formation of the Company through which country clergymen and daily
governesses in the provinces hoped to advance the British Drama and earn
20 per cent, dividends.
I was at the first night of every play produced at the Lyceum for over
twenty years, and I knew that Irving never fell short of the highest
and the truest possible conception of any part that he attempted. At his
best he was unapproachable. It was not the actor who failed, when
there was failure; it was the play that failed. Only one marvellously
inartistic feature was in the adaptation of _The Courier of Lyons_. He
assumed that the sole way by which identification of a man is possible
is by his appearance--that the intonation of his voice counts
for nothing whatsoever. He acted in the dual rôle of Dubose and
Lesurges--the one a gentle creature with a gentle voice, the other a
truculent ruffian who jerked out his words hoarsely--the very antithesis
to the mild gentleman in voice, in gait, and in general demeanour,
though closely resembling him in features and appearance. The impression
given by this representation was that any one who, having heard Dubose
speak, would mistake Lesurges for him must be either stone-deaf or
an idiot. But each of the parts was finely played; and the real old
stage-coach arriving with its team smoking like Sheffield, helped to
make a commonplace melodrama interesting.
Personally I do not think that he was justified in trying to realise at
the close of the trial scene in _The Merchant of Venice_, the tableau of
Christ standing mute and patient among the mockers. It was an attempt to
obtain by suggestion some pity and sympathy for an infamous and inhuman
scoundrel. In that pictorial moment Shylock the Jew was made to pose as
Christ the Jew.
Mrs. Friswell had not seen Irving's Shylock, but she expressed her
belief that Shylock was on the whole very badly treated; and Dorothy was
ready to, affirm that Antonio was lacking in those elements that go to
the composition of a sportsman. He should not have wriggled out of his
bargain by the chicanery of the law.
“They were a bad lot, and that's a fact,” I ventured to say.
“They were,” acquiesced Friswell. “And if you look into the history
of the Jews, they were also a bad lot; but among them were the most
splendid men recorded as belonging to any race ever known on this earth;
and I'm not sure that Irving wasn't justified in trying to get his
audiences to realise in that last moment something of the dignity of the
Hebrew people.”
“He would have made a more distinct advance in that direction if he had
cut out the 'business' of stropping his knife a few minutes earlier, 'To
cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there,'” I remarked.
“If he had done that Shakespeare would not have had the chance of his
pun--the cheapest pun in literature--and it would not be like the author
to have neglected that,” said Mrs. Friswell.
They all seemed to know more of the play than I gave them credit for
knowing.
It was Heywood who inquired if I remembered another of Irving's plays at
the close of which a second greatly misjudged character had appealed for
sympathy by adopting the same pose.
Of course I did--I remembered it very distinctly. It was in _Peter the
Great_, that the actor, waiting with sublime resignation to hear the
heart-rending death-shriek of his son whom he had condemned to drink
a cup of cold poison, is told by a hurrying messenger that his
illegitimate child has just died--then came the hideous shriek, and the
actor, with his far-away look of patient anguish, spoke his words,--
“Then I am childless!”
And the curtain fell.
He appealed for sympathy on precisely the same grounds as were
suggested by the prisoner at the bar who had killed his father with a
hatchet, and on being convicted by the jury and asked by the judge if
he could advance any plea whereby the sentence of death should not be
pronounced upon him, said he hoped that his lordship would not forget
that he was an orphan.
In this drama the first act was played with as much jingling of
sleigh-bells as took place in another and rather better known piece in
the repertoire of the same actor.
But whatever were its shortcomings, _Peter the Great_ showed that poor
Lawrence Irving could write, and write well, and that he might one day
give to the English theatre a great drama.
