LONDON LETTER.

The Phoenix Society.
In my last letter I mentioned an approaching performance
by the Phoenix Society of Ben Jonson's Vovpone; the performance proved to be the
most important theatrical event of the year in London. The play was superbly
carried out; the performance gave evidence of Jonson's consummate skill in stage tech-
nique, proceeding without a moment of tedium from end to end; it was well acted,
and both acted and received with great appreciation.

Almost the only opportunity for seeing a good play is that given by a few
private societies, which by reason of their "private" character are allowed to
give performances (for subscribers) on Sunday evenings. These are not co mer-
cial enterprises, but depend upon the enthusiasm of a few patrons and the devo-
tion of a few actors, most of whom have other engagements during the week. The
Phoenix, which restricts itself to Elizabethan and Restoration drama, is an off-
shoot of the Incorporated Stage Society, which produces modern and contemporary
plays of the better sort; the better sort usually being translations. At the
beginning of its venture, last year, the Phoenix was obliged to suffer a good
deal of abuse from the daily press, especially from the "Daily News" and the
"Star". These two journals are, to my mind, the least objectionable of the
London newspapers in their political views, but their Manchester-School poli-
tics gives a strong aroma of the Ebenezer Temperance Association to their views
on art. The bloodiness of Elizabethan tragedy, and the practice of the Society
in presenting the complete text of the plays, were the points of attack. The
"Daily News" reviewed the performance of "The Duchess of Malfi" under the head-
ing "Funnier than Farce!"

Mr William Archer mumbled "this farrago of horrors...shambling and ill-
composed...funereal affectation...I am far from calling the "Duchess of Malfi"
garbage, but..."

Still droller was a certain Sir Leo Money: "I agree with Mr
Robert Lynd that 'there are perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shake-

2

speare's that are as great as his third-best work', but I should not include the
'Duchess of Malfi' in the dozen ... I did not see the Phoenix production, but I
hope that some fumigation took place". Sir Leo writes frequently about the Ta-
riff, the income tax and kindred topics. For my part, I am more and more con-
vinced that the Phoenix is wholly justified in its refusal to admit any expurga-
tion whatever. The sense of relief, in hearing the indecencies of Elizabethan
and Restoration drama, leaves one a better and a stronger man.

I do not suggest that Jonson ІХХХХХграїстаххраматизація is comparable to Shakespeare. But we do not know Shakespeare; we only know Sir J. Forbes-Robert-Shylock, so on.

son's Hamlet, and Irving's МЖЖЖЖ, and MrXMasXaviahkx@thekk. The performance of "Volpone" had a significance for us which no contemporary performance of Shakespeare has had; it brought the great English drama to life as no contemporary performance has done. Shakespeare (that is to say, such of his plays are produced at all) strained through the nineteenth century, has been dwarfed to the dimensions of a part for Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Sir Frank Benson, or other histrionic nonentities: Shakespeare is the avenue to knighthood. But the continued popularity of Shakespeare perhaps has this meaning, that the appetite for poetic drama, and for a peculiarly English comedy or farce, has never disappeared; and that a native English popular drama, if it existed, would be nearer to Shakespeare than to Ibsen or Tchehov. It is curious that the popular desire for Shakespeare, and for the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, should be insatiable, although no attempt is ever made to create anything similar; and that on the other hand the crudest American laughter & tears plays, such as "Romance" or "Peg o' my Heart", should be constantly imported. Curious, again, that with so much comic talent in England more than any other country, no intelligent attempt has been made to use it to advantage in good comic opera or revue.

Music-Hall and Revue
This is an age of transition between the music-hall and
the revue. The music-hall is older, more popular, and is sanctified by the ad-
miration of the Nineties. It has flourished most vigorously in the North, many
years ago.

3

of its most famous stars are of Lancashire origin. (Marie Lloyd, if I am not mistaken, has a bit of a Manchester accent). Lancashire wit is mordant, ferocious, and personal; the Lancashire music-hall is excessively intime; success depends upon the relation established by a comedian of strong personality with an audience quick to respond with approval or contempt. The fierce talent of Nellie Wallace (who also has a Lancashire accent) holds the most boisterous music-hall in complete subjection. Little Tich, and George Robey (though the latter has adapted himself in recent years to some inferior revues) belong to this type and generation. The Lancashire comedian is at his best when unsupported and making a direct set, pitting himself, against an suitable audience; he is seen to best advantage at the smaller and more turbulent halls. As the smaller provincial or suburban hall disappears, supplanted by the more lucrative Cinema, this type of comedian disappears with it.

