Part 4
“And that, I venture to suggest, ma’am,” he respectably continued, “is why your worthy husband has been so much more fortunate in the world than myself. We are both respectable, if I may say so, patterns of respectability” (Crichton coloured with gratification at this compliment from the Master), “and yet our respectability has brought us very different fates. And why, if you please, ma’am? Because I have served the young, while he has served the old—for I believe, ma’am, the most noble the Earl of Loam is long past the meridian. Besides, ma’am, we Early Victorians had not your husband’s educational advantages. There were no Board schools for me. Not that I’m complaining, ma’am. We could still teach the young ’uns a thing or two about respectability.” And so with a proud humility (and an intuition that there was to be no more port) he took his leave, again shutting the door with the utmost delicacy. He was, in truth, well content. He had seen his boy. The sacred lamp of respectability was not out.
But Mr. Crichton sat in a maze, still washing his hands with invisible soap.
HENRY JAMES REPUDIATES “THE REPROBATE”
He had dropped, a little wearily, the poor dear man, into a seat at the shady end of the terrace, whither he had wended or, it came over him with a sense of the blest “irony” of vulgar misinterpretation, almost zig-zagged his way after lunch. For he had permitted himself the merest sip of the ducal Yquem or Brane Cantenac, or whatever—he knew too well, oh, _didn’t_ he? after all these years of Scratchem house-parties, the dangerous convivialities one had better show for beautifully appreciating than freely partake of—but he had been unable, in his exposure as the author of established reputation, the celebrity of the hour, the “master,” as chattering Lady Jemima _would_ call him between the omelette and the chaudfroid, to “take cover” from the ducal dates. Well, the “All clear” was now sounded, but his head was still dizzy with the reverberating ’87’s and ’90’s and ’96’s and other such bombs of chronological precision that the host had dropped upon the guests as the butler filled their glasses. His subsequent consciousness was quite to cherish the view that dates which went thus distressingly to one’s head must somehow not be allowed to slip out of it again, but be turned into “copy” for readers who innocently look to their favourite romancers for connoisseurship in wines. What Lady Jemima had flung out at lunch was true, readers _are_ a “rum lot,” and, hang it all, who says art says sacrifice, readers were a necessary evil, the many-headed monster must be fed, and he’d be blest if he wouldn’t feed it with dates, and show himself for, indulgently, richly, chronologically, “rum.”
It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision of future “bluffing” about vintages interfered not at all with the measure of his actual _malaise_. He still nervously fingered the telegram handed to him at lunch, and, when read, furtively crumpled into his pocket under Lady Jemima’s celebrated nose. It was entirely odious to him, the crude purport of the message, as well as the hideous yellow ochre of its envelope. “Confidently expect you,” the horrid thing ran, “to come and see your own play.” This Stage Society, if that was its confounded name, was indeed of a confidence! Yes, and of the last vulgarity! His conscience was not void, but, on the contrary, quite charged and brimming with remembered lapses from the ideal life of letters—it was the hair-shirt he secretly wore even in the Scratchem world under the conventional garment which the Lady Jemimas of that world teased him by calling a “boiled rag”—but the “expected,” _that_, thank goodness, he had never been guilty of. Nay, was it not his “note,” as the reviewers said, blithely and persistently to balk “expectation”? Had he not in every book of his successfully hugged his own mystery? Had not these same reviewers always missed his little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted him on the back as when they kicked him on the shins? Did a single one of them ever discover “the figure in the carpet”? How many baffled readers hadn’t written to him imploring him to divulge what _really_ happened between Milly and Densher in that last meeting at Venice? Certainly he was in no chuckling mood under the smart of the telegram, but it seemed to him that he could almost have chuckled at the thought that he beautifully didn’t know what happened in that Venetian meeting himself! And this impossible Stage Society, with that collective fatuity which seems always so much more gross than any individual sort, “confidently expected” him to come!