Irving was accused of neglecting English authors; but the accusation was
quite unjust. He gave several of them a chance. There was, of course,
W. G. Wills, who was a true dramatist, and showed it in those plays to
which I have referred. But it must not be forgotten that he produced a
play by Mr. H. D. Traill and Mr. Robert Hitchens, and another by Herman
Merrivale; Mr. J. Comyns Carr took in hand the finishing of _King
Arthur_, begun by Wills, and made it ridiculous, and helped in
translating and adapting _Madame Sans Gêne_. Might not Lord Tennyson
also be called an English author? and were not his three plays, _Queen
Mary, The Cup, and Bechet_ brought out at the Lyceum? Irving showed
me how he had made the last-named playable, and I confess that I was
astonished. There was not a single page of the book remaining untouched
when he had done with it. Speech after speech was transferred from one
act to another, and the sequence of the scenes was altered, before the
drama was made possible. But when he had finished with it _Bechet_
was not only possible and playable, it was the noblest and the best
constructed drama in verse that the stage had seen for years.
I asked him what Lord Tennyson had said about this chopping and
changing; but he did not give me a verbatim account of the poet's
greeting of his offspring in its stage dress--he only smiled as one
smiles under the influence of a reminiscence of something that is better
over.
When he went to Victorien Sardou for a new play and got _Robespierre_,
Irving got the worst thing that he had produced up to that date; but
when he went a second time and got _Dante_, he got something worse
still. Sir Arthur Pinero's letter acknowledging the debt incurred by the
dramatists of England to M. Sardou for showing them how a play should be
written was a masterpiece of irony.
The truth is that Irving was the greatest of English actors, and he was
at his best only when he was interpreting the best. When he was acting
Shakespeare he was supreme. In scenes of passion he differed from most
actors. They could show a passion in the hands of a man, he showed the
man in the hands of a passion. And what actor could have represented
Corporal Brewster in _Waterloo_ as Irving did?
About the changes that we veterans have seen in the stage during the
forty years of our playgoing, we agree that one of the most remarkable
is the introduction of parsons and pyjamas, and of persons with a past.
All these glories of the modern theatre were shut out from the theatres
of forty years ago. When an adaptation of _Dora_ by the author of
_Fedora_ and _Theodora_ was made for the English stage under the name
of _Diplomacy_, the claim that the Countess with a past had upon the
Diplomatist who is going to marry--really marry--another woman, was
turned into a claim that she had “nursed him through a long illness.”
The censor of those days thought that that was quite as far as any one
should go in that direction. It was assumed that _La Dame aux Camélias_
could never be adapted without being offensive to a pure-minded English
audience. I think that _A Clerical Error_ was the first play in which a
clergyman of the Church of England was given the entrée to a theatre
in London. To be sure, there were priests of the Church of Rome in Dion
Roufcicault's Irish plays, but they were not supposed to count. I heard
that Mr. Pigott, the Censor, only passed the parson in _A Clerical
Error_ on the plea of the young nurse for something equally forbidden,
in _Midshipman Easy_, that “it was a very little one.” But from that day
until now we have had parsons by the score, ladies wearing camellias and
little else, by the hundred. As for the pyjama drama, I don't suppose
that any manager would so much as read a play that had not this duplex
garment in one scene. I will confess that I once wrote a story for
_Punch_ with a pyjama chorus in it. If it was from this indiscretion
that a manager conceived the idea of a ballet founded on the same
costume I have something to answer for.
But in journalism and literature a corresponding change has come about,
only more recently. It is not more than ten or twelve years since
certain words have enjoyed the liberty of the press. In a police-court
case the word that the ruffian in the dock hurled at a policeman was
represented thus--“d----n,” telling him to go to “h----” no respectable
newspaper would ever put in the final letter.
But now we have had the highest examples of amalgamated newspapers
printing the name of the place that was to be found in neither gazette
nor gazetteer, in bold type at the head of a column, and that too in
connection with the utterance of a Prime Minister. As for the d----n of
ten years ago, no one could have believed that Bob Acres' thoughtless
assertion that “damns have had their day,” should be so luridly
disproved. Why, they have only now come into their inheritance. This
is the day of the damn. It occupies the _Place aux Dames_ of Victorian
times; and now one need not hope to be able to pick up a paper or a
book that has not most of its pages sprinkled with damns and hells as
plentifully as a devil is sprinkled with cayenne. I am sure that in the
cookery books of our parents the treatment of a devilled bone would not
be found, or if the more conscientious admitted it, we should find it
put, “how to cook a d--------bone,” or, “another way,” as the cookery
book would put it more explicitly, “a d--------d bone.”
