Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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Houghton was, not without full justice, called the leader of the Manchester School of dramatists. He was hard; he was unimaginative; he was unromantic. But he was extraordinarily apt, and he had a neat and tidy brain. Close must have been that union of souls that bound his soul to the soul of Miss Horniman. Miss Horniman never (well, hardly ever) produced a romantic play, and Stanley Houghton never wrote one. He was out to “make good,” and Miss Horniman helped him to go one better.

I need scarcely say that Houghton was, so far as his plays were concerned, an industrious man of business. When the real artist has finished a work, he ceases to take interest in it; but, with Houghton, when a play was completed his interest in it immediately intensified. He sent his plays everywhere: to the provinces, to London, to America, to agents. As soon as a play came back, “returned with thanks,” out it went again by the next post. And he pulled strings—oh! ever so gently, but he pulled them.