that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking us in the still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting his views on recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how trivial were such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to be beaten in getting my despatch to the telegraph wire, that once, when three pontoons of the bridge across the Danube were sunk, he crossed the gap hand over hand by the hand-rope, sloshing down with the current as the slack of the rope gave to his weight! Andreas became quite an institution in the Russian camp. When Ignatieff, the Tsar’s intimate, the great diplomatist who has now curiously fizzled out, would honour us by partaking sometimes of afternoon tea in our tent, he would call Andreas by his name and call him “Molodetz”–the Russian for “brave fellow.” In the Servian campaign Dochtouroff had got him the Takova cross, which Andreas sported with great pride, and Ignatieff used to tell him that the Tsar was seriously thinking of conferring on him the Cross of St. George, badinage which Andreas took as dead earnest. MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take greater care of his invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity occurred to him, the campaign would _ipso facto_ come to an end. Andreas knew that MacGahan was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly droll how he purred and bridled under the light touch of that genial humourist, whose merits his own countrymen, to my thinking, have never adequately recognised. The old story of a prophet having scant honour in his own country.
[Illustration: “CROSSED THE GAP HAND OVER HAND.”]
After the long strain of the desperate but futile attack made by the Russians on Plevna in the early part of the September of the war, I fell a victim to the malarial fever of the Lower Danube, and had to be invalided back to Bucharest. The illness grew upon me, and my condition became very serious. Worthy Andreas nursed me with great tenderness and assiduity in the lodgings to which I had been brought, since they would not accept a fever patient at Brofft’s. After some days of wretchedness I became delirious, and, of course, lost consciousness; my last recollection was of Andreas wetting my parched lips with lemonade. When I recovered my senses, and looked out feebly, there was nobody in the room. How long I had been unconscious I had no idea. I lay there in a half stupor till evening, unable from weakness to summon any assistance. In the dusk came the English doctor who had been attending me. “Where is Andreas?” he asked. I could not tell him. “He was here last night,” he said; “you have been delirious for seven days.” The woman of the house was summoned. She had not seen Andreas since the previous night, but, busy about her own domestic affairs, had no suspicion until she entered the room that Andreas was not with me still.
Andreas never returned. It appeared that he had taken away all his belongings. One day, when gradually mending, I put my hand under the pillow with intent to find my watch, which was an heirloom, and wind it up. I could find no watch. No more could I find the bag of ducats which was alongside the watch before I lost my senses. Search was made throughout the room without success, and, with whatever reluctance to believe a thing so utterly unlikely, I could not refrain from the conviction that Andreas must have carried off both money and watch. The thought caused a relapse, but at length I attained convalescence, and was able to drive out. But the doctor was firm that during the now imminent winter I was not to return to the field. Fortunately, my able colleagues, MacGahan and Millet, were there; and I was therefore the less distressed by Dr. —-‘s peremptory sentence on me. I was condemned to return to England as soon as I should be strong enough to travel.
When I had to leave the Plevna front, my colleagues temporarily took charge of my field equipment. But I had brought back to Bucharest my best riding horse, and during my illness he had been standing at livery in the stables of the English Tramway Company. Determining now on the melancholy necessity of selling an animal which had on many a hard day and many a long night-ride served me staunchly, I drove to the stables, and instructed the manager to sell my horse. “Your horse!” he exclaimed, in evident surprise; “your horse was sold weeks ago! Your man, Andreas, came here with a message that we were to dispose of it; and I sold it next day to General Todleben on his way through Bucharest to take the command before Plevna. It fetched a good price, 105 ducats, more than you gave for it; Andreas called for the money, and, of course, I gave it to him.”
So Andreas was thief and rogue–deliberate thief and rogue. I was angry, but I was yet more heart-sorry that so fine and true a native should have thus fallen. Just as I was leaving Bucharest for England, a letter came to me from a friend in Galatz, a commercial city of Roumania, near the mouth of the Danube. Its P.S. only is worth quoting. “So you have parted with your man, Andreas. I thought from what you had told me that you would retain him for life. He is here now, I saw him drunk in the street yesterday. He told Kennedy that he believed you were dead.”
[Illustration: “ANDREAS DROPPED ON HIS KNEES.”]
I went straight to Galatz, a long half-day’s journey. Andreas was not hard to find; he was smoking in the “Concordia” saloon. I saw him before he saw me; he had a furtive air, he was pallid and his lips twitched; he looked to me on the verge of _delirium tremens_. I approached him from behind, and uttered the one word, “Andreas!” At the word, he started as if he had been shot, spun round, dropped on his knees, with his hands raised beseechingly, and cried in a broken voice, “Before God, master, I thought you were dead, else I should never have done it! I have not had a happy moment since I threw away my good name–I could not go home! Kill me, send me to prison, punish me how you choose. I shall rejoice to suffer!” And the poor wretch grovelled before me on his stomach.
I had meant to punish him; but he was too broken for chastisement. I could not send to prison the man who had saved my life among the pine-trees of Djunis. I wonder if he really thought me dead–not that, if so, his act was thereby materially palliated. And I thought of two little sentences which my mother taught me when I was a child: “Judge not that ye be not judged,” and “Lead us not into temptation.” I pulled the man on to his feet and grasped his hand, then with the words, “Give me my father’s watch–good-bye, Andreas. I shall remember all the good in you, and forget those last bad days.” I turned from him, and quitted the “Concordia” with a lump in my throat that I could not swallow down.
* * * * *
TOLD BY THE COLONEL.
X.
A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.
BY W. L. ALDEN.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. JACK.
“And by the way,” continued the Colonel, “a curious thing about this Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and never had any wife whatever.”
The Colonel had begun a story concerning one Josiah Wilson, which promised to be interesting, but his incidental allusion to Mr. Wilson’s matrimonial experience awakened our curiosity, and we begged him to interrupt his narrative long enough to tell us how it came to pass that Josiah was a married man who never had a wife.
[Illustration: “HOWLED FOR HELP.”]
“The marriage laws in the United States,” said the Colonel, giving his chair an increased tilt backwards, which was his usual way of beginning a fresh anecdote, “are as peculiar in their way as are the divorce laws. You would think to look at them that they would permit anybody to marry anybody else in any way that either of them might choose, but for all that they sometimes make it impossible for a man or a woman to get married. There was a couple who intended to be married in a balloon, which is a style of lunacy that is quite fashionable in some parts of the country, though I can’t see why a man should want to risk his neck in a balloon on his wedding day unless it is that it takes so much courage to be married at all that a man forgets all about such minor dangers as are connected with ballooning. The bride, the minister, and two witnesses of assorted sexes went up in the balloon at the appointed time, and, naturally, the bridegroom intended to go with them, but he accidentally caught his foot in a neglected guy-rope, and went up head downwards about twenty feet below the car. The party in the balloon could not haul him up because they could not get hold of the rope, and the bride would not consent to give up the trip, because the groom had always been a little shy, and she was afraid that, if she let him go this time, she might not be able to land him again. So the parson went on with the ceremony, and the groom made most of his responses in bad language, and howled for help when he wasn’t swearing. When the ceremony was over, the aeronaut managed to land the balloon without seriously damaging the bridegroom, but when, a year or two afterwards, the bride wanted to get her divorce, the court held that there had never been any marriage, for the reason that both the groom and the bride had not appeared together in the presence of the officiating minister, and that, furthermore, there was no provision in the law which would permit a man to be married upside down.
[Illustration: “SMITH’S BULL-DOG.”]
“But to get back to Josiah Wilson. He lived in Indiana, close to the boundary line between that State and Illinois, and he courted Melinda Smith, a young woman who lived a little way up the mountain side with her father and three brothers. The girl was anxious to be married, but her family was dead against it. You see Josiah was a Republican and a Methodist, while the Smiths were Democrats and Baptists, and, naturally, they hated each other like poison, and one night as old man Smith and Josiah met on their way to rival prayer meetings, they exchanged revolver shots, without, however, doing any harm. Then once Josiah had most of the calf of his leg taken off by the Smiths’ bull-dog, and twice the Smith boys came into the sitting-room where Josiah was calling on Melinda, and suggested to him with their shot-guns that he had better go home. Gradually Josiah and Melinda came to the conclusion that her family was resolved to discourage the match, so they determined to elope and be married without the knowledge or consent of anybody.
“One dark night Josiah carried a ladder and planted it under Melinda’s window. He had advised her to walk out of the front door, which was always left unlocked at night, but she refused, saying that if she was going to elope she should do it in the proper way, and that if Josiah had no respect for her, she had some little respect for herself. She climbed down the ladder with a good deal of difficulty, because she insisted that Josiah should help her, and also that he should stand forty yards away, for reasons connected with her ankles, and he found it rather trying to follow out these contradictory orders. However, Melinda reached the ground at last, and the pair started in a carriage that had been waiting just around a bend in the road, in company with the Methodist minister. Their plan was to drive to the next town and there to be married, but it happened that one of the Smith boys, being restless, got up in the night, and, looking out of the window, saw the ladder standing at Melinda’s window. In about twenty minutes after the young people had started, the whole Smith family and their shot-guns were following the runaways in a waggon, and gaining on them fast.
“The Methodist minister, whose hearing was unusually good, heard the sound of hoofs before Josiah noticed it, and told the young people that there was not the least doubt that they were pursued, and would be overtaken in a very few minutes. ‘And then, you know,’ he added, ‘the chances are that, being Baptists, they will shoot first, and ask for explanations afterwards. The only thing for us to do is to get the marriage ceremony over before they come up. Then they will see that opposition is of no use, and will listen to reason.’
[Illustration: “THEY WERE MARRIED.”]
“Josiah and Melinda at once consented, and the parson, noticing a little clearing in the woods on the left hand side of the road, and a flat sort of tombstone standing in the middle of it, said that he would stand on that stone and marry his young friends so quick that it would make their hair curl. He was particularly glad to meet with a handy tombstone, for he said that a tombstone was the next thing to a church, and that to be married by the side of a tomb would be almost as solemn as to be married in a minister’s study. So the party hastily descended; the parson mounted the stone; Josiah and Melinda joined hands in front of him, and they were married, and the parson had kissed the bride and pocketed his fee just as the Smiths’ waggon drove up and the Smith boys cocked their guns and covered the party. But the parson was wide awake. He had his revolver out and old man Smith covered before anybody had taken aim at him, but, instead of shooting, he remarked that he was a minister of the blessed gospel of peace; that there was no necessity for bloodshed, and that he would blow a hole through old Smith unless the Smith boys lowered their weapons and consented to argue the matter. ‘The fact is, Colonel Smith,’ said the parson, ‘you’re too late. The young people are legally married, and the sooner you accept the situation the better. I married them not two minutes ago, standing on that identical tombstone.’
[Illustration: “‘YOU’LL COME STRAIGHT HOME WITH ME.'”]
