ON A COMIC GENIUS
"Like to see Harry Lauder? Of course I should like to see Harry Lauder. But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have, as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do you realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls, buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to – "
"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed £52,000 to the War Loan. In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan. You are making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him and he passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a patriotic duty to go and see Harry Lauder."
I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went. It was a poor setting for the great man – one of those dismal things called revues, that are neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry without these accompaniments. I like him to have the stage to himself. I like Miss Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about. I do not want anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time with his foot and humming the melody.
And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed by any intrusive and alien note. And it is this faculty of creating a state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the extraordinary influence he exercises over his public. If you are susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike anything else on the stage or in life. Like Bottom, you are translated. Your defences are carried by storm, your severities disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other boys to the piping of the magician. The burden has fallen off your back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the sunshine.
This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the professional sense. It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is not an actor at all. Contrast him with the other great figure of the music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will understand what I mean. Chevalier is never himself, but always somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real – an incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch." With his great powers of observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type. He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to you. If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.
But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage. You do not want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself. It doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often you have seen him do it. In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it the better you like it. His jokes may be old, but they are never stale. They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and old port that grow better with age. His songs may be simple and threadbare. You don't care. You just want him to go on singing them, singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring." You want to see him walk, you want to see him skip – oh, the incomparable drollery of that demure little step! – you want to hear him talk, you want to hear him laugh. In short, you just want him to be there doing anything he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.
He has art, of course – great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a genial satire. And his figure and his face add to his equipment. His walk is priceless. His legs – oh, who shall describe those legs, those exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive? Clothed in his kilt and his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical, droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery. Your first impulse is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with him. You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for his laugh is irresistible. It is so friendly and companionable, so full of intimacies, so open and sunny.
He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his pockets and tells you the history of the contents, or gossips of the ways of sailors, and you gather round like children at a fair. The sense of the theatre has vanished. You are not listening to an actor, but to an old friend who is getting nearer and nearer to you all the time, until he seems to have got you by the button and to be telling his drolleries to you personally and chuckling in your own private ear. There is nothing comparable to this intimacy between the man and his audience. It is the triumph of a personality, so expansive, so rich in the humanities, so near to the general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort of spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all-pervasive.
But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the spell. If so, be not scornful of us who have. Be sorry for yourself. Believe me, you have missed one of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world.
ON A VANISHED GARDEN
I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road the other evening, talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked: "What is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome of the war?"
"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," I replied. "Come this way and I'll show it to you."
He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I turned from the road and led him through the gorse and the trees towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures, men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches and looking at the fruits of their labour springing from the soil. "There," I said, "is the most important result of the war."
He laughed, but not contemptuously. He knew what I meant, and I think he more than half agreed.
And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider what that stretch of allotments means. It is the symptom of the most important revival, the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations. Wherever you go that symptom meets you. Here in Hampstead allotments are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn. A friend of mine who lives in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish. In the neighbourhood of London there must be many thousands. In the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands. If dear old Joseph Pels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening, see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and potato patches, what joy would be his! He was the forerunner of the revival, the passionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened the sleeper.
Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can be measured in terms of food. That is important, but it is not the most important thing. The allotment movement will add appreciably to our food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual resources of the nation. It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is blighting our people. What is wrong with us? What is the root of our social and spiritual ailment? Is it not the divorce of the people from the soil? For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has been sucked into the great towns, and we have seen grow up a vast machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the streets. Can you walk through a London working-class district or a Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous perversion of life into the arid channels of death? Can you take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?
And now the sun is going to rise. We have started a revolution that will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of the people. The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. The dead hand is going to be lifted from the land. Yes, you say, but these people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and so on. That is true. But the movement must get hold of the intelligenzia first. The important thing is that the breach in the prison is made: the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born – not still-born, but born a living thing. It is a way of salvation that will not be lost, and that all will traverse.
This is not mere dithyrambic enthusiasm. Take a man out of the street and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him. I have seen the miracle again and again. I know a bus conductor, for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind. But one night I touched the key of his soul, mentioned allotments, and discovered that this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of his garden triumphs. He had got a new purpose in life. He had got the spirit of the earth in his bones. It is not only the humanising influence of the garden, it is its democratising influence too.
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?
You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss gardens. I know a distinguished public servant and scholar whose allotment is next to that of a bricklayer. They have become fast friends, and the bricklayer, being the better man at the job, has unconsciously assumed the role of a kindly master encouraging a well-meaning but not very competent pupil.
And think of the cleansing influence of all this. Light and air and labour – these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that ancient fable. Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of soul that is found in gardens. He must find his way back to Eden if he is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though Eden is but a twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a hundred other twenty-pole allotments, he will find it as full of wonder and refreshment as the garden of Epicurus. He will not find much help from the God that Mr. Wells has discovered, or invented, but the God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs – let the theologians say what they will.
Not God in gardens? When the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign —
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt the sign, or lose its impress through all his days. I know, for I was once a child whose world was a garden.
*****
It lay a mile away from the little country town, shut out from the road by a noble hedge, so high that even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver, the wonder and the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so thick that no eye could peer through. It was a garden of plenty, but also a garden of the fancy, with neglected corners, rich in tangled growths and full of romantic possibilities. It was in this wilder terrain that I had found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow-worm's delicate light, and here, with my brain excited by "The Story of the Hundred Days," that I knew the Frenchmen lurked in ambush while I at the head of my gallant troop of the Black Watch was careering with magnificent courage across the open country where the potatoes and the rhubarb and the celery grew.
It was ever the Black Watch. Something in the name thrilled me. And when one day I packed a little handbag with a nightgown and started out to the town where the railway station was, it was to Scotland I was bound and the Black Watch in which I meant to enlist. It occurred to me on the road that I needed money and I returned gravely and asked my mother for half a crown. She was a practical woman and brought me back to the prose of things with arguments suitable to a very youthful mind.
