London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

"Perhaps I 'd better kill him."

"My dear sir, your American experiences have done you good."

"They put me under gas and injected the spirit."

And with that we heard the clock strike the hour when we should start for the place where he was to lecture that evening on "The Greater Gratitude."

Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World", had attempted, as a clerical and friendly critic said, "to treat religion as a fact of nature, no less solid and capable of scientific analysis than any other fact which science claims for its own." Everybody read the book, for it was translated into all the European languages. And everybody read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in the World." The volumes, which were small, carried the name of their author around the globe in a large way, for they came from the press in tens of thousands. I suppose he had a million readers, and the most these knew about him was that he held the professorship of natural science in the Free Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little over thirty when he wrote the little books, and that, for a year, he had disappeared in the wilds of Africa. He returned to find himself famous, or as some thought and said, notorious.

He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered them. He was a theologian himself. His object was to stretch theology to man's size. The champions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies chattered fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts. It seems a very small matter now, but, after all, it helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man. He was a young man's man, and there you have one of the keys to him.

To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk College might imply that a man was hampered as to words and views. It was not so in Drummond's case, at any rate. I have said that he was a theologian; I will add that he was a geologist. When I knew him, he was famous and forty-two, and he had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains of a fossil forest. He had just returned from America, where he had been lecturing at the Lowell Institute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man." How he laughed over his Boston surprise! Of course he knew the Lowell Institute by name, but he had n't an idea of what it really was. He had supposed that he would have an audience of two or three dozen old fogies and a number of short-haired blue-stockings. He found the place crammed with alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusiastic. There was a greater crowd outside, hoping vainly to get in. His thought was, as he mounted the platform: "My lecture won't do. I must popularise it. There are no Dryasdusts here." He altered the lecture as he went along, and when he had finished, he returned to his hotel and undertook to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from Scotland. There were no fogies in the throngs that heard him. He had already been two or three times to America; now he began to understand what it really was,—the country of the young.

Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glasgow. He kept bachelor's hall there, and kept it very well, indeed. The house was spacious, "rich not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and trophies of ivory, and everything about them suggesting comfort and agreeable taste. It did not in the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian, Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the granite-like hardness of the houses of some geologists I have known. If I say that we had jolly evenings there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, the life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New England and Old England, and the Academy, and books, and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the Rocky Mountains, it is only to show that theological-geologists can be human. Drummond was more than human; he was companionable. He had always the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent worker. Work never drove him, though; he held the reins over it and mastered it. If you had an appointment with him, the time was yours; he had set it apart; you were not made to feel that there was any pressure. This may seem a simple thing to do; but, as most men live, it is not.

Drummond's person was tall and slender; he had brown hair; his eyes were—shall I call them brownish-grey?—his moustache and short side whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was pleasing, and he shook hands with a hearty grip. He attracted you not so much by cordiality as by sincerity. He went to the point at once.

I was making a study of British municipal policy and administration, with a view to certain movements in America. Drummond was helpful daily. He knew the things that had been done and the men who did them; he knew the practical fellows and the extremists; the men who worked at reforms and the men who merely talked about them; the originators and the copyists; the men who were out for politics and party, and the men who were out for the good they could do. And so I got at results and saved time and weariness, though not without much weariness and time. Down narrow, grimy streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, I went by day and night through the densest, soul-rending parts of Glasgow; up twisting flights of stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious smells; people were shovelled there to live as they could. At every little distance we would come to spaces where old masonry was being levelled, and new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, tenements, model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding places, washing places, drying places, places where the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep about,—the municipality was overhauling things.

I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the everlasting Scotch mist, have a bath, a nap, a change of clothing, and then tuck my knees under his mahogany, tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching, fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his explanations would bring in Moody.

"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or "Moody started us," or "Moody collected the money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody showed us the way."

Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," he said.

"Then why not talk of him?"

"I 'd like nothing better. Unless you knew him, and knew him at work, you could n't half appreciate him." I feared I never did. "Well, then, take him as a manager of men—" and there would begin a run of anecdote showing that the renowned evangelist was a great organiser, and would have been as great in the business world, or the political world, or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as he had been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Americans.

Moody had discovered Edinburgh, or Edinburgh had discovered Moody; I was never quite sure which. Anyhow, Moody made Drummond discover himself and his work in life, and that is the most important discovery a man can make. Drummond was a Scotsman of the Scots. He was born near the field of Bannockburn. He came of God-fearing folk, or as he preferred to say, God-loving. His father was a wealthy merchant, and meant that his boy should become a minister. But the boy took his theology without going in for orders. He made science his profession, and taught theology to scientists and science to theologians.

