to be of very considerable antiquity, and to have been introduced
into England from abroad in a singular manner. I am not quite certain
as to the details, but the _mythos_ imparted to members was something
after this fashion. A gentleman interested in occult studies was
looking round the shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where the works
which attracted him were sometimes to be found. He was examining a
particular volume--I forget whether its title was given--when he
found between the leaves a few pages of dim manuscript, written
in a character which was strange to him. The gentleman bought the
book, and when he got home eagerly examined the manuscript. It was
in cipher; he could make nothing of it. But on the manuscript--or,
perhaps, on a separate slip laid next to it--was the address of a
person in Germany. The curious investigator of secret things and
hidden counsels wrote to this address, obtained full particulars,
the true manner of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort
of commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in Germany to
administer the mysteries in England. And hence arose, or re-arose, in
this isle the Order of the Twilight Star. Its original foundation was
assigned to the fifteenth century.
I like the story; but there was not one atom of truth in it. The
Twilight Star was a stumer--or stumed--to use a very old English
word. Its true date of origin was 1880–1885 at earliest. The “Cipher
Manuscript” was written on paper that bore the watermark of 1809 in
ink that had a faded appearance. But it contained information that
could not possibly have been known to any living being in the year
1809, that was not known to any living being till twenty years later.
It was, no doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. Its originators
must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously
was this occult fraud “put upon the market” that, to the best of my
belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an
entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.
It must be said that the evidence of the fraudulent character of the
Twilight Star does not rest merely upon the fact that the Cipher
Manuscript contained a certain piece of knowledge that was not in
existence in the year 1809. Any critical mind, with a tinge of occult
reading, should easily have concluded that here was no ancient order
from the whole nature and substance of its ritual and doctrine. For
ancient rituals, whether orthodox or heterodox, are founded on one
_mythos_ and on one _mythos_ only. They are grouped about some fact,
actual or symbolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry is said to have
as its centre certain events connected with the building of King
Solomon’s Temple, and they keep within their limits. But the Twilight
Star embraced all mythologies and all mysteries of all races and all
ages, and “referred” or “attributed” them to each other and proved
that they all came to much the same thing; and that was enough! That
was not the ancient frame of mind; it was not even the 1809 frame of
mind. But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and later frame of
mind.
I must say that I did not seek the Order merely in quest of odd
entertainment. As I have stated in the chapter before this, I had
experienced strange things--they still appear to me strange--of body,
mind and spirit, and I supposed that the Order, dimly heard of, might
give me some light and guidance and leading on these matters. But, as
I have noted, I was mistaken; the Twilight Star shed no ray of any
kind on my path.
* * * * *
It was towards the end of 1900 that I perceived that as I had lost
sight of the admirable Syon, so Bagdad was wearing badly enough. I
have seen from the train the architecture of the “White City” in
these recent years. It was never anything at its best, assuredly;
never anything save foolishness. Still, lit up on a summer night,
with its extravagant towers and walls, pavilions and domes and
minarets, with all its fretted and fantastic work, with its still
lakes and pouring waterfalls; in those old days before the war I have
no doubt that it symbolised joy and enchantment to young and simple
hearts. But afterwards, when long neglect had told upon it, when
winter rains had wept upon its walls and soot showers had drifted
on its pavilions, when the summer suns had scorched its whiteness,
and black March winds had torn its feigned embroideries and false
ornaments, when many autumn storms had beat upon its plaster
battlements and the waterfalls were stilled and the lakes were become
obscene pits of slime and rubbish--what an ugly mockery it stood
there, an idiot’s city fallen into ruin, a scenic fairyland in evil
days. So my Bagdad became like the “White City,” magic down at heel,
its enchantments silly and clumsy tricks, its mystic architecture a
shabby sham, its strange encounters, meetings with people who turned
out to be bores or worse than bores. You know the story of the fairy
gold: at night the man who had had happy commerce with the People
of the Hills found himself enriched with boundless and wonderful
treasure; but in the morning the marvel of gold had all turned into a
heap of dead leaves; such was my case.
