Chapter VI: Part 6

One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”

Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575. The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation” which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting, but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday, at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the which order is well observed.”

“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays. Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came to the Temple.”

In July, 1577, Lord Burghley is again at “Buckstons” [_sic_] and the faithful recorder sends him a budget of news. He has been at the Mercers’ feast “and there were we all very merry ... and I told them that I was to write privately to your Lordship; and they required me all to commend them to your good Lordship; at which time the Master of the Rolls, who is no wine drinker, did drink to your Lordship a bowl of Rhenish wine and then Sir Thomas Gresham drank another, and Sir William Demsell the third and I pledged them all.” It reads like a page from the Book of Snobs.

And after the “great and royal banquet” which took place at the house of the new Master, some time we may suppose about mid-day, Fleetwood, as he tells us “walked to Powle’s to learn some news.” For in that day St. Paul’s was the Exchange and the club and the Market Place of the men of the world where news came from all quarters of the world and where news passed from lip to lip and thence out into the corners of England in such letters as this of Fleetwood’s to Lord Burghley. The extraordinary uses to which the Cathedral was put in Elizabeth’s time, are a constant theme of reproach from religious-minded men. Idlers and drunkards used to sleep on benches at the choir door, and porters, butchers and water bearers were suffered in service time, to carry and re-carry their wares across the nave, and in the upper choir itself irreverent people walked about with hats on their heads, whilst if any entered the Cathedral booted and spurred, the gentlemen of the choir left their places and demanded “spur-money” and threatened their victim with a night’s imprisonment in the choir if the tax were not paid. Such was “Powle’s” on this July afternoon when Recorder Fleetwood went down in search of news, and indeed he heard terrible tidings; for there “came suddenly into the church Edmund Downing, and he told me that he was even then come out of Worcestershire and that my Lord Chief Baron died at Sir John Hubbard’s house and that he is buried at Leicester. And he said that the common speech of that country is that Mr. Serjeant Barham should be dead at Worcester, but that is not certain. The like report goeth of Mr. Fowler, the Clerk of the same Circuit ... and a number of other gent that were at the gaol delivery at Oxon are all dead. The inquest of life and death are almost all gone. Such Clerks servants and young gent, being scholars as were at the same gaol delivery, are either dead or in great danger. Mr. Solicitor’s son and heir being brought home to his father’s house at Woodstock, lieth at the mercy of God. Mr. Attorney’s son and heir was brought very sick from Oxon to his father’s house at Harrow, where he lieth in as great danger of death as might be, but now there is some hope of amendment. The gaol delivery of Oxon, as I am told, was kept in the Town Hall, a close place and by the infection of the gaol as all men take it, this mortality grew.”

We know now all about the Oxford Black Assizes of the 5th and 6th of July, 1577, and how Judges, Sheriffs, Knights, Squires, Barristers and members of the Grand Jury were stricken down with what was probably typhus. The disease spread to the Colleges. Masters, Doctors and heads of houses left almost to a man. “The Master of Merton remained _longe omnium vigilantissimus_ ministering to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection.” Wild rumours spread abroad that it was the result of a Papist plot. In a few weeks of the Assizes, some five hundred perished, nearly all men of the better class. The disease did not attack the poor or women. There seems little doubt that the infection was among the prisoners and there is a record that two or three thieves had died in chains shortly before the Assizes. One would have supposed that such a visitation would have been a signal for prison reform, but those who have read of Howard’s experiences, know how little was done to mitigate the horrors of life in gaol until a much more recent date.

Fleetwood tells us a great deal about his own activity at this time. He is holding an oyer and terminer at the Guildhall in the vacation “to keep the people in obedience.” He sits with the Justices to discuss the abolition of alehouses and the advancement of archery, he is constant in his search after rogues and masterless men and there being cases of plague in the Savoy, he takes occasion to pass with all the constables between the bars and the tilt-yard in both the liberties, to see the houses shut, which he notes with pride “neither the Master of the Rolls nor my cousin Holcroft the Bailiff, would or durst do.” At the same time he was writing a book on “The Office of a Justice of the Peace” which was printed a hundred years later. Amidst these various employments however, he finds room for the lighter social duties and spends an afternoon with the Shoemakers of London, who “having builded a fair and a new hall, made a royal feast there for their friends, which they call their housewarming.”

