was fraught with yet graver peril. The world of scholarship was at
that time agitated by the recent discovery of what might or might not
prove to be a fragment of Sappho. Browning proclaimed his unshakeable
belief in the authenticity of these verses. To my surprise, Ibsen,
whom I had been unprepared to regard as a classical scholar, said
positively that they had not been written by Sappho. Browning
challenged him to give a reason. A literal translation of the reply
would have been "Because no woman ever was capable of writing a
fragment of good poetry." Imagination reels at the effect this would
have had on the recipient of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." The
agonised interpreter, throwing honour to the winds, babbled some
wholly fallacious version of the words. Again the situation had
been saved; but it was of the kind that does not even in furthest
retrospect lose its power to freeze the heart and constrict the
diaphragm.
I was fain to thank heaven when, immediately after the termination
of the meal, Ibsen rose, bowed to his host, and bade me express
his thanks for the entertainment. Out on the Grand Canal, in the
gondola which had again been placed at our disposal, his passion
for "documents" that might bear on his work was quickly manifested.
He asked me whether Herr Browning had ever married. Receiving an
emphatically affirmative reply, he inquired whether Fru Browning had
been happy. Loth though I was to cast a blight on his interest in the
matter, I conveyed to him with all possible directness the impression
that Elizabeth Barrett had assuredly been one of those wives who do
not dance tarantellas nor slam front-doors. He did not, to the best
of my recollection, make further mention of Browning, either then or
afterwards. Browning himself, however, thanked me warmly, next
day, for having introduced my friend to him. "A capital fellow!" he
exclaimed, and then, for a moment, seemed as though he were about
to qualify this estimate, but ended by merely repeating "A capital
fellow!"
Ibsen remained in Venice some weeks after my return to London. He was,
it may be conjectured, bent on a specially close study of the Bride of
the Adriatic because her marriage had been not altogether a happy one.
But there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that he went again,
either of his own accord or by invitation, to the Palazzo Rezzonico.
OF CHRISTMAS
_By_
H*L**RE B*LL*C
There was a man came to an Inn by night, and after he had called three
times they should open him the door--though why three times, and not
three times three, nor thirty times thirty, which is the number of
the little stone devils that make mows at St. Aloesius of Ledera over
against the marshes Gué-la-Nuce to this day, nor three hundred times
three hundred (which is a bestial number), nor three thousand times
three-and-thirty, upon my soul I know not, and nor do you--when,
then, this jolly fellow had three times cried out, shouted, yelled,
holloa'd, loudly besought, caterwauled, brayed, sung out, and roared,
he did by the same token set himself to beat, hammer, bang, pummel,
and knock at the door. Now the door was Oak. It had been grown in the
forest of Boulevoise, hewn in Barre-le-Neuf, seasoned in South Hoxton,
hinged nowhere in particular, and panelled--and that most abominably
well--in Arque, where the peasants sell their souls for skill in such
handicraft. But our man knew nothing of all this, which, had he known
it, would have mattered little enough to him, for a reason which I
propose to tell in the next sentence. The door was opened. As to the
reasons why it was not opened sooner, these are most tediously set
forth in Professor Sir T.K. Slibby's "Half-Hours With Historic Doors,"
as also in a fragment at one time attributed to Oleaginus Silo but now
proven a forgery by Miss Evans. Enough for our purpose, merry reader
of mine, that the door was opened.
The man, as men will, went in. And there, for God's sake and by
the grace of Mary Mother, let us leave him; for the truth of it is
that his strength was all in his lungs, and himself a poor, weak,
clout-faced, wizen-bellied, pin-shanked bloke anyway, who at Trinity
Hall had spent the most of his time in reading Hume (that was
Satan's lackey) and after taking his degree did a little in the way
of Imperial Finance. Of him it was that Lord Abraham Hart, that
far-seeing statesman, said, "This young man has the root of the matter
in him." I quote the epigram rather for its perfect form than for its
truth. For once, Lord Abraham was deceived. But it must be remembered
that he was at this time being plagued almost out of his wits by
the vile (though cleverly engineered) agitation for the compulsory
winding-up of the Rondoosdop Development Company. Afterwards, in
Wormwood Scrubbs, his Lordship admitted that his estimate of his young
friend had perhaps been pitched too high. In Dartmoor he has since
revoked it altogether, with that manliness for which the Empire so
loved him when he was at large.
