able to go up to an old woman selling roses in the streets of Paris
and say ‘_C’est_ Melba’ and to have the roses pressed into your hands
in a sort of homage. Something to know that wherever music is played
or songs are sung all over the world, the artist who is playing before
you is giving his utmost. Something to be able to lean back in the
theatre stalls at a first night, and to say to Bernard Shaw, as I once
observed, ‘I know who _you_ are’ and to receive the answer: ‘You don’t
know me nearly as well as I know you.’
And to remain, at the end of it all, so simple that you are never
happier than when eating macaroni in a restaurant where you may have
your fill for two shilling, so humble that you will kiss the cheek of
the youngest débutante whom, you feel, has in her something of the
divine fire.
Melba, I salute you. It is not my fault that this sketch of you is so
inadequate. It is yours. I cannot paint landscapes on threepenny bits.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Hicks--Hicks--and Nothing but Hicks
It is a matter of very small importance either to Seymour Hicks or
to anybody else that I regard him as capable of the finest acting on
our stage. It merely gives a keynote to what is written below, if you
should be kind enough to read it.
I never really knew Seymour until we went to Australia on the same
ship, and if you want to know anybody well, go through that very
disagreeable experience, and nothing will be hidden from you. I had of
course met him in London, we had eaten together, drunk together, and
had feverish conversations in his dressing-room when he had arrived
late for his Act and was endeavouring to put on grease paint at the
rate of greased lightning.
But all that goes for nothing. Wait till you have eaten stale fish
and bottled cream at the same table for six weeks, till you have been
bitten by mosquitoes at Colombo and rolled together in the Australian
Bight, till you have been bored silly by the ship’s wits and driven
almost crazy by the ship’s sopranos--wait till you have done all those
things, and somehow managed to come through them smiling, and then you
can certainly call a man a friend.
Admiration is never a bad basis on which to start a friendship, and
I passionately admired the artistry of Seymour Hicks. Only recently
I had seen his performance in _The Love Habit_, and my eyes were
still dazzled by his performance. The accomplishment of the man! The
tricks! The diabolical cleverness! Watch him _listen_, for example.
There is no more difficult or less understood art on the stage than
this one of listening, and when you have seen Seymour listening, you
have seen the whole thing, inside out, upside down, backwards. The
head slightly forward, the eyes fixed on the speaker, the whole body
set in a poise which seems to suggest a question mark that gradually
straightens itself out as the question is resolved, to end as a mark
of exclamation. And the face! As each sentence is uttered, he seems
to hear it for the first time. A tiny flicker at the mouth, a faint
narrowing of the eyes, an almost imperceptible wrinkling of the
forehead ... if I were an actor I should go and hide my head in shame
after such an example of virtuosity.
And yet, with the exception of _The Man in Dress Clothes_, things seem
to have gone wrong with him lately, while mediocre artists have made
messes of plays which he might have transfigured with his genius.
One of the first things he ever told me was the truth about _The Man
in Dress Clothes_--the play which was changed, in one night, from a
failure to a success owing to the intervention of Northcliffe.
‘Funny thing, isn’t it, what the Press can do for a man?’ he said
to me one day. We were gliding silently one evening down the long,
straight reaches of the Suez Canal, and the atmosphere of desert and
clean-washed sky seemed to lend itself to conversation. ‘Take _The Man
in Dress Clothes_, for example. It had been running for three weeks
when Northcliffe saw it, and up till then it had been an absolute
failure.’
‘Why did Northcliffe come at all?’ I asked.
‘Max Pemberton. He told him about it, and Northcliffe wrote me a
letter saying, “Dear Mr. Hicks, I don’t usually like plays, but I will
come to yours.” He came to a matinée. After the first Act he sent a
special messenger down to Carmelite House to order some of his staff up
to the theatre at once, and when I went to see him after the second Act
he said to me:
‘“These gentlemen have just been instructed to boom your play, Mr.
Hicks. It’s the best play I’ve ever seen. There will be a photograph
of it in every edition of the _Daily Mail_ for the next month, and a
paragraph in the _Evening News_ telling London that London has got to
come and see it.”