And here I am moved to wonder, as I often wonder, whether what we
call “fairy tales” do not in fact contain a curious wisdom and the
secrets of a very strange and mysterious psychology. Take this old
tale of the fairy gold and its transmutation into ugly rubbish, as
an example. To most of us it is a tale and nothing more than a tale;
without any reason, without any meaning, without any sort of sense
or significance in it. We accept it just as a piece of picturesque
fancy and nothing more; the turning of the magic gold into leaves
was just a happy notion of the unknown and remote individual who
made up the story. But suppose that there is something more than
this: rather, something quite different from this. I am well aware,
of course, of the various explanations of the fairy mythology;
the fairies are the gods of the heathen come down in the world:
Diana become Titania. Or the fairies are a fantasy on the small,
dark people who dwelt in the land and under the land before the
coming of the Celts; or they are “elementals,” spirits of the four
elements: there are all these accounts, and, for all I know, all
may be true, each in its measure. But is it possible that there is,
now and then, a more hidden and interior sense in some of the tales
of the fairyland and the fairies? I am inclined to think that this
may be so; that the stories may be--occasionally, not always by any
means--the veils of certain rare interior experiences of mankind;
experiences, I may say, which are best avoided. The gold faded into
dead leaves; it may be more than an idle tale. At any rate, it was a
very dismal disenchantment to me when I woke up and found that I was
not the Commander of the Faithful, that the fair Circassian was, in
fact, a native not of Circassia but of Clapham, that Bagdad was not
Bagdad at all, but a London “Exhibition” fallen into very bad repair
and urgently in need of tacks and whitewash. The Palace was not
habitable; rain was coming in through cracks and rents in the marble
that was plaster on the head of him who for a time had been Haroun
Alraschid, who now began to suspect that his real style and title
was Silly Fool. And then I went on the stage, which is a world of
illusion certainly, but of a much less harmful illusion than that of
plaster-Bagdad and fairy gold and the hall under the hill.
I have wondered at times why there is no good novel of the stage.
But a little consideration shews that there can be no such thing.
George Moore wrote long ago a clever book called “A Mummer’s Wife.”
It is a capital book, and I should think a very faithful impression
of a “Cloches de Corneville” touring company in the early ’eighties.
I would say of an individual “Cloches de Corneville” company, for
the characters strike one as portraits of particular people; there
is nothing of the universal about the book, nothing of the essence
of the stage life. And it is probably impossible to write the real
novel of the stage, for the good reason that the stage is not one but
many. In the old days, in the days of the Crummles Company, it would
have been easier. The actor of those days was supposed, till he had
proved his supreme eminence in one particular line of business, to
be capable of all. He was to play “Hamlet,” he was also to go on in
the Farce, he was to dance a hornpipe between the acts, he was always
to be ready with a song; and, again, unless he were a very eminent
actor indeed, he very rarely associated with people beyond the
range of the call-boy’s voice. The stage in those days was a world
apart, and the men and women who trod it a race apart; the actor was
a type, just as the sailor of Smollett’s day was a type. But all
that is long over; it would be very difficult to find a general
formula to cover the life of the stage to-day. Commodore Trunnion
viewed all existence as a voyage on board one of His Majesty’s
ships; and I knew a stage-manager who, playing skittles, avowed his
determination to bring down “that O.P. skittle”; but the Commodore
is dead, and the stage-manager is dying. In fact I should say that
the average actor of to-day is far from being gratified when he is
recognised as an actor; rather he is inclined to be ashamed of his
profession. I remember that as I was talking to two stage friends
on a London pavement an old man who was selling laces and studs
and such matters in the gutter implored us to buy: “I was an actor
once myself, gentlemen.” I perceived that my friends were very far
from being pleased. I think that the poor old man would have done
better if he had said: “I was an officer in the Guards once myself,
gentlemen.” So, in brief, the actors are no longer the race apart of
the old days; they mix with all sorts of people and have, naturally,
become very much like all sorts of people. Some of them think that
the change is for the better, others disagree. I venture no judgment
save this: that they are certainly less picturesque, because less
differenced than of old, and thus it is that nobody is likely to do
much good with a story of the stage.
I daresay that few people outside the profession are aware that the
old players had a language of their own, or rather a language which
they shared with another and a widely different craft. Not merely
the technical language of the stage, though that had its curiosities
too. For example, I once heard George Alexander at rehearsal say
to one of the company: “Too much of the old, Smith, too much of the
old!” And Smith, though he had been for many years on the stage,
told me afterwards that he had never heard the phrase before, and
didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant, having associated,
like Mr. Lillyvick, with members of the theatrical profession in the
provincial, that is more or less, the less fortunate grade. “The old”
means the melodramatic style of acting, the manner which used to be
associated with the name of Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, “I
gave them a bit of the old,” he meant that he exaggerated somewhat
both in his tones and in the business of the scene; in other words,
that he made it “big” and “broad.”
But this is not the language I mean. Once on a provincial tour I
found that the stage-manager had somehow heard of my connection with
literature, and was inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a little
of being, as we should say now, a “high-brow” and to resent the
supposed fact. So I put him through an examination. I asked if he
knew what “omees” were, in particular as to the character signified
by the phrase “omee of the carser.” Then as to the idioms “nunty
munjare” and “nunty dinnari” and so on. He broke down badly, but he
put away his evil suspicions from that moment; he knew that if I had
written books in my day I had turned over a new leaf and had become a
reformed character: I knew the curious speech better than he did. It
is barbarous Italian, and was the lingo of old-fashioned actors and
thieves.
