CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library D 400.L43A3 Pleasures and palaces; 3 1924 027 828 957 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027828957 PLEASURES AND PALACES ^l <=Id lead lived and ^balaced Gke cJl&emotzd Of jDtincedd Jbazaiovick-cnD'tebeUcLnovicli (Sleanoz (oalhoun) efUudttated with, drawinc/d by oJolitt vvotcott Sqdamd and with photogzaphd vhe @entuti/ (So, Copyright, 1915, by The Century Co. Published, October, 1915 TO MY MOTHER MY SOUL'S GUIDING STAR — WHEREVER SHE MAY BE IN GOD's ECONOMY — AND TO MY BELOVEDS STILL HERE TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I SOCIETY IN LONDON 3 II THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION OF A PLAY WITH NATURE ONLY AS STAGE AND SCENERY 59 III CONTINENTAL SCENES 93 IV PHASES OF LONDON AND PARIS LIFE . . . .130 V "LADY MACBETH" AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON . . 297 VI A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION 307 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page ELEANOB LAZABOVICH-HBEBELIAROVICH . . . Frontispiece CALHOUN'S VALLEY 6 SCENE OF MISSION PAGEANT PLAY WITH CALIFOENIA INDIANS, OLD SAN GABRIEL MISSION, NEAR LOS ANGELES 11 I WENT FIBST TO LONDON .17 MY MOTHEE 24 "I THANK YOU, SIR. YOUR KIND APPRECIATION GIVES ME PLEASURE" 30 THE WHOLE LONDON WORLD CALLED UPON ME ... 39 THERE IS NO BETTER DOMESTIC SERVICE THAN THAT OF ENGLAND 45 IN THAT VAST UNIVERSE OF HOUSES ... ... 52 I SEE AGAIN THE BLUE HYACINTHS OF ENGLAND 61 RAMBLES THAT LADY ARCHIBALD AND I USED TO ENJOY IN THE GLORIOUS WARREN ... 68 SHE, TOO, WAS EXCITED AT THE THOUGHT .... . . 74 THE HIGHROADS, LANES, AND ATT, OTHER AVAILABLE SPACES WERE CROWDED WITH FOUR-IN-HANDS AND CARRIAGES . ... 83 AN ILLUSTRIOUS GATHERING OF THE MAKERS OF LIFE'S MAGNIFI- CENCE . ... ... 89 LADY ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL AS "Orlando" ; ELEANOR CALHOUN AS "Rosalind" .... . . 96 ROBERT BROWNING . . .... 105 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR ... . . . . .112 QUEEN ALEXANDRA . . . . ... 118 PRINCE BISMARCK ...... . 127 QUEEN VICTORIA . ... ... ... 133 DELICATE, SENSITIVE, AND SHY LADIES ENTER ACTIVELY, AND OFTEN POWERFULLY, INTO THE CAMPAIGN .... . .140 THE PONY-CART OF LADY DOROTHY NEVILL'S DAUGHTER MERESIA 145 LADY JEUNE'S WAS ONE OF THE FEW HOUSES WHERE THOSE PRES- ENT APPEARED TO BE MOST DISTINCTLY THEMSELVES . 151 LADY JEUNE HAD THE WIT TO DEVELOP THE MENTAL GRACES AND WIT OF OTHERS ... 158 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page A SMALLEB AND MOBE STRICTLY CONSERVATIVE CIEOLE WAS THAT WHOSE CENTEB WAS THE HOUSE OP LADY DOBOTHY NEVILL . 164 OEOBGE BEBNABD SHAW 173 ISRAEL ZANGWILL 179 KINO EDWARD VII 186 JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLEB . . 191 SISTEB JESSIE IN HEB COUBT DBESS . 197 COQTIELIN WAS BETUBNING TO FRANCE BY THE NEXT MOBNINO TBAIN 204 I NEVEB APPEABED OUT-OF-DOOBS UNACCOMPANIED 210 ONE OP THEM ALSO WAS PBESENT IN THE DBAWING-BOOM DURING ANY VISITS I RECEIVED 219 FOB THIS FIBST TRIAL I CHOSE SABDOU'S "Dora" 225 SIB JOHNSTON FOBBES-BOBEBTSON . . 232 BENOlT CONSTANT COQUELIN 237 HENBY JAMES 243 VICTOB MABIE HUGO . . 254 THE THEATBE WAS FILLED TO OVEBFLOWING BY AN AUDIENCE COM- POSED OF THE NOTABILITIES OF THE PLACE .... . 263 SIB HENBY IRVING . . 270 THE IMPOBTANT ACT WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO ATTAIN A CLI- MAX OF THOROUGH SUCCESS 276 eleanob calhoun AS "Hermione" 285 HUDSON MAXIM AT T.ATTT: HOPATCONG . 291 sisteb Virginia as "Ramona" 310 LAZAEOVIOH-HBEBELIANOVICH 327 MABA LAZABOVICH-HBEBELIANOVICH 334 PBINCE AND PRINCESS LAZABOVICH-HBEBELIANOVICH 339 ELEANOB LAZABOVICH-HBEBELIANOVICH 345 PUBLISHERS' PREFACE With the permission of the Princess Lazarovich, we have selected out of her most voluminous and in- teresting manuscript memoirs those portions that deal with her life in European centers. Though these extracts relate to the late- Victorian era, they have peculiar interest to-day as the record of the passing of an older order. PLEASURES AND PALACES PLEASURES AND PALACES CHAPTER I SOCIETY IN LONDON IF you or I shall write truly of people and life as you or I found them in Europe, or in any other region, surely an essential part of the matter must reside in our respective powers of perception, in all that which colors or qualifies the individual capacity to observe. The color is not in the object, but in the eye that beholds it, says scientific dictum. The great question, then, is with what eyes did we look? With what heart did we perceive? Sworn testi- mony in courts of law constantly reveals the fact that the retina of one man's eye will register differ- ent aspects of an occurrence from those recorded of the same incident at the same instant by the visual organs of another man, and the veridical transcrip- tion of impressions of people and events cannot hope to eliminate the conditioning individuality of the transcriber. Let him try to veil it, it still lies there like an un- confessed fault. Or let him pretend the absence of this ego, or endeavour circuitously to get around PLEASURES AND PALACES it, in deference to the supposed susceptibilities of that species of reader who is offended by the self- consciousness of all other people save only, those who are long dead, therefore securely beyond the reach of any accidental or inferred responsiveness which might arouse their vanity or their self-satisfied ela- tion, the "I" perishes not, but endures even in you when I am dead. Perhaps in this, as in many other matters, the simple, direct method is the best, and the chronicler of impressions, in first token of confidence in the good taste and good-will of his reader, chooses the better way of being frankly personal. I at least, desiring sincerity, am constrained so to choose. A few months ago I revisited California, my na- tive State, after having been absent from it in Eu- rope since earliest girlhood with the exception of a few short visits years ago. I went again to the Sierran valley of my infant days, to find no house there, as the ruins of the one we lived in had been carried away. Upon leaving the place at sunset I asked my friends to wait in the car while I mounted the high ridge of the divide, whence I could see east- ward the far ranges upon ranges of Sierras, with their intervening valleys, toward which, standing in the same spot, in childhood I used to strain my eyes, hoping to see a solitary horseman — my father — re- turning after weeks of absence. Westward lay the lovely vale, with its oak-groves sheltering other 4 'P O H ■< o SOCIETY IN LONDON memories of early years. At that moment it was flooded with golden sunset. As I stood high on the rock, I called loud and long down the valley to the echoes we used to hear there. I was startled at the response, not the mountain-side alone answering, hut wild animals roaming within the shadows of the gorges and the pine-mantled slopes. First, a coy- ote yelped, then farther on another and another, with other strange growls and screams. I ceased calling; their cries died down. I began again, and again they took up the chorus. My friends in the automobile below were as astounded as I was. "Oh, listen!" they said. "That surely is the call of the wild." There flashed to my thoughts the vision of the fresh young mind which I took to London and Paris almost straight from such wilds, as an eager girl about to enter upon a career imposed upon me by circumstances. How hungry for life I had been in those childish days! How often I climbed to the topmost rock of the topmost peak, whence I could look down through the blue mists of distance across the limitless deserts lying far below the mountains on one side of our valley! I panted for realms of human beings beyond. From the book-shelves of our valley home, Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Schiller, Goethe, Homer, Dante, and many great ones had said a world of things to me. I was eager to see for myself. I was athirst for the great world of endless numbers of human beings. As a child I often spoke to my 7 PLEASURES AND PALACES mother of the things I should do when I grew up and went to London and Paris. When the time came, my star took me there where I would be. I had paused a brief period to lap a tongue's taste of schooling at San Jose. A famous traveler has called Santa Clara one of the three most beautiful valleys on earth. On its mountain ranges are mighty redwoods and giant cedars. Its groves of oak and ilex and sycamore stretch up the silvery foot-hills, which spread curtains of freshening dews, and shed ripening sheaves of sunshine down their sides upon the rich orchards of plum and peach, cherry, apple, grape, almond, and vast berry- patches. The white houses of the twin towns, San Jose and Santa Clara, bowered in gardens of roses and sweet flowers, gleam through palms and acacia, pepper-trees and pine, cyprus and magnolia, euca- lyptus and willow, great double rows of which were planted by the mission fathers a century ago to link these twin outposts of early Spanish days, by the famous Alameda. Those who pass along the streets across the old plaza under the trees, are, many of them, students or their teachers, ponder- ing such things as are taught in schools and churches, and by the glistening observatory dome on Mount Hamilton, looming high against the rising sun, whose blazing shafts it flames with in the evening, — all sacred and still at night,' — a great eye peering into the vastest secrets of the starry regions. On revisiting that spot, I found its enchanting love- liness enhanced by the poetic arcades and quadran- 8 SOCIETY IN LONDON gles and towers of the new normal building, dream- like in the sunshine or under the summer moon, one of those works of architectural evocation in which California is embodying her own genius in noble and pure forms of beauty, rebaptizing the old world with youth and the exultant sense of new creative might and glory. A young heart, freighted with all such impres- sions, I went first to London, eager in purpose, bent upon serious accomplishment. I had thought only to study for a time there and in Paris, but circum- stances decreed that those two cities were to be the scenes of nearly all my life's endeavors from that time to this. There is nothing more astounding or enchanting to the very young heart than the easy, natural way in which the most interesting things happen of them- selves "over there," in London, for instance. You have some work or study of severe exaction, your bosom burns with some ambition or desire,^ — it cer- tainly does, if you are a true American, — you bend all your faculties to that task, and just as the strain becomes intense, life comes to you when you least expect it with both hands full. I was a rank American, as tart as any green ap- ple in my ideas of independence. I had once said to Mrs. James Russell Lowell, when, as lihe wife of the American ambassador, she took me under her protecting wing and showed me all the kindness of a mother: 9 PLEASURES AND PALACES "I want to see everybody and everything, but if I'm presented to any queens or princesses, I'll never make a curtsy; I '11 not bend the knee to any of them." But even the American eagle sat quite still at that speech, for Mrs. Lowell, who was a proud spirit, too, smiled and said kindly: "Yes, my dear, we all of us had such sentiments once. I remember school-days when the word 'red- coats' roused old Revolutionary blood in us ; we were ready to march on the instant. But you probably wouldn't like to be considered gauche or ill-bred; it would n't, perhaps, be your intention to make an act of ordinary courtesy the occasion of a national demonstration in favor of an issue which your fore- fathers settled on the battle-field long ago." Shamefaced at my primitiveness, I said: "Thank you so much for showing me my foolish- ness. Of course I should n't like to be ignorant of the peremonies of polite usage in a foreign land. The curtsy to the queen, and all that, is, I see, merely 'ze custom of ze country.' To object would put one on a par with that type of newly made American citizen who thinks he practises 'independence' when he speaks rudely to a lady." Later, though, I heard things "to the contrary, notwithstanding." For instance, I heard a haughty British peeress say of the beautiful young American Vice-reine of India, " I '11 never bob to Mary Cur- zon." As a matter of fact, she accomplished that act gracefully when the occasion arrived. 10 SOCIETY IN LONDON Another little story recounts of the liveliest of the present young royal princes in his earliest youth, that one day shortly after the death of Queen Vic- toria he asked his father, "Who does the bobbing in heaven?" "Sh! There isn't any bobbing in heaven." "What," he exclaimed, "won't anybody bob to grandma? Oh, I say, grandma won't like that!" I put myself unreservedly in Mrs. Lowell's hands and made myself acquainted with the English social formula, as if I myself had been the wife of an am- bassador 1 just entering upon a new post. As we all know, those ladies, in going to a capital for the first time, always take pains to have a thoroughly qualified official of that foreign land instruct them completely in every detail relating to the special usages and ceremony of the court to which they are accredited; for although there is not much percep- tible difference between the manners of well-bred 1 Surprise is sometimes expressed abroad that while there is a Brit- ish Ambassadress, a French Ambassadress, a Russian Ambassadress, an Italian and a German Ambassadress, — an Ambassadress in fact at every other Embassy in the world, the American Embassy alone, claims for its hostess, no further dignity than the rather ambiguous — almost semi-morganatic title of "wife of the American Ambassador," the fact is commented upon especially as American men are in many ways, noted for their chivalry toward women. The spunk was much admired of one American diplomat's wife who, on finding herself, on the occasion of her first appearance at a foreign court, in a group of ambassadresses each one of whom she heard addressed in a style of respect superior to that used toward herself, sharply and in a shrill voice brought up a gartered gentleman in the midst of his formal compliment with: "Excellency, please!" As long as that lady's hus- band was Ambassador at that court she was as a special mark of respect, accorded equal status and precedence to that required by all other great countries for the wives of their ambassadors. 13 PLEASURES AND PALACES people, whatever their nationality, court customs and many small conventions vary with the country. Shortly after my conversation with Mrs. Lowell, I met the first royal personage to whom I was pre- sented in Europe, his late Majesty, King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, who came to bring me his congratulations upon an occasion of some impor- tance to me. A fairy-story-feeling came over me, charming, ambient images of castles and kings and queens. At the instant of the presentation I dropped my curtsy as should be, and answered the compliment addressed to me with: "I thank you, sir. Your kind appreciation gives me pleasure. Only one thing, sir, could possibly make me happier still — to know what her Royal Highness, the Princess, thinks of my effort." , The words expressed my sentiments exactly, but some of those present gasped. The Prince of Wales, with that rare perspicacity which was able immediately to estimate character correctly, did not make the mistake of supposing that the young chit of a girl meant to read him a lesson. He appeared rather touched than otherwise, and his somewhat prominent blue eyes looked semi-amused, under- standing that the utterance was from a naive heart. He at once made haste to say that he was on the point of delivering to me the message which the Princess had begged him to convey, etc., excusing her on account of a difficult staircase. Very soon afterward I was presented to that royal lady at Kensington Palace. 14 SOCIETY IN LONDON The next day, when I talked this incident over with Mrs. Lowell, she said: "My dear child, in the innocence of your heart you did for yourself, in the esteem of both the Prince and the Princess of Wales, what no one else in the world could have done for you. You made yourself un- equivocably known to them. Many things may be all the easier for you here in London because of that simple speech." However that was, their attitude toward me throughout that part of my life which was passed in England was always one of homelike friendliness. One morning an equerry came to bring me a "command" of her Royal Highness Princess Louise to an evening reception at Kensington Palace, where I was to be presented to the Princess of Wales. The letter contained an intimation that I might come alone and early, and that Princess Louise herself would take charge of me, it being my custom never to attend any party without being chaperoned by some English friend also invited to the same party. I wore a fresh little gown, made for the occasion, of finest and sheerest white tissue, pleated with a wide satin border at the bottom and worn over a white satin slip, a white satin, low-cut bodice with old lace; white satin slippers; a Watteau fan; and roses with stems tied together in a bunch for a bou- quet. My maid attended me, and waited for me in the room where the wraps were left. The company assembled was one of great bril- 15 PLEASURES AND PALACES liancy, beside the heir to the British throne and the Princess, the King of Sweden and many other royal- ties and personages of the diplomatic and court world, there being present Prince William of Prus- sia, shortly to mount the German throne, and strik- ingly to fulfil the declaration he had recently uttered in the south of France, according to reports then going the rounds in London, "When I am Emperor, I shall be Emperor in fact as well as in name and rule." The hostess, Princess Louise, — sister of the late King Edward VII, and in many ways one of the most interesting women among all the British royal family — was, to my girlish imagination, a perfect type of royal and womanly grandeur. An artist herself, therefore understanding those whose ambi- tions sought fulfilment in an art form, with charm- ing looks and beautiful blue eyes, she was also pos- sessed of that grace which gave the highest value to her other endowments: she was kind and sympa- thetic. That she had married for love the son of the Duke of Argyll touched her personality with ro- mance. Scottish friends told me that the whole north country celebrated the alliance with joy. But "for a' that and a' that," the way the braw laddies of bonnie Scotland put it was, "Aw, but it's a prood day for-r the Queen of England to see her doghter wed with Ar-rgyll!" Then my princess of romance lived in old Kensing- ton Palace, full of fascinating memories. On the occasion of my first visit there she had shown me the 16 I WENT FIRST TO LONDON SOCIETY IN LONDON wide, short flight of steps that marked a change of level from one floor to a large lower ceremonial room, and said, "Just there on that landing is where, on June 20, 1837, young Princess Victoria stood in her nightgown, in the light of a flickering candle, as she was roused from sleep in the night, to see below her the Prime Minister of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury on bended knees, announcing the death of King William IV, hailing her as queen, and doing first homage to their young sovereign," who, hardly awake, timidly, as their liege lady, ex- tended that small and exquisitely formed hand, fa- mous since then all over Europe as the most perfect hand in the world, that for more than half a century was to set the imperial seal on the mighty acts of Britain. Say what you may, there is some magnetic thrill, justified by more than imaginative fancy, in the presence of those who embody, either as statesmen or as personages born and bred in the purple of em- pire, the sole aim of a country's greatness. Such a one was Washington, and several of our statesmen since his time. But such can never be those who only ephemerally make their chief object the na- tion's weal. That night at old Kensington I was presented to the Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra. As she, entered the drawing-room with the Prince of Wales, followed by a brilliant procession of princes, diplomats, lords, and ladies, Princess Louise lightly passed her arm about my waist, drew me f or- 19 PLEASURES AND PALACES ward some steps, and said, "This, Ma'am, is my young friend, Miss Eleanor Calhoun." I made my curtsy, and the Princess of Wales took me with her to a sofa, about which other handsome and magnificently attired ladies remained standing, and talked with me>. One of the first things she said was in admiration of my dainty little gown, which she likened to a white rose in the midst of the splen- did array of jewels and dress of the others pres- ent. I answered that I was proud to have her ap- proval, as my dress had been invented by me for the occasion, and put together with the help of my maid. I noticed a slight ambiguity in the smile of some of the ladies near at the simplicity of that information, but the gracious compliment of the princess was, "As a girl I, too, used to do such things," whereupon I was immediately reinstated in the good opinion of the other ladies. The whole London world, I think I may say, called upon me, and I received so many invitations to dinners, luncheons, balls, receptions, country- house visits, concerts, and all other kinds of enter- tainment, that I could not possibly answer, much less accept them all. However, people were very kind and accepted my excuses without misjudging me. Princess Louise had warned me how it would be, and had said that I must not think it necessary to use time required for my work in attending to these other matters, as I would find that English people would understand I must have immunity. I believe that quality of understanding and of non- 20 SOCIETY IN LONDON sensitiveness — that is, of quickly perceiving and con- sidering the situation, together with the intention in social intercourse — is always a mark of the thor- oughbred. It is only persons uncertain of them- selves, those feeling their pedestals oscillate beneath them, who are constantly on guard against the least jolt, trembling for their social equilibrium. Nowhere more than in London does the blazing shield show a dark reverse. For, along with the splendors of life, that ancient city brought me, too, the first overwhelming sense of the world's misery. For some time my work took me daily through a large stretch of London. It seemed to me that I was wading through vast tides of human woe. Fixity of types, like age-long tyrannies of ignor- ance, suffering and vice, welded into the flesh, bound enormous segregations into more or less uniform kinds of people. The misery-besodden "lower orders," as I heard them called, seemed narrowed and fixed and starved and warped forever. The "lower middle classes" gave the impression of being jammed in between adamantine walls from above and below, as if all broad or noble feeling, or gener- ous enjoyment of beauty, were kept from penetrat- ing to them or issuing from them. The "upper mid- dle classes" and the "higher classes" appeared to look with horror upon any real contact with the oth- ers, while intermarrying with them was impossible. Yet those "higher" ones did not seem to have delib- erately superimposed themselves upon the others; they seemed just to be there naturally. They were 21 PLEASURES AND PALACES born there, in the full light and enjoyment of a splen- did state of existence, dwelling in ancestral homes which still shelter ideals of chivalrous and non-com- mercial life, horn to the duty of augmenting and up- holding England's political and intellectual great- ness. Occasionally some shining spirit from the lower strata would pierce through, and reach for a place in the world of finer and more exalted obligations. Apart from the ordinary share of "human jealousy, which always rises to dispute the path with one who seeks a way to accomplishment or fame, I invariably observed in England a readiness to recognize un- usual ability, and a certain sense of pride in bestow- ing award of place and honor upon such. Indeed, new members of the peerage and all lower ranks are constantly recruited from the purely "self-made man." But the marks of his origin are always upon him, even when not in the crude form of cockney intonation or an uncertain distribution of "h's" in speech. His women-folk and other relatives are scarcely at ease among the higher social grouos, and are apt to be dubbed "impossible." But it was the vast crowds of the others, the "wholesale lot," that reflected their discouragement in my mind; there were endless numbers of them, trudging along the streets, a dull and set look on their faces, the same desolate world within a world which to-day tramps all great cities and industrial centers. It saddened me to realize the great extent to which the human race partook of these piteous # MY MOTHER Mrs. Ezekiel Ewing Calhoun author of "Scenes of Early California Lite and biological writin, S- SOCIETY IN LONDON conditions, stinted of life. Not theirs to go forward to any higher hope, or even to the just recompense of common, peaceful labor. And those with the power within them to blossom and bear harvest, yet over against the wall, with not enough sustenance, not enough sunshine, who strive and try, battling with too heavy circumstances, yet desperately hanging on to hope, fed still on faith in some idea or ambition! I used often to join the prayer of my innermost soul to theirs, but secretly, knowing how even the sympathetic look of a stranger would be stinging to them. Although my own work was fortunate, and a kind of home-heartedness carried me on to effort with the stirring sense of life's revealings, still the inexorable sorrows and burdens of the multitudes I passed through along the London streets bore down upon me until I began to find it difficult to keep my mind on my work. In coming in, sometimes I used to throw myself on my bed and cry myself to sleep, haunted by the dirty, tear-stained faces of women and pale little children and tired, dazed-looking men. At that time all the doubts that spring from child- ish impressions and ignorance to assail belief took my thoughts into torment. I re-read my Bible from the first page to the last, praying for some way of understanding. I began to read the economists, and passed whole nights over John Stuart Mill and other theorists and Utopians. I knew I was to blame for taking time and strength from my own work. I did not allow myself to make a serious effort to 25 PLEASURES AND PALACES study the social questions that perplexed me, nor did I discuss them much with others, but prayed over them and wept over them to myself. An incident occurred which made me aware of how morbid I had become. During a walk in Hyde Park I saw a poor woman with her baby wrapped in the end of the shawl she had around her. I was unaware that I had stopped and was gazing in misery at her infant until I heard myself say : "Poor little thing! You 've got to live." The mother, no doubt thinking me a lunatic, caught her babe closer and fled. Feeling ashamed and ridiculous, I thought, "She knows better than I do and has more faith in God, whether she has any conscious belief or not." Notwithstanding the preoccupations of an exigeant existence, one that was certainly happy and con- stantly unfolding new interests and delights, there was always a moaning shore in my soul. Once at a glorious old place in the country where I used to visit sometimes I had talks with Mr. Bal- four, a much beloved friend of the host and hostess. He asked me what I found in my readings of John Stuart Mill. I said, "He makes me know in elegant language what ails us, but I do not see that he offers any practical means of relief . Has he definitely ac- complished anything?" "I 'm afraid not much," he answered, and his smile, which was entirely kind and even sweet, was educat- ing to my young mind, revealing some claim of phi- losophy — perhaps for all I yet knew — justified, to 26 SOCIETY IN LONDON remain immune from the necessity of concrete re- alization. Still, ideas of reform were in some manner con- sidered or discussed in every house, and I think it can be said with truth that the nobler classes in England, who have arrived at a very high type of beautiful existence within their own order, were not at all heartless or unresponsive concerning the others. On the contrary, I often noticed the tender pity they ex- pressed not only in word and general attitude, but in deeds. It was considered the acme of underbreed- ing to manifest any sense whatever of patronage in such deeds. "Only the nouveau riche, the ill bred, or the brutal could be guilty of such vulgarity," I heard it said. True graciousness to all, indeed knowing no great or small, rich or poor, is generally the mark of the French or English gentlewoman of exalted rank. The prig and the snob form the ex- ception. As a picture of contrast between the disinherited and miserable masses, and the fine and exquisite flower of civilized attainment on the fair heights of English life, I shall remember always one of the most perfect of her type, Lady B , a high-born English woman, whose portrait by Watts, hanging on the walls of her splendid town house, is famous. That morning in the country, stately, beauteous to behold, she stood in a room that was hung with Van- dykes and other priceless treasures of art, and whose grand proportions matched her own superb person- 27 PLEASURES AND PALACES ality. Through the open window, beyond, were the peaceful expanses of green field and wood, and in the foreground against the soft blue sky immense dark cedars- — seeming to hold the silence of centuries and their secrets in the wide, calm planes of their thick-massed foliage. Shakespeare many a time must have passed into their cool shade from the sun- shiny fields, where he used to stroll with one of his dearest friends, then the lord of these fair demesnes. These very rooms all knew him well and the other men and women whose brains were the smithies which forged Elizabethan greatness. Looking at this beautiful Lady B , herself the living embodiment of the scene and its association, the impression that flooded my mind came to my lips. "You, standing here in the midst of all this grandeur make a picture, containing the most perfect things of splendor and magnificence that culture and life through all the ages of civilization have been able to produce and bring together." The truth was spoken simply, almost unconsciously. She answered in the same way, saying slowly, with a glance around her and a slight sigh: "Yes, it is indeed perfect; but my heart aches when I think that far outside, beyond those gates, there are such vast numbers of persons who have none of these things, whose lives have no beauty or even comfort. Neither my brother nor my sister-in-law nor I can resist the melancholy of these thoughts. Indeed, this strange injustice makes us all unable to believe in God, we would all sacrifice much if we could have 28 I THANK YOU, SIR. YOUR KIND APPRECIATION GIVES ME PLEASURE SOCIETY IN LONDON the simple faith which you have. But we cannot, somehow. We never miss the services at our beau- tiful cathedral! We often stroll in at other times and sit there alone, resting awhile in the quiet gran- deur of the place; but its beauty, which we love, is sad to us — the tragedy of unbelief. It is the thought of all that outer sorrowing world that hinders." Poetic irony! I pondered the old Greek conception of fate. Deeply embedded in English nature is the sense of hierarchy. This is observable any afternoon at Hyde Park Corner in the mutual amenities of the drivers of the various vehicles which are apt to con- gest at that point. The coachman of the still-per- sisting carriage and pair has tacit recognition as be- longing to the "right-of-way" people, and does not hesitate to put the others in their places, either with the easy and not unkind authority which makes sons of Britain masters of strange races, or else with the cut of his whip to the horse of a hansom cab or the "growler," should that humbler vehicle impertinently block his way. That driver in turn deals the same 'discipline to the one beneath him or to the omnibus- driver, who takes it out on " 'Arry and 'Arriette," with their donkey-cart. They in their turn assert a superior dignity over the next one lower down by jostling the coster who has to push his cart himself. While the royal carriage is the great leveler, putting for the moment one and all, great and small, into the same class as they make way for it to pass from Hyde Park Gate down Constitution Hill. 31 PLEASURES AND PALACES The Lowells lived at 31 Lowndes Square, having moved there from another house in the same square. Their establishment was not magnificent, but ade- quate, with a sufficient complement of servants. These servants were engaged for special posts in the "service," as is always the custom in England, and each was a stickler for his prerogative and per- quisites, and quick to resent any demand that did not fall in the province of his sharply defined duties. It so happened that, in moving, a carpet from the for- mer house had been put down in the new one, leaving a few inches uncovered in a corner which the fur- nishers had overlooked. As there was a dinner- party at the embassy that night, and Mrs. Lowell possessed a piece of the carpeting sufficient to cover the bare spot on the floor, she rang for one of the men-servants, and asked him if he would kindly tack it down for her. He drew himself up, distinctly of- fended in his pride. "I beg pardon, your Excellency," he said, "but it is not my place to do that. I will ring for Alfred." Alfred appeared, and his answer to the same re- quest was : "I beg pardon, your Excellency, but it is not my place to lay carpets. I will call Charles." And Charles came with the same answer. Mrs. Lowell called up, I think, every male servant in the house, but one and all stuck their noses in the air and looked with disdain upon the humiliating ham- mer and tacks. She then had them stand in a row while she herself proceeded to nail down the small SOCIETY IN LONDON corner of carpet, and instantly dismissed them from her service. Once this principle of "each his exclusive task" is mastered, there is no better domestic service than that of England, where there are still old retainers who make part of the f