THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ALARUMS ^ EXCURSIONS i ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS BY I JAMES AGATE author of "responsibility" Ah ! je vous reconnais, tous mes vieux ennemis ! Le Mensonge ? Tiens, tiens ! Ha ! ha ! les Compromis, Les Prejuges, les Lachetes ! . . . Que je pactise? Jamais, jamais ! Ah ! te voila, toi, la Sottise ! Je sais bien qu'.\ la fin vous me mettrez a bas ; N'importe : je me bats ! je me bats ! je me bats ! {Cyrano /ait des motdinets immenses) Rostand. NEW YORK ■ GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY I Printed in Great Britain bt the Riversidi Press Limited Edinburgh 1922 TO C. E. MONTAGUE Aa(. Contents A Cartel to Modesty . The Decay of Criticism Sarah Bernhardt. A Postscript Big Pugs and Little Swan and Dragon-Fly . A Note on Repertory . Cackle and 'Osses The Art of the Guitrys A View of " The Beggar's Opera " An Eveninor at Collins's Incidental Music and Some Shakespeare Vesta Ave Atque Vale . Charlie Chaplin . Heartbreak Shaw Scaramouch in Seven Dials . The Hound of Drinkwater A Point of Style . Hippocampelephantocamelos . For the Purposes of Revenue A Happy Commentator Page 9 13 34 62 75 81 102 133 139 153 165 174 179 187 193 199 205 21 1 224 259 A Cartel to Modesty Ham. Then saw you not his face ? HOR. O, yes, my lord ; he wore his beaver up. Hamlet^ Act i., so. 2. HOW many things are there," says Verulam, "which a man cannot, with any face or comeHness, say or do himself!" "It has often been remarked," echoes Professor Raleigh, "how few are the story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so much as by a passing re- flection or sentiment, without a discordant effect." Now I, the meanest of guests at the table of the rich, holding out promise of entertainment that I may dine, make bold to blame the host who should deprive me of the string upon which I harp best. What more fittingly becomes the critic, recount- ing after dinner the story of his likes and dislikes, than his challenging " I want this," and " I won't have that " .'* There is no mock-humility about the great in this line. It is not the modesty of Lamb, the bated breath of Hazlitt nor the whispering humbleness of Leigh Hunt which are the strength of these authors. Shyness is the small change of their agreeableness. And yet I would not wish to have seen these egoists in the flesh. Neither do I long to behold, bodily, their successors of to-day. These, too, shall be the magnificent selves of their writings. The peacockery 1 of that prince of dilettanti, Mr Max Beerbohm — let me have no pretence of intimacy — has always called to mind the burnished, 1 I confess to long consideration of this word and that for six months "coxcombry," in the Maxian sense, stood in its place, to be softened after one more reading of William and Mary, perhaps the most attecling and most beautiful, certainly the simplest, short story in the English language. Alarums and Excursions dandiacal Htde fellow who, in the bootmaker's show-case, enthuses over Meltonian boot-polish. And in that configuration of him I would die. Once in the theatre I sat next to a famous critic, revered from childhood, to find that he slept throughout a French comedy of some sparkle. In the intervals, durinof which the orreat man Stirred to wakefulness, I would have sought speech but for the fear of interrupting a scholarly re-perusal of The Decline and Fall. Once I was placed next to Mr Shaw, and lo, instead of the fire-eater, a kindly gentleman gravely a-twinkle, perilously like the "bearded lady" of Rodin's effigy. I go in fear of meeting Mr Walkley, whose prose so dazzles that it may only be read through smoked glasses, lest the spoken word prove less than unbearable. I am in terror lest proximity reduce the girth of Mr Chesterton. " It is strange," muses M. France's immortal dog, " how as objects approach I get smaller, and as they recede I get bigger." ^ It would be a terrible disillusion for the Riquet in us to find that as Mr Chesterton drew near we did not grow less. I have never been one to suffer mortification ; determined always that great men shall be of the stature of their works. It has been my privilege to escape contact with the important of this earth. Once, at the opening of the Jubilee Exhibition, I trespassed to within two paces of a Stout Gentle- man and his Lady. As a small boy exploring the House of Commons, I accidentally butted into Mr * Adapted. lO A Cartel to Modesty Labouchere. I have survived an over on the sands from Dr Grace. At Olympia I have stumbled over the legs of Mr Joseph Beckett. Unwillingly was I presented to a Helen of the boards whose beauty was to youthful eyes, oh, ever so much more than fabled barks. Once I met R^jane, and found her a competent body with no halo of artistry. ... It had been wiser to refrain from these encounters, so true is it that "the manna of greatness may be lost in the leaven of habit." For as politicians have their public and their private codes of honour, so writers have their public and their private personalities. It was objected of Sir Isaac Newton and Mr Locke that " beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men." Is it possible that this must of the great be ever true ? I fear it, I promise you, since of a modern philosopher it is written, "One expected him as a voluminously bearded Jew, with a vast forehead, bright, sparkling- eyes, and a certain obscurity of manner, for this, according to the conventions which mould our views, is the successful Continental professor from east of the Rhine. Instead, there walked on to the crowded platform a rather tired-looking school- master in middle age, clean-shaven but for a mous- tache, and indifferently dressed." Of this aspect of truth I am shyer than I am of Einstein himself. It would seem that we are here to reconcile two propositions which would appear at first sight to be mutually destructive. The first is the right of the artist to sink the individual, to II Alarums and Excursions be known by his artistry alone. The actor shall be such as his characters are on the stage, the author such as his works reveal him ; and though both use the parade and glory of art to trick out the plain citizen it shall not be accounted vanity. The second proposition is the right of actor and author to make all possible play with the first person singular. This is an apparent opposition ; in reality there is no see-saw. For just as the first condition of the actor's art is that the instrument upon which he plays shall be himself, so is the instrument of the critic his wide-flung, uncompromising egoism. But, again, this egoism is no more than the "idea" of a personality which the writer, consciously or un- consciously, has woven for you in the texture of his book. He does not buttress opinion with matters outside the reader's concern, the number of his town and country houses, his tale of plate and linen. His prestige is in the written page, not in himself. " Elia," at odds with the Scheme of Things, may urge a gentle displeasure which had been .impious in the India House clerk "But," objects the reader, "it is to 'Elia' and not Charles Lamb that the essays are ascribed by their author." I pray the reader, therefore, to substitute for the name on my cover that of N. or M., John Doe or Richard Doe, or such fantasy as shall please him. And I, John Richard Doe, N. or M., claim the right to confront my reader in my own person as often as shall please me. 12 The Decay of Criticism Those who will not stoop to the baseness of the modern fashion are too often discouraged. Those who do stoop to it are always degraded. Macaulay. MANY can write books, few can choose titles. I liad long meditated a work upon stage players across whose cover should gleam, streamer-wise, " Lord, what Fools these Actors be ! " A list of names was to follow. Why should the devil have all the best tunes ? Why should the railway bookstalls sell nothing but rubbish } Were it not an act of high morality to bluff the traveller for his own good .'^ Why should not the dull fellow, allured by spicy prospects of detraction, insure himself against tedium in a company with a highly fraudulent prospectus } What care I though he pitch me out of window at the first hint of disillusion .'* Is there not just a chance that before it comes to the pitching we shall stumble, he and I, upon some common delight ? And for a dull critic to proclaim, and a dull reader to reaffirm, a common joy marks an epoch in the education of both. It was the fear of libel actions which turned me from this fine fling. I made tentative alterations : " Lord what Fools . . ." and a quite cryptic, ". . . These Actors be." But I could not rid myself of the feeling that in the Law Courts it is the letter and not the spirit which prevails. A Puckish extravagance, I should have pleaded ; hyperbole in Macaulay's sense of lying without intention to deceive, defamation without intent to defame. 13 Alarums and Excursions No actor, I would have agreed, is a fool save in a way of folly presently to be explained. Yet that there must be something of this in his make-up it were only reasonable to suppose. How else, the law of averages holding, and the actor's theatrical genius knowing neither measure nor containment? A commonplace of all who write about actors is their brief continuance, the transitoriness which is the essence of their glory. They are your true ephemera. Astronomers leave behind them new stars, explorers new continents, statesmen new measures, politicians old speeches ; philosophers bequeath us their speculations, poets their verses ; even my lord the newspaper-proprietor prints trivialities on the sands of time — records of net sales graven upon the Margate shore. Whereas the actor dazzles and is gone, his cometary stuff his own body. There is no elixir, you would say, which may prolong the illusion of his being, nor endow him, once de- parted, with the faculty of having been. Yet there is a little breed of men who would ensure that the memory of great acting shall outlive the actor — aye, and for more than half-a-year. These are the dramatic critics, monumental masons whose works are headstones. The dear simplicity of actors consists in their scorn of these their epitaphers and memorialists, in their disregard of those who would ensure for them a terrain a perpdtuiU. For this, at least, is in the gift of the critic. The Decay of Criticism " It matters nothing whether your criticism be written well or ill ; tell me how I acted ! " is said to be the actor's demand. As well might the critic retort : " It matters nothing how you mow and gibber ; leave your damnable faces and let the author speak." The quarrel is the old one as to the function of criticism. Is it demanded and who is it that demands, that the theatrical "notice" shall be purely informative, determinative of the busy man's choice of distraction ? Is it to be a compendium of the plot, a list of players and a computation of recalls? Must it resolve itself into an appreciation of the dresses, a bill of the celebrities in the boxes, a note of the gallery's behaviour ? I do not say that such a hotch-potch were out of place in some part of a newspaper : it is, after all, a kind of news. But for the recording thereof there are news-reporters and news-columns. The relations of the critic are fourfold. There is the relation to the intelligent reader, and I am not persuaded that there is no public for some- thing different from mere reporting. There is the relation to the theatre-managers, and I am not convinced of the insistence of these gentlemen that the opinions which they have invited shall be non-critical. But neither of these is my im- mediate point. My concern is with the relation there might be between critic and dramatist and critic and actor were not the newspaper-editor ever in the way. Have not they, actor and dramatist, the right to demand that the critic 15 Alarums and Excursions matched against them shall be of their fellows, a craftsman at his own trade, a conscious as well as a conscientious artist ? This is not a counsel of perfection. La plus belle fille ne pent donner que ce qu'elle a ; no writer can give beyond his talent. The difficulty is still with the newspapers, the obtaining of editorial con- sent to the functioning of that talent according to its degree. Even though the journalist, be he critic or reporter, perceive that a different handling is required as between a new Hamlet and a speech at the Mansion House, there remains always his chief to be circumvented. That battles are won by the common soldier and not by the general will always be true of the newspaper world. With a few rare and honourable exceptions, the finest criticism has always been achieved in the face of higher authority ; even the best of editors may be screwed up to the courage of your fine midnight assault upon established reputation because the hour is too late for timidity. When, recently, a company of players from the Comedie Fran^aise visited London the programme contained a reference to G. H. Lewes — " one of the half- dozen really inspired critics of the drama and of acting." How many London papers, one asked oneself, would open their columns to-day to any "inspired critic" should such an one arise ? Criticism is at a discount ; it is a drug in the market, a waste of space. The Times frankly admits that "The theatre has meant i6 The Decay of Criticism nothing to England. It has been no part of our life. We have no genius for the theatre. We make an ' amusement ' of it, it is true, and a great industry. But we have not made it even an amusement with the dignity and the passion of the drama enjoyed by nations with a genius for the theatre." The attitude of the Press itself has changed during the last twenty years, for in place of the old obligation to lead public taste the modern urgency is to pursue it. The Press has descended from criticism of books to person- alities about authors ; from criticism of actors to chatter of the wings. When formerly a great actor arose the polite world held its breath until a Hazlitt, a Lewes, or even a Clement Scott had pronounced judgment. But the acting of the actor is no longer supposed to be the reader's concern. He is offered, in place of criticism, irrelevant gossip after the manner of the servants' hall. Newspaper criticism is divided to-day into two distinct kinds. The first wears the old air of erudition and authority which serves to conceal or, perhaps, to betray a well-bred indifference ; it is become a livery of pure tedium. One must suppose thirty or forty years of writing about the London theatre to have induced in the finer sort of critic a weariness too jaded even for indig- nation ; the sight of the most polished of light comedians "^ crawling on his stomach about a bed- room floor no longer stirs him to protest. The * Mr Charles Hawtrey in Up in AfabePs Room. B 17 Alarums and Excursions second is not criticism at all. It consists of a bald statement of the plot of the play, a denuded account of the acting, and a rapturous tale of the reception. The whole under twenty lines. The best that can be said of such criticism is that it is strictly non-committal. In many papers the dramatic criticism is entrusted to the hack whose job it is to concoct the daily or weekly column of theatrical "news." Now either the weekly gossip-column is made up of paragraphs sent in by the theatrical Press-agent, unaltered and pinned together, or it is not. In the first case these paragraphs are simple advertisements and should be paid for as advertisements and the public notified that they are advertisements. The second case presupposes some sort of editing. A critic who is entrusted with the work of criti- cising actors who are artists must necessarily be an artist himself. Not even your lordliest polypapist^ will deny this. Justifiable, therefore, would be the employment of an artist to sub-edit gossip were the intention to discard the chaff and use only the grain. But it is clear that what is demanded is not the sifting- of an unconscionable amount of trash, but its increase. From which it follows that an artist is the last person to be chosen. If the sifter's mesh be fine, he is useless to his paper in the vulgar capacity ; if it be coarse, he cannot have fineness of discrimina- 1 We have the authority of a highly critical review for taking this word to mean "an owner of many papers" and not "a believer in many popes." i8 The Decay of Criticism tion and should not be employed as critic. No critic should be asked to puff, nor, being asked, will so betray his function ; whilst it is unfair to demand of the strenuous news-monger that he shall have a mind for values. Pedlars should stick to their wares. There is yet one other way of concocting a gossip-column, a way one shrinks from ex- amining too closely. This is the method of first- hand collection. Imagination boggles at the thought of a " really inspired critic " hanging over bars, toadying to managers, bribing the call-boy, confabbing with underlings — the whole art and science of the tout. How otherwise can these sly-boots justify their salaries? If the theatre- manager wants it to be known that Miss Biddy from Bideford is giving place to Miss Bahs from Bahhicomhe there are the drum and cymbals, siren and foghorn of the Press-agent ready to his hand. If the manaofer does not want the tremendous secret to be known, what is there but treachery in these mischievous flutings ? It is difficult to justify the collective or inventive gossip. Either he is pure busybody, or the theatrical publicity-monger is a less communicative person than one thought. Were I an actor, I should immensely resent being criticised at night by a spy who had spent his morning at the keyhole. It is not the eavesdropping to which I should object but the mentality of the eavesdropper.^ * I have never, to my knowledge, set eyes on a professional gossip-monj^er who wormed out his own secrets. If it be proved that there are such 19 Alarums and Excursions What one would, of course, unhesitatingly condemn would be that any Press-agent in the pay of a theatrical management should be engaged as dramatic critic on the staff of a newspaper. Against this it may be argued that a man cannot live by dramatic criticism alone, and that it were unjust he should be debarred from exercising his talents in a collateral interest. Let there be no misunderstanding. I do not say that both functions may not be discharged with honour by the same person. I do say that no considerate editor would put his critic into* the difficult position of having to notice the productions of his theatrical employer. Not even in the theatre can a man serve two masters. It were no answer to say that in such a case the critic would be absolved from noticing the performance he is paid to puff in another column, and that someotherrepresentative of the paper would be sent. He would still have to notice the productions of his employer's rivals. Here again I do not say that the most perfect fairness might not be maintained. The point is that the position is one of extreme delicacy for the critic and that the public should be made aware of the delicate position. At the head of every newspaper criticism written by a theatrical Press-agent the reader should be notified as follows : — Mr X. is the accredited Press-agent of Messrs A . B. people and that their profession is one of distinction and honour, I will persuade my publisher to print a second edition of this book that the necessary correction may be made. 20 The Decay of Criticism and C. The Daily Lynx submits Mr A.'s opinions of the productions of this and other managements in the perfect persuasion ^ of his critical honesty. But to find the real trouble we must go very much deeper. The real trouble is that the Press- agent, being a man of the theatre of the same order as the producer, sees the theatre from the inside, in terms of the producer's "effects." He knows the lath and plaster too well to see the structure as a whole, is too intimate with the bricks and rriortar of make-believe to come with fresh eyes to reality and truth. The attitude of the fine critic must always be one of complete detachment. For him the play's the thing ; no other consideration may come within his ken. His province is the relation between art and life. For him the intercourse and traffic of the players, the inner workings of the stage, do not exist. For him the curtain rises upon the unknown, and descends upon a world that has ceased to be. The " inspired "■ critic of former days relied upon his taste. He who to-day should plead long apprenticeship to the study of the drama, a feel- ing for acting and some fastidiousness of style would be hounded out of Fleet Street. No ! the word's too strong, and presupposes moral indigna- tion. He would be gently laughed out of the office. That there is not a larger body of con- sidered judgment of the theatre, the work of fine minds, is the fault of those who harry taste * If the editor be in good heart he may go as far as " full conviction." 21 Alarums and Excursions down the public street and woo her at every corner. And all because of the crazy notion that there is no middle way between the "highbrow"^ and the no brow at all, that the writer who is master of his subject is necessarily unreadable and that the public will steadily refuse to have anything to do with the brains of others or to use its own. What, under these conditions, be- comes of my plea for the critic as artist ? First let us suppose that the newspapers are not what we know them to be. Then let us decide what exactly is an artist, be he painter, poet, musician, critic, mime. I cannot, I think, do better than quote a passage which every actor and every dramatic critic should know by heart. It is to be found in The Manchester Stage, 1 880-1 goo. This little book is now very difficult to obtain and I make no apology for giving the passage here. It is by C. E. Montague. " What is an artist ? What, exactly, is it in a man that makes an artist of him ? Well, first a proneness in his mind to revel and bask in his own sense of fact ; not in the use of fact — that is for the men of affairs ; nor in the explanation of fact — that is for the men of science ; but simply in his own quick and glowing apprehension of what is about him, of all that is done on the earth or goes on in the sky, of dying and being 1 This objectionable word has been debased, if it could be debased, to mean not only the super-intellectual and hypercritical, but also, in the case of writers, whosoever retains a sense of the decency and dignity of letters. 22 The Decay of Criticism born, of the sun, clouds, and storms, of great deeds and failures, the changes of the seasons, and the strange events of men's lives. To mix with the day's diet of sights and sounds the man of this type seems to bring a wine of his own that lights a fire in his blood as he sits at the meal. What the finest minds of other types eschew he does, and takes pains to do. To shun the dry light, to drench all he sees with himself, his own temperament, the humours of his own moods — this is not his dread but his wish, as well as his bent. ' A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.' ' You shall see the world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower.' This heightened and delighted personal sense of fact, a knack of seeing visions at the instance of seen things, is the basis of art. " Only the basis, though. For that art may come a man must add to it a veritable passion for arresting and defining in words, or lines and colours, or notes of music, ^ not each or any thing that he sees, nor anybody else's sense of that thing, nor yet the greatest common measure of many trained or untrained minds' senses of it, but his own unique sense of it, the precise quality and degree of emotion that the spectacle of it breeds in him and nobody else, the net result of its contact with whatever in his own temperament he has not in common with other men. That is the truth of art, to be true less to facts without 1 The aclor was not specifically in the writer's mind or he would have added accent and gesture. 2.S Alarums and Excursions you than to yourself as stirred by facts. And truth it must be with a vengeance. To find a glove fit of words for your sense of ' the glory and the freshness of a dream,' to model the very form and pressure of an inward vision to the millionth of a hair's breadth — the vocabulary of mensuration ludicrously fails to describe those infinitesimal niceties of adjustment between the in- ward feeling and the means of its presentment. . . . " ' There are no beautiful thoughts,' a fastidious artist has said, * without beautiful forms.' ^ The perfect expression is the completed emotion. So the artist is incessantly preoccupied in leading his sense of fact up to the point at which it achieves not merely expression but its own completion in the one word, phrase, line, stanza that can make it, simply as a feeling of his own, all that it has in it to be. He may be said to write or paint because there is a point beyond which the joy of tasting the world about him cannot go unless he does so ; and his life passes in a series of moments at which thought and expression, the sense of fact and the consummate presentation of that sense, rush together like Blake's ' soul and body reunited,' to be indistinguishably fused together in a whole in which, alone, each can attain its own perfection." I cannot think that the actor will cavil at this exposition of what artistry means to him. Nor can I think that he will willingly offer his art * A fastidious critic of acting will say that there can be no beauty of conception without beauty of execution. 24 The Decay of Criticism to shafts less nobly winged. I do not believe that he desires the commendations of unlettered boors. If the actor be the artist I take him for, he will demand that criticism of his acting shall assume the colour of his acting. To do this effectively the critic must be artist as well as reporter. If the critic be the artist I take him for he will hug the ground of plain fact in so far as he is under the necessity of recording the player's accent and gesture, his treatment of line and scene ; but he will also take to himself wings with which to beat the air of the actor's inspira- tion. He will insist that you read not between his lines but above them. Am I asked to give examples which fulfil these two functions ? This is a fair challenge and I will meet it fairly. I will take four criticisms — three of living players and one of a great Frenchwoman recently dead. It is from the columns of a great provincial paper that I take them. Of Mrs Patrick Campbell ^ : "The Lady Ellingham of the play is animated by Mrs Campbell into one of the women whom she acts as a class rather than individually — so that her acting almost seems like an argument, a theory of femininity, like Matthew Arnold's about ' things that live and move Mined by the fever of the soul.' Like her Mariana, her Paula, her Beata, so her Lady Ellingham seems, behind all that she directly says, to be asserting the title ^ By C. E. Montague. 