The side windows of the house commanded the whole length of the garden to where at the end stood the pump whence issued delicious ice-cold water brought up from a well so deep that you could imagine Australia to be not far from the bottom.
If only I could get to Australia! I knew it lay there under my feet with people walking along head downwards and kangaroos hopping about with their young in their pockets. It was merely a question of digging to get there. I chose a sequestered corner and worked all a summer morning with a heavy spade in the fury of this high emprise, but I only got the length of the spade on the journey and retired from the task with a sense of the bitter futility of life.
Never was there a garden more rich in fruit. Around the western wall of the house was trained a noble pear tree that flung its arms with engaging confidence right up to my bedroom window. They were hard pears that ripened only in keeping, and at Christmas melted rich and luscious in the mouth. They were kept locked up in the tool-shed, but love laughs at locksmiths, and my brother found it possible to remove the lock without unlocking it by tearing out the whole staple from its socket. My father was greatly puzzled by the tendency of the pears to diminish, but he was a kindly, unsuspecting man who made no disagreeable inquiries.
Over the tool-shed grew a grape vine. The roof of the shed was accessible by a filbert tree, the first of half a dozen that lined the garden on the side remote from the road. On sunny days there was no pleasanter place to lie than the top of the shed, with the grapes, small but pleasant to the thirsty palate, ripening thick around you. A point in favour of the spot was that it was visible from no window. One could lie there and eat the fruit without annoying interruptions.
Equally retired was the little grass-grown path that branched off from the central gravelled path which divided the vegetable from the fruit garden. Here, by stooping down, one was hidden from prying eyes that looked from the windows by the thick rows of gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes that lined the path. It was my favourite spot, for there grew a delicious gooseberry that I counted above all gooseberries, small and hairy and yellow, with a delicate flavour that is as vivid to-day as if the forty years that lie between now and then were but a day. By this path, too, grew the greengage trees. With caution, one could safely sample the fruit, and at the worst one was sure to find some windfalls among the strawberry beds beyond the gooseberry bushes.
I loved that little grass-grown path for its seclusion as well as for its fruit. Here, with "Monte Cristo" or "Hereward the Wake," or "The Yellow Frigate," or a drawing-board, one could forget the tyrannies of school and all the buffets of the world. Here was the place to take one's griefs. Here it was that I wept hot tears at the news of Landseer's death – Landseer, the god of my young idolatry, whose dogs and horses, deer and birds I knew line by line through delighted imitation. It seemed on that day as though the sun had gone out of the heavens, as though the pillars of the firmament had suddenly given way. Landseer dead! What then was the worth of living? But the wave of grief passed. I realised that the path was now clear before me. While Landseer lived I was cribbed, cabined, confined; but now – My eyes cleared as I surveyed the magnificent horizon opening out before me. I must have room to live with this revelation. The garden was too narrow for such limitless thoughts to breathe in. I stole from the gate that led to the road by the pump and sought the wide meadows and the riverside to look this vast business squarely in the face. And for days the great secret of my future that I carried with me made the burden of a dull, unappreciative world light. Little did those who treated me as an ordinary idle boy know. Little did my elder brother, who ruled me with a rod of iron, realise that one day, when I was knighted and my pictures hung thick on the Academy walls, he would regret his harsh treatment!
But to return to the garden. The egg-plum tree had no favour in my sight. Its position was too open and palpable. And indeed I cared not for the fruit. It was too large and fleshy for my taste. But the apple trees! These were the chief glory of the garden. Winter apple trees with fruit that ripened in secret; paysin trees with fruit that ripened on the branches, fruit small with rich crimson splashes on the dark green ground; hawthorndean trees with fruit, large, yellow-green, into which the teeth crunched with crisp and juicy joy. There was one hawthorndean most thoughtfully situated behind the tool-shed. And near by stood some props providentially placed there for domestic purposes. They were the keys with which I unlocked the treasure house.
A large quince tree grew on the other side of the hedge at the end of the garden. It threw its arms in a generous, neighbourly way over the hedge, and I knew its austere fruit well. Some of it came to me from its owner, an ancient man, "old Mr. Lake," who on summer days used to toss me largess from his abundance. The odour of a quince always brings back to me the memory of a sunny garden and a little old man over the hedge crying, "Here, my boy, catch!"
I have said nothing of that side of the garden where the vegetables grew. It was dull prose, relieved only by an occasional apple tree. The flowers in the fruit garden and by the paths were old-fashioned favourites, wallflowers and mignonette, stocks and roses. And over the garden gate grew a spreading lilac whose tassels the bold militiamen, who camped not far away, would gaily pluck as they passed on the bright May days. I did not resent it. I was proud that these brave fellows in their red coats should levy tribute on our garden. It seemed somehow to link me up with the romance of war. By the kitchen door grew an elderberry tree, whose heavy and unpleasant odour was borne for the sake of the coming winter nights, when around the fire we sat with our hot elderberry wine and dipped our toast into the rich, steaming product of that odorous tree – nights when the winter apples came out from the chest, no longer hard and sour, but mellow and luscious as a King William pear in August, and when out in the garden all was dark and mysterious, gaunt trees standing out against the sky, where in the far distance a thin luminance told of the vast city beneath.
I passed by the old road recently, and sought the garden of my childhood. I sought in vain. A big factory had come into the little town, and workmen's dwellings had sprung up in its train. Where the garden had been there was now a school, surrounded by cottages, and children played on the doorsteps or in the little back yards, which looked on to other little back yards and cottages beyond. My garden with its noble hedge and its solitude, its companionable trees and grass-grown paths, had vanished. It was the garden of a dream.