What was it, please, he put the question to himself with a heat which seemed to give even the shady end of the terrace the inconvenience of an exposure to full sun, they expected him to come _to_, or, still worse, for having probed the wound he must not flinch with the scalpel, to come _for_? Oh, no, he had not forgotten _The Reprobate_, and what angered him was that _they_ hadn’t, either. He had not forgotten a blessed one of the plays he had written for the country towns a score of years ago, when he had been bitten by the tarantula of the theatre, and, remembering them, he felt now viciously capable of biting the tarantula back. He had written them, God forgive him, for country towns. He positively shuddered when he found himself in a country town, to this day. The terrace at Scratchem notoriously commanded a distant prospect of at least three, in as many counties, with cathedrals, famous inns, theatres—the whole orthodox equipment, he summed it up vindictively in cheap journalese, of country towns. Vindictive, too, was his reflection that these objects of his old crazy solicitude must have been revolutionized in twenty years, their cathedrals “restored,” their inns (the “A.B.C.” vouched for it) “entirely refitted with electric light,” their theatres turned into picture palaces. All the old associations of _The Reprobate_ were extinct. It was monstrous that it should be entirely refitted with electric light.
And in the crude glare of that powerful illuminant, with every switch or whatever mercilessly turned—didn’t they call it?—“on,” he seemed to see the wretched thing, bare and hideous, with no cheap artifice of “make-up,” no dab of rouge or streak of burnt cork, spared the dishonour of exposure. The crack in the golden bowl would be revealed, his awkward age would be brought up against him, what Maisie knew would be nothing to what everybody would now know. His agony was not long purely mental; it suddenly became intercostal. A sharp point had dug him in the ribs. It was Lady Jemima’s, it couldn’t _not_ be Lady Jemima’s, pink parasol. Aware of the really great ease of really great ladies he forced a smile, as he rubbed his side. Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed—that was a part of their high bravery and privilege.
“Dear Master,” she began, and the phrase hurt him even more than the parasol, “won’t you take poor little _me_?”
The great lady had read his telegram! Olympian unconventionality was of a licence!
“Yes,” she archly beamed, “I looked over your shoulder at lunch, and——”
“And,” he interruptingly wailed, “you know all.”
“All,” she nodded, “_tout le tremblement_, the whole caboodle. Now be an angel and take me.”
“But, dear lady,” he gloomed at her, “that’s just it. The blest play is so naïvely, so vulgarly, beyond all redemption though not, thank Heaven, beyond my repudiation, caboodle.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she playfully rejoined, and the artist in him registered for future use her rich Olympian vocabulary, “you _wrote_ it, Master, anyhow. We’ve all been young once. Take me, and we’ll both be young again,” she gave it him straight, “together.”
Ah, then the woman _was_ dangerous. Scratchem gossip had, for once, not overshot the mark. He would show her, all Olympian though she was, that giving it straight was a game two could play at.
“Dear lady,” he said, “you’re wonderful. But I won’t take you. What’s more, I’m not”—and he had it to himself surprisingly ready—“taking _any_.”
M. BERGERET ON FILM CENSORING
A late October sun of unusual splendour lit up the windows of M. Paillot’s bookshop, at the corner of the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries. But it was sombre in the back region of the shop where the second-hand book shelves were and M. Mazure, the departmental archivist, adjusted his spectacles to read his copy of _Le Phare_, with one eye on the newspaper and the other on M. Paillot and his customers. For M. Mazure wished not so much to read as to be seen reading, in order that he might be asked what the leading article was and reply, “Oh, a little thing of my own.” But the question was not asked, for the only other _habitué_ present was the Lecturer in Latin at the Faculty of Letters, who was sad and silent. M. Bergeret was turning over the new books and the old with a friendly hand, and though he never bought a book for fear of the outcries of his wife and three daughters he was on the best of terms with M. Paillot, who held him in high esteem as the reservoir and alembic of those humaner letters that are the livelihood and profit of booksellers. He took up Vol. XXXVIII. of “L’Histoire Générale des Voyages,” which always opened at the same place, p. 212, and he read:—
“ver un passage au nord. ‘C’est à cet échec, dit-il, que nous devons n’avoir pu visiter les îles Sandwich et enrichir notre voyage d’une découverte qui....’”