A really heavy sessions must have been a terrible experience since this is what the Recorder evidently regards as a light one. “At the last Sessions,” he writes, “there were executed eighteen at Tyburn, and one, Barlow, born in Norfolk but of the house of the Barlows in the county of Lancashire, was pressed. They were all notable cut-purses and horse-stealers. It was the quietest Sessions that ever I was at.” At the beginning of the year he makes an audit of known criminals “that I may know what new may be sprung up this last year and where to find them if need be” and he makes out a list of “receivers and gage takers and melters of stolen plate and such like.”

Part of his duty was the actual police work of “searching out of sundry that were receptors of felons.” In the course of this duty he tells Burghley on another occasion of the discovery of a den that Dickens might have used as a model in Oliver Twist, so little had the ways of criminals altered from Elizabeth to Victoria. “Amongst our travels this one matter tumbled out by the way, that one, Walters, a gentleman born and some time a merchant of good credit, who falling by time into decay, kept an alehouse at Smart’s Keye (Quay) near Billing’s Gate, and after some misdemeanour being put down he reared up a new trade of life and in the same house he procured all the cut-purses about this city to repair to his same house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. There were hung up two devices, the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung about with hawk’s bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without the noise of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial nipper.” Note that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nipper is termed a pick-purse or a cut-purse.

The path of an honest judge in the days of Elizabeth was beset with difficulties. Although bribes were not actually offered to the individual magistrate, yet he was written to by influential persons about the Court, and he had to choose between doing his duty and incurring the dislike of powerful men. Fleetwood complains “that when by order we have justly executed the law ... we are wont either to have a great man’s letter, a lady’s ring, or some other token from some other such inferior persons as will devise one untruth or another to accuse us of if we prefer not their unlawful requests.” Our honest Recorder is strong to maintain the principle that all men are equal in the sight of the law.

Here is a typical case of which he complains: “Mr. Nowell of the Court hath lately been in London. He caused his man to give a blow unto a carman. His man hath stricken the carman with the pommel of his sword and therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man are likely to be indicted thereof, I am sure to be much troubled with his letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like case heretofore, I have been even with the same man. Here are sundry young gentlemen that use the Court that most commonly term themselves gentlemen; when any of them have done anything amiss, and are complained of or arrested for debt, then they run unto me and no other excuse or answer can they make but say—‘I am a gentleman, and being a gentleman I am not thus to be used at a slaves and a colion’s (scullion’s) hands.’ I know not what other plea Mr. Nowell can plead. But this I say, the fact is foul.”

A “gentleman” in England in Elizabethan days seems to have thought himself as little amenable to law as an American millionaire, but Fleetwood had the English gist of the matter in him when he says “the fact is foul.”

But though the Recorder stood firm against the hangers on of the Court, London was not a happy soil for judicial integrity. He never attained to the promotion he deserved, and maybe it was because he could not dishonour his office to serve his friends at Court. Such mercy as the Recorder could honestly show to a prisoner, he was only too ready to exercise. “Truly, my Lord,” he writes, “it is nothing needful to write for the stay of any to be reprieved for there is not any in our commission of London and Middlesex but we are desirous to save or stay any poor wretch if by colour of any law or reason we may do it. My singular good Lord, my Lord William of Winchester was wont to say: ‘When the Court is furthest from London then is there the best justice done in all England.’ I once heard as great a personage in office and authority as ever he was and yet living say the same words. It is grown for a trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves; twenty pounds for a reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days. I see it will not be holpen unless one honoured gentleman who many times is abused by wrong information—and surely upon my soul not upon any evil meaning—do stay his pen. I have not one letter for the stay of a thief from your Lordship.”

But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars, who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two days further life.

The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars, poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called “reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they committed any excesses.

