the popularity of the Chaplin films is probably that in them certain
things happen which cannot happen in real life without the intervention
of the law, and which are almost always withheld from the real stage. I
mean that men so freely assault each other; physical violence has the
fullest and most abundant play. Every one longs to see kicks and blows
administered, but is usually defrauded, and Charlie is a spendthrift
with both. And so cheerfully and victoriously does he distribute them
that I wonder an epidemic of such attentions has not broken out in both
hemispheres. I know this--that a fat policeman with his back towards the
exit of a cinema at the time a Chaplin film had ended would be in great
danger from my foot were I then leaving. I should hope for enough
self-control; but I could promise nothing, and I should feel that
Charlie's example, behind the action, sanctified it. Film life and real
life would merge into each other so naturally that if the policeman
repaid me--or attempted to--in any other way but kind, I should feel
outraged. To be arrested for it would be like a stab in the back from a
friend.
How long Charlie will remain the darling of two hemispheres we must wait
to see. But of one thing I am certain, and that is that if at any time
the "The Funniest Man on Earth" ceases to compel laughter, he might by
slightly changing his methods draw tears. For while he can be as
diverting as the greatest glutton for mirth desires, he has all the
machinery of dejection too. One of his melancholy smiles is really
beautiful.
A CONQUEROR
It is proverbial that a child may lead a horse to the water, but that
not even Mr. Lloyd George, with all his persuasive gifts, can make him
drink. An even more difficult task is to induce a horse in the pink of
robust health to convey a suggestion of being seriously ill--as I chance
just to have discovered. It is not the kind of discovery that one can
anticipate; indeed, when I woke on the morning of the day on which it
happened and, as is my habit, lay for a while forecasting the possible
or probable course of events during the next four-and-twenty hours, this
example of equine limitation had no place whatever in my thoughts. To
the receptive and adventurous observer many curious things may, however,
occur; and no sooner was lunch finished than out of a clear sky fell a
friend and a taxi (the god and the machine, if you will), and jointly
they conveyed me to as odd a building as I have ever thought to find any
horse in, where, under a too searching blue glare, was an assemblage of
people as strange as their environment.
There were men in evening dress, toying with cigarettes and bending over
women in evening dress; there was an adventuress or two, one with hair
in such fluffed-out abundance as can only be a perquisite of notable
wickedness; there was a stockman, who was, I fancy, too fond of her;
there was a lady in riding boots; there was a comely youth in pyjamas;
and there were footmen and page-boys. And all seemed to me made-up to a
point of excess. Who could they be? a stranger to the marvel of science
might well ask. Strayed revellers? A lost party of masqueraders being
held here on bail and photographed for identification purposes?--for
there was no doubt about the photography, because the benignant,
masterful gentleman with a manuscript, who gave them instructions, every
now and then stood aside in order that the camera-operator might direct
his machine-gun and turn the handle; but what was said I could not hear,
such was the crackling and fizzling of the blue lights.
I cannot pretend to have learned much about the cinema on such a brief
visit, but I acquired a few facts. One is that there is no need for any
continuity to be observed by the photographer, because the various
scenes, taken in any order, can, in some wonderful way, be joined up
afterwards, in their true order, and made consecutive and natural.
Indeed, I should say that the superficially casual and piecemeal manner
in which a moving drama can be built up is the dominant impression which
I brought away from this abode of mystery. The contrast between the
magically fluid narrative as unreeled on the screen and the broken,
zigzag, and apparently negligent preparation of it in the studio is the
sharpest I can imagine. And it increases one's admiration of the man
with the scissors and the thread (or however it is done) who unites the
bits and makes them smoothly run.
Another fact which I acquired is that unless the face of the cinema
performer is painted yellow it comes out an impossible hue, so that to
see a company in broad daylight is to have the impression that one has
stumbled upon a house party in the Canary Isles. And a third fact is
that the actors, while free to say what they like to each other at many
times, must, when in a situation illustrated by words thrown on the
screen, use those identical words. One reason for this rule is, I am
told, that some time ago, in an American film, the producer of which was
rather lax, one of the characters spoke to another with an impossible
licence, and a school of deaf mutes visiting the picture palace
"lip-read" the awful result. The consequence (America being a wonderful
country, with a sufficiency of deaf-and-dumb to warrant protective
measures) was the withdrawal of the film and the punishment of the
offenders.