amilies they serve, and which perhaps their fathers served before them. It must be said in justice that an exception must be made to the single-task rule in the person of the butler, who, while generally of a stamp altogether superior to the others, often combines the offices of majordomo, chamberlain, and a kind of premiership in the house- hold, and is respected and cherished by the whole family as a true and reliable friend — sometimes, in- deed, almost its only reliable friend in a maze of intricate relationships. I have known of butlers who saved the honor, even the life, of a member of a family, and went about their duties as usual, with no one the wiser. Of course that kind of pride and character — idealism it may truly be called — is part of what made England great in days when she was acquiring greatness. A gentleman of great riches and position in Lon- don, living in one of the most palatial houses in the region of Carlton House Terrace, had a secret drink-and-drug habit which was not suspected by any one outside of the family. For his political supporters to have known it would have been instant ruin. In her desperate efforts to conceal and cure his fault, his beautiful and brilliant wife was sec- onded by the butler, who was always on the watch 33 PLEASURES AND PALACES tactfully and quietly to protect him from himself. One freezing winter night this gentleman, in a mad moment, went to the room of his wife, dragged her down two flights of stairs by the hair of the head, flung her fainting and half -clad form on the front steps, and locked the door. The butler, awakened by the noise, rescued her, and had the presence of mind, coupled with the necessary physical strength, to lock the husband in a room while he personally fetched the doctor. For several days the gentleman was kept a prisoner by them until he consented to legally defined conditions for the lady's protection, and thereafter, up to the day of his death, he was always virtually a prisoner on parole, with the doc- tor and the butler in surveillance. It was only after that gentleman died that the facts came to be partly known among those who had once hoped great things of him and had been puzzled at his gradual collapse. One day as I came out of the Garrick Theatre a poor family was passing along the pavement. Both father and mother were drunk, and each was being led by a tiny child. The little boy, of about five, was skilfully engineering his father away from the gutter, while a three-year-old, tugging the mother away from the walls, was every instant in danger of being fallen upon by the reeling parent or else of tumbling with her down some area stairway. I felt I would gladly give my life then and there to work for some scheme of relief, if there existed any known means to make such sickening sights impossi- ble. Often, after the fashion of fairy-tales, I used SOCIETY IN LONDON to comfort myself with visions as I went along, im- agining what a fair sight it would he to see the Brit- ish fleet on the ocean, laden with the poor of London, carrying them far away to Australia or South Af- rica or other empty places, where they could have land for farms, or at least gardens, and make homes and lives for themselves. One afternoon at a symposium at the editorial rooms of Mr. W. T. Stead, two lines of discussion were curiously going on at the same time, Sir John Gorst and Lord Grey (later Governor-General of Canada) and others were maintaining the two dif- ferent streams of discussion. Sir John Gorst spoke of the piteous conditions among the poor not only in London, but elsewhere in England, and of the num- bers of starving school-children. He wanted to have some of them, at least in a certain district of the East End in London, provided with breakfasts, so that they should not faint over their benches. He complained of the "vested charity interests" that op- posed the measures he was urging, which included money for the purpose already at his command. Lord Grey and others were describing conditions at the mines in South Africa, showing how hard it is in those empty vastnesses of country to get labor. They spoke of the attempts made to lure the black man by providing him with comfortable quarters, a garden-patch, short hours of labor, and every other inducement of a semi-luxurious existence, but to no avail. He would not stay unless he could have all the wives he asked for, and would n't stay anyway, 35 PLEASURES AND PALACES but took himself off to the wilds again despite all blandishments. I ventured to ask why the poor starving town chil- dren and their parents should not be taken to the mines and given the wild man's chance, thus linking up the two necessities. A gentleman answered me sharply: "Those people are not fit to work. They are weak and good for nothing." "Could n't they be fed up for three or four months and then tried?" I asked. There was something of petulance in the answer I received that rather humiliated me, but Lord Grey rose and said: "I should be glad for Miss Calhoun to know that her suggestion is exactly in line with one put forward by the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain." Not only vested interests, but vested rights of opinion, as it were, seemed to combat any form of advance. A world of theories and notions for the "making over of things" would crowd into my thoughts. Many an organization did I figure out in fancy for giving all things to all men and women, a kind of city beautiful. My castles in the air were all whole populations evolving a golden age. At that time I was not acquainted with any socialists or their works. My ways lay mainly in conservative precincts, where theories of prudent advance, based on sympathies intellectually apprehended, and which were concerned, so it seemed to me, more with the SOCIETY IN LONDON glory of imperial England than with the imperious demands of the various orders and masses and classes clamoring for a "fair share." They relied on old-fashioned faith in the slow-moving Briton, and were unruffled by a still remote insistance, un- perceiving of any imminent invasion of the peaceful domain within the gates, and lingered yet a while amidst the umbrageous purlieus of "Philosophies of Doubt." During those days I was one of a house party at Coombe Hill Farm, where the other guests were the late King Edward and Queen Alexandra (then Prince and Princess of Wales), the present King George, the princesses, his sisters, and one or two other persons. Remembrance of a most trivial inci- dent of conversation at the dinner-table lingers in my mind, a few words "as light as air" that have power to make the merry monarch, now dead, live again in thought, recalling vividly his laughing eyes and voice. It was much the fashion in those days for women and girls to put a small black line under the eyelashes, deepening their shadow. His Majesty had, it seems, a little joke which had amused him im- mensely to practise on the fair owners of particularly bright eyes, sometimes confusing them into confes- sion. I had never heard of this joke, and was startled when he abruptly turned to me — I was seated at his left — and asked, as if shocked: "My dear young lady, what do you do to your eyes?" 37 PLEASURES AND PALACES Taken aback, — black lashes inherited from my mother made the only "dark" under my eyes, — I an- swered: "Nothing, sir. Nothing at all!" The whole table paused. "What? Don't you dot your i's?" he asked tri- umphantly. "N-n-no," I replied, saving myself in the nick of time; "I always use capital ones." The laugh was on my side; everybody applauded. "Bravo!" said the prince, shaking with laughter. "You escaped my trap." On the occasion of my first night as Dora in the Haymarket revival of Sardou's "Diplomacy," I met for the first time in my stage experience of a few months that strange thing — a theater full of human beings roaring like lions, so that for a moment I thought it was execration and that they wanted to tear me limb from limb; but it was success. The next day many persons called to offer me congratu- lations. Among them were Sir Algernon and Lady Borthwick. Sir Algernon, afterward Lord Glenesk, owned the "Morning Post." His first words to me were: "We came to see you glow; for you must be glow- ing with happiness to-day." I answered: "I was just ready to cry, thinking of the faults, of the weak places." Sir Algernon and Lady Borthwick thought the whole rendition a triumphant success. They were 38 THE WHOLE LONDON WORLD CALLED UPON ME SOCIETY IN LONDON even excited, and he went on in an almost boyish way: "My wife, too, is ambitious, as you are ; her ambi- tion is to have a great political salon." Lady Borthwick was the founder of the Ladies' Grand Council of the Primrose League. In talking with them a sudden joy came over me with the realizing thought of what it is to accomplish something, even with faults, in big London. What is won there is won. The people I met, the hostesses of great houses, all of them political, or who enter- tained in the interest of some idea, some intellectual or moral movement, and none of them for sheer frivolity; the statesmen; the men of science, litera- ture, art; the renowned soldiers; the royalties — all in some way were creating or striving to create some- thing, all were makers of worlds. That is why, I think, the merely rich, the mere users and abusers of money, are obliged to put forth such efforts to make themselves interesting in London or in any of the great capitals in Europe. If they can only give in coin, heavy sums are levied upon them for hospitals and the like, as a matter of course; but still, with it all, they cannot become in- teresting until they have bestowed such fortunes upon public objects that they, too, become creative. Such persons, coming from other lands, are often as- tonished to discover that despite all their wealth, though they may have been dominators in their own country, the doors in European capitals do not fly open to them on that account alone. It sometimes 41 PLEASURES AND PALACES occurs that they enter the magic portals under the protecting wing of some person poor in material goods, but interesting to the great world because of native wit and worth, or by reason of distinguished accomplishment in the regions of art, politics, letters, or science. The owner of a mind creative and orig- inal in one of these spheres is sure of a welcome. Millionaires have been known to come to England with the crudest notions imaginable as to how their . vast wealth is to be made to oil the wheels. They are most amusing when they think to accomplish that end economically. At a garden party given at a beautiful old place in the country, a friend of mine, a woman of rank related to the reigning family, came up to me con- vulsed with laughter and said as she put her arm through mine: "I must tell you — I 've just had the most extraor- dinary experience. Do you see that little short- legged, plaid-trousered man down there talking at N ? [Her husband.] I was over near the gate — I 'd just waved my adieus to some departing friends — when this little man suddenly popped up before me out of the blue, and accosted me in a loud and nervous voice. " 'Are you Lady N ?' "I said, 'I am.' Then he came closer to me and said: " 'Can I have a word with you?' He pointed out a gorgeous four-in-hand outside the gates, and said 42 SOCIETY IN LONDON it was his; that he had driven down yesterday and stayed the night at the village; that he was not in- vited here, but added: 'I guess I know how to get into most places. If you '11 let me have a little word with you, Lady, I think I can convince you of that.' As I stood in blank amazement, he kept on chatter- ing; I thought he might be an escaped lunatic. He kept calling me 'Lady,' and I noticed he took out a large pocket-book and pulled a Bank-of -England note partly out of it. Then he gave me his card. The name on it was that of a millionaire I had vaguely heard about. 'I suppose,' he said, 'you are like all the other people 'way up, have a lot of chari- ties, eh? That 's the first thing to get hold of, they say; if you want to get in, you must set up a charity. Couldn't we step further down the garden?' he asked, almost winking at me. " 'Oh,' I said to myself, 'he wants to endow.' I edged him down toward where N was standing; I assure you, I never felt so comically uncomfort- able, but I was wild to see how he was going to man- age me. 'I am sorry to say,' I said, 'that I have no charities.' " 'Well, now, that 's funny,' he began, and became confidential, half swallowing his words in a twang undertone. 'You see, my wife and I we 've come over here and took a big house, and we 're going to spend a lot; we want to get right in right away. You say you have n't any charities. Well, I guess you can find a place for this ; there is more where it PLEASURES AND PALACES comes from.' Then and there he put a twenty- pound bank-note into my hands. I was angry and laughing at the same time. " 'Certainly, if you wish to make a contribution to some charity, I '11 hand it over for you to a work I know of, with pleasure,' and I bestowed upon him my sweetest smile. 'A thousand guineas, I think you said?' "He looked a little staggered, but grinned, and said I should have his check to-morrow. Just think of his trying to tip me twenty pounds ! N- came up, and I introduced him — you should have seen N 's face when the little fellow said quite famil- iarly: " 'Well, Lord, I 've fixed it up with your good lady here.' I could n't help blurting out : " 'For heaven's sake! don't call him "Lord"! I must tell you in all kindness that in this country nobody ever addresses another person as "Lord" un- der any circumstances.' " The next day the thousand-guinea check duly ar- rived, as I afterward heard; and also my friend was startled to read in the morning paper, in two lines following each other, that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been present at a garden party at ■ Castle on the preceding day, and that Mr. and Mrs. were also "among the guests." The true historian must further state that, who- ever it was that laughed last in this joke, that gentle- man to-day is the worthy grandfather of a scion of ancient British nobility, and has exchanged his plaid 44 THERE IS NO BETTER DOMESTIC SERVICE THAN THAT OF ENGLAND SOCIETY IN LONDON trousers for the latest Piccadilly cut when in town and for "kilties" in the summer among the "Hielan" hills. The Lowells, whose exquisite culture imparted its charm to their official situation, knew wonderfully well, as did the Phelpses after them, with their gen- tle dignity, their sweet quaint humor, how to gain the austere respect of the British, coupled with a pe- culiar regard amounting in both cases to affection, and yet remain wholly and purely American and democratic. Not the democracy of the spurious type in which ignorance and moral ugliness, if they be but richly gilded, lay claim to consideration, or that type which makes liberty and uncouthness synonomous. Theirs was that proud acceptation of republicanism, which frees the humblest life that it may take the noblest flight, and also insists upon the attainment of such altitudes both in act and idea. There is now and then observable in certain Ameri- can diplomats a curious trait never, I believe, mani- fested by representatives of other countries. That is, it has more than once occurred not only in Eng- land, but in other countries of Europe, that the American diplomat has appeared to "spill over," as it were, on the other side, busying himself to a large extent in doing what the foreign country wants done, as if his sole aim, instead of only half of it, were to make himself persona grata to that govern- ment. It is also a fact that those foreign repre- sentatives never really secure either for themselves 47 PLEASURES AND PALACES or their country the true esteem of the people to which they are accredited. But though these too obliging diplomats are the cause of amused sarcasm privately, their presence is much desired by those countries, and they are publicly flattered, sometimes to a degree bordering on the impertinent. Ameri- cans would hardly find it agreeable to hear their ambassador referred to as "his Pomposity" or "his Comic Excellency," or such expressions in govern- mental circles as, "Turn the American ambassador on to go down there; he is always glad of a chance to talk," etc. I have often heard people remark that they had been much disappointed, in meeting famous person- ages, not to hear them say something out of the or- dinary; but my own experience has, as a rule, been different. I incline to think that just beneath the surface of even the most journeyman mind lies some- thing worth listening to, if only it is liberated. One of my tests of this was in asking the first workman I met one day in London whether he was a Liberal or a Conservative in politics. He looked at his hard, cracked hands and grinned kindly. "Well, Miss," he said, "ef I 'ad hanythink to be conservative with, I 'd be a conservative ; but has I hain't got nothink, I 'm a Rad." People are like children: if they're expected to show off, they don't, or they can't. One night there was a large dinner at the Amer- ican embassy, still at 31 Lowndes Square, but under the Phelps regime, to which the guests were bidden 48 SOCIETY IN LONDON to meet H. R. H. the Duke of Cambridge, Field- Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, that prince who came very near being King of England, as he was at one time the next male heir in line of succession. It was only the dominating star of destiny which placed Victoria, daughter of his uncle, the Duke of Kent, before him on the throne. It was said that a certain awkwardness in his bearing and an aloofness from the full tide of affairs were caused by the bitterness of that situa- tion. That evening at the embassy dinner, almost at once after Mrs. Phelps had risen from the table, his Royal Highness left the other gentlemen to smoke and came up to join her in the drawing-room. At the moment when his huge and bulky form, rather magnificent in his stars and ribbons, appeared within the doorway, every lady present, including the hos- tess, was in the act of sipping a cup of hot water, following a fad of the time. Flattered by his unex- pected attention in deserting the men down-stairs for them, they raised their heads, graciously wait- ing for his royal utterance, a matter of particular curiosity to one or two young American women among them who were encountering royalty for the first time. In the general pause the duke ap- proached the nearest lady ponderously, looked into her tea-cup and said: "What 's that in your cup, Madam?" "Hot water, sir." Then passing a few steps on, peering into the next 49 PLEASURES AND PALACES cup, in the unconscious perfunctory manner of an officer inspecting troops at mess, he said: "And you — what are you drinking there, Madam?" "Hot water, sir." "Goot Gott! Do you all want to gif up your dinners?" was the royal speech that went down in one or two diaries that night. The revealing charm of London lay not alone in making acquaintance with those who "dwell in mar- ble halls," — in England, be it said, they are not mar- ble, but sculptured wood on sculptured stone and ancient tapestry, — but in that vast universe of houses, big and small, whose lights glimmer softly through hazy atmosphere or blink morosely in the fog, the aristocrats of genius also rove. On certain days, from gray and dull, the place suddenly bright- ened into a new enchantment, as into my picture there came along some poet or painter, some writer of novels, or other great one whose name since child- hood had made my heart flutter like Wordsworth's daffodils, or the yellow poppies on the California plains. In response to the invitation, "Won't you come in for a cup of tea with us on Wednesday afternoon?" I had gone to the house of a new acquaintance, find- ing in reality a crush of fashionables in her drawing- rooms. She put me into a seat, and introduced me to an old lady on my right and an old gentleman on my left, both of whom looked very bright and alive. "Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), 50 IN THAT VAST UNIVERSE OF HOUSES SOCIETY IN LONDON mother of Adelaide Procter; Mr. Browning — the poet, you know." At the names my heart thumped. I was wedged in between them. "I surely have a lucky star," I said. "To think of my good fortune in being placed just here!" "Yes," piped the old lady, merrily, "it 's nice to like one's fellow-sardines." Browning said: "I am always glad to meet Americans, they are so appreciative ; only in one way they 're worse even than our people here. I think I may say that the thing that puzzles me most in the world is the Brown- ing Society, and America seems full of Browning societies." "That shows how much you mean to America," I ventured. "H'm, yes," he answered dryly; "it is n't very flat- tering to think you can't be understood without the aid of organized effort." He was very sweet and laughed at himself. I mentioned Tennyson. Old Mrs. Procter said: "Look sharp. He does not love Americans. I simply adore Lowell, and Tennyson is one of my dearest. I 've tried in a hundred ways to have him meet Lowell, but he answers like a brute. I '11 not give up, though. Lowell wrote me a poem on my birthday. I thought that would fetch Alfred, so I took it down to Hazlemere and flirted it before his face. " 'You sha'n't read it,' I said. He grunted. I PLEASURES AND PALACES folded it up and stuffed it into my pocket and said, 'I 'm back to town.' He pouted like a naughty child, seized my hand and growled : " 'You may read it.' "'Oh, no; never,' I said. He finally insisted. 'Well, since you beg me to, it begins like this: "I know a girl, they say she 's eighty — " I paused. 'Damned familiar!' snorted Alfred, never cracking a smile." The old lady chuckled. "But he 's an angel all the same ; they 're both angels." In the midst of our talk somebody began to play a long classical piece on the piano. Everybody said, "Sh!" Browning, who was in great vein, whispered, "I abominate piano-players* — murderers of conver- sation." It was cruel; the piano ran the whole gamut of its possibilities for half an hour; Mrs. Proc- ter and Browning rolled their eyes at each other and at me as if in agony. At last it stopped. Browning applauded frantically, holding out his hands, and looking back over his shoulder at us, while he began to say, "Thank God! it's over! I must tell you about the strangest experience I ever had. It was in France — " Just then the pianist began an en- core. Browning almost screamed: "What's she doing? You don't think she is going to — " "Yes," I said, "you applauded so hard she had to begin again." "God forgive me!" he groaned. "Never again will I commit that error." The old lady almost choked with laughter, and Browning bolted for the door, dragging me after SOCIETY IN LONDON him by the hand. Out in the corridor he said: "I just remember that I 'm specially invited by Mr. and Mrs. William Story to meet you on Friday. They 're making a great fete to themselves of the affair." "They know," I said, "how much I prize making your acquaintance. In the goodness of their hearts, I know, it is true, they are looking forward to giving me that happiness." "Yes," said Browning, "with the joy of children. We must n't let them know of our meeting to-day. When we are introduced, we must both act up to the occasion, as if we 'd never met before." When Friday came, I found that dear Mr. and Mrs. Story, who were in London from Rome only for a short stay, had asked several distinguished per- sons to meet me and witness my delight at being in- troduced to Mr. Browning. The poet had not yet arrived. I felt more and more like a cheat and a villain, and wanted to run away. Just then Brown- ing came in. Mr. and Mrs. Story, one on each side of him, brought him up to me and beamed with a "There now!" look. Browning bowed with the greatest solemnity. I tried to control my counte- nance, and might have succeeded if he had n't looked up at me, while his head was still bowed, with an expression of surprise, almost of injured innocence. I strove not to laugh, but his sudden stern eye, fixed sidewise on me, was too much. I burst out frankly into peals of laughter. "How could you! Now, I could have gone on 55 PLEASURES AND PALACES looking like that till doomsday," exclaimed Brown- ing. "Not if you could have seen yourself in the glass," I said. The Storys had their pleasure all the same, and that evening, beginning in fun, was one of the mer- riest and happiest. Many deep and serious things were talked of, too. In London there are strange contrasts of the light in which matters are estimated. In taking the train for the country at Waterloo on one occasion, I had just sat down in a second-class compartment when I noticed just opposite my toes two tiny little feet in low slippers. While I was musing on their un- practical character, the day being showery, the owner of the dainty slippers exclaimed, "My dear Miss Calhoun!" It was Lady Dorothy Nevill, one of the most fa- mous women of her age, who had been the friend of Disraeli and the recipient of many of his published letters, and about whose table circled the representa- tive conservative element of all that was genius in England. Of her, too, Watts made a portrait, not beautiful, but subtler in realism and more epigram- matic, if such an expression of a painting can be pardoned, than any of his other works, and still not able to convey completely the lively personality ex- cept to those who knew the original and could see in the portrait just where the dimples about the mouth would break forth in those sallies of wit and 56 SOCIETY IN LONDON shrewd appreciation which made that little old lady- engaging up to the very final curtsy of her exit. She was full of bright curiosity to know where I was going, and said that she herself was on her way to her small place at Hazlemere. I said: "I am going to Hazlemere, too." "Now do tell me who you 're goin' to," she said. "To Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw," I answered. "How interestin'! But — ain't he a shockin' so- cialist?" When we arrived at the station it was sprinkling. Lady Dorothy said,."Good-by," invited me to see her, and trotted quickly away with a maid who was there with an umbrella. I could n't help smiling to myself as I drove up the winding road in the "shock- in' socialist's" handsome and comfortable trap, while the Tory Lady Dorothy could be seen, far down the hillside, trudging through the mud and rain, carry- ing her net of little parcels, the maid holding some other packages and the umbrella. On arrival at the Shaws' house at the top of the hill, with fine, far realms for the vision on all sides, Mr. Shaw, just recovering from illness, was at the door, and said, without other greeting, as he took my hand : "Do you know what a disgusting occupation I 've been engaged in this morning? Counting up in- come!" A few days after his marriage, Mr. Shaw sent me a post-card written closely in his small, clear, ex- m PLEASURES AND PALACES quisite script, describing the ceremony, which had taken place at the registrar's office. He had been ill, and said : "I made such a poor figure, was so shabbily dressed, you wouldn't have looked at me. The registrar wanted to marry my bride to my best man, whom he considered a much properer person." One night Mr. Shaw and Mr. Balfour occupied a box together at a theater. When I commented to him with some surprise on that hobnobbing of the great socialist with the Tory leader, he answered: "Why not? Balfour and I are probably more alike in our ultimate aims than any other two men in England." Many persons used to think Bernard Shaw the very devil, unaware that, stowed away from sight, back of the satire and stabbing laugh, were large deeds of brotherliness which he would never have called "kindness"' — ready for the fellowman who chanced to be too hard hit. Many were unwilling to read what Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb wrote, or one of Mr. Shaw's Fabian essays for fear of being "perverted." "If you leave your mind gadding about on the loose, one of these scoundrels will pick it up and set it going for you in a way you don't like," I heard said. 58 CHAPTER II THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION OF A PLAY WITH NATURE ONLY AS STAGE AND SCENERY WHEN" spring appears, and the tender young grass upheaves the moist sod, left all fresh by melted snows and winter rains ; when bright flow- ers once more break through and flutter their per- fumes to the air, dancing in happy praise of the god Hyacinth's return and of nature new-create, I see again the blue hyacinths of England massed by the million under the grand old oaks and pines of Coombe Wood. In mind I stroll again with a rare and noble friend amid the tall green bracken by those purple pools of blossom, whose scent mingles with the faint, fine smell of the yellow primroses stuck thickly and closely to the earth at every path- edge and tree-root cranny and beside every clod. As we walked or rested awhile, sitting maybe, on the low limb of a tree, we read and discussed some book — Keats or Tennyson or Swinburne, Lowell or Edgar Allan Poe or other poet, or some book of essays on art or other kindred subject. Such times reminded me of "just the other day" in California, when we children used to go along with our mother through the knee-deep wild flowers of our valley. She, too, carried some book, which 59 PLEASURES AND PALACES we used to read out among the hills, and in our play pretend that we were the characters in it. My friend of Coombe Wood, Surrey, England, was Lady Archibald Campbell, of old Scottish ruling stock, closely related by marriage to the royal family, being the sister-in-law of Princess Louise, sister of King Edward, standing in succes- sion as Duchess of Argyll, and the mother of the heir to that dukedom. Among the women of her country and of her time she will remain note- worthy. Possessed of a high type of beauty, tall, slender, of elegant mold, fair of hair and skin, she was specially remarkable for an originality that led her to rove in thought and action wherever her fancy strayed, controlled and restrained only by the exac- tions of an exquisite discernment and a proud spirit of race. This absolute independence and sense of detachment from the ordinary leashes of social obli- gation in all that related to entertaining and being entertained, or in recognizing this or that debt to ordinary social life or relationships, linked with an almost childlike lack of self -consciousness, disturbed the complacency of certain persons, impatient of the unusual and intolerant of the eccentric. Another trait in her that fault-finders could not abide was that she had no notion of time. I heard it recounted of her wedding (marriage being legal in those days only if performed before noon) that she kept Queen Victoria and all the court folks waiting in the church till nearly upon the stroke of twelve, when she flew up the aisle to the altar and almost screamed out to 60 ns I SEE AGAIN THE BLUE HYACINTHS OF ENGLAND THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION the anxious clergyman: "Look at the clock, man! Mar-r-ry us!" It was done precipitately, shorn' of all circumstance. Whistler, an intimate of the Coombe circle, used to say, "To the mediocre mind, genius is madness." Once an exceedingly dull and heavy painter, in a rage of the commonplace against the rare, published an angry attack against Whistler. Whistler's re- mark, when he heard of it, was: "Thank God! one danger is past. What if he had praised me!" At Coombe for the first time I heard of "art for art's sake." On that occasion Lord Dufferin took part in the discussion, while Whistler stood for the contention that the artist paints for himself alone; that art is its own sole end and aim, and has nothing to say to others. "Still," I said, "you did not isolate yourself from lif e out in the wilds of our Western plains or on top of the Rockies, far from man, to paint for your own joy. You came to the world's heart, to London, to Paris, to Velasquez, as I have heard you say." He grinned, then said lightly, but seriously: "We take our solitudes with us." Secretly, each man likes to think that God and Nature have a message for him alone — perhaps it is so. The talk that evening was vivid, epigram- matic. I had but lately come from the mountains and plains of California, and it flung into my mind a maze of brilliant new conceptions. I had never dreamed of analyzing art-impulses or art-motives, but was instinctively seeking means of expression. PLEASURES AND PALACES A picture of Lady Archibald Campbell evokes the background of her English home and surround- ings. She herself never called any place home but the old Scottish lands in Argyllshire — Ardinglas — which had belonged to her ancestors before her, and I think she always partly dwelt with the fairies in the green hills of Scotland. Coombe Hill Farm, Surrey, England, is an Elizabethan farm-house at the edge of Coombe Wood, on the gentle, southern slope of a low hill. Adjoining the ends of the two- storied, gabled, and ivy-draped house are high brick walls, screening the northern side of the main part of the house from the approach, and inclosing the gardens, with their jasmine bowers and the flower- covered arcade that skirts the steep lawn and its rose-plots. This arcade forms a perfumed and shady cloister straight down from the house and along the bottom of the lawn, leading through a small, tangled orchard to a thick group of tall limes at the extreme right, and separating the upper gar- den from the hot-houses, the lower vegetable garden, the strawberry patches, and grassy paddocks. At the foot of the hill stretch the grain- and hay-fields toward Coombe and Maiden Station, two miles dis- tant. In the upper garden, along the level top of the hill, runs a gravel path from the bowered side door of the small hallway and drawing-room to the lime trees. That parlor, with its fireplace and two large casement windows extending almost from floor to ceiling, looking through trailing jasmine, blue and purple clematis, wistaria, and other inter- 64 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION twining tendrils, — one window westward, toward the limes, the other southward, close to the entrance of the long pergola, — is not large, but has been made a poetic spot by the fancy of her who inhabits it and it has seen brilliant and historic company. When Lord and Lady Archibald Campbell ac- quired the place they rebuilt it inside. The