Joseph Hatton

“ LORD AND LADY VERNER.
A delightful September morning inaugurated the second day of the return home to Montem Castle. The sun shone upon the grand old towers which stood out in clear outline against the sky; and upon the old ruin with its moss-grown walls and whispering ivy, a grey old token of the past, with a long line of green turf stretching forth to the more modern castle which had been built in presence of the ancient ruin. The modern establishment had been built as closely as possible after the old model, and furnished too in antique style, but with all modern comforts. ”

“ He travelled over it again in the firelight. He saw himself a studious boy without playmates, without companions; he saw himself verging into manhood with a strangely awakened love of art and nature, and with only a poor broken-down painter taking any interest in the mysterious signs which his genius would make in spite of himself. He saw his humble home and his toiling parent; a mother without one gleam of sympathy in common with his aspirations, and who only bore querulously with his odd ways, and a father whose besetting sin was the bottle, which was his ruin. ”

“ A signal station with green and red lights slips by us. The swinging bell of an approaching train is heard. The conductor stands on the platform and waves his lamp. Our train stops. There looms suddenly out of the darkness behind us a vast globe, white and glowing, like a sun. It comes on, growing larger, and accompanying it is the bang, bang, bang of the engine’s bell, a familiar, but uncanny, sound in America. A number of minor lights dance about on either side of the approaching monster. It does not stop until its great single blazing Cyclopean eye looks straight into our car. ”

“ It is the height of the London season, and all the great town is filled with the pomp and glitter of high [Pg 266] life. Everything looks bright, even poverty has a smile. The beggar is in clover, and the wretched are at least warm. There are no snowstorms, no cold cutting winds to torture the body and make cheerless hearths still more dismal. London wears her fairest smiles; the sun with one broad depth of light clasps the great world in a fond embrace. The great town is a whirl of life. Royalty, nobility, commonalty, roll along the glowing thoroughfares in glitter of gold and silver. ”

“ Let Phœbe and Arthur be judged by this standard, and they are to be envied indeed. To sit hand in hand, to walk and talk with freedom of their love, of the little incidents of past days, to recall their moments of doubt, and look back to times of utter hopelessness, to trace their little acts of sympathy from the first days of their love, to recall that grand festival beneath the cathedral roof, to think of the days when each loved the other in secret and in fear and dread and in solitude! Was not this perfect happiness? ”

“ In rain or sunshine, in winter or summer, Barton Hall, beneath the shadow of Berne Hills, is always beautiful. In evening sunsets, with the red light on its great flashing windows, and a tinge of gold on the vane of its Italian tower, you might take it for the romantic retreat of a southern king rather than the home of a merchant prince of Old England.
Christopher Tallant was to all intents and purposes a self-made man. ”

“ We dash along, over level crossings, past very continental-looking riverside cabarets and rum-shops, under elevated railroads, and up streets that recall Holland, France, Brighton, and Liverpool, until we reach Washington square. The dead leaves of autumn are beginning to hide the fading grass; but the sun is shining gloriously away up in a blue sky. Irving is impressed with the beauty of the city as we enter Fifth avenue, its many spires marking the long line of street as far as the eye can see. The Brevoort House has proved a welcome, if expensive, haven of rest to many a weary traveller. ”

“ Nearly a year has elapsed since the Brazencrook bells proclaimed the Countess of Verner a mother; two years have gone by since Lionel Hammerton sailed for India; and once more it is summer-time o’er all the land,—hot, glowing, glorious summer,—and we propose to let down the drop-scene amidst the refulgent splendours of the time.
Shining with the same genial warmth upon all men and things, Great Sol is your only constitutional monarch. Yon magnificent sun,—nothing influences his benign influence. The courtier wins no smile from him that the beggar may not have. ”

