Eva Moore

“ 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. ”

“ 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”! ”

“ I saw her do a “Man and Woman” act, one half of her dressed as a woman, the other half as a man. These “two” people fought together—it was a masterpiece. I shall never forget the unstinted praise which it called forth from Harry, who was with me. I saw her not long ago, not on the stage; she was then looking forward to an operation on her eyes, which she hoped would make it possible for her to “work” again. Whether she does so or not, I shall always look back on those two evenings—one at the Tivoli, the other many years later at Chelsea—as occasions when I saw a very brilliant artist at work. ”

“ I have told you how he came to play “D’Artagnan” in the Musketeers, in the place of Lewis Waller, and I remember the doubts which were expressed everywhere as to whether Harry was sufficiently robust and virile to play the part of the Gascon soldier of fortune. How Harry, realising that so far as personal appearance went he was as unlike the traditional hero of Dumas’ romance as well could be imagined, set to work to give such a reading that his slimness, his boyishness, his delicate air of romance, might be changed from handicaps to assets. ”

“ Now, to Harry, “Touchstone” was a “jester”, not a “clown”, and he believed that when Shakespeare so designated him it was used in the sense of “one who clowns or jests”; he saw no reason to make “Touchstone” anything but a “clown” in name, for he held that his words prove him to be the cleverest man in the play, and that he is the forerunner of “Jack Point”, “Grimaldi”, and even poor dear pathetic Dan Leno and Charlie Chaplin—the great comedians who make you laugh with the tears never very far from your eyes, because they are so tragically funny ”

“ The lame man, who looks so fierce, is Sydney Valentine. He looks fierce, and rather as though he had more brain than heart. His looks belie his nature. He leans on his stick by my window, and we talk of the early days of the Actors’ Association. I remind him of the splendid fight he made to gain the Standard Contract for the acting profession. I ask him, “Do you remember the Lyric Theatre meeting?”, and I add some hard things about the people who attacked him there. He smiles, and reminds me of our own Suffrage motto (and how he used to hate the Suffrage Movement, too!) ”

“ 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. 197He, 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. ”

“ I know it is impossible; it needs greater skill than mine to make the men and women live on paper. It is only possible for me to recall some small incident which seems typical of the individual. In itself, that may be a poor way of drawing mental pictures; but it is the only way I can attempt with the smallest hope of success. Great people, whether great in art, wit, or greatness of heart, demand great skill to depict them, so, having excused myself for my inevitable shortcomings, I will set to work. ”

“ Charles Frohman was one of the missing passengers. Early on the Monday, Harry and I went to Queenstown, to try and find his body. The sight we saw in the shed on the Cunard quay is beyond description. Lying on the concrete floor, their hands all tied with thick pieces of rope, lay nearly a hundred victims of war and German civilisation! Men, women, children, and little babies. I shall never forget the pathos of the dead children and babies! Dragged into the awful machinery of war, the Holy Innocents of the Twentieth Century, butchered by the order of a Modern Herod. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A playwright should “hold the mirror up to Nature”, but the result must depend upon what he sees in the mirror; if he sees stories which have the gold and glitter of romance, then, in writing his play, which contains both, he is only depicting truly what he has seen.
Bogey was not the success that it might have been, but it was sufficient to prove finally to its writer that he had the power to write, a power which only needed developing. ”

“ They join the others, and walk in my garden, to remind me of the times we have laughed together, and to assure me that life in the future still has good things for me.
For, make no mistake, youth is very wonderful, youth is very beautiful, but it passes and leaves behind, if you will only try to cultivate it, something which can never pass away: that is the youth that is not a question of years, but of humanity and a young heart. ”

“ In the old days, when we all used to go holiday-making together, when Harry, Gerald du Maurier, and Charles Hallard were almost inseparable companions, they were known as “The Gent., The Genius, and The Young Greek God”—one of those happy phrases, coined under sunny skies, which, under all the fun that prompts them, have a sub-stratum of truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His first play to be produced in London, with the exception of a one-act play called Rest, was Bogey; and here I must quote the Standard critic, who wrote of the play: “A fairy tale, if you will, but a fairy tale which deals with the passions of men and women.” That was so very true of so many of Harry’s plays; they were “fairy tales”, because that was how he saw life—as a wonderful fairy tale, with an ending that was intended to be happy, and, if it failed to be, was so because mortals had meddled with the story and spoiled it. ”

