by Unknown
This mysterious something is got with no effort. You just become enrolled a member of that school, and gradually you acquire the something. So far as I can understand it oozes out of the historic old walls and penetrates through your clothes. Never it is said were there so many applications as now to get sons into those houses, never have parents made mightier sacrifices for this great end. Everybody is after the something: will the old walls that provide it hold out? Let us hope so — but life is becoming more strenuous. Somebody somewhere, somehow, will some day have to submit a piece of that something for scientific examination.
Don’t think I am saying one word against those great institutions. Even if I wanted to — and I do not — it would be quite useless. No one could move them. When the last trump sounds and all the other buildings fall they will not even have noticed the disturbance. All I am arguing for is, that it they are so splendid, a way in should be found for the boys outside, and that in the meantime slabs of the something should be procured for other schools, with, of course, a big chunk for Wallasey.
Until you acquire the something you must get along with the something else that you already have. What you have is a school to be proud of, such a school and such joys as were denied to most of your forebears. To a few of you the glories of Oxford and Cambridge lie ahead — an enchanted land — to the many, practical advantages. You can go from here as members do yearly, equipped, or nearly so, to live intelligently by your own work, to make a fair wage in interesting callings, and to be chosen for your jobs in preference to men because you have proved that you can do them better. There must be a mighty satisfaction in that. There must be hundreds of girls to-day doing important secretarial work, for instance, in the cities for the one of a few years ago. A good few others are already flying higher than it used to be thought any girl could perch. It ought soon to make a change in the very appearance of young women in this country — to give them a more serene look.
I remember being in Paris on the night of the Armistice, where I had also been for some nights previously, and I think the most wonderful sight I have ever seen in this world was the changed appearance of the women as they realized that the black years had come to an end. No Cinderella ever looked more different after she was dressed by her godmother. ‘It’s over,’ was the universal cry — nothing boastful, just a shining thankfulness. Such schools as yours are a bursting of light through the gloom of the past. Never again will it be quite impossible for a girl, poor or rich, to adorn herself in the fair garments of learning. ‘It’s over — the dark days are over,’ you can cry at last. Well, that is going too far, but you can at least say, ‘It has begun to be over.’ It will largely depend on you and myriads of others like you — the young women of tomorrow — when it is to be completely over.
I should like to give you a motto — something to strive for — I should like to see it blazoned over the entrance to Wallasey High School — the words: ‘That every child born into the British Empire should get an equal chance.’ That will need some doing.
To the Printers’ Pension Corporation
AT THE CONNAUGHT ROOMS
November 12, 1924
MAJOR ASTOR, your Royal Highness, gentlemen — especially Mr. Churchill 1 — what worries me is those two suspicious objects that have been put upon the table in front of me. (Two microphones had been placed on the table to broadcast the speeches.)
1 Major J. J. Astor, M.P. presided, H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester (then Prince Henry) was present, and Mr. Winston Churchill had just proposed the toast ‘Literature and the Press, coupled with the name of Sir James Barrie.’
I do not know what they are, but I presume that one of them represents Literature, and the other the Press. I think we should all feel very beholden to an eminent politician for coming here and talking to us so delightfully about literature and the Press, especially at a moment when the country is on the eve of a General Election — I mean to vote this time. But, though Mr. Churchill has been very nice about it, I know the real reason why I have been asked to reply for this toast. It is because I am the oldest person present. Many years ago I saw, in an American ‘Whitaker,’ my name in a list, headed ‘Interesting Octogenarians,’ and I think therefore that the best thing I can do is to give you some literary recollections of far past days. I dare say I may sometimes get a little muddled between past and present, between father and son, but then I notice that you have done that also tonight. You have been congratulating Mr. Churchill on being Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of course, it was his father who was that. I will tell you a secret — I know quite well what has been happening to Mr. Churchill, and I think that he is only wearing the laurels that he has so splendidly earned. But let us couple with him tonight the father, who must be proud of his boy.
Those of you who are at present writing your reminiscences, and that must mean the greater number of you, I warn you that there is not much use having reminiscences nowadays unless you can remember Robert Louis Stevenson. The only time I met Stevenson was in Edinburgh, and I had no idea who he was. It was in the winter of’79. I well remember the wind was ‘blawin’ snell’ when I set off that afternoon with my notebooks to the Humanities class of the University of Edinburgh. As I was crossing Princes Street — a blasty corner — I ran against another wayfarer. Looking up, I saw that he was a young man of an exceeding tenuity of body, his eyes, his hair, already beginning to go black, and that he was wearing a velvet jacket. He passed on, but he had bumped against me, and I stood in the middle of the street regardless of the traffic, and glared contemptuously after him.
