Atheist Friswell has been wondering where he saw a mount like mine crowned with just such a structure, and he has at last shepherded his wandering memory to the place. I ventured to suggest the possibilities of the island Scios, and Jack Heywood, the painter, who, though our neighbour, still remains our friend, makes some noncompromising remark about Milos “where the statues come from.”
“I think you'll find the place in a picture-book calledBeauty Spots in Greece” remarked Mrs. Friswell. Dorothy is under the impression that Friswell's researches in the classical lore of one Lemprière is accountable for his notion that there is, or was, at one time in the world a Temple with some resemblance to the one in which we were sitting when he began to wonder.
“Very likely,” said he, with a brutal laugh. “The temples on the hills were sometimes dedicated to the sun—Helios, you know.”
Of course we all knew, or pretended that we knew.
“And what did your artful Christians do when they came upon such a fane?” he inquired.
“Pulled it down, I suppose; the early artful Christians had no more sense of architectural or antiquarian beauty than the modern exponents of the cult,” said Heywood.
“They were too artful for that, those early Christian propagandists,” said Friswell. “No, they turned to the noble Greek worshippers whom they were anxious to convert, and cried, dropping their aspirates after the manner of the moderns, 'dedicated to Elias, is it?' Quite so—-Saint Elias—he is one of our saints. That is how it comes that so many churches on hills in the Near East have for their patron Saint Elias. Who was he, I should like to know.”
“I would do my best to withhold the knowledge from you,” said Dorothy. “But was there ever really such a saint? There was a prophet, of course, but that's not just the same.”
“I should think not,” said Friswell. “The old prophets were the grandest characters of which there is a record—your saints are white trash alongside them—half-breeds. They only came into existence because of the craving of humanity for pluralities of worship. The Church has found in her saints the equivalents to the whole Roman theology.”
“Mythology,” said I correctively.
“There's no difference between the words,” he replied.
“Oh, yes, my dear, there is,” said his wife. “There is the same difference between theology and mythology as there is between convert and pervert.”
“Exactly the same difference,” he cried. “Exactly, but no greater. Christian hagiology—what a horrid word!—is on all-fours with Roman mythology. The women who used to lay flowers in the Temple of Diana bring their lilies into the chapel of the Madonna. There are chapels for all the saints, for they have endowed their saints with the powers attributed to their numerous deities by the Greeks and the Romans. There are enough saints to go round—-to meet all the requirements of the most freakish and exacting of district visitors. But the Jewish prophets were very different from the mystical and mythical saints. They lived, and you feel when you get in touch with them that you are on a higher plane altogether.”
“Have you found out where you saw that Temple on the mound over there, and if you have, let us know the name of the god or the goddess or saint or saintess that it was dedicated to, and I'll try to pick up a Britannia metal figure cheap to put in the grove alongside the Greek vase,” said I.
He seemed in labour of thought: no one spoke for fear of interrupting the course of nature.
“Let me think,” he muttered. “I don't see why the mischief I should associate a Greek Temple with Oxford Street, but I do—that particular Temple of yours.”
“If you were a really religious business man you might be led to think of the City Temple, only it doesn't belong to the Greek Church,” remarked Heywood.
“Let me help you,” said the Atheist's wife; “think of Truslove and Hanson, the booksellers. Did Arthur Rackham ever put a Temple into one of his picture-books?”
“After all, you may have gone on to Holborn—Were you in Batsford's?” suggested Dorothy.
“Don't bother about him,” said I. “What does it matter if he did once see something like our Temple; he'll never see anything like it again, unless——”
“It may have been Buszards'—a masterpiece of Buszards,—pure confectioners' Greek architecture—icing veined to look like marble,” said Dorothy.
“I have it—-I knew I could worry it out if you gave me time,” cried Friswell.
“Which we did,” said I. “Well, whisper it gently in our ears.”
