at Venice. Those economical people built their walls of brick and
laid their marbles upon that. My collection of marbles was distinctly
inferior to theirs, but I flatter myself that it was come by more
honestly. The only piece of which I felt doubtful, not as regards
beauty, but respecting the honourable nature of its original acquiring,
was a fine slab, with many inlays. It was given to Augustus J. C. Hare
by the Commander of one of the British transports that returned from the
Black Sea and the Crimea in 1855, and it was originally in a church
near Balaclava. In the catalogue of the sale of Mr. Hare's effects at
Hurstmonceaux, the name of the British officer was given and the name of
his ship and the name of the church, but the rest is silence. I cannot
believe that that British officer would have been guilty of sacrilege;
but I do not know how many hands a thing like this should pass through
in order to lose the stain of sacrilege, so I don't worry over the
question of the morality of the transaction, any more than the devout
worshippers do beneath the mosaics of St. Mark--that greatest depository
of stolen goods in the world.
All the rest of my coloured marbles that I applied to the brickwork of
my little structure came mostly from old mantelpieces and restaurant
tables, but I was lucky enough to alight upon quite a large number of
white Sicilian tiles, more than an inch thick, which were invaluable
to me, and a friendly stonemason gave me several yards of statuary
moulding: it must have cost originally about what I paid for my entire
building.
It was a great pleasure to me to watch the fabric arise, which it
did like the towers of Ilium, to music--the music of the thrushes and
blackbirds and robins of our English landscape in the early summer when
I began my operations--they lasted just on a fortnight--and the splendid
colour-chorus of the borders. But what is a Temple on a hill without
steps? and what are steps without piers, and what are piers without
vases?
All came in due time. I found an excellent quarry not too far away, and
from it I got several tons of stone that was easily shaped and squared,
and there is very little art needed to deal efficiently with such
monoliths as I had laid on the slope of the mound--the work occupied a
man and his boy just three days. The source of the piers is my secret;
but there they are with their stone vases to-day, and now from the
marble seat of the temple, thickly overspread with cushions, one can
overlook the parterres between the mound and the house, and feel no
need for the sunk garden which is the ambition of such as must be on the
crest of the latest wave of fashion.
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
Atheist Friswell has been wondering where he saw a mount like mine
crowned with just such a structure, and he has at last shepherded his
wandering memory to the place. I ventured to suggest the possibilities
of the island Scios, and Jack Heywood, the painter, who, though our
neighbour, still remains our friend, makes some noncompromising remark
about Milos “where the statues come from.”
“I think you'll find the place in a picture-book called _Beauty Spots
in Greece_” remarked Mrs. Friswell. Dorothy is under the impression
that Friswell's researches in the classical lore of one Lemprière is
accountable for his notion that there is, or was, at one time in the
world a Temple with some resemblance to the one in which we were sitting
when he began to wonder.
“Very likely,” said he, with a brutal laugh. “The temples on the hills
were sometimes dedicated to the sun--Helios, you know.”
Of course we all knew, or pretended that we knew.
“And what did your artful Christians do when they came upon such a
fane?” he inquired.
“Pulled it down, I suppose; the early artful Christians had no more
sense of architectural or antiquarian beauty than the modern exponents
of the cult,” said Heywood.
“They were too artful for that, those early Christian propagandists,”
said Friswell. “No, they turned to the noble Greek worshippers whom they
were anxious to convert, and cried, dropping their aspirates after the
manner of the moderns, 'dedicated to Elias, is it?' Quite so---Saint
Elias--he is one of our saints. That is how it comes that so many
churches on hills in the Near East have for their patron Saint Elias.
Who was he, I should like to know.”
“I would do my best to withhold the knowledge from you,” said Dorothy.
“But was there ever really such a saint? There was a prophet, of course,
but that's not just the same.”
“I should think not,” said Friswell. “The old prophets were the grandest
characters of which there is a record--your saints are white trash
alongside them--half-breeds. They only came into existence because of
the craving of humanity for pluralities of worship. The Church has found
in her saints the equivalents to the whole Roman theology.”
“Mythology,” said I correctively.
“There's no difference between the words,” he replied.
“Oh, yes, my dear, there is,” said his wife. “There is the same
difference between theology and mythology as there is between convert
and pervert.”