“It is satisfactory to learn that the Church which so long enjoyed the
soul right to the property in these words, has relinquished its claim
and handed over the title deeds of the freehold, with all the patronage
that was supposed to go with it,” said Friswell. “I read in the papers
the other day that the Archbishop had received the report of the
Committee he appointed to inquire into the rights of both words, and
this recommended the abolition of both words in the interpretation
accepted for them for centuries in religious communities; and in future
damnation is to be taken to mean only something that does not commend
itself to all temperaments, and hell is no more than a picturesque but
insanitary dwelling.”
“I read something like that the other day,” said Dorothy. “But surely
they have not gone so far as you say.”
“They have gone to a much more voluminous distance, I assure you,” said
he. “It is to enable us all to say the Athanasian Creed without our
tongue in our cheek. Quicunque vult may repeat 'Qui-cunque Vult' with a
full assurance that nothing worth talking about will happen.”
“All the Bishops' Committees in the world cannot rob us Englishmen of
our heritage in those words,” I cried, feeling righteously angry at the
man's flippancy. “If they were to take that from us, what can they give
us in its place--tell me that?”
“Oh, there is still one word in the same connection that they have been
afraid to touch,” said he cheerfully. “Thank Heaven we have still got
that to counteract any tendency of our language to become anæmic.”
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
I had been practically all my life enjoying gardens of various kinds,
but I had given attention to their creations without giving a thought to
their creation; I had taken the gifts of Flora, I would have said if I
had been writing a hundred years ago, without studying the features or
the figure of the goddess herself. If I were hard pressed for time and
space I would say directly that I lived among flowers, but knew nothing
of gardens. I had never troubled myself to inquire into the details of
a garden's charm. I had watched gardeners working and idling, mowing
and watering, tying up and cutting down, but I had never had a chance of
watching a real gardener making a garden.
It is generally assumed that the first gardener that the world has known
was Adam. A clergyman told me so with the smile that comes with the
achievement of a satisfactory benefice--the indulgent smile of the
higher criticism for the Book of Genesis. But people who agree with that
assumption cannot have read the Book with the attention it deserves,
or they would have seen that it was the Creator of all Who planted the
first garden, and there are people alive to-day who are ready to affirm
that He worked conscientiously on the lines laid down by Le Notre. Most
gardeners whom I have seen at work appeared to me to be well aware
of the fact that the garden was given to man as a beatitude, and that
agriculture came later and in the form of a Curse; and in accordance
with this assurance they decline to labour in such a way as to make the
terms of the Curse apply to themselves. If they wipe their brows with
their shirt-sleeve, it is only because that is the traditional movement
which precedes the consulting of their watch to see if that five minutes
before the striking of the stable clock for the dinner hour will allow
of their putting on their coats.
A friend of mine who had been reading Darwin and Wallace and Lyell
and Huxley and the rest of them, greatly to the detriment of his
interpretation of some passages in the Pentateuch, declared that the
record of the incident of the Garden Designer in the first chapters of
Genesis, being unable to do anything with his gardener and being obliged
(making use of a Shakespearian idiom) to fire him out, showed such a
knowledge of the trade, that, Darwin or no Darwin, he would accept the
account of the transaction without reservation.