wood- work and floors of the hall were lacquered a bright sealing-wax red from the low-gabled front entrance- door past the good-sized dining-room, expanding into a small square, and again, near the parlor door, narrowing and crossed at right angles by another corridor. Of the same red lacquer were the wood- work and floor of the dining-room. The walls of all the house, except in the small gable rooms, were hung with painter's canvas, where by degrees they painted the creatures and scenes of their imagina- tion. On the hall walls Lord Archibald painted armored knights, boar-hunts, and Tennysonian tapestry-like subjects. There hung, too, a portrait he had made of Lady Archibald at an earlier time, "a beauteous faire ladye" of the knight-errantry age, with golden hair towered high. He painted the dining-room walls with a rich Japanese subject — the sea and flamingos ; the walls of his own room, with its hangings of rich Elizabethan broideries, were painted around with heaving, flowing waves of the sea, in the azure and aquamarine of which played dolphins — golden, I think they were — amid mer- maids and sporting fishes. But the room which has been most talked about 65 PLEASURES AND PALACES is the parlor, the "Iris Parlor," the evocation of Lady Archibald Campbell. Across the mid-panel of its door are traced in letters of gold on white lacquer verses of Walter Savage Landor beginning: "But I have sinuous shells within, of pearly hue" . . . She has painted the walls with the iris, grouped hap-hazard, of many a hue and form and length of stem. She did this in a desultory way, as the images came and pleased her. Whistler used at times to make suggestions as she painted, and he himself dragged the brush over the canvas here and there. He thought the flowers she wrought de- lightful. The tone of floor and furniture reflected the same colors, while the window hangings were also things of some enchantment — of palest rose satin, repeating the inner tint of the Abalone shells which were appliqued on them as rare points in the large embroidered pattern of silk and mother of pearl which decorated them, richly yet lightly. They caught the glint and the glow of the setting sun on summer evenings when the southern casement was open wide and the evening air, bringing into the room the scent of roses, jasmine and mignonette, vibrated through its JEolian harp in a monotonous, melting strain, as if faint and far. Within the room, shells were used decoratively ; many were gifts from distant British lands, from all the oceans of the world. I, too, once brought her a rare and beau- teous treasure for this bower. It was a bush of pale rose-tinted coral, the color of "La France" roses. I had bought it of an old Spanish woman at 66 RAMBLES THAT LADY ARCHIBALD AND I USED TO ENJOY IN THE GLORIOUS WARREN THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION Monterey during a Californian visit as a votive offering for the Iris Parlor. When Lady Archi- bald took it to a jeweler to have the branches polished, he told her that it was priceless. So she had him set the long pale-rose fronds and twigs into a crown, stuck here and there with diamonds, and wore it to Court. On that same occasion, too, I think it was, with her magnificent court-train, all embroidered with heraldrie, bearing her Coat of Arms — Campbell of Argyll and Callender — she had the satisfaction of wearing a garment then much discussed, one which was being "affected" by certain noble ladies inter- ested in the unhobbling of womankind — the divided skirt. Not that Lady Archibald ever of her own free choice thought or acted with any "group" or "movement" — quite the reverse — but the garment in question appealed to her as delightful to walk in and picturesquely adaptable to a tall, spare figure. She took much pains to perfect its possibilities and evolved a result which the passerby would never have suspected of being a "they," instead of an "it." Polite society experienced a tremor when it was known that "they" had actually passed by the lord- chamberlain at a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace and made obeisance to Queen Victoria. That fact had been subsequently confirmed beyond all doubt at Marlborough House, when their gentle sponsor stood on a chair to demonstrate the betwixt and the between of "their" intricacies. Certainly the delight of stepping out freely is one 69 PLEASURES AND PALACES which mere skirted woman can never know. I re- member what astonished sensation was mine when I took my first trembling, and for an instant, self- conscious steps in the costume of Ganymede — Rosalind — when I first embodied the part, which I did, at that time in London. Swift upon the first sense of charmed surprise, came the new joy of going along free, like treading the air, next to flying — never to be forgotten. When I first embodied the part in London, I had designed the dress of Rosalind of a combination of leathers and rough woolens in wood colors, with a draping mantle of dull lichen-green, to make its wearer one with the woods, as Shakespeare's love- lorn, but witty, princess was evidently fashioned to be. Whistler praised it much when he saw me play- ing Rosalind in London and exclaimed: "Amaz- ing! Brown bud in leaf of green — what?" He wanted to paint me in it, but I could not give the sittings. I used sometimes to have the costume with me at Coombe from Saturday to Monday, high leather boots and all, and wore it under a long ulster during the rambles that Lady Archibald and I used to en- joy in the glorious warren. Not a soul did we ever meet there. This bit of fine old forest, silent but for its own denizens, might be far from the world of men, though it is hardly more than an hour's drive from Hyde Park Corner, and almost adjoins Rich- mond Park. The secret is that it is crown domain, and only once or so a year did the royal ranger — at 70 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION that time the Duke of Cambridge — ever come to dis- turb its solitudes by a few hours of shooting. Lord Archibald Campbell's family were accorded an en- trance key and had the freedom of the woods. One summer day when the sun, a somewhat ex- clusive god in England, deigned to show forth in full power, and splash the forest with splendor, flam- ing on the trees and between their dark velvety masses of shadow, making more vivid still the crim- sons and purples and rose-colors of the stretches of rhododendrons, it seemed to me that in such an Eng- lish forest must the vision of Rosalind have first come to Shakspere. In an impulse at the thought, I threw off my wrap and began to speak Rosalind's words. Lady Archibald stood far back as audience, while I acted through the scenes. As I heard the words I was speaking ringing through the woods, the idea flashed upon me, "Why not give the play so, here, on this very spot?" I called out to my friend, "I want to act this play right here among these trees." I ran to her and began to expound the matter. "What if I bring actors and realize Shakespeare's own dream out here in the forest itself!" At that time no play had ever been acted in the open forest, making scenes of nature, the scenes of the play. The means of projection of such a presentation are of necessity, entirely different from those em- ployed in the open air theatres of antiquity, or the garden-stages and court-yard productions of the 71 PLEASURES AND PALACES early modern ages, or of such as those of Lope de Vega. That thrilling moment in Coombe Wood, under the grand old oaks by "the dell of tall pines," was the annunciation of a conception the happy and full realization of which a twelve-months later, in the presence of a most brilliant and illustrious assem- blage, brought forth a new art form, a new art emo- tion, as it was acclaimed to be throughout Europe; it was an intermingling of art and nature not seen before. The new idea was immediately copied throughout England, on the Continent, and in America, resulting in many similar attempts, and in the revival of out-of-door pageantry, garden per- formances, and open-air plays that to-day have come to take an important place in general educa- tional and cultural development. At that time Lady Archibald had no personal ex- perience of acting. She was not intimately familiar with the play of "As You Like It." But I had recently been acting Rosalind in London, and all its scenes were before me like an open book. My words fired her imagination and appealed to her sense of beauty. "But can it be done?" she asked, not realizing how much of the play lies in the forest of Arden. "Be practical. You are excited, Eleanor." She, too, was excited at the thought, and as we walked back to Coombe Hill Farm, my mind flew through every scene with an accumulating joy in the growing certitude that the realization of those scenes 72 SHE, TOO, WAS EXCITED AT THE THOUGHT THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION among the trees could and would be accomplished. When we reached the house I sat down in the little red hall with Shakespeare, paper and pencil, and never moved, not even for dinner, till my flying thoughts and speeding pencil had arranged the scenes for the forest presentation of the play almost exactly in the form in which we gave it in Coombe Wood Grove the following summer. During the ensuing autumn, winter and spring, while I acted at the Haymarket at night, I spent much of my daytime at Coombe, working out the methods of projection for this new kind of presenta- tion and trying them out amid the landscape itself. I had no prejudices or acting habits to overcome, for so very short a stage experience lay back of me that my imagination was in no way theater-bound. In- deed, the earth of my California mountains still clung to my shoes, and it was more natural for my notions to run free in a wild grove than to remember theater exigencies and restrict the realization of the poet's imaginings within the means of the footlights. Lady Archibald entered with heart and soul into the plan, taking entire charge of the financial and business part of the venture. The poet's dream that was being evoked into actual existence held her also in thrall, and a longing grew upon her to become part of it, too. A number of the most interesting personalities of the time were cast for the various characters. Mr. Vezin, the finest speaker of Shakespearian verse, a man renowned as Jacques, was to play that part, 75 PLEASURES AND PALACES and Touchstone was to be Mr. Elliot, an actor of classical taste and attainment, a relative of Lord Minto. Celia, as Shakspere wrote her, but as she is not played at the theater, is, in her bright and gracious nature, not less than in her devotion to her cousin, an exquisitely defined character. That she is not seen so on the boards is because it often chances that Rosalind, after the fashion of stage firmaments, would be "a star, when only one is shin- ing," and takes Celia s brave words out of her mouth and speaks them herself, thereby wrecking the au- thor's fine quantities and incidentally estranging herself from his conception of Rosalind. Our Celia was Miss Annie Schletter, the most talented ama- teur actress in London, who portrayed the part to perfection, and since then has played as a profes- sional in Mrs. de la Pasture's play in a way to force from the critics favorable comparison with the great Duse. The Phoebe was Mrs. Plowden, one of the most famous and exquisite beauties of the day, mother of the present young Lady Lytton. Her dress was like a pea-blossom, and some one asked, "Why should not Phoebe sweet pea be?" Arthur Bourchier was Oliver; William Rose, of literary fame, the William; De Cordova was Corin; and, in fact, every part was embodied by a person of some distinction. The part of Orlando remained for a time unfilled, as did Audrey. In our style of presentation, which was more po- etic, and yet at the same time more realistic, more concrete than any other, it was especially difficult to 76 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION find an Orlando. One touch of love-making on the part of Orlando, or the least recognition by him of femininity in the masquerading Ganymede, or the slightest instinctive flutter of sentimental response to his supposed boy play-fellow would shatter the delightful situation between them, and besides, of course, be grossly inadmissible. It was more than ever necessary for Orlando, as Shakespeare makes him say, "to live by thinking." His eyes and dreams must be so enspelled by the inner vision of his Rosalind, seen but one immortal moment, then hid from him in life's drift, that he cannot see her in the flesh when she stands before him. He does not look at his real princess, and she may with impunity bom- bard his unresponsive outside and stick him over like a full target with the shafts of her wit and loving raillery. Where could such a dreamer be found? Hardly in stagedom. After some time of fruitless quest, Lady Archi- bald came to me and said tremblingly, and with face flushing like a child's: "Eleanor, I want to play Orlando. I feel I could; I just must." She began to recite in loud, uncontrolled tones, and with a Scotch burr marking her utterance more than ordi- narily, "Hang ther-re my ver-rse, in witness of my love!" The voice itself was rich, though harsh and blurting at that time, and there was plenty of it. Her close-cropped, curling hair, prematurely tinged with silver, showed a noble, well-poised head. She was tall, lean, and could easily convey the figure and aspect of a slender youth of gentle lineage. The 77 PLEASURES AND PALACES impersonal and detached impression she always con- veyed would go well with Orlando. She worked for the part not after the usual fashion of the dilettante, but as an artist works, and her ultimate fine por- trayal of it suggested that had destiny not cribbed her within castle walls, she could have been a great actress. In years following this woman of genius played as an amateur in several other parts, one of which was in a weirdly beautiful poetic drama in verse, written by herself, based on the Scottish fairy ballads of "Tamlyn." That play was given several times consecutively as part of the regular evening bill at the chief theater at Edinburgh, Lady Archi- bald, herself, acting the part of Tamlyn. As Orlando, she fashioned herself a costume somewhat in the style of mine, taking for its color the gray-green of my mantle, which I then changed to one the tint of autumn leaves. Thereby Orlando and Rosalind together made up my original color scheme of "brown bud and leaf of green." In these costumes we rehearsed in the woods. The months of preparation were a deep delight for the most part, but their course, like that of true love, did not always run smooth. Some of Or- lando's relatives objected strongly to her playing the part, and sometimes it seemed as if the matter were all off. As Lady G , the wife of the prime minister, put it when Lady Archibald asked her to buy tickets from the silken bag that she carried dur- ing the whole year: "Certainly not, my dear Janey. I, for one, won't go down to see you make 78 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION a fool of yourself — and in boy's get-up, too!" After the first triumphant performance, when all London was ringing with acclaim of "the most beau- tiful and enchanting scenes ever witnessed," and that same Lady G came running after her, imploring her to find her a place for the following day, Lady Archibald gave back in retort victo- rious: "Cer-r-rtainly not! I just snor-r-rt at you!" A dilemma remaining long unsolved concerned the casting of the part of Audrey, a character in which the least cockneyism or the least staginess would mar the fresh scenes of Arden, as they were in our Arcadia. Yet the part called for robust fun not generally within the means of any but skilled players. It finally fell to the cook at Coombe Hill Farm, a hearty country lass who had watched some of the rehearsals surreptitiously, learned the part, and implored the chance to read it until it could be properly filled. Her reading astounded us all, it was so wholly, richly Shakespearian, so true in rustic savor and naive slyness, so rankly comic, a character with its own homely well-being, too, and, though amusingly contrasted, yet not incompatible with other poetic and courtly creatures who might be roaming in the forest. Her success was one of the hits of the day. During long stretches of time there was heavy work, with anxious incertitude. Many obstacles had to be overcome. Magpies perched on our standards, and crows croaked over us. At first 79 PLEASURES AND PALACES Lord Archibald looked sourly on us; yet sinews of war were necessary. We could not have the proper paraphernalia or the "heavenly music" hid in the woods without much good coin of the realm, and where to turn for it? When Lady Archibald heard the price set upon the rehearsing of the music alone, she exclaimed, "Lor-rd! fancy Ar-r-rchie for-rking out a hundr-r-red pounds for our-r accur-rsed music!" However, some one with enlightened chiv- alry came nobly to the rescue — the Marquess of Lome, as Lady Archibald told me. Lady Archibald once asked me in great delight to come to a neighboring farm and see "a str-range and wonder-rful animal for our woods!" We found there a big, tangled, small-headed thing, like a four-footed ostrich. "Where did it come from? What is it?" we asked. "Hit 's from Haustralia, m' Loidy. Hit 's a hallpacker." "Hallpacker-r-r-r !" Lady Archibald repeated in disgust. "How unpoetical! We must call it some- thing else." With more accurate information, but with like grammar, the man would probably have said, "Hit 's a lammer — got hoff the Handees." There were rehearsal days when the works would n't work and the actors would n't act, but de- veloped eccentric wills; then each one sought a tree to pout under, or took the train back to town with a 80 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION sinister farewell. On such days hope seemed no better than a dead lion. Once a telegram came to me: It 's all over, the royal George is furious. Come. Janey. It referred to the Duke of Cambridge, whose per- mission to hold our revels in Coombe Wood we had intended to obtain at a later stage of development. But alas! he, who never went to Coombe but a day or so a year, had suddenly arrived there, plumping along with one or two companions, and pulled up short on seeing a man with a cart engaged in laying down sod under the trees. The work was all but finished, and had set in well, making a marvelous plushy carpet of green stretching from tree to tree and along a lovely path. "What are you doing there?" he roared at the man. "I 'm a-pup-pup-puttin' down moss, y'r Roil 'Ighness." "Moss? Moss? What for? Who told you to do that? Who are you?" "I 'm 'er Loidyship's gardener, y'r Roil 'Ighness, from Coombe '111 Farm. 'Er Loidyship wants the moss 'ere for the theatricals — Sir." "The devil she does !" roared the royal ranger. "We took it from them 'ere mounds down the 'ill, y'r Roil 'Ighness — " "What !" he thundered. "Not from the graves of 81 PLEASURES AND PALACES my chargers!" and the royal George, simply chok- ing, plunged on to see. When he found that it was all only too true, — the tombs of those faithful com- panions of the Crimea lay there stripped and de- spoiled, of the regal mossy pall that their old war- master had caused to be spread over them, — his rage knew no bounds. He would hear no more of us and our "damned goings on," and a flaming sword was thenceforth set to turn every which way at the gates of that Eden. After much tribulation, however, another spot was secured in a part of the same forest belonging to another estate. Some time before our final rehearsals, Whistler, at one of his famous breakfasts, introduced to me Mr. Godwin, a gentleman whose ability in group- ing many figures on the stage had been the subject of much praise, notably in connection with a produc- tion of Mr. Wilson Barrett's. I asked him to come to Coombe and help group the numerous persons in the scenes of the court of the banished duke. He was delighted to do so, and gave much valuable as- sistance. Besides the musicians, Mr. Godwin was the only person, so far as I know, who received any salary in connection with the production. Lord Archibald was finally won over, or, rather, he came of his own free will and ranged his good wishes with us. We had a most valuable ally in the Princess Louise, sister of King Edward, whose tal- ent as a sculptress bestows added distinction upon her estate as a royal princess. a © a o !> D CO 3£ M en O >■ o a g a t- 1 H DO 13 >• O H IB H a a o I a H a THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION At last the great day arrived. Every inhabitant and wanderer in Arden was hidden in his or her own copse, behind a tree, or in the gulch below the hill. A seating-stand had been erected, with screening walls of green at the sides and back, just high enough to shut off the view of the landscape except in front. The back was to the west, so that the spectators re- mained in shadow, while the afternoon sun streamed full into the forest scene before them. Until the play began, the view was hidden from the audience by a large gray-green curtain, swung between two tall lime-trees the branches of which almost touched above their heads. The curtain fell into a trench, after the fashion of antiquity, disclos- ing the forest vista chosen as the scene of the play, a lovely wooded glade, blocked somewhat in the far middle distance by a great dark cedar the branches of which lapped the earth. To the right a steep hillside formed a most fortunate means of screening the actors from view, and beyond it could be faintly heard the tinkling bells of old Covin's flocks. The characters of the play could be heard and observed both far and near, and from their first coming into view were seen talking and fully occupied with what concerned them, using the words of Shakspere only from the moment they came within earshot of the audience, of whom they remained totally unaware. It was as if the audience were invisibly peer- ing into that forest world of life and romance. At times a shepherd page could be seen glinting here and there through the woods, but never came near 85 PLEASURES AND PALACES enough to the peepers — the audience — for them to make his acquaintance. "In his own person" he was the call-boy. The highroads, lanes, and all other available spaces were crowded with four-in-hands and car- riages, blazoned with the proudest arms of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, for the occupants of the coveted seats in the great tribune beneath the tall elm- and lime-trees were the grandest folk in the three kingdoms and many from the Continent: King Edward and Queen Alexandra, then Prince and Princess of Wales; the King of Sweden; the Crown Prince Frederick of Germany, soon to be emperor (who presented me with flowers at the end of the play) ; the present King George; the Princess Royal of England; Queen Maud of Norway; Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, Duchess of Argyll and the duke; the pretenders to the throne of France, the Comte and Comtesse de Paris ; and many other royal personages ; the aristo- crats of genius; statesmen, diplomats, poets, and other writers of renown ; painters, sculptors ; and the finest of the world of fashion — an illustrious gather- ing of the makers of life's magnificence. The bright sun warmed earth and sky and played harmonies of shade and brilliancy on glade and tree. The hunting-horns of the exiled duke and his comrades in banishment are heard afar in the woods ; their happy singing and the barking of the leashed hounds sound nearer and nearer before they come into view, carrying the slain deer. Through the 86 THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION trees the hunters wind and disappear. As the echo of their voices dies away Orlando, with old Adam leaning on him, is seen in the edge of the forest, then passes out of sight in search of shelter for the faith- ful old servant. The band of lordly hunters, re- turning, throw themselves down under the trees to rest and make a merry feast. As they sprawl on the grass with cup and song, there ascends with the blue smoke of their camp-fire their ringing words of hearty tribute to wild-wood freedom and the "sweet uses of adversity." In this forest presentation of "As You Like It" the first scenes of the play, the court scenes, contain- ing the exposition of the story, had to be omitted, but their feeling had to be conveyed by both Rosa- lind and Orlando when they first appeared in the forest. Those scenes all bitter with the effects of envy "cruel as the grave," and treacherous con- spiracy of usurpation and death, show Rosalind and Orlando each the sad victim of greedy and mur- derous men, both despoiled of their possessions and driven forth in exile. In the brief moment of her meeting with Orlando, when he says that if he be killed, he is willing to be so, as he has "none to la- ment him and nothing in the world" "only to fill a place which may be better supplied when he shall make it empty," his words find swift and melting response deep down in that sadness which Rosalind, in tender answer to her dear sister-cousin's entreaty, had consented to "forget." After that one look wherein heart flew to heart, the time parts them, 87 PLEASURES AND PALACES evidently to meet no more. So the wanderer Orlando, alone and hopeless, strays to the forest of Arden, as lief it were any other where — dwelling solely with the inner vision of his lost love, not noting the outer-world or its show. When Rosalind wearily drags her steps thither, she, too, brings a heart that has "briers in it," full of hopeless longing, ready to "weep like a woman," however courageous an outside her will and wit put on. It is essential not to lose the plaintive and piteous strains of this prelude, if the later tale is to find the full fun, the romance, and thrill of its mounting en- chantment as it unrolls in Arcadia. For the forest of Arden was Shakespeare's "Arcadia" at a time when, in England and all over Europe, authors were meddling with pastoral, trying to find the key to the "Golden World." Arcadia haunted them all, tracking Theocritus' Greek idyll and Latin eclogue, past Politian, seeking the vein of Sannazaro, Bec- cari, and sweet, wild Tasso. Echoes of Pan's pipe were heard, and elegant shepherds danced and made music in praise of sylvan nature, amid the art glories of the Italian Renaissance, sucking the nectar of contrast between imagined free existence in some flowery woodland paradise and the glittering con- straint and magnificent man-made beauty of the highly cultured ducal courts. Shakespeare alone followed them not, but took of what they brought, — as he did with the findings of others, — and drew from it what they had left unper- ceived, its immortal part. So all the "Arcadias," 88 , ■ -i °- M 'i AN ILLUSTRIOUS GATHERING OF THE MAKERS OF LIFE S MAGNIFICENCE THE FIRST FOREST PRODUCTION the flower and exquisite quintessence of artificiality, are as dreams gone by. But "As You Like It" pulses in such unison with nature that its world of creatures and the forest, being brought together in our interpretation of it, glowed with intermingled and intenser life, forming a harmony of beauty to "dissolve the soul in ecstasy." Those words of Mil- ton do not overreach expressions used that day by onlookers, men and women of discretion and intel- lect, not usually given to extravagance. The inten- sity of the spell was such that when, during a scene, a young bird floundered and fell from its twig to the ground, and was picked up by an actor and tenderly tossed up to its nest among the branches, tears started to the eyes of persons present. No mere cramped, built-up stage could afford means of conveying the maze of entangling "love-in- idleness" which Rosalind, amid the leafy glades of the deep grove, twines about the unconscious, wan- dering steps of Orlando, who never once appre- hends her presence. His eyes are ever and ever more vague to the moving forms about him, and his thoughts more and more withdrawn to the remote idol of his imagination, whose unnoted original, dancing in delight at his side, and all about and around him, like an invisible sprite in his path at every turn, goads and torments and augments his misery, feeding on the love she forces him to re- veal, holding back from him all comfort, though once she faints and nearly betrays herself yet speaks never a word to allay his melancholy. When at last 91 PLEASURES AND PALACES he cries out in uncontrollable despair, "I can live no longer by thinking!" she conies to him with an over- flowing cup of recompense, and rapture beyond mortal. So Shakespeare, with Rosalind and Orlando and their whole romantic train, came to Coombe Wood, and there, with all grandeur as was meet, was shown forth for the first time in the world a play having no other stage and no other scenes than the sunny, grassy swards, the flowery dells, the trees and brake and twittering birds, the hills, and the blue sky of nature. CHAPTER III CONTINENTAL, SCENES I HAD never passed any time at a fashionable watering-place, and my first experience of one was a month of August after the London season at Kissingen, Bavaria, which I repeated in two suc- ceeding years. Two dear and kind friends chaper- oned me there: Countess Vitzthun von Eckstadt and an Irish lady, a relative of Lord Eglington, Mrs. Horne-Payne, in whose amusing company I made the trip from London to Kissingen and back again. Kissingen, where Bismarck and Princess Bis- marck always came for the waters, was under royal police supervision, which made the place peculiarly exclusive, and also provided a society of greater freedom and spontaneity of intercourse than could be possible in a place where strangers meet without such guaranties of personal standing. For instance, one morning there appeared in the gardens an exceedingly smart-looking couple who were registered on the books as Lord and Lady D , the prelude, as it afterward transpired, of a scandal in high life. For though the lady was the Lady D , her companion was not the "milord" of the same name. Within twenty-four hours they 93 PLEASURES AND PALACES were seen no more under the trees followed by their conspicuous white caniche. When I asked why, Countess Vitzthun said: "S-h-h, ma chere! It was the police commis- sioner who needed their apartment at the hotel; they had to go." Kissingen lies in a valley among the soft Bavarian hills. The small railway station is at an old hamlet, the quaint houses and narrow cobbled streets of which huddle up against its ancient castle walls, be- tween which and the mountain stream lie the gardens with the Kurhaus (or casino) along one side of them. The gardens are edged at one end by several hotels ; at the far opposite extremity are the mineral springs, with a little kiosk over them, where the curative waters are served hot in tall glasses. Our train arrived at nightfall, and when I looked out of my window for a first view of the gardens, the trees were all decorated with strings of tiny, many- colored lamps in honor of the fete of Our Lady. Strains of waltz music from the Kurhaus, together with the pleasant chatter of persons who could be seen more or less dimly walking up and down under the trees, wafted up to me a certain delightfulness of impression. There was not as yet any electricity used in the little lamps, which were simply tiny col- ored glass cups of tallow dip. But if they did not light the garden walks as electricity does, still, they glowed among the branches of the trees and shrubs with some kind of soft charm that might be called personal and homely. And that impression was the 94 LADY ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL AS "ORLANDO" ELEANOR CALHOUN AS " ROSALIND" In Coombe Wood, Surrey, England, during rehearsal of "-Is You Like It" CONTINENTAL SCENES one that endured at Kissingen, something of Old World charm and simplicity of social intercourse among men and women who yet were children of the age, some of them, indeed, famous among the makers of the modern world; Bismarck; the Hungarian statesman, Tisza; Senator Stanford; Prince Mal- com Khan; and others. On that first evening in the little Bavarian town, ancient for a thousand years, that public, conven- tional honoring of the mother of Christ, not exactly as a deliberate, self-conscious, religious act, but as some happy, matter-of-course custom or remem- brance, — conveyed to my Western heart a sense of lif e's nobility and civic ideal, as registered in elegant public observance. After supper and a turn in the gardens, where I was introduced to several foreign friends of my friends, I was recommended to go to bed early, "for everybody is up and in the gardens at six o'clock here. We walk down to the kiosk for hot glasses of mineral water, swallowed between each turn of promenading up and down; at eight we breakfast under the trees in friendly groups ; at ten we go to the saline baths, walking about a mile and a half up the little river, or else going up on the little 'tea- kettle' steam-launch." One of the graceful features of the life at Kis- singen was met immediately on our coming down into the gardens at six the next morning. There, near the hotel door, was a long row of flower-women sell- ing bouquets of roses, carnations, gilly-flowers, and 97 PLEASURES AND PALACES other sweet-smelling, old-fashioned blossoms, fresh and dewy from the little farms in the valley, where they had just been plucked. By the flower-baskets gentlemen stood, holding bouquets which they had just bought, vying with one another to be first on hand for best choice. These they presented to the ladies of their acquaintance with morning greetings as they appeared in the walk. I was surprised to find, although we had arrived only the night before, a young officer who had barely been introduced to me coming forward with a bouquet to offer me. The unlooked-for act, the crisp, sweet flowers, quaintly packed tightly together in a stiff, white scalloped paper-holder, and the delicious morning air charmed my senses. Breakfast under the trees at eight, when several friends of my friends joined us, as the band played, and other persons paused at our table to pass the top of the morning and gossip, pointing out or intro- ducing this one or that one, saying who they were and what was their place in the great world, was the initiation for me into a new phase of Continental life. I met several girls who were walking up and down with their mamas — a young German