_Chapter XI_
It is a very odd experience to go on the stage at the age of
thirty-nine. It is, of course, unpractical, since at that age a
man is too old to learn the business properly; but it is a great
entertainment. The change was so extreme. I had always lived a
very quiet life. I had few friends, few acquaintances. My life was
in reading books and in writing them. All my preoccupations were
literary. Every morning after breakfast I went over what I had
written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere,
generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as
I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for
a walk from 12 to 1, and another half-hour walk in the afternoon.
Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour of
the literary game till 7, and again after dinner till 11. It was a
life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and
rare triumphs were those of the written page. I did not know a single
actor, and had no curiosity as to the actor’s life, circumstances,
customs or manners. And then, one afternoon in February, 1901, I
found myself stuck up with a number of ladies and gentlemen on a
thing like a greenhouse flower-pot stand, and we were all required
to express suitable and varied emotions as Shylock appealed for the
fulfilment of the bond which Antonio had given him. This was the
first thing I had tried to do on the stage, and I believe it was
the most difficult. No doubt Mr.--afterwards Sir Frank--Benson was
right in saying that it was the only way to learn how to act; but
gesture, facial expression, pantomime, the knack of knowing how to be
individual and yet to join in effectively with the crowd; all these
things are extremely difficult, very much more difficult than the art
of speaking an effective line effectively.
But--very likely because the change from my former way of living
was so tremendous in every respect--I found the life an enchanting
one. Of course I could not have begun under happier auspices; nay, I
could not have begun under any auspices half so happy. It has been
said, I think, more than once, and said by men far more qualified
to speak than I, that if it had not been for the Benson Company,
acting as an ordered art, with its technique and tradition, would
pretty well have perished out of England. The old stock companies
were gone, with their manifold opportunities for learning the actor’s
craft. The young man who went on the stage probably walked on for
six months or a year in a London production, and unless he were an
exceptionally bright young fellow he learned very little. Perhaps,
if he were lucky, he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking
one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!” every night; but still
he learned very little. If he became a good actor under this régime,
it was a case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of course good
actors come from everywhere: from the academies, from melodramas
travelling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from
the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London run; but, as I say,
these are cases of greatness overcoming difficulties. But under the
training provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s fault if he
did not learn to act; it was pretty definite proof that there was no
acting in his composition. I remember Henry Ainley saying in this
very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I have played twelve
different parts, and if that won’t teach a man how to act, nothing
will.” This, I may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at
Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful time.
But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards under no happier
auspices. There was a constant succession of small parts, so graded
with due tenderness both to the beginner and the audience that not
much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness, and much good was
certain to be gained by the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion
that the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in “The Merchant,”
all of us beginners, were about as bad as bad can be; but it really
signified little. The people in front were looking at Shylock and
Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our incapacity diminished
to any calculable extent the public entertainment. Then in the next
piece, “As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had to say to the
Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to him straight,” and Oscar Asche took
pains to show me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with my
back to the audience; but the fortunes of the play hardly depended on
that line, while I was beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence.
And how all this was an utterly different world from anything that I
had ever conjectured; I cannot express the gulf that yawned between
the old and the new. In the former years I struggled with words and
phrases and sentences and shades of meaning implied by them: now I
strove to understand how something like an attenuated pigtail could
become a highly probable fifteenth-century beard and moustaches in a
couple of minutes, when skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was
occupied with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so that
you command the stage as F. R. B. instructed me, and the endeavour to
take in and profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions given
by the elder members of the company: here was a holiday, indeed, for
a man who had tried to tear the secret of literature from the thorn
castle where it is concealed, who had torn his hands and his heart
sadly enough in the endeavour.
I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder Brethren amongst
the Bensonians. This was a great part of the discipline and
instruction of the course. It was not only what Benson said at
rehearsal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or Brydone or Swete said
after the rehearsal or after the show, and often what they said
was, quite rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember when Henry
Herbert--“starring” in America now, I believe--was playing in “King
John,” it fell to him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting
the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them, as I thought,
with great spirit; but Brydone--dead not long ago--took him apart
afterwards and talked to him for half an hour or more as to the grave
mistake he had committed.
“You spoke the lines as if they were beautiful poetry,” said Brydone,
“and, indeed, they are. If you had been reciting them your reading
would have been quite right; but not in the scene, on the stage.
So-and-so--I have forgotten the name of the part--is raging against
King John; he isn’t thinking of the poetic beauty of the words he is
using.”