For six years past the same page had presented itself to M. Bergeret, as an example of the monotony of life, as a symbol of the uniformity of daily tasks, and it saddened him.
At that moment M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, entered the shop and greeted his friends with the slight air of superiority of a traveller over stay-at-homes. “I’ve just got back from England,” he said, “and here, if either of you have enough English to read it, is to-day’s _Times_.”
M. Mazure hastily thrust _Le Phare_ into his pocket and looked askance at the voluminous foreign journal, wherein he could claim no little thing of his own. M. Bergeret accepted it and applied himself as conscientiously to construing the text as though it were one of those books of the Æneid from which he was compiling his “Virgilius Nauticus.” “The manners of our neighbours,” he presently said, “are as usual more interesting to a student of human nature than their politics. I read that they are seriously concerned about the ethical teaching of their kinematography, and they have appointed a film censor, the deputy T. P. O’Connor.”
“I think I have heard speak of him over there,” interrupted M. de Terremondre; “they call him, familiarly, Tépé.”
“A mysterious name,” said M. Bergeret, “but manifestly not abusive, and that of itself is a high honour. History records few nicknames that do not revile. And if the deputy O’Connor, or Tépé, can successfully acquit himself of his present functions he will be indeed an ornament to history, a saint of the Positivist Calendar, which is no doubt less glorious than the Roman, but more exclusive.”
“Talking of Roman saints,” broke in M. Mazure, “the Abbé Lantaigne has been spreading it abroad that you called Joan of Arc a mascot.”
“By way of argument merely,” said M. Bergeret, “not of epigram. The Abbé and I were discussing theology, about which I never permit myself to be facetious.”
“But what of Tépé and his censorial functions?” asked M. de Terremondre.
“They are extremely delicate,” replied M. Bergeret, “and offer pitfalls to a censor with a velleity for nice distinctions. Thus I read that this one has already distinguished, and distinguished _con allegrezza_, between romantic crime and realistic crime, between murder in Mexico and murder in Mile End (which I take to be a suburb of London). He has distinguished between ‘guilty love’ and ‘the pursuit of lust.’ He has distinguished between a lightly-clad lady swimming and the same lady at rest. Surely a man gifted with so exquisite a discrimination is wasted in rude practical life. He should have been a metaphysician.”
“Well, I,” confessed M. de Terremondre, “am no metaphysician, and it seems to me murder is murder all the world over.”
“Pardon me,” said M. Bergeret, “but there, I think, your Tépé is quite right. Murder is murder all the world over if you are on the spot. But if you are at a sufficient distance from it in space or time, it may present itself as a thrilling adventure. Thus the Mexican film censor will be right in prohibiting films of murder in Mexico, and not wrong in admitting those of murder in Mile End. Where would tragedy be without murder? We enjoy the murders of Julius Cæsar or of Duncan because they are remote; they gratify the primeval passion for blood in us without a sense of risk. But we could not tolerate a play or a picture of yesterday’s murder next door, because we think it might happen to ourselves. Remember that murder was long esteemed in our human societies as an energetic action, and in our manners and in our institutions there still subsist traces of this antique esteem. And that is why I approve the English film censor for treating with a wise indulgence one of the most venerable of our human admirations. He gratifies it under conditions of remoteness that deprive bloodshed of its reality while conserving its artistic verisimilitude.”
“But, bless my soul,” said M. de Terremondre “how does the man distinguish between guilty love and lust?”
“It is a fine point,” said M. Bergeret. “The Fathers of the Church, the schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Descartes and Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, have all failed to make the distinction, and some of them have even confounded with the two what men to-day agree in calling innocent love. But is love ever innocent—unless it be that love Professor Bellac in Pailleron’s play described as _l’amour psychique_, the love that Petrarch bore to Laura?”
