Part 36
We parted in Chicago. He was so anxious to hurry home that he took the fastest train, while I made $16 by arriving twelve hours later by another route. We exchanged several telegrams on our different routes. I put it down as one of the most enjoyable and delightful companionships that I have ever had.
At the close of this six months’ tour Mr. Crawford sailed for his home in Italy, still in poor health. I hardly expected ever to see him again. I was lonesome without him, and busied myself at odd times with writing him letters, which he never answered. I feared he was ill, or that I had hurt his feelings in some way, but, to my delight, in due time the following letter came, which brought great joy to the Pond household:
* * * * *
“SANT’ AGNELLO DI SORRENTO, ITALY, “Dec. 16, 1898.
“DEAR OLD MAJOR:
“A Merry Christmas to you, and to Mrs. Pond, and Bim, and Miss Glass, and all the very best wishes of the season! I am not dead and buried, and as you may have supposed from a rude way I have of never answering a man’s letters till he has written about six times. But I have been very busy with my work, and between times with enjoying a long spell of home with my wife and children. Knowing how you hate Mrs. Pond and Bim, you will probably find this most extraordinary! You must try and get used to the idea. (This letter does not contain a request for a loan for five dollars at the end of it, so you may read it quite calmly--I just thought of that.)
“I look over my old note books of last year, and it hardly seems possible that I could ever have been the talking-piece of baggage that was sent flying over the country for six months to be wound up every day at the same hour. This is a good deal more comfortable, my friend, and there is less wear and tear on one’s throat and good clothes--not to mention one’s temper and digestion. All the same, I am glad I did it once, and saw the country from end to end and from top to bottom, and with a man who knows the West as you do. But if we ever do it again, I shall take a patent reversible india-rubber coffin which can be used as a bath, overcoat, or pulpit, and can be hermetically sealed so as to bring the lecturer home on ice from the point at which he dies!
“Well--I am all right again, thank goodness! Whatever you do, my friend, _never let_ your lecturer go and visit the smelting furnaces in Colorado. That was the beginning of my trouble, and you were not there on that day to prevent me from going.
“We had a little earthquake here not long ago--a sort of little kitten earthquake--but it made me think of that evening in San Francisco, when the house rocked and the boy dropped the cheese into the ice box and ran! That was a good supper, well shaken down--we shall probably never digest another so quickly.
“I have discovered that the wicked Emperor Tiberius was left-handed--you and I are in good company.
“This is just a Christmas greeting--a little less than a lecture, a little more than an autograph, from
“Your friend and old lecturer, “F. MARION CRAWFORD.”
* * * * *
Gen. Lew Wallace has made three distinct and creditable reputations, as a soldier in the war for the Union, as a lawyer and orator, and as an author. As a State lawyer and political speaker, he is confessedly one of the most distinguished at the bar and on the stump of Indiana. As a novelist, he has made one of the most brilliant successes of late years. His “Ben Hur” had only one rival in popularity in America--“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” As a lecturer, he has proved one of the best attractions in the lyceum, and his popularity is increasing.
After the success of “Ben Hur” he was called for from all parts of the land, especially by the Young Men’s Christian Associations. I don’t know that anybody has been in so much demand since Gough’s time for these societies as General Wallace. After two or three years of earnest effort I succeeded in getting him to make a tour of one hundred lectures. The General was a pessimist in regard to lecturing. He did not think the people cared to hear him, and to some extent he was right.
He surprised me by making the suggestion that instead of the regular fifteen per cent commission for booking time, I should take twenty-five per cent; he thought that was little enough. That enabled me to put a good deal of extra spirit into my work. He kept the engagements, a hundred in number. The tour proved very profitable. From a business standpoint it was delightfully satisfactory. I could ask nothing pleasanter in my life than to be constantly associated with Gen. Lew Wallace and to be his daily companion while he was travelling about the country delivering lectures. He had kind words for every person he met. They were genuine, too, and did not smack of the demagogue.
During his engagements with me, Mr. Klaw of Messrs. Klaw & Erlanger called on me several times and proposed that I should get General Wallace to consent to the dramatization of “Ben Hur,” saying that they would pay any amount of money I wanted. I made this suggestion to General Wallace several times, and tried to point out to him the good it would do, and the profit that was to be realized from it, as these managers would spare no money in making the production a success. I pointed out to him that there was an opportunity in the chariot race for an unsurpassed scene and dramatic effect. The General would not listen to it, although I approached him from every standpoint possible. That success was not for me. Two years later I found that these same managers had obtained General Wallace’s consent to dramatize “Ben Hur” and to bring it out in New York. I never got over it; I entertained so high an opinion of the General’s fairness, and felt so satisfied that our business relations had been the pleasantest in the world, and that he would not under any circumstances do me a wrong. I have never seen him or heard from him on the subject and I have never seen the play. If the General happens to read this he will know why I have never seen it. That was another of my escapes.
