"Father, I have spilt the butter. What shall I do?""Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric.""Why?""Because friction generates caloric, which volatises the oleaginous particles of the stearine matter."
"Father, I have spilt the butter. What shall I do?"
"Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric."
"Why?"
"Because friction generates caloric, which volatises the oleaginous particles of the stearine matter."
—And once I knew many psalms.
One of the odd things about what we call loss of memory is that it is catching. How often when one person forgets a name well known to him does his companion, to whom it is equally well known, forget it too. Why is that? The other day I had an excellent example of this curious epidemic. It was necessary for the name of a certain actor—not a star, but a versatile repertory actor of distinction—to be recalled in order that a letter to him might quickly be despatched. I had forgotten his name, but I described him and his methods with sufficient accuracy for every one (there were about six of us) to recognise him. Some of us could even say in what parts we had seen him and compare notes as to his excellence, and yet his name absolutely eluded one and all. Why? We all knew it; why did we unanimously fail to know it then?
We parted intent upon obtaining this necessaryinformation, my last sapient words being that to the best of my belief his first name was Joseph and his second began with P. On meeting again the next day, each of us had it pat enough, and it had broken upon each, more or less suddenly, during the night. Since the name was Michael Sherbrooke, you will understand why, in my case, its arrival was peculiarly gratifying. If I am not now known to those others as Mrs. Nickleby, it is only because they are so kind-hearted.
The great mystery is, Where, while one is forgetting them, are the things one forgets, but suddenly will remember again? Where are they lurking? This problem of their whereabouts, their capacity to hide and elude, distresses me far more than one's inability to call them from the vasty deep of the brain. Or are they, perhaps, not there at all? Do they not, perhaps, have evenings out, times off for lunch and so forth, and thus we sometimes miss them? Or can there perhaps be some vast extra-mural territory of the brain from which facts have to be fetched—as, if one would consult old newspapers at the British Museum, one must wait until the volumes can be brought from Hendon? The fact that they always, or nearly always, return, sooner or later, rather supports these theories.
The prettiest little book that ever I saw lies before me. It is called "The Toilet," and was published by the author in 1821 and sold by Mr. Sams, bookseller to H.R.H. the Duke of York, at No. 1 St. James's Street; for princes in those days had their own booksellers no less than their own wine-cellars. Times have changed, and to-day No. 1 St. James's Street is a block of flats, and the Duke surveys London from the top of a column of stone.
The author of "The Toilet" was "S. G." (standing for Stacey Grimaldi), and the purpose of his book—so laudable then and how unnecessary now!—was to make young women better. This task was to be performed by means of a preface and a number of verses, but chiefly by a series of copperplate engravings with movable covers. I have seen old gardening books on this principle, by Capability Brown and others, in which the potentialities of gentlemen's places are made evident by the same mechanical means. Thus, by lifting up one clump of trees you see where the housecould most advantageously stand, and by lifting up another you gaze along the lovely avenue that ought to be planted there, and so forth; but I never saw good manners and high ideals inculcated in this way. That they can be "The Toilet" proves.
But let me explain. The articles illustrated are those that are found in ladies' boudoirs, such as mirrors, and jewel case, and bottles of essence—all very charmingly designed as though by a Chippendale. Indeed, the copy which lies before me—as pretty a little book, did I say? as ever I saw—is known by its owner as "The Chippendale Book"; and never could the effort to get gentleness and the best manners into an impressionable female nature be more ingeniously or ingratiatingly made. Imagine, now, the fair one opening at the preface, where she reads at once these words: "I request your acceptance of a few appendages to your toilet, of extreme beauty and value, though some of them may be at variance with modern fashions." She then turns on and finds that the appendages consist of an Enchanting Mirror, a Wash to Smooth Wrinkles, some Superior Rouge, some Matchless Ear Rings, a Fine Lip Salve, a Mixture to Sweeten the Voice, and so forth—each delicately drawn.
Before lifting the cover of the mirror shereads that it is long since many of the gay inhabitants of the town have decorated themselves before it, and then, lifting the cover, discovers the word "Humility" on the glass. Fancy the shock to the frivolous and vain! But humility is not all; Uriah Heep had that and still was a most undesirable person, and so she must read on, all recipiency. Doing so she learns that it is singular that although we do generally wear ear-rings similar to those in the jewel case in the presence of a superior, we are apt to cast them off in the company of our inferiors; and, lifting the lid of the case, she finds the word "Attention" within. And so on through the book. The Wash to Smooth Wrinkles turns out to be Contentment; the Universal Beautifier is Good Humour; the Best White Paint is Innocence; the Superior Rouge is Modesty; the Mixture giving Sweetness to the Voice is Mildness and Truth (where is the young woman who any longer wants mildness?), and the Finest Lip Salve is Cheerfulness.
