lost my temper— I, who so depended on being always suave. Among my elders, a very real modesty saved me from such loss by debarring me from conflict — even if these elders happened to be so old as to be no more than a match for me. Had Hall Caine been as old as Methuselah I would not have interrupted him. The fact that he wasn’t fifty set an additional seal on silence. Besides, I liked listening to him.

And for that reason I was rather sorry when my eldest niece, Viola, asked him if she might do a drawing of him. I felt it was only right that the charming talent of the niece should give a counterpoise to the things done by the repulsive talent of the uncle; but I fell also that Hall Caine, thorough in all things, would not talk while he gave a sitting. Nor in fact did he. But I was to be compensated for his silence by a deed which made me like him more than ever. My niece was drawing him in side-face, and, as he sat with his head bent slightly downwards, his very high loose collar covered in some measure the lower part of his face. He suddenly realised that this must be so and asked if it was so. My niece admitted that the collar did rather interfere. “Had I better take it off?” asked the sitter, and adroitly, without moving his head, he loosened his neck-tie, plucked the collar open in front and twitched it wholly off from the back of his neck. And, as he sat holding it in his hand, I was not a little thrilled at seeing on it the name of a firm of hosiers whose popularity was as wide as Hall Caine’s own: Hope Bros, I don’t deny that his action had amused me. But if you are merely amused by it you are shallower than I. It betokened some vanity; but more did it betoken honesty, simplicity. If you and I had faces as characteristic and distinguished as Hall Caine’s we should be vain of them. But we should pretend that they were as naught, and that it was no matter whether or not they were partially hidden. If we knew beforehand that we were going to be portrayed, we should secretly prepare ourselves to the best advantage, and try to look as if we had made no preparation at all. If in the course of a sitting sprung on us we discovered some defect, we should not have the courage to rectify it: we should but sit nursing our regrets. In Hall Caine there was no such humbug. He sat nursing his collar; and, as I have said, I liked him the more.

It is a dangerous doctrine, for mankind at large, that first impressions are always right. They are certainly the sharpest, and therefore the hardest to erase, and their resistent quality is often mistaken for rightness in them. But they are trustworthy enough in people who have an intuition for character. People who have that gift are not indeed to congratulate themselves that it is a great one. There are other gifts which I should much prefer to have had — intellect, imagination, bravery, moral fervour, and so on. But, such as it is, I am grateful for this gift. It saves me no end of trouble. If my first impressions happen to be wrong, they are erased with comparative ease because my mind is of so susceptible a substance. And the fact is that they very seldom are wrong. Wrong, I mean, for me. I am not such a fool as to pretend to see any object “as in itself it is.” No man can do that. Or rather, no man can know that he has done that. I claim but the power to see rather quickly Mr. This or Mr. That as he appears to me and as he probably would still appear to me if I spent the rest, of my life with him on a desert island. Fate decreed that Hall Caine and I should not live together on a desert island. Fate went so far as to decree that I should not often meet him after that first time. But those few other meetings — they and some letters I had from him on a matter that concerned us both—strengthened my first impressions of him. And I think of him always not only as a man of great force and magnetism, but as one who had a rare sweetness and sincerity of character, and was very simple and kind and good.