Now the young man's name was Dimby--"Trot" Dimby--and his mother had
been a Clupton, so that--but had I not already dismissed him? Indeed I
only mentioned him because it seemed that his going to that Inn might
put me on track of that One Great Ultimate and Final True Thing I am
purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet what that Thing is.
Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast you must hunt as you may in
the forests that are round about the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby
curse, gibbet, and denounce in _execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam_
the man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way--as, lying low,
nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling noiselessly till
he shall come near to his quarry and then taking careful aim. Here's
to him who hunts Truth in the honest fashion of men, which is, going
blindly at it, following his first scent (if such there be) or (if
none) none, scrambling over boulders, fording torrents, winding his
horn, plunging into thickets, skipping, firing off his gun in the air
continually, and then ramming in some more ammunition anyhow, with
a laugh and a curse if the charge explode in his own jolly face. The
chances are he will bring home in his bag nothing but a field-mouse
he trod on by accident. Not the less his is the true sport and the
essential stuff of holiness.
As touching Christmas--but there is nothing like verse to clear the
mind, heat the blood, and make very humble the heart. Rouse thee,
Muse!
One Christmas Night in Pontgibaud
(_Pom-pom, rub-a-dub-dub_)
A man with a drum went to and fro
(_Two merry eyes, two cheeks chub_)
Nor not a citril within, without,
But heard the racket and heard the rout
And marvelled what it was all about
(_And who shall shrive Beelzebub?_)
He whacked so hard the drum was split
(_Pom-pom, rub-a-dub-dum_)
Out lept Saint Gabriel from it
(_Praeclarissimus Omnium_)
Who spread his wings and up he went
Nor ever paused in his ascent
Till he had reached the firmament
(_Benedicamus Dominum_).
That's what I shall sing (please God) at dawn to-morrow, standing on
the high, green barrow at Storrington, where the bones of Athelstan's
men are. Yea,
At dawn to-morrow
On Storrington Barrow
I'll beg or borrow
A bow and arrow
And shoot sleek sorrow
Through the marrow.
The floods are out and the ford is narrow,
The stars hang dead and my limbs are lead,
But ale is gold
And there's good foot-hold
On the Cuckfield side of Storrington Barrow.
This too I shall sing, and other songs that are yet to write. In
Pagham I shall sing them again, and again in Little Dewstead. In
Hornside I shall rewrite them, and at the Scythe and Turtle in Liphook
(if I have patience) annotate them. At Selsey they will be very
damnably in the way, and I don't at all know what I shall do with them
at Selsey.
Such then, as I see it, is the whole pith, mystery, outer form, common
acceptation, purpose, usage usual, meaning and inner meaning, beauty
intrinsic and extrinsic, and right character of Christmas Feast.
_Habent urbs atque orbis revelationem._ Pray for my soul.
A STRAIGHT TALK
_By_
G**RGE B*RN*RD SH*W
(_Preface to "Snt George. A Christmas Play"_)
When a public man lays his hand on his heart and declares that his
conduct needs no apology, the audience hastens to put up its umbrellas
against the particularly severe downpour of apologies in store for
it. I wont give the customary warning. My conduct shrieks aloud for
apology, and you are in for a thorough drenching.
Flatly, I stole this play. The one valid excuse for the theft would
be mental starvation. That excuse I shant plead. I could have made
a dozen better plays than this out of my own head. You don't suppose
Shakespeare was so vacant in the upper storey that there was nothing
for it but to rummage through cinquecento romances, Townley Mysteries,
and suchlike insanitary rubbishheaps, in order that he might fish out
enough scraps for his artistic fangs to fasten on. Depend on it, there
were plenty of decent original notions seething behind yon marble
brow. Why didn't our William use them? He was too lazy. And so am I.
It is easier to give a new twist to somebody else's story that you
take readymade than to perform that highly-specialised form of skilled
labor which consists in giving artistic coherence to a story that you
have conceived roughly for yourself. A literary gentleman once hoisted
a theory that there are only thirty-six possible stories in the world.