"I would never be wholly off with the one, nor wholly on with the other," said he. "I am fond of both. And I believed that I was better as a geologist and botanist than I could possibly be as a preacher."

When Moody and Sankey came to Scotland, the latter, with his keen capacity for selecting staff officers, selected Drummond as one of his. Drummond shared two years of labour with the American revivalists. They went through England, Scotland, Ireland. Then Moody and Sankey returned to America, and Drummond returned to his studies, religious and scientific, gained his professorship, taught his classes, wrote his books, carried on evangelical work among young men, geologised in Malta, Africa, and the Rocky Mountains, and found this a good world to live in if you knew how to work.

We were reviewing his experiences one day. I said:

"You have omitted to mention a great advantage that you started with and have kept."

"What's that?" he asked.

"Money. You never had to work for your living. You were free to indulge your bent, your theological-evangelical-scientific bent, free to help your soul and work for the souls of others, without having to think about bills, or grind your powers for the taskmaster, Debt!"

"Moody had n't a dollar when he began his work in Chicago," said Drummond. "See what he did!"

"Moody was a genius. He made a business success before he gave himself to religious work. He had proved his greatest power—the management of men. You or I would have had to grapple with theology, or geology, or to swim in ink, once we had started and had been left to ourselves."

"Perhaps."

"No doubt about it. A poor man can be a theologian, or a follower of science, but he can't be both, and explore the Rocky Mountains and Darkest Africa, and conduct soup kitchens in Glasgow, and do a two-years tour with Moody and Sankey."

"That aspect had n't occurred to me. I am glad I was not compelled to have it occur to me," said Drummond.

"A man needing money and unable to get it is like a machine without lubricating oil. Almost any man who has done much without money could have done more with it," I said.

"You think so?"

"Are we to think that friction is the best result?"

"No," Drummond answered.

"Some men can't make money because their work does n't run to it, or they may have the ability, but not the desire, or they may not be able to afford to make money; you remember Agassiz's case. Perhaps he did n't need it."

"Money-making is a special faculty," said Drummond. "A man has it or does n't have it, as he may or may not have a musical ear, an eye for colour, a delicate sense of smell, and so on. I know moneyed men, and I daresay you know others, who are duffers outside their special lines. Most men are duffers outside their special lines."

"The defect of specialised training, eh?"

"Possibly: like over-specialisation in the trades."

"Cutting threads on screws for thirty years," said I.

"Shall we say the same thing of theology? Most men may overtrain in that."

"They do. Therefore try mixing science with it."

"That must dilute theology. A little too much science, and the theology becomes watery. But in the Roman Church they dilute the science."

"Don't you think it depressing to listen to Carnegie's cant about his intention to die poor?" I asked. "What else could he do? He says nothing about living as a poor man. Poverty is a 'blessing' that we all recognise in essays, sermons, and speeches, but we use all the strength we can to avoid the blessing, and we don't delude the poor with our pretences. All of us like to use money as a force. Perhaps you would call it a mode of motion."

"That sounds like Moody," said Drummond. "There 's the other side," he went on, "the deadly monotony of the lives of the average rich folk, deadly monotony, a weary existence dragged along without any interest in useful things. Take an interest in things; that is the way to live; not merely think about them. No man has a right to postpone his life for the sake of his thoughts. This is a real world, not a think world. Treat it as a real world—act!"

"That is from your 'Programme of Christianity'," said I.

"Yes. The might of those who build is greater than the might of those who retard."

We got to talking about socialism. "Its basis," he said, "is materialism, not man. Herbert Spencer said: 'By no political alchemy can you get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.' And that's a good standard for testing politicians. None better."

Drummond was always looking at the bright side of life, illuminating it with common sense. And he loved a joke as well as anybody. He told with gusto of the fun he had at the Chicago Exhibition when, one evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode through the grounds, gazing gravely at the marvels of that western civilisation.

"Marvellous," he repeated. "We shall never see anything like it again. Nor like those Arabs. If you could have seen them, as they passed from light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking with laughter, they removed the sheets and pillow cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and colored tablecloths which had served them as robes and turbans and sashes, you would have said they were as marvellous as anything in the show. And when they wiped the colour from their faces, you would have recognised several of the most learned professors in America and one Scotsman with a smudge on his cheek." He roared at the recollection.

He was a professor at twenty-five. And his pupils were university graduates studying for the ministry. It was part of their duty to study natural science, to know something about the world they would preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig science out of Scripture. Well, Drummond was the man for his work. And besides natural science, his work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising evangelicism. At the end of his week in the classroom he would run over to Edinburgh and hold a religious service with a thousand young men attending earnestly.

"How do you get into personal touch with your college students?" I asked him.