“It was in a scene in a play at the Princess's Theatre,” he cried triumphantly. “Yes, 1 recollect it distinctly—something just like your masterpiece, only more slavishly Greek—the scene was laid in Rome, so they would be sure to have it correct.”
“What play was it?” Dorothy asked.
“Oh, now you're asking too much,” he replied. “Who could remember the name of a play after thirty or forty years? All that I remember is that it was a thoroughly bad play with a Temple like yours in it. It was the fading of the light that brought it within the tentacles of my memory.”
“So like a man—to blame the dusk,” said his wife.
“The twilight is the time for a garden—the summer twilight, like this,” said Mr. Heywood.
“The moonless midnight is the time for some gardens,” said Dorothy, who is fastidious in many matters, though she did marry me.
“The time for a garden was decided a long time ago,” said I—“as long ago as the third chapter of Genesis and the eighth verse: 'They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day.'”
“You say that with a last-word air—as much as to say 'what's good enough for God is good enough for me,'” laughed Friswell.
“I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day,” said Mrs. Friswell gently.
“There are some people who would fail to hear it at any time,” said I, pointedly referring to Friswell. He gave a laugh. “What are you guffawing at?” I cried with some asperity I trust.
“Not at your Congregational platitudes,” he replied. “I was led to smile when I remembered how the colloquial Bible which was compiled by a Scotsman, treated that beautiful passage. He paraphrased it, 'The Lord went oot in the gloamin' to hae a crack wi' Adam ower the garden gate.'”
“I don't suppose he was thought irreverent,” said Dorothy. “He wasn't really, you know.”
“To take a step or two in the other direction,” said Mrs. Friswell; “I wonder if Milton had in his mind any of the Italian gardens he must have visited on his travels when he described the Garden of Eden.”
“There's not much of an Italian garden in Milton's Eden,” said Dorothy, who is something of an authority on these points. “But it is certainly an Italian twilight that he describes in one place. Poor Milton! he must have been living for many years in a perpetual twilight before 't darkened into his perpetual night.”
“You notice the influence of the hour,” said Heywood. “We have fallen into a twilight-shaded vale of converse. This is the hour when people talk in whispers in gardens like these.”
“I dare say we have all done so in our time,” remarked some one with a sentimental sigh that she tried in vain to smother.
“Ah, God knew what He was about when He put a man and a woman into a garden alone, and gave them an admonition,” said Friswell. “By the way, one of the most remarkable bits of testimony to the scientific accuracy of the Book of Genesis, seems to me to be the discovery, after many years of conjecture and vague theorising, that man and woman were originally one, so that the story of the formation of Eve by separating from Adam a portion of his body is scientifically true. I don't suppose that any of you good orthodox folk will take that in; but it is a fact all the same.”
“I will believe anything except a scientific fact,” said Dorothy.
“And I will believe nothing else,” said Friswell. “The history of mankind begins with the creation of Eve—the separation of the two-sexed animal into two—meant a new world, a world worth writing about—a world of love.”
“Listen to him—there's the effect of twilight in a Garden of Peace for you,” said I. “Science and the Book of Genesis, hitherto at enmity, are at last reconciled by Atheist Friswell. What a triumph! What a pity that Milton, who made his Archangel visit Adam and his bride and give them a scientific lecture, did not live to learn all this!”
“He would have given us a Nonconformist account of it,” said Mrs. Friswell. “I wonder how much his Archangel would have known if Milton had not first visited Charles Deodati.”
There was much more to be said in the twilight on the subject of the world of love—a world which seems the beginning of a new world to those who love; and that was possibly why silence fell upon us and was only broken by the calling of a thrush from among the rhododendrons and the tapping of the rim of Heywood's empty pipe-bowl on the heel of his shoe. There was so much to be said, if we were the people to say it, on the subject of the new Earth which your lover knows to be the old Heaven, that, being aware of the inadequacy of human speech, we were silent for a long space.
And when we began to talk again it was only to hark back from Nature to the theatre, and, a further decadence still—the Gardens of the Stage.