This--I say it with no deference at all--is bosh. There are as many
possible stories in the world as there are microbes in the well-lined
shelves of a literary gentleman's "den." On the other hand, it is
perfectly true that only a baker's dozen of these have got themselves
told. The reason lies in that bland, unalterable resolve to shirk
honest work, by which you recognise the artist as surely as you
recognise the leopard by his spots. In so far as I am an artist, I
am a loafer. And if you expect me, in that line, to do anything but
loaf, you will get the shock your romantic folly deserves. The only
difference between me and my rivals past and present is that I have
the decency to be ashamed of myself. So that if you are not too
bemused and bedevilled by my "brilliancy" to kick me downstairs, you
may rely on me to cheerfully lend a foot in the operation. But, while
I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going
to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man
of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve
again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good as to listen
to the evidence on the present charge.
In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I had to go
down to Dorsetshire. In those days the more enterprising farm-laborers
used still to annually dress themselves up in order to tickle the
gentry into disbursing the money needed to supplement a local-minimum
wage. They called themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed
a play entitled Snt George. As my education had been of the typical
Irish kind, and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely
the ideas that once in Tara's Hall were regarded as dangerous
novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being suddenly
bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of the time I
had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a matter of five
hundred years old, it would have the same effect to-day on the average
London playgoer if it was produced in a west end theatre.) The plot
was simple. It is set forth in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native";
but, as the people who read my books have no energy left over to cope
with other authors, I must supply an outline of it myself.
Entered, first of all, the English Knight, announcing his
determination to fight and vanquish the Turkish Knight, a vastly
superior swordsman, who promptly made mincemeat of him. After the
Saracen had celebrated his victory in verse, and proclaimed himself
the world's champion, entered Snt George, who, after some preliminary
patriotic flourishes, promptly made mincemeat of the Saracen--to the
blank amazement of an audience which included several retired army
officers. Snt George, however, saved his face by the usual expedient
of the victorious British general, attributing to Providence a result
which by no polite stretch of casuistry could have been traced to the
operations of his own brain. But here the dramatist was confronted
by another difficulty: there being no curtain to ring down, how were
the two corpses to be got gracefully rid of? Entered therefore the
Physician, and brought them both to life. (Any one objecting to this
scene on the score of romantic improbability is hereby referred to
the Royal College of Physicians, or to the directors of any accredited
medical journal, who will hail with delight this opportunity of
proving once and for all that re-vitalisation is the child's-play of
the Faculty.)
Such then is the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing
esthetic qualities you will find in it--dramatic inventiveness, humor
and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like--you must bless
the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To
me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience
that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic
conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play
a masterpiece.
Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some
one else) than to perform my task in that
God-rest-you-merry-gentlemen-may-nothing-you-dismay spirit which
so grossly flatters the sensibilities of the average citizen by its
assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares
him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was
vaguely conscious of the abuses around him; but his spasmodic efforts
to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising
to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into
debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses
of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the
social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under
the prosaic guidance of Henry 8. The time was out of joint; and the
Swan, recognising that he was the last person to ever set it right,
consoled himself by offering the world a soothing doctrine of despair.
Not for me, thank you, that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly
to fuddle myself in the shop of "W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as
to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of "C. Dickens, Family
Butcher." Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage
consists in weaving round the shop-door a barbed-wire entanglement of
dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the customers.
In this devilish function I have, as you know, acquired by practice
a tremendous technical skill; and but for the more or less innocent
pride I take in showing off my accomplishment to all and sundry, I
doubt whether even my iron nerves would be proof against the horrors
that have impelled me to thus perfect myself. In my nonage I believed
humanity could be reformed if only it were intelligently preached
at for a sufficiently long period. This first fine careless rapture
I could no more recapture, at my age, than I could recapture
hoopingcough or nettlerash. One by one, I have flung all political
nostra overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific
breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I
believe in the future; but this only makes the present--which I
foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so--all
the more excruciating by contrast.
