immediately went into a second edition; it still sells. It was the first of my books that The Times ever condescended to review; the Spectator took it seriously in a column and a quarter; and my friends took it seriously. I even received cables from foreign lands with offers to buy translation rights. I became known as the author of that serial. And all this, save for an insignificant trifle, to the profit of an exceedingly astute syndicate!
Subsequently I wrote other serials, but never again with the same verve. I found an outlet for my energies more amusing and more remunerative than the concoction of serials; and I am a serialist no longer.
XIII
While yet an assistant-editor, I became a dramatic critic through the unwillingness of my chief to attend a theatrical matinee performance given by some forlorn little society, now defunct, for the rejuvenation of the English drama. My notice of the performance amused him, and soon afterwards he suggested that I should do our dramatic column in his stead. Behold me a “first-nighter”! When, with my best possible air of nonchalance and custom, I sauntered into my stall on a Lyceum first night, I glanced at the first rows of the pit with cold and aloof disdain. “Don’t you wish you were me?” I thought behind that supercilious mask. " You have stood for hours imprisoned between parallel iron railings. Many times I have stood with you. But never again, miserable pittites!” Nevertheless, I was by no means comfortable in my stall. Around me were dozens of famous or notorious faces, the leading representatives of all that is glittering and factitious in the city of wealth, pleasure, and smartness. And everybody seemed to know everybody else. I alone seemed to be left out in the cold. My exasperated self-conscious fancy perceived in every haughty stare the inquiry: “Who is this whipper-snapper in the dress-suit that obviously cost four guineas in Cheapside?” I knew not a soul in that brilliant resort. During the intervals I went into the foyer and listened to the phrases which the critics tossed to each other over their liqueur-glasses. Never was such a genial confusion of “Old Chap,” “Old Man,” “Old Boy,” “Dear Old Pal”! “Are they all blood-brothers?” I asked myself. The banality, the perfect lack of any sort of aesthetic culture, which characterized their remarks on the piece, astounded me. I said arrogantly: “If I don’t know more about the art of the theatre than the whole crowd of you put together, I will go out and hang myself.” Yet I was unspeakably proud to be among them. In a corner I caught sight of a renowned novelist whose work I respected. None noticed him, and he looked rather sorry for himself. “You and I . . .!” I thought. I had not attended many first nights before I discovered that the handful of theatrical critics whose articles it is possible to read without fatigue, made a point of never leaving their stalls. They were nobody’s old chap, and nobody’s old pal. I copied their behaviour.
First on my own paper, and subsequently on two others, I practised dramatic criticism for five or six years. Although I threw it up in the end mainly from sheer lassitude, [ enjoyed the work. It means late nights, and late nights are perdition; but there is a meretricious glamour about it that attracts the foolish moth in me, and this I am bound to admit. My trifling influence over the public was decidedly on the side of the angels. I gradually found that I possessed a coherent theory of the drama, definite critical standards, and all the rest of the apparatus; in short, that I had something to say. And my verdicts had a satisfactory habit of coinciding with those of the two foremost theatrical critics in London— perhaps in Europe (I need not name them). It is a somewhat strange fact that I made scarcely any friends in the theatre. After all those years of assiduous first-nighting, I was almost as solitary in the auditorium on the evening when I bade a blase adieu to the critical bench as when I originally entered it. I fancied I had wasted my time and impaired my constitution in emulating the achievements of Theophile Gautier, Hazlitt, Francisque Sarcey and M. Jules Lemaitre, to say nothing of Dutton Cook and Mr. Clement Scott. My health may have suffered; but, as it happened, I had not quite wasted my time.
“Why don’t you write a play yourself?”
This blunt question was put to me by a friend, an amateur actor, whom I had asked to get up some little piece or other for an entertainment in the Theatre Royal back-drawing-room of my house.
“Quite out of my line," I replied, and I was absolutely sincere. I had no notion whatever of writing for the stage. I felt sure that I had not the aptitude.
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “It’s as easy as falling off a log.”
We argued, and I was on the point of refusing the suggestion, when the spirit of wild adventure overcame me, and I gravely promised my friend that I would compose a duologue if he and his wife would promise to perform it at my party. The affair was arranged. I went to bed with the conviction that in the near future I stood a fair chance of looking an ass. However, I met with what I thought to be an amusing idea for a curtain-raiser the next morning, and in the afternoon I wrote the piece complete. I enjoyed writing it, and as I read it aloud to myself I laughed at it. I discovered that I had violated the great canon of dramatic art,—Never keep your audience in the dark, and this troubled me (Paul Hervieu had not then demonstrated by his L'Énigme that that canon may be broken with impunity); but I could not be at the trouble of reconstructing the whole play for the sake of an Aristotelian maxim. I at once posted the original draft to my friend with this note: “Dear —, Here is the play which last night I undertook to write for you.”
The piece was admirably rendered to an audience of some thirty immortal souls—of course very sympathetic immortal souls. My feelings, as the situation which I had invented gradually developed into something alive on that tiny make-shift stage, were peculiar and, in a way, alarming. Every one who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you pull the starting lever, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like that as I watched the progress of my first play. It was as though I had unwittingly liberated an energy greater than I knew, actually created something vital. This illusion of physical vitality is the exclusive possession of the dramatist; the novelist, the poet, cannot share it. The play was a delicious success. People laughed so much that some of my most subtle jocosities were drowned in the appreciative cachinnation. The final applause was memorable, at any rate to me. No mere good-nature can simulate the unique ring of genuine applause, and this applause was genuine. It was a microscopic triumph for me, but it was a triumph. Every one said to me: “But you are a dramatist!” “Oh no I” I replied awkwardly; “this trifle is really nothing.” But the still small voice of my vigorous self-confidence said: “Yes, you are, and you ought to have found it out years ago!” Among my audience was a publisher. He invited me to write for him a little book of one-act farces for amateurs; his terms were agreeable. I wrote three such farces, giving two days to each, and the volume was duly published; no book of mine has cost me less trouble. The reviews of it were lavish in praise of my “unfailing wit”; the circulation was mediocre. I was asked by companies of amateur actors up and down the country to assist at rehearsals of these pieces; but I could never find the energy to comply, save once. I hankered after the professional stage. By this time I could see that I was bound to enter seriously into the manufacture of stage-plays. My readers will have observed that once again in my history the inducement to embark for a fresh port had been quite external and adventitious.
I had a young friend with an extraordinary turn for brilliant epigram and an equally extraordinary gift for the devising of massive themes. He showed me one day the manuscript of a play. My faith in my instinct for form, whether in drama or fiction, was complete, and I saw instantly that what this piece lacked was form, which means intelligibility. It had everything except intelligibility. “Look here!” I said to him, “we will write a play together, you and I. We can do something that will knock spots off—” etc. etc. We determined upon a grand drawing-room melodrama which should unite style with those qualities that make for financial success