“Colonel Smith was a lawyer, and the sharpest one in that part of the country. He saw the force of the minister’s remarks, so he told the boys to put up their guns, and he shook hands with the minister. Then he inquired, in a careless sort of way, where Josiah and Melinda had stood while they were being married. The parson showed the footprints of the bride and groom, and then Colonel Smith turned to Melinda and said, ‘You’ll come straight home with me. There hasn’t been any marriage yet. That stone is the boundary mark between Indiana and Illinois, and you were standing in Indiana and that other idiot was standing in Illinois when the parson tried to marry you. Nobody can marry in two States at the same time, and I shan’t recognise the pretended marriage till a court of law compels me to do so, which will be never. I hope this will teach you the folly of fooling with Methodism. When you want to get married next time try a Baptist minister, who will know the difference between a tombstone and a boundary mark.’ There were too many Smiths, and they were too well armed to be reasoned with successfully, so the upshot was that Melinda went home with her family, and Josiah and the parson went to see a lawyer.
“The next day Josiah brought a suit for divorce against Melinda. It was a friendly suit, you understand, and his only object was to test the question of the validity of his marriage, for, of course, no man can get a divorce unless he first proves that he is married. Old man Smith conducted the case on his side, and a lawyer named Starkweather, who is now a member of the Illinois Legislature, appeared for Josiah Wilson. Colonel Smith argued that while the parson who conducted the alleged marriage ceremony could undoubtedly have married a couple in the State of Indiana, he could not marry a woman in Indiana to a man in Illinois, for the reason that the man and the woman could not be in the same place while they were in two different commonwealths, and that hence Josiah and Melinda had not legally appeared together before the officiating minister. Furthermore, he argued that the minister at the time of the pretended marriage was standing neither in Indiana nor in Illinois, but on the boundary line; that the statute defined the boundary line as ‘an imaginary line’ running from such and such a point to such and such a point, and that a minister who stands in a purely imaginative locality stands virtually nowhere, and hence cannot perform any function of his calling.
“On the other hand, Josiah’s lawyer claimed that the minister had married Melinda Smith in the State of Indiana; that consequently she must have been married to somebody, and that that somebody was unquestionably Josiah Wilson. As to the point that the minister stood in an imaginary locality because, as was alleged, he stood on the boundary line, the lawyer maintained that it was a physical impossibility that a minister weighing two hundred and fifty pounds could stand in a purely imaginative place. Moreover, he was prepared to prove that, while performing the ceremony, at least one of the minister’s feet was in the State of Indiana, which was sufficient to make him legally present in that State.
“The arguments lasted three days, and the court before which it was tried, consisting of three judges, took all the third day to deliver its verdict. It decided that Melinda Smith was legally married to some person unknown, though not to Josiah Wilson, and that Josiah Wilson was also married to some unknown woman, who was not Melinda Smith, whoever else she might be; that no marriage between the plaintiff and the defendant had ever taken place, and that no divorce could be granted, but that if either of them married anyone else, he or she would be guilty of bigamy.
[Illustration: “SHE WAS A GOOD DEAL CAST DOWN.”]
“The Smiths, with the exception of Melinda, were delighted with the decision, for it made it reasonably certain that Josiah could never be recognised as her husband. She was a good deal cast down about it, for, like every other Indiana girl, she had looked forward to being married and divorced as the natural lot of woman. Now it appeared that she was married, but in such an unsatisfactory way, that she could never have a husband, and never be divorced from anyone. As for Josiah, he was furious, but there was no help for it, the law was against him, and, as a law-abiding man, he was obliged to respect it, especially as he could not hope to kill off all four of the Smiths, if he decided to make a family feud of it; he himself having no family whatever, and no one to help him to keep up his end of the feud.
“For the next fifteen years Josiah lived a single man except in name, and Melinda mourned her hard fate and kept house for her father and brothers; but one day Josiah’s lawyer, who was by this time in the Legislature, came to him and offered to have his marriage to Melinda made legal in all respects for five hundred dollars. The lawyer was so certain that he could do this that he was willing to wait for his pay until after he had gained a verdict, and Josiah, after a little bargaining such as every self-respecting man would have made, in his place, consented to the lawyer’s terms. It seems that the lawyer had accidentally discovered that there had been a mistake in the survey of part of the boundary line between Indiana and Illinois, and at the very place where Josiah and Melinda were married, A rectification of this mistake would move the line ten feet west, and so place the spot where the pair stood during their wedding entirely within the state of Indiana. The proper steps to obtain the rectification of the boundary were taken, and it was rectified. Then Melinda in her turn began a suit for divorce against Josiah, and had no difficulty in proving the marriage and in obtaining a decree. Josiah paid the lawyer his five hundred dollars, and was overjoyed at being finally able to call his Melinda his own. But he met with a little disappointment. Now that Melinda had obtained her divorce she thought she might as well live up to it, and marry a fresh husband. So she married the Methodist minister, who had just lost his third wife, and lived happily ever afterwards.
[Illustration: “OFFERED TO HAVE HIS MARRIAGE MADE LEGAL.”]
“It was just after this that Josiah, being perhaps made a little reckless by his disappointment, became involved in the affair that I was going to tell you about when you interrupted me, and wanted to hear about his marriage. Matrimony is a mighty curious thing, and you can never tell precisely how it is going to turn out. That is one reason why I was never married but once, though I spent ten years of my life in Chicago, and had friends at bar who stood ready to obtain divorces for me at any moment and without a dollar of expense.”
* * * * *
[Illustration: IDLERS.]
* * * * *
“LIONS IN THEIR DENS.”
No. II.–GEORGE GROSSMITH AND THE HUMOUR OF HIM.
BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.
(_Photographs by Messrs. Fraddle and Young and Alfred Ellis._)
[Illustration: MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.]
A little, slight man, with a thin, clever, mobile, clean-shaven face, a sharp inquisitive nose surmounted by a perpetual pair of _pince-nez_, and a rather sarcastic mouth, from which wit and humour as light and airy as the cigarette smoke which accompanied each remark continually flowed.
Mr. George Grossmith, the well-known actor and society clown.
He stands on the hearthrug of his own special sanctum in his handsome house in Dorset Square, with his back to the fire, cigarette in his mouth, his hands now in his pockets, now waving in the air, as he vivaciously tells me the story of his busy, energetic and wonderfully interesting life.
[Illustration: MRS. GEORGE GROSSMITH.]
“I was born,” said he, “in 1847. I come of a family of actors and reciters. My father, whose portrait you see there on the wall, was a well-known lecturer and entertainer. Sixty or seventy years ago my uncle created a great sensation as a child actor, and he was commonly known as the ‘celebrated infant Roscius.’ Come out into the hall,” continued the lively little entertainer, “and I will show you some old engravings which represent him in his favourite characters. Then my brother Weedon, as you know, is, of course, a well-known actor, as well as a clever artist, and part author with myself of several sketches which have appeared in _Punch_. My eldest son now begins to display the family tendency to a most alarming extent. For my own part, I started my career as a reporter at Bow Street Police Court, a training which I have found invaluable in many respects ever since. My subsequent history as actor and society clown is so well known that I need not trouble you with it any further.”
“I suppose you find the taste of your audiences has gone up considerably within the last twenty years, do you not?”
“Why, yes,” he replied. “They wouldn’t stand to-day what they used to roar at then. My music is quite elaborate compared with the two or three chords which easily satisfied people in the sixties and early seventies. Listen to this,” continued my host, as he sat down to the _piano_ and struck a couple of very simple chords. Then he glided softly into what he termed a modern accompaniment. It was all the difference between “Ten Little Niggers” and a slumber song of Schubert.
[Illustration: MR. GROSSMITH’S HOUSE.]
“And do you find the public very critical?”
“Well,” he replied, with a smile, “they are very kind. It is your professional critic who is severe, though I can honestly say they invariably treat me well. Criticism up to a certain point is good enough. Beyond that point it is absolutely disabling to me. My father was a very severe critic. When we went out together he used to take the first half-hour, and then go to the back of the hall and criticise me. But it so hampered me by causing me to think of and consider every pose that I had to beg of him to desist. And then again, as regards criticism, I always think–it may be very conceited on my part–that I know a great deal more what the public want than my critics do. I declare to you I should have to take everything out of my sketches if I attempted to carry out all the suggestions that are made to me. I can absolutely feel the public pulse after so many years upon the platform. I am almost always right. When I first started ‘See me Dance the Polka’ it fell quite flat. I gave it up, although I felt sure it ought to go. The public then demanded it, and it went with a swing. The public had changed its mind. Not I.”
[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM.]
“And how do you prepare your sketches?” said I, as Mr. Grossmith lit another cigarette, and took up his position on the hearthrug again.
“Anyhow and anywhere the idea comes to me for a sketch. I am seated in a railway train, and I think of a sea-side sketch. I close my eyes and try to recall every single feature of interest on a crowded fashionable beach in the height of the season. Nothing is too unimportant. The way in which an old lady settles herself comfortably into her chair, the manner in which a man, especially a shy man, walks into the room, all these things, slightly exaggerated, but still true to nature, are immensely appreciated. First I have the idea, then I elaborate, sometimes for months, then I produce on the stage, and the people say, ‘How remarkable it is you should invent all this on the spur of the moment!’ That, of course, is a great compliment. The song-writing is always amusing,” continued Mr. Grossmith, as he placed in my hand a little notebook in which were suggestions and elaborations innumerable. One thing I noticed, which he himself had condemned, but which was decidedly amusing, although it has never been allowed to see the light of day:
[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM.]
“I’ve been engaged to many,
Quite a score of times at least;
I don’t think I with safety _can say_ Where I met my first _fiancee_.
Oh! ’tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all;
So I may say I have loved and _lost a lot_, And my fickleness has _cost a lot_.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Grossmith, as he leaned over me and saw what I was reading; “my better judgment told me that was not good enough for the public.”
Then came a pencilled note in this little book, “You can take a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.” “That gave me an idea,” cried Mr. Grossmith, as he sprang to his feet. “You can take a boy to the piano, but you can’t make him play.’ Thought I to myself, that would make a capital sketch. And here is how I set about it,” continued he, as he proceeded to illustrate his remarks. “Imagine a little fellow in the corner there. I then begin in dumb show to encourage him to come to the piano. ‘Come on, my boy; you know you can play that pretty piece you played yesterday. Come on, there’s a good fellow!’ Wonderful what you can do with persuasion! He refuses. I attempt to lead him to the piano. He won’t budge an inch. I carry him under my arm and seat him in front of the instrument, the audience roaring all the time. At last his mistakes are so many and so ridiculous, I lose all patience and catch him a mighty box upon the ears! Tableau!! Of course there is no boy on the platform at all, I am quite alone, but I have so thoroughly lost myself in my imagination that people have declared years after, ‘Oh! but I am quite sure you had a boy with you; why, don’t you remember how you boxed his ears?'”