For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my indictments of the
present from a purely political standpoint, the old play of Snt George
occurred to me as having exactly the framework I needed. In the person
of the Turkish Knight I could embody that howling chaos which does
duty among us for a body-politic. The English Knight would accordingly
be the Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the
electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign politics
the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in home politics
the spirited attitudinisings of a Garibaldi or Cavor, are foredoomed
to the failure which its inherent oldmaidishness must always win for
the Liberal Party in all undertakings whatsoever. Snt George is, of
course, myself. But here my very aptitude in controversy tripped me up
as playwright. Owing to my nack of going straight to the root of the
matter in hand and substituting, before you can say Jack Robinson, a
truth for every fallacy and a natural law for every convention, the
scene of Snt George (Bernard Shaw)'s victory over the Turkish Knight
came out too short for theatrical purposes. I calculated that the play
as it stood would not occupy more than five hours in performance. I
therefore departed from the original scheme so far as to provide the
Turkish Knight with three attendant monsters, severally named the
Good, the Beyootiful, and the Ter-rew, and representing in themselves
the current forms of Religion, Art, and Science. These three Snt
George successively challenges, tackles, and flattens out--the first
as lunacy, the second as harlotry, the third as witchcraft. But even
so the play would not be long enough had I not padded a good deal of
buffoonery into the scene where the five corpses are brought back to
life.
The restorative Physician symbolises that irresistible force of human
stupidity by which the rottenest and basest institutions are enabled
to thrive in the teeth of the logic that has demolished them. Thus,
for the author, the close of the play is essentially tragic. But what
is death to him is fun to you, and my buffooneries wont offend any of
you. Bah!
FOND HEARTS ASKEW
_By_
M**R*CE H*WL*TT
TO WILLIAM ROBERTSON NICOLL SAGE AND REVEREND AND A TRUE KNIGHT THIS
ROMAUNT OF DAYS EDVARDIAN
PROLOGUE.
_Too strong a wine, belike, for some stomachs, for there's honey in
it, and a dibbet of gore, with other condiments. Yet Mistress Clio
(with whom, some say, Mistress Thalia, that sweet hoyden) brewed it:
she, not I, who do but hand the cup round by her warrant and good
favour. Her guests, not mine, you shall take it or leave it--spill it
untasted or quaff a bellyful. Of a hospitable temper, she whose page
I am; but a great lady, over self-sure to be dudgeoned by wry faces in
the refectory. As for the little sister (if she did have finger in the
concoction)--no fear of offence there! I dare vow, who know somewhat
the fashion of her, she will but trill a pretty titter or so at your
qualms._
BENEDICTUS BENEDICAT.
I cry you mercy for a lacuna at the outset. I know not what had
knitted and blackened the brows of certain two speeding eastward
through London, enhansomed, on the night of the feast of St. Box:
_alter_, Geoffrey Dizzard, called "The Honourable," _lieu-tenant_ in
the Guards of Edward the Peace Getter; _altera_, the Lady Angelica
Plantagenet, to him affianced. Devil take the cause of the bicker:
enough that they were at sulks. Here's for a sight of the girl!
Johannes Sargent, that swift giant from the New World, had already
flung her on canvas, with a brace of sisters. She outstands there, a
virgin poplar-tall; hair like ravelled flax and coiffed in the fashion
of the period; neck like a giraffe's; lips shaped for kissing rather
than smiling; eyes like a giraffe's again; breasts like a boy's, and
something of a dressed-up boy in the total aspect of her. She has
arms a trifle long even for such height as hers; fingers very long,
too, with red-pink nails trimmed to a point. She looks out slantwise,
conscious of her beauty, and perhaps of certain other things. Fire
under that ice, I conjecture--red corpuscles rampant behind that meek
white mask of hers. "_Forsitan in hoc anno pulcherrima debutantium_"
is the verdict of a contemporary journal. For "_forsitan_" read
"_certe_." No slur, that, on the rest of the bevy.
Very much as Johannes had seen her did she appear now to the cits,
as the cabriolet swung past them. Paramount there, she was still more
paramount here. Yet this Geoffrey was not ill-looking. In the secret
journal of Mary Jane, serving-wench in the palace of Geoffrey's father
(who gat his barony by beer) note is made of his "lovely blue eyes;
complexion like a blush rose; hands like a girl's; lips like a girl's
again; yellow curls close cropped; and for moustachio (so young is he
yet) such a shadow as amber might cast on water."