Finally we come to a very beautiful flowered pot—I wish you could see it—containing "The Late King's Eye Water"—the late King being George III, the father of the Prince whose own particular bookseller put forth this little volume. All the time, from the first moment of opening it, I had the feeling that somewhere hoveringaround or over "The Toilet" was the spirit of the courtier. Its blend of discretion and elegance is such as a palace mentor could hardly be without, and the description of the Late King's Eye Water settled it. "You are perhaps aware that our late much-beloved King possessed bad sight, and, doubtless, many different eye waters were prescribed for his use; but I can assure you, that whatever else the good Monarch might have used, he invariably possessed some of the accompanying description; it was by him recommended to our present Sovereign [George the Fourth], as also to his own beloved and illustrious Daughters; it has been by them constantly used, and their example has diffused it throughout the British Empire." On lifting the cover of the pot containing the Late King's Eye Water (which he recommended to his eldest son) we find it to contain "Benevolence"; but a certain poem by Moore, addressed to George IV after the death of Sheridan, would suggest that the collyrium was not at any rate "constantly" used.
If the measure of an artist is the accuracy with which the life of his times is reflected in his work, and the width of his range, then John Leech, the centenary of whose birth was August 29, 1917, is the greatest artist that England has produced. But since such a claim as that would submerge us in controversial waters, let it rather be said that Leech is the most representative artist that England has produced. The circumstances that he worked in black and white and was chiefly concerned with the humorous aspect of men and manners do not affect the position.
The outlines of Leech's life are very simple. He was born in London on August 29, 1817, the son of John Leech, proprietor of the once very prosperous London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, who was said to be something of a draughtsman and was also a Shakespeare enthusiast. The child took early to the pencil; and it is recorded that Flaxman, a friend of the family, found him at a tender age, on his mother's knee, drawing well enough to be encouraged.The great sculptor's advice was that the boy, whom he thought to be clearly destined for an artist, should be permitted to follow his own bent. Three years later Flaxman seems to have repeated this counsel. At seven, Leech was sent to school at Charterhouse, then in its old London quarters; and the story is told that Mrs. Leech, who probably thought seven far too young, took a room which over-looked the playground in order secretly to watch her little son, thus displaying a sympathetic solicitude which that son inherited and carried through life. At Charterhouse Leech remained until he was sixteen, among his school-fellows being Thackeray; but as Thackeray was six years his senior it is unlikely that they saw much of each other as boys, although they were always glad later in life, when they became very intimate colleagues onPunch, to recall their schooldays and extol their school.
On leaving, Leech went to Bart.'s to learn to be a surgeon, and there by curious and fortunate chance fell in with a congenial fellow-student named Percival Leigh, whose interest in comic journalism was to play a very important part in Leech's career. Leigh had two friends who shared his literary tastes and ambitions—Albert Smith, a medical student at the Middlesex Hospital, and Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, a youngbarrister, these forming a humorous band of brothers to which Leech made a very welcome addition. Leigh was seriously concerned also with medicine, but there is no evidence that Leech burnt any midnight oil in its pursuit, although he made some excellent anatomical drawings. The popularity of the London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill meanwhile declining, a less expensive instructor than St. Bartholomew became necessary; and Leech was placed with the ingenious Mr. Whittle of Hoxton, who, under the guise of a healer, devoted most of his attention to pigeons and boxing. Mr. Whittle of Hoxton (who is to be found under the name of Rawkins in Albert Smith's novel, "The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury," which Leech illustrated) may not appreciably have extended his pupil's knowledge of therapeutics, but he is our benefactor in quickening his interest in sport. Leech's next mentor was Dr. John Cockle, son of the Cockle of the pills; and then, the paternal purse being really empty, he, at the age of eighteen, flung physic to the dogs and trusted for a living to his pencil, which, since Charterhouse had the most indifferent of drawing-masters, was still untrained.
In those days there were many ephemeral satirical sheets, in addition to the magazines, to offer employment to the comic draughtsman,and Leech did not starve; his two experiences of the inside of a sponging-house being due to his good nature rather than to financial foolishness of his own. His first publication was a slender collection of street types entitled "Etchings and Sketchings," by A Pen, 1835. He tried also political caricatures and drew bruisers for "Bell's Life in London." In 1836 he was among those draughtsmen (Thackeray was another) who competed without success for Seymour's post as illustrator of a series of humorous papers describing the proceedings of the Pickwick Club. In 1840 appeared his parody of the Mulready envelope, which was very popular and a real foundation-stone for the young artist, and Percival Leigh's "Comic Latin Grammar" and "Comic English Grammar," the illustrations to which fortified the impression which the Mulready skit had made, and established the fact that a new pictorial humorist of resource and vigour had appeared.