[Illustration: “I ENCOURAGE HIM.”]
[Illustration: “I ATTEMPT TO LEAD HIM.”] [Illustration: “I CARRY HIM.”]
[Illustration: “I LOSE ALL PATIENCE.”]
No less marvellous than his power of acting is his power of mimicry. “I will show you how I do Irving,” said he, and in a moment the little man had ruffled his hair, had assumed to the life not only Irving’s peculiar gait, but, even more remarkable still, had managed to secure almost exactly the very expression of the great tragedian’s face.
[Illustration: “HOW I DO IRVING.”]
“Then again, I find it a good idea to take up some craze or topic of the moment. ‘The Drama on Crutches’ I wrote when the craze first arose amongst the aristocracy for going on the stage. One of the sketches which you will find outlined in that little notebook is entitled, ‘Is Music a Failure?’ and I endeavoured to answer the question by showing how popular it is among all classes of the community.” I will quote pretty freely from this outlined sketch, as it will give my readers an idea, better than anything else would do, of the manner in which Mr. Grossmith prepares his delightful sketches.
“I am not going to treat the subject seriously,” he writes, “but in my own particular, impertinent way. The question often arises–are we a musical nation? The foreigners think we are not. But where in the wide, wide world is there a country where you will hear so many organs and German bands? Where is the country, excepting ours, that can appreciate the concertina? Where, except in England, can you hear that delightful combination of harp and cornet outside a house of refreshment? The prejudice of other nations is distressing; and as for their ignorance, why, I don’t suppose Italy and Germany have even heard of the ocarino and the Jew’s harp.”
And so the sketch runs on, until, in speaking of the universal manner in which music is appreciated in England by all classes, Mr. Grossmith goes on to say: “We have made rapid strides, so have our servants. They don’t know how to dust the piano, but they can play it. Everybody plays the piano, from the Peerage to the School Board. Then look how music has crept into our homes and social circles. Besides the piano, the mother and daughters play the banjo, the son plays the first fiddle, and the father the second fiddle–as usual. I know of a Lord Mayor who plays the trombone, a clergyman who plays the big drum–that’s a nice unpretentious, giddy instrument!–and I know of any number of members of Parliament who blow their own trumpets!!” And so the notes go brightly on through many pages.
[Illustration: THE STUDY.]
[Illustration: MR. WEEDON GROSSMITH.]
“This,” explained my host, “is a fair specimen of the method I employ in preparing a drawing-room sketch. As a rule, my audiences of that class are capital. I always love a well-dressed audience, it is so cheerful. You mayn’t perhaps get as much applause as you do from the sixpenny gallery, but then applause often spoils your point. Once, however, I remember singing at a private house in the country to an odd assortment of people. I was informed that the party followed a wedding which had taken place in the morning. If it had followed a funeral it could not have been more gloomy and depressed than it was. I played the piano and the fool for three-quarters of an hour, and anything more dismal than the result it would be impossible to conceive. A temptation seized me suddenly, and I said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,–I am going to reveal to you a secret. Pray don’t let it go any further. This is supposed to be a comic entertainment. I don’t expect you to laugh at it in the least; but if, during the next sketch, you would only once oblige me with a society smile, it would give me a great deal of encouragement.’ The audience for a moment were dumbfounded. They first began to titter, then to laugh, and actually to roar, and for a time I could not proceed with the sketch. They were transformed into a capital and enthusiastic audience, and the hostess told me that both her guests and herself were most grateful to me. I am sometimes amused with the little eccentricities of people who wish to secure my services for their parties. A gentleman once wrote to me to entertain some friends of his, and, added he, ‘I trust that your sketches are strictly _comme il faut_, as I have several young daughters.’ I was so immensely tickled by this that, rightly or wrongly, I replied that my entertainments _were_ as they should be, for I was recently married, and hoped myself to have several young daughters. He wrote thanking me for this assurance, and I was to consider myself accordingly engaged. There is a story I tell in my book which will bear repetition: A young gentleman once called upon me. He explained that he was acting as a sort of ambassador for a friend of his, Mrs. —-, of Mayfair, who wished me to dine at her house. I replied that I had not the honour of the lady’s acquaintance, and, though appreciating her kind invitation, I did not see how I could very well avail myself of it. He said that Prince Somebody or other and La Comtesse de So-and-so would be dining there, and Mrs. —- would be so pleased if I would join the party, and sing a little song after dinner. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if Mrs. —- wishes to engage me professionally, that is another matter, and if I am at liberty, I will come with much pleasure.’ ‘Well,’ said the ambassador, ‘I fancy Mrs. —- is under the impression that if she includes you in her dinner party it is an understood thing that you sing afterwards.’ ‘I am afraid I do not understand that,’ I said. ‘It would not pay me to do so. I only consume about ten shillings worth of food and wine, and my terms are more than that.’ There,” said Mr. Grossmith, “could you have believed that anyone would have been so inconceivably mean and caddish?”
[Illustration: OLD ENGRAVINGS.]
[Illustration: MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.] [Illustration: MR. GEO. GROSSMITH, JUN.]
“I have had some curious experiences on tour,” he went on. “That is hard work, if you like. I have gone a four months’ tour without missing a night. It takes it out of one terribly. But it is very paying work. In the South of England I have made as much as L300 a week. My friends tried to frighten me as to the apathy of my Scotch audiences; as a matter of fact, I have no better audiences anywhere. I like performing to country audiences. I am never nervous as I am apt to be at St. James’s, where there are a number of my friends. And it is on my country tours that I have many curious experiences. Amateurs invariably call at the hotel to see me, and to ask my advice as to their powers of recitation. Some are quite hopeless, and I haven’t the heart to condemn them utterly, or to go beyond ‘I tell you quite candidly, since you ask me, that I have heard better.’ As a rule they are very quiet and modest, but now and again one encounters some fearful specimens. I remember once at a country town, which we will call Mudborough, a flashy young cad, in a very loud suit, called to see me with a parcel under his arm. He had come, he told me, to learn my opinion of his singing. He further informed me that he was known as ‘the Mudborough Grossmith.’ He didn’t have the courtesy to take off his hat; he walked up and down my room, whistling, singing, and handing me over now and again specimens of his powers as a water-colour painter. I looked at them. At last, tired of the idiot and his airs, I said, ‘I hope your musical sketches are better than you water-colour sketches.’ Nothing, however, could snub this fellow. He proceeded straightway to sing me an improved version of ‘See me Dance the Polka.’ ‘Do your audience like it?’ I asked. ‘I should think they did,’ he replied; ‘I will let you have that last verse if you like.’ I thanked him sarcastically, and at last he withdrew. I have, however, come across some real talent in this way. For instance, that admirable actor and entertainer, Eric Lewis, is a _protege_ of mine, and you could not have a better man than he. Another amusing incident occurred at Southsea. My secretary was in a shop one day, and he overheard three ladies discussing the respective merits of Corney Grain and myself. Two of them were for Corney Grain and one was for me. Finding at last that the odds were too strong for her, she departed with this final shot: ‘Well, never mind, Mr. Corney Grain can’t jump on to a piano,’ referring to my imitation of Minnie Palmer.”
[Illustration: “A FLASHY YOUNG CAD, IN A VERY LOUD SUIT.”]
Replying to a question I put to him as to his theatrical experiences, Mr. Grossmith told me that it was in the November of 1877 that he received the following letter:–
“Beefsteak Club,
“King William Street,
“Tuesday Night.
“Dear Mr. Grossmith,–Are you inclined to go on the stage for a time? There is a part in the new piece I am doing with Gilbert which I think you would play admirably. I can’t find a good man for it. Let me have a line, or come to Albert Mansions to-morrow, after 4; or Thursday, before 2.30.
“Yours sincerely,
“ARTHUR SULLIVAN.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
“This was a great moment in my life, although at the time my father, whose good judgment I valued much, was of opinion that I was not very successful as an actor. Sullivan, however, who had heard me give a musical sketch at a dinner party, was of the contrary opinion, and felt sure that I should suit him. It appears he and Arthur Cecil were both writing letters at the Beefsteak, when the former said, ‘I can’t find a fellow for this opera.’ Cecil said, ‘I wonder if Grossmith–‘ Before he had finished the sentence, Arthur Sullivan said, ‘The very man!’ And so I was engaged. I am much indebted to these two Arthurs,” continued the bright little man with a laugh. “I reverence the very name of Arthur. I remember when Gilbert wanted to engage me for the part of _John Wellington Wells_, though I saw the part would suit me to perfection, I said to him, ‘I should have thought you required a fine man with a fine voice for the part of a magician.’ I can still see Gilbert’s humorous expression as he replied, ‘That is just what we _don’t_ want.’ I played _Sir Joseph Porter_ in ‘Pinafore’ every night for nearly two years. Long runs don’t affect the nerves of the actors nearly as much as they affect the performance. Constant repetition begets mechanism, and that is a terrible enemy to contend against. I make a point of playing my best to a bad house; for it is a monstrous thing to slur through one’s work because the stalls are empty, and thereby punish those who _have_ come for the fault of those who _have not_. Still, I repeat it, constant repetition is a dreadful thing. Fancy playing ‘Pinafore,’ as I did, for 700 nights without missing a single performance!”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
As he said this Mr. Grossmith led the way out of the room in which we had been talking, and which he told me was his own special sanctum, “into which no one is ever allowed to come except my wife, for anyone rushing in here when I was composing or thinking out a sketch would inevitably drive every single idea from my head,” and we went upstairs together. Here in the drawing-room he set himself down to a spinet which bore the date of 1770, and he struck a few exceedingly sweet-sounding, if slightly tinkling, chords from it. “And this,” said he, “is the oldest _Broadwood_ in England. You can see for yourself the date–1795.” Downstairs he showed me a beautiful model of a steam engine, upon which he was enabled to ride, and which he could drive himself. “I thoroughly understand locomotives,” said he, as he pointed to a shelf full of all the works upon the subject which he had been able to discover.
* * * * *
A BLIND BEGGARMAN
BY FRANK MATHEW.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. PEGRAM.
“Left dark among mine enemies.”
Long ago, the Fairies often stole children; they chose the prettiest, and carried them to Fairyland–the Kingdom of Tyrnanoge,–leaving hideous Changelings instead. In those days no man had call to be ashamed of his offspring, since it a baby was deformed or idiotic it was known to be a Changeling.
[Illustration: “THE PIG WAS A FRIENDLY ANIMAL.”]