The most effective garden scene in my recollection is that in which Irving and Ellen Terry acted when playing Wills' exquisite adaptation ofKing Renê's Daughter, which he calledIolanthe. I think it was Harker who painted it. The garden was outside a mediaeval castle, and the way its position on the summit of a hill was suggested was an admirable bit of stagecraft. Among the serried lines of pines there was at first seen the faint pink of a sunset, and this gradually became a glowing crimson which faded away into the rich blue of an Italian twilight. But there was enough light to glint here and there upon the armour of the men-at-arms who moved about among the trees.
The parterre in the foreground was full of red roses, and I remember that Mr. Ruskin, after seeing the piece and commenting upon themise-en-scène, said that in such a light as was on it, the roses of the garden would have seemed black!
This one-act play was brought on by Irving during the latter months of the great run ofThe Merchant of Venice. It showed in how true a spirit of loyalty to Shakespeare the last act, which, in nearly all representations of the play, is omitted, on the assumption that with the disappearance of Shylock there is no further element of interest in the piece, was retained by the great manager. It was retained only for the first few months, and it was delightfully played. The moonlit garden in which the incomparable lines of the poet were spoken was of the true Italian type, though there is nothing in the text of what is called “local colour.”
Juliet's garden on the same stage was not so definitely Italian as it might have been. But I happen to know who were Irving's advisers. Among them were two of the most popular of English painters, and if they had had their own way Romeo would have been allowed no chance: he would have been hidden by the clumps of yew, and juniper, and oleander, and ilex, and pomegranate. A good many people who were present during the run ofRomeo and Julietwere very much of the opinion that if this had taken place it would have been to the advantage of all concerned. Mr. Irving, as he was then, was not the ideal Romeo of the English playgoer. But neither was the original Romeo, who was, like the original Paolo, a man of something over forty.
I have never seen it pointed out that a Romeo of forty would be quite consistent with the Capulet tradition, for Juliet's father in the play was quite an elderly man, whereas the mother was a young woman of twenty-eight. As for Juliet's age, it is usually made the subject of a note of comment to the effect that in the warm south a girl matures so rapidly that she is marriageable at Juliet's age of thirteen, whereas in the colder clime of England it would be ridiculous to talk of one marrying at such an age.
There can be no doubt that in these less spacious days the idea of a bride of thirteen would not commend itself to parents or guardians, but in the sixteenth century, twelve or thirteen was regarded as the right age for the marriage of a girl. If she reached her sixteenth birthday remaining single, she was ready to join in the wail of Jephtha's Daughter. In a recently published letter written by Queen Elizabeth, who, by the way, although fully qualified to take part in that chorale, seemed to find a series of diplomatic flirtations to be more satisfying than matrimony, she submitted the names of three heiresses as ripe for marriage, and none of them had passed the age of thirteen. The Reverend John Knox made his third matrimonial venture with a child of fifteen. Indeed, one has only to search the records of any family of the sixteenth or seventeenth century to be made aware of the fact that Shakespeare's Juliet was not an exceptionally youthful bride. In Tenbury Church there is a memorial of “Ioyse, d. of Thos. Actone of Sutton, Esquire.” She was the wife of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom she married at the age of twelve. If any actor, however, were to appear as a forty-two year Romeo and with a Juliet of thirteen, and a lady-mother of twenty-eight, he would be optimistic indeed if he should hope for a long run for his venture.
Of course with the boy Juliets of the Globe Theatre, the younger they were the better chance they would have of carrying conviction with them. A Juliet with a valanced cheek would not be nice, even though she were “nearer heaven by the attitude of a chopine” than one whose face was smooth.
I think that Irving looked his full age when he took it upon him to play Romeo; but to my mind he made a more romantic figure than most Romeos whom I have seen. But every one who joined in criticising the representation seemed unable to see more of him than his legs, and these were certainly fantastic. I maintained that such people began at the wrong end of the actor: they should have begun at the head. And this was the hope of Irving himself. He had the intellect, and I thought his legs extremely intellectual.
