by Unknown
Ah! Great Queen Bess, that famous chop at Fotheringhay — the third hack — has not silenced Mary Stuart. Rather has it decreed that she live on alluringly and find new servants. In old Edinburgh there must be a moment of the night when in the Royal Mile they still hear the beat of her vagrant heart. We see the charming, dangerous creature even now, after more than 300 years, sailing away from us, not into the past, but into the future, in the barque of her Royal sister’s contrivance — her white ruff concealing the rim of red — her hazel eyes sparkling, her form disdainfully melting — to our imagination, winged, though it may be the raven’s wing — mocking all our attempts to solve her — Scotia’s proud-fated, starry mistress. And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you want her to have a leaning to you, fall to. Her bazaar is open.
The Freedom of Jedburgh
IN THE PUBLIC HALL, JEDBURGH
October 15, 1928
I wish I could tell you with how much pride and pleasure I receive this great honour from Jedburgh. I came among you a few days ago as an outsider, and I go away — but why on earth I go away I cannot make out. It seems the one foolish thing I am to do since I came to Jedburgh. But I know why I am going away: it is because if I did not go away I could not come back again. I have spent many happy days in this countryside, mostly at Edgerston, which you have been applauding so handsomely, and where live two people whom I esteem as much as any others in this country. In the happy days in which I used to be with them I used to fish the Jed and its tributaries, including that lovely stream which runs through their property. I fished it from morning to night, but never thought to land so big a fish as this (touching the casket). I dare say, knowing myself outside the remarks of the Provost, that by and by I shall be showing this casket to people in London and telling them it is the actual casket connected with Mary Queen of Scots. I dare say I shall even show them her finger marks on it. That would make it sell for a very large sum when collected, especially if by American collectors. But I promise you I will never sell my Jedburgh casket.
I dare say you have noticed that I have seemed a little uncomfortable. The reason is because there are two strangers present to-day whom I have never met before, though I understand they are going nowadays to come frequently to public functions. I refer to these two little gentlemen here (pointing to the microphones). I believe they are connected in some way with broadcasting, and that they have designs on me that at any moment they may begin to do something to me, two little policemen ready to take charge of me. I don’t know how they work, although I have listened once or twice in houses to the results, but was never quite sure it was not really people through the wall. I am told that they are able, and are going, once they begin, to scatter me through Scotland. I have even heard that they could escort me across the Border also, into England, but that it could only be done by creating atmospheric disturbance. It makes me feel as if I was Prince Charlie. I do not know how they work, but I wish they would get begun. I am really strung up about it....
I must say I think if there was any little mistake on the first day of the bazaar it was that some of the speakers seemed to me to be slightly fanciful. For my part, if you will excuse me, I want to be practical, because it is my own natural bent. On the evening of the first day of the bazaar out at Edgerston Mr. Oliver got us all rather early to bed, because he was sure we were tired. He was going early too. I went to bed, but I had a certain suspicion about him somehow, and I went to bed, and was reading, and I heard stealthy footsteps outside my window. I got up, and opened my window, and I had just time to see Mr. Oliver galloping off to Jedburgh. He was carrying a lantern. It was quite obvious why he was off, but I may tell you, Sir, with a certain pleasure that he did not see her.
When he came back, however, he had seen a very interesting thing, if his word is to be credited. He said that in the silent streets of Jedburgh he saw what he took to be a procession of men trudging along carrying sacks of coal; but when he got nearer he saw that it was the Provost and Bailie Mabon, Mr. Halliburton, and some others all journeying from this hall to the council chambers, carrying pillow-cases, which were crammed with the takings of the bazaar.
I don’t think, you know, that the ladies have been sufficiently thanked for all they have done at the bazaar. I suppose, if we went into it, we should find that we owe about nine-tenths of its success to them, and I feel we ought to pay them some very special recognition. Indeed, I think that the Provost should have paid it on the second night, and that it was a grave dereliction of duty on his part not to do it. What I mean we might have done was to have put all the ladies who helped up to auction. I think we could even have raffled them. Then all the other people in Scottish towns who are thinking of having bazaars this year would have come and bid so strongly for our ladies that there would have been another procession of pillow-cases.