In 1841Punchwas founded, with Mark Lemon as its editor and Leigh on its staff; and for Leech to join up was merely a matter of time. His first efforts were tentative, but by 1844, when Thackeray was also a power on the staff, he had become the paper's strong man, and its strong man he remained until his death twenty years after.Punchhad a greatpersonnel, courage, and sound ideas, but without Leech's sunny humanity week after week it is unlikely to have won its way to such complete popularity and trust. It was he, more than any other contributor, who drove it home to the heart of the nation.
Leech's cartoons were for the most part suggested to him, the outcome of discussion round the Mahogany Tree (which is made of pine); but to a larger extent probably than with any of his colleagues or successors the social drawings, by which he is now best known and by which he will live, were the fruits of his own observation, visual and aural. That is to say, he provided words as well as drawings. He also followed the line of least resistance. It was enough for him to think an incident funny, to set it down, and by the time it had passed through that filter—a blend of humane understanding and humane fun—which he kept in his brain, it was assured of a welcome byPunch'sreaders too. To-day the paper is a little more exacting, a little more complex: a consequence possibly, in some measure, of the fertility and universality of its earlier giant, who anticipated so many jokes. To-day, as it happens, there is more of the Leech spirit inLife, where absurdity for its own sake is to a greater extent cultivated. But for twenty yearsthat spirit permeated and dominatedPunch. Leech had a great chance and he rose to it. Never before had things been made so easy for a satirical artist with alert eyes. Hogarth had had to plan and struggle to get his engravings before the public; Gillray and Rowlandson had only the print-sellers as a medium; but Leech had an editor who appreciated him and gave him his head, and employers who paid handsomely, while his work appeared in a paper which increased its circulation with every number. That is to say, he knew that he had an audience: no small incentive. The result is that "Pictures of Life and Character" is the completest survey of the social England of his times that any artist has ever made or is likely to make.
To-day this inexhaustible work in three immense volumes is out of print, but there never was a book that better deserved continuous accessibility. It is Leech's monument, and he has no other. One learns from it, while laughing the honestest of laughter, how inveterate a plagiarist from herself is Dame Fashion. The number of drawings which need only the slightest modernizing change to be telling now is extraordinary. Leech missed nothing; and the world is always coming full circle.
The criticism has too often been made thatLeech could not draw. Placed beside Keene or Phil May he is, it is true, wanting in inevitableness; his line is merely efficient, never splendid; yet sometimes he could draw amazingly and get the very breath of life into a figure. In particular was he a master of gesture, and now and then his landscapes are a revelation. But the resplendent fact is that he could draw well enough; he did, as Thackeray said, what he wished to do; that is proved by his triumph. A man who cannot draw does not get all his fellow-countrymen following his pencil in a rapture (as though it were the Pied Piper's whistle) as Leech did for twenty years. Du Maurier, who admired him immensely, hit on a happy comparison when he said that Leech was "a ballad-writer among draughtsmen," or, in other words, he had simplicity, lucidity, movement, and a story. It has to be remembered, too, that Leech did single-handed what ever since his day it has needed a syndicate to accomplish. He, himself and alone, was cartoonist, social draughtsman, low-life draughtsman, and the provider of hunting scenes. If the Volunteers were to be chaffed, Leech's was the hand; if the priceless Mr. Briggs was to be invented and kept busy, Leech was his impresario. And it was he also whodrew the prettiest girls in what Thackeray called "Mr. Punch's harem."
All his life, after finding himself, Leech worked too hard, being, although well paid, in some mysterious way continually either in debt or about to be. He was also uniformly behind time; and Mark Lemon used humorously to bemoan half his days misspent in cabs between thePunchoffice and the artist's various residences collecting his belated drawings. Leech, however, when once he had made up his mind, drew very rapidly, and his productiveness was amazing, for besides hisPunchwork he illustrated a large number of books, including (which some people would call his masterpiece) the sporting novels of Surtees.
In private life—but all his life was private—Leech was not less simple than that other great Carthusian, Colonel Newcome. He loved his family, rode his horse Red Mullet whenever there was a free moment, and as often as possible had a day's run with the Puckeridge hounds, not only for enjoyment, but in order that that very important section of his work, his hunting scenes, might not languish. He was fond of dinner parties, both as host and guest, and after them preferred conversation to cards. He sang lugubrious songs in a deep, melancholy voice, with his eyes fixed upwards—the favouritebeing Barry Cornwall's "King Death," the words of which, Dickens averred, were inscribed on the ceiling in mystic characters discernible only by the singer. He told stories well, but the record of good things said by him is meagre, and his letters are singularly free from humorous passages. Once, however, when a liberty had been taken with him by a public man, he threatened "todrawand defend himself"; and there is a pleasant story of his retort to some rowdy inebriated men in Kensington who excused themselves by saying that they were Foresters: "Then, why the devil don't you go to the forest and make a din there?" Noise was, indeed, his bane. He had double windows in his house, but was always in danger of headaches and shattered nerves from street sounds and, in particular, barrel organs. It is even said that street music led to his early death; but that probably was only indirectly. He died of overwork, aged forty-seven.