Meanwhile, what of the horse? I will tell you.
The camera-operator having taken as much of the fast life in the swell
hotel (with the hollow columns without backs to them) as was necessary,
including a "still" (as it is called in the movie world--meaning a
photograph in the ordinary sense of the term) of the fluffiest of the
adventuresses in an expression signifying a blend of depravity and
triumph, turned his attention to the loose-box which some attendants had
been rapidly constructing, chiefly with the assistance of a truss of
straw. Into this apartment was led (through the hotel lounge, and at
enormous risk to its plaster masonry) a horse--the horse, in fact, which
was to defeat Edison. Of the plot of the play I know nothing. (How could
I, having seen it in preparation?) But this I can tell you: that the
hero's horse had to be ill; and this also: that the horse in question
refused to be ill. In vain for the groom to shake his head, in vain for
the hero to say that it had the shivers; never was a horse so far
removed from malady, so little in need of the vet. Nor could any device
produce the desired effect. If, then, in the days to come you see on
the films a very attractive story with a horse in it, and the horse
shivers only in the words on the screen, you will know why. It is
because the movies for once met their master.
THE NEWNESS OF THE OLD
In an American paper I find this anecdote: "An old lady was being shown
the spot on which a hero fell. 'I don't wonder,' she replied. 'It's so
slippery I nearly fell there myself.'"
Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to
most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the _Victory_. Indeed
it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the
wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America
it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go
on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its
recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new.
It is a problem why we tend to be so resentful when an editor or a
comedian offers us a jest that has done service before. It is, I
suppose, in part at any rate, because we have paid our money, either for
the paper or the seat, and we experience the sense of having been
defrauded. We have been done, we feel, because the bargain, as we
understood it, was that we were purchasing novelty. So that when
suddenly an old, old jape, which perhaps we have ourselves related--and
that of course is an aggravation of the grievance--confronts us, we are
indignant. But what, one wonders, would a comic paper or a revue that
had nothing old in it be like. We can never know.
The odd thing is that we not only resent the age of the joke, even
though it is in our own repertory, but we resent the laughter of those
to whom it is new--perhaps three-quarters of the audience. How dare they
also not have heard it before? is our unspoken question. Not long ago,
seated in a theatre next a candid and normally benignant and tolerant
friend, I found myself laughing at what struck me as a distinctly
humorous remark made by one of London's nonsensical funny men. Engaged
in a competition with another as to which had the longer memory, he
clinched the discussion by saying that he personally could remember
London Bridge when it was a cornfield. To me that was as new as it was
idiotic, and I behaved accordingly; but my friend was furious with me.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed with the click of the tongue that usually
accompanies such criticism, "fancy digging that up again! It's as old as
the hills." And his face grew dark and stern.
What we have to remember, and what might have softened my friend's
granite anger had he remembered it, is that a new audience is always
coming along to whom nothing is a chestnut. It is not the most
reassuring of thoughts to those who are a little fastidious about
ancientry in humour; but it is nature and therefore a fact. Just as
every moment (so I used to be told by a solemn nurse) a child is born
(she added also that every moment some one dies, and she used to hold up
her finger and hush! for me to realise that happy thought), so nearly
every moment (allowing for a certain amount of infant mortality) an
older child attains an age when it can understand and relish a funny
story. To those children every story is original. With this new public,
clamorous and appreciative, why do humourists try so hard to be novel?
(But perhaps they don't).
I suppose that there are theories as to what is the oldest story, but I
am not acquainted with them. That people are, however, quite prepared
for every story to be old is proved by the readiness with which, when
Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" was translated into Greek for a School
Reader, a number of persons remarked upon the circumstance that the
humourist had gone to ancient literature for his jest. For by a curious
twist we are all anxious that stories should not be new. Much as we like
a new story, we like better to be able to say that to us it was
familiar.
Many stories come rhythmically round again. Such, for example, during
the Great War, as those with a martial background. I remember during the
Boer War hearing of a young man who was endeavouring to enlist, and was
rejected because his teeth were defective. "But I want to fight the
Boers," he said, "not eat them." Between 1914 and 1918 this excellent
retort turned up again, only this time the young man said that he did
not want to eat the Germans. I have no doubt that in the Crimean War a
similar applicant declared that he did not want to eat the Russians, and
a hundred years ago another was vowing that he did not want to eat the
French. Probably one could trace it through every war that ever was.
