Complete Works of Bram Stoker (681 page)

“If you don’t know the other person’s language, keep on speaking your own. Do not get hurried or flustered, but keep as natural as you can; your intonation, being natural, will convey something. You have a far better chance of being understood than if you try to talk a language you don’t know!”

CHAPTER LVII

HALL CAINE

A remarkable criticism  —  Irving and “ The Deemster “- “ Mahomet”  —  For reasons of State  —  ’Weird remembrances  —  ” The Flying Dutchman “  —  ” Home, Sweet Home”  —  “ Glory and John Storm”  —  Irving and the chimpanzee  —  A dangerous moment  —  Unceremonious treatment of a lion  —  Irving’s last night at the play

I

THE early relations between Irving and Hall Caine are especially interesting, considering the positions which both men afterwards attained. They began in 1874. On the 16th of October in that year Irving wrote to him a very kindly and friendly letter in answer to Hall Caine’s request that he should allow his portrait to be inserted in a monthly magazine which he was projecting.

A fortnight later Hall Caine, as critic of the Liverpool Town Crier, attended the first night of Hamlet at the Lyceum-31st October 1874. His criticism was by many friends thought so excellent that he was asked to reprint it. This was done in the shape of a broad-sheet pamphlet. The critique is throughout keen and appreciative. The last two paragraphs are worthy of preservation:

“To conclude.  —  Throughout this work (which is not confined to the language of terror and pity, the language of impassioned intellect, but includes also the words of everyday life), every passage has its proper pulse and receives from the actor its characteristic mode of expression. Every speech is good and weighty, correct and dignified, and treated with feeling. The variety, strength and splendour of the whole conception have left impressions which neither time nor circumstance can ever efface. They are happy, indeed, who hear Hamlet first from Mr. Irving. They may see other actors essay the part (a very improbable circumstance whilst Mr. Irving holds his claim to it), but the memory of the noble embodiment of the character will never leave them.

“We will not say that Mr. Irving is the Betterton, Garrick, or Kemble of his age. In consideration of this performance we claim for him a position altogether distinct and unborrowed. Mr. Irving will, we judge, be the leader of a school of actors now eagerly enlisting themselves under his name. The object will be  —  the triumph of mental over physical histrionic art.”

This critical forecast is very remarkable considering the writer’s age. At that time he was only in his twenty-second year. He had been writing and lecturing for already some time and making a little place for himself locally as a man of letters.

Two years later they had a meeting by Irving’s request. This was during a visit to Liverpool whilst the actor was on tour. There began a close friendship which lasted till Irving’s death. Caine seemed to intuitively understand not only Irving’s work but his aim and method. Irving felt this and had a high opinion of Caine’s powers. I do not know any one whose opinions interested him more. There was to both men a natural expression of intellectual frankness, as if they held the purpose as well as the facts of ideas in common. The two men were very much alike in certain intellectual ways. To both was given an almost abnormal faculty of self-abstraction and of concentrating all their powers on a given subject for any length of time. To both was illimitable patience in the doing of their work. And in yet one other way their powers were similar: a faculty of getting up and ultimately applying to the work in hand an amazing amount of information. When Irving undertook a character he set himself to work to inform himself of the facts appertaining to it; when the time for acting it came, it was found that he knew pretty well all that could be known about it. Hall Caine was also a “ glutton “ in the same way. He absorbed facts and ideas almost by an instinct and assimilated them with natural ease. For instance, when he went to Morocco to get local colour before writing The Scapegoat he so steeped himself in the knowledge of Jewish life and ideas and ritual that those who read his book almost accepted him as an authority on the subject.

II

When Hall Caine published The Deemster in 1887 Irving was one of its most appreciative admirers. We were then on tour in America and he naturally got hold of the book a little later than its great and sudden English success. Still he read it unprejudiced by its success and thought it would make a fine play. When we got back to England early in April 1888, he took his earliest opportunity of approaching the author; but only to find that he had already entered into an arrangement with Wilson Barrett with regard to dramatisation of the novel.

