CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

Atheist Friswell has been wondering where he saw a mount like mine crowned with just such a structure, and he has at last shepherded his wandering memory to the place. I ventured to suggest the possibilities of the island Scios, and Jack Heywood, the painter, who, though our neighbour, still remains our friend, makes some noncompromising remark about Milos “where the statues come from.”

“I think you'll find the place in a picture-book called Beauty Spots in Greece” remarked Mrs. Friswell. Dorothy is under the impression that Friswell's researches in the classical lore of one Lemprière is accountable for his notion that there is, or was, at one time in the world a Temple with some resemblance to the one in which we were sitting when he began to wonder.

“Very likely,” said he, with a brutal laugh. “The temples on the hills were sometimes dedicated to the sun—Helios, you know.”

Of course we all knew, or pretended that we knew.

“And what did your artful Christians do when they came upon such a fane?” he inquired.

“Pulled it down, I suppose; the early artful Christians had no more sense of architectural or antiquarian beauty than the modern exponents of the cult,” said Heywood.

“They were too artful for that, those early Christian propagandists,” said Friswell. “No, they turned to the noble Greek worshippers whom they were anxious to convert, and cried, dropping their aspirates after the manner of the moderns, 'dedicated to Elias, is it?' Quite so—-Saint Elias—he is one of our saints. That is how it comes that so many churches on hills in the Near East have for their patron Saint Elias. Who was he, I should like to know.”

“I would do my best to withhold the knowledge from you,” said Dorothy. “But was there ever really such a saint? There was a prophet, of course, but that's not just the same.”

“I should think not,” said Friswell. “The old prophets were the grandest characters of which there is a record—your saints are white trash alongside them—half-breeds. They only came into existence because of the craving of humanity for pluralities of worship. The Church has found in her saints the equivalents to the whole Roman theology.”

“Mythology,” said I correctively.

“There's no difference between the words,” he replied.

“Oh, yes, my dear, there is,” said his wife. “There is the same difference between theology and mythology as there is between convert and pervert.”

“Exactly the same difference,” he cried. “Exactly, but no greater. Christian hagiology—what a horrid word!—is on all-fours with Roman mythology. The women who used to lay flowers in the Temple of Diana bring their lilies into the chapel of the Madonna. There are chapels for all the saints, for they have endowed their saints with the powers attributed to their numerous deities by the Greeks and the Romans. There are enough saints to go round—-to meet all the requirements of the most freakish and exacting of district visitors. But the Jewish prophets were very different from the mystical and mythical saints. They lived, and you feel when you get in touch with them that you are on a higher plane altogether.”

“Have you found out where you saw that Temple on the mound over there, and if you have, let us know the name of the god or the goddess or saint or saintess that it was dedicated to, and I'll try to pick up a Britannia metal figure cheap to put in the grove alongside the Greek vase,” said I.

He seemed in labour of thought: no one spoke for fear of interrupting the course of nature.

“Let me think,” he muttered. “I don't see why the mischief I should associate a Greek Temple with Oxford Street, but I do—that particular Temple of yours.”

“If you were a really religious business man you might be led to think of the City Temple, only it doesn't belong to the Greek Church,” remarked Heywood.

“Let me help you,” said the Atheist's wife; “think of Truslove and Hanson, the booksellers. Did Arthur Rackham ever put a Temple into one of his picture-books?”

“After all, you may have gone on to Holborn—Were you in Batsford's?” suggested Dorothy.

“Don't bother about him,” said I. “What does it matter if he did once see something like our Temple; he'll never see anything like it again, unless——”

“It may have been Buszards'—a masterpiece of Buszards,—pure confectioners' Greek architecture—icing veined to look like marble,” said Dorothy.

“I have it—-I knew I could worry it out if you gave me time,” cried Friswell.

“Which we did,” said I. “Well, whisper it gently in our ears.”

“It was in a scene in a play at the Princess's Theatre,” he cried triumphantly. “Yes, 1 recollect it distinctly—something just like your masterpiece, only more slavishly Greek—the scene was laid in Rome, so they would be sure to have it correct.”

