Lastly, with other industrial communities, we share the finest of all qualities—the power and the will to work. We do work. All of us work. We have no use for idlers. Climb a hill and survey our combined endeavour, and you will admit it to be magnificent.
THE MIDLANDS—1910-1911
I—THE HANBRIDGE EMPIRE
When I came into the palace, out of the streets where black human silhouettes moved on seemingly mysterious errands in the haze of high-hung electric globes, I was met at the inner portal by the word “Welcome” in large gold letters. This greeting, I saw, was part of the elaborate mechanics of the place. It reiterated its message monotonously to perhaps fifteen thousand visitors a week; nevertheless, it had a certain effectiveness, since it showed that the Hanbridge Theatres Company Limited was striving after the right attitude towards the weekly fifteen thousand. At some pit doors the seekers after pleasure are received and herded as if they were criminals, or beggars. I entered with curiosity, for, though it is the business of my life to keep an eye on the enthralling social phenomena of Hanbridge, I had never been in its Empire. When I formed part of Hanbridge there was no Empire; nothing but sing-songs conducted by convivial chairmen with rapping hammers in public-houses whose blinds were drawn and whose posters were in manuscript. Not that I have ever assisted at one of those extinct sing-songs. They were as forbidden to me as a High Church service. The only convivial rapping chairman I ever beheld was at Gatti’s, under Charing Cross Station, twenty-two years ago.
Now I saw an immense carved and gilded interior, not as large as the Paris Opéra, but assuredly capable of seating as many persons. My first thought was: “Why, it’s just like a real music-hall!” I was so accustomed to regard Hanbridge as a place where the great visible people went in to work at seven a.m. and emerged out of public-houses at eleven P.M., or stood movelessly mournful in packed tramcars, or bitterly partisan on chill football grounds, that I could scarcely credit their presence here, lolling on velvet amid gold Cupids and Hercules, and smoking at ease, with plentiful ash-trays to encourage them. I glanced round to find acquaintances, and the first I saw was the human being who from nine to seven was my tailor’s assistant; not now an automaton wound up with deferential replies to any conceivable question that a dandy could put, but a living soul with a calabash between his teeth, as fine as anybody. Indeed, finer than most! He, like me, reclined aristocratic in the grand circle (a bob). He, like me, was offered chocolates and what not at reasonable prices by a boy whose dress indicated that his education was proceeding at Eton. I was glad to see him. I should have gone and spoken to him, only I feared that by so doing I might balefully kill a man and create a deferential automaton. And I was glad to see the vast gallery with human twopences. In nearly all public places of pleasure, the pleasure is poisoned for me by the obsession that I owe it, at last, to the underpaid labour of people who aren’t there and can’t be there; by the growing, deepening obsession that the whole structure of what a respectable person means, when he says with patriotic warmth “England,” is reared on a stupendous and shocking injustice. I did not feel this at the Hanbridge Empire. Even the newspaper-lad and the match-girl might go to the Hanbridge Empire and, sitting together, drink the milk of paradise. Wonderful discoverers, these new music-hall directors all up and down the United Kingdom! They have discovered the folk.