One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.” Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very little to amend.

The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons. It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers. Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the hemp with her mallet.

The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination, the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell, where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this wretched woman.”

But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson, was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren, standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him, and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench. And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case, and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole week in his predecessor’s time.”

So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails, chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.

And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty, and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582, is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is, as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”

The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February 28th, 1594.

And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.

“This day I rode to the Yeld (Guild) Hall to sit on the commission for strangers and in the lower end of Cheapside towards Poole’s (St. Paul’s) there stood a man and a woman both aged persons with papers upon their heads. The man was keeper of the conduit there. These two lewd people in the night entered into the Conduit and washed themselves, _et ad hunc et ibidem turpiter exoneraverunt ventres eorum, etc._

This day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office. The lot is now to be cast between Mr. Serjeant Drew and one Mr. Fleming of Lincoln’s Inn. This present Saturday.

Your good Lordship’s most bounden

W. FLETEWOODE.”

This picture of the old Recorder riding out to the Guild Hall for his last sitting and reporting to my Lord the common sights of the City brings back to us a real picture of his days. So that we can almost feel that we are living on “this present Saturday” and regretting with all good citizens that “this day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office.”

THE FUNNIEST THING I EVER SAW.

“Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to
ourselves and nature.”

—_Sir Philip Sidney._

To ask one to write to such a title is a challenge to be taken up, but one does not expect to vanquish the challenger. The funniest thing I ever saw would not make you laugh because you never saw it and if I had the skill to make you see it probably you would not think it funny. Then again the older you grow the few funnier things you see. What a lot of laughter there was thirty or forty years ago. Whither has it fled? In childhood nearly every discomfort or disaster to others is food for laughter whilst your own little troubles are tragedies fit for tears.

It is a curious thing that the funny things you see always involve a certain amount of cruelty, pain or at least discomfort to others, and I suppose as one grows older the painful side of the matter oppresses you more than the funny side inspires you to laughter. There are some human attributes that are always laughable. Of these the chief is fatness. The troubles of a fat man or woman are always comic. Littleness, if it amounts to wee-ness, is comic in a somewhat less degree and thin-ness may move folk to laughter but scarcely unless it be added to some amusing eccentricity. Height and tall-ness are not funny. One never heard of a king employing a giant as a jester or a butt. The dwarf on the other hand has been cast for such parts from time immemorial.

I believe quite small babies see a lot of funny things. Certainly they laugh to themselves without end and seem to find their surroundings full of amusement. I have no doubt the funniest thing one ever saw is cinematographed on some ancient film at the back of one’s brain so far out of reach that the memory cannot get at it. Children undoubtedly see most of the fun. I remember many years ago Louis Calvert, the well-known actor, was staying with me in a little house in a remote corner of Wales. The house had a small verandah doorway with two narrow doors, one of which was usually bolted as it was a windy place and the outlet by the half door was, to say the least of it, meagre. Louis Calvert was in those days, I will not say fat or stout or corpulent—these ample men are so susceptible—but he was a fine figure of a man and he was then as he is now a great actor in both comedy or tragedy. It was a summer afternoon and I was lolling in a deck chair beneath our only tree, and the children, four of them, from five years old to twelve, were sitting on the lawn in front of the doorway basking in the sun. Suddenly Calvert appeared at the doorway and accidentally stuck in it as he was coming through. The children caught sight of him and on the moment were off in fits of laughter which good manners required them to stifle as he came among us. But if laughter challenges manners, the latter generally get the worst of it, and the mere memory of the incident sent one or another off into small explosions of laughter. Calvert who always wanted to be in at any fun sought explanations, which only made them laugh the more and reprove each other for doing it, and whilst their attention was so engaged I told Calvert what the joke was. A few minutes later he went back into the house making an elaborate sideway entrance, which started the young audience on the laugh again and all eyes were fastened on the door watching for his return.

And he did return and gave us one of the finest pantomimes I have ever seen. He came along loading a pipe and not looking at the doorway at all and stuck fairly fast in it before he was aware that he was up to it and opened his eyes in annoyance and amazement. Four shouts of laughter greeted him. Fingers of delighted mockery were pointed at him and he made a face as if he were on the brink of tears, which drew echoing tears of uncontrollable laughter from the youngsters. Then his pipe dropped on to the shingle path in front of the door and he dived to get it and failed and grabbed and kicked in the air until the children threw themselves on the ground and sobbed and begged him to leave off for he was hurting them. Then Calvert, to give them a moment’s respite, pulled himself together and still fast in the doorway rested his hand on the door-post and thought dismally while the audience sobbed and sniffed and slowly recovered breath enough to laugh again. By a mighty effort he now backed out of the doorway and approached it as Uncle Remus would say “behime” first. This was a signal for yells of delight, the more so as the manœuvre resulted in the most undignified and comic failure. All beautiful and simple people have a thoroughly broad and healthy laugh for the “behime” quarters of man in awkward positions. A man sitting down on the ice, a man sitting on another’s hat—these are situations that can never cease to be funny whilst there is any fun left in the world and simple minds to be moved to laughter. But this effort at an exit was only one of many. A carefully designed strategetic move edgeways, after the fashion of Bob Acres, which was so nearly successful that it grew really exciting to watch, ended in hilarious shouts and yells, when the climax of it was the victim waving his arms and head out of the door and kicking violently inside the house and calling for help. This business having nearly reduced the audience to exhaustion there was further pantomime of deep expressive thought followed by a solemn retirement within the doors and a laboured and careful pulling at the bolts of the other half of the door and a ceremonial entrance through the whole double space of it with a smile and sigh of supreme content at the glorious triumph over difficulties undergone and vanquished. I can see in my mind’s eye a middle-aged gentleman with tears rolling down his cheeks and four absolutely limp children lying on the grass still gasping with laughter—dying with laughter as the phrase is—and begging Calvert in the intervals of their spasms to “Do it again!”

Now this may not seem one of the funniest things in the world nor was it perhaps the funniest thing I ever saw, for unfortunately I was only the middle-aged gentleman and my days for seeing funny things were more or less over. But to the children it was certainly one of the funniest things they ever saw, only the question that haunts me is—will they, when they grow up, be able to describe the fun they saw so as to impart a tithe of it to those who never saw it? And although I know that, at some period of my life, I must have seen equally funny things that moved me to equally stormy and glorious laughter, yet the storm and the glory have died so completely away that the memory of them is gone and I cannot even remember from what point of the compass they sprang.

And in my view grown up people really see beautifully funny things only in the conduct of children and these incidents can only be described to fathers and mothers, or people who love children as though they were their fathers or mothers. One of the funniest things I ever saw since I was grown up was a baby struggling to find its way to its mouth with a rusk. Why don’t they have a baby doing that at a music hall to slow music, or at least show one on a cinematograph? I could laugh at such a thing “sans intermission an hour by the dial.” How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy and at length is rewarded by success.

There is plenty of comedy and laughter about a baby as well as sleepless melodrama in the middle of the night—but it must be your own baby. There is no fun in next-door babies except when the Clown gets hold of them in a pantomime.

And now having solemnly failed to recount the funniest thing I ever saw, let me again remind you that I said from the first that the task was impossible, since the thing to be funny must be seen, and the funniest thing I ever saw you never saw. But the way to see funny things and to enjoy them is to keep your heart like the heart of a little child, for it is only children who are moved to the purest and healthiest laughter as the trees are moved in the breeze by a power they know nothing of. And of course if you have never been a child—and some poor people are born grown up—you will never have been able to see the funniest thing you ever saw.

THE PLAYWRIGHT.

“In youth he learned had a good mistére
He was a well good wright a carpentére.”

_Chaucer._

The play is very nearly extinct. This is an age of dramatists. The reason is not far to seek. The playwright is merely a craftsman. The dramatist—so his friends in the press tell him—is a genius. And in these years genius is plentiful and craftsmanship becomes a rarer thing every day.

Just at the moment it is certainly not considered important to be a playwright. It is better to be an aviator. In the eighteenth century it was better to be a performing bear. But in my view now as in the eighteenth century the alternatives to the theatre will not destroy the theatre and a sound entertaining play will always find theatre-goers. There is room for plays written by a playwright, and as it is open to anyone who cares to learn the business to become a respectable craftsman—just as a man can learn to play the fiddle or make an etching on copper—there will generally be a few writers for the stage of literary merit who can turn out a stage play capable of weathering the varied storms of taste and criticism by which it is assailed in its endeavours to make safe harbour in the Box Office.

A playwright is according to Dr. Johnson “a maker of plays.” The word “wright” is satisfactorily enough a Saxon word derived from _wyrht_, the third person indicative of _wyrcan_, meaning “one that worketh.” The mere derivation of the word is enough to account for the absence of the thing itself. This is not an age of work. We retain in a degraded form the Saxon word, but the Saxon idea is foreign to our civilisation. Still in things that really matter we cling to the old world notion of a “wright” or person who knows his business, as in our word “ship-wright.” Unfortunately in the affairs of the theatre which in the present age do not really matter very much, any clever man may exploit his wares without learning his business. Money is lost over it, and the theatre as an institution suffers. But playgoers like voters and ratepayers will continue the struggle to obtain a well-made article built according to their tastes, and in course of time workmanship in playwriting will have its value again. Meanwhile it seems a pity that among so many brilliant and intelligent writers for and about the stage, hardly one will take the trouble to master a few essential problems of what is really, compared to the technicalities of music or painting, a simple business.

If a man were to claim to be a ship-wright for instance, it would be accounted to him as a matter of blame if, after money and time had been spent on building his vessel, it were to be found bottom up on the evening of the launching. Explain it as he might, his career as a ship-wright would be endangered. With a playwright it is quite otherwise. If a man hangs out a sign that he is a wheelwright, you go to him in the expectation that he can make a wheel. It may not be a highly artistic wheel. It may be roughly painted, there may be no poetical carving in its wood-work, still you do expect him to turn you out a wheel. You would be disappointed if the article were oblong or rhomboid in shape. You would hesitate to trust yourself to it if it had no hub, no spokes, no tyres—none of the attributes of a wheel, and you would certainly be utterly disgusted if it did not run. But a playwright who makes his play without dramatic hubs or spokes or tyres, is often accredited a genius by those who have never learned how, and how only, a play can be made, and the fact that his play does not run is set down to the centrifugal ignorance of the spectators by the side of the road who came there desiring to see it run.

There are of course many playwrights to-day who are masters of their craft and audiences who can approve of them, but unfortunately the men who make it their business to write criticisms of the theatre are peculiarly and in some cases boastfully ignorant of the business of the playwright. In this way they mislead the aspirant dramatist into the idea that his audience is to blame for not appreciating his play, when his audience is only the mercury in the barometer recording the general depression that must result in a theatre from a badly made play. However beautiful the words and the sentiments of a play may be, and whatever their moral and literary value, they are quite useless unless they are put in a form to get over the footlights. Quite silly sentiments and foolish language may be made serviceable by a playwright who knows his craft, and it would be valuable if some of the writers about theatrical affairs were to turn their attention from the discovery of new genius to the interesting business of the making of stage plays. One does not expect this to happen just yet, for the stage as a craft is a dull thing from a literary point of view, compared to the politics of the theatre and the apportioning of praise and blame—especially the latter—to writers, actors, and theatre-goers. Besides, there is a cult and creed among these writers, and to be in the movement, you must of necessity abjure the well-made play. I read a very clever essay the other day by a modern writer about the theatre, proving that “the well-made play” was the abomination of desolation. The essay was full of learning and epigram, and the questions were cleverly begged and answered in an apparent spirit of generosity, but it did not convince me. Supposing the title of the essay instead of being “the well-made Play” had been “the well-made Coat” or “the well-made Porridge” and the author had set out to prove to you that you were a stodgy Early Victorian duffer, because you pretended to like well-made coats and well-made porridge, might you not reasonably have sighed over his perversity. But this would never happen, for you will find that in the matter of coats and porridge, your writer is full of learning, and will write on these subjects if at all, with a sound knowledge of the craft he is criticising. Indeed I think the playwright and the actor are the only craftsmen whose work is widely written about by people who deliberately refrain from learning the grammar of the crafts they are writing about. Even the critic of pictures has generally failed to paint them, and that in itself is a liberal education. But many brilliant entertaining writers about the stage seem to base their right to be read with attention upon the scant attention they have themselves given to the subject matter of their criticisms. Thankful as I am, for the amusement contained in their epigrams, I am still of opinion that for men to set out to judge a play who have no idea how a play is made, and no desire to learn how a play is made, is bound to end in amazement.

I remember taking an eminent antiquarian to Old Trafford on the occasion of a county cricket match. It was in the historic days of A. N. Hornby and Lancashire were in the field. My friend—who by-the-bye had written dramatic criticism in his early days—knew little or nothing about cricket but was not wanting in that kind of courage that goes to the making of a great critic. Viewing the game solemnly for about a quarter of an hour, he at length delivered judgment. “If I were Hornby,” he said, “I should never have chosen those two fellows in the long white coats for a Lancashire team; they haven’t tried to stop a ball for the last ten minutes.” I am often reminded of that story when I read a criticism of a play. Nor do I for a moment harbour any feelings of wrath against average critics. Like my friend they too have great literary and scholastic qualities that I can humbly envy and admire, but there is one thing that they have not taken the trouble to learn because it is too simple and easy for their really superior intelligence—the rules of the game.

And playwriting is a game like chess or cricket or many another great game and many a duffer can learn its elementary moves and rules and the more studious can master its gambits and strategy, but not even the greatest can succeed at the game, or understand what the game is about if they will not learn the rules. This is an age in which quackery and slush and conceit are having a long innings, and it is a common boast that some new genius has found a new way of saving souls, or painting pictures or making plays that is to revolutionise the practice of these things. Originality is a good thing, and who shall say a harsh word to the youth who dreams in the waking hours of his inexperience of a new way of doing old things. There are many new things to be done in the world, but not so very many for the playwright or the wheelwright. The world has long ago laid down the lines on which a play or a wheel is to be built and whilst it is open to us to use any material we choose, that will bear the necessary strain and decorate it with all the artistic ability we possess the structure must be sound—the work of the _wright_ must be done—or all is vanity. The most eloquent writer of sermons in the world cannot make a play of his preachings merely by chopping them into acts and giving them to different eminent actors and actresses to recite.

There is an A-B-C for the apprentice playwright to learn as there is for the child at school, and if he never learns it, he will not be a proficient workman. I acknowledge this simile is a little old-fashioned for the modern kindergarten child is taught nowadays to grunt strange sounds instead of mastering his or her A-B-C; the scientific teacher being I suppose, under a delusion that English is a phonetic language like my own native Welsh. But when the educational slush has subsided a little, we shall begin again with the A-B-C in our study of the English tongue, just as our playwrights will go back to the simple elementary rules of their interesting craft.

When Shakespeare wrote of the players that “they have their exits and their entrances,” he wrote what was strictly true of his own plays, for he took care to provide them with exits and entrances as any honest playwright should. And to explain briefly what I mean by the simple rules of the craft, let us consider for a moment the subject of “entrances.” It does not, nor need it, enter into the head of the playgoer that his convenience is consulted by the playwright on the matter of the entrances of the characters. The critic generally misses the best “entrances” if any, and makes his own exit with the programme as a book of reference before the players’ exits are completed. He has a soul above these matters. But Shakespeare knew that an actor wanted—and rightly wanted both an exit and an entrance and would not be happy unless he got them. These matters had to be thought out and designed, and in the matter of entrances, Shakespeare seems to have learned a very simple little truth, namely, that from a playwright’s point of view, and equally from an audience’s point of view, it was not the slightest use for a player to be talking upon the stage unless the audience knew who he was. Open your Hamlet and see how the play begins:

_ACT I. SCENE I. A Platform before the Castle._

_FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO._

_Ber._ Who’s there?

