In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

I

One afternoon in the nineties, I called upon my friend Mrs. Chandler Moulton, the American poet. She had taken a first-floor suite of rooms in a large house in the west of London, in which other paying guests were also just then staying. I was shown into the reception room attached to Mrs. Moulton’s suite, and was told that she would be with me in a few minutes. Almost immediately after, another of Mrs. Moulton’s friends, Madame Antoinette Sterling, called, and was shown into the room where I was waiting. We had met before, and fell to chatting. Madame Sterling happened to mention the piece in her repertoire, which was not only her own favourite, but was also that which, in her opinion, best suited her voice. When I said that by some chance I had been so unfortunate as to miss hearing her sing it, she replied quickly:

“If that is so, I will sing it for you now.”

Then she rose, and drew herself up statuesquely—as it were to “attention”—and to her full height, a striking figure. Grant Allen once said to me that he suspected she had a strain of Red Indian blood in her veins. If that be so—I do not know—it showed itself in a certain proud imperturbability of bearing, and by the fact that she stood, if not exactly stock-still, at least almost motionless and gestureless. It showed itself, too, in the high cheek-bones; in the swarthiness of her complexion, and the snaky smooth coils of black hair that, parted low and loosely over the brow, toned down, and softened into womanliness, the almost masculine massiveness of the strong purposeful features. Throwing back her head, like a full-throated thrush, and with her hands clasped simply in front of her, she began to sing, low and flute-like at first, but as she went on letting her glorious voice swell out in an organ-burst of song.

The effect was singular. The London season was at its height, and the house was full of visitors, chiefly, I believe, Americans. When Madame Sterling began to sing, we could distinctly hear the buzz of conversation coming up from the floor below. Overhead, one could hear the restless movement of feet, and sounds like those which come from a kitchen—the chink of china and the clashing together of knives, forks, and spoons, as if in preparation for a meal—were also audible.

But as the first few notes of the rich, full, noble, and far-carrying contralto rang out, the chatter of voices below, the shuffle of feet, or of furniture overhead, even the necessary commonplace, vulgar sounds that came from the basement and the kitchen, were suddenly checked, shamed, and silenced; and, as the singer’s voice deepened into full diapason, one almost fancied that not only the men and women gathered together in different rooms under that one roof, but the very house itself, even the dead and inanimate pieces of furniture, were strained and stilled in listening silence.

I am reminded of this old-time and almost forgotten incident by an “Impression of Stephen Phillips,” contributed under the initials “H.W.B.” to the Outlook of December 18, 1915, by Mr. Horace Bleackley, the distinguished novelist. Just as that noisy boarding-house was at first surprised, and then, as it were, frozen into a strange, almost uncanny silence by Madame Sterling’s marvellous notes, so, by the majesty of spoken words, Stephen Phillips compelled an unwilling company to a like hushed and awed reverence.

“It was an evening party in an undergraduate’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, about twenty-seven years ago,” writes Mr. Bleackley. “It was a decorous gathering—not a ‘wine’—but there had been music and mirth, and none of us were at all inclined towards serious things. Suddenly the host announced that a member of the Benson Company—several of whom were our guests on this occasion—would give a recitation. A grave and thoughtful young man rose before us, with the features of a Greek god, whom most of us recognised at a glance (for we all had been at the theatre that week) as the Ghost in Hamlet. Somewhat resentfully we relapsed into silence, few showing any signs of enthusiasm, for scarcely any of us had the slightest doubt that we were going to be bored.

“For twenty minutes the actor held us spellbound. His voice was musical and his elocution that of a consummate artist. But this we had realised before. It was not the charm of his diction that enthralled us, but the melody of his verse—fresh and pure from the heavenly spring. And when he had finished there were awestruck whispers—which I seem to hear still—even from the Philistines: ‘It is his own poem!’ Few of that company can have been surprised when, about a decade later, all the world had hailed Stephen Phillips as one of the greatest of living poets.”

Mr. Bleackley’s “Impression” was gathered long before Phillips had reached the plenitude and the maturity of his power, for the poet was then a very young man, leaving Cambridge as he did without taking a degree, and joining his cousin’s Sir F. R. Benson’s touring theatrical company. Those who heard Phillips at his prime and at his best, will agree with me that his rendering of poetry cannot be described by such words as “reading,” “recitation,” or “recital.” The plain unexaggerated fact is that by mere words his rendering of poetry cannot be described.

I am not writing of his acting, nor of his public reading, for, excellent and memorable as were both, I doubt whether those who have heard and seen Phillips only upon the stage, or the platform, have any idea what he was like at his best—and at his best he never was in public. It was in his own or in a friend’s home, and in the company only of intimates, of whose sympathy and understanding he was assured, that Phillips was his natural self, and therefore, his natural self (alas, that he was not always that natural self!) being inherently noble, at his highest and best. I have heard spiritualists assert that the presence of one single person of unsympathetic temperament has made it impossible to attain the necessary trance condition on the part of the medium, and so has brought a séance to nought.

Whether that be so or not I cannot say, for I have no knowledge of spiritualism, but I recall occasions when Stephen Phillips had been strangely disappointing, and, in explaining his failure to me afterwards, he said:

“I couldn’t help it. That man or that woman’s very presence spoilt everything and put me off. I seemed to feel his or her cold and fish-like eyes fastened upon me as I read. I was all the time as aware of that person’s boredom as sailors are aware, by the change in the coldness of the atmosphere, of approaching bergs. Worse, I was like a skater, fallen into a hole under the ice; who can find no way out, but is held down and drowned under a roof of solid and unbroken ice. One man, one woman, like that in my audience, or even in a room, keeps me self-conscious all the time, and so makes poetry impossible; for poetry, high poetry, is the sublimation, the exaltation, of the senses into soul. It is the forgetting of self, the losing, merging and fusing of one’s very individuality into pure thought, and into visions and revelations of the Truth and the Loveliness that are of God.”