Читать книгу Henry Irving's Impressions of America - Joseph Hatton - Страница 14

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We encounter more new-comers in the saloon. Two of them bring copies of the morning papers. I recognize several of the interesting crowd, and cannot help telling them something of the conversation of the Beefsteak Club room guest who drew their pictures in London, as a warning to the traveller whom they were going to meet. I find them almost as ill-informed, and quite as entertaining, concerning Irving’s mannerisms, as was the traveller in question touching their own occupation. They talk very much in the spirit of what has recently appeared here in some of the newspapers about Irving and his art-methods. New York, they say, will not be dictated to by London; New York judges for itself. At the same time they do not think it a generous thing on the part of the London “Standard” to send a hostile editorial avant-courier to New York, to prejudice the English actor’s audiences and his critics.[2] Nor do they think this “British malevolence” will have any effect either way, though the “Standard” practically proclaims Mr. Irving and Miss Terry as impostors. This article has been printed by the press, from New York to San Francisco, while the Lyceum Company and its chief are on the Atlantic. I have often heard it said, in England, that Irving had been wonderfully “worked” in America. Men who are worthy to have great and devoted friends unconsciously make bitter enemies. Irving is honored with a few of these attendants upon fame. If the people who regard his reputation as a thing that has been “worked” could have visited New York a week before his arrival they could not have failed to be delighted to see how much was being done against him, and how little for him. An ingenious and hostile pamphleteer was in evidence in every bookseller’s window. Villainous cheap photographs of “actor and manager” were hawked in the streets. Copies of an untruthful sketch of his career, printed by a London weekly, were circulated through the mails. The “Standard’s” strange appeal to New York, Boston, and Chicago was cabled to the “Herald” and republished in the evening papers. Ticket speculators had bought up all the best seats at the Star Theatre, where the English actor was to appear, and refused to sell them to the public except at exorbitant, and, for many play-goers, prohibitive rates. So far as “working” went the London enemies of the Lyceum manager were so actively represented in New York that his friends in the Empire city must have felt a trifle chilled at the outlook. The operations of the ticket speculators, it must, however, be admitted, seemed to project in Irving’s path the most formidable of all the other obstacles.