Probably a young Hittite with indifferent teeth proclaimed that his
desire was to fight the Amalekites and not to eat them. The story was
equally good each time; and there has always been a vast new audience
for it. And so long as war continues and teeth exist in the human head,
which I am told will not be for ever, so long will this anecdote enjoy
popularity. After that it will enter upon a new phase of existence based
upon defects in the applicant's ratelier, and so on until universal
peace descends upon the world, or, the sun turning cold, life ceases.
AUNTS
The story is told that an English soldier, questioned as to his belief
in the angels of Mons, replied how could he doubt it, when they came so
close to him that he recognised his aunt among them? People, hearing
this, laugh; but had the soldier said that among the heavenly visitants
he had recognised his mother or his sister, it would not be funny at
all. Suggestions of beautiful affection and touching deathbeds would
then have been evoked, and our sentimental chords played upon. But the
word aunt at once turns it all to comedy. Why is this?
I cannot answer this question. The reasons go back too far for me; but
the fact remains that it has been decided that when not tragic, and even
sometimes when tragic, aunts are comic. Not so comic as mothers-in-law,
of course; not invariably and irremediably comic; but provocative of
mirth and irreverence. Again I say, why? For taken one by one, aunts are
sensible, affectionate creatures; and our own experience of them is
usually serious enough; they are often very like their sisters our
mothers, or their brothers our fathers, and often, too, they are
mothers themselves. Yet the status of aunt is always fair game to the
humourist; and especially so when she is the aunt of somebody else.
That the word uncle has frivolous associations is natural, for slang has
employed it to comic ends. But an aunt advances nothing on personal
property, an aunt is not the public resort of the temporarily
financially embarrassed. No nephew Tommy was ever exhorted to make room
for his aunt, a lady, indeed, who figures in comic songs far more rarely
than grandparents do, and is not prominent on the farcical stage. One
cannot, therefore, blame the dramatists for the great aunt joke, nor
does it seem, on recalling what novels I can with aunts prominently in
them, to be the creation of the novelists. Dickens has very few aunts,
and these are not notorious. Betsy Trotwood, David Copperfield's aunt,
though brusque and eccentric, was otherwise eminently sane and
practical. Mr. F.'s aunt was more according to pattern and Miss Rachel
Wardle even more so; but the comic aunt idea did not commend itself to
Dickens whole-heartedly. Fiction as a rule has supported the theory that
aunts are sinister. Usually they adopt the children of their dead
sisters and are merciless to them. Often they tyrannise over a
household. The weight of the novelists is in favour of aunts as anything
but comic. There are exceptions, of course, and that fine vivid figure,
the "Aunt Anne" of Mrs. W. K. Clifford, stands forth triumphant among
the charming; while Sir Willoughby Patterne's twittering choruses are
nearer the aunts of daily life. But even they were nigher pathos than
ridicule.
I believe that that wicked military wag, Captain Harry Graham, has done
more than most to keep the poor lady the aunt in the pillory. This kind
of thing from his "Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes" does a lot of
mischief:
In the drinking well,
Which the plumber built her,
Aunt Eliza fell--
We must buy a filter.
How can aunts possibly survive such subtle attacks as that? And again:--
I had written to Aunt Maud,
Who was travelling abroad,
When I heard she'd died from cramp:
Just too late to save the stamp.
Supposing that the verse had begun
I had written Cousin Maud
it would have lost enormously. There must be something comic in aunts
after all.
