[187]CHAPTER XVICATHEDRAL MUSICAL FESTIVALSNo; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in mellow September days that were vastly amusing and which were not reported in the papers, and it is about these I am going to tell you.It used to be very charming to go to one of these cathedrals early each autumn, drink cider, listen to music six hours a day, walk by the river, have jolly “rags” in the hotel at night, and come home again at the end of a week or ten days. September is a tired month, I always think ... if not tired, a little languorous.... It has many days in which one wants to walk about just quietly, enjoying being alive. It would be wrong to fuss and work really hard. I suppose that in all those wonderful places in which I have spent so many happy weeks—Worcester, Lincoln, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich—people ruminate and browse at all times. Certainly I have seen them browsing in herds in September days. I once watched the Bishop of Hereford browsing. He stood perfectly still and seemed to be contemplating and measuring and gently wondering about the growth of a healthy nasturtium.Everybody used to migrate to these festivals. Well, not quite everybody ... but you know what I mean; just the very people you most awfully wanted to meet again and talk to and hear music with: people like Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Samuel Langford, John Coates, Dr McNaught, Frederic Austin, Herbert Hughes.[188]London used to send thirty or forty critics, and the provinces about the same number. And from the surrounding towns would pour in county families, middle-class families anxious (poor deluded ones!) to keep abreast of the musical times (or do I meanThe Musical Times?), maiden ladies still and for ever ecstatic over Mendelssohn’s poor oldElijah, fierce choir-masters with ideas on choral singing, village organists who really believed that Dr Brewer was the Last Word, immaculate young men with æsthetic fever and a decided leaning towards Elgar’sThe Dream of Gerontius(always alluded to by them asThe Dream), very “nee-ice” young ladies who when at home played the violin, and, last of all, deans (oh yes, lots of deans), minor canons, slim curates, parsons of all kinds, squires without money, squarsons.It was hard for us musical critics to take these festivals quite as seriously as the festivals expected us to do, for it always seemed incredible to us that London or Birmingham or Glasgow should have the least desire to know how the choruses of Handel’sThe Messiahwere sung in a little town like Gloucester. Moreover, many of us were amused at the tragic seriousness of these age-old festivals—festivals at which, as a rule, only two new works of any importance were produced and over which old oratorios—an impossible form of art—hung like a heavy cloud. So we used to amuse ourselves in our different ways, and the ringleaders in our occasional rags were generally Granville Bantock and Ernest Newman.Almost every detail of one of these joyous occasions lingers in my memory. Dr McNaught, the doyen of us all, an experienced critic, a witty speaker, and a most profound musician, was the not unwilling victim. Bantock or, to give him his full title, Professor Granville Bantock, M.A., had brought from Birmingham two live eels in a tank. When he bought these sturdy creatures, he must have had in his mind some jollification or other, and when[189]I met him in the streets of Hereford (I think it was Hereford) during the morning of the Festival’s first day, he asked me what was the most amusing thing I could think of that could be done with two live eels.“Eels!” exclaimed I, in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you really possess two live eels?”“Yes, here in Hereford. One gets a little dull here after a couple of hours, and, after all, eels are very lively fry. They break the monotony of life.” He paused a moment. “And,” he added rather dreamily, “they swish their tails so busily. I suppose an eel’s tail is the busiest thing in the world. Come and have a look; they’re in my room at the hotel.”And there they were in a tank: dark objects in dark water, swirling about with enormous enthusiasm.The day passed and no amusing idea occurred to me. Bantock conducted one of his works in the cathedral that evening—a very important and solemn occasion, and when we critics had left our “copy” at the post-office for telegraphic transmission to our respective newspapers, we foregathered in the hotel.Now Dr McNaught had gone to spend the late hours with a friend and was not expected back till nearly midnight; it became obvious, therefore, both to Bantock and myself, that the eels must, in some way, be made to surprise him on his return. We placed the slimy creatures in a washhand basin in his bedroom, poured water upon them, and gazed down upon them with knitted brows.“It is enough,” said Bantock; “there is no need to think of anything else. Listen.”And, truly, there was a most stealthy and uncouth sort of noise. Eels may have soft skins, but their muscles are hard and, as they careered round the basin, one heard a continuous smooth sound as of people going about some nefarious business in the dark, and now and again,[190]at unexpected moments, a loud thwack would be heard as one of the fish threw his tail upon the side of the basin.Newman and Frederic Austin and one or two others collaborated in preparing our scheme. A female figure was made, carefully placed on the middle of Dr McNaught’s pillow, and gently covered to the neck with the bedclothes.These elaborate arrangements for Dr McNaught’s entertainment were only just completed when the doctor himself returned. We waited in dark corners of the corridor for the result.After an interval of a few minutes, a bell rang and a chambermaid appeared.“There is some mistake, I think,” said Dr McNaught genially. “Either this room is a bedroom, a larder, or an aquarium; it would be most good of you if you would decide as soon as possible which it really is.”The chambermaid entered the bedroom and we could just hear her quiet voice as, a moment later, she half whispered:“But, sir, the room is already occupied. There is a lady in your bed.”Of course, the psychological moment had arrived, and we strolled casually into the bedroom to become witnesses of Dr McNaught’s embarrassment. The jape was continued. McNaught was taken to the smoke-room, solemnly tried by judge and jury for having murdered a woman and concealed her body (it was at the time of the Crippen affair), and sentenced to death. Newman brought a hatchet from the cellar and, not long before dawn, the mock sentence was carried out with elaboratepantomime....“Very childish—just like schoolboys!” I hear a reader (not you, of course) say, rather contemptuously. Yes, it was like schoolboys, and substitute “-like” for “-ish” in “childish” and I agree with you most heartily.. . . . . . . .[191]But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long hours of talk, great talk from Langford ofThe Manchester Guardian, a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from all kinds of people.I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true; yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly; besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish poet.[192]It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of “respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes; men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies ofElijah; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social “occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize. My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it contained the following passage:Iris.And when with regal, arrogant step she passedAcross the portico, her white breasts gleamed;Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proud assault; she wasAs one who lives for a last carnival[193]Of love, in which she may be stabbed and tornBy large excess of passion.Charmion.Oh!Our QueenHas wine for blood; her tears are heavy dropsOf water stolen from some brackish seaOr murderous waves; her heart now leaps with lifeAnd now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;Her heart is housing many a mad desire,And she is sick for Antony.Iris.ThedayHas gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wineThat sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once moreVenus and Bacchus meet, and all the worldStands still to watch the bliss of living gods.There was a little more to the same effect, and when I wrote the stuff I thought it very fine and still think it rather pretty. But a section of the musical Press attacked it violently, and for a couple of months I was quite a notorious person. I gathered from the articles and letters that appeared that my dramatic poem was not likely to engender music that would carry on the tradition of Mendelssohn’sElijah. That had been my object in writing it. I was sick of that tradition. I wished to help to break it.One day, while the little storm was still raging, I received a letter from Sir Henry J. Wood, who was to conduct the Festival at Norwich at which my work was to be given. (Mr Julius Harrison, who has since become prominent as one of Sir Thomas Beecham’s assistant conductors, had gained the prize for the musical setting of my poem.) In his letter Sir Henry wrote: “Very much against my will, I am writing to ask you on behalf of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival if it is possible for you to make any alternative version of the ‘two objectionable lines’ (I fail to find them myself) in your libretto,Cleopatra.... From my point of view, the whole thing is absurd and ridiculous.”