“Exactly the same difference,” he cried. “Exactly, but no greater.
Christian hagiology--what a horrid word!--is on all-fours with Roman
mythology. The women who used to lay flowers in the Temple of Diana
bring their lilies into the chapel of the Madonna. There are chapels
for all the saints, for they have endowed their saints with the powers
attributed to their numerous deities by the Greeks and the Romans. There
are enough saints to go round---to meet all the requirements of the most
freakish and exacting of district visitors. But the Jewish prophets were
very different from the mystical and mythical saints. They lived, and
you feel when you get in touch with them that you are on a higher plane
altogether.”
“Have you found out where you saw that Temple on the mound over there,
and if you have, let us know the name of the god or the goddess or
saint or saintess that it was dedicated to, and I'll try to pick up a
Britannia metal figure cheap to put in the grove alongside the Greek
vase,” said I.
He seemed in labour of thought: no one spoke for fear of interrupting
the course of nature.
“Let me think,” he muttered. “I don't see why the mischief I should
associate a Greek Temple with Oxford Street, but I do--that particular
Temple of yours.”
“If you were a really religious business man you might be led to
think of the City Temple, only it doesn't belong to the Greek Church,”
remarked Heywood.
“Let me help you,” said the Atheist's wife; “think of Truslove and
Hanson, the booksellers. Did Arthur Rackham ever put a Temple into one
of his picture-books?”
“After all, you may have gone on to Holborn--Were you in Batsford's?”
suggested Dorothy.
“Don't bother about him,” said I. “What does it matter if he did once
see something like our Temple; he'll never see anything like it again,
unless----”
“It may have been Buszards'--a masterpiece of Buszards,--pure
confectioners' Greek architecture--icing veined to look like marble,”
said Dorothy.
“I have it---I knew I could worry it out if you gave me time,” cried
Friswell.
“Which we did,” said I. “Well, whisper it gently in our ears.”
“It was in a scene in a play at the Princess's Theatre,” he cried
triumphantly. “Yes, 1 recollect it distinctly--something just like your
masterpiece, only more slavishly Greek--the scene was laid in Rome, so
they would be sure to have it correct.”
“What play was it?” Dorothy asked.
“Oh, now you're asking too much,” he replied. “Who could remember the
name of a play after thirty or forty years? All that I remember is that
it was a thoroughly bad play with a Temple like yours in it. It was the
fading of the light that brought it within the tentacles of my memory.”
“So like a man--to blame the dusk,” said his wife.
“The twilight is the time for a garden--the summer twilight, like this,”
said Mr. Heywood.
“The moonless midnight is the time for some gardens,” said Dorothy, who
is fastidious in many matters, though she did marry me.
“The time for a garden was decided a long time ago,” said I--“as long
ago as the third chapter of Genesis and the eighth verse: 'They heard
the voice of the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool of the
day.'”
“You say that with a last-word air--as much as to say 'what's good
enough for God is good enough for me,'” laughed Friswell.
“I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a
garden at the cool of the day,” said Mrs. Friswell gently.
“There are some people who would fail to hear it at any time,” said
I, pointedly referring to Friswell. He gave a laugh. “What are you
guffawing at?” I cried with some asperity I trust.
“Not at your Congregational platitudes,” he replied. “I was led to
smile when I remembered how the colloquial Bible which was compiled by
a Scotsman, treated that beautiful passage. He paraphrased it, 'The Lord
went oot in the gloamin' to hae a crack wi' Adam ower the garden gate.'”
“I don't suppose he was thought irreverent,” said Dorothy. “He wasn't
really, you know.”
“To take a step or two in the other direction,” said Mrs. Friswell; “I
wonder if Milton had in his mind any of the Italian gardens he must have
visited on his travels when he described the Garden of Eden.”
“There's not much of an Italian garden in Milton's Eden,” said Dorothy,
who is something of an authority on these points. “But it is certainly
an Italian twilight that he describes in one place. Poor Milton! he
must have been living for many years in a perpetual twilight before 't
darkened into his perpetual night.”
“You notice the influence of the hour,” said Heywood. “We have fallen
into a twilight-shaded vale of converse. This is the hour when people
talk in whispers in gardens like these.”