No child ever quite gets over the feeling of strangeness at hearing his
mother called aunt by his cousins. A mother is so completely his own
possession, and she so obviously exists for no other purpose than to be
his mother, that for her also to be an aunt is preposterous. And then
there is the shock of hearing her name, for most children never realise
their mother's name at all, their father, the only person in the house
who knows it intimately and has the right to use it, usually preferring
"Hi" or any loud cry. To Hamlet the situation must have been peculiarly
strange, for his mother, after the little trouble with his father's ear,
became his aunt too. If it were not that, since our aunts are of an
older generation than ourselves, proper respect compels us to address
them as aunts, they would not be comic. The prefix aunt does it. If we
could call Aunt Eliza, Eliza, without ceremony, as if she were a
contemporary, she would be no more joke to us than to her
contemporaries, even though she did fall in the well and necessitate
that sanitary outlay. Just plain Eliza falling in a well is nothing; but
for Aunt Eliza to do so is a scream. It is having to say Aunt Eliza that
causes the trouble, for it takes her from the realms of fact and
deposits her in those of humour. If aunts really want to acquire a new
character they must forbid the prefix.
ON RECITATIONS
Although none of us know what, when the time comes, we can do, to what
unsuspected heights we can rise, we are fairly well acquainted with what
we cannot do. We may not know, for example, what kind of figure we
should cut in a burning house, and even less in a burning ship: to what
extent the suddenness and dreadfulness of the danger would paralyse our
best impulses, or even so bring out our worst as to make us wild beasts
for self-protection. Terrible emotional emergencies are rare, and, since
rehearsals are of no use, all that is possible is to hope that one would
behave rightly in them. But most of us know with certainty what our
limitations are. I, for instance, know that I cannot recite in public
and that no circumstances could make me. There is no peril I would not
more cheerfully face than an audience, even of friends, met together to
hear me, and, worse, see me, on such an occasion. And by recite I do not
mean the placid repetition of an epigram, but the downright translation
of dramatic verse into gesture and grimace. The bare idea of such a
performance fills me with creeping terror.
The spectacle of any real reciter, however self-possessed and decent, at
his work, suffuses me with shame. I myself have in my brief experience
of them blushed more for reciters than the whole army of them could ever
have blushed for themselves. Even the great humane Brandram when he
adopted the falsetto which he deemed appropriate to Shakespeare's women
sent the hot tide of misery to my face, while over his squeaking in
"Boots at the Holly Tree Inn" I had to close my eyes. Brandram, however,
was not strictly a reciter in the way that I mean: rather was he an
actor who chose to do a whole play by himself without costumes or
scenery. The reciters that I mean are addicted to single pieces, and are
often amateurs (undeterred and undismayed by the grape-shot of Mr.
Anstey's "Burglar Bill") who oblige at parties or smoking concerts.
Their leading poet when I was younger was the versatile Dagonet, who had
a humble but terribly effective derivative in the late Mr. Eaton, the
author of "The Fireman's Wedding," and their leading humourist was the
writer of a book called "T Leaves." Then came "Kissing Cup's Race"
(which Mr. Lewis Sydney on the stage and "Q" in literature toiled so
manfully to render impossible), and now I have no notion what the
favourite recitations are, for I have heard none for a long time.
But from those old days when escape was more difficult comes the memory
of the worst and the best that I ever heard. The worst was "Papa's
Letter," a popular poem of sickly and irresistible sentimentality, which
used to call out the handkerchiefs in battalions. The nominal narrator
is a young widow whose golden-haired boy wishes to join her in writing a
letter to his father. This was at a time before Sir Oliver Lodge had
established wireless telephony between heaven and earth. Since the child
cannot write she turns him into a letter himself by fancifully sticking
a stamp on his forehead. He then (as I remember it) runs out to play, is
knocked down by a runaway horse, and--
"Papa's letter is with God."
Who wrote this saccharine tragedy I cannot say, but I once found the
name of W. S. Gilbert against it on a programme. Could he possibly have
been the author? The psychology of humour is so curious....
So much for the worst recitations. The best that I can recall I heard
twenty-five years ago, and have only just succeeded in tracking to
print. It was recited at a Bohemian gathering of which I made one in a
Fleet Street tavern, the reciter being a huge Scottish painter with a
Falstaffian head. His face was red and truculently jovial, his hair and
beard were white and vigorous. I had never seen him before, nor did I
see him after; but I can see him now, through much tobacco smoke, and
hear him too. Called upon to oblige the company, this giant unfolded
himself and said he would give us James Boswell's real opinion of Dr.