‘And, by Jove, they did come to see it. On the next day, in the
_Evening News_ appeared an article about my play headed “The best play
in London,” and the same night the receipts were multiplied five times
over. It became almost embarrassing. I used to get almost afraid of
opening the Northcliffe papers to see what they had written next. All
the same, it kept that play running for a year, and I am eternally
grateful to Northcliffe for that.’
One of the most interesting conversations I ever had with him was, of
all places, at the Sydney Zoo. Not that the Sydney Zoo is like ordinary
zoos. It is very superior, in fact almost beautiful. It lies above the
eternal blue of Sydney harbour, looking over the waves to where the
white houses and red roofs glitter in the sunshine. There are wattle
trees to give you a touch of yellow (how I wish Australians would call
wattle by its proper name--mimosa) and there are flame trees to give
you a touch of scarlet. And the animals in this particular zoo do not
seem to be in the zoo at all, for there are not cages, but pits. So
that there is a fine thrill waiting for anybody who does not know
this, for all the animals look as though they are about to leap out to
devour.
The zoo had nothing to do with our conversation, but I cannot
dissociate it from its surroundings. Seymour was standing in front
of a paddock containing a number of kangaroos, which leapt about,
disdainfully regarding the stale monkey-nuts which were thrown to them
by sticky children. The kangaroo does not eat stale monkey-nuts. I have
no idea what he does eat, but he does not eat that.
He gazed absently at the kangaroo for a moment, threw it a peppermint
drop, and said:
‘Of course the only critic who’s going to be of any use to the English
Theatre to-day is the man who talks about the _acting_.’
‘You mean the acting before the play?’ I said. ‘I love talking to you,
because you agree with everything I say. You may say that the star
system is overdone, but no star, if he _was_ a star, has ever done
anything but good to the theatre. He ennobles everything he touches.’
Seymour nodded. ‘Look at Edmund Kean. Columns and columns of Press
cuttings I’ve got about him. They really criticized in those days.
They watched every movement, every gesture, they listened to every
intonation of the voice. They put him through a third degree of
criticism.’
‘And he came out triumphant?’
‘Not always. Pretty often. Anyway, what I mean is, they concentrated on
the _acting_, and they set tremendously high standards. Look at half
the critics to-day. They don’t care a damn. They spend half their time
in an analysis of the play itself, which interests nobody, and then
they say that somebody or other was “brilliant.” It’s wrong. A critic
ought to have two ink-pots, vitriol and gold. And he ought to be jolly
sparing with the gold one.’
‘The very first thing that struck me about the theatre,’ I said (I
wanted, you see, to encourage him to talk), ‘when I began criticism,
was that we were too afraid of being theatrical. Now, I like a theatre
to look like a theatre, to smell like a theatre, to feel like a
theatre. I don’t like a theatre that looks like a church or a town
hall. I like....’
This conversation is beginning to sound like a dialogue in the deceased
_Pall Mall Gazette_, but I really don’t mind. Seymour agreed with me,
and said:
‘I’d far rather see somebody come on and say, “Gadsooks. My mistress
has forsaken me,” and say it as though he meant it, than see a young
man in a beautiful dinner-jacket light a cigarette, and mumble, “Oh
really, Flora seems to have gone off with Rupert,” as though he were
saying, “It’s a rather cold morning, isn’t it?” The last thing an actor
should fear is to be thought theatrical. When a really good actor of
the old school came on he struck an attitude. He bounced. He filled the
stage. You said, “By God, here’s an actor,” and you jolly well watched
what he did. Irving for example.
‘Irving realized the enormous importance of a first entrance. Look at
his King Lear. Heralds approach. A train of soldiers. More heralds. The
suspense increasing every moment. You can almost feel him coming. You
lean forward in your seat, awake, expectant. And then--enter Irving,
slowly, with a falcon on his wrist. Now that’s _acting_. That isn’t
any nonsense about being life-like or trying to look as though you
weren’t an actor. As soon as a man does that, he _doesn’t_ look like an
actor, because he isn’t one, and never will be, and his place is in the
thirtieth row of a cinema, watching glycerine run down Mary Pickford’s
cheeks.’
There is more sound sense--I _could_ call it profound wisdom, but I
won’t--in those remarks than in half the nonsense that is written
to-day about ‘realistic’ plays and ‘realistic’ acting. You might as
well talk about ‘realistic’ music and praise a composer who sits down
at the piano and tries to imitate a waterfall.