“What play was it?” Dorothy asked.

“Oh, now you're asking too much,” he replied. “Who could remember the name of a play after thirty or forty years? All that I remember is that it was a thoroughly bad play with a Temple like yours in it. It was the fading of the light that brought it within the tentacles of my memory.”

“So like a man—to blame the dusk,” said his wife.

“The twilight is the time for a garden—the summer twilight, like this,” said Mr. Heywood.

“The moonless midnight is the time for some gardens,” said Dorothy, who is fastidious in many matters, though she did marry me.

“The time for a garden was decided a long time ago,” said I—“as long ago as the third chapter of Genesis and the eighth verse: 'They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day.'”

“You say that with a last-word air—as much as to say 'what's good enough for God is good enough for me,'” laughed Friswell.

“I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day,” said Mrs. Friswell gently.

“There are some people who would fail to hear it at any time,” said I, pointedly referring to Friswell. He gave a laugh. “What are you guffawing at?” I cried with some asperity I trust.

“Not at your Congregational platitudes,” he replied. “I was led to smile when I remembered how the colloquial Bible which was compiled by a Scotsman, treated that beautiful passage. He paraphrased it, 'The Lord went oot in the gloamin' to hae a crack wi' Adam ower the garden gate.'”

“I don't suppose he was thought irreverent,” said Dorothy. “He wasn't really, you know.”

“To take a step or two in the other direction,” said Mrs. Friswell; “I wonder if Milton had in his mind any of the Italian gardens he must have visited on his travels when he described the Garden of Eden.”

“There's not much of an Italian garden in Milton's Eden,” said Dorothy, who is something of an authority on these points. “But it is certainly an Italian twilight that he describes in one place. Poor Milton! he must have been living for many years in a perpetual twilight before 't darkened into his perpetual night.”

“You notice the influence of the hour,” said Heywood. “We have fallen into a twilight-shaded vale of converse. This is the hour when people talk in whispers in gardens like these.”

“I dare say we have all done so in our time,” remarked some one with a sentimental sigh that she tried in vain to smother.

“Ah, God knew what He was about when He put a man and a woman into a garden alone, and gave them an admonition,” said Friswell. “By the way, one of the most remarkable bits of testimony to the scientific accuracy of the Book of Genesis, seems to me to be the discovery, after many years of conjecture and vague theorising, that man and woman were originally one, so that the story of the formation of Eve by separating from Adam a portion of his body is scientifically true. I don't suppose that any of you good orthodox folk will take that in; but it is a fact all the same.”

“I will believe anything except a scientific fact,” said Dorothy.

“And I will believe nothing else,” said Friswell. “The history of mankind begins with the creation of Eve—the separation of the two-sexed animal into two—meant a new world, a world worth writing about—a world of love.”

“Listen to him—there's the effect of twilight in a Garden of Peace for you,” said I. “Science and the Book of Genesis, hitherto at enmity, are at last reconciled by Atheist Friswell. What a triumph! What a pity that Milton, who made his Archangel visit Adam and his bride and give them a scientific lecture, did not live to learn all this!”

“He would have given us a Nonconformist account of it,” said Mrs. Friswell. “I wonder how much his Archangel would have known if Milton had not first visited Charles Deodati.”

There was much more to be said in the twilight on the subject of the world of love—a world which seems the beginning of a new world to those who love; and that was possibly why silence fell upon us and was only broken by the calling of a thrush from among the rhododendrons and the tapping of the rim of Heywood's empty pipe-bowl on the heel of his shoe. There was so much to be said, if we were the people to say it, on the subject of the new Earth which your lover knows to be the old Heaven, that, being aware of the inadequacy of human speech, we were silent for a long space.

And when we began to talk again it was only to hark back from Nature to the theatre, and, a further decadence still—the Gardens of the Stage.

