Edgar Fawcett

( Originally Published 1912 )

SPEAK of Edgar Fawcett to readers below middle age now, and you will find that they know nothing of him. Thirty years ago he was a celebrity and one of the best known figures in New York, a man familiar about town as well as in literary circles, from whom came a steady flow of plays, novels, and books of verse, all of which attracted attention, though opinions as to their merit conflicted and ran to extremes. One often wished that he would produce less or winnow more: his garden needed weeding and his lilies and roses were choked by the unplucked luxuriance of a rank fertility. I never knew a man with less discrimination, and he often saw more beauty in his cabbages than in the most exquisite of his flowers. Much of his poetry was ambitious and the higher the flight attempted the less triumphant was the achievement.

As a friend of mine said: "His longer things I wanted to read only once, but his shorter ones I could read over and over again."

What jewels the shorter ones are! He would not have had it so, but they are the fragments by which his name may be restored and perpetuated when nothing else of his various and copious work endures. I cannot refrain from quoting "To an Oriole" as an example of them :

How falls it, oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendour through our Northern sky?
At some glad moment was it nature's choice
To dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?

Or did some orange tulip, flaked with black
In some forgotten garden, ages back,
Yearning toward Heaven until its wish was heard,
Desire unspeakably to be a bird?

And the reader will not be impatient with one more, which, like the other, shows the daintiness and originality of his fancy and his sense of verbal colour wedded with music:

A HUMMING-BIRD

When the mild gold stars flower out
As the summer gloaming goes,
A dim shape quivers about
Some sweet, rich heart of a rose.

If you watch its fluttering poise,
From palpitant wings will steal
A hum like the eerie noise
Of an elfin spinning-wheel!

And then from the shape's vague sheen,
Quick lustres of blue will float,
That melt in luminous green
Round a glimmer of ruby throat!

But fleetly across the gloom
This tremulous shape will dart.
While searching for some fresh bloom,
To quiver about its heart.

Then you, by thoughts of it stirred,
Will dreamily question them: "
Is it a gem, half bird,
Or is it a bird, half gem ?"

Such things as these he valued lightly. Longer and more laboured things, narrative poems, and five-act plays in blank verse, the things the public would not have, he gloried in. Oh, Edgar, generous but irascible and unreasonable friend, I quake as I venture on this appraisal! Raise not thy ghostly hands against me. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.

I could quote many noble lines of his if there were space, and I think they would gain rather than lose by their detachment. He loved the polysyllabic, the grandiose, and the sonorous. His thought and feeling were often smothered by the decorations in which he framed them.

I imperilled our friendship by candour which went no farther than a gentle hint of redundance; but who is there so modest that, much as he may protest his desire for criticism, does not wince when he gets it? Of some-thing he read to me I confessed my thought that it was redundant, and his reply, impetuous, unyielding, and unapologetic as a defiant child's, was, "William, I love redundancy!"

He had confidence in himself, and that is a possession solacing only so long as it is impassive under the opinion of others who do not believe it to be justifiable. Far from being impassive, Edgar was the most hypersensitive creature I ever knew, except Richard Mansfield, and he let himself be angered even by the gibes of some who were quite unworth his notice. It became a sport to badger him, and he never refused to be drawn, but played the game to the end at his own cost. He wore himself out slapping at gnats and mosquitoes. His lack of discrimination and of the sense of proportion was his greatest weakness, and it involved his friends as well as himself.

What excellence he always discovered in our work, in which there were no flaws and nothing that could be improved! Our lyrics were as good as "Songs Before Sunrise," our elegiacs comparable with "In Memoriam," our sonnets like Landor's, and our novels one of them which had a bit of success for a month (where is it now? it vanished like a breath on a mirror) was "better than Thackeray at his best!" We listened with smiles, but were not fatuous enough to be deluded, though we never doubted, nor do I doubt now, that what looked so much like egregious flattery was uttered by him in unquestioning faith and sincerity.