Now, I do not presume to judge whether Brydone were right or wrong in
this criticism; such matters are too high for my small experience as
an actor; but consider the enormous value to the beginner of living
in such an atmosphere of thought and observation and consideration of
the things of the theatre. Herbert may have come eventually to the
conclusion that he had been right after all, and that Brydone was
wrong; but, anyhow, he had worried the question out and weighed it in
his mind, and looked at it and around it; and all that, it seems to
me, is the very air in which good craftsmanship is born and nurtured
and grows great and flourishes.
And so, apart from these after-confabulations and dressing-room
counsels, a rehearsal in the Benson Company has always struck me as
a liberal education in the player’s art. Benson himself--the “Pa”
of the affectionate and reverent remembrance of many hundreds of
his grateful sons and scholars--has always been an imaginative poet
of a high order; though somehow he has never written any poetry.
Instead, he has produced Shakespeare, and perhaps he has chosen the
better way. He has illuminated his text admirably, and his way was
not to come down to the theatre with the whole scheme of things cut
and dried in his head, with every intonation, every bit of business
and every position settled immutably beforehand, but rather to
approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal and open spirit.
The main conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he
could find in the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no
matter whether it came from one of the elder brethren or from the
newest member of the company. For example, during the rehearsals of
“King John” we had come to the scene wherein the Legate, Pandulph,
reconciles the King to Holy Church. I was talking to the Legate at
the wings during some brief interval, and ventured very tentatively
to describe the symbolical embrace known as the Kiss of Peace as a
possibly effective bit of business in the reconciliation scene. The
Legate, interested, asked me to show him how it was done, and we went
through the business. But Benson, who seemed to be considering other
matters down stage, had noticed what we were about, and he called
out: “I like that: we’ll do it.” And done it was; and I had been a
little over two months in the company and on the stage!
And another instance, taken from the same play, of a Bensonian
rehearsal of those days. The scene was the discovery of the dead
body of Prince Arthur. I had to say:
“What wilt thou do, renowned Faulconbridge,
Second a villain and a murderer?”
Whereon Hubert furiously interposed:
“Lord Essex, I am none!”
And then I had to draw the cloak away from the corpse and exclaim:
“Who killed this Prince?”
And thereupon a debate arose. Should the words be spoken before
the removal of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the
uttering of the line? Should word and action be simultaneous? The
point was discussed with the utmost earnestness, as a matter of
vital importance, and I, feeling that I was in mighty deep waters,
suggested in all humility that I should speak the words with an
indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled,
and remove the cloak and discover the body of the Prince. But this
started another subsidiary debate, and the rehearsal breaking off at
this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney (Faulconbridge) were
left on the Stratford stage, walking up and down, and wondering,
in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of
possibility and stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak
away. Their faces were grave, earnest and perplexed. Outside in the
sunshine by the Avon I encountered “Pa.” He looked at me with a
certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on my
part, and said:
“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”
“Indeed, sir,” I replied, “I don’t venture to have any opinion.”
And I meant what I said, for I didn’t think then, and I don’t think
now, that it befits the entered apprentice to express his opinion, or
presume to have any opinion, in the presence of past masters.
Now it may be thought that I am “guying” the Company methods in this
matter of Prince Arthur’s funeral cloak. I am not doing anything
of the sort. I only wish I had gone on in the craft, and were now
myself entitled to walk up and down the stage, debating just such
a point. The matter in itself was, no doubt, small enough: a stage
management in a hurry would have given a ruling and the scene would
have proceeded; but under a stage-management in a hurry what would
have become of the vivid interest taken in the smallest circumstance
of the play by the whole company, from F. R. Benson downward?
And, by the way, I trust I am not giving the impression that the
Bensonians of that day were a body of solemn pedants? I have not
yet forgotten my admiration, my almost awestruck admiration, at
seeing the manner in which the man who was to play King John drank
home-brewed ale in a triangular parlour of the Windmill on the
afternoon before the production. He drank in the manner of the
ancient heroes, and he gave a very good performance at night.
But the Stratford Festival drew to its dose. On the last Saturday
we were rehearsing in the morning, playing in the afternoon and
playing again in the evening. Some time in the course of the day I
was told that I was to play Nym in the “Merry Wives” on Monday night
at Worcester. I bought the play and looked at the part and got the
cuts from the Prompt Book--and I wonder why I didn’t drown myself in
the Avon after the show as the easiest way out of the difficulty;
and if anyone wants to know why, let him read the part of Nym in
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how he would like to
learn that queer gibberish and learn how to play it in a couple
of days, he having had three months’ experience of the stage. But
instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I ... refreshed myself at a
famous tavern of the town together with about half the company; and I
think we heard the chimes at two o’clock in the morning, and it was
reported that old George Weir, on being asked “to write something” in
the hostess’s book had written the words: “When my cue comes call me
and I will answeir.”