25 Alarums and Excursions of a certain temperament to more of the good things of the emotional world than it commonly gets ; the appealing lassitude, the quick untruth- fulness, the troubled and plaintive tenderness all seem like changing modes following some one quest, and the impression is never stronger than in those passages of listening to long speeches by others in which Mrs Campbell, usually sitting in profile with outstretched neck, gives so wide a range of expressiveness to the mere act of attention. She can listen as articulately as many actors can speak ; within the limits of silence she attains the diversity and intensity of emotional significance that brings her art near to the delicacy achieved by Maeterlinck in his." Of Miss Irene Vanbrugh ^ : "She is far the best of English actresses at expressing a certain kind of salt, sane, wayward honesty of ill-will and generosity, the temper that jumps in a semi-calculable way up and down the whole scale of equity and magnanimity, from uncompromisingly Mosaic doctrines of an eye for an eye to super-Christian prodigies of self- sacrifice. Small shame to her that this time she does the Old Testament ethics the better of the two, for Mr Pinero does them vastly better. Indeed the whole theory of retaliatory justice, with its set contrasts and its spirit of pat, triumphant repartee, is much more easily drama- tised than the mild, blond sort of moral beauty 1 By C. E. Montague. 26 The Decay of Criticism that answereth not again. The vivacity with which Miss Vanbrugh's Nina routed the advanced guard of Hilary Jesson's heavy brigade of argu- ments for the wearing of haloes did good to the natural man in all of us, though there were other and less momentous moments at which her art was even finer. Like Irving and Bernhardt, she can shout through a door into a passage in a way that turns scenery real, or sit dead still in a room full of people and turn the rest into faint sketches, so importunate is the sense she conveys of the greater authenticity and vehemence of her own emotions." Of Mr Arthur Bourchier ^ : " Mr Bourchier sees in Macbeth a human creature, and he plays it humanly. He does not project himself into the grandiose tradition, and his performance, fine and imaginative as it was, appeared deficient in that it hardly gave us the thrill of something transcendent or aloof. Sometimes it seemed to ground on prose, and it did, now and then, decline into conventional declamation. Of course one must disagree with details. We look in vain for anything in the text to justify the extraordinary nervous break- down in the scene before Banquo's murder, and if in this the actor is preparing us for the great paroxysms of the next scene he has gone beyond Shakespeare, who terrifies him with an honest Ghost, and no mere subjective apparition. If Mr ' By A. N. Monkhouse. 27 Alarums and Excursions Bourchier is wrong here, however, he is wrong deliberately and ingeniously ; his reception of the news of the Queen's death seems rather the accept- ance of convention — the human convention. A man must be overcome by the news of his wife's death even if Shakespeare has taken pains to show us that he was not. Yet nothing in the play seems more illuminating than Macbeth's indifference under the stress of his tremendous preoccupation. He is concerned with himself, his life, his fate ; his wife has been left behind in the race, and her death is merely another starting-point for the philosophisings of the in- satiable egoist. Life has lost its savour, but it is still worthy of comment by one who tastes it like a poet. If Mr Bourchier did not make a great spirit of Macbeth, he did present a real personality. When Macbeth must, by the terms of his part or the tradition from which no actor can set himself free, strike a key violently un- natural Mr Bourchier conformed to the necessity ungraciously. In his dealings with the witches there was no attempt at Irving's subtle note of scepticism, but even with such a concession to the modern spirit the witches of the stage are anachronisms ; this great play has not weathered evenly." Of R^jane i : " Paris has buried Rejane with the infinite regret due to any artist who can do any one * Presumably Montague, from the style. 28 The Decay of Criticism thing, however hmited, uniquely well, so that the artist's death is a diminution, for the time being, of the world's power of seeing itself. Rejane's acting showed us the most primitive and physical of emotions worked up to their last subtleties of quiet finesse. Her genius was sex bejewelled with every invention of cunning and charm that in civilised history — perhaps long before — the instinct has forged for its harmony, so that you felt she was the last, up to date, of the line of Helen and Sappho and Queen Cleo- patra and Mary Stuart, and all the women famous in history for womanishness. The craft which spoke in her voice and her eyes was the sum and perfection of what, in all but the most noble ages, most men have wished women to have instead of high intellect. Perhaps her virtuosity was great- est when she was vulgar, as she sometimes was, for it was always in the character and was the vulgarity that is seldom far from the human animal when it has only decorated its animal life and not built an ampler life upon it. All that she did on the stage was done with an indescribable energy and sparkle that restored wonderfulness to old themes which in other hands would be dull. " For the Paris playgoer a whole range of ' femininity ' goes dim at her death, as a kind of film formed between our eyes and the great scamps of Moliere when Coquelin died." I claim that these passages make good the theory of artistry in criticism. They present 29 Alarums and Excursions the actor to the life, and what more can be demanded.^ That actors wilfully ignore such life-giving criticism is the matter of my quarrel with them. Dear, delightful people, unaccountable, irra- tional, splendidly right for the wrongest reasons. How they love to whittle away their own creations with some tale of dismal intention ! Actors' mouths should be shut upon them that they may betray their creations nowhere save in their own brain. They are the best judges of the tricks of acting, the worst of the art in its relation to life. And this for a compelling reason to be found in their lack of a standard of refer- ence outside the theatre.^ They regard their art as absolute, and so it must be to them. They look upon it with the physical eye, for not other- wise could they carry out their half of the contract. But they forget that stage-illusion is a pact between actor and spectator. Just as the ^ Ever bearing in mind the editorial principle that the reader must at all costs be entertained, I lay no stress on the instructional value of these passages. I maintain that they are more amusmg than the meaningless list of adjectives, the perfunctory " magnificents " and "amazings. " ^ It would seem that some of our lighter actresses do not give themselves time to become acquainted with life outside the dressing-room. The following is a theatrical "star's " account of " what I did during the last two days before I set out on tour with . Three visits to my theatrical dressmaker ; two visits to my own dress- maker ; measured for theatrical shoes ; measured for private foot-gear ; six hours at Messrs 's, my theatrical photographers ; four hours at rehearsals ; two visits to theatrical milliners ; visit to a well-known song- writer to try over some new songs he was writing for me ; an hour s practice at two new dances ; signed over three hundred picture post-cards, and replied personally to thirty-four letters. " I note, however, that "the stage calls for the possession of certain qualities just in the same way as do all other professions." In gratitude for the concession I kiss the writer's "private foot-gear." 3° The Decay of Criticism reader uses Shakespeare's page to visualise the characters for himself, so the playgoer uses the actor to corroborate some mental picture of his own. Falstaff calls not only to the Falstaff of an inner vision, but also to the spectator's whole conception of spiritual fatness. Othello sends us harking back to all noble souls wrought and perplexed. Marguerite Gautier is one of a class. The smiling rogues of Hawtrey, the clowns of Grock, are but incarnations of ourselves. From which it follows that actors are least good when they draw most attention to their cleverness and skill ; best, when they leave the mind free to build up its own images. It were, however, inhuman to ask the actor to accept so stern a limitation of his art, and it is easy to understand that in his eyes he should be appraised according to what is to him palpable achievement. An illuminative story is told of the American actor Forrest, who, being complimented on his acting of Lear, exclaimed, "Act Lear! I do not act Lear. I act Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please ; but, by God ! Sir, I am Lear ! " You can never get your great actor to believe that only the spectator is competent to say which part he plays at being and which he brings to life.i 1 " With my heart literally in my mouth, and feeling the most insignificant person in the world, I went on the stage — and then, at last, I forgot that I was Miss Jones. My nervousness vanished ; I was not myself any more, I was just Angela." So writes a young lady of the musical-comedy stage in a work of self-revelation. Prom which we are to gather that every- body in the audience was convinced that she was "just Angela." Alarums and Excursions We are not, then, surprised to find a great actress writing, "Seldom does the outsider, how- ever talented as a writer and observer, recognise the actor's art, and often we are told that we are actinor best when we are showing- the works most 1 • 1 • • • plamly, and denied any special virtue when we are concealing our method." The passage is so definitely wrong-headed that it makes my point. It is not the duty of the critic to award marks for degrees in skilful concealment, to give praise to Madame Sans-Gene for a successful assumption of vulgarity or withhold it from Beatrice on the pretext that a star danced and under that star a great and dear actress was born. The business of a critic who shall stand up to Beatrice is to give as exactly as he may an idea of the actress's definite achievement, her reading and her "busi- ness " ; then to make parade of the images which rose to his mind as she strode back and forth, masterfully, clapping capacious hands together, now beguiling, now bullying, wheeling over the text like some bird on broad wing or taking the aisle of the church like some fair ship in sail. There were little value to the present day, and none at all to posterity, in an enumeration of recalls and a vague deposition as to power and pathos. The critic must give images of that power, and clues to the particular quality of pathos. He will endeavour to "hit off" Mr Nigel Playfair's round-eyed, solemn personages by some such imaginative turn as " A Parliament of Owls in Conclave," to bring back Miss Fay 32 The Decay of Criticism Compton's Mary Rose by some such phrase as "her simplicity shone as the sun and was trans- figured before us." Recently, after the exit, in a play which drew all London, of one of our strongest and least silent raisonneurs, an elderly gentleman turned to me and said : " Excuse me, sir, I have been out of England for twenty-seven years. Could you tell me whether that actor is Mr ?" I assented, and he then exclaimed: "I thought so. I played cricket with him at Oxford, and he hatted just like that.'' I take this to be the finest criticism of an actor ever uttered. Players, in their memoirs, too rarely cite that which their memorialists, humbly striving, have written to the perpetuation of their fame. Rather will they recount how many times they played a part and what clothes they wore, the remarks of the dresser and the chatter of friends, the overture of fear and the finale of triumph. Of such dross they are prodigal indeed ; all too niggardly of the gold which fine minds, plying pick and shovel, have wrested from the hidden places of their art.^ ^ Miss Ellen Terry, in a book of which the noblest thing is her apprecia- tion of the art ot Henry Irving, has the following passage : — " In 1902 on the last provincial tour that we ever went together, Irving was ill again, hut he did not give in. One night when his cough was rending him and he could hardly stand up for weakness, he acted so brilliantly and strongly that it was easy to believe in the triumph of mind over matter— in Christian science in fact ! Strange to say, a newspaper man noticed the splendid power of the performance that night and wrote of it with uncommon discernment." Observe that in spite of Miss Terry's manifest desire to do honour to the memory of a great actor, it does not occur to her to quote the passage and so restore to livelier memory that "most cunning pattern of excelling nature.'' c 33 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript THOSE who like myself have cherished a feeling for the actor's art akin to reverence must have rubbed their eyes on seeing a whole front page of a popular news- paper devoted to the personal affairs of little Miss Mary Pickford and a bare half-dozen lines to the announcement that Madame Sarah Bern- hardt had appeared in Athalie : " The famous actress is in her seventy-sixth year. The role may be described as of the recumbent order." Shudder though one may at blithe enormity, it is useless to cavil at the editorial sense of news- values. To the whole uneducated world it really does matter what Miss Pickford eats, wears, and thinks. We were once mountebank-mad ; we are now tied to the grimace. Miss Pickford is very pretty and quite a good maker of babyish faces. She brings to many "escape from their creditors and a free field for emotions they dare not indulge in real life." She gives pleasure to millions who have never heard of the great actress, or having heard that she is an old lady of seventy-six, desire not to see her. Oh, it offends me to the very soul when old age is treated so ! The hey-day of a great spirit knows no passing ; there is that in this old artist which shall please our children provided they have eyes to see that which is spirit and im- perishable. It were idle to pretend that the gesture is as firm, the eye as bright, the voice as liquid as once we knew them. The wonder is in the gentleness of Time which has marred 34 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript only the inessential. To him who would contri- bute his quota of good-will this great lady's art is still the quintessence of loveliness. Memory aiding, it is possible to "call back the lovely April of her prime," and looking out upon a later day to see " despite of wrinkles, this her golden time." But you have only to turn to the notices of her latest appearance in Daniel to realise the blindness of those who will not look beyond the flesh. " It is a matter for regret," writes one lusty fellow, "that this actress should be driven by circumstance to parade her infirmities before us." Follows a catalogue of departed bodily graces. " I will not bring my critical functions to bear upon the spectacle of an old lady with one leg portraying a paralytic," he concludes. I do not know that I would condemn this blind soul to any darker circle than that of its own sightlessness. The eye sees what the eye brings the means of seeing. As the artist's physical powers have waned, so her intellectual faculties have ripened. Thirty years ago she had been content to play this foolish little Daniel with "her beauty, her grace, her flashing eye, her sinuous charm " — I quote from the catalogue of departed virtues — gathering him up to heaven at the end in her well-known cloud of fire-works. To-day Madame Bernhardt plays him, as it were, colloquially, informing unreality with a hundred little shades and accents of reality. She is fanciful, wistful, wayward, endowing little 35 Alarums and Excursions things with an actor's interest, with something of the writer's preoccupation with style. I can- not imagine any more dehghtful grace-note than that of the Httle blue flames of the rum omelette which shall enliven her loneliness. And when she quotes her line of verse you are made conscious that this is a boy's poem. She lingers over it with the tenderness of all grreat artists for immaturity. What panting English tragddienne, in the full measure of bodily vigour, may compass the intimacy and interest of the Frenchwoman's lowest tone and slightest motion? In the first two acts Daniel does not appear and the stage is given over to scenes of emotion very creditably portrayed by a leading light of the Com^die Fran9aise. We applaud, for the thing seems well done ; but when, in the long colloquy with Daniel, the older artist sits motionless at her table, leaving the scene in full generosity to the younger, her very silence it is which holds us, and not the tinkle of less significant speech. What other actress, when it comes to dying, can so let life out of her voice and lineaments, so cease upon the midnight.'* Add to the glories of such a performance something that I would call a corona of malice, a gouaillerie, a Puckish hint that we shall not take this for the sublime car of tragedy but for some workaday vehicle for tears. We are to feel that the rarer gfifts of the actress have not been harnessed, and our minds are sent on haunting quest for the greatnesses that once she compassed. As a 36 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript younger woman she had neither the wit nor strength of mind to make this bargain with our penetration. A year or two ago a series of performances was announced which was to be determinate and valedictory. Equally looked forward to and dreaded, they did not, as it happened, come off. In the first place the lady declared, in that vigorous way of hers, that the visit would in no way be one of farewell. She was not for epilo- gising ; in any case the time was not yet. She was off to Honolulu, Hong-Kong, Saskatchewan, how did she know whither ? — and merely desired to take temporary leave of the polite world. And then she became ill and the engagement was not fulfilled. Well, there's no harm in this sort of good-bye. May this triumphant lady spend her long winter with her hand at her lips bidding adieu. That's one simile, and I would find another to fit her glory now departing. The shadows may be long ; they will be longer yet before the dark, fingers to stir old memories, to set pulses beating at thought of a gflamour that never was on earth. Is it our creeping age and recollection playmg us tricks ? Was it not the artist's acting but our own youth that was the miracle ? I wonder ! But there is nothing which does the subject even of avowed panegyric so much harm as lack of discrimination in praise. Let me frankly admit that Sarah Bernhardt was never the 37 Alarums and Excursions mistress of the art of reticence, and that, great show-woman that she is, she has always turned advertisement to commodity. Take the forty- year-old history of her famous tiff with the Comedie Fran9aise, ending in the rupture which was the necessary preliminary to those galli- vantings over the unacted globe. The story of it all, so far as may be gleaned from the records of the time, is somethinor as follows. The Comedie pays a visit to London, bringing in its train Mademoiselle Bernhardt, a young member whose talents have already been ac- claimed by the Parisians. And here we must note that the French, in spite of an excitable temperament, are capable of a rare level- headedness in their attitude towards artists. They know how to distinguish between the personality of the actor and his talent, and are not swayed by exorbitances outside the scope of the theatre. "Je ne veux connaitre de la Comedie Fran9aise en ce feuilleton," writes Sarcey, " que ce que Ton peut en voir de sa stalle d'orchestre." The English are quite other. The critic of The Times permits himself to write : " Further, all that we have heard of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, of her various talents and mani- fold faculties, her character and even her eccen- tricities, has added to the effect produced by her acting and has made her, indisputably, the centre of our curiosity and interest in the Comedie Fran9aise." No Frenchman could have written so. The effect produced by the acting of an 38 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript artist is, to him, incapable of irrelevant addition or subtraction ; he is conquered by the artist and not by the woman. Our race is more phlegmatic, but it is also more naive. In the first pages of the Journal of the Visit of the ComMie Franfaise to London in 1879 Sarcey begins by deploring the coldness of the English public towards the members of the troupe other than Mademoiselle Bernhardt. He recounts for the benefit of his readers in Paris how, in spite of her altogether admirable second act in Le Misanthrope, Mademoiselle Croizette failed to please. How, in Les Caprices de Marianne, her capriciousness was ravishing but of no avail. How, in LEtrangere the same actress displayed her greatest fascination yet without fascinating ; how, after her fine explosion in the fourth act, the audience did, after a fashion, explode in sympathy. " Mais ce n etait pas cela. Le cceur n'y etait pas." The only reason he can assign is that the English cannot worship two mistresses at the same time and that their hearts have gone out wholly to Mademoiselle Bernhardt. This is the first mention of her in the Journal and is followed by the phrase : " Oh ! celle-la ..." " Nothing," he continues, "can convey any idea of the infatuation she has aroused. It amounts to madness. When she is about to appear a quiver runs through the audience ; she appears, and an Ah ! of joy and rapture is heard on all sides. The house listens with rapt attention, bodies bent forward, glasses glued to their eyes ; 39 Alarums and Excursions they will not lose a word, and only when she has finished break into a fury of applause. Outside the theatre they speak of no one else." It looks very much as though the English on this occasion came to the correct critical conclusion, although, it may be, for the wrong reasons. We must take into account, too, the kind of plays in which Mademoiselle Bernhardt was appearing, and contrast them with our own at the time. In 1879 the English theatre had not yet entirely emerged from the Robertsonian floods of milk-and-water. W. S. Gilbert was still posing as a sentimentalist, Byron's Our Boys had been produced four years earlier, the previous year had seen Wills's play of Olivia. Concur- rently with the Com^die Fran9aise at the Gaiety there was running at the Lyceum young Mr Pinero's Daisy s Escape, and Mr Burnand's Betsy was in rehearsal. London had been melted by the pity of Miss Ellen Terry's Olivia ; it was to be purged by the terror of the Frenchwoman's Phedre. The English of that period were ac- customed to see passion garbed as decently as their table legs. What, then, must they have thought of Racine and Sarah in frank exposi- tion of incestuous love! Imagine the English- man of du Maurier's pencil confronted by Mr Joseph Knight's account, in the respectable columns of The Athenceum, of this diversion : "From the moment she entered on the stage, carefully guarded and supported by CEnone, 40 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript Mademoiselle Bernhardt realised fully the passionate, febrile, and tortured woman. Her supple frame writhed beneath the influence of mental agony and restless desire, and her postures seemed chosen with admirable art for the purpose of blending the greatest possible amount of seduc- tion with the utmost possible parade of penitence. This is, of course, the true reading, and the whole shame of Phedre is due to her ill success. The key-note to her character is struck in a later act, the third, wherein she says : * II n'est plus temps : il sait mes ardeurs insensees, De I'austere pudeur, les bornes sont passees. J'ai declare ma honte auxyeuxde mon vainqueur, Et I'espoir malgre moi s'est glisse dans mon coeur.' While, accordingly, she exhausts herself in invec- tive against herself for her crime, she is, in fact, in the very whirlwind of her passion studying, like a second Delilah, ' His virtue or weakness which way to assail.' Obvious as is this view, it is not always presented, the cause of absence being, perhaps, the weak- ness of the actress. In the present case it was fully revealed, and the picture of abject and lascivious appeal was terrible in its intensity." Add to such a portrayal the personality which was to charm the educated men and women of half the civilised globe, and there is no wonder that the English public lost something of measure in its praise. Incense was offered up, the idol's 41 Alarums and Excursions head was turned. I give what happened next as related by M. Georges d'Heylli : '• It is common knowledge that this great and original artist has a distaste for behaving like the rest of the world and that discipline appears to her mechanical and wearisome. One is not mistress of several arts for nothing. Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt did not content herself in England ^yith exhibiting one aspect of her charming personality : to be an actress and nothing but an actress was not enough. She established a studio for painting and sculpture where she could be admired in the delightful costume with which the photographers have made us familiar. Yielding to the numerous requests which her great talents and the general curiosity procured for her, she consented to give performances in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy. Now this would have been in no way the concern of either her colleagues or the Press, had it not been that the stress of this additional work told so much upon the actress as to render her physically and mentally incapable of giving her best in the theatre. The day arrived when she was unable to fulfil her part in L'Etrangere. The bill had to be changed and the money which had been taken for the perform- ance returned. This was followed by recrimina- tions between the artist and the French and English Press. Mademoiselle Bernhardt, annoyed at the general censure, resigned her membership of the Comedie Fran9aise, and 42 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript accepted, or did not accept — the rumour at least was rife — an engagement for a tour in America." Peace was, however, restored, the artist made a societaire and granted two months' holiday in the year. She resumed her performances on 17th April 1880. Shortly afterwards a critic of standing complained that she played Dona Clorinde in Augier's L'Aventuriere in the same manner as Virginie in LAssommoir. " La nouvelle Clorinde a eu, pendant les deux derniers actes,;des emportements excessifs de toute maniere, d'abord parce qu'ils for^aient sa voix qui n'a de charme que dans le midium, ensuite parce qu'ils I'amenaient a des mouvements de corps et de bras qu'il serait facheux d'emprunter a la grande Virginie de I'Assommoir pour les introduire a la Comedie Fran^aise." Thus Auguste Vitu in the Figaro. Sarah again resigned, and the great Sarcey was devilish cross about it. "Is it the fault of the Comedie," he asks, " that one of the members has perferred the role of star to that of artist.'