I wonder he did not do some padding to bring his calves into the market, and make—as he would have done—a handsome profit out of the play. In the old days of the Bateman Management of the Lyceum, he was never permitted to ignore the possibilities of making up for deficiencies of Nature. In the estimation of the majority of theatre-goers, the intellect of an actor will never make up for any neglect of the adventitious aid of “make-up.” WhenEugene Aramwas to be produced, it was thought advisable to do some padding to make Irving presentable. There was a clever expert at this form of expansion connected with the theatre; he was an Italian and, speaking no English, he was forced into an experiment in explanation in his own language. He wished to enforce the need for a solid shape to fit the body, rather than a patchwork of padding. In doing so he had to made constant use of the wordcorpo, and as none of his hearers understood Italian, they thought that he was giving a name to the contrivance he had in his mind; so when the thing passed out of the mental stage into the actor's dressing-room, it was alluded to as the corpo. The name seemed a happy one and it had a certain philological justification; for several people, including the dresser, thought that corpo was a contraction for corporation, and in the slang of the day, that meant an expansion of the chest a little lower down.
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 theInfernowhich 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 themad nauseam, and I said so.
“That is not what we were smiling at,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It was at the recollection of the wordcorpo.”
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' playNinonat 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 writingCharles 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 inCharles 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 fromNinon, 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.
0168
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 inLeah, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and America—how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors,The Bellsrang 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.
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 inIolanthe, and its “built” yews and pomegranates inRomeo 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 thepoudre de ninonof 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 ofFaust?
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.Faustmade 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'sFaustare 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.
Faustmade 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 ofThe 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 inThe 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 inPeter 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 Greatshowed 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 ofKing Arthur, begun by Wills, and made it ridiculous, and helped in translating and adaptingMadame Sans Gêne. Might not Lord Tennyson also be called an English author? and were not his three plays,Queen Mary, The Cup, and Bechetbrought 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 itBechetwas 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 gotRobespierre, Irving got the worst thing that he had produced up to that date; but when he went a second time and gotDante, 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 inWaterlooas 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 ofDoraby the author ofFedoraandTheodorawas made for the English stage under the name ofDiplomacy, 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 thatLa Dame aux Caméliascould never be adapted without being offensive to a pure-minded English audience. I think thatA Clerical Errorwas 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 inA Clerical Erroron the plea of the young nurse for something equally forbidden, inMidshipman 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 forPunchwith 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 thePlace aux Damesof 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.”
Ihad 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.
I am only in a position to speak definitely on behalf of the working proprietor, but I am certain that the daughters of the house who have been working so marvellously for the first time in their lives, at the turning out of munitions, taking the place of men in fields and byres, and doing active duties in connection with hospitals, huts, and canteens, will not now be content to go back to their tennis and teas and “districts” as before. They will find their souls in other and more profitable directions, and it is pretty certain that the production of food will occupy a large number of the emancipated ones. We shall have vegetables and fruit and eggs in such abundance as was never dreamt of four years ago. Why, already potato crops of twelve tons to the acre are quite common, whereas an aggregate of eight and nine tons was considered very good in 1912. We all know the improvement that has been brought about in regard to poultry, in spite of the weathercockerel admonition of the Department of the Government, which one month sent out a million circulars imploring all sorts and conditions of people to keep poultry, and backed this up with a second million advising the immediate slaughter of all fowls who had a fancy for cereals as a food; the others were to be fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, but if the master were known to give the crumbs to birds instead of eating them himself or making them into those poultices, recommended by another Department that called them puddings, he would be prosecuted. Later on we were to be provided with a certain amount of stuff for pure bred fowls, in order that only the purest and best strains should be kept; but no provision in the way of provisions was made for the cockerels! The cockerels were to be discouraged, but the breeding of pure fowls was to be encouraged!
It took another million or so of buff Orpmgton circulars to explain just what was meant by the Department, and even then it needed a highly-trained intelligence to explain the explanation.