any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage
that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three
places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and
maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath
to give up, though when he was instructed as to their true meaning, he
saw how he could get a better effect out of it. He had an excellent
intelligence, but this was employed so entirely in the study of
impression that significance was often a secondary matter with him. He
had not much humor, and Maxwell doubted if he felt it much in others,
but he told a funny story admirably, and did character-stuff, as he
called it, with the subtlest sense; he had begun in sketches of the
variety type. Sometimes Maxwell thought him very well versed in the
history and theory of the drama; but there were other times when his
ignorance seemed almost creative in that direction. He had apparently no
feeling for values; he would want a good effect used, without regard to
the havoc it made of the whole picture, though doubtless if it could
have been realized to him, he would have abhorred it as thoroughly as
Maxwell himself. He would come over from Manchester one day with a
notion for the play so bad that it almost made Maxwell shed tears; and
the next with something so good that Maxwell marvelled at it; but
Godolphin seemed to value the one no more than the other. He was a
creature of moods the most extreme; his faith in Maxwell was as
profound as his abysmal distrust of him; and his frank and open nature
was full of suspicion. He was like a child in the simplicity of his
selfishness, as far as his art was concerned, but in all matters aside
from it he was chaotically generous. His formlessness was sometimes
almost distracting; he presented himself to the author's imagination as
mere human material, waiting to be moulded in this shape or that. From
day to day, from week to week, Maxwell lived in a superficial
uncertainty whether Godolphin had really taken his play, or would ever
produce it; yet at the bottom of his heart he confided in the promises
which the actor lavished upon him in both the written and the spoken
word. They had an agreement carefully drawn up as to all the business
between them, but he knew that Godolphin would not be held by any clause
of it that he wished to break; he did not believe that Godolphin
understood what it bound him to, either when he signed it or afterwa