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 Title: Mainly on the Air
 Author: Beerbohm, Max [Henry Maximilian] (1872-1956)
 Date of first publication: 1946
 Edition used as base for this ebook:
    London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1946
    (first edition)
 Date first posted: 30 May 2010
 Date last updated: 30 May 2010
 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #542

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MAINLY ON THE AIR


_Other Books by Max Beerbohm_


THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM
MORE
YET AGAIN
AND EVEN NOW

THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE
ZULEIKA DOBSON
SEVEN MEN
THE DREADFUL DRAGON OF HAY HILL

A CHRISTMAS GARLAND

LYTTON  STRACHEY (REDE  LECTURE)

CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN
THE POET'S CORNER
THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL
A BOOK OF CARICATURES
FIFTY CARICATURES
A SURVEY
ROSSETTI AND HIS CIRCLE
THINGS NEW AND OLD
OBSERVATIONS



MAINLY ON THE AIR

BY
MAX BEERBOHM


WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD

LONDON      ::      TORONTO



FIRST PUBLISHED 1946

THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE
CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORISED
ECONOMY STANDARDS

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE WINDMILL PRESS
KINGSWOOD, SURREY


NOTE


I fear that an apology should be made to any reader of the six
broadcasts that form the greater part of this book. They were composed
for the ears of listeners; and though of course a writer should always
write not less for the ear than for the eye of the reader, he does
not, in writing for the ear only, express himself in just the way that
would be his if he were writing for the eye as well. He trusts the
inflexions of his voice to carry the finer shades of his meaning and
of his feeling. He does not take his customary pains to make mere
typography leave no barrier between his reader and him. I would
therefore take the liberty of advising you to read these broadcasts
aloud to yourself--or to ask some friend to read them aloud to you.

I have included in the book six other things--narrowcasts, as it were.
The first of these appeared in _The Windmill_, the second and fourth
in _World Review_, the third in _The Carthusian_, the fifth in _The
Cornhill_, and the sixth in _The London Mercury_ (and afterwards in
one of the volumes of a limited edition of my writings).

The broadcasts all appeared in _The Listener_; and some portions of
'Speed' were, I am pleased to say, used by the Pedestrians'
Association as a pamphlet.

M. B.


BROADCASTS
                                         _page_
London Revisited (_1935_)                    1

Speed (_1936_)                              13

A Small Boy Seeing Giants (_1936_)          25

Music Halls of My Youth (_1942_)            37

Advertisements (_1942_)                     49

Playgoing (_1945_)                          61


OTHER THINGS

A Note on the Einstein Theory (_1923_)      71

From Bloomsbury to Bayswater (_1940_)       77

Old Carthusian Memories (_1920_)            87

The Top Hat (_1940_)                        95

Fenestralia (_1944_)                       103

T. Fenning Dodworth (_1922_)               117




LONDON REVISITED

(_Sunday evening, December 29th, 1935._)


One of the greatest of Englishmen said that the man who is tired of
London is tired of life.

Well, Dr. Johnson had a way of being right. But he had a way of being
wrong too--otherwise we shouldn't love him so much. And I think that a
man who is tired of London may merely be tired of life _in London_. He
won't, certainly, feel any such fatigue if he was born and bred in a
distant county, and came to London and beheld London only when he had
reached maturity. Almost all the impassioned lovers of London have
spent, like Dr. Johnson, their childhood and adolescence in the
country. Such was not my own fate. I was born within sound of Bow
Bells. I am, in fact, a genuine Cockney (as you will already have
guessed from my accent). Before I was able to speak or think my eyes
must have been familiar with endless vistas of streets; countless
people passing by without a glance at the dear little fellow in the
perambulator; any number of cart-horses drawing carts, cab-horses
drawing cabs, carriage-horses drawing carriages, through the more or
less smoke-laden atmosphere. I was smoke-dried before I could reason
and prattle. For me there was never the great apocalyptic moment of
initiation into the fabulous metropolis. I never said, 'So this--is
London!'

Years passed: I became a small boy. And I daresay I used to exclaim,
'So these are Kensington Gardens!' I liked the grass and the trees.
But there were the railings that bounded them, and the pavements and
thoroughfares beyond the railings. These had no magic for me. It was
the country--the _real_ country--the not imitation country--that I
loved.

I became a young man. London was the obvious place for me to earn a
living in. In my native city I abode until the year 1910, at which
time I was thirty-seven years old. Then I escaped. I had known some
parts of the vast affair pretty well. I wish I had appreciated their
beauty more vividly while it lasted: a beauty that is gone--or all but
gone. I am going to be depressing. Perhaps you had better switch me
off.

London is a Cathedral town. And in my day--in the 'eighties of my
boyhood and the 'nineties of my youth--London, with all her faults,
seemed not wholly unlike a Cathedral town, I do assure you. There was
a demure poetry about her: one could think of her as 'her': nowadays
she cannot be called 'she': she is essentially 'it'. Down by the
docks, along the Mile End Road, throughout the arid reaches of South
Kensington, and so on, I daresay she was 'it' already; full of
later-nineteenth-century utilitarianism and efficiency, throwing out
harsh hints of what the twentieth century had up its horrid sleeve.
But in such districts as I liked and, whenever I could, frequented,
she kept the eighteenth century about her. Hampstead, upon its hill,
was a little old remote village; and so was Chelsea, down yonder by
the river. Mayfair and Westminster and St. James's were grand, of
course, very urban, in a proudly unostentatious way. There were
Victorian intrusions here and there in their architecture. But the
eighteenth century still beautifully reigned over them. They were
places of leisure--of _leesure_, one might almost have said in the
old-fashioned way. And, very urban though they were, they were not
incongruous with rusticity. St. James's Park seemed a natural appanage
to St. James's Street; and the two milkmaids who milked two cows
there, and sold the milk, did not seem strangely romantic. The Green
Park seemed not out of keeping with the houses of Piccadilly. Nor did
the Piccadilly goat strike one as more than a little odd in
Piccadilly.

I don't know much about him, though I so often saw him and liked him
so much. He lived in a large mews in a side-street, opposite to
Gloucester House, the home of the venerable Duke of Cambridge. At
about ten o'clock in the morning he would come treading forth with a
delicately clumsy gait down the side-street--come very slowly, as
though not quite sure there mightn't be some grass for him to nibble
at between the paving-stones. Then he would pause at the corner of
Piccadilly and flop down against the railings of the nearest house. He
would remain there till luncheon-time and return in the early
afternoon. He was a large, handsome creature, with great intelligence
in his amber eyes. He never slept. He was always interested in the
passing scene. I think nothing escaped him. I wish he could have
written his memoirs when he finally retired. He had seen, day by day,
much that was worth seeing.

He had seen a constant procession of the best-built vehicles in the
world, drawn by very beautifully-bred and beautifully-groomed and
beautifully-harnessed horses, and containing very ornate people.
Vehicles of the most diverse kinds. High-swung barouches, with immense
armorial bearings on their panels, driven by fat, white-wigged
coachmen, and having powdered footmen up behind them; signorial
phtons; daring tandems; discreet little broughams, brown or yellow;
flippant high dog-carts; low but flippant Ralli-carts; very frivolous
private hansoms shaming the more serious public ones. And all these
vehicles went by with a cheerful briskness; there was hardly ever a
block for them in the traffic. And their occupants were very visible
and were looking their best. The occupants of those low-roofed
machines which are so pitifully blocked nowadays all along Piccadilly
may, for aught one knows, be looking their best. But they aren't on
view. The student of humanity must be content to observe the
pedestrians.

These, I fear, would pain my old friend the goat. He was accustomed to
what was called the man-about-town--a now extinct species, a lost
relic of the eighteenth century and of the days before the great
Reform Bill of 1831; a leisurely personage, attired with great
elaboration, on his way to one of his many clubs; not necessarily
interesting in himself; but fraught with external character and point:
very satisfactory to those for whom the visible world exists. From a
sociological standpoint perhaps he was all wrong, and perhaps his
successor--the earnest fellow in a 'trilby' and a 'burberry' and a
pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, hurrying along to his job--or in quest
of some job--is all right. But one does rather wish the successor
looked as if he felt himself to be all right. Let him look serious by
all means. But need he look so nervous? He needs must. He doesn't want
to be killed, he doesn't even want to be maimed, at the next crossing.
He must keep his wits about him. I advise him to dash down with me
into one of the Tubes. He will be safer there, as were the early
Christians in the catacombs.

They are not beautiful, these Tubes; nor are they even interesting in
character, except to engineers. But are the streets above them
beautiful--or interesting in character--nowadays, to anybody of my own
kind and age? London never had any formal or obvious beauty, such as
you find in Paris; or any great, overwhelming grandeur, such as Rome
has. But the districts for which I loved her, and several other
districts too, had a queer beauty of their own, and were intensely
characteristic--inalienably Londonish. To an intelligent foreigner,
visiting London for the first time, what would you hasten to show?
Except some remnants here and there, and some devious little nooks,
there is nothing that would excite or impress him. The general effect
of the buildings that have sprung up everywhere in recent years is not
such an effect as the intelligent foreigner may not have seen in
divers other places--Chicago, for example, or Berlin, or Pittsburg.
London has been cosmopolitanised, democratised, commercialised,
mechanised, standardised, vulgarised, so extensively that one's pride
in showing it to a foreigner is changed to a wholesome humility. One
feels rather as Virgil may have felt in showing Hell to Dante.

It is a bright, cheerful, salubrious Hell, certainly. But still--to
_my_ mind--Hell. In some ways a better place, I readily concede, than
it was in my day, and in days before mine. Heinrich Heine was
horrified by the poverty--the squalor and starvation--that abounded in
the midst of the immense wealth and splendour. Some years later
Gavarni's soul was shocked by it; and then Dostoievsky's; and
presently Monsieur Ludovic Halvy's; and in due course Mr. Henry
James's. I too am human. I am therefore glad that Seven Dials--and
similar places which I used to skirt with romantic horror--are gone.
Had I been acting as guide to those distinguished visitors, I should
have tried to convince them that no such places existed, save in the
creative alien fancy. But I ask myself: Suppose those illustrious
visitors rose from their graves to-day and asked me to show them round
the sights that would best please their sthetic sensibilities in the
London of this year of grace, what should I say, what do, in my
patriotic embarrassment? I suppose I would, with vague waves of the
hand, stammeringly redirect them to their graves.

I could not ask them to accompany me along Piccadilly or up Park Lane,
to admire the vast excesses of contemporary architecture. I could not
say to them, 'Never mind the rasure of certain unassuming houses that
were called "great houses" in your day--and in mine. Cast up your
eyes--up, up, up!--at the houses that have displaced them. Try to
count the little uniform slits that serve as windows in the splendid
ferro-concrete surface. Admire the austerity of the infinite
_ensemble_. Think how inspiring to the historic imagination it will
all be, a century or so hence!' I couldn't speak thus, for I cannot
imagine any history being made in these appallingly bleak yet garish
tenements. Or, at any rate, I refuse to suppose that they or any of
the similar monstrosities that have been springing up in all the more
eligible districts could ever take on an historic tone. They will
continue to look like--what shall I say?--what _do_ they look
like?--improper workhouses.

Odious though they are in themselves, one might not hate them much if
one found them on some barren plain in (say) the middle-west of
America--some plain as barren and as meaningless as they. But when one
thinks of the significant houses, the old habitable homes, that were
demolished to make way for them, and when one sees how what remains of
decent human architecture is reduced by them to the scale of hardly
noticeable hovels, then one's heart sickens, and one's tongue curses
the age into which one has survived. A few years ago, in the Print
Room of the British Museum, Mr. Laurence Binyon showed me a very
ancient little water-colour drawing. The foreground of it was a rather
steep grassy slope. At the foot of the slope stood a single building,
which I at once recognised as St. James's Palace. Beyond the Palace
were stretches of green meadows; and far away there was just one
building--the Abbey of Westminster. And I thought how pained the
artist would have been if he had foreseen the coming of St. James's
Street. I felt sure that he, like myself, preferred the country to any
town. Yet I could not find it in my heart to deplore the making of
that steep little street, destined to be so full of character and
history. I could only regret that my favourite street was being
steadily degraded, year after year, by the constructive vandals. There
are no actual sky-scrapers in it, as yet. But already the Palace cuts
a poor figure. And the lovely faade of Boodle's is sadly squat. And a
certain little old but ever young shop that stands somewhere between
those two is hardly visible to the naked eye. I would affectionately
name it, were I not so anxious to obey the B.B.C.'s admirable ban on
that greatest of all modern pests, the advertiser.

Regent Street, Nash's masterpiece, which is mourned so bitterly by so
many people, was never very dear to my heart, even before the days
when Norman Shaw's pseudo-Florentine fortress suddenly sprang up and
ruined the scale of its quadrant and of all the rest of it. Its tone
was always rather vulgar. It was never anything but a happy
hunting-ground for ardent shoppers. Nothing but shopping had ever
happened in it. But it was a noble design. And when its wide road and
pavements were empty in the dawn, and its level copings were pale
against the smokeless sky, the great long strong curve of the
smooth-faced houses had a beauty that I shall not forget. I conceive
that the pretentious chaos now reigning in its stead must in the quiet
magic of the dawn be especially nasty.

It was the Squares, that particular glory of London, that I loved best
of all. Their green centres have not yet been built over, for some
reason. I look with pleasure at their surviving grass and trees. But I
try not to see from the corners of my eyes what has happened to their
architecture. St. James's Square, the finest of them all, has been
wrecked utterly. Berkeley Square, which was a good second, has
suffered a like fate. So has Portman Square. Dear little Kensington
Square has been saved, by the obstinacy of some enlightened tenants,
from the clutches of Mammon. Bedford Square is intact, as yet. Let us
be thankful, before it is too late, for much of Bloomsbury. The
London University is about to play the deuce there. I suppose the Inns
of Court, those four sanctuaries of civilisation, are safe in the
adroit hands of the lawyers. Parliament will not be able to betray
_them_, as she has betrayed that other sanctuary, the Adelphi.

I revisit England and London at intervals of two or three years; and
every time I find that the havoc that has been wrought in my absence
is more than ever extensive. How do I contrive to bear it? Let me
reveal that secret. As I go my rounds, I imagine that the present is
the past. I imagine myself a man of the twenty-first century, a person
with an historic sense, whose prayer that he should behold the London
of a hundred years ago has been granted. And my heart is thrilled with
rapture. Look! There's a horse drawing a cart! And look! There's a
quite small house--a lovely little thing that looks as though it had
been built by the hand of man, and as though a man might quite
pleasantly live in it. It has a chimney, with smoke coming out of it.
And there's a coal-heaver. And there's--it must be--it _is_--a
muffin-man!

By such devices of make-believe do I somewhat console and brace
myself. But there is always a deadweight of sadness in me. Selfish
sadness: I ought to keep my pity for the young people who never saw
what I have seen, who will live to see what I shall not see--future
great vistas of more and more commercialism, more machinery, more
standardisation, more nullity.

I warned you that I was going to be depressing. I wish I hadn't kept
my word. I might well have broken it on an evening so soon after
Christmas, so soon before the New Year. Forget this talk. Or at any
rate discount it. Remember that after all I'm an old fogey--and
perhaps rather an old fool. And let me assure you that I'm cheerful
company enough whenever I'm not in London and not thinking of London.
And now I'm just off to the country. I have arranged to be driven
straight from Broadcasting House to Paddington. I shall _just_ catch
the train.--I wish you all a very happy New Year--somewhere in the
country.--I hope I haven't advertised Paddington.--Ladies and
Gentlemen, goodnight.




SPEED

(_Sunday evening, April 26th, 1936._)


        _In the Eye of the Lord,
        By the Will of the Lord,
        Out of the infinite
        Bounty dissembled,
        Since Time began,
        In the Hand of the Lord,
        Speed!_

    Speed as a chattel:
    Speed in your daily
    Account and economy;
    One with your wines,
    And your books and your bath--
    Speed!
    Speed as a rapture:
    An integral element
    In the new scheme of Life
    Which the good Lord, the Master,
    Wills well you should frame
    In the light of His laugh
    And His great, His ungrudging
    His reasoned benevolence--
    Speed!


These words, ladies and gentlemen, are not mine. They are the words of
a man far more remarkable than I: William Ernest Henley, poet and
critic, editor of 'The Scots Observer', a great inspirer of youth. The
light of his fame is dim now; but it shone fiercely in the
eighteen-nineties, and after. He himself was a fierce fellow enough.
He had the head of a Viking, and the torso of a Viking; but from his
early manhood he had been crippled by ill-health, insomuch that he
could walk only with the help of crutches--he, who should have gone
ever swinging over hill and dale, to satiate his vitality. In the very
early years of this century, in the very early days of motoring, young
Mr. Alfred Harmsworth, who was one of his great admirers, took him out
for a long drive into the country. At last Henley went swinging over
hill and dale. The Mercdes was for him a glorious revelation, an
apocalypse. His Muse vibrantly responded, and he wrote the fine poem
of which I have read to you the opening lines.

In those days even a quite prosaic and quite agile person, seated in a
motor-car, felt something of that fine frenzy which filled Henley's
breast. Cars were not the things they are now. You didn't have to
creep into them and crouch _in_ them and squirm _out of_ them. They
were wide-open to the elements, and wind-screens were unknown. And in
fine dry weather, as you sped along the roads at what seemed then a
terrific pace, the air rushed into your lungs with the utmost
violence, making a new man of you--and a better man of you. So as not
to be blinded with dust, you wore large goggles over your eyes. But
dust entered into your ears and nostrils and into the very pores of
your skin. And all the while you were moving not forward merely. The
machine was such that you were continuously bobbing up and down, and
oscillating from side to side. Your body was taking an immense amount
of wholesome exercise. Insomuch that when the ride was over, and you
had gone and vigorously shampooed the dust away from you, you felt
that you were now an even newer and a still better man.

I, at any rate, used to have that conviction about myself. And if I
had been a poet--and a generaliser, as every poet is--I should
doubtless have tried to found on my experience some great philosophic
moral. Henley was not content to have had a joy-ride. The joy of his
ride had to be brought into close relation to the cosmos. It must be
shown that the life of mankind on this planet had been immensely and
for ever enriched by the internal combustion engine. Said Henley:


    The heart of Man
    Tears at Man's destiny
    Ever; and ever
    Makes what it may
    Of his wretched occasions,
    His infinitesimal
    Portion in Time.

    Hence the Mercdes!


And by the discovery of the Mercdes our portion in Time was to be
very appreciably and very agreeably magnified.

Henley had not any religion of an ecclesiastical kind. But he was
nevertheless a deeply religious man. He had made a god of Literature.
He had made a god of the British Empire. He had made a god also of the
Tory Party. And here was a new god for him--Speed. If someone had
asked him whether the invention of the steam-engine and the railroad
had greatly blessed our lot, he might have looked rather dubious. For
he was, despite his Imperialism, essentially an eighteenth-century
man, and Victorian things did not arride him. But his faith in the
universal beneficence of the Mercdes showed that he was, after all,
in one respect, rather belatedly, a true Victorian. He believed, as
we, alas!--we distressful moderns--no longer do, in the idea of
Progress. I rather doubt whether, if he were living to-day, in a world
that has succumbed so meekly to the ideal of speed--speed everywhere
and at all times, produced by means of machinery and regarded as an
end in itself--he would maintain that we had added a cubit to our
stature.