* And then, is this so new to us Parisians ? Are we not by this time used to the eccentricities of this flamboyant personage ? Mademoiselle Bernhardt has resigned and is leaving us. It is unfortunate, it is true, but more particularly un- fortunate for her. The Comedie loses a charming actress and must for the time being withdraw a few plays which are now hardly practicable with- 43 Alarums and Excursions out her. But the number of these plays is small, for her art, divine instrument though it be, has not many notes. Her absence is to be regretted, but we shall get over it, and another artist will arrive, perhaps Mademoiselle Bartet, who with other qualities will turn the public's head in the same way and efface the memory of her pre- decessor. Actors come and actors go. After Regnier, Coquelin ; after Provost, Thiron ; after Samson, Got ; and others will succeed to the inheritance of Got, Thiron, and Coquelin. Remember the old proverb, Faute d'un moine Vahhaye ne chomepas." Finally he delivered him- self up to prophecy. " Let her make no mistake ; her success will not be lasting. She is not one of those who can bear the whole brunt of a play and whose brilliance has no need of a background of mediocrity." Was ever augur more woefully mistaken? Sarcey had tried to bolster up Croizette ; the world has long judged between Mademoiselle Bernhardtand Mademoiselle Bartet. But there is another factor in this character besides wilfulness and caprice — the vacillation in artistic purpose. The Journal of the Goncourts gives a picture of her in mid-career which illus- trates this. It is Edmond who writes : loth October. " Lunch with Sarah Bernhardt at Bauer's, who is kindly using his influence to induce her to play my La Faustin. " Sarah arrives in a pearl-grey tunic braided 44 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript with gold. No diamonds except on the handle of her lorgnette. A moth-like wisp of black lace on the burning bush of her hair ; beneath, the black shadow of lashes and the clear blue of her eyes. • Seated at the table she complains of being little, and indeed her figure is that of the women of the Renaissance. She sits sideways on the corner of her chair, exactly like a child who has been promoted to the big table. "At once, with gusto, she embarks upon the history of her world-scamperings. She relates how in the United States, as soon as her next tour is announced, and though it be a year before- hand, orders are sent to France for a shipload of professors in order that the young American ' miss ' may know what the play is about. " I am placed next to Sarah. She must be nearly fifty. She wears no powder and her complexion is that of a young girl. . . . She talks hygiene, morning exercises, hot baths. From this she goes on to portraits of people she has known. Dumas fih among others. She has a natural instinct for affability, a desire to please which is not assumed." I 'jth October. " Dinner at Sarah's to read La Faustin. " The little studio where she receives is not unlike a stage setting. On the floor against the walls rows of pictures, giving the apartment something of the appearance of an auction-room ; over the mantelpiece her full-length portrait by 45 Alarums and Excursions Clairin. Furniture everywhere, medic'eval chests and cabinets, an infinity of articles of virtu more or less rasta, statuettes from Chili, musical instruments from the Antipodes. Only one sign of individual taste, the skins of great polar-bears shedding a lustre on the corner where she sits. . . . "At dinner Sarah is very gracious and full of small attentions. We return to the studio to read the play. There is no lamp and only a few candles. The copy is typewritten and much less readable than it would have been in the usual round hand, with the result that Bauer does not read very well. The effect is cold. After the seventh scene I insist upon reading myself. I, too, do not manage very well, but I get tension into it and Sarah seems impressed by the last scene. Then tea, during which there is no further talk of the play. Finally Sarah comes over to me, says that the piece is full of passion, that the last act seems superb, and asks me to leave the script that she may go through one or two scenes which have been omitted. A few vague sentences which may mean that Sarah will accept the play, and even a phrase as to putting me into touch with her manager, but nothing decisive. '* Now there are some thinors which are not favourable. Sarah is a romantic. At the moment the fuss they are making of R^jane inclines her towards the modern, but her artistic temperament is against it. Further, in my play 46 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript Sarah has a wretch of a sister, and it so happens that she actually possesses one — a fact of which, until recently, I was ignorant." 2(iih November. "In reply to my letter asking for the return of my play I have to-day received a telegram from Sarah affirmino- a wish to act in somethinor of mine, and asking for a further six weeks in which to think La Faustin over quietly. My belief is that although she may wish to give the piece she will not do so." 22nd February. " To-day, without a word, the manuscript is returned." Once free of the Comedie, Sarah envisages her famous world-tours, and embarks upon gallivantings innumerable. And once definitely on the rampage candour compels me to admit, as it compelled Joe Gargery, that she was indeed a Buster. So began the long period of trumpet- ing vagabondage, and with it the history of " Sardoodledum." The actress tore about the habitable globe piling whirlwind upon earth- quake and littering the stages of half-a-dozen countries with the pasteboard wreckage of Fedoras, Theodoras, Toscas, Sorcieres. There was probably not more than one English critic who kept his head in all this welter of popes, princes, cardinals, Russian Grand Dukes, Austrian Archdukes, German counts, cantatrices, In- 47 Alarums and Excursions quisitors, gaolers, nihilists, poisoners and assas- sins. Amid the general delirium Mr Shaw alone was heard to declare himself unimpressed by the sight of an actress " chopping a man to death with a hatchet as a preliminary to appear- ing as a mediaeval saint with a palm in her hand at the head of a religious procession." " Her charm," he declared, "could be imitated by a barmaid with unlimited pin-money and a row of footlights before her instead of the handles of a beer- machine." Her voice he likened to the voix celeste stop, "which, like a sentimental New England villager with an American organ, she keeps always pulled out." But this was not criticism's general temper. Even Mr Shaw admitted that when the actress was engaged " not in stabbing people with hat- pins, but in the normal straightforward business of acting she could do it completely enough," Then came the great day of Wednesday, 9th December 1896. A grand fete was organised by a Mr Henry Bauer, "to mark the apogee of Mademoiselle Bernhardt's artistic career." This gentleman invited Sarah to sit herself down for an hour or two and, recalling her early struggles and her present triumphs, let the readers of the Figaro into her soul-state on the occasion of a ceremony which was to be in every way remark- able. Nothing daunted, the great artist replied : ** Mais c'est un examen de conscience que vous me demandez, cher ami," and with characteristic aplomb continued : " Et cependant, je n'hesite 48 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript pas une seconde ^ vous repondre." The affair was a combination of luncheon and theatrical performance ; sonnets specially composed were read by Fran9ois Copp^e, Edmond Haraucourt, Andre Theuriet, Catulle Mendes and one, inaudibly, by Heredia. And then the great Rostand gave tongue : " En ce temps sans beaut^, seule encor tu nous restes Sachant descendre, pale, un grand escalier clair, Ceindre un bandeau, porter un lys, brandir un fer. Reine de I'attitude et Princesse des gestes. En ce temps, sans folie, ardente, tu protestes ! Tu dis des vers. Tu meurs d'amour. Ton vol se perd. Tu tends des bras de reve, et puis des bras de chair. Et quand Phedre parait, nous sommes tous incestes. Avide de souffrir, tu t'ajoutas des coeurs ; Nous avons vu couler — car ils coulent tes pleurs! — Toutes les larmes de nos ames sur tes joues. Mais aussi tu sais bien, Sarah, que quelquefois Tu sens furtivement se poser, quand tu joues, Les levres de Shakespeare aux bagues de les doigts." D 49 Alarums and Excursions Our own Wilson Barrett sent a silver crown with the names of her roles on the leaves, and Sarah was duly overcome. But then Sarah could always be overcome at will. It is said that when, many years later, she rehearsed the English of her reply to the address to be publicly presented to her by Sir Herbert Tree, she paused in the middle and said : " Here I shall cry a little." And, on the day, in that place she did cry a little. There is a strange account of the actress by the Roumanian, de Max, which the curious will not desire that I should omit : "II y a deux Sarah — au moins. II y a celle qu'on voit de la salle. Et il y a celle qu'on voit des coulisses. Le malheur est que, des coulisses, on voit quelquefois la mcme que dans la salle, la plus belle. C'est un malheur, parce que ces jours-la, on n'est plus maitre de soi ; on arrive avec de la haine, de la fureur. On veut se venger d'elle, et puis on devient spectateur en jouant ; quand le rideau se ferme, on lui baise les mains, avec des larmes. . . . Acteur, je connus I'actrice Sarah. Je commus aussi a son Theatre une petite fille, qui s'appelait, par hasard, Sarah. Ai-je deteste, ai-je aim6 cette insupportable petite fille? Je ne sais plus. C'est si loin. J'ai vieilli. Pas elle. C'est toujours une petite fille, une in- supportable petite fille, qui a des caprices, des cris, des crises. Ah ! les crises de cette petite fille!" 50 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript And yet this petite fille is the artist from whom " speech fell, even as her dress, in great straight folds, fringed with gold." It is the artist with the soul of Clairon's " I am eighty-five ; my heart is twenty-five." It is now a good many years since Madame Sarah, as she likes to be called by people who have a real affection for her, came to lunch at my mother's house at Manchester. My mother managed, throughout her long life, to superimpose upon an outlook not unlike Jane Austen's a great sympathy with all artists. This may have been through her descent from Edward Shuter, the comedian, of whom Doran says that his life was one round of intense professional labour, jollification, thoughtlessness, embarrass- ment, gay philosophy and addiction to religion as expounded by Whitfield. My mother's grace and wit were, however, entirely her own. She accepted Madame Sarah's proposal that she should come to lunch graciously and without commotion of spirit. There was some discussion, I remember, as to what ceremonies were to be observed, and what eaten and drunk. We tried to imagine what Charles Lamb would have set before Mrs Siddons. Could we rely upon our guest "counting fish as nothing"? Our old nurse it was who clinched the matter. " I suppose the poor body cats like everyone else," she said, " her stomach will be none the worse for a good warming." There was some question as to who 51 Alarums and Excursions should hand the great lady out of her carriage and help her up the steep slope of the path. It was decided that the gardener, who for many years had performed this office for my mother, should not now be denied. If there had ever been sincerity in Adrienne's passages with the old servitor, she would, we felt, understand. You see we were not unmindful of the fiasco of the seaport Mayor. The story goes that many years ago the great actress was to descend upon a town which boasts of a fine council-chamber, situated at the top of a flight of forty-six steps. Here, when the time came, were to be ensconced the Mayor in his robes, the town clerk, the beadle and other dignitaries. It was up these steps that the great actress was to toil. The train draws in, a state carriage with postillions and outriders is at hand. A huge crowd. A delighted Sarah sets forth, only to catch sight, after a few yards, of the stairway at top of which, perched in his eyrie, Bumble-surrounded, awaits her the Mayor. " Ah, mais non ! mais non ! " she cries. " J'ai assez grimpe dans ma vie ! A I'hotel." Well, Madame Sarah came, and she came in state. She wore a wonderful mantle of misty grey like the breasts of sea-birds. It was in the first chill of autumn, and I like to think that the bowed trees of the garden bent still lower to touch with the tips of their branches the radiance as it passed. It was a moment or two before the presentations were over ; she had brought her granddaughter and a woman friend. And then 52 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript lunch, of which we could persuade our guest to touch only a quarter of a wing of chicken and some toast fingers dipped in milk. Horribly I found myself thinking of Tilburina and her con- fidante. But almost at once, to put us at our ease, she began to talk. The smallest of small talk, conventional inquiries as to what we did, a declaration that if my brothers became great men or my sister a great actress, we should not, the whole lot of us, amount to the value of our mother's little finger. About the theatre she would say very little and it was a subject we naturally avoided. I had a feeling that one of us might suddenly, out of sheer nervousness, ask her to recite. And then, after a time, Sarah fell to talking about actors and acting, and this I take to be the finest politeness I have experienced. First she had some handsome things to say of English players. Of Henry Irving, whom she called a great artist and a bad actor. She admired his temperament, but his oddities, his uncouthness, his queerness of technique perplexed her, and I should certainly not have trusted her to ap- preciate Benson. Of Forbes- Robertson, whose Hamlet she considered a jewel to be worn on the finger of the poet himself. She talked affectionately of Coquelin, " ce bon Coquelin," and admiringly of Rejane. A very great comedian she called her, but rather resented my suggestion that she had great tragic gifts. " Non," she replied, "elle a la voix canaille." 53 Alarums and Excursions And then the conversation turned upon her interpretation of a part which she was then playing. This was Lucrecia Borgia, of whom I thought then, and still think, her conception wrontr. Her idea of Lucrecia — and in this it must be admitted that she followed Mugo's lead— was of a perfectly good woman with a poisonous kink. She held that even if Lucrecia did entertain a passion for murder she would not show her vice except when viciously engaged. One remembered Charles Peace fiddling be- tween thefts, but without succeeding in thinking this an apt reinforcement for her. One thought, too, of the provincial lady who was accustomed to give a lecture to schoolgirls on the occasion of the annual Shakespearean revisal. Confronted with Antony and Cleopatra the lecturer evaded the difficulties of her subject by announcing that she proposed to confine her considerations of the heroine's character to her aspect as a mother. This, again, did not seem a very suitable remark, and frankly, we did not shine. Actors are always difficult to talk to. They will not realise that all that matters is the im- pression the spectator actually receives and that he is not influenced by what the actor thinks or hopes he is conveying. If only actors knew how much of the interpreting is done by the spectator and how little by themselves ! We experienced, of course, extreme difficulty in putting it to Sarah that what she thought about Lucrecia was of no importance, that it was only what she made us 54 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript think that mattered. In fact we could not put it at all. We could only say that she turned Lucrecia into a good-natured goose with un- accountable moments. However, she came to the rescue with a happy "Eh bien, je vois que 9a ne vous plait pas. Qu'est-ce qui vous plait done ? " And we tried to get her to talk about her Pelleas, which is the one perfect thing that not Mademoiselle Mars, not Mademoiselle Clairon, not ten thousand Rachels could ever have accom- plished. She had singularly little to say about this, but we put it down to our not having proved ourselves worthy to be talked to. The thing we would most have instilled into our guest was that our admiration was critical. Youthfully we had long settled the order of her parts. First Pelleas, the butt and sea-mark of her utmost sail, then the world-wearied Phedre ; next the Jeanne d'Arc of inviolate ecstasy, and last the Marguerite, patchouli'd, but still incredibly lovely. We wanted her to realise something of this. Well, we failed. We would have read to her the whole of that passage on art and the artist which I have given in an earlier part of this book. "There!" we would have said. "That's what we think of the actor's art, and of the heights to which only the very few are capable of rising. It's just because art is as fine as all this that you can be so fine." I think we would have lectured her in our young enthusiasm, but for the impossibility of throwing off so tremendous a creed at a moment's notice. SS Alarums and Excursions *' Mais, qu'est-ce qu'ils me chantent, ces enfants ? " she would have exclaimed. She declared that she never read dramatic criticism : " Les critiques ne savent rien." It was then that I wanted to do something violent, to induce in that august head some perception of the discernment of which she had been the object. But she was, I thought, a little like some in- tolerant goddess bored by her worshippers and disinclined for nice distinctions. I tried to get her to understand something of the overthrow of my small soul when first I saw her act. It was on an evening in July in the early nineties. From my place in the queue I could see a long poster in mauve and gold, spangled with silver stars. The ineffability was that of Marguerite Gautier. It was not for some years that I was to hear how such a common- place sentence as " On nous abandonne, et les longues soirees succedent aux longs jours," could be set to such music that it should vibrate in the memory for ever. I had yet to hear these phrases dropped like stones into some golden well of felicity. The play that evening was La Tosca. The wait was long. At the hour of her coming my heart began to beat. I remember as though it were yesterday the opening of the door, the dark, silent theatre, the second long wait, the turning up of the lights, the going up of the curtain, the exquisite tenderness of the opening scene. I remember the setting of the candles round the body of Scarpia, and that is all. I next 56 Sarah Bernhardt '- A Postscript saw the actress in Fedora, and shortly afterwards in Frou-frou and Adrienne Lecouvreur. La Dame aux Camdias followed about 1898. All these were in Manchester ; and then came the time when I went to Paris frequently and saw her often. There was always great difficulty in getting a glimpse of her Phedre. The actress seemed wilfully to prefer rubbish, and both Phedre and Pelleas were difficult birds to bring down. When, finally, one saw it there was the further difficulty of finding any French critic up to writing adequately about it. Once more I turn up my little hand-book and read again what the late W. T. Arnold wrote forty years ago : " Could anything have been more deliciously poetical than that kindling eager eye, the hand slowly stretched out, and the finger pointing into space, as Phedre sees before her half in a dream the chariot * fuyant dans la carriere ' ? The great Phedre has hitherto been that of Rachel. It is useless to dilate upon Rachel's tragic power. Her performance alike in the second and in the fourth acts is declared by all competent critics to have been all but perfection. The doubtful question is rather whether she was capable of rendering the tenderness and the infinite piteous- ness of the hapless woman as she rendered her transports of passion. We can conceive Rachel as haviniT been better than Madame Bernhardt in the denunciation of Qinone, and, indeed, M. Sarcey, in his notice of the performance of 57 Alarums and Excursions Phedre by the Comcdie Fran^aise intimates that she was so ; but we should like to know how Rachel said such passages as this : * Ginone, il peut quitter cet orgueil qui te blesse ; Nourri dans les forets, il en a la rudesse. Hippolyte, endurci par de sauvages lois, Entend parler d'amour pour la premiere fois : Peut-etre sa surprise a cause son silence ; Et nos plaintes peut-etre ont trop de violence.' The inexpressible tenderness with which those lines were sighed rather than spoken was all Madame Bernhardt's own. This line again : ' Et I'espoir malgre moi s'est glisse dans mon coeur.' And this, when she has discovered the love of Hippolyte and Aricie, and contrasts their affection with her own guilty passion : ' Tous les jours se levoient clairs et sereins pour eux.' These were the passages Madame Bernhardt marked with the most personal and enduring charm, and in these we cannot believe that she has not surpassed her forerunners." And then came the time, about 1908, when I was first privileged to write about her. I have written elsewhere all that I ever intend to write. What more is there to be said of that quick and frenzied diction, that foam and spate of speech 58 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript alternating with pools of liquid bliss ? What more of those plumbed depths of abasement, those scaled yet unimaginable heights of remorse, that fury of immolation tearing its own flanks as the tiger " rends with those so awful paws the velvet of the breeding hind " ? Where earlier actresses have been content with a molten and brassy horror, Bernhardt's passion has taken on the fragrance of bruised violets. None other could suffer as she did. Rachel may have exceeded her in terror ; she cannot have surpassed her in inviolacy and immaculacy, in rapt and mystical purity. Bernhardt did not use to die so much as to swoon upon death. '* Combien sont morts qui, moins heureux que vous, n'ont pas meme donne un seul baiser a leur chimere ! " Her beloved Rostand asks the same question : " Combien, Moins heureux, epuises d'une poursuite vaine, Meurent sans avoir vu leur Princesse lointaine." And Melissinde replies : "Combien, aussi, I'ont trop tot vue, et trop longtemps, Et ne meurent qu'apres les jours desenchantants ! " Yet none of this is true of Bernhardt. She has embraced the glory and the dream. She has measured herself with destiny and touched the lips of her desire. Her acting is now an affair of the spirit, the victory of the incorruptible. For victory it is, victory over the fraying 59 Alarums and Excursions scabbard, victory in the dauntless survival of the soul of steel, the will to persist, quand meme. One picture springs to the mind. It is the trans- figuration of Lear : " I will do such things — What they are, yet 1 know not ; but they shall be The terrors of the earth." Substitute for terrors, wonders ; then picture this valiant woman still wresting a last late secret from her art. Can we not see the trust put in us here to read by the spirit those ardours, perils, and adventures which may no longer be expressed save by the spirit ? Yet be sure of this, that as no quarter is asked so none will be given. If this acting of to-day mislikes you, you must be pre- pared to say that at the player's hey-day you had also been displeased ; for of genius it is the spirit and not the body which matters. Of this artist all that is left is spirit. She has bent her will to battle with doom and death. She has, to echo Charlotte Bronte, fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood, resisted to the latest the rape of every faculty, has willed to see, has willed to hear, has willed to breathe, has willed to live up to, within, and even beyond the moment when death to any less fiery spirit had said : " Thus far and no farther ! " Can it not be realised that it was something of all this that we wanted, and failed so lamentably, to say? We wanted to tell her that we knew. Did she know, I wonder ? As she drove away 60 Sarah Bernhardt : A Postscript she said something to my mother which we did not hear. The carriage receded and she waved her flowers. There was a look of grave amuse- ment in her eyes, something of the memory and the kinship of youth. 6i Big Pugs and Little The high and heroic state of man. Hazlitt. THE refusal of a leading promoter of box- ing shows to magnoperate on behalf of principals who fail to carry out their contracts is a shrewder blow than these gentle- men are accustomed to receive even from one of their own kidney. It may mean the end of boxing as a fashionable entertainment, and should bring to their senses gladiators accustomed to receive for half-an-hour*s play of thew and sinew the reward of a Prime Minister's brains. But not all boxers are simple virtuosos in brawn. Carpentier is one of the exquisite figures of our time ; no handsomer or more intelligent actor graces those other boards. There is in his manner towards an opponent something of Hamlet's " What's his weapon ? " What weapon indeed has British stolidity to counter Gallic wits .