One night I was dining with Ellaline Terris and him, and it suddenly
occurred to me to tell them the plot of a rather gruesome short story
which had come into my head a few days before. When I had finished
Seymour said, ‘My word, what a play!’ In fact, everybody said, ‘My
word, what a play!’ And there and then we hunched ourselves round the
table and began to talk it out.
Of course, we never did talk it out. That is why it is so charming a
memory. But Seymour can teach one more about play-making in a few hours
than most of the books (or, indeed, the plays) in the world. And people
seem to be interested in play-making. They like to know ‘how it is
done.’ So here goes.
The first thing that he talked about was the absolute necessity of
deciding exactly who the characters _were_. It sounds obvious enough,
but if you have ever thought of writing a play you will probably
remember that you thought of a woman in a certain situation, and
beyond the fact that you knew she was good, bad, or merely improper,
you did not know the first thing about her.
But, before we decided on a single line, we had to make those people
real people. We had to know not only what their lives were, but what
they had been, and why. In other words, we had to delve deep back into
the past (long before the period of my short story), into the drama of
the past, in order that we might approach the drama of the present with
minds forewarned.
And then, when we had decided who the people were, we had to decide
exactly what the story was. All this sounds fantastically obvious,
but I assure you, it is not so obvious as it sounds. Take again your
own case, if you are an amateur playwright, as I feel convinced you
are, you have probably thought of it all in _Acts_. You have said
the first Act will be set in an attic, and will end with the arrest
of Joseph on a charge of some vice--(naming your own favourite one).
The second Act will be in a ballroom, in which Joseph’s fiancée will
spurn the Duke. And the third Act will be in a court of justice, where
Joseph is declared innocent. It is all wrong. You mustn’t do that. You
mustn’t even think of the theatre at all. You must think of life, of
what is happening to these people in the open air, in bed, when they
are asleep, when they are in their baths. Think of them as real human
beings. And then, when you have decided what they are doing, what they
have done, and what they are going to do, then go at it for all you’re
worth, and be as theatrical as a Christmas fairy, and good luck to you.
And the other thing I learnt during those hours after midnight in
which we sat conspiring together, was that not a line must be written
before the construction is absolutely water-tight. You have to build
a play--a good play--like a jigsaw puzzle. Every little bit must fit.
There must be so much this, and so much that. There must be a place for
everything, and everything in its place. If you dribble into dialogue
too soon, you are done. God help you, for you will be like a ship
without a rudder, and you will lose your way in a sea of talk, blown by
the winds of every passing mood.
It sounds prosaic. There is nothing of the thrill, which comes to
those who dash to their tables at midnight, and write out passionate
speeches in which perfect ladies declare their innocence and imperfect
women their guilt. But, after all, the greatest fun, I should think, is
seeing your play _played_. And the impromptu, passionate sort of play
doesn’t usually get beyond the paper on which it is scrawled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Showing how a Genius worshipped Devils in the Mountains
All young men love paying pilgrimages, especially when the pilgrimage
is to some rather exotic and remote hermit who happens to be in the
vogue. Incidentally, I am quite convinced that the hermits like it
too. How often has one read, in memoirs, of the humble, too humble,
delight of some wild musician who is visited, in his retreat in the
Northern Hebrides, by young things from Oxford, who group themselves
in decorative attitudes round his carpet slippers. ‘To me, living in
the realm of art,’ he writes, ‘these visits from fellow-spirits in the
outer world are infinitely sweet, infinitely welcome. Mr. Bernard Bank,
of Brasenose, arrived to-day at dawn, praying that I might come down,
so that he should throw himself at my feet. I did. And he did. I feel
“remarkably refreshed.”’
I rather wish that I had gone to see Norman Lindsay in this way. He has
all the qualifications for a really good hermit scene. He lives in the
heart of the Blue Mountains beyond Sydney, he is an utterly isolated
figure in an immense continent, and his finely erotic designs have
given a great many dull people fits.
But my visit to him, though picturesque, was sophisticated. I went out
to see him with Melba in an exceedingly comfortable car, and after
three hours of speeding along under tall white gum-trees, with the
flash of green parrots in the branches, we arrived at the broken,
tumble-down road which leads to the house where Norman Lindsay lives
with his wife and children.