In a sense, mankind has always loved speed. Speed here and there,
speed in season, has always been acknowledged to be great fun. The
Marathon race was a very popular institution. So were the Roman
chariot races. One is probably right in supposing that Adam and Eve
used often to race each other round the Garden of Eden, very blithely.
Dick Turpin's exploit on Black Bess would have commended itself in any
era to the people of any nation. So would even the involuntary
adventure of John Gilpin. Dear to us all is the thought of Puck
putting a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. Long live the
Derby, and the Grand National! All honour to young Mr. Timpson, of
Trinity College, Cambridge, who walked, the other day, to St Paul's
Cathedral and back in twenty-three hours, for a wager. Even that
occasional squadron of stockbrokers marching from London to an hotel
in Brighton rather thrills the heart . . . or doesn't it? Charles
Dickens never wrote anything more exhilarating than the Pickwickians'
journey by coach to Rochester. De Quincey was at his very best on the
subject of the Eclipse coach. Coaches seem, indeed, to have been a
godsend to all novelists and essayists. There was magic in them,
evidently. They are not romantic to us alone: they were so to their
contemporaries. Railway-trains were romantic for a few years. In the
memoirs or diaries of the Victorians you will find that the first
journey by rail made as deep a dint on sensibility as did the Duke of
Wellington's funeral, or the first visit to the Crystal Palace. Well
might those early passengers have prayed,


    Lord, send a man like Bobbie Burns
    To sing the Song of Steam!


But many years were to elapse before Mr. Kipling came, combining with
an immense gift for verse a mystical adoration of machinery. 'Romance
brought up the nine-fifteen', said Mr. Kipling. But, we ask ourselves,
did it? Wasn't it rather the engine-man and the stoker? And we ask
ourselves whether they perhaps are romantic figures, and we hope that
we can answer in the affirmative; but--well, it would seem that in
machinery there is for most of us something non-conductive of emotion.
A man on a horse, galloping hell-for-leather, or a man driving a pair
or more of horses in like manner, a man running like an arrow from the
bow, a man sailing a boat in a great gale, strikes a chord in us and
is a promising subject for literary art. So would be a man flying fast
through the empyrean by means of a pair of natural wings. But the man
in the aeroplane or in the motor-boat or in the motor-car is somehow
less inspiring--recent and fresh though he is, and eagerly waiting to
have masterpieces written about him by poets and essayists and
novelists. May those masterpieces be written soon! I shall welcome
them the more heartily for not having expected them.

Mental speed is a thing which, like speed of limb, has always
commanded admiration. We are glad that Lope de Vega wrote fifteen
hundred plays. We wish our Shakespeare had done likewise, but console
ourselves by the report that 'he never blotted a line.' It gratifies
us that Father Newman wrote his lovely _Apologia_ in eight weeks, and
Samuel Johnson his fine _Rasselas_ in the evenings of one week. We
should be inspirited by any evidence that Edward Gibbon wrote the
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ in six months, or that
Christopher Wren designed St. Paul's Cathedral in twenty-five minutes.
And oh, how we should rejoice to find that the rapidity of transport
that is now at our disposal had duly accelerated the pace at which our
brains work! We are ashamed that our thoughts form themselves no more
swiftly than in the old restful days. I have an impression that most
people do talk rather faster than when I was young. They certainly eat
much faster; insomuch that if I am invited to meet some of them at
luncheon or dinner I find at each course that I have only just begun
when they have all finished; and when I reach my home I ask, 'Are
there any biscuits?' Perhaps this general quickness of mastication is
a sign of greater athleticism. But it may be due merely to the fact
that people have so much to do now. One hears much of unemployment.
But most of the people whom I meet now are employed somewhere, and
after luncheon must hurry back to the places they came from. That is a
very wholesome state of things. But, as a good listener, I rather sigh
for the old leisurely repasts and the habit of lingering long after
them to hear more from the lips of such talkers as Oscar Wilde or
Henry James, Reginald Turner or Charles Brookfield--and then strolling
home, well-satisfied, along the uncrowded pavements and across the
quite safe roads.

Quite safe roads. Rather an arresting phrase, that! I can imagine that
in more than one home some listening-in child has just exclaimed, 'Oh,
mother, were roads ever safe?' And perhaps the mother is at this
moment telling the child that they once were--instead of listening to
_me_. Perhaps she would rather _not_ listen to me. Roads are a painful
subject nowadays. They are railroads without rails. They are so not
only in London, but all over the British Isles. They are so in every
country and every city all over the world. They are places for
motorists only. And the motorists themselves are not comfortable on
them.

The other day, a motoristic friend of mine was complaining to me
bitterly, even violently, about the behaviour of pedestrians. They
were abominably careless and stupid, he insisted. I hate to see anyone
agitated by a grievance, and I tried to soothe my friend by an appeal
to reason. I said, 'No doubt we pedestrians are very trying. But you
must remember that, after all, we were on the roads for many, many
centuries before you came along in your splendid car. And remember, it
isn't we that are threatening to kill _you_. It is you that are
threatening to kill _us_. And if we are rather flustered, and
occasionally do the wrong thing, you should make allowances--and, if
the worst comes to the worst, lay some flowers on our graves.'

We are constantly told by the Press that we must be
'traffic-conscious'. But there is really no need to tell us we must be
so. How could we be otherwise? How not be concussion-apprehensive,
annihilation-evasive, and similar compound words? When the children of
this generation, brought up in fear, shall have become adult, what
sort of nervous ailments will their progeny have, one wonders? Many of
the present children won't grow up at all. Very old people and very
young people form the majority of those who are annually slaughtered
upon our roads.

Statistics do not travel well through the air; so I shall spare you
them. Nor is the air a very good vehicle for moral indignation.
Tub-thumping is apt to fail there. The listener cannot see the tub,
nor the fist, nor the flashing eye. But I do hope that orators on
platforms are magnetically orating, all the time, about the habitual
carnage; and I hope that the clergy of all denominations express
themselves likewise in their pulpits, every Sunday. For I think you
need rousing. You are ashamed that in years not very remote from ours
young women were worked to death in the factories, and children in the
coal-mines. You blush at the barbarities of criminal justice in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What do you think posterity
will think of _this_ age?

'Perhaps,' you say, 'posterity will be worse than we are.' Well, then,
let us set a good example to posterity. Let us persuade our
legislators that we are shocked by the present state of things. Let us
suggest to them that they may lose votes if they are not as shocked
as we are. Let us insinuate that tests far more exacting than the
present tests should be imposed on anyone who desires a licence to
drive a motor-car. Let us whisper that the system by which a motorist
can insure himself against any loss by his own carelessness is not a
very good system. Let us, slightly raising our voices, demand that a
driver convicted of dangerous driving should be liable to a much
longer term of imprisonment than he is now. Let us--but all this is
merely tinkering with the problem. The main root of the mischief is
that great fetish of ours, Speed.

I have friends who argue brilliantly, and in perfect sincerity, that
Speed in itself is no danger. They say that if the traffic were slower
than it is the number of accidents would be increased. And they quote
figures, and draw diagrams, and are as able as they are technical; and
I am very much bewildered. If a man said to me, 'Oh, well, England is
very much over-populated,' or 'The Orientals don't attach the same
value to life as we do; and they are notoriously wiser than we
are--though they've always been so slow in comparison with us,' I
should understand his point of view, though I should not share it. Nor
do I dispute the proposition that Speed in itself is no danger. A
cannon-ball fired from a cannon is not in itself dangerous. It is
dangerous only if you happen to be in the way of it. You would like to
step out of its way; but there is no time for you to do so. Perhaps it
would like to stop short of you; but it can't: it is going too fast.
That is what motorists are doing even when in 'built-up areas' they
obey the speed-limit of thirty miles an hour. They are going too fast.
It would be unreasonable to expect them to impose on themselves a
speed-limit of twenty miles an hour. But this is the limit which
should--and sooner or later will be--imposed on them. Whether this
slowing-down of traffic will cause a great or a small loss of national
income, is, I am told, a point on which expert economists are not
agreed. What is certain is that it will save annually a vast number of
lives.

At first, of course, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The motorists will be frightfully sorry for themselves. And those of
you who are not motorists will feel rather sorry for _them_. Rather
sorry for yourselves too, perhaps. You will feel that there has been a
great act of desecration: hands have been laid on the Ark of the
Covenant: the divinity of Jazz has been impugned.

But here is a heartening fact for you. We are all of us travelling at
a tremendous rate, and we shall always continue to do so. We shall
not, it is true, be able to get rid of our speed-limit. But it is a
very liberal one. 1,110 miles a minute is not a limit to be grumbled
at. Our planet is not truly progressing, of course: it is back at its
starting-point every year. But it never for an instant pauses in its
passage through space. Nor will it do so even when, some billions of
years hence, it shall have become too cold for us human beings to
exist upon its surface. It will still be proceeding at its present
pace: _1,110 miles a minute_.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed a beautiful and a consoling
thought--a thought for you to sleep on, to dream of. Sleep well. Dream
beautifully. In fact--Good Night.




A SMALL BOY SEEING GIANTS

(_Sunday evening, July 26th, 1936._)


Ladies and Gentlemen,--The title that has just been announced to you
is perhaps rather cryptic. And as I am not a young poet, and have not
that lovely modesty which forbids the young poet to think that his
meaning could matter twopence to anybody on this earth, I hasten to
explain that the Small Boy is myself--or rather was myself, half a
century ago; and that the Giants were some more or less elderly
Liberal or Conservative gentlemen who governed England in those days.
They were my great hobby. I might almost say that they were my
passion. I hadn't the honour of knowing any of them personally. But I
knew them all by sight. And it was always with rapture that I saw
them.

In my earlier years, soldiers had monopolised the romantic side of me.
Although, like all my covals, I wore a sailor suit, my heart was with
the land forces; insomuch that I insisted on wearing also, out of
doors, a belt with a sword attached to it, and on my breast a medal
which, though it had merely the Crystal Palace embossed on it, I
associated with the march to Kandahar. I used to watch with emotion
the sentries changing guard outside Kensington Palace; and it was my
purpose to be one of them hereafter. Meanwhile I made many feeble
little drawings of them, which I coloured strongly. But somehow,
mysteriously, when I was eight years old or so, the soldiery was
eclipsed for me by the constabulary. Somehow the scarlet and the
bearskins began to thrill me less than the austere costume and
calling of the Metropolitan Police. Once in every two hours a
policeman came, on his beat, past the house of my parents. At the
window of the dining-room I would await his coming, punctually behold
him with profound interest, and watch him out of sight. It was not the
daffodils that marked for me the coming of the season of Spring. It
was the fact that policemen suddenly wore short tunics with steel
buttons. It was not the fall of the leaf nor the swallows' flight that
signalled Autumn to me. It was the fact that policemen were wearing
long thick frock-coats with buttons of copper. But even more than in
the day-time did policemen arrest me, as it were, in the watches of
the night. The dark lantern was the truly great, the irresistible
thing about them. More than once, from the window of my night-nursery,
I had seen that lantern flashed at opposite front doors and through
area-railings. My paintings of policemen were mostly nocturnes--a dim,
helmeted figure with a long white ray of light. Although I possessed,
of course, a dark lantern of my own, and used it much, I preferred my
occasional glimpses of the genuine article, and looked forward
impatiently to being a member of the Force. But the young are
faithless. By the time I was eleven years old I despised the Force. I
was interested only in politicians--in Statesmen, as they were called
at that time.

I had already, for some years, been aware of them. I had seen them,
two-dimensionally and on a small scale, every Wednesday, in the pages
of _Punch_, and had in a remote and tepid way revered them. I had not
thought of them as actual, live men. Rather, they were, as portrayed
in the cartoons of the great John Tenniel, nobly mythical to me.
Sometimes they wore togas; but more often they wore chitons and
breastplates, and were wielding or brandishing swords. Their shins
were protected by greaves, and their calves were immensely muscular;
and in the matter of biceps they were unsurpassable. They were Ajaxes
and Hectors and Achilleses. Now and then they rose to greater
heights, becoming Herculeses, Vulcans, Marses and the like. _Punch_
was firmly Gladstonian in its politics; and therefore the Prime
Minister was always more muscular than any of his enemies, redoubtable
though they too were; and the attitudes that he struck were more
striking than theirs. I didn't quite like this. For my father was a
Conservative, and so, accordingly, was I. I wished--though I didn't
care enough to pray--for the downfall of Gladstone. Some time in the
year 1883 I read a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Lord
Randolph Churchill. I felt that here was the man to compass the
downfall; for he was so very rude. Even the best-behaved little boys
rejoice in the rudeness of other people. Lord Randolph's rudeness in a
good cause refreshed my young heart greatly; nor ever did his future
speeches disappoint me. But, much though I delighted in him, I didn't
quite think of him as an actual person. I thought of him as Phaton.
Tenniel--or was it Linley Sambourne?--had depicted him as Phaton,
standing ready on the ground while old Sir Stafford Northcote (the
leader of the Opposition, here depicted as Phoebus Apollo) was driving
the chariot of the sun. I resented the cartoonist's analogy. But the
physical image abode with me.

It was the London Stereoscopic Company that first opened my eyes to
the fact that Churchill and Gladstone, Northcote and Harcourt,
Chamberlain, Hartington and all those others were actual, mortal,
modern men. Not until I was nearly twelve did I inspect that great
long double window on the eastern side of Regent Street, famous for
its galaxy of photographs of eminent personages. The place of honour
was accorded of course to members of the Royal Family. But precedence
over Archbishops and Bishops, Generals, Admirals, Poets, Actors and
Actresses, was taken by the Statesmen, as we no longer call them. Not
even to Lord Tennyson and Sir Garnet Wolseley and Mr. Henry Irving
and Miss Connie Gilchrist was accorded such prominence as to the least
of these. For these were giants in those days. They were not perhaps
Gods, but they certainly were Titans, in the public eye. And here they
all were in _my_ eye, tailored and hosier'd as men. With luck, I might
some day see one of them in the street. I studied the portraits
keenly. I fixed the features in my mind. I stayed there long. And on
my way home I saw a man who was unmistakably--Mr. Childers. To you,
Ladies and Gentlemen, I suppose his name means nothing. But he was at
that time Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a great, a throbbing
moment.

Of Mr. Childers I made several drawings--very unpromising little
drawings--when I reached my home. And thereafter, in the course of my
holidays from school, I drew many of his colleagues. When a Cabinet
Council was to be held, the fact was usually announced by the morning
papers of that day. And there at the hour appointed, there on the
pavement of Downing Street, opposite to No. 10, would be I, awaiting
breathlessly the advent of the Giants. The greatest and most awful of
them all would of course be invisible. Mr. Gladstone was somewhere
behind those brown brick walls. But the others would be vouchsafed to
me, one of them coming perhaps from the direction of Parliament
Street, another from the courtyard of the Government Offices behind
me, another up the flight of steps from St. James's Park. They are
dead, one and all of them. Most of them died very many years ago.
While I stood staring at them, Mr. Asquith was unknown to them: he was
just a barrister in fairly good practice. The present Father of the
House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George, was a young solicitor, roaming
nightly with bare feet and dreamful eyes along the clouded ridges of
the Welsh mountains and hailing the roseate dawn. Mr. Baldwin was at
Harrow. A quite recent President of the Oxford Union, Mr. George
Nathaniel Curzon, was travelling observantly in the waste spaces of
Siam and of Korea. Mr. Edward Carson was just beginning to make a name
for himself in the Irish police-courts. Mr. Austen Chamberlain was at
Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr. Neville Chamberlain was at Rugby. Mr.
Winston Churchill was a pugnacious and not very happy little boy at a
preparatory school. Many, many years were to elapse before Mr. Duff
Cooper and Mr. Anthony Eden, Mr. Harold Nicolson and Mr. A. P.
Herbert, were summoned forth from among the infinite ranks of the
unborn. I am what the writers of obituary notices call 'an interesting
link with the past'.

I wish I could have foreseen the future. Had I done so--had I known
how exactly, how furtively like one another our rulers would try to
look--I should have revelled even more than I did revel at the sight
of those men of 1884. Visually, they let themselves go, without
self-consciousness or fear. Each one of them was a law unto himself.
Some of them--Lord Kimberley, for example, and Mr. Dodson--had beards
without moustaches. Some of them were clean-shaven. One of them, Mr.
Shaw-Lefevre, had always what looked like a four days' growth of
beard. Lord Hartington's beard and moustache were far longer than Sir
Charles Dilke's. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was content with small
side-whiskers. Sir William Harcourt had a 'Newgate frill'. So had Lord
Northbrook, who wore, however and moreover, a becoming tuft on the
chin. The wide, pale, pleasantly roguish face of old Lord Granville
was framed in masses of silvery curls. Some wore their hair long,
others short. Some of them dressed badly, others--in an off-hand
way--well. To none of them except Chamberlain and Dilke, those two
harbingers of another age, would one have applied the epithet _neat_.
Believe me, they offered no end of latitude to the limner.

Spiritually, nevertheless, they bore strong likenesses to one another.
Barring the two harbingers, and barring of course Mr. Gladstone, who
was a creature apart, not to be fitted into any category whatsoever,
they were authentic Whigs, one and all; eighteenth-century men,
despite their date. Some of them were old enough to have dined, often,
at Holland House. Not one of them, I feel sure, had failed to
breakfast frequently with Mr. Samuel Rogers. The new Government
Offices were still new to them, and I expect they admired those
buildings greatly. They remembered the time when Downing Street had
lodging-houses in it, and a tavern or two, and a milliner's
shop--things inconsonant with the affairs of a great nation. I daresay
they regretted that Nos. 10 and 11 had not been demolished and rebuilt
in the grandiose modern fashion. What charm would the Eighteenth
Century have had for gentlemen who were a part of it? The love of
by-gone things is a quite recent growth--due mainly to the fact that
we have fallen on evil times. If we could all of us follow Mr. H. G.
Wells's good example, dismiss the present from our minds, and fix our
eyes steadfastly on the future, then we could share his wholesome
contempt for the past. But we can't. We are morbid. I, perhaps, more
so than most of us. Some weeks ago, as I was passing through St.
James's Park, I looked up towards the street that I had so fondly
haunted in my childhood--the street of the Giants. I ascended the
steps to it and stood again before No. 10, gazing. 'This sweet corner'
Horace Walpole had called it in a letter written by him therefrom to
Sir Horace Mann. 'Sweet' is a trivial epithet, but one must remember
that Horace's father, Sir Robert, had no preceding Giant in that
corner: only a little of history had been made there as yet; the rest
was to come. I gazed at the house of Pitt and Palmerston, Disraeli,
Gladstone, and all those others; at the narrow front-door, with the
unassuming fanlight above it; at the lantern in the traceries of the
wrought-iron 'overthrow' beneath which so many Giants had stepped so
long before I was born. And then my eye was attracted by a grey-blue
placard in one of the two hall-windows. I crossed the road to read it
. . .


