Chapter V: Part 5

Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very doubtfully, almost incredulously, certain results. The results that I obtained were totally different from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised, or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or Couéd, or in any way bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the good reason that I had never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it, and was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by it, half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was very near to death. I may state, by the way, that in the course of a pretty extensive acquaintance with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything at all comparable with this strange adventure of mine. A man was running on, foolishly and uncritically enough, about his various occult experiences--they were of little interest as a whole--and talked at last of some sojourn that he had made amongst the Moors of Northern Africa. Here, he said, he had met a man who had known wonders, and he proceeded to tell them. There was nothing very wonderful, so far as I can remember; but the Moor or Arab of the story had an experience like enough to mine--I need not say that I had not mentioned it nor so much as hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The African also had seen the walls shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that the world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken within him. Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale without any sense, apparently, that it had any special significance; it was part of his occult pack, that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish about the “correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed with real relish and a high sense of its infinite importance. I think that he alone knew the real “attribution” of the aforesaid Tarot Trumps, but he “had received it under pledge and was not at liberty to speak”--for which inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little patience for solemn hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any sort. But in ending his story of the Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had seen the material world quivering and fading before his eyes, had received, in some manner not indicated, a command or an intimation that he must “leave everything”; and this he could not do, having a wife and children. And I must say at once that being pretty well acquainted with Jones-Robinson and all his type, I should have paid no more attention to his story of the Moor than I paid to his story of the Tarot Trumps--if it had not been for something which I knew and kept to myself. As it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and wondered deeply, and still wonder.

But now to our point: the connection between material or sensible things and spiritual things, the question whether the former are ever of any real consequence or significance. As I have said before, the evidence that Home the medium rose “miraculously”--to adopt a convenient shorthand--into the air seems to me good; but is such a phenomenon of any more true consequence than the phenomenon of Hydrogen gas rising into the air from the admixture of water, zinc and sulphuric acid? And so, were the incense clouds that came to my nostrils in places where, assuredly, no material incense smoked, of consequence? Was the billowy and resilient pavement of detestable Rosebery Avenue of consequence? Were the pictures that shivered and wavered on the unstable wall of consequence? I do not know; but I am sure that the state which followed this last experience was of high consequence. For when I rose, afraid, and broke off the process in which I had been engaged, I found to my utter amazement that everything within had been changed. Amazement; for the utmost that I had hoped from my experiment was a temporary dulling of the consciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my troubles. And what I received was not mere dull lack of painful sensation, but a peace of the spirit that was quite ineffable, a knowledge that all hurts and doles and wounds were healed, that that which was broken was reunited. Everything, of body and of mind, was resolved into an infinite and an exquisite delight; into a joy so great that--let this be duly noted--it became almost intolerable in its ecstasy. I remember thinking at the time: “There is wine so strong that no earthly vessels can hold it”: joy threatened to become an agony, that must shatter all. Emily Brontë, describing the state of Heathcliff soon before his death, has described just such a condition; I have often wondered how she knew of it.

But this was later. For that day and for many days afterwards I was dissolved in bliss, into a sort of rapture of life which has no parallel that I can think of, which has, therefore, no analogies by which it may be made more plain. The vine and the exultation of the vine are solemn and ancient and approved figures of the joys of the interior life, but these are not quite to my purpose. I can only fall back on little things, and quite material things. My chambers in Verulam Buildings were towards the northern portion of the Inn, and the traffic of Theobald’s Road was distinct enough, distinct enough, often, to be an annoyance. But this night, the “ping, ping!” of the omnibus bell, the grind of the many wheels upon the cobble-stones sounded to me as marvellous and tremendous chords reverberating from some mighty organ; filling the air, filling the soul and the whole being with rapture immeasurable. And another trifle, as insignificant, even more insignificant, perhaps. In the ordinary state of existence the sense of touch is exercised constantly, but almost unconsciously. Now and again it is used with intent; the buyer of old furniture acquires a sort of thumb-and-finger craft; he passes the tips of his fingers over the edges of the bureau or cabinet, and they help him to decide whether the object is an antique or a novelty. And so, I suppose, a woman choosing stuffs uses her fingers in much the same manner, learning something about the silk or velvet by the process. But in general, and very conveniently, you take up pen or pencil, or place your hand on the back of the chair without any distinct consciousness of the impact of your flesh on these exterior objects: unless, that is, your hand encounter some unexpected object which insists on notice, such as a pin point or a rusty nail. But in these strange days of which I am speaking touch became an exquisite and conscious pleasure; I could not so much as place my hand on the table before me without experiencing a thrill of delight which was not merely sensuous, but carried with it, mysteriously and wonderfully, the message of a secret and interior joy.