It is quite evident that these things (the microphones) are not going to work. There is not a sound. I expect they have been wound up too tight. I am very sorry about this — sorry for you, because I am sure you would have liked to have seen me picked up and be scattered, and sorry, too, for the two little policemen themselves, for they are sure to catch it tomorrow. They will remember the Jedburgh bazaar. I am sorry, too, for those people called listeners-in, sitting there with those ear-flaps on and nothing happening. I should like to explain to them that it is not my fault, nor the Provost’s fault, but that I don’t know how to reach them. For my own part I am rather glad that that mechanism has failed to work to-day, because, it seems, I am supposed to have an objection to broadcasting, though I didn’t know it, and I believe they said they were going to get me at Jedburgh. And I have won....
And now it has got to be goodbye. Some of us, the Provost and bailies and others, are going on from here to a very serious and mysterious function. It is called a cake and wine banquet, and I believe in others places that is what it is. But, of course, in Jedburgh we don’t do things as they are done elsewhere, and I have been asking the Provost what it is precisely we do, and I now explain. The information comes from him, as you will gather when you hear it. It seems that the first thing we do when we arrive at the council table is to lay all those well-crammed pillow-slips on the table, and the first duty of the youngest burgess is to slit them open with a knife. There are so many of them that when that deed has taken place the table is covered with bank-notes a foot deep.
And then, after that, there is this matter of the cake and the wine. I don’t remember what he said about the cake — I am not sure even that he mentioned it — but about the wine. In other places what they do is to drink the wine. In Jedburgh we always remember Queen Mary. I dare say many of you remember that Queen Mary’s favourite wine was Burgundy, and that she liked to drink it opposite a lookingglass, so that she could see the flush upon her beautiful throat as the wine went down. Only beautiful skin can show this effect if it is to be genuine. I asked the Provost if it was true.
Well, we, the Provost and bailies, and all of us — as you know, the Provost and bailies are elected in Jedburgh; it is all connected with whether they have got beautiful skins, and in this case we all drink wine, and while we drink this Burgundy we stare at each other’s throats. And when that is over the hours pass, and then presently the Provost and I are left alone in the council chamber, and he says to me, ‘Do you remember?’ and I say to him, ‘Do you remember?’ and then we produce our pipes. He does not smoke, but I’ve got two, and we fill our pipes, and there is this grand sight. There are so many bank-notes lying about that we make spills of them. Last scene of all, the lights are going out. Mr. Mabon, who seems to do everything, is outside putting out the lights, and if you come closer to the window you will see the Provost and myself still there alone — but he is now wearing my sprig of white heather and round my neck is his gold chain of office.
To the Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers
AT THEIR ANNUAL DINNER, AT THE HYDE PARK HOTEL — November 28, 1928
(Sir James Barri
e was elected President of the Society in succession to Thomas Hardy, who had died in the spring of that year.)
I WISH I was famous, I mean just for this one night, so that I could do you credit. Even then I would not take it on, unless I had a return ticket. A friend of mine once said to me, ‘Everybody is famous for something, and you are famous for living opposite Bernard Shaw.’ And now Mr. Shaw has gone from across the way, little recking what he has taken away of mine. Could I bring an action against him? In Scotland (I knew we should soon get there) at social functions the great problem of a hostess is which of the clergymen present she should ask to say grace. There must be some apparently good reason, or the feelings of the others will be lacerated. I have heard her ask without a quiver, ‘Will you
say grace, Mr. So-and-So, as you are the nearest the door?’ Ladies and gentlemen, I see now why you elected me your president; it was because I was nearest the door. Quite a nice reason, but nothing grand about it. Is there no inspired playwright present who can give me a better entrance? Yes, there is. Suddenly everyone in the room, including myself, realizes that I shall be famous in the hereafter as the last male president of the Society of Authors.
