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Beerbohm at five-o'clock tea when advancing years, powerless to rob him of one shade of his wonderful urbanity, had nevertheless imprinted evidence of their flight in the pathetic stoop, and the low melancholy voice of one who, though resigned, yet yearns for the happier past, I feel that too precise a description of his personal appearance would savour of impertinence.
Shakespeare's King John opens very simply. The stage direction reads, "Enter King John, Queen Elinor, Pembroke, Essex, Salisbury and others, with Chatillon"; and then the king speaks the opening line of the play. Yet when Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree revived this drama at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1899, he devised an elaborate opening to give a climacteric effect to the entrance of the king.
The late Sir George Alexander produced Paolo and Francesca; Herod was acted in London by Beerbohm Tree, and in America by William Faversham. Neither of these plays was a failure, but it is regrettable that he wrote for the stage at all.
He picked up the books on the table two novels, Sentimental Tommy, by J. M. Barrie, and Sir George Tressady, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. Swinburne's Tale of Balen, and The Works of Max Beerbohm. Last of all Leslie Stephen's Social Rights and Duties. He looked at them all, with their light yellow Mudie labels, their fresh bindings, then, slowly and very carefully, put them back on the table.
Beerbohm, in virtue of his 'Defence of Cosmetics, was but a pamphleteer. In 1895 he was the famous historian, for in that year appeared the two earliest of his profound historical studies, The History of the Year 1880, and his work on King George the Fourth.
This no doubt is a theory demanding perfection. Up to a certain point efforts are made to realize it. Under the generous management of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, we often have music composed expressly for the drama by musicians of quality, and sometimes it is well enough written to deserve and afterwards obtain performance in the concert-room.
"Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavour'." "Ah, that is an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere. I can't break myself of it. I assure you I hardly ever open a book. Of life, though, my experience has been very wide. Brief?
He met the accusation at once and very fairly, I thought, and told me the whole story. It puts the triumphant power and address of the man in a strong light, and so I will tell it as he told it to me. "When I was rehearsing 'A Woman of No Importance' at the Haymarket," he began, "Beerbohm Tree showed me a letter I had written a year or so before to Alfred Douglas.
But the letter, a copy of which had been sent to Beerbohm Tree, was not amongst them. "Some time afterwards a man named Allen called upon me one night in Tite Street, and said he had got a letter of mine which I ought to have. "The man's manner told me that he was the real enemy. 'I suppose you mean that beautiful letter of mine to Lord Alfred Douglas, I said.
In the recently published Life of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the collaborators do not allude to that curious vein of impish humour which at times possessed him, turning him into a sort of big rollicking schoolboy. There was one episode which I can give with Tree's actual words, for I wrote them down at the time, as a supreme example of the art of "leg-pulling."
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