“ And Amy rattled away and laughed at Phœbe’s sober face, and kissed her fair forehead, as joyously as if she were about to marry her first love; but when she was alone in her bedroom, she flung herself down and sobbed aloud.
Why had heaven given her all those warm passions, that deep capacity to love, and set the idol before her, and let all her love go for naught? This was the burden of the burning thoughts which Phœbe’s conversation had aroused.
“Alas! the love of woman! it is known
To be a lovely and a dangerous thing.” ”

“ For the last two or three years his love for Phœbe Tallant had grown up into a passion which he could not control, and it was only this which disturbed the peaceful course of his life. He had never thought of disclosing his feelings to her. It had been a great relief to him to tell Lionel Hammerton, and more particularly when he had for a moment feared that he had a rival in his friend. Not that Arthur, perhaps, ought to have looked upon any one as a rival, when marriage could hardly be said to have entered his thoughts. ”

“ Nothing in America is so unlike England as the desolate appearance of the meadows in the fall and early winter months. From New York to Boston, a journey of six hours, in the second week of December, not a blade of green grass was to be seen. The train ran through a wilderness of brown, burnt-up meadows. With a tinge of yellow in the color of them, they would have resembled the late corn-stubbles of an English landscape. ”

“ Mrs. Phillips and the Countess sat together at Montem watching the leaves whirl hither and thither; those leaves,—so wild, so weird, so beautiful, so sad, so eloquent to Amy—they flew along the terrace like flocks of birds, away over the green turf, until they lighted on the distant lake, and sailed about wherever the wind willed. And Amy told her dear friend how the leaves had whirled round those carriage-wheels on that autumn day, when she first saw her husband. They always recalled that day, these autumn leaves—always brought it back to Amy’s mind. ”

“ Who has not stood at night in some quiet churchyard with his thoughts reverentially turned to heaven by the solemn strains of an evening hymn rippling out through the half-open doorway? Who has not sat without the precincts of cathedral choirs and felt the power of religious strains move him more deeply than when in the presence of the choristers? Is it that the mind likes to fall back upon itself now and then, to wed the music to its own hopes and aspirations? ”

“ An intellectual audience—eager, alert, responsive, quick to see the intention almost before it was suggested, and to recognize each and every point, however subtle and delicate, of the actor’s art—seemed to awaken all his latent fire, and nerve him to a free and bounteous utterance of his own spirit; and every sensitive mind in that numerous and brilliant throng most assuredly felt the presence of a royal nature, and a great artist in acting. Upon Mr. Irving’s first entrance the applause of welcome was prodigious, and it was long before it died away. ”

“ Did he repent of his neglect towards Amy? Did he love her after all? Did the memory of those happy days at Barton torture him with remorse? Or had that idea of Amy’s mercenary motives evaporated in presence of that honest and noble face, about which he had talked so rapturously in the artist’s studio? If so, why did he not write to her and say so, or send some message to her by Arthur Phillips? This would have been easy enough, and sufficient too for Amy, who would have caught at the merest straw that offered a prospect of regaining his love. ”

“ If Asmodeus had taken you to that model farm-house, that you might have been a calm spectator of the love that had folded his wings and settled down there beside that hearth, you would have been happier for the sight. For it was a catching happiness, that of Phœbe and Arthur; an epidemic of joy and bliss and peace. You could not possibly have come within a yard of its influence without feeling a certain delight. If you happened to be a young fellow, a slight touch of envy might, perhaps, have struggled into your heart and embittered the sight ”

“ Yes, Arthur Phillips was desperately in love. A silly thing that, now-a-days, is it not? Love! All very well in poetry and romance; all very well for school-girls and beardless boys.
But may we not excuse an artist for fostering such a ridiculous passion? It is something in his line, you know. Painters, Senior Mammon will probably say, are ridiculous fellows at best. They spend their time in a fool’s paradise, studying the changes of the sky, making copies of trees and leaves, and lashing themselves into furious excitement about the glories of summer mornings and autumn sunsets. ”