“If I remember aright,” interposed M. Mazure, “someone else in the play remarked that Laura had eleven children.”
Just then Mme. de Gromance passed across the Place. The conversation was suspended while all three men watched her into the patissier’s opposite, elegantly hovering over the plates of cakes, and finally settling on a _baba au rhum_.
“Sapristi!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, “she’s the prettiest woman in the whole place.”
M. Bergeret mentally went over several passages in Æneid, Book IV., looked ruefully at his frayed shirt cuffs, and regretted the narrow life of a provincial university lecturer that reduced him to insignificance in the eyes of the prettiest woman in the place.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh, “it is a very fine point. I wonder how on earth Tépé manages to settle it?”
THE CHOCOLATE DRAMA
Civilization is a failure. That we all knew, even before the war, and indeed ever since the world first began to suffer from the intolerable nuisance of disobedient parents. But the latest and most fatal sign of decadence is the advent of a paradoxical Lord Chancellor. I read in a _Times_ leader:—“When the Lord Chancellor ponderously observes in the House of Lords that the primary business of theatres ‘is not to sell chocolates but to present the drama,’ he is making a statement which is too absurd to analyse.” _The Times_, I rejoice to see, is living up to its high traditions of intrepid and incisive utterance. I should not myself complain if the Lord Chancellor was merely ponderous. As the dying Heine observed, when someone wondered if Providence would pardon him, _c’est son métier_. What is so flagrant is the Lord Chancellor’s ignorance of the commanding position acquired by chocolate in relation to the modern drama.
Let me not be misunderstood. I am not a _chocolatier_. I have no vested interest in either Menier or Marquis. But I am a frequenter of the playhouse, and live, therefore, in the odour of chocolate. I know that without chocolates our womenkind could not endure our modern drama; and without womenkind the drama would cease to exist. The question is, therefore, of the deepest theatrical importance. I feel sure the British Drama League must have had a meeting about it. The advocates of a national theatre have probably considered it in committee. The two bodies (if they are not one and the same) should arrange an early deputation to the Food Controller.
Meanwhile the Lord Chancellor wantonly paradoxes. Evidently he is no playgoer. That is a trifle, and since the production of _Iolanthe_ perhaps even (in the phrase of a famous criminal lawyer) “a amiable weakness.” But, evidently also, he is not a chocolate eater, and that is serious. I suppose, after all, you are not allowed to eat chocolates on the Woolsack. But there is the Petty Bag. It would hold at least 2 lb. of best mixed. Why not turn it to a grateful and comforting purpose? The Great Seal, too, might be done in chocolate, and as I understand the Lord Chancellor must never part with it, day or night, he would have a perpetual source of nourishment. It is time that the symbols of office ceased to be useless ornaments. Stay! I believe I have stumbled incidentally on the secret of Lord Halsbury’s splendid longevity. Ask Menier or Marquis.
But the present Chancellor has, clearly, missed his opportunities. Let him visit our theatres and there recognize the futility of his pretence that their primary business is to present drama. He will see at once that what he put forward as a main business is in reality a mere parergon. Drama is presented, but only as an agreeable, not too obtrusive, accompaniment to the eating of chocolate. The curtain goes up, and the ladies in the audience, _distraites_, and manifestly feeling with Mrs. Gamp (or was it Betsy Prig?) a sort of sinking, yawn through the first scene or two. Then there is a rustle of paper wrappings, little white cardboard boxes are brought out and passed from hand to hand, there is a dainty picking and choosing of round and square and triangular, with a knowing rejection of the hard-toffee-filled ones, and now the fair faces are all set in a fixed smile of contentment and the fair jaws are steadily, rhythmically at work. To an unprepared observer it cannot be a pretty sight. Fair Americans chewing gum are nothing to it. There are superfine male voluptuaries who do not much care to see women eat, even at the festive board. But to see scores of women simultaneously eating chocolates at the theatre is an uncanny thing. They do it in unison, and they do it with an air of furtive enjoyment, as though it were some secret vice and all the better for being sinful. The act-drop goes up and down, actors are heard talking or the orchestra playing, men pass out for a cigarette and repass, but the fair jaws never cease working. The habit of needlework, lace-making, and perhaps war knitting has given lovely woman that form of genius which has been defined as a long patience. They eat chocolates with the monotonous regularity with which they hemstitch linen or darn socks. It has been said that women go to church for the sake of the _hims_, but they go to the theatre for the sake of chocolates. And the Lord Chancellor, good, easy man, says the primary business of the theatre is to present drama!
