Things near & far
said, I think, more than once, and said by men far more qualified
to speak than I, that if it had not been for the Benson Company,
acting as an ordered art, with its technique and tradition, would
pretty well have perished out of England. The old stock companies
were gone, with their manifold opportunities for learning the actor’s
craft. The young man who went on the stage probably walked on for
six months or a year in a London production, and unless he were an
exceptionally bright young fellow he learned very little. Perhaps,
if he were lucky, he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking
one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!” every night; but still
he learned very little. If he became a good actor under this régime,
it was a case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of course good
actors come from everywhere: from the academies, from melodramas
travelling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from
the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London run; but, as I say,
these are cases of greatness overcoming difficulties. But under the
training provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s fault if he
did not learn to act; it was pretty definite proof that there was no
acting in his composition. I remember Henry Ainley saying in this
very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I have played twelve
different parts, and if that won’t teach a man how to act, nothing
will.” This, I may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at
Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful time.
But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards under no happier
auspices. There was a constant succession of small parts, so graded
with due tenderness both to the beginner and the audience that not
much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness, and much good was
certain to be gained by the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion
that the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in “The Merchant,”
all of us beginners, were about as bad as bad can be; but it really
signified little. The people in front were looking at Shylock and
Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our incapacity diminished
to any calculable extent the public entertainment. Then in the next
piece, “As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had to say to the
Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to him straight,” and Oscar Asche took
pains to show me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with my
back to the audience; but the fortunes of the play hardly depended on
that line, while I was beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence.
And how all this was an utterly different world from anything that I
had ever conjectured; I cannot express the gulf that yawned between
the old and the new. In the former years I struggled with words and
phrases and sentences and shades of meaning implied by them: now I
strove to understand how something like an attenuated pigtail could
become a highly probable fifteenth-century beard and moustaches in a
couple of minutes, when skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was
occupied with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so that
you command the stage as F. R. B. instructed me, and the endeavour to
take in and profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions given
by the elder members of the company: here was a holiday, indeed, for
a man who had tried to tear the secret of literature from the thorn
castle where it is concealed, who had torn his hands and his heart
sadly enough in the endeavour.
I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder Brethren amongst
the Bensonians. This was a great part of the discipline and
instruction of the course. It was not only what Benson said at
rehearsal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or Brydone or Swete said
after the rehearsal or after the show, and often what they said
was, quite rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember when Henry
Herbert--“starring” in America now, I believe--was playing in “King
John,” it fell to him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting
the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them, as I thought,
with great spirit; but Brydone--dead not long ago--took him apart
afterwards and talked to him for half an hour or more as to the grave
mistake he had committed.
“You spoke the lines as if they were beautiful poetry,” said Brydone,
“and, indeed, they are. If you had been reciting them your reading
would have been quite right; but not in the scene, on the stage.
So-and-so--I have forgotten the name of the part--is raging against
King John; he isn’t thinking of the poetic beauty of the words he is
using.”
Now, I do not presume to judge whether Brydone were right or wrong in
this criticism; such matters are too high for my small experience as
an actor; but consider the enormous value to the beginner of living
in such an atmosphere of thought and observation and consideration of
the things of the theatre. Herbert may have come eventually to the
conclusion that he had been right after all, and that Brydone was
wrong; but, anyhow, he had worried the question out and weighed it in
his mind, and looked at it and around it; and all that, it seems to
me, is the very air in which good craftsmanship is born and nurtured
and grows great and flourishes.
And so, apart from these after-confabulations and dressing-room
counsels, a rehearsal in the Benson Company has always struck me as
a liberal education in the player’s art. Benson himself--the “Pa”
of the affectionate and reverent remembrance of many hundreds of
his grateful sons and scholars--has always been an imaginative poet
of a high order; though somehow he has never written any poetry.
Instead, he has produced Shakespeare, and perhaps he has chosen the
better way. He has illuminated his text admirably, and his way was
not to come down to the theatre with the whole scheme of things cut
and dried in his head, with every intonation, every bit of business
and every position settled immutably beforehand, but rather to
approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal and open spirit.