bar- oness, a Polish girl, and two lovely Spanish girls. Some young officers were introduced. The girls and they and I promenaded up and down in front of the group of mamas. There was a distinct dis- cipline of demeanor observed, yet everybody knew everybody or was made acquainted at once, and 98 CONTINENTAL SCENES there was a general atmosphere of freedom, and ab- sence of self -consciousness, which are found only in circumstances where everybody belongs to the polite world, conditions which prevailed at Kissingen be- fore Prince Bismarck's death, thanks to the royal Bavarian police regulations, which stringently sifted the visitors to Kissingen. One of the girls I met on that first morning was a young Rumanian who did not walk with the other girls and me, but was always strictly flanked by her mother on one side and an older married sister on the other. Only on the third or fourth morning, as we sat at the table under the trees sipping our coffee, did this girl venture to draw near to us and enter into our conversation for a moment. She was pale and poetic in appearance, and the look in her big dark eyes, as she gazed at us passing by, was more than wistful. She did not join our merry excur- sions among the hills, but remained within apron- string-length of her mother, though her eyes seemed always turned toward us. One day, as we all sat listening to the music in the concert-room, she sidled up to me with a movement almost surreptitious, and I seized upon the occasion to let her talk to her heart's desire, for the sense of repression in her was painful. She poured forth her whole heart to me in those few instants. She said: "You are the first American girl I ever met, but we know about them in Rumania. Oh, to be free — free as you are! I would do anything, I would run 99 PLEASURES AND PALACES away, escape to America, where women are given everything they want and have nothing to do but enjoy life and freedom!" I was astounded ; I had never met such a person- ality before, and her ideas, infantile and perilous, alarmed me. I thought she must be on the eve of some desperate act. I hastened to set her right in regard to what would happen to a young girl such as she who might run away to America with any such notions. In order to be able to say words which she could understand I questioned her closely as to what life was like in her own land. "Oh, yes, we have a beautiful home, no doubt, plenty of servants to wait on us. We get our dresses from Paris, and all that; but we are never allowed to go anywhere alone. We can only go out with our mothers to balls ; everywhere we are accom- panied. We are not allowed to read any French novels until we are married, and some girls marry as soon as they can to be free to read all the French novels they wish. Now you — you can read even the most dreadful of them, and do whatever you like." "But I assure you," I said, "I don't do anything of the kind." I wondered what words I could use to make her understand. As she hurriedly rejoined her mother, she implored me not to repeat anything she had said to a living soul. She was utterly innocent; she looked like a sad-eyed, hungry baby. I took close note of her mother's talk and of that of her married sister, but could see nothing abnormal or morbid in 100 CONTINENTAL SCENES either. They appeared reasonable, refined, whole- some. The next morning when we went down into the gardens I was surprised to see this girl, who was evi- dently on the lookout for my appearance, leave her mother's side and literally fly to me in almost hys- teric pleasure, chattering and smiling and choking back tears at the same time. She said: "May I walk with you? Oh, say I may! Don't say no !" "Why, of course; I shall be only too pleased. Come along." After we had taken a turn up and down the main walk, she said in a quick whisper, as if she were ask- ing for the moon: "Could n't we walk over there' — on the far side of the garden?" We went; then she asked, all in a flutter, "Couldn't we go down as far as the bridge?" We went there. Then, as my friends were beckoning me to their little table for the morning coffee and Fruhstuck-Stollen, she thanked me with fervor, and before flying back to her mother as a dove to its cote, asked, "Could you bear to let me walk with you up the river, if you go up to the saline baths?" I said I should be glad to have her with me the next day, but not that one, as I was going with friends on an excursion to see an old ruined castle among the hills. Our party included, among others, Prince and Princess Voronyetzka, a fascinating Polish couple; 101 PLEASURES AND PALACES the Marchese and Marchesa de Pallavicini, she a per- son of great beauty and a delightful amateur musi- cian; another Rumanian princess, Princess Ghikha and her husband; my two Spanish girl friends, Con- cha and Maria de Heredia; and one or two young German officers. I suggested inviting the Ru- manian girl. Her mother at once gave permission, but stipulated that she should not leave my side through the entire day, a promise kept with almost comic fidelity. The girl tried in vain to suppress or control the wildness of her delight, the degree of which, escaping in a whispered word now and then, to me was almost delirium. We were all in a large open brake, the day was heavenly, and a sheer joy all the way. Coming home, we sang songs in all the various languages represented. A picture by the wayside remains in memory.- There had been lively discussions of the newest books, of Wagner and folk-songs, of Scho- penhauer and Chopin. From art we had drifted to atheism and religion, superficially touched on. A ruddy sunset glow was lighting up the yellow grain on the hillside, which the horses were slowly ascending. At the top of the hill ahead of us we saw a huge roadside cross outlined against the sky and as we came up to it we saw that a peasant woman knelt at its foot, almost prostrate in prayer, her hands clasping some cheap artificial roses, old and faded, which she was offering there. One of the young officers was just asking in strident tones, "What is religion, after all? I await a final defini- ng CONTINENTAL SCENES tion." But his sentence grew faint and died away at the sudden symbol of the tired, dusty woman bent before the crude cross bearing its wooden, weather- beaten Christ. She did not move, or heed our pass- ing wagon. In the silence and beauty of the mo- ment not one of us but knew somehow that the old peasant was in the presence of Divine Love, not one of us but felt the melting, sweet influence of her poor but loving, tribute expressed in the tawdry muslin roses — when nature's crimson poppies and blue corn- flowers grew thick about her in the yellow grain. My Rumanian girl friend was with me as much as possible during the two remaining weeks of her mother's stay in Kissingen, and on bidding me fare- well said: "You can never know what it has been to me to know you, nor what a rapturous visit I have had here, thanks to you." Her mother, too, was most tender in bidding me good-by, and gave me many warm in- vitations to visit her at Bucharest and said, "God will always bless you, my child." Until after their departure I had not mentioned my Rumanian friend in any unusual way, but when they were gone, I spoke of this puzzling experience to Countess Vitzthun, who interrupted me by say- ing that the Rumanian mother had confided to her that it was her strict custom to make her daughter repeat on her knees under oath every night every word of conversation she had had during the day with any one, exactly, word for word, what she her- self had said and what had been said to her. That 103 PLEASURES AND PALACES the girl, trained to this habit from infancy, never failed by a syllable, even when she had to repeat, "I asked her [or him] not to tell mama." The mother had done as usual in regard to the girl's first talk with me in the Kurhaus. That and all subsequent conversation had been faithfully confessed night by night ; wherefore the mother had given her daughter full leave to be alone in my company whenever possi- ble, which, she said, was the first time in her whole life that the girl had ever been allowed such a per- mission in regard to any one. What a different ac- ceptation of existence from ours ! For the first time I thanked God in' my heart for my country and my mother; that I had never known any iron but the iron of principles welded into the will to shield me. There was great variety and charm in the society of these people from the four corners of Europe, America, and the Orient, who all met on the common plane of easy, well-bred intercourse, yet each having a distinctly defined racial personality that brought vivid suggestions of their lands of origin. In our Polish friends there was always "lost Poland," and also — a trait of exile perhaps — that non-French Parisianism distinct from the French kind, which distinguished members of many races contribute to the alluring exotism of that capital on the Seine, helping Paris to be Paris, ever renewed, ever gay. Prince Malkom was the diplomatic representative of Persia for all Europe, being accredited at the same time to London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and 104. ROBERT BROWNING CONTINENTAL SCENES Rome. His wife a beautiful Armenian princess, a Christian, was one of my dearly prized friends in London. Prince Malkom told us one day of how he came to be Persian diplomatic representative to all Europe. He was a relative of the shah, had been educated in several countries in Europe, and had become deeply interested in the Christian re- ligion as the root-force of Western civilization. His own land, he said, had been brought to inertia and ruin by Mohammedanism, and was symbolized to-day by the ruins of ancient Persian palaces, now lost in the sands of centuries, with only a jutting cor- ner or dome to tell of past Persian grandeur. But the Christian West, with all its blemishes, was a vital, progressing force, having within it a principle of life which was bound to go on evoluting to the end of time. He gave us an account of his conversion to Chris- tianity, the first thrilling germ of which was planted in his bosom by an actress — a Jewess, none other than the great Rachel — at the Comedie Francaise, in Paris, in Corneille's tragedy, "Polyeucte." He said that her voice, her look, her whole appearance, when, in the character of the pagan maiden, beholding her Christian lover's martyrdom, she uttered the words, "Je vois; je crois!" sent an electric shock of divine revelation throughout the audience, which for the moment understood that martyrdom in the early centuries was not "mere hysteria," as our age has sometimes pronounced it. Malkom Khan, a believer in the value of Free- 107 PLEASURES AND PALACES masonry for Turkey, was one of the first enthusiasts, if not founders of the Young Turk party, whose success, as he saw it, would bear a relationship to matters which interested him in Persia. I little thought then that Turk, young or old, would ever have any special meaning for me ; or that Macedonia could have for me any interest greater than that there were roads in it traveled by St. Paul. How could I guess then that the hopes and fears, the loves and hates, the battles for freedom, the songs, the tears, the prayers, the heroism, of one of its ancient races would one day be dear to me? Prince Malkom told us how he studied and pon- dered long to hit upon some means of bringing Chris- tian principles to Persians in forms which they would understand, making Christianity the fulfilment of old Mithraic and Zoroastrian conceptions. Hav- ing formed a plan he returned to Persia, and began to talk to his countrymen, and put before them the ideas which he believed would raise up the fallen nation. The people everywhere listened to him eagerly, followed him about in throngs, until finally some of them, still in the gyves of old ways of think- ing, began to proclaim him a prophet, and almost would have worshipped his person. He took every means in his power to combat that tendency, in which he saw the speedy and complete wreckage of his dearest hopes. One day the shah sent for him and said: "My cousin, you are much followed about here. You are exerting yourself too much; you need rest. 108 CONTINENTAL SCENES Would you like to go as my ambassador to Europe — and stay there many years?" Then Prince Malkom added: "I knew what he meant, so with my heart falling like a stone, I answered, 'Yes, your Majesty; I ac- cept.' On that day I started on my journey west- ward. And all these years I have been virtually a European." "But what did the shah really mean?" I asked. Prince Malkom grinned, showing his white teeth, and with a queer gurgle made the sign of a knife drawn across his throat. So the whole group of these Kissingen friends were doors to me, opening up different vistas of for- eign life. The young Baroness Justine Lochner, daughter of the Castle of Kissingen, embodied a German phase of life new to me, and we were all interested in her love-story, a typical German story. Her ancestors belonging to the "Ur-adel" 1 had al- ways lived in that castle, which had been "thor- oughly renovated in the fourteenth century," her mother told us in showing us over the place and tell- i The Ur-adel are those families in Germany whose nobility is so ancient that it was never created by letters-patent, which they there- fore do not possess. The prestige of this proud old Ur-adel never derived from imposing riches or possessions. Some of them within their ancient castle-walls have been even poor from century to cen- tury, but their pride has always lain in sternly maintained traditions of courage and honor and a high family ideal of service to the state and to the church. When the King of Prussia in 1852 sent Bismarck, who also belongs to the Ur-adel, on a special mission to Vienna, he wrote to the Em- peror Francis Joseph: "I send Herren von Bismarck-Schbnhausen, 109 PLEASURES AND PALACES ing us its history. A thousand years ago the castle had been the center of a small Slavonic settlement. As we followed the Baroness Lochner along the corridors and through the rooms, we noticed that the walls were so thick that, in the young baroness's room, for instance, a few steps led from the floor up to the window-sill, upon which stood her writing desk, work-table, and chairs, making of it a sunshiny little room by itself. As we were passing along one of the corridors, a place in the wall was shown that in olden days, when pressed, would cause a part of the masonry to give way, revolving like a turnstile, catching and shutting within its grip any unwary person who might be close against the wall, and whom the slightest push would send over its brink into a deep pit below the foundations of the castle, never to be seen or heard of again. It was an oubliette. The baroness also showed us interesting old hang- whose ancestors held place in the Mark [Brandenburg] before we Hohenzollern came there." It is this Ur-adel which has given to the modern German Empire its staunchest fiber, its finest mettle. It would be interesting to fix the place in the building of modern empires of some of the ancient orders whose members were trained through generations to a stern code of courage and honor. Would Japan, for instance, ever have been, without the old order of the Samurai, despising mere riches, staunch in loyalty even to death? Would free America ever have existed without the austere courage and faith of the Pilgrim fathers and mothers, whose narrow severity bequeathed to us a broad freedom, or without the proud and heroic sons and daughters of Europe's noblest aristocracy who founded Vir- ginia and the other Southern States, and whose legacy makes Amer- icans heirs of all the best that was ever fought for and won in the old world? 110 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR CONTINENTAL SCENES ings, embroidered — and woven, too, I think — by fingers of ancestral ladies, who bent over them in days long ago. She showed us some beautiful tapestries upon which she herself worked in her spare moments. They would probably be finished in the next generation. They had been begun by her mother or grand-mother, or still further back. The rugged stone walls of the banquet-hall were panoplied with arms and armor illustrating every age from the cross-bow down. And all these pieces of steel, wrought for conquest or defense, had been worn by the men of the family, or were trophies cap- tured by them in fight. These men had sat at this long table ; had held their drinking-cups at the mouth of the sculptured beast's head protruding through the wall, which, during those bouts, continually gushed wine or meed from barrels inserted in the wall of the adjoining serving-room. These walls had reverberated for generations with ' their war- songs, their bridal songs, and their laughter; per- haps, too, sometimes with sudden cries of alarm or rage or terror. Senator Stanford of California was just finishing his cure at Kissingen when we arrived, and was on the eve of departure. He spoke much of his son, his only child. He and Mrs. Stanford simply idol- ized the young fellow, whose ideas, ambitions, and future appeared to make up the sum of their whole interest in life. He was telling us that he and his wife were going with young Stanford to Rome. He had hardly uttered the words when Mrs. Horne- 113 PLEASURES AND PALACES Payne, my Irish friend, with a sudden and almost passionate impulse that we afterward recalled, be- gan to implore him not to do so on account of the danger from Roman fever in that time of the year. So insistent was she, that finally he said he would try to alter their plans and delay their trip to Rome. But within an incredibly short time after his de- parture from Kissingen we read in the newspapers that the adored son was down with Roman fever, then that he was dead. The blow virtually wrecked the reason of both the father and mother for several weeks. Afterward they dragged themselves back again along the way of life, finding their only solace in the founding of a glorious memorial to the dead boy, Leland Stanford Junior University. "So that," as Senator Stanford said, "in spite of the fate which cut him down in early youth, he should still have a life-work on the earth that would live on and on im- mortally in other boys." Prince and Princess Bismarck came every year to Kissingen, where they had a house. Countess Vitz- thun knew Princess Bismarck, and took me with her when she called to see the princess, who never fre- quented the public gardens or made acquaintances with visitors to the place. Prince Bismarck had talked much with Senator Stanford at Kissingen, and later gave him counsel and such help as he could toward founding the university. Princess Bismarck said that her husband had much enjoyed talking with Senator Stanford, of whom he remarked "that his ideas refresh like a well-spring, because he has 114 CONTINENTAL SCENES not learned them out of books, but has found them out for himself. They are based on his personal ex- perience and judgment." Another interesting trait in Bismarck of which his wife spoke was the pleas- ure he took in reading Browning's poems, which gen- erally went into his dressing-case when he traveled. The first time I saw Bismarck, I found him one morning in the path ahead of me on the way up to the saline baths. The presence of genius has irresistible power to thrill the imagination, as mine was stirred at the sight of that formidable, rather forbidding fig- ure, realizing, as I said to myself, that "just there ahead of me within that big skull is the smithy of an empire." Bismarck was followed at heel by his two huge dogs. No one else was in sight, and all the way up the river I, too, followed the three massive creatures as they silently strode along at uniform pace, neither man nor dog taking any notice of the outer world. Bismarck left Kissingen shortly after our arrival, so that I had no conversation with him. That op- portunity, even had he remained longer, would prob- ably not have been mine, as his aversion to talking with women at all was well known, and he would not have been likely to spend any words on a mere girl. But if he was indifferent or even rude, as was said of him, to women in general, there was one, as all the world knew, for whom through all his married years his deep love never waned — that big-eyed, loyal, in- tensely devoted wife, whose very soul sat in his every wish or want or comfort, his "darling little Puss," 115 PLEASURES AND PALACES as he called her. His plans and aims were known to her. She had a plumb-line for his every friend and his every foe, never spared herself, kept vigil with him and for him; threw bulwarks about his peace, asked nothing, would accept nothing from existence for herself apart from him. Also she gave nothing to it except through him. She literally lost her life, day by day, that she might find it in him alone. To her, in utter confidence, to his mother, and to his sister he was an open book, but to all other women the volume was sealed. Because of that never-fail- ing perception and appreciation of the all-sacrificing home-hearts, all other women forgave him his harsh barring out of themselves, and all women honored him as the noblest example of domestic virtue. One of the friends whose talk and reminiscences gave me glimpses of an enchanting, though passing, world, as he stood on its threshold, not to enter, but to leave it, a receding past already far away, was the Polish Baron Tanski, author of "Cinquante annees d'exile." An old, old man, he had lived his long span of years in the grand world and had known all of the remarkable people of his century. 1830 seemed as yesterday to him. He was elegant in manners, of the old school of breeding, and had well sifted out what was worth while in this life to a per- fect gentleman. He was one of the few persons I have met in whom worldliness was a grace, even a virtue, and an attainment of culture and kind philosophy. Baron Tanski had almost a young delight in the 116 QUEEN ALEXANDRA CONTINENTAL SCENES society of the young, to whom he was paternal and sweetly tolerant. He was full of the wisdom of the art of living. One day he said to a rather youthful mother whose lovely daughter was to be presented at court during the next season: "Madam, let an old observer of society impress upon you the meaning and value of a young girl's dress — of appropriate dress. If you overdress her, you make her self-conscious and vain, besides expos- ing her to ridicule. If you dress her too soberly or severely, you dampen her spirits and lessen her mag- netism. She will be unhappy, therefore, ill at ease. But if you dress her exactly as the occasion requires, and always, in all hours, with charm, and to look her best, she will never think of her clothes at all, will blossom naturally like a beautiful flower, and will have perfect composure in every circumstance." This charming man, so light of touch, was a sol- dier, too, with sternness in him. As an officer in the Polish army he had fought against Russia in 1830-31 ; during his long exile he had battled with the pen for his beloved land, where he returned for a brief time to fight in the Polish insurrection against Russia in 1863 ; had fought at the side of Don Carlos in Spain, and afterward summed up that experience and his observations in a book on the Carlist army. He was a typical and brilliant Pole of a period of brave national struggle for freedom. How the old baron in his vivid and witty talk made the life and times he remembered live before us! He told us of court-life under the French Em- 119 PLEASURES AND PALACES pire, and of another "court," as he called it, that of Lady Holland in Florence. He even remembered well and admired the "gorgeous Lady Blessington" and Comte d'Orsay. When subsequently, some time after my return to London, I was shown through Holland House and inspected its wonderful collection of china and other art treasures, — among them Addison's writing-desk, running my fingers over its surface where his quill had scratched upon paper thousands of those pithy, pungent words of the "Spectator," when I saw there the molded model of Lady Holland's perfectly formed hand, and, strangest of all, the round-rimmed hole in the wainscoted wall through which peeps one of that fa- mous lady's beautiful eyes, so painted that it startles the sudden beholder by its realism, — it was the re- membrances of Baron Tanski's description that peo- pled that historical house and its spacious park with the whole social life of London, when Queen Vic- toria was young and happy. When the time came to bid adieu to Kissingen and all its charming experiences, the platform of the lit- tle railway station was crowded with friends to see us off. Our compartment was literally filled with flowers, the pretty custom being then to say good-by with a bouquet to cheer the traveler on the journey. As the train rolled out, the old baron stood there among the younger friends waving his adieus. Just then I noticed a slender fold of note-paper sticking out among the flowers he had brought me. As a 120 CONTINENTAL SCENES last gesture of his kind and old-time grace were the words he had written: Charmante £leanore, Ton ami triste et vieux, Te demande une grace encore ; Daignes, sous tes beaux yeux, Mouvoir ces jolies roses, Que de ses larmes il arrose ! At Le Treport I was invited by M. and Mme. Jules Verne on board their yacht- — the one that went "Round the World in Eighty Days," or at least, if it did not, carried the readers of that discoverer of science-romance on that famous trip, which was con- sidered the product of a giddy imagination when it was written. Jules Verne was a white-haired, silent man, who just sat and watched and dreamed, as if apart from it all, while Mme. Verne talked in a high, small voice faster even, I think, than the pace of her husband's imagination, seeming never to need to take breath. Many French seaside places appear at first glance to be specialized phases of fashion's mart, conveying the impression of a perpetual parade of Paris dresses, worn with self -consciousness and open rivalries. We had friends owning a villa at Trouville, and visiting them revealed the fact that, apart from the fashion- able beach life, there are many nooks of delightful seaside existence sheltered among gardens and trees, but that their owners did not belong to the Tron- ic PLEASURES AND PALACES ville casino crowd, which, no doubt, amused itself in its own way. That way appeared to me artificial and inhuman. I could not bring myself quite to be- lieve that the people — the casino people — were really happy. Only the children seemed normal and nat- ural, yet even some of these, dressed in the latest fashion, like cunning little apes of their elders, fully aware in the same way of being chic and coquet, strutted or wiggled with a little air of impertinent vanity along the fashionable walks, looking out for compliments and rivals. Nowhere else in France did I ever see that breed of infants, for, as a rule, no child in the world is sweeter than the French little one. A sister of mine, Mrs. W. H. Anderson of Los Angeles, and I spent a few weeks at Beaulieu, be- tween Nice and Monte Carlo. From our hotel win- dows, looking south, we used to see the light of sun- rise striking across the Mediterranean in colors of rose and gold on the distant rocky island of Corsica, birthplace of Napoleon, which lay in the blue waters like a palace in a dream. As all scenes on earth possess their greatest power to thrill through their connection with some human being or event, so Cor- sica was resplendent with Napoleon as well as with the morning glow. The whole coast-line from Cannes to Mentone is dreamy, sweet-scented with orange- and lemon- groves and other aromatic trees and flowers, spark- ling with the golden sun and the azure sea, which turns to deep lazuli to match the sky as the hours m CONTINENTAL SCENES deepen. The cooler air calls for warm wraps if you intend to stray along the sea's edge to enjoy the sun- set and the stars or the streaming moonshine. The place is like the borders of some land of beauty, where perhaps even on this earth pure happiness might dwell unstained of any tear. The outer beauty drugs the power to realize that up behind the fairest palm-bordered esplanade of all is the Monte Carlo, gambling-den of the world. In such an hour I heard some one day, "Another man shot himself in the gardens this afternoon; that 's the third since we 've been here." "Poor fellow! he was young, too," a girl said, and an elderly elegant-looking man shrugged and an- swered her in pinched and precise pronunciation: "What will you? He, no doubt, had a just sense of proportion!" The words sent a chill through my heart colder than the shiver in the air. One day shortly before we left for London, some friends — an Englishwoman and her husband — took us with them into the gaming-rooms of Monte Carlo. Before entering we decided that we would play a single piece of money on each table, "just for fun, to see what happens." So we each shut in our palms a silver piece and a gold piece for the trente- et-quarante and roulette. 'In the first room where silver was played there was a crowd standing about and a buzz of talk. We were so interested in all we saw that we forgot to lay our silver on the table. When we passed into the big room beyond, where only pieces of gold were played, the place seemed 123 PLEASURES AND PALACES almost empty, and we entered at once an atmosphere of anxious stillness surcharged with suspense. The players sat jammed close about the edge of the table, their eye strained toward the green baize. The strange quiet between the jingles of gold coin was broken only by the sharp, cutting tones of the croupier, calling out at regular intervals, like the swing of a fateful bell, "Messieurs, faites-votre jeu!" "Rien ne va plus!" Never had I seen, nor have I ever since seen any- where else, persons like the major part of those who sat pressed together arm tight against arm about that table. There were women there especially whose very souls appalled me, haggish, wrinkled, past all ordinary relationship with life. They seemed like burnt-out craters, as if even despair were a thing of the past with them. Their look was dull, with a curious uniformity of mask, the eyes only glittering, or contracting shrewdly, according as the croupier's rake clawed the gold away from them or shoved it to- ward them. One thing which puzzled me was that when they won their faces did not light up with pleasure. The dull strain on it seemed scarcely to relax; they became somewhat stiller, more expres- sive of suspense, if possible, than before. Day by day we had heard much talk in the trains, along the streets, in the hotels or shops, everywhere, of sys- tems for winning or for breaking the bank. All about were men and women who, wherever they were, incessantly figured in little note-books, work- ing out a system. 184 CONTINENTAL SCENES At this table, as we stood behind the chairs of the gamblers watching them and the play, we noticed a thin-haired, wild-looking man at the very corner of the table figuring desperately in a tiny note-book, so intent upon his "system" that he was forgetful of the game itself. Unaware of everything about him, he held his note-book against the edge of the table the better to write. Now and then a louis d'or fell on the page. Enraged at the interruption of his pencil, he would flirt the gold piece off, sometimes with such spite that it flew far out on the table and rolled about. As we watched him, and he kept on figuring in his book oblivious of everything else, the persons near him began to look at him in astonish- ment. We wondered why, until suddenly the croupier, in angry impatience, shoved his rake out toward a big pile of golden louis heaped just before the man, and said sharply, "A qui est-ce cette masse la!" Startled, the man raised his head with a dazed look, then suddenly realized as his neighbors had done for some moments, that the small yellow moun- tain belonged to him. He had unwittingly, in flirt- ing off the offending coins from his page, put money on winning numbers until his heap grew and grew beyond his wildest hopes, no doubt; for there was an instant of breathless interest in him, as with a curious low cry he grabbed at the gold, filled all his pockets, and rushed away from the table and out of the door like a madman. Some one remarked, "Let 's hope he won't go out and kill himself for joy." It seems that such cases were not unknown. 