                       Garden Party
                   Mrs. Stanley Baldwin
                          At Home
                at No. 10, Downing Street
                         in aid of
               The Safer Motherhood Appeal
                       Tuesday July 14
                when the world's greatest
              male ensemble of 35 performers
                   The Don Cossack Choir
                with their famous conductor
                         Sarge Jaroff
    will make their one appearance in London this season
                      Tickets 2. 2. 0


These words I read with surprise, but with entire sympathy. Here was
an excellent cause to support, a very good use for the old garden to
be put to. Had I been rich enough, I would have bought a ticket. But I
rather wondered what Horace Walpole would have had to say in the
matter. Something supercilious, something flippant, I am afraid. He
was rather inhuman.

I wished I could see again those old Gladstonian figures--and the
Salisburyans who succeeded to them in '85: the distinguished and
formidable figure of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach; the distinguished and
venerable figure of Lord John Manners, that last survivor of the Young
England movement, whom Miss Charlotte Bront, when as a young man he
visited Haworth parsonage, had thought so handsome; above all, the
distinguished and attractive figure of Lord Randolph, my chosen hero.
He seemed, in some ways, always rather out of the picture. He seemed
young for Downing Street, and had the air of a man of fashion rather
than of affairs. He alone wore a moustache without beard or
whiskers--an arrangement suggestive of levity. His was the only
top-hat that was ironed, and it was ironed to the utmost lustre. He
alone smoked cigarettes, and he smoked them through a very long amber
mouthpiece. He, and only he, sometimes wore a buttonhole. Sometimes he
looked as happy and insouciant as Mr. Gladstone's young disciple, Lord
Rosebery; at other times, and oftener, he looked as tragically sad as
did Lord Rosebery in later years. Very different though the two men
were in character, they had points in common. The gods had bestowed on
both of them shining gifts of mind and of speech, and had fore-doomed
them both to fail irretrievably.

There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than
success. Rosebery and Randolph Churchill are, among the office-holders
of their generation, the only two that still hold our attention and
stir our curiosity. Lord Salisbury, their elder contemporary, is a
noble, a monumental figure which does not detain us. It may be that if
the veteran Mr. Gladstone had carried Home Rule he would be rather
less detentive than he now is. For some time after his death we tended
to depreciate him. Three or four years ago I was amused by a
conversation between two political ladies of fashion, one an
Asquithian Liberal, the other a Tory. The Liberal one, after having
spoken of Mr. Gladstone with enthusiasm, said, 'But of course people
only talk of Dizzy now. Gladstone's forgotten.' The Tory one said,
'Oh--I thought he was rather comin' in again, dear?' She was right.
Mr. Gladstone is once more with us. Here he is, the mystical realist.
Dizzy, the sceptical idealist, is rather further away. Dizzy is, of
course--Dizzy always was--irresistible. His novels, his phrases, some
of his speeches even, can still delight us deeply. His imagination and
his wit are glorious, as was his patience. But he lacks something. In
the last year of his life, speaking to one of the members of the
Fourth Party, he said, 'I fully appreciate your feelings, but you must
stick to Northcote. He represents the respectability of the Party. I
wholly sympathise with you all, because _I_ was never respectable.'
Nor has he become so. We can revel in him; but we cannot respect him.
There is something unreal, something absurd about him. In this
unrestful and threatened age of the world's history we are moved to
hanker after the moral force and fervour, and the endless vitality of
Gladstone. We want a Gladstone _de nos jours_.

I saw him only three times. Once from the Strangers' Gallery in the
House of Commons, early in 1885; and then and there, for the first and
last time, I also heard him. He was merely answering a question about
procedure, but he spoke for not less than a couple of minutes, in low
tones, leaning far forward, with hands outspread upon the table, and
ever turning from side to side and around, envisaging the whole
assembly. Though I regarded him as a great power for evil, he
fascinated, he won me. The second time was a year or so later. I was
one of the crowd that assembled in Parliament Square when he was about
to introduce the first Home Rule Bill. There were boos among the
cheers as he drove past, beside his wife, in an open landau, gravely
bowing, his great dark eyes very wide open in his ivory-white old
face. I was not among the booers. I cheered--in spite of
myself--wildly. The third time, I was an undergraduate, standing on
the steps outside the Sheldonian Theatre, in which building Mr.
Gladstone, after long absence from Oxford, was to lecture on the
Homeric poems. The Vice-Chancellor's brougham punctually arrived, and
out of it stepped the Vice-Chancellor and, in his D.C.L. robes, Mr.
Gladstone, bareheaded, amidst a tumultuous welcome. He ascended the
steps, dark-eyed, white-faced, smiling; very old, but stalwart; he
turned, stood, bowed slowly, deeply, from side to side, to the crowd
below. He had bowed to many crowds, in his day, but never to one that
loved him more than this one. I associate him always with Oxford.

And it was with Oxford--more, even, than with Scotland, I think--that
he especially associated himself. When he lay dying, the Hebdomadal
Council sent to him a message of regard and affection. 'To this,' says
his biographer, John Morley, 'he listened most attentively and over it
brooded long, then he dictated to his youngest daughter sentence by
sentence his reply: "There is no expression of Christian sympathy that
I could value more than that of the ancient University of Oxford, the
God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford. I served her,
perhaps mistakenly, but to the best of my ability. My most earnest
prayers are with her to the uttermost and to the last."'

These are grand words. With them let me close my discourse. I said at
the outset that I was an interesting link with the past. Perhaps that
was begging the question. I claim merely that I am a link with the
past. If I have bored you, forgive me. And be of good cheer. This is
the last time that I shall have the honour of addressing you, for the
present. I am going to Italy, to my home, and shall not soon be here
again. And so I wish you not only Goodnight, but also Goodbye.




MUSIC HALLS OF MY YOUTH

(Sunday evening at ten o'clock, 18th January, 1942.)


Ladies and Gentlemen, or--if you prefer that mode of
address--G'deevning.

It is past my bed-time; for when one is very old one reverts to the
habits of childhood, and goes to bed quite early--though not quite so
early as one went to one's night-nursery; and not by command, but just
of one's own accord, without any kicking or screaming. I always hear
the nine o'clock news and the postscript; but soon after these I am in
bed and asleep. I take it that my few elders and most of my
contemporaries will have switched off and retired ere now, and that
you who are listening to me are either in the prime of life or in the
flush of enviable youth, and will therefore know little of the subject
on which I am going to dilate with senile garrulity.

Would that those others had sat up to hear me! In them I could have
struck the fond, the vibrant chords of memory. To instruct is a dreary
function. I should have liked to thrill, to draw moisture to the eyes.
But, after all, you do, all of you, know _something_ of my theme. The
historic sense bloweth where it listeth, and in the past few years
there has been a scholarly revival of interest in the kind of melodies
which I had supposed were to lie in eternal oblivion. Some forty years
ago that enlightened musician, Cecil Sharp, was ranging around remote
parts of England and coaxing eldest inhabitants in ingle-nooks to
quaver out folk-songs that only they remembered. It was a great good
work that Cecil Sharp did in retrieving for us so many beautiful old
tunes and poems--poems and tunes in which are enshrined for us a
happier and better life than ours, a life lived under the auspices of
Nature. I salute his memory. And I take leave to think that he would
have been as glad--well, almost as glad--as I am to hear often, on the
wireless, revocations of things warbled across the footlights of Music
Halls in decades long ago. For these too are folk-songs, inalienably
English, and racy of--no, not of the soil, but of the pavements from
which they sprang. I even take leave to think that if Shakespeare had
lived again and had heard them warbled in the Halls he might have
introduced them into his plays, just as he had introduced--with
magical variations, of course--the folk-songs of his own time. He
might have done so. Or again, he might _not_. For he was very keen,
poor man, on a thing which many of the younger poets of our day
disapprove of, as being in rather bad taste: the element of beauty.
And I cannot claim that this element was to be found in the songs of
the 'Lion Comique' or of the 'Serio' of my day, or of the days before
mine. Indeed, I cannot claim for these ditties much more than that
there was in them a great gusto. But gusto is an immense virtue. Gusto
goes a huge long way.

'My day', as I have called it, dawned exactly fifty-one years ago. I
was a callow undergraduate, in my first Christmas vacation. I had been
invited to dine at the Caf Royal by my brother Julius, whose age was
twice as great as mine; and after dinner he proposed that we should go
to the Pavilion Music Hall, where a man called Chevalier had just made
his debut, and had had a great success. I was filled with an awful,
but pleasant, sense of audacity in venturing into such a place, so
plebeian and unhallowed a den, as a Music Hall; and I was relieved,
though slightly disappointed also, at finding that the Pavilion seemed
very like a theatre, except that the men around us were mostly
smoking, and not in evening clothes, and that there was alongside of
the stalls an extensive drinking-bar, of which the barmaids were the
only--or almost the only--ladies present, and that the stage was
occupied by one man only. One and only, but great: none other than The
Great MacDermott, of whom I had often heard in my childhood as the
singer of 'We Don't Want To Fight, But, By Jingo, If We _Do_'. And
here he was, in the flesh, in the greasepaint, surviving and thriving,
to my delight; a huge old burly fellow, with a yellow wig and a vast
expanse of crumpled shirt-front that had in the middle of it a very
large, not _very_ real diamond stud. And he was still belligerent,
wagging a great imperative forefinger at us across the footlights, and
roaring in a voice slightly husky but still immensely powerful a song
with the refrain 'That's What We'd Like To Do!' In Russia there had
been repressive measures against Nihilists, and Mr. Joseph Hatton had
written a book entitled 'By Order of the Czar'--a book that created a
great sensation. And in consequence of it the Great MacDermott had
been closeted with the Prime Minister; nor did he treat the interview
as confidential. I remember well some words of his song.


    '"What would you like to do, my Lord?"
          I asked Lord Salisburee'----


but the words need the music; and I remember the music quite well too.
A pity I can't sing it. But perhaps I could do a croaking suggestion
of it . . .


(_Sung_)
    '"What would you like to do, my Lord?"
      I asked Lord Salisburee.
    "The great Election's very near,
      And where will then you be?
    The English people have the right
      To fight for those who are

    Being oppressed and trodden down
      By Order of the Czar.
    That's what we'd like to do!
      Beware lest we do it too!
    To join those aspirants
      Who'd crush Russian tyrants----
    _That's_ what we'd like to do!"'


And I do assure you that the audience would have liked to do it. You
may wonder at that, after hearing my voice. You would not have
wondered had you heard the Great MacDermott's.

But the fierce mood was short-lived. There arose in the firmament
another luminary. Albert Chevalier, as new as MacDermott was old, came
shining forth amidst salvoes of fervid expectation. A very elastic and
electric little creature, with twists and turns of face and body and
voice as many as the innumerable pearl buttons that adorned his jacket
and his breeches. Frankly fantastic, but nevertheless very real, very
human and loveable in his courtship of 'Arriet by moonlight, or in his
enjoyment of the neighbours' good wishes as he drove his little
donkey-chaise along the Old Kent Road. I was at that time too young to
appreciate the subtleties of the technique that he had acquired and
matured on the legitimate stage. But in later years I knew enough to
realise that he was becoming rather a slave to these subtleties. He
was no longer content to merge his acting in the singing of a song. He
acted outside the song, acted at leisure between the notes, letting
lilt and rhythm go to the deuce. But his composition of words and
music never became less good. There was always a firm basic idea, a
clear aspect of human character. 'My Old Dutch', 'The Little Nipper',
'You can't Get a Roise out o' Oi', and the rest of them, still live
for that reason. I had the pleasure of meeting him once, in his later
years, and was sorely tempted to offer him an idea which might well
have been conceived by himself: a song about a publican whom the
singer had known and revered, who was now dead, whose business was
carried on by his son, Ben, an excellent young man,--'But 'e'll never
be the man 'is Father woz'. The chorus was to be something of this
sort:


(_Sung_)
    'I drops in to see young Ben
    In 'is tap-room now an' then,
    And I likes to see 'im gettin' on becoz
       'E's got pluck and 'e's got brains,
        And 'e takes no end o' pains,
    But--'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz.'


But nothing so irks a creative artist as to be offered an idea, good
or bad. And I did not irk Chevalier.

A man who introduces into an art-form a new style of his own has
usually to pay a high price for having done so. Imitators crop up on
all sides, cheapening his effects. This price Chevalier did not have
to pay. He escaped in virtue of being partly French. His manner and
method were inimitable in our rough island Halls. Singers of coster
songs began to abound but they were thoroughly native and traditional.
Gus Elen defied the conventions only by the extreme, the almost
desperate glumness of his demeanour, and the bitterness of what he had
to say, on a stage where cheeriness against all odds was ever the
resounding keynote. Immensely acrid was the spirit of his ''E Dunno
where 'e Are' and of his 'Well, it's a Grite Big Shime'; but even
these were mild in comparison with the withering pessimism of a later
song of his. Often in reading the work of some of those younger poets
whom I have mentioned I am reminded of that other famous song, 'Wot's
the good of ennyfink? Why, nuffink!'

Very different was the philosophy of Dan Leno. Fate had not smiled on
him, his path was a hard one, he was beset by carking troubles and
anxieties, he was all but at his wits' end, the shadow of the
workhouse loomed, but there was in his little breast a passion of
endurance, and a constant fount of hope, that nothing could subdue.
His meagre face was writhen with care, but the gleam in his eyes
proclaimed him undefeatable. He never asked for sympathy: he had too
much of Cockney pride to do that; but the moment he appeared on the
stage our hearts were all his. Nature had made him somehow
irresistible. Nor do I remember any one so abundant in drollery of
patter. He was, by the way, the inaugurator of patter. In his later
years he hardly sang at all. There was just a perfunctory gabble of a
stanza and a chorus, and the rest was a welter of the spoken word--and
of imaginative genius.

He used to appear yearly in the Drury Lane pantomime, with the
enormous Herbert Campbell as foil to him. But there he was wasted.
Team-work nullified him. He could shine only in detachment. Besides,
Drury Lane was too big for anybody but Herbert Campbell; and for him,
it seemed to me, any Music Hall was too small. But I was very fond of
him, that Boanergetic interpreter of the old tradition, with Mr. James
Fawn as his only peer or rival. Physically somewhat less great than
these two, Mr. Charles Godfrey had a wider range. He could be heroic
as well as comic; and he abounded also in deep sentiment. 'After the
Ball' is indeed a classic; but alas, as I found some years ago in a
modern song book, the text has been corrupted, to suit tastes less
nave than ours were. The unsophisticated syntax of what Godfrey sang
in his baggy dress-suit has been wantonly changed. No doubt you know
the opening words of the present version. But what Godfrey gave us was


(Sung)
    'Came a small maiden,
       Climbed on my knees,
       "Tell me a story,
        Do, Uncle, please!"
       "Tell you a story?
        What shall I tell?
      Tales about giants?
        Or in the dell?"
    After the Ball was over,
      After the '----


and so on. But 'Tales about giants? Or in the dell?' That's the thing
to remember and cherish.

Mr. Harry Freeman, dear man, sounded no depths, and scaled no heights
of sentiment, and indeed had no pretensions of any kind, except a
thorough knowledge of his business, which was the singing of songs
about Beer, about the Lodger, about being had up before the Beak,
about the Missus, about the sea-side, and all the other safest and
surest themes. He never surprised one. He never disappointed one. He
outstood in virtue of being a perfect symbol and emblem of the
average. I delighted in him deeply. I think he had a steadying
influence on me. To this day, whenever I am over-excited, or am
tempted to take some unusual and unwise course, I think of Harry
Freeman.

A saliently sharp antithesis to him was R. G. Knowles, surnamed 'The
Very Peculiar American Comedian'. Nothing restful, everything
peculiar, about _him_! He alone had a 'signature tune'. He was the
inventor of that asset. The opening bars of Mendelssohn's Wedding
March were played as he rushed on from the wings, hoarsely ejaculating
'I've only a moment to linger with you': a tall man with a rather
scholarly face, wearing a very shabby frock-coat, an open collar, and
not very white duck trousers, much frayed at the heels of very large
old boots; also an opera-hat, flat-brimmed and tilted far back from
the brow. He spoke rather huskily, with a strong native twang, at the
rate of about ten words to the second. I tremble to think how many
anecdotes he must always have uttered before he broke into a brief
song and rushed away to linger for a moment with an audience in one of
the other Halls. From some of his anecdotes one gathered that he was
no prude. But there one wronged him. Some years ago my dear friend
William Archer, the famous dramatic critic, and introducer of Ibsen to
our shores, told me that he had recently met, travelling in India, a
man of whom I probably knew a good deal, R. G. Knowles, a Music Hall
performer. 'He told me,' said Archer, 'that he had definitely retired
from the Music Halls; and I asked him why. He said that the tone of
them had fallen to a very low level: there was so much that was
ob-jectionable. He said, "Mr. Archer, in _my_ turns there was never
anything ob-jectionable. Sudge-estive--_yes_."'

I am not in a position to deny that ob-jectionability may have
supervened. I had ceased to attend the Halls because the virus of
'Variety' had come creeping in: conjurors, performing elephants,
tramp-bicyclists, lightning calculators, and so on, and so forth. The
magic had fled--the dear old magic of the unity--the monotony, if you
will--of song after song after song, good, bad, and indifferent, but
all fusing one with another and cumulatively instilling a sense of
deep beatitude--a strange sweet foretaste of Nirvana.

I often wondered, in the old Tivoli and elsewhere, who wrote the
common ruck of the songs I was listening to, and what the writers
bought one half so precious as the wares they sold. As to their
tariff, I once had a queer little side-light on that in a newspaper
report of a case in the County Court at Hastings. The defendant stated
that he earned his living by writing the words and music for Music
Hall songs. He was asked by the Judge how much he earned in the course
of a year. He replied promptly, 'Three hundred and sixty-five pounds.'
And then, the Judge being astonished at such exactitude, he explained
that he was paid one pound for every song, and wrote one every day.

I should have liked to learn more about him. That he was not of the
straitest sect of Sabbatarians is obvious. For the rest, what manner
of man was he? Was he entirely a creature of habit? Or had he
sometimes to plod without aid from his Muse, while at other times she
showered inspiration on him? Was it in the comic or in the sentimental
vein that he was happier? And was he a discerning judge of his own
work? For aught I know, he may have written and composed 'Daisy,
Daisy, Give me your Answer True'. On the evening of that day, did he
say to himself, 'Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall
outlive this powerful rhyme'? And this question leads to another. Why,
exactly, has 'Daisy, Daisy' triumphed perennially, holding her ground
against all comers? There is a reason for everything in this world,
there is a solution of every mystery. And, with your co-operation, I
should like to--but time forbids. I should like also to have said a
great deal about Marie Lloyd, whose funeral was less impressive only
than that of the great Duke of Wellington; about Little Tich, who took
Paris by storm; about Vesta Tilley and Mark Sheridan; also about Miss
Ada Reeve, and about Mr. George Robey. To her, and to him, and to the
shades of those others, I apologise for my silence. The work of all of
them gave me great delight in my youth. Perhaps you will blame me for
having spent so much of my time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I
should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and
compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to
think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to
know all that in all ages and in all lands has been thought by the
best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for
the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very
miserable old age.

_Good_ night, childrenn ... everywhhere.




ADVERTISEMENTS

(_Sunday evening, September 18th, 1942_.)


Ladies and Gentlemen,--I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting
one; and as I don't like excitement I shall approach it in a gentle,
timid, round-about way. I am all for a quiet life. That is a
deplorable confession, I suppose. I remember that many people were
irritated and reproachful when, as a youngish man, I wrote in some
newspaper, or in some book, that my ideal of happiness was 'a
four-post bed in a field of poppies and mandragora'. London, when I
wrote those words, was not so large a city as it has since become, but
it was too large, and too civic, for my taste, and great always was my
pleasure in getting away from it, for a while, whenever I could: away
from the hustle and the jostle that ought to have been so congenial to
me.

