I. BEAU AUSTIN
By W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson,
Haymarket Theatre, November 3, 1890.
Spoken by Mr. Tree in the character of Beau Austin.
‘To all and singular,’ as Dryden says,
We bring a fancy of those Georgian days,
Whose style still breathed a faint and fine perfume
Of old-world courtliness and old-world bloom:
When speech was elegant and talk was fit,
For slang had not been canonised as wit;
When manners reigned, when breeding had the wall,
And Women—yes!—were ladies first of all;
When Grace was conscious of its gracefulness,
And man—though Man!—was not ashamed to dress.
A brave formality, a measured ease
Were his—and hers—whose effort was to please.
And to excel in pleasing was to reign,
And, if you sighed, never to sigh in vain.
But then, as now—it may be, something more—
Woman and man were human to the core.
The hearts that throbbed behind that brave attire
Burned with a plenitude of essential fire.
They too could risk, they also could rebel:
They could love wisely—they could love too well.
In that great duel of Sex, that ancient strife
Which is the very central fact of life,
They could—and did—engage it breath for breath,
They could—and did—get wounded unto death.
As at all times since time for us began
Woman was truly woman, man was man,
And joy and sorrow were as much at home
In trifling Tunbridge as in mighty Rome.
Dead—dead and done with! Swift from shine to shade
The roaring generations flit and fade.
To this one, fading, flitting, like the rest,
We come to proffer—be it worst or best—
A sketch, a shadow, of one brave old time;
A hint of what it might have held sublime;
A dream, an idyll, call it what you will,
Of man still Man, and woman—Woman still!
II. RICHARD SAVAGE
By J. M. Barrie and H. B. Marriott Watson, Criterion Theatre, April 16, 1891.
To other boards for pun and song and dance!
Our purpose is an essay in romance:
An old-world story where such old-world facts
As hate and love and death, through four swift acts—
Not without gleams and glances, hints and cues,
From the dear bright eyes of the Comic Muse!—
So shine and sound that, as we fondly deem,
They may persuade you to accept our dream:
Our own invention, mainly—though we take,
Somewhat for art but most for interest’s sake
One for our hero who goes wandering still
In the long shadow of Parnassus Hill;
Scarce within eyeshot; but his tragic shade
Compels that recognition due be made,
When he comes knocking at the student’s door,
Something as poet, if as blackguard more.
Poet and blackguard. Of the first—how much?
As to the second, in quite perfect touch
With folly and sorrow, even shame and crime,
He lived the grief and wonder of his time!
Marked for reproaches from his life’s beginning;
Extremely sinned against as well as sinning;
Hack, spendthrift, starveling, duellist in turn;
Too cross to cherish yet too fierce to spurn;
Begrimed with ink or brave with wine and blood;
Spirit of fire and manikin of mud;
Now shining clear, now fain to starve and skulk;
Star of the cellar, pensioner of the bulk;
At once the child of passion and the slave;
Brawling his way to an unhonoured grave—
That was Dick Savage! Yet, ere his ghost we raise
For these more decent and less desperate days,
It may be well and seemly to reflect
That, howbeit of so prodigal a sect,
Since it was his to call until the end
Our greatest, wisest Englishman his friend,
’Twere all-too fatuous if we cursed and scorned
The strange, wild creature Johnson loved and mourned.
Nature is but the oyster—Art’s the pearl:
Our Dick is neither sycophant nor churl.
Not as he was but as he might have been
Had the Unkind Gods been poets of the scene,
Fired with our fancy, shaped and tricked anew
To touch your hearts with love, your eyes with rue,
He stands or falls, ere he these boards depart,
Not as dead Nature but as living Art.
III. ADMIRAL GUINEA
By W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson,
Avenue Theatre, Monday, November 29, 1897.
Spoken by Miss Elizabeth Robins.
Once was an Age, an Age of blood and gold,
An Age of shipmen scoundrelly and bold—
Blackbeard and Avory, Singleton, Roberts, Kidd:
An Age which seemed, the while it rolled its quid,
Brave with adventure and doubloons and crime,
Rum and the Ebony Trade: when, time on time,
Real Pirates, right Sea-Highwaymen, could mock
The carrion strung at Execution Dock;
And the trim Slaver, with her raking rig,
Her cloud of sails, her spars superb and trig,
Held, in a villainous ecstasy of gain,
Her musky course from Benin to the Main,
And back again for niggers:
When, in fine,
Some thought that Eden bloomed across the Line,
And some, like Cowper’s Newton, lived to tell
That through those parallels ran the road to Hell.