The music-hall comedian, however, can still be seen to perfection, whereas the revue comedian never is, because the revue is never good enough. Our best revue comedienne, Miss Ethel Levy, has seldom had the revue, and never the appreciation, that she deserves. Her type is quite different from that of Miss Lloyd Nellie Wallace. She is the most aloof and impersonal of personalities; indifferent, rather than contemptuous, toward the audience; her appearance and movement are of an extremely modern type of beauty. Hers is not broad farce, but a fascinating inhuman grotesquerie; she plays for herself rather than for the audience. Her art requires a setting which (in this country at least) it has never had. It is not a comedy of mirth. Ben Jonson might have done something for her. An element of bizarrerie is present in most of the comedians whom we should designate as of the revue stage rather than the music-hall stage: inLPINO LANE, in Robert Hale and George Graves; a bizarrerie more mature, perhaps more cosmopolitan, than that of Little Tich. But the revue itself is still lacking.

Caricature, Baudelaire, in his essay on *Le Rire* (qui vaut bien celui de

4

Bergson) remarks of English caricature

Pour trouver du comique féroce et très-féroce, il faut passer le Manche et visiter les royaumes brumeux du spleen... KXXXIXXkaiXXIXXkii lesigne distinctif de ce genre de comique était la violence".

Perhaps the best of the English caricaturists of journalism is H. M. Bateman.
He has lately held a very interesting exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.
It is curious to remark that some of his drawings descend to the pure and in-
significant funniness without seriousness, which appeals to the readers of
Punch; while others continue the best tradition from Rowlandson and Cruikshank.
They have some of the old English ferocity. Bateman is, I imagine, unconscious
of the two distinct strains in his work; Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in his exhibition now
on show at the same gallery, is wholly conscious and deliberate in his attempt
to restore this peculiarly English caricature and to unite it with serious work
in paint. Mr. Lewis is the most English of English painters, a student of Ho-
garth and Rowlandson; his fantastic imagination produces something essentially
different from anything across the Channel. I have always thought his design
at its best greatest when it approached the border of satire and caricature; and his
Tyros may be expected to breed a most interesting and energetic race.

The State of Criticism
The disappearance of the Athenaeum as an independent organ, and its gradual suffocation under the ponderous mass of the Nation, are greatly to be deplored. It leaves the Times Literary Supplement and the London Mercury as the only literary papers. The former is a useful bibliographer; it fills, and always will fill, an important place of its own. This place it can only hold by maintaining the anonymity of its contributions; but this anonymity, and the large number of its contributors, prevent it from upholding any definite standard of criticism. Nevertheless it possesses more authority than the Mercury, which is homogeneous enough, but suffers from the mediocrity of the minds most consistently employed upon it. Mr. Murry, as editor of the Athenaeum, was genuinely studious to maintain a serious criticism. With his particular tastes,

5

as well as his general statements, I find myself frequently at variance: the former seem to me often perverse or exaggerated, the latter tainted by some unintelligible Platonism. But there is no doubt that he had much higher standards and greater ambitions for literary journalism than any other editor in London. When he is not deceived by some aberration of enthusiasm or dis-like, and when he is not deluded by philosophy, he is the only one whom I can read all accreditated critics of his reading. There is Mr Clutton Brock, whose attention is not focussed upon literature but upon a very mild type of philosophic humanitarian religion; he is like a very intelligent archdeacon. There is Mr Robert Lynd, who has successfully cultivated the typical vices of daily journalism and has risen to the top of his profession; and there is Mr Squire, whose solemn trifling fascinates multitudes; and there are several writers, like Mr Edmund Gosse and Mr Sidney Calvin, whom I have never read and so cannot judge.

I cannot find, after this muster, that there is any ground for the rumour current in the chatty paragraphs of the newsprint several months ago, that the younger generation has decided to revive criticism. There has been a brisk business in centenaries. Keats and Marvell have just been celebrated in this way. The former has been particularly unfortunate. All the approved critics, each in his way, a different paper, blew a blast of glory enough to lay Keats' ghost for twenty years. I have never read such unanimous rubbish, and yet Keats was a poet. Possibly, after the chatty columns of the newsprint have ceased to cheer the "revival" of criticism, they will get a tip to lament its decay. Yet the "revival" of criticism as a "form" is not the essential thing; if we are intelligent enough, and really interested in the arts, both criticism and "creation" will in some form flourish.