The main conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he
could find in the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no
matter whether it came from one of the elder brethren or from the
newest member of the company. For example, during the rehearsals of
“King John” we had come to the scene wherein the Legate, Pandulph,
reconciles the King to Holy Church. I was talking to the Legate at
the wings during some brief interval, and ventured very tentatively
to describe the symbolical embrace known as the Kiss of Peace as a
possibly effective bit of business in the reconciliation scene. The
Legate, interested, asked me to show him how it was done, and we went
through the business. But Benson, who seemed to be considering other
matters down stage, had noticed what we were about, and he called
out: “I like that: we’ll do it.” And done it was; and I had been a
little over two months in the company and on the stage!
And another instance, taken from the same play, of a Bensonian
rehearsal of those days. The scene was the discovery of the dead
body of Prince Arthur. I had to say:
“What wilt thou do, renowned Faulconbridge,
Second a villain and a murderer?”
Whereon Hubert furiously interposed:
“Lord Essex, I am none!”
And then I had to draw the cloak away from the corpse and exclaim:
“Who killed this Prince?”
And thereupon a debate arose. Should the words be spoken before
the removal of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the
uttering of the line? Should word and action be simultaneous? The
point was discussed with the utmost earnestness, as a matter of
vital importance, and I, feeling that I was in mighty deep waters,
suggested in all humility that I should speak the words with an
indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled,
and remove the cloak and discover the body of the Prince. But this
started another subsidiary debate, and the rehearsal breaking off at
this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney (Faulconbridge) were
left on the Stratford stage, walking up and down, and wondering,
in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of
possibility and stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak
away. Their faces were grave, earnest and perplexed. Outside in the
sunshine by the Avon I encountered “Pa.” He looked at me with a
certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on my
part, and said:
“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”
“Indeed, sir,” I replied, “I don’t venture to have any opinion.”
And I meant what I said, for I didn’t think then, and I don’t think
now, that it befits the entered apprentice to express his opinion, or
presume to have any opinion, in the presence of past masters.
Now it may be thought that I am “guying” the Company methods in this
matter of Prince Arthur’s funeral cloak. I am not doing anything
of the sort. I only wish I had gone on in the craft, and were now
myself entitled to walk up and down the stage, debating just such
a point. The matter in itself was, no doubt, small enough: a stage
management in a hurry would have given a ruling and the scene would
have proceeded; but under a stage-management in a hurry what would
have become of the vivid interest taken in the smallest circumstance
of the play by the whole company, from F. R. Benson downward?
And, by the way, I trust I am not giving the impression that the
Bensonians of that day were a body of solemn pedants? I have not
yet forgotten my admiration, my almost awestruck admiration, at
seeing the manner in which the man who was to play King John drank
home-brewed ale in a triangular parlour of the Windmill on the
afternoon before the production. He drank in the manner of the
ancient heroes, and he gave a very good performance at night.
But the Stratford Festival drew to its dose. On the last Saturday
we were rehearsing in the morning, playing in the afternoon and
playing again in the evening. Some time in the course of the day I
was told that I was to play Nym in the “Merry Wives” on Monday night
at Worcester. I bought the play and looked at the part and got the
cuts from the Prompt Book--and I wonder why I didn’t drown myself in
the Avon after the show as the easiest way out of the difficulty;
and if anyone wants to know why, let him read the part of Nym in
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how he would like to
learn that queer gibberish and learn how to play it in a couple
of days, he having had three months’ experience of the stage. But
instead of drowning myself in the Avon, I ... refreshed myself at a
famous tavern of the town together with about half the company; and I
think we heard the chimes at two o’clock in the morning, and it was
reported that old George Weir, on being asked “to write something” in
the hostess’s book had written the words: “When my cue comes call me
and I will answeir.”
And that reminds me: At the Bensonian dinner in the year in which
this great actor, George Weir, died, F. R. Benson began his speech.
His manner commanded the cessation of applause, and he raised one
hand, and held it high, and said:
“This year, one amongst us has answered the summons of the call-boy
of the stars.”
* * * * *
But to return to my small business. On the Sunday we travelled to
Worcester, and I spent the rest of the day in a desperate struggle
with Nym and “the humour of bread and cheese,” and “that’s the humour
of it,” in endeavouring to get into my memory phrases which are not
merely old but old-fashioned, for Nym, like Touchstone, discourses
for the most part Elizabethan catchwords which, three hundred years
before, were “certain of a laugh,” which the process of time and