Here, had I my will, I would limn you Mary Jane herself, that parched
nymph. Time urges, though. The cabrioleteer thrashes his horse (me
with it) to a canter, and plunges into Soho. Some wagon athwart the
path gives pause. Angelica, looking about her, bites lip. For this
is the street of Wardour, wherein (say all the chronicles most
absolutely) she and Geoffrey had first met and plit their troth.
"Methinks," cries she, loud and clear to the wagoner, and pointing
finger at Geoffrey, "the Devil must be between your shafts, to make a
mock of me in this conjunction, the which is truly of his own doing."
"Sweet madam," says Geoffrey (who was also called "The Ready"), "shall
I help harness you at his side? Though, for my part, I doubt 'twere
supererogant, in that he buckled you to his service or ever the priest
dipped you."
A bitter jest, this; and the thought of it still tingled on the
girl's cheek and clawed her heart when Geoffrey handed her down at the
portico of Drury Lane Theatre. A new pantomime was afoot. Geoffrey's
father (that bluff red baron) had chartered a box, was already there
with his lady and others.
Lily among peonies, Angelica sat brooding, her eyes fastened on the
stage, Geoffrey behind her chair, brooding by the same token.
Presto, he saw a flood of pink rush up her shoulders to her ears. The
"principal boy" had just skipped on to the stage. No boy at all (God
be witness), but one Mistress Tina Vandeleur, very apt in masquerado,
and seeming true boy enough to the guileless. Stout of leg,
light-footed, with a tricksy plume to his cap, and the swagger of one
who would beard the Saints for a wager, this Aladdin was just such a
galliard as Angelica had often fondled in her dreams. He lept straight
into the closet of her heart, and "Deus!" she cried, "maugre my
maidenhood, I will follow those pretty heels round the earth!"
Cried Geoffrey "Yea! and will not I presently string his ham to save
your panting?"
"_Tacete!_" cried the groundlings.
A moment after, Geoffrey forgot his spleen. Cupid had noosed
him--bound him tight to the Widow Twankey. This was a woman most
unlike to Angelica: poplar-tall, I grant you; but elm-wide into the
bargain; deep-voiced, robustious, and puffed bravely out with hot
vital essences. Seemed so to Geoffrey, at least, who had no smattering
of theatres and knew not his cynosure to be none other than Master
Willie Joffers, prime buffo of the day. Like Angelica, he had had fond
visions; and lo here, the very lady of them!
Says he to Angelica, "I am heartset on this widow."
"By so much the better!" she laughs. "I to my peacock, you to your
peahen, with a Godspeed from each to other."
How to snare the birds? A pretty problem: the fowling was like to be
delicate. So hale a strutter as Aladdin could not lack for bonamies.
"Will he deign me?" wondered meek Angelica. "This widow," thought
Geoffrey, "is belike no widow at all, but a modest wife with a yea for
no man but her lord." Head to head they took counsel, cudgelled their
wits for some proper vantage. Of a sudden, Geoffrey clapped hand to
thigh. Student of Boccaccio, Heveletius, and other sages, he had the
clue in his palm. A whisper from him, a nod from Angelica, and the
twain withdrew from the box into the corridor without.
There, back to back, they disrobed swiftly, each tossing to other
every garment as it was doffed. Then a flurried toilet, and a
difficult, for the man especially; but hotness of desire breeds
dexterity. When they turned and faced each other, Angelica was such
a boy as Aladdin would not spurn as page, Geoffrey such a girl as the
widow might well covet as body-maid.
Out they hied under the stars, and sought way to the postern whereby
the mummers would come when their work were done. Thereat they
stationed themselves in shadow. A bitter night, with a lather of snow
on the cobbles; but they were heedless of that: love and their dancing
hearts warmed them.
They waited long. Strings of muffled figures began to file out, but
never an one like to Aladdin or the Widow. Midnight tolled. Had these
two had wind of the ambuscado and crept out by another door? Nay,
patience!