No, its primary business is to provide comfortable and amusing surroundings for fair chocolate-eaters. The play is there for the same reason the coon band is at a restaurant, to assist mastication. That is the real explanation of recent vicissitudes in the dramatic _genres_. Why has tragedy virtually disappeared from the stage? Because it will go with neither _fondants_ nor _pralinés_. Why the enormous vogue of revues? Because they suit every kind of chocolate from 4_s_. to 6_s_. per lb. Why is Mr. George Robey so universal a favourite? Because he creates the kind of laughter which never interferes with your munching. The true, if hitherto secret, history of the drama is a history of theatrical dietary. Why is the Restoration drama so widely different from the Victorian? Because the first was an accompaniment to oranges and the second to pork-pies. We live now in a more refined age, the age of chocolate, and enjoy the drama that chocolate deserves. There has been what the vulgar call a “slump” in the theatrical world, and all sorts of far-fetched explanations have been offered, such as the dearth of good plays and the dismissal of the “temporary” ladies from Government offices, with consequent loss of pocket-money for playgoing. The real cause is quite simple, as real causes always are. Chocolate has “gone up.”
And that is the secret of all the agitation about the 8 o’clock rule. The purveyors know that, once in the theatre, ladies _must_ eat chocolate, whatever its price. It is a necessity for them there, not a luxury, and after 8 p.m., when the imported supplies are running low, almost any price might be obtained for the staple article of food on the spot. But why, it may be asked, are the imported supplies, in present circumstances, insufficient for the whole evening’s consumption? Simply because the chocolates eaten by women are purchased by men, and men are _so_ forgetful. Besides they have an absurd prejudice against bulging pockets. Clearly “Dora” ought gracefully to withdraw the 8 o’clock prohibition. It would not only be a kindness to those meritorious public servants, the chocolate vendors, but be also a great lift to the languishing drama. Ladies who have emptied their chocolate boxes are apt to become peevish—and then woe to the last act. With still another smooth round tablet to turn over on the tongue (especially if it is the delightful sort that has peppermint cream inside) the play might be followed to the very end with satisfaction, and even enthusiasm. The Lord Chancellor may ignore these facts, but they are well known to every serious student of the chocolate drama.
GROCK
There must be a philosophy of clowns. I would rather find it than look up their history, which is “older than any history that is written in any book,” though the respectable compilers of Encyclopædias (I feel sure without looking) must often have written it in their books. I have, however, been reading Croce’s history of Pulcinella, because that is history written by a philosopher. It is also a work of formidable erudition, disproving, among other things, the theory of the learned Dieterich that he was a survival from the stage of ancient Rome. No, he seems to have been invented by one Silvio Fiorillo, a Neapolitan actor who flourished “negli ultimi decenni del Cinquecento e nei primi del Seicento”—in fact, was a contemporary of an English actor, one William Shakespeare. Pulcinella, you know (transmogrified, and spoiled, for us as Punch), was a sort of clown, and it is interesting to learn that he was invented by an actor all out of his own head. But I for one should be vastly more interested to know who invented Grock. For Grock also is a sort of clown. Yet no; one must distinguish. There are clowns and there is Grock. For Grock happens to be an artist, and the artist is always an individual. After all, as an individual artist, he must have invented himself.