The most effective garden scene in my recollection is that in which Irving and Ellen Terry acted when playing Wills' exquisite adaptation of King Renê's Daughter, which he called Iolanthe. I think it was Harker who painted it. The garden was outside a mediaeval castle, and the way its position on the summit of a hill was suggested was an admirable bit of stagecraft. Among the serried lines of pines there was at first seen the faint pink of a sunset, and this gradually became a glowing crimson which faded away into the rich blue of an Italian twilight. But there was enough light to glint here and there upon the armour of the men-at-arms who moved about among the trees.

The parterre in the foreground was full of red roses, and I remember that Mr. Ruskin, after seeing the piece and commenting upon the mise-en-scène, said that in such a light as was on it, the roses of the garden would have seemed black!

This one-act play was brought on by Irving during the latter months of the great run of The Merchant of Venice. It showed in how true a spirit of loyalty to Shakespeare the last act, which, in nearly all representations of the play, is omitted, on the assumption that with the disappearance of Shylock there is no further element of interest in the piece, was retained by the great manager. It was retained only for the first few months, and it was delightfully played. The moonlit garden in which the incomparable lines of the poet were spoken was of the true Italian type, though there is nothing in the text of what is called “local colour.”

Juliet's garden on the same stage was not so definitely Italian as it might have been. But I happen to know who were Irving's advisers. Among them were two of the most popular of English painters, and if they had had their own way Romeo would have been allowed no chance: he would have been hidden by the clumps of yew, and juniper, and oleander, and ilex, and pomegranate. A good many people who were present during the run of Romeo and Juliet were very much of the opinion that if this had taken place it would have been to the advantage of all concerned. Mr. Irving, as he was then, was not the ideal Romeo of the English playgoer. But neither was the original Romeo, who was, like the original Paolo, a man of something over forty.

I have never seen it pointed out that a Romeo of forty would be quite consistent with the Capulet tradition, for Juliet's father in the play was quite an elderly man, whereas the mother was a young woman of twenty-eight. As for Juliet's age, it is usually made the subject of a note of comment to the effect that in the warm south a girl matures so rapidly that she is marriageable at Juliet's age of thirteen, whereas in the colder clime of England it would be ridiculous to talk of one marrying at such an age.

There can be no doubt that in these less spacious days the idea of a bride of thirteen would not commend itself to parents or guardians, but in the sixteenth century, twelve or thirteen was regarded as the right age for the marriage of a girl. If she reached her sixteenth birthday remaining single, she was ready to join in the wail of Jephtha's Daughter. In a recently published letter written by Queen Elizabeth, who, by the way, although fully qualified to take part in that chorale, seemed to find a series of diplomatic flirtations to be more satisfying than matrimony, she submitted the names of three heiresses as ripe for marriage, and none of them had passed the age of thirteen. The Reverend John Knox made his third matrimonial venture with a child of fifteen. Indeed, one has only to search the records of any family of the sixteenth or seventeenth century to be made aware of the fact that Shakespeare's Juliet was not an exceptionally youthful bride. In Tenbury Church there is a memorial of “Ioyse, d. of Thos. Actone of Sutton, Esquire.” She was the wife of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom she married at the age of twelve. If any actor, however, were to appear as a forty-two year Romeo and with a Juliet of thirteen, and a lady-mother of twenty-eight, he would be optimistic indeed if he should hope for a long run for his venture.

Of course with the boy Juliets of the Globe Theatre, the younger they were the better chance they would have of carrying conviction with them. A Juliet with a valanced cheek would not be nice, even though she were “nearer heaven by the attitude of a chopine” than one whose face was smooth.

I think that Irving looked his full age when he took it upon him to play Romeo; but to my mind he made a more romantic figure than most Romeos whom I have seen. But every one who joined in criticising the representation seemed unable to see more of him than his legs, and these were certainly fantastic. I maintained that such people began at the wrong end of the actor: they should have begun at the head. And this was the hope of Irving himself. He had the intellect, and I thought his legs extremely intellectual.