In 1910, when I was thirty-seven years old, I did altogether get away
from it, to a little house on a coast-road of the Gulf of Genoa. A
very quiet coast-road, traversed mostly by rustic carts and horses; a
road on which a motor-car created excitement; a road on which little
children ran races during a great part of the day. But a foreign
country in war time--however friendly to one's cause--is an
uncomforting place to be in. One wants to be where the English
language is spoken, and English thoughts and feelings are expressed.
Early in 1915 I was back in England, for rather more than the duration
of what we ingenuously called the Great War. In the years that
followed, considerable strides were being made along the aforesaid
coast-road towards modern civilisation. The road itself was
magnificently asphalted from side to side; the carts and horses were
fewer than before; but great plenty of motor-cars and motor-bicycles
more than atoned for this fewness; and the heartiness of their hooting
and of their mostly open exhausts was a great improvement on the cries
of those little boys and little girls who had been wont to run races,
and could no longer do so . . . I wish, Ladies and Gentlemen, I could
cure myself of the habit of speaking ironically. I should so like to
express myself in a quite straightforward manner. But perhaps it's as
well that I can't; for, if I could, my language might be over-strong
for Sunday evening.

It is now four years since the darkening omens of another war brought
me once more to England. Since then London has become a far quieter
city, by day and by night, than it was in my youth, and an infinitely
quieter one than it presently became; and now, when I come up to it
from the country, I do not experience the shock with which it used to
assail me. And I should feel thankful for the change if the reason for
it were not so tragic a one. Or should I? A quiet capital city is a
contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral. London is
quiet for the first time in its history. I imagine that it never was
noisier than in the seething days of the Elizabethans. In the
eighteenth century life had become more or less canalised, the social
structure had taken rigid shape. But Horace Walpole and the characters
in 'The School for Scandal'--barring Charles Surface--were not typical
of the time. It was rather Charles's time than Joseph's or Horace's: a
robust and loud time. The Regency was an age of din, and the din did
not immediately die down in Early Victorian times. It was modified
only later by the coming in of the great new middle class, a class
that was not, like the nobility and the mob, sure of itself. This
slight lull ceased in the Edvardian Era--an Era which began many years
before the death of Queen Victoria and lasted for four years after
King Edward's death; an Era that was in its social manifestations very
like to the Second Empire in France. Perhaps some young man who is
listening to me has often thought he would like to have lived in
Edvardian Days. I myself, when I was young, had a hankering after the
Second Empire. I never realised that it was here and now--and I not
enjoying it. Imagination is a great painter and gilder, is she not?

Of London in the period between the last war and this one I saw
little; but I gather from what I have heard and read--from things said
and written by quite good-natured, non-censorious people--that it is
not a period of which one has great reason to feel, on the whole,
proud. What I saw of it for myself seemed to me a distinctly inferior
imitation of the Edvardian model. That model had not been altogether
without grace. It assuredly had not lacked gusto. These qualities
seemed to me rather lacking in the revival. But the noisiness was
undeniably, I thought, greater. And the kind of noisiness that had
increased more than any other was that visible kind which is
especially unbeloved by me. There had been an horrific increase in the
volume, the torrential spate and flood of--advertisements.

Those waters have now, of course, subsided very much; they are
comparatively a trickle. But I presume that after this war, if
economic conditions permit, they will rise again in all their diluvian
and submersive strength. Even now they are no mere trickle as compared
with what they were in my childhood. And I confess to a fondness for
the memory of those which found their way into my nursery. There was a
fruit-salt of which I have since been told by experts that the
proprietor was the Father of Modern Advertising. If indeed he was so,
he, that dear old quiet man, builded greater than he knew. There was
nothing startling, nothing arresting in his writings. They weren't
even terse. They were by way of being prolix, and were interspersed
with quotations from the Old Testament, and with references to
anything that came into his head; and they were printed in very small,
closely set, unassuming type. But I read them carefully, with all the
pride of one who had but lately learned to read. And my fancy was
always engaged by the accompanying rather smudgy wood-cut at the top
of the column. I clearly remember the look of radiant well-being which
not even the smudginess could disguise on the faces of the
grandfather, the grandmother, the mother, the father and the children
seated round a lamp-lit table with a turkey or a plum-pudding--or was
it both?--in the midst of them. And there was a similar family eating
its Christmas dinner out of doors, in the rays of the sun, in
Australia. This struck a deep geographical chord of wonder in my
little breast. Somewhat later, a wonderful soap swam into my ken. Sir
John Millais had painted a great picture of a little boy with golden
curls and a green velveteen suit, and upturned eyes, blowing bubbles;
and this picture had been acquired by the vendor of the soap and
widely reproduced on the soap's behalf. My elders, in those
pre-historic days, wondered that Sir John should have authorised this
use of his great gifts. And they were shocked, too, that the beautiful
young Mrs. Langtry had for the soap's sake allowed engravings of a
photograph of herself to be sown broadcast in the Press, with the
admonition 'For look you, she is fair as a lily!' Mrs. Weldon, the
famous litigant, had gone even further. Her portrait was subscribed by
her, 'I am forty-seven, but my complexion is seventeen'. I wonder what
my elders would think of those perfectly well-brought-up and
non-litigious young ladies of rank and fashion who nowadays let their
photographs be reproduced in favour of some unguent used by them and
ecstatically praised by them, with an accompanying diagram of their
features and a laudatory description of each feature by the
unguentarian?

Only fools, of course, would accuse these young ladies of advertising
themselves. They passionately believe in this or that balm and cannot
but testify to the faith that is in them. But fools are not few in
this world, and I rather wish the young ladies belonged to some guild
that forbade its members to do anything that might be misconstrued as
a desire for personal publicity. There is such a guild for doctors,
another for barristers, another for stockbrokers, as we all know.
Perhaps in course of time the Medical Council and the Bar Council and
the Committee of the Stock Exchange will be broader-minded and more
indulgent--who knows? Meanwhile their members are implacably debarred
from advertising in the Press, and never do so. And yet, no, even as I
speak these words, I remember--or rather even as I wrote these words
to be read to you I remembered--an advertisement by a doctor, a very
concise and therefore not expensive one, that caught my eye many years
ago in _The Church Times_: 'Medical Man in Cheltenham can accommodate
one female resident patient. Epileptic Churchwoman preferred.' This
pleased me much; and of course there was nothing in it that could pain
the Medical Council. The doctor did not give his name--gave merely his
initials and 'Box' such and such a number; and he promised no cure at
all. But perhaps he was the thin end of the wedge?

To these 'Want' advertisements, as I think they are called, to these
spontaneous cries from the heart, I have no objection at all. It is
the 'You _do_ want, and woe betide if you don't get' ones that bore me
to death. We are taught to believe that the outcriers are entirely
altruistic men. Some years ago there was held at Wembley an
International Advertising Convention, which lasted for three days or
so. I was not present, but the speeches made at it were very fully
reported in all the organs of the daily press. And I gathered that the
Advertisers were very noble fellows indeed. They were spending
themselves in what they called Service. The hall in which they met was
adorned with strenuously edifying slogans: 'All for Each, and Each for
All' is the one that I best remember. I gathered that these
proprietors and these agents of theirs were not 'out', as they would
have said, to make a good deal of money. Their aim, their incentive
was just to serve you and me, to irradiate our darkness and give us
full and happy lives. They spoke not as tradesmen; they spake as
Crusaders, as Knights of the Holy Grail. I rather wondered they hadn't
had a marching song composed for them. They ought to have come
tramping from Wembley to London, four abreast, under flying banners,
chanting a song with that almost sacred refrain: 'All for Each, and
Each for All'. I am sorry to say that I presently struck a jarring
note. I was having an exhibition of caricatures at the Leicester
Galleries; and one of these, hung in the middle of one of the walls,
was a group of strong, stout, square-jawed business men, with hands
piously folded and brass haloes attached to their heads, and with a
very rude inscription by me beneath them. I have often wondered who
bought the nefarious thing. I am sorry to say that on the opening day
it was one of the first drawings sold. It was described in two papers,
_The Manchester Guardian_ and _The Saturday Review_: the others drew
over it the veil of pained silence.

Who was it--Lord Macaulay, I think--who first called the Press the
Fourth Estate of the Realm? The advertisers are now certainly the
Fifth. 'As you are strong', I venture to say to them, 'be merciful. Do
try not to be quite so strong here as you are in, for instance,
America'. I have seen American weekly and monthly magazines in which
at first glance it isn't easy to find anything _but_ advertisements.
All the rest is printed in disjected fragments. An essay or a story
begins briefly, say, on page 20, and then you must turn to page 33,
and thence to page 47, amidst the glare and blare of things for sale.
And in the London daily papers how much less space than of yore can be
spared, could even before the war be spared, for consideration of the
arts of literature, drama, painting, music--or even for the utterances
of senators. Of course the advertisers are not really to blame, nor
are the editors. The mischief is due to the enormous increase in the
cost of producing a newspaper. The cost of book-production has, I
suppose, gone up not less hideously. But so far the pages of novels or
poems, of essays or biographies, have not been interspersed by their
publishers with pans on the various competing brands of whisky and
millinery and cigarettes. Perhaps, after we have won the war, not even
_this_ mercy will be vouchsafed to us. Meanwhile, if I were endowed
with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the
principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short
sentence, printed in huge block letters--a sentence that I once heard
spoken by a husband to a wife: 'My dear, nothing in this world is
worth buying'. But of course I should alter 'my dear' to 'my dears'.

And now for a matter which agitates me far more than the effect that
advertisements have on newspapers. Though newspapers without
advertisements could not nowadays survive, I see no reason for
believing that without this support the streets and squares of our
cities, and the roads and hills and valleys of our countryside, would
presently disappear. On the contrary, they are rather by way of
disappearing already behind the insistences on what we ought to
purchase. Beautiful architecture and beautiful scenery are things far
more important to the soul of man than even the best newspaper. So too
is the sky, surely; especially the sky by night. But the advertisers
are creatures of the night as well as of the day. Some years ago, a
clever man invented a device by which illuminated advertisements could
be inscribed upon the sky by night and would remain fixed there for a
fairly long time. The sanction of Parliament was somehow necessary to
the execution of this plan. There was strong opposition to it from
many quarters, certainly from all the best ones. But the Bill, with
some slight modification, was passed by both Houses. That beautiful
quarter of London, the Adelphi, had recently been handed over by them
for demolition and for sky-scrapers. Why _shouldn't_ the sky be
scraped? And why shouldn't it have advertisements scrawled on it? Is
this a free country, or is it not? What right have its rulers to
prevent _anybody_ from making money wherever he sees a chance of doing
so? To hinder him, thought the majority of Lords and Commons, would be
un-English. Some of them perhaps went even further, and thought that
it wouldn't be cricket.

But the invention seems not to have fulfilled its dreadful promise. So
far as I know, the space between us and the stars remained unmolested,
and all was well. And now, during this war we can further be glad of
one thing: that London by night is not vulgarised and debased by those
loathsome red-hot-coal illuminations, appearing and clumsily spelling
themselves out and disappearing and re-appearing on the copings and
facades of buildings. If such things must be, let them be done with
some semblance of taste and fancy. Many of you will have seen and
rather liked, in this and that foreign city, those inscriptions in
neon light on the frontages of shops by night: inscriptions done in
graceful, fluent lettering, and in pleasant tints--primrose, or pale
pink, or lavender. But in the average foreign country there is a
Ministry of Fine Arts, and to that Ministry all such spectacular
advertisements must be submitted, and by it approved. We ourselves
nowadays have a Ministry of almost everything. Some day perhaps we
shall have one of Fine Arts? But I fancy we shan't ever have one, and
that if we had one it would quake in abject terror of any vested
interests.

And on that note of mild pessimism, Ladies and Gentlemen, I will bid
you good night. I told you at the outset that my subject was an
exciting one. If I haven't made it seem so to you, don't accuse me of
breach of faith. I didn't promise you that _I_ wasn't going to be
rather dull. Besides, you must remember that not one of you has been
listening to me for his or her own sake, for his or her own
gratification. You have been listening All for Each, and Each for All.




PLAYGOING

(_Sunday evening, October 8th, 1945._)


Ladies and Gentlemen,--The title I have chosen for this soliloquy has
rather an old-world flavour. But I myself am one of the relics of an
older, an easier and more pleasant and yet a more formal world than
this one, and my lips were loth to frame the modern equivalent, 'Doing
a Show.' I might have said, 'Going to the Play,' which was a familiar
phrase in the Victorian and Edvardian eras. Familiar but strange. The
use of the definite article was so very indefinitive. Going to _what_
play? There was always more than one; though certainly plays were
fewer, and theatres fewer, and we had only two or three
dramatists--only two or three, I mean, who were alive and also worth
mentioning. In fact, for better or worse, things were very different.
Let me maunder over some of the differences.

Actors and actresses were certainly regarded with far greater interest
than they are nowadays. The outstanding ones inspired something deeper
than interest. It was with excitement, with wonder and with reverence,
with something akin even to hysteria, that they were gazed upon. Some
of the younger of you listeners would, no doubt, if they could,
interrupt me at this point by asking, 'But surely you don't mean, do
you, that our parents and grandparents were affected by them as we are
by cinema stars?' I would assure you that those idols of ours were
even more ardently worshipped than are yours. Yours, after all, are
but images of idols, mere shadows of glory. Those others were their
own selves, creatures of flesh and blood, there, before our eyes.
They were performing in our presence. And of our presence they were
aware. Even we, in all our humility, acted as stimulants to them. The
magnetism diffused by them across the footlights was in some degree
our own doing. You, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the
performances of which you witness the result. Those performances--or
rather those innumerable rehearsals--took place in some far-away gaunt
studio in Hollywood or elsewhere, months ago. Those moving shadows
will be making identically the same movements at the next performance,
or rather at the next record; and in the inflexions of those voices
enlarged and preserved for you there by machinery not one cadence will
be altered. Thus the theatre has certain advantages over the cinema,
and in virtue of them will continue to survive. But the thrill of it
is not quite what it was in my young days.

In those piping days of yore, there was in playgoing a spice of
adventure, of audacity. The theatre was frowned on by quite a large
part of the community. The Nonconformist Churches were, without
exception, dead against it. Ministers of even the Church of England
were very dubious about it and never attended it. Players were no
longer regarded in the eighteen-eighties and 'nineties as rogues and
vagabonds, but the old Puritan prejudice against them still
flourished. Not long ago I came across an excellent little book
published in the 'sixties, entitled _A Manual for Chess Players_. It
had as preface a very erudite history of the game, in the course of
which occurred these words: 'Chess has throughout the ages been the
favourite pastime of all sorts and conditions of men, from Popes and
Emperors to actors and dustmen.' And here is another straw to show
that the wind was still blowing briskly that way even in the
'eighties. A small boy, a son of that great actress, Mrs. Kendal, on
his first day at a preparatory school in London, was asked by an elder
boy, 'Your mother's an actress, isn't she?' He replied with spirit,
'If you say that again, I'll knock you down.' I remember, too, that at
the public school to which I was admitted in 1885 none of the boys,
though my elder brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was already a
well-known actor, ever referred to our brotherhood. It was only in
1887, when Herbert became an actor-manager, that the silence was
broken, that the subject ceased to be a delicate one. An
actor-_manager_ could be mentioned quite frankly, and even with awe.

Well, the days of the actor-manager are past. No doubt he was not a
faultless institution. But he was an impressive and exciting one.
There he was, in his own theatre, and giving to that theatre a
definite individuality of its own. It was not merely a building, it
was a kind of temple, with its own special brand of worshippers. First
nights were thrilling, throbbing occasions. People had come not so
much to see a mere play as to see a play with their idol in it. They
hoped the play would be a success for _his_ sake. If it seemed to them
a failure the pit and gallery booed the author for having betrayed
their idol. They were in no mood to stand any nonsense from an author.
Many of them had been sitting on camp-stools, or standing for hours
and hours outside the theatre, patiently, smilingly, devotedly. Some
of them even were quick to resent in one of the characters of the play
any lack of right feeling for the leading man. I remember the first
night of a play written for Mr. Lewis Waller--a play in which he was
an important Anglo-Indian soldier, in a white uniform and in command
of a province. In the second act there came to him an evil native with
a petition of a kind that Mr. Waller could not grant. The native
produced a pistol and fired it at him. I was in the back row of the
stalls, and was almost deafened by a young lady who, in the front row
of the pit, screamed 'How _dare_ he?'

I remember also a first night in which that excellent romantic actor,
in his speech before the curtain, thanked the audience for their
'loyalty' to him. And indeed that word was not inappropriate.
Actor-managers were kings, in their fashion--in the English, the
constitutional fashion: not autocrats in danger of their lives. In the
day-time they drove about unguarded in hansom cabs--or even walked,
taking the pavement with as easy a grace as that with which they took
the boards.

They are gone. They have been replaced by theatrical syndicates. Are
you thrilled when you see a syndicate sauntering down Piccadilly or
driving down it in a _char--banc_? Is your pulse quickened by the
thought of the awful financial risks taken by these brave fellows? Do
you pray that their box-offices will be for ever besieged? I fear you
are coldly concerned with the mere question whether the play they are
running is a good one, worthy of your respect. Even if they themselves
were playing the male parts in it the sight of them out in the open
air would not deeply stir you. The play, not so much the players
nowadays, is what you are really keen on. 'The play's the thing.'

And it is, on the whole, a better thing than it used to be. In my very
young days it was mostly something adapted from the French, and had
suffered greatly in the Channel crossing. Henry Arthur Jones and
Arthur Wing Pinero were almost alone in having both a sense of the
theatre and a sense of the realities of life. And the Americans gave
us no help. Mr. Augustin Daly's farces were then her sole export, and
not at all a good one. America was very grateful for the imports she
got from us. Meanwhile in Norway a great grim dramaturgist was every
morning at his desk, unresting but unhurrying, giving to his
compatriots one play every two years. And in England there was a
Scotsman who knew the Norwegian tongue and translated the biennial
achievement. Towards the end of the 'eighties he even managed to get
the latest of those achievements produced precariously in some small
theatre in London. The dramatic critics of that time were a less
sophisticated race than the present one. They were a race of cheerful
hacks. They did not see eye to eye with their argute Scottish
colleague, William Archer, on the merits of 'A Doll's House'. Even A.
B. Walkley, though he of course recognised the magnitude of Ibsen,
found Ibsen rather rebarbative; and Bernard Shaw, though promptly
Ibsenite, had not yet become a dramatic critic. The Ibsen movement
became more mobile later on, when a very dynamic and fervent little
Dutchman, J. T. Grein, who was not at all content with being
'something in the City' and being also Consul for Bolivia, rushed in,
founded The Independent Theatre and produced 'Ghosts'. And lo, there
was a terrific outcry against Ibsen. But there was also an earnest
outcry _for_ him, raised by people who had hitherto rather disdained
the theatre. There was so much to be said for the Ibsen method--for
the stage as just a three-walled room, with some people in it talking
in a perfectly natural manner; not doing much, but thinking and
feeling deeply; and illustrating some idea, and presenting some
problem or other; and with no prospect of that happy ending to which
the public was accustomed. And presently, under the Ibsen influence,
Mr. Pinero wrote 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray'. I am told that it seems
very artificial nowadays; but it seemed dreadfully, delightfully true
to nature then. And anon came the Stage Society, with performances of
earlier and later plays by Ibsen, and of plays by other more or less
grim foreigners, and of a play or two already by Bernard Shaw. And
very superior young men who had never thought of writing for the
theatre began to do so, not without some measure of devious success.
And in course of time it befell that Shaw became actually popular.
Harley Granville-Barker, allied with Mr. Vedrenne, had brilliantly
established himself in the Court Theatre, and it was there that 'Man
and Superman' was produced. Someone told King Edward that it was a
play he ought to see. One night he came and saw it. Then came all rank
and fashion to see it. And the bourgeoisie came to see _them_. And
incidentally both the seers and the seen discovered that Shaw was
really a most delightful person.