He was commonly spoken of as a poet, but his novels outnumbered his books of verse. At least three of them 'have documentary value to any student of social conditions in New York, and I think that with the one exception of Howells's "A Hazard of New Fortunes," his "An Ambitious Woman" is the best novel of New York life ever written. It is a record of humanity undistorted by the conventional exigencies of story telling, and satisfying enough without them. The two others —"A Hopeless Case" and "A Gentleman of Leisure"— are slighter, but they also are faithful pictures of their period. "An Ambitious Woman" is, in my opinion, his masterpiece, and neglected as it is now, undeservedly neglected, I feel sure that some day or other it will be recovered. If not sooner, it may turn up in the time to come when revolution has thrown this republic into the hands of a dictator, and the excesses of the dictator have led to a constitutional monarchy. An antiquary exploring the ruins of the public library may pick up a singed and crumpled copy and rejoice in his discovery for the light it will throw on the way some of us lived in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I recommend others meanwhile to see for themselves how good it is, though probably to the new generation it will already seem old-fashioned.

He knew society, not as an observer from the outside, but as one who has a place in it. Had he chosen he might have given himself up to the glittering but unprofitable waste of fashionable life. He was the son of a gentle-man, a substantial scholar, Spencerian in his philosophy, highly cultivated, restless intellectually, urbane in manner and speech, with all the unconscious ease and polish of an assured social position. Nevertheless, his means were small, and he stood in need of the earnings of his pen. Had he been rich his temperament would not have allowed him to be an idler. He seethed with ideas and, travelling or at home, at all hours, early and late, sick or well, he found his chief pleasure in that varied work which flowed from him without intermission, now running clear, and then, as was inevitable, thickening and stumbling in its haste. He always had a note-book in his pocket, and out it came, not for mere memoranda, but for things begun and finished while we waited, such as a sonnet composed within ten minutes of our arrival at the top of the Righi when we were touring together in Switzerland, or another sonnet on Austerlitz (both of them creditable), which he excogitated within as short a time amidst the hubbub of embarkation at Liverpool. Facility was his bane, and overwork his ruin. His querulousness was but the outcry of his abused and protesting nerves, which suffered not only from the number of his working hours but also from the fact that those hours were nocturnal.

I called at his lodgings one day. The floor and the table in his parlour were littered with books pulled from their shelves the previous night the books of Tennyson, Swinburne, Keats, Shelley, and Baudelaire, English and French, the books he admired opened at the pages he liked to repeat. The sun creeping through the drawn blinds discovered nothing of the day. Everything betokened the previous night and its occupations, the glasses, the ashes of tobacco, the choice of the books. I surmised congenial company parting only with the dawn Maurice Barrymore, very likely, Frank Saltus, and George Parsons Lathrop. My resounding knock on the bedroom door had to be repeated before it told. Then a thunderous and indignant voice cried out from within, " Go away. Go away ! How dare anybody disturb me at this hour of the night."

I looked in, and there he was in bed, prepared for vengeance on the disturber, furious till he recognized me. A small table within his reach held a pencil and a pad; he had been writing even after that prolonged causerie. He was a handsome man, of florid complexion and jet black hair, with a head and jowl suggestive of tenacity of purpose and obstinacy, beardless but heavily moustached. His eyes in contrast with his other features were like those of a girl's, an exquisite violet.

" Good heavens, William ! What's the matter? What has happened to bring you here in the middle of the night?"

I looked at my watch: noon had passed, but the information did not startle him.

"Those fellows stayed quite late," he yawned, and with a smile he handed me the verses he had jotted down before going to sleep :

TO A NEWSPAPER CRITIC

For blood, an adder's gall;
For brain, a gnat's weak hate;
For heart, a pebble small;
For soul, "a whiskey straight."

For conscience, pelf, and hire;
For pride, a donkey's tether;
For ink, a gutter's mire;
For pen, a goose's feather.

He read them himself ore rotundo, and they put him in good humour at once.