I wonder he did not do some padding to bring his calves into the market, and make—as he would have done—a handsome profit out of the play. In the old days of the Bateman Management of the Lyceum, he was never permitted to ignore the possibilities of making up for deficiencies of Nature. In the estimation of the majority of theatre-goers, the intellect of an actor will never make up for any neglect of the adventitious aid of “make-up.” When Eugene Aram was to be produced, it was thought advisable to do some padding to make Irving presentable. There was a clever expert at this form of expansion connected with the theatre; he was an Italian and, speaking no English, he was forced into an experiment in explanation in his own language. He wished to enforce the need for a solid shape to fit the body, rather than a patchwork of padding. In doing so he had to made constant use of the word corpo, and as none of his hearers understood Italian, they thought that he was giving a name to the contrivance he had in his mind; so when the thing passed out of the mental stage into the actor's dressing-room, it was alluded to as the corpo. The name seemed a happy one and it had a certain philological justification; for several people, including the dresser, thought that corpo was a contraction for corporation, and in the slang of the day, that meant an expansion of the chest a little lower down.

Mrs. Bateman, with whom and with whose family I was intimate, told me this long after the event, and, curiously enough, it arose out of a conversation going on among some visitors to the house in Ensleigh Street where Mrs. Bateman and her daughters were living. I said I thought the most expressive line ever written was that in the Inferno which ended the exquisite Francesca episode:—

“E caddi come un corpo morto cade.”

Mrs. Bateman and her daughter Kate (Mrs. Crowe) looked at each other and smiled. I thought that they had probably had the line quoted to them ad nauseam, and I said so.

“That is not what we were smiling at,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It was at the recollection of the word corpo.”

And then she told me the foregoing.

Only a short time afterwards in the same house she gave me a bit of information of a much more interesting sort.

I had been at the first performance of Wills' play Ninon at the Adelphi theatre, and was praising the acting of Miss Wallis and Mr. Fernandez. When I was describing one scene, Mrs. Bateman said,—

“I recollect that scene very well; Mr. Wills read that play to us when he was writing Charles I.; but there was no part in it strong enough for Mr. Irving, He heard it read, however, and was greatly taken with some lines in it—so greatly in fact that Mr. Wills found a place for them in Charles I. They are the lines of the King's upbraiding of the Scotch traitor, beginning, 'I saw a picture of a Judas once.' Some people thought them among the finest in the play.”

I said that I was certainly among them.

That was how they made up a play which is certainly one of the most finished dramas in verse of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It was Irving himself who told me something more about the same play. The subject had been suggested to Wills and he set about it with great fervour. He brought the first act to the Lyceum conclave. It opened in the banqueting hall of some castle, with a score of the usual cavaliers having the customary carouse, throwing about wooden goblets, and tossing off bumpers between the verses of some stirring songs of the type of “Oh, fill me a beaker as deep as you please,” leading up to the unavoidable brawl and the timely entrance of the King.

“It was exactly the opposite to all that I had in my mind,” Irving told me, “and I would have nothing to do with it. I wanted the domestic Charles, with his wife and children around him, and I would have nothing else.”

Happily he had his own way, and with the help of the fine lines transferred from Ninon, the play was received with acclamation, and, finely acted as it is now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never fails to move an audience.

I think it was John Clayton who was the original Oliver Cromwell. I was told that his make-up was one of the most realistic ever seen. He was Cromwell—to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his dressing-room was lost in admiration of the perfection of the picture, and declared that the painter should sign it in the corner, “John Clayton, pinx.” But perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne.

0168

Only one more word in the Bateman connection. The varying fortunes of the family are well known—how the Bateman children made a marvellous success for a tune—how the eldest, Kate, played for months and years in Leah, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and America—how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors, The Bells rang in an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't suppose that many people know' that Mrs. Bateman, the wife of “The Colonel,” was the author of several novels which she wrote for newspapers at one of the “downs” that preceded the “ups” in her life.

And Compton Mackenzie is Mrs. Bateman's grandson!

And Fay Compton is Compton Mackenzie's youngest sister.

There is heredity for you.