Fanny’s First Play

When does the play begin? Half-past eight? Footman Nine, sir. Savoyard Oh, good. Well, will you telephone to my wife at the George that it’s not until nine? Footman Right, sir. Mrs. Cecil Savoyard, sir? Savoyard No: Mrs. William Tinkler. Don’t forget. The Footman Mrs. Tinkler, sir. Right, sir. The Count comes in through the curtains. Here is the Count, sir. Announcing Mr. Cecil Savoyard, sir. He withdraws. Count O’Dowda A handsome man of fifty, dressed with studied elegance a hundred years out of date, advancing cordially to shake hands with his visitor. Pray excuse me, Mr. Savoyard. I suddenly recollected that all the bookcases in the library were locked⁠—in fact they’ve never been opened since we came from Venice⁠—and as our literary guests will probably use the library a good deal, I just ran in to unlock everything. Savoyard Oh, you mean the dramatic critics. M’yes. I suppose there’s a smoking room? The Count My study is available. An old-fashioned house, you understand. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Savoyard? Savoyard Thanks. They sit. Savoyard, looking at his host’s obsolete costume, continues, I had no idea you were going to appear in the piece yourself. The Count I am not. I wear this costume because⁠—well, perhaps I had better explain the position, if it interests you. Savoyard Certainly. The Count Well, you see, Mr. Savoyard, I’m rather a stranger in your world. I am not, I hope, a modern man in any sense of the word. I’m not really an Englishman: my family is Irish: I’ve lived all my life in Italy⁠—in Venice mostly⁠—my very title is a foreign one: I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. Savoyard Where’s that? The Count At present, nowhere, except as a memory and an ideal. Savoyard inclines his head respectfully to the ideal. But I am by no means an idealogue. I am not content with beautiful dreams: I want beautiful realities. Savoyard Hear, hear! I’m all with you there⁠—when you can get them. The Count Why not get them? The difficulty is not that there are no beautiful realities, Mr. Savoyard: the difficulty is that so few of us know them when we see them. We have inherited from the past a vast treasure of beauty⁠—of imperishable masterpieces of poetry, of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of music, of exquisite fashions in dress, in furniture, in domestic decoration. We can contemplate these treasures. We can reproduce many of them. We can buy a few inimitable originals. We can shut out the nineteenth century⁠— Savoyard Correcting him. The twentieth. The Count To me the century I shut out will always be the nineteenth century, just as your national anthem will always be God Save the Queen, no matter how many kings may succeed. I found England befouled with industrialism: well, I did what Byron did: I simply refused to live in it. You remember Byron’s words: “I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcase back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.” Savoyard Did Byron say that? The Count He did, sir. Savoyard It don’t sound like him. I saw a good deal of him at one time. The Count You! But how is that possible? You are too young. Savoyard I was quite a lad, of course. But I had a job in the original production of Our Boys. The Count My dear sir, not that Byron. Lord Byron, the poet. Savoyard Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you were talking of the Byron. So you prefer living abroad? The Count I find England ugly and Philistine. Well, I don’t live in it. I find modern houses ugly. I don’t live in them: I have a palace on the grand canal. I find modern clothes prosaic. I don’t wear them, except, of course, in the street. My ears are offended by the Cockney twang: I keep out of hearing of it and speak and listen to Italian. I find Beethoven’s music coarse and restless, and Wagner’s senseless and detestable. I do not listen to them. I listen to Cimarosa, to Pergolesi, to Gluck and Mozart. Nothing simpler, sir. Savoyard It’s all right when you can afford it. The Count Afford it! My dear Mr. Savoyard, if you are a man with a sense of beauty you can make an earthly paradise for yourself in Venice on 1500 pounds a year, whilst our wretched vulgar industrial millionaires are spending twenty thousand on the amusements of billiard markers. I assure you I am a poor man according to modern ideas. But I have never had anything less than the very best that life has produced. It is my good fortune to have a beautiful and lovable daughter; and that girl, sir, has never seen an ugly sight or heard an ugly sound that I could spare her; and she has certainly never worn an ugly dress or tasted coarse food or bad wine in her life. She has lived in a palace; and her perambulator was a gondola. Now you know the sort of people we are, Mr. Savoyard. You can imagine how we feel here. Savoyard Rather out of it, eh? The Count Out of it, sir! Out of what? Savoyard Well, out of everything. The Count Out of soot and fog and mud and east wind; out of vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner and Ruskin. Don’t you envy me, Mr. Savoyard? Savoyard Some of us must live in England, you know, just to keep the place going. Besides⁠—though, mind you, I don’t say it isn’t all right from the high art point of view