Once was a pair of Friends, who loved to chance
Their feet in any by-way of Romance:
They, like two vagabond schoolboys, unafraid
Of stark impossibilities, essayed
To make these Penitent and Impenitent Thieves,
These Pews and Gaunts, each man of them with his sheaves
Of humour, passion, cruelty, tyranny, life,
Fit shadows for the boards; till in the strife
Of dream with dream, their Slaver-Saint came true,
And their Blind Pirate, their resurgent Pew
(A figure of deadly farce in his new birth),
Tap-tapped his way from Orcus back to earth;
And so, their Lover and his Lass made one,
In their best prose this Admiral here was done.
One of this Pair sleeps till the crack of doom
Where the great ocean-rollers plunge and boom:
The other waits and wonders what his Friend,
Dead now, and deaf, and silent, were the end
Revealed to his rare spirit, would find to say
If you, his lovers, loved him for this Play.
IV. EPICEDIA
TWO DAYS
(February 15—September 28, 1894)
To V. G.
That day we brought our Beautiful One to lie
In the green peace within your gates, he came
To give us greeting, boyish and kind and shy,
And, stricken as we were, we blessed his name:
Yet, like the Creature of Light that had been ours,
Soon of the sweet Earth disinherited,
He too must join, even with the Year’s old flowers,
The unanswering generations of the Dead.
So stand we friends for you, who stood our friend
Through him that day; for now through him you know
That though where love was, love is till the end,
Love, turned of death to longing, like a foe,
Strikes: when the ruined heart goes forth to crave
Mercy of the high, austere, unpitying Grave.
IN MEMORIAM
THOMAS EDWARD BROWN
(Ob. October 30, 1897)
He looked half-parson and half-skipper: a quaint,
Beautiful blend, with blue eyes good to see,
And old-world whiskers. You found him cynic, saint,
Salt, humourist, Christian, poet; with a free,
Far-glancing, luminous utterance; and a heart
Large as St. Francis’s: withal a brain
Stored with experience, letters, fancy, art,
And scored with runes of human joy and pain.
Till six-and-sixty years he used his gift,
His gift unparalleled, of laughter and tears,
And left the world a high-piled, golden drift
Of verse: to grow more golden with the years,
Till the Great Silence fallen upon his ways
Break into song, and he that had Love have Praise.
IN MEMORIAM
GEORGE WARRINGTON STEEVENS
London, December 10, 1869.
Ladysmith, January 15, 1900.
We cheered you forth—brilliant and kind and brave.
Under your country’s triumphing flag you fell.
It floats, true Heart, over no dearer grave—
Brave and brilliant and kind, hail and farewell!
LAST POST
The day’s high work is over and done,
And these no more will need the sun:
Blow, you bugles of England, blow!
These are gone whither all must go,
Mightily gone from the field they won.
So in the workaday wear of battle,
Touched to glory with God’s own red,
Bear we our chosen to their bed.
Settle them lovingly where they fell,
In that good lap they loved so well;
And, their deliveries to the dear Lord said,
And the last desperate volleys ranged and sped,
Blow, you bugles of England, blow
Over the camps of her beaten foe—
Blow glory and pity to the victor Mother,
Sad, O, sad in her sacrificial dead!
Labour, and love, and strife, and mirth,
They gave their part in this goodly Earth—
Blow, you bugles of England, blow!—
That her Name as a sun among stars might glow,
Till the dusk of Time, with honour and worth:
That, stung by the lust and the pain of battle,
The One Race ever might starkly spread,
And the One Flag eagle it overhead!
In a rapture of wrath and faith and pride,
Thus they felt it, and thus they died;
So to the Maker of homes, to the Giver of bread,
For whose dear sake their triumphing souls they shed,
Blow, you bugles of England, blow,
Though you break the heart of her beaten foe,
Glory and praise to the everlasting Mother,
Glory and peace to her lovely and faithful dead!
IN MEMORIAM
REGINAE DILECTISSIMAE VICTORIAE
(May 24, 1819—January 22, 1901)
Sceptre and orb and crown,
High ensigns of a sovranty containing
The beauty and strength and state of half a World,
Pass from her, and she fades
Into the old, inviolable peace.
I
She had been ours so long
She seemed a piece of England: spirit and blood
And message England’s self,
Home-coloured, England in look and deed and dream;
Like the rich meadows and woods, the serene rivers,
And sea-charmed cliffs and beaches, that still bring
A rush of tender pride to the heart
That beats in England’s airs to England’s ends:
August, familiar, irremovable,
Like the good stars that shine
In the good skies that only England knows:
So that we held it sure
God’s aim, God’s will, God’s way,
When Empire from her footstool, realm on realm,
Spread, even as from her notable womb
Sprang line on line of Kings;
For she was England—England and our Queen.