The True Church and the Nineteen Churches While the poetry lovers have been subscribing to purchase for the nation the Keats house in Hampstead as a museum, the

6

the Church of England has apparently persisted in its design to sell for de-
molition nineteen religious edifices in the City of London. Probably few
American visitors, and certainly few natives, ever inspect these disconsolate
fanes; but they give to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hi-
deous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced. Some are by Chris-
topher Wren himself, others by his school; the least precious redeems some
vulgar street, like the plain little church of All Hallows at the end of London
Wall. Some, like St. Michael Paternoster Royal, are of great beauty. As the
prosperity of London has increased, the City Churches have fallen into desuetude;
that for their destruction the lack of congregation is the ecclesiastical ex-
cuse, and the need of money the ecclesiastical reason. The fact that the exec-
tion of these churches was apparently paid for out of a public coal tax, and
their decoration probably by the parishioners, does not seem to invalidate the
right of the True Church to bring them to the ground. To one who, like the
present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand'io sentii chiavar
l'uscio di sotto), the loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane,
and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the
dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and unforgotten. A small
pamphlet issued for the London County Council (Proposed Demolition of Nineteen
City Churches: P. S. King & Son Ltd., 2/4 Gt. Smith Street, Westminster S.W.1.,
3s.6d. net) should be enough to persuade of what I have said.

2

which accompanied it. The effect was like "Ulysses" with illustrations by the best contemporary illustrator.

Stravinsky, that is to say, had done his job in the music. But music that is to be taken like operatic music, music accompanying and explained by an action, must have a drama which has been put through the same process of development as the music itself. The spirit of the music was modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony. The Vegetation Rites upon which the ballet is founded remained, a pageant of primitive culture in spite of the music. It was interesting to anyone who had read the "Golden Bough" and similar works, but hardly more than interesting. In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even the "Golden Bough" can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation. In everything in the *Sacre de Printemps*, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present. Whether Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these fearful noises into music.

Mr. BERNARD SHAW.

It is not within my province to discuss "Back to Methusaleh", but the appearance of the book may make some observations on Mr. Shaw not impertinent, and it is an advantage for my purpose that the book is as well known in America as it is here. A valedictory tone in this book (already noticed by Mr. Seldes) is not inapposite to a successful season of his plays by Mr. Macdermott's company. "Blanco Posnet" is now running at the Court Theatre. indicated
The recognition implied by this success implies perhaps that Mr. Shaw has attained, in the most eulogistic sense of his own term, the position of an Ancient.

3

Seven years ago, in 1914, when Mr.Shaw came out with his thoughts about the War, the situation was very different. It might have been predicted that what he said then would not seem subversive or blasphemous now. The public has accepted Mr.Shaw, not by recognising the intelligence of what he said then, but by forgetting it; but we must not forget that at one time Mr.Shaw was a very unpopular man. He is no longer the gadfly of the commonwealth; but even if he has never been appreciated, it is something that he should be respected. Today he is perhaps an important elder man of letters in a sense in which Mr.Hardy is not. Hardy represents to us a still earlier generation: not by his date of birth but by his type of mind. He is of today the day exactly only before yesterday, whilst Shaw is of a today that is barely this evening. Hardy is Victorian, Shaw is Edwardian. Shaw is therefore more interesting to us, for by reflecting on his mind we may form some plausible conjecture about the mind of the next age - about what, in retrospect, the"present" generation will be found to have been. Shaw belongs to a fluid world, he is an insular Diderot, but more serious. I should say - for it is amusing, if unsafe, to prophesy - that we shall demand from our next leaders a purer intellect, more scientific, more logical, more rigorous. Shaw's mind is a free and easy mind: every idea, no matter how irrelevant, is welcome. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, the Preface to Methuselah would have seemed a cogent synthesis of thought instead of a delightful farragof Mr. Shaw's conversation about economics, politics, biology, dramatic and art criticism. It is not merely that Mr.Shaw is wilful; it is also that he lacks the interest in, and capacity for, continuous reasoning.

Mr.Shaw has never cajoled the public; it is no fault of his that he has been taken for a joker, a cleverer Oscar Wilde, when his intention was always austerely serious. It is his seriousness which has made him unpopular, which has made Oscar Wilde appear, in comparison, dull enough to be a safe and res-

5

logical science: not in the sense that this science actually made more progress
than the others, but in the sense that it was biology that influenced the imagi-
nation of non-scientific people. Darwin is the representative of those years,
as Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps of ours. Creative evolution
is a phrase that has lost both its stimulant and sedative virtues. It is possi-
ble that an exasperated generation may find comfort in admiring, /if without un-
derstanding, mathematics, may suspect that precision and profundity are not in-
compatible, may find maturity as interesting as adolescence, and permanence more
interesting than change. It must at all events be either much more demoralised
intellectually that the last age, or very much more disciplined.