He must have grown conscious of this, because he turned round and looked at me. I continued to glare. He went on a little bit, and turned round again. I was still glaring, and he came back and said to me, quite nicely: ‘After all, God made me.’ I said: ‘He is getting careless.’ He lifted his cane, and then, instead, he said: ‘Do I know you?’ He said it with such extraordinary charm that I replied, wistfully: ‘No, but I wish you did.’ He said: ‘Let’s pretend I do,’ and we went off to a tavern at the foot of Leith Street, where we drank what he said was his favourite wine of the Three Musketeers. Each of us wanted to pay, but it did not much matter, as neither of us had any money.
We had to leave that tavern without the velvet coat and without my class books. When we got out it was snowing hard, and we quarrelled — something about Mary Queen of Scots. I remember how he chased me for hours that snowy night through the streets of Edinburgh, calling for my blood. That is my only reminiscence of R. L. S., and I dare say that even that will get me into trouble.
It may interest Major Astor to know that I was the man who bought the first copy of The Times containing the news of the victory of Waterloo. I happened to be passing Printing House Square at the time, and I vividly remember the Editor leaning far out of his window to watch the sales, and I heard him exclaim exultantly, ‘There goes one copy, at any rate!’ Waterloo! I never knew Napoleon in his great days, but I chanced to be lodging in the same house that he came to, as you remember, as a stripling, just for a week, when he was trying to get a clerkship in the East India Company. The old connection between France and Scotland brought us together. I remember well taking him one evening to Cremorne Gardens, then at the height of its popularity, and introducing him to a stout friend of mine, whom some of you may remember, Jos Sedley. What fun we had in the fog driving Jos home in his coach to Russell Square! Napoleon was singing gaily, and Jos was bulging out of both windows of the coach at once. This is perhaps only interesting as being the first encounter between these two figures, who were afterwards to meet on the tented field. Napoleon, as is now generally known, did not take up that clerkship in the East India Company. I dissuaded him against it. Looking back, I consider that this was one of my mistakes.
Gentlemen, the unenviable shades of the great, who have to live on here after they have shed this mortal tenement! Not for them the dignity of dying and being forgotten, which is surely the right of proud man! Who knows that
where they are fame is looked upon as a rather sordid achievement? The freer spirits may look upon those immortals with pity, because they have to go on dragging a chain here on earth. It may be that the Elysian Fields are not a place of honour, but of banishment!
‘Literature and the Press!’ It is a noble toast, and never can it be drunk more fittingly than in honour of the best friend that literature and the Press ever had — the printer. All seems well with the Press. We are gathered tonight round a chairman not unconnected with a journal of which we can perhaps say, without vainglory, that it is a possession which all the nations envy us. The Press nowadays, as Mr. Churchill has said, takes all the world in its span. I cannot look at Mr. Churchill, because I have been told to look at these two things (the microphones), but one who was very lately a Lord Chancellor, and now another, a Chancellor of the Exchequer, have both — I do not know whether Mr. Churchill is beginning to look a little nervous about what I am going to say next — all I am going to say is in glorification of the Press — when it is garbed in its Sunday best — they are the two brightest jewels on its proud bosom.
Literature, when it can be heard at all above the syrens — Mr. Churchill has had a good deal to say about literature and the Press, and has found that they are very much the same thing. He used an expression about there being no arbitrary dividing line between literature and the Press. I should like to give a definition of what I think is the arbitrary dividing line just in half a dozen words. It is this — Literature used to be a quiet bird. All, I think, is very well with literature, especially with the young authors. From its looms comes much brave literature, devised by cunning hands, women’s equally with men’s. There is no question whether a woman is worthy of a place in our Cabinet. Those young authors!
All hail to them! Happy they! Multitudinous seas incarnadine boil in their veins. They hear the thousand nightingales which we once thought we heard. They have a short way with the old hands, but in our pride in them we forgive them for that. Perhaps they sometimes go a little to excess, treating even God as if He were, shall we say, the greatest of the Victorians. I thank you for listening to me so patiently.
The Freedom of Dumfries
The freedom of Dumfries was presented to Sir James Barrie, ‘in token,’ as the burgess ticket stated, ‘of the admiration and gratitude of the citizens for the great gift of literature and drama which, by his genius, he has given to the world, and of their pride that here he spent the best of his youth, and that his old school, The Academy of Dumfries, is honoured in her son.’ (Sir James was at Dumfries from 1873 to 1878.)
I
THE FREEDOM CEREMONY, AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE, DUMFRIES
December 11, 1924
Mr. PROVOST, ladies and gentlemen — No, I claim my first privilege — Fellow Townsmen. To be your youngest burgess — what does it feel like? I suppose I should be unreasonable were I to ask you to let me sit down now to think that out? I very nearly began by saying that the burgess ticket was the most agreeable document, and Mr. McGeorge the ideal Provost. I see you think he is, but no one is perfect — not even in Dumfries, and even your Provost — my Provost, has his Achilles heel. How easy it would have been for him, and what a relief to me, if the burgess ticket had on this occasion ended with some such beautiful words as these:
‘Any reply by the new burgess is to be deprecated, and, lest in his emotion he should break into speech, the Town Clerk is hereby empowered to append the Common Seal of the burgh to his mouth.’