At that time I was a dramatic critic, and very angry that not all the
theatres in London were given over to intellectual drama. I was still
in that mood when, thirty-five years ago, I retired from dramatic
criticism, and left London, and ceased to go to theatres. My nature
then mellowed. I became tolerant of whatever might be going on behind
my back. But I gathered from the newspapers that my former colleagues,
especially the younger ones, seemed to grow more and more distressed
about things, and I remember that in about 1912 I composed in my head
a drinking-song for them. I didn't send it to them, for I was afraid
they might think the metre too cheerful. It ran as follows:


    In days of yore the Drama throve
      Within our storm-bound coasts,
    The Independent Theatre gave
      Performances of 'Ghosts',
    Death and disease, disaster
      And downfall were our joy,
    The fun flew fast and faster
      While Ibsen was our Master
    And Grein was a bright Dutch boy, my boys,
      And Grein was a bright Dutch boy.

    The Future of the Drama
      Was our theme day in, day out,
    Pinero was most sanguine,
      Henry Arthur had no doubt.
    'On, on!' cried William Archer,
      And no man was less coy
    Than Shaw, that spring-heel'd marcher
      In _any_ new deparcher,
    When Grein was a bright Dutch boy, my boys,
      When Grein was a bright Dutch boy.

    The Movies moved not yet, my boys,
      Revues were not in view,
    The present state of things was not
      Foreseen by me and you.
    We sailed o'er seas uncharted
      Of youth and faith and joy.
    None cried 'Are we downhearted?'
      In those dear days departed
    When Grein was a bright Dutch boy, my boys.
      When Grein was a bright Dutch boy.


For any man who has been and is no longer a dramatic critic there is a
peculiar pleasure in playgoing, even if the play be a bad one, and
even if the theatre be one of those austere, bleak, neutral-tinted,
ferro-concrete tabernacles which the modern architect and his
upholsterer seem to think preferable to such genial places as the
Haymarket or the St. James's, and even if the players be seeming to
forget that the room they are in is only a _three_-walled one, and
that we are come to hear what they have to say. For such a man there
is the bliss of knowing that he need not write one line about what is
going on--need not be anxiously on the look-out for some point of view
from which he could compose an article which readers would think
clever and would enjoy. Oh yes, I assure you I am very mellow. If the
bad old times, and with them the bad old tricks (the 'soliloquy', the
'aside', and so on) came in again, I think I should rather welcome
them, for old sake's sake. And if intellectual ideas were to vanish
from the boards I am not sure that my heart would break. Indeed, I
have a sort of feeling that one can appreciate ideas, is more
susceptible to them and better able to grapple with them, when they
are set forth in a book that one is reading by one's own fireside than
when they are mooted to an auditorium. One can pause, can linger, can
perpend. I have a notion that the drama is, after all, essentially a
vehicle for action (for drama, as the Greeks quite frankly called it),
is essentially, or at least mainly, a thing to cause the excitement of
pity and awe, or of terror, or of laughter, rather than to stimulate
one's ratiocinative faculties. The theatre, I would say, is a place
for thrills. You may, of course, be thrilled at your fireside by a
book of philosophy or of history. You are still more likely to be so
by a fine work of fiction. But the characters in a novel are not there
before your very eyes, saying and doing things in your very presence.
The novelist's power to startle you, or to hold you in breathless
suspense, is a slight one in comparison with the dramatist's. All the
vividest of my memories of the theatre are memories of stark
'situations'--the appearance of the Ghost on the battlements at
Elsinore; or the knocking at the gate while Duncan is murdered, and
the repetition of that knocking; or the screen with Lady Teazle behind
it, and the fall of that screen; or, in plays of later date, 'Who are
you?'--'Hawkshaw, the detective!'--Curtain. Or 'Disguise is useless!
You are Macari!' Or, in Oscar Wilde's classic farce, the appearance of
Algernon, in deepest mourning, at the garden gate, to announce the
death of his figmentary brother.

Is this a Philistine standpoint? Well, I have no time to defend
myself, and I fear you are glad that I haven't. I fear that you,
Ladies and Gentlemen, have _not_ been thrilled by _me_ at your
firesides, and are yearning for the next item on the programme:
_Barcarolle._ And at this moment the Barcarollists are straining at
the leash. Good night.




A NOTE ON THE EINSTEIN THEORY

(_1923._)


It is said that there are, besides Dr. Einstein himself, only two men
who can claim to have grasped the Theory in full. I cannot claim to be
either of these. But I do know a good thing when I see it; and here is
a thing that is excellent in its kind--romantically excellent in a
kind that is itself high. When I think of rays being deflected by
gravity, and of parallel lines at long last converging so that there
isn't perhaps, after all, any such thing as Infinity, I draw a very
deep breath indeed. The attempt to conceive Infinity had always been
quite arduous enough for me. But to imagine the absence of it; to feel
that perhaps we and all the stars beyond our ken are somehow cosily
(though awfully) closed in by certain curves beyond which is nothing;
and to convince myself, by the way, that this exterior nothing is not
(in virtue of _being_ nothing) something, and therefore . . . but I
lose the thread.

Enough that I never lose the thrill. It excites, it charms me to think
of elderly great mathematicians of this and that nation packing their
portmanteaus whenever there is to be a solar eclipse, and travelling
over land and sea to the Lick Observatory, or to some hardly
accessible mountain-top in Kamskatka, and there testing, to the best
of their power, the soundness or unsoundness of the tremendous Theory.
So far, the weather has not been very favourable to these
undertakings. Nature, who is proud and secretive, has opposed many
clouds to the batteries of telescopes. But she has had only a partial
success, it seems. Some observations have been more or less clearly
made, some conclusions more or less clearly drawn. And these more or
less clearly point to the likelihood that what Dr. Einstein in his
humdrum home evolved from his inner consciousness is all delightfully
correct.

But is the British public delighted? It gives no sign of being so. Its
newspapers did at the first news of Einstein's existence try, very
honourably, to excite it about Einstein and even about his work. It
would _not_ be excited. Strange! The tamest batting of Hertfordshire
_v._ Australia, the feeblest goal-keeping of Wormwood Scrubbs _v._
Hornsey Rise, the lightest word that falls from the lips of the least
accomplished negro boxer, are better 'copy' than any challenge to our
notion of the Cosmos. This is all the stranger because the public is
not careless of other things than Sport. Its passionate interest in
archology, for instance, rose to boiling-point, only the other day:
it could _not_ hear too much about the tomb of Tutankhamen, nor tire
of debating whether or not the bones of that king might rightly be
disturbed. Why never a word as to the disturbance of our belief that
parallel lines can nowhere converge? I haven't grudged Tutankhamen the
renewal and immense enlargement of the fame he once had. I have but
deplored the huge cold shoulder turned on the living Einstein.

Newton, no greater an innovator than he, is popular enough. Everybody
knows something about Gravitation--and all about the apple. Perhaps if
Newton had not mentioned that apple, he too would be generally
ignored. It is a great advantage for a discoverer to have been
inspired by some homely little incident. Newton and the apple,
Copernicus and the whipping-top, James Watt and the kettle. But
Einstein and----? Poor Einstein!

Men of his magnitude are not avid of popularity? True; but this does
not mean that popularity would be disagreeable to them. When the
newspapers were trying to make Relativity a household word, I read an
account of Einstein, written by one who knew him, and enhanced by a
photograph of him. A very human person, I gathered; far from
stand-off-ish; a player of the fiddle; the constant smoker of a large
pipe; a genial, though thoughtful, critic of current things. I liked
his views on education. Why all this forcing of a child's memory?
Memory--a matter of little moment. Let the child be taught to see, and
to think, for itself. And let every child be taught a trade. And
'after all,' said Einstein, dismissing tuition, 'the best thing in the
world is a happy face.' It was clear from the photograph that his own
face was a happy one. But I discerned in it a certain wistfulness,
too--the wistfulness of a thorough good fellow whose work somehow
repels the attention of that good fellow, the average man. My heart
went out to him. I wished I could help him. And now, I think, I can.
Hark!

Yesterday afternoon I was walking on the coast-road from Rapallo to
Zoagli when I saw approaching in the distance a man of strenuous gait,
and of aspect neither Italian nor English. His brow was bare to the
breeze; and as he drew near I perceived the brow to be a fine one; and
as he drew nearer still I perceived the face to be a very happy
one--with just a hint in it of wistfulness, which, however, vanished
at my words, 'Dr. Einstein, I presume?' He clapped a cordial hand on
my shoulder; he treated me as an old friend, as a brother, and
insisted that we should sit together on the low wall that divides the
road from the cliff. Presently--after he had praised the sun and the
sea, and had expressed an ardent sympathy with Fascismo, and with
Socialismo, no less--I said to him, 'Master (if one who is not a
disciple may so address you), tell me: What was it that first put you
on the track of the tremendous Theory?' He knitted his fine brow,
saying that his memory was not a very good one; but after a while he
remembered, and spoke to me as follows:

'One winter's evening, after a hard day's work, I was sitting by my
fireside--for I have an open fire in the English fashion, not a stove:
I like to sit watching the happy faces in the coals--when my eye
lighted on the tongs in the fender. Of course it had often lighted on
them before; but this time it carried to my brain a message which my
brain could not understand. "Here," I mused, "are two perfectly
parallel lines. And yet, and yet, they meet at the extreme ends. How
is that?" My friend Professor Schultz had promised to drop in and
smoke a pipe with me that evening, and when he came I drew his
attention to the phenomenon. He knelt down by the fender, pushed his
spectacles up on to his forehead, gazed closely, and muttered, "Gott
in Himmel--ja!" I asked him--for he is a very ready man--if he had any
explanation to offer. He rose from his knees and sat down on a chair
heavily, burying his head in his hands. Suddenly he sprang to his
feet. "Einstein," he said, "I believe I have it! I believe that the
iron-worker who made those bars must have heated them red-hot and then
bent the ends towards each other." Dear old Schultz! Always so
ready!--so shallow! I suppose I ought not to have laughed; but I did;
and Schultz went out in some anger. It was dawn when I rose from the
fireside. The fire had long ago burnt itself out, and I was stiff with
cold. But my mind was all aglow with the basic principles of
Relativismus.'

'The world,' I said quietly, 'shall hear of this, Dr. Einstein.'




FROM BLOOMSBURY TO BAYSWATER

(_1940_)


In August, 1935, it seemed that we might at any moment be at war with
Italy, a country in which I had resided for many years. Accordingly I
returned to the land of my birth and heart; and the stormy petrel,
partly by chance, and partly for good reasons of economy, folded its
wings in Bloomsbury, and was there for rather more than a year.

Tavistock Square is not so fine a place as Bedford Square or Brunswick
Square; but it is (as you will already have guessed) a Square, and has
therefore much to be said for it. Very greatly did I enjoy the charm
of seeing through my two large windows on the ground-floor the gradual
turn of the leaf, the yellowing and the browning of it, its fall, its
wind-swept eddying along the road; and the austere nakedness of the
great old trees, offering a distant view of the houses on the other
side, and of the omnibuses that passed incessantly along that unhappy
other side and blessedly couldn't be heard on ours; and in due time
the clean snow upon the grass and upon the soot-black but noble
branches; and later the small green buds that are so much stranger
than on country trees; and gradually the disappearance of the
inaudible omnibuses and of the windows of the unblest; and then again
the yellowing and the browning, the falling and the eddying. It is in
a city, surely, that the lover of Nature finds deepest pleasure in
watching her old round of phases.

Nevertheless, he prefers the country; and I am sure that in the
eighteenth century I should have wished to murder that Duke of
Bedford who for purposes of pelf had his great house demolished, and
his park and his fields innumerable built over by a bright young
architect and surveyor. I should not have realised that the
architecture was good. I should have taken its manner as a matter of
course. The spaciousness and solidity and homely grandeur of it all,
the generous width of its doors and door-steps and of its areas, would
have won no word of praise from my pursed-up lips. Nor would the
correspondingly generous width of the roads and of the pavements have
surprised and mollified me. One lives and learns. One lives another
century and a half and begins to appreciate.

In my youth Bloomsbury meant little to me. It didn't--it doesn't even
now--appeal to the historic sense. Such places as St. James's and
Westminster and Mayfair had always had shining inmates: such places
were of the centre, and near the rose. Bloomsbury in its day was much
favoured by eminent lawyers, and by their wives and families. And
outside their courts lawyers mostly burn with but a dim light.
Moreover, they had deserted Bloomsbury before I was born, leaving
their houses to the letters of lodgings and to the keepers of
boarding-houses, or even to emptiness and darkness, or even to
disrepute. If Bloomsbury had vanished utterly, my young heart would
not have mourned it. But now it _is_ beginning to vanish little by
little. Many of the Squares and Streets have been more or less
vandalised. All of them are threatened. I gather that the
arch-threatener is the University of London. I understand that there
are no limits to its desire for expansion of that bleak, blank,
hideous and already vast whited sepulchre which bears its name.
Simultaneous tens of thousands of youths and maidens yet unborn will
in the not so very far distant future be having their minds filled
there and their souls starved there. Poor things! (And I'm sorry for
the dons too.)

To them, perhaps, what may remain of the present Bloomsbury will have
that historic interest which for us it lacks. They may say to one
another, 'In that small brown house yonder, Henry Smith wrote his
immortal "Snarls",' and 'In that one, Philip Robinson painted some of
the most exquisitely unsightly of his dissignifications.' For of
course, since 1918 or so, Bloomsbury has got into inverted commas, and
has (though Philip Robinson will blame me for using the word) a
meaning. It has become an intellectual centre, or, as it would call
itself (for it is very Russian in its leanings), a focus of the
intelligentsia. I myself am not _very_ Russian, and to me the term
'intelligentsia' seems less modest and less apt than 'mental
underworld'. Dostoievsky, their god, was a man of genius, certainly,
and gave beautifully poignant expression to his spinelessness. But he
is altogether alien to our rough island race; and laborious little
imitations of his inspired maunderings cut no ice, and win scant
patience from the average reader, even if they are contrived in all
deep reverence to the memory of Karl Marx, and in fond though violent
indigestion of the theories of Dr. Freud. But here I am presuming an
average reader able to elucidate those tricksy snippets of dry prose
in which the poetry of the West Central young is written. Here am I
forgetting that intelligibility is as darkly frowned on by these young
as are those stuffy old fads of the Victorian bourgeoisie, beauty,
harmony, movement, development, and similar rot that had been handed
down from the dark ages of Periclean Athens and had loathsomely
imposed itself on generation after craven generation of the cloddish
human race, and was seen through and discarded only as a result of the
European War of 1914-1918.

Certainly that war was a bad time to be born in, and the subsequent
years must have been unhappy ones to grow up in. I daresay that were I
a young man of the period I too should be disgruntled. I was fortunate
in the (almost pre-historic) date of my birth. Even so, however, I
was foolish enough in my youth, as is the way of young men. But I
wonder whether, if I were young now, I should be quite such a fool as
to suppose that literary or graphic artists can advantageously forgo
the influence of tradition and start with quite clean slates. The
world has been going on for ever so long, with ever so many gifted
people in it. Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently.
Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth. Let
the young rise in revolt, from time to time, by all means. But, to be
fruitful, their revolts must be, in another sense, from time to time:
from the present to the past. In the nineteenth century there were two
movements of importance; one of them a revolt from the formalism of
the previous century, the other from the current fashions of academic
art. But Romance was, after all, an old and familiar affair; nor were
Giotto and his kind imaginary figures. The only novelty was the style
in which the old ways were handled and developed and extended in the
new period. The Impressionists? For the moment, I was forgetting them.
But they are no snag. None of my Chelsea friends of the 'nineties
supposed Manet to have been a phoenix. Steer and Sickert, MacColl and
Will Rothenstein, were all vocally aware of kings before
Agememnon--Spanish, Italian, and other kings.

I wonder that the Chelsea of those days could have slipped my memory,
so obvious is the contrast of it with the Bloomsbury of these!--so
fresh and tonic was the air of it; so gay were the artists of that
village (for village it still seemed to be) by the riverside. Why
hasn't Bloomsbury a river?--a cheering, strong-flowing river, washing
things away to the sea. I feel sure that even in the inter-bella
period a river would have done Bloomsbury no end of good. Regent's
Park is very airy, and isn't very far away from Bloomsbury; but it is
a smug, urban expanse, and, such as it is, can be reached only by
walking along the Euston Road, awfullest of thoroughfares, and is
therefore valueless for the purpose of bracing up the spirits of the
Bloomsburyites and giving them that lively faith in themselves and in
their works which is just what, in my daily rovings around the
district, and in my observings of the passers-by, they seemed to me to
lack. The passers-by were never many. The inhabitants didn't seem to
take much exercise. They seemed to be mostly at home and at work all
day. And it may be that none of the young men and women who passed by
me was a poet or a painter, or even a critic. But some of them, I
thought, must be something of that kind. And I wished they would bear
themselves more proudly. I did not demand of them defiance. I merely
craved an air of young self-confidence--a pleasant touch of juvenile
swagger. Their work was treated with deep respect by most of the
elderly reviewers (terrified of not seeming abreast of the times). But
they seemed to be not elated by the timorous eulogies that were heaped
on them. Their eyes lacked lustre. Their cigarettes drooped almost
vertically from between lips that never broke into a smile. And
sometimes, I noted, they were wearing very muddy shoes though the sun
had for several days been shining brilliantly. But there was one of
them (and he a foreigner, I was told) who stood out distinctly from
the rest: he was a tall, thin, keen-faced man with short
side-whiskers; and he wore a kind of tam-o'-shanter, a brick-coloured
cloak, a long robe to match, and a pair of sandals; and his brown hair
fell to the back of his waist, and in windy weather streamed out
behind him with immense vivacity. He attracted great attention always,
and comment too, of course. The best comment on him that I overheard
was made by one of two costermongers whom he had just passed by.
"Well, Bill," said the one to the other, who was grinning widely, "at
any rate 'e's got more courage than wot _we_'ve got."

These words, so typical of cockney wisdom and tolerance, impressed me
deeply. And perhaps it was they that caused me, me too, to become
courageous. I had read in letters to the press many hostile references
to 'the Old School Tie', as a symbol of snobbish devotion to an
individuality-crushing old horrid system, and had thought to myself,
"What nonsense!" It had never occurred to me to exercise my right to
wear such a tie. But now, here, in the heart of Bloomsbury, I felt
that I would belatedly do so, and I went to my hosier and ordered two
Old Carthusian ties. Do you know the colours? They are three: bright
crimson, salmon pink, and royal blue. They are dangerous to the
appearance of even a quite young man. To that of an old man they are
utterly disastrous. Nevertheless, I, without faltering, wore one of my
pair until my sojourn in Bloomsbury came to its end.