Apropos of this, there is one other escape I had while in Boston. Mr. Alexander Graham Bell came to me wanting to interest me in a new invention that he had by which he could hear in Lowell, or in any other town, a lecture delivered in Boston. I went out and heard a test of it with Mr. Bell. I suggested to him that it would be just the thing for communication between business offices and factories, livery stables and hotels. He wanted me to go into the business with him and urged me to do so. He spent an hour sitting by my desk talking about it. I spoke about it to my partner, but he reminded me that our business contract would not admit of speculation of any kind. I felt pretty certain that there was a fortune in the business, and came very near telling him that I would leave the lyceum and take the risk and go into the telephone business. As Mr. Bell was leaving my office a gentleman from Providence, who ran a lecture course in that town, came in, and I said to Mr. Bell: “Here is the man you want for that business.”
Turning to the other gentleman, I said: “Gower, here’s something that there’s a fortune in. Now you go into this thing.”
Mr. Gower did his errand in a moment, and walked out of the office with Mr. Alexander Graham Bell. I never saw him afterward. Gower went up in a balloon in Paris and was never heard from. It was said that he was worth over a million dollars when he disappeared--all from the telephone business. At that time he was the husband of Lilian Norton--our Nordica. That was another narrow escape which I had.
Israel Zangwill, author of “The Children of the Ghetto,” is another of the unique characters that I have introduced to American audiences, and one who interested me deeply. Many inquiries about him had come from all over the country, especially from Jewish societies. I called on Mr. Zangwill at his home in London, in 1897, and was very cordially received. He had never lectured, but thought he could make a go of it, and after an hour’s conversation with him I came to the conclusion that he could not fail to interest all who met him. It was a peculiar fascination, largely due, I think, to his indomitable assurance. He looked me right square in the eye when he talked, and whatever he said was so because he said so, although I knew better at the time.
He showed me over his two rooms--one of them a library with book shelves on all sides filled with books that bore the marks of wear and tear, and arranged on these shelves _ad libitum_, or perhaps I should say disarranged. I asked him if he had saved press notices of his various books. He took me into the adjoining room and lifted the lid of a trunk which was stuffed full of press cuttings, with the Romeike attachments. (There must have been $500 worth.) He had been in the habit of throwing them promiscuously into the trunk and pressing them down or stamping on them, until it looked like a trunk packed full of old waste paper or refuse packing material.
Zangwill had just got back from Jerusalem, and showed me another trunkful of unmounted photographs of the great paintings and architecture of all parts of Europe. There were thousands of them,--most of them very beautiful too,--but they were almost ruined by the rough way in which they had been carelessly thrown into the trunk. One very peculiar photograph was of the mummy of Pharaoh. I asked him to let me take a snapshot of it, and got him to hold the photograph up against the window-sill.
It seemed almost impossible to come to any kind of understanding with Zangwill. He thought that there was a great public waiting for him over here, and I also thought so to a considerable extent. But he couldn’t understand why he should come over to America and draw great crowds and I get a third of the profits from his earnings; so nothing was definitely settled at that interview. I came away knowing well enough that he intended to visit the United States, and to get all that there was in it if he did come. Weeks went by, and nothing was satisfactorily arranged between us. He kept me informed of his movements. He was to sail in August in the steamship _Lucania_ in company with his friend Judge Sulzburger of Philadelphia, whose guest he was to be while over here.
He arrived on the morning of September 27th, and I met him at the steamer. We had made no arrangement, and he was not under my direction or under any obligation to me in any way. Still, I knew he had made no other arrangements. Several Jewish friends met him and took possession of him. I asked him if he would see reporters, and he said that he would be glad to meet them at any hour I might name. He went with me to the Everett House, leaving his other friends to call for him to go to Long Branch at five in the afternoon.
He met the press representatives in my office, all gathered around the same table where many other English men of letters had been on the stand. There was great interest in him. The reporters recognized a brilliant subject, and succeeded in getting about as rich material for “space” as they had encountered for some time. Zangwill answered questions of every conceivable sort, and returned the fire from his assailants with vigor. The reports in all the papers the next day were excellent, and the interest in the great Jewish novelist was manifest everywhere.