_Fran._ Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.

_Ber._ Long live the king!

_Fran._ Bernardo?

_Ber._ He.

_Fran._ You come most carefully upon your hour.

_Ber._ ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

_Fran._ For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

_Ber._ Have you had a quiet guard?

_Fran._ Not a mouse stirring.

_Ber._ Well, good-night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

_Fran._ I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who’s there?

_Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS._

_Hor._ Friends to this ground.

_Mar._ And liegemen to the Dane.

_Fran._ Give you good-night.

_Mar._ O! farewell, honest soldier:
Who hath relieved you?

_Fran._ Bernardo has my place.
Give you good-night. [_Exit._

_Mar._ Holla! Bernardo!

_Ber._ Say,
What! is Horatio there?

_Hor._ A piece of him.

_Ber._ Welcome, Horatio; welcome, good Marcellus.

Notice how naturally and in what a businesslike way Bernardo, Francisco, Horatio and Marcellus are all introduced to the audience, and the care taken to stamp their identity upon the mind of the spectators. The natural easy way in which it is done springs from the good craftsmanship of Shakespeare, but the doing of it is the business of every playwright.

One would suppose that such a simple matter as that could not be overlooked, but if one turns to the plays of some modern dramatists and seeks to understand them without studying the stage directions and noticing carefully the name of the speaker, one is apt to get into confusion. The latest craze is to publish a programme with the “order of going in” like a cricket card and thus you can buy for sixpence information that the playwright is too slovenly and too ignorant of his business to provide for you. There were no programmes in Shakespeare’s time, but there were playwrights.

It may occur to those who have not studied the rules of the game that there is not the same necessity for careful workmanship in the matter of entrances in a play of to-day that there was three hundred years ago. The answer to that is that a play or a wheel of to-day is essentially the same as a play or a wheel was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The duty of the playwright to make his entrances obvious to his audience is equally clear, and is equally understood by the man who knows his business.

Compare as a modern instance Sir Arthur Pinero’s opening of “Sweet Lavender.” The scene is a sitting-room at 3 Brain Court Temple. Left and right are two doors leading to the rooms of Richard Phenyl and Clement Hale. Ruth, the housekeeper, is discovered, and Bulger, the barber, enters the room and the play begins. Now note the workmanship.

_Bul._ I’ve give Mr. ’Ale a nice shave, Mrs. Rolt, clean and
quick. Water’s ’ot enough for me jist to rub over Mr. Phenyl’s
face if ’e’s visible.

_Ruth._ I’m afraid Mr. Phenyl isn’t well enough for you this
morning, Mr. Bulger.

_Bul._ Not one of ’is mornings, hey?

(_Ruth goes to the right-hand door and knocks sharply_).

_Ruth_ (_calling_). Mr. Phenyl! Mr. Phenyl! The barber.

You see, Sir Arthur Pinero, having been an actor and knowing his business, informs you in a few lines not only the names of Phenyl, Hale, their housekeeper, and barber, but where each of the two men sleep and something of their characters. In a word, Pinero, like Shakespeare, is a thoroughly experienced playwright.

No doubt the younger writers of to-day have been led into their contempt for the business they have undertaken by the success that has enriched Mr. Bernard Shaw. They should remember, however, that he is more of a preacher and society entertainer than a playwright, winning the game by his delightful personality or personalities. He is an earnest religious man, with a great hatred of the theatre, the stage, and entertainment, to use his own words, “the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience.” But dour Nonconformist as he is, his dullest moments are interrupted by his deep insight into the really funny things of this world. Mr. Shaw could make a sound play if he cared enough about it to try to do so, and in “Arms and the Man” and “You Never Can Tell” he showed much knowledge of the business. He would never, I think, have attained the real grip of the matter that Shakespeare and Pinero have, and knowing this he prefers to exploit his really great qualities in other ways.