THESE, TOO ...

Remy de Gourmont has propounded, somewhere, an interesting theory. If life is worth anything per se, is the substance of the argument, then we do wrong to live it in a series of high moments separated by long hours of dulness. We ought to take the amount of energy, or ecstasy, we possess, and spread it as thin as possible, relishing each moment for itself, each being as good as any other. (I do not mean that Gourmont endorsed this philosophy; he discussed it.) It is, of course, the logical conclusion of burning always with a hard gemlike flame, for if one is to be always anything it is more likely to be calm and languorous and reserved; that is the difference between burning and burning up—of which Pater was aware.

We have all had these days of halcyon perfection, when the precise degree of warmth was a miracle, when the aroma of a wine seemed to have the whole fragrance of the earth, when one could do anything or nothing and be equally content. In the presence of great works of art we experience something similar. We are suspended between the sense of release from life, the desire to die before the image of the supremely beautiful, and a new-found capacity for living. Our daily existence gives us no such opportunity; we cannot live languorously because we have no leisure, and we are compelled to be intense at rare intervals if life isn’t to be entirely a hoax and a bore. In the preoccupations of daily life a tragic incident or an outburst of temper or a perfectly cut street dress or the dark-light before a storm, may give us, apart from our emotional lives, the intensity we require. We rather defend ourselves from the impact of great beauty, of nobility, of high tragedy, because we feel ourselves incompetent to master them; we preserve our individual lives even if we diminish them.

The minor arts are, to an extent, an opiate—or rather they trick our hunger for a moment and we are able to sleep. They do not wholly satisfy, but they do not corrupt. And they, too, have their moments of intensity. Our experience of perfection is so limited that even when it occurs in a secondary field we hail its coming. Yet the minor arts are all transient, and these moments have no lasting record, and their creators are unrewarded even by the tribute of a word. A moment comes when everything is exactly right, and you have an occurrence—it may be something exquisite or something unnamably gross; there is in it an ecstasy which sets it apart from everything else. The scene of the “swaree” in the Pickwick Papers has that quality; nearly the whole of South Wind has it (I choose examples as disparate as possible). The whole performance of Boris by Chaliapin (the second time he sang it at the Metropolitan on his second visit to the United States) had precisely the same exaltation—and Conrad Veidt as Cesare had one comparable moment: the breathless second when the draperies seem to cling to the ravished virgin in the hands of the Somnambulist. It is an unpredictable event; but there are those on whom one can count to approach it. All of those I am writing about here have given me that thrill at least once—and my memory goes back to these occasions, trying to catch the incredible moment again.

(Courtesy of A. and C. Boni)

Leon Errol. By Alfred Frueh

It will be impossible to communicate even the sense of it unless the material be dissociated from the event. Surely there is nothing exquisite in the roaring charwoman created by George Monroe. He had to an inspiring degree the capacity to be one of those vast figures in Dickens—Mrs Gamp to perfection—and it is odd that another impersonator, Bert Savoy, should have created, in Margie, Mrs Gamp’s own confidante and admirer, the devoted Mrs Harris. George Monroe’s creation was huge and cylindrical—more like a drainpipe than a woman in shape. There was no effort at realism, for Monroe roared in a deep bass voice, and his “Be that as it ma-a-y” was a leer in the face of all logic, order, and decency. There was in it an unrestraint, a wildness, an independent commonness which rendered it immortal. The creation of Bert Savoy is at the other extreme. It is female impersonation and the figure is always the same—the courtesan whose ambition it is to be a demi-mondaine. Savoy makes capital of all his defects down to the rakish slanting hat over one eye. His repetitions, apparently so spontaneous, are beautifully timed and spaced; the buzz and pause in the voice—“you muzzt com’over ... you don’t know the ha-ff of it, dear-ie” fix themselves in memory. He is remembered for the excellent stories he tells, and they are worth it, but the interpolations are funnier than the climax. The audacity is colossal and disarming. The occurrence of a character out of Petronius on our stage is exceptional in itself, that it should at the same time be slightly vicious and altogether charming, funny and immoral and delicate, is the wonder.

Last year there was an added touch, when Savoy danced while he sang a stanza about the Widow Brown. It was as delicate, it passed as quickly, as breath on a windowpane.[15]

I repeat the material doesn’t matter. For Leon Errol has nothing but the type drunkard to work with, and is wonderful. In his case it is easy to analyse the basis of the effect—it is in the loping dance step into which he converts the lurch of the drunkard. The tawdry moment—funny enough if you can bear it—is always Errol’s breathing into someone else’s face; the great moment comes directly after, when the lurch and the fall are worked up into a complete arc of dance steps, ending in three little hops as a sort of proof of sobriety. Jimmy Barton has the same quality in his skating scene—he uses less material and the movement round the rink is beautiful to watch. But of him it is useless to speak. Someone has pointed out that he can slap the bare back of a woman and make that funny!