Irving’s view of this was different to that of both Caine and Barrett. To him the dramatic centre and pivotal point of the play that would be most effective was the Bishop. Had the novel been available he would  —  Caine being willing to dramatise it or to allow it to be dramatised by some one else  —  have played it on those lines.

I think it was a great pity that this could not be, for Irving and Hall Caine would have made a wonderful team. The latter was compact of imagination and  —  then undeveloped  —  dramatic force. With Irving to learn from, in the way of acting needs and development, he would surely have done some dramatic work of wonderful introspection and intensity.  —  As he will do yet; though his road has been a rough one.

From that time on, Irving had a strong desire that Caine should write some play that he could act. Time after time he suggested subjects; theories that he could deal with; characters good to act. But there seemed to be always some impasse set by Fate. For instance, Irving had had for a long time a desire to act the part of Mahomet, and after the publication in France of the play on the subject by De Bornier it seemed to be feasible. Herein too came the memory of the promptings and urging of Sir Richard Burton of some three years before as to the production of an Eastern play. De Bornier’s play he found would not suit his purpose; so he suggested to Hall Caine that he should write one on the subject. Caine jumped at the idea  —  he too had a desire to deal with an Eastern theme. He thought the matter out, and had before long evolved a scenario. Well do I remember the time he put it before me. At that time he was staying with me, and on the afternoon of Sunday, January 26, 1890, he said he would like to give his idea of the play. He had already had a somewhat trying morning, for he had made an appointment with an interviewer and had had a long meeting with him. Work, however, was  —  is-always a stimulant to Hall Caine. The use of his brain seems to urge and stimulate it “ as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” Now in the dim twilight of the late January afternoon, sitting in front of a good fire of blazing billets of old ship timber, the oak so impregnated with salt and saltpetre that the flames leaped in rainbow colours, he told the story as he saw it. Hall Caine always knows his work so well and has such a fine memory that he never needs to look at a note. That evening he was all on fire. His image rises now before me. He sits on a low chair in front of the fire; his face is pale something waxen-looking in the changing blues of the flame. His red hair, fine and long, and pushed back from his high forehead, is so thin that through it as the flames leap we can see the white line of the head so like to Shakespeare’s. He is himself all aflame. His hands have a natural eloquence  —  something like Irving’s; they foretell and emphasise the coming thoughts. His large eyes shine like jewels as the firelight flashes. Only my wife and I are present, sitting like Darby and Joan at either side of the fireplace. As he goes on he gets more and more afire till at the last he is like a living flame. We sit quite still; we fear to interrupt him. The end of his story leaves us fired and exalted too....

He was quite done up; the man exhausts himself in narrative as I have never seen with any one else. Indeed when he had finished a novel he used to seem as exhausted as a woman after childbirth. At such times he would be in a terrible state of nerves  —  trembling and sleepless. At that very time he had not quite got through the nervous crisis after the completion of The Bondman. At such times everything seemed to worry him; things that he would shortly after laugh at. This is part of the penalty that genius pays to great effort.

III

The next day, January 27, 1890, in the office at the Lyceum, Caine told  —  not read  —  to Irving the story of his play on Mahomet. Irving was very pleased with it, and it was of course understood that Caine was to go on and carry out the idea. He set to work on it with his usual fiery energy, and in a few months had evolved a scenario so complete that it was a volume in itself. By this time it was becoming known that Irving had in mind the playing of Mahomet. The very fact of approaching De Bornier regarding his play had somehow leaked out. As often happens in matters theatrical there came a bolt from the blue. None of us had the slightest idea that there could be any objection in a professedly Christian nation to a play on the subject. A letter was received from the Lord Chamberlain’s department, which controls the licences of theatres and plays, asking that such a play should not be undertaken. The reason given was that protest had been made by a large number of our Mahometan fellow-subjects. The Mahometan faith holds it sacrilege to represent in any form the image of the Prophet. The Lord Chamberlain’s department does its spiriting very gently; all that those in contact with it are made aware of is the velvet glove. But the steel hand works all the same  —  perhaps better than if stark. It is an understood thing that the Lord Chamberlain’s request is a command in matters under his jurisdiction. Britain with her seventy millions of Mahometan subjects does not wish  —  and cannot afford  —  to offend their sensibilities for the sake of a stage play. Irving submitted gracefully at once, of course. Caine was more than nice on the matter; he refused to accept fee or reward of any kind for his work. He simply preserved his work by privately printing, three years later, the scenario as a story in dramatic form. He altered it sufficiently to change the personnel of the time and place of Mahomet, laying the story of The Mandi in modern Morocco.

