ON TAKING THE CALL
Jane came home from the theatre last night overflowing with an indignation that even the beauty of a ride on the top of a bus in the air of these divine summer nights had not cooled. It was not dissatisfaction with the play or the performance that made her boil with volcanic wrath. It was the vanity of the insufferable actor-manager, who would insist on "taking the call" all the time and every time. There were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed, but the more the audience called for them the more the preposterous "old-clo'" man of the stage came smirking before the curtain, rubbing his fat hands and creasing his fat cheeks. "It was disgusting," said Jane. "The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all night, and the audience were trying to level things up a bit by giving the interesting people a show, and this greedy cormorant snatched every crumb for himself. I hate him. He is a Hun."
The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard about another actor-manager. At the end of the play he went on the stage and found his company bending down in a circle and gazing intently at something on the floor. "What are you looking at?" he asked. "Oh," they chanted in chorus, "we're looking at a spot we've never seen before. It's the centre of the stage."
There are, of course, people who carry the centre of the stage with them. It does not matter where they go or what they play: they dominate the scene. "Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table," and where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage. He needed no placard to remind you that he was someone in particular. You would no more have thought of turning the limelight on to him than you would have thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or the sun at midday. He just appeared and everyone else became accessory to that commanding presence: he spoke and all other voices seemed like the chirping of sparrows.
And so in other spheres. Take the case of Mr. Asquith, for example, in relation to the House of Commons. It does not matter where he sits. He may go to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre of the stage will go with him. When he had sat down after delivering his first speech in opposition, one of the ablest observers in Parliament turned to me and said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of the House." And that exactly expressed the feeling created by that authoritative manner, that masculine voice, that air of high detachment from the mere squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game. He never seemed greater to the House than in the moment when he had fallen – never more its intellectual master, its most authentic voice, its wisest and most disinterested counsellor.
It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, who come sprinting before the curtain after drenching themselves in the limelight on the stage. They hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the applause. The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking the call" are quite another breed. You know the type, both on the stage and off. Take that eminent actor, Bluffington Phelps. He shambles about the stage, his words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances at the man with the limelight he is straining to catch the voice of the prompter at the flies. But when it comes to "taking the call" there is not his superior on the stage. He monopolises the applause as he monopolises the limelight; and by these artifices he has persuaded the public that he is an actor. It is a glorious joke —
Hood an ass in reverend purple,
So that you hide his too ambitious ears,
And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some of the people all the time. Mr. Bluffington Phelps knows that it is true. He knows that there is a large part of the public, possibly the majority of the public, which is born to be fooled, which will believe anything because it hasn't the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd and which will always follow the ass with the longest ears and the loudest bray.
It is the same off the stage. The art of politics is the art of "taking the call." Harley knew the trick perfectly. Where anything was to be got, it was said of him, he always knew how to wriggle himself in; when any misfortune threatened he knew how to wriggle himself out. He took the cheers and passed the kicks on to his colleagues. His chivalrous spirit is not dead. It is familiar in every country, but most of all in democratic countries. We all know the type of politician who has the true genius for the limelight. If the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is miserable. "What has happened to the publicity department? Has the fellow in charge of the limelight gone to sleep? Wake him up. Don't let the public forget me. If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em that my hat is two sizes larger than it was a year ago. Tell 'em about my famous smile. Tell 'em about my dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable piety. Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every morning and never leave it until half-past seven the next morning. Tell 'em anything you like – only tell 'em."
If things go right, and there is applause in the house, he skips in front of the curtain to take the call. "Thank you, gentlemen – and ladies. Thank you. Yes, alone I did it. Nobody else in the company had a hand in it – nor a finger. No, not a finger." If anything goes wrong and the audience hiss, does he shirk the ordeal? Not at all. He comes before the curtain with indignant sorrow. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I agree with you. Most scandalous failure. It was all Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's. I went down on my bended knees to them, but they wouldn't listen to me – wouldn't listen. And now you see what's happened. Hear the anguish in my voice. Look at the tears in my broken-hearted eyes. Oh, the pity of it, ladies and gentlemen – the pity of it. And I tried so hard – I really did. But they wouldn't listen – they wouldn't l-l-listen." (Breaks down in sobs.)
I recall a legend that seems apposite. A certain politician of antiquity – let us all call him Eurysthenes – hit on a happy idea for making himself famous. He bought a lot of parrots and taught them to shriek "Great is Eurysthenes!" Then he turned them all out into the woods, and there they sat and squawked "Great is Eurysthenes!" And the Athenians, astonished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried, "Great is Eurysthenes." And Eurysthenes, who was waiting in the flies, so to speak, took the call and was famous ever after.
A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG
Chum, roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking at the universe in general and at the cows in the paddock beyond the orchard in particular. Occasionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but he soon tires of this diversion and resumes his loud-voiced demand to share in the good things that are going. For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting over the valley, and the woods are calling him to unknown adventures. They shall not call in vain. Work shall be suspended and this morning shall be dedicated to his service. For this is the day of deliverance. The word is spoken and the shadow of the sword is lifted. The battle for his biscuit is won.