A meagre breakfast satisfied him, and then, day after day, headache or no headache, after the valeting of a devoted servant, he went forth to work as regularly and persistently as an industrious mechanic, finding both anodyne and stimulant in his appointed task. For his scenes in fashionable life he needed no preparation, and when he was not at his desk he explored the town and its environs in search of material for those humbler scenes and characters which he reproduced with the effect of convincing intimacy.

A wanderer myself, and on a similar mission in those days, I often met him in out-of-the-way places, following, for instance, dusty and squalid funerals over the swamps and sand hills of Greenpoint; in the slums of Mulberry Street and Chatham Square, and among the old Elysian Fields of Hoboken, green and sylvan then, vanished now, where Aaron Burr despatched Alexander Hamilton. You could see him sitting on the benches of Stuyvesant Square and Central Park, usually with a tablet and a pencil in his hands, a dignified and dreamy figure at whom policemen and nursemaids glanced curiously, but with-out suspicion, while now and then he made pictures for the children who flocked around him, confident that he was their friend and a most accomplished and delightful person.

Poor, tired, impatient, splenetic Edgar ! While you were his friend you were superhuman, and he never wearied of proclaiming your excellence. Any criticism of you he resented as vehemently as criticism of himself. You became interested in yourself through his interest in you. He encouraged and inspired you. But unfortunately he took offence easily, and when that happened the little rift within the lute could never be repaired. Old friendships once broken, were broken forever. He could not forgive.

Without effort he was a voluminous correspondent, and even when he was tired he could find relaxation and refreshment in writing to his friends. Out of a bundle of those letters which flowed as easily as his talk I choose a few which illustrate the liveliness of his mind and the variety of his interests.

I had spoken to him about a silly young fellow who had become entangled with a married woman, and this was his reply:

Love is a trickster; he makes us cry out at our wounds, and then flies away, leaving us regretful that they are so suddenly healed. A passion is the most mysterious and delicious thing in the world; it is also the most ridiculous and trivial. Schopenhauer reduces it ail to a blind, indeterminate will, which accomplishes its results in plants, animals, and men with an equally reckless tyranny. I don't know that he is not right. Love is so much and so little! I once doted on a girl. I used to take to bed violets that she gave me, and go to sleep with them pressed against my lips. One afternoon I went to see her. She was distraite — unwell. I kissed her as men kiss women they would die for, and begged her to tell me why she was so wretchedly ennuyee. It was a tooth. She had a bad tooth. My love died, somehow, on the instant. I could never forgive that toothache. If she had committed some dreadful crime I might have forgiven it; but I looked into her mouth and saw a discoloured tooth — and love died!

Love to me is the most sublime and most ludicrous of human sentiments. But thrice fortunate is to love as he does. Let him not bemoan his fate. Let him exult in it, and treasure every pang it gives him. They are all exquisite pangs; they draw him to the very stars them-selves; put sweet odours into the oil of his midnight lamp, and line his post-prandial slippers with a fur stolen from the throats of nightingales. Let him appreciate his despair, for its death will leave a more bitter void than its life. Happy the man who can touch a woman's garment inadvertently, and tremble as he does so! The impulse of self-renunciation, the hopeless desire, the stolen meeting, the clandestine kiss — they are worth a whole century of apathetic satiety. Let him be glad while he has the wine to drink; it will soon enough turn to water. Alas! it always does turn to water — and sometimes to wormwood! Some day — will regret his present misery and be willing to give a decade of contentment for a day of its recurrence. He should not fear the wound; it is always a flesh wound. It is the remedy he should dread — cold as death itself — which heals it. The well is flanked with Athenian sculptures; the golden cup hangs over it by a silver chain. Drink, and you thirst no more. But thirst is better. The longer you drink, the more the enchanted forests fade, and suddenly you find that you stand in a gray, blank dawn, drinking from — well, a town pump! And by the way, in America, at least, married women will exact much from their lovers, but never concede. They like one on one's knees; they are complaisant, but rarely truly passionate. And they are sometimes strangely treacherous. As a rule they love you at their feet, but when you rise they are too apt to laugh at the way your trousers bag at the knees!