Leech's friends were devoted to him, as he to them. Thackeray came first, and indeed once he said that he loved him more than any man, although on another occasion it was FitzGerald and Brookfield whom he named. Dickens and Leech were friends as well as collaborators. It is to Dean Hole, with whom Leech took the "Little Tour in Ireland" in 1858, that wemust go for the best description of his appearance—"A slim, elegant figure, over six feet in height, with a grand head 'on which nature had written Gentleman,' with wonderful genius in his ample forehead; wonderful penetration, observation, humour in his blue-grey Irish eyes, and wonderful sweetness and sympathy and mirth about his lips, which seemed to speak in silence."
Of Leech's genius and accomplishment no one has written better than Dr. John Brown in "Horœ Subsecivæ," third series. Millais, who coached Leech in oil painting for his exhibition of enlarged scenes from the career of Mr. Briggs, also was his close friend; while Trelawny, whom Millais painted, claimed to have loved Leech next only to Shelley. Another artist friend was W. P. Frith, who became his biographer. All his friends testify to the sweetness of his nature and the purity of his character, while the two great novelists of his day, writing of his work—Dickens of his "Rising Generation" and Thackeray of the "Pictures of Life and Character"—used independently the phrase that he came to his task like "a gentleman." In those days gentlemen, at any rate in public places, were less uncommon than now; but even then Leech was conspicuous.
It is perhaps with Dickens and Thackeraythat he will be most closely associated by posterity. He stands between them as a fellow-Victorian colossus. All three were doing, in different ways, the same work—that is to say, they were selecting and fixing, for all time, their time; and all three were distinguished by that remarkable abundance which makes the middle years of the last century so astonishing to us. Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, Trollope, Leech, in England; Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Doré, in France. What rivulets to-day compared with those floods!
Leech died prematurely (in his father's arms, while a children's party was in progress in his house) on October 29, 1864, less than a year after Thackeray. "How happy," said Miss Thackeray (afterward Lady Ritchie), "my father will be to meet him!"Punch'stribute contained this sentence: "Society, whose every phase he has illustrated with a truth or grace and a tenderness heretofore unknown in satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame." No words to-day, fifty-six years after, can improve on it; nor has in the interim any greater social delineator or humaner genius arisen.
Many summers ago I was on one of David MacBrayne's steamers on the way to a Scotch island. Among the few passengers was an interesting man with whom I fell into conversation. He was vigorous, bulky, tall, with a pointed grey beard and a mass of grey hair under a Panama, and he was bound, he told me, for a well-known fishing-lodge, whither he went every August. He had been a great traveller and knew Persia well; he had also been in Parliament, and one of his sons was in the siege of Mafeking. So much I remember of his affairs; but his name I did not learn. We talked much about books, and I introduced him to Doughty's "Arabia Deserta."
I have often thought of him since and wondered who he was, and whenever I have met fishermen or others likely to be acquainted with this attractive and outstanding personality. I have asked about him; but never with success. And then the other day I seemed really to beon the track, for I met a man in a club who also has the annual custom of spending a fortnight or so in the same Scotch island, and he claimed to know every one who has ever visited that retired spot.
This is what happened.
"If you're so old an islander as that," I said, "you're the very person to solve the problem that I have carried about for four or five years. There's a man who fishes regularly up there"—and then I described my fellow-passenger. "Tell me," I said, "who he is."
He considered, knitting his brows.
"You're sure you're right in saying he is unusually tall?" he inquired at last.
"Absolutely," I replied.
"That's a pity," he said, "because otherwise it might be Sir Gerald Orpington. Only he's short. Still, he was in Parliament right enough. But, of course, if it was a tall man it's not Orpington."
He considered again.
"You say," he remarked, "that he had been in Persia? Now old Jack Beresford is tall enough and has plenty of hair, but I swear he's never been to Persia, and of course he hasn't a son at all. It's very odd. Describe him again."
I described my man again, and he followed every point on his fingers.
"Well," he said; "I could have sworn I knew every man who ever fished at Blank, but this fellow——Oh, wait a minute! You say he is tall and bulky and had travelled. Why, it must be old Carstairs. And yet it can't be. Carstairs was never married and was never in Parliament."
He pondered again.
Then he said, "You're sure it wasn't a clean-shaven bald man with a single eyeglass?"
"Quite," I said.
"Because," he went on, "if he had been, it would have been old Peterson to the life."
