by Max Beerbohm
But even there neither of those pairs of eyes could have made its fullest effect. The most terrifically gratifying way of seeing one’s hero and his eyes for the first time is to see them in his own home.
Anywhere else, believe me, something of his essence is forfeit. `The rose of roses’ loses more or less of its beauty in any vase, and rather more than less there in a nosegay of ordinary little blossoms (to which I rather rudely liken Mrs. T—‘s other friends). The supreme flower should be first seen growing from its own Sharonian soil.
The worshipper should have, therefore, a letter of introduction.
Failing that, he should write a letter introducing himself—a fervid, an idolatrous letter, not without some excuse for the writing of it: the hero’s seventieth birthday, for instance, or a desire for light on some obscure point in one of his earlier works. Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise. Some of them, however, are bad at answering letters. The worshipper must not scruple to write repeatedly, if need be. Sooner or later he will be summoned to the presence. This, perhaps, will entail a railway journey. Heroes tend to live a little way out of London. So much the better. The adventure should smack of pilgrimage. Consider also that a house in a London street cannot seem so signally its owner’s own as can a house in a village or among fields. The one kind contains him, the other enshrines him, breathes of him. The sight of it, after a walk (there should be a longish walk) from the railway station, strikes great initial chords in the worshipper; and the smaller the house, the greater the chords. The worshipper pauses at the gate of the little front-garden, and when he writes his autobiography those chords will be reverberating yet. `Here it was that the greatest of modern spirits had lived and wrought. Here in the fullness of years he abode. With I know not what tumult of thoughts I passed up the path and rang the bell. A bright-faced parlourmaid showed me into a room on the groundfloor, and said she would tell the master I was here. It was a wonderfully simple room; and something, perhaps the writing-table, told me it was his work-room, the very room from which, in the teeth of the world’s neglect and misunderstanding, he had cast his spell over the minds of all thinking men and women. When I had waited a few minutes, the door opened and’ after that the deluge of what was felt when the very eminent man came in.
Came in, mark you. That is a vastly important point. Had the very eminent man been there at the outset, the worshipper’s first sight of him would have been a very great moment, certainly; but not nearly so great as in fact it was. Very eminent men should always, on these occasions, come in. That is the point I ask them to remember.
Honourably concerned with large high issues, they are not students of personal effect. I must therefore explain to them why it is more impressive to come into a room than to be found there.
Let those of them who have been playgoers cast their minds back to their experience of theatres. Can they recall a single play in which the principal actor was `discovered’ sitting or standing on the stage when the curtain rose? No. The actor, by the very nature of his calling, does, must, study personal effect. No playwright would dare to dump down his principal actor at the outset of a play. No sensible playwright would wish to do so. That actor’s personality is a part of the playwright’s material. Playwriting, it has been well said, is an art of preparing. The principal actor is one of the things for which we must be artfully prepared. Note Shakespeare’s carefulness in this matter. In his day, the stage had no curtain, so that even the obscure actor who spoke the first lines (Shakespeare himself sometimes, maybe) was not ignominiously `discovered.’ But an unprepared entry is no good. The audience must first be wrought on, wrought up. Had Shakespeare been also Burbage, it is possible that he would have been even more painstaking than he was in leading up to the leading man.
Assuredly, by far the most tremendous stage entries I ever saw were those of Mr. Wilson Barrett in his later days, the days when he had become his own dramatist. I remember particularly a first night of his at which I happened to be sitting next to a clever but not very successful and rather sardonic old actor. I forget just what great historic or mythic personage Mr. Barrett was to represent, but I know that the earlier scenes of the play resounded with rumours of him-accounts of the great deeds he had done, and of the yet greater deeds that were expected of him. And at length there was a procession: white-bearded priests bearing wands; maidens playing upon the sackbut; guards in full armour; a pell-mell of unofficial citizens ever prancing along the edge of the pageant, huzza-ing and hosanna-ing, mostly looking back over their shoulders and shading their eyes; maidens strewing rose-leaves; and at last the orchestra crashing to a climax in the nick of which my neighbour turned to me and, with an assumption of innocent enthusiasm, whispered, I shouldn’t wonder if this were Barrett.’ I suppose (Mr. Barrett at that instant amply appearing) I gave way to laughter; but this didn’t matter; the applause would have drowned a thunderstorm, and lasted for several minutes.
My very eminent reader begins to look uncomfortable. Let him take heart. I do not want him to tamper with the simplicity of his household arrangements. Not even the one bright-faced parlourmaid need precede him with strewn petals. All the necessary preparation will have been done by the bare fact that this is his room, and that he will presently appear. `But,’ he may say, with a toss of his grey beard, `I am not going to practise any device whatsoever. I am above devices. I shall be in the room when the young man arrives.’ I assure him that I am not appealing to his vanity, merely to his good-nature.
Let him remember that he too was young once, he too thrilled in harmless heroworship. Let him not grudge the young man an utmost emotion.
Coming into a room that contains a stranger is a definite performance, a deed of which one is conscious—if one be young, and if that stranger be august. Not to come in awkwardly, not to make a bad impression, is here the paramount concern. The mind of the young man as he comes in is clogged with thoughts of self. It is free of these impediments if he shall have been waiting alone in the room. To be come in to is a thing that needs no art and induces no embarrassment.
One’s whole attention is focussed on the comer-in. One is the mere spectator, the passive and receptive receiver. And even supposing that the young man could come in under his hero’s gaze without a thought of self, his first vision would yet lack the right intensity. A person found in a room, if it be a room strange to the arriver, does not instantly detach himself from his surroundings. He is but a feature of the scene. He does not stand out as against a background, in the grand manner of portraiture, but is fused as in an elaborately rendered `interior.’ It is all the more essential, therefore, that the worshipper shall not have his first sight of hero and room simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon converted into a presence-chamber by the hero’s entry. And let not the hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in. I would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty, bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, it would, we may be sure, have come slowly, that the prophet should have time to realise the grandeur of the miracle. Let the hero remember that his coming, too, will seem supernatural to the young man. Let him be framed for an instant or so in the doorway—time for his eyes to produce their peculiar effect. And by the way: if he be a wearer of glasses, he should certainly remove these before coming in. He can put them on again almost immediately. It is the first moment that matters.
As to how long an interval the hero should let elapse between the young man’s arrival and his own entry, I cannot offer any very exact advice. I should say, roughly, that in ten minutes the young man would be strung up to the right pitch, and that more than twenty minutes would be too much. It is important that expectancy shall have worked on him to the full, but it is still more important that his mood shall not have been chafed to impatience. The danger of over-long delay is well exemplified in the sad ca
se of young Coventry Patmore. In his old age Patmore wrote to Mr. Gosse a description of a visit he had paid, at the age of eighteen, to Leigh Hunt; and you will find the letter on page 32, vol. I, of Mr. Basil Champneys’ biography of him. The circumstances had been most propitious. The eager and sensitive spirit of the young man, his intense admiration for `The Story of Rimini,’
the letter of introduction from his father to the venerable poet and friend of greater bygone poets, the long walk to Hammersmith, the small house in a square there—all was classically in order. The poet was at home. The visitor as shown in…. `I had,’ he was destined to tell Mr. Gosse, `waited in the little parlour at least two hours, when the door was opened and a most picturesque gentleman, with hair flowing nearly or quite to his shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat and a Vandyck collar of lace about a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, “This is a beautiful world, Mr.
Patmore!”’ The young man was so taken aback by these words that they `eclipsed all memory of what occurred during the remainder of the visit.’
Yet there was nothing wrong about the words themselves. Indeed, to any one with any sense of character and any knowledge of Leigh Hunt, they must seem to have been exactly, exquisitely, inevitably the right words. But they should have been said sooner.
SERVANTS
1918.
It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship, so that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in, must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimblewitted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, `‘Tis a matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair henceforth.’ Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, `Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder—oh, preposterous!’
Whereat Sir John exclaimed `Zounds!’ and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, `Let powder be taxed.’ And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end of those things which the Nobility and Gentry had long since shed from their own persons—as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, `My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more,’ and that his Lady will say `Oh, all right.’ Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining te^te-a`te^te with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure—higher than in Rogers’ day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, `Discharge two more.’ Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blastfurnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.
Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, will have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when `the servant question,’ as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively `knowing their place,’ as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that `Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded’ not to do this and that.
But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not `obliging’ but obedient.
As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidlyincreasing middle class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal.
And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment’s more leisure than
was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, `followers’ were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month’s notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. `Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills, not her own.’ Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father’s. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word.
But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.