"There you touch a tender point," he said. "There is n't enough personal touch in the colleges of Scotland! We put too much faith in lectures. Young men come but rarely into personal touch with their professors. I knew very little of mine. And that's the rule. A man must break through the routine; the professor must, the student must. Personal touch would open both of them. Take So-and-So at the University. He lectures in the morning to one hundred and fifty or two hundred students. In the afternoon to two hundred more. No personal touch in that; no opportunity for it. Youth can't be taught in droves, or saved in masses. And yet, if you go in for individual development, or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond all possibility. Our system is wrong. It neglects character for the sake of competition. But what can be done? Effort, individual effort, is the only thing worth a bawbee. All the rest is formulae."

He said that, as far as his own efforts went, he did what he could, in every way that he could. The development of personal responsibility was what he drove at. "That's the aim and end of life. If you don't base education on it, what is the use of education? Come. We are responsible for our physical condition. Let's go for a walk!"

Even in Scotland there are moments without rain. Pallid things that might have been stars peeped through the scudding clouds. We walked on, with good, easy strides, and talked,—talked of patriotism for one thing. "We don't have to teach that in Scotland," he said. "We take it for granted. Every Scot is born with it. And there 's no immigration in Scotland. We 're luckier than you, in America, where you have—what is it? A million a year pouring through the steerages? I asked about that in my visits, but could n't find that you were teaching patriotism, except by fits and starts, in widely separated places. They were talking of teaching it there in the schools. What a funny idea! School is n't the place to acquire patriotism. Home is! But where you have immigration on a huge scale the conditions differ, I confess."

The talk swung over to Gladstone. Drummond was very friendly with him. I had said that I thought the G.O.M. a vindictive old gentleman. Drummond laughed: "Oh, but we worship him. We take him very seriously."

"Yes, and he illustrates your favourite theory about taking an interest in things."

"Right! He is interested in things—movements, tendencies of thought, theology, religion, literature. I can't, though, quote him as an authority on science. But his interest, his active interest in things, keeps him fresh and young, and out of grooves. He is interested in things, in masses, nations, races, mountain ranges, literature, not art—literature above all, theological literature most of all."

"In Home Rule but not in Home Rulers," I interrupted.

"Does not the greater include the less?"

"Sometimes," said I, "but in politics it does not include even what is set down in black and white. Where would you put Gladstone as compared with your other hero, Moody? Moody, you say, was the biggest human being you ever knew."

"I won't retract that. Gladstone throws a greater spell over his hearers, and, when one meets him, an incomparable fascination. Moody's influence will last the longer, and so will his work."

This was interesting, to say the least of it. Then we turned home.

Four years later, Drummond died. Only forty-five!

CHAPTER XIII

SIR HENRY IRVING

Too much is said about the evanescent nature of an actor's fame. Is it so evanescent? Or are we believing, according to habit, merely what we have been told? Burbage's fame has lived as long as Queen Elizabeth's, and that is long enough. Suppose the Great Queen's fame eventually should chance to live longer than that of her subject, what is there evanescent about the latter since it has lived already through the three hundred years which separate us from his death? Betterton's fame may yet outlive that of the sovereigns under whom he flourished,—Charles II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. What reason have we to suppose that it will not? Betterton's name has been one of the highest, most honoured names in England for two centuries and a half. Garrick's fame has lived as long as Doctor Johnson's, and Garrick had no Boswell. Mrs. Siddons is as well known to-day as, say George III, and more favourably known. Talma's fame has not been eclipsed by Napoleon's. Of Rachel we know as much as of the Empress Josephine. It is easier to tell offhand who was a famous actor one hundred and fifty years ago than to say who was Prime Minister at the same time. Plunket was a greater orator, by all accounts, than Gladstone or Canning, Disraeli or Bright. Tell me—without looking him up in a Book of Reference—who was Plunket? Who were the chancellors of exchequer during Henry Irving's reign? Who were the leaders of the House of Commons? How long must fame last to satisfy all reasonable requirements? The names of how many princes, generals, preachers, statesmen, survive their deaths a hundred years?

An actor's fame, however short it may be, is long enough. How long has the fame of Roscius lasted? An actor has more than fame. He has the public's affection, its money, its applause, its cheers. And he has these nightly, besides the name that lingers after death. How will you prove now that Macready's name is less well known than Macaulay's? Are you safe in asserting that Edmund Kean's name will not add another century to its credit? Or Kemble's name? What reason is there for assuming that Byron's will live longer than that?

Even if the art of acting die, and the acted drama with it, overwhelmed by the cinema, it does not follow that the names and memories of the great players who have already lived will perish the more quickly. We may cherish them with a lively curiosity as the eminent practisers of a lost art, cherish them, in fact, because we are no longer able to replace them. The cinema could never have given us Sir Henry Irving, or the Kendals, the Bancrofts, or John Hare, or Edwin Booth, or Joseph Jefferson, or Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. No, not if it unreeled to a million spectators an hour, and its daily receipts exceeded the transactions at the Bank of England!