-* Bull-dog courage ? Alas, in this mimic warfare as in the real, it is not elemental virtue which prevails. Ask the British champion, Mr Joseph Beckett. I have a deal of respect for Mr Joe — he should have been surnamed Oak- tree. He is own brother to that Michael of whom it has been written that though he will not bend he breaks with comparative ease. No Adonis resting neat-gloved hands upon the ropes and treading the powdered resin into his shoes can make Joe bend. There is purpose here. Bull-dog that he is, he will not let go, though he bite nothing better than the dust. We 62 Big Pugs and Little English have not been without our figure of admiration, but the very thought of combat has made our Crichton cry out with Troilus : " I am giddy ; expectation whirls me round." And thus to offer an easy mark to a more stable foe. Of all the prize-fight.s — for let us be honest and call things by their proper names — of recent years, the one that has excited me most was that between the Bombardier and Joe. Other fights I remember vividly enough though not with the same passion. There was Welsh's cold and scientific defeat of Ritchie, and Car- pentier's lucky win over Gunboat Smith. Both events took place at Olympia shortly before the war, and drew their quota of fashionable ladies and elegant trollops, gold-toothed niggers, fops, clergymen, shop - assistants, artists. At this "venue" — as the newspapers call it when the prices are high enough — was the "clash" between Jimmy Wilde and Pal Moore, the fight- ing a foregone conclusion to that ardent sup- porter and Celtic soul who brought from his native coal-fields an enormous dragon-embroidered flag v/ith which to cover victor and vanquished in one hurly-burly of confusion and glory. Jimmy is no longer the wistful figure of frailty he once was. I have an early photograph in which he wears his yonderly expression, that air of "not being strong." His features at the time had well adorned the fly-leaf of a story by George Macdonald. There was the remote, faint at- mosphere of the Sunday school about him ; he 63 Alarums and Excursions was a Donal Grant, an Alec Forbes, a youthful Marquis of Lossie. To judge by the colour of his hands, the little fellow might have posed after a day's work in the mine. Or say that he had been put up in his buff to fight a bully — the sport of some Saturday afternoon. Forked radish were too much a symbol of mass to denote his physique of those days. To-day Mr Wilde takes his oysters and his champagne like a man. He fills his clothes and so shrinks to life-size. He has ceased to be the wonder and the marvel of the age ; he is no longer miraculous. He ranks with the world's workaday talents, with Hambourg, Hobbs, and Lasker, rather than with Chaplin, Nijinsky, Donoghue. He has be- come reckonable ; he does the things grown men may do and not those which it were unthinkable a child should attempt. Other great events of the ring have I seen— Jim Driscoll's "tragedy" ; Basham's woeful attempt to stand up against "Kid" Lewis; that hero's eighteen seconds' dismissal of " Frankie " Moody; the unreflec- tive pitting of rival beeves which was the fight between Goddard and Moran ; Beckett's long- drawn agonies with M'Goorty and McCormick ; encounters Blackfriars way, where, in the ring, the blood is up indeed and, on the surrounding benches, admiration struggles with cupidity in the sharp-set, cunning faces of the "butchers from Tothill Fields, brokers from Whitechapel." Yet not one of these matches had the same quality of apprehension as the Wells- Beckett 64 Big Pugs and Little affair. The issue was never in doubt and yet seemed dreadfully to matter. It were a sane thing to suggest that the issue of the battle of Jutland was fraught with graver consequences than this clash of pugs. May the Bombardier forgive me ; but he is that, in spite of his auburn, close-curled hair, his courtesy and charm. Phoebus Apollo turned Promethean pug. Yet will I swear that our breaths came more quickly durinof those few short rounds than with the scene set for the overthrow of a great navy. It is not to be supposed that the hearts of boxers beat as fast as those of their idolaters. Wells gives you the impression that his heart has long ceased to beat. He is fey, he cannot win ; he will stave off defeat, gallantly, for an all too small number of rounds. He is "an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing." And that is why he is foredoomed. He has everything that a gentleman should have and nothing that a prize-fighter must own.^ He makes pretence to defy augury ; yet he knows that if defeat be not now, it will come at the end. What is it then to lose betimes ? Not much to him, perhaps, but to his friends an abiding sorrow. About Mr Joe there is no air * In his book Carpentier wrote: "Wells is without what I call person- ality—a fif^hting personality." He goes on to explain that to worry and jolly an opponent, to get on his mind as an obsession in the days of preparation before a match, is part of the " psychology" of the game. But then Georges had been staying in America. E 6^ Alarums and Excursions of mystery. He glowers in his corner, and peering through httle screwed-up eyes, would seem to glimpse a big thing in front of him, to see it and bend up every corporal agent to do it. For the rest he is a plain, blunt man, slow to give or take offence. One of the most deeply rooted things in the English character is the love of sailors and of prize- fighters. "Almost everybody in our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed by exceptional aesthetic surround- ings, can understand and sympathise with an admiral or a prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket Benbow and Tom Cribb ; but, depend upon it, they are practically bracketed for admira- tion in the minds of many frequenters of ale- houses. If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus going back to Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep, but tell them about Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put down their pipes to listen." So Stevenson. And thus it came about that on the night of combat all roads led to Olympia, The previous day had been Sunday, and Sunday's peace had been routed by the din of the impending conflict. You could not pick up a news-sheet without having it forced upon you that Mr Wells was "quietly confident," and that Mr Beckett was in the habit of saying nothing but grimly shooting out his lips. The men themselves do not advertise. But the newspapers have their self- 66 Big Pugs and Little respect, bless you, and see to it that heroes lose nothing by a Quakerish reserve. They make wonderful play with the "human interest," do our papers, with Mr Beckett's stolidity and Mr Wells's nerves. " As fiddlers they are bad, but then, Consider what they are as men." As champions, judged by the old standard, both our heroes are poor, and Mace and Belcher must be tired of turning in their graves at the com- parisons which have been made. " Under- standing and sympathy " indeed it must be which drags a mayor from his council-chamber to set a champion on his way, and places at the disposal of a pair of maulers the nation's telegraphs, telephones, and police. People there were who grumbled, but in this country we take no notice of the curmudgeon. An the authorities seek sanction for their exuberance they will find it in Sir William Temple's "Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure it is so in States to honour them." To my mind no sanction is needed beyond the people's pleasure. Arrangements were made to flash the news of the result all over England, "Till Belvoir's lordly terraces the sign to Lincoln sent. And Lincoln sped the message on o'er the wide Vale of Trent, 67 Alarums and Excursions Till Skiddaw saw the fire that burned on Gaunt's embattled pile, And the red jrlare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of . . . Southampton." But on Solent's shore that fateful night there was no question of "retiring" until the screen had spoken. On this momentous night no lad throuiihout the lenoth and breadth of the land went ignorant to bed ; in the London clubs, at two in the morning, peers of the realm fought the battle over again, whereby certain noble benches remained untenanted for days. In the morning every old gentleman whose heart was still sound turned first in his paper to the news that mattered ; duchesses and dowagers rang for their gossip betimes. All hearts were with Wells. " I have taken the depth of the water," said Admiral Duncan, "and when the Venerable goes down my flag will still fly." The Bombardier knew that he must go down ; but he had taken the depth of public esteem and knew also that his flag would still be flying. Wells is no coward ; he is not nervous in the sense that he fears defeat. It is the thought of victory which unmans him. He is like the cricketer fainting on the verge of a century, who faced the first ball without a tremor. History does not lack instances ; so Hackenschmidt when he beat Madrali. A journalist of the period tells us that as the wrestlers were due to leave their dressing-rooms the news went round that the 68 Big Pugs and Little great Russian had an attack of nerves. His stomach was wrong ! They were anointing him with alcohol! He was faint! He was trem- bling ! And yet you would have sworn the huge fellow's nerves to be those of an ox. "It may be that coarse metals are less flexible than finer ; certain it is that they do not well cohere." It may be that this is true in mineralogy — philolo- gists will know whether I mean metallurgy — it is not true in men. Wells was the finer metal of the two, finer in the sense of being the more sensitive, but it was Beckett who cohered and Wells who, in sporting parlance, came unstuck. But then he had gone to pieces before the fight began. " It's St Paul's agin the blinkin' Monument," said a tough, "and the blinkin' Monument'll crack." It is said that the champion, shooting out his lips, pushed aside one of his seconds who was framing to ascend the steps before him. I did not notice this. What I did observe was a self-hypnotised Wells rooted to earth at the ring-side, his seconds patting the ladder to encourage him to mount. He was morally defenceless ; it was as though his op- ponent held a sword of fire in his hand against an unarmed body. And yet he did pretty well ; he returned blow for blow, stalled off ruin, raised hopes, was battered to his knees. " There was little cautious sparring — no half hits — no tapping and trifling, none of the petit-mattreship of the art — they were almost all knock-down blows ; the 69 Alarums and Excursions fi^ht was a ^(^od stand-up fight. To see two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies ; and then, before you could recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand steady to inflict or receive mortal offence and rush upon each other ' like two clouds over the Caspian ' — this is the most astonishing thing of all : this is the high and heroic state of man ! " What is the secret of the hold Wells has over the British public ? Why do we lean so tenderly to this reed shaken by the wind of every fighter's fist? Why, when the boards " received his hams and body," as a Georgian poet has it, did they receive one who was still a national hero ? Perhaps it is because his is the head upon which "all the ends of the world are come." Perhaps, mischievously, because the beauty of Wells is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries. Set it for a moment beside one of those tall goddesses and beautiful heroines of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. Like the vampire he has been outed many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about him ; and trafficked for strange belts with fighting P^renchmen ; and all this has been to him but as the sound of lyres and flutes. . . . 70 Big Pugs and Little They wrapped Wells up in that dolorous dressing-gown which it is his wont to doff so hopefully when the lights go up, and to don so hopelessly when his light is out. But virtue and comfort remain in its folds ; it will ever be cheered in the four corners of the land ; and he will still be a bold fighter in whose honour the seconds take it in their charge. " It hurts," said Wells's chief supporter after the fight. '* It hurts, but there can't be two winners." This is the philosophy proper to the occasion. So Peter Jackson, negro and gentleman, after he had knocked out Slavin. Jackson : Good-night, Paddy. There can't be two winners, but good luck to you. Slavin : Good-night, Peter. But it is the smaller fry towards whom my heart more particularly leans. It is meat and drink to me to see a second-rater. One gets tired of the big men, of their preening and peacocking, of their portentousness. I mislike the air of coming down to the arena horsed by captive kings. There is too much solemnity at Olympia, and the crowd is too well behaved. In the smaller booths the little chaps dive in and out of the ring like fishes, without ceremony at the start, without too great a degree of elation or discomforture at the finish. It would seem sometimes as though getting down to weight were with them not a part of training but an economic shift. They can be desperately thin. 71 Alarums and Excursions They are of all trades — blacksmiths, porters, fishmongers, newsboys — but common to them all are the badges of the heroic profession — the matted hair plastered low on the narrow forehead, the ringed and shaven neck, the felicitous devices of the tattooist. Stunted though they may be in intelligence, these budding bruisers can never be as inept as the polite young gentlemen who posture in revue. I cannot imagine a more honourable career than to knock-out and be knocked-out ; I cannot conceive a less noble one than to loll life away on plush divans in company with eleven other scented and manicured little masters, I am conscious of some unfairness here. What alternative is there for the beauty-chorister ? Selling gloves over a counter, making up posies at the florist's, barbering — all these demand a higher education. Clerking calls for greater intelligence, and portering for greater industry. We should, perhaps, be prepared to forgive these little manikins that they jig, amble and lisp ; they might starve else. But their principals ! Consider the highly-paid hero of musical comedy who sings a ditty in lawn-tennis flannels and yachting cap, and a different ditty — the composer tells us it is a different ditty— in dress-clothes and an opera-hat. Strip him of flannels and dress-clothes and, bless me, how little remarkable he would look ! Strip your boxer, and he rises to the pristine dignity of man. Clothe him, and he falls from his high estate. The queasy cap, the muffler, the coat with three buttons crowded 72 Big Pugs and Little together in the pit of the stomach, the tight trousers, the boots of soft uppers and snubbed toecaps— what uniform of degradation is this ! Boxers are those who, clothed, are in their wrong mind. Strippen out of rude array, they are men who reaHse that complete ferocity may go hand in hand with perfect amity. I remem- ber being present at a small provincial show at which a lad was disqualified for biting. There was the usual uproar ; the livery of shame was declared thenceforth the offender's only wear ; there was talk of taking away his living. After the fight I took occasion to touch delicately, gingerly even, upon the subject of his trespass. The lad assured me with many fervent protesta- tions that he had been totally unconscious of the action. He, if I may so express it, " sw'elp-me'd," into conviction of his moral innocence. "Besides," said he, "lor' lumme, / were winnin any owl Got 'im set, I 'ad. Easy ! There'd 'av bin no sense in bitin', an' that. I must 'a wanted to knock the grin off 'is ugly dial, see ? Sw'elp me, that's stright ! That's 'ow I looks at it, see? Wivout finkin'." And surely, wilful bit- ing under extreme excitement is more the act of a sportsman than the cold-blooded consent to rig a fight. Perhaps these small shows are least admirable in their best-paid bouts, and it may be that any but the strongest of referees would be chary of disqualifying a dirty fighter with a popular following. I once saw a French boxer, proffering a helping hand to one of our 73 Alarums and Excursions own brutes lialf-toppled through and tangled-up in the r()i)es, rewarded with a vicious blow in the mouth. But the Frenchman was equal to the occasion. "Si c'est comme <^a ! " he said, with a shrug, and resigned the fight. The referee at these contests must needs be a man of cour- age ; a ginger-beer bottle hurled from the gallery is a formidable missile, A man of courage he is, then, an Olympian with a thunderbolt in each hand. And when a dazed and beaten man hangs helpless on the ropes, and in the din no voice can make itself heard ; when, in this extremity, he bids Time advance a full minute and strike upon the bell, then is it with the thronged circle of spectators as though an- other Joshua had arisen to order the sun to heel. 74 T Swan and Dragon-Fly HE critic is bound from time to time to declare some standard to which his judg- ments are referable. This in pure un- selfishness, that he may bring into play the reader's own power of deduction and interpretation ; in expediency, that, when the curtain falls too late for him to go to the root of the matter, he may be taken on trust. The critic who always insists on a preliminary of first principles may be a nuisance, but he should not be above boring his readers now and again, especially when it is for his good as well as theirs. When, re- cently, Madame Pavlova reappeared in London after an absence of six years, our critics asked to be taken on trust to a man. They assured us that there were many dancers but only one Pavlova, that she was still the adorable and adored Pavlova, that no good purpose could by any possibility be served by a detailed analysis of so much pure and unadulterated joy as Pavlova commanded. The grounds of this artist's peculiar adorableness were not stated, nor was there any word as to the manner in which the pure joy evoked by her resembled or differed from the unadulterated delight imparted by Kar- savina, the incomparable ecstasy of Lopokova, the rapture of Tchernicheva. Now it may be that criticism by people who know all there is to be known about the art of dancing, does not need to be reasoned, and may be taken largely on trust. I, who know nothing about that art, prefer to try my hand at finding in first 75 Alarums and Excursions principles common to all arts a reasonable key to my unreasonable admiration of Pavlova. Here let mc confess to an inability to regard the old- fashioned ballet, pitchforked into the middle of an opera, as anything but a pure and simple irrelevance, or distraction for elderly satyrs. This may be nonsense, but it was also Balzac's view. In this school not dancing, but the dancer, is exploited. Its technique interests me just about as much and in exactly the same way as the technique of the haute ^cole of the circus-master. A premiere danseuse taking three hundred steps to cross the stage, thereafter with the fixed smile of the marionette to stand interminably a-tiptoe, provokes in me the same quality of amazement as when a horse curtsies or, erect on its haunches, paws at vacancy. In neither case are the emotions aroused, whereas the function of the dancer, as distinct from the acrobat, is to arouse them very definitely. " It is a mistake to regard poetry, music, and painting" — one mentally adds dancing — "as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour in painting, of sound in music, of rhymical words in poetry. , . . Each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind." So Pater, voicing the incon- trovertible principle underlying all criticism. The arts are so many passports to beauty, as strictly 76 Swan and Dragon-Fly non-transferable as the return halves of railway tickets. The moment you ask of a picture, a symphony or a dance: "What does it mean?" you are asking for an expression in words, in terms of literature, of what the artist by his choice of medium has already declared to be inexpress- ible save in the terms of painting, music, and dancing. A painter would sooner explain a picture to you by painting something else ; a musician one sonata by playing you another. The finding of tongues in painted trees, books in painted brooks, and sermons in the stones of Venice is simple wrong-headedness. The writer must not hope to convey in printed symbols the exact emotion created by the dancer when, as the Swan, she sinks flutteringly to rest, or, as the Gipsy, lays her despair upon the ground, letting sorrow ebb in the ripple of her arms. The greatest dancing, first principles tell us, must be that of the premiere danseuse, that art so formal and self-contained, as little heedful of any aim, other than the expression of itself, as a page of Henry James or the Japanese decoration of a fan. There may be a world behind these things, but it is a faint, unreal world, and our immediate delight is in the thing itself, an exquisite baffling thing filling us with the sense of not being able to catch up. Whereas the great dancers throw such an art boldly over ; their dances are to interpret, to mean, ih the fatal sense, in the same way that Strauss declared Also Sprach Zarathustra to mean the development 77 Alanons and Excursions of the human race up to Nietzsche and the Uebcrmensch. Here we come upon a paradox. I'hc irreatest dancintr refuses adherence to first {)rinciples, declines to remain absolute, and positiv^ely insists upon humbling itself to the position of interpreter, the decently-garbed attendant showing you through the habitation of some more magnificent muse. The greatest dancers are not content to remain dancers ; they will be actors as well. Perhaps it is that they are not the greatest dancers of all, that their absence of detachment and the complication of human interest removes them from the higher and colder sphere. Certain it is that Pavlova moves you in a purely human way, sending the mind working after images and symbols with which to express their human emotion. You find yourself thinking in terms of scudding clouds and orchard-surf, the beat of waves, a string of birds against the moon, the wing-laden shimmer of the dusk. "She had upon her skin the good odours of withered violets, her loins bent as palm-trees, her hands were as running waters of desire." Other pictures crowd upon you, beauty seized at the supreme moment of expression and held for ever, arrested figures on a Grecian vase, pictures of Botticelli, Such dancing has "phrasing," as the musicians put it, and one is amazed at its purely decorative quality, the power of filling a space, a circle, as Burne-Jones could do. Sometimes the sheer beauty of "natural" grace catches you by the throat. There is a melody of 78 Swan and Dragon-Fly line, if you like, but the heard melodies of the orchestra are reduced to a subordinate tinkle, so well does this beautiful art pipe to you ditties of no tone save its own soundless one of perfect motion. Dancing may concern itself with im- mortal beauty or a game of skittles in a bar parlour — Pavlova at her best sends us back to Aphrodite. " I was free, I was pure. The seas shook for love of me at the touch of my heels. I was beauty ! I was shapeliness ! I trembled over the world asleep ; substance was dried up at the sight of mine eyes, of itself it strengthened into just shapes." Something of this we would have said of the Pavlova of old, a Pavlova which, alas ! the recent visit did not show us. This artist needs a dramatist to stand up to, not a ballet-master. She has been acclaimed as the equal of the great tragic players, and mere prettiness, however exquisite and enchanting, will not suffice. Imita- tions of swans and dragon-flies, however haunt- ing, can never be more than divertissements. From the play-bill I had imagined that she was to appear in Thai's, and I read wonders into what the performance was to be. It was to give me all over again the Moreau-Huysmans paint- ing : " Diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks ; on her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts into flame, scatters in 79 Alarums and Excursions snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned, tea- rose flesh like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morn- ing gold, diapered with steel blue, streaked with peacock green." Imagine my distress at finding that it was exactly in this ballet that Madame Pavlova was not to appear. A lady of the school I will have none of, a premiere danseuse, was to enact Thais, And what a mess Massenet and his dancing master have made of the story : a pagan festival of middle-class exuberance of the same order as the Fete de Neuilly ; a courtesan to kindle deserts dowered with the circum- spection of a young miss from school. Certain it is that no dancer who is not an actress could have made us see " the lids of her eyes shiver as the wings of a moth." This little affair of paper-roses and decorous, bare-footed young men, of modest shudderings and bashful comings- on would have sobered a Bacchante. Miss Pinkerton herself had not been alarmed. 80 A Note on Repertory The function of art is to make us love what we have tried to love a hundred times before and found dull each time. {Adapted.) IS it just fancy that the general public is com- ing round, slowly, to the idea that the drama styled elevating is not such a boring affair after all, and that the bogey of theatrical educa- tion is nothing more fearsome than a means of getting more fun out of life.^ Theatrical educa- tion is not, like Alice's growth, a tilting at the roof; it is a broadening of the base or scope of the mind, and may embrace both Ibsen's Ghosts and Mr Harry Tate's Motoring. It is a mistake to confuse intellectual plays, which undoubtedly exist, with intellectual acting which has no exist- ence save in the apprehension of the timid. There are intellectual plays and there are stupid plays ; there is good acting and there is bad. The snare of so-called intellectual actingr is the supposition that transcendence of thought may excuse the commoner imperfections, that it does not matter what clayey pitfalls our actors stumble into, so long as their heads are generously in the clouds. Now the acting demanded by the repertory play is exactly the same kind as that demanded by the commercial play. We should not forgive an actor at the St James's Theatre who could neither talk, walk, nor sit still, simply because of some imagined rarity of soul ; and there is not the slightest reason for a different code of leniency * Written before the Gaiety at Manchester went down into the bottom- less pit of the kinema. F 8l Alarums and Excursions at the Court. Acting demands primarily not so much certain vague qualities of mind as certain very definite attributes of body. It is not of the first importance that an actor should hold the key to Marchbanks, or feel in the marrow of his bones the rottenness of Morell, It is essential that he should create a living being whom the spectator may fill out into Marchbanks or Morell. Punch and Judy have no understanding, yet their show is the most complete illusion of life. Puppetry is the first and all but the last word in acting ; it is the point at which all schools converge. Coquelin, carefully sponging from his face all individual expression, then composing the empty mask into the likeness of another man's features ; the elder Irving arrogating all other personalities to his own : both came to absolute life. The ofift of livintr in front of an audience — not the fatal talent of looking- like life — is not to be analysed. Tragedians have lacked it, mounte- banks possessed it abundantly. Salvini and Dan Leno were rich in it ; never a trace in Jane Hading's supremely clever calculations. The actors of Ibsen must act like actors first of all, and then like clever people if they can. This is what Mr Shaw means when he says that Ibsen makes demands upon a finer technique than English acting possesses. Technique, you notice, not brains. The actor in an Ibsen play is not concerned with the play's spiritual or literary merit. He is not concerned with anything beyond his own sense of the theatre, the spectator's sense of 8? A Note on Repertory the theatre, and the job of fusing the two. It is extraordinary how much can be done, even with Ibsen, by the professional duffer, the " sound and competent " actor. Such an actor may not have the brains of a hen, and yet be carried on to some kind of success by the perfection of his purely technical mechanism. On the other hand, not all the brains in the world, the nicest dis- crimination in the thinking out of a part that is psychologically all thumbs, are of much avail to a man who does not quite know what to do with his hands. In other words, acting is a tempera- mental art. In the realm of pure reason there may be an art of intellectual acting ; on the stage there can never be other than temperamental actors. There is nothing the temperamental actor cannot do, even if he has to get other brains to help him ; but there is nothing the intellectual actor can do, if he have the brains of a Bacon and lack the stage-temperament. Mr Esm^ Percy played Tanner in Man and Superman very much better than I have ever seen it played because he simply played it like an actor and not like a thinker. It is true that temperamental acting does no better with writing of the quality of Mr Shaw's than it does with other people's rubbish. Only it is saved the bother of transfiguring the rubbish. A good actor will be just as effective in Maria Martin as in Othello ; and it takes a good actor to do justice to both. When you come to the actor who ofets all there is to be ofot out of both tragedy and barn-storming, and is 83 Alarums and Excursions immeasunibly finer in tragedy, then you know that you are in the presence of the great actor. The finest compliment ever paid to a repertory company was when a popular actor-manager, speaking of the Court Theatre as a rival attraction, said : '* It is not the plays that do us the damage ; it is the acting ! " The first essential for the actors of intellectual plays is, then, that they shall be temperamentally competent. But the writers of these plays have a habit of demandingr a gfood deal more even than that. When Henry James asked of his immemorial butler: "And to whom do you, beautifully, belong ? " he assumed his actor cap- able of adumbrating in a single gesture the New World's view of the Old. And he as- sumed the audience capable of taking that gesture in. When Mr Gilbert Cannan asked a lady in one of his plays : "What really was the man to whom you always beautifully belonged ? What manner of man was this of whom you are becoming more and more perfectly the widow?" he should have realised that neither actors nor audience could by any manner of possibility be up to it. For was not he, the author, up against the tyranny of the temperamental actor's view of what constitutes a good part and of how a good part should be played ? Must there not, inevit- ably, be the "note" of the widowed lady.'