[178]
]He spoke to us, but his speech had nothing in it save welcome.
. . . . . . . .
When I see, as I frequently do, the newspapers and reviews praising the works of Mrs Humphry Ward and describing her as the greatest of living British female writers, I rub my eyes in astonishment and wonder why Miss Elizabeth Robins is overlooked. Mrs Humphry Ward can, it is true, tell a story: she knows well much of the behind-the-scenes life of modern politics: moreover, she is a woman of the world with a highly cultivated mind and a varied experience of life. But if ever there was a woman without genius, without, indeed, the true literary gift, she is that woman. She cannot fire the imagination, quicken the pulse, or stir the heart. She plays with puppets and never reveals life. Miss Robins, on the contrary, strikes deep into life—cleaves it asunder, disrupts it, opens it out to our gaze. She has the gift of tragedy.... When I think concentratedly of Mrs Humphry Ward’s books, I remember atmospheres, social environments, a few incidents, and I see dimly about half-a-dozen pictures. But when my mind dwells on The Open Question and The Magnetic North, I see and hear and touch live men and women.
I know nothing of Miss Elizabeth Robins’ private affairs, but if my intuition guides me rightly, she has had a tragic life and her life is still and always will be tragic. Her temperament is not dissimilar to Charlotte Brontë’s, that great little woman whose sense of the ridiculous was so great but whose power of expressing it was so small.
Miss Robins, as you all know, entered the ranks of the militant suffragettes, and it was at a meeting of the W.S.P.U. that I met her and heard her speak. In the real sense, she has no gift of speech. When she has to address an audience, she prepares her words beforehand, memorises them, and then delivers them with the lucidity, [179] ]the passion and the eloquence of a great actress. I think I have heard all the best-known women speakers from Lady Henry Somerset up to Mrs Pankhurst, but though my admiration of Mrs Pankhurst’s brave and proud gifts scarcely knows a limit, I consider that Miss Robins surpasses her in her power of sweeping an audience along with her and in her great gift of quickening the spirit and urging it upwards to the heights of an enthusiasm that does not quickly die....
Perhaps in reading this book you have not gathered the impression that I am afflicted by a devastating bashfulness that, always at the wrong moments, robs me of speech and makes me appear an imbecile. Nevertheless that affliction is mine. The more I like and reverence people, the more bereft of speech I become in their presence. It is so when I am with Orage, though we have been intimate enough for him to address me in letters as “My dear Gerald”; it is so with Frank Harris (but perhaps you think I ought not to “reverence” him—yet his genius compels me to); and it is so with Ernest Newman and Granville Bantock. And when Miss Elizabeth Robins’ hand met mine in a firm clasp and she spoke some words of greeting, I had not a word to say. Like an ashamed schoolboy, I walked, speechless and fuming, from the room and kicked myself in the passage outside.... I know this shyness has its origin in vanity, but then I am vain. But I am a fool to allow my vanity to gain the upper hand of my speech.
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Frank Mullings!... Well, I have more than once said that singers bore me, but if a man is bored by Mullings, he is worse than a fool. One always has a special kind of affection for men whom one has known in obscurity and of whom one’s prophecies of great things has come true. Mullings has, indeed, travelled far since those jolly days when we used to meet in Sydney Grew’s little flat in [180] ]Birmingham and make music with Grieg, Bantock and Wolf for company. A great “lad,” as we say in Lancashire: a great fat boy without affectation, without jealousy, without even the pride that all great artists should possess: a generous, simple-hearted man who is capable of travelling a couple of hundred miles to sing, without fee, the songs of Bantock, just because he loved those songs and wanted others to love them.
He was always untidy, short-sighted, and either very depressed or very jolly. His moods were thorough, and they infected you. In Birmingham, in days when only a few, and those few powerless to help, were aware of his astonishing gifts, he was serene and happy. I remember him, Sydney Grew and myself sitting on the floor of Grew’s very narrow drawing-room, our backs to the wall, and talking of our future. I was the oldest of the three, and for that reason spoke with simulated wisdom.
“Only one of us is marked down for real success, and you, Mullings, are the man,” I said. “You have the successful temperament. Sydney here will do valuable work, but he hasn’t the gifts that shine and blind. As for me, I shall make the most of my small but, I really think, engaging talent and swank about in a little circle of appreciators.”