[194]I could not find the objectionable lines. I showed the poem to a most maiden aunt and watched her as she read it, hoping to tell by her sudden blush when her eyes had reached the evil place. She did not blush; she simply read the thing and said: “Oh, Gerald, how nice! I do think you have such pretty thoughts.” So did I.A few days later Mr Julius Harrison came to my aid. The committee, it appeared, objected to “her white breasts gleamed” and also to:Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proudassault....I changed those lines, and the work in due course was performed at Norwich, and in Queen’s Hall, London. Later on, when my little poem was sung in Southport in its original form, with Mr Havergal Brian’s music (for he also had honoured me), Mr Landon Ronald conducting, the members of the audience did not leave their seats when the “objectionable” lines occurred; rather did they seem to lean forward a little and listen more intently.I have mentioned this incident, not because in itself it is important, but because it so beautifully illustrates the point of view of our Cathedral Festivals. Their “secular” concerts are echoes of the concerts given in the Cathedral. They hate (or else they are afraid of?) every emotion that is not a religious emotion. They think that God made our souls and the devil our bodies. They may be right; if they are, it is clear the devil is not lacking in consideration.. . . . . . . .There is no doubt that our most ecstatic moments at the Cathedral Festivals were supplied by Wagner’sParsifal, which Mr J. F. Runciman, in his little book on this composer, describes as “this disastrous and evil opera.” Only excerpts from it, of course, were given; all “objectionable lines” were cut out. IfParsifalis to[195]be given on the platform at all—and, in view of the fact that we seldom have it on the stage, why not?—then it had better be given on a platform that has been erected in a spacious and beautiful cathedral. I remember those white voices floating down from a place out of sight near the roof, away above the clerestory. I always used to try to obtain a seat near some dimly stained window so that it might for me blot out the rather bewildered or consciously “rapt” faces of my fellow-creatures, for, in listening to noble music, I invariably feel much greater than, and curiously irritated by the presence of, other people.And it used to be so fine to come forth from the Cathedral at noon, step into that mellow September English sunshine which I have not seen for nearly three years, and walk by the river ... walk perhaps a mile or so and come back to the hotel to eat cool meats and cool salads and drink cool wine. It was at these times I used to sigh and long for Bayreuth and wonder if I should ever see the grave of Wagner in the garden of Villa Wahnfried in that little Bavarian town.It was at Gloucester, I think, that one year I was pursued by a certain hard-working, but not very talented, composer who, having gained a most extensive “popular” public for his work, was now anxious to win the suffrage of more cultivated people. Most unhappily for me, he took it into his head that my musical criticism had some influence in the north, and though he was quite wrong in this assumption, I was never able to convince him of his error. Wherever I went, lo! he was there with me. And always under his arm was a musical score, a score of his own composition. Something new, he assured me; something really quite modern. Would I look at it? I did. It was feeble, paltry and bombastic, but I did not like to tell him so. But when he pressed me for an opinion I said, what was near enough to the truth, that it was a great advance on his previous work. This seemed to[196]please him, and he took to inviting me out to lunch. If ever I went into the hotel smoke-room for a quiet pipe, I would invariably notice a vague but self-important figure in the doorway, and presently would hear the unmistakable pop that a champagne bottle so deliciously makes when it is opened. A bubbling glass would be placed at my side.“Now, Richard Strauss in hisEin Heldenleben...” his voice would begin. And he would proceed to tell me all aboutEin Heldenlebenand its beauties. To bewilder him, I used to assert thatCarmenseemed to me a much finer work than Strauss’sElektra, and, because he was very ignorant and because he had not the slightest appreciation of Strauss, he used to look at me rather pitifully, and would eventually confess that he too liked Bizet more than he liked Strauss and that, indeed, it appeared to him that ArthurSullivan....One day, when we were alone, he asked me if I would write a series of articles on his works. It was my turn to be bewildered.“A series?” I asked, utterly stunned.“Yes,” answered he, “a series. First of all, there are my part-songs. Then there are my instrumental pieces. Last of all, my Cantatas.” He pronounced cantatas with a capital C. “Just a short series: three articles in all.”I hesitated, but he looked at me most pleadingly. I tried a little sarcasm, but that made him more pertinacious than ever. So then I flatly refused, and kept on refusing, and did not stop refusing.“Well, then,” said he at length, “will you put in writing and sign what you said to me the other day about my new work? You will remember that you said it was the best thing I had ever done, that it was original, full of vigour, astonishingly fresh, subtle inharmony....”“Oh, really,” I protested, “did I say all that?”“Yes, indeed, you did.”[197]And then I became very, very rude indeed, and, after that, whenever we met, we used to bow to each other most politely and say never a word.This kind of man, and there is quite a handful of them, haunts the more important Festivals, but it must be very rarely that one of them obtains what he desires.. . . . . . . .Can you recall the most curious and most unlikely sight you have ever witnessed? Most of us, even in the course of a few years of a very ordinary existence, witness many strange things, but of all the strange things I have stumbled across nothing has been so wayward, sooutré, so fundamentally silly, as the forty organists I saw sitting in one room at Worcester. One can imagine two, or even three, organists sitting talking together, but forty, and fifteen of the forty Cathedral organists, seems incredible.Now, you have only to be fond of modern music to feel instinctively that a man who is an organist and nothing else is sitting on the wrong side of the fence. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is helping to hold things back; he hates the rapid progress which music is making, and he has as much imagination as thevox humanastop.Well, the forty organists were sitting and talking and smoking, and as I looked at them and at their mild, but worried, faces, it seemed to me and my companion that, in the interests of art, morality and ordinary decency, some protest should be made. And we decided that we were just the people to make it. We could have forgiven them if they had met together to discuss some professional question—e.g.how to get their salaries raised, how to get the better of their respective vicars, or how they could expand their minds so as to be able to appreciate Debussy or Ravel or even Max Reger. But they were gathered together merely because they liked it, just for the sake of enjoying each other’s society. Monstrous absurdity! Could they not see how ridiculous they were? Forty[198]organists in one room!—why, there ought not to be forty organists in the whole world.Fortunately the room was on the ground floor and the hour late. My companion and I stepped outside the hotel, waited till the street was quiet, and then rapped a series of three tattoos upon the window-pane to secure silence within. We then sang in two parts, I in a high falsetto and my friend in a lugubrious bass, the “Baal” Chorus fromElijah. “Baal, we cry to thee! Baal, we cry to thee!”We had not proceeded very far in this beautiful music—intended by the dear, delicious Mendelssohn for a shout of savagery, but really a quite charming cradle song—when a cry of delighted laughter came from the room, and two or three of the organists, hatless and earnest, rushed out into the street.“Come inside!” they said; “come and join us. You belong tous!”Too utterly flabbergasted at this invitation to make any reply, we turned and fled, rushed back to our hotel, and ordered whisky-and-sodas.The great musician to whom we told the story next day said:“Well, once more, you see, the biters were bit.”But my friend and I did not think so.
No; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in mellow September days that were vastly amusing and which were not reported in the papers, and it is about these I am going to tell you.
It used to be very charming to go to one of these cathedrals early each autumn, drink cider, listen to music six hours a day, walk by the river, have jolly “rags” in the hotel at night, and come home again at the end of a week or ten days. September is a tired month, I always think ... if not tired, a little languorous.... It has many days in which one wants to walk about just quietly, enjoying being alive. It would be wrong to fuss and work really hard. I suppose that in all those wonderful places in which I have spent so many happy weeks—Worcester, Lincoln, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich—people ruminate and browse at all times. Certainly I have seen them browsing in herds in September days. I once watched the Bishop of Hereford browsing. He stood perfectly still and seemed to be contemplating and measuring and gently wondering about the growth of a healthy nasturtium.
Everybody used to migrate to these festivals. Well, not quite everybody ... but you know what I mean; just the very people you most awfully wanted to meet again and talk to and hear music with: people like Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Samuel Langford, John Coates, Dr McNaught, Frederic Austin, Herbert Hughes.[188]London used to send thirty or forty critics, and the provinces about the same number. And from the surrounding towns would pour in county families, middle-class families anxious (poor deluded ones!) to keep abreast of the musical times (or do I meanThe Musical Times?), maiden ladies still and for ever ecstatic over Mendelssohn’s poor oldElijah, fierce choir-masters with ideas on choral singing, village organists who really believed that Dr Brewer was the Last Word, immaculate young men with æsthetic fever and a decided leaning towards Elgar’sThe Dream of Gerontius(always alluded to by them asThe Dream), very “nee-ice” young ladies who when at home played the violin, and, last of all, deans (oh yes, lots of deans), minor canons, slim curates, parsons of all kinds, squires without money, squarsons.
It was hard for us musical critics to take these festivals quite as seriously as the festivals expected us to do, for it always seemed incredible to us that London or Birmingham or Glasgow should have the least desire to know how the choruses of Handel’sThe Messiahwere sung in a little town like Gloucester. Moreover, many of us were amused at the tragic seriousness of these age-old festivals—festivals at which, as a rule, only two new works of any importance were produced and over which old oratorios—an impossible form of art—hung like a heavy cloud. So we used to amuse ourselves in our different ways, and the ringleaders in our occasional rags were generally Granville Bantock and Ernest Newman.