Here is another of pleasant reminiscences:

I have a happier word to say for the second day of the Authors' Readings. Howells and I had a pleasant little chat, and afterward at a dinner party at Courtlandt Palmer's I met Julian Hawthorne and George Lathrop and his wife. At the dinner we all agreed that the Readings had been a great success. Howells was admirable. On second day he read a passage or chapter from what he told us was an "unwritten novel." The humour was even better and more gently persuasive than on the previous day. It was very interesting to me to note how its quiet yet keen points "took" when delivered behind the footlights. It confirmed a theory of mine that American audiences are anxious for good literary things in the theatre. Augustin Daly is with me, here, and yet not quite with me. . . . If you or any of the few artists like you, chose to do anything fresh in comedy for Daly, you would be sure of a most appreciative and courteous welcome. He wrote me the other day from Philadephia: If you do a comedy for me this summer you shall suffer no loss. Is not that nice? — But I somehow feel that I am losing what slight power I ever had. Late midnight writing kills me, and day-writing seems to cast a critical glare upon my work, emphasizing its worst faults. . . . Mark Twain was immense at the Readings The house was in continuous roars while he spoke. Beecher was the only poor one; he read, and read in a hesitant, senile, almost maundering way. At the Irving dinner he had made so brilliant a speech that I was prepared to be charmed on Wednesday. "Non omnis moriar " applies to him! — and yet does it? He will not wholly die, yet will he live longer than to the end of this century? His gifts are oratorie, and he has no litera scripta. Those are what tell in the matter of immortality. John Boyle O'Reilly simply charmed me. Don't you like him very much? I had never seen him before, and he impressed me as so handsome, so graceful, so full of fire and force. He read some very brilliant and poetic epigrams, and a long, sombre, but occasionally very eloquent poem called "The City Streets." He rushed off in the middle of the entertainment, or I should certainly have sought an introduction to him. Lady Wilde raved over him in London, and I can understand it. I think Lytton's poem ("Glenaveril") perfectly awful! Not a ray of the old sweet, dulcet-voiced Owen Meredith in it! (Pardon my hash of metaphors!) It is laboured, forced, and ridiculous in its diatribe against all the Liberals and its eager exaltation of the Jingoes. The idea of putting Lord Salisbury above Gladstone! But the poem, in other ways, is essentially artificial and shallow. I never was more disappointed in my life. Quantum mutates ab illo, &c.

His rhymed satire, "The Buntling Ball," had flared into popularity and it was soon followed by another book in the same dancing Gilbertian measure.

I shall now tell you what I have not told you before. Besides a number of short stories and six or seven poems, I wrote this summer "The New King Arthur," and two new comedies for Daly! The first of these, "Thin Ice," he sat down on so mercilessly, demanding such radical alterations, that I hopelessly threw it aside. The second, "Swains and Sweethearts," he likes better, but has just written me that I must invent two new, originaI, and startling situations in it for the ends of first and second acts (it is three acts in all) before he will contract for it. And even then the whole play must be gone over, with changes which he will indicate! Well, what can I do but try to satisfy him? Besides, I don't know that he is not perfectly right. He ought to be, with his immense experience. I wrote him today that I would do all I could — whatever that may mean. I know him so well that I can read between the lines of his last letter, and perceive that S. & S. has in a manner "caught on" with him. But don't you pity me, dear boy, in the distracting task which yet remains to be accomplished?

