I DO not know that at any time Hastings is a very lively place. The
houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with
its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on Sundays, and its seats
upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of Puritans and invalids
than of pleasure. If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order
of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant
shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists
with vacant faces of dead men. But when in late March the day has
squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness
of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore,
creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter
with salt, a man might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the
extreme cruelty of Nature, the timid injustice of man.
Being of Anglo-Saxon blood, I did not give definite expression to the
melancholy which the quenched seascape had invoked. I contented myself
with leaning on the rail, and sneering at the art of the cripple who had
made mathematically exact scratchings of Windsor Castle and the Eddystone
Lighthouse on the sand. There was something almost humorously
impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping
for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey. How could
a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the
blank face of the earth for coppers? His one foot was bare so that his
Silver-like activities might not spoil his pictures, and when he was not
hopping he shivered miserably. As I saw him at the moment he stood very
well for humanity—sordid, grotesque, greedy of mean things, twisted and
bruised by the pitiless hand of Nature.
And then in a flash there happened one of those miracles which rebuke us
when we lack faith. Through the shadows which were not grey but purple
there burst a swarm of children running on light feet across the sands.
They chased each other hither and thither, stooped to gather shells and
seaweed, and inspected the works of the cripple with outspoken
admiration. Regarding my mournful and terrible world in detail, they
found it beautiful with pink shells and tangled seaweed and the gallant
efforts of men. So far from being terrified or humiliated by the sombre
wastes of sand and sky, they made of the one a playing-ground, and woke
the other with echoes of their shrill laughter. Perhaps they found that
the sea was rather larger than the Serpentine, perhaps they thought that
the sands were not so well lit as Kingsway; but, after all, they were
making holiday, and at such a time things are different. They laughed at
space.
For these were London children, and all the resources of civilisation had
not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose
with age. The stars are small and of little importance, and even the sun
is not much larger than a brandy-ball. But a golden pebble by the
seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is
certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely. We
may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who
would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power
to appreciate it? So it was that I had found the world wide and ugly and
terrible, lacking the Aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the
children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the
search exciting. They flitted about the beach like eager moths.
Yet on these children Civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning,
with her most recent resource. For they were little actors and actresses
from Drury Lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the
world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in
the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints.
Nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-belief of the theatre
and the intoxicating applause, they ran down to the sea to find the
diamonds and pearls that alone are real. If this is not wisdom I know
not where wisdom lies, and, watching them, I could have laughed aloud at
the thought of the critics who have told me that the life of the stage
makes children unnatural. There are many wise and just people who do not
like to see children acting, forgetting perhaps that mimicry is the
keynote of all child’s play, and that nothing but this instinct leads
babies to walk upright and to speak with their tongues. Whether they are
on the stage or not, children are always borrowing the words and emotions
of other people, and it is a part of the charm of childhood that through
this mask of tricks and phrases the real child peeps always into the eyes
and hearts of the elect.
And this is why I know nothing more delightful than the spectacle of a
score of children playing at life on the stage. They may have been
taught how to speak and how to stand, and what to do with their hands;
they may know how to take a prompt, and realise the importance of
dressing the stage; every trick and mannerism of the grown-up actor or
actress may be theirs; yet, through their playing there will sound the
voice of childhood, imaginative, adventurous, insistent, and every
performance will supply them with materials for a new game. So it was
with these children, whose sudden coming had strewn the melancholy beach
with pearls. I had seen them in the dimness of a ballet-room under Drury
Lane Theatre; now, with a coin, I bought the right to see them on a stage
built with cynical impertinence in the midst of the intolerant sea. The
play, indeed, was the same, and the players, but the game was different.
The little breaks and falterings which the author had not designed, the
only half-suppressed laughings which were not in the prompt-copy, bore no
relationship, one might suppose, to the moral adventures of Mother Goose.
But far across the hills the spring was breaking the buds on the lilac,
and far along the shore the sea was casting its jewels, and even there in
the theatre I could see the children standing on tiptoe to pick lilac,
and stooping on the sands to gather pearls. They did not see that they
were in a place of lank ropes and unsmoothed boards soiled with the dust
of forgotten pageants and rendered hideous by the glare of electric
lights; and they were right. For in their eyes there shone only that
place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they
tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To
the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our
actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative,
and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. The game is with the children.
And truly they play it for what it is worth, and they are wise enough to
know that it is worth all things, alike on the boards of the theatre and
on the wider, but hardly less artificial, stage of civilised life. We
who are older tremble between our desire for applause and our
unconquerable dread of the angers of the critical gods and the gaping
pit, and it is for this reason that every bitter-wise adult knows himself
to be little better than a super, a unit of a half-intelligent chorus,
who may hope at best to echo with partial accuracy the songs and careless
laughters of the divine players. There is something pathetic in the
business; for we, too, were once stars, and thought, finely enough, to
hold the heavens for ever with our dreams. But now we are glad if the
limelight shines by accident for a moment on our faces, or if the
stage-manager gives us but one individual line. We feel, for all the sad
fragrance of our old programmes and newspaper-cuttings, that it is a
privilege to play a part in the pageant at all. The game is with the
children; but if we are wise, there is still somewhere at the back of the
stage a place where each one of us can breathe the atmosphere of
enchantment and dream the old dreams. No Arcadia is ever wholly lost.