This was in October, 1936. The Anglo-Italian horizon had cleared. I
returned to my home in Italy. In August of the next year but one, that
horizon was again dark. One didn't know at what moment Hitler might
strike, nor whether Mussolini wouldn't strike with him. Behold me
again upon this isle!--but, this time, in Bayswater, where, indeed, I
had been born and had lived (barring school-terms) until I was
sixteen. A touching picture. The return of the old native.

There, in Inverness Terrace, I abode for some months, remembering
Bloomsbury, and marvelling how two districts with but a few miles
between them could have inhabitants so immeasurably different.

Bayswater! Is there no magic for you, reader, in that name? There had
been none in it for me. But I'm not at all sure that it won't be found
graven on my heart--graven there by the feeble hand of Bloomsbury.

Is it the climate that makes the difference? Bayswater is on a higher
level, certainly. Or is it the soil? Bloomsbury, I am sure, is on
clay, and Bayswater on gravel. Or is it the presence of Kensington
Gardens? As is the river to Chelsea, so is (or are?) Kensington
Gardens to Bayswater--exhilarating, purging, cobweb-preventing,
spirit-of-village preserving. Even in the darkest days of the autumnal
crisis the mien of the inhabitants was suggestive of Merrie England.
Swinging was their gait, bright were their eyes, clear their
complexions, obviously high their spirits. The scene was Arcadian, the
scene seemed vernal. The young women hadn't masked their faces with
make-up nor plucked out their eyebrows, and weren't smoking, and were
mostly wheeling perambulators with babies in them. The young men
accompanying them seemed not to have a care in the world, and were
mostly wearing Old School Ties. And the old people looked quite young.
Time does not age the people of Bayswater.




OLD CARTHUSIAN MEMORIES

(_1920._)


I am afraid I was never an Old Carthusian of the straitest sect. I
remember that in my first term at Oxford (A.D. 1890) I did a drawing
of Thomas Sutton, whose features had been so familiar to me during the
past five years; and under it I wrote these three elegiac couplets:


    FLORUIT innumeros Schola Carthusiana per annos,
        Olim Londinii pessima pernicies.
    FLORET in aerio jam condita vertice montis
        Quingentosque docet tristitiam pueros.
    FLOREBIT, nec non Plutonis regna manebunt.
        Altera ut agnoscam sum memor alterius.


The drawing was a gross caricature of that grand old merchant, and the
verses were an unpardonable libel on my views. I thought Charterhouse
a very fine school really. I was very glad of having been there.
But----no, I was _not_ of the straitest sect. My delight in having
been at Charterhouse was far greater than had been my delight in being
there. I was well content to be where I was: in Oxford. I am well
content to be where I am: in Rapallo. The straitest sect is never
happy. It simply can't bear the thought of having left Charterhouse.
After-life for it is one long anticlimax. It simply can't forget that
goal which Gownboys kicked in that match against Hodgsonites. It
cherishes all the old jokes about Monsieur Petilleau. It remembers how
prismatically in winter-time the morning sun used to glow through the
east window of Chapel. It would gladly be liable to write out and show
up a hundred lines or more for whatever fault it may commit. It
recalls how splendidly Prescott mi. scored off old Judson about those
decimals. It still vibrates with the thrill it felt on that Saturday
evening when the Rifle Corps brought back the Ashburton Shield from
Bisley for the fourth time running. The future leaves it cold. The
present enchants it not at all. It sees even now the black eye that
Simpson gave Thompson for calling him a rotter. And it dies with the
word Adsum on its lips.

'C'est bien beau, cet amour qui est plus fort que la mort.' But is it
not rather hard on a man's wife and children and friends? _Ought_ he
to walk backwards along the high-road of life, with his eyes ever
yearningly fixed on the more and more distant spires of his old
school? Carthusiana Domus--a beautiful phrase, yes. Let a boy at
school regard his school as a home, if he can do so, by all means. But
let him not be homesick for it ever after. I said that I was 'afraid'
I did not belong to the straitest sect. That was not quite sincere. It
was but an orator's device for conciliating his audience at the
outset. I am very glad not to be of the straitest sect, and glad also
that this sect is not (so far as I have been able to observe) a large
one. Passionately retroverted Old Etonians are common enough in my
experience; and I have known a great number of quite maudlin Old
Wykehamists. But among Old Carthusians I have noted few cases of
schoolsickness (that terrible scourge) in its more virulent forms.
Perhaps the keenly bracing air of the Surrey hilltop tends to destroy
in a lad's breast the germs of excessive sentiment. If Dr. Haig-Brown
had been an ordinary, conservative, unimaginative man, saying, 'All's
for the best in this best of all possible Greyfriars,' and had _not_
led his flock forth (in 1872, wasn't it?) to those pastures above
Godalming, perhaps we Old Carthusians would be less sanely romantic
than we are. Climate does much. Architecture also, I think, does
something. Charterhouse is very handsome. This epithet is not one
which would leap to the lips of a man beholding Eton or Winchester--or
Charterhouse in the City of London. Of such places no man would say,
'How well-adapted to the purpose in view! The very stones cry out
"Efficiency"!' Those mouldering stones and discoloured bricks, all
that decaying wood-work, strike no chord in the practical side of our
nature. They do not seem anxious to satisfy us. They seem to be
brooding over old memories. And we find ourselves brooding with them.
Had Thomas Sutton had a roving eye and adventurous spirit, like Dr.
Haig-Brown, and seen yonder hilltop, and climbed it, and said to his
stonemasons, 'It is here that ye shall build,' then, I fancy again,
there might be less sanity than there is in our Old Carthusian
romanticism. I never see Charterhouse without reflecting how good for
me were the five years I spent there. But I have not that unreasonable
emotion which comes to me when I revisit Oxford. Oxford, too, was good
for me, in its different way. Yet I do not think there of any gain I
may have had therefrom. The practical side of my nature falls into
abeyance. This happens also, to some extent, when I go to Greyfriars.
I feel there rather as an American of English ancestry may be supposed
to feel when he visits England: 'Here is the beautiful little old
cradle of my race.' But the American has to reflect that he himself
was never rocked in that cradle. He knows he has a strong American
accent. In Greyfriars I feel that I have a strong Surrey accent, and
only a rather remote kinship with Addison and Steele.

The good that those aforesaid five years did me----'isn't,' my young
readers interrupt me, 'very clear to _us_.' I was about to say that
had I been educated by a private tutor I should have become a prig and
an egoist. 'But,' say my young readers, 'isn't that just what you
_have_ become?' To a certain extent, yes, perhaps. But I should be
much worse if I hadn't been at Charterhouse. I am, moreover, much
better than my young readers suppose. When the Editor of _The
Carthusian_ asks one to write some memories, it is difficult to avoid
egoism. And I am not really priggish when I haven't a pen in my hand,
believe me. The very fact that I foresaw your distaste for what I have
written shows that I have a power of getting outside myself. That is a
very useful power. And it is a power which a shy and sensitive and
pensive little boy learns better at a public school than he could
anywhere else. A private tutor might have made me proficient in
French, in Algebra, even in Science. Of these subjects (partly, but
only partly, because I had no natural bent for them) I knew next to
nothing when I left Charterhouse. The main thing that I had learnt
there, and have not yet forgotten, was a knack of understanding my
fellow-creatures, of living in amity with them and not being rubbed
the wrong way by their faults, and not rubbing them the wrong way with
mine. I live in Italy nowadays, because I like the sun very much. But
whenever I go to England my friends are really pleased to see me. I
have not lost that good-humoured, give-and-take spirit which only the
communal life of a public school could have given me. It is often
complained that public schools tend to repress individuality in a
child. Charterhouse in the eighteen-eighties did not at all tend that
way--and doesn't, I am sure, now. Its traditions left plenty of
latitude. I was a queer child. I didn't care a brass farthing for
games. What I liked was Latin prose, Latin verse, and drawing
caricatures. Nobody bothered me to play games. Boys and masters alike
(Mr. Tod always especially) encouraged me to draw as many and as
impudent caricatures as possible. I ought to have been very happy.
But--oh, how I always longed to be grown-up! Boys are mostly not
cursed with a strong instinct towards independence; nor men mostly,
for the matter of that. I, alas, was. My lips duly said Adsum for me
at the right moment, on the appointed spot. But my heart was always
out of bounds. There was an old gentleman who used often to pass in
front of the garden of Duckites, driving a phaeton slowly up the steep
road. He wore a square-topped brown hat, he had an aquiline nose and a
drooping white moustache and an air of command, and a groom behind
him. I don't know who he was. But I knew that he could stay out as
long as he liked, and would dress for dinner, and be dining while I
sat in Banco, and be fast asleep when I was in Chapel next morning. I
wished immensely that I were he. But now, after all, I am glad that I
had to go on being myself. I rejoice that I was not able to skip even
one of the years that were so good for me. And if ever I am born into
a second incarnation ('Which Heaven forbid!' say my young readers) I
hope I shall be sent back to my old school.




THE TOP HAT

(_1940._)


'What is that?' the very young will ask; and their parents, ever quick
to correct, will say to them, 'You mean, What _was_ it?' For it is, of
course, very definitely, a thing of the past; almost a museum piece.
Indeed, some parents, those who are less than middle-aged, may not
even have heard of it. I plead guilty to finding in the past a charm
which the present lacks for me. I hasten to say, however, that this
charm is slight in comparison with that which the future would have
for me if I were youngish, for (I gather from many publicists) the
future, the post-bellum period, is to be perfectly splendid: new men,
new ideas, new policies, new cosmic outlooks, new hills and valleys,
new Old Masters, new fathers and mothers, new wines, new Old Moore's
Almanacs, new everything. But I, alas, shan't live to see much, or
perhaps anything, of all that. And I fondly strain my time-dimmed eyes
towards that backward horizon whereon stands the top hat, a black but
shining old monument.

Just _how_ old, I can't say. I do but know that it had been erected
already in the later days of Charles James Fox. He wears a top hat in
that fine portrait of him sitting in his garden, immensely corpulent,
but still full of energy and animation, of benignity and genius. He
wears it pushed cheerfully back from his brow, and it looks rather odd
in relation to his knee-breeches: a queer blend of the new and the old
century. It is a beaver hat, of course. The silken kind was a
Victorian discovery. But I think that had I been in that garden when
that portrait was in the making I should have been shocked that the
sitter was not wearing a gold-laced tricorn; for even in those days I
should not have been a great approver of current things. Fox himself,
no doubt, was very proud of the new headgear. Perhaps he himself
invented it? Had he not, a few years before, said in writing to a
friend about the fall of the Bastille, 'How much the greatest thing it
is in history! and how much the best!'? Strange that a hat that was to
symbolise all that was most static and most reputable may have been
designed by a man so dangerous!

I imagine that the Whigs, who in all things followed the beloved
Charles like sheep, were soon enthusiastic wearers of the top hat,
while the Tories looked on it with frigid horror and would none of it.
But very soon, long before the dreadful Reform Bill, they themselves
were wearing it, sullenly perhaps, but without protest. It had imposed
itself upon them, with a mysterious and inexorable power that was
somehow latent in it. It had ceased to be a sign of the times. It had
become a natural phenomenon. It seemed to be even a part of the human
body. Not merely did one hunt in it, as one still does: one fished,
one skated, one played cricket in it. One wore it throughout debates
in the Houses of Parliament, taking it off (with a wrench) only when
one rose to orate, and resuming it (with a sigh of relief) as soon as
ever one had said one's say. At routs and receptions, however great
the crush, one carried it in one's hand all the time--and one must
have been glad when, some time in the 'sixties, somebody invented the
crush-hat, the gibus, which could be held under the arm, inobtrusively
saving the situation. One kept it on one's head, even while eating
luncheon in one's club. I don't think there are any clubs now where
this custom survives. But it did survive in quite recent years at the
'In and Out', magically wafting any guest into a past age. Until quite
lately, in theatres or opera houses, when you went out to smoke in the
foyer, you always took your hat with you lest some evil thing should
befall you. And when you paid an 'afternoon call' (a habit not then
extinct) you would rather have died than not appear before your
hostess hat in hand--and gloves there too. These things you presently
placed upon the floor beside your chair, where she could still see
them, symbols of good breeding and reassuring proclamations of the
fact that you were only a visitor and hadn't come to abide with her
forever.

On Sundays the top hat acquired an even sacred significance. When a
family entered the family pew, the father, instead of kneeling down
with his wife and children for some moments, merely sat forward and
said his silent prayer into his hat. This always puzzled me. I did not
grasp the underlying theory that a prayer offered through that medium
was likely to be the more acceptable.

On Sundays at Oxford--I was going to use again the adverb 'recently',
but though the time when I was a freshman seems to me only yesterday,
it is now just half a century ago--there were still some
undergraduates who honoured the day with top hats and frock-coats. And
no undergraduate who, in defiance of proctorial regulations, dared to
pay a flying visit to London, would have dared to do so without those
urban insignia, though they invited detection on the way to the
railway station. One bespoke a cab on the eve of the adventure, and on
the morning of it one instructed the cabman to drive to the station
very quickly; and on the platform, if one espied a donnish-looking
man, one tried to look very old and irreproachable. A motor-car would
have been a great convenience. But motor-cars were not yet. And the
top hats which in later days they, as it were, bashed in, and the
accompanying frock-coats which, so to speak, they ran over, were still
vitally necessary to any young gentleman with any self-respect and
respect for London.

Or, for that matter, to any decently modest young gentleman who didn't
want to be stared at. In London even the crossing-sweepers mostly wore
top hats. The 'old-clo'-men', those hoarsely vocal perambulants, went
even further: they wore three, one rammed down on another, in token, I
suppose, of big business. The policemen had indeed long ago taken to
helmets--not, I am sure, of their own accord, but because some Home
Secretary had thought they would look more frightening. There was only
one other civilian body of men that did not follow the all-prevailing
fashion: nearly all the actors wore billicocks. The comedians tended
to wear brown ones, the tragedians black ones; and those tragedians
who were Bohemian in their way of life were apt to prefer sombreros.
The actor-manager attended rehearsals in a top hat; and a top hat
could be worn also by any actor who had played leading parts in other
theatres, and very careful was such an one to wear it, to the envy of
less illustrious members of the cast. I always wished those others
would combine to break loose and fly in the face of immemorial
etiquette, boldly encylindered. But they never fulfilled my hope.
Nowadays, I suppose, not even the most eminent and responsible of
actors rehearses in anything but what (heaven knows why) is called a
trilby. Alas, the Spirit of the Age is one that levels down, not up.

Bank-messengers, Westminster boys, the porter at either end of such
places as the Albany or Palace Gardens Terrace, are faithful among the
few. And there is of course the occasional, the spasmodic fidelity of
men going to weddings or funerals, or (in peace time) to Ascot or the
Eton and Harrow match. My heart is gladdened at sight of these? At the
risk of seeming querulous, I protest that it isn't. The males of the
Latin races are far less self-conscious than we, far more adaptable in
the matter of costume. Carnival time in any French or Italian city is
a very good time indeed. The revellers do revel in their fantastic
attire, are urged up by it to the height of high spirits. But among my
memories none is drearier than that of the Fancy Dress Balls which
used to be given in Covent Garden Opera House. The women seemed happy
enough, but the men--how woe-begone! how deeply ashamed of themselves!
The street acrobats of my childhood, in their spangles and pink
tights, acquitted themselves quite gaily throughout their professional
somersaults and other feats. But when they finished, when they fared
along the pavements to their next pitch, what shuffling figures of
embarrassment they did cut, to be sure! Not less awfully abashed by
their own appearance are the gentlemen going their way to and from
weddings or any other of those functions which involve what has
become, quite obviously, fancy dress.

Perhaps after the present war the top hat will never reappear at any
function whatsoever, even on the head of the eldest man. Perhaps it
will be used as a flower-pot in the home, filled with earth and
nourishing the bulb of a hyacinth or other domestic flower. I hope, in
the goodness of my heart, the housemaid will not handle it untenderly,
and will brush it the right way. For it is very sensitive. Its
sensibility was ever one of its great charms. It alone among hats had
a sort of soul. If one treated it well, one wasn't sure that it didn't
love one. It wasn't as expressive as one's dog, yet it had an air of
quiet devotion and humble comradeship. It had also, like one's cat, a
great dignity of its own. And it was a creature of many moods. On dull
cloudy days itself was dull, but when the sun was brightly shining, it
became radiant. If it was out in a downpour of rain, without an
umbrella, it suffered greatly: it was afflicted with a sort of black
and blue rash, most distressing to behold, and had to be nursed back
to health with tender and unremitting care. Nature herself was the
best nurse, however, during the early stages of the malady. The
patient was best left to grow quite dry by action of the air, before
being ever so gently brushed with the softest of brushes. Gradually it
became convalescent, and seemed to smile up at you while it was rubbed
slowly with a piece of silk. And anon it was well enough to be ironed.
When I was very young I used to have my hat ironed periodically at my
hatter's, like other young men. Rather a fascinating process to
watch!--the expert swiftness and sureness of it, the immense change
wrought with a violent celerity that seemed dangerous and yet did no
harm. But in later times I would not entrust my dumb friend to
hireling hands howsoever trustworthy, and he almost spoke his
gratitude to me when I purchased an iron of the kind required--or
rather two irons, a wide one for shaft and crown, a narrow one for
brim--and tentatively ironed him myself. At first my 'prentice hand
was slow and faulty, and I never did quite master the art of swirling
the curves of the iron with perfect symmetry around the crown. I must
confess also that more than once, in the early days, I miscalculated
the temperature of the iron and did grievous hurt to my friend--hurt
so grievous that though he mutely assured me that it was no matter,
and implored me not to abandon him, I had to secure a successor
instantly.

But, as I look back across the gulf that lies between me and those
Victorian and Edvardian years, I feel that I may justly claim to have
deserved the affection my hats had for me. And I hope that my young
readers will not scoff--though I fear they will--at the fulness with
which that feeling was reciprocated by me.




FENESTRALIA

(_1944._)


'The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the
lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of
his chariot?'

A vivid scene, this, is it not? You _see_ it, _hear_ it; and you are
moved by its dramatic irony, knowing what the mother does not know;
knowing what Jael has done.

'And when Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted
her face and tired her head, and looked out at a window. And as Jehu
entered in at the gate, she said, Had Imri peace that slew his master?
And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side?
who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs.'

Some dramatic irony here, too. Jezebel knows not, as do we, how
imminent her doom is. But the irony is less poignant, forasmuch as
Jezebel is not a sympathetic personage. We cannot, with the best will
in the world, feel very sorry for her. Nevertheless, her words haunt
us as do those of the mother of Sisera. Thanks, in some measure, to
Coverdale, to Tyndale? No doubt. But also because her words were
spoken, like those others, from a window.

Had either of those women been seated in a room, or walking in a
garden, or looking across a wall, we should be far less impressed.
People seen or things said indoors or out-of-doors have not the same
arresting quality as things said or people seen half-indoors,
half-out. There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as
a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to
literature. It strongly defines its content. It excludes all but what
it encloses. It firmly rivets us. In fact, it's a magic casement.