Almost every detail of one of these joyous occasions lingers in my memory. Dr McNaught, the doyen of us all, an experienced critic, a witty speaker, and a most profound musician, was the not unwilling victim. Bantock or, to give him his full title, Professor Granville Bantock, M.A., had brought from Birmingham two live eels in a tank. When he bought these sturdy creatures, he must have had in his mind some jollification or other, and when[189]I met him in the streets of Hereford (I think it was Hereford) during the morning of the Festival’s first day, he asked me what was the most amusing thing I could think of that could be done with two live eels.
“Eels!” exclaimed I, in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you really possess two live eels?”
“Yes, here in Hereford. One gets a little dull here after a couple of hours, and, after all, eels are very lively fry. They break the monotony of life.” He paused a moment. “And,” he added rather dreamily, “they swish their tails so busily. I suppose an eel’s tail is the busiest thing in the world. Come and have a look; they’re in my room at the hotel.”
And there they were in a tank: dark objects in dark water, swirling about with enormous enthusiasm.
The day passed and no amusing idea occurred to me. Bantock conducted one of his works in the cathedral that evening—a very important and solemn occasion, and when we critics had left our “copy” at the post-office for telegraphic transmission to our respective newspapers, we foregathered in the hotel.
Now Dr McNaught had gone to spend the late hours with a friend and was not expected back till nearly midnight; it became obvious, therefore, both to Bantock and myself, that the eels must, in some way, be made to surprise him on his return. We placed the slimy creatures in a washhand basin in his bedroom, poured water upon them, and gazed down upon them with knitted brows.
“It is enough,” said Bantock; “there is no need to think of anything else. Listen.”
And, truly, there was a most stealthy and uncouth sort of noise. Eels may have soft skins, but their muscles are hard and, as they careered round the basin, one heard a continuous smooth sound as of people going about some nefarious business in the dark, and now and again,[190]at unexpected moments, a loud thwack would be heard as one of the fish threw his tail upon the side of the basin.
Newman and Frederic Austin and one or two others collaborated in preparing our scheme. A female figure was made, carefully placed on the middle of Dr McNaught’s pillow, and gently covered to the neck with the bedclothes.
These elaborate arrangements for Dr McNaught’s entertainment were only just completed when the doctor himself returned. We waited in dark corners of the corridor for the result.
After an interval of a few minutes, a bell rang and a chambermaid appeared.
“There is some mistake, I think,” said Dr McNaught genially. “Either this room is a bedroom, a larder, or an aquarium; it would be most good of you if you would decide as soon as possible which it really is.”
The chambermaid entered the bedroom and we could just hear her quiet voice as, a moment later, she half whispered:
“But, sir, the room is already occupied. There is a lady in your bed.”
Of course, the psychological moment had arrived, and we strolled casually into the bedroom to become witnesses of Dr McNaught’s embarrassment. The jape was continued. McNaught was taken to the smoke-room, solemnly tried by judge and jury for having murdered a woman and concealed her body (it was at the time of the Crippen affair), and sentenced to death. Newman brought a hatchet from the cellar and, not long before dawn, the mock sentence was carried out with elaboratepantomime....
“Very childish—just like schoolboys!” I hear a reader (not you, of course) say, rather contemptuously. Yes, it was like schoolboys, and substitute “-like” for “-ish” in “childish” and I agree with you most heartily.
. . . . . . . .
[191]But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long hours of talk, great talk from Langford ofThe Manchester Guardian, a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from all kinds of people.
I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true; yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly; besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.
Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish poet.
[192]It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of “respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes; men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies ofElijah; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social “occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.
I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize. My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it contained the following passage:
Iris.And when with regal, arrogant step she passedAcross the portico, her white breasts gleamed;Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proud assault; she wasAs one who lives for a last carnival[193]Of love, in which she may be stabbed and tornBy large excess of passion.Charmion.Oh!Our QueenHas wine for blood; her tears are heavy dropsOf water stolen from some brackish seaOr murderous waves; her heart now leaps with lifeAnd now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;Her heart is housing many a mad desire,And she is sick for Antony.Iris.ThedayHas gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wineThat sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once moreVenus and Bacchus meet, and all the worldStands still to watch the bliss of living gods.
Iris.And when with regal, arrogant step she passedAcross the portico, her white breasts gleamed;Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proud assault; she wasAs one who lives for a last carnival[193]Of love, in which she may be stabbed and tornBy large excess of passion.Charmion.Oh!Our QueenHas wine for blood; her tears are heavy dropsOf water stolen from some brackish seaOr murderous waves; her heart now leaps with lifeAnd now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;Her heart is housing many a mad desire,And she is sick for Antony.Iris.ThedayHas gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wineThat sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once moreVenus and Bacchus meet, and all the worldStands still to watch the bliss of living gods.
Iris.And when with regal, arrogant step she passedAcross the portico, her white breasts gleamed;Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proud assault; she wasAs one who lives for a last carnival[193]Of love, in which she may be stabbed and tornBy large excess of passion.Charmion.Oh!Our QueenHas wine for blood; her tears are heavy dropsOf water stolen from some brackish seaOr murderous waves; her heart now leaps with lifeAnd now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;Her heart is housing many a mad desire,And she is sick for Antony.Iris.ThedayHas gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wineThat sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once moreVenus and Bacchus meet, and all the worldStands still to watch the bliss of living gods.
Iris.And when with regal, arrogant step she passed
Across the portico, her white breasts gleamed;
Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
The expectancy of proud assault; she was
As one who lives for a last carnival
[193]Of love, in which she may be stabbed and torn
By large excess of passion.
Charmion.Oh!Our Queen
Has wine for blood; her tears are heavy drops
Of water stolen from some brackish sea
Or murderous waves; her heart now leaps with life
And now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.
But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;
Her heart is housing many a mad desire,
And she is sick for Antony.
Iris.Theday
Has gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wine
That sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once more
Venus and Bacchus meet, and all the world
Stands still to watch the bliss of living gods.
There was a little more to the same effect, and when I wrote the stuff I thought it very fine and still think it rather pretty. But a section of the musical Press attacked it violently, and for a couple of months I was quite a notorious person. I gathered from the articles and letters that appeared that my dramatic poem was not likely to engender music that would carry on the tradition of Mendelssohn’sElijah. That had been my object in writing it. I was sick of that tradition. I wished to help to break it.
One day, while the little storm was still raging, I received a letter from Sir Henry J. Wood, who was to conduct the Festival at Norwich at which my work was to be given. (Mr Julius Harrison, who has since become prominent as one of Sir Thomas Beecham’s assistant conductors, had gained the prize for the musical setting of my poem.) In his letter Sir Henry wrote: “Very much against my will, I am writing to ask you on behalf of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival if it is possible for you to make any alternative version of the ‘two objectionable lines’ (I fail to find them myself) in your libretto,Cleopatra.... From my point of view, the whole thing is absurd and ridiculous.”
[194]I could not find the objectionable lines. I showed the poem to a most maiden aunt and watched her as she read it, hoping to tell by her sudden blush when her eyes had reached the evil place. She did not blush; she simply read the thing and said: “Oh, Gerald, how nice! I do think you have such pretty thoughts.” So did I.
A few days later Mr Julius Harrison came to my aid. The committee, it appeared, objected to “her white breasts gleamed” and also to:
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proudassault....
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proudassault....
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted withThe expectancy of proudassault....
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
The expectancy of proudassault....
I changed those lines, and the work in due course was performed at Norwich, and in Queen’s Hall, London. Later on, when my little poem was sung in Southport in its original form, with Mr Havergal Brian’s music (for he also had honoured me), Mr Landon Ronald conducting, the members of the audience did not leave their seats when the “objectionable” lines occurred; rather did they seem to lean forward a little and listen more intently.
I have mentioned this incident, not because in itself it is important, but because it so beautifully illustrates the point of view of our Cathedral Festivals. Their “secular” concerts are echoes of the concerts given in the Cathedral. They hate (or else they are afraid of?) every emotion that is not a religious emotion. They think that God made our souls and the devil our bodies. They may be right; if they are, it is clear the devil is not lacking in consideration.
. . . . . . . .