"He wasn't bald or clean-shaven," I said.
"You're sure he said Blank?" he inquired after another interval of profound thought.
"Absolutely," I replied.
"Tell me again what he was like. Tell me exactly. I know every one up there; I must know him."
"He was a vigorous, bulky, very tall man," I said, "with a pointed beard and a mass of grey hair under a Panama; and he used to go to Blank every August. He had been a great traveller and knew Persia; he had been in Parliament, and one of his sons was in the siege of Mafeking."
"I don't know him," he said.
It had been decided that there never was such a resemblance as is to be traced between my homely features and those of a visitor to the same hotel the previous year—Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street. This had become an established fact, irrefutable like a proposition of Euclid, and one of my new friends, and a friend also of the Harley Street physician who had so satisfyingly and minutely anticipated my countenance, made it the staple of his conversation. "Isn't this gentleman," he would say to this and that habitué of the smoking-room as they dropped in from the neighbouring farms at night, "the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was here last year?" And they would subject my physiognomy to a searching study and agree that I was. Perhaps the nose—a little bigger, don't you think? or a shade of dissimilarity between the chins (he having, I suppose, only two, confound him!), but, taking it all around, the likeness was extraordinary.
This had been going on for some time, until I was accustomed, if not exactly inured, to it, and was really rather looking forward to the time when, on returning to London, I could trump up a sufficient ailment to justify me in calling upon my double in Harley Street andscrutinising him with my own eyes. But last night my friend had something of a set-back, which may possibly, by deflecting his conversation to other topics, give me relief. I hope so.
It happened like this. We were as usual sitting in the smoking-room, he and I, when another local acquaintance entered—one who, I gathered, had been away for a few weeks and whom I had therefore not yet seen, and who (for this was the really important thing to my friend) consequently had not yet seen me.
In course of time the inevitable occurred. "Don't you think," my friend asked, "that this gentleman is the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was here last summer?"
"What Dr. Sullivan's that?" the new-comer inquired.
"Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was fishing here last summer. Don't you remember him? The very image of this gentleman."
"The only Dr. Sullivan I know," replied the new-comer, "is Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle. He's a very old man by now. A very learned man too. He has a wonderful private museum. He——"
"No, no, the Dr. Sullivan I mean was from Harley Street—a specialist—who took the Manor fishing last summer and stayed in the hotel."
"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle is a very oldman—much older than this gentleman," replied the stranger, "and not a bit like him. He's a most interesting personality. He is the great authority on the South Sea Islanders. You should see his collection of Fiji war clubs."
"But that's not the Dr. Sullivan I mean. You must remember him," said my impresario; "we all used to meet evening after evening, just as we're doing now—Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, the specialist, a clean-shaven man, exactly like this gentleman here. Every one has noticed the likeness."
"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle has a beard," said the new-comer. "And he's a very old man by now. A great receptacle of miscellaneous learning. He showed me once his collection of coins and medals. He's got coins back to the Roman Emperors and stories about every one of them. His collection——"
"Yes, but——"
"—of idols is amazing. You never saw such comic figures as those natives worship. There's nothing he doesn't collect. He's got a mummy covered with blue beads. He's got skulls from all over the world, showing different formations. It's some years——"
"Yes, but——"
"—since I saw him last, and of course he may be——"
"Yes, but——"
"—dead. But if not, he's a man worth knowing. If ever you go to Newcastle, sir,"—this was to me,—"don't forget about him. But he must be very old by now. He——"
At this point I finished my glass and slipped away to bed. Consulting the mirror as I undressed, I smiled at the reflection that confronted me. "You can sleep more comfortably to-night," I said, "for there are signs that you are about to have a rest."
Reading the terms of the agreement which Charlie Chaplin refused in New York early in 1916 I had a kind of nervous collapse. For we English are not so accustomed to great sums of money as the Americans are. Then I bound a wet towel round my head and studied the figures as dispassionately as it is possible to study figures when they run into kings' ransoms. Charlie was offered ten thousand dollars a week for a year: which came then to £104,000 and is now (1920) much more. He was offered one hundred thousand dollars as a bonus for signing the agreement. He was also offered 50 per cent. of any profits made by his films after his salary had been paid. But it did not satisfy him. He refused it.
Now here is a most remarkable state of affairs—that the popular demand for laughter is such that a little acrobatic man with splay feet and a funny way with a cigarette, a hat, and a cane could be offered and could repudiate such colossal wealth as that, and for no other services than to clown it for the cinematoscope. Nor isthe oddity of the matter decreased by the reflection that these figures which make an ordinary person dizzy, belonged to war-time. Charlie Chaplin's rise to affluence and power coincided with the bloodiest struggle in history.