It is sixty years now since old Mike Lonergan, who lived in a hovel in Moher Village, was robbed of his child. It was his wife first found out the theft, for she had seen her unborn son in a dream, and he was beautiful; so when she saw the sickly and ugly baby, she knew that he was not hers, and that the Fairies had stolen the child of her dream. Many advised her to roast the Changeling on the turf-fire, but the White Witch of Moher said it would be safer to leave him alone. So the child Andy grew up as a stranger in his father’s hovel and had a dreary time of it, he got little food and no kindness. The Lonergans gave him neither offence nor welcome, hoping that he might see fit to go home to Tyrnanoge and yet bear them no grudge. He grew up an odd wizened little wretch, and everyone shunned him. The children loathed him because they were afraid of him, so they hooted him from a distance, or stoned him from behind walls.
Indeed, at this time his only ally was the pig that lived in one corner of the hovel. The pig was a friendly animal, his front half was a dull white and the other half black, and this gave him a homely look as if he was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. Andy would shrink into the corner, and sit cuddled there with one arm round the pig’s neck. Old Mike Lonergan took to drink, and spent every evening at the Shebeen–small blame to him–for how could a man be expected to stay at home with a Changeling sitting in a corner and staring at him?
When the pig was driven to the Fair at Ennistimon, Andy was left friendless, and then–in all winds and weather–was to be found on the Cliffs of Moher. Sometimes he stopped out all night, till hunger would bring him back when the Lonergans were rejoicing at his disappearance. He knew every inch of the Cliffs, and spent half his time lying on the edge of the grey precipice, looking down at the sea, six hundred feet below, or watching the clouds of sea-birds; he found new paths down the cliff-side and clambered like a goat; he knew where the gulls nested, but never robbed them, and the caves where the seals lived, and the seals shouldered their way through the water close by him, looking at him with soft eyes.
When he was about fourteen, the Famine Year came; fever and “The Hunger” swept Clare. The fever took Lonergan and his wife, and they were buried in the dead-pit at Liscannor; it left Andy, but it left him blind. Then the neighbours began to have their doubts whether he was a Changeling after all; for the Fairies are faithful, and who ever heard of a Changeling being left blind and penniless? If he was only mortal he had been cruelly treated, so to make amends they gave him the fiddle that had belonged to the “Dark” Man–that is the blind man–of St. Bridget’s Well, who had lately starved. There was still a feeling that he was unfit for a Holy Well, so he took up a post at the Liscannor Cross-roads, and there levied a toll on passers with the professional heart-broken cry:
“Remember the Dark Man! For God’s sake, remember the Dark Man!”
* * * * *
For nearly twenty years Andy haunted the Cross-roads, he came to be honoured as one of the institutions of Moher, though the folk considered there was much that was uncanny about him, he was so silent, and he hated the smell of whisky. Now those were the times when Cornelius Desmond ruled Moher in the old open-handed haphazard way, never troubling penniless tenants. But “Corney” died and the daisies grew over him, so the estate was managed by an agent who made short work of paupers, and evicted “Dark” Andy from his ancestral hovel. Andy did not seem to know his misfortune. He spent the day of the eviction, as usual, at the Cross-roads, and came back at night to a ruin. His neighbour, Larry Ronan the blacksmith, was grieved to see that he took the change as a matter of course, and that after groping in the four corners of the cabin he sat on the window-ledge as if unaware that nothing was left of his home but the walls.
Next day it was rumoured that Bridget McCaura, of Moher Farm, had sheltered Dark Andy. Bridget was a warm woman, a “woman of three cows,” a masterful old maid, who in her time had refused many a pretty fellow, perhaps because she suspected them of hankering after her live stock, her poultry, and her sixty acres of rocks. Then the old parish priest, Father Peter Flannery, rode over to see her. Bridget was called out of her house to speak to him; he was afraid to dismount. She stood in the narrow gateway in front of her farm, with her arms akimbo, ready to defend her home against all comers. Peter’s heart trembled; he has a great dread of angry women.
“Is it thrue?” he asked–and was so frightened that he looked even sterner than usual–“is it thrue what I’m afther hearing, Bridget McCaura, that ye’ve taken the Dark Man, Lonergan, to live with ye–to live in the Farm?”
“Is it thrue? ‘Tis so,” said Bridget.
“But ye’re not going to keep him, are ye now?”
“Keep him? I am that,” said Bridget.
Peter screwed up his courage and told her warily, that though it was well-meant of her, and “’tis you have the kind warm heart, Bridget me dear,” still, that propriety forbade it.
He was afraid to look at her as he spoke. Bridget was purple.
“What! a misfortnit ould omadhaun the likes of that?” she cried.
“I know, I know,” said Peter (this is a pet phrase of his and usually means that he does not know). “I know, I know, but ’tis because ye’re a lone woman, tell me now are ye listening to me? If ye’d been married now, ‘twould have been another thing.”
“Married!” cried Bridget with infinite scorn–“Married! If that’s all, I’ll marry the craythur to-morrow!”
And so Dark Andy was married to the richest woman in Moher. He seemed indifferent; as for Bridget, she had made up her mind to shelter him, and there was an end of it, she took pleasure in astounding her neighbours.
[Illustration: “I’LL MARRY THE CRAYTHUR TO-MORROW!”]
There was never such excitement in Clare as when those banns were read. Everyone saw that poor Bridget McCaura–“dacint woman”–had been bewitched. All the old stories about Dark Andy came to life, there was no room for doubt now, and the bravest unbelievers trembled before him. There was many a woman would never hear his name without crossing herself, and he got the credit of every misfortune between Kilkee and Kinvarra, though some doubted whether a blind man could have the Evil Eye. It was felt that he should be asked to give up his post by the Cross-roads, since it was inconvenient for the neighbours to have to climb two stone walls to avoid passing him. However, no one could be found to suggest this to him, so he still sat there daily, for he liked to feel that he was earning his own livelihood.
* * * * *
One rough afternoon during my first visit to Clare I was caught in a storm of rain, and took refuge at the Liscannor Cross-roads under a thick clump of trees that are stunted and bent eastward by cowering from the sea-wind. As I reached them I heard a shrill cry, “Remember the Dark Man!” Then I saw the blind beggarman sitting huddled in a ragged great-coat so much too big for him that till he stood up I did not see how tiny he was. He had a doleful peaked face, set in a shock of grey hair. By him sat a little brown dog–the queerest of mongrels–with a tin can tied round his neck.
Andy was friendly that day, and talked eagerly in a shrill, stammering voice. I found later that he was wretched in still weather, and loved the malicious rush of the rain; he was happiest when the wind rattled in his ears and the rain whipped his face. “Call that rain?” he said, “sure th’ air is flooded, an’ ye might as well swim as walk.”
Many times after that I went out of my way on my long solitary walks to pass the Cross-roads, but as often as not he was glum and silent, and then Bonaparte, sharing his mood, would growl like a small thunderstorm. The seat was well chosen, for the cowering trees are like a shed over it, and there is a pleasant landscape in front (though that mattered little to Andy), a landscape of dim green moors–with brown stains on them where sedge grows and black shadows where bushes huddle in clefts–chequered by a grey net of low walls, dotted with the white gables of cabins, and framed by a wavering line of hills.
Sometimes I found him playing his fiddle to keep himself company, but he stopped when he heard me, and, to tell the truth, I was glad of it, for his playing was uncanny. Sometimes I met him shambling along the brink of the Cliffs–a grotesque little figure, with his old shapeless hat, his huge coat flapping behind him, and the mighty blackthorn he carried–he knew the ground so well that he walked as if he could see (indeed, he saw more than I could, for while to me the breakers were only streaks of light, he spoke as if he was close to them on the wet weedy rocks), or I came on him lying by the edge, listening to the grumbling of the breakers and the cries of the gulls.
[Illustration: “LISTENING TO THE GRUMBLING OF THE BREAKERS AND THE CRIES OF THE GULLS.”]
Mostly he was unsociable, he shrank from his neighbours because they had been cruel to him when they were children, and the dislike was more than returned; yet I think that, but for the loneliness of his whole life, he would have been friendly enough. No one knew more of folklore–I think he half believed that he was a Changeling, and found comfort in the thought of that former life when he was one of the merry “Little Good People”–and sure old Mike Lonergan and his wife ought to have known best. He knew the ways of every ghost in the county, and it was even said that he was on speaking terms with the Headless Man who haunted Liscannor. Of course he knew all about Fairies. When the fallen leaves scurried past his feet he knew that the “Little Good People” were playing football, when the wind whispered in the leaves overhead he heard them chatting, and when it whined in the creaking bare branches, heard the poor little folk crying with cold and bewailing the days when they found shelter by snug firesides and sat there unseen but not unwelcome. Once, before the world grew hard, they gathered in the cabins, and the roughest fare grew pleasanter, the saddest hearts lighter, from their good wishes; but no one cares for them now, and they cannot rest in unfriendly houses.
[Illustration: “HE WAS ON SPEAKING TERMS WITH THE HEADLESS MAN OF LISCANNOR.”]
As he grew older, he talked more of them, grew more moody and restless, could not sit quiet while the wind was up, and spent night after night out of doors. My friend Father Peter Flannery, who is my chief authority for this history, told me that often, riding on his sick calls in stormy weather, he met Andy staggering along the rough roads.
Last year on November Eve–the night when the Fairies have power, and the dead wake and dance reels with them–the blind beggarman started out from the Farm. An Atlantic gale was shattering seas against the Cliffs, the air was salt with foam, and throbbed with the pulse of the breakers. Bridget tried in vain to stop him; he said the “Little Good People” were calling him. She watched him disappear into the darkness, the whimpering of his fiddle died into the shrieks of the wind. “‘Tis a quare divil, he is,” she said, “God help him!”
Once in the night she thought she heard a snatch of the “Fairies’ Reel”; but Andy never came back. Next morning they found Bonaparte whining on the edge of the Cliffs; there was no sign of his master. He must have gone over the Cliffs in the darkness, but the waves gave no token.
Some folk in Moher believe that the Fairies took back their child, and that the old blind fiddler lives now in the Kingdom of Tyrnanoge, and makes music for their dances in that enchanted country where the old grow young and the blind see. Some say that he still haunts the Cross-roads, and only a week ago, Larry Ronan, coming back at night from Ennistimon Fair, saw a black shadowy figure under the black trees, and heard a heart-broken voice cry “Remember the Dark Man!” Larry’s natural surprise at this accounted for his being found next morning asleep in the ditch. But it is agreed in Moher that Andy left life on November Eve, whether he became the playfellow of the Fairies or the plaything of the waves.
* * * * *
CHURCH AND STAGE.
A REVIEW OF HENRY IRVING,
BY THE REV. DR. JOSEPH PARKER.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM F. BARNARD AND J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE.
[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS “HAMLET.” (_From the Portrait by EDWIN LONG._)]
[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS “DIGBY GRANT” IN “TWO ROSES.”]