J. S. Eist

4

any more than I can believe that Plato was an Oxford don. Of course, he
sometimes parodies himself (his parodies are instructive); but anything, unless
it is as well done as it can be done, may be ridiculous.

One writer, and indeed, in my opinion, the most interesting novelist
in England — who has apparently been touched by Dostoevsky, is Mr. D.H. Laurence.
Mr. Laurence has progressed — by fits and starts, it is true; for he has
perhaps done nothing as good as a whole as Sons and Lovers. He has never yet,
I think, quite surrendered himself to his work. He still theories at times
then he should merely see. His theory has not yet reached the point at which
it is no longer a theory, he still requires (at the end of the book) the
mouthpiece for an harangue. But there is one scene in this book — a dialogue
between an Italian and several Englishmen, in which one feels that the whole
is governed by a creator who is purely creator, with the terrifying disinterest-
cedness of the true creator. And for that we can forgive Mr. Laurence his
subsequent lapse into a theory of human relationships.

ORIGINAL
OLD STYLE

173

November 1927

LONDON LETTERS

It requires some effort of analysis to understand why one person, among many who do a thing with accomplished skill, should be greater than the others; nor is it always easy to distinguish superiority from great popularity, when the two go together. I am thinking of Marie Lloyd, who has died only a short time before the writing of this letter. Although I have always admired her genius I do not think that I always appreciated its uniqueness; I certainly did not realise that her death would strike me as the most important event which I have had to chronicle in these pages. Marie Lloyd was the greatest musical artist in England: she was also the most popular. And popularity in her case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest.

Marie Lloyd's funeral became a ceremony which surprised even her warmest admirers:

The scenes from an early hour yesterday, had been eloquent of the supreme place which Marie Lloyd held in the affection of the people. Wreaths had poured into the house in Woodstock Road from all parts of the country. There were hundreds of them from people whose names are almost household words on the variety stage, and from such people as a flower boy in Piccadilly Circus: the taxi-drivers of Punter's Garage: and the Costermongers' Union of Farringdon Road, etc.

"In wonderful memory of my wonderful friend of long ago!"

Bombardier Wells sent a wreath. It was a white cushion, and across
it in vials were the words "At Rest" with deepest sympathy from Mrs. and
Billie Wells.

Tributes were also sent by Hetty King, Clarence Mayne, Clara Mayne, Little Tich, Arthur Prince, George Mozart, Harry Weldon, Charles Austin, Gertie Gitana, the Brothers Egbert, Zetta Mare, Julia Neilson, and Fred Terry, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Curzon, Marie Loftus, many of the provincial music-halls, the Gulliver halls, and dressers from most of the theatres, and many of Miss Lloyd's old school chums.

A favourite song of Miss Lloyd's was recalled by a wreath fashioned
like a bird's cage. The cage was open, but the old cock linnet had flown.

A large floral horseshoe, with whip, cap, and stirrups, was from
"Her Jockey Pals" Donoghue, Archibald, and other men famous in the racing
world.

There were other wreaths from the National Sporting Club, the
Eccentric Club, the Ladies' Theatrical Guild, the Variety Artists'
Federation, Albert and Mrs. Whelan, Lorna and Toots Pounds, Kate Carney,
Nellie Wallace, the Ring at Blackfriars, Connie Ediss (who sent red
roses) the Camberwell Palace (a white arch with two golden gates), Lew Lake,
Major J. Arnold Wilson, and innumerable other people.