If it is needful for so many people to hold their sides, Charlie's career is justified. He is also the first droll to conquer the whole world. I suppose that it is no exaggeration to say that at any moment of the day and night—allowing for divergences of time—it would be safe to maintain that ten million people are laughing at the Chaplin antics somewhere or other on this planet of ours. For wherever there is a township of more than two thousand inhabitants, there, I imagine, is a cinema; and wherever there is a cinema there is Charlie; not always quite up to date, of course, for managers are wily birds, but in some film, even though an ancient one. Does the Funniest Man on Earth, as he is called, I should like to know, realise what a rôle he fills? Does he stand before the glass and search the recesses of his countenance—which is now far more familiar to the world than any other—and marvel?
Charlie, by the way, has his private uses too. During a recent visit from a young friend, I found that the ordinary gulf that is fixed between a boy in the neighbourhood of ten and aman in the neighbourhood of five times that number was for once easily bridgeable. We found common ground, and very wisely stuck to it, in the circumstance that each of us had seen Charlie, and, by great good fortune, we had each seen him in his latest sketch. Whenever, therefore, alongueurthreatened, I had but to mention another aspect of Charlie's genius, and in the discussion that followed all was well.
That Charlie is funny is beyond question. I will swear to that. His humour is of such elemental variety that he could, and probably does, make a Tierra del Fuegan or a Bushman of Central Australia laugh not much less than our sophistical selves. One needs no civilised culture to appreciate the fun of the harlequinade, and to that has Charlie, with true instinct, returned. But it is the harlequinade accelerated, intensified, toned up for the exacting taste of the great and growing "picture" public. It is also farce at its busiest, most furious. Charlie brought back that admirable form of humour which does not disdain the co-operation of fisticuffs, and in which, by way of variety, one man is aimed at, and another, too intrusive, is hit. However long the world may last, it is safe to say that the spectacle of one man receiving a blow meant for another will be popular.
What strikes one quickly is the realisation ofhow much harder Charlie works than many of the more illustrious filmers. He is rarely out of the picture, he is rarely still, and he gives full measure. There is no physical indignity that he does not suffer—and inflict. Such impartiality is rare in drama, where usually men are either on top or underneath. In the ordinary way our pet comedians must be on top and untouched. Even the clown, though he receives punishmenten route, eventually triumphs. But Charlie seldom wins. He remains a butt, or, at any rate, a victim of circumstances whom nothing can discourage or deter. His very essence is resiliency under difficulties, an unabashed and undefeatable front. His especial fascination to me is that life finds him always ready for it—not because he is armed by sagacity, but because he is even better armed by folly. He is first cousin to the village idiot, a natural child of nonsense, licensed up to the hilt, and (like Antæus) every time he rises from a knockdown blow he is the stronger.
It is a proof of the charter which the world has handed to this irresistible humourist that he has been permitted to introduce such an innovation in stage manners as the hitting of women. We only laugh the more when, having had his ears boxed by the fair, he retaliates with double strength. And there is one of his plays inwhich every audience becomes practically helpless, as after, with great difficulty, extricating a lady in evening dress from a fountain, he deliberately pushes her in again. It required a Charlie Chaplin to make this tolerable; but such is his radiant unworldliness that we accept it as quite legitimate fun.
One of the chief causes—after the personality of the protagonist—of the popularity of the Chaplin films is probably that in them certain things happen which cannot happen in real life without the intervention of the law, and which are almost always withheld from the real stage. I mean that men so freely assault each other; physical violence has the fullest and most abundant play. Every one longs to see kicks and blows administered, but is usually defrauded, and Charlie is a spendthrift with both. And so cheerfully and victoriously does he distribute them that I wonder an epidemic of such attentions has not broken out in both hemispheres. I know this—that a fat policeman with his back towards the exit of a cinema at the time a Chaplin film had ended would be in great danger from my foot were I then leaving. I should hope for enough self-control; but I could promise nothing, and I should feel that Charlie's example, behind the action, sanctified it. Film life and real life would merge into each otherso naturally that if the policeman repaid me—or attempted to—in any other way but kind, I should feel outraged. To be arrested for it would be like a stab in the back from a friend.
How long Charlie will remain the darling of two hemispheres we must wait to see. But of one thing I am certain, and that is that if at any time the "The Funniest Man on Earth" ceases to compel laughter, he might by slightly changing his methods draw tears. For while he can be as diverting as the greatest glutton for mirth desires, he has all the machinery of dejection too. One of his melancholy smiles is really beautiful.