“ The world can no more exist without the drama than it can without its sister art,—music. The stage gives the readiest response to the demand of human nature to be transported out of itself into the realms of the ideal,—not that all our ideas on the stage are realized; none but the artist knows how immeasurably he may fall short of his aim or his conception; but to have an ideal in art, and to strive through one’s life to embody it, may be a passion to the actor, as it may be to the poet. ”

“ Arthur was altogether at a loss to understand Mrs. Somerton; but he boded ill from all this apparent mystery, and yet a voice seemed to whisper hope all through it.
“You are in love with Miss Phœbe,” said Mrs. Somerton at length, and with singular abruptness; “I know it. I have not watched and watched with a mother’s eye for nothing, and I think the young lady loves you in return—if there is such a thing as love—and I begin to think there may be, or something better than love, something better than love.” ”

“ From a Stock Exchange bear to a money-lender’s cad; from an advertising sharper to a begging-letter writer; from haunting clubs to frequenting hotels; from hotels to taverns; from taverns to gin-shops; from gin-shops to the lowest night-houses, Shuffleton Gibbs had become a mean, shabby, out-of-elbows, unshaven outcast of society, who had twice been within a gaol, and seemed likely to die in the gutter.
There is no exaggeration in this rapid downward career—it is a common occurrence. ”

“ No man was ever more written of or talked about in America than Henry Irving; probably no man was ever more misrepresented as to his art and his life. A monster, according to his enemies; an angel, if you took the verdict of his friends; he was a mystery to untravelled American journalists, and an enigma to the great play-going public of the American cities. They were told that people either loved or hated him at first sight. American tourists even carried home contradictory reports of him, though the majority were enthusiastic in praise of him as an actor and as a man. ”

“ Free from all the ordinary cares of the world, with faculties cultivated and imagination influenced and softened by the loving study of art, blessed in the love of the one woman who had been the dream of his life, as husband and father, Arthur Phillips had realised far more than all his dearest hopes.
And Phœbe,—that frank, confiding girl who had loved him all along, and told him so when he had been courageous enough to ask the question,—her life was as near an approach to the perfect happiness of which we spoke in some preceding pages as it is possible for mortal existence to be. ”

“ The true sadness is not in the pain of parting—it is in the when and the how you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view; from the passionate farewell to the woman who has your heart in her keeping, to the cordial good-bye exchanged with pleasant companions at a watering-place, a country-house, or the close of a festive day’s blithe and careless excursion—a chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and Time’s busy fingers are not practised in re-splicing broken ties. ”

“ We have no tradition in the sense that those who would insist upon our observance of it means; what we have is bad,—Garrick played Othello in a red coat and epaulettes; and if we are to go back to Shakespeare’s days, some of these sticklers for so-called tradition forget that the women were played by boys. Shakespeare did the best he could in his day, and he would do the best he could if he were living now. Tradition! It is enough to make one sick to hear the pretentious nonsense that is talked about the stage in the name of tradition. ”

“ Somerton as well as he could for what she had said, and he began to look out into the future with hope.
We never know how unexpectedly Hope may pay us a gorgeous visit; how often she comes when we least expect her. With death barring his way, and funeral plumes crossing his path, Arthur Phillips could hardly have expected Hope to come by his side and whisper so confidently of happiness almost beyond his most sanguine thoughts. ”

“ They were ringing, these Lincolnshire bells, in celebration of the marriage of Arthur Phillips and Phœbe Somerton, who had walked arm in arm to church to be married, unattended save by Luke Somerton and Paul, and their own true love. It was Arthur’s wish that it should be so; and nobody but those most intimately concerned knew of the marriage until the bells, big with the secret, burst their iron bonds, and gave birth to that joyous melody. ”

“ These artists were content to stand still while the culture of the century passed by them. At last there emerged out of obscurity, out of the jostling multitude of mediocrity, a man who drank in the spirit of his age,—a man who broke down the rotten barriers of tradition; a man who caught the intensity, the poetry, the artistic realism of his time; a man who inaugurated a new epoch in the art of acting. Final success was achieved only after a long and bitter struggle against conservative prejudices.
This man was Henry Irving. ”