Among all of that small number of music-hall performers, whose names
are familiar to what is called the lower class, Marie Lloyd had far the
strongest hold on popular affection. She is known to many audiences in
America. I have never seen her perform in America, but I cannot imagine

that she would be seen there at her best; she was only seen at her best
under the stimulus of those audiences in England, and especially in Cockney
London, who had crowded to hear her for 30 years. The attitude of these
audiences was different, toward Marie Lloyd, ~~to what it was~~ to any other of
their favourites, and this difference represents the difference in her art.
Marie Lloyd's audiences were invariably sympathetic, and it was through this
sympathy that she controlled them. Among living music-hall artists none
can so well control an audience as Nellie Wallace. I have seen Nellie
Wallace interrupted by jeering or hostile comment from a boxful of
East-Enders; I have seen her, hardly pausing in her act, make some quick
retort that silenced her tormentors for the rest of the evening. But I
have never known Marie Lloyd to be confronted by this kind of hostility;
in any case the feeling of the vast majority of the audience was so mani-
festly on her side, that no objector would have dared to lift his voice.
And the difference is this: that whereas other comedians amuse their
audiences as much and sometimes more than Marie Lloyd, no other comedian
succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of that audience, in
raising it to a kind of art. It was, I think, this capacity for expressing
the soul of the people that made Marie Lloyd unique and that made her
audiences, even when they joined in the chorus, not so much hilarious
as happy.

It is true that in the details of acting Marie Lloyd was perhaps
the most perfect, in her own line, of British actresses. There are 1/
no cinema records of her; she never descended to this form
of money-making; it is to be regretted, however, that there is no film
of her to preserve for the recollection of her admirers the perfect
expressiveness of her smallest gestures. But it is more in the thing that
she made it, than in the accomplishment of her act, that she differed from

other comedians. There was nothing about her of the grotesque; none of her comic appeal was due to exaggeration; it was all a matter of selection and concentration. The most remarkable of the survivors of the music-hall stage, to my mind, are Nellie Wallace and Little Tich; but each of these is a kind of grotesque; their acts are an inconceivable ergy of parody of the human race. For this reason, the appreciation of these artists requires less knowledge of the environment. To appreciate for instance the last turn in which Marie Lloyd appeared, one ought to know already exactly what objects a middle-class woman of the charwoman class would carry in her bag; exactly how she would go through her bag in search of something; and exactly the tone of voice in which she would enumerate the objects she found in it. This was only part of the acting in Marie Lloyd's last song, *ONE OF THE RUINS THAT CROMWELL KNOCKED ABAHT* (M I'

A BIT.

Marie Lloyd was of London - in fact of Hoxton - and on the stage from her earliest years. It is pleasing to know that her first act was for a Hoxtan audience, when at the age of 10 she organised the "Fairy Bell Minstrels" for the Nile Street Mission of the Band of Hope; at which she sang and acted a song entitled "Throw down the bottle and never drink again", which is said to have converted at least one member of the audience to the cause now enforced by law in America. It was similar audiences to her first audience that supported her to the last.

Marie Lloyd's art will I hope be discussed by more competent critics of the theatre than I. My own chief point is that I consider her superiority over other performers to be in a way a moral superiority: it was her understanding of the people and sympathy for them, and the people's recognition of the fact that she *was* aork embodied the virtues which they genuinely most respected in private life, that raised her to

the position she occupied at her death. And her death is itself a
significant moment in English history. I have called her
the expressive figure of the lower classes. There has been no such
expressive figure for any other class. The middle classes have no
uch idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt. That is to say,
it is themselves and their own life which finds no expression in such a
person as Marie Lloyd; nor have they any independent virtues as a
class which might give them as a conscious class any dignity. The
middle classes, in England as elsewhere, under democracy, are morally
dependent upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are morally in
fear of the middle class which is gradually absorbing and destroying
them. The lower class still exists; but perhaps it will not exist for
long. In the music-hall comedians they find the aristocracy
expression and dignity of their own lives; and this is not found in
the most elaborate and expensive revue. In England, at any rate,
expresses almost nothing. With the dwindling of the music-hall, by
the encouragement of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower
classes will tend to drop into the same state of amorphous protoplasm
as the bourgeoisie. The working man who went to the music-hall and saw
Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself a performing part of
the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience
with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in
dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is pulled by
action
continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act
upon, and receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which
the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of
art. He will also have lost some of his interest in life. Perhaps this

will be the only solution. In a most interesting essay in the recent
volume of "Essays on the depopulation of Melanesia," the great psychologist
W.H.R. Rivers adduces evidence which has led me to believe that the natives
of that unfortunate Archipelago are dying out principally for the reason
that the "Civilisation" forced upon them has deprived them of all
interest in life. They are dying, but this from pure boredom. When
every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical
instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has
been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made
it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless
receiver attached to both ears, when applied science has done everything
possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as
possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire
civilised world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians. You will
see that the death of Marie Lloyd has had a depressing effect, and that
I am quite incapable of taking any interest in any literary events in
England in the last two months, if any have taken place.

T.S. Eliot