It is something to have lived till the second decade of the twentieth century turns the corner, and find that Irving still glows in the memory, Irving and the Lyceum nights. That glow makes the generation which has it richer than the generation which has it not. The Lyceum with Irving was as different from anything now known to London as was all Europe before the war. You cannot make the generation that is pressing on behind understand this. Words cannot do it. Moving pictures cannot do it. Imagine a motion picture of "To be or not to be"!

There was once an art of acting. It is used now chiefly by politicians. But if their parts are more important, their presentation of them is less interesting than that of Irving and Ellen Terry, and the others mentioned here. And it is of no importance at all to art. The politicians will be remembered only for the troubles they bring to us and to posterity; the actors are still remembered for the enjoyment they brought.

We who saw Irving through his long reign know what the world lost in losing him, for we seek through the world and find nothing to take the place of that sovereign and his achievements, nothing at this day to suggest them even remotely. The lack is a gap in life.

Will the gap ever be filled again? I doubt it. What chance is there of filling it? To begin with, they tell us every day that public taste does not run in that direction. It really does not seem to do so, that is certain. And as the survivors of an older tradition die, their tradition dies with them. Tradition means more to the theatre than it means to other callings. Irving died in 1905. His tradition cannot be revived, that is clear. And it required traditions unbroken for nearly three hundred years to make the conditions for him. Broken now, for the first time in three centuries, who shall replace them? And how? It may never be done. I do not say that it never will be done, but I do say that all the conditions of modern entertainment are against it. And the generation which furnishes the majority of the playgoers of to-day does not care a button. It is their affair, after all. And they cannot take from us what we have had.

Irving was a kingly possession. He was as much a national figure as any statesman, or painter, or warrior, or popular personage of his time. He was a great man, and he worked to noble ends. No one could be in his presence without the consciousness of being in the presence, under the spell, if you like, of a great man. If one appreciates him more since his death, it is because the world is so much the poorer for his absence. We cannot say: "The King is dead; long live the king." There is no king. There is not even a pretender.

Irving's declamatory moments were often queer, but his handwriting was always almost the worst in the world. It was almost as bad as Horace Greeley's. I have letters from him which I cannot read to-day. I have forgotten what they were about and appear to have kept no key to their mystery. But I connect with them pleasant recollections, for they never concerned anything that Irving wanted for himself, but always something that he wanted to do for somebody else,—an invitation to the play for some distinguished visitor from my own country, a supper in the Beefsteak Rooms, a Sunday up the river, or something of the kind. If, at the time, the hieroglyphics were indecipherable and could be associated with no known subject, I would take the letter to my neighbour, Bram Stoker, Irving's business manager and Fidus Achates, and adroitly prevail upon him for a translation. Usually, though, the letter from Irving would be followed, next post, by one from Stoker who would say: "The Chief tells me that you have kindly consented to so-and-so, or will bring So-and-So, or ask This-and-That; do you mind my suggesting Thus-and-So?"

Stoker's handwriting was almost as cryptic as Irving's, but not quite. It could be read by due perseverance. And, at the worst, one could always know who wrote the first letter because Irving's signature was like a flight of stairs, and Stoker's—well, it was different. Whether Stoker followed up all the letters of his Chief with a translation I cannot say, and now that he has followed his Chief Out Beyond there is no one who can decipher the few remaining letters and so revive in my memory incidents which I am sure were charming and in every way delightful. I must get on without the letters.

I saw the beginning and the end of Irving's management of the Lyceum Theatre, and nearly all the brilliant achievements between the beginning and the end. Management! It was more than a management; it was an august and splendid reign! It lasted more than twenty years; it made victorious expeditions to America; it seemed likely to end only with his life. And it did end only with his life. But the Lyceum, which he had made his home, which indeed he had made the chief temple of the drama in the English-speaking world, passed from his control as the nineteenth century died. He made valiant efforts to restore his kingdom, but the Fates prevailed against him. He went to Drury Lane for a while, but it was not his place, not his temple, not the centre to which he had drawn the world. He reigned now, but did not govern. He felt the change. Misfortunes had pressed upon him hotfoot. The splendour and pomp had vanished; he withdrew from London; he became a king in exile; he died in the provinces. They gave him a stately funeral in Westminster Abbey. If they had supported him as liberally in his final years as they had in his prosperous ones, I would not be inclined to scoff as I do sometimes when the Londoners flatter themselves on their loyalty to old favourites. And Irving would not have died, as I think he died, with a broken heart. But he was valiant and upstanding to the end.