I can conceive no dramatic situation in existence stronger than this. Miss Ellen Terry had returned to the stage: to her well-grounded skill was intrusted this striking incident. Circumstances had invested her first appearance with unusual interest. She was equal to the occasion: her form dilated, her eyes sparkled with fire, her voice trembled, as she exclaimed, in tones of passionate emotion, "I am its mother!"
At this moment, Reade told me, there burst forth a roar of derision which shook the building, and a howl of savage laughter arose which he should never forget if he lived to the age of Old Parr. The curtain fell amid yells, and the piece was doomed there and then: indeed, it was only kept in the bill until something could be prepared to take its place.
The presence of that unfortunate baby "cooked" "The Double Marriage;" and yet at or about that very time another theatre was being crowded nightly with audiences which not only tolerated the wonderful D'Alroy baby in the last act of "Caste," but "gushed" at it. The critics who saw genius in the one piece could detect nothing but the essence of absurdity in the other. The adage that one man may steal a horse and ride off on its back, unmolested, to glory, while if the other looks over the hedge he is dragged to durance vile, was never more appositely illustrated than on this occasion.
Here was another facer for my poor friend: at the very moment when he felt assured that he had got firm hold of the dramatic public, hey-presto! the phantom vanished, and he had to begin all over again.
Immediately preceding the production of "It is Never Too Late to Mend," "The Colleen Bawn" had achieved a great success. Boucicault and Reade were on terms of friendly intimacy. It occurred to them that the names of the authors of "The Colleen Bawn" and of "It is Never Too Late to Mend" were names to conjure by. They would write a novel first, dramatize it after, and sweep both England and America with it. The novel was projected, and I believe the publishers paid for it the largest sum ever given up to that period in this country in advance for a work of fiction.
In its narrative form "Foul Play" was highly successful. Then came the question of the dramatization, and it was soon found that "when two men ride on horseback, one must ride behind." Both authors objected to take a back seat, and they rode off in different directions. Boucicault took his version to the Holborn Theatre, where it failed most signally. Reade brought his adaptation to me. It was a powerful but sprawling play; strength, however, it had in abundance, and all that was necessary was to lick it into shape. Mr. Reade was amenable to reason, and accepted my practical suggestions. For example, when it was first put into my hands, the second act was in seven scenes. I put them all into one, suggested the whole of the business of "The Crossing the Line," in the third act, and transposed and arranged the island act until it assumed its present form. The drama was produced the first season of my new theatre at Leeds, with immediate and pronounced success, and I am emboldened to say was one of the best acted and best mounted plays that have been produced in this generation.
Mr. Reade was always jealous of his "words," and woe betide the unhappy wight who dared to tamper with them. It required great diplomacy to induce him to accept my cutting and slashing and reconstruction, before we commenced rehearsals; but when we got on the stage, not another word would he allow to be excised. At the end of the fourth act he had allotted me a speech of twenty tedious, explanatory lines to speak, after the heroine had quitted the stage and I was left alone on Godsend Island. It was in vain that I pointed out that the speech was an anticlimax, that the explanation could be deferred to the next act: he was inexorable. "My composition, my boy, my composition," he exclaimed: "besides, it is the articulation" (a favorite word of his)
