Part 9

Mrs. Bateman, with whom and with whose family I was intimate, told me this long after the event, and, curiously enough, it arose out of a conversation going on among some visitors to the house in Ensleigh Street where Mrs. Bateman and her daughters were living. I said I thought the most expressive line ever written was that in the _Inferno_ which ended the exquisite Francesca episode:--

“E caddi come un corpo morto cade.”

Mrs. Bateman and her daughter Kate (Mrs. Crowe) looked at each other and smiled. I thought that they had probably had the line quoted to them _ad nauseam_, and I said so.

“That is not what we were smiling at,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It was at the recollection of the word _corpo._”

And then she told me the foregoing.

Only a short time afterwards in the same house she gave me a bit of information of a much more interesting sort.

I had been at the first performance of Wills' play _Ninon_ at the Adelphi theatre, and was praising the acting of Miss Wallis and Mr. Fernandez. When I was describing one scene, Mrs. Bateman said,--

“I recollect that scene very well; Mr. Wills read that play to us when he was writing _Charles I._; but there was no part in it strong enough for Mr. Irving, He heard it read, however, and was greatly taken with some lines in it--so greatly in fact that Mr. Wills found a place for them in _Charles I._ They are the lines of the King's upbraiding of the Scotch traitor, beginning, 'I saw a picture of a Judas once.' Some people thought them among the finest in the play.”

I said that I was certainly among them.

That was how they made up a play which is certainly one of the most finished dramas in verse of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It was Irving himself who told me something more about the same play. The subject had been suggested to Wills and he set about it with great fervour. He brought the first act to the Lyceum conclave. It opened in the banqueting hall of some castle, with a score of the usual cavaliers having the customary carouse, throwing about wooden goblets, and tossing off bumpers between the verses of some stirring songs of the type of “Oh, fill me a beaker as deep as you please,” leading up to the unavoidable brawl and the timely entrance of the King.

“It was exactly the opposite to all that I had in my mind,” Irving told me, “and I would have nothing to do with it. I wanted the domestic Charles, with his wife and children around him, and I would have nothing else.”

Happily he had his own way, and with the help of the fine lines transferred from _Ninon_, the play was received with acclamation, and, finely acted as it is now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never fails to move an audience.

I think it was John Clayton who was the original Oliver Cromwell. I was told that his make-up was one of the most realistic ever seen. He was Cromwell--to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his dressing-room was lost in admiration of the perfection of the picture, and declared that the painter should sign it in the corner, “John Clayton, pinx.” But perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne.

Only one more word in the Bateman connection. The varying fortunes of the family are well known--how the Bateman children made a marvellous success for a tune--how the eldest, Kate, played for months and years in _Leah_, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and America--how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors, _The Bells_ rang in an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't suppose that many people know' that Mrs. Bateman, the wife of “The Colonel,” was the author of several novels which she wrote for newspapers at one of the “downs” that preceded the “ups” in her life.

And Compton Mackenzie is Mrs. Bateman's grandson!

And Fay Compton is Compton Mackenzie's youngest sister.

There is heredity for you.

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

It was melancholy--but Atheist Friswell alone was to blame for it--that we should sit out through that lovely evening and talk about tawdry theatricals, and that same tawdriness more than a little musty through time. If Friswell had not begun with his nonsense about having seen my Temple somewhere down Oxford Street we should never have wandered from the subject of gardens until we lost ourselves among the wings of the Lyceum and its “profiles” of its pines in _Iolanthe_, and its “built” yews and pomegranates in _Romeo and Juliet_. But among the perfume of the roses surrounding us, with an occasional whiff of the lavender mound and a gracious breath like that of

“The sweet South

That breathes upon a bank of violets

Giving and taking odours,”

we continued talking of theatres until the summer night was reeking with the smell of sawdust and oranges, to say nothing of the fragrance of the _poudre de ninon_ of the stalls, wafted over opera wraps and diamond-studded shirt-fronts--diamond studs, when just over the glimmering marble of my temple the Evening Star was glowing!

But what had always been a mystery to Friswell as the extraordinary lack of judgment on Irving's part in choosing his plays. Had he ever made a success since he produced that adaptation of _Faust?_

Beautifully staged and with some splendid moments due to the genius of the man himself and the never-failing charm of the actress with whom he was associated in all, yet no play worth remembering was produced at the Lyceum during that management. _Faust_ made money, as it always has since the days of Marlowe; but all those noisy scenes and meaningless moments on the misty mountains--only alliteration's artful aid can deal adequately with such digressions from the story of Faust and Gretchen which was all that theatregoers, even of the better class, who go to tire pit, wanted--seemed dragged into the piece without reason or profit. To be sure, pages and pages of Goethe's _Faust_ are devoted to his attempt to give concreteness to abstractions. (That was Friswell's phrase; and I repeat it for what it is worth). But in the original all these have a meaning at the back of them; but Irving only brought them on to abandon them after a line or two. The hope to gain the atmosphere of the weird by means of a panorama of clouds and mountain peaks may have been realised so far as some sections of the audience were concerned; but such a manager as Henry Irving should have been above trying for such cheap effects.