He does not know what a narrow shave he has had. He does not know that for weeks past he has been under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a luxury that this savage world of men could no longer afford; that having taken away his bones we were about to take away his biscuits and leave his cheerful companionship a memory of the dream world we lived in before the Great Killing began. All this he does not know. That is one of the numerous advantages of being a dog. He knows nothing of the infamies of men or of the incertitudes of life. He does not look before and after and pine for what is not. He has no yesterday and no to-morrow – only the happy or the unhappy present. He does not, as Whitman says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or lamenting his past or worrying about his future. His bereavements do not disturb him and he doesn't care twopence about his career. He has no debts and hungers for no honours. He would rather have a bone than a baronetcy. He does not turn over old albums, with their pictured records of forgotten holidays and happy scenes and yearn for the "tender grace of a day that is dead," or wonder whether he will keep his job and what will become of his "poor old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he doesn't, or speculate whether the war will end this year, next year, some time, or never. He doesn't even know there is a war. Think of it! He doesn't know there is a war. O happy dog! Give him a bone, a biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, and his cup of joy is full. Would that my needs were as few and as easily satisfied.
And now his biscuit is safe and I have the rare privilege of rejoicing with Sir Frederick Banbury. I do not know that I should go as far as he seems to go, for in that touching little speech of his at the Cannon Street Hotel he indicated that nothing in the heavens above or in the earth beneath should stand between him and his dogs. "In August, 1914," he said, "my son went to France. The night before he left he said, 'Father, look after my dogs and horses while I am away.' I said, 'Don't you worry about them.' He was killed in December, and I have got the horses and dogs now. As I said to Mr. Bonar Law last year, I should like to see the man who would tell me I have not to look after my son's dogs and horses." Well, I suppose that if the choice were between a German victory and a dog biscuit, the dog biscuit would have to go, Sir Frederick. But I rejoice with you that we have not to make the choice. I rejoice that the sentence of death has passed from your dead son's horses and dogs and from that noble creature under the cherry tree.
Look at him, barking now at the cows, now with eloquent appeal at me, and then, having caught my eye, turning sportively to worry the hated rope. He knows that my intentions this morning are honourable. I think he feels that, in spite of appearances, I am in that humour in which at any radiant moment the magic word "Walk" may leap from my lips. What a word that is! No sleep so sound that it will not penetrate its depths and bring him, passionately awake, to his feet. He would sacrifice the whole dictionary for that one electric syllable. That and its brother "Bones." Give him these good, sound, sensible words, and all the fancies of the poets and all the rhetoric of the statesmen may whistle down the winds. He has no use for them. "Walk" and "Bones" – that is the speech a fellow can understand.
Yes, Chum knows very well that I am thinking about him and thinking about him in an uncommonly friendly way. That is the secret of the strange intimacy between us. We may love other animals, and other animals may respond to our affection. But the dog is the only animal who has a reciprocal intelligence. As Coleridge says, he is the only animal that looks upward to man, strains to catch his meanings, hungers for his approval. Stroke a cat or a horse, and it will have a physical pleasure; but pat Chum and call him "Good dog!" and he has a spiritual pleasure. He feels good. He is pleased because you are pleased. His tail, his eyebrows, every part of him, proclaim that "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," and that he himself is on the side of the angels.
And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he has the sense of sin. A cat may be taught not to do certain things, but if it is caught out and flees, it flees not from shame, but from fear. But the shame of a dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any human emotion. He has fallen out of the state of grace, and nothing but the absolution and remission of his sin will restore him to happiness. By his association with man he seems to have caught something of his capacity for spiritual misery. I had an Airedale once who had moods of despondency as abysmal as my own. He was as sentimental as any minor poet, and at the sound of certain tunes on the piano he would break into paroxysms of grief, whining and moaning as if in one moment of concentrated anguish he recalled every bereavement he had endured, every bone he had lost, every stone heaved at him by his hated enemy, the butcher's boy. Indeed, there are times when the dog approximates so close to our intelligence that he seems to be of us, a sort of humble relation of ourselves, with our elementary feelings but not our gift of expression, our joy but not our laughter, our misery but not our tears, our thoughts but not our speech. To sentence him to death would be almost like homicide, and the day of his reprieve should be celebrated as a festival…
Come, old friend. Let us away to the woods. "Walk" …
ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND
I was walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago and had a singular impression of a cheerful world. The Strand is to me always the most attractive street I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light glints and dances in the eyes of the crowd moving westward. Then it is that I seem to see the wayfarers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pursuit of some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am almost persuaded to turn round and catch with them the flash of vision that gleams in their eyes. But the thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual gaiety of the people. It seemed to me that I had never seen such a procession of laughing, happy faces. Probably it was due to the fact that it was about the time when the afternoon theatres were emptying. Probably also the impression on my mind was all the sharper because it was a day of depressing tidings – bad news from Russia, from Italy, from everywhere. I did not suppose that these merry people were ignorant of the news or indifferent to it. They were simply obeying the impulse of healthy minds and good digestions to be cheerful —quand même.