Lecture committees called and letters of inquiry came pouring in, but as yet I could give no answer. In the interviews the day before he evaded all questions as to his plans, and so it went on until October. Many excellent applications had to be rejected because no definite answer could be given. The result was that when an understanding was finally reached, nearly all the lyceum courses in the country were made up, and the only way to book Zangwill was to hire halls and speculate or accept certainties wherever they came from.
After our contract was duly signed, I at once engaged the Lyceum Theatre in New York for his initial performance in America. It took place on the afternoon of October 11th, 1898. The pretty theatre was crowded with as intelligent and fashionable an audience as New York could turn out to welcome a stranger. “The Drama as a Fine Art” was the subject chosen by Mr. Zangwill. He told me that he would speak without notes, as he had been assured that to attempt to read a lecture to a New York audience was fatal. There was no use of arguing this with him. It was with some difficulty that he got under way, but the lecture itself was a shower of epigrams interspersed with sparkles of wit that carried his audience with him from the beginning to the very last word. Not until the close of the lecture did a single person leave the house. The speaker was recalled and cheered vociferously for a long time.
The lecture was a severe criticism of the dramatic critics, and most of our New York critics were there. The only one of whom Zangwill had spoken kindly was William Winter, on whom the compliment was lost because the latter had ceased long ago to take interest in such affairs.
Many of New York’s best people rushed upon the stage to congratulate Zangwill on his real success. Some of the most prominent Jewish citizens were there--among them Mr. Seligman and Mr. Isidor Straus. The latter, who sat by me, declared that I had certainly found a winner. I don’t think I ever knew an audience to be more delighted.
Yet the papers the next morning, much to my surprise, were not very complimentary of Mr. Zangwill’s criticism, and when Zangwill and I met to join Hall Caine and Judge Sulzburger, with whom we were to lunch that day at the Waldorf, he wore about as dejected an expression as I have ever seen. Mr. Caine’s play “The Christian” was receiving very vigorous treatment at the hands of the New York papers about this time, and when he and Mr. Zangwill met at the lunch table, I think Judge Sulzburger must have noticed that the two men were in so chopfallen and dejected a state of mind that they might have put pepper in their coffee instead of sugar without ever having known the difference.
If the reporters could have heard that little interchange of opinions of the American press from two such brilliant minds, their story would have delighted the general public if not the journalists themselves.
I had little difficulty in booking Zangwill. After New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, he went to Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis; from there to Birmingham, Ala., Atlanta, and back to New York, making a succession of the longest rides that ever a lecturer attempted in this country. Everywhere Zangwill met big crowds, and his audiences were delighted.
On his return in November he gave a series of three lectures in the Waldorf-Astoria; but the newspapers had succeeded in creating a prejudice against the speaker, and these lectures were very poorly attended.
I booked him for a Sunday night in Boston, and there was a large advance sale up to the Friday evening before the lecture. Then came a blizzard, and not another ticket was sold until the night of the lecture, when only $2 was taken in at the box office. It was one of the historic blizzards of Boston. The advance sale had been $480 up to Friday, and Sunday night it was swelled to $482, but very few of the people who had purchased tickets in advance were able to get to the theatre.
Arrangements were made for another Sunday night in Boston three weeks later, but the public proposed to wait until the night came before buying their tickets, as many of them had been disappointed on the last occasion. On the Saturday before this Sunday another blizzard set in. Mr. Zangwill was on hand and filled the bill, but the house was empty. Nobody could get there. Mr. Zangwill and I had rented the theatre and were speculating. Our loss was about $80, but Mr. Zangwill wrote me a letter declaring he thought he must have been the Jonah on this occasion, and insisted on paying all the loss out of his own pocket.
The two leading Jewish clubs in New York, the Harmony Social and the Freundschaft, each paid him $500 for a lecture on Sunday evening, and I don’t believe Mr. Zangwill or anybody else ever faced a more cultivated or appreciative audience than on these occasions.
Many offers were made to Mr. Zangwill for his literary work, and he accepted a dazzling proposition from Harpers to write a novel, and withdrew _forever_ from the platform, as he said.
I tried very hard to secure Mr. Zangwill for another season, as his lectures had given great satisfaction in the large cities which he visited and they had been extensively reported. He was about the best-advertised man in the country, and the public had learned that he had something to give for the money which the American public has always been willing to pay under such conditions. But it was no use. Theatrical managers were after him to dramatize “The Children of the Ghetto.” Mr. Zangwill was a great dramatic critic, and he believed he could write a great play, and managers had the same belief, which they were ready to back up with large sums of money.
He came over again in 1899 and produced the play in Washington in October of that year. There were fine criticisms and every prospect of a fortune in sight; but it was not what New York wanted, and so, after a long and fair trial, it was withdrawn from the boards of the Herald Square Theatre.
