Cease towards the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.”
But besides quotations from the poets he knew innumerable tags, epitaphs, epigrams, which used to come out on occasions: Sidney Smith’s receipt for a salad; Miss Fanshawe’s riddle, “’Twas whispered in heaven, ’twas muttered in hell”; and many other poems of this nature.
My father spoke French and German and Spanish. He knew many of Schiller’s poems by heart. Soon after he was married, he bet my mother a hundred pounds that she would not learn Schiller’s poem “Die Glocke” by heart. My mother did not know German. The feat was accomplished, but the question was how was he to be got to hear her repeat the poem, for, whenever she began he merely groaned and said, “Don’t, don’t.” One day they were in Paris and had to drive somewhere, a long drive into the suburbs which was to take an hour or more, and my mother began, “Fest gemauert in der Erde,” and nothing would stop her till she came to the end. She won her hundred pounds. And when my father’s silver wedding came about, in 1886, he was given a silver bell with some lines of the “Glocke” inscribed on it.
Mrs. Christie was decidedly of the opinion that we ought to learn German, and so were my father and mother, but German so soon after the Franco-Prussian War was a sore subject in the house owing to Chérie, who cried when the idea of learning German was broached, and I remember one day hearing my mother tell Mrs. Christie that she simply couldn’t do it. So much did I sympathise with Chérie that I tore out a picture of Bismarck from a handsome illustrated volume dealing with the Franco-Prussian War—an act of sympathy that Chérie never forgot. So my father and mother sadly resigned themselves, and it was settled we were not to learn German. I heard a great deal about German poetry all the same, and one of the outstanding points in the treasury of traditions that I amassed from listening to what my father and mother said was that Goethe was a great poet. I knew the story of Faust from a large illustrated edition of that work which used to lie about at Coombe.
But perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the singers of the past, especially to the singers. My father was no great idolater of the past in the matter of acting, and he told me once that he imagined Macready and the actors of his time to have been ranters.
It was French acting he preferred—the art of Got, Delaunay, and Coquelin—although Fechter was spoken of with enthusiasm, and many of the English comedians, the Wigans, Mrs. Keeley, Sam Sothern, Buckstone. The Bancrofts and Hare and Mrs. Kendal he admired enormously, and Toole made him shake with laughter.
At a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting or shook with laughter if amused, or cried if he was moved. Irving made him groan as Romeo or Benedick, but he admired him in melodrama and character parts, and as Shylock, while Ellen Terry melted him, and when he saw her play Macbeth, he kept on murmuring, “The dear little child.” But it was the musical traditions which were the more important—the old days of Italian Opera, the last days of the bel canto—Mario and Grisi and, before them, Ronconi and Rubini and Tamburini.
My mother was never tired of telling of Grisi flinging herself across the door in the Lucrezia Borgia, dressed in a parure of turquoises, and Mario singing with her the duet in the Huguenots. Mario, they used to say, was a real tenor, and had the right méthode. None of the singers who came afterwards was allowed to be a real tenor. Jean de Reszke was emphatically not a real tenor. None of the German school had any méthode. I suppose Caruso would have been thought a real tenor, but I doubt if his méthode would have passed muster. There was one singer who had no voice at all, but who was immensely admired and venerated because of his méthode. I think his name was Signor Brizzi. He was a singing-master, and I remember saying that I preferred a singer who had just a little voice.