“I dare say we have all done so in our time,” remarked some one with a
sentimental sigh that she tried in vain to smother.
“Ah, God knew what He was about when He put a man and a woman into a
garden alone, and gave them an admonition,” said Friswell. “By the way,
one of the most remarkable bits of testimony to the scientific accuracy
of the Book of Genesis, seems to me to be the discovery, after many
years of conjecture and vague theorising, that man and woman were
originally one, so that the story of the formation of Eve by separating
from Adam a portion of his body is scientifically true. I don't suppose
that any of you good orthodox folk will take that in; but it is a fact
all the same.”
“I will believe anything except a scientific fact,” said Dorothy.
“And I will believe nothing else,” said Friswell. “The history of
mankind begins with the creation of Eve--the separation of the two-sexed
animal into two--meant a new world, a world worth writing about--a world
of love.”
“Listen to him--there's the effect of twilight in a Garden of Peace for
you,” said I. “Science and the Book of Genesis, hitherto at enmity, are
at last reconciled by Atheist Friswell. What a triumph! What a pity that
Milton, who made his Archangel visit Adam and his bride and give them a
scientific lecture, did not live to learn all this!”
“He would have given us a Nonconformist account of it,” said Mrs.
Friswell. “I wonder how much his Archangel would have known if Milton
had not first visited Charles Deodati.”
There was much more to be said in the twilight on the subject of the
world of love--a world which seems the beginning of a new world to those
who love; and that was possibly why silence fell upon us and was only
broken by the calling of a thrush from among the rhododendrons and the
tapping of the rim of Heywood's empty pipe-bowl on the heel of his shoe.
There was so much to be said, if we were the people to say it, on the
subject of the new Earth which your lover knows to be the old Heaven,
that, being aware of the inadequacy of human speech, we were silent for
a long space.
And when we began to talk again it was only to hark back from Nature to
the theatre, and, a further decadence still--the Gardens of the Stage.
The most effective garden scene in my recollection is that in which
Irving and Ellen Terry acted when playing Wills' exquisite adaptation
of _King Renê's Daughter_, which he called _Iolanthe_. I think it was
Harker who painted it. The garden was outside a mediaeval castle,
and the way its position on the summit of a hill was suggested was an
admirable bit of stagecraft. Among the serried lines of pines there was
at first seen the faint pink of a sunset, and this gradually became
a glowing crimson which faded away into the rich blue of an Italian
twilight. But there was enough light to glint here and there upon the
armour of the men-at-arms who moved about among the trees.
The parterre in the foreground was full of red roses, and I remember
that Mr. Ruskin, after seeing the piece and commenting upon the
_mise-en-scène_, said that in such a light as was on it, the roses of
the garden would have seemed black!
This one-act play was brought on by Irving during the latter months
of the great run of _The Merchant of Venice_. It showed in how true
a spirit of loyalty to Shakespeare the last act, which, in nearly all
representations of the play, is omitted, on the assumption that with the
disappearance of Shylock there is no further element of interest in the
piece, was retained by the great manager. It was retained only for the
first few months, and it was delightfully played. The moonlit garden
in which the incomparable lines of the poet were spoken was of the true
Italian type, though there is nothing in the text of what is called
“local colour.”
Juliet's garden on the same stage was not so definitely Italian as it
might have been. But I happen to know who were Irving's advisers. Among
them were two of the most popular of English painters, and if they had
had their own way Romeo would have been allowed no chance: he would have
been hidden by the clumps of yew, and juniper, and oleander, and ilex,
and pomegranate. A good many people who were present during the run of
_Romeo and Juliet_ were very much of the opinion that if this had taken
place it would have been to the advantage of all concerned. Mr. Irving,
as he was then, was not the ideal Romeo of the English playgoer. But
neither was the original Romeo, who was, like the original Paolo, a man
of something over forty.
I have never seen it pointed out that a Romeo of forty would be quite
consistent with the Capulet tradition, for Juliet's father in the
play was quite an elderly man, whereas the mother was a young woman of
twenty-eight. As for Juliet's age, it is usually made the subject of a
note of comment to the effect that in the warm south a girl matures so
rapidly that she is marriageable at Juliet's age of thirteen, whereas
in the colder clime of England it would be ridiculous to talk of one
marrying at such an age.