Zangwill is a good lecturer, because his subject-matter is educational to a great degree, and his copious flow of English and epigrammatic sentences render it as entertaining and novel as it is instructive. There is good money for him in America whenever he wishes to set aside the time for it; but he will not do it. He cannot jump on a steamer and come over here, give a few lectures and run back again, without notifying the people in advance that he is coming.
William Webster Ellsworth is a man whose fame as a lecturer was not acquired through _The Century Magazine_, but who has helped to make _The Century_ what it is at this time. He has been secretary of the great corporation which publishes _The Century_ since its establishment by Roswell Smith. Mr. Ellsworth is of Puritan stock, a great-grandson of Chief Justice Ellsworth and of Noah Webster, and he was reared in Connecticut, a stamping-ground of Revolutionary heroes. A few years ago he found himself a recognized authority on Revolutionary subjects. It came about, I believe, through a publisher’s suggestion to an author. Mr. Ellsworth asked Elbridge S. Brooks to write a book for boys and girls on the Revolution, proposing that it should take the form of a trip to the battlefields, and he offered to go with Mr. Brooks. They made the trip together, and the photographs taken by Mr. Ellsworth were used as illustrations for “The Century Book of the American Revolution,” and were afterward made the basis of a lecture by Mr. Ellsworth which many of the societies of Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution promptly asked to hear. His position gave him access to private and public collections of manuscripts and printing, and with his heart in the subject Mr. Ellsworth has brought to light more interesting documents and pictures than were ever supposed to exist. Scores of lyceum, patriotic, and historical societies have had his two lectures, one on the Revolutionary War, and the other on “Arnold and Andre: the Story of the Treason,” which he prepared two years ago.
During the last two years he has made discoveries and brought to light much interesting new material relating to the early history of George Washington. A new lecture has been prepared by Mr. Ellsworth on the subject, which I was invited to hear at his home, Esperanza Farm, near New Hartford, Conn., in August, 1900. This has certainly proved the most interesting and charming of all. Gifted with a descriptive voice that is strong, resonant, and absolutely faultless in delivery, with the personal magnetism that is so essential to a lecturer’s success, Mr. Ellsworth is unquestionably one of the best-equipped men for an instructive and entertaining lecture that the lyceum has yet produced. From one of Mr. Ellsworth’s lectures the rising generation can obtain more knowledge of the early history of our nation than from a whole winter of hard study. School boards and teachers are beginning to find out that one of the simplest and most thorough means of instruction nowadays is the lecture platform. In the city of New York there is hardly a public school that does not have a large hall set aside for lectures. Last year over three thousand free lectures were given in the public schools in Greater New York on nearly every possible educational topic, generally illustrated with stereopticon pictures which greatly enhanced their value. In this special line great advances are being made, and they are due to the fact that such men as Mr. Ellsworth, who have something to give in return for what they receive, are available for the work.
Anthony Hope Hawkins was discovered by Robert Barr, who first went to London in the interests of the Detroit _Free Press_. One night Barr, then editing _The Idler_ with Jerome K. Jerome, met a thin, pale, bald young barrister who talked so charmingly about books that Barr, who is big, burly, bouncing, and straightforward, asked him:
“Do you do anything of the sort?”
Mr. Hawkins confessed, with a blush, that he did when not painfully busy.
“I’ll come and read some of ’em to-morrow,” said Barr. And he did. After he had read the last sheet he said:
“Say, Hawkins, how much have you got like this?”
“Considerable.”
“Want to sell it?”
“Why--why, yes, I’d like to.”
“How much do you want a thousand words?”
Hawkins was amazed. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Would a pound be too much?”
Barr laughed. “You don’t know much about this business, do you?” he asked.
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Well,” drawled Barr, “I’ll give you several pounds a thousand, and we’ll start publishing right away.”
Beneath the title of each sketch Mr. Hawkins had written: “By Anthony Hope.”
“Ought I to put my last name there?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make any difference about the name,” answered Barr; “it’s the stuff that counts.”
And count it did.
Anthony Hope Hawkins is an English gentleman in every sense that the words implies. I cannot say that I ever associated with a man whom I held in higher esteem. He sees everything from the most agreeable point of view. He has one of the most delightful laughs in conversation that ever I heard, and I made it my business to excite as often as possible the vein in his nature that brought it out.
He has the better qualities of the English voice, its softer tones and accents. Owing to its richness, he can be heard distinctly by every auditor. Although monotonous in his delivery, because of his distinct enunciation and the sweetness of his voice, the monotony is not objectionable.
He charms invariably his audiences, because he feels his characters and is able to exploit them.