“ I think that was Harry’s feeling about women like his heroine in The Dangerous Age—that it was probably the fault of a very definite “someone” that they had not made a greater success of life.
He loved to write of children, and wrote of them with almost singular understanding and reality. The children in The Wilderness, the two boys in The Dangerous Age, the “Tommy” and the Midshipman in The Law Divine, the small caddie in A Kiss or Two, are all real children, full of humour and wonderful high spirits, who never—as do so many “stage children”—become tedious or boring. ”

“ 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. ”

“ HARRY, THE ACTOR “There comes a time in every man’s life when his own judgment is of greater use to him than other people’s.”
—When We Were Twenty-One. “I have been lectured a good deal during my career.”
—Fools of Nature. No man in his time played more parts than Harry. To begin with, he started very young, started off from the bosom of a family which had no knowledge of the stage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He could play devout lovers, rakes (and what delightful rakes, too, they were!) , old men, and mad men, and play them all with more than a touch of genius. There you had his handicap: from the very fact of the excellence of all he did, he was never allowed to specialise. He never became definitely associated with any special type of part. It never became a case of “No one can play that except Harry Esmond”, for there was probably a part in almost every play which Harry Esmond could have played, and played with charm and distinction. ”

“ Again I seem to see Calgary, with its crowd of men of all nationalities; here a cowboy in full kit, with rattlesnake stirrups; there an Indian, incongruous with his hair in plaits and yet wearing European clothes, his squaw with him; a Japanese; even an Indian wearing a turban—all making a wonderful picture of East and West. And then, in the midst of all this cosmopolitan crowd, the huge hotel with all the most modern comforts—for all the C.P.R. Hotels are wonderful. It was from the roof garden of this hotel at Calgary that I had my first sight of the Rockies—and, oh! the joy of the Rockies. ”

“ Another point of his writing is that almost all the characters, where it is possible, have to depict a full range of emotions. Fun and pathos are in almost every part, every part is worthy of study, for by giving the time and thought to it the actor can come to realise the character in full, because behind the actual written word lies so much that may be found if it is sought for. That is due, I think, to the fact that Harry could, if necessary, have written the whole life of every character, because before he began to write he lived with them, as it were, for weeks. ”

“ He came to the dress rehearsal, and later we rode home to our little flat in Chelsea on the top of a bus, discussing the play. Suddenly, as if struck by a bright thought, he turned to me and said: “Don’t you think you’d look awfully well in a cloak?” I felt dubious, and said so, but that did not shake him. “I do,” he said, and added: “Your legs are much too pretty to show! I’ll see about it in the morning.” He did! Early next morning he went up and saw Monsieur Alias, the cloak was made and delivered to me at the theatre that very evening, and I wore it too. ”

“ I should never wish to be an egotist, even though this is an account of “My Life”; and that is why I have included in my bundle of letters only a few that have been written to me, but mostly those which were written to Harry. Here is one, however, which appealed to me then, and does still, as “high praise”. It is from a Frenchwoman—and is, therefore, “praise from Sir Hubert Stanley”—for it refers to the performance of Mumsie, by Edward Knoblauch—that dear, human, though unsuccessful play for which I had so much love:
I could see working in you all the feelings of a Frenchwoman. ”

“ You’re not the only ornament on the stage, you know!”
Then followed a Barrie play—or, rather, two Barrie plays—one, Josephine, a political satire; the other, Mrs. Punch. I recollect working like a Trojan to learn an Irish jig, and that is about the extent of my memories of the play.
It seems rather remarkable how easily one does forget plays. For the time being, they are a very actual part of one’s life; but, once over, they are very quickly forgotten, with all the hopes and fears, the worries and uncertainties, attached to them. ”

“ She remembered seeing Harry in the part when she “was a little girl”! At the dress rehearsal her fears vanished. She came up to me and told me what she had feared. “But now,” she said, “well, just look at him; he’s straight from the nursery; my husband says I’m baby-snatching.”
Swing the pendulum to the other side, and recall his “Jacob Ussher” in his own play, Birds of a Feather—the old Jew, the modern Shylock, who sees himself bereft of the only thing he loves in life, his daughter. ”