* Temperamental actors will always find you a "note" with which they can hit off, simply and unerringly, and without confusion or mistake, a 84 A Note on Repertory character which may be to the author who has created it all confusion and compromise, half- assertion and half-denial. The "note" of char- women is tearful penury, of cabmen huskiness, of soldiers the uppishness of Corioli. Must not the "note" of the widow be the inevitable mixture of archness and resignation ? Elaboration and subtlety in the theatre — are they, after all, worth while — since you can never get from the "note" anything but bell-like certainty and directness? The audience, too, will they not want a "dramatic" conflict, not of ideas but of happenings, some common hammer-and-tongs of action to keep the play, as it were, "alive"? So even the intel- lectual playwright is tempted to give up the magnificent thing as impossible, in view of the actor's ineradicable preference for "notes," his unconquerable aversion to coming on the stage at all until less important characters have played the audience to their seats, his determination to be on the stage, and in the middle of it, when the curtain comes down and applause is going. If the intellectual playwright is to do any good, he must be seconded by actors who have tempera- mental genius, and the intelligence to suppress all that the temperamental actor, as a rule, thinks it incumbent upon him to stress. A great critic talks somewhere of surveying Ibsen's idealism "from the clear ether above, which can only be reached through its mists " — that is, through the mists of idealism. The 85 Alarums and Excursions plain man will have to do a deal of striving to break through the clouds of such a play as Rosmersholm, to rub his eyes industriously and peer hard, if he is to be rewarded by so much as a glimpse of the top. Frankly, one feels that criticism in this case is rather like leading up a climb you have not done before. The drama is the purest symbolism, a play not of life but of the philosophy of life. " People don't do such things " as Rosmer, his wife and Rebecca con- trive to do in this play, or if they did we should think the world gone mad. But we should think the world gone mad if poets, philosophers, re- formers acted their dreams instead of dreaming them, and that is just what Ibsen's people do. They are pegs for ideas, and we are to care little for what happens to the pegs and everything for what happens to the ideas. Who, that knows the plays well, wants to weep at Oswald, or is distressed at Lovborg's wound in the stomach, and Hedda's in the temple? Who cares how many steeples Solness topples from, or is moved by the threefold drowning in the mill stream at Rosmersholm ? And yet these were moving things if we had not been preoccupied with the tragedy of idea, the disaster that crowns high effort, the struggle to progress further, not per- haps in a clearly-defined direction, but somehow further than we are now. It is not the physical or actual agonies of these people that are, in Whitman's fine phrase, among our changes of garments, it is the agony of the propelling 86 A Note on Repertory philosophy that we wear. The danger of doing right, of going forward, the hazard of all ideals is the theme of Rosmersholm. Rebecca sets Rosmer's mission and high purpose against his wife's existence, unhesitatingly sacrificing the wife. Rosmer sets his own faith in his mission against Rebecca's existence, and ruthlessly de- stroys her. Only the Rosmersholm tradition, the idea of expiation, forces him to throw his life away with hers. In the play the sacrifice is of life to an ideal ; on the stage it is one of fiesh and blood to ideas. It is Ibsen's old insistence on the relativity of right and wrong to one's particular step on the road. Note that it is always the people with ideals who do the mischief. Brand's saintly, Mrs Alving's domestic, and liedda's neurotic idealisms bring about all sorts of havoc, and yet these people are on the side of the angels, or at least not actively on the devil's. In these plays the black sheep do the least harm. Martensgard the disreput- able, the scorner of ideals, is the man to whom the poor bring their troubles, and by some he is accorded the victor. Ulric, the drunken charlatan with a touch of genius, is kicked into the gutter by the man he has reviled. Rebecca herself would be a power for good to Rosmer and his mission, if it were not that the three-cornered household is a scandalous affair. One feels that she lacked the courage to do a little wrong and did a greater, whilst the wife, taking the coward's course courageously and drowning 87 Alarums and Excursions herself, brought about the shattering of this Httle world. It would seem that the only way to keep upright in the apparent topsy-turvydom, is to fasten resolutely upon some idea (it does not much matter what) that Ibsen seems to be working out, and let the rest go hang. The idea at the back of Rosmersholm seems to be that the greater an ideal's power for good, the greater its danger. Without some such clue the play is meaningless, even dull. People who call themselves Ibsenites — a deplorable but sufficiently convenient classifica- tion — are curiously bad tacticians. Surely it is the business of the Ibsenite to recognise the futility of fighting on all sides at once, to choose his battle-ground and take his stand on Ibsen as a writer of plays for the theatre, as an artist with a vehicle of expression, and not as a preacher with a message. The point which has never been made with sufficient emphasis is the magni- ficence of the plays as plays, Ibsen crops up vaguely in the general mind as the biggest man of a school in revolt against the "well-made play " ; by inference as the apostle of clumsy and careless construction, compensated by any amount of purpose. No idea could be more foolish. There was, of course, wonderful dexterity in the old plays. When Scribe intended his heroine to sniff at a poisoned bouquet in Act V., he took care to explain the possibilities of poison by inhalation in Act I. Ibsen's ingenuity is equally amazing, but it is not concerned with daggers 88 A Note on Repertory and bowls. In A DolVs House Nora clearly fore- shadows the end by saying to the children's nurse : " And if my little ones had nobody else, I am sure you would ," and then, putting the idea away from her : " Nonsense, nonsense ! " Any serious study of the plays must reveal that they are the tightest, tautest, sparest pieces of writing in the literature of the stage. And we may be quite certain that an author who will not allow himself a word too many, means us to take the words he does use at their fullest value. Adopting this principle, there is very little doubt that we must find in Helmer something more than the normal conventional husband, the owner of a pretty wife and an elegant flat with a tasteful flower-pot in the front window. Helmer is an incorrigible aesthete. " Nobody has such exquisite taste as you," says Nora. Helmer can't bear to see dress- making ; he suggests embroidery, which is pretty, in place of knitting, which is ugly and " Chinese." He notices the red flowers on the Christmas tree. (Please remember that there is no idle chatter in Ibsen, and that every word is of vital importance.) He looks upon Rank's sufferings as a cloudy background to the sunshine of his own happiness, whilst Rank will not have him in his sickroom — " Helmer's delicate nature shrinks so from all that is horrible." Nor can we doubt that Ibsen intended to convey a considerable sensualism as well. The scene after the dance is one of the most searching things on the stage. Helmer is drunk, or at least, he has had a good deal of 89 Alarums and Excursions champagne, and the whole scene seems intended to show that Nora was never a wife, never more than a legalised mistress. Helmer has not the brains to realise this when he is sober, and he masks his unsuspected self with all the egregious cant about sheltering wings that Mr Shaw gave us again in Morell. On this interpretation Helmer is quite convincing, and his rage at dis- covering his mistress-wife more fool than knave is perfectly reasonable. There is great superficial resemblance between Helmer and Morell, but we cannot imagine Morell behaving to Candida as Helmer did to Nora. But then Morell is neither aesthete nor sensualist, and is much closer to the normal husband than Helmer. Helmer is abnormal ; this fact admitted, the play hangs together. Make him normal, and the play leaves us with the unpleasant conviction that none of us should 'scape whipping. The conviction that Verhaeren's The Cloister is a great dramatic poem is not appreciably weakened by the fact that a fine performance by Mr William Poel and a Belgian performance in the original still leave us fumbling with a sense of tragedy imperfectly accounted for. Perhaps a certain unaccountableness is essential to these soaring dramas of the spirit, if they are really to soar : which of us would circumscribe Hamlet with too complete an understanding } Mr George Moore has laid it down that "great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses — reasons never," 90 A Note on Repertory to which one would add the corollary that if art is not to reason she must be careful not to handle matter which cries out principally for argument. The difficulty with The Cloister is that its un- accountableness is of dual quality : a loftiness of spirit transcending and scorning reason, combined with poverty of thinking on the lower planes. There is much theological disputation in the play, but it gets no further than Thomas's " Since God cannot be Evil and since we can have fear of evil things alone, it must follow that it is wrong to preach that ' the Fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom,'" to which Balthazar replies : "You reason too much," instead of, more properly : " You reason too loosely. The Awe of the Omnipotent and the dread of Evil are different kinds of fear." Unprofitable then must be the ensuing theological arraignments and defences by two such faulty logicians. Now take the more tangible conflict of the play, Balthazar's urgency to confess his crime. He is a parricide of ten years' standing, has received absolution from the Prior, and risen to such eminence in his Order that the supreme leadership is to be his. We are told that the whole safety and survival of the monastery de- pends upon Balthazar's acceptance of the leader- ship. Is he to accept these blushing honours without publicly blushing for his crime .-^ Must he give himself up to civil justice and bring ruin on his Order ? An old catch stated over and over a • ^ , — X Uurability = rrice Petrol consumption Not even the dapper little gentlemen who foist these soulless things upon you will dissent from such a proposition. But who is the fellow who will estimate his horse in terms of — ^ — ^ ^ ^ X Length of days = Value ? Cost of keep One car is as good as another if it will do the same thine for the same leng-th of time at the same cost. The test for beauty is the same as in the case of the big gun, the aeroplane, or any other engine for the destruction of man— the test of efficiency. Whereas the horse will answer, thank God, to every other test under heaven. Who that owns a car can spend an evening with it in its stable without butchery, and a whole ritual of evisceration reminiscent of fourteenth-century Messes Noires ? You cannot commune with iron- mongery without taking it to pieces. Whereas you can talk to your nag in kindness and even gather something of his replies. " He who has seen tree-tops bend before the wind or a horse move knows all that there is to be known of the art of dancing," says an old writer upon ^^^sthctics. The gleanings of him who has spent hours by the road-side with a broken axle do not go beyond immobility. But the whole case for beauty in the car is given away by its proper advocates. What panegyrist of mechanical traction is there who, after a picture of the road gleaming white 115 Alarums and Excursions in the moonlight, will refrain from saying that the driver "opened out her throttle and felt the car bound beneath him like a live thing " ? Whereas the horse is a live thing. . . . The value of a motor-car may be determined by a computation of the cost of production plus the margin of profit current in the trade. Roughly it is worth a thousand pounds or it is not. If it be worth a thousand pounds you will get that sum for it, and I, who know less about a car than Mr Harry Tate's assistant, will, after a visit to a shop assistant's tailor and three weeks' tuition in the art of " approaching " customers, sell as many as the next fellow. You can sell a car on paper, by specification, before it is made. Twenty thousand young sprigs are there who, were they driven to earn their own living, would take to selling Rolls-Royces as easily as Jews to money- lending. They have only to stare through the shop windows of Bond Street from the other side. But give them a poor horse, worth twelve hundred when he is fit, and ask them to get that sum for him ! For the value of a horse is not determined by the supply and demand ruling in the trade, so much as by what you can persuade the customer to think of him as an individual. This is the sellinor which is an art. Of what cylindered thing could you write such a description as this of Ophelia? "The first time I ever saw her was at Lord Londesborough's Stud Farm, near Market 116 Cackle and ^Osses Weighton. I was driving along the road and she was running in the fields. When she heard the rattle of our trap she raised her head, pricked up her ears and stood at attention, a living picture I shall never forget. She had a perfect head and neck, full of character, going back with beautiful symmetry into splendidly sloped shoulders that only Denmark could hand down from his great sire. Sir Charles, the grandest horse and best goer that Yorkshire had then produced. We got out of our trap and walked over to the hedge, where we stood looking at her, spellbound, for we recognised that we were in the presence of the finest Hackney mare we had ever seen. She looked sixteen hands high, so majestic was her bearing, although as a matter of fact her height was only fifteen hands and a quarter of an inch. She was a long, low mare to the ground, with a back as level as a billiard table and her tail set right on the end of it, with no sign of a droop in her quarters. And when she walked away from us up went her tail as if it had been set up. She stood on a set of legs made of whipcord and steel, every thew and sinew standing out clean and distinct, and her feet were of ivory, so dense and close was the texture. If you had put a hood over her neck you would have said her back was too long, but she was wonderfully ribbed up, and her last rib was, I think, the deepest I ever saw on a horse of anything like her size. When set alight her action was perfect. She lived in the air and 117 Alarums and Excursions only ceime down to the earth to kiss it. As old S , the vet, who bred Gentleman John, used to say, she could go as high as wild geese can fly. The first thing that struck me when I saw Ophelia for the first time was the beautiful balance of her lines and proportions, and I took off my hat to her as my mistress instructor in the balance of a horse. In 191 2 I stayed with the late Tom Smith, the owner of her grandson, Admiral Crichton,^ and we drove over in the mornino; with the late William Foster to Frank Batchelor's place for his dispersal sale. There I saw Ophelia for the last time. She was out in the meadow, and the moment we rattled our hats up went her head and tail, and she trotted away with the same fascinating force and elegance as when I had first seen her as a three-year-old, a quarter of a century before." I should like to read the man who could write like this of a steam-engine or a motor-bus. It takes a horseman to recognise twelve hundred pounds running loose in a field, to get that sum or to give it. I, who know nothing about cars, will undertake to give twelve hundred to-morrow morning and bring home some thousand pounds' worth at the worst. But your dapper little gentleman shall put twelve hundred pounds in his pocket and buy a horse running in a field, and he will be lucky indeed if he do not have to take fifty the next time Crewe sales come round. 1 This, and nol Admirable Ciichton, was actually the horse's name. 118 Cackle and ' Osses Your motorist may say that I have only to go to the right shop. Well, I will take him to the right field. . . . Old S was the finest horseman of my time. In appearance he was a composition of Coquelin and Lord Lonsdale. He had the comedian's "titled sensitive nose, which seemed to flick like a terrier's." His irascibility was well known all over the East Riding, whilst even his geniality had some quality of terror. He wore a roundish bowler hat of the type you can see in the back numbers of Punch, and brown cloth gaiters. Between them his covering seemed to consist solely of a stone-coloured Melton overcoat. This had eight buttons in mother-of-pearl, the size of half-crowns, and made still gayer by repre- sentations of steeple-chasing, tandem-driving, coaching, the death of Reynard, duck-shooting, coursing, the Hackney mare Bounce, and her son. Gentleman John. There was about old S something of the horse-dealer in the print Messrs Screwdriver and Reardones Opinions con- cerning ''The Prize" own brother to ''Lottery,'' on the first of May 1841, a copy of which and its fellow hung in his front parlour. You know the old picture — the yard, the dealer all geniality, the customer all simpleness, the ostler who might have stood for a model of Fagin, the tight old groom cleaning a bridle, the rude little boy pulling bacon, the screw himself, ears well back, tail set up, every inch a rogue. Underneath, the legend : " There's a boss, Mr Green. Only 119 Alarums and Excursions feel them legs, sir. Six years old, never did a day's work in his life, up to twenty stone, thoroughbred as Eclipse, and can gallop like a pony. I gave two hundred for him at Rugely last week, and old Andrews wished he might be damned if he warn't the cheapest nag in the fair. He offered me twenty pound for the buying on him, to carry a werry good customer of his'n, the Hemperor of Russia, a heavy man, but I know'd he'd suit you, Mr Green, so I didn't mind throwing the Hemperor over — specially as he warn't no customer of mine. If you gives me two hundred and fifty and takes and rides him as I knows you ivill ride him, I'll pound it the Herl of P sends you a cheque for Five hundred pounds for him the first day the Queen goes down into the grass below Harrow." And then the fellow-print : Messrs Screwdriver and Rear done s Opinions concerning " The Prize,'' own brother to *' Lottery " the property of James Green, Esquire, on the 1st October 1841. The figures are the same, the situation alone is altered. "So he is, Mr Green, a useful animal, very. But lord, sir, only just look in my stables, full as ever they can hold. I haven't sold a boss these two months. . . . However, Mr Green, to oblige you I'll take him at harness price — thirty pounds — if yoiill warrant him^ he's worth a deal more I dessay, but at this time of year I'd rather not have him at all, 'pon my life, I wouldn't. Mind, Mr Green, I said pounds, not gumeas." 120 Cackle and ^Osses None was safe from the lash of old S- irony. It is recorded of him that in a deal with one of his cronies he swopped a cottage piano for a brood mare. But when the mare arrived she turned out to be not the agreed animal but a substitute, poor, stale as a bone, herring-gutted. Whereupon old S took the works out of his piano and dispatched the empty case. The parties remained the best of friends ; those were not the days of weak-kneed lawsuits. It was a case of pull devil, pull baker, and victory to the stronger. Some little time afterwards the substituter of the mare bought from old S a harness gelding which, on arrival, turned out to be an aged stud- horse. To the laconic telegram : " Your gelding is a stallion," S replied: " I know, and so was his father before him." Both stories are apocryphal, and in any case the feud was an avowed and friendly one. In his dealings with the outer world the old grentleman was a model of what a horseman should be. He would not pull out an animal on Sunday or Good Friday or Christmas Day for the best customer breathing, though on weekdays he worked himself and his family from four in the morning till four the next. Like a good horseman he never really slept. Perhaps the best animal S ever owned was Bounce. She was bought as a two-year-old for one hundred and twenty pounds from George Wakefield, farmer and horse-breeder of Messing- ham. Lines, turned away and brought up again 121 Alarums and Excursions as a three-year-old to be broken to harness. And then, as the old gentleman used to say : " Nobody could mak' nowt on her. She wouldn't hev it. She broke all her harness, and the only man as ever tried to get on her that day never tried again." So into the char-a-banc she had to go, a char-a-banc in those times being a " numb " thing, in the pin of which a refractory animal could hurt neither itself, its neighbours nor its driver. Bounce was put into the pin between the other two horses, and driven with a load of excursionists from Hull to Bridlington, a distance of thirty-four miles, and back again. At Driffield, on the return journey, or fifteen miles from home, the driver reported that she "gave in." For the last few miles it was only the two poles that held the mare up, and on being taken out she collapsed. During the whole of that day she had refused food, and now took an oatmeal drench with as ill- grace as any hunger-striker. Next morning her legs were like millposts, and generally she was very sorry for herself. This was the mood old S ■ was waiting for. He put a saddle and bridle on her and she carried him quietly. The same night he drove the mare in single harness on his round, and for several weeks afterwards she did her eight or ten hours on the road. She was no " hollow-pampered jade of Asia which cannot go but thirty miles a day." Next she was sold to B , a London dealer, for two hundred guineas, and presently going through a shop window in Piccadilly was again for sale. 122 Cackle and ' Osses B wrote to S , who immediately went up to London, ostensibly a country customer for the animal, actually to see the amount of damage done. This turned out to be small. In an inter- view with the young swell S said that, to look at, she seemed a " nicesh " mare, and a "good sort." He asked whether this had hap- pened before, how long she had been in her present ownership, whether she had ever been ridden, who bred her, the usual mystifications of the dealer buying back his own. Finally, if his lordship, who was asking two hundred guineas, cared to send the mare on at twenty-seven pounds — not guineas — and would warrant her, his lord- ship could do so. His lordship did. On her return to Hull she did all S 's veterinary rounds, together with the work of the fire-brigade, the prison- van and the job-yard. She was exhibited at shows all over the country-side, and on her last public appearance carried off the championship at the Great Lincolnshire. Retired to the stud she bred seventeen foals, fourteen colts and three fillies. Her most famous son was Gentleman John, perhaps the most beautiful Hackney stallion which ever set foot in a show- yard. With an injection of two grains of strychnine and corded he was also one of the finest movers ever seen ; but as both these means of showing a horse are illegitimate, it were per- haps more honest to judge him standing. Even then he was worth every penny of the four thousand pounds he fetched in his prime. The I2g Alarums and Excursions last time he was sold was at Crewe for, if I remember rightly, fourteen guineas. It is pleasant to think that this sum was given to save the old horse from that last dread traffic which ends in Beloium, " Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse " is to put the friend of man on a lowish level. Old S used to tell a yarn of a country squire whose wife lay ill in bed with pneumonia. Finding his favourite hunter shak- ing in his box he rushed indoors, tore the blankets from his wife's bed and put them on his dearer prize. Your horse is a great provoker of sincerity. On his death-bed S called his sons round him. " My feyther left me nowt," he said, "and A'm leaving yo nowt. A'm leaving all my brass i' trust for my grandchilder." "That's no matter, Dad," replied the eldest- born. " You've left us the wide world to roam in." " An' I reckon it'll be wide enough to hold ye," the old man retorted. And so saying, died. When his private papers were gone through they were found to consist of the most ordinary business memoranda. His had been a life entirely without secrets. One envelope alone was sealed. It bore the following inscription : — " Prescription for Worm Pouders to be opened after my death to the one that follows the busi- ness to be kept secret." A visit to the old farm which has now changed 124 Cackle and ^Osses hands is not without melancholy. Some little time ago young S took me over and proudly showed me the stone boxes with their tenants' names over the door and their effigies carved on the lintel. Here is Bounce's box, next to hers is Gentleman John's, here Tip-top's, Topper's, Merlin's. Let into the wall at the entrance to the yard is a tablet in white stone, marking the spot where the mare lies buried. It bears the following inscription : — IN MEMORY OF THE HACKNEY MARE, Bounce, h.s.b. No. 36 A mare they called Bounce in this grave lies at rest, She's left stock behind her of the very best. She was over fifteen hands high and her colour dark brown, A brood mare or in harness in the show-ring well known. Her last record in the show-ring to end her show career When she was fourteen years of age she won the great Lincolnshire. And she was plucky to the last with her action fresh and free, The time she reigned upon this earth was thirty years and three. Gentleman John Winner of the Challenge Cup in America Outright. 