125 PLEASURES AND PALACES One day a placard in French and English appeared, tacked to a palm-iree in the gardens, saying, "Gen- tlemen, if you intend to blow your brains out, please don't do it here." When we were out of the building again, our English friend said, "Children, you did not try your luck, after all." There, sure enough, clasped tight in our hands, were our coins. In the intensity of watching the gamblers we had never thought of join- ing them. No kind of coaching-trip could exceed in delight- fulness one I made with a most intellectual and charming woman, the Marchesa de Viti di Marco of Rome. The starting-point was Geneva, and the route day by day followed the Rhone to its head- waters, on to the Engadine, where we spent a month. We were driven by a famous "Carlist bandit," as he called himself, who had been engaged long in ad- vance to meet us with his coach and fine horses. This dashing ex-leader of guerrillas in the Carlist wars in Spain, bedecked his splendid team in gay woolen tassels, drove them five at a time, with relays, and had a firm, though airy, hand that inspired con- fidence, certainly, but without entirely banishing the sensation, as we lunged at a good pace on the down grades and swept around roads overhanging dizzy steeps, that coaching among the Alps, at least with a Carlist from the Pyrenees, still possesses something of a sporting character. By the third day, I think it was, we had tracked 126 PRINCE BISMARCK CONTINENTAL SCENES the Rhone to its very source at the Furka Pass. Standing there by the vast, icy sea on the mountain- side, we saw the little trickles from the Rhone glacier that are the infant beginnings of that splendid river. There, too, high at the margin of the melting snow, I found some gentians, such as never grow in lower altitudes. The vivid, deep blue of these marvelously beautiful blossoms was so intense and pure in tone, so vibrant and singing, that it suggested the equator rather than the edge of everlasting snows. Later I sought in Paris and London for any like color in flow- ers or silks or ribbons, but in vain. I much desired to have silk mull or chiffon of the color for a dress. Finally some Scottish dyers said they would under- take to reproduce it for me in a dye, if I could give them a bit of the exact tone of color. The painter, John S. Sargent, said he might make a stroke of it for me with his brush, but could obtain it only with the purest ground, Russian lapis lazuli. One day he sent me a most beautiful gentian — which I have care- fully kept — "one of the only three in England," he said. He had asked for it, to give it to me, from the garden in Warwickshire of a painter friend, Frank Millet, who had great pride in it. The shape and size differed somewhat from the Swiss gentian, but the glorious color was there in part of its shading, and was the model for the dyers, who were at last able to turn a tissue of filmy white silk to that gor- geous heavenly blue. 129 CHAPTER IV PHASES OF LONDON LIFE FROM the first moment of my arrival in Eng- land I found in London life the keen zest in all its experiences that is the effect of existence in a great metropolis where many general interests come into focus. To be able to study with the finest means at hand; to go to balls, sometimes three in the same night, for I loved to dance, and it was much the fashion for London hostesses to give charming little balls, for their young folks, where there were only about a hundred guests ; to go about chaperoned by some kind woman friend to all the different par- ties, "at homes," concerts, flower-shows, polo- matches, receptions, private views of pictures at the Royal Academy or those at the Grafton or the Gros- venor Gallery; to attend dinner-parties, where I was often the only unmarried lady present, and where it seemed natural to find the most famous persons of the day next me at table — all such experiences made my girlhood existence in London a most pleasurable kaleidoscopic study. Certain aspects of that life were of far deeper interest and revealed the true meaning and power of social intercourse in the po- lite world, when all the more frivolous and shallow characteristics of what is called "society," — the in- terchange of hospitable compliment, the elegancies 130 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE of entertainment, the good table, music, dress, — are made mere adjuncts of the aims to be attained. They are the setting and paraphernalia of the real matter. It has been said that" at the present moment the salon does not exist, and that the explanation is found in the rush of the present time, and in the place which newspapers are more and more taking, not only as purveyors .of news, but as arenas where questions are fought out, and their interests promul- gated or combated. It is certain that there were several great salons in London a few years ago, which were not only political, but had in a general way much the character of those of the Hotel Ram- bouillet, which gave sun and rain to the French men of literary genius in the seventeenth century, and the drawing-rooms of several famous French and English women of the great world since that time. If there is no salon in London to-day, it is not yet perceptible that men, intensely bound up in the ac- complishment of an aim, political or other, find them- selves too rushed to welcome working partizans in the ranks of the powerful social world, or that they show themselves too much in a hurry to listen to in- telligent appreciation of their endeavors, expressed in terms of a "desire to be useful." For the salon is a place where building goes forward, favored by the means peculiar to the more directly personal and graceful influences of social relationships and inter- course. Upon that province the publicly printed word could never in any way impinge. Judging by 131 PLEASURES AND PALACES the results of my own observations, I should say that the salon is to-day, as always it was, an affair of the personality of the mistress of the house. Mere wealth of material equipment and prodigal outlay in sumptuous entertainments will not create for a host- ess that influence, or inspire in men or women that confidence which will draw them to make her in some way their umpire and friend. They must know that she has qualities of heart, as well as of mind, upon which they can rely in all circumstances. She must possess keenly discriminating powers of apprecia- tion, a distinct ideal, a philosophical aim, and, with all, kindness — true, clear-seeing kindness. I have my doubts as to the disappearance of the spirit of the salon. I have in mind houses on the walls of which hang some of the most famous pic- tures of the old masters, as well as of the new, where the atmosphere is one of sober elegance or dignified grandeur, where the hospitality is still rich and full- flavored, like precious old wine, and where the inter- ests that bring together the friends of those houses are mainly intellectual, and have direct bearing on questions which form the life of the nation. But these are not families who keep a press-agent; in- deed, reticence concerning any important thing said within their doors is taken for granted, and to depart therefrom would be a breach of breeding that would cause astonishment. This type of family has not yet forgotten that the desire, as well as the power, to be helpful is the first attribute of the grand seig- neur or of the grande dame. In measure as that 132 QUEEN VICTORIA PHASES OF LONDON LIFE attribute disappears, it drags down its order with it, whether that order be a creation by royal charter or the simple and definite attainment of culture and ideal. For do we not all know that in degree as man ceases to be brother, he becomes prey? If some onlookers at general London life see the disappearance of the salon, their attention is ab- sorbed, no doubt, by those phases of society caused by the inrush of mere rampant riches and the stand- ards imposed for the time, shown in arrogant rival- ries of dress, jewels, food and all means of material amusement. Cruel, hard, not even pretending to kindness, this part of the social realm, common to all great centers of wealth, is itself creating the very devils that will tear it down. Glorying in heaped- up luxury, it flings into the public mind images of inordinate self-indulgence and orgy which corrupt the ideals of the legitimate uses of fortune and en- rage the vast semi-starving masses who are bound down by the police to self-control and the expected exercise of all the virtues. One of the most striking characteristics of Eng- lish political lif e is the place of woman in it. When a husband or brother was standing for Parliament, it was to me both surprising and amusing to see deli- cate, sensitive, and shy ladies enter actively, and often powerfully, into the campaign, speaking from the platform as well as canvassing from house to house in behalf of their men-folks. And all this they did without faltering or without the least self- consciousness, and as naturally as if they were 135 PLEASURES AND PALACES merely taking tea at the rectory, attending the Ascot races, or driving down to Hurlingham for polo. Who is not familiar with the pony-cart that Lady Dorothy N evill's daughter, Meresia, arch-conserva- tive herself, drove about, seated between big white canvas screens that were inscribed with "Vote for " and other electioneering devices? A typical case is that of the Hon. Mrs. Lyttleton, who, when her husband was taken down with typhoid fever at the beginning of the parliamentary elections at which he was a candidate, stepped instantly into that husband's shoes, kept his engagements, fought the campaign through on his behalf, and at the end pre- sented her convalescent lord with his seat in the House, triumphantly won by her sole efforts during his illness. These women belong to the upper classes, and noblesse oblige has always been for them as well as for their men-folks. John Stuart Mill, in his essay "The Subjection of Women," remarks in effect that royal women and those of the nobility and the other higher orders possess, in proportion to the altitude of their social rank, and have always possessed, political rights and voice in public affairs, the right to rule, the duty to guard, and, when necessary, to govern the family territorial estate. One of the most serious aspects of a mesalliance in the mind of an ancient family of exalted rank is the supposed non-capacity of the woman not to the manner born or to the purpose reared to discharge such lofty duties. Those aware of conditions in Europe will not 136 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE gainsay that the singular success of certain Ameri- can women who have married men of high rank has been owing to the fact that they were either the daughters of families maintaining an exacting ideal of family duty, or else they were girls of individual genius enough to perceive and adapt themselves to a service of inexorable duties of a public or semi- public nature which are the correlatives of the high privileges of women of rank in the old world. The failures have been marked by the lack of that genius, or by the presence of a lesser ideal, one which un- fortunately has, in cases which occur easily to the mind, pictured palace life and the possession of exalted title as being chiefly the occasion of "putting on side" socially, excelling only in gorgeous apparel and entertainments. No one acquainted with their authors could read the recent memoirs of Lady St. Helier, famous as Lady Jeune, holder of the most renowned general political salon of her times, and the autobiography of Lady Dorothy Nevill, not less famous as the friend of Disraeli and the second Duke of Welling- ton, and the center of a strictly conservative political group, without realizing the reserve that those who know most about matters feel bound to impose upon their contemporaneous utterances in print. In both books there are veils and veils of silence over certain moments and epochs which these ladies had a hand in and concerning which they could speak words of vivid interest. Lady St. Helier was the confidante and some- 137 PLEASURES AND PALACES times the counselor of many leading political men who in hours of national importance or grave crisis often communicated with her by special messenger. Such a letter arrived once when I was with her. After reading and rereading it, she threw it into the fire, and told me she had made it her rule to burn im- mediately every letter that might bear any clue to the plans and actions of her political friends. She was a conservative in politics^ — a Liberal Unionist, I be- lieve, — but she possessed that fine fiber and breeding which would have made it impossible for her, even under goading circumstances, to betray a confidence reposed in her by men of a party opposed to her own; and she did receive such confidences. On the paneling of the great white drawing-room, high over the fireplace, hangs a portrait of Lady Jeune, the only picture on the wall. It shows her in her prime, with close black hair, a small, well- shaped head, with round white forehead and expres- sive black eyes. Her simple, dark gown, Spanish- like, with a touch of flowers, is reserved and con- ventional, even severe in its simplicity, heightening the Spanish impression. When I made that remark to her once, she told me that she had a Spanish strain of descent — Spanish Jewish, I think. Hence the dash of exotic genius in her, which was also seen in her handsome sister, Julia, Marchioness of Tweed- dale. Lady Jeune always dressed quietly and con- ventionally in black or dark colors, not seeming to take note of clothes. However, other women always dressed in their 138 DELICATE, SENSITIVE, 'AND SHY LADIES ENTER ACTIVELY, AND OFTEN POWERFULLY, INTO THE CAMPAIGN PHASES OF LONDON LIFE best when they went to her house, where they were sure to find the most renowned and interesting peo- ple in London, whether British or foreign. And those people always talked at Lady Jeune's; for hers was one of the few houses where those present appeared to be most distinctly themselves, and their talk was of what interested them most vitally. Besides the large evening parties and the dinners during the week, men of note and a few women — generally by special invitation — came to Lady Jeune's on Sunday afternoon; and the luncheon- hour of almost any day called about her table impor- tant cabinet ministers and other members of both Houses of Parliament, and the women of their par- ties. Every man or woman of note came to Lady Jeune's to discuss the questions of the time, expres- sing there some of their finest thought and feeling. Such conversation is more than mere momentary enjoyment: it is constructive of thought and works. There was not much aggressive advancing of the speakers' personality, rather a diffidence of manner conveying a sense of personal aloofness or detach- ment. But these men's words go where they are sent, as if they had battle-ships back of them, and that is one of the Englishman's distinctive traits : he has battle-ships back of his opinions. It was an education in life to hear the talk in the houses of Lady Jeune, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lady Wantage, Lady Borthwick, — the last named a house where Lord Byron had lived, and where the white paneled walls and the candelabra, lighted with 141 PLEASURES AND PALACES wax-candles, made all the women look beautiful,^ — the house of Mrs. Tennant of Whitehall, a Liberal, and devoted to Gladstone, who often came there, and the other houses, the special haunts of the famous and mysterious circle of friends known as the "Souls," an expression irritating to some people, like that old sportsman Lord H who, when the lady next to him at table asked, "Just what is a soul, anyway?" answered gruffly: "I don't know; but I am sure it must be something quite nahsty." The Souls, I believe, were an intellectual group, tacitly vowed to the upholding of a certain altitude of ideal in art and in life. All of them were men and women of distinction, among them Mr. Arthur Balfour, Miss Margot Tennant (Mrs. Asquith), and kindred spirits. To be at Lady Jeune's when political events of importance in foreign lands were occurring and hear the discussion of what went on concerning those for- eign matters in Parliament, was to have before the mind a vast drama of the nations from the British point of view. The Indies, China, Afghanistan, the Egyptian deserts, Africa, and Greece, gave the flaming scenery to a tremendous human epic. Not less true is it that the life stream of the world which whirls around Britain and centers in London was most sentient in the houses of these brilliant women, where assembled not alone those interested in politics. There art, archaeology, science, and lit- erature had voice and showed how they, too, built for PHASES OF LONDON LIFE Britain; for mingled with the powerful impulse of conquest and empire, and the steady attempt to set up and establish Anglo-Saxon ideals in conquered lands, as the sprouting staves of political mastery, was the constant tendency toward the enrichment in England of cultural influences. These flowed back to the islands from distant shores, almost side by side with trophies of war. They came from the sands in the shadow of the pyramids and the great sphinx and the temples of Karnak and the mysteries of Indian shrines, amazing and confusing myriads of human forms like jumbled centuries on sculptured walls and pillars; broken gods and winged bulls from the gates of kings in Babylon and Nineveh, which "discovered Layard," as a club banter of comradely envy expressed the sudden fame which that archaeologist acquired by his great find. Heaped like loot under the staircase of a famous country house, I once saw the exquisite porcelains of China. It was at Fonthill, where the astonishing author of "Vathek" built his Tower Abbey in three days and nights — employing three thousand labor- ers to work by torchlight, as they tell visitors. Field-Marshal Lord Wolseley was standing by me near the staircase at the moment. He spoke of the burning of the Summer Palace, ordered by the Brit- ish, as the most heart-wringing and terrifying means of disciplining the Chinese nation. He said, as he looked with admiration at the beautiful porcelains, "I tried to prevent the carrying off of these things, but control was impossible." The hostess of that PLEASURES AND PALACES house, who, among many other objects, had ac- quired from the loot the ancient imperial table- service, told us that the Chinese Empress had writ- ten to her, saying how dearly above all her lost treasures she had prized those old yellow porcelains, and had begged their present owner to send her back to China one piece of each that she might have them copied, promising to return the originals afterward. My friend sent the pieces of porcelain to the em- press, and, after waiting a due time, received them back in England again — "foi d'imperatrice." Ear more precious than any trophy of China, India, or Egypt are those treasures guarded by the stupendous columns of the British Museum, against whose smoky blackness clouds of white pigeons dive and flutter, like doves from Cydnus. And the place is Cydnus come to London, since it is the home of Aphrodite. Do any of our travelers, in looking upon the wonders of the Phidian marbles, ever think of how they came down from the Acropo- lis to the secret ship which lay at night with spread sails in the blue waters of the glorious isles? Those waves, which of old rippled over the feet of Aphro- dite, bore Ulysses back to faithful Penelope, and reflected blue shadows into the far-gazing green- gray eyes of Pallas Athene. Those waves waited to bear away the sculptured gods to a place of refuge in another far isle, safe in England, it was thought, from any further shattering by Turks or any other war-makers. The bearer of the marbles was Lord Elgin, and 14* a fed o § 7 o ► s o *d a d o w o H B fed t) d o a H fed W g fed W fed PHASES OF LONDON LIFE in leaving Greece they were no longer called the "Phidian," but the "Elgin" marbles. To England, too, though not through war or diplomacy, or after the manner of "the lifting of the cattle of the Macdonald's," Mausolus, the "Seventh wonder of the world," with his lions and horses came from ancient shores to London to stand in the same classic repository not far from the Great Demeter of Phidias. A continuous pattern of life might be composed of the rarely gifted and renowned men and women whose luster shone forth in the splendid company of Lady Jeune's and other bright palaces of dim, foggy London. Lady Jeune was endowed with that quick understanding of character and ability which called forth the best there was in the persons about her. She had the wit to develop the mental graces and wit of others. But her influence was not given alone to the triumphant world where, if men strive, they may win power and deathless renown. Her large heart reached out to the masses of those who toil with only a humble goal before them at the best, who, giving all, get very little in return. One night at her house Joseph Chamberlain said to me that he believed any man of even moderate endowment could attain any given aim which he set before him with unremitting effort and "enduring to the end." To my question, "Why, then, do so many men fall short of their ambitions?" he answered: "They come to the place where they turn back. They may have killed the dragon at the first bridge 147 PLEASURES AND PALACES and at the second, perhaps even at the third ; but the dragons are always more formidable the further we go. Many turn back disheartened, and very few will meet the monsters to the end. Almost none is willing to have a try with the demon at the last bridge; but if he does, he has won forever." At a later period, during a conversation with Mr. Cham- berlain at Highbury, Birmingham, on matters con- nected with my husband's Macedonian work for the freeing of Old Serbia, he spoke also of his own hopes for his country, and though he did not expect favor- able results from the oncoming elections, "the coun- try," he said, "will by degrees come to understand and we shall have success, though I may not be here to see it." It used to be said in fun of Mr. Chamberlain that his most characteristic "personal features" were his aggressive and determined nose, his monocle, the orchid in his buttonhole, and his lovely American wife, whom I first met at the White House, Wash- ington. She had the warm regard of Queen Vic- toria, was always cheered with her husband by the crowds, and formed, in fact, an endearing part of his own personality. The first of these character- istics may well denote the dauntless spirit of the man whose iron will continued to work its way through English political evolution even after he had stepped back into the shadow, and will continue even now that he has gone. Mr. Chamberlain's conceptions and influence changed the whole character and trend of public thought in certain ways. There was then a 148 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE fashionable affectation of speech that made the term "provincial" one of social reproach and a butt for the wit of persons of supposed superiority. But far more stigmatizing even than that term was another designation, illustrated by the remark of a lady who once said of a young girl who had come with her father from Australia to be presented at court, "She is pretty enough, and her father has a mountain of gold out there, but, my dear, she is not only dread- fully provincial, but positively colonial." Such a speech would not be tolerated to-day. The change began to be perceptible from the time when Mr. Chamberlain succeeded in bringing the ends of the earth together at Queen Victoria's last Jubilee, in which, at his instance, the colonial min- isters and detachments of troops from all the colo- nies and dominions participated. Mr. Chamberlain's actions were always discussed with heat beyond those of any other man except Gladstone. I recall how electric was the atmos- phere at Lady Jeune's, Lady Dorothy Nevill's, and other political houses when he left the Gladstone cabinet, and during the whole exciting period when many of the staunch old Liberals like Lord Hart- ington, afterward the eighth Duke of Devonshire, and the radical Chamberlain "went back and walked no more" with Gladstone, but, driven by Gladstone's home-rule fight into a separate camp, merged with many of the Tories and came to form a new party which was in reality Conservative in the highest sense, though called "Liberal Unionist." 149 PLEASURES AND PALACES Mr. Chamberlain, however, did not appear to be most concerned with interior problems except as they had empire-wide significance. His genius was essentially that of a great foreign minister and he doubtless would have made one of the greatest that England ever possessed, since his chosen work would have been the greatest that England ever had to perform. When Joseph Chamberlain chose to be- come Secretary for the Colonies, we heard nothing but astonishment expressed on all sides. The post was despised by the ambitious, and shared somewhat in the general obloquy of the word "colonial." But Chamberlain's vision compassed far horizons, and an empire was beating in his heart. His con- ception was to take the magnificent material which England had stacked up in every quarter of the globe, and use it to construct a building on safe foundations, solid and abiding. With the second Jubilee, a new conception of a corporate body began to steal into the general mind, and to-day the grow- ing tide toward imperial federation bids fair to make substantial Chamberlain's long dream. And the building has begun with Ireland, that bright emerald porch of the West. On Jubilee day I had a fine seat of vantage at St. Paul's Cathedral, which the procession circled, passing twice before us a few feet away. Before, beside, and behind the sovereign's carriage rode In- dian princes on splendid horses. The necklaces of enormous pearls that they wore and the jewels that studded their gorgeous apparel gleamed and spar- 150 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE kled in the sun. The queen, serene and reverend in aspect, — mother of strange peoples, — was a more impressive symbol of the world-belting empire than a king would have been. During those days at a reception at Mrs. Tennant's I heard Lady Stanley exclaim exultantly the thought that was in many minds, "We'll never go out of Egypt after this!" There was a kind of general murmur of disclaimer, and almost a "S-sh!" went around the room. To- day it is difficult to remember that anybody ever said or imagined that the British would evacuate Egypt. I saw also the day when the dead body of Queen Victoria was borne through London on a gun-car- riage draped with British flags, and just behind it King Edward on his horse, forming a picture of simple grandeur. The morning papers had de- scribed the passing of the royal yacht, bearing the dead queen from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth, between two rows of mighty battle-ships standing prow in and booming slowly their last salute. As I looked on in London at the silent cortege, I could not help saying to the friends with me, "How happy and fortunate such a life and such a death!" One of the most dignified figures of that time was the late Duke of Devonshire. Like his ancestor, the first duke in the seventeenth century, he was typical of the true grand seigneur not only of Britain, but of all lands, the man who identifies himself with na- tional honor and power, and is ready to make any sacrifice even of life itself in the interest of the state. 153 ' PLEASURES AND PALACES Though he refused the highest office, he was still the chieftain consulted in every crisis and before every crisis. High fortune having liberated these men from the necessity of fighting for personal ends, self- considering becomes ignoble, and the man of the "well-bred soul" devotes his capacities fully and freely, as his only fitting occupation, to the interests of his country. These men have always fought for their opinions without fear or favor, and were loyal friends unto death. The most illustrious among our American statesmen have all been such men. A smaller and more strictly Conservative circle was that whose center was the house of Lady Doro- thy Nevill. She was small, merry of speech, and sharp of wit, bright-eyed, loving life, taking it with high relish and gusto down to the end of her long span of years. She loved to talk, to charm, and to be charmed. She enjoyed having her table sur- rounded by the most gifted — I was about to say suc- cessful — literary men and women, and delighted in conversational pyrotechnics, as well as in more seri- ous discussion. On one occasion the lovely Mrs. Craigie sat be- tween Edmund Gosse and Henry James. Mrs. Craigie liked to wear ermine. Her clothes were always beautiful, and touched with bright colors, generally crimson, which became her dark hair. The peculiar brilliancy of her blue eyes, with their long black lashes, and the red that flew to her cheeks through a peculiarly white skin, making her espe- cially bewitching as she talked, no doubt betokened 154 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE the heart malady that cut off her young life in the time of its full blossom and promise. Under Lady Dorothy's aegis, and to a great ex- tent under her roof, important forces were organized for the Conservatives. There was inspired in the mind of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a relative of Lady Dorothy, the formation of the famous "Fourth- Party," which became an astonishing implement in the hands of Lord Randolph Churchill in his daring free-lance onsets. Sir Henry was handsome, bril- liant in conversation, and wise in the knowledge of men and matters. He admired genius and the splendor of the dignity belonging to high positions of public service in the state. British ambassador and privy councilor, he was one of Britain's most distinguished sons, and he was a friend true and loyal to the core. His telegraphic address of "Suc- cour" denoted his peculiar grace of heart and an ideal which he exercised in the interests of his friends to the limits of his ability. Beyond all others, the man for whom he held an almost boyish admiration and affection, in all chivalrous fealty, was the late King Edward. Some years later this brilliant wit and diplomat, whom I had first met at Lady Dorothy Nevill's house, and his wife, a woman of rare charm and ex- quisite sympathy, became dear friends through Sir Henry's interest and help in my husband's political work in the near-East. Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was also the originator of the immensely powerful Primrose League. 155 PLEASURES AND PALACES The Primrose League, offspring of the political houses rather than of the clubs, composed at first of men only, later, through the efforts of Lady Borth- wick, admitting women, and subsequently, forming a subsidiary children's branch, was brought into be- ing as a means of consciously and definitely preserv- ing the noblest cultural and idealistic acquisitions of past British political and social genius and support- ing their modern developments. Apart from its fundamental active characteristics, the league took cognisance of old-fashioned honor and good taste, and the general ethics of gentlehood. At a time when the broadened social stream had be- gun to shift its bed, fertilizing vast new and uncer- tain areas, this league was an influence for holding in place all those conceptions of intercourse under- stood tacitly as what a man or woman of honor and good breeding can, or cannot do. That is, the prin- ciples and spirit of loyalty and good faith and chiv- alry which must actuate their conduct, with or without promises, regardless of how individuals of another mental stratum might regulate themselves by the letter of signed agreements or sworn stipu- lations. The Primrose League, in short, might have been called the "canon of true pride." As the league grew in numbers and influence, it became the natural ally of the Conservative party and recognized its filial relationship to the aristo- cratic elements of English life. It has proved of great political worth to the Conservative and Lib- eral Unionist parties. 