The instant I had passed through the wooden gate, which was blistered
by the eternal blaze of sunshine, I had a feeling of stepping on to
enchanted ground. (You observe, the hermit complex was already at
work.) From some bushes over in the corner a fawn’s head leered at
me through the shadows, and on the grass leading up to the house a
concrete lady with an enormous chest stared haughtily in front of her.
Advancing to the veranda one had a glimpse of the same lady, flying in
haste from presumably the same fawn--a really beautiful piece of rough
statuary which Lindsay afterwards informed me had been roughly ‘thrown
together’ in the space of a single afternoon.
As for Lindsay himself--he did not walk towards us--he fluttered to us,
like a bird. So like a bird is he that I had a feeling, all the time,
that I must catch hold of the end of his jacket in order that he should
not fly up to a gum-tree and pipe his distracting arguments from the
topmost branch. He was so thin, so fluttering, his eyes were so bright,
his nose so like a beak, perched on top of the tiny neck.
As for his talk--that, too, was bird-like--the words pouring out one
after the other, making one think of when the swallows homeward fly.
As difficult to follow, too, as a bird. In the first half-hour of
our conversation--(I say ‘our,’ although my contribution was limited
to negatives and affirmatives)--he had smashed the whole Christian
philosophy, set Nietzsche on a pedestal, made at least a hundred
genuflexions to him, pulled a long nose at Rubens, kicked Chopin out of
the house, and invited me three times to have a drink without doing
anything more about it.
We went for a walk in the garden, Lindsay still talking. A child
appeared--a rosy cheeked thing with cherries embroidered round its
collar. It was clasping a doll firmly in its arms.
‘The maternal instinct developed already, you see,’ he said.
Odd, I thought. I felt that Freud had dropped something which Lindsay
had picked up, taken to a looking-glass, and read backwards.
Somebody again suggested a glass of white wine. This time his eyes
sparkled. We went back into the house and drank. I watched him. He
talked of the wine as though he were a Bacchanalian. One had the
impression that he was only five minutes off a bout of drunkenness.
Yet, he sipped only a mouthful, and even that was taken with pursed
lips, as an old lady takes her tea.
Odd, again. It was the _idea_ of intoxication, you see, that appealed
to him. The gesture was the important thing, not the reality. I
honestly believe that Lindsay could get quite drunk on coloured water,
if he were persuaded the water was wine.
And then we went into lunch. I remember a room with huge windows and
sunshine blazing in. I remember an enormous plate of chicken and some
very red carrots. And most of all I remember Lindsay’s sudden pæan of
praise in favour of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.
‘He’s my god,’ he said excitedly, digging his fork into a particularly
beautiful carrot and waving it wildly about. ‘My god. The Appassionata
Sonata contains everything of life that life has to give. In its
rhythm you can find the secret of the entire universe.’ He ran from the
room and returned bearing a mask of Beethoven which he triumphantly
placed beside him.
I cannot give you much of Norman Lindsay’s talk because I simply did
not understand it. He talks at such an immense speed, dragging so
many tattered philosophies in his wake, that one could only follow,
exceedingly faint, but pursuing.
However, I did not give up the attempt. I tried to keep him strictly
to facts, and after lunch I led him to one of his concrete ladies and
asked him how he did it.
His thin hand stroked the concrete lady’s chin with a lingering
affection. But he took not the faintest notice of my question, and
started off on a different tack.
‘There are only two people whom I want to meet in England,’ he said. ‘I
wonder if you can guess who they are?’
Now, I never guess when asked. It is too dangerous. Do you know the
sort of people who have a face massage, arrange the lights, hold their
chins very high, and say, ‘You won’t guess _my_ age, I’m sure.’ They
are quite right. I won’t.
Norman Lindsay relieved the suspense. ‘Aldous Huxley and Dennis
Bradley,’ he said.
‘_What?_’
There must have been something a little tactless in my tone of voice,
for he frowned and said, ‘Well, I don’t see why you should be so
surprised.’
I was surprised, however, because it seemed such an odd couple to
choose. Lytton Strachey I could have imagined. Shaw, at a pinch.
Augustus John more than most. But Aldous Huxley and Dennis Bradley....
I still do not know, from the whirl of words with which he defended
his two idols, exactly what he meant. But from out of the chaos
there did eventually emerge something--that he considered them both
anti-Christian. Perhaps, after the psychic experiments of Dennis
Bradley, his ardour may have abated. I don’t know.