There is no doubt that our most ecstatic moments at the Cathedral Festivals were supplied by Wagner’sParsifal, which Mr J. F. Runciman, in his little book on this composer, describes as “this disastrous and evil opera.” Only excerpts from it, of course, were given; all “objectionable lines” were cut out. IfParsifalis to[195]be given on the platform at all—and, in view of the fact that we seldom have it on the stage, why not?—then it had better be given on a platform that has been erected in a spacious and beautiful cathedral. I remember those white voices floating down from a place out of sight near the roof, away above the clerestory. I always used to try to obtain a seat near some dimly stained window so that it might for me blot out the rather bewildered or consciously “rapt” faces of my fellow-creatures, for, in listening to noble music, I invariably feel much greater than, and curiously irritated by the presence of, other people.
And it used to be so fine to come forth from the Cathedral at noon, step into that mellow September English sunshine which I have not seen for nearly three years, and walk by the river ... walk perhaps a mile or so and come back to the hotel to eat cool meats and cool salads and drink cool wine. It was at these times I used to sigh and long for Bayreuth and wonder if I should ever see the grave of Wagner in the garden of Villa Wahnfried in that little Bavarian town.
It was at Gloucester, I think, that one year I was pursued by a certain hard-working, but not very talented, composer who, having gained a most extensive “popular” public for his work, was now anxious to win the suffrage of more cultivated people. Most unhappily for me, he took it into his head that my musical criticism had some influence in the north, and though he was quite wrong in this assumption, I was never able to convince him of his error. Wherever I went, lo! he was there with me. And always under his arm was a musical score, a score of his own composition. Something new, he assured me; something really quite modern. Would I look at it? I did. It was feeble, paltry and bombastic, but I did not like to tell him so. But when he pressed me for an opinion I said, what was near enough to the truth, that it was a great advance on his previous work. This seemed to[196]please him, and he took to inviting me out to lunch. If ever I went into the hotel smoke-room for a quiet pipe, I would invariably notice a vague but self-important figure in the doorway, and presently would hear the unmistakable pop that a champagne bottle so deliciously makes when it is opened. A bubbling glass would be placed at my side.
“Now, Richard Strauss in hisEin Heldenleben...” his voice would begin. And he would proceed to tell me all aboutEin Heldenlebenand its beauties. To bewilder him, I used to assert thatCarmenseemed to me a much finer work than Strauss’sElektra, and, because he was very ignorant and because he had not the slightest appreciation of Strauss, he used to look at me rather pitifully, and would eventually confess that he too liked Bizet more than he liked Strauss and that, indeed, it appeared to him that ArthurSullivan....
One day, when we were alone, he asked me if I would write a series of articles on his works. It was my turn to be bewildered.
“A series?” I asked, utterly stunned.
“Yes,” answered he, “a series. First of all, there are my part-songs. Then there are my instrumental pieces. Last of all, my Cantatas.” He pronounced cantatas with a capital C. “Just a short series: three articles in all.”
I hesitated, but he looked at me most pleadingly. I tried a little sarcasm, but that made him more pertinacious than ever. So then I flatly refused, and kept on refusing, and did not stop refusing.
“Well, then,” said he at length, “will you put in writing and sign what you said to me the other day about my new work? You will remember that you said it was the best thing I had ever done, that it was original, full of vigour, astonishingly fresh, subtle inharmony....”
“Oh, really,” I protested, “did I say all that?”
“Yes, indeed, you did.”
[197]And then I became very, very rude indeed, and, after that, whenever we met, we used to bow to each other most politely and say never a word.
This kind of man, and there is quite a handful of them, haunts the more important Festivals, but it must be very rarely that one of them obtains what he desires.
. . . . . . . .
Can you recall the most curious and most unlikely sight you have ever witnessed? Most of us, even in the course of a few years of a very ordinary existence, witness many strange things, but of all the strange things I have stumbled across nothing has been so wayward, sooutré, so fundamentally silly, as the forty organists I saw sitting in one room at Worcester. One can imagine two, or even three, organists sitting talking together, but forty, and fifteen of the forty Cathedral organists, seems incredible.
Now, you have only to be fond of modern music to feel instinctively that a man who is an organist and nothing else is sitting on the wrong side of the fence. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is helping to hold things back; he hates the rapid progress which music is making, and he has as much imagination as thevox humanastop.
Well, the forty organists were sitting and talking and smoking, and as I looked at them and at their mild, but worried, faces, it seemed to me and my companion that, in the interests of art, morality and ordinary decency, some protest should be made. And we decided that we were just the people to make it. We could have forgiven them if they had met together to discuss some professional question—e.g.how to get their salaries raised, how to get the better of their respective vicars, or how they could expand their minds so as to be able to appreciate Debussy or Ravel or even Max Reger. But they were gathered together merely because they liked it, just for the sake of enjoying each other’s society. Monstrous absurdity! Could they not see how ridiculous they were? Forty[198]organists in one room!—why, there ought not to be forty organists in the whole world.
Fortunately the room was on the ground floor and the hour late. My companion and I stepped outside the hotel, waited till the street was quiet, and then rapped a series of three tattoos upon the window-pane to secure silence within. We then sang in two parts, I in a high falsetto and my friend in a lugubrious bass, the “Baal” Chorus fromElijah. “Baal, we cry to thee! Baal, we cry to thee!”
We had not proceeded very far in this beautiful music—intended by the dear, delicious Mendelssohn for a shout of savagery, but really a quite charming cradle song—when a cry of delighted laughter came from the room, and two or three of the organists, hatless and earnest, rushed out into the street.
“Come inside!” they said; “come and join us. You belong tous!”
Too utterly flabbergasted at this invitation to make any reply, we turned and fled, rushed back to our hotel, and ordered whisky-and-sodas.
The great musician to whom we told the story next day said:
“Well, once more, you see, the biters were bit.”
But my friend and I did not think so.