The innumerable reviews of Mr. Irving by literary and artistic experts have left room enough for an amateur estimate by a man who is accustomed to regard human life mainly from a religious standpoint. A complete review of the Stage by the Pulpit could hardly be the work of a single pen; for my own part, therefore, I can only make a very small contribution to such a review by indicating a few points which have occurred to me in the study of one particular actor. At once, however, the question arises, Is Mr. Irving a man who can be thus summarily characterised? In a dramatic sense, are there not many Mr. Irvings? When a man can act “The Two Roses” and “The Dead Heart” with equal effect, when he can at will be as vulgar as _Robert Macaire_, or as dignified as _Cardinal Wolsey;_ when he can be either as young as Hamlet or as old as Lear, the inquiry as to his plurality becomes natural and pertinent. For my part, I rank Mr. Irving the comedian above Mr. Irving the tragedian, just as I rank Nature above Art: each may be highest in its own way, yet the one may have a charm which the other cannot boast. Mr. Irving’s tragedy sometimes requires working up, but his comedy is spontaneous and immediate. The needful working up of tragedy is no fault of the actor. Tragedy should hardly ever begin at once. The murder may come too soon. Premature rage is followed by untimely laughter. _Digby Grant_ begins at once, and can be his best self in the very first sentence, but _Macbeth_ must move towards his passion by finely-graded ascents. In Mr. Irving’s exquisite representation, _Macbeth’s_ anxieties and perturbations, his rapid alternations of courage and cowardice, make delicate but obvious record of themselves in deepening the grey of his hair, and ploughing more deeply the lines of his face. A comedy may be judged scene by scene, almost sentence by sentence, but a tragedy can be truly estimated only when viewed in final perspective.
[Illustration: “A LITTLE CHEQUE.”
(MR. IRVING AS “DIGBY GRANT” IN “TWO ROSES.”)]
Judged by this test, I have no hesitation in regarding Mr. Irving’s _King Lear_ as the finest creation of his genius. This is an instance in which the actor creates the piece. Shakespeare is, as a poet and playwright, at his worst in “King Lear.” Yet his accessories are wonderful in variety and suggestiveness. Only Shakespeare could have created the heath, and have so ordered the old King’s passion, as to make his madness part of the very thunder and lightning. That was Shakespeare’s magnificent conception, and Mr. Irving’s rendering is worthy of its tempestuous grandeur. How to talk up to the storm, how to pierce the tumult with the cries of human distress, how to escape the ridiculous and the incongruous, how to be a King on the desolate heath, and to make the royalty gleam through the angry darkness, were the problems, and Mr. Irving solved them one and all, even with redundance of faculty and skill. At the end of the heath scene the man is more remembered than the storm. It has been objected that in the first scene Mr. Irving’s _Lear_ is too old and feeble. I venture to think otherwise. I further venture to think that the King’s age and the King’s imbecility have both been accurately appreciated. A man at eighty, a man athirst for flattery, a man who would pay a kingdom in exchange for adulation, must have outlived all that is best and strongest in human nature. He comes upon the stage as a wreck. His vanity has eaten up his sagacity, so that she, _Goneril_ or _Regan_, who can flatter most, can lie most, and can play the devil best, shall fare most lavishly at his hands. Is it not well partly to excuse these excesses of self-valuation by such mitigations as can be found in the infirmity of old age? Even in an elderly man they would have been treated with contempt; they could only be endured in one whose eighty years had been doubled by the hardness of his life lot.
In “Henry VIII.” Mr. Irving had little to do. In that play the labour and the glory fell upon another, to the infinite delight of the public. In “Lear,” Mr. Irving has everything to do. From beginning to end there is only one character. Even the fascinating _Cordelia_ is but a silver cloud on the far horizon. “The King is coming” is the cry of the play. His madness is more, as to display and effect, than the sense of all the others. The scene is stiff and cold until his wild hair is observed to approach the front, and then the whole spectacle is alight with feeling and purpose. The other actors are not to blame that, to a large extent, they are thrown into the shade; indeed, they are to be warmly congratulated upon their self-suppression and their passive sympathy. It is a hard task to play the part of two heartless and treacherous daughters, and a pitiful fate to have to represent the villainy of _Edmund_, yet all this was admirably done. It cannot be an easy thing to come forward to play the villain well, for the better the dramatic villain is played the more is the actor compelled to recognise in his execration the exact degree of his success. So admirably can Mr. Irving himself play the villain, that it is difficult to believe that any godparents ever, on his unconscious behalf, renounced the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.
In many minor parts–or along the subsidiary lines of great parts–Mr. Irving’s subtlest power comes into effective play. Who, for example, can be more gentle or more graceful with a little child? Who could hug the “fool” more fondly than old _King Lear_? Then recall his wonderful recognitions of old friends. When, in “The Dead Heart,” he is liberated from the Bastille, how old times slowly but surely dawn into consciousness, and how quickly the dawn hastens into the noontide of the tenderest fellowship and highest festival of joy. It is verily a resurrection. After eighteen years’ entombment this political Lazarus comes forth to liberty, to leadership, to dominance.
In “Lear,” there are two wonderful instances of recognition, the recognition of _Gloster_ and of _Cordelia_. _Gloster_ is blind and bandaged. _Cordelia_ has been long out of sight–if not in actual days yet in depth of feeling–and the King himself is demented. Little by little things shape themselves in the memory and fancy of the King. There is something confusedly familiar in the voice of _Gloster_ which, tone by tone, settles into recognition. In the case of _Cordelia_ the father gradually subdues the King, and instinct takes the place of reason; then, in a fine strain, comes the identification:
“Do not laugh at me,
For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.”
The utterance of these words by Mr. Irving is simply thrilling. The tones, the glances, the approach, the embrace, lift up the words into new light, keen and tender as the brightness of a summer morning. The words themselves are by no means striking, are, indeed, the merest commonplace, but, uttered with the natural pathos of a consummate actor, they carry the play to its most subduing climax. The humanity and the genius satisfy expectation in its most eager and jealous temper. Failure at that point would have ruined the play. Which was better, _Lear_ or _Cordelia_, in that critical action? We must first settle, Which is better, the star of morning or the morning star?
[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS “KING LEAR.” (FROM THE LYCEUM SOUVENIR.)]
* * * * *
As I opened this brief review with a reference to the religious standpoint, it may be well now to ask how the Church is to regard the Stage as an educational institution? The Stage cannot be put down. It responds to an instinct which is ineradicable, and which need not be ignoble. The parables of the New Testament are the sublimest recognition of that instinct. The drama is older than the theatre. Much of the greatest preaching has been dramatic, by which I mean that it has touched human life through the medium of story and parable, coloured and toned by a living fancy. Sometimes, too truly, the dramatic in preaching has degenerated into impossible anecdotes, most of them originating in the Far West of America, yet even such anecdotes testify to the overpowering force of the dramatic instincts when limited to their most vulgar conditions. My submission is, that a properly-conducted stage might be the most powerful ally of the pulpit. I advance upon this submission, and contend that the function of the preacher is infinitely superior to the function of the actor. Whatever the preacher has to say that is distinctive he can trace to what he believes to be a Divine and authoritative origin. I hold the great preacher to be a spiritual medium. In his next evolution he will simply tell the people whatever may have been given him in the same hour to say. This does not mean that indolence will supersede industry. Through the indolent man God sends no messages. The true prophet will always be preparing himself. By learning, by meditation, by self-discipline, the true prophet will prepare his heart for the incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory of Heaven will be as a fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art preachers we have had in too great abundance. Mechanical talkers have brought upon the pulpit the disrepute of dulness. The age now waits for the messenger in whose loving heart there is the glow and the radiance of divinest sympathy. The great actor himself would be the first to admit that the preacher cannot trace his own public secondariness to the poverty of his themes. Where the preacher falls behind the actor, it is because the preacher does not realise the majesty and the tenderness, the vehemence and the urgency, of his own message.
* * * * *
THAT BEAST BEAUTY.
BY KIRBY HARE.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERNEST M. JESSOP.
I was a man born to misfortune. In fact, my first misfortune, the death of my father, happened three months before I came into the world. When I did duly appear, and was giving a proper howl of disgust, a fresh misfortune fell upon me; my mother departed to join my father, leaving me in the lurch in a vale of unavailing tears. I should have preferred going with my family to that blessed Utopia where there are neither births, deaths, marriages, divorces, breaches of promise, nor return tickets; only, unfortunately, I was not invited. So I became a posthumous orphan, soothed by Daffy’s elixir and the skim-milk of human kindness. The milk was none too sweet, human kindness did not spare the rod, and I firmly believe it was Daffy’s elixir that turned my hair red. However, I grew up at length into stand-up collars and tail coats, and at the age of seventeen springs was adopted (on trial) by a maiden aunt of seven-and-forty autumns. Like a gleam of sunshine hope flashed into my loveless life, lighting up my path to fortune. But it was only the glimmer of an _ignis fatuus_, which led me into a quicksand and snuffed itself out in a fog.
[Illustration: A PROPER HOWL OF DISGUST.]
[Illustration: HIS MAIDEN AUNT.]
My relative had plenty of money, and plenty of other equally good qualities in the long run, no doubt; but the period of my adoption was too short to make sure of either the one or the other. If the wealthy maiden was really a worthy soul she did not let her nephew know it. Corporeally she was angular and iron-grey, with a summary tongue and wintry temper, chastened by a fondness for feline favourites. Unluckily, I was always falling foul of the latter, and my aunt continually fell foul of me in consequence. Crabbed age and youth could not live together in our case on account of cats. Age, as represented by the mature virgin, adored the brutes; youth, in the shape of a sprouting hobbledehoy, abhorred them altogether, and one evil minded black Tom in particular. My aunt called him Beauty, in happy ignorance that all her household called him a Beast. I admire beauty in the abstract; I also like it in the concrete; and in the concreted form of youthful feminine humanity I love it. But that feline black Beauty was the most outrageous misnomer unhanged. I had tried to hang him several times, down in the cellar in the dead of night; but his patent cast-iron neck set suspensory science at defiance, and Beauty triumphantly refused to give up the ghost. At first, he kicked and fought against it lustily, and yelled murder with all his might; but after a little practice the malefactor acted more philosophically, regarding the performance quite as part of his nocturnal programme. He never allowed it to make him late for breakfast, nor take away his appetite. Each morning, after execution, the moment the bell rang for prayers, in marched Beauty with a swollen head well on one side, growling anathemas from somewhere round the corner all prayer-time; after which the escaped convict devoured breakfast with the voracity of a stiffnecked cannibal.
[Illustration: ONE EVIL-MINDED BLACK TOM.]
[Illustration]
Finding the beast utterly unhangable, I determined to try drowning. My nature is by no means a cruel one, quite the reverse; but Beauty’s cup of iniquity had long been full to the brim, and running over into the saucer. He had gulped down my canaries like pills, poached my pigeons, fricasseed my rabbits, and made himself an abominable beast generally; and had now committed a crime that capped everything.