Interest in your president at last springs up in the Society. What manner of man is he? you ask; and, indeed, I have sometimes wondered myself. How did he begin? What was his first work? He began by replying to an advertisement for a leader-writer on a Midland daily paper, and somehow they took him. Result, transport, followed by a sinking. He remembered that he had not only never written a leader, but had never read one. The time was summer, and the chimney was stuffed with newspapers. He pulled those newspapers down the chimney by the dozen, did that brave heart, and blew the soot off them with the bellows, and sat down and studied how to become a leader-writer. First published book. It was a shilling one, and he remembers, like yesterday, the only person he ever saw reading it.
She was a stranger to him, and it was in a box outside Denny’s bookshop in Holywell Street. The drizzle of an autumnal day had ceased, and from the busy Strand near by came the roar of a great city. He stood watching her. She was a brunette, willowy, but the chief thing about her was that she was reading his book. Several times she tried to go away from it, but she had to return to it. Her tapered fingers strayed again and again to her purse. The sun was now sinking in the west. At last she went off without buying, but he felt that if the book had been ever so little better he would have got her, and it is undoubtedly owing to her encouragement that that poor struggler is here tonight.
Would you care, ladies and gentlemen, to have a few words of reminiscence about our illustrious pair, Meredith and Hardy? The one of them has told me how he used to rush round Hyde Park three times on end, flying from his misery, and I know a gate on which the other sat and wished he had never been born. When I came to London I bought a silk hat to impress editors, and with the remainder of the sovereign I took a ticket to Box Hill, where Meredith lived. I sat on the grass mound opposite his cottage and by and by I saw a face at a window, the finest face I have ever seen on a man. I was to become well acquainted with both him and Hardy, and I don’t know which was the greater; but the most satisfactory thing in my little literary history is that the two whom as writers I have most admired became the two whom as men I have most loved.
Hardy I met first at a club in Piccadilly, where he had asked me to lunch. It is a club where they afterwards adjourn to the smoking-room and talk for a breathless hour or two about style. Hardy’s small contribution made no mark, but I thought how interesting that the only man among you who doesn’t know all about style and a good deal more is the only man among you who has got a style. Style is the way the artist paints his picture. No, it can’t be so easy as that. All sorts of things seem so easy to me until I read clever works about them. Hardy could scarcely look out at a window in the twilight without seeing something hitherto hidden from mortal eye. That must have helped his style. He has been called a pessimist. Surely pessimists are just people without any root to them. Was he that?
Once when I was at Dorchester he showed me a letter from a firm which had presented him with a broadcasting set. They said they were delighted to hear from him that it gave pleasure, but that they were rather damped to learn from another source that it was not he who listened but his dog. This was quite true. We went that afternoon to a local rehearsal of the play of ‘Tess,’ and the dog, who was with us, behaved beautifully until the time came when he knew the wireless would be putting on ‘the Children’s Hour.’ It was his favourite item. He howled for it so that even Tess’s champion had to desert her and hurry home with him. The dog afterwards discovered that a weather report, or something of the kind, was issued in the early morning, and I understand his master used to go downstairs in the cold and turn it on for him.
Hardy could easily be hurt by not ill-intended pens. He had things to do, and without meaning to they got in the way of his doing them, but he never desired his fame. It if could have been separated from his poesy he would have given it to any beggar at the door. When he published ‘Tess’ I warned him that he was heading straight for glory — and he winced. When ‘The Dynasts’ came out I said, ‘Now you’ve gone and done it,’ and I expect he said, ‘We won’t have that man at Max Gate any more.’ Whatever angel guards the portals of Elysium, he must have had to push Thomas Hardy in. Most of them there are too dashing for that quietest figure in literature, with their Olympian revels and their boisterous talk about everything — no, not about everything — not about style. He was not quite as others are. Everyone knows that he had an intimacy with trees surpassing even that of Giles Winterbourne; but there was an eerier element in it than that. The trees had a similar knowledge of him, and when he passed through their wood they could tell him from all other men. Perhaps that was the price he paid.