There can be no doubt that in these less spacious days the idea of a
bride of thirteen would not commend itself to parents or guardians, but
in the sixteenth century, twelve or thirteen was regarded as the right
age for the marriage of a girl. If she reached her sixteenth birthday
remaining single, she was ready to join in the wail of Jephtha's
Daughter. In a recently published letter written by Queen Elizabeth,
who, by the way, although fully qualified to take part in that chorale,
seemed to find a series of diplomatic flirtations to be more satisfying
than matrimony, she submitted the names of three heiresses as ripe for
marriage, and none of them had passed the age of thirteen. The Reverend
John Knox made his third matrimonial venture with a child of fifteen.
Indeed, one has only to search the records of any family of the
sixteenth or seventeenth century to be made aware of the fact that
Shakespeare's Juliet was not an exceptionally youthful bride. In Tenbury
Church there is a memorial of “Ioyse, d. of Thos. Actone of Sutton,
Esquire.” She was the wife of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom she married at the
age of twelve. If any actor, however, were to appear as a forty-two year
Romeo and with a Juliet of thirteen, and a lady-mother of twenty-eight,
he would be optimistic indeed if he should hope for a long run for his
venture.
Of course with the boy Juliets of the Globe Theatre, the younger they
were the better chance they would have of carrying conviction with them.
A Juliet with a valanced cheek would not be nice, even though she were
“nearer heaven by the attitude of a chopine” than one whose face was
smooth.
I think that Irving looked his full age when he took it upon him to play
Romeo; but to my mind he made a more romantic figure than most
Romeos whom I have seen. But every one who joined in criticising the
representation seemed unable to see more of him than his legs, and these
were certainly fantastic. I maintained that such people began at the
wrong end of the actor: they should have begun at the head. And this was
the hope of Irving himself. He had the intellect, and I thought his legs
extremely intellectual.
I wonder he did not do some padding to bring his calves into the market,
and make--as he would have done--a handsome profit out of the play.
In the old days of the Bateman Management of the Lyceum, he was never
permitted to ignore the possibilities of making up for deficiencies
of Nature. In the estimation of the majority of theatre-goers, the
intellect of an actor will never make up for any neglect of the
adventitious aid of “make-up.” When _Eugene Aram_ was to be produced,
it was thought advisable to do some padding to make Irving presentable.
There was a clever expert at this form of expansion connected with the
theatre; he was an Italian and, speaking no English, he was forced into
an experiment in explanation in his own language. He wished to enforce
the need for a solid shape to fit the body, rather than a patchwork of
padding. In doing so he had to made constant use of the word _corpo_,
and as none of his hearers understood Italian, they thought that he was
giving a name to the contrivance he had in his mind; so when the thing
passed out of the mental stage into the actor's dressing-room, it
was alluded to as the corpo. The name seemed a happy one and it had a
certain philological justification; for several people, including the
dresser, thought that corpo was a contraction for corporation, and in
the slang of the day, that meant an expansion of the chest a little
lower down.
Mrs. Bateman, with whom and with whose family I was intimate, told me
this long after the event, and, curiously enough, it arose out of a
conversation going on among some visitors to the house in Ensleigh
Street where Mrs. Bateman and her daughters were living. I said I
thought the most expressive line ever written was that in the _Inferno_
which ended the exquisite Francesca episode:--
“E caddi come un corpo morto cade.”
Mrs. Bateman and her daughter Kate (Mrs. Crowe) looked at each other and
smiled. I thought that they had probably had the line quoted to them _ad
nauseam_, and I said so.
“That is not what we were smiling at,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It was at the
recollection of the word _corpo._”
And then she told me the foregoing.
Only a short time afterwards in the same house she gave me a bit of
information of a much more interesting sort.
I had been at the first performance of Wills' play _Ninon_ at the
Adelphi theatre, and was praising the acting of Miss Wallis and Mr.