It is proverbial that a child may lead a horse to the water, but that not even Mr. Lloyd George, with all his persuasive gifts, can make him drink. An even more difficult task is to induce a horse in the pink of robust health to convey a suggestion of being seriously ill—as I chance just to have discovered. It is not the kind of discovery that one can anticipate; indeed, when I woke on the morning of the day on which it happened and, as is my habit, lay for a while forecasting the possible or probable course of events during the next four-and-twenty hours, this example of equine limitation had no place whatever in my thoughts. To the receptive and adventurous observer many curious things may, however, occur; and no sooner was lunch finished than out of a clear sky fell a friend and a taxi (the god and the machine, if you will), and jointly they conveyed me to as odd a building as I have ever thought to find any horse in, where, under a too searching blue glare, was an assemblage of people as strange as their environment.
There were men in evening dress, toying with cigarettes and bending over women in evening dress; there was an adventuress or two, one with hair in such fluffed-out abundance as can only be a perquisite of notable wickedness; there was a stockman, who was, I fancy, too fond of her; there was a lady in riding boots; there was a comely youth in pyjamas; and there were footmen and page-boys. And all seemed to me made-up to a point of excess. Who could they be? a stranger to the marvel of science might well ask. Strayed revellers? A lost party of masqueraders being held here on bail and photographed for identification purposes?—for there was no doubt about the photography, because the benignant, masterful gentleman with a manuscript, who gave them instructions, every now and then stood aside in order that the camera-operator might direct his machine-gun and turn the handle; but what was said I could not hear, such was the crackling and fizzling of the blue lights.
I cannot pretend to have learned much about the cinema on such a brief visit, but I acquired a few facts. One is that there is no need for any continuity to be observed by the photographer, because the various scenes, taken in any order, can, in some wonderful way, be joined up afterwards, in their true order, and madeconsecutive and natural. Indeed, I should say that the superficially casual and piecemeal manner in which a moving drama can be built up is the dominant impression which I brought away from this abode of mystery. The contrast between the magically fluid narrative as unreeled on the screen and the broken, zigzag, and apparently negligent preparation of it in the studio is the sharpest I can imagine. And it increases one's admiration of the man with the scissors and the thread (or however it is done) who unites the bits and makes them smoothly run.
Another fact which I acquired is that unless the face of the cinema performer is painted yellow it comes out an impossible hue, so that to see a company in broad daylight is to have the impression that one has stumbled upon a house party in the Canary Isles. And a third fact is that the actors, while free to say what they like to each other at many times, must, when in a situation illustrated by words thrown on the screen, use those identical words. One reason for this rule is, I am told, that some time ago, in an American film, the producer of which was rather lax, one of the characters spoke to another with an impossible licence, and a school of deaf mutes visiting the picture palace "lip-read" the awful result. The consequence(America being a wonderful country, with a sufficiency of deaf-and-dumb to warrant protective measures) was the withdrawal of the film and the punishment of the offenders.
Meanwhile, what of the horse? I will tell you.
The camera-operator having taken as much of the fast life in the swell hotel (with the hollow columns without backs to them) as was necessary, including a "still" (as it is called in the movie world—meaning a photograph in the ordinary sense of the term) of the fluffiest of the adventuresses in an expression signifying a blend of depravity and triumph, turned his attention to the loose-box which some attendants had been rapidly constructing, chiefly with the assistance of a truss of straw. Into this apartment was led (through the hotel lounge, and at enormous risk to its plaster masonry) a horse—the horse, in fact, which was to defeat Edison. Of the plot of the play I know nothing. (How could I, having seen it in preparation?) But this I can tell you: that the hero's horse had to be ill; and this also: that the horse in question refused to be ill. In vain for the groom to shake his head, in vain for the hero to say that it had the shivers; never was a horse so far removed from malady, so little in need of the vet. Nor could any device produce the desiredeffect. If, then, in the days to come you see on the films a very attractive story with a horse in it, and the horse shivers only in the words on the screen, you will know why. It is because the movies for once met their master.
In an American paper I find this anecdote: "An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. 'I don't wonder,' she replied. 'It's so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'"
Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and theVictory. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new.
It is a problem why we tend to be so resentful when an editor or a comedian offers us a jest that has done service before. It is, I suppose, in part at any rate, because we have paid our money, either for the paper or the seat, and we experience the sense of having been defrauded. We have been done, we feel, because the bargain, as we understood it, was that we were purchasing novelty. So that when suddenly an old, old jape, which perhaps we have ourselves related—and that of course is an aggravation ofthe grievance—confronts us, we are indignant. But what, one wonders, would a comic paper or a revue that had nothing old in it be like. We can never know.
The odd thing is that we not only resent the age of the joke, even though it is in our own repertory, but we resent the laughter of those to whom it is new—perhaps three-quarters of the audience. How dare they also not have heard it before? is our unspoken question. Not long ago, seated in a theatre next a candid and normally benignant and tolerant friend, I found myself laughing at what struck me as a distinctly humorous remark made by one of London's nonsensical funny men. Engaged in a competition with another as to which had the longer memory, he clinched the discussion by saying that he personally could remember London Bridge when it was a cornfield. To me that was as new as it was idiotic, and I behaved accordingly; but my friend was furious with me. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed with the click of the tongue that usually accompanies such criticism, "fancy digging that up again! It's as old as the hills." And his face grew dark and stern.
