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

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Though quite a few of his plays had been produced in the north, and though he had written some clever dramatic criticism for The Manchester Guardian, he was unknown in London till the Stage Society produced Hindle Wakes. Then Fame came to him and knocked him off his feet. It is impossible to imagine a man more conscious of his success. His consciousness of it made him, on occasion, tongue-tied. In conversation he could be ready, and his repartee was frequently brilliant, but during the years I knew him his attitude always suggested that he ssss1 anticipated and feared attack. I saw him once at the bar of the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, in the midst of a group of friends. I was not of their company, but I noticed that he stood silent, erect and strained, his head a little thrown back, his face set. Then, and on many other occasions, it seemed to me that he longed to break down the feeling of awkwardness—to throw off the obsession of self-consciousness—that overcame him.

But I must confess that I rarely saw him in company in which there were not two or three who were hostile to him; therefore I saw him but seldom at his best. Not infrequently, there was a “dead set” against him, and if the banter were edged with malice (as it not infrequently was) he withered like a lily under the grip of a frost. The truth is, he was not modest and he could not feign modesty. His vanity was neither charming nor aggressive; it was cold and distant, without geniality, without humour. Genius is one of the wombs of vanity, but Houghton had no genius; there was not a trace of magic in him; he was merely extraordinarily clever, closely observant and possessed of an instinctive sense of form and of literary values.