I have set eyes on many great men, in my time, and have had the
privilege of being acquainted with some of them (not of knowing them
well, understanding them well, for to do that there must be some sort
of greatness in oneself). And of all the great men whom I have merely
seen the one who impressed me most was Degas. Some forty years ago I
was passing, with a friend, through the Place Pigalle; and he,
pointing up his stick to a very tall building, pointing up to an open
window _au cinquime_--or was it _sixime_?--said, 'There's Degas.'
And there, in the distance, were the head and shoulders of a
grey-bearded man in a red bret, leaning across the sill. There Degas
was, and behind him, in there, was his studio; and behind him, there
in his old age, was his life-work; and with unageing eyes he was, I
felt sure, taking notes of the 'values' and what not of the populous
scene down below, regretting perhaps (for he had never cast his net
wide) the absence of any ballet-dancers, or jockeys, or laundry-girls,
or women sponging themselves in hip-baths; but deeply, but
passionately observing. There he was, is, and will always be for me,
framed.

Not perhaps a great, but certainly a gifted and remarkable man was Dr.
Jowett, at first and last sight of whom, driving along the Broad in a
landau, more than half a century ago, I, a freshman, experienced a
mild thrill. How much less mild must have been the thrill vouchsafed
to that party of visitors whom C. S. Calverley was showing over
Balliol many years earlier! 'There', said Calverley, 'is the Jowler's
window. And,' he added, having picked up a stone and hurled it at the
window, 'there's the Jowler.' It is thus, and thus only, that a man is
seen at his best--or, for that matter, a woman at hers. In Robert
Browning's great galaxy of women none is so vivid to me as Riccardi's
bride, and never have I passed Palazzo Riccardi without wondering
whether 'The Statue and the Bust' would ever have been written had not
Duke Ferdinand's first sight of that bride been framed in one of those
windows, that window at which he was evermore content to see her, to
leave her, day after day, as he rode by.

She, you will remember, when she was growing old, summoned to her
presence Luca della Robbia and bade him mould a portrait of her at her
habitual window, so that after her death she would still be there. And
perhaps it was her example that in later times set the fashion of
those _finte_ which were until recent years so frequently to be seen
on blank walls of Italian houses. These were not up to the standard of
'Robbia's craft so apt and strange.' They were indeed, if you will,
rather vulgar. The average leaner-out was apt to be somewhat
over-dressed in the complex mode of the eighteen-seventies,
over-frilled, over-jewelled; and her blond tresses (for, of course, to
suit the wistful taste of the Italians, she was always a _biondina_)
were rather over-blond. The curtains of her window were of a very
bright red or blue, and there was likely to be a very yellow canary in
a cage beside her. And hers was a vapid simper as she leaned forth
with one elbow on the cushioned sill, and one index finger posed upon
her cheek. There was much to be said against her; yet one misses her,
now that she's gone. She had the charm of windowhood.

I have often wondered that (barring the artless makers of those
_finte_) so few painters have used that charm, woven that spell. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, one of those few, might, with his constant striving
after 'intensity,' have been expected to be a devotee of windows; but
even he did but once avail himself of frame within frame. Once; and of
all his portraits of women, haunting as these are by reason of what he
saw in them, or transfused into them, assuredly the most haunting is
that of the head and shoulders of a cottage girl at a small lattice
window, a girl in a smock, drawing back a chequered curtain, looking
out into the morning, and (one guesses) taking in the scent of the
flowers in a small front-garden unseen by us. Behind her, unseen too,
is her room, with such little belongings in it as are hers; and, just
because it isn't visible, that room is a far better setting than those
elaborate environments of wondrous fabrics, of mediaeval bibelots and
of exotic flowers in strange bowls or vases with which Rossetti, for
the most part, endowed his models.

A great element in the charm of windows is that unless they are on the
ground-floor and you flatten your nose against the panes you cannot
see more than a very little, if anything at all, of what lies behind
them. Your imagination has free play. Do you know those tiny little
old half-length figures in waxwork at Hertford House?--those Spanish
noblemen and noblewomen of the seventeenth century, each of them
enshrined in a square box that is black outside and black inside and
has one side made of glass to allow the inmate to look, sombrely,
disdainfully out at us from what our fancy assures us is a great old
august apartment in a worthy palace? I have often gazed at them, and
never without an illusion of having been wafted back across three
centuries into Madrid, or into Seville, and of seeing this and that
great personage alive, haughtily in the flesh, at a great window.
Henry James, roaming around the Boboli Gardens, some fifty years ago,
paused and, gazing fixedly up at one of the windows of the vast stony
palace, reflected that from _it_ Medici after Medici had stood looking
out. "And the Medici were great people," he mused, as he tells us in
the essay that he presently wrote; and "the ache of the historic
spirit" in him was poignant. He would have experienced no such ache in
that room on the ground-floor of Hertford House in which I so often
stood before the windows of those minim waxworks. His historic sense
would have blest and feasted.

Playwrights, like painters, have been chary of windows. Shakespeare,
like Rossetti, used only one, once only, so far as I remember. He
seems not to have realised that words spoken from a window are thereby
as much the more effective as the person seen thereat. Stage-struck
young ladies, by some queer instinct, are aware of this fact; hence
the desire of all of them to commence as Juliet: the window will
conceal incompetence. My most vivid memory of Mrs. Patrick Campbell is
framed in the window of Mlisande. And this memory reminds me that
Mlisande's was not the only window vouchsafed to us by Maurice
Maeterlinck, and that of all his plays _Intrieur_ was the most
strangely moving and haunting. The foreground of the stage is a garden
in the dusk of night. In the background there are the windows of a
lighted room, in which, clearly visible, are the father and mother and
sisters of a girl whose drowned body, as we know from the hushed and
broken talk of the men and women in the garden, is being brought from
the river. The mother and father and sister will soon know what is
known to us. The action of the piece lasts no more than half-an-hour.
But at the end of it one seems to have suffered a very long period of
pity and awe.

Let me pass on to another play, in itself less remarkable than
_Intrieur_, but far more famous and more popular. Its author is
nameless, its action is crudely barbarous, its dialogue is but shrill
incoherent gibberish. Yet it has for all of us, whenever we come
across it, a perennial fascination. How can we account for that?
Easily enough. The whole drama is enacted in a window-frame, the frame
of the one and only window in Punch's strange old portable house.

Politicians, please note. The gift of oratory has been conferred on
few of you; nor are many of you able to express yourselves fluently,
accurately, and without grievous triteness. Think how much less
restive your audiences would be if you spoke to them through a window!
My temperament was conservative even in my youth. My mind, moreover,
was ossified years ago. I abominate all alterations. But for your
sakes I do hope you will insist that St. Stephen's new Chamber shall
have a small inner structure, simple or ornate, with a window through
which all speeches shall be delivered. Let me also commend to you a
similar device on the platforms of Town Halls. Even that baker's dozen
of you who _can_ speak with the tongue of men and angels, and can hold
their constituents or their fellow-Members spellbound, would find
their triumphs enhanced by my scheme. I suppose that the greatest
English orator in the nineteenth century was Mr. Gladstone; and I take
it to have been the peak of his achievements in the spoken word that
on a bitterly cold afternoon, and on Blackheath Common, at the time of
the Bulgarian Atrocities, he dominated and swayed for one hour and a
half a gathering of not less than six thousand persons, most of whom
had violently booed him at the outset of his speech. There, indeed,
was a man who could dispense with windows. Yet, in later years, in the
Midlothian phase of his career, he made frequent use of them. And I
feel sure his greatest effects were made in those successive railway
stations where, to serried throngs, he spoke burning words from the
window of a railway-carriage, on his way northward or southward. I can
see that ivory face and that silvery hair; and those dark flashing
eyes looking forth. Would that I had been there to hear the
organ-music of the voice!

Gladstone's great rival and antithesis was no man for mobs, and
excelled only in the Chamber. But he did have one great success in
presence of a multitude. I refer to the one and only occasion on which
he spoke from a window. I wish I had been old enough to be in the
crowd down to which, from a frame on the first floor of 10 Downing
Street, he made his pronouncement about Peace with Honour. I should
like also, of course, to have heard him in parliamentary debate. I
was once told by an old gentleman who had sat on the back benches, as
a Conservative member, when Mr. Disraeli was Leader of the House, that
sphinx-like though the face was to all beholders the great debater's
back was very expressive--the movements of the shoulders, of the
elbows and the hips vividly illustrating his words. But even in repose
a back, if it be of the right kind, can be eloquent--such a back as
Goethe's, for example. Do you know that sketch which Johann Tischbein
made in one of the bedrooms of a Roman inn, while Goethe was leaning
out of the window and looking down to the street below? It is a
graceful, a forceful, and a noble back that we see there in that
bedroom. Had Napoleon been there to see it, he would have murmured, as
you know he did when he saw Goethe face to face at Weimar in later
years, 'Voil un homme!' It is moreover the back of a man rapt in
contemplation, rapt in the joy of being, at last, in the city of his
dreams; a man avidly observing, learning, storing up. He is wearing
slippers, he has not yet put on his waistcoat nor buttoned his
breeches at the knees. His toilet can wait. His passionate curiosity
cannot. It is as intimate, as significant a portrait as ever was made
of one man by another.

I like to think that it may have been made on Goethe's very first
morning in Rome, and that he had arrived overnight. In visiting a city
that you have never yet seen it is well to arrive at night, for sake
of the peculiar excitement of next morning's awakening to it--the
queer deep thrill of your prospection into whatever street or square
underlies your window, presaging all else that will be seen later. A
square is preferable to a street; a populous old spacious square, set
with statues and animated by fountains; somewhere in Italy, for
choice. Such a square is a good starting-point for your future
rovings; and to it from them you will always return with a feeling of
affection, and will spend much time at that window of yours, fondly.
But I beg your pardon for dogmatising about you. When I said _you_, I
meant _I_. You perhaps are an ardent sight-seer, a scrupulous examiner
of aisles and sacristies and side-chapels, an indefatigable turner-in
at turnstiles of museums and picture-galleries and the like. I'm an
alfrescoist. The life of the city, and the architectural background
against which that life is lived, suffice my soul while I rove around,
or merely lean forth from the window that is, for the time being,
mine. Merely? I take back that word. One is more observant from one's
coign of vantage up there, and all that is to be seen stands out more
clearly, and one's mind is more sensitive, than when one pads the hoof
down there.

'The last time I saw Paris'--otherwise than from the ceinture
railway--abides with me more vividly and delightfully than any of the
previous times. Yet I saw but one aspect of the city's life. You know
the huge grey faade of the Gare du Nord, and may have noted that it
is adorned (or at any rate weighted) with rows of proportionately huge
statues, one on each side of every window, symbolising the Continents,
and the principal French provinces and cities, and Liberty, I think,
and Justice, and many other things of national or universal import.
But you may not be aware that all the windows on the first floor are
those of an hotel, an hotel that occupies this one floor only, and
consists of twelve vast bedrooms (each with a small anteroom and a
bathroom), and nothing else. Behind the bedrooms runs a corridor whose
opposite side has windows through which you see, far down, the many
platforms of the station and the steam of arriving and departing
trains. These windows are of thick double glass. The corridor is a
quiet one. Little locomotives are seen and not heard. But the bedrooms
are the great point. They seem to have been built for giants and
giantesses, so vast are their ancient wardrobes, dressing-tables, and
beds; and each of their two windows is in proportion to the stone
figure that stands on either side of it, planting a colossal foot
upon the sill. If I remember rightly, it was from between the ankle of
a masculine Africa and of a feminine Marseilles that I looked forth
early on my first morning, and saw a torrent of innumerable young
human backs, flooding across the square beneath and along the straight
wide Rue Lafayette beyond. The fulness and swiftness of it made me
gasp--and kept me gasping, while in the station behind me,
incessantly, for more than an hour and a half, trainload after
trainload of young men and women from the banlieue was disgorged into
the capital. The maidens outnumbered the youths by about three or four
to one, it seemed to me; and yet they were one maiden, so identically
alike were they in their cloche hats and knee-deep skirts and
flesh-coloured stockings, and in virtue of that erectly tripping gait
which Paris teaches while London inculcates an unsteady slouch. One
maiden, yet hundreds and thousands of maidens, each with a soul of her
own, and a home of her own, and earning her own wages. Bewildering!
Having seen that sight, I needed no other. During the three or four
days of my sojourn I didn't bother to go anywhere, except for meals in
a little restaurant hard by, famous for its oysters and its
bouillabaisse. I spent my time in reading newspapers and books, and in
looking forward to the early morrow's renewal of the incalculable
torrent.

From some windows one can gaze and be rapt at any hour of the day,
even though no human being is to be seen from them. From any window,
for instance, that looks out on to the sea. For many years I lived in
a little house that looks down to what a great poet, reared beside
Northumbrian breakers, rudely called 'the tideless dolorous midland
sea.' It has a tide really (though not perhaps a very great one), and
its aspect is constantly changing, and I was never tired of watching
it and its moods. I remember, too, with affection, the little bedroom
in an old farm-house at Pagham, where I abode for some weeks of the
autumn after the last war. There were a few stairs up to the bedroom,
but the window was so placed that its sill was no more than five feet
or so above the level of the ground. Outside there was nothing to be
seen but a large field of ripening barley. The sea was quite near, but
invisible. One was all alone with the barley, which grew in a friendly
eager manner right up against the wall of the farm-house, inviting one
to lean down and touch its ears.

Let not such memories imply any disparagement of quite ordinary
windows--street windows, with recurrent glimpses of neighbours
opposite. I am glad that from the windows of my nursery in a Victorian
cul-de-sac I knew by sight various other children, and their nurses,
and their parents. I had no great desire to know them outside their
frames. I think I had a shrewd suspicion that they were not really so
interesting and so exciting as my fancy made them. In my adolescence
no neighbours were to be seen. Nevertheless, I was fond of my bedroom
window, from which I could gaze in a moralising manner over the
multitude of tombstones in what had been throughout the eighteenth
century the burial-ground of St. George's, Hanover Square; and I was
still fonder of my sitting-room window, from which I could watch, year
after year, the budding of the leaves in Hyde Park, and their prime,
and their decline and fall. Trees are of course the best thing Nature
has to show us; and in London one values them far more than one does
elsewhere. I missed them sorely when, in later years, I lived in a
street again. The faces at the windows over the way were unchanging,
were unaffected by the sequence of the seasons. Also, alas, my talent
for weaving fancies was not what it once had been. Still, I was a
frequent looker-forth--especially on Thursdays. I had become a
professional writer. I wrote a weekly article for _The Saturday
Review_; and Thursday was the day on which I did it; and the doing
was never so easy as I sometimes hoped it might be: I had never, poor
wretch, acquired one scrap of professional facility. I often doubted
whether I had in my mind enough to fill the two columns that were
expected of me. I sometimes found that I had got ahead of my argument,
or even that I was flatly contradicting something that I had said at
the outset, or that my meaning was obscure even to myself. At such
crises I would rise from my desk and take, as it were, refuge at the
window, with brows knitted, and chin tightly clasped between finger
and thumb. I would envy the hansom cabmen as they flashed by below me.
I would envy some old lady leading a dog on a leash. I would envy her
dog.

'And if it was thus, thus in the prime of me,' need I say that the
composition of what you have just been reading or skipping was not
done without much recourse to a window?




T. FENNING DODWORTH

(_1922._)


This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the street.
But it is a name highly esteemed by men whose good opinion is most
worth having. When the idols of our market-place shall have been
jerked from their pedestals by irreverent Time, Fenning Dodworth will
not be utterly forgotten. His name will crop up _passim_, and
honourably, in the pages of whatever Grevilles and Creeveys we have
had among us during the past thirty years.--'Met Fenning Dodworth in
Pall Mall this morning. He told me he had it on the best authority
that St. John Brodrick would not be put up to speak on the Second
Reading.'--'Heard an amusing and characteristic _mot_ of Fenning
Dodworth's. He was dining with some other men at E. Beckett's one
night last week, when the conversation turned on Winston's speech at
Oldham. Beckett said, "Whatever Winston's faults may be, he has
genius." "That," said Dodworth, in the silence that ensued, "is a
proposition on which I should like to meditate before endorsing it."
Collapse of Beckett!'--'Sat next to Dodworth at the Cordwainers'
dinner. He said that he did not at all like the look of things in the
Far East. Later in the evening I asked him point-blank whether the
phrase "A Government of Pecksniffs," which has been going the rounds,
had been coined by him. "It may have been," he said drily.
Characteristic!'

Dodworth's wit is undeniable. It is not, certainly, of the kind that I
like best and rate highest--the kind that pierces without leaving a
wound. Dodworth's shafts are barbed, and, though it were too much to
say that they are poisoned, assuredly they have been dipped in very
caustic acids. And he has not humour. At least, if he has, he uses it
sparingly, and never at all in my presence. But humour, delightful
though it is for current purposes, lacks durability. There are
fashions in humour, and they are always changing. Wit, on the other
hand, being a hard and clean-cut thing, is always as good as new.
Dodworth's gems, set in the golden tissue of private journals given to
the world, will have lost nothing of their flash. And among readers of
those journals there will be a great desire to know what Dodworth
himself was like. Keepers of journals are so apt to omit that sort of
thing. What faces, complexions, girths, heights, gaits, voices,
gestures, tricks of manner, shirt-studs, preferences in food and wine,
had the more or less eminent men who were forever pouring into the
diarist's ear their hopeful or fearful conjectures about to-morrow
night's Division? The diarist knew, and had therefore no need to tell
himself. But _we_ don't know, and we want to know. That Division was a
turning-point in the world's history? No doubt. Those more or less
eminent men are dust? Alas, yes. But they were flesh and blood to the
diarist, and he could have made them so to us, too. It may be that the
diarists of our own day have held in mind the omissions of their
fore-runners, and make a point of telling themselves just the things
that are a matter of course to them. But it may be otherwise. So I
insert here, for posterity, a note or two on the surface of Fenning
Dodworth--who, quite apart from his wit, seems to me one of the most
remarkable, the strongest and, in a way, most successful men of our
time.

Dignity, a Roman dignity, is the keynote of his appearance. This is
undoubtedly one of the causes of his success. Is it also, I sometimes
ask myself, partly a result of his success? But no. Twenty years ago
(when first I made his acquaintance) he was as impressive as he is, at
the age of sixty, now. Moreover, had his mind any knack to remould
his body, surely he would be taller. He remains very far below the
middle height. But he carries his head high, thus envisaging the more
easily the ruck of common objects, and making on such of those objects
as are animate the kind of effect which his unaided stature might
preclude. One of his eyebrows is slightly raised; the other is
slightly lowered, to hold in position a black-rimmed single eyeglass.
His nose is magnificently Roman. His lips are small, firm, admirably
chiselled, and every word that falls from them is very precisely
articulated. His chin is very strong, and his chest (in proportion to
his height) deep. He has the neatest of hands and feet. Draped in a
toga, and without his monocle, he might pass for a statuette of
Seneca. But he prefers and affects a more recent style of costume--the
style, somewhat, of the Victorian statesmen who flourished in his
youth: a frock-coat and a rather large top-hat, a collar well-open at
the throat, and round it a riband of black silk tied in a loose bow.
He is a good judge (and, I take it, the sole survivor among judges) of
sherry. Nor is this the only way in which he imparts agreeably the
flavour of a past age. In Thackeray, in Trollope, in the old volumes
of _Punch_, you will have found a wealth of testimony to the fact that
persons of high importance, meeting persons of slight importance,
often did not shake hands, but offered a finger or two to be shaken.
Incredible, nevertheless? Then perhaps you will not believe me when I
say that I have been offered two fingers by Dodworth. Indignantly you
ask whether I shook them. I avoid your eye, I evade your question, I
do but say that I am very susceptible to--well, to greatness.