It certainly does not at this moment make me feel young. Too many loved ones who walked Dumfries in my time will not pass this way again, among them the brother who was far more fitted than I for the noble compliment you have paid me. It is not only faces one misses, but the many-coloured pretties, too lightly held, that come not back to man or woman when once we have let go the string, the aspirations, the fancies, the laughter, that in company with yours have long since been rolled down the Nith to the contemptuous sea. I am reminded to-day of a Spanish proverb: ‘God gives us walnuts when we have no teeth to crack them.’
I had a curious experience just before I rose, connected with one of the distinguished burgesses who are now separated from us by a thin sheet of paper, Sir James Anderson (who laid the Atlantic cable) came to me. Our conversation was quite unsentimental. He wanted me, as the youngest burgess, to tell him about these newfangled things called ‘wireless’ and ‘broadcasting.’ He was rather brusque about them, and seemed to think he knew of a sounder way of communicating with America. I just mention this to show that being a burgess may have odder issues than are contemplated in the ticket.
Nothing in the ticket pleases me more than the reference to the old Academy. It is what has got me into your Valhalla. The Academy has given me a prize at last. It is natural, I suppose, that you should expect me to say something to you of those old days — so I have been instructed — and they are, after all, the only part of me in which you can have much interest. What was that saying about walnuts? — that we get them after our teeth can’t crack them. Only a half-truth. I think the five years or so that I spent here were probably the happiest of my life, for indeed I have loved this place. Instead of a set speech, let me tell you of a few of the walnuts Dumfries has given me, whose taste is still sweet to the tongue.
The country round Dumfries! It is lovely. Criffel, the Nith frozen, the Nith released, Torthorwald, Caerlaverock, Lincluden, the Solway, the very names of them are music to Scottish ears; when you and I were young they were our partners in the ball. We must always have something in common that others cannot share if we have sat out a dance with the Cluden. She was my favourite partner of all, and sometimes she sang to me and sometimes I had a book with me to improve her mind. Still I see
‘... the river dimple by,
Holding its face up to the sky.’
I wooed her in a canoe, but she was a capricious mistress and often went off with the canoe, leaving me with the water. I dare say she is carrying on the same diversions still — the Helens of Troy never mend their ways. The next time one of you goes in pursuit of her — in a canoe — I wish you would give her my love and say that I never think of her without feeling wet.
I have a singular memory of the Cluden, and connected with it is the first boy friend I made in Dumfries — a friendship that began on my first day at the Academy, which I am happy to say continues still. He looked me over in the playground and said, ‘What’s your high jump?’ and I said, ‘Three-and-a-half. What’s yours?’ and he said, ‘Four. What’s your long jump?’ and I said, ‘Six. What’s yours?’ and he said ‘Seven. What’s your 100 yards?’ I said I didn’t know, but what was his, and he said, ‘Five secs, less than yours.’ Then he said the one word, ‘Pathfinder,’ showing he was, like myself luckily, an admirer of Fenimore Cooper. I replied with the same brevity, ‘Chingacock.’
‘Hawkeye,’ said he. ‘The Sarpint,’ I replied. ‘I knew you had read about them,’ he said, ‘as soon as I saw you.’ I asked him how he knew, and he said he knew by my cut. I was uncertain what cut was — I am not sure that I know now — but when he said he liked my cut I had the sense to say that so did I like his cut. He then took me aside and became more confidential. ‘I wonder,’ he asked, ‘whether you have noticed anything peculiar about me?’ Subsequent experience of life has told me that this is the one question which every person wants to ask of every other person. They all — all mankind — know that they are extraordinarily peculiar, and want to know if you have noticed it. I sometimes think that I must be the only person extant who is not peculiar. He explained what he meant. ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘how Pathfinder laughed?’ And I said ‘Yes, he laughed so softly that no one could hear it.’
‘Listen, then,’ said he, and when I replied that I could hear nothing, he said triumphantly, ‘Of course you can’t — that was me laughing like Pathfinder — I always do it that way now’; and so we swore friendship because we liked each other’s cut, and any time we fell out after that was
if I laughed like Pathfinder.
That brings us back to the Cluden with a jump from my first day at the Academy to perhaps my last year. I was by then secretly engaged in literary pursuits, and I thought I had made an interesting discovery, no less than that Burns and Carlyle — though at different times — had made love across the same stile — a stile on the Cluden. I cannot remember now what was my authority for this, but I did believe that I had found some. Nor can I ever have learned how they made love — though I am sure I know, and that you know, which did it best.