The truth is, the way of the American dramatist is bitterly hard beyond all recognized calculation. It is not merely that he must fight the European and English market, squarely and fairly. He must, indeed, do considerably more than this. He must fight the best work of the best authors now across the Atlantic — work that has been thoroughly tried on transpontine audiences and not found wanting in any essential of solid popularity. Is it not disheartening? You've no idea, dear William, of the immense "survival of the fittest" which goes on with Daly in the production of such plays as "Love on Crutches," "A Night Off," "The Passing Regiment," &c., &c. I myself have seen the stacks and piles of translated plays which he possesses. Hundreds scarcely express their quantity. Everything is sent him that Berlin or Vienna sees — and those two cities have not the long runs of London, Paris, and New York. Besides this, the Vienna comedy-theatre (I forget its German name, which you probably remember) is considered by many people superior to the Comedie Francaise. This is the sort of pick that Daly has. Why the deuce should my plays stand any chance with him, or with anybody?

Yet Daly, in his way, is fair and just and discriminating beyond all other New York managers, and I firmly believe (indeed, I know) that he would rather put on an American success than a foreign one. Still, he must go according to his lights, whether they are torches or tallow dips.

I myself am as utterly humble about my dramatic work as it is possible to conceive. I have tested the tremendous chance of the whole thing, and cannot, however much I rack my poor brain, hit upon any ghost of a mathematical formula by means of which the public is to be hit. "The False Friend" was a pure stroke of luck. I see that now, tho' I didn't then. Because Cazauran cut and slashed it, gutting whole scenes, this was no reason why it should take. For Cazauran's judgment, in the "Fatal Letter," in "Far from the Madding Crowd," and in several other things which he did for the Union Square Theatre after Palmer left it, has been proved thoroughly fallible. Ah, well! if it were not for the big rewards attendant upon a successful play, who would dream of writing one? That, however, is the very thing, I fancy, which is preventive of good plays being written here — that, and the monstrous extraneous pressure of foreign preferment.

In another he was, at my request, autobiographical.

I remember so well my first appearance in print. It occurred at Rye before I was graduated from college; I think in 1865. My father had for some time taken the deepest interest in Spiritualism (a "fad," by-the-by, which he never entirely outgrew, and which haunted him, in a disappointed, half-disillusioned way, even to the hour of his death), and he had for some time subscribed to the Banner of Light. You recollect the paper, perhaps? It was the jeer of my mother and sisters, who were never tired of reminding my father, with ironies either direct or covert, that he had put himself under its rather disreputable aegis. It abounded in "trance lectures" and in "communications" from spectral celebrities like Poe, Shelley, and for all I know even your own beloved Thackeray. Well, one day I wrote a copy of verses beginning,

Of all the months in the happy year,
No fitter birth-month could he choose
When May smiles out from April's tear,
And blossoms in her countless hues.

I forget the rest, but "he" was a baby, born in the first stanza under these highly flowery circumstances, and dying in the last stanza under, if I mistake not, the most sombrely autumnal ones. In fear and trembling, dreaming only of fame and not at all of pelf, I sent my verses as a contribution to the Banner of Light, accompanying them with some sort of pseudonym. A week or two later they appeared, and on my word of honour as a confirmed scribbler, the joy and thrilling pride which I felt when I saw them has never since been equalled. I know how commonplace this is; every author is always saying the same thing whenever he becomes biographical. But I can't resist recording those feelings, nevertheless, of my own especial juvenile case. I regarded the publication of those verses as a great state secret. Nobody must know of it. And so, like the silly ostrich that I was, I hid my head in the sand with a vengeance; I tore, or cut, the little poem from the paper. My father came up from town, eager for his treasured Banner. The mutilated page filled him with inquiries, and I fear somewhat irritated ones. Some one had seen me clutching a Banner of light agitatedly and hurrying off with it. Circumstantial evidence crushed me. There was the mangled cherry tree, and the culpable little G. W. was not far off. And so, with tears of haughty shame, I was forced at once to confess my theft, and my distinction. I recall thinking the latter a disclosure far too lightly valued. But from that hour I was a marked boy; I had not merely made verses; I had got them into print. As you know, I have never lived clown the odium; it has clung to me most adhesively for over twenty unconscionable years.