156 LADY JEUNE HAD THE WIT TO DEVELOP THE MENTAL GRACES AND WIT OF OTHERS PHASES OF LONDON LIFE One of the workers for the league was Lady Bec- tive, a person of great beauty and distinction not only of mind, but of body. Lady Bective bore me an invitation to head a "habitation" of the Primrose League, and gave me a document to sign. When I read the paper, I laughed. It contained in effect an oath of alle- giance to the British sovereign: a declaration the purport of which was to maintain the dominance of Britain and all things British throughout the world on land and sea. Although I admire what is noble and majestic in England and have many dear and lifelong friends there, and in relation to that realm sympathize with the aims of the Primrose League, needless to say, I never wore the primrose badge or entered the league, named for that simple flower which every year, on Lord Beaconsfield's birthday, crowns his dark bronze statue at the gates of Parlia- ment. Though my heart went out to rebels, still I had strong sympathies with that party which repre- sents the old motto, "Keep what your fathers suf- fered to win." Engaged with lighter interests was Mr. Hamilton Aide, an old-time gentleman of many parts, like a French marquis of the court of Louis XIV, retain- ing his youthful enjoyment up to the end, as the pressed rose between the leaves of a book keeps lin- gering remembrance of its past perfume and gaiety. He delighted in having about him a large circle of distinguished acquaintances and friends for the sheer pleasure of bright company. A painter in 159 PLEASURES AND PALACES water-color, poet, playwright, composer and singer of his own early- Victorian compositions, he was practised enough in all the arts and mental graces to joy in them all and flair their fine aroma. As if by subtle permeation of his own personality, his parties always conveyed to the senses some charm of dilettante existence. When he seated himself at the piano and sang in sweet tremulous strains his own old song, "The Blue Danube," I oft since then have watched the moon And seen the moonbeams quivah, but nevah, oh, nevah, Can I forget that night in June Upon the Danube Eivah, the quaver in his voice and the sentimental, unshed tear, evoked pictures of days of long, long ago. It was almost as if we, too, were remembering their dear vanished romance. At any unexpected turn in this old society, some echo of other days is apt to ring out as clear and near as the merry horn of the four-in-hand drag dashing off gaily for Virginia Water or one of the races. For instance, one evening in London my mother had been taken in to dinner by the Earl of A , a gentleman prominent in his country's service, one well known on the Continent and in America, the bearer of an old Scottish name. When wine was served at dessert, the tumblers were also filled with water. He held up his wine-glass, and there was silence around the table, while all the 160 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE other gentlemen present, copying his gesture, passed their glasses of wine across their tumblers of water, and then drained them without a word. My neigh- bor whispered to me, "That toast was to our king over the water," and in memory of "Bonnie Prince Charlie." The survival here in the midst of our modern time of this Jacobite sentiment is curious; and, as an officer told me, an old order, also still strictly observed in England to-day, forbids water to be on the officers' mess-table when the king's health is being drunk, to avoid any accidental intru- sion of the gay cavalier. In this connection, I might state that a curious trait of Queen Victoria was her Jacobite "sympathy," as it was called. She de- lighted in the romance of the Charleses and the pre- tenders; and it was said, though I could not vouch for it, that one of the "garlands for sweet remem- brance" placed mysteriously before the statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square on a certain anniver- sary came from the queen. Speaking of Queen Victoria, reminds me of a morning during her lifetime when I found Prin- cess Louise at work on the queen's statue which is now in Kensington Gardens. Princess Louise, of course, modeled it after life. But the queen said: "Make it like me when I was young." "But you forget, Mother, that I never saw you in those days — not when I was old enough to re- member." "Still," said the old queen, "I shall be gone in a few years; then no one period of my past personal 161 PLEASURES AND PALACES appearance will represent me any more truly than any other. Why not select for posterity the aspect of me which I liked the best, when I looked my best and was young and happy?" Princess Louise, in telling this, said, half smiling, half sad: "She thought I ought to be able to do that." And the old queen-empress was in a way right, as Napoleon was in desiring his painter to portray rather "the Emperor of the French" than the "ephemeral man Napoleon." For, as an Afghan whom I met at Susan Lady Malmesbury's house said, "The vast myriads of Queen Victoria's subjects in the Orient look upon her as a goddess. You in the West have no notion of the way they think of her in that regard." That Afghan gentleman, Mir Munshi, Sultan Mohammed Khan, Minister of State of the Ameer Abdur Rahman, whose memoirs he published in English, was also an interesting figure about London. He looked very young, was handsome, rather fair of skin, spoke exquisite Eng- lish, had won degrees at British universities, quoted Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, and knew about Ib- sen. He gave us interesting accounts of his sov- ereign's romantic career and forceful methods of modernizing Afghanistan. He told us how Abdur Rahman, on his return from Russia, had brought his army up to date, beginning by "making the soldiers kick off their fifteen yards of pleated petticoat trou- sers and get into modern uniforms"; of how the Ameer reformed religion (Mohammedanism). His 162 05 w H z; H o w GO o a * H «i HI 05 is H >< o M « o o 05 O > Q h H > o H h CO O iz! O o H 10 s* O j w H HH X 05 Eh H aa to O a Q |Z! •d 05 H J J to '•• ■ KING EDWARD VII PHASES OF LONDON LIFE their illustrations of the Greek principles of pose and repose and poise and drapery, and the classical spirit of their conception and execution. Sir Charles, the greatest of British archaeologists, an Oxford scholar of renowned classical achievement and of severe and exacting critical judgment, found all his ideals in that old Greek world whose golden age was the chosen plane of his mental existence. Together with the sense of pure pleasure that comes from the study and intimate companionship of the Phidian marbles, there steals into the soul a divine intolerence of the self-conscious and anarchic in art. Great Demeter from the pediment of the Parthenon, as harmonious and immaculate as the summits of the eternal Alps, yet warm like the bosom of the earth with ages gone by and those yet unborn, sits forever in judgment on all things that men may make and call beautiful. Classicism be- comes cold only with the first frost of decadence, that hour of a nation's decline, when faith and hero- ism die, and its sculptors, poets, and philosophers, not less than its political guardians, grown sickly, endow the gods with their own immoralities, cyni- cism, and ugliness. In the course of my Elizabethan researches and studies in England I chanced upon a thrilling trace of documents relating to Shakespeare. It is thought more than possible by the custodian of those archives that they contain manuscripts in his hand- writing. Their examination would, however, in- volve taking cognizance of some other matters in the 187 PLEASURES AND PALACES same chest which for public reasons, not unimpor- tant, it has not appeared desirable to disturb these three hundred years. I had, too, the pleasure of acquaintance with the early rare editions of Shakespeare in the famous Huth library at Bolney House, a palace built spe- cially to house the priceless treasures in books and manuscripts of the Huth collection, inherited by Al- fred Huth from several generations of bibliophile ancestors, of whom the most ardent was his father, who stipulated in his will that he should "live with the books." The most magnificent fancy-dress ball of the time was given by the Huths, and that night we danced, surrounded by those treasures, my young sister Jessie wearing a brilliant Rumanian costume lent her by the wife of the Rumanian minister to Great Britain, Princess Ghika, a sister of Queen Natalie of Serbia. Years later the Shakespeare folios came to America, through the munificence of Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran, and now repose at Yale University, his alma mater. Shakespeare was not regularly acted anywhere in London, although now and then one of his plays would be given as a "great production." The first time I saw Sir Henry Irving was in his "revival" of Romeo and Juliet. The scenery was gorgeous, and much of the acting was fine; but when we went around on the stage at the end of the play and Sir Henry, benign and courteous to a young and un- important beginner, asked me how I liked his per- formance, I answered energetically: 188 PHASES OF LONDON LIFE "Oh, Mr. Irving, I wish I had seen you in some- thing else !" My friends, startled, tried to jump into the breach to explain my speech away, but Sir Henry put them back, and said: "She is right; the part does n't suit me at all." Then he turned to me, with the eagerness and simplicity of a boy, and talked with me about the production. Several times during coming years he asked me to play at the Lyceum in Shakespearian, or other poetical plays, but, unfortunately, on ac- count of previous engagements or for other reasons, I could never do so. Another part in which I did not care for Irving, was Macbeth. We discussed that thoroughly, too, a few years later, after my re- turn from France. On that occasion, also, with the modesty of the truly great, he admitted he had not projected the part as he would have desired, but that it interested him deeply. As we sat talking, he be- gan to recite speeches and whole scenes of it, I an- 'swering him. When we first began to talk, he did not see Lady Macbeth at all as I did, but later, when I did battle for my view, he said: "No one but Sid- dons could act such a conception of the part. Of course, if you could, you would have a right to your statue," alluding to the statue of Sarah Siddons, the greatest of English tragedians, which stands in Westminster Abbey. Although Sir Henry spoke rather caustically, he was roused from the mood of casual conversation, and as we went from scene to §cene ? the divine fire poured through his speech with *8? PLEASURES AND PALACES even a greater power than I ever saw him manifest on the stage. As I left him, he was very kind and said: "Try for it. It's worth trying for, even if it takes a life-time." Despite the well-known peculiar faults of dic- tion that sometimes gave Sir Henry's utterance on the stage the effect of cumulative grunts, as if inar- ticulate through excess of passion — peculiarities of speech which made him the easy subject of carica- ture, he always conveyed the impression of genius and a high quality of intellect, with perfect dis- tinction of style in whatever role he acted. The time is perhaps not yet — or perhaps it is — for some one to undertake to record in a book the impressions which the acting and the personality of Ellen Terry left in the minds of those who can still remember her as she was on the stage in her prime. Such a book would be valuable not only because of its direct object, but it would be a treasure of lovely joyousness and fine poetic feeling as embodied in one human creature. She was the living Beatrice, un-' dimmed by modernism, and she was Marguerite, and in many another part she formulated to the full a rare, but immortal, type of woman's youth-time. In my constant study of Shakespeare I found continual revealings of the height and depth of life itself, similar to those which flame in upon the mind from all passing experience when one has the cus- tom, which I had always kept, of looking into my Bible for a brief moment or so on awakening. However universal Shakespeare is, his genius is 190 james McNeill whistler PHASES OF LONDON LIFE essentially English, and England is the place in which best to study his plays, though England is, perhaps, the land where they are least studied as an art of the theater. Their representation on the stage calls for a knowledge of poetry and practised skill in speaking it and other requirements of pure technique which the conditions and aims of the thea- ter, as they have been for some time, give no oppor- tunity to command. Most players would like to act these plays, but the equipment they are given no more fits them to do so than it does to work in mar- ble or bronze. When actors and others deplore these conditions, they are told that the public wants what it gets and nothing else. My own observations in several lands lead me to differ from that view. I believe in the public — that is, in the mass — potentially. I think it wants the best of everything, and has power of im- mediate response to the best. But it has no appre- ciation of mere technique, no understanding or mercy for the mere attempt, or for what is less than typical of all humanity. It is truth universal the people demand. That is why they, far more than the mere fashionables, appreciate the classic drama in all lands where it is adequately represented, and why, too, vulgar and common plays of no artistic merit, but based on the lower, but general, human passions, make money for their managers. That type of exploiter, acting on self-evident economic principles, aiming only at quick results in cash, sees no reason for expending time, energy, and money 193 PLEASURES AND PALACES in an appeal to the people's nobler capacities for en- joyment, which, even if it brings him the same finan- cial return, educates their taste, develops their pow- ers of discrimination, and raises their standard of demand in increasing ratio. While to cater for the grosser stomach brings in the same cash, in less time, with less trouble, while it decreases the critical faculty of the public, and tends to bring its standard of exaction to the lowest possible level. Yet, as Lady Macbeth says: "What's done is done," in more senses than one. The joy of life lies in climbing to the new, higher summit just ahead, not in sliding down to the foot of the mountain to begin anew the ascent by the same beaten paths, the good things of which have already been gathered as we first came up. The theater, like other modes of modern expres- sion, is probably working its way through a chaos of new and immeasureable masses of life forces, legacy of the past, as well as guerdon of fresh experience which in due time may seek a standard of perfec- tion of form even sterner than those which hitherto the word "classical" has been used to designate, as the forms into which the genius of an age and a peo- ple has molded its finest attainments of thought and feeling. When that moment approaches, it will be marked by a general movement toward puri- fication of all moral and mental conceptions, and the impulse will be seen even in small things, like man- ners, dress, recreation, courtesy, and taste in ordi- nary speech and intercourse. This will be when m PHASES OF PARIS LIFE democracy comes to realize its true ideal and prerog- atives, and proudly discards the "leveling down" notion. One of the most cherished friends of the Tennants of Whitehall was the greatest of all French actors of comedy, the late Constant Coquelin, the style of whose art was, in its way, as classical as the writing of Moliere, whose most perfect exponent Coquelin was. I had never met him, though he had seen me act in London in the part of Hester Prynne in my own production of a dramatization of Hawthorn's "Scarlet Letter," in which Mr. — now Sir — John- stone Forbes-Rohertson was playing Dimmesdale, both performances winning high praise. That very noble Shakespearian player, portrait-painter, and scholar, was the leading actor at the Haymarket while I was there in the beginning of my stage-ex- perience during the last two years of the brilliant Bancroft regime. Some business caused me to make a quick trip to New York. While I was away Mrs. Tennant sent repeatedly to my mother, who was with me in Lon- don at the time and who remained there during my journey to America, inquiring the date of my return, and asking to be apprised of it at once. On my arrival, I found awaiting me an urgent message from Mrs. Tennant, asking my mother and me to dine with her that same night, hinting at an im- portant matter which she desired to make known by word of mouth. At her house that evening I saw Coquelin for the first time off the stage. In intro- 195 PLEASURES AND PALACES ducing him to me, Mrs. Tennant said: "Sit there on that sofa, and let M. Coquelin tell you what he has to say. Do not answer until you have thought well of what he says; it is for your great good." I began to expect some valuable criticism of my work, but he explained to me that he expected to open a theater of his own in Paris, and asked me if I would be willing to play there in French with him. He thought I could soon make my accent good enough for that purpose. He had a simple and straightforward appreciation of his own value, and said that he was sure my acting with him in Paris in that way would be worth my while from every point of view. Both Mrs. Tennant and her daughter, Lady Stan- ley, urged the suggestion, and I promised to let M. Coquelin know my decision by letter to Paris, as he was returning to France by the next morning train, having finished his London engagement. Coinci- dence counts for much in human affairs, as has often been remarked, for if the ship on which I had come from New York had been delayed for a few hours I should have missed meeting M. Coquelin and should never have undertaken the French work which proved to be so interesting and should never have acquired the personal thorough knowledge of French life and character which is now so valuable to me. It might seem an odd proposition to break off a career so fortunately in the ascendant, as mine was in London, to enter an untried field in a foreign 196 V'£l .'■ ' .-■ . ■ . . "^ SISTER JESSIE IN HER COURT DRESS The day she was presented at the British court to Queen Victoria PHASES OF PARIS LIFE tongue, especially when the work would be submit- ted to comparison in the foremost art-center of Eu- rope with that of players whom the world generally agreed to place at a level of excellence above those of all other nations. If I took the idea under consideration, and finally resolved to go to Paris and embark upon the venture, the deciding factor was the prospect of studying the art of acting, as the French know it. As soon as my friends in London knew of my de- cision to go, everything possible was done to hinder me ; it was represented to me that I was wrecking a brilliant career on the high road to a splendid tri- umph; that all my friends would mourn me as one prematurely taken from them. Many other argu- ments were so ardently put forward that I became aware for the first time that my presence in London was of any particular moment to any important number of persons. I was made to feel that I was leaving a second home, and though I had remem- brance of what happened to the lady of the Bible who turned back, I very nearly gave up the adven- ture, and perhaps might have done so but that a deep personal sorrow which had struck across my life at that time caused me to desire the distraction of a new and more absorbing occupation. Many kind friends sent me letters of recommenda- tion to persons in France. Acting upon friendly advice, I decided to make my home with some French family during my studies in Paris, so as to learn French ways of thought to the core, and speak, 199 PLEASURES AND PALACES write, think, and live French during that period. Many were the letters given me by friends to fam- ilies of distinction, with injunctions to look kindly after me. But chance at the last moment led me blindly, as it were, to persons who were strangers to me, who yet became, throughout all my stay in France, my "famille de France" as they called them- selves, — my mother, my sisters, my old grandmother, — and never was there a more devoted and loyal home circle than this exquisite French family of the old regime became to me. At a house where I was dining on the evening be- fore my departure from London to Paris my hostess asked me casually if I could deliver a message in Paris for her to the Marquise Le Mulier. On my arrival in Paris I went first to the home of the aged Madame Le Prevost, mother of the poet of that name, who was a friend in London of friends of mine. It had been arranged that I should remain a day or so with her in order to present some of my letters of introduction and be able to observe the lay of the land before undertaking to decide upon a per- manent place of abode during my stay in France. The morning after my arrival, old Madame Le Prevost — she was past ninety — asked me, as my fiacre stood at the door, if I would mind waiting a few moments for the arrival of her two "dear little children," who were coming presently to pay her a morning visit, as she would like me to see them ; and further that, "if she dared, she would say that if I would allow them to accompany me in the carriage, 200 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE it would be to them a great pleasure." Of course I consented, imagining they must be her grandchil- dren or great-grandchildren. When they arrived, it proved that the younger of them was much older than my mother. They laughed heartily when I told them of the childish treats I had planned for them. They did, however, accompany me in the carriage. Before starting on my rounds to call on the per- sons — a family of rank and of some literary distinc- tion — with whom certain English friends had hoped I might find a home during my stay in France, I made it my duty to go to 9 rue Logelbac, just overlooking the lovely little pare Monceau, to de- liver the message I had brought to the Marquise Le Mulier. I left the ladies who accompanied me in the carriage, and alone went up the five flights of stairs to the Marquise's apartment. It was rather early in the morning; the outer door leading into the ante-chamber was opened to me by a young girl about fourteen, of exquisite and aristocratic appear- ance, a type of face resembling very exactly the best portraits of Mary Queen of Scots, a collection of whose portraits had just been on exhibition in Lon- don. She had masses of dark, bushy hair, drawn back from a fine, white forehead; fair skin, with straight, black brows and lashes and dark-blue eyes ; and the full, though delicately molded, lips of Mary Stuart. None of the portraits of that unhappy queen quite explain the singular power of the beauty that so enthralled her lovers, and of which poets have 201 PLEASURES AND PALACES sung. On seeing this young girl, whose every fea- ture seemed to be a replica of those of that queen, my first thought was, "She shows what the beauty of Mary Stuart was like." In the absence of the servant — an old soldier, who had served her grand- father, — she showed me into the drawing-room with dignified and gentle simplicity, and went to call her grandmother, the marquise. The furnishing of the drawing-room, or, rather, double drawing-rooms, belonged to an older time, mellow, distinguished, and in some way personal to the family. There were, for instance, three por- traits in oil of the three Louis, Louis the Fourteenth, ' Fifteenth and Sixteenth, none of them very remark- able as art, but with the stamp of their several ages upon them, and interesting as having been the gifts of each of those sovereigns, in turn, to successive an- cestors of the family. The family consisted of the old marquise; her daughter, Madame Germaine, a lady of fifty or so ; two grandsons ; and three grand- daughters, Marie, Olga, and young Germaine, the girl who had opened the door for me. These grand- children were orphaned of both parents, having been brought up by their aunt and grandmother. I should like to paint this exquisite old marquise, who has since then joined the throng of the unseen world, as has, too, the young Germaine, having in her turn as the young chatelaine of an ancient chateau, been mother to a boy and a girl, then lain down in the earth beside the grandmother, a rose and an autumn leaf folded away together. 202 COQUELIN WAS RETURNING TO FRANCE BY THE NEXT MORNING TRAIN PHASES OF PARIS LIFE They showed me a precious miniature of the old marquise by the famous miniaturist Guerin, depict- ing her at the age of three, holding a doll and stand- ing in the gardens of the Palais Royal. It was a good portrait in essence of the marquise as I saw her before me, small, with very large, wide- opened blue eyes, laughing and bright, and a broad forehead. Only the hair, now snow-white, was, in the miniature, a golden cloud as light as silk being softly blown about, and her spirit was essen- tially the same, joy-loving and child-like, yet coura- geous, proud, a woman of race, with loyalty to her traditions inbred. I admired her at once and was charmed by her. It seemed to me she was some- thing to me. I felt as if there were some tender destiny between me and all that exquisite family. As the time came to rise and end my short visit, it seemed suddenly sad for me to go. I spoke my thoughts aloud, and said to myself, murmuring the words, as they afterward told me, "This is the place where I should be happy." Then I turned and asked Mme. Le Mulier if she could not take me into her fold, and gave a full explanation of my purpose in coming to Paris. The suggestion caused a mo- ment of silence. I said, "I seem to know you — you would understand me; I should have perfect confi- dence here." They looked at one another, then excused them- selves, and withdrew for a consultation. Presently they returned and stood around me, and the old mar- quise said, "Dear Mademoiselle, what you have 205 PLEASURES AND PALACES suggested is a very serious matter. It is that you should make part of this family, become for the time a daughter of this house. Your interests are entirely foreign to anything we know about as per- sonal experience. Yet we realize the difficulties of your undertaking here in Paris. You have come here to learn and to explore French genius; that touches us. Your frank confidence also touches us, and you bear one of the most illustrious names of your country; you belong to one of its noblest fami- lies. Your request is sudden and somewhat strange, but we, too, feel that for some purpose the dear God has sent you to us, and that we must not shut you out. Come ; we will be your family of France." Then she pulled my head down and kissed me on the forehead very sweetly, but very gravely. Her daughter, also — "Tante Germaine," as the girls called her — who had been to them both aunt and ten- derest mother, who looked like the Bourbons at their best, intellectual, somewhat martial, altogether fine, kissed me on both cheeks and said: "Come, ma chere, demoiselle — ma chere enfant. We will do our best to make you happy." Both she and the marquise afterward called me "ma file A'Amtrique" — "my daughter from America" — and spoke of themselves as my "family of France" and my "sisters of France." During my entire stay in France those expressions were made good in deeds, and have always proved true since that first day of our accidental meeting. This was not the sole occasion in my life where, 206 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE in following blindly, as it were, some instinctive im- pulse, I was led wisely as if by an invisible, far-see- ing destiny. Indeed, after praying over a matter, I was never afraid of what came to me — if one may speak simply, as if already beyond this life. I was always on the lookout for good things to happen — and they did, very often. Here, as well as any other where, perhaps, I may register an experience which has meant much to me. Whether or not it might have any significance to the mind of another, of course, I cannot say. At a period when the miseries I saw in life perplexed me beyond measure, when for the first time I felt a cold dumbness in mere na- ture, and many questions puzzled and tormented my soul up to the point of losing all faith, I was "com- muning with my heart," as the Psalmist says, one night as I lay awake, somewhat as follows, "Christ said, 'Pray without ceasing,' and he, himself, prayed often, not only in the presence of the disciples, but alone, and 'remained all night in prayer to God.' " I asked, "Why is it necessary to pray — to raise the be- ing toward God, if 'He already knows our need, loves us with a love beyond all understanding and is almighty?' " The answer came to my spirit, as clear and calm as a spoken word, "Because by prayer you enter the plane where things are created." In planning my Paris study of the dramatic art, my main design was to get within French thought and feeling as far as could be possible to one foreign born. Oddly enough, nothing that I saw or heard seemed strange to me ; but, on the contrary, my sym- 207 PLEASURES AND PALACES pathies were at once engaged with the various mani- festations of French thought and character, which appeared to me to be parts wholly natural to them- selves, of an interesting world. Pursuing the old dictum, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," I put myself into the hands of my French family, and asked them to advise me as if our pleasant fiction were actually true and I were their daughter in very fact. In that way I saw life from the French point of view. I deliberately followed the custom of French girls of birth and breeding, who never go about unaccompanied by another mem- ber of the family or by a trusted companion. Dur- ing my entire stay in France I never so much as ap- peared out-of-doors unaccompanied by the marquise or by one or more of those ladies. One of them was also present in the drawing-room during any visits I received. I thought in that way to avoid being ever misunderstood by the French and that I should be freer than if I were alone, which proved to be the case. Never once did I encounter any of those disagree- able and impertinent incidents often told by young American girls and older women in Paris, of being accosted by strangers as they went along the streets, or when they appeared in other public places alone. I never met with anything but the most perfect courtesy while in France. This small detail of decorum concerning being accompanied is mentioned because I was told by French persons that this conforming to French custom in that re- 208 I NEVER APPEARED OUT-OF-DOORS UNACCOMPANIED PHASES OF PARIS LIFE gard was of very real value to me, and caused me to be received not as a foreigner, but as a French girl would have been. I took up several courses in French with univer- sity professors, studied tragedy and comedy with the most distinguished and famous actors of the Theater Francais, rehearsing with Coquelin, Aine and Paul Mounet- Sully, as well as with several others: with M. Laugier, of the Comedie Francaise; and Paul Berton, who had played the leading parts with Sarah Bernhardt, and was the grandson of Samson, the old actor with whom Rachel studied her great classical roles. Berton possessed many letters of Rachel's to his grandfather. I was interested, too, in observing all phases of French art, and noticing the artistic instinct which is a trait of character found in all classes from the laundry-woman and the workman in the blouse, who know something about the artists, poets, painters, and composers of the day, and who sit in the gal- leries of the Francais when the great classical trag- edies or Moliere's comedies are played, up to the art- ists themselves. The artistic appreciation of the working-classes is remarkable. Every artist feels that in them he has friends. We once saw Coquelin playing one of his great roles at the Francois on a fashionable night, — the box-holder's night, — and by chance witnessed his act- ing in the same part at the classical matinee on the following Sunday afternoon. Before the world of fashion he was correct, distinguished, delightful, and 211 PLEASURES AND PALACES immensely applauded. The Sunday matinee is given especially for the sake of those whose work during week-days and nights makes it difficult for them to attend the theater. Before that Sunday au- dience, almost entirely made up of working-men and women, Coquelin was glowing, radiant, the soul of glee — great. He enjoyed his triumph as much as the public did. At our rehearsal on the following day — Monday — I expressed to him my astonishment at the radical difference in his two performances, which was all the more remarkable in view of his continual contention that the actor's portrayal of a character is like a painting in intonations, reasoned, fixed, hardly at all an emotional affair. "You were marvelous on Sunday," I said to him; "a revelation not at all the same man as on Tuesday. Then you were simply distinguished." He laughed and answered: "Que voulez-vous, mademoiselle. On Sunday I had human beings before me; on Tuesday — what can I do 'de ces vieux sabots-la?' ('with those old wooden clogs?')" The marquise smiled, too, at this rather rough sally, not feeling herself or her order in any way touched by his shafts. I often noticed that the French aristocrats, like those, indeed, of other coun- tries I have visited, always took the people's side in any such question of contrast between dominating and humble orders, whether it referred to rights or to the affirmed superiority in sincerity and heart of 212 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE those who earn their bread in the sweat of their brows over the leisured orders whom these serve. I have more than once seen a tear of admiration rise to the eyes of one of them at the spectacle of heroic endurance or other noble trait of character in a work- ing-man or woman. But they hate the bourgeois, the social middle-man; there can be no doubt of that. They think he stands between, and trades on both sides. I myself have no opinion on this sub- ject, or, if I have, it is too involved for extrication at the moment. My laundry-woman, a strapping peasant in am- ple and ankle-short skirt, with crisp apron and cap — a woman with big, swimming eyes and full lips, used to come before I was up, and chatter to me in a lusty voice as she counted out the linen she had brought, telling me how, as a small child, she had carried to the theater linen which her mother washed for Ra- chel; and of how, afterward, she used to creep into a corner and sit enthralled while the great tragedian was rehearsing Racine's "Phedre" or "Hermione" or Corneille's "Camille des Horaces" until it was so late she would run home in fear and trembling be- cause of the spanking she was sure to get for her tardiness. Never shall I forget the morning when, fired by the knowledge that I was to have an audi- tion, in one of these classical plays, she suddenly stood forth in the middle of the room and, speaking of Rachel, said: "Oh, mademoiselle, she was magnificent, superb; there are no words to say how she was." Then in 213 PLEASURES AND PALACES high exaltation: "Oh, mademoiselle, if you could have heard her when she said — " and she began to pour out whole scenes from the tragedies, one after another, rushing on like flame or molten lava, which nothing can stop. It was comic at first. Her eyes seemed to start from her head ; she gasped for breath, and floundered with her arms in an occasional ges- ture, her hands on her hips. But what amazed me, beyond the enormous volume of energy and dramatic fire, was that she spoke the verses correctly, and managed with all her rough speech to project to an extraordinary degree the nobility of emotion and the passion of the character she avalanched forth. At last she stopped short, the tears streaming down her face. "Oh, pardonez-moi — pardonez-moi, mademoiselle , what have I done here! But if you could have seen her! — Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! it was beautiful!" She seemed overcome with shame at her own audacity, and every time she came after- ward she continued to excuse herself and to thank me for letting her once speak it all out. In an- swer to my questions, she told me that she al- ways studied these plays at night after her work was done. Several persons who had been acquainted with Ra- chel told me stories of her, and of the impression her acting created on their minds. Among them was Lord Glenesk, whose father had known Rachel well; Leconte de Lisle, who had met her; Victorien Sardou; and Marie Laurent, a handsome, white- haired, black-eyed woman, who as a young girl had 214 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE played Rachel's suivante with her in all of her great roles. The impression was always the same — that of all-conquering genius. It was clear that those who saw Rachel act did not bring away opinions of her work, but a fiery experience which had lifted all minds to a sublime height of emotion, which they never forgot during the rest of their lives. Lord Glenesk gave me an account of his first meeting with Rachel. He had gone to Paris for the first time as a youth, and for the first time his father had taken him to the Francais to see Rachel in Racine's "Phedre." The entire audience had been stirred to the wildest pitch of enthusiasm and excite- ment. The next morning early he had ridden to the Bois with his father, and on the way his father had said, "We will turn out of the avenue a moment, down this street; I want to show you the house of the marvelous woman we saw act last night." It was barely sunrise, and as they pulled their horses up outside a high wall inclosing a small villa, they were astonished to hear, proceeding from within, what appeared to be the reacting of the very scenes they had witnessed the night before at the theater, but spoken in dead tones, as if by a somnambulist. Dismounting from their horses, they entered the garden. There they found Rachel, clad in loose garments, dull-eyed, with disheveled hair and wan face, utterly cold of all the flaming magnetism that a few hours earlier had filled her frame. To the questions of Lord Glenesk's father, she answered wearily that she had been rehearsing there under the 215 PLEASURES AND PALACES trees since it was scarce day, trying in vain to find means of expressing certain passages in which she had "failed at the night's performance" — that per- formance which had so thrilled those who witnessed it, marking an epoch in their lives! The old poet Leconte de Lisle, whose