[199]CHAPTER XVIIPEOPLE OF THE THEATRESir Herbert Tree—Gordon Craig—Henry Arthur Jones—Temple Thurston—Miss Janet Achurch—Miss HornimanSir Herbert Treenever met a stranger without trying to impress him. He always succeeded. He would take the utmost pains about it: go to any lengths: use his last resource.... I am not now, of course, dealing with him as an actor. We all have our varying opinions of him as an actor. Some think he could; some think he couldn’t.... But I am writing of him at the present moment as a man. A showman, if you like. As a man, as a man who “showed off” either as a wit, a mimic, a man of the world, a superman, or what not, he was supreme.I met him in his private office at His Majesty’s in the middle of the run ofJoseph and his Brethren. He had invited me there in order to dictate an article to me, but, as he told me over the ’phone, he hadn’t the remotest notion what the subject of the article was going to be. Could I help him with any ideas? His article was for a Labour paper. Did I know anything about Labour? If I didn’t, did I know anybody who did?In speaking to me over the ’phone, he appeared so anxious that I began to rack my brains for a subject. In the recesses of my meagre intellect I found the remnants of two or three subjects, and at nine o’clock that evening I presented myself at His Majesty’s Theatre with them on the tip of my tongue.His room was empty as I entered it. Opposite the door[200]was a fireplace and above the fireplace a mirror; on the left of the door as you entered it was Sir Herbert’s large desk. By the side of this, seated on a low chair, I waited. I had not to wait long, for presently I heard a soft, rather pulpy kind of sound coming down the passage and, a moment later, Sir Herbert entered, wearing a long white beard and the garments of a gentleman of the East. The play was still in the first act, and he had that minute come off the stage.“Got a subject?” he asked, shaking hands. “So have I. The Influence of the Stage on the Masses! What do you think of it? Very trite, I know, but there are a few important things I want to say. Sit here, will you? Here you are—ink and paper.”And, sitting down, he began immediately to dictate the article. He got along swimmingly, and about a third of the article must have been down on paper when I heard a squeaky voice outside the door. It was the call-boy. Sir Herbert rose, stroked his beard, adjusted his gown, and walked outside; as he did these things he continued dictating, his voice stopping in the middle of a rather involved sentence when he was out in the passage.After five or six minutes, I heard the same soft, pulpy sound approaching and, while yet outside the door, he began dictating at the precise point where he had left off, rounding off the sentence most beautifully. It was a remarkable feat of memory. After a very short period, we heard the high-pitched voice a second time, and once more he moved dreamily away, still dictating. Again he stopped, purposely as it seemed to me, in the middle of a sentence, and again, when he reappeared, he spoke the waiting word. Marvellous! He gave me a cautious, inquiring look, as if to discover if I had noticed his cleverness. I smiled back reassuringly. In a few minutes the article was finished.[201]“Do you like it?” he asked.“Exactly the thing.The Daily Citizenreaders will be delighted. But what an extraordinary memory you have!”“Ah! You noticed that?” he said, seemingly well pleased.He began to talk ofJoseph and his Brethrenand, in the middle of our conversation, Mr Temple Thurston, looking rather nervous, was shown in. I knew that, at that time, Thurston was writing for Tree a play on the subject of the Wandering Jew, and as I guessed they had business to transact, I withdrew as quickly as possible.I saw Sir Herbert on another occasion, but whether it was soon before, or soon after, the incident I have just related I cannot recollect.He was conducting a rehearsal on the stage of His Majesty’s, and I stood in the wings, watching him. He had recently produced a play called, I think,The Island, by a Spanish or a Brazilian writer. It was a dead failure and was withdrawn after three or four nights. It was to talk of this play that I had come, and as he advanced to the wings I noticed that he looked rather worried.“Whatwaswrong with the play?” he asked. “All you critics have tried to tell me, but I’m blessed if I can understand what you are all talking about.”“To me the fault of the play was quite obvious. The author had got hold of a good idea and the drama had several fine situations; but, whereas the idea was poetical and mysterious and the situations tense and dramatic, the author or the translator had employed the most stilted kind of dialogue, and language as commonplace as that which I am now using. The play should have been translated or rewritten by a poet.”“Ah! It’s very strange you should say that, for I myself had felt strongly disposed to ask John Masefield[202]to prepare the thing for the stage. I wish I had done; but, of course, it’s too late now. But a manager can never tell beforehand what play will be a success and what won’t.”“Pardon me. That is often said, but I don’t believe it’s true. Some people reallydoknow what the public wants. Arnold Bennett, for example, and Hall Caine, not to mention others. Dotheyever make mistakes? Has Arnold Bennett ever been guilty of a failure?”“No, perhaps not. But I can’t engage Bennett as a reader. Even if he would consent to do the work, I should not be able to afford his fee.”“Yes, I know. But my contention is that there are people who can and do gauge to a nicety the taste of the public.” And I mentioned the names of two critics who had, on many occasions, foretold most accurately the exact length of time new pieces would run.Tree was called back to the rehearsal, and he glided away for a few moments, fluttering a handful of loose papers as he went. He soon returned, and this time he was cheerfulness itself.“It’s going very well,” he said, referring to the rehearsal. “It’s only a stop-gap, of course, but it’ll make a little money. I must write to those critics you mentioned,” he added musingly; “or perhaps it would be better if I seemed to run across them accidentally?”But whether or not he did run across either of the critics accidentally, I do not know, for the war broke out soon after and disrupted everything.. . . . . . . .It was when I was staying in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury, six or seven years ago, in a house opposite the Foundlings’ Hospital, that, one morning, Gordon Craig came into the room. He was, I think, in search of Ernest Marriott, a most ingenious and original artist, who at that time and for long after was doing some sort of work for[203]Craig. Marriott and I were staying at the same boarding-house.When Craig’s bulky form filled the doorway I recognised at once, from Marriott’s description of him, who he was, and I introduced myself to him, telling him Marriott was out.“Yes, I know he is,” said Craig; “but I have often wanted to look at one of these fine old houses.”And he walked round and round the room, with his eyes on the cornice, telling me all sorts of things, which I have long forgotten, that I had never heard before. He seemed to have made a special study of English architecture of the early nineteenth century, and whilst he was in the house talked of nothing else, though I tried to lure him into gossip of the theatre.He gave me the impression of a large, white man with hair which, if not entirely grey, was very fair. He had, I remember, hands much plumper than one would expect an artist to possess; his face also was rather plump. He seemed to fill the large room and radiate vitality. He left as suddenly and as inconsequently as he had come.“How like he is to Miss Ellen Terry!” remarked my landlord, not knowing the identity of his visitor.“Yes,” said I, “now you mention it, I notice the extraordinary resemblance. But, after all, the resemblance is not so remarkable, for you see, he is her son.”. . . . . . . .On one occasion I was sent to interview Mr Henry Arthur Jones. Over the telephone I made an appointment with him for the morrow, and when I arrived at his house I found rather elaborate preparations had been made for the occasion. Mr H. A. Jones was standing in the middle of the drawing-room with outstretched hand, on a table near the open window (it was July, I think) was a tray with what one calls tea-things, a lady shorthand typist (specially engaged for the occasion) was[204]waiting with notebook and pencil, and a maid was carrying into the room a teapot, and cress sandwiches.The presence of the lady typist embarrassed me. She took down in shorthand my questions and Mr Jones’ replies. Thinking it would be foolish to waste any time on preliminary politenesses, I plunged straight into the middle of my subject. The lady typist sipped her tea in the awkward little pauses that came from time to time. It was not an interview; it was a kind of official statement. It was like the proceedings at a police court. I felt I should be held responsible to a higher authority for every word I spoke.However, at the end of an hour a good deal of excellent matter had been taken down, probably enough for a two-column article. But my news editor did not want a two-column article. He wanted a scrappy little paragraph or, at most, two scrappy little paragraphs. Now, in view of the fact that Mr Jones had gone to the trouble and expense of getting a shorthand typist specially from town, and, more particularly, in view of the fact that it was perfectly clear that he had not contemplated the possibility of an interview with him being used merely and solely for a snappy little paragraph, I felt it incumbent upon me to tell him just how matters stood. But how could I? Could you have told him? Well,Icouldn’t, though I tried and tried hard.When the interview was over, he arranged that the shorthand typist should return to her office, type out her shorthand, and send the result to me in Fleet Street early that evening. In due course, ten foolscap sheets of valuable and most interesting matter came along, and I handed it in to the night-editor just as it stood.Next morning, only two snippety paragraphs appeared in the paper, and I have often thought since that Mr H. A. Jones must have felt disgusted with the paper, a little more disgusted with himself, but most of all[205]disgusted with me. After all, it was not entirely my fault, was it?... I mean, he should not have taken himselfquiteso importantly, should he?I retain a very clear impression of his personality. He was short, rather dapper, and very deliberate. He always thought briefly before he answered a question, but when he did answer it he did so without hesitation, going straight into the middle of the matter. He struck me, as he sat on a rather low chair opposite the window, as essentially earnest, essentially honest-minded, essentially clear-headed. His manner was a little important. He may be said to have “pronounced” things rather than to have spoken them. He was formally courteous. I do not think one could justly say that he has the “artistic” temperament, and I imagine he possesses no particularly acute perception of beauty. There is no emotional enthusiasm about him; he has no unreliable “moods”; he does not think or feel one thing to-day and another to-morrow. By no means typically a man of this generation, and yet not a man who has outlived his own time. It appeared to me that he had little intuition; his