1904. Against all Nations judged by Americans. The poet is one Northard of Reedness, Goole. I know of no other works of his. 125 Alarums and Excursions Let me recount one other Yorkshire history, that of Taylor's Performer, from whom the great OpheHa and all our modern harness horses are descended. In the year 1840 James Taylor, of Pocklington, a poor groom, borrowed from his master the sum of nineteen pounds, wherewith to purchase a chestnut roadster colt foal which had taken his fancy. Too poor to keep the foal, he agreed with some horse-dealers of Givendale to sell them a half-share in it, in return for which they promised to keep it until the age of three years. When in three years' time the poor groom claimed his half of the horse the dealers denied the bargain, and, swearing that Taylor was only their servant, refused to give up the horse or any share of the money he had earned. They then shut the animal up in a barn, which they secured with lock and key. Advised by his lawyer that he must not break a lock, the groom went at dead of night with a friendly brick-layer and removed the window-casement at the back of the barn. Making a slope of litter, he led out the horse which, to the barn-breaker's horror, promptly emitted a loud neigh. Fortunately the dealers slept on both ears that night, and Taylor got his horse away. After travelling as far as Leicester, he boldly took the animal back to Givendale, was arrested for theft, tried and acquitted. The horse was put up to auction and knocked down to Taylor at one hundred and fifty guineas, which was advanced by the kindly master who had supported him all along. Afterwards known as 126 Cackle and "^Osses Taylor's Performer, the horse became the sire of Sir Charles, who begat Denmark, who begat Danegelt. In 1884 was foaled Ophelia, the dauorhter of Denmark or Daneo-elt — it will never be known which. When, many years afterwards, the late Frank Batchelor broke up his stud, this grand old mare alone was retained to end her days in peace. There, amid the cheerful noises of the farm, in "pastoral fields burned by the setting sun," she was to live out the remainder of her days. Is it outside poetic fancy to imagine that, like any human, "with each slow step" and perhaps nibbling here and there a mouthful, she did "curiously inspect our lasting home".-* When she was brought out and paraded for the last time, all the bidders and those who had not a brass farthing — grooms, strappers, horse-copers, the in- describable rag tag and bobtail that gather round a sale ring — rose as one man. Rascals who would curse their mothers stood up in their places, removed the straws from their mouths and respectfully took off their hats. Ophelia's offspring were Lord Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Polonius, Fortinbras — afterwards and less happily re-named Heathfield Squire, the only horse which ever beat the great Forest King — Royal Ophclian, Miss Terry — in compliment to the actress who had just charmed England with her Ophelia — and Ophelia's Daughter Grace. And here, the Shakespearean style and title ends, and the names of the remaining children, including 127 Alarums and Excursions the great son Mathias, are not to my purpose. I shudder to record that to a horse with a double cross of the Ophelia blood has been given the name OpJielius, a horrid invention to be brought to the notice of some Academy of Equine Taste. It sometimes happens that horses born to studs in unlikely places have to be re-named before being sent into the show-ring. It would never do to saddle a show-horse with a name of plebeian origin. Just as the Misses Lizzie Sinclair and Susie Miggs, of 999b Petticoat Lane, will appear on the West End stage as the elegant and dashing Mesdames Elise St Clair and Suzanne de Volte - Face, so will those homely nags, Bermondsey Bill and Whitechapel Walter, suffer a Richmond-and-Olympia change to the princes Florizel of Mayfair and Charming of Piccadilly. But they will be their mothers' sons for all that. The champion harness-horse of this present year is called Dark Legend — a beautiful name ; but then he comes from beautiful Camilla Lacey. The house that Fanny Burney built is now the headquarters of one of the finest Hackney studs in the country. To what different uses men and things may come ! I love the harness horse. I love the way in which, emergent from his rugs in treasured splendour, he is sent into the arena. There the artistry of preparation and the rascality of pre- parers come to fruition. Your true showman is immune from misadventure save that which may befall his horse, proof against sorrow, impervious 128 Cackle and ' Osses to natural shock. Wife, child — they should have died hereafter. Your true horseman would rather drive over Yorkshire moors to mend a pair of damaged forelegs than pass in review the ancient statuary of Greece. On the last of such excursions young S it was who drove me in a heavy pig- cart, with a Hackney mare twenty-four years old between the shafts, over some four miles of rough up-hill track in less than twenty-four minutes. She had that morning taken a load to Beverley, a distance there and back of eighteen miles, and looked as fit as a fiddle and fresh as a daisy. Her sire was Gentleman John and her dam a mare by Danegelt, who was by Denmark, by Sir Charles, again by Taylor's Performer, the horse belonging to our poor Yorkshire groom. I love these Yorkshire moors ; every blade of grass prates of the horse's whereabout. In all fiction the landscape which has most, even though vaguely, remained with me is the park- land through which Meredith takes Diana and Lady * for a drive on a wettish day with a sou'wester blowing. But the country badly needs a horse besides that or those in the carriage, and I would give all the brilliant chatter for a picture of some Ophelia over the hedge, trotting away ' There are borrower's gaps in my shelves. Seven times have I sent to the local library for ihe lady's name, but on each occasion Diana has been out. It would appear that unfashionable interest in this author is not on the wane. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much bIoc)d in him ? I 129 Alarums and Excursions from you, wearing two good ends and using hocks and stifles. I have known some eventful days in my life. There was the day when my first dramatic criti- cism was printed, when my first book appeared, when I put on uniform and again when I put it off. There was the day when I first beheld in the flesh the Editor of The Saturday Review, and two days on which I was to realise that Stevenson drew a longfish bow when he said : " A writer can live by his writing ; if not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously."^ I count such illumination happiness. 1 A well-known writer has warned budding authors that it is of no use writing masterpieces unless you are prepared to stand out for their full market value. As a very young man I had an experience which may serve as an awful warning to other very young men with a belief in the commercial generosity of the world in general, and newspaper proprietors in particular. In January 1906 I sent a letter on some theatrical subject to the editor of a North of England halfpenny paper, of great wealth, influence and circulation. This was inserted. Some time afterwards an arrangement was concluded whereby I was to undertake the dramatic criticism of the paper for one year. This being my first literary venture, I was naturally modest as to its value and ignorant also of the rates paid by newspapers for such copy. To be perfectly candid, I was anxious to try my hand at a year's 'prentice work, quite content if I received the lowest scale of remuneration paid to the worst kind of reporting. In my naivete I proposed to leave it to the editor of the paper to pay me at Christmas whatever sum he should then consider the articles to have been worth. To this he agreed. During that year I went to the theatre some forty-nine times and con- tributed some forty-nine articles fnmi a third to three-quarters of a column in length. As I found that whenever I made reference to Sarah Bernhardt the paper next morning printed Sarah Dewhurst, I made a practice of staying in the office until two, three, or even four o'clock in the morning to correct my proofs. When Christmas Eve came I received a letter from the editor enclosing a cheque for seven guineas, which amount he said he had increased from the five originally contemplated, "owing to the superior quality of the work." Now I maintain that either (a) the proprietors of the journal still owe me a considerable sum or (h) that they were guilty of extraordinary discourtesy and unfairness both to their readers and to the theatrical profession in publishing dramatic 130 Cackle and ''Osses But none of these days, how glorious soever in eventfulness or illumination, is comparable in rapture with that on which my little David — FiyU Edition was his Stud Book name — pitted himself against orreat Goliath — the fifteen-two Haddon Marphil — and beat that giant for the championship of a great North of England show. Round and round the enormous track they went, the big horse collected, within himself, going great guns, the pony beating him for pace, out- shining majesty with fussy self-importance. So you may compare the ocean-going liner with the steam-tug breasting the Thames, and breaking up that placid bosom into impertinent ruffles. So did First Edition break up the show-ring into foam and spume, a flurry of white socks. When the little fellow had gone ten laps to the big horse's nine, the judge went with the crowd and criticism which they were honourably convinced was not of greater value. The dilemma is perfect. It was on the strength of these articles that I received and accepted an invitation to join the critical staff of TAe Manchester Guardian. On the day some fourteen years later on which I took the MS. of Responsibility to my publisher I treated myself to luncheon at a famous restaurant. I had never taken any interest in the huckstering side of literature, and was uncertain therefore as to the amount which might be demanded on account of royalties. Seeking a line through honest industry, I asked one of the less tremendous doorkeepers of the famous eating-house what his earnings were. •' Four pounds a week, sir, reg'lar." Now the book had taken two years' hard work, which, at a doorkeeper's rate, amounts to some four hundred pounds. Modestly I determined to ask two, but my interview ultimately resulted in a meagre cheque for fifty. "You see, my dear fellow," said my publisher with his most charming smile, "the chasseur fulfils a useful function." The bill for typing came to ^"21, 15s., author's corrections ;i{^ 25, agent's fee £2, los., leaving me a net profit of fifteen shillings, on which I submit that existence for two years would need to be of the "less luxurious" order. I understand that the r<;yallies actually earned fell short of the amount generously advanced. Alarums and Excursions gave him best. He stood thirteen and a half hands high, had a leg at each corner and a heart of gold. In his box children could play with him ; in his leather he was a ball of fury. There was nothing royal about him ; he was not even a patrician. He was a commoner, a Povey with a dash of Denry, and he had the dsemonic energy of Denry's creator. He went better at the fortieth tour of the ring than at the first, although when he had grone half-a-dozen times round he would edge towards the judges m the centre, so accustomed was he to be the first to be called in. When the war broke out I sold him to a butcher to hearten the streets of some manufacturing town. What has since become of him I know not. Would I were with him wheresoe'er he is ! 132 The Art of the Gut try s IN the spring of 1920 a number of the plays of the younger Guitry were produced in London with the assistance of M. Guitry the elder. The success of Nono is very far removed from that dismal thing, the success of scandal ; it is an intimate and vivacious account of the sentimental adventures of a couple of michh and their ^^*^o/o — to borrow the classicisms of the Place Blanche. " To distrust one's impulses is to be recreant to Pan," wrote the most moral of literary fauns, surely a direct en- couragement to the timid to enjoy any play which moves frankly and amusingly just below the recognised surface, on the fringe of the just not fashionable half-world. It encourages the shy to find that young simpleton natural who hesitates between the return of his mistress and the return of four thousand francs, to laugh at the witty compoundings of the worldly buffoon who has stolen both ; and to find also that little lady not recreant to Pan, who, when invited to choose between her lovers, calmly replies : " (T^a: mest ^gall " To have a lover at all costs, just not to be "landed," is the reasonable philosophy of her world. Plump into his cauldron of bubbling wit M. Guitry drops an ice-cold morsel of intellectual honesty, his little lady's matter-of-fact accept- ance of her destiny. ''Ma mere en etait, ma sceur en est, moi fen suis, que voulez-vous P " She is as her mother was, and her sister is. What would you .<* Mademoiselle Yvonne 133 Alarums and Excursions Printemps played Nono very well indeed. Her manners, gestures, intonation, accent were all adorably canaille ; she hit off the required commonness to a nicety. M. Sacha Guitry's . middle-aged lover was clever enough to be just faintly disagreeable. The playwright has created a pair of vicious, vacuous babies, in neither of whom does there seem justification for quite the venom which he, as an actor, instilled into the one he played. M, Hieronimus hardly began to act at all. He seemed to me to bring to his playing exactly the same personality and tricks of manner which he used as the boy in Le Vieux Marcheur. Mademoiselle Suzanne Avril showed a delightful sense of comedy ; but the finest piece of acting of all was the waiter of M. Gildes. This was valetry as it should be played, a piece of ripe, grave, ineffable fooling that would have warmed the heart of Moliere. In one of Balzac's novels there is an old government employee who, on the eve of his retirement, petitions his old enemy, the depart- mental wag. " Ecoutez, Monsieur Bixiou, je n'ai plus que cinq jours et demi a rester dans les bureaux, et je voudrais une fois, une seule fois, avoir le plaisir de vous comprendre ! " The plain Englishman is almost as much mystified by M. Sacha Guitry. " How is it possible," he asks, "for the a-moralities of La Prise de Berg- op-Zoom to become the spiritualities of Pasteur ? The truth is that there has been no. change. '34 The Art of the Guitrys Both qualities have always existed side by side in M. Guitry. For here we come upon a funda- mental truth about French character, in regard to which they are mystificateurs, and the English so many functionaries in the dark. The funda- mental quality of our neighbours is their essential gravity. Sterne was right when he said that if the French have a fault, it is that they are too serious. Every Englishman wants, au fond, to be taken seriously, to be considered a responsible being with a vote. Mr Chesterton would be staggered if you were to read his paradoxes literally, and fail to detect in logic on her head the symbol of eternal truth. Almost, I am con- vinced, would Mr Galsworthy sacrifice the theatre for the Bench, with its scope for leniency, and Mr Beerbohm his wit and pencil-hand for the earnestness of the author of Justice. Now the ruling passion of the Frenchman is to be taken for a clown. His genius for fooling has been canonised as V esprit gaulois. He is the master and the child of wit, only it is often a child very near to crying. Remember Beaumarchais. M. Guitry is devastatingly witty on the subject of light love just because, in his country, marriage is such an essentially serious affair. I do not care very greatly for the acting of M. Sacha Guitry. His creations, when he plays them himself, strike me as Faustian, too full of elder knowledge, apt to see evil and to choose it. "The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his 135 Alarums and Excursions scenes not only anything- like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever." But M. Guitry the playwright is, at heart, full of goodness and good feelings^ He draws morals. These may be only a shrug of the shoulders, but in a Frenchman's shrug a world of criticism is implied. His acting it is which is a-moral. It is not genial. That which in the plays is froth in the acting becomes dregs. There is something about the over-long sleeves, the enormous tie, the too facile smile which is irresistibly reminiscent of a comedian of a very different order — the late Mark Sheridan. Wit which should be as beaded bubbles has become a low and evil jocosity. It is sinister, even louche. Pasteur, the fine flower, has grown out of the same soil as these earlier and venomous blossoms. The later writer is still never jovial, never riotous, has no tinge of the buffoon ; his weapon is the rapier and not the bludgeon ; we are to surrender ourselves to witty thumps on the head, not on the back. Landor says that true wit requires the grave mind and reminds us that Rabelais and La Fontaine were dreamers. " Few men have been graver than Pascal. Few men have been wittier. There is more serious- ness in M. Guitry than his wittiest plays might lead us to suppose, although it would have taken a very Bunthorne to find more innocent fun in Pasteur than a casual spectator might imagine. 136 The Art of the Guitrys It has been said that this is not really a play. Its five acts break every canon. There is no action, no development of character. Yet these acts are charged with a rare and high emotion. The play is, as any play ought to be, a trifle too big for the spectator. It gives scope to a character so monumental that the audience can't quite grasp the whole of him. We want to turn him round, to see the other side, to think him over. Yet what does it all amount to I A scene or two of defiant scorn, of old age in tender contemplation of youth, of the approach of winter anoferinof an untirincj and unvieldino- brain. And that is all. M. Lucien Guitry's acting of Pasteur is in the grand tradition. I do not mean that it is of the robustious order. Never, indeed, was acting more completely "natural." But it is a performance to compel the admiration of all actors of all times, nationalities and schools. Johnson would have found some sonority to fit it ; Mr Walkley was sobered by it into English. And yet it is, exteriorly, nothing more than a portrait of a dictatorial and rather boorish pro- fessor, with a snuff-coloured beard and sagging belly. With him you range the very topmost peaks of human grandeur. Stevenson says of a novel by Dumas that nowhere is the end of life presented with so fine a tact. But then he had not seen Lucien Guitry grow old. As the actor's body dwindles the spirit increases ; as the tenant-soul prepares for flight the house falls in. It is pitiful and glorious. Like that greatest 137 Alarums and Excursions play of Ibsen about the defaulting stockbroker in a garret, there is nothing for the eye here. Will, that superb volonU which is never for very long out of a Frenchman's mouth, is stamped in every line of the brow, every fine, defiant gesture, every burning word, and even in every silence. It is the will of Balzac in his last rebellion against death, of our own Stevenson in his passionate cherishing of his shortened span of life. It is, above all, the will to do right. There is some- thing of God in it. No praise can be too high for the grandeur of conception, the physical energy and speed of the earlier acts, the bodily slowing down, the clarity of mind unimpaired at the end. 138 A View of The Beggar^ s Opera You should go to Hammersmith, Child, to learn Valour. Gay {Adapted). HANG the age! I will write for antiquity!' ' cried a fastidious spirit. " Hang the age!" Mr Nigel Playfair exclaims, "I will revive for the past ! " and so saying pulls out the old Beggar s Opera and enlists a popular author to help in the text revisions. The opera is an en- chanting affair, a perfect combination of "those two good things, sense and sound." Spontini, Cherubini, Bellini, Rossini, Puccini — the whole "ini" family have done nothing more fragrant than this bouquet of homely melodies. Of the first author and producer of this play it is possible to be handsomely ignorant. " Of Doctor Pepusch old Queen Dido Knew just as much, God knows, as I do." Since four hours is too much of a good thing for modern audiences and taste has degenerated, let me, poetising in turn, imagine Mr Playfair in soliloquy, confronted with these two-fold difficulties of space-time and century-taste. " If cut I must this be my tenet, The cutter shall be Arnold Bennett, And Pepusch' spirit won't be lost in Sympathetic Frederick Austin ; Whilst how to act the tribe of Peachum It's up to Nigel P. to teach 'em." A curious adventure to find the perfect enter- tainment in this modest Hammersmith playhouse. 139 Alarums and Excursions You leave the unfashionable street to mix with a crowd of shiny-faced enthusiasts who have not thought it necessary to bare their backs and tire their heads in order to hear better. And what a world of romance greets you on the stage, the world of the High-toby-crack and the Ordinary, the bridle-cull, the clay-faker, the buttock-and- file ! A world of scoundrels undismayed, of rogues with a sense of style, doxies and wives, soon to be hempen widows, gazing tearless upon the heroic turning-off. Polly was of gentler mould. The picture she makes of her lover going to the gallows is of the most touching simplicity. " I see him sweeter than the nosegay in his hand ; the admiring crowd lament that so lovely a youth should come to an untimely end ; even butchers weep, and Jack Ketch refuses his fee rather than consent to tie the fatal knot." All, it would appear, were exquisites who came to this tree. " He was but sixteen," says the biographer of Roderick Audrey. "He went very decent to the gallows, being in a white waistcoat, clean napkin, white gloves, and an orange in his hand." The Beggars Opera was Hazlitt's favourite satire. Plentiful references to it abound through- out the essays, which contain two full-dress de- scriptions of the plot, and the lessons in morality to be drawn therefrom. In both Hazlitt stresses the vulgar error which would call this a vulgar play, and harks back to that "happy alchemy of mind " which can extract the essence of 140 A View of The Beggar's Opera reiinement from the dregs of life. He is full of the "justice to nature." It is because America has no history that she has never been able to appreciate the play. "And in America — that Van Diemen's Land of letters — this sterling- satire is hooted off the stage, because, fortun- ately, they have no such state of manners as it describes before their eyes ; and because, unfor- tunately, they have no conception of anything but what they see. America is singularly and awkwardly situated in this respect. It is a new country with an old language ; and while everything about them is of a day's growth, they are constantly applying to us to know what to think of it, and taking their opinions from our books and newspapers with a strange mixture of servility and of the spirit of contradiction." This was written in 1827 and it is curious that when, in 1921, in consequence of the tremendous success of the revival over here, the play was once more tried in America, it was again a dismal failure. The Yankees appear to have made up their minds on both occasions without applying to our books and newspapers to know what to think. The vicissitudes which The Beggar s Opera has undergone in its own country should explain the lack of appreciation abroad. Already, in 1828, we find the essayist deploring the degeneracy of the age. "It is not that there are not plenty of rogues and pickpockets at present ; but the Muse is averse to look that way ; the imagination has 141 Alarums and Excursions taken a higher (Hght ; wit and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking- the grains of gold out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire ; and the age has a sublime front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the milky-way of passion." Even the players had begun to forsake truth for gentility. The Lucy of that year " put a negative on an encore that was likely to detain her five minutes longer in Newgate." Polly "was frightened at the interest she might inspire and was loth to waste her sweetness on a blackguard air." How then shall we account for the enormous success of the present revival in an age of fashionable comedy raised to the seventh heaven of inanity ? Shall I submit a revulsion from those drawing-room games of Blind Man's Buff or the King's Proctor Hoodwinked, Hunt the Slipper, or The Maid's Shift } ^ Shall I say that these days of terrorism and unwritten laws are a sign that we are no longer degenerate, but reborn ? I am afraid that neither plea will hold. The success of The Beggar s Opera is, alas ! not more than a success of antiquity ; it pleases like a chair of some good period which it is delightful to gaze upon and to handle, but which one would not dream of using. The satire of the past has lost its sting. And this brings me to a very nice point. What, exactly, do we expect in a performance of The Beggars Opera} Let me pay all possible * See A Social Convenience, The Fulfilling of the Law, and Up in MabePs Room. 142 A View of The Beggar s Opera tribute to a production of charm, taste and wit. The artists act well enough, and sing tunably ; the stage-pictures are a deHght to the eye, the ground-swell of the musicians is a solace to the ear. All that can humanly be asked is performed, and yet the thing is not the Beggar's Opera of our dreams. This is a matter worthy of some discussion, since the whole function of the theatre is here called in question. Can life be put upon the stage at all ? Was that slice of life which is The Beggar s Opera ever played to any perfection save in the spectator's brain ? And is not something more demanded from the spectator than mere corroboration, an essential eking out of the all too insufficient actor's art ? It is the case of the blackamoor in a temper all over again. The quintessence of the Moor is not to be acted. Read Othello and the map of a noble character is spread before you like some fair country, of which jealousy is an accidental scarp. But in the theatre the spectator's nose is to the quarry-face ; he too is blinded by a single passion. In the theatre you are allowed to take nothing for granted ; the sawing of the lip, the frenzied rolling of the eye are " effects " to be brought off to satisfy the dullards. So, too, Falstaff's paunch may never be taken for granted. The actor must, at all costs, inflict upon you the well-oiled machinery of ventripotence, whereas, to the reader, it is his mind which drips fatness. Who will say that that stoutish, middle-aged, bald-headed figure in the limelight, clad though 143 Alarums and Excursions he be in brown surtout and imposing shirt-collar, with a roll in the voice and indescribable, genteel air, is really Micawber as we know him who have lived with him ? These, the externals of the man which the reader takes for granted, are on the stage stressed beyond endurance, lest, per- adventure, we mistake the fellow for Ally Sloper. Peachum and Macheath are alike unactable. They shall be pictures to fright and to please the eye of childhood, villainy lined roughly and gallantry daubed after the fashion of a Christmas Number. The fault is not in the actors but in their art which, of itself, can go only such a little way towards creation. In the theatre the brain of a spectator must prove the female to the actor's ; in no other way can life be begot. The poorest printed page is, by itself, nearer creation than the actor's unaided flesh and blood. Apply this to the work before us. The Beggar's Opera was written some twenty years before Jonathan Wild, but it is from Fielding that these immortal rogues look out upon their time and upon us. Where Gay writes Peachum, Lockit and Polly we must read Jonathan, Blueskin and Laetitia Snap. Listen once again to Fielding's description of Miss Tishy : " Her lovely hair hung wantonly over her forehead, being neither white with, nor yet free from, powder ; a neat double clout, which seemed to have been worn a few weeks only, was pinned under her chin ; some remains of that art with which ladies improve nature, shone upon her cheeks ; her body 144 A View of The Beggar's Opera was loosely attired, without stays or jumps ; so that her breasts had uncontrolled liberty to display their beauteous orbs, which they did as low as her girdle ; a thin covering of a rumpled muslin handkerchief almost hid them from our eyes, save in a few parts where a good-natured hole gave opportunity to the naked breast to appear. Her gown was a satin of a whitish colour, with about a dozen little silver spots on it, so artificially interwoven at great distance, that they looked as if they had fallen there by chance. This, flying open, discovered a fine yellow petticoat, beautifully edged round the bottom with a narrow piece of half-gold lace, which was now almost become fringe ; beneath this ap- peared another petticoat stiffened with whalebone, vulgarly called a hoop, which hung six inches at least below the other ; and under this again appeared an under garment of that colour which Ovid intends when he says, ' Oui color albus erat nunc est contrarius albo.' She likewise displayed two pretty feet, covered with silk and adorned with lace, and tied, the right with a handsome piece of blue riband ; the left, as more unworthy, with a piece of yellow stuff which seemed to have been a strip of her upper-petticoat." Who, with this picture in his mind, can quite have reconciled himself to the ladies at the Lyric, those immaculate and silver fountains } And then there is the difficulty of Polly, who was K 145 Alarums and Excursions played as though she were Patience. Alas ! that we cannot know from observation how Miss Stephens or Miss Nash used to play the part. We read: "The acting of Miss Stephens throughout was simple, unaffected and graceful and full of tenderness. There is a severity of feeling and a plaintive sadness, both in the words and music of the songs in this opera, on which too much stress cannot be laid." Neither Miss Nelis nor Miss Arkandy had tenderness ; they were neither plaintive nor sad, nor unaffected. They took refuge from anything resembling severity of feeling in the highly artificial, conscious artlessness of Gilbert's milkmaid. They were china figures, and delectable, but unreal. Peachum erred on the side of gentility. He should be "an old rogue." So is not Mr Frederick Austin. He should have looked like " Phiz's" illustrations, his face all bubukles and whelks and flames of fire. Whereas there was something moral about Mr Austin, something of Matthew Arnold in's aspect, a dash of the discon- certing debonair, a hint of Escamillo. You could not imagine him cutting up lives and booty. The Mrs Peachum of Miss Elsie French was excellent in intention, but a trifle lacking in gusto. Not the cleverest actress can, by taking thought, add richness to her personality, and I do not think it lay in Miss French's physical powers to play the part other than as she did. Nevertheless, Mrs Peachum was too shrill and shrewish, too much the harridan, the secret, black and midnight hag. 146 A View of The Beggar* s Opera Chambering and strong waters called for a more generous habit ; she did not warm to her villainies. Where there should have been the rump-fed ronyon there was the ghoul. The Lucy of Miss Violet Marquisita was an admirable spitfire, and Lockit most excellently cut out in cardboard. His hypocrisy had just the proper touch. " 'Tis thus the crocodile his grief displays, Sheds the false tear, and, whilst he weeps, betrays." The scuffle between Peachum and Lockit was well done and we should not have been surprised to hear an old gentleman in the pit shout, as on an earlier occasion : " Hogarth, by God ! " But the performance, as any performance of this opera must, stands or falls by Macheath. Upon this part Hazlitt expends all the wealth of his discern- ment. Macheath, he says, is not a gentleman but a "fine gentleman." His manners should resemble those of this kidney as closely as the dresses of the ladies in the private boxes resemble those of the ladies in the boxes which are not private. He is to be one of God Almighty's gentlemen, not a gentleman of the black rod. " His gallantry and good breeding should arise from impulse, not from rule ; not from the trammels of education, but from a soul generous, courageous, good-natured, aspiring, amorous. The class of the character is very difficult to hit. It is something between gusto and slang, like H7 Alarums and Excursions port wine and brandy mixed. It is not the mere gentleman that should be represented but the blackguard sublimated into the gentleman." Hazlitt could find no one on the stage of his day to play the part as he conceived it. The elder Kemble might have done, but he was no singer. Mr Kean might have made the experi- ment, but he would not have succeeded. Incledon was not sufficient of a gentleman, Davies did not sing well enough, Sinclair was too finical, Cooke without title for the part. Mr Frederick Ranalow, then, had in Macheath a sufficiently challenging part from the point of view of tradition. We may say at once that he was good-looking, gallant, debonair, vocal. Perhaps he was a trifle over-wigged, which makes Macheath something less than the "pretty fellow " of Madame Vestris. Whilst his gentility was exactly right — and we can imagine the page of purple our essayist would have given to the nicety of his hitting-off — we did not quite believe in his scoundrelism. He was the sentimental philanderer of our own day, and not the trusser of women. This small discrepancy apart, Mr Ranalow was admirable. No praise could have been too high for the perfection of his diction, the wit of his Before the Barn-Door Crowing, the pathos of The Charge is Prepared, the finesse of How Happy could I he with Either. He is a most accomplished singer, and an actor to his finger-tips. Still, the only part in the present production which I take to be entirely in accord- 148 A View of The Beggar's Opera ance with the old spirit is Filch. Filch is a serious, contemplative, conscientious character. He is to sing 'Tis Woman that seduces all Mankind, as if he had a pretty girl in one eye and the gallows in the other. The actor is not to make a joke of the part. By being sober, honest and industrious he hopes to escape Tyburn by way of Transportation. The Filch of Mr Frederick Davies was exactly in this key. His gesture at the words " Pox take the Tailors for making the Fobs so deep and narrow " was the one canaillerie in the play. Here we come again at our point. The characters in the Opera are to have but a superficial air of gallantry and romance ; there should be something hang-dog about them. All the gallants in the revival could ogle a wench ; not one of them save Filch had the gallows in his composition. The shadow of the gibbet was not here ; you would have un- hesitatinglyinvited them to sup at your own house. Even the women of the town were, you feel, only pretending. An old French critic singled out among the many excellencies of the comedy, "the differentiation the author makes between the jades, how each has her separate character, her peculiar traits, her peculiar modes of expres- sion, which give her a marked distinction from her companions." Whereas each of the hussies personified at the Lyric was qualified to mate with an earl. There was nothing of a dis- tinguishing tawdriness about them except their styles and titles. 149 Alarums and Excursions Gay seems to have glossed over the real nature of the intrigue. It was, doubtless, always a delicate thing to suggest to English ears, even in the eighteenth century, that Peachum_^^fe et mere have a vested interest in Polly's wantonness, and a legitimate grievance in her revolt in favour of a single lover. " Look ye. Wife," says Peachum, " a handsome Wench in our way of Business is as profitable as at the Bar of a Temple Coffee- House, who looks upon it as her livelihood to grant every Liberty but one." Fielding was less squeamish, and so too are our neighbours. Compare that moral tract of Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Les Demois,elles de Bienfddtre, written some forty years ago. The story might with equal justice have been called Peachum Philosophe or Peachum Chez Nous. These ladies were "deux de ces ouvrieres qui vont en journ^e la nuit." Their trade of plea- sure was ungrateful, often laborious. But they respected the Sabbath, were economical, and maintained their parents. Elles tcnaient le haul du pavd. None better walked the streets. And then the younger sister, Olympe, made a slip. She fell in love with a poor student. One day the elder sister, Henriette, who had now to bear the burden of the family alone, met Olympe in the street, dressed simply, without a hat, and carrying a little jug in her hand. Henriette pretended not to know her, whispering as she passed : " Your conduct is unpardonable. You might at least respect appearances ! " 150 A View of The Beggar* s Opera Olympe blushed and passed on. Bienfilatre made one attempt to rescue his daughter. He climbed the stairs of the student's poor lodging. "Give me back my child," he sobbed. "I love her," replied the student, "and I will marry her." " Wretch,' replied Bienfilatre, turning away revolted by such cynicism. Soon after, Henriette meets her shameless sister in a caf^, and harangues her before the cus- tomers assembled over their little glasses. " Is there not such a thing as duty to one's family } ... A ne'er-do-well without a sou. . . . Social ostracism. . . . No sense of responsibility. . . . We are not brought into this world for pleasure. . . ." Olympe takes to her bed and dies, literally of shame. To the priest she murmurs : " J'ai eu un amant ! Pour le plaisir ! Sans rien gagner ! " The lover appearing, Olympe repulses him with a gesture of horror. Then, as the dying girl perceives the glint of gold pieces in the student's hand, actually the examination fees which he has received from his parents and now hurries to pour into her lap, her face takes on a look of ecstasy which the priest mistakes for a proof of the redemption to come. Murmuring : " He has repented. God has given him light," the girl expires. But perhaps it is Polly's innocence which has kept The Beggar s Opera sweet. It may be that it is easier to keep that quality fragrant than Alarums and Excursions to ensure that wit shall remain astringent and aseptic. And so we come back to the milkmaid at the end. The manners of the eighteenth century are no longer ; to contemplate those times too seriously is to risk giving them coun- tenance ; it were safer, perhaps, to take the story with an air of its being too preposterous to be true. It is not, however, to be thought that Hazlitt saw the play so, nor that Fielding is to be read in that light. We come back to the original statement that here is the most delightful entertainment on the stage to-day, provided always that the mind is granted full liberty to bring to it what it likes. 152 An Evening at Collinses Vulgarity is an implicit element of the true music-hall. . . . Out of the vulgarity of the people did the music-hall arise, nor will anyone be so foolish as to contend that, by tampering with its foundations, we shall go one step towards refining the people. Max Beerbohm. THAT delicate and penetrative writer, Dixon Scott, imagines in one of his playful essays the more than cosmopolitan Mr Walkley for the nonce desorienU. The Five Towns it is which bring to a disconcerting stand- still this "picked man of countries." "Where are they ? " he asks wearily and a trifle shame- facedly, after the manner of a schoolboy stumped for the whereabouts of Carthage. I, in my turn, no " student of the drama " since there is little on the English stage left to study save Mr Oscar Asche's sham orientalism and Mr Hichens's real camels, must confess to a singular ignorance of theatrical activity outside the quarter-mile radius. " Where is Collins's } " and " Who is Mr George Carney ? " would therefore have risen naturally to my lips, and not at all in the judicial manner, pour rire, when a youth, engaged in mending my bicycle, hopelessly confused his tale of the machine's defects with references to a place called Collins's, that fellow Carney, and a certain history confided by some colonel to his adjutant. Would have risen to my lips, I say — but here some explanation is necessary. I have from youth up cherished an extreme dislike for lack of definition in the things that matter, and an equal repugnance for a pedantic accuracy in the things which do not matter at 153 Alarums and Excursions all, I abhor all those befogged conceptions and blurred declarations of faith which are the stock- in-trade of half the philosophers and three-fourths of the clergy. Tell me definitely that Space is curved and I will believe it, though truth wear a German complexion. Deny that Space is curved, and certify the same on the Royal Society's proper form for denials, and I will consider to which camp I will belong. But let there be no " iffing and affing," as they say in Lancashire. It annoys me that people can turn the careless side of their intelligence to such fundamental affairs as Time and Space, the nature of matter, the impasse of a self-existent or a created universe, whilst taking the most passionate interest in such trivia as dates and places, the addresses of tradespeople and the hours of trains. I do not ever hope to re- member the name or number of the street in which I live, nor have I for years been able to discriminate between the keepers of my lodging- houses. All landladies are one, co-equal, co- eternal and co-incomprehensible. I hate to decide what I shall do on Saturday, to determine whether the air will be fresher at Ramsgate or Margate, Southend or Clacton-on-Sea. I am in complete ignorance of the geography of London, and invariably take what is called a hackney coach from King's Cross to St Pancras. I have for many years left the choice of place of amusement to the discerning cabby. " Any- where you like," say I, "except Chu Chin 154 An Evening at Collinses Chow. Wherever one may be set clown, the prime condition of life will be fulfilled — to see yet more of an amusing- world and its humanity. Few people have shown a more philosophic appreciation than Bernard Clark and Ethel Monticue when they " oozed forth " into the streets. The phrase accurately describes my first attempt to find Collins's music-hall. I had always "placed" Collins's as lying vaguely south of the river, somewhere between the Elephant and the Obelisk, Now the game of inattention to the trivialities of life has its rules, and one of them is that having made your intellectual bed so you must lie on it. You are to have the courage of your lack of mental industry. You have not attended to the lesson ; you may not crib the answer. To dine at Princes' and bid the commissionaire whistle an instructed taxi were outside the code. No ; I had placed Collins's near the Obelisk, and near the Obelisk I must find it, first dining befittingly and then oozing forth afoot. This may not be the place to describe a dinner "at the Obelisk." Sufficient to say that if the cuts were not prime, the manners of my fellow-guests undoubtedly were. They did their meal the courtesy of being hungry ; they ate, but not because it was the polite hour. They made no conversation, because they were not afraid of silence. My neighbour, an itinerant musician — in plain English he played a fiddle in the gutter — was, I judged, a man of uncertain character, but Alarums and Excursions definite education. He forbore to relate his history. I discovered that he spoke French perfectly when, apropos of the osillades of some poor draggle-tail at a neiohbouring table, we fell to discussing the efficacy of the Duchess's revenge in Barbey d'Aurevilly's story — a good tale, but sadly lacking the American quality of "uplift." I let slip, as they say, that I was bound for Collins's, and my friend took occasion to point out that I was very much out of my course. I thanked him and listened to his in- dications for the following evening, it being a dispensation of the Inattentivists that you are not bound to reject information thrust upon you. We talked until the hour at which a paternal Government decrees that polite conversation in public places shall cease. And separated. But not before my fellow-artist had warmed sufficiently to me to hint that he was "doing well," and that he hoped next year to enter his son for Eton. Islington I found to be perfectly well informed both as to the locality of Collins's and the reputa- tion of Mr Carney. If not within a stone's-throw of the Angel, the hall yet contrives to be at so nice a distance that one may transfer oneself from one house of entertainment to the other without, as old Quex has it, the trouble of drawing on one's gloves. There is nothing of listless, well- bred indifference in a visit to Collins's ; you must be prepared to take the red plush benches by storm if you would be in at North London's tak- ing to heart of that rarity among comedians, an 156 An Evening at Collinses actor with a comic sense. I like to watch the curtain go up, having first enjoyed my fill of its bewitching advertisements. I like to watch the musicians file in, to see the flute-player put his instrument together, and that honest workman, the double-bass, spit on his hands, as all honest workmen should. I adore the operation of tuning-up, the precision of those little runs and trills executed in as perfect light-heartedness as the golfer's preliminary swing. The conductor at these places is a captivating personage ; he epitomises the glory of suburbia — dinner jacket, " dickey," and white, ready-made bow. The overture at Collins's, perfunctory, gladia- torial, had a familiar air about it, although the programme was not helpful. I should hate to think that a piece with which I am familiar can really be The Woodbine Willie Two-Step. Followed turns of which, or of whom, the chief were a juggler striking matches on his skull, a stout lady with a thin voice, prima donna of some undisclosed opera company, and a Versatile Comedy Four having to do with bicycles. At length and at last, Mr George Carney. The first of his two " song-scenas " is a study of grandeur and decadence, of magnificence on its last legs, dandyism in the gutter, pride surviv- ing its fall ; in plain English, a tale of that wreckage of the P^mbankment which was once a gentleman. He wears a morning coat which, in spite of irremediable tatters, has obviously known the sunshine of Piccadilly, has yet some hang of 157 Alarums and Excursions nobility. The torn trousers still wear their plaid with an air. Enfin, the fellow was at one time gloved and booted. There is something authentic, something inherited, something ghostly about this seedy figure. Trailing clouds of glory does he haunt the Embankment. The ebony cane, the eyeglass with the watered ribbon, the grey topper of the wide and curling brim — all these fond accoutrements of fashion bring back the delightful nineties, so closely are they the presentment, the counterfeit presentment, of the swell of those days. " Bancroft to the life! " we mutter. And our mind goes back to that bygone London of violet nights and softly-jingling han- som cabs, discreet lacquer and harness of cheer- ful brass — nocturnes, if ever such things were, in black and gold — the London of yellow asters and green carnations ; of a long-gloved diseuse, and, in the photographer's window, a delicious Mrs Patrick Campbell eating something dreadfully expensive off the same plate as Mr George Alexander ; of a hard-working Max with one volume of stern achievement and all Time before him ; of a Cafe Royal where poets and not yet bookmakers forgathered ; of a score of music- halls which were not for the young person. . . . But I am getting away from Mr Carney, The matter is not very much above our heads — somethingr about a Count who has " taken the count." The purest stuff of the music-hall, as a music-hall sonor should be. " There's a n'ole 'ere ! " pipes with fierce glee the cherub boot- '58 An Evening at Collinses black, bending over the broken boots and abat- ing the deference to the broken swell no jot of his Trade Union rate of "frippence." How it hurts, the contempt and raillery of this pitiless infant ? Enfant goguenard if ever there was one, a capitalist in his small way, and with all the shopkeeper's scorn of failure. " There's a n'ole 'ere ! " he insists, and we are reminded of Kipps's tempestuous friend, "a nactor-fellow." "Not a n'ole — an aperture, my dear fellow, an aperture," corrects the noble client, "the boots were patent, but the patent's expired." Here the Count drops his cigar and indulges in unseemly scuffle with the urchin. " No, you don't," says the riper smoker, regaining possession, "that's how / got it." But the child has yet another arrow. " Landlady says as 'ow you've got to share beds wiv a dustman." But the shaft fails to wound ; clearly our hero is of the Clincham mould to whom social distinctions are as "piffle before the wind." "Want a pyper ? " goads the boy, and his client lays out his last remaining copper. He unfolds the sheets and instinctively his eye runs over the fashionable intellioence. " Know Colonel Br'th'l'pp at all } " he inquires. This one recognises as the delightful touch of the man of the world anxious to put a social inferior at his ease. Something after this manner, one imagines. Royalty. " Doing very well in Russia. Was up at Cambridge with his brother, the elder Br'th'l'pp, don' cher know." And so to babble of the day's gossip to the scornful child at his 159 Alarums and Excursions feet. The courtesy, I submit, of one man of polish to another. Night falls, the river puts on its jewels, the result of a cunning arrangement of n'oles and n'apertures in the back-cloth, it draws very cold. More pitiful than the accustomed heir of destitu- tion, but with stiff upper lip, our d^class^ shivers, draws his rags more closely about him and moves on. But it is the second song which brings down the house. Here the actor appears as an Army cook, and at Islington we have all been Army cooks in our time. A couple of dixies, the stew in which is discoverable last week's " Dickey Dirt," talk of "jippo" and "the doings" — all the familiar traffic of the camp rises to the mind's eye and sets the house in a roar. We are not, we gather, in any theatre of war, but safely at home in halcyon, far-off training days. Almost you can hear the cheerful clatter of the canteen, the thud and rattle of the horse-lines. The wording of the song is in no sense precious. " What was the tale the Colonel told the Adjutant, What did the Adjutant say to Major Brown ? " There is a chorus, also serving as corps de ballet, and consisting first of the inveterate grumbler who objects to the presence in his coffee of so harmless a beastie as a "drahned mahse " — the accent is a mixture of Devon and Berkshire with a dash of Cockney. Then comes the superior youth of ingratiating, behind-the-counter manner, i6o An Evening at Collinses the proud possessor, we feel sure, of a manicure set in ivory — does he not abstractedly polish his nails with the end of the towel ? After him the " old sweat " who will neither die nor fade away, and lastly our rosy boot-black, now the dear brother-in-arms of the immortal Lew and Jakin. This nucleus of an Army has but a single mind : to know what has become of its blinking dinner. Many and various are their ways of putting it, and it appears that they are no more than Messengers or Forerunners of the cohorts press- ing on their heels. But the orderly beguiles their impatience. " What did the Major whisper to the Captain? The Captain told the Subs to hand it down." The orderly is the slipshod, inefficient, im- perturbable "bloke " we know so well ; with him we are to rise to what Mr Chesterton calls " the dazzling pinnacle of the commonplace." I am not sure that this is not the best of all this author's fireworks ; it is so stupendous a rocket that the stick has cleared the earth, never to return but to go on whirling around us for ever- more. Mr Carney is the embodiment of the commonplace civilian turned warrior. He is the cook who will drop into the stew all manner of inconsidered trifles : cigarette ash, match ends, articles of personal attire. He is the hero who will be up to all the petty knavery and "lead- swinging" that may be going, who will "work dodges " with the worst of them, and, on occasion, L i6i Alarums and Excursions join with the best in such deeds — he would still call them "dodges" — as shall put terror into the hearts of a ten times outnumbering foe. Of that order of heroic cooks which held Ypres. But it is part and parcel of this actor's generalship that he will have no truck with heroics. Tell Mr Carney that he raises tears and he will make a mock of you. Or more probably he will con- tinue his song. " What did the Quarter -master tell the Sergeant? The Sergeant told the CorpWil, it appears ; The CorpWil told the Private and the Private told his girl, Now shes looking for Mademoiselle from Armen- teers." Have I over-glorified my subject, whose talent is not more remarkably expended than on a dixie and a soldier's ration of stew ? Ah, but was not always one of the great tests for comic acting the power to throw a preternatural interest over the commonest objects of daily life? "What," say you, pricking your ears at the familiar phrase, " surely at this time of day you are not going to dish up that old stuff about kitchen tables and constellatory importance, joint-stools and Cassiopeia's chair ? " Oh, but I am, and let appositeness be my apology. " So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision." Why should I not elevate, an 162 An Evening at Collinses it please me, Mr Carney's pot and ladle to the same high category ? I do not ask you to see in this actor an image of primeval man lost in wonder of the sun and stars, but I do ask you to believe that a tin of "bully" contemplated by him amounts, or very nearly amounts, to a Platonic idea. Grant at least that he understands a dixie in its quiddity. It may be that in my estimate of this conscientious comedian I have overshot the just mean. Well, granting that my little appraisement is an error, it seems to me to be an error on the right side. I have a comfort- able feeling that Islington at least is with me, that I have a solid popular backing. Collins's pit and stalls, circle and gallery would have borne me out that the actor diffused a glow of sentiment " which made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man " ; would have probably agreed that he had " come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people." I do not think that in expanding Islington's approval I have misread it. Its ecstatic hand- clapping and shouts of "Good ole George! Good ole George ! " cannot deceive an ear attuned to shades of applause. The civilian on my left with the wound-stripes on his sleeve is dumb with appreciation. His lips are parted, his breath comes in short gasps, his eyes are fixed on the stage seeing and not seeing, his whole soul in some setting of the past. I am sure he hears once more the clatter of the canteen and the cheerful rattle of the horse-lines. The 163 Alarums and Excursions soldier on my right, still in the Army's grip and not yet victim of the nostalgia to come — a very small rty in demobilisation's ointment, but there it is — is drunk, simply, uncomplicatedly drunk, with the lilt and swing of the tune. He rises half out of his seat, puts a steadying hand on my arm, and with the other wildly conducts the house now singing in chorus : " What was the tale the Colonel told the Adjutant ? What did the Adjutant say to Major Brown? What did the Major whisper to the Captain ? The Captain told the Subs to hand it down. What did the Quarter -master tell the Sergeant ? The Sergeant told the CorpWil, it appears, The Corp'ril told the Private and the Private told his girl, Now shes looking for Mademoiselle from Armen- teers!' There is a limit to the number of recalls even the most grateful servant of the public may permit himself, and at last Mr Carney is allowed to retire in favour of the next turn. But my friend on the right takes some little time to simmer down. " Good ole George ! " he con- tinues to mutter under his breath. "Oh, good ole George ! " And as the tumblers who come next are a dull pair, I wend my way out. 164 Incidental Music and Some Shakespeare OF all the actors, scene - painters and musicians who were to breathe life into the revival of The Tempest at the Aldwych Theatre only Mr Arthur Bliss achieved any measure of success. When he was silent Shakespeare was silent too. There was also Sullivan to babble of magic islands, but a' babbled after the wrong fashion. Still, it is time the Muse was put in her place. Eminent concert critics have flattered that young lady till she is now out of hand. " The theatrical shows are sad experiences for the musicians," writes Mr Ernest Newman. " I rarely go to the legitimate theatre. A serious play, even if it is a work of genius, merely echoes what is said so much more tellingly in the music of the great masters." Stuff and nonsense ! Lord Burleigh's nod were then as nothing compared with this cyclopaedic bowing and scraping. A theme for oboe, double- bass and triangle is no longer a pleasing con- catenation but a full statement of, say, Racine's version of an yEschylean tragedy. Strike C five times running and you are to suppose Andro- maque, C sharp and you get Pyrrhus, F and you are sure of Hermione. Orestes, that wild beast of the compassionate entrails whose name I will not Frenchify, alone remains. " So add B flat for tiger's chaudron And Orestes pops up in cauldron." 165 Alarums and Excursions Bandy the phrase about a little, make the gruel thick and slab, and there is no longer need of Racine to tell us all about it.^ Now this won't do. Music may be the sublim- est of the arts, but it is also the least complicated. It makes up for being the least intellectual by being the most purely emotional. It is the only art which appeals to the brute creation. No dog, however intelligent, reads Mr Max Beer- bohm ; no horse, however tyroical, appreciates Mr Wyndham Lewis, Orpheus may have had his way with trees, mountain tops that freeze, plants, flowers, the billows of the sea ; but we are not told of his success with pit and stalls. Music may be elemental as sun and wind, but that does not mean that it is to ride rough-shod over us in our playhouses, the most rigorous excluders. Heaven knows, of daylight and fresh air. The French, rightly, have banished music from their theatres. But then they are jealous for their actors and they know the truth of the matter. They know that, with certain reserva- tions, critics like Mr Ernest Newman are right, and that music, which is merely in the way when the play and the acting are good, may be the one thing that will save bad acting and bad plays. 'It is conceivable that music might be of use in "recommending" a snippet, in giving a "reference" as to character. In the fifth act of Andromaque, which we have recently seen dragged raw and bleeding from its context, llermione has all her work cut out to imply in a single gesture that she is annoyed with her betrothed for slaying at her instiga- tion the man with whcjm she is really in love, just because he has black- niniled another woman into marrying him, Cest trop, and an elucidatory blast from one of Mr Newman's trombones might help. 1 66 Music and Some Shakespeare In Shakespearean tragedy music is to be abhorred ; in the purely human comedies it is an unmitigated nuisance ; in the masques and fairy plays it has a certain salvage value. The Tempest on the stage stands badly in need of salvaging, I have never been able to take a liking to it as a stage-play, although painfully conscious that the big guns are against me. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has decided that he would rather have written The Tempest than Othello, Hamlet or Lear. " For I can just imagine a future age of men, in which their characterisation has passed into a curiosity, a pale thing of anti- quity ; as I can barely imagine, yet can just im- agine, a world in which the murder of Desdemona, the fate of Cordelia, will be considered curiously, as brute happenings proper to a time outlived ; and again, while I reverence the artist who in Othello or Lear purges our passion, forcing us to weep for present human woe. The Tempest, as I see it, forces diviner tears, tears for sheer beauty ; with a royal sense of this world and how it passes away, with a catch at the heart of what is to come. And still the sense is royal ; it is the majesty of art : we feel that we are greater than we know. So on the surge of our emotion, as on the surges ringing Prospero's island, is blown a spray, a mist. Actually it dwells in our eyes, bedimming them, and as involuntarily we would brush it away, there rides in it a rain- bow, and its colours are wisdom and charity, with forgiveness, tender ruth for all men and 167 Alarums and Excursions women growing older, and perennial trust in young love." Sir Arthur Ouiller-Couch is a critic worthy of respect. The passage is a beautiful one, but I cannot help thinking that it was wrought and hammered in the study and not jotted down on a theatre programme between the acts of the play. In the theatre Prospero is the difficulty ; there is nothinor to be done with him. Never were there such dramatic longueurs as those unending speeches. Realising that Prospero is not an amusing conversationalist, his creator constantly nudges the audience. "Dost thou attend me?" "Thou attend'st not." "Dost thou hear me ? " " I pray thee, mark me." There is no human interest in this wind-bag. The normal method of playing Prospero as a compound of Good King Wenceslas and Father Christmas is failure in advance. Neither of these old fogeys may say with conviction : " I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the grreen sea and the azured vault Set roarinor ^var : to the dread rattlingr thunder Have I given fire, and rifled Jove's stout oak With his own bolt ; the strong-based promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar : graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth By my so potent art." i68 Music and Some Shakespeare Prospero should be august, terrible, not quite of this world. He is of the cellarage, an old mole come to the upper world, uncanny, a sight to awe. Irving could never have delivered himself of the verse, but his incantations had not been without potency. You would have been terrified by the spirits of his beck and call. Mr Ainley was irresistible in the wrong way. He endowed Prospero with charm. His womanish, clean-shaven countenance, his carefully silvered, Whistlerian lock of hair, the purple mantle at which he perpetually hitched and thrutched as though it had not been the garment of twenty years' custom, the perfunctory wavings of a wand in which there was neither magic nor terror — the whole aspect of Prospero was that of a masculine fairy queen. A great critic, writing of a player of another day, said : " His Prospero was good for nothing ; and, consequently, was indescribably bad. It was grave without solemnity, stately without dignity, pompous with- out being impressive, and totally destitute of the wild, mysterious, preternatural character of the original, Prospero, as depicted by Mr Young, did not appear the potent wizard brooding in gloomy abstraction over the secrets of his art, and around whom spirits :ind airy shapes throng- numberless ' at his bidding' ; but seemed himself an automaton, stupidly prompted by others : his lips moved up and down as if pulled by wires, not governed by the deep and varied impulses of passion." So Mr Ainley. 169 Alarums and Excursions Caliban may be played simply as a monster, grotesque and terrible, or he may be humanised into a thing of pity. The power and truth of Mr Louis Calvert's performance seemed to be contained solely in the character's legs, stuccoed, like one of Mr E.T. Reed's monsters, with jags and tufts of hair. These were the only grotesque feature of the performance. For the rest, the actor went down on his knees like paterfamilias on the hearthrug playing at bear. Never can there have been such a miscastins: as Miss Winifred Barnes. Nothing, one felt, was going to suit this chubby little sister of Ariel's less than a return to the raw, unsophisticated elements. She sang the songs fairly well. "We do not, however, wish to hear them sung, though never so well ; no music can add anything to their magical effect. — The words of Shakespeare would be sweet, even ' after the songs of Apollo ! ' " I ask those Shakespearean producers who will inflict music upon us to note that these words' are not mine. The incidental music to Henry IV., Part II., at the Court Theatre was perfection. There wasn't any! But Henry IV. is an acting play and can stand alone. This simple unpretentious production, although not amazingly well acted, was yet full of quiet satisfaction. Mr Fagan tidied up the sprawling play into three exquisite parcels, the first containing all that is richest in Falstaff, the second disposing to kingly seriousness, the third a burst of sunshine in a Gloucestershire 170 Music and Some Shakespeare garden three hundred years ago. It was wonder- fully mellow and full of the orchard-sense of the ripest of all comedies. Mr Frank Cellier's King was in exactly the right key. It had not too much bodily majesty which, indeed, should not be asked. What sick and dying man may keep more than the frailest hold upon the slipping robe of kingship .-* Mr Basil Rathbone's Prince achieved a certain height of moral grandeur free from priggishness, but for me a Harry of long ago bars the way to any later appreciation. I refer to the unforgettable performance of Mr Courtenay Thorpe in the nineties. Laurence Irving was the Justice Shallow in those days, and again I could not see Mr H. O. Nicholson's clever performance with unclouded eyes. As usual the part of Feeble was entirely miscon- ceived. To this steely soul in woman's body is given the most valiant of Shakespeare's utter- ances upon death : " By my troth, I care not ; a man can die but once : we owe God a death : I'll ne'er bear a base mind : An't be my destiny, so ; An't be not, so : no man's too good to serve's prince ; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." Now, either Shakespeare did not mean Feeble to be an utter fool or he momentarily ignored him and filled him up out of the superfluity of his own passion. It is a risky thing to say that an actor misconceives his part. I remember that a suggestion of mine that a young man of breeding could quarrel with his mother and achieve impertinence without 171 Alarums and Excursions putting his feet up on the sofa drew down upon me from the actor the very succinct rebuke : "Critical sir, quite so. But have you never heard of the producer ? " But this is by the way. Henry IV. can never be more than a casket enshrining Falstaff. Here is a problem to con front the actor. In that saddest of all comic passages : " And is old Double dead ! " the barren emptiness of life is made bare ; in every line of Falstaff there is life everlasting. Only it is life upon this earth, the life of the gross body and also of the wit nimble, apprehensive, fiery, quick and delectable. One half of Falstaff is meaning- less without its complement ; the actor shall give you the tidy little Bartholomew boar-pig, the glutton, the foiner, the opportunist ; but he shall also insist upon the greatheart and the fallen Knight. Do players study their parts beyond conning them by rote ? Does Othello spend day and night bethinking him into that savage skin, or does he rely for shadowed livery solely upon his box of paints ? Does Falstaff take counsel beyond his own cogitations ? I should like to think that every player of Sir John has taken to heart not only the lines of his part but every line of another famous passage. " He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar. He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon or a haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again ; and pours out upon them the oil of gladness. His tongue 172 Music and Some Shakespeare drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain it snows of meat and drink." Mr Alfred Clark's Falstaff was a replica of small size. He had not the intellectual thews and stature, the antique villainy, the sly licorous- ness. Corruption in him hardly raised its head, nor were the humours of the authentic dropsical. A chuckle displaced the giant roar ; the light of jocularity would twinkle in his eye but fail to come to birth, unthinkable miscarriage in that master of fecundity as of all other human attri- butes. He did not dominate Pistol in the brawl. But Bardolph's " Sir " was a tribute to the gentle- man, and this side of him the actor conveyed admirably. He kept Falstaffs fallen day about him. Yet to him Doll had never opened out with her fine " Come on, you whoreson chops." Nor could this pleasant country squire have compassed the gross pleasantry of his entree en mature : " Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor," etc. Nor yet declare : " I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one." Falstaff, with his wide- awake brain, was alive to the hoggish possibility. No degeneration there ! A captain of rare parts in command of an unruly body of members, A better man than the Prince. He warmed both hands before the fire of life, and none has ever been ready that the old fellow should depart. 173 Vesta Ave Atque Vale There's a tune in my head to-night, As I walk, as I talk, And it swoons in a whirl of light (While the day fades away) And I hear my heart as it beats A refrain, and again I am splashed by the mud of the streets. And again feel the rain. Arthur Symons. IT could be wished that poets and philosophers were not such cozeners. To make the best of a bad business is a form of worldly wisdom, a policy and no more. But where the business is so bad that no amelioration is possible, your poet and philosopher will have it that it cannot be such a bad business after all. Necessary evil, be thou my good 1 they cry. But like the essayist who was honest with himself, I take death to be the capital plague-sore. Like him I can in no way be brought to digest that " thin, melancholy Privation.'' Yet those others will tell us that since no man has aught of what he leaves, 'tis naught to leave betimes ; that he must be very impatient, who would repine at death in the society of all things that suffer under it ; that no man can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied. Well, I am not satisfied and there's an end of it. One of the great dissatisfactions of my life is the retirement of actors. Partir, c'est mourir un peu. To say good-bye is to die a little. To bid farewell to the stage is to de- part wholly ; these ceremonious leave-takings are only one degree less chillsome than the last adjurations. I dislike all partings, adieux, 174 Vesta Ave Atque Vale valedictories. I hate to pray for Buckingham, and have a distaste for the slow decline. I would leave ships to sink and dying men to die ; the pity's too abominable. I would pretend that age and death are not, and on the stage that players remain what they have always been. Let the retired actor live in our memories if it be of comfort to him ; 'tis none to us. To comfort me must Ellen T y be a goblin ? Actors should die in harness. I open my paper o' mornings and, turning first to the column of theatrical advertisements, still look to see Olivia, Miss Ellen Terry ; Susan Hartley, Mrs Kendal ; Quex, Sir John Hare ; Old Songs and New Favourites, Miss Vesta Tilley. It is with this little lady that I am concerned here. I will not say that appreciation in volume of applause has not been deep enough. Palms may wear out with clapping, voices hoarsen through cheering, curtains part again and again to give yet one more glimpse of that trim, taut little figure with the boyish hair, boyish manner and proud, boyish smile — and yet leave something unexpressed. I remember as though it were not more than a year ago the first time I saw Vesta Tilley. It was my first pantomine, and I recall to this day her clearness of enunciation and tiny modicum of voice. In recollection I breathe again the "tart ozone " of her distinction. She was not content with being just Aladdin or Dick, Sinbad, Robinson or Prince Charming. She was the "masher" of those days, and how long ago those days are 175 Alarums and Excursions you best can tell by entering the snuggery of some theatrical house of entertainment and exam- ining the faded photographs on the wall. There you will find beauty long since faded with the rose — simpering, wistful memories. Belle Bilton and May Yohe, Letty Lind, Harriet Vernon, Lottie Collins, Maggie Duggan. Among these melancholy pictures you will of a surety espy one of a trim little figure in a dress-coat curiously rounded and curved, with what is obviously a red silk handkerchief — the note of the period — in the shirt-front. Other images there will be of that long succession of "Midnight Sons," "Piccadilly Johnnies," " Burlington Berties," heady youths all, with an amazing selection of waistcoats, gloves, ties and canes. They are the embodi- ment of the bucks the most modest of us in our hearts knew ourselves in those far-away days to be. Burton may talk contemptuously of the transmogrification of the toga'd citizen into terms of boiled shirt, dove-tailed coat, black-cloth clothes, white pocket-handkerchief and diamond ring. Vesta Tilley has always known better than to be contemptuous of clothes. Her waist- coats have had both a devastating and a moral effect upon the young man. Her visits to pro- vincial towns were occasions for extravagant launchings-out on the part of the " cards " into suits of clothes they could ill afford ; but never, on the other hand, did these visits fail to lead to a more regular pressing under the mattress of workaday trousers. To what vain comparisons, 176 Vesta Ave Atque Vale to what futile emulations did we not surrender ourselves ? But the influence was all to the good. You have only to read Mr Arnold Bennett to realise that well-creased trousers, even if a trifle worn, have more influence on a young man's career than a verbatim knowledge of the poets. And didn't hearts beat soundly beneath the creases .-* Weren't the hearts of the gay and giddy young "clurks," as Miss Tilley has always called them, in the right place in their bodies if not in my prose ? Didn't they volunteer for the South African War? Not 'arf! Welcome, welcome, C.I.V.'s. And has she not cheered in greater circumstance the children of those earlier heroes ? Of all the songs. Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier was perhaps the best. It had the most heart in it. It showed the "rookie" puffing behind his big cigar, his heart swelling with pride and just a little too full for words. The suspicion of a tear brushed away upon the pipeclayed cuff, one more roll and lick of the cigar, one more tug at the belt, and with swagger-stick under arm the boy would march away, the heir to all our military glory. " Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my dis- position ? " Yes, we do think this. Vesta Tilley was ever a boy whom nothing could unman. Master of her characters, she was mistress of herself. Was there ever such triumphant storm- ing of an audience, such dignified acceptance of their fealty.-* Has ever actor since Irving so M 177 Alarums and Excursions proudly proclaimed himself the public's "loving, orateful and obedient servant " ? Recently, in an old lumber-room, I came across a fretwork frame, made in the days when boys did that sort of thing, containing five photographs of Vesta Tilley. Two of them were illustrative of Happy Hampton and the Sad Sea Waves, the others showed a recruit, a Piccadilly Johnny, and an amazing young gentleman, presently to enlist in the C. I.V.'s, and now clad in a waistcoat quartered into the emblems of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and having at the end of his gold-mounted cane the flag of Empire. Is the lumber-room a fitting shrine? Nenni! Not in that sad repository but in the storehouse of the mind shall she be preserved. But it will take more than Shakespeare, Synge or Sir Thomas Browne, with whose trite philosophies I began, to persuade me that she should have departed at all. It may be true that no one can be acting for ever. I am not satisfied. 178 Charlie Chaplin"^ Hey, but he's doleful ! Patience. IF you did not reflect you might say that Covent Garden, when it opened its arms to Charlie Chaplin, underwent "a reverse." The haunt of beaux quizzing a Bride of Lammermoor virginal at fifty summers, of belles deliciously pdmdes before some Italian Puss-in- Boots masquerading as Edgardo — surely the old Opera House suffered a "come-down " when for these sublimities were substituted a pair of middling boxers and their attendant "fans." And now must the great building bemean itself still further, and drink of the very dregs of dis- grace, the silent buffoonery of the billycock and cane. The last indignity this ; more, you might plead, than these old bricks and mortar should be asked to endure. I do not a^ree. I am to comfort the old house, to bid it take heart again. I declare with the utmost seriousness that in the thumpings of Messrs Beckett and McCormick I find a deeper note of conviction than ever I do in the roulades of be-wigged and be-ringleted puppets. I declare that in the acting of this film-comedian I find sincerity great as any bruiser's, and a mastery of tragi-comedy unknown to the operatic stage. (I except the Russians, who have nothing to do with the Garden.) Almost am I persuaded to divert the trickle of my theme, which is Charlie Chaplin, into the ' This chapter, and tlie four which succeed it, appeared originally in The Saturday Review^ and are reprinted by the kind permission of the Editor of that paper. 179 Alarums and Excursions more general stream of "The Opera Revisited" or " Grandeur and Decadence Reversed," The title, ** Sed Revocare Gradum," were nicely to hand. What jollier than a hymn to the ridicu- lous turned sublime? Charlie is my more immediate darling, however, and I will stick to my text. Charlie Chaplin sublime? This is some writer's trick, say you, some literary flourish. I lay my hand on my heart and swear that it is not, that there is, at least for me, more emotion in a single tear of The Kid than in all the bucketfuls of " Vesti la giubba." "But," you reply, "what nonsense have we here? All the world knows that Charlie Chaplin is a clown," But just as there is laughter and laughter, so there are clowns and clowns. Here let me pro- mise that I have no intention of following the comic spirit into Meredithian or Bergsonian fast- nesses, I know a funny fellow without the help of your greybeards. A funny fellow is he who makes me laugh, willy-nilly, without discoverable reason. So that great moon-calf. Crock, So Mr Fred Kitchen. So any of your essential drolls. But not so Charlie, At him I laugh for reasons which I know instinctively to be eminently discoverable. The first glimpse of that little shuffling gnome sets all my critical faculties stirring ; I want to probe and dissect, to analyse, to trace that humour to the source I know it must ultimately reveal. I am on my critical ^uard. Whereas the other side to the is i8o Charlie Chaplin actor's genius, his immense and confounding pathos, finds me utterly defenceless. Let that lip droop for an instant and the Nile is here. I care not whence it comes. Place must be found for a short dissertation upon the sense of humour, lest I be deemed as bereft thereof as was Eliza's husband. For I do not look to join the agelastic choir — Mr Dombey and the author of the Hymn of Hate, Mrs Humphry Ward, Mr Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln — who had surely by our little clown been unamused. I doubt whether Charlie had been commanded to Victorian Windsor; Mr Gladstone had certainly turned him into a sermon. Humour is a kittle thing. Let me, when I would laugh royally, have comedians about me that are fat. I am for Falstaff and Bully Bottom, Micawber and Herbert Campbell. I leave to more reflective mood those brain- teasers, Malvolio and Jingle, Smike^ and Mr Alfred Lester. I adore the rotundity of Potash but cope less easily with Perlmutter. I worship the little butter-pat which is Jeff; Mutt is apt to become an intellectual strain. I repeat that when I hold my sides, I do not want to know why. There is, alas ! a kind of fellow, much about these days, who insists upon always knowing why, and in his nosings leads our wittiest by that organ. Mr Walkley is the latest sufferer from what I will call Crocitis, with * Strictly speaking, Sniil