POOR JACK
A PLAY IN ONE ACT
PRIVATELY PRINTED
RICHMOND
1906
To R. D. L.:
“There are some ghosts,” said poor Jack,“that will not easily bear raising....”
Thus am I confounded by words of my ownchoosing, for in truth I have raised one; andnot for me, as for Dame Sylvia, does Chivalryblow upon a silver horn to drown the squeakingsof that folly. Which is merely anotherway of saying that those younglings we twoknow and love, and who fretted me into thewriting of a play for their theatricals, have rejectedthe outcome after a tentative rehearsal,with certain remarks for my pondering.
Well might that fat whoresome man havebeen left to the undignified fate his creator hadappointed for him!—or at least in the staidertrappings wherewith I did gird his behemothianbulk in my story, The Love Lettersof Falstaff. Decked for the stage and withbella donna in its eyes, my sketch, they tell me,is a ghastly remains to which the footlightswould add but the effect of funeral candles. Infine, that which lacks both plot and action, andoffers, in lieu of lusty characters, four grayghosts, is not a play but an edifying exposé ofthe pitfalls and snares into which a romancistmight be expected to stumble when he dons thehabit of a playwright. These and many otherplaints which I shall strive to live down in theyears before me, conveyed a discomfortingunanimity of opinion on the part of my hopefulplayers.
With such humility as becomes one of oursoberer estate in the presence of these, ourjuniors and betters, I pointed out that it wasnot my fault, assuredly, that Falstaff was nolonger the merry taker of purses whose roaringoaths had filled all Gadshill. Nor that Willhad never displayed any very hearty admirationfor humanity nor found many more commendabletraits in general exercise among itsindividuals than did the authors of the Bible:a spirit which, however distasteful to my palate,I was obliged in this instance to emulate!Yet I dared think (and my defense grewnoticeably weaker under their incredulousstare) that old, gross and decayed as he hadgrown, the demiurge still clings to the oldreprobate; yea, and the aura of divinity toHelen, whose beauty is drifting dust, so thatFalstaff sees before him not Sylvia Vernon butSylvia Darke.
Poor Falstaff. “Were’t not for laughing Ishould pity him!”
But they had since ceased to listen. Vanishedwere they like the merry company whose merenames, thought Falstaff, were like a breath ofcountry air. My script lay before me, eloquentin naught but their disillusion. Alone, I thoughtthe fire winked knowingly at me, much like theone I had fanned from the embers of the past,as if it said: How old must a man become ’erehe shall be wise enough to content these sureyoung critics, so awfully and so inevitablyright?
I should have dropped the record of my follyinto the flames and so played out the last s