The proof, for me, of Dodworth's greatness is in what he has achieved.
He has made so much out of so little. Many men have been ten times
more successful (in the coarse sense of that word) without winning a
tithe of what he has won. It is often said that nothing succeeds like
success. Dodworth's career offers a corrective of such cynicism--or
would do so if his case were a common one. I admit that to have
excelled in some undertaking is not always needed for the making of a
great prestige. Dukes and princes are not without honour even if they
have done nothing--or even if they shall have tried to do something
and failed. Dodworth was not born exempt from the advisability of
doing something. '_b._ 12. Feb. 1860, _o.s._ of J. Dodworth and
Rachel, _e.d._ of W. K. Fenning, of Norwich.' Thus does he speak, in
_Who's Who_, of his origin; and as he is (albeit less a toady than any
man I know) one of the most finished snobs I have ever met, his
reticence tells much. Old Mr. Dodworth was of some town so mean that
it is not mentionable. And what did he do there? What, for that
matter, did old Mr. Fenning do at Norwich? Something dreadful, you may
be sure, from the social standpoint. What school was the young
Dodworth sent to? Obviously to some school, else we should find
'_Educ_: privately.' There is no mention of any school. The boy went
to some school that is unmentionable. But it may be surmised that he
did well there, for we do find '_Educ_: Won open scholarship at Queens
Coll., Oxford, 1879.' A presage, this, of coarse successes. But mark
the sequel! 'Second Class in Classical Mods., 1881; Third Class, Lit.
Hum., 1883. Treasurer of Union, 1882.' He was thrice a candidate for
the Presidency of the Union; and I happen to have met in later years
two of his successful opponents, both of them men rather prominent in
public life to-day. One of them told me that Dodworth's speeches were
the wittiest ever heard in the Union 'or, I do believe, anywhere
else'; the other described them as the most closely reasoned. And
neither of these men spoke of Fenning Dodworth as one who had not
lived up to his early promise. They seemed to pride themselves,
rather, on having always foreseen his ascendancy.

Men prominent in public life are mostly hard to converse with. They
lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront
them with their own great themes. I have found that the best way to
put them at their ease, to make them expand and glow, is to mention
Fenning Dodworth. They are all, from their various standpoints, of one
mind about him. Judges think he would have been an ornament to the
Bench, statesmen wish he were in the Cabinet, diplomatists wish he
were one of them, and wish he could be at Tokyo or Pekin or wherever
at the moment his grasp of things in the Far East and his unfailing
dislike of the look of them would be most obviously invaluable. And
all these gods console themselves with anecdotes of his wit--some
mordant thing he said years ago, some equally mordant thing he said
last week. 'I remember,' a Judge will tell you, 'one night at mess on
the Northern Circuit, somebody said "I call Bosanquet a very strong
man in Nisi Prius." Dodworth looked at him in that queer dry way of
his, and said "Ah! I should hardly go so far as that."' The judge will
then throw himself back in his chair and alarm you with symptoms of
choking. If you ask him why Dodworth did not remain at the Bar, the
answer will be that he got so few briefs: 'He was the best all-round
Junior I ever heard, but he wasn't a man for the jury: you can't saw a
plank of wood with a razor. Pity he didn't practise in Chancery! But I
suppose he was right to devote himself to politics. He's had more
scope there.'

He has not, certainly, been cramped. For him there has been no durance
within the four walls of the House of Commons. He contested (I quote
again his narrative in _Who's Who_) 'East Grinstead, 1888; Dulwich,
1890; Skipton, 1891; Cannock, 1893; Haggerston, 1897; Pontypool, 1898;
Peebles, 1900.' He escaped, every time, the evils of election. (And
his good angel stood not less close to him on the three occasions when
he offered himself as candidate for the London County Council.)
Voters, like jurors, would not rise to him. At length it was borne in
even on the leaders of his party that they must after all be content
to rely on his pen rather than on his tongue. 'Has been,' he says in
_Who's Who_, 'for many years a contributor to the leading reviews.'
That is so. Those reviews are not edited by the vulgar. Dodworth's
MSS. have always been printed. I used to read articles by him when I
was yet a schoolboy, and to wonder whether the Liberal Party would
ever again hold up its hideous head. I remember one entitled 'The
Franchise Bill--And After,' and another entitled 'The Home Rule
Peril--And After.' Both seemed to me splendid, partly perhaps because
of their titles. Dodworth was, I believe, the first publicist to use
that magical affix, that somehow statesmanlike, mysterious, intriguing
formula, '--And After.' In later years I began to think him narrow in
his views. I became a prey to that sentimentalism from which in one's
schooldays one is immune, and ceased to regard the ideas of the
Liberal Party as perverse. Dodworth as a political thinker seemed to
me lacking in generosity, lacking even (despite his invariable '--And
After') in foresight. But the older I grew, and the less capable of
his doctrine, the more surely did I appreciate his command of literary
form. Losing the taste which undergraduates have for conceits and
florid graces, I rendered justice to the sombre astringency of
Dodworth's prose. Whatever his theme, whatever the Liberal Party was
in office proposing, or in opposition opposing, his article was
substantially the same as every other article he had written; but,
like some masterpiece in music, it never palled. With perfect sobriety
and fairness he would state the arguments on which the Liberal
spokesmen had been basing their case; he would make these _seem_ quite
unanswerable; but then, suddenly, like a panther crouching to spring,
he would pause, he would begin a new paragraph: What are the facts?
The panther had sprung. It was always a great moment. I usually
skipped the forthcoming facts and went on to the point where Dodworth
worked back to first principles and historic parallels and (best of
all) quotations from the mighty dead. He was always very adept in what
may be called the suspensive method of quotation. 'It was written long
ago, by one who saw further and grasped more firmly than is given to
most men to see and to grasp, that "the fate of nations is in the
conscience of their rulers." It is for us to ask ourselves whether, in
saying this, Mr. Burke was right.' Or, 'In a speech delivered in the
Guildhall at a time when Europe stood in the shadow of great events, a
First Minister of the Crown, as to whom not a few of us are agreed in
wishing that he were alive to-day, said that the art of government lay
in the construction of safeguards. Mr. Disraeli never spoke a truer
word.' But presently, with a swoop from the past to the present, and
from the general to the particular, the scholar would be merged in the
panther, and the Liberal Party be mauled so frightfully that at last
even the panther seemed to recoil in pity for 'a Party once great' and
to wonder if some excuse could not be found for it. The excuse, the
last sentence of Dodworth's article, was usually _Quos deus vult
perdere prius dementat_; but sometimes, more simply and poignantly,
_Quos deus vult_.

Fifteen years ago it seemed to the leaders of his Party and to the
veiled prophets in their Central Office, that such a voice as his, if
it were heard daily by a vast public, would be proportionately more
potent than in its monthly addresses to the few. There was an
old-established daily newspaper whose proprietor had just died, and
his estate not yet been wound up. And there was, on one of the back
benches of the Party, a stout, silent man, middle-aged, very affluent,
a Mister. Some word in season, some word in the ear, was spoken to
this man, on a moonless night, by one of the veiled prophets. That
old-established newspaper was acquired. Dodworth was installed in the
editorial chair, gave the keynote to the staff, and wrote every night
a leading article with his own incisive pen. But 'you cannot,' as the
Judge said, 'saw a plank of wood with a razor.' To uneducated readers
the almost-daily-recurring phrase _Quos deus vult_ had no meaning.
Half-educated readers thought it meant 'The Lord watch between thee
and me when we are absent one from another.' The circulation fell by
leaps and bounds. Advertisers withdrew their advertisements. Within
six months (for the proprietor was now a Sir, and oafishly did not
want to become something better) that old-established newspaper ceased
utterly to be. 'This,' I thought, 'really is a set-back for Dodworth.'
I was far from right. The set-back was rather for myself. I received
no payment for three or four of the book-reviews that I had
contributed, and I paid two guineas for my share of the dinner offered
to Dodworth at the Savoy Hotel, and five guineas towards a portrait of
him 'in oils' by one of the oldest and worst of Royal Academicians.
This portrait was presented to him after dinner by our chairman (the
Prime Minister of that time) in a speech that would have been cloying
if it had been more fluent. Dodworth bandied no compliments. This was
a private occasion, and he lived up to his reputation of being
privately as caustic about his friends as he was publicly about his
foes. He 'twitted' his friend the Prime Minister with one thing and
another, reducing that statesman and the whole company to paroxysms of
appreciation. . . . 'Our chairman has said that he will continue to do
what in him lies to help the cause that we all have at heart (hear,
hear). Well, wherever there is a cause there is also an effect
(laughter). I hope that the effect in this instance will be of the
kind that we all desiderate (much laughter). I do not say that it will
be, I only say I hope that it will be (hysterics).' I wish I could
recall more of what Dodworth said. Every one agreed that he was in his
best vein and had never been more pungent.

Two or three years later I attended another banquet at which he was
the guest of the evening--a banquet at the Hotel Cecil, offered by the
Playgoers' Club. He had written a three-act comedy: 'The
Antagonists--A Satire on Certain Aspects of Political Life.' This had
been instantly snapped up, and soon produced, with a very strong cast,
by Sir George Alexander. All the leaders of both parties in both
Houses were present on the first night, and many of them (rashly, so
weak were they with laughter) were present also on the second, third
and fourth nights, and would probably have been present on other
nights, too; but (such was the absenteeism of the vulgar) there were
no other nights. Dodworth had again not sawn the plank. But it was
clear to me, a week later, on the Sunday evening fixed--some time
previously--for the banquet, that the edge of his razor was quite
unblunted. In responding to the speech of the President (who had said
nothing to imply that the play was not still running), Dodworth
taunted us, very tartly, with our failure to arrest the decay of
dramatic art by elevating the taste of the public. Had he been less
witty, he might rather have spoilt our evening, so deep did he plant
in us a sense of our failure. His own peculiar strength was never
better attested than when, later in the evening, Alexander rose and
announced with pride that he had that morning secured from his friend
Fenning Dodworth the promise to write another comedy for the St.
James's Theatre.

As this was never performed, I am quite sure it was never written. And
I think the cause of the unfulfilment is to be found in the history of
our time. Politics had now become too tense and terrible for the
lighter use of Dodworth's pen. After the death of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman 'a Party once great' cast off what old remnants of
decency had clung to it. Mr. Lloyd George composed a Budget. The Lords
rejected it. Mr. Asquith introduced the Parliament Bill. Those were
stirring times; and during them, as it seemed to me, Dodworth was
greater, aye! and happier, than he had ever been. Constitutional
points and precedents had always lain very near to his heart. In them
he had always both publicly and privately abounded. His dislike of the
look of things in the Far East had never been more than skin-deep.
Such themes as the Reform Bill of 1832 had ever touched him to far
finer issues. The fiscal problems raised by Mr. Chamberlain, strongly
though he had backed Mr. Chamberlain's solution of them, had left in
abeyance what was best in him. The desirability of enriching some rich
manufacturers cannot be expressed in the grand manner. Mr. Asquith's
desire to limit the Lords' veto was a worthy theme. Month followed
month. I soon lost count of Dodworth's articles. 'The Assault on the
Constitution--And After,' 'The Betrayal--And After,' 'The End of All
Things--And After,' are the only three that I recall. Enough that he
was at his best in all of them, and ended every one of them with the
inference that Mr. Asquith (one of his staunchest though most
reluctant admirers) was mad.

I had the good fortune to meet him constantly in those days of crisis.
I hardly know how this was. I did not seek him out. It seemed simply
that he had become ubiquitous. Maybe his zest had multiplied him by
100 or so, enabling him to be in as many places at once. He looked
younger. He talked more quickly than was his wont, though with an
elocution as impeccable as ever. He had none of those austere, prim
silences for which he was so feared. He was a bard. His command of the
nobler, the statesmanlike kind of slang, and his unction in the use of
it, had never been so mesmeric. 'If the Sovereign sent for the P. M.
and said "I shall do nothing till the case arises," what could the P.
M. say? Nothing. On the other hand, if the P. M. sought audience
to-morrow _with a view to a contingent assurance_, and the Sovereign
said "That's all very well, but what d'you hypothecate?" and the P. M.
simply referred him back to what Mr. G. said when The Buffalo was
threatening to throw out the Franchise of '85--_then_ what? The
Sovereign would be in a damned ticklish position. And the only way out
of it', etc. Little wonder that agd ears played truant at his tales,
and younger hearings were quite ravishd, so sweet and voluble was his
discourse.

Alas, the Sovereign did not slip through whatever loophole it was that
Dodworth descried. The P. M. did not climb down. The Buffalo did not
rise from the grave. Lord L. sold the pass. The backwoodsmen went back
to the backwoods. Dodworth was left sitting among the ruins of the
Constitution. But the position suited him. He was still in his
element, and great. It was at the outbreak of the War that I feared
there might be no more of him. And there was, indeed, less. No longer
young, he did not acquire more than a smattering of the military
idiom, nor any complete grasp of strategy. But he was ever in close
touch with the War Office and with G.H.Q., and was still fairly
oracular. Several times in the last year of the conflict, he visited
(with temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel) certain sectors of the
Western Front and made speeches to the men in the trenches, declaring
himself well-satisfied with their _morale_, and being very caustic
about the enemy; but it may be doubted whether he, whose spell had
never worked on the man in the street, was fully relished by the men
in the trenches. _Non omni omnia._ Colonel Dodworth was formed for
successes of the more exquisite kind. I think the Ministry of
Information erred in supposing that his article, 'Pax Britannica--And
After,' would be of immense use all the world over. But the error was
a generous one. The article was translated into thirty-seven foreign
languages and fifty-eight foreign dialects. Twelve million copies of
it were printed on hand-woven paper, and these were despatched in a
series of special trains to a southern port. The Admiralty, at the
last moment, could not supply transport for them, and the local
authorities complained of them that they blocked the dock. The matter
was referred to the Ministry of Reconstruction, which purchased a
wheat-field twenty miles inland and erected on it a large shed of
concrete and steel for the reception of Dodworth's pamphlets, pending
distribution. This shed was nearly finished at the moment when the
Armistice was signed, and it was finished soon after. Whether the
pamphlets are in it, or just where they are, I do not know. Blame whom
you will. I care not. Dodworth had even in the War another of his
exquisite successes.

Yet I am glad for him that we have Peace. At first I was afraid it
might be bad for him. We had been promised a new world; and to that,
though he had come so well through the War, I feared he would not be
able to adjust himself. The new world was to be, in many respects,
rather dreadful--a benign cataclysm, but still a cataclysm, and
Dodworth perhaps not to be found in any of his favourite chairs when
the crystal waters subsided and the smiling land was revealed. We may
have it yet. But the danger seems to be less imminent. A few days ago
I met Dodworth in Bird-Cage Walk, and said to him something about it
seeming likely that moderate councils would prevail among the Labour
men. 'Ah,' he said in that queer dry way of his, 'it's their moderate
intelligence that's the danger.' He said it instantly (and it was
obviously not a thing he could have prepared). And the very fact that
he was able to jest once more was a heartening proof for me of his
belief that the worst was past. Another good sign was that he had
resumed his top-hat. During the last eighteen months of the War he had
worn a thing of soft black felt, which I took to be a symbol of inward
pessimism; and he had gone on wearing this long after the treaty of
Peace was signed--a retention which seemed to me equally sinister, as
a silent manifesto of unfaith in the future of our body politic. But
now he was crowned once more with a cylinder from his old Victorian
block. And a further good sign was that he was on his way to the
House. In the old days, he had been wont to occupy, whenever an
important debate was afoot, one or another of those nice seats near
the Serjeant-at-Arms. In the course of the War he had ceased from such
attendance. He had become very bitter against 'the politicians' and
especially 'the lawyer politicians.' But I suspect that what revolted
him even more was the sight of the new, the 'business' types on the
Treasury Bench--the bullet-headed men in reefer-jackets, rising to
tell the House what they were 'out for' and what they were 'up
against,' and why they had 'pushed' this and 'turned down' that, and
forgetting to address the Chair. Dodworth's return to St. Stephen's
implied for me the obsolescence of such men. I asked him what he
thought, from a tactical standpoint, of the line recently taken by the
Independent Liberals. 'I am afraid,' he said, 'there is not much hope
for these Adullamites without a Cave.' This phrase he may not have
coined on the spur of the movement. But, even so, how extraordinarily
good! It's wicked, it's unjust, it hurts, but--it seems to me even
more delicious than his description of Gladstone in '86 as 'a Moses
without a Pisgah.' I think he was pleased, in his queer dry way, by my
delight, for he said he would send me a copy of his forthcoming
book--a selection from the political articles written by him since his
earliest days. He had not, he said (quoting, I think, from his
preface), intended to resuscitate these ephemer. The idea was not his
but ----'s (he named the head of an historic firm of publishers). The
book will be out next month, and will include that most recent of his
articles, 'A Short Shrift for Sinn Fein--And After.' It will be
'remaindered,' of course, in a year or so, but will meanwhile have
taken an honoured place in every eminent man's library. By the way, I
had feared that Mr. Lloyd George, with his Celtic rather than classic
mind, made a break in the long line of Prime Ministers who have rated
Dodworth highly. I am glad to hear that at a dinner held somewhere the
night before last he impulsively rose and proposed Dodworth's health,
recalling that when he himself was a bare-legged, wild-eyed, dreamy
little lad on the Welsh mountains he read every word of Fenning
Dodworth's earlier articles as they came out, and had never forgotten
them (applause). Since those days he had met Dodworth many a time in
the valley and got some resounding whacks (laughter). But he always
felt, and more than ever he felt to-night, that Dodworth and he were
destined to walk hand in hand on the heights, misty though those
heights might be now, and hail together the glory of the sunrise that,
sooner or later, had got to come (prolonged applause). My informant
tells me that of all the eyes around the table Dodworth's alone were
dry, and maintains that in returning thanks he ought not to have been
pungent. I disagree. I want no signs of weakness in dear old Dodworth.

_Dear_ old Dodworth? Well, no--and yet _yes_, too. I don't like him,
perhaps; but there is no man whom I so delight to see, to watch, and
to think of. I hope he will not predecease me. Of one thing I am sure:
he will die game, and his last words will be '--And After?' and will
be spoken pungently. And of another thing I am sure; the eminent men
of all kinds will sign a petition about him to the Dean of
Westminster. But there is a tradition of Philistinism in that Deanery.
The voices of the eminent fall on deaf ears there, and only the roar
of the man in the street is heard. Dodworth will, characteristically,
not have the coarse success of lying in our Abbey. His monument will
be found--piecemeal, indeed, but great, but glittering--in the diaries
which I mentioned at the outset of this little essay in his honour.




[End of _Mainly on the Air_ by Max Beerbohm]