very considerable knowledge of human nature is probably based on close observation and most careful deduction.When we parted he gave me copies of two of his plays.He was a man of considerable personal charm and no little intellectual weight: a man both kindly and stern: a man who could at all times be trusted to see the humour of things and who, on occasion, could be cruel to be kind.. . . . . . . .Not so very long before the war, my journalistic duties took me to the first night of Mr Temple Thurston’sThe Greatest Wish in the World, a rather weak but quite innocuous play given by Mr Bourchier. If the play “succeeded,” the audience assuredly didn’t. When the curtain went down on the last act, there was a good deal[206]of applause, chiefly from the gallery, and we who were seated in the stalls waited a moment to discover what the verdict of the house was going to be.Now, every close observer of theatre audiences knows well enough that among the many different kinds of applause there is one kind that is very sinister: it is a kind difficult to describe, but unmistakable enough when heard: to the uninterested listener it sounds sincere and hearty, but if you listen carefully you will catch, beneath the heartiness, a derisive note—something viciously eager in the shouts, something malicious in the whistles. There was this sinister sound, a kind of ground-bass, in the applause that followed the last fall of the curtain at the first production of Mr Temple Thurston’s play. The mimes had walked on and bowed their acknowledgments when, suddenly, there arose loud cries of “Author! Author!” Well did I know what those cries meant, and I told myself that the play had failed pitifully. I was edging my way out of the stalls when, to my amazement, I saw the curtain rise once more and disclose the nervous figure of Mr Temple Thurston. Instantly there went up from a section of the audience hisses and boos and cries of half-angry disappointment. Mr Thurston shrank and winced as though he had been struck in the face, and his exit was confused and awkward. It was as wanton an act of cruelty as I have ever witnessed: deliberate, heartless, stupid. This is not the place to discuss the propriety or otherwise of an audience insulting a writer who has failed to please it, but it is certain that in no other profession, in no other walk of life, do such savage traditions prevail as in the enticing and intoxicating world of the theatre.Not long after this incident I was received by Mr Temple Thurston at his flat. I found him writing, and almost at once he began to talk most intimately about himself.[207]“Never again,” said he, apropos of the episode I have just related, “shall I ‘take a call.’ I cannot even now think of those awful few moments on the stage without a shudder. It is distressing enough for an author to fail—distressing:not only because of his own disappointment, but chiefly because of the disappointment he brings to the actors who have done their best for his play—without having his failure hurled in his face, so to speak. But though I shall never again take a call, I shall continue writing plays. I have never yet written a really successful play, and no work of mine has had a longer run than sixty performances. I have had many chances, of course, but I shall have more.”He then told me of his early attempts to win fame. Like many other successful writers, he began in Fleet Street. The work there did not suit him, and he soon abandoned it. He married early, lived with his wife in a couple of rooms in Chancery Lane, and for a little time picked up a living as best he could. The story of his first wife’s extraordinary success withJohn Chilcote, M.P., is common knowledge. That success preceded his own by two or three years, but he had not long to wait before his own work found and pleased the public.I saw Thurston on two or three other occasions, and found him a man avid of enjoyment, frank, a little bitter, combative, kindly, strong, sensitive, independent. He has a nature at once contradictory and baffling.. . . . . . . .Twenty years must have passed since Miss Janet Achurch gave her astounding performance in Manchester of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’sAntony and Cleopatra. It was a performance so remarkable, so electrifying, that the old Queen’s Theatre in Quay Street became, for a time, the centre of theatrical interest for the whole of England. What London critic nowadays goes to Manchester, or anywhere else more than five miles from[208]home, to witness a Shakespeare play? Yet they all went to see Miss Achurch. I remember a cheeky and brilliant article by Bernard Shaw inThe Saturday Reviewon Miss Achurch, another by Clement Scott inThe Daily Telegraph, a third by William Archer in (I think)The World.For myself, I saw the play seventeen times, and though I have seen many other actresses interpret Cleopatra, I have not known one whose performance could rank with the gorgeous presentation by Miss Achurch.All my visits to the Queen’s were surreptitious, for I was brought up in a family that not only hated the theatre as an evil place but feared it also. Though I was but a boy I had a certain amount of freedom, for I was studying medicine at the Victoria University, and many afternoons that should have been spent in dissecting human feet and eyes were passed in the gallery of Flanagan’s theatre.I suppose I must have been in love with Miss Achurch, though the kind of feeling that a boy sometimes has for a great emotional actress is more akin to worship than love. I longed to approach my divinity, but feared to do so. I wrote about her in local papers, and I remember a curious weekly calledNorthern Financewhich, for some dark reason or other, printed, among its news of stocks and shares, a crude, bubbling article of mine on Miss Achurch. I sent all my articles to her and, with the colossal impudence of youth, and driven by a schoolboy curiosity, asked for an interview.She wrote to me. Reader, are you young enough to remember how you felt when you first saw Miss Ellen Terry? Can you recall your adoration, your devotion?... Those days of young worship, how fine they are! Novelists always laugh at calf love because they cannot write about it and make it as beautiful as it really is. Like many other things that are human, calf love is[209]absurd and beautiful, noble and silly, profound and superficial. But, unlike so many things that are human, there is nothing about it that is mean and selfish, nothing that is not proud and good.Yes, she wrote to me and invited me to visit her. She was kind and gracious.... Amused? Oh, I have no doubt she was amused, but she never betrayed it.I used to hang about the stage door in the dark to watch her go into the theatre or come out of it. I scraped up an acquaintance with several members of the orchestra, for I thought I saw in them a kind of magic borrowed from her. Her hotel was a castle.Those of my readers who never saw Miss Achurch in what theatrical writers call her “palmy” days can have only a very faint conception of her genius. She became ill: her beauty faded. Only rarely did one see her on the stage.Years later I saw her in Ibsen’sGhostsand, again much later, in a small part in Masefield’s adaptation of Wiers-Jennsen’sThe Witch. She was wonderful in both plays, but the grandeur had departed, the glory almost gone.It is most sadly true that actors live only in their own generation. Janet Achurch ought to have lived for ever. She will not be forgotten while we who saw her live; but we cannot communicate to others the genius we witnessed and worshipped.. . . . . . . .Miss Horniman is one of the many people I have never met. “Then why write about her?” you ask. I really don’t know, except that I want to. She was (and, for all I know to the contrary, still is) something of a personality in Manchester, and she was so for a considerable period, she producing quite a few plays at the Gaiety Theatre that were well worth seeing.But she was ridiculously overpraised. She was petted and spoiled byThe Manchester Guardian, the Victoria[210]University gave her an honorary Master of Art’s degree, many literary and dramatic societies went down on their knees to her and implored her to come and speak to them, and she was regarded by the entire community as a woman of daring originality, great wisdom and vast experience. She could do nothing wrong. No play she produced, no matter how sour and Mancunian, was ever condemned by the local Press. Miss Horniman had given it, therefore it was “the right stuff.” She knew about it all:she knew:SHE KNEW. Many Manchester dramatic critics were themselves writing plays, and Miss Horniman smiled upon them. She smiled upon Stanley Houghton, Harold Brighouse, Allan Monkhouse, all critics ofThe Manchester Guardian. She would have smiled upon the plays of J. E. Agate and C. E. Montague if they had written any. She was our benefactress, and we used to sit and watch her in her embroidered gown as she rather self-consciously queened it in a box at her own theatre.Yet, after all, she had a rather depressing effect upon the city. She gave no new play that was perfectly beautiful. She appeared to detest romance and had little understanding of blank verse. Starting her public life as a patron of Bernard Shaw, she declined upon Shaw’s fevered disciples. She spoke in public very frequently, and always said the same things. She had all the enthusiasm of a clever business woman. Wishing very much to make money (so she told us), she understood all the arts of self-advertisement. But, really, Manchester was not the place for her; it was sufficiently hard and provincial before shecame——But perhaps I am allowing myself to run away with myself in writing down all these disagreeable things. Yet I believe them to be true, and they must stand. Her plays gave me several enjoyable evenings which, but for her, I should never have had, and I can never be[211]too grateful to her for restoring to the Gaiety Theatre the drink licence that the Watch Committee had taken away some years before she came. That act, at all events, did in some degree help to make the Manchester plays a little less like Manchester plays.
Sir Herbert Tree—Gordon Craig—Henry Arthur Jones—Temple Thurston—Miss Janet Achurch—Miss Horniman
Sir Herbert Treenever met a stranger without trying to impress him. He always succeeded. He would take the utmost pains about it: go to any lengths: use his last resource.... I am not now, of course, dealing with him as an actor. We all have our varying opinions of him as an actor. Some think he could; some think he couldn’t.... But I am writing of him at the present moment as a man. A showman, if you like. As a man, as a man who “showed off” either as a wit, a mimic, a man of the world, a superman, or what not, he was supreme.
I met him in his private office at His Majesty’s in the middle of the run ofJoseph and his Brethren. He had invited me there in order to dictate an article to me, but, as he told me over the ’phone, he hadn’t the remotest notion what the subject of the article was going to be. Could I help him with any ideas? His article was for a Labour paper. Did I know anything about Labour? If I didn’t, did I know anybody who did?
In speaking to me over the ’phone, he appeared so anxious that I began to rack my brains for a subject. In the recesses of my meagre intellect I found the remnants of two or three subjects, and at nine o’clock that evening I presented myself at His Majesty’s Theatre with them on the tip of my tongue.
His room was empty as I entered it. Opposite the door[200]was a fireplace and above the fireplace a mirror; on the left of the door as you entered it was Sir Herbert’s large desk. By the side of this, seated on a low chair, I waited. I had not to wait long, for presently I heard a soft, rather pulpy kind of sound coming down the passage and, a moment later, Sir Herbert entered, wearing a long white beard and the garments of a gentleman of the East. The play was still in the first act, and he had that minute come off the stage.
“Got a subject?” he asked, shaking hands. “So have I. The Influence of the Stage on the Masses! What do you think of it? Very trite, I know, but there are a few important things I want to say. Sit here, will you? Here you are—ink and paper.”
And, sitting down, he began immediately to dictate the article. He got along swimmingly, and about a third of the article must have been down on paper when I heard a squeaky voice outside the door. It was the call-boy. Sir Herbert rose, stroked his beard, adjusted his gown, and walked outside; as he did these things he continued dictating, his voice stopping in the middle of a rather involved sentence when he was out in the passage.
After five or six minutes, I heard the same soft, pulpy sound approaching and, while yet outside the door, he began dictating at the precise point where he had left off, rounding off the sentence most beautifully. It was a remarkable feat of memory. After a very short period, we heard the high-pitched voice a second time, and once more he moved dreamily away, still dictating. Again he stopped, purposely as it seemed to me, in the middle of a sentence, and again, when he reappeared, he spoke the waiting word. Marvellous! He gave me a cautious, inquiring look, as if to discover if I had noticed his cleverness. I smiled back reassuringly. In a few minutes the article was finished.
[201]“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Exactly the thing.The Daily Citizenreaders will be delighted. But what an extraordinary memory you have!”
“Ah! You noticed that?” he said, seemingly well pleased.
He began to talk ofJoseph and his Brethrenand, in the middle of our conversation, Mr Temple Thurston, looking rather nervous, was shown in. I knew that, at that time, Thurston was writing for Tree a play on the subject of the Wandering Jew, and as I guessed they had business to transact, I withdrew as quickly as possible.
I saw Sir Herbert on another occasion, but whether it was soon before, or soon after, the incident I have just related I cannot recollect.
He was conducting a rehearsal on the stage of His Majesty’s, and I stood in the wings, watching him. He had recently produced a play called, I think,The Island, by a Spanish or a Brazilian writer. It was a dead failure and was withdrawn after three or four nights. It was to talk of this play that I had come, and as he advanced to the wings I noticed that he looked rather worried.
“Whatwaswrong with the play?” he asked. “All you critics have tried to tell me, but I’m blessed if I can understand what you are all talking about.”
“To me the fault of the play was quite obvious. The author had got hold of a good idea and the drama had several fine situations; but, whereas the idea was poetical and mysterious and the situations tense and dramatic, the author or the translator had employed the most stilted kind of dialogue, and language as commonplace as that which I am now using. The play should have been translated or rewritten by a poet.”
“Ah! It’s very strange you should say that, for I myself had felt strongly disposed to ask John Masefield[202]to prepare the thing for the stage. I wish I had done; but, of course, it’s too late now. But a manager can never tell beforehand what play will be a success and what won’t.”
“Pardon me. That is often said, but I don’t believe it’s true. Some people reallydoknow what the public wants. Arnold Bennett, for example, and Hall Caine, not to mention others. Dotheyever make mistakes? Has Arnold Bennett ever been guilty of a failure?”
“No, perhaps not. But I can’t engage Bennett as a reader. Even if he would consent to do the work, I should not be able to afford his fee.”
“Yes, I know. But my contention is that there are people who can and do gauge to a nicety the taste of the public.” And I mentioned the names of two critics who had, on many occasions, foretold most accurately the exact length of time new pieces would run.
Tree was called back to the rehearsal, and he glided away for a few moments, fluttering a handful of loose papers as he went. He soon returned, and this time he was cheerfulness itself.
“It’s going very well,” he said, referring to the rehearsal. “It’s only a stop-gap, of course, but it’ll make a little money. I must write to those critics you mentioned,” he added musingly; “or perhaps it would be better if I seemed to run across them accidentally?”
But whether or not he did run across either of the critics accidentally, I do not know, for the war broke out soon after and disrupted everything.
. . . . . . . .
It was when I was staying in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury, six or seven years ago, in a house opposite the Foundlings’ Hospital, that, one morning, Gordon Craig came into the room. He was, I think, in search of Ernest Marriott, a most ingenious and original artist, who at that time and for long after was doing some sort of work for[203]Craig. Marriott and I were staying at the same boarding-house.
When Craig’s bulky form filled the doorway I recognised at once, from Marriott’s description of him, who he was, and I introduced myself to him, telling him Marriott was out.
“Yes, I know he is,” said Craig; “but I have often wanted to look at one of these fine old houses.”
And he walked round and round the room, with his eyes on the cornice, telling me all sorts of things, which I have long forgotten, that I had never heard before. He seemed to have made a special study of English architecture of the early nineteenth century, and whilst he was in the house talked of nothing else, though I tried to lure him into gossip of the theatre.
He gave me the impression of a large, white man with hair which, if not entirely grey, was very fair. He had, I remember, hands much plumper than one would expect an artist to possess; his face also was rather plump. He seemed to fill the large room and radiate vitality. He left as suddenly and as inconsequently as he had come.
“How like he is to Miss Ellen Terry!” remarked my landlord, not knowing the identity of his visitor.
“Yes,” said I, “now you mention it, I notice the extraordinary resemblance. But, after all, the resemblance is not so remarkable, for you see, he is her son.”
. . . . . . . .
On one occasion I was sent to interview Mr Henry Arthur Jones. Over the telephone I made an appointment with him for the morrow, and when I arrived at his house I found rather elaborate preparations had been made for the occasion. Mr H. A. Jones was standing in the middle of the drawing-room with outstretched hand, on a table near the open window (it was July, I think) was a tray with what one calls tea-things, a lady shorthand typist (specially engaged for the occasion) was[204]waiting with notebook and pencil, and a maid was carrying into the room a teapot, and cress sandwiches.
The presence of the lady typist embarrassed me. She took down in shorthand my questions and Mr Jones’ replies. Thinking it would be foolish to waste any time on preliminary politenesses, I plunged straight into the middle of my subject. The lady typist sipped her tea in the awkward little pauses that came from time to time. It was not an interview; it was a kind of official statement. It was like the proceedings at a police court. I felt I should be held responsible to a higher authority for every word I spoke.
However, at the end of an hour a good deal of excellent matter had been taken down, probably enough for a two-column article. But my news editor did not want a two-column article. He wanted a scrappy little paragraph or, at most, two scrappy little paragraphs. Now, in view of the fact that Mr Jones had gone to the trouble and expense of getting a shorthand typist specially from town, and, more particularly, in view of the fact that it was perfectly clear that he had not contemplated the possibility of an interview with him being used merely and solely for a snappy little paragraph, I felt it incumbent upon me to tell him just how matters stood. But how could I? Could you have told him? Well,Icouldn’t, though I tried and tried hard.
When the interview was over, he arranged that the shorthand typist should return to her office, type out her shorthand, and send the result to me in Fleet Street early that evening. In due course, ten foolscap sheets of valuable and most interesting matter came along, and I handed it in to the night-editor just as it stood.
Next morning, only two snippety paragraphs appeared in the paper, and I have often thought since that Mr H. A. Jones must have felt disgusted with the paper, a little more disgusted with himself, but most of all[205]disgusted with me. After all, it was not entirely my fault, was it?... I mean, he should not have taken himselfquiteso importantly, should he?
I retain a very clear impression of his personality. He was short, rather dapper, and very deliberate. He always thought briefly before he answered a question, but when he did answer it he did so without hesitation, going straight into the middle of the matter. He struck me, as he sat on a rather low chair opposite the window, as essentially earnest, essentially honest-minded, essentially clear-headed. His manner was a little important. He may be said to have “pronounced” things rather than to have spoken them. He was formally courteous. I do not think one could justly say that he has the “artistic” temperament, and I imagine he possesses no particularly acute perception of beauty. There is no emotional enthusiasm about him; he has no unreliable “moods”; he does not think or feel one thing to-day and another to-morrow. By no means typically a man of this generation, and yet not a man who has outlived his own time. It appeared to me that he had little intuition; his very considerable knowledge of human nature is probably based on close observation and most careful deduction.
When we parted he gave me copies of two of his plays.
He was a man of considerable personal charm and no little intellectual weight: a man both kindly and stern: a man who could at all times be trusted to see the humour of things and who, on occasion, could be cruel to be kind.
. . . . . . . .
Not so very long before the war, my journalistic duties took me to the first night of Mr Temple Thurston’sThe Greatest Wish in the World, a rather weak but quite innocuous play given by Mr Bourchier. If the play “succeeded,” the audience assuredly didn’t. When the curtain went down on the last act, there was a good deal[206]of applause, chiefly from the gallery, and we who were seated in the stalls waited a moment to discover what the verdict of the house was going to be.
Now, every close observer of theatre audiences knows well enough that among the many different kinds of applause there is one kind that is very sinister: it is a kind difficult to describe, but unmistakable enough when heard: to the uninterested listener it sounds sincere and hearty, but if you listen carefully you will catch, beneath the heartiness, a derisive note—something viciously eager in the shouts, something malicious in the whistles. There was this sinister sound, a kind of ground-bass, in the applause that followed the last fall of the curtain at the first production of Mr Temple Thurston’s play. The mimes had walked on and bowed their acknowledgments when, suddenly, there arose loud cries of “Author! Author!” Well did I know what those cries meant, and I told myself that the play had failed pitifully. I was edging my way out of the stalls when, to my amazement, I saw the curtain rise once more and disclose the nervous figure of Mr Temple Thurston. Instantly there went up from a section of the audience hisses and boos and cries of half-angry disappointment. Mr Thurston shrank and winced as though he had been struck in the face, and his exit was confused and awkward. It was as wanton an act of cruelty as I have ever witnessed: deliberate, heartless, stupid. This is not the place to discuss the propriety or otherwise of an audience insulting a writer who has failed to please it, but it is certain that in no other profession, in no other walk of life, do such savage traditions prevail as in the enticing and intoxicating world of the theatre.
Not long after this incident I was received by Mr Temple Thurston at his flat. I found him writing, and almost at once he began to talk most intimately about himself.
[207]“Never again,” said he, apropos of the episode I have just related, “shall I ‘take a call.’ I cannot even now think of those awful few moments on the stage without a shudder. It is distressing enough for an author to fail—distressing:not only because of his own disappointment, but chiefly because of the disappointment he brings to the actors who have done their best for his play—without having his failure hurled in his face, so to speak. But though I shall never again take a call, I shall continue writing plays. I have never yet written a really successful play, and no work of mine has had a longer run than sixty performances. I have had many chances, of course, but I shall have more.”
He then told me of his early attempts to win fame. Like many other successful writers, he began in Fleet Street. The work there did not suit him, and he soon abandoned it. He married early, lived with his wife in a couple of rooms in Chancery Lane, and for a little time picked up a living as best he could. The story of his first wife’s extraordinary success withJohn Chilcote, M.P., is common knowledge. That success preceded his own by two or three years, but he had not long to wait before his own work found and pleased the public.
I saw Thurston on two or three other occasions, and found him a man avid of enjoyment, frank, a little bitter, combative, kindly, strong, sensitive, independent. He has a nature at once contradictory and baffling.
. . . . . . . .
Twenty years must have passed since Miss Janet Achurch gave her astounding performance in Manchester of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’sAntony and Cleopatra. It was a performance so remarkable, so electrifying, that the old Queen’s Theatre in Quay Street became, for a time, the centre of theatrical interest for the whole of England. What London critic nowadays goes to Manchester, or anywhere else more than five miles from[208]home, to witness a Shakespeare play? Yet they all went to see Miss Achurch. I remember a cheeky and brilliant article by Bernard Shaw inThe Saturday Reviewon Miss Achurch, another by Clement Scott inThe Daily Telegraph, a third by William Archer in (I think)The World.
For myself, I saw the play seventeen times, and though I have seen many other actresses interpret Cleopatra, I have not known one whose performance could rank with the gorgeous presentation by Miss Achurch.
All my visits to the Queen’s were surreptitious, for I was brought up in a family that not only hated the theatre as an evil place but feared it also. Though I was but a boy I had a certain amount of freedom, for I was studying medicine at the Victoria University, and many afternoons that should have been spent in dissecting human feet and eyes were passed in the gallery of Flanagan’s theatre.
I suppose I must have been in love with Miss Achurch, though the kind of feeling that a boy sometimes has for a great emotional actress is more akin to worship than love. I longed to approach my divinity, but feared to do so. I wrote about her in local papers, and I remember a curious weekly calledNorthern Financewhich, for some dark reason or other, printed, among its news of stocks and shares, a crude, bubbling article of mine on Miss Achurch. I sent all my articles to her and, with the colossal impudence of youth, and driven by a schoolboy curiosity, asked for an interview.
She wrote to me. Reader, are you young enough to remember how you felt when you first saw Miss Ellen Terry? Can you recall your adoration, your devotion?... Those days of young worship, how fine they are! Novelists always laugh at calf love because they cannot write about it and make it as beautiful as it really is. Like many other things that are human, calf love is[209]absurd and beautiful, noble and silly, profound and superficial. But, unlike so many things that are human, there is nothing about it that is mean and selfish, nothing that is not proud and good.
Yes, she wrote to me and invited me to visit her. She was kind and gracious.... Amused? Oh, I have no doubt she was amused, but she never betrayed it.
I used to hang about the stage door in the dark to watch her go into the theatre or come out of it. I scraped up an acquaintance with several members of the orchestra, for I thought I saw in them a kind of magic borrowed from her. Her hotel was a castle.
Those of my readers who never saw Miss Achurch in what theatrical writers call her “palmy” days can have only a very faint conception of her genius. She became ill: her beauty faded. Only rarely did one see her on the stage.
Years later I saw her in Ibsen’sGhostsand, again much later, in a small part in Masefield’s adaptation of Wiers-Jennsen’sThe Witch. She was wonderful in both plays, but the grandeur had departed, the glory almost gone.
It is most sadly true that actors live only in their own generation. Janet Achurch ought to have lived for ever. She will not be forgotten while we who saw her live; but we cannot communicate to others the genius we witnessed and worshipped.
. . . . . . . .
Miss Horniman is one of the many people I have never met. “Then why write about her?” you ask. I really don’t know, except that I want to. She was (and, for all I know to the contrary, still is) something of a personality in Manchester, and she was so for a considerable period, she producing quite a few plays at the Gaiety Theatre that were well worth seeing.
But she was ridiculously overpraised. She was petted and spoiled byThe Manchester Guardian, the Victoria[210]University gave her an honorary Master of Art’s degree, many literary and dramatic societies went down on their knees to her and implored her to come and speak to them, and she was regarded by the entire community as a woman of daring originality, great wisdom and vast experience. She could do nothing wrong. No play she produced, no matter how sour and Mancunian, was ever condemned by the local Press. Miss Horniman had given it, therefore it was “the right stuff.” She knew about it all:she knew:SHE KNEW. Many Manchester dramatic critics were themselves writing plays, and Miss Horniman smiled upon them. She smiled upon Stanley Houghton, Harold Brighouse, Allan Monkhouse, all critics ofThe Manchester Guardian. She would have smiled upon the plays of J. E. Agate and C. E. Montague if they had written any. She was our benefactress, and we used to sit and watch her in her embroidered gown as she rather self-consciously queened it in a box at her own theatre.
Yet, after all, she had a rather depressing effect upon the city. She gave no new play that was perfectly beautiful. She appeared to detest romance and had little understanding of blank verse. Starting her public life as a patron of Bernard Shaw, she declined upon Shaw’s fevered disciples. She spoke in public very frequently, and always said the same things. She had all the enthusiasm of a clever business woman. Wishing very much to make money (so she told us), she understood all the arts of self-advertisement. But, really, Manchester was not the place for her; it was sufficiently hard and provincial before shecame——
But perhaps I am allowing myself to run away with myself in writing down all these disagreeable things. Yet I believe them to be true, and they must stand. Her plays gave me several enjoyable evenings which, but for her, I should never have had, and I can never be[211]too grateful to her for restoring to the Gaiety Theatre the drink licence that the Watch Committee had taken away some years before she came. That act, at all events, did in some degree help to make the Manchester plays a little less like Manchester plays.