This was not Irving’s first experience of the action on a political basis of the Lord Chamberlain. I shall have something to say of it when treating of Frank Marshall’s play, Robert Emmett.

IV

During the visit to me in Edinburgh in 1891 Irving and Caine saw much of one another. On the 18th we took supper with Dr. Andrew Wilson, an old friend of us all, at the Northern Club. That night both Irving and Caine were in great form and the conversation was decidedly interesting. It began with a sort of discussion about Shakespeare as a dramatist  —  on the working side; his practical execution of his own imaginative intention. Hall Caine held that Shakespeare would not have put in his plays certain descriptions if he had had modern stage advantages to explain without his telling. Irving said that it would be good for moderns if they would but take Shakespeare’s lesson in this matter. Later on the conversation tended towards weird subjects. Caine told of seeing in a mirror a reflection not his own. Irving followed by telling us of his noticing an accidental effect in a mirror, which he afterwards used in the Macbeth ghost: that of holding the head up. The evening was altogether a fascinating one; it was four o’clock when we broke up.

V

On November 19, 1892, Hall Caine supped with Irving in the Beefsteak Room, bringing his young son Ralph with him. The only other guest was Sir (then Mr.) Alexander Mackenzie. It was a delightful evening, a long, pleasant, home-like chat. Irving was very quiet and listened attentively to all Caine said. The latter told us the story of the novel he had just then projected. The scene was to be laid in Cracow to which he was shortly to make his way.

Irving was hugely interested. Any form of oppression was noxious to him; and certainly the Jewish “ Exodus “ that was just then going on came under that heading. I think that he had in his mind the possibilities of a new and powerful play. As I said he was most anxious to have a play by Hall Caine, and after the abortive attempt at Mahomet, he was more set on it than ever.

He had before this suggested to Caine that he should do a play on the subject of the “ Flying Dutchman.” The play which he had done in 1878, Vanderdecken, was no good as a play, though he played in it admirably. For my own part I believed in the subject and always wanted him to try it again  —  the play, of course, being tinkered into something like good shape, or a new play altogether written. The character, as Irving created it, was there fit for any setting; and so long as the play should be fairly sufficient the result ought to be good. Irving had a great opinion of Caine’s imagination, and always said that he would write a great work of weirdness some day. He knew already his ability and his fire and his zeal. He believed also in the convincing force of the man.

VI

In 1894 Hall Caine wrote a poem called The Demon Lover, in which he found material for a play. He made a scenario, which he told rather than read to Irving after supper in the Beefsteak Room on St. Valentine’s day of the next year, 1895. Irving was much impressed by it but thought that the part would of necessity be too young for him  —  he was then fifty-six. He asked Caine again to try the “ Flying Dutchman.”

In the June of next year 1896 we were in Manchester in the course of a tour. Hall Caine came over from the Isle of Man to stay with me, bringing with him the scenario of a play on the “ Flying Dutchman “ and also the scenario of a new play which he had just completed, Home, Sweet Home. He read, or rather told, me the latter with the MS. open before him. He never, however, turned the pages! The next forenoon we went by previous arrangement to Irving’s rooms at the Queen’s Hotel. There he read  —  or told from his script  —  the scenario of his play on the “ Flying Dutchman.” We discussed it then, and afterwards during a carriage drive, Irving asked Caine if he could not make the character of Vanderdecken more sympathetic and less brutal at the start. Caine having promised to go into this and see what he could do, then told the story of Home, Sweet Home. Irving feared from the description that the play would not do for him. In Act I. the character was too young; in Act II. too rough; and in Act III. too tall. For his objection in the last case he gave a reason, enlightening in the matter of stage craft: