Chapter II: Part 2

When they were at last arrived and seated in their box Lady Catherine approved the spacious dignity of the baronial hall, which, she said, reminded her of the great gallery at Pemberley, but was shocked at the familiarities which passed between the Baron and Baroness Beauxchamps and their page-boy. “These foreign nobles,” she exclaimed, “adventurers, I daresay! It was Sir Lewis’s opinion that _all_ foreigners were adventurers. No English baron, it is certain, would talk so familiarly to a common domestic, a person of inferior birth, and of no importance in the world. Honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest, forbid it. With such manners, I do not wonder that the domestic arrangements are in disorder, the very stair-carpet unfastened, and a machine for cleaning knives actually brought into a reception room! See, they cannot even lay a table-cloth!” And her ladyship advised Charlotte on the proper way of laying table-cloths, especially in clergymen’s families.

After a song of Miss Florence Smithson’s Charlotte talked in a low tone with Elizabeth, and her ladyship called out:—“What is that you are saying, Mrs. Collins? What is it you are talking of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is.”

“We are speaking of music, madam,” said Charlotte.

“Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

When Cinderella set out for the ball in her coach-and-six with a whole train of running-footmen Lady Catherine signified her approbation. “Young women should always be properly guarded and attended, according to their situation in life. When my niece Georgiana went to Ramsgate last summer, I made a point of her having two men-servants go with her. I am excessively attentive to all those things.”

But now they were at the ball, and the box party was all attention. The Prince, dignified and a little stiff, reminded Elizabeth of Mr. Darcy. But guests so strange as Mutt and Jeff, she thought, would never be allowed to pollute the shades of Pemberley. Mr. Collins’s usually cold composure forsook him at the sight of the Baroness playing cards with the Baron on one of her _paniers_ as a table, and felt it his duty to apologize to Lady Catherine for the unseemly incident. “If your ladyship will warrant me,” he began, “I will point out to my cousin that neither a person of your high station nor a clergyman of the Church of England ought to be asked to witness this licentiousness of behaviour.” “And advise him,” said her ladyship, “on the authority of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, that _paniers_ were never used for this disgraceful purpose. There is no one in England who knows more about _paniers_ than myself, for my grandmother, Lady Anne, wore them, and some day Mrs. Jennings, the housekeeper, shall show them to Miss Bennet,” for Elizabeth could not forbear a smile, “at Rosings.”

The party retired early, for Elizabeth had to be conveyed to her uncle’s as far as Gracechurch Street, and Lady Catherine desired the interval of a long night before choosing her new bonnet. It was not until Mr. Collins was once more in his parsonage that he sent his cousin an acknowledgment of the entertainment afforded at Drury Lane, as follows:—

“HUNSFORD, _near_ WESTERHAM, KENT,

“_January, 19—_.

“DEAR SIR,—We withdrew from your Christmas entertainment
on Monday last with mingled feelings of gratification and
reprobation. When I say ‘we’ I should tell you that my
Charlotte and I not only brought with us a Miss Elizabeth
Bennet, one of the friends of her maiden state, but were
honoured by the company of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine
de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and
beneficence have, as you know, preferred me to the valuable
rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour
to demean myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship,
and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which
are instituted by the Church of England. It is as a clergyman
that I feel it my duty to warn you against the sinful game of
cards exhibited in the scene of the Prince’s ball. If it had
been family whist, I could have excused it, for there can be
little harm in whist, at least among players who are not in
such circumstances as to make five shillings any object. But
the Baroness Beauxchamps is manifestly engaged in a game of
sheer chance, if not of downright cheating. The admission of
this incident to your stage cannot but have proceeded, you must
allow me to tell you, from a faulty degree of indulgence. And
I am to add, on the high authority of Lady Catherine, probably
the highest on this as on many other subjects, that there is no
instance on record of the _paniers_ once worn by ladies being
used as card-tables. With respectful compliments to your lady
and family,

“I remain, dear sir, your cousin,

“WILLIAM COLLINS.”

MR. PICKWICK AT THE PLAY

“And now,” said Mr. Pickwick, looking round on his friends with a good-humoured smile, and a sparkle in the eye which no spectacles could dim or conceal, “the question is, Where shall we go to-night?”

With the faithful Sam in attendance behind his chair, he was seated at the head of his own table, with Mr. Snodgrass on his left and Mr. Winkle on his right and Mr. Alfred Jingle opposite him; his face was rosy with jollity, for they had just dispatched a hearty meal of chops and tomato sauce, with bottled ale and Madeira, and a special allowance of milk punch for the host.

Mr. Jingle proposed Mr. Pickwick; and Mr. Pickwick proposed Mr. Jingle. Mr. Snodgrass proposed Mr. Winkle; and Mr. Winkle proposed Mr. Snodgrass; while Sam, taking a deep pull at the stone bottle of milk punch behind his master’s chair, silently proposed himself.

“And where,” said Mr. Pickwick, “shall we go to-night?” Mr. Snodgrass, as modest as all great geniuses are, was silent. Mr. Winkle, who had been thinking of Arabella, started violently, looked knowing, and was beginning to stammer something, when he was interrupted by Mr. Jingle—“A musical comedy, old boy—no plot—fine women—gags—go by-by—wake up for chorus—entertaining, very.”

“And lyrics,” said Mr. Snodgrass, with poetic rapture.

“I was just going to suggest it,” said Mr. Winkle, “when this individual” (scowling at Mr. Jingle, who laid his hand on his heart, with a derisive smile), “when, I repeat, this individual interrupted me.”

“A musical comedy, with all my heart,” said Mr. Pickwick. “Sam, give me the paper. H’m, h’m, what’s this? _The Eclipse_, a farce with songs—will that do?”

“But is a farce with songs a musical comedy?” objected Mr. Winkle.

“Bless my soul,” said Mr. Pickwick, “this is very puzzling.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said Sam, touching his forelock, “it’s a distinction without a difference—as the pork pieman remarked when they asked him if his pork wasn’t kittens.”

“Then,” said Mr. Pickwick, with a benevolent twinkle, “by all means let us go to _The Eclipse_.”

“Beg pardon, sir,” said Sam again, doubtfully, “there ain’t no astrongomies in it, is there?” Sam had not forgotten his adventure with the scientific gentleman at Clifton. But, as nobody knew, they set off for the Garrick Theatre, and were soon ensconced in a box.

They found the stage occupied by a waiter, who was the very image of the waiter Mr. Pickwick had seen at the Old Royal Hotel at Birmingham, except that he didn’t imperceptibly melt away. Waiters, in general, never walk or run; they have a peculiar and mysterious power of skimming out of rooms which other mortals possess not. But this waiter, unlike his kind, couldn’t “get off” anyhow. He explained that it was because the composer had given him no music to “get off” with.

“Poor fellow,” said Mr. Pickwick, greatly distressed; “will he have to stop there all night?”

“Not,” muttered Sam to himself, “if I wos behind ’im with a bradawl.”

However, the waiter did at last get off, and then came on again and sang another verse, amid loud hoorays, until Mr. Pickwick’s eyes were wet with gratification at the universal jollity.

“Fine fellow, fine fellow,” cried Mr. Pickwick; “what is his name?”

“Hush-h-h, my dear sir,” whispered a charming young man of not much more than fifty in the next box, in whom Mr. Pickwick, abashed, recognized Mr. Angelo Cyrus Bantam, “_that_ is Mr. Alfred Lester.”

“A born waiter,” interjected Mr. Jingle, “once a waiter always a waiter—stage custom—Medes and Persians—wears his napkin for a nightcap—droll fellow, very.”

By and by there was much talk of a mysterious Tubby Haig, and they even sang a song about him; but he did not appear on the stage, and Mr. Pickwick, whose curiosity was excited, asked who this Tubby Haig was.

Sam guessed he might be own brother to Mr. Wardle’s Fat Boy, Joe, or perhaps “the old gen’l’m’n as wore the pigtail—reg’lar fat man, as hadn’t caught a glimpse of his own shoes for five-and-forty year,” but Mr. Bantam again leaned over from his box and whispered:—

“Hush-h-h, my dear sir, nobody is fat or old in Ba-a——I mean in literary circles. Mr. Tubby Haig is a popular author of detective stories, much prized, along with alleytors and commoneys, by the youth of this town.”

But a sudden start of Mr. Winkle’s and a rapturous exclamation from Mr. Snodgrass again directed Mr. Pickwick’s attention to the scene. He almost fainted with dismay. Standing in the middle of the stage, in the full glare of the lights, was a lady with her shoulders and back (which she kept turning to the lights) bare to the waist!

“Bless my soul,” cried Mr. Pickwick, shrinking behind the curtain of the box, “what a dreadful thing!”

He mustered up courage, and looked out again. The lady was still there, not a bit discomposed.

“Most extraordinary female, this,” thought Mr. Pickwick, popping in again.

She still remained, however, and even threw an arch glance in Mr. Pickwick’s direction, as much as to say, “You old dear.”

“But—but—” cried Mr. Pickwick, in an agony, “won’t she catch cold?”

“Bless your heart, no, sir,” said Sam, “she’s quite used to it, and it’s done with the very best intentions, as the gen’l’man said ven he run away from his wife, ’cos she seemed unhappy with him.”

If Mr. Pickwick was distressed, very different was the effect of the lovely vision upon Mr. Winkle. Alas for the weakness of human nature! he forgot for the moment all about Arabella. Suddenly grasping his hat, he rose from his seat, said “Good-night, my dear sir,” to Mr. Pickwick between his set teeth, added brokenly, “My friend, my benefactor, my honoured companion, do not judge me harshly”—and dashed out of the box.

“Very extraordinary,” said Mr. Pickwick to himself, “what _can_ that young man be going to do?”

Meanwhile, for Mr. Winkle to rush downstairs, into the street, round the corner, as far as the stage-door, was the work of a moment. Taking out a card engraved “NATHANIEL WINKLE, M.P.C.,” he hastily pencilled a few fervent words on it and handed it to the door-keeper, requiring him instantly to convey it to Miss Teddie Gerard.

“What now, imperence,” said the man, roughly pushing him from the door and knocking his hat over his eyes.

At the same moment Mr. Winkle found his arms pinioned from behind by Sam Weller, who led him, crestfallen, back into the street and his senses. The public were now leaving the theatre, and Mr. Pickwick, beckoning Mr. Winkle to approach, fixed a searching look upon him, and uttered in a low, but distinct and emphatic, tone these remarkable words:—

“You’re a humbug, sir.”

“A what!” said Mr. Winkle, starting.

“A humbug, sir.”

With these words, Mr. Pickwick turned slowly on his heel, and rejoined his friends.

MR. CRICHTON AND MR. LITTIMER

They were seated together, Mr. and Mrs. Crichton in the bar-parlour of their little public-house in the Harrow Road, at the more fashionable end, for which Mr. Crichton had himself invented the sign (in memory of his past experiences) of “The Case is Altered.” Mr. Crichton, too, was altered and yet the same. He wore one of the Earl’s old smoking-jackets, with a coronet still embroidered on the breast pocket—not, he said, out of anything so vulgar as ostentation, but as a sort of last link with the Upper House—but his patent leather boots had given place to carpet slippers, and his trousers, once so impeccable, were now baggy at the knees. Altogether he was an easier, more relaxed Crichton, freed as he was from the restraining, if respectful, criticism of the servants’ hall. Indeed, Miss Fisher, who had always hated him, hinted that he had become slightly Rabelaisian—a reference which she owed to mademoiselle—though she would not have dared to repeat the hint to Mrs. Crichton (_née_ Tweeny). For marriage had in no degree abated Tweeny’s reverence for her Crichton, or rather, as old habit still impelled her to call him, her Guv.

The Guv. was at this moment comforting himself with a glass of port (from the wood) and thinking of that bin of ’47 he had helped the Earl to finish in past days. And now he was inhabiting a road where (at least at the other, the unfashionable, end) port was invariably “port wine.” Such are the vicissitudes of human affairs. Tweeny herself was guilty of the solecism, as was perhaps to be expected from a lady who, for her own drinking, preferred swipes. Though she had made great strides in her education under the Guv.’s guidance (she was now nearly into quadratic equations, and could say the dates of accession of the kings of England down to James II.), she still made sad havoc of her nominatives and verbs in the heat of conversation.

“A gent as wants to see the Guv.,” said the potboy, popping his head in at the bar-parlour door—the potboy, for Tweeny knew better than to have a barmaid about the place for the Guv. to cast a favourable eye on.

A not very clean card was handed in, inscribed:—

“MR. LITTIMER,”

and the owner walked in after it. Or, rather, glided softly in, shutting the door after entry as delicately as though the inmates had just fallen into a sweet sleep on which their life depended. Mr. Littimer was an old-fashioned looking man, with mutton-chop whiskers, a “stock,” tied in a large bow, a long frock-coat, and tight trousers—the whole suggesting nothing of recent or even modern date, but, say, 1850. It was an appearance of intense respectability, of super-respectability, of that 1850 respectability which was so infinitely more respectable than any respectability of our own day. Mr. Crichton stared, as well he might, and washed his hands with invisible soap. Though, in fact, now middle-aged, he felt in this man’s presence extremely young. He clean forgot that he had been a King in Babylon. Indeed, for the first time in his life he, the consummate, the magisterial, the admirable Crichton, felt almost green.

“Mr. Crichton, sir,” said the visitor, with an apologetic inclination of the head, “I have ventured to take the great liberty of calling upon you, if you please, sir, and,” he added with another inclination of the head to Mrs. Crichton (who felt what she would herself have called flabbergasted), “if _you_ please, ma’am, as an old friend of your worthy father. He was butler at Mrs. Steerforth’s when I valeted poor Mr. James.” His eye fell, respectably, on Mr. Crichton’s port. “Ah!” he said, “_his_ wine was Madeira, but——” A second glass of port was thereupon placed on the table, and he sipped it respectably.

Mr. Crichton could only stare, speechless. All his _aplomb_ had gone. He gazed at a ship’s bucket, his most cherished island relic, which hung from the ceiling (as a shade for the electric light—one of his little mechanical ingenuities), and wondered whether he ever _could_ have put anybody’s head in it. His philosophy was, for once, at fault. He knew, none better, that “nature” had made us all unequal, dividing us up into earls and butlers and tweenies, but now for the first time it dawned upon him that “nature” had made us unequally respectable. Here was something more respectable, vastly more respectable, than himself; respectable not in the grand but in the sublime manner.

He could not guess his visitor’s thoughts, and it was well for his peace of mind that he could not. For Mr. Littimer’s thoughts were, respectably, paternal. He thought of Mr. Crichton, sen., and still more of the senior Mrs. Crichton, once “own woman” to Mrs. Steerforth. Ah! those old days and those old loves! How sad and bad and mad it was—for Mr. Littimer’s poet was Browning, as his host’s was Henley, as suited the difference in their dates—and how they had deceived old Crichton between them! So this was _his_ boy, his, Littimer’s, though no one knew it save himself and the dead woman! And as he gazed, with respectable fondness, at this image, modernized, modified, subdued, of his own respectability, he reflected that there was something in heredity, after all. And he smiled, respectably, as he remembered his boy’s opinion that the union of butler and lady’s maid was perhaps the happiest of all combinations. Perhaps, yes; but without any perhaps, if the combination included the valet.

Unhappy, on the other hand, were those combinations from which valets were pointedly excluded. There was that outrageous young person whom Mr. James left behind at Naples and who turned upon him, the respectable Littimer, like a fury, when he was prepared to overlook her past in honourable marriage.

His meditations were interrupted by Mrs. Crichton, who had been mentally piecing together her recollections of “David Copperfield”—her Guv. had given her a Dickens course—and had now arrived at a conclusion. “Axin’ yer pardon, mister,” she said (being still, as we have stated, a little vulgar when excited), “but if you was valet to Mr. James Steerforth, you’re the man as ’elped ’im to ruin that pore gal, and as afterwards went to quod for stealin’. I blushes”—here her eye fell on the Guv., who quietly dropped the correction “blush”—“I _blush_ for yer, Mr. Littimer.” “Ah, ma’am,” Mr. Littimer respectably apologized, “I attribute my past follies entirely to having lived a thoughtless life in the service of young men; and to having allowed myself to be led by them into weaknesses, which I had not the strength to resist.”

“And that, I venture to suggest, ma’am,” he respectably continued, “is why your worthy husband has been so much more fortunate in the world than myself. We are both respectable, if I may say so, patterns of respectability” (Crichton coloured with gratification at this compliment from the Master), “and yet our respectability has brought us very different fates. And why, if you please, ma’am? Because I have served the young, while he has served the old—for I believe, ma’am, the most noble the Earl of Loam is long past the meridian. Besides, ma’am, we Early Victorians had not your husband’s educational advantages. There were no Board schools for me. Not that I’m complaining, ma’am. We could still teach the young ’uns a thing or two about respectability.” And so with a proud humility (and an intuition that there was to be no more port) he took his leave, again shutting the door with the utmost delicacy. He was, in truth, well content. He had seen his boy. The sacred lamp of respectability was not out.

But Mr. Crichton sat in a maze, still washing his hands with invisible soap.

HENRY JAMES REPUDIATES “THE REPROBATE”

He had dropped, a little wearily, the poor dear man, into a seat at the shady end of the terrace, whither he had wended or, it came over him with a sense of the blest “irony” of vulgar misinterpretation, almost zig-zagged his way after lunch. For he had permitted himself the merest sip of the ducal Yquem or Brane Cantenac, or whatever—he knew too well, oh, _didn’t_ he? after all these years of Scratchem house-parties, the dangerous convivialities one had better show for beautifully appreciating than freely partake of—but he had been unable, in his exposure as the author of established reputation, the celebrity of the hour, the “master,” as chattering Lady Jemima _would_ call him between the omelette and the chaudfroid, to “take cover” from the ducal dates. Well, the “All clear” was now sounded, but his head was still dizzy with the reverberating ’87’s and ’90’s and ’96’s and other such bombs of chronological precision that the host had dropped upon the guests as the butler filled their glasses. His subsequent consciousness was quite to cherish the view that dates which went thus distressingly to one’s head must somehow not be allowed to slip out of it again, but be turned into “copy” for readers who innocently look to their favourite romancers for connoisseurship in wines. What Lady Jemima had flung out at lunch was true, readers _are_ a “rum lot,” and, hang it all, who says art says sacrifice, readers were a necessary evil, the many-headed monster must be fed, and he’d be blest if he wouldn’t feed it with dates, and show himself for, indulgently, richly, chronologically, “rum.”

It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision of future “bluffing” about vintages interfered not at all with the measure of his actual _malaise_. He still nervously fingered the telegram handed to him at lunch, and, when read, furtively crumpled into his pocket under Lady Jemima’s celebrated nose. It was entirely odious to him, the crude purport of the message, as well as the hideous yellow ochre of its envelope. “Confidently expect you,” the horrid thing ran, “to come and see your own play.” This Stage Society, if that was its confounded name, was indeed of a confidence! Yes, and of the last vulgarity! His conscience was not void, but, on the contrary, quite charged and brimming with remembered lapses from the ideal life of letters—it was the hair-shirt he secretly wore even in the Scratchem world under the conventional garment which the Lady Jemimas of that world teased him by calling a “boiled rag”—but the “expected,” _that_, thank goodness, he had never been guilty of. Nay, was it not his “note,” as the reviewers said, blithely and persistently to balk “expectation”? Had he not in every book of his successfully hugged his own mystery? Had not these same reviewers always missed his little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted him on the back as when they kicked him on the shins? Did a single one of them ever discover “the figure in the carpet”? How many baffled readers hadn’t written to him imploring him to divulge what _really_ happened between Milly and Densher in that last meeting at Venice? Certainly he was in no chuckling mood under the smart of the telegram, but it seemed to him that he could almost have chuckled at the thought that he beautifully didn’t know what happened in that Venetian meeting himself! And this impossible Stage Society, with that collective fatuity which seems always so much more gross than any individual sort, “confidently expected” him to come!

What was it, please, he put the question to himself with a heat which seemed to give even the shady end of the terrace the inconvenience of an exposure to full sun, they expected him to come _to_, or, still worse, for having probed the wound he must not flinch with the scalpel, to come _for_? Oh, no, he had not forgotten _The Reprobate_, and what angered him was that _they_ hadn’t, either. He had not forgotten a blessed one of the plays he had written for the country towns a score of years ago, when he had been bitten by the tarantula of the theatre, and, remembering them, he felt now viciously capable of biting the tarantula back. He had written them, God forgive him, for country towns. He positively shuddered when he found himself in a country town, to this day. The terrace at Scratchem notoriously commanded a distant prospect of at least three, in as many counties, with cathedrals, famous inns, theatres—the whole orthodox equipment, he summed it up vindictively in cheap journalese, of country towns. Vindictive, too, was his reflection that these objects of his old crazy solicitude must have been revolutionized in twenty years, their cathedrals “restored,” their inns (the “A.B.C.” vouched for it) “entirely refitted with electric light,” their theatres turned into picture palaces. All the old associations of _The Reprobate_ were extinct. It was monstrous that it should be entirely refitted with electric light.

And in the crude glare of that powerful illuminant, with every switch or whatever mercilessly turned—didn’t they call it?—“on,” he seemed to see the wretched thing, bare and hideous, with no cheap artifice of “make-up,” no dab of rouge or streak of burnt cork, spared the dishonour of exposure. The crack in the golden bowl would be revealed, his awkward age would be brought up against him, what Maisie knew would be nothing to what everybody would now know. His agony was not long purely mental; it suddenly became intercostal. A sharp point had dug him in the ribs. It was Lady Jemima’s, it couldn’t _not_ be Lady Jemima’s, pink parasol. Aware of the really great ease of really great ladies he forced a smile, as he rubbed his side. Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed—that was a part of their high bravery and privilege.

“Dear Master,” she began, and the phrase hurt him even more than the parasol, “won’t you take poor little _me_?”

The great lady had read his telegram! Olympian unconventionality was of a licence!

“Yes,” she archly beamed, “I looked over your shoulder at lunch, and——”

“And,” he interruptingly wailed, “you know all.”

“All,” she nodded, “_tout le tremblement_, the whole caboodle. Now be an angel and take me.”

“But, dear lady,” he gloomed at her, “that’s just it. The blest play is so naïvely, so vulgarly, beyond all redemption though not, thank Heaven, beyond my repudiation, caboodle.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she playfully rejoined, and the artist in him registered for future use her rich Olympian vocabulary, “you _wrote_ it, Master, anyhow. We’ve all been young once. Take me, and we’ll both be young again,” she gave it him straight, “together.”

Ah, then the woman _was_ dangerous. Scratchem gossip had, for once, not overshot the mark. He would show her, all Olympian though she was, that giving it straight was a game two could play at.

“Dear lady,” he said, “you’re wonderful. But I won’t take you. What’s more, I’m not”—and he had it to himself surprisingly ready—“taking _any_.”

M. BERGERET ON FILM CENSORING

A late October sun of unusual splendour lit up the windows of M. Paillot’s bookshop, at the corner of the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries. But it was sombre in the back region of the shop where the second-hand book shelves were and M. Mazure, the departmental archivist, adjusted his spectacles to read his copy of _Le Phare_, with one eye on the newspaper and the other on M. Paillot and his customers. For M. Mazure wished not so much to read as to be seen reading, in order that he might be asked what the leading article was and reply, “Oh, a little thing of my own.” But the question was not asked, for the only other _habitué_ present was the Lecturer in Latin at the Faculty of Letters, who was sad and silent. M. Bergeret was turning over the new books and the old with a friendly hand, and though he never bought a book for fear of the outcries of his wife and three daughters he was on the best of terms with M. Paillot, who held him in high esteem as the reservoir and alembic of those humaner letters that are the livelihood and profit of booksellers. He took up Vol. XXXVIII. of “L’Histoire Générale des Voyages,” which always opened at the same place, p. 212, and he read:—

“ver un passage au nord. ‘C’est à cet échec, dit-il, que nous
devons n’avoir pu visiter les îles Sandwich et enrichir notre
voyage d’une découverte qui....’”

For six years past the same page had presented itself to M. Bergeret, as an example of the monotony of life, as a symbol of the uniformity of daily tasks, and it saddened him.

At that moment M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, entered the shop and greeted his friends with the slight air of superiority of a traveller over stay-at-homes. “I’ve just got back from England,” he said, “and here, if either of you have enough English to read it, is to-day’s _Times_.”

M. Mazure hastily thrust _Le Phare_ into his pocket and looked askance at the voluminous foreign journal, wherein he could claim no little thing of his own. M. Bergeret accepted it and applied himself as conscientiously to construing the text as though it were one of those books of the Æneid from which he was compiling his “Virgilius Nauticus.” “The manners of our neighbours,” he presently said, “are as usual more interesting to a student of human nature than their politics. I read that they are seriously concerned about the ethical teaching of their kinematography, and they have appointed a film censor, the deputy T. P. O’Connor.”

“I think I have heard speak of him over there,” interrupted M. de Terremondre; “they call him, familiarly, Tépé.”

“A mysterious name,” said M. Bergeret, “but manifestly not abusive, and that of itself is a high honour. History records few nicknames that do not revile. And if the deputy O’Connor, or Tépé, can successfully acquit himself of his present functions he will be indeed an ornament to history, a saint of the Positivist Calendar, which is no doubt less glorious than the Roman, but more exclusive.”

“Talking of Roman saints,” broke in M. Mazure, “the Abbé Lantaigne has been spreading it abroad that you called Joan of Arc a mascot.”

“By way of argument merely,” said M. Bergeret, “not of epigram. The Abbé and I were discussing theology, about which I never permit myself to be facetious.”

“But what of Tépé and his censorial functions?” asked M. de Terremondre.

“They are extremely delicate,” replied M. Bergeret, “and offer pitfalls to a censor with a velleity for nice distinctions. Thus I read that this one has already distinguished, and distinguished _con allegrezza_, between romantic crime and realistic crime, between murder in Mexico and murder in Mile End (which I take to be a suburb of London). He has distinguished between ‘guilty love’ and ‘the pursuit of lust.’ He has distinguished between a lightly-clad lady swimming and the same lady at rest. Surely a man gifted with so exquisite a discrimination is wasted in rude practical life. He should have been a metaphysician.”

“Well, I,” confessed M. de Terremondre, “am no metaphysician, and it seems to me murder is murder all the world over.”

“Pardon me,” said M. Bergeret, “but there, I think, your Tépé is quite right. Murder is murder all the world over if you are on the spot. But if you are at a sufficient distance from it in space or time, it may present itself as a thrilling adventure. Thus the Mexican film censor will be right in prohibiting films of murder in Mexico, and not wrong in admitting those of murder in Mile End. Where would tragedy be without murder? We enjoy the murders of Julius Cæsar or of Duncan because they are remote; they gratify the primeval passion for blood in us without a sense of risk. But we could not tolerate a play or a picture of yesterday’s murder next door, because we think it might happen to ourselves. Remember that murder was long esteemed in our human societies as an energetic action, and in our manners and in our institutions there still subsist traces of this antique esteem. And that is why I approve the English film censor for treating with a wise indulgence one of the most venerable of our human admirations. He gratifies it under conditions of remoteness that deprive bloodshed of its reality while conserving its artistic verisimilitude.”

“But, bless my soul,” said M. de Terremondre “how does the man distinguish between guilty love and lust?”

“It is a fine point,” said M. Bergeret. “The Fathers of the Church, the schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Descartes and Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, have all failed to make the distinction, and some of them have even confounded with the two what men to-day agree in calling innocent love. But is love ever innocent—unless it be that love Professor Bellac in Pailleron’s play described as _l’amour psychique_, the love that Petrarch bore to Laura?”

“If I remember aright,” interposed M. Mazure, “someone else in the play remarked that Laura had eleven children.”

Just then Mme. de Gromance passed across the Place. The conversation was suspended while all three men watched her into the patissier’s opposite, elegantly hovering over the plates of cakes, and finally settling on a _baba au rhum_.

“Sapristi!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, “she’s the prettiest woman in the whole place.”

M. Bergeret mentally went over several passages in Æneid, Book IV., looked ruefully at his frayed shirt cuffs, and regretted the narrow life of a provincial university lecturer that reduced him to insignificance in the eyes of the prettiest woman in the place.

“Yes,” he said with a sigh, “it is a very fine point. I wonder how on earth Tépé manages to settle it?”

THE CHOCOLATE DRAMA

Civilization is a failure. That we all knew, even before the war, and indeed ever since the world first began to suffer from the intolerable nuisance of disobedient parents. But the latest and most fatal sign of decadence is the advent of a paradoxical Lord Chancellor. I read in a _Times_ leader:—“When the Lord Chancellor ponderously observes in the House of Lords that the primary business of theatres ‘is not to sell chocolates but to present the drama,’ he is making a statement which is too absurd to analyse.” _The Times_, I rejoice to see, is living up to its high traditions of intrepid and incisive utterance. I should not myself complain if the Lord Chancellor was merely ponderous. As the dying Heine observed, when someone wondered if Providence would pardon him, _c’est son métier_. What is so flagrant is the Lord Chancellor’s ignorance of the commanding position acquired by chocolate in relation to the modern drama.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not a _chocolatier_. I have no vested interest in either Menier or Marquis. But I am a frequenter of the playhouse, and live, therefore, in the odour of chocolate. I know that without chocolates our womenkind could not endure our modern drama; and without womenkind the drama would cease to exist. The question is, therefore, of the deepest theatrical importance. I feel sure the British Drama League must have had a meeting about it. The advocates of a national theatre have probably considered it in committee. The two bodies (if they are not one and the same) should arrange an early deputation to the Food Controller.

Meanwhile the Lord Chancellor wantonly paradoxes. Evidently he is no playgoer. That is a trifle, and since the production of _Iolanthe_ perhaps even (in the phrase of a famous criminal lawyer) “a amiable weakness.” But, evidently also, he is not a chocolate eater, and that is serious. I suppose, after all, you are not allowed to eat chocolates on the Woolsack. But there is the Petty Bag. It would hold at least 2 lb. of best mixed. Why not turn it to a grateful and comforting purpose? The Great Seal, too, might be done in chocolate, and as I understand the Lord Chancellor must never part with it, day or night, he would have a perpetual source of nourishment. It is time that the symbols of office ceased to be useless ornaments. Stay! I believe I have stumbled incidentally on the secret of Lord Halsbury’s splendid longevity. Ask Menier or Marquis.

But the present Chancellor has, clearly, missed his opportunities. Let him visit our theatres and there recognize the futility of his pretence that their primary business is to present drama. He will see at once that what he put forward as a main business is in reality a mere parergon. Drama is presented, but only as an agreeable, not too obtrusive, accompaniment to the eating of chocolate. The curtain goes up, and the ladies in the audience, _distraites_, and manifestly feeling with Mrs. Gamp (or was it Betsy Prig?) a sort of sinking, yawn through the first scene or two. Then there is a rustle of paper wrappings, little white cardboard boxes are brought out and passed from hand to hand, there is a dainty picking and choosing of round and square and triangular, with a knowing rejection of the hard-toffee-filled ones, and now the fair faces are all set in a fixed smile of contentment and the fair jaws are steadily, rhythmically at work. To an unprepared observer it cannot be a pretty sight. Fair Americans chewing gum are nothing to it. There are superfine male voluptuaries who do not much care to see women eat, even at the festive board. But to see scores of women simultaneously eating chocolates at the theatre is an uncanny thing. They do it in unison, and they do it with an air of furtive enjoyment, as though it were some secret vice and all the better for being sinful. The act-drop goes up and down, actors are heard talking or the orchestra playing, men pass out for a cigarette and repass, but the fair jaws never cease working. The habit of needlework, lace-making, and perhaps war knitting has given lovely woman that form of genius which has been defined as a long patience. They eat chocolates with the monotonous regularity with which they hemstitch linen or darn socks. It has been said that women go to church for the sake of the _hims_, but they go to the theatre for the sake of chocolates. And the Lord Chancellor, good, easy man, says the primary business of the theatre is to present drama!

No, its primary business is to provide comfortable and amusing surroundings for fair chocolate-eaters. The play is there for the same reason the coon band is at a restaurant, to assist mastication. That is the real explanation of recent vicissitudes in the dramatic _genres_. Why has tragedy virtually disappeared from the stage? Because it will go with neither _fondants_ nor _pralinés_. Why the enormous vogue of revues? Because they suit every kind of chocolate from 4_s_. to 6_s_. per lb. Why is Mr. George Robey so universal a favourite? Because he creates the kind of laughter which never interferes with your munching. The true, if hitherto secret, history of the drama is a history of theatrical dietary. Why is the Restoration drama so widely different from the Victorian? Because the first was an accompaniment to oranges and the second to pork-pies. We live now in a more refined age, the age of chocolate, and enjoy the drama that chocolate deserves. There has been what the vulgar call a “slump” in the theatrical world, and all sorts of far-fetched explanations have been offered, such as the dearth of good plays and the dismissal of the “temporary” ladies from Government offices, with consequent loss of pocket-money for playgoing. The real cause is quite simple, as real causes always are. Chocolate has “gone up.”

And that is the secret of all the agitation about the 8 o’clock rule. The purveyors know that, once in the theatre, ladies _must_ eat chocolate, whatever its price. It is a necessity for them there, not a luxury, and after 8 p.m., when the imported supplies are running low, almost any price might be obtained for the staple article of food on the spot. But why, it may be asked, are the imported supplies, in present circumstances, insufficient for the whole evening’s consumption? Simply because the chocolates eaten by women are purchased by men, and men are _so_ forgetful. Besides they have an absurd prejudice against bulging pockets. Clearly “Dora” ought gracefully to withdraw the 8 o’clock prohibition. It would not only be a kindness to those meritorious public servants, the chocolate vendors, but be also a great lift to the languishing drama. Ladies who have emptied their chocolate boxes are apt to become peevish—and then woe to the last act. With still another smooth round tablet to turn over on the tongue (especially if it is the delightful sort that has peppermint cream inside) the play might be followed to the very end with satisfaction, and even enthusiasm. The Lord Chancellor may ignore these facts, but they are well known to every serious student of the chocolate drama.

GROCK

There must be a philosophy of clowns. I would rather find it than look up their history, which is “older than any history that is written in any book,” though the respectable compilers of Encyclopædias (I feel sure without looking) must often have written it in their books. I have, however, been reading Croce’s history of Pulcinella, because that is history written by a philosopher. It is also a work of formidable erudition, disproving, among other things, the theory of the learned Dieterich that he was a survival from the stage of ancient Rome. No, he seems to have been invented by one Silvio Fiorillo, a Neapolitan actor who flourished “negli ultimi decenni del Cinquecento e nei primi del Seicento”—in fact, was a contemporary of an English actor, one William Shakespeare. Pulcinella, you know (transmogrified, and spoiled, for us as Punch), was a sort of clown, and it is interesting to learn that he was invented by an actor all out of his own head. But I for one should be vastly more interested to know who invented Grock. For Grock also is a sort of clown. Yet no; one must distinguish. There are clowns and there is Grock. For Grock happens to be an artist, and the artist is always an individual. After all, as an individual artist, he must have invented himself.

It was a remarkably happy invention. You may see that for yourselves at the Coliseum, generally, though true clown-lovers follow it about all over the map wherever it is to be seen. Victor Hugo (and the theme would not have been unworthy of that lyre) would have described it in a series of antitheses. It is genial and _macabre_, owlishly stupid and Macchiavellianly astute, platypode and feather-light, cacophonous and divinely musical. Grock’s first act is a practical antithesis. A strange creature with a very high and very bald cranium (you think of what Fitzgerald said of James Spedding’s: “No wonder no hair can grow at such an altitude”) and in very baggy breeches waddles in with an enormous portmanteau—which proves to contain a fiddle no larger than your hand. The creature looks more simian than human, but is graciously affable—another Sir Oran Haut-ton, in fact, with fiddle substituted for Sir Oran’s flute and French horn.

But Sir Oran was dumb, whereas Grock has a voice which reverberates along the orchestra and seems almost to lift the roof. He uses it to counterfeit the deep notes of an imaginary double bass, which he balances himself on a chair to play, and he uses it to roar with contemptuous surprise at being asked if he can play the piano. But it is good-humoured contempt. Grock is an accommodating monster, and at a mere hint from the violinist waddles off to change into evening clothes. In them he looks like a grotesque beetle. Then his antics at the piano! His chair being too far from the keyboard he makes great efforts to push the piano nearer. When it is pointed out that it would be easier to move the chair he beams with delight at the cleverness of the idea and expresses it in a peculiarly bland roar. Then he slides, in apparent absence of mind, all over the piano-case and, on finally deciding to play a tune, does it with his feet. Thereafter he thrusts his feet through the seat of the chair and proceeds to give a performance of extraordinary brilliance on the concertina.... But I am in despair, because I see that these tricks, which in action send one into convulsions of laughter, are not ludicrous, are not to be realized at all in narrative. It is the old difficulty of transposing the comic from three dimensions into two—and when the comic becomes the grotesque, and that extreme form of the grotesque which constitutes the clownesque, then the difficulty becomes sheer impossibility.