II
O, she was ours! And she had aimed
And known and done the best
And highest in time: greatly rejoiced,
Ruled greatly, greatly endured. Love had been hers,
And widowhood, glory and grief, increase
In wisdom and power and pride,
Dominion, honour, children, reverence:
So that, in peace and war
Innumerably victorious, she lay down
To die in a world renewed,
Cleared, in her luminous umbrage beautified
For Man, and changing fast
Into so gracious an inheritance
As Man had never dared
Imagine. Think, when she passed,
Think what a pageant of immortal acts,
Done in the unapproachable face
Of Time by the high, transcending human mind,
Shone and acclaimed
And triumphed in her advent! Think of the ghosts,
Think of the mighty ghosts: soldiers and priests,
Artists and captains of discovery,
God’s chosen, His adventurers up the heights
Of thought and deed—how many of them that led
The forlorn hopes of the World!—
Her peers and servants, made the air
Of her death-chamber glorious! Think how they thronged
About her bed, and with what pride
They took this sister-ghost
Tenderly into the night! O, think—
And, thinking, bow the head
In sorrow, but in the reverence that makes
The strong man stronger—this true maid,
True wife, true mother, tried and found
An hundred times true steel,
This unforgettable woman was your Queen!
III
Tears for her—tears! Tears and the mighty rites
Of an everlasting and immense farewell,
England, green heart of the world, and you,
Dear demi-Englands, far-away isles of home,
Where the old speech is native, and the old flag
Floats, and the old irresistible call,
The watch-word of so many ages of years,
Makes men in love
With toil for the race, and pain, and peril, and death!
Tears, and the dread, tremendous dirge
Of her brooding battleships, and hosts
Processional, with trailing arms; the plaint—
Measured, enormous, terrible—of her guns;
The slow, heart-breaking throb
Of bells; the trouble of drums; the blare
Of mourning trumpets; the discomforting pomp
Of silent crowds, black streets, and banners-royal
Obsequious! Then, these high things done,
Rise, heartened of your passion! Rise to the height
Of her so lofty life! Kneel, if you must;
But, kneeling, win to those great altitudes
On which she sought and did
Her clear, supernal errand unperturbed!
Let the new memory
Be as the old, long love! So, when the hour
Strikes, as it must, for valour of heart,
Virtue, and patience, and unblenching hope,
And the inflexible resolve
That, come the World in arms,
This breeder of nations, England, keeping the seas
Hers as from God, shall in the sight of God
Stand justified of herself
Wherever her unretreating bugles blow!
Remember that she lived
That this magnificent Power might still perdure—
Your friend, your passionate servant, counsellor, Queen.
Be that your chief of mourning—that!—
England, O Mother, and you,
The daughter Kingdoms born and reared
Of England’s travail and sweet blood;
And never will you lands,
The live Earth over and round,
Wherethrough for sixty royal and radiant years
Her drum-tap made the dawns
English—Never will you
So fittingly and well have paid your debt
Of grief and gratitude to the souls
That sink in England’s harness into the dream:
‘I die for England’s sake, and it is well’:
As now to this valiant, wonderful piece of earth,
To which the assembling nations bare the head,
And bend the knee,
In absolute veneration—once your Queen.
Sceptre and orb and crown,
High ensigns of a sovranty empaling
The glory and love and praise of a whole half-world,
Fall from her, and, preceding, she departs
Into the old, indissoluble Peace.
Into a land
Storm-wrought, a place of quakes, all thunder-scarred,
Helpless, degraded, desolate,
Peace, the White Angel, comes.
Her eyes are as a mother’s. Her good hands
Are comforting, and helping; and her voice
Falls on the heart, as, after Winter, Spring
Falls on the World, and there is no more pain.
And, in her influence, hope returns, and life,
And the passion of endeavour: so that, soon,
The idle ports are insolent with keels;
The stithies roar, and the mills thrum
With energy and achievement; weald and wold
Exult; the cottage-garden teems
With innocent hues and odours; boy and girl
Mate prosperously; there are sweet women to kiss;
There are good women to breed. In a golden fog,
A large, full-stomached faith in kindliness
All over the world, the nation, in a dream
Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps
Of well-being, and so
Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down
Into a rich deliquium of decay.
Then, if the Gods be good,
Then, if the Gods be other than mischievous,
Down from their footstools, down
With a million-throated shouting, swoops and storms
War, the Red Angel, the Awakener,
The Shaker of Souls and Thrones; and at her heel
Trail grief, and ruin, and shame!
The woman weeps her man, the mother her son,
The tenderling its father. In wild hours,
A people, haggard with defeat,
Asks if there be a God; yet sets its teeth,
Faces calamity, and goes into the fire
Another than it was. And in wild hours
A people, roaring ripe
With victory, rises, menaces, stands renewed,
Sheds its old piddling aims,
Approves its virtue, puts behind itself
The comfortable dream, and goes,
Armoured and militant,
New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
To those great altitudes, whereat the weak
Live not. But only the strong
Have leave to strive, and suffer, and achieve.
Worthing, 1901.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press