_Faust_ made money, however, and helped materially to promote the formation of the Company through which country clergymen and daily governesses in the provinces hoped to advance the British Drama and earn 20 per cent, dividends.

I was at the first night of every play produced at the Lyceum for over twenty years, and I knew that Irving never fell short of the highest and the truest possible conception of any part that he attempted. At his best he was unapproachable. It was not the actor who failed, when there was failure; it was the play that failed. Only one marvellously inartistic feature was in the adaptation of _The Courier of Lyons_. He assumed that the sole way by which identification of a man is possible is by his appearance--that the intonation of his voice counts for nothing whatsoever. He acted in the dual rôle of Dubose and Lesurges--the one a gentle creature with a gentle voice, the other a truculent ruffian who jerked out his words hoarsely--the very antithesis to the mild gentleman in voice, in gait, and in general demeanour, though closely resembling him in features and appearance. The impression given by this representation was that any one who, having heard Dubose speak, would mistake Lesurges for him must be either stone-deaf or an idiot. But each of the parts was finely played; and the real old stage-coach arriving with its team smoking like Sheffield, helped to make a commonplace melodrama interesting.

Personally I do not think that he was justified in trying to realise at the close of the trial scene in _The Merchant of Venice_, the tableau of Christ standing mute and patient among the mockers. It was an attempt to obtain by suggestion some pity and sympathy for an infamous and inhuman scoundrel. In that pictorial moment Shylock the Jew was made to pose as Christ the Jew.

Mrs. Friswell had not seen Irving's Shylock, but she expressed her belief that Shylock was on the whole very badly treated; and Dorothy was ready to, affirm that Antonio was lacking in those elements that go to the composition of a sportsman. He should not have wriggled out of his bargain by the chicanery of the law.

“They were a bad lot, and that's a fact,” I ventured to say.

“They were,” acquiesced Friswell. “And if you look into the history of the Jews, they were also a bad lot; but among them were the most splendid men recorded as belonging to any race ever known on this earth; and I'm not sure that Irving wasn't justified in trying to get his audiences to realise in that last moment something of the dignity of the Hebrew people.”

“He would have made a more distinct advance in that direction if he had cut out the 'business' of stropping his knife a few minutes earlier, 'To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there,'” I remarked.

“If he had done that Shakespeare would not have had the chance of his pun--the cheapest pun in literature--and it would not be like the author to have neglected that,” said Mrs. Friswell.

They all seemed to know more of the play than I gave them credit for knowing.

It was Heywood who inquired if I remembered another of Irving's plays at the close of which a second greatly misjudged character had appealed for sympathy by adopting the same pose.

Of course I did--I remembered it very distinctly. It was in _Peter the Great_, that the actor, waiting with sublime resignation to hear the heart-rending death-shriek of his son whom he had condemned to drink a cup of cold poison, is told by a hurrying messenger that his illegitimate child has just died--then came the hideous shriek, and the actor, with his far-away look of patient anguish, spoke his words,--

“Then I am childless!”

And the curtain fell.

He appealed for sympathy on precisely the same grounds as were suggested by the prisoner at the bar who had killed his father with a hatchet, and on being convicted by the jury and asked by the judge if he could advance any plea whereby the sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him, said he hoped that his lordship would not forget that he was an orphan.

In this drama the first act was played with as much jingling of sleigh-bells as took place in another and rather better known piece in the repertoire of the same actor.

But whatever were its shortcomings, _Peter the Great_ showed that poor Lawrence Irving could write, and write well, and that he might one day give to the English theatre a great drama.

Irving was accused of neglecting English authors; but the accusation was quite unjust. He gave several of them a chance. There was, of course, W. G. Wills, who was a true dramatist, and showed it in those plays to which I have referred. But it must not be forgotten that he produced a play by Mr. H. D. Traill and Mr. Robert Hitchens, and another by Herman Merrivale; Mr. J. Comyns Carr took in hand the finishing of _King Arthur_, begun by Wills, and made it ridiculous, and helped in translating and adapting _Madame Sans Gêne_. Might not Lord Tennyson also be called an English author? and were not his three plays, _Queen Mary, The Cup, and Bechet_ brought out at the Lyceum? Irving showed me how he had made the last-named playable, and I confess that I was astonished. There was not a single page of the book remaining untouched when he had done with it. Speech after speech was transferred from one act to another, and the sequence of the scenes was altered, before the drama was made possible. But when he had finished with it _Bechet_ was not only possible and playable, it was the noblest and the best constructed drama in verse that the stage had seen for years.