The saying that God sent food but the devil sent cooks may be adapted to
horticulture, as a rule, 1 think; but it should certainly not be applied
indiscriminately. The usual “jobber” is a man from whom employers expect
a great deal but get very little that is satisfactory. That is because
employers are unreasonable. The ordinary “working gardener” does not
think, because he is not paid to think: he does not get the wages of
a man who is required to use his brain. When one discovers all that a
gardener should know, and learns that the average wage of the trade
is from one pound to thirty shillings a week, the unreasonableness of
expecting a high order of intelligence to be placed at your service for
such pay will be apparent.
Of course a “head” at an establishment where he is called a “curator”
and has half a dozen assistants, gets a decent salary and fully earns
it; but the pay of the greater number of the men who call themselves
gardeners is low out of all proportion to what their qualifications
should be.
Now this being so, is the improvement to come by increasing the wages of
the usual type of garden jobber? I doubt it. My experience leads me to
believe very strongly in the employer's being content with work only,
and in his making no demand for brains or erudition from the man to
whom he pays twenty-five shillings a week--pre-war rates, of course:
the war-time equivalent would, of course, be something like £2 5s.--the
brains and erudition should be provided by himself. The employer or some
member of his family should undertake the direction of the work and ask
for the work only from the man.
I know that the war days were the means of developing this system beyond
all that one thought possible five or six years ago; and of one thing I
am sure, and this is that no one who has been compelled to “take up” his
own garden will ever go back to the old way, the leading note of which
was the morning grumble at the inefficiency of the gardener, and the
evening resolution to fire him out. The distinction between exercise and
work has, within the past few fateful years, been obliterated; and
it has become accepted generally that to sweat over the handle of a
lawnmower is just as ennobling as to perspire for over after over at
a bowling crease; and that the man who comes in earth-stained from his
allotment, is not necessarily the social inferior of the man who carries
away on his knees a sample of the soil of the football field. There may
be a distinction between the work and the play; but it is pretty much
the same as the difference between the Biblical verb to sweat and
the boudoir word to perspire. The pores are opened by the one just as
healthfully as by the other. And in future I am pretty sure that we
shall all sweat and rarely perspire.
I need not give any of the “instances” that have come under my notice of
great advantage accruing to the garden as well as to the one who gardens
without an indifferent understudy--every one who reads this book is in a
position to supply such an omission. I am sure that there is no country
town or village that cannot mention the name of some family, a member
or several members of which have been hard at work raising flowers or
vegetables or growing fruit, with immediately satisfactory results, and
a prospect of something greatly in advance in the future.
I am only in a position to speak definitely on behalf of the working
proprietor, but I am certain that the daughters of the house who have
been working so marvellously for the first time in their lives, at the
turning out of munitions, taking the place of men in fields and
byres, and doing active duties in connection with hospitals, huts, and
canteens, will not now be content to go back to their tennis and teas
and “districts” as before. They will find their souls in other and more
profitable directions, and it is pretty certain that the production of
food will occupy a large number of the emancipated ones. We shall have
vegetables and fruit and eggs in such abundance as was never dreamt of
four years ago. Why, already potato crops of twelve tons to the acre are
quite common, whereas an aggregate of eight and nine tons was considered
very good in 1912. We all know the improvement that has been brought
about in regard to poultry, in spite of the weathercockerel admonition
of the Department of the Government, which one month sent out a million
circulars imploring all sorts and conditions of people to keep poultry,
and backed this up with a second million advising the immediate
slaughter of all fowls who had a fancy for cereals as a food; the others
were to be fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, but if
the master were known to give the crumbs to birds instead of eating
them himself or making them into those poultices, recommended by another
Department that called them puddings, he would be prosecuted. Later
on we were to be provided with a certain amount of stuff for pure bred
fowls, in order that only the purest and best strains should be kept;
but no provision in the way of provisions was made for the cockerels!
The cockerels were to be discouraged, but the breeding of pure fowls was
to be encouraged!
It took another million or so of buff Orpmgton circulars to explain
just what was meant by the Department, and even then it needed a
highly-trained intelligence to explain the explanation.