I suppose many of you have been reading the noble biography of which half has just appeared. There is a passage of two or three lines in it that may be more revealing than anything else in the book, that in which we are told how from his earliest years he disliked being touched by anyone. I believe I can say that outside a relative no man alive, much as Hardy drew affection, ever put a hand on his shoulder. It could not have been even on the day when he sat so unhappy on that gate. In his youth he used to carry in his pockets two dumpy volumes of verse by one whose sympathetic shade perhaps pressed so close to him that day that there were two on the gate. There are a hundred, a thousand, pencil marks on those two volumes that look now like love messages from the young poet of one age to the young poet of a past age. What in human experience can be more stainless? I think Hardy’s first words in the Elysian Fields were, ‘Which is Shelley?’ and that then the hand fell upon his shoulder for which he had so long been waiting. Perhaps those pencil marks on the books are the scrapings of a skylark, trying to bring those two together, and succeeding at last —
‘the lark that Shelley heard
And made immortal through times to be,
Though it only lived like another bird
And knew not its immortality,
Lived its meek life, then one day fell,
A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished, when piped farewell,
And where it wastes, are alike unknown.’
A little bird, twice immortal, and in its end more fortunate than they.
I have only one complaint to make of Hardy. He never read ‘Wuthering Heights.’ The reason he gave will make you like him more than ever. He said he heard it was depressing. Well, ladies, don’t worry, I guess he will find a copy there. Our greatest woman.
Before sitting down, just a word of warm greeting to those with whom the future lies. Your motto, I suppose, is ‘Whatever was is wrong,’ and though it is possibly wanting in perfection, I am sure it is better than the one that I now see did for me, ‘Whatever is, is right.’ Be bold. May you scale Parnassus, if you think it is pleasant up there. Hail and farewell. Is it true that some of you recently cli
mbed a mountain to see the sun rise, and when it rose you didn’t think much of it, so you hissed? Well, a magnificent gesture. At any rate, be forbearing, won’t you, with the old ‘uns, though we may occasionally forget our missions and steal out to smell a rose? I suppose the roses were shown up long ago. Perhaps Shelley and Hardy were all wrong about the skylark. Let us keep it dark. And so, ladies and gentlemen, your servant. However reprehensible it may be in novels, all speeches have a happy ending.
To the Royal Scottish Corporation
PRESIDING OVER THE 264TH ST. ANDREW’S DAY FESTIVAL OF THE CORPORATION, AT THE HOLBORN RESTAURANT
November 30, 1928
IN Mr. Moncrieff’s delightful sketch of the history of this Corporation — I wish, though, we were still called, after the Box in front of me, the ‘Scots Box’; do you mind if, instead of proposing the Corporation, I now sit down and write a play entitled ‘The Scots Box’? — in Mr. Moncrieff’s sketch he tells us that in the year 1567 there were only 40 Scots in London. That is all he seems to know about them, but I can tell him more. I can assure him that most of the 40 met in friendly reunion on the St. Andrew’s evening of that year, that they partook somehow of haggis, afterwards said by the southerner to be boiled bagpipes, and that speeches were made which left the company in no doubt that the Scots are the greatest people on earth. When James I. came here he was followed by many compatriots, each carrying his little Scots Box, but with no Corporation to speak of. Like Mr. Moncrieff they lost the one and found the other. Ever since then we have forgathered on St. Andrew’s Day in London, and everywhere else, to second the above motion.
It has struck me that now and again, say every hundredth year, we might make a memorable attempt to discover whether the Scots have any deficiencies. That is what I am after tonight. It might give a sensational fillip to the thing if the gentlemen of the Press would kindly put down as their headings, ‘Flaw found by a Scotsman in the Scottish Nation.’ Or would it be cannier to wait till I have found it?