Lindsay hates Christ. He hates him as one man hates another. It is in
no way the feeble sort of dislike which so many modern anti-Christians
entertain--the dislike which is explained merely by the fact that
Christ makes them feel uncomfortable, as though he were a skeleton
at the feast of life. It is a militant, violent hatred, the clash of
one philosophy against another. He ranges himself, a solitary figure,
against the angels, his whole mind and body tense with rage, his hand
gripped grimly round an unsheathed sword.
It was not till I went with him to his studio, which is a sort of
wooden shack at the end of the garden, that I began to understand this
dislike. He danced round with portfolio after portfolio, producing
drawings which were a riot of pagan beauty, a miracle of design. But
the beauty and the art he seemed to pass by. It was the satire--the
anti-Christian satire--which he was longing to show me.
‘Look,’ he said. I looked. He was holding up an immense engraving
crowded with figures. I have a dim memory of light shining through
pillars, of an endless staircase, of a conglomeration of strange,
dishevelled shapes, darkly etched in the foreground.
‘Amazing,’ I said.
‘Yes--yes--but don’t you see him?’
‘Him?’
‘Jesus Christ, man. Look.’
He put his finger on to the design. It touched a pale face--sickly,
anæmic, almost half-witted. It was like a patch of fever in the riotous
health and brutality which crowded it in on all sides.
He laughed loud and long. I could not laugh. I felt absurdly,
desolatingly shocked. Not, I think, by what Lindsay had shown me of
Christ. But by something which he had shown me of--myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Defence of Dramatic Critics
A little while ago Mr. Philip Guedalla (that squib who never stops
fizzing) annoyed me very much by making rude remarks about dramatic
critics. He said that they looked like waiters or conjurers. I should
not in the least mind looking like some waiters I have seen, but he
was not referring to face or figure. He was being sartorial. And when
Guedalla is sartorial, God alone knows what will happen.
He referred to the ‘dingy uniform’ of this ‘Sad Guild.’ It struck me as
slightly vulgar and entirely inaccurate. I would match my own exquisite
waistcoats (you know the sort--nothing at the back and a broad pique in
front) with Mr. Guedalla’s any day. It would be rather an entertaining
match. I can imagine our respective laundresses panting for days
beforehand, and I can see us strutting round and round, examining each
other for the faintest sign of a wrinkle.
But it is not of clothes that I would write, but of dramatic
criticism, and the only excuse I have for holding up an imaginary
Guedalla by the scruff of his neck is because of that phrase ‘Sad
Guild.’ It is a childish, facile, meaningless phrase. It calls up the
stale conventional vision of rows of gloomy faces, ‘like Micawbers
waiting for something to turn down.’ It is the sort of phrase that
an unsuccessful playwright might use, to excuse his failure. As if
critics, by some Satanic grace, were gifted with power to fool _all_
the public, in _all_ the theatres, _all_ the time.
I am a dramatic critic. I know of no sad guild. I have yet to wear a
dingy uniform. Every time that I go to a theatre it is with a heart
beating high in hope. Every time that I open a programme and read that
‘the curtain will be lowered for thirty seconds in Act II to denote the
passing of a hundred years,’ I tremble with the satisfaction that only
make-belief can give. Every time I read that Mr. Clarkson has sold a
few more wigs, my being trembles with delight. To be a dramatic critic
does not imply that one must be old and shrivelled and pessimistic.
I was absurdly young when I began. And I didn’t care a damn. If love of
the theatre was any qualification for criticism, then I was qualified
with the highest degrees. My first toy was a toy theatre. In the misty
days of the late King Edward VII I have laid for whole seasons on my
small stomach putting pink heroines and black villains in their proper
places. I have burnt candles for footlights as ardently as any human
saint burnt candles for sacrifice. I have drawn thunder from a tin can
and lightning from a piece of tinsel. And at school, when I should
have been engaged on more orthodox matters, I have routed out ancient
books on the theatre--as Æschylus knew it in Greece, as Goldoni knew
it in Italy, and, in dreams, have fought my youthful battles on those
vanished stages, made mock love with adolescent passion, closed my
eyes, and been, in rapid succession, hero, heroine, cynic, clown, every
emotion tearing my young heart to tatters.