My cock bantam, which had won first prize at the Slocum-Pogis poultry show, mysteriously disappeared. Jim, the gardener’s boy, and I hunted everywhere without finding any trace till we sighted Beauty. The beast was seated on my verbena bed, with fearfully distended stomach, waving my poor little bantam’s tail feathers from between his teeth. Had I been an ancient Egyptian high priest, and Beauty at the top of the tree of holy cats, his diabolical godship should have been made into a mummy instanter. As things were, he had to be drowned forthwith.
[Illustration: AT A CABINET COUNCIL IN THE COAL CELLAR.]
At a cabinet council in the coal cellar, composed of the cook, footman, Jim, and myself, all the executive details were arranged; my aunt being, of course, kept in happy ignorance of our intentions. As soon as my respected relative uttered the preliminary snore of her afternoon siesta, Beauty made an involuntary exit out of the house, all the lower doors and windows having been carefully fastened. Then commenced a silent cat-hunt, a serio-comic drama in dumb show, with a crowded audience breathlessly gazing from the windows. The scenery was a series of dissolving views, beginning on a flower-decked lawn, and ending at a mill-pool a mile or so away from the audience. Beauty played leading actor with considerable activity, notwithstanding the drawback of being handicapped with an undigested bantam. He flew over dozens of flower-beds, through all the outhouses, over the stable, out into the park, up and down all the tallest trees, and all over the country, till he took refuge in the deserted old mill. There we wriggled him into an ancient sack, and tied him up in the harmonious company of a couple of brickbats. Then we committed the body to the deep. The burial service was short, but hearty. “One–two–three, and away!” sung out in unison, was the special form for the occasion, accompanied by Beauty’s farewell blessing as we “awayed” him into the silent depths of the mill-dam. There was a splash, a shrill cry from a frightened moorhen, a short jubilate from Jim, to which I piously added “amen,” and all was over. Jim ran home with half-a-sovereign in his pocket, while I walked back to dress for dinner. On the stairs I met my aunt, already in evening array, and looking hungry. I knew the sign, and stealthily tried to vanish, vainly.
[Illustration: IN THE DESERTED OLD MILL.]
“Late again, Samuel!” she remarked, with a freezing spectacle-gleam that fixed me to the stair-carpet–my right foot two steps above the left. “You have just come in, I suppose. Have you seen Beauty?”
[Illustration: “LATE AGAIN, SAMUEL!”]
Horror! Could she suspect anything? I felt my face growing the colour of my hair, and my tongue frozen solid.
“Can’t you answer?” she went on wrathfully. “And can’t you stand up straight?”
I pulled my legs together and commenced to stammer.
“I–I saw Beauty out–outside, aunt, in the garden,” I managed to mutter.
“Which way was he going?”
“Why, I think he was running towards the house, aunt.”
[Illustration: THIRTY MILES AN HOUR.]
And then the remembrance of how he _was_ running–thirty miles an hour, with tail on end and ears flat to his head, with Jim and my long-legged self racing in rear–made me choke with laughter I was forced to swallow. But my aunt’s eyes were on me, and her gold-rimmed barnacles blazed through me, so I suffocated in silence.
“Don’t stand making faces like an idiot. Go and dress, and be quick,” snapped my loving relative, as she marched away downstairs and I flew to the region above.
My bedroom door was partly open, and I dashed in hastily, pulling off my things as I went.
[Illustration: DRESSING FOR DINNER.]
My evening clothes were laid out ready on the bed, and–what was that on my shirt?–a black mass of–something moving!–some animal! Why, heavens and earth, it was the ghost of–that beast Beauty! It was Beauty himself! I ran for the poker; Beauty rushed out of the door. Confound that rotten old sack!
I was late for dinner, and found Beauty seated in my chair, sleek and dry, with a ravenously whetted appetite. My aunt was so pleased with her favourite’s improved appearance that she became quite affable, even to me. I was informed that as I had not been looking well lately I might go for a few days’ change to the seaside; the salubrious air of Muddiford-on-the-Ooze would just suit me. What a blessing! To have escaped from those ice-gleaming spectacles and from that resuscitated beast Beauty I would gladly have gone to Jericho, much more to Muddiford-on-the-Ooze. Then my aunt continued her course of instructions, with the nearest approach to a smile I had ever seen on her face.
[Illustration: A SHOW AT MUDDIFORD-ON-THE-OOZE.]
“You will enjoy yourself, I am sure, Samuel, and you will also be able to show what pains you can take to please me,” she said, sipping her first glass of Burgundy with approving relish. “There is to be a show at Muddiford the day after to-morrow, at which I intend exhibiting, and you will be able to manage everything for me; so mind you are careful to do your best.”
“I shall be most delighted,” I declared gushingly. “What show is it? And what can I have the pleasure of taking charge of for you, my dear aunt?”
“It’s the Grand All-England Cat Show, and you will take Beauty; and I shall be greatly disappointed if you do not bring me back the first prize. So be on your best behaviour, Samuel, or perhaps you may live to regret it.”
My jaw dropped, and I thought I should have slid under the table. Good heavens! It was that beast Beauty who was to go for a holiday, while I was to act as the infernal fiend’s keeper! O my prophetic soul–my aunt! But there was no help for it; I was bound in bonds of gold.
On the following day, Beauty and I were duly driven to the station, the former being luxuriously nested in a small hamper specially furnished for the occasion. About half-way on the road, just as we had mounted a long, steep hill, the cat managed to roll his residence from the stern of the dog-cart and trundle himself half-way home again. Luckily, he screeched blue murder at the tip-top of his voice, or we might not have missed the beast. As it was, his cyclical retrogression made us just too late for the train, and we had to wait two hours for the next. So I seated myself on the hamper–like Patience on the proverbial monument–and beheld the coachman depart homewards, with a sympathetic hat-touching salute, leaving me with a gloomy conviction of coming misfortune. The train, when it did arrive, was tolerably empty, and I secured a vacant first-class. For a time all went happily; then the cat commenced groaning.
[Illustration: SEATED MYSELF ON THE HAMPER.]
My aunt having solemnly ordered me to give the brute dinner, I now prepared to stop his mouth with cold chicken. While I was cautiously unfastening the hamper lid, Beauty remained quiet as a dormouse; and then he proceeded personally to assist the unfastening, with a vengeance. There was a bouncing volcanic eruption, a blood-curdling howl, a mixed-up whirling round the carriage, and then–smash!–bang through the window went Beauty!–leaving me doubled up on the seat, holding out half a chicken. It was a forty-feline-power hurricane, while it lasted; and drops of perspiration trickled down my nose on to the chicken, at which I sat stupidly staring. After a dazed pause I staggered to the broken window and looked out. There was Beauty, with a perpendicular tail like a young fir-tree, going like great guns in exactly the wrong direction. We had just come through a long tunnel, and the last I saw of my aunt’s pet demon was as he dived headlong into its Hades-like mouth. And I had to take home first prize for him from the Grand All-England Cat Show!
[Illustration: LEAVING THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE.]
[Illustration: INTO ITS HADES-LIKE MOUTH.]
[Illustration: INCIPIENT CATALEPSY.]
When the 4.40 down express arrived at Muddiford-on-the-Ooze station, an auburn-haired youth limply emerged from a first-class carriage. In his arms he bore a basket, and his grey-green eyes gleamed with incipient catalepsy. Yes, such would undoubtedly have been my description had I posed as the momentary hero of a penny novelette. I forgot all about my luggage, imbecilely clinging to the late habitation of the lost beast Beauty, wandering I knew not why nor whither. Outside the station, round a quiet corner, my steps were arrested by the surprising sight of–Beauty!–the very identical devil himself! There stood the unhangable, undrownable, hurricane-creating beast, looking as serene as a newly-born black cherub, washing his fiendish face! I approached on tiptoe, breathlessly, with the basket behind my back and the half chicken extended as a peaceable card of introduction. He scented it instantly–my aunt always keeping Beauty’s tit-bits until sufficiently gamey to suit his highly epicurean taste.
[Illustration: WASHING HIS FIENDISH FACE!]
With a finishing toe-touch to his whiskers, he amicably trotted up to me and–yes!–actually rubbed against my new trousers! What could have happened to him! Had his run through the tunnel turned him out virtuous? And how could he possibly have got here? Experience has shown that a leopard can change his spots, and a negro can grow spotted; but could a diabolical cat become even as a sucking dove and fly over twelve miles all in the space of twenty minutes? Impossible! So I put on a pair of folder-glasses and scrutinised this new arrival doubtingly. No; it was _not_ Beauty–not nearly ugly enough. It was a twin, but larger, blacker, sleeker, a million times more amiable, and very much fatter. Ah!–ha, ha!–hurrah!–happy thought! Why not? I would. And, thereupon, I instantly did it.
Placing the basket gently on the ground, I opened the lid and put in the cold chicken, when lo! in jumped the amiable twin. Half an hour later that basket, that heaven-descended twin, and that successful chicken, were safely deposited in custody of the cat-show steward, with the errant Beauty’s entry ticket affixed. If the steward had never seen the real original he would never discover the difference; and if he did happen to be acquainted with the genuine article he could but think that the beast was surprisingly improved, and might even award it first prize for having turned over such a notable new leaf. And for the same reason, my aunt ought to be highly delighted at her favourite’s favourable transformation. My heart was lightened of its oppressive troubles, as my hands were free from their feline load. With a hearty appetite I ate an excellent dinner at the hotel, went to the theatre, and turned into bed thankful for all fortune’s favours.
[Illustration: I ATE AN EXCELLENT DINNER.]
During the two following days, carefully steering clear of the cat-show, I enjoyed my freedom gaily, and had–what our three-thousand-miles- removed cousins would call–real good time. On the third morning a letter arrived from my aunt, with an enclosure which for the first moment I took to be a big cheque–a grateful offering, as I hoped, for services skilfully performed. However, it proved to be merely a second letter, in writing that was strange to me, and which with some curiosity I proceeded to peruse. As I unfolded the sheet, a vision suddenly crossed my mind of that savage beast Beauty; a chilly shiver shot through my marrow, and I sent the waiter for soda and brandy. It was an awful thought of what that unkillable cat might do! There he was, rampaging over a civilised country populated with children and lambs, and other unprotected innocents, half mad, perhaps, with hunger, where neither canaries nor pigeons, rabbits or cold chicken were grabbable. What desperate murders he might commit! And should I be held responsible? Here the timely arrival of the waiter helped to raise my spirits by a strong dose of B. and S., and I began the enclosed letter.
[Illustration: WHAT DESPERATE MURDERS HE MIGHT COMMIT!]