I asked him what Lord Tennyson had said about this chopping and changing; but he did not give me a verbatim account of the poet's greeting of his offspring in its stage dress--he only smiled as one smiles under the influence of a reminiscence of something that is better over.

When he went to Victorien Sardou for a new play and got _Robespierre_, Irving got the worst thing that he had produced up to that date; but when he went a second time and got _Dante_, he got something worse still. Sir Arthur Pinero's letter acknowledging the debt incurred by the dramatists of England to M. Sardou for showing them how a play should be written was a masterpiece of irony.

The truth is that Irving was the greatest of English actors, and he was at his best only when he was interpreting the best. When he was acting Shakespeare he was supreme. In scenes of passion he differed from most actors. They could show a passion in the hands of a man, he showed the man in the hands of a passion. And what actor could have represented Corporal Brewster in _Waterloo_ as Irving did?

About the changes that we veterans have seen in the stage during the forty years of our playgoing, we agree that one of the most remarkable is the introduction of parsons and pyjamas, and of persons with a past. All these glories of the modern theatre were shut out from the theatres of forty years ago. When an adaptation of _Dora_ by the author of _Fedora_ and _Theodora_ was made for the English stage under the name of _Diplomacy_, the claim that the Countess with a past had upon the Diplomatist who is going to marry--really marry--another woman, was turned into a claim that she had “nursed him through a long illness.” The censor of those days thought that that was quite as far as any one should go in that direction. It was assumed that _La Dame aux Camélias_ could never be adapted without being offensive to a pure-minded English audience. I think that _A Clerical Error_ was the first play in which a clergyman of the Church of England was given the entrée to a theatre in London. To be sure, there were priests of the Church of Rome in Dion Roufcicault's Irish plays, but they were not supposed to count. I heard that Mr. Pigott, the Censor, only passed the parson in _A Clerical Error_ on the plea of the young nurse for something equally forbidden, in _Midshipman Easy_, that “it was a very little one.” But from that day until now we have had parsons by the score, ladies wearing camellias and little else, by the hundred. As for the pyjama drama, I don't suppose that any manager would so much as read a play that had not this duplex garment in one scene. I will confess that I once wrote a story for _Punch_ with a pyjama chorus in it. If it was from this indiscretion that a manager conceived the idea of a ballet founded on the same costume I have something to answer for.

But in journalism and literature a corresponding change has come about, only more recently. It is not more than ten or twelve years since certain words have enjoyed the liberty of the press. In a police-court case the word that the ruffian in the dock hurled at a policeman was represented thus--“d----n,” telling him to go to “h----” no respectable newspaper would ever put in the final letter.

But now we have had the highest examples of amalgamated newspapers printing the name of the place that was to be found in neither gazette nor gazetteer, in bold type at the head of a column, and that too in connection with the utterance of a Prime Minister. As for the d----n of ten years ago, no one could have believed that Bob Acres' thoughtless assertion that “damns have had their day,” should be so luridly disproved. Why, they have only now come into their inheritance. This is the day of the damn. It occupies the _Place aux Dames_ of Victorian times; and now one need not hope to be able to pick up a paper or a book that has not most of its pages sprinkled with damns and hells as plentifully as a devil is sprinkled with cayenne. I am sure that in the cookery books of our parents the treatment of a devilled bone would not be found, or if the more conscientious admitted it, we should find it put, “how to cook a d--------bone,” or, “another way,” as the cookery book would put it more explicitly, “a d--------d bone.”

“It is satisfactory to learn that the Church which so long enjoyed the soul right to the property in these words, has relinquished its claim and handed over the title deeds of the freehold, with all the patronage that was supposed to go with it,” said Friswell. “I read in the papers the other day that the Archbishop had received the report of the Committee he appointed to inquire into the rights of both words, and this recommended the abolition of both words in the interpretation accepted for them for centuries in religious communities; and in future damnation is to be taken to mean only something that does not commend itself to all temperaments, and hell is no more than a picturesque but insanitary dwelling.”

“I read something like that the other day,” said Dorothy. “But surely they have not gone so far as you say.”

“They have gone to a much more voluminous distance, I assure you,” said he. “It is to enable us all to say the Athanasian Creed without our tongue in our cheek. Quicunque vult may repeat 'Qui-cunque Vult' with a full assurance that nothing worth talking about will happen.”

