"Like to see Harry Lauder? Of course I should like to see Harry
Lauder. But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord
Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that
extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands
to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have,
as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do you
realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry
Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls,
buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a
conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to----"
"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed L52,000 to the War Loan.
In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan.
You are making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him and he
passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a patriotic duty to go and
see Harry Lauder."
I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a
good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went. It was a poor setting
for the great man--one of those dismal things called revues, that are
neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger
contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially
anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster
young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry without these
accompaniments. I like him to have the stage to himself. I like Miss
Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about. I do not want
anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I
want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time
with his foot and humming the melody.
And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of
art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed
by any intrusive and alien note. And it is this faculty of creating a
state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the
characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the
extraordinary influence he exercises over his public. If you are
susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the
Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike
anything else on the stage or in life. Like Bottom, you are
translated. Your defences are carried by storm, your severities
disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the
world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other
boys to the piping of the magician. The burden has fallen off your
back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of
light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the
sunshine.
This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the
professional sense. It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is
not an actor at all. Contrast him with the other great figure of the
music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will
understand what I mean. Chevalier is never himself, but always
somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real--an
incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man
celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch." With his great powers of
observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type.
He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to
you. If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.
But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage. You do not
want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself. It
doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often
you have seen him do it. In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it
the better you like it. His jokes may be old, but they are never
stale. They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and
old port that grow better with age. His songs may be simple and
threadbare. You don't care. You just want him to go on singing them,
singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the
heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to
you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring." You want to
see him walk, you want to see him skip--oh, the incomparable drollery
of that demure little step!--you want to hear him talk, you want to
hear him laugh. In short, you just want him to be there doing anything
he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful
of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.
He has art, of course--great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of
voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate
sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a
sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a
genial satire. And his figure and his face add to his equipment. His
walk is priceless. His legs--oh, who shall describe those legs, those
exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive? Clothed in his kilt and
his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical,
droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery. Your first impulse
is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with
him. You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for
his laugh is irresistible. It is so friendly and companionable, so
full of intimacies, so open and sunny.
He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his pockets and tells
you the history of the contents, or gossips of the ways of sailors, and
you gather round like children at a fair. The sense of the theatre has
vanished. You are not listening to an actor, but to an old friend who
is getting nearer and nearer to you all the time, until he seems to
have got you by the button and to be telling his drolleries to you
personally and chuckling in your own private ear. There is nothing
comparable to this intimacy between the man and his audience. It is
the triumph of a personality, so expansive, so rich in the humanities,
so near to the general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort
of spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all-pervasive.
But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the spell. If so, be not
scornful of us who have. Be sorry for yourself. Believe me, you have
missed one of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world.