[Illustration: 0186]
When we get rid of these clogs to industry known as Departments, we
shall, I am sure, all work together to the common good, in making
England a self-supporting country, and the men and women of England a
self-respecting people, and in point of health an A 1 people instead of
the C 3 into which we are settling down complacently. The statistics of
the grades recently published appeared to me to be the greatest cause
for alarm that England has known for years. And the worst of the matter
is that when one asks if a more ample proof of decadence has ever been
revealed, people smile and inquire if the result of the recent visits
of the British to France and Italy and Palestine and Mesopotamia suggest
any evidence of decadence. They forget that it was only the A classes
that left England; only the A classes were killed or maimed; the lower
grades remained at home with their wives in order that the decadent
breed might be carried on with emphasised decadence.
If I were asked in what direction one should look for the salvation
of the race from the rush into Avernus toward which we have been
descending, I would certainly say,--
“The garden and the allotment only will arrest our feet on the downward
path.”
If the people of England can throw off the yoke of the Cinema and take
to the spade it may not yet be too late to rescue them from the abyss
toward which they are sliding.
And it is not merely the sons who must be saved, the daughters must be
taken into account in this direction; and when I meet daily the scores
of trim and shapely girls with busts of Venus and buskins of Diana,
walking--_vera incessu patuit dea_--as if the land belonged to
them--which it does--I feel no uneasiness with regard to the women with
whom England's future rests. If they belong to the land, assuredly the
land belongs to them.
But the garden and not the field is the place for our girls. We know
what the women are like in those countries where they work in the fields
doing men's work. We have seen them in Jean François Millet's pictures,
and we turn from them with tears.
“Women with labour-loosened knees
And gaunt backs bowed with servitude.”
We do not wish to see them in England. I have seen them in Italy, in
Switzerland, and on the Boer farms in, South Africa. I do not want to
see them in England.
Agriculture is for men, horticulture for women. A woman is in her right
place in a garden. A garden looks lovelier for her presence. What an
incongruous object a jobbing gardener in his shirt-sleeves and filthy
cap seems when seen against a background of flowers! I have kept out of
my garden for days in dread of coming upon the figure which I knew
was lurking there, spending his time looking out for me and working
feverishly when he thought I was coming.
But how pleasantly at home a girl in her garden garb appears, whether on
the rungs of a ladder tying up the roses, or doing some thinning out
on a too rampant border! There should be no work in a garden beyond her
powers--that is, of course, in a one-gardener garden--a one-greenhouse
garden. She has no business trying to carry a tub with a shrub weighing
one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another; but she can
wheel a brewer's or a coalman's sack barrow with two nine-inch wheels
with two hundredweight resting on it for half a mile without feeling
weary. No garden should be without such a vehicle. One that I bought
ten years ago from a general dealer has enabled me to superannuate
the cumbersome wheelbarrow. You require to lift the tub into the
wheelbarrow, but the other does the lifting when you push the iron
guard four inches under the staves at the bottom. As for that supposed
bugbear--the carting of manure, it should not exist in a modern garden.
A five-shilling tin of fertiliser and a few sacks of Wakeley's hop
mixture will be enough for the borders of a garden of an acre, unless
you aim at growing everything to an abnormal size. But you must know
what sort of fertilising every bed requires.
I mention these facts because we read constantly of the carting of
manure being beyond the limits of a girl-gardener's strength, to say
nothing of the distasteful character of the job. The time is coming when
there will be none of the old-fashioned stable-sweepings either for the
garden or the field, and I think we shall get on very well without it,
unless we wish to grow mushrooms.
The only other really horrid job that I would not have my girl face is
pot-washing. This is usually a winter job, because, we are told, summer
is too busy a time in the garden to allow of its being done except when
the ice has to be broken in the cistern and no other work is possible.
But why should the pots be washed out of doors and in cold vater? If
you have a girl-gardener, why should you not give her the freedom of the
scullery sink where the hot water is laid on? There is no hardship in
washing a couple of hundred pots in hot water and _in_ a warm scullery
on the most inclement day in January.