And one more instance. I had always been subject to headaches which visited me at intervals of five, six or seven weeks, and invariably lasted for twenty-four hours. The pain was distressing, and any movement of the head raised it into a racking, throbbing agony; I should imagine that I suffered from a kind of migraine or megrims. Late one night during the time of which I am speaking I felt the first approaches of one of these tiresome attacks. I said to myself: “I wonder whether I can stop it,” and I placed the tip of the forefinger of the left hand upon my forehead. I felt the sense as of a dull shock: and the pain was gone. And though I have had my share of pains and aches since then, I have never been revisited by that particular kind of headache from that day to this.

And there was yet another matter. In a little book of mine called “The Great Return,” which nobody has heard of, I have told how the Holy Grail came back for a brief while to Britain after long years. And describing some of the things that were seen and known during that happy visitation, I have written:

“The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more difficult to explain (than certain other matters duly related). For they say that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended, there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before, so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him, as if it were sport and play.”

Thus in the story, and thus it was with me in fact, in that autumn and winter of 1899–1900. It was with a singular surprise that I read, in St. Adamnan, many years afterwards, how St. Columba’s monks, toiling in the fields, experienced now and again the very sensation--if it be just to speak of it as a sensation--that I have described. They, too, weary with their work of reclaiming the barren land of their isle, would know that sudden glow of joy and strength and courage; and they believed that it was the prayer of their Father in God, Columba, strengthening them and inspiring them, as he knelt before the altar of the Perpetual Choir. And lest it be said that I had read Adamnan when I was a boy and had forgotten all about it consciously though I had retained it subconsciously, I must solemnly declare that this was not the case; and that when this strange experience first befell me, I was overwhelmed with astonishment, and could scarcely credit that which was actually happening. I have hesitated as to whether it should be, in strictness, called a sensation, and I still hesitate. It seems to me, and I think that I can trust my recollection, that the two worlds of sense and spirit were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from the inward and spiritual grace. _Magnum vere sacramentum._ And all this, be it remembered, would fall out in dim Bloomsbury squares, in noisy, clattering Gray’s Inn Road, in a train on the Underground, amongst hustling crowds in common streets. I mention this, not forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which I received from a very high literary quarter on account of that little book, “The Great Return,” which I have just cited. The critic noted the fact that in my book the Holy Grail was manifested to the common people, to common modern people, to Welsh tradesmen and farmers. He seemed to think this very low. It may be low, but perhaps things happen in this way sometimes; and so with me: I, by no manner of means a knight, received joys and knew wonders while the trams clanged along the Clerkenwell Road in the grey winter afternoon. So it was, and it appears to me necessary to tell the truth. As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier writer: “Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in the light.”

And beyond all this, beyond these experiences in which things of the body and things of the spirit were mingled, there was a better world of which I saw the verges. There was no more grief; there was no more resentment, there was no more anger. The griefs that flood the heart with agony, the great sorrows of life, these were seen to be but passing trifles of no moment, like the sorrow of a little child which is past and forgotten before its tears are dry. I remember tearing up an old diary which I had kept in the bitter days of Clarendon Road, a record of struggles and starvings and desolations; I tore it up because it no longer signified anything to me. The words, I daresay, were strong enough, but the tale had become of no meaning at all. I glanced at one page and another of the tattered old notebook before I rent it, with a kind of mild curiosity as to the state of mind of the silly stranger who had written all this, and had whined so dismally. At all events, it had nothing to do with me, and so it went into fragments and into the fire. If it could be restored to me now, I should read it all with interest and whine again and foam again _sæva indignatione_; but then I have long returned into that darkness in which, I suppose, most of our lives are spent.

* * * * *

There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment of the Oriental Occult Ass. I confess that I have written all this with difficulty, and with doubt as to the decency of writing it at all, especially when the tale, if it is to be a true tale, makes it necessary for me to seem to compare, for one little moment, the saints of the company and following of St. Columba with myself. But I do hope that nobody will say: “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A B C out of it in the Svanka Visatvara. Why, when the Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam Ghosh was over here last summer he mentioned all these phenomena as things you have to forget before you set out on the Way. As he put it so beautifully: ‘The sun arises. It gleams on the Lotus. The petals of the _bhulji_ flower expand. The stars are no longer seen.’ Yes, isn’t he wonderful? Fancy anybody still bothering about Keats and those silly people!”

I hope, I say, that I shall be spared that. I can bear better I think the (more or less) Occidental Idiot, who will speak of Shin--the letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, not the delicate portion of our anatomy--attribute it to the Tarot Trump called the Fool, and just throw in a reference to Salt, Sulphur and Mercury.

As for me, I make no deductions, I infer nothing, I refrain from saying “therefore.” Like Sancho Panza: “I come from my own vineyard; I know nothing.” Perhaps I may venture to say that I have seen a lousy, lazy tramp drinking from a roadside stream that drips cold and pure from the rock in burning weather. Then the wastrel passes on his ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and lazy as ever.