What we have to remember, and what might have softened my friend's granite anger had he remembered it, is that a new audience is alwayscoming along to whom nothing is a chestnut. It is not the most reassuring of thoughts to those who are a little fastidious about ancientry in humour; but it is nature and therefore a fact. Just as every moment (so I used to be told by a solemn nurse) a child is born (she added also that every moment some one dies, and she used to hold up her finger and hush! for me to realise that happy thought), so nearly every moment (allowing for a certain amount of infant mortality) an older child attains an age when it can understand and relish a funny story. To those children every story is original. With this new public, clamorous and appreciative, why do humourists try so hard to be novel? (But perhaps they don't).
I suppose that there are theories as to what is the oldest story, but I am not acquainted with them. That people are, however, quite prepared for every story to be old is proved by the readiness with which, when Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" was translated into Greek for a School Reader, a number of persons remarked upon the circumstance that the humourist had gone to ancient literature for his jest. For by a curious twist we are all anxious that stories should not be new. Much as we like a new story, we like better to be able to say that to us it was familiar.
Many stories come rhythmically round again. Such, for example, during the Great War, as those with a martial background. I remember during the Boer War hearing of a young man who was endeavouring to enlist, and was rejected because his teeth were defective. "But I want to fight the Boers," he said, "not eat them." Between 1914 and 1918 this excellent retort turned up again, only this time the young man said that he did not want to eat the Germans. I have no doubt that in the Crimean War a similar applicant declared that he did not want to eat the Russians, and a hundred years ago another was vowing that he did not want to eat the French. Probably one could trace it through every war that ever was. Probably a young Hittite with indifferent teeth proclaimed that his desire was to fight the Amalekites and not to eat them. The story was equally good each time; and there has always been a vast new audience for it. And so long as war continues and teeth exist in the human head, which I am told will not be for ever, so long will this anecdote enjoy popularity. After that it will enter upon a new phase of existence based upon defects in the applicant's râtelier, and so on until universal peace descends upon the world, or, the sun turning cold, life ceases.
The story is told that an English soldier, questioned as to his belief in the angels of Mons, replied how could he doubt it, when they came so close to him that he recognised his aunt among them? People, hearing this, laugh; but had the soldier said that among the heavenly visitants he had recognised his mother or his sister, it would not be funny at all. Suggestions of beautiful affection and touching deathbeds would then have been evoked, and our sentimental chords played upon. But the word aunt at once turns it all to comedy. Why is this?
I cannot answer this question. The reasons go back too far for me; but the fact remains that it has been decided that when not tragic, and even sometimes when tragic, aunts are comic. Not so comic as mothers-in-law, of course; not invariably and irremediably comic; but provocative of mirth and irreverence. Again I say, why? For taken one by one, aunts are sensible, affectionate creatures; and our own experience of them is usually serious enough; they are often very like their sisters our mothers, ortheir brothers our fathers, and often, too, they are mothers themselves. Yet the status of aunt is always fair game to the humourist; and especially so when she is the aunt of somebody else.
That the word uncle has frivolous associations is natural, for slang has employed it to comic ends. But an aunt advances nothing on personal property, an aunt is not the public resort of the temporarily financially embarrassed. No nephew Tommy was ever exhorted to make room for his aunt, a lady, indeed, who figures in comic songs far more rarely than grandparents do, and is not prominent on the farcical stage. One cannot, therefore, blame the dramatists for the great aunt joke, nor does it seem, on recalling what novels I can with aunts prominently in them, to be the creation of the novelists. Dickens has very few aunts, and these are not notorious. Betsy Trotwood, David Copperfield's aunt, though brusque and eccentric, was otherwise eminently sane and practical. Mr. F.'s aunt was more according to pattern and Miss Rachel Wardle even more so; but the comic aunt idea did not commend itself to Dickens whole-heartedly. Fiction as a rule has supported the theory that aunts are sinister. Usually they adopt the children of their dead sisters and are merciless to them. Often they tyrannise overa household. The weight of the novelists is in favour of aunts as anything but comic. There are exceptions, of course, and that fine vivid figure, the "Aunt Anne" of Mrs. W. K. Clifford, stands forth triumphant among the charming; while Sir Willoughby Patterne's twittering choruses are nearer the aunts of daily life. But even they were nigher pathos than ridicule.
I believe that that wicked military wag, Captain Harry Graham, has done more than most to keep the poor lady the aunt in the pillory. This kind of thing from his "Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes" does a lot of mischief: