and then tripping merrily into the rest of it:
--beautiful as a butterfly,
As fair as a queen,
Was pretty little Polly Perkins
Of Paddington Green.
It is given to most of us--not always without a certain wistful
regret--to recall the circumstances under which we first heard our
favourite songs; and on the evening when I met "Pretty Polly Perkins" I
was on a tramp steamer in the Mediterranean, when at last the heat had
gone and work was over and we were free to be melodious. My own position
on this boat was nominally purser, at a shilling a month, but in reality
passenger, or super-cargo, spending most of the day either in reading
or sleeping. The second engineer, a huge Sussex man, whose favourite
theme of conversation with me was the cricket of his county, was, it
seemed, famous for this song; and that evening, as we sat on a skylight,
he was suddenly withdrawn from a eulogy of the odd ways and deadly
left-handers of poor one-eyed "Jumper" Juniper (whom I had known
personally, when I was a small school-boy, in a reverential way) to give
the company "Pretty Polly Perkins." In vain to say that he was busy,
talking to me; that he was dry; that he had no voice. "Pretty Polly
Perkins" had to be sung, and he struck up without more ado:
I'm a broken-hearted milkman,
In woe I'm arrayed,
Through keeping the company of
A young servant maid--
and so forth. And then came the chorus, which has this advantage over
all other choruses ever written, that the most tuneless singer on earth
(such as myself) and the most shamefaced (I am autobiographical again)
can help to swell, at any rate, the notable opening of it, and thus
ensure the success of the rest.
That evening, as I say, was more than twenty years ago, and I had
thought in the interval little enough of the song until the other pretty
Perkins suggested it; but I need hardly say that the next day came a
further reminder of it (since that is one of the queer rules of life) in
the shape of a Chicago weekly paper with the information that America
knows "Pretty Polly Perkins" too.
The ballads of a nation for the most part respect their nationality, but
now and then there is free trade in them. It has been so with "Pretty
Polly Perkins"; for it seems that, recognizing its excellence, an
American singer prepared, in 1864, a version to suit his own country,
choosing, as it happens, not New York or Washington as the background of
the milkman's love drama, but the home of Transatlantic culture itself,
Boston. Paddington Green would, of course, mean nothing to American
ears, but Boston is happy in the possession of a Pemberton Square, which
may, for all I know, be as important to the Hub of the Universe as
Merrion Square is to Dublin, and Polly was, therefore, made comfortable
there, and, as Pretty Polly Perkins of Pemberton Square, became as
famous as, in our effete hemisphere, Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington
Green. The adaptor deserves great credit for altering as little as
possible. Beyond Polly's abode, and the necessary rhymes to mate with
Square, he did nothing, so that the song, while transplanted to America,
remained racy of the English capital. It was still the broken-hearted
milkman who sang it, and the _dénouement_, which is so very
English--and, more than English, Cockney--was unaltered:
In six months she married,
That hard-hearted girl;
It was not a squire,
And it was not a nearl.
It was not a baronet,
But a shade or two wuss--
'Twas the wulgar old driver
Of a twopenny 'bus.
But the story of Polly is nothing. The merit of the song is its air, the
novelty and ingenuity of its chorus, and the praises of Polly which the
chorus embodies. The celebration of charming women is never out of date.
Some are sung about in the Mediterranean, some in Boston, and some all
the world over; others give their names to roses.
So far had I written--and published--in a weekly paper, leaving open a
loophole or two for kind and well-instructed readers to come to my aid;
and as usual (for I am very fortunate in these matters) they did so.
Before I was a month older I knew all. I knew that the author, composer,
and singer of "Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green" were one and
the same: the famous Harry Clifton; and that Polly married "not the
wulgar old driver" of a twopenny 'bus, as was my mistaken belief, but
quite the reverse--that is to say, the "bandy-legged conductor" of the
same vehicle. A gentleman in Ireland was even so obliging as to send me
another ballad by Harry Clifton, on the front of which is his portrait
and on the back a list of his triumphs--and they make very startling
reading, at any rate to me, who have never been versatile. The number of
songs alone is appalling: no fewer than thirty to which he had also put
the music and over fifty to which the music was composed by others, but
which with acceptance he sang. Judging by the titles and the first
lines, which in the advertisement are always given, these songs of the
sixties were very much better things than most of the songs of our
enlightened day. They seem to have had character, a humorous
sententiousness, and a genial view of life. And judging by his portrait
on the cover, Harry Clifton was a kindly, honest type of man, to whom
such accessories of the modern comic singer's success as the
well-advertised membership of a night club, or choice of an expensive
restaurant, were a superfluity.
Having read these letters and the list of songs, I called on a friend
who was at that moment lying on a bed of sickness, from which, alas! he
never rose--the late George Bull, the drollest raconteur in London and
one of the best of men, who, so far as I am concerned, carried away with
him an irreplaceable portion of the good humour of life; and I found
that the name of Harry Clifton touched more than one chord. He had heard
Harry Clifton sing. As a child, music-halls were barred to him, but
Harry Clifton, it seems, was so humane and well-grounded--his
fundamentals, as Dr. Johnson would say, were so sound--that he sang also
at Assembly Rooms, and there my friend was taken, in his tender years,
by his father, to hear him. There he heard the good fellow, who was
conspicuously jolly and most cordially Irish, sing several of his great
hits, and in particular "A Motto for Every Man," "Paddle Your Own
Canoe," and "Lannigan's Ball" (set to a most admirable jig tune which
has become a classic), one phrase from which was adopted into the Irish
vernacular as a saying: "Just in time for Lannigan's ball." Clifton
might indeed be called the Tom Moore of his day, with as large a public,
although not quite so illigant a one. For where Moore warbled to the
ladies, Clifton sang to the people. Such a ballad as that extolling the
mare of Pat of Mullingar must have gone straight to the hearts of the
countrymen of Mr. Flurry Knox:
They may talk of Flying Childers,
And the speed of Harkaway,
Till the fancy it bewilders
As you list to what they say.
But for rale blood and beauty,
You may travel near and far--
The fastest mare you'll find belongs
To Pat of Mullingar.
An old lady in Dublin who remembers Clifton singing this song tells me
that the chorus, "So we'll trot along O," was so descriptive, both in
words and music, that one had from it all the sensations of a "joult."
Harry Clifton seems to have had three distinct lines--the comic song, of
which "Pretty Polly Perkins" may be considered the best example; the
Irish song; and the Motto song, inculcating a sweet reasonableness and
content amid life's many trials and tribulations. Although, no doubt,
such optimism was somewhat facile, it cannot be denied that a little
dose of silver-lining advice, artfully concealed in the jam of a good
tune and a humorous twist of words, does no harm and may have a
beneficial effect. The chorus of "A Motto for Every Man," for example,
runs thus:
We cannot all fight in this battle of life,
The weak must go to the wall.
So do to each other the thing that is right,
For there's room in this world for us all.
An easy sentiment; but sufficient people in the sixties were attracted
by it to flock to hear Harry Clifton all over England and Ireland, and
it is probable that most came away with momentarily expanded bosoms, and
a few were stimulated to follow its precepts.
Looking down this remarkable list of titles and first lines--which may
be only a small portion of Harry Clifton's output--I am struck by his
cleanliness and sanity. His record was one of which he might well be
proud, and I think that old Fletcher of Saltoun, who had views on the
makers of a nation's ballads, would probably have clapped him on the
back.
Another thing. If many of the tunes to these songs are as good as that
to "Polly Perkins," Harry Clifton's golden treasury should be worth
mining. The songs of yesterday, when revived, strike one as being very
antiquated, and the songs of the day before yesterday also rarely bear
the test; but what of the songs of the sixties? Might their melodies not
strike freshly and alluringly on the ear to-day? Another, and to-day a
better known, Harry--Harry Lauder--whose tunes are always good, has
confided to an interviewer that he finds them for the most part in old
traditional collections, and gives them new life. He is wise. John
Stuart Mill's fear that the combinations of the notes of the piano might
be used up was probably fantastic, but the arrival of the luckless day
would at any rate be delayed if we revived tunes that were old enough
for that process; and why should not the works of Harry Clifton be
examined for the purpose? But perhaps they have been....
And then we come back to the marvel, to me, of the man's variousness. I
can plead guilty to having written the words of a dozen songs or so in
as many years, but to put two notes of music together is beyond me, and
to sing anything in tune would be an impossibility, even if I had the
assurance to stand up in public for that purpose. Yet Harry Clifton,
who, in the picture on the cover of the song which the gentleman in
Ireland sent me, does not look at all like some brazen lion comiques,
not only could sing acceptably but write good words and good music. I
hope he grew prosperous, although there is some evidence that his native
geniality was also a stumbling-block. Your jolly good fellows so often
are the victims of their jolly goodness. Nor had the palmy days of comic
singing then begun. There were then no £300 a week bribes to lure a
comic singer into _revue_; but the performers, I guess, were none the
worse for receiving a wage more in accordance with true proportion. I
say true proportion, because I shall never feel it right that
music-hall comedians should receive a bigger salary than a Prime
Minister; at least, not until they sing better songs and take a finer
view of life in their "patter" than most of them now do.