literal translations of the masterpieces of ancient Greece are thought hy many scholars to convey more of the feeling and genius of the originals than do any other modern renditions, told me much of Rachel's tech- nic in speaking verse, and of her personality. He recalled an occasion at table when she had said half playfully to the person next her, "If I forbid you to lift your glass and drink from it, you will be un- able to do so." The gentleman accepted the chal- lenge, and clasped his fingers about his wine-glass; but, in obedience to a gesture from her long, taper finger and her spoken, "I forbid you," he was totally unable to budge it from its place, much to his em- barrassment and chagrin. He said that she never shook hands with any one, and explained to him once that she felt her strength leave her whenever she found herself obliged to take the hand of another person. Sardou also gave me his impressions of Rachel. Like others, he found her sublime in the great trag- edies. I asked him if he did not regret not having had her interpret his own works. "Not at all. She couldn't have played them any better than Sarah does," he replied. He further told me, as did every other person who had seen her, that Rachel played 216 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE modern pieces with only moderate success; indeed, that some of her attempts outside of the great classi- cal roles might be called failures. I should like to transcribe verbatim Sardou's estimate of her as a tragedian, but his words, though exceedingly vivid, are so intermingled with other references and com- parisons bearing upon living persons that I am pre- vented from repeating them. He said that even off the stage Rachel possessed perfect and exquisite na- tive distinction of mind and manner, seen in her every movement and tone of voice, while the other members of her family, on the contrary, were vulgar and sordid, and seemed to belong to another racial stratum. Mme. Marie Laurent was cast to play with me in Racine's "Andromaque" the same part she had acted with the great Rachel at the Odeon and the Francais many years before, when her magnificent mass of snowy hair had been black, to match her great black eyes, which even in youth could hardly have been more lustrous. The dignified life and character of this lady are well known, her deeds on the battlefield in 1870-71 having won for her the Legion of Honor. She was kind and sympathetic toward me during my rehearsals of Hermione in "Andromaque" and continually gave me reminis- cences, both personal and artistic, of Rachel, who, from all evidence, appears to have been the greatest actress that ever lived, at least in Europe. My be- lief is that could Clara Morris have acted in the great capitals abroad, she would have repeated in a dif- 217 PLEASURES AND PALACES ferent kind of drama the supreme triumphs of the great Jewess. I was taken to San Francisco to see her act when I was too young for my impressions to have any value. The effect she created was over- whelming at that time, but not more so than when some years later, as I passed through New York on my way from Europe to California for a short home visit, I chanced to see her at a matinee on an occa- sion when she had left her retirement for the day, I believe. I cannot desist from speaking of that ex- perience. The play, a bad translation from the French, called, I think, "The Mother" or "The Mar- tyr," designated itself to the mind as clap-trap, and rattle-trap, worthless. Of the actress, the friends with me warned me that "she has been a terrible suf- ferer from spinal trouble. You will see only a mag- nificent wreck." I cannot explain why it was, but as Clara Morris came on the stage, the symbol was for an instant poignant in my mind. I saw a stately, full-rigged ship of old, storm-driven, with sails torn in the wind's rack, yet full of treasure lost to the world. Her voice was very natural, very real, that beautiful, vibrating Irish voice, and her entire personality was the embodiment of that natu- ral, immediately recognized quality which we call "human"; not the mean human, but the great real self of humanhood, the very one within us all, worthy that Christ should suffer life in this world and agony on the cross to call it forth in the flesh. All that she did and said in the scenes was simple and true, enthralling through that integrity, with no shadow 218 ONE OF THEM ALSO WAS PRESENT IN THE DRAWING-ROOM DURING ANY VISITS I RECEIVED PHASES OF PARIS LIFE of affectation or self -consciousness ; no smirk on her, or bid for favor, and, strangely enough, though en- tering into our innermost life, yet never personal. She was not only that particular mother whose situa- tion and peculiarities she carried easily, like some characteristic garment, but far beyond all that, be- yond the play, and the day, she was mother — the earth mother. I am reminded of a remark made to me about Adelina Patti by an organist in London who had often accompanied her and other great singers. He said: "I have closely studied all the great voices of my time. The secret of Mme. Patti's power is in the exact and perfect trueness of every one of her notes. The voices of several other singers have outrivaled hers in the beauty of certain notes, but she is the only one whose every note always rang absolutely and fully true to the uttermost cadence. The sense of complete security and confidence which that quality conveyed to her hearers imparted to their enjoyment of the music she was pouring forth the feeling of absolute repose. I believe that was why people often used the words 'immortal' and 'eternal' in speaking of Patti's voice." Perhaps all greatness lies in that simple thing, to strike a true note, to ring true. This takes me back to a little reminiscence that Marie Laurent gave me of Rachel. She said that once in the long ago when she was rehears- ing the suivante in "Les Horaces" Rachel was dis- 221 PLEASURES AND PALACES tressed because she could not put sufficient ex- pression into the curse that Camille pronounces on her brother after he has slaughtered her lover. While she was laboring in that attempt, "getting dryer every moment," as. she herself expressed it, an iron vice that was being turned at rapid pace by a large screw caught a finger of one of the stage mechanics and crushed it till the blood ran down. Every one screamed; Rachel fainted. On coming to her senses, she said, "Some drops from the mangled finger of a stranger made me faint, yet I could look at a sword covered with the life-blood of my dearest and only rant!" She then hurled forth the famous imprecation de Camille in a way that brought every hammer on the stage to a stand- still and "struck terror to us all." It is strange what power the air of France has to fire the soul with inspiration. Her men and women of genius would make an army; and from French soil Jeanne d'Arc, Napoleon, Rachel, all flamed up like giant lightning to the stars. Yet all three were sprung from other races. I had not progressed very far with my French studies in Paris when I became keenly aware of one or two facts calculated to dampen the ardor of even a beginner, which I was not exactly, as within a comparatively short period of time I had already won some distinction on the London stage, and un- derstood very well the value of continuity and con- centration of effort in the accomplishment of any serious achievement. It had, indeed, been the con- PHASES OF PARIS LIFE viction that I could at that juncture learn more in Paris than anywhere else that had led me to turn my face away from the allurements of steadily develop- ing success in London humbly to do students' work in Paris. Whether I was right or not Heaven only knows. I mean, that knowledge lies only in the eyes of the gods, who can see afar to the end. Cer- tainly, on my return to England, I found an in- creased power of mastery in Shakespearian work, especially in two of the tragedies, "Lady Macbeth" and "Cleopatra." I had to face the fact that it would be necessary to devote far more time than I had reckoned upon, or than M. Coquelin had sup- posed to be necessary, to the study of French diction, pronunciation and intonation, before I could qual- ify to act on the French stage. I realized also that, jmy requirements being unusual, there was no one person in Paris who could instruct me, nor any ordi- nary means of achieving the necessary skill in speech. That difficulty applied to far more than mere pro- nunciation. It concerned chiefly the intonations, which in the French tongue are the underlying means of all expression, just as in French rhetoric it is not the word used, but the turn of phrase, following, as it were, an inflection of the thought which controls meaning, accomplishing a subtlety and clearness of statement which have made French the diplomatic language of Europe, the language also of the exact sciences. The late William W- Story, the old poet and sculptor, used to say: "I never know whether the Frenchman is witty or PLEASURES AND PALACES scientific; he is always both." By the intonation in which a French person says: "Madame," "Mon- sieur," he or she reveals a whole history concerning themselves and the person addressed, their own and that person's social status, their opinion and inten- tion regarding that person, and many other fine shades of intelligence. I was therefore confronted with the necessity of inventing for myself means of learning what I needed to acquire. Subsequently, during a long and arduous study, I discovered and recorded for my own convenience, by a method which I invented for that purpose, many interest- ing facts relating to the human voice in speech. When some time later I visited Mr. Edison and told him of my findings, he was much interested, and out of those conversations grew practical sug- gestions which have since proved of general public value. M. Coquelin left Paris on a long European and African tour, which changed my outlook somewhat. I took counsel with M. Sardou and others. His advice to me was to test the exact status of my quali- fications at the time by rehearsing and acting at one of the theaters some play at a private morning audi- tion, where the audience would consist, in addition to my French family, solely of himself, one or two actors of the national theater, and perhaps one or two other persons of severe critical judgment. Either at this audition or a later one of "Fedora" were present the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, and Mr. George W. Smalley, whose keen and 2 o S) H w W co H O a o CO H on > O d to o So PHASES OF PARIS LIFE statesmanly observations have long lent peculiar au- thority to his opinions in Europe. For this first trial I chose Sardou's "Dora" and he offered to secure for me the actors and theater, which he did, giving me collaboration from among the finest actors in Paris, none of whom would refuse anything to M. Sardou. The experiment passed off satisfac- torily. An odd occurrence of the occasion may per- haps be worth recording. At the end of the most dramatic act, after Doras husband had left her, she runs after him, beating on the locked door, then turns wildly toward the window, as if to throw her- self down from it, but falls fainting on the floor. As I turned toward the window a vision seemed to pass between me and it, a slender figure clad in black, drooping with sorrow. My thought was "the image of grief." I made no particular gesture, I think, but at that instant Sardou, sitting back in the stalls, cried out enthusiastically, "Un geste de maitre!" He bounded up on the stage at the end of the scene, and when I asked him what gesture he referred to, he said: "I hardly know, but I have never seen — not in any one — the entire being of a person more expres- sive." Although I continued to study and rehearse classi- cal plays with actors of the Fraricais, M. Sardou went to great pains to rehearse also several of his own plays with me, and arrange auditions for me at the theater in the same way. It would require a vol- ume to enter into any full account of my studies in 227 PLEASURES AND PALACES France. The stage of the Vaudeville Theatre was used in the rehearsals with M. Sardou. On all other occasions when I saw him in Paris, except when he attended my classical rehearsals, we — Madame Le Mulier and I — used always to go to his house at eight o'clock in the morning, where we found him already at work, sitting at his desk in his magnifi- cently furnished study. With his morning costume, he wore a little black silk cap, from which his long- ish, sparse, iron-gray hair hung down, framing the thin, fine features, and causing him to look, as I said to him, like a hybrid of Raphael (the por- trait by himself) and Voltaire (the Voltaire of the statue in the foyer of the Theatre Francais ) . There was also in Sardou's mental and emotional nature much that recalled traits of those two great geniuses, at opposite poles from each other in nature, the lovely and lovable flower of the Italian Renaissance painters — and the mocking philosopher of France. Those antipodal characters in the most Parisian of modern Parisian authors were continually in Sar- dou, mutually self-annulling. For purposes of art connected with my rehearsals of Sardou's "Fedora" I desired to have some exact knowledge concerning the actions of a person dying of prussic acid, and was taken to call on a doctor in the municipal employ connected with the police service, whose lot it had been to see death from that and other poisons. He was a man who had made important scientific research in criminology. As we ascended several long flights of stairs, we met PHASES OF PARIS LIFE numbers of very ragged and poor people going up or coming down. At the top, the anteroom, the cor- ridor, and another room opening into it were full of "the maimed, the halt, and the blind" — sick-looking men and women with ill children, with throats or heads or arms or legs bandaged — all evidently the most miserable and starving people of Paris. We passed them going to the doctor's small room within. He was a very tall, big, raw-boned man, with large, white forehead, big, dreamy, dark eyes, very wide apart, long, big hands, and slow movements, a kind of prehistoric impression about him. He gave the de- sired information in a gentle, cavernous voice. Just at the door, when we were going away, I asked: "Who are all these numbers of people in your anteroom?" The abstract, impersonal way melted, and a sweet light spread over his broad face, as he answered in the same slow, deep cello voice: "Ce sont mes en- fants" (they are my children) . As we passed from the room he reached out among them his long, kind hands, like those of some giant mother, and drew a batch of them into his study, saying in his tender, slow way, "Venez! Venez!" I was told that he never accepted a sou from them for his services. That man, capable of winning fame and riches, found his life in giving it utterly and freely to the suffering and destitute. This instance is one of many which it has been my fortune to see of applied idealism in old Europe. On several occasions in summer-time, Mme. Le 229 PLEASURES AND PALACES Mulier and I spent a morning with Sardou at Marly-le-Roy. As we walked and talked among the roses of his palace-like villa, which was set on a fair hill-top and which, remembering its past during the reigns of the Louis, called up many a frivolous and fascinating ghost of those courtly old times, and a sentimental one or two, who used to pass with us along the sunny paths, in and out among the trees and flowers, or near the great gateway guarded by the granite sphinxes, Sardou, in short, pun- gent, picturesque sentences, speaking with increas- ing rapidity, talked of the famous persons of the day and of those he had known when young. As he went on with accelerating vim, his portraiture be- came intensified in epigrammatic power, until some- times, with either laughter or scorn, suddenly, in a single scintillating or elegantly brutal phrase, he would depict a whole character, almost an epoch. I believe he threw more genius into his conversation than into any other manifestation of his mind. One day in a gentle mood, he gave us an account of how he came to acquire this splendid Marly prop- erty. His story was interwoven with many remi- niscences of his early struggles, and is too long to transcribe here in full. The main tale showed him too poor to follow the doctor's prescription to cease work for a year and live in the open air in the coun- try. Still he coughed and grew more fragile, so much so that one night the police arrested him, ac- cusing him of being a girl in boys' clothes. Finally, in order to get air and sunshine and still go on work- 230 SIR JOHNSTON FORBES-ROBERTSON PHASES OF PARIS LIFE ing, he acquired the use of a discarded donkey, say- ing, as he let the reins fall and gave the beast its' head, settling himself on its back, and taking out pencil and manuscript book: "Go where thou wilt, my friend. I confide myself to thy taste and good be- havior." The animal carried him along country roads known to itself. The young author, plunged in his work, was oblivious of all else except at mo- ments when the donkey came to a full stop. Then Sardou would look up, notice that they seemed to be pausing in the grounds of some villa, discreetly, at the back; then after a time they would go to an- other villa, and still to another, in each case pausing in the back court-yard of the house. The last stage of all was up the long shaded alleyway of one par- ticularly fine park. There evidently the animal was happiest, for there he lingered long while Sardou would often glance up at the splendid old villa, ad- mire the beautiful landscape, basking in the sunshine and the fresh, delicious air, and think how happy people were to be able to possess such a home. Dur- ing these reflections, Sardou remembered that the animal had come to him with credentials of a long and honorable career connected with a milk-cart. After many vain attempts and hope long deferred, and disappointments because of many plays refused by managers, Sardou at last pressed the right but- ton, and the gates of success flew wide open before him. All he had longed for, was his for the taking. He bought the beautiful park and the house at the back door of which he had often sat donkey-back, PLEASURES AND PALACES winning them. He told his old long-eared, hairy friend of his good luck and said: "It was thou who conducted me to this beautiful home. It was thou who carried me to health, to fortune." The don- key, sad at heart, answered him : "Alas! then, thou hast no more need of me!" But the happy author scratched him lovingly around the ears and said: "Never will I abandon thee. Thou hast been my comrade in hard times; thou shalt share my joy. Thou shalt have rest in a field to thyself, and the juiciest nettles to eat, or, rather, thou shalt have artichokes ; and when thou diest, I will drop a tear in thy tomb." And it all happened so. For exercise I used to walk every day through Pare Monceau, generally up Avenue Hoche to the Arc de Triomphe, then down the Avenue du bois, — "Avenue de 1' Imperatrice," as my dear old marquise persisted in calling it, — and often in the Bois de Boulogne. My companion during these walks was Olga. I saw constant proofs of the indestructability of goodness in the French heart, and in the human heart in general, illustrated by many a daily trait of existence, often strange or naive. One day it was drizzling rain as Olga and I walked up the Avenue Hoche for our usual consti- tutional; not a soul was in sight but ourselves for some time. But well on toward the Arc de Tri- omphe we saw ahead of us standing at the sides of the pavement, one of those slouch, rag-ridden, des- PHASES OF PARIS LIFE perate-looking individuals which a recent "emeute" (riot) had emptied out into the streets of Paris and which the police had not yet been able to entirely drive back into their abodes among the City's drains and gutters — according to a warning printed in the papers. This man was evidently waiting for us — as if intending to accost us in some way. I swiftly decided what course I would take and asked Olga to show no surprise at whatever she saw me do. As we came along, the man stepped out as if to inter- cept us, and in a voice of brutal insult, like a knife flashed in the air, asked for money. I had loaded my thoughts toward him, and altho' my heart thumped, I looked him straight in the eyes — think- ing "I am looking at the innocent sweet little baby you were once," and said with all the love I could put into my voice: "You see my hands are both engaged" — in one was my umbrella, with the other, I held up my skirts — "but my pocket is just here in the folds of my dress; please put your hand into it and get my purse and take something out of it for yourself." I was smiling as sweetly as I could, thinking of the little child. The man was startled, looked suspicious and impertinent, but I took no notice of that, but looked down at my dress and just kept on smiling and saying — "please, it would be so kind of you!" — indicating my pocket with my elbow and eyes. Then he daintily drew my purse from my pocket, opened it — there were gold, silver and copper in it, took out of it some sous, and stepped back politely with his heels together and his torn cap 335 PLEASURES AND PALACES in his hand — his head bent and eyes to the ground and murmured in a strained voice as if about to weep — "Je vous remercie Madame" — I put something more into his hand as we passed on. A block away, I turned back to see what had become of him, but he was still standing there with his head down, evi- dently not having looked up after us. I had made the test to see if the sunken goodness in him would not come to light if spoken to. Another beggar of Avenue Hoche was quite a friend — in a tacit way. He was old and white-haired but very clean, with a gentle expression of face. He was always near the same spot, by the English Church (Eglise An- glaise) . Sometimes I gave him a penny, sometimes only nodded and said, "Bon jour monsieur." Once, the first time we exchanged words, I had bought some roses of a little boy near the Arc de Triomphe and as I passed by the old fellow, I stopped and pinned one into his coat-lapel. The tears came into his innocent old eyes, he straightened up, and in the tone of the hero of a Victor Hugo play, saying: "Je suis grand d'Espagne" ("I am a grandee of Spain"), he said: "Madame, void 59 annies que je suis mendiant a Paris, et c'est la premiere fois quon m'a donne une rose — vous me faites un plaisir que je n'oublierai jamais — merci — madame" ("Fifty-nine years that I am a beggar in Paris and this is the first time anybody ever gave me a rose — you give me a pleasure I shall never forget!") Another day he explained to me that the little girl playing near by was his great-grandchild, orphan of BENOIT CONSTANT COQUELIN PHASES OF PARIS LIFE father and grandfather, but that he would see to it that she went to school at the Sacre Coeur and had a dot to marry with. It is hardly possible to write during the life of persons all that one would say in other circum- stances, but telling of days past and characters on the far other side of the ocean, it is permissible to note rare and exquisite natures, especially when they are typical of a particular world of ideas, and have been closely interwoven with one's own daily life during two or three years of anxious, strenuous, but happy work. Olga had the loveliness of a Madonna in her face and in her character, that singular spirit of beauty and serenity of mind through faith which distinguishes her poems, stories, and the lectures on French literature and philosophy that have formed the product of her capacities since that time. That same spiritual endowment made it appear natural for her to come to the succor of thousands of the destitute nuns at the time of the closing of the con- vents in France, a work for which His Holiness the Pope personally bestowed upon her a special seal of authority. Not one member of my so-called French family could have been more tenderly devoted to me in every circumstance of my existence during that whole time if we had been related to one another by the closest of blood-ties. They sympathized with me and helped me in all my endeavors, rejoiced at every successful step, encouraged me and cheered me on when I was discouraged or tired or sad. PLEASURES AND PALACES There were times when, instead of those last three words, my state of mind could have been more exactly described by "despairing," wondering if, after all, I were not wasting my time. Many friends urged me to give up my attempt. Man- agers of London theaters came to see me more than once in order to persuade me to renounce my French work and return to England. "If singing were to be your task," they said, "that would be comparatively easy; but never in the world will the French allow you to act here in their own tongue on the speaking stage. Or if by any chance they should, remember the fate of that lovely and talented Russian girl who played at the Francais one night and committed suicide the next day." Once when I did go across to London to play for five or six weeks, I encountered the same pressure on all sides. One day during that flying trip to Lon- don I attended a matinee given there by M. An- toine's players of "La mort du Due d'Enghien." Henry James, the novelist, came to speak to me and said: "Do you know who that is in the stall in front of you? Fanny Kemble that was; shall I in- troduce you to her? But I must warn you she is rather alarming." The old woman appeared big and strong, arid every line of her back and shoulders, her neck, and even the back of her hat expressed anger, in some way suggested suppressed rage. The friend at my right laughed at Mr. James and said: 240 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE "I have heard that she gnashes with her false teeth, and under her voluminous skirts has a long, heavy tail like a lion's, with which she pounds and lashes the floor when she sees things she can't en- dure." I was in happy humor that day, and felt that I could bear anybody's tantrums, so I acquiesced in Mr. James's suggestions. The old lady was civil, though expressive of ascerbity in all her person. She was good enough to offer to drive me home in her brougham. Mr. James conducted her to the carriage. She took me beside her, then pointed to the little seat facing us, and said with sharp com- mand, "Henry, sit there!" He submissively got in. The moment the carriage was moving she be- gan a perfect hail, or, rather, sleet, of sarcastic ques- tions and comment on my temerity and presumption in thinking I could ever act in French, or be allowed to open my mouth on the French boards. "Even I," she sneered, "could not do it, for I went to Paris before you were ever born, and stud- ied with the gr-r-r-reat R-R-R-Regnier, and he told me to go back to England — me! And you imagine that you — " With irony of voice and word, em- phasized to the point of caricature, as if measured to get over the footlights of Covent Garden in the "good old days," she pelted me unmercifully, and, as it were, torrentially washed me out of existence. Mr. James was like a good lamb, but the few short sentences she addressed to him were vocal slaps. I never spent such a comic half hour. When next I 24*1 PLEASURES AND PALACES saw Mr. James I said, "I am sure you must have some secret sin, and take her as self-imposed pen- ance." He smiled, and answered that she was not really so very terrible at heart. While speaking of these landmarks of a past age on the stage, I recall the charm and kindness of man- ner and the impressive dignity of the Shakespearian actress, Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), who enter- tained me at her house in London. Her distin- guished husband, the historian, Sir Theodore Mar- tin, looked upon her, I think, as a kind of poetical goddess, and it was easy to understand how it was that Queen Victoria so much cherished her friend- ship. But to return to Paris. The dear old marquise, whose enjoyment of life remained young and fresh, and whose big, blue eyes neither mist of years nor tear-dew could rob of their merry sparkle, was en- dowed with a sweet soprano voice of truly marvelous range and sweetness. It had been trained in her youth by the incomparable Garcia, the elder, and she had often sung for charity in duets with Malibran. She said that the main point in the teaching of Garcia, who trained all of the singers of renown of his age, was to sustain the note in even and unfalter- ing sweetness, flute-like, and that the least trembling or quavering — "bleating," he called it — was the one fatal and unforgivable crime in a singer. I tested and applied the same principle to speech utterance, and realized its value. My dear old friend would sit at the piano, accompanying herself without a music- HENRY JAMES " PHASES OF PARIS LIFE book, and sing with the greatest joy parts of all the opera repertory of the early and middle nineteenth century. She would fling the Napoleonic era, its ambitions, romance — its distant tragedy, into our souls by the way in which she poured forth "Partons pour la Syrie" her fine old eyes flashing with some flame that was feminine, yet martial, gay, heroic. The fine flower of the French spirit was in her voice as she sang "Honneur a la plus belle, gloire au plus vaillant!" Her voice remained pure and youthful, with no cracking in it, no quavering; only as she sang it happened now and then that a note would be silent — drop out — like those on some old piano. The owner of this wonderful voice would, they told me, in response to the urgings of Garcia and many others, have sung on the operatic stage, only that in those early days it was not admitted in France that a lady of good family could adopt the stage as a profession. Sometimes, after a fatiguing day, I used in the evenings to delight in improvising and dancing, among ourselves in the drawing-room, with no other person ever present, what I called a Greek dance, in which I tried to embody the Greek feeling, as I had found it in the Greek statues, friezes, and vase-paintings in the British Museum and the Lou- vre. I wore simple, flowing garments, with san- dals, and in my dance used a scarf, models of the double flutes, or small cymbals, of which I possessed a pair with a very sweet clang. I never really de- veloped the dance, or danced it anywhere else than 245 PLEASURES AND PALACES there, and no one ever saw it but my French family. I began by telling a story, in a sentence or two, of what I was going to portray in niy dance. The marquise would run her fingers over the keyboard a moment, then as she played, I danced, both of us improvising. At that time I had never heard of the beautiful Isadora Duncan, and there had been none of the so-called classical dancing which now flourishes widely. The dance which Miss Margot Tennant, the present Mrs. Asquith, wife of the British premier, used to perform for her friends was a "skirt dance." When my French family came with morning com- pliments as I sipped my coffee in bed, — the "petit lever" as they called it, — they gave me delightful reminiscences of olden days. Colonel Le Mulier, the marquise's husband, had been an officer of Napoleon III, and she had lively remembrances of the court of the Empress Eugenie. They showed me old handwritten books containing all sorts of odds and ends of life of other days — receipts for beauty-lotions, for special dishes, for healing, rec- ords of ceremonial etiquette and traditions, accounts of battles won by members of the family. They showed me tiny facsimiles of all the grand Crosses of Honor, from the Croix de St. Louis down to the Legion d'Honneur, such as families are allowed to keep when the state takes back the great crosses at the death of those upon whom they have been con- ferred. Having always been a military family, my friends, like the French press, were much interested 246 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE in the fact of my being an honorary member of the Gate City Guard of Atlanta, the insignia of which, an enameled gold cross, with Georgia diamonds, was conferred upon me by its commander, Colonel Burke, at a review of the Guards, in the presence of the Governor of Georgia, the Mayor of Atlanta, and a brilliant assembly of Georgians. When Lady Lytton, British Ambassadress, called on me, she came up the long five flights of stairs to see me, elevators not being then in such gen- eral use in Paris as now. On the occasion of my first visit to the Embassy, in return of Lady Lytton's call, she received me in the large formal reception room, the chairs being arranged somewhat as they are in the great draw- ing-rooms of the palaces and chateaux that are still inhabited by the old families, though this style is discarded by those who pride themselves on being ultra-modern. In the great salons of those who still cling to old-fashioned formality, and cherish a sense of grandeur as part of the pleasure and charm of social ministration, as writers cherish style, the arrangement of the chairs, suggests that a call is an interchange of courtesies, and an act of solici- tude, or of homage, on the one part, and apprecia- tion and hospitality on the other, the agreeableness of which is not lessened by its being formulated with a certain elegance and attention. Beginning with an arm-chair on the right side of the chimney, and one facing it on the left of the fireplace, there are two regular rows of chairs directly opposite each 247 PLEASURES AND PALACES other, continuing down the main part of the room, with no haphazard seats, the space between the two lines on ordinary occasions being only somewhat wider than the chimney-hearth. At the back of these two rows of chairs, between them and the wall, is an empty space as wide as a corridor. There against the walls, between the long, richly curtained win- dows, are the cabinets of Buhl (Boulle), or Vernis Martin, or other elegant receptacles for little artistic treasures or mementos of bygone times, vases of flowers, bronzes, etc. The polished floors of these rooms often have very few rugs on them, or none at all. Sometimes, instead of the first arm-chair to the right of the chimney, where the hostess sits, and its vis-a-vis, the seat offered to the most honored guest, there are sofas, it being also the custom for the chatelaine to offer the place beside her on the sofa to the person with whom she especially desires to talk. The young folks generally find themselves in the seats the farthest removed from the fireplace end of the series, the stiff order of which recalls the formal rows of hollyhocks and other old-fashioned flowers in the chateau gardens. As the newcomer passes up the middle of the room to the host- ess, she is aware, as it has been frivolously remarked, that there is ample opportunity for those present to admire her demeanor and her personal appearance. It is apparent how this arrangement of itself or- ganizes the company present, and also how it de- clines in favor with the waning of the love of hier- 248 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE archy and etiquette, until its extreme opposite turns into that kind of indiscriminate crush and scramble where the hostess, very warm and obliged to be en- ergetic, stands near the door with a smile and a sin- gle word of appropriate inquiry for each, as they jam past into her drawing-rooms, as in the case of that good lady who, shaking hands heartily with an old acquaintance whom she had not seen for months asked, "And how is your dear, dear mother?" "Alas!" he answered, "we have lost her. She died six months ago." "Oh, how very, very sad !" said the lady. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry to hear it !" Then, without pause, reaching over his shoulder and smiling to the next batch, "How do you do?" and "How do you do?" etc. After some moments of misery in the crowd, he again found his hostess to say good-by. She, rather dazed, smiled warmly as she gripped his hand, and said with hearty emphasis: "And how is your dear, dear mother?" "Thank you, she is still dead," he replied. The room in which I found Victor Hugo was ar- ranged in that old formal way when I was taken to see him on the occasion of my first landing in Eu- rope, as I was on my way to England shortly be- fore the poet's death. He sat in an arm-chair next the fire, with an empty seat beside him and the two rows of lion-worshipers down the room opposite each other, scarcely daring to whisper in "the pres- ence." Victor Hugo had been one of our heroes in 249 PLEASURES AND PALACES our mountain valley, and when I was brought up before him, the old poet asked politely, as he bent to kiss my hand, "Vous permettez, mademoiselle?" I quickly stretched out the left one also, with, "Oh, yes; and this one, too, to the maker of Jean Valjean." The dead silence which the rows of chairs kept whenever the great one spoke was broken by approving sighs and murmurs and nods. The poet smiled, pleased, as he said, at this "homage from the West." He made me sit beside him, then bent over and indicated the long room at right angles to the one we were in, where, through the open doors, we saw groups of visitors standing about and regaling themselves with supper. He asked: "Do you know who that man down there is' — the man with the white face and the halo of red hair? — • that is Svinbeweme, the greatest of English poets." Such was my first sight of Swinburne, pointed out by Victor Hugo. Lady Lytton used to say that one of the most trying parts of being an ambassadress was the official smile that was expected to have that stay- ing quality which has been widely placarded on posters as inherent in the result produced by a cer- tain well-advertised comestible. She said she es- caped for a few moments to her room whenever she could and sat before her looking-glass, trying to iron out the muscles about her mouth with her fingers, or to straighten them by making grimaces in the opposite sense from the tyrannical smile. 250 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE She also remarked that she never appreciated so much the art of the great French actors as when she first saw French amateurs acting. "They are quite as bad as our own English ones," she said. Lord Lytton, author of "Lucile," was a pic- turesque personality, and his power of fascination was proverbial. His dark hair, partly gray, was of the ringletty kind, in short, small curls, rather damp in texture. At the Embassy, during a discussion, at table once, of the problematic value of my work in French, Lord Lytton said that though he had spoken French all his life and was an ardent admirer of French genius, he believed that all the verses he ever wrote in that language had been "thought" in English and were really a French translation of English. He doubted that any one ever really thought except in his mother tongue. "I find the French," he said, "totally un- able to appreciate a British joke, despite all their wit." He could not bear cut flowers, and in defer- ence to that sentiment no cut flowers or wreaths were sent to his burial when he died, which was in Paris. I used to go to the Persian embassy in Boulevard Maillot to see my dear and beautiful Princess Mal- kom, whose husband, Malkom Khan, had been trans- ferred from London to Paris. Again in that house was verified the saying, "The world is wide and the world is wee," for among the old friends of the Malkom Khans were members of an ancient Arme- nian family of royal descent whose destinies were 251 PLEASURES AND PALACES one day to intercross with mine, though at that time, in Paris, they were of no more moment to me than "ships that pass in the night." This family, with the Bragratians, the Rhupens — descendants of the kings of old Armenia, are all supposed to have in their veins a strain of the blood of King David, an honor claimed, too, I believe, by Queen Victoria and the German kaiser. These friends of the Malkoms came and went, were nothing to me ; I cared nothing whatever about them, never even so much as looked at them squarely. I have since regretted the failure to scrutinize the stranger. How beautiful she was, Princess Malkom, a noble and poetic Oriental personality, with an unuttered sigh deep in her soul. Only when her look met that of her husband did there seem to be an instant's consoling of the unspoken sor- row which bound them without surcease in its communion, for their beautiful first-born girl had been kidnapped and lost to them forever at the age of sixteen. Princess Malkom and I talked of recently passed London days and of current events. The prince spoke of "young Turks" and "Persian matters." As I sat there, all unaware, by my dreamy, dark-eyed friend, the hidden Fates wove and wove me into their remote pattern. In the course of ordinary comment and gossip came the subject of the marriage of a girl nearly related to the Malkom Khan's Armenian friends to a Serbian nobleman. Some said he was a pretender to the Serbian crown, or might be, 252 VICTOR MARIE HUGO PHASES OF PARIS LIFE and that King Milan, who lived in Paris, kept an eye on him. I don't think I heard the name, or, if I did, it left no impression on my mind. Paris is famous as the home of royal exiles. This girl's father was Count Serurier, one of whose ancestors had fought for American freedom and had been at Yorktown, while another was Marechal de France, whose tomb is in the Invalides, near that of his comrade, the great Emperor Napoleon; still another ancestor had been a French ambassa- dor at Washington when John C. Calhoun was Sec- retary of War, and there is record of much interest- ing discussion between Calhoun and Serurier over the War of 1812. A few years after I had left France, when that lady, after giving birth to the youngest of her three children, had died, and the children's widowed father had come to England, where I, too, was, I became his second wife, not realizing until after our marriage that I had heard of him in Paris years before. He brought me the three little ones — a nest of eaglets, as it were — beg- ging me to be mother to them, and right dear they became to me. The aspects of French life with which I came into contact socially were almost entirely relics of mon- archical days, and belonged to the Faubourg St. Germain and the Faubourg St. Honore. My ex- periences in that connection — and much else that interested me vividly bearing on the political and economical trends and movements of the time — are a book in themselves. There is no space for them 255 PLEASURES AND PALACES Here, or for the rich impressions of French litera- ture or of art in Paris, both in its masterpieces of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and in its modern "movings aright," all of them embodiments of general tend- encies of the age. There was treasure-trove in the genuine and honest quest for beauty and artistic truth, for the freshness and newness of form, dis- playing new vistas as the world unwraps itself of its hours and its ages. There were, too, those other manifestations, those of the dark ways of the soul, "flowers of evil," striv- ing to assert a beauty for the morbid and moribund, in the "sublime putrescente" to quote exact words from a circular issued at the time of one of the first exhibitions of fantastically symbolic and depressing pictures, which we were all invited to visit. There were other decadent formulations of the "spirit that denies," and manifestations of moral anarchy in Paris which did not come under my personal obser- vation, but which I heard spoken of under breath as "unavowable," things denoting the ex- treme of insanity — the "Black mass," for instance. If ever I perceived the faintest whiff of the dank and mold of that dismal influence, it struck chill and horror to me. I fled from it into the sun, realizing the value of Bossuet's words, "Common sense is the king of human life," and felt intensely that, as effi- cient life is pure, so true art is virile, wholesome; for only the wholesome is constructive and builds eternally — hence its immortality, its greatness. 256 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE I remember saying this to Mr. MacMonnies, the American sculptor whose genius interested France much. He showed us the first small clay model of a composition for his fountain for the Chicago ex- position. That mere sketch, the sculptor's first vision, flung into clay warm, with his thumb-prints on it, was rythmic with inspiration. Its miniature figures and distances suggested vastness and "a world elsewhere." Could such hope of beauty as it roused in the mind ever be fulfilled and brought into concrete form? Or, is fixed form in line and substance only a vain attempt to prison that which cannot be bound, and which ever and always evades human attainment, leading artist, poet, or phi- losopher a chase through the centuries and eons up to the gates of heaven itself? Comendatore Boni, the Italian archaeologist, said, while showing us the scene of his excavations in the Forum at Rome, the secret temple and spring of the Vestal Virgins, the perfect small marble altar, and the statues he had dug up, "When these conceptions of worship were formulated in these beautiful statues, they had al- ready lived; their day was passing away." Some time after Coquelin had returned to Paris, and I had rehearsed with him in Moliere's comedies and several other plays of the Theatre Francais rep- ertory, and had made a special study of a French translation of Shakspere's "Taming of the Shrew," — "Shaming of the True," as I called it, — he asked me to play Kaiherine to his Petruchio at Orleans, where he was booked in that play, with the other act- 257 PLEASURES AND PALACES ors of the Comedie Francaise. "La Megere Ap- privoisee" as the French version is called, is a rous- ing and delightful comedy, and is, I believe, the one exception where a translation of one of Shakspere's works equals, and even surpasses, the original. This play was translated and adapted by a young writer who was gifted with style as well as wit, and whose early death unfortunately blighted the bril- liant promise his work showed of really high achievement. The English comedy of Italian life, being thus Latinized, gained wonderfully in both its amusing and picturesque qualities. Losing every tinge of artificiality, it was a living page from the Italian Renaissance, with that light touch of improvisation in it, so peculiarly Italian, making it fresh and full of fun. Yet the psychological and physical traits which it good humoredly satirized with its buffet- tings and buffoonings, remain unimpaired. With all its naive and rank realism in parts, it still had easy room for true romance, even touches of poetry, as at the end of the play, and at the close of the great dis- ciplining act. Here, after leading the poor girl such a race and putting her through such paces that she is thoroughly worn out physically and confused in spirits, and finally falls asleep in the great arm- chair before the big fireplace, Coquelin, as Petruchio, touched by her piteous plight and half relenting, tenderly placed her weary feet on a cushion, care- fully drew a silken cover over her from her chin to the floor, and then tiptoed softly to a seat op- 35§ PHASES OF PARIS LIFE posite her and sat there, while the storm raged with- out, watching her sleep in the firelight, half smiling, and yet at heart thrilled with admiration of that very spirit and nature in her which was to be edu- cated, not broken. How the famous comedian man- aged to convey that abrupt contrast from boisterous and dramatic comicality to high poetic comedy, how he attained that subtle sequence of sentiment in the final part of the scene, would appear to be a mys- tery. But observing narrowly, another initiate of his own art could discover his means in his marvelous mastery and use of intonation more than in all the other means of the actor's art. That appearance as Kaiherine to the Petruchio of Coquelin and other actors of the Comedie Francaise was the very first occasion when I set foot in public on the French stage. At Orleans, though not afterward, I played under the name of Mme. de Beauregard, as I thought it possible my effort might prove a complete fiasco. Coquelin himself had said at the last re- hearsal, "All we can say now is, a la grace de Dieu." The eventful day came to take the train for Or- leans, storied city of the military and mystic triumph of Jeanne dArc. I believe that these performances were a part of a great celebration in honor of the sainted girl-warrior. All I could do I had done. Every detail, even to the costume, had received attention. My short, stiff dress of crimson bro- cade for the first act was ready. With it was to go very red lips and dark hair, bunched out at £59 PLEASURES AND PALACES the sides as in the Bellini heads. The grand wed- ding-gown was complete, from golden circlet and veil to the rich stoles of milk-white silks, copying an old Venetian dress, and embroidered richly, by the finest embroiderer in Paris, a man, an Italian. The design was of early Renaissance patterns, large conventionalized flowers in gold and silver and rich dull colors. Of the amberish white skirt, over which the stole fell front and back, there was a coun- terpart all muddy and dripping from the storm pud- dles where Petruchio had made Kaiherine wade. She is wearing it when she first enters his house at the beginning of the act. After Mme. Le Mulier and I had settled ourselves in our rooms at the hotel in Orleans, we went for a walk to look at the old town, then drove back and, after a de- licious dinner served in my room, I went to sleep for an hour, according to my usual custom on days when I was to act at night. The theater was filled to overflowing by an audience composed of the notabilities of the place, who came to welcome the great Coquelin and the other actors of the na- tional theater. They knew nothing about me what- ever, and probably hardly noticed that Kaiherine was being played by a "Mme. de Beauregard." The performance went forward without hitch or falter except for two small contretemps, unnoticed by the audience, but which created something of a flutter on our side of the curtain. The first affected me only. It proceeded from the prompter's box, a large wooden hood at the front edge of the stage, 260 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE in the very middle of it. I had not been warned that it would be used, and had no experience of such a contrivance. The man inside of it had a book of the play before him, and in rasping, fierce whis- pers, spoke every sentence just as the actor was about to pronounce it. If the actor paused before it, he pronounced it twice, and went on repeating it until the actor began to speak it, when he hissed out the next phrase, made sharper and magnified by the wooden hood. To my ears the sounds made a hor- rible confusion and scuffle. With my first utter- ance and his, I turned dizzy and felt I should faint. Then I rushed ahead with my words, to show him that I knew them like ABC; but he hurried on ahead of me and got there first, never letting me catch up. The faster I went, the faster he chat- tered. It was comic beyond words. I nearly laughed right out in the middle of my scene. In fact, I did put in a lot of "ha! ha's!" that had not been planned. The other unrehearsed effect was in the great act, when Katherine sits asleep in the arm-chair in the firelight, the man at the back of the chimney, who was to have thrown over the scene a red glow from the flames, used by mistake a pale bluish green, a lovely moonlight. My eyes were closed; I knew nothing about the matter. The audience under the spell of the scene was not aware of anything un- usual, but cheered the scene enthusiastically. How- ever, when the curtain had finally fallen after the act, M. Coquelin came to me with voice trembling, 261 PLEASURES AND PALACES but self-controlled, and said, as he offered me his hand, "Mademoiselle, permit me to conduct you to your loge." Mme. Le Mulier was at my side, as he led me quite formally with old-fashioned politeness to the foot of the little staircase leading to my dress- ing-room. There he said, "Have the kindness to close your door when you enter," and stood motion- less until my door was shut. Then he turned like a hurricane toward the stage with such language as a storm might use if it came to the point where it could no longer bear heaven and earth and undertook to rip up the universe. The terms were not such as persons who use the word "choice" would care to record, but he never knew to his dying day that the thin boards of my loge, in which there was an open window for ventilation, caused me to hear in full what he, with the delicacy of a gentleman, had un- dertaken to shield me from. At Orleans Mme. Le Mulier and I visited some wonderful rose-nurseries, and I sent a box of roses with long stems to Paris to Leconte de Lisle, who was old and ailing, and to Mme. de Lisle. I often went to their house in Paris. That proud old poet, born in the island of Paul and Virginia in the sul- try sun of the Indian Ocean, was big, calm, of clas- sic severity in matters of taste and verse-workman- ship. He was the antipodes of Parisian, and essen- tially intellectual. Even the passions which in- spired him to poetic composition partook of a philo- sophical nature ; he had been a close friend of Theo- phile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Beaudelaire, and THE THEATRE WAS FILLED TO OVERFLOWING BY AN AUDIENCE COMPOSED OF THE NOTABILITIES OF THE PLACE PHASES OF PARIS LIFE Renan. Of Renan he repeated the saying that "he was seduced by his own eloquence." Leconte de Lisle had been baptized a Roman Catholic, but had "fallen away." His most famous poem had been looked upon as blasphemous. I, sometimes, in the outright American way, used to tell him how much it surprised me to hear him re- peat the kind of so-called "free-thought" speech which young collegians are apt to affect during the early stages of their philosophical studies, but which are rarely met with in older men who have done great things in life. Once, when I was teasing him in that vein, saying that I had noticed that when men of brains apostatize, it often merely means that they have been blessed with an elderly aunt or other fond relative who had punished them when they were little by forcing them to say too many "aves," he suddenly towered up from his sick chair in a most awful expression of rage, and his wife grew white and looked so frightened that I saw I had done something dreadful. She told us privately as we were going away that her husband had not al- lowed her to practice her faith for years, and had forbidden to any of his friends ever to mention the matter of religion in his presence. The next time Mme. Le Mulier and I went to the de Lisles, he began to ask me the most searching questions as to what I believed, and why, inquiring how I could explain certain sayings and acts of Christ's. I became afraid to talk on the subject, fearing to speak foolishness; but he persisted until 265 PLEASURES AND PALACES at length I answered him that I did not feel that my notions could have any real value to him, as "I am only in the question-time, myself." "Yes," he said, "you seem to me like a child — a child met at sunset; but children know much." He told me that Beaudelaire, who sought inspira- tion in drugs and drink, standing high on the verge of that descent, at the bottom of which poor Ver- laine was to he supine, used to say in answer to re- monstrances of friends that in that regard he delib- erately emulated the great American poet Poe. On the very day Leconte de Lisle told me this, I brought to him the Tauchnitz edition of letters of Poe, then recently first published, in which he in- dignantly refuted such a charge in words I cannot exactly recall, but which were in essence: "To ex- press my conceptions, I should require even a clearer and better brain than I possess at the best." So the French poet, author of "Flowers of Evil," had turned into a vicious path, corrupting his own genius, led by a lie, that old calumny against Poe, who was at that very moment repudiating it with scorn. One day I was giving Leconte de Lisle a descrip- tion of a brilliant gathering of friends, where every one present sang, or played some instrument, or read a poem. I had repeated a few verses of his own, and he expressed curiosity as to which ones I had chosen. When I named, "A un poet mort" he lifted up his hands as if that were the last thing to be expected, and said: 266 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE "I wrote those words as I stood gazing upon the dead body of my dear friend Theophile Gautier, and was seized with a sense of horror at human fu- tility — the horror of being a man. Of all I ever wrote, I think you could the least understand these verses. Repeat them to me." When I had done so, he said: "You do seem to understand; but how can you?" "If I had your measure of doubt," I answered, "of disbelief — and still possessed, as you do, the longing for the soul's perfection, I, too, should feel the bitterness, the ultimate desolation, you express in those verses." It so happened, by coincidence, that the very mo- ment when Mme. de Lisle was opening my box of roses from Orleans, and my letter inclosing the press notices from that town, containing accounts of my acting of Kaiherine with Coquelin, one of the managers of the Odeon Theatre called on the poet- translator of the Greek masterpieces, to ask him to write an ode for some important memorial occasion at that branch of the national theater. He saw the roses, and the De Lisles naturally spoke of me. When he read the newspaper references to my Katherine, he asked Leconte de Lisle to communi- cate with me at once, saying, "This young lady is the person we want for a new play we are bringing out." And that is how I came to be engaged, to act the chief part in a new play at the Odeon Theatre, Paris. Apart from the fact that the Odeon is the second 267 PLEASURES AND PALACES of the arms of the national theater of France, there is a somber grandeur about this classical old temple of Melpomene. In its great pillared porch Rachel had stood, as had also Mme. Ristori, when she acted at the Odeon in Italian. In that porch, too, Napoleon walked, poverty- stricken and without prospects, at the hour when his destiny turned and mounted toward an empire. From that hour in the porch of the Odeon the world began to talk of Napoleon, and has never since that time ceased doing so. Even now, more than a hun- dred years afterward, it is probable that no day passes when the word "Napoleon" is not printed or uttered anew on the earth. There in the Odeon the great Italian actress Ristori, noble in character as well as in genius, played in the Italian tongue and incidentally was a storm-center at the time. They tell a passionate story in Paris of the pitched battle between the partisans of Ristori and of those of the great Rachel, one incident of which was that at that very Odeon, on the occasion of a performance by Rachel of Racine's Hermione, in "Andromaque," I think, the populace made a riot in the theater and tore up the orchestra stalls. On that historic stage, too, acted the most renowned of all celebrated French tragedians and comedians, who, in the serv- ice of the state, have belonged to the national thea- ter in both its branches, the Odeon and the Theatre Francais, including, after Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Coquelin, and a long list of others who would also, no doubt, have remained in the world's memory if it 268 SIR HENRY IRVING PHASES OF PARIS LIFE could have had the opportunity of seeing them, hut who, known only to Parisians, were, as the liturgies of the Eastern Christian Church say of its Saints, "non-mercenary," and preferred the dignity and pleasure as members of a state institution, of devel- oping and exercising their art, with the stimulating cooperation of their peers, rather than to leave those artistic surroundings to win fame and fortune in distant quarters of the globe. But from those who went forth, like Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin, as well as from those who remained in Paris, the world has been the gainer both ways. When preliminary rehearsals had already begun, the managers of the Odeon invited me to confer with them on the question of salary. They sealed a contract with me, giving me the highest salary which the state paid at the Odeon. Every part of my experience at the Odeon was deeply interesting. The other players and I were introduced to one another, and they at once entered into sympathetic comradeship with me. At the be- ginning of rehearsals a little cabin, roof and all, with the wall next the stage omitted, was erected over the orchestra-stalls bordering the stage. At a table within it sat the author and often the mana- gers, and at different times the actors or any other persons whose connection with the production made it useful for them to study from the front the effects to be obtained on the stage. In all the plays I acted or rehearsed, or saw re- hearsed by others, in Paris, including the new ones, 271 PLEASURES AND PALACES the main scheme of presentation was in the hands of the actor or actress, or both, who played the chief parts of the play under consideration. In England the same result was obtained where there was an actor-manager or manageress playing the chief role. That point has more importance than may appear to the uninitiated. Its bearings are many, but chief is the securing of a clearly stated, properly proportioned, and evenly corre- lated whole, enabling the main protagonists, through and about whom the story moves, to be able to ex- press their conceptions and attain the effects which they conceive to be the author's intention. In this stage-work, as elsewhere in Paris, my ob- servations led me to conclude that, though with the French there is always an atmosphere of compli- ment and courtesy, doubtless expressive of their sense of elegant form as applied to social inter- course, still, when any art work is on hand, they be- come direct and simple, and though retaining polite- ness of phrase, the element of flattery is entirely ab- sent. The Frenchman is by nature, I should say, almost supersensitive or nervous, but under work he is calm; some critical coolness in him keeps watch over his ardor. Because of this, and of the pleasure they take in finding formulation for their ideas, it is inspiring to work in companionship with the French. With the beginning of rehearsals, I no- ticed how very much the actor is left in peace. There was the seeking and trying of effects un- molested, the squandering of time where necessary. 272 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE There was an atmosphere of the subjective through- out all the work of preparation. Images and pic- tures began to come forth of themselves, as it were. When we had been rehearsing for about three weeks, there came to my mind a notion of how the principal act of the play could be brought out in quite a different way from that in which we were rehearsing it. As it would involve an entirely dif- ferent stage-setting and the loss of what we had already built up, and as I was in Paris as a learner, it never occurred to me to propose the change to the author, M. Leon Hennique. I merely mentioned the idea casually as an impression. The author at once asked me if I would be willing to work the act out on those lines and let him have an idea of it com- plete. Even then it did not occur to me that my plan would be adopted. But the author and the managers did not hesitate an instant to throw aside all that had been arranged and substitute for it my rendition of the act. Neither did the actors make any protest at the extra work, but showed a keen in- terest in the new scheme, toward which they made valuable suggestions and were in every way kind- ness itself. It gives me pleasure to put on record that much in my success was due to them. The very first performance was, according to time-honored custom at the Odeon and the Fran- cais, the "private rehearsal," — la repetition generate — at which there was no gallery, no public, but only a theater full of critics, authors, painters, sculptors, statesmen, and other officials and grandees of the PLEASURES AND PALACES social world, the most formidable and critical au- dience that France could muster. It is at the Repetition generate that the fate of play and players is practically sealed. On that occasion not only is there an empty gallery, but also no claque, an or- ganized institution on other nights. The claque has been naturally the object of much satire. It is sup- posed to be the foundation-stone of some artistic reputations, but the fact is that when the audience do not like an act or an actor, they do not lift a hand, and the few claps from that small row of official applauders sounds a dismal knell in the silence. What a shiver the poor actor has next day when he reads in the papers, "the claque applauded en- thusiastically!" Unknown to me at the time, there was bitter op- position in certain quarters to my engagement, as a foreigner, at the national theater. A few mo- ments before I made my first entrance in the first act, I was informed that menacing letters had been sent to the managers, and one of the managers came to say to me that if any uproar occurred in the au- ditorium, I should not be alarmed, but remain quietly wherever I chanced to be on the stage, and that the curtain would be rung down. It can be imagined how my heart beat as my entrance cue drew nearer. I turned to the two actors who were supposed to enter just after me— we were all supposed to be ascending a staircase — and said: "I am going to tell you a funny story, while we 274. THE IMPORTANT ACT WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO ATTAIN A CLIMAX OF THOROUGH SUCCESS PHASES OF PARIS LIFE are still unseen on the staircase. Answer me any- thing you like. Let us all talk together at once, and laugh if we can. Let us not see the audience as we come on." "Count on us," they said, and I began at once to tell them the most comic American story I could think of. We all came on the stage laughing and talk- ing, I with my back to the audience as I finished what I was saying in the doorway. It was certainly "natural," and helped me control my thumping heart to some extent. It obviated the necessity of receiving applause at the entrance or making pain- fully apparent the absence of it. By the best of good luck, my scene came at the end of the first act, and was both brilliant and deeply human, a continual play of contrasts. I believe there was no greeting hand of applause at my entrance, but midway through my scene I had to say something that was as light as gossamer, but curiously tragic in depth; comic on the surface, tragic in the deeps. At rehearsal the author had said, "You strike a true note there; but the instant is so slight, they [meaning the public] may not per- ceive it." However, as soon as I had uttered the words in question, I felt a flutter of response, fol- lowed instantly like a clap of thunder after light- ning by a tremendous dash of applause throughout the entire audience, sharp, clear, and instantly cut short with perfect and exquisite silence, permitting me to go forward without any interruption of the 277 PLEASURES AND PALACES character. I mention this small incident not only because from that moment the managers and all present felt that my ground was won, but because that outright and unstinted response from an au- dience not well disposed toward me at the start showed the French characteristic of swift, almost involuntary, recognition of artistic value sweeping away any untoward preconception. The important act — the one I had been allowed to plan, and in which I was on the stage from the rise of the curtain to its fall — was fortunate enough to attain a climax of thorough success. When the curtain was down, the stage, the foyers, and all the corridors at the back of the theater were thronged from the auditorium, which the entire au- dience appeared to have emptied, pressing toward my room to tell me that I had triumphed in Paris. The marquise and Mme. Germaine stood at my door and presented the persons to me. The first words I heard from the jamming corridor were, "Let me be the first to offer my hand. I am Sir H. Camp- bell Clark, Paris editor of the London 'Daily Tele- graph.' " Then came a host of "all Paris." The critics were all strangers to me, — I had never set eyes on one of them before,' — but the entire Paris press without exception, I believe, praised my work. Among those present was Whistler, who, after ex- pressing himself concerning my acting, said he thought my white satin dress the most beautiful gown he had ever seen both in line and recognition of texture-value. I had designed it to suggest an 278 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE inverted lily, with its vertical ridges incrusted with dew-like crystals, and wore no other ornaments whatever, the upper part of the