Fernandez. When I was describing one scene, Mrs. Bateman said,--
“I recollect that scene very well; Mr. Wills read that play to us when
he was writing _Charles I._; but there was no part in it strong enough
for Mr. Irving, He heard it read, however, and was greatly taken with
some lines in it--so greatly in fact that Mr. Wills found a place for
them in _Charles I._ They are the lines of the King's upbraiding of
the Scotch traitor, beginning, 'I saw a picture of a Judas once.' Some
people thought them among the finest in the play.”
I said that I was certainly among them.
That was how they made up a play which is certainly one of the most
finished dramas in verse of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
It was Irving himself who told me something more about the same play.
The subject had been suggested to Wills and he set about it with great
fervour. He brought the first act to the Lyceum conclave. It opened in
the banqueting hall of some castle, with a score of the usual cavaliers
having the customary carouse, throwing about wooden goblets, and tossing
off bumpers between the verses of some stirring songs of the type
of “Oh, fill me a beaker as deep as you please,” leading up to the
unavoidable brawl and the timely entrance of the King.
“It was exactly the opposite to all that I had in my mind,” Irving
told me, “and I would have nothing to do with it. I wanted the domestic
Charles, with his wife and children around him, and I would have nothing
else.”
Happily he had his own way, and with the help of the fine lines
transferred from _Ninon_, the play was received with acclamation, and,
finely acted as it is now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never
fails to move an audience.
I think it was John Clayton who was the original Oliver Cromwell. I was
told that his make-up was one of the most realistic ever seen. He was
Cromwell--to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his dressing-room
was lost in admiration of the perfection of the picture, and declared
that the painter should sign it in the corner, “John Clayton, pinx.” But
perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne.
[Illustration: 0168]
Only one more word in the Bateman connection. The varying fortunes of
the family are well known--how the Bateman children made a marvellous
success for a tune--how the eldest, Kate, played for months and years
in _Leah_, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and
America--how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors,
_The Bells_ rang in an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't
suppose that many people know' that Mrs. Bateman, the wife of “The
Colonel,” was the author of several novels which she wrote for
newspapers at one of the “downs” that preceded the “ups” in her life.
And Compton Mackenzie is Mrs. Bateman's grandson!
And Fay Compton is Compton Mackenzie's youngest sister.
There is heredity for you.
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
It was melancholy--but Atheist Friswell alone was to blame for it--that
we should sit out through that lovely evening and talk about tawdry
theatricals, and that same tawdriness more than a little musty through
time. If Friswell had not begun with his nonsense about having seen my
Temple somewhere down Oxford Street we should never have wandered from
the subject of gardens until we lost ourselves among the wings of the
Lyceum and its “profiles” of its pines in _Iolanthe_, and its “built”
yews and pomegranates in _Romeo and Juliet_. But among the perfume of
the roses surrounding us, with an occasional whiff of the lavender mound
and a gracious breath like that of
“The sweet South
That breathes upon a bank of violets
Giving and taking odours,”
we continued talking of theatres until the summer night was reeking with
the smell of sawdust and oranges, to say nothing of the fragrance of
the _poudre de ninon_ of the stalls, wafted over opera wraps and
diamond-studded shirt-fronts--diamond studs, when just over the
glimmering marble of my temple the Evening Star was glowing!
But what had always been a mystery to Friswell as the extraordinary lack
of judgment on Irving's part in choosing his plays. Had he ever made a
success since he produced that adaptation of _Faust?_
Beautifully staged and with some splendid moments due to the genius of
the man himself and the never-failing charm of the actress with whom he
was associated in all, yet no play worth remembering was produced at
the Lyceum during that management. _Faust_ made money, as it always has
since the days of Marlowe; but all those noisy scenes and meaningless
moments on the misty mountains--only alliteration's artful aid can deal
adequately with such digressions from the story of Faust and Gretchen
which was all that theatregoers, even of the better class, who go
to tire pit, wanted--seemed dragged into the piece without reason or
profit. To be sure, pages and pages of Goethe's _Faust_ are devoted to
his attempt to give concreteness to abstractions. (That was Friswell's
phrase; and I repeat it for what it is worth). But in the original all
these have a meaning at the back of them; but Irving only brought them
on to abandon them after a line or two. The hope to gain the atmosphere
of the weird by means of a panorama of clouds and mountain peaks
may have been realised so far as some sections of the audience were
concerned; but such a manager as Henry Irving should have been above
trying for such cheap effects.