And as I passed along I wondered whether, in spite of all the tragedy in which our life is cast, our fund of personal happiness is undiminished. Do we come into the world with a certain capacity for pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our external circumstances may be? Johnson took that view and expressed it in the familiar lines incorporated in Goldsmith's "Traveller" – the only lines of Johnson's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort of immortality:
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consigned
Our own felicity we make or find.
In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse. Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform. And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation to the conditions in which we live.
It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by exploiting others. And like most falsities there is a sense in which it is true. The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and probably experiences as much animal happiness – assuming it is sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm – as the boy in the Eton playing-fields. It is a mercy it is so. It is a mercy that we have this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and bitter blows of outward circumstance. But he who advances this fact as a political argument is not a wise man. Is the quality of happiness nothing? Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the infinite fields of the mind's adventures? Is it nothing to society? We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.
But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects, there is much truth in Johnson's lines. Happiness is an entirely personal affair. We have it in large measure or in small, but in so far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of fortune. I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of happiness. If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction. I hope it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less to-day than in normal times.
I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most "interesting" period of the world's history. There was an indignant protest against the word from another member of the company; but the author insisted. Yes, interesting. Could not tragedy be interesting as well as comedy? Could not one feel all the horror and misery and insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and pronounce it – yes, interesting? His own record of unselfish service during the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and ordered world were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.
And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough. There has never been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we are living. It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe, and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships. I can fancy that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has overtaken us. In a sense they will be right. In another sense they will be wrong. We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our dreams. The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to plunge us individually in despair. But it doesn't. Individually we seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, snatch our pleasures with a sharpened appetite, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the lightnings that stab the tortured earth.
As I look up I see the buses passing and read the announcements on the knife-boards. You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in the most light-hearted of worlds. There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to "Zig-Zag." These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with which England amused itself in the time of the tempest. And do not forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy. Perhaps without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled renown. For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties – a violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of things even. The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its equilibrium throughout.
We are seen both at our best and our worst – stripped naked as it were to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both. Our nerve-ends are bare, and our reactions to circumstance are violent and irrational. We are at once more generous and more bitter. We are the sport even of the weather. If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush of our winter nights. I could not help associating with the procession of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I witnessed in a bus the other night. It seemed the reverse side of the same shield. A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of the darkness and the sleet. They were both rather large, and there was not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to waste on anybody. You know the sort of people. If you don't get out of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you. They do not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?" That would be a sign of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness, except in other people. They expect it in other people.
"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.
"Victoria," said the man with a snap.
"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.
"I've told you six times," snapped the man.
"What a bully you are," retorted the woman. Then they subsided into silence. Husband and wife, I thought – bursting with bad temper to such an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people. Probably they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.
But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust. They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the gloom of the London night in their souls. Most of us get it in our souls more or less. It makes us ill-humoured and depressed. In the early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so beautiful before. They even wrote poems about it. When you blundered into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating. But three winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make it a debauch of another kind.
But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves and our tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on each other. The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore. We have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed. Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the other day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers. When Mars is abroad Venus must be abroad, too. Murder is the sole business of the world and lust is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any bookstall and note the garbage which lines its shelves. Dip into the morass of the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable tragedy.
It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity always reveals these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the background of a city perishing of plague. We live at once more intensely and more frivolously. The pendulum of our emotions swings violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers the mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that that couple in the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and read that Vimy Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys' Diary, a delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise. It is the 10th of September (Lord's Day), 1665. The plague is at its worst and the whole city seems doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. Mrs. Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black. But there comes news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich —
– where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the grave John Evelyn having this gaiety in him! You will read the whole of his Diary and not get one smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity to turn to his own record of the same time. He has no entry for the 10th, but two days before, he says:
Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however, I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's, a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest evening of his life. And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the surface. There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage in that great and moving book "Under Fire" – the most tremendous picture of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man. One of the squad of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is before the English had taken over that part of the line. There is a quiet time and some of the men get on companionable terms with the enemy. This man's wife and child are in Lens, just behind the German lines. He has not seen them for eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into Lens. He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a comrade sitting at their work. In the room with them are two German non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife is smiling as she talks to the non-coms. – "Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave." He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words of extraordinary beauty:
"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat. It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's all. It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there is to it."
In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter. We live. And, living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that we can be happy and may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our natures. We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become mad. We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There was a good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that "Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood." The wild current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of events. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event. She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little callously. And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits of the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this faculty of detachment and independent life. If there were no private relief for this public tragedy the world would have gone mad. But perhaps you will say it has gone mad…