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

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Only a very few men really understood Houghton, and those were men who, like Walter Mudie, had known him intimately in boyhood. Mudie swore by him and would hear no word against him. But there was something forbidding in Houghton’s nature—a barricade of reserve that ssss1 he himself had not wilfully erected, but which had been placed there by Nature. It was impossible for people who met him casually a few times to form a high opinion either of his intellect or of his personality. I remember Captain James E.Agate, a most original and brilliant colleague of Houghton’s on The Manchester Guardian, once saying to a group of people: “Don’t you make any mistake about Houghton. He’s not such a fool as he appears.” But it is a very incomplete man who requires such a double-edged defence as that.

Though the contrary has often been stated, Houghton did not, I believe, take much interest in anybody’s work except his own. He patronised a young bank clerk, Charles Forrest, who had written a promising little play that was subsequently, by Houghton’s recommendation, I believe, given in Manchester and Liverpool; but when he came in contact with work that was, in many respects, superior to his own, he was airily superior and supercilious. He once asked to see a blank-verse play of my own that was given at the Manchester Gaiety, but as I was aware that he knew as much of blank verse as I do of conic sections—which is nothing at all—I refrained from passing on my MS. to him. In other men’s work he looked for faults; in his own he found perfection.