It was headed from the cat-show secretary’s office. Why, of course, that charming twin had got first prize, no doubt. Let us see. “Dear Madam,” so ran the official note, “I beg to call your attention to what I imagine must, in some way, have been an oversight. Your cat, described on the entrance form as ‘a black male, named Beauty,’ which was, on the evening of its arrival, placed in the class pertaining to the descriptive form, was found this morning to have presented us with four remarkably fine kittens. This, of course, necessitated the family’s removal from the male cat class. I have much pleasure in being able to inform you that both mother and kittens are in the best of health, and will be carefully attended upon. If you will kindly forward your instructions respecting their disposal, I shall be greatly obliged.” That was the note, and wildly did the letters dance before my eyes.
[Illustration: FOUR REMARKABLY FINE KITTENS.]
[Illustration: GASPING FOR BREATH.]
Having saved myself from fainting by finishing the B. and S., I sat for some minutes gasping for breath. Then I rubbed my eyes and reread that awful epistle. Yes–it was so–in solemn, sober black ink! Beauty’s twin had got four fine kittens! Great Jehoshaphat! How could I ever get over those confounded kittens! It was too late to murder them. And my aunt–but stop! Let me read her letter; it might suggest something–some feline legerdemain method of conjuring four fine kittens into a first prize black male cat. So here goes. And this is how it went: “I always considered you to be a fool, Samuel, but nothing worse, until now. Unless the enclosed letter is immediately fully explained, and the matter set right, I shall plainly let you know what I do think of you now, and act accordingly. See the secretary, and telegraph me the result at once.” Not much hope in that, worse luck; only a limited respite.
[Illustration: WENT FISHING.]
Away I went to the show, saw the secretary–from a safe distance–and immediately telegraphed: “Have seen the secretary. Hard at work setting matters right. Awfully sorry.” Then I hired a boat, and went fishing for the rest of the day. In the evening I wired: “Beauty must have got changed. Cats now all going home. Found clue and am following up. All right shortly.” But my aunt’s patience had expired. Next morning came a curt note saying she would at once join me, and either rescue Beauty or settle that secretary. How could I ever face those searching spectacles! I fled. From a lonely spot on the wilds of Dartmoor I wired: “Am following clue sharp. Getting close up. Good news next time.” Back came an answer: “Shall be with you to-morrow at noon.” At noon next day, I boarded the mail packet Tongariro, bound from Plymouth to New Zealand.
[Illustration: OFF TO NEW ZEALAND.]
* * * * *
PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET
BY SCOTT RANKIN.
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.
[Illustration]
“You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you also can do nothing by being too much afraid of them…. Be content to be a new ‘sect,’ ‘conventicle,’ or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_, with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.”–_Robert Elsmere_.
* * * * *
THE IDLERS CLUB
Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction?
[Sidenote: Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks there is no doubt as to Love’s reality.]
Of the desperate reality of the passion there is no doubt; of the intrinsic value of the thing beloved there may be many. The passion for which men and women have died stands like a tower four-square to all the winds of heaven; but how far that tower has been self-created by fancy, and how much is objectively real, who is the wise man that can determine? What is Love? We know nothing of its source. Sense and sex cannot wholly explain its mystery, else would there be no friendship left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty carving on the chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore–only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring note spoils the chord; the idol once accepted as of gold and precious stones, proves to be only common clay, thinly gilt. The diamonds are paste; the pearls are beads of glass filled with shining fishes’ scales; and the love which we thought would be a practical reality for life, is nothing but a pleasing fiction, good for its day, and now dead and done with. The lover sees nothing as it is. Life is distorted between jealousy and admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person; the happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are on all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable roadway of a rainbow. Custom, familiarity, daily habits are the sole tests by which the reality of the thing beloved can be tried–the reality of the thing beloved and consequent validity of love. Before these tests are applied, the whole affair is as a fairy dream born of the perfume and the mystery of night. With the clear cold breath of morning the dream vanishes, but–what is left? The sigh of the vanishing god?–a tear on the cheek of Psyche?–the loathing of the man who finds Melusine a serpent rather than a woman?–or the peaceful joy of the child who dreams of angels and wakes in its mother’s arms?–of those who sleeping on the ocean wake to find themselves safe in port?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “Rita” thinks Love is beautiful and wise.]
At one period of life, love is simply an emotion–the outcome of attraction, or the effect of that vague mystery which surrounds sex. In this emotional stage the _feeling_ may be real enough, but the passion is an illusion. A girl is often more in love with Love than with an actual lover. The youth who beholds his ideal in the First Woman is in love with the woman herself who for the time (usually very brief) embodies that ideal. But to the girl and the youth comes an hour when they are humiliatingly conscious of study wasted on a prettily-bound work of fiction that for all use and purpose in life is quite valueless. The edifice of romance is constructed much on the same plan as a child’s castle of cards, and deservedly shares the same fate. That is to say, the topmost card overbalances the whole structure. It is usually the hand of Reason that topples over Love’s romantic tenement by crowning it with the card of Common Sense. When we find Love has become a practical reality, the discovery is often very unpleasant. We would rather not be unhappy if we had the choice. Unfortunately, we haven’t, and find ourselves in that condition without exactly knowing how we drifted into it. Drifters often discover Love to be a very practical reality, because of unpleasant consequences. It is decidedly humiliating to find ourselves in the toils of a siren the very reverse of our high ideal of the personage who is to have the honour and glory of subjugating us. This is one of Love’s amusing little ways of proving that ideals are really not important. The best and safest test of the reality of Love is to ask yourself how much you have suffered on account of it. I don’t speak of such trifles as tears, heartaches, sleepless nights, fevers of jealousy and despair, sacrifices, or discomforts, but of _real_ genuine self-torment and mental torture which only this passion is capable of inflicting on its victims. The most sceptical will acknowledge that its powers in this line are only excelled by its apparent animosity. To discover the life that completes and contents our own is not given to many of us poor mortals. Here and there some fortunate individuals have made that discovery–but they are rare–and not given to boasting on the subject; yet though worldly wise folk scoff at love as a myth, I question whether they could name any other passion of the heart which has occupied so important a place in the world’s history, which has given life to all that is great and divine in art, or inspired such deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. Before its patient strength men have stood mute and wondering, and proud heads have bent in reverence, and stern eyes grown dim. For Love is beautiful, despite faults, and wise, despite follies. It alone of all human emotions can lift our souls heavenwards, and make even life’s thorny path a thing of beauty.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: John Strange Winter’s opinions.]
Love may be classed under several heads. The first, the great, the unattainable, the one-sided, and the worn-out. They are all real! What can be more real than the perhaps not very practical passion which first makes young hearts ache? What agony it is to _her_ when _he_ dances three times running with that horrid, stuck-up London girl, with her fashionable jargon, her languorous movements, just a turn or two, and then stop for as many minutes! First love is not often last love. _He_ thinks _her_ unreasonable to mind those dances, yet when a great love comes into her life, making her think of him as “just a boy,” he suffers all, or nearly all, the pangs of a great passion. Unavailing pain! _She_ has cast the die of her life, and past loves are shadows compared with the absorbing power that now grips her heart like a vice. Much may happen to the great love, but it is very real! A great love may merge into matrimony, and life may run on oiled wheels, and Darby and Joan may pass through the world, loving faithfully, and without digression, to the end. Or something may come between, and the great love may become the unattainable! It will not be the less real for that.
[Sidenote: The Unattainable.]
The unattainable has more in it of pathos than despair. Romance sweetens it, and the romance never dies. The tenderness of “what might have been” gives balm to many a suffering soul! The wife may be unhappy, neglected, heartsick, she may even loathe him whose name she bears, but she is often upholden by the thought that _he_ would have been wholly different! A husband may know that he has married the wrong woman, yet he bears what is, because he cannot have _her_ who would have made life all sunshine. Few pity the one-sided love, helpless, hopeless, and without justification as it is; yet it is very real to the lonely soul. The worn-out love is the very essence of sadness! It is heart-breaking to watch the efforts of a foolish heart to keep a love dying or already dead, to see love, which would once have made a paradise, poured out at the feet of one who is only bored and not even touched by it. Nothing is so dead as a dead love–yet, even _that_ is real!
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miss May Crommelin takes a professional view]
Can any sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this subject, anybody’s opinion (full-grown) is as good as another’s. Let the footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and the cook will cry out, “What do they know more about it than _us_?” Is it not a human feeling, call it instinct or no? Surely old Sally Jones has simpler feelings than the Dowager Countess; as much experience in this. Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet day; as–as influenza. The first may be a “pleysing payne”: the latter must be a very displeasing one. But there is little fiction about either to the victims. Well, suppose love a mere brain-fantasm; an odd survival when sensible folk have swept away beliefs in witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire and faggot for the wicked ones who don’t say their prayers the same way we do. _Still, was it not worth while to have invented it?_ However the idea was evoluted, just consider the glamour it throws over thorns and thistles, as we dig through life’s long day of toil. As Trollope’s stout widow says, when choosing her second: “It’s a whiff of the rocks and the valleys.” (So she had her marriage settlements tightly drawn up, to enjoy her romance comfortably.) Consider this epitaph–a real one–
“Poorly lived, and poorly died;
Poorly buried, and _nobody cried_.”
Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of wine. Yes, and far more–while it lasts. Some elders profess scorn, because their minds are so choked with years’ dust of daily cares they have forgotten how they, too, once believed love real–while it lasted! Ay! there’s the rub. You are told–truthfully–that love is strong as death: inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them–
“In the whole wide world there was but one.”
Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first love, “many other lodgers.” This seems clear, love is real to those who _give it_! Only they who care more to _get it_, call it moonshine and naughty names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument, each follows one who looks at another. Never one scorned, but has rejected a third.
“As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr, The satyr Lyda–and so the three went weeping.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing fiction.]