Why does this queer combination of anthropoid appearance, unearthly noises, physical agility, and musical talent—so flat in description—make one laugh so immoderately in actual presentation? Well, there is, first, the old idea of the parturient mountains and the ridiculous mouse. Of the many theories of the comic (all, according to Jean Paul Richter, themselves comic) the best known perhaps is the theory of suddenly relaxed strain. Your psychic energies have been strained (say by Grock’s huge portmanteau), and are suddenly in excess and let loose by an inadequate sequel (the tiny fiddle). Then there is the old theory of Aristotle, that the comic is ugliness without pain. That will account for your laughter at Grock’s grotesque appearance, his baggy breeches, his beetle-like dress clothes, his hideous mouth giving utterance to harmless sentiments. Again, there is the pleasure arising from the discovery that an apparent idiot has wholly unexpected superiorities, acrobatic skill, and virtuosity in musical execution. But “not such a fool as he looks” is the class-badge of clowns in general. There is something still unexplained in the attraction of Grock. One can only call it his individuality—his benign, bland outlook on a cosmos of which he seems modestly to possess the secret hidden from ourselves. One comes in the end to the old helpless explanation of any individual artist. Grock pleases because he is Grock.

And now I think one can begin to see why literature (or if you think that too pretentious a word, say letterpress) fails to do justice to clowns. Other comic personages have their verbal jokes, which can be quoted in evidence, but the clown (certainly the clown of the Grock type) is a joke confined to appearance and action. His effects, too, are all of the simplest and broadest—the obvious things (obvious when he has invented them) which are the most difficult of all to translate into prose. You see, I have been driven to depend on general epithets like grotesque, bland, _macabre_, which fit the man too loosely (like ready-made clothes cut to fit innumerable men) to give you his exact measure. My only consolation is that I have failed with the best. Grock, with all his erudition, all his nicety of analysis, has failed to realize Pulcinella for me. And that is where clowns may enjoy a secret, malign pleasure; they proudly confront a universe which delights in them but cannot describe them. A critic may say to an acrobat, for instance:—“I cannot swing on your trapeze, but I can understand you, while you cannot understand me.” But Grock seems to understand everything (he could do no less, with that noble forehead), probably even critics, while they, poor souls, can only struggle helplessly with their inadequate adjectives, and give him up. But if he condescended to criticism, be sure he would not struggle helplessly. He would blandly thrust his feet through the seat of his chair, and then write his criticism with them. And (Grock is a Frenchman) it would be better than Sainte-Beuve.

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism, as every baby in _Utopia Limited_ had its own ickle prospectus. This makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based on temperaments alien from his own. You have, in fact, the converse of Stendhal’s statement that every commendation from _confrère_ to _confrère_ is a certificate of resemblance; every sign of unlikeness provokes the opposite of commendation. So I took up with somewhat mixed feelings an important leading article in the _Literary Supplement_ on “The Function of Criticism.” Important because its subject is, as Henry James said once in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, among “the highest speculations that can engage the human mind.” (Oho! I should like to hear Mr. Bottles or any other _homme sensuel moyen_ on _that_!) Well, after reading the article, I have the profoundest respect for the writer, whoever he may be; he knows what he is talking about _au fond_, and can talk admirably about it. But then comes in that inevitable recalcitrancy. It seems to me that if the writer is right, then most art and criticism are on the wrong tack. Maybe they are—the writer evidently thinks they are—but one cannot accept that uncomfortable conclusion offhand, and so one cannot but ask oneself whether the writer _is_ right, after all.

He is certainly wrong about Croce. The ideal critic, he says, “will not accept from Croce the thesis that all expression is art; for he knows that if expression means anything it is by no means all art.” Now the very foundation-stone of the Crocean æsthetic is that art is the expression of intuitions; when you come to concepts, or the relations of intuitions, though the expression of them is art, the concepts themselves (what “expression means”) are not; you will have passed out of the region of art. Thus your historian, logician, or zoologist, say, has a style of his own; that side of him is art. But historical judgments, logic, or zoology are not. Croce discusses this distinction exhaustively, and, I should have thought, clearly. Yet here our leader-writer puts forward as a refutation of Croce a statement carefully made by Croce himself. But this is a detail which does not affect the writer’s main position. I only mention it as one of the many misrepresentations of Croce which students of that philosopher are, by this time, used to accepting as, apparently, inevitable.

Now, says the writer, the critic must have a philosophy and, what is more, a philosophy of a certain sort. That the critic must have a philosophy we should, I suppose, all agree; for the critic is a historian, and a historian without a theory of realities, a system of values, _i.e._, a philosophy, has no basis for his judgments—he is merely a chronicler. (And a chronicler, let me say in passing, is precisely what I should call the writer’s “historical critic”—who “essentially has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for him.”) But what particular philosophy must the critic have? It must be, says the writer, “a humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, and subject to an intimate, organic governance by an ideal of the good life.” Beware of confusing this ideal of good life with mere conventional morality. Art is autonomous and therefore independent of that. No; “an ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably_ be æsthetic. There is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms.” And so we get back to Plato and the Platonic ideas and, generally, to “the Greeks for the principles of art and criticism.” “The secret” of the humanistic philosophy “lies in Aristotle.”