_De torrente in via bibet: propterea exaltabit caput._

_Chapter X_

MR. CHARLES O’MALLEY, Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway.

That was the inscription of a card which had just been placed in my hand, as I walked along Southampton Row--on which I found myself stupidly gazing in real old Southampton Row, not the staring, blatant street that bears the name now--one fine day in the summer of 1900.

Ten minutes or so before I had been taking my morning stroll in the company of my bulldog, Juggernaut. I was accosted very politely by a stoutish, youngish, clean-shaven gentleman, well dressed, with the mere suspicion of an Irish accent.

He had said without preface of any kind:

“A fine dog you’ve got, sir. I should be very glad if you’d come up with me and show it to a lady I know who lives in the flats opposite.”

I assented at once, feeling thoroughly in the scene, as they say on the stage. I followed him and we displayed the dog Juggernaut, certainly a noble specimen of his noble race, to the lady who, I may say at once, was a lady, and appeared to be on terms of polite acquaintance with the gentleman. Jug was admired, and the gentleman and I went down into the street again. The lady had not evinced the faintest astonishment at the introduction of a total stranger with a bulldog into her flat. When we were both down on the pavement of Southampton Row, the amateur of bulldogs gave me his card, and told me that I should be welcome and more than welcome if ever I found myself near Castle O’Malley, in County Galway. And so he vanished--if he ever were there, as to which I held and still hold, in a fantastic sort of way, vague doubts.

No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and unostentatious one. Nothing to drink was produced; there were no K.O. drops. The lady did not ask me to look in again some evening for a quiet game of cards with a few congenial friends. Mr. O’Malley did not say that he had salvaged a Spanish galleon wrecked beneath the rocks on which Castle O’Malley was built, and that in consequence he had more money than he knew what to do with. And I missed nothing from my pocket. That is one of the reasons why I hate rationalism, since, when it is called in, in a little difficulty or perplexity, its advices and explanations are always so stupid, so wide of the mark, so absolutely futile. Finally, from that day to this, I have never seen Mr. Charles O’Malley, of Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor have I heard of him. I have forgotten to say that he did not so much as ask me my name.

I only wish that I had kept some kind of note of the very strange period which I had entered. It came about gradually, the merging of Syon into Bagdad; and I have a much dimmer recollection of the latter city. For its essence, as will be seen in the anecdote of the O’Malley, was lack of purpose, a certain fantastic confusion, a sense that something without any ratio might happen at any moment. Nothing began, nothing ended: strange people were apt to separate themselves from the crowd, to engage in queer discourse without intelligible motive or meaning, and then to sink back again, leaving no trace behind. And when events lack logical sequence or connection, it is difficult to retain them in the memory. But I believe that I do remember that on this very day of the O’Malley incident ten total strangers addressed me, without any very manifest reason and to no discernible end. We encountered in all sorts of places, in the street, in the restaurant, in the vanished Café de l’Europe in Leicester Square; the strangers uttered their mysterious messages, which to me were as incomprehensible as if they had been in cipher, and so vanished away. Indeed, looking back, I begin to wonder whether I were constantly being mistaken for someone else, who must have been exactly like me; this Someone Else being evidently a prominent member of a secret society, who would be aware of the signs and passwords of the order. For all I know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor old Jug--he has long years ago gone to be a gargoyle on the parapet of some great Gothic church of the skies--I should have answered: “Yes, he is a fine dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots are finer.” Then, it may be, the interview would have become coherent, and tending to some end, and the lady in the flat would have pressed the secret panel and have disclosed ... I really don’t know what.

That very day, I mean the day of the incident of the Bulldog, Mr. O’Malley and the Lady in the Flat, I was sitting in the Café de l’Europe with a friend, discussing various matters, when, as we rose to go a young man of a somewhat colourless and unpretending appearance, who had been sitting at the other side of the table, suddenly observed:

“I have been very much interested, sir, in your conversation, and I should very much like to hear more of it.”

Again, I was in the scene. I gave him my address in Gray’s Inn, and he called to see me several times, always coming at night and staying pretty late, asking me many questions about interior things. I think it was only on his last visit that I found out his odd manner of leaving the Inn, when he went away at one or half-past one in the morning. He was ignorant of the fact that the Raymond Buildings Gate and the Holborn Gate have watchers by them who will open the portals all the long night; and so when he left me he would climb the spiked wall which separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s Inn Road and make off into the gaslight. He, too, vanished, and I saw him no more.

It was some time earlier in this year that I became conscious of a very odd circumstance. It will perhaps have been noticed that I have become insensibly Stevensonian in my diction, as I have spoken of the Incident of the Bulldog, or of this or of that. That is so because the atmosphere in which I lived was becoming remarkably like the atmosphere of “The Three Impostors,” which, as I have remarked, is derived from the “New Arabian” manner of R. L. Stevenson. Not only did strange and unknown and unexplained people start up from every corner, from every café table, and engage me in obscure mazes of talk, quite in the Arabian manner, but I presently became aware that something very odd indeed was happening: certain characters in “The Three Impostors” showed signs of coming to life, a feat which, perhaps, they had failed to perform before. I was once talking to a dark young man, of quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses--he and I had met at a place where we had to be blindfolded before we could see the light--and he told me a queer tale of the manner in which his life was in daily jeopardy. He described the doings of a fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster--I may say that there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him--had, for some reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of eight shillings and sixpence a day--a sum, by the way, that sounds as if it were the face value of some mediæval coin long obsolete. I listened in wonder, for there are some absurdities so enormous that they seem to have a stunning effect on the common sense, paralysing it for the moment and inhibiting its action. It was only when I got home that it dawned upon me that I had been listening to the Young Man in Spectacles, and that he came out of “The Three Impostors.” And soon Miss Lally, another character from the book, appeared, and like her prototype discoursed most amazing tales, was the heroine of incredible adventures, would appear and disappear in a quite inexplicable manner, relating always histories before unheard of, a personage wholly diverting, enigmatic and enchanting.

And the odd thing is that it was as if these two had parts to play for a season, and played them--till the prompter’s bell sounded, and the curtain fell and the lights went out. Both Miss Lally and the Young Man in Spectacles still live; but they have become useful members of society and eminently successful, as I believe, in their several employments. Thus do the King and Queen in the play go home to their flats or their lodgings after the show and enjoy cold beef, pickles and a comfortable bottle of beer.

And now I am going at last to say a good word for literature. I have said, again and again, even to tedium, that the only good that I can see in it is that it is one of the many ways of escaping from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid. The way I have always seen it is like this: I go out on a Sunday afternoon in March with the black north-easter blowing to take a walk up Gower Street. I say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand this,” and go home and write--or try to write--a chapter in “The Hill of Dreams.” Many people will say that the chapter is much worse than the street, and I daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, it was different: it was, for me, the nearest way out of Gower Street and the black north-easter. But I believe that there may be a little more in literature than this. It is certainly the escape from life; but perhaps it is also the only means of realising and shewing life, or, at least, certain aspects of life. Here is an example to my hand. Here am I, not trying to write literature, but doing my best to tell a true tale, and I find that I can make nothing of it. I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite conscious that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and indescribable impression which the events of those days made upon me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the world was changed utterly for me--of all this I can give no true picture, dealing as I am with what are called facts. I maintained long ago in “Hieroglyphics” that facts as facts do not signify anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make nothing of the year 1900. But, avoiding the facts, I have got a good deal nearer to the truth in the last chapter of “The Secret Glory,” which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are paying their first visit to London. _I_ never bolted up to town with the house-master’s parlour-maid; but truth must be told in figures.

There is one episode of this period of which I may say a little more, that is the affair of the Secret Society. Putting two and two together, a good many years after the event, I am inclined to think that it was a mere item in the programme of strange and Arabian entertainment that was being produced for my benefit: the Secret Society was of the same order as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley and the Adventure of the Young Man who always left by the Spiked Wall, only of a more gorgeous and elaborate kind. And I must confess that it did me a great deal of good--for the time. To stand waiting at a closed door in a breathless expectation, to see it open suddenly and disclose two figures clothed in a habit that I never thought to see worn by the living, to catch for a moment the vision of a cloud of incense smoke and certain dim lights glimmering in it before the bandage was put over the eyes and the arm felt a firm grasp upon it that led the hesitating footsteps into the unknown darkness: all this was strange and admirable indeed; and strange it was to think that within a foot or two of those closely curtained windows the common life of London moved on the common pavement, as supremely unaware of what was being done within an arm’s length as if our works had been the works of the other side of the moon. All this was very fine; an addition and a valuable one, as I say, to the phantasmagoria that was being presented to me. But as for anything vital in the secret order, for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there was nothing of it, and less than nothing. Among the members there were, indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my opinion, ought to have known better after a year’s membership or less; but the society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent and imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever about anything and concealed the fact under an impressive ritual and a sonorous phraseology. It had no wisdom, even of the inferior or lower kind, in its leadership; it exercised no real scrutiny into the characters of those whom it admitted, and so it is not surprising that some of its phrases and passwords were to be read one fine morning in the papers, their setting being one of the most loathsome criminal cases of the twentieth century.

And yet it had and has an interest of a kind. It claimed, I may say, 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?”