“Pleasing fiction,” forsooth; would that it were! It is a very real game, and the rules thereof are practical. I know it, for verily I myself have suffered. Let it not be understood, however, that it is _as_ a “practical, real lover” that I have suffered. Not at all. It is that this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and I meet it, and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a pleasing fiction, how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it–a trifle to talk of, a dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality, and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many pounds of incompetent irritability; _so_ exacting about trifles, so fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of the uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a village, and he fell in love with a pretty girl–they mostly do that–but she would have nothing to say to him; and after every rejected proposal he went straight home and made a three-legged stool (he was a carpenter by trade, or perhaps it might have affected him differently). He was what one might call an importunate man, for he proposed nineteen times in all, and nineteen three-legged stools stood as silent witnesses of his importunity. He changed houses after the twelfth, for he found a sad joy in contemplating his handiwork as he sat at his lonely meals, and his first sitting-room was only twelve feet by eight. Finally, either because of his importunity, or because she disliked the thought that the wordless witnesses might fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married the man, and scrubbed the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew quite fond of them. And only once did she regret her surrender; and that was when it flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a prettier number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew happy. Then there was Dante’s love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have produced something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I know a naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean collar every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for he told me so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over his toilet every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness. Love should not be scorned, even if it is real and sometimes uncomfortably practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers make a pretty sight. What I protest is, that all creatures should be lovers–or _none_. It is the half-and-half state of the world which is irksome.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a pleasing reality]
Ah, my gentle cocksure friends, how well you all know Love, and how ready you are to say what it is, to cut it up, to carve it, to classify it, and generally to spread it out. We live in a world of lies, and conventions, the dead leavings of an ignorant past, bind us still. Some day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a pleasing reality. It can never be so in the majority of cases so long as we play at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned. The good man won’t teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the gutter. The good woman keeps her daughters ignorant. As it stands it is an evil to love anyone over-much. And when we love we love over-much, for Love has been repressed till it has got savage in the race. “La privation radicale d’une chose cree lexees.” All the trouble comes from this–that we men have partially created women. But Nature had something to do with her compounding. That is, perhaps, a pity from the social point of view. For Nature can’t be nice and comfortable. She is only kind when we go her way. Let us remember that Love is the foundation of the world. The very protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love. The time will come, perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and faced the truth, we shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing than any fiction. Love is something real and wonderful, and in a natural world we shall have passed through the blood-splashed gates of Passion and be calm. Now Love is tortured, for we love ignorantly. We are like shipwrecked folk on some strange land–we know not the fruits of the trees of it. We learn the poisons by experiment, and we let others learn. This is Love the Fiction. But some day when we awake we shall know what we now dream, and Love will be always the most precious flower that grows in the garden of the soul. It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we discover ourselves. We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a new nature on every hand. We who were in the night, and of it, become vivid with the sun. Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods of evil that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy. For Truth and Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to throw away the Law of Lies and to acknowledge that the two are one.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Zangwill reviews the evidence.]
The traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that I am almost tempted to the hypothesis that it really exists. There seems to be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start learning a new language you always find yourself confronted with the verb “to love”–invariably the normal type of the first conjugation. In every language on earth the student may be heard declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he and you and they and every other person, singular or plural, have loved, and do love, and will love. “To love” is the model verb; expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, “to love,” which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always “regular” in grammar, and this without barring accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale–from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was “made in Germany.” Not only is “to love” deficient in no language (as _home_ is deficient in French, and _Geist_ in English), but it is never even “defective.” No mood or tense is ever wanting–a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and tense of life, in association with every variety of proper and improper noun, and every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted; none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active Voice in the matter; indeed, “to love” is so perfect that, compared with it, “to marry” is quite irregular. For, while “to love” is sufficient for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages that division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence enshrined in language to the records of history, the same truth meets us at any date we appoint. Everywhere “‘Tis love that makes the world go round,” though more especially in ball-rooms. It is awful to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam. What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money, nor his family. For these she couldn’t have cared a fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken after their mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie’s! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have told all stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man’s love, Power woman’s. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist–he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman’s admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, “If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be.” The Romantic Love of the poets and novelists was of late birth; the savage and many civilisations knew it not, and philosophers explain that it could not be developed till Roman Law had developed the conception of Marriage as a Contract. Even to this day it is as rare as large paper editions of the books about it. Roughly speaking, I should say it would spring up here and there among all classes of the population, except poets and novelists. Romantic Love is the rose Evolution has grown on earthly soil. _Floreat!_
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[Sidenote: Burgin thinks it all depends on the people who love.]
One morning the average man gets up, lights his pipe, roams round his rooms in all the ease of unshaven countenance and dressing-gown-clad form. Then he goes out, and meets _her_. There may be a hundred women in the room, or park, or tennis ground, wherever the tragedy (Love is a tragedy) commences. When the lights are low he comes back, and is low also. Wonders how men can be such brutes as to want dinner; thinks his life has been misspent; that he is unworthy to touch her hand; that he has wallowed in the fleshpots, and here is a way out of them. And if the man’s nature be noble and sweet and true; if he has hitherto drifted adown the stream of circumstance because his fellows have also drifted; then, with the deepening tides of his passion, the old spirit of knight-errantry descends upon him with its mystic mantle of white samite. And slowly out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse and devotion is born a new man–a man with a soul–a man who can dare all things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman he loves. At the baptism of her touch he becomes whole, and shapes his life to noble ends. Even if he can’t marry her, he is the better for his passion. Such a love endures until the leaves of the Judgment Book unroll; for it laughs to scorn the pitiful fools who boast of infidelity, the “male hogs in armour,” as Kingsley calls them, who look upon women as toys, the sport of an idle moment, rather than the spiritual force which leavens the world, and makes it an endurable and joyous dwelling-place.
[Sidenote: And on the woman loved.]
Of course, I was speaking of good women. I once heard a story about a bad woman–a woman of the world, who was very much amused at being taken seriously by a boy who loved her. “Tell me all about it,” she would say to him. “Explain what you feel, why you love me, why you believe in me. Don’t you see I’m courted and admired–a social force–that men flock round me everywhere I go?” “Oh, yes,” said the boy, “I see all that. But you’re an angel of goodness, and can’t help men liking you. If I lost faith in you, I’d kill myself.” “Ah,” she rejoined, “that’s what you all say. You would doubt me, and live on.” Then, one afternoon, he had good cause to doubt, inasmuch as her engagement to another man was announced. That evening she received a note from him: “Good-bye. If I lived on, I might doubt; it’s better to die and–believe!” They told her of the–the accident that night, and she wrote a touching little paragraph about it for the Society papers before dining out.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Gribble generaliseth confidently.]
In a sense, of course, Love is necessarily a fiction, whether pleasing or otherwise; for illusion is of the essence of it. The lover, in fact, is like the artist who sees things through a temperament, and, by eliminating the irrelevant, builds up the ideal on the foundation of the real. Tityrus sees more in Amaryllis than his brother shepherds see, just as Mr. Whistler sees more in a November fog than is visible to the eye of the casual wayfarer who gets lost in it, and mingles profanity with his coughs, yet, granting this, the reality and completeness of the illusion does not admit of doubt. On no alternative hypothesis can the great majority of marriages be explained. If commonplace people saw each other as others see them, surely they would remain single all their lives. Yet most people are commonplace, and most people marry. The reality–the controlling over-mastering reality–of Love has to be assumed to make their behaviour intelligible.
[Sidenote: Having hasted from a wedding for the purpose.]
This point struck me forcibly the last time I was present at a wedding. It was a Jewish wedding, celebrated at the little synagogue behind the Haymarket. I had no acquaintance with anyone concerned in the ceremony, but had dropped in quite casually, having heard that Jewish weddings were picturesque. The one thing that impressed me more than anything else was the decided undesirability of both the bridegroom and the bride. That the bride was not comely goes for little. But her forehead indicated a limited range and low ideals; the corners of her mouth spoke of an irritable temper; her bearing was vulgar; her voice had a twang that made one long to take her by the shoulders and shake her violently. She was also escorted by gaudy female relatives, by looking at whom one could anticipate the awful possibilities of her maturity. As for the bridegroom, he was a Hebrew of the florid type. His waistcoat was protuberant; he had a red face with red whiskers sprawling all over it; he wore flash jewellery; his hair shone with pomatum; there was that in his bearing which indicated that he followed some sordid calling, such as pawnbroking, or the backing of horses on commission. Yet one could see that these two unattractive persons were really attracted by each other. A great and beautiful miracle had been performed; and the power which had performed it was that Love in which some profess to disbelieve.
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[Sidenote: Frank Mathew displays his Ignorance.]
Ignorance–says some wiseacre–is the mother of eloquence, and I take it that the less one knows of Love the easier it is to write of it. I side with those who hold that the Love described by poets and other wordy people is mainly fanciful, a flattering picture, that the best school for such writing is an unhappy affection, and that no man can want better luck than to have his heart broken, and so be made proof against lovesickness. An unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the prose of life. A man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his Beloved remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her an unwieldy and wearisome old woman. And when at times he grows sentimental–a bachelor’s privilege–he can feel again the old hopes that he never found false, and see the old perfections that were never disproved. He has a life-companion who comes only when she is wanted, and then with a “smile on her face and a rose in her hair,” whose voice is always gentle, to whom wrinkles are not necessary and bills are not known.
[Sidenote: And praises ugliness.]
I am one of those who prefer the luckless adorers in novels to the conquering heroes; and hold that the quality an ideal lover needs most is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew a boy who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story–in a sprawling hand and on ruled paper–a wonderful story, telling how an unlovely but admirable Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode out to win her by great deeds, and how when he came back triumphant, the sight of her brought his unworthiness home to him so that he dared not claim her. And I knew another boy who was good-looking, and wrote a story (during study-time, of course, and by stealth) about a handsome hero who went to Court in fine clothes, and was worshipped by all the girls. I think now that he was the manlier, but that the first would have made the more devout lover. But the drawback of luckless adorers is that their constancy has not been tried by the ordeal of success. Many a fellow who lived loyal and heart-broken would have made an unfaithful husband.
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[Sidenote: ‘Q.’ is surprised at his sister.]
Love, no doubt, is a subject of popular interest, but a man is always staggered to find his sister holding an opinion upon it. If I remember rightly, in the days when Lilian Quiller Couch (then aged seven) did me the honour of playing Juliet to my Romeo, the interest was mainly acrobatic, Romeo descending the gardener’s ladder head-foremost, while Juliet tilted her body as far over the nursery window-sill as she could manage without breaking her neck. We “cut” the love speeches. Two years later, indeed, my sister schemed to marry me to our common governess. There was no love on my side; so she turned over the Prayer-book, hoping to find “A man may not marry his governess” in the table of Forbidden Degrees. Such a prohibition (she well knew) would be a trumpet-call to my native spirit of disobedience. But I am convinced that even then the nature of true affection did not enter into her calculations. She merely counted on my marital influence to end or mend the French irregular verbs. I am delighted that, in these later days, she sees Love to be a “practical reality.” For my part, I want a definition. Popular custom bestows the name of Love on a green sickness which is in fact a part of Nature’s wise economy. I will expound. Almost all young men, say between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, incline to consume much meat and do next to no work. Were there no corrective, it is clear that in a few years the face of the earth would be eaten bare as by locusts. But at this season Nature by the simplest stroke–the flush of a commonplace cheek, the warm touch of a commonplace hand–in a twinkling redresses the balance. Forthwith the ideal devourer of crops and herbs not only loses his appetite, but arising, smacks the earth with a hoe till the clods fly and the fields laugh with harvest. Thereon he mops his steaming brow, bedecks him with a bunch of white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you’ll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold:
“But in the world I learnt, what there Thou wilt too surely one day prove,
That will, that energy, though rare, Are yet far, far less rare than love.”
I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. Indeed, the capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand that I am not commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of the sheep-boy’s pipe.