Johnson. A thrill of expectation ran through the room, for it appeared
that the artist was famous for this effort. For me, who knew nothing,
the title was good enough. With profundities of humour, such as it is
almost necessary to cross the border to find, he performed the piece;
sitting tipsily on the side of an imaginary bed as he did so. Every word
told, and at the end the greatness of the Great Cham was a myth. For
years I tried to find this poem; but no one could tell me anything about
it. Here and there was a man who had heard it, but as to authorship he
knew nothing. The Scotsman was no more, I discovered. Then last year
appeared one who actually knew the author's name: Godfrey Turner, a
famous Fleet Street figure in the 'sixties and 'seventies, and in time I
met his son, and through him was piloted to certain humorous
anthologies, in one of which, H. S. Leigh's "Jeux d'Esprit," I found the
poem. Like many of the best recitations, it does not read famously in
cold blood, but as delivered by my Scottish painter it carried big guns.
Here it is; but there seems to be an error in the beginning of the third
stanza, unless Bozzy's muzziness is being indicated:--
"Bid the ruddy nectar flow!"
I say, old fellow, don't you go.
You know me--Boswell--and you know
I wrote a life of Johnson.
Punch they've here, a splendid brew;
Let's order up a bowl for two,
And then I'll tell you something new
Concerning Doctor Johnson.
A great man that, and no mistake,
To ev'ry subject wide awake;
A toughish job you'd have, to make
A fool of Doctor Johnson;
But everybody worth a straw
Has got some little kind of flaw
(My own's a tendency to jaw
About my poor friend Johnson).
And even that immortal man,
When he to speechify began,
No greater nuisance could be than
The late lamented Johnson.
Enough he was to drive you mad,
Such endless length of tongue he had,
Which caused in me a habit bad
Of cursing Doctor Johnson.
We once were at the famous "Gate"
In Clerkenwell; 'twas getting late;
Between ourselves I ought to state
That Doctor Samuel Johnson
Had stowed away six pints of port,
The strong, full-bodied, fruity sort,
And I had had my whack--in short
As much as Doctor Johnson.
Just as I'd made a brilliant joke
The doctor gave a grunt and woke;
He looked all round, and then he spoke
These words, did Doctor Johnson:
"The man who'd make a pun," said he,
"Would perpetrate a larceny,
And punished equally should be,
Or my name isn't Johnson!"
I on the instant did reply
To that old humbug (by the bye,
You'll understand, of course, that I
Refer to Doctor Johnson),
"You've made the same remark before.
It's perfect bosh; and, what is more,
I look on you, sir, as a bore!"
Says I to Doctor Johnson.
My much-respected friend, alas!
Was only flesh, and flesh is grass.
At certain times the greatest ass
Alive was Doctor Johnson.
I shan't go home until I choose,
Let's all lie down and take a snooze.
I always sleep best in my shoes,
All right! I'm--Doctor Johnson.
Good as that piece was as done by the Scotch artist, I should not care
to hear it again. Nor, indeed, do I want to hear any recitation again,
unless it is given in mimicry of some one else. Under those conditions I
could listen to anything, so powerful is the attraction of the mimic's
art. Possibly part of this fascination may be due to one's own inability
to imitate too; be that as it may, no mimic who is at all capable ever
bores me, and all fill me with wonder. Of course I am conscious that
many of the imitators who throng the stage are nothing but pickpockets:
too lazy and too mean to acquire novelties of their own, they annex
snatches of the best songs of the moment under the plea of burlesquing
the original singers. But even so, I often find myself immorally glad
that they figure in the programme.
Not the least remarkable thing about good mimics is their capacity not
only to reproduce the tones of a voice but the actual style of
conversation. I remember hearing someone thus qualified giving a
spontaneous impression of a famous scholar whom he had just met, and the
curious part of it was that the imitator, though a man of little
education, for the moment, under the influence of the concentration
which possessed him, employed words proper to his victim which I am
certain he had no knowledge of in cold blood and had never used before.
It was almost as if, for a brief interval, the mimic was the scholar,
though always with the drop of ridicule or mischief added. It would be
interesting to know if, when anyone is being impersonated as intensely
as this, any virtue departs from him--whether he is, for the moment, by
so much the less himself.
CLICQUOT WELL WON
My hostess and her daughter met me at the station in the little
pony-cart and we set off at a gentle trot, conversing as we went. That
is to say, they asked questions about London and the great wicked world,
and I endeavoured to answer them.