“All the Bishops' Committees in the world cannot rob us Englishmen of our heritage in those words,” I cried, feeling righteously angry at the man's flippancy. “If they were to take that from us, what can they give us in its place--tell me that?”

“Oh, there is still one word in the same connection that they have been afraid to touch,” said he cheerfully. “Thank Heaven we have still got that to counteract any tendency of our language to become anæmic.”

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

I had been practically all my life enjoying gardens of various kinds, but I had given attention to their creations without giving a thought to their creation; I had taken the gifts of Flora, I would have said if I had been writing a hundred years ago, without studying the features or the figure of the goddess herself. If I were hard pressed for time and space I would say directly that I lived among flowers, but knew nothing of gardens. I had never troubled myself to inquire into the details of a garden's charm. I had watched gardeners working and idling, mowing and watering, tying up and cutting down, but I had never had a chance of watching a real gardener making a garden.

It is generally assumed that the first gardener that the world has known was Adam. A clergyman told me so with the smile that comes with the achievement of a satisfactory benefice--the indulgent smile of the higher criticism for the Book of Genesis. But people who agree with that assumption cannot have read the Book with the attention it deserves, or they would have seen that it was the Creator of all Who planted the first garden, and there are people alive to-day who are ready to affirm that He worked conscientiously on the lines laid down by Le Notre. Most gardeners whom I have seen at work appeared to me to be well aware of the fact that the garden was given to man as a beatitude, and that agriculture came later and in the form of a Curse; and in accordance with this assurance they decline to labour in such a way as to make the terms of the Curse apply to themselves. If they wipe their brows with their shirt-sleeve, it is only because that is the traditional movement which precedes the consulting of their watch to see if that five minutes before the striking of the stable clock for the dinner hour will allow of their putting on their coats.

A friend of mine who had been reading Darwin and Wallace and Lyell and Huxley and the rest of them, greatly to the detriment of his interpretation of some passages in the Pentateuch, declared that the record of the incident of the Garden Designer in the first chapters of Genesis, being unable to do anything with his gardener and being obliged (making use of a Shakespearian idiom) to fire him out, showed such a knowledge of the trade, that, Darwin or no Darwin, he would accept the account of the transaction without reservation.

The saying that God sent food but the devil sent cooks may be adapted to horticulture, as a rule, 1 think; but it should certainly not be applied indiscriminately. The usual “jobber” is a man from whom employers expect a great deal but get very little that is satisfactory. That is because employers are unreasonable. The ordinary “working gardener” does not think, because he is not paid to think: he does not get the wages of a man who is required to use his brain. When one discovers all that a gardener should know, and learns that the average wage of the trade is from one pound to thirty shillings a week, the unreasonableness of expecting a high order of intelligence to be placed at your service for such pay will be apparent.

Of course a “head” at an establishment where he is called a “curator” and has half a dozen assistants, gets a decent salary and fully earns it; but the pay of the greater number of the men who call themselves gardeners is low out of all proportion to what their qualifications should be.

Now this being so, is the improvement to come by increasing the wages of the usual type of garden jobber? I doubt it. My experience leads me to believe very strongly in the employer's being content with work only, and in his making no demand for brains or erudition from the man to whom he pays twenty-five shillings a week--pre-war rates, of course: the war-time equivalent would, of course, be something like £2 5s.--the brains and erudition should be provided by himself. The employer or some member of his family should undertake the direction of the work and ask for the work only from the man.

I know that the war days were the means of developing this system beyond all that one thought possible five or six years ago; and of one thing I am sure, and this is that no one who has been compelled to “take up” his own garden will ever go back to the old way, the leading note of which was the morning grumble at the inefficiency of the gardener, and the evening resolution to fire him out. The distinction between exercise and work has, within the past few fateful years, been obliterated; and it has become accepted generally that to sweat over the handle of a lawnmower is just as ennobling as to perspire for over after over at a bowling crease; and that the man who comes in earth-stained from his allotment, is not necessarily the social inferior of the man who carries away on his knees a sample of the soil of the football field. There may be a distinction between the work and the play; but it is pretty much the same as the difference between the Biblical verb to sweat and the boudoir word to perspire. The pores are opened by the one just as healthfully as by the other. And in future I am pretty sure that we shall all sweat and rarely perspire.

I need not give any of the “instances” that have come under my notice of great advantage accruing to the garden as well as to the one who gardens without an indifferent understudy--every one who reads this book is in a position to supply such an omission. I am sure that there is no country town or village that cannot mention the name of some family, a member or several members of which have been hard at work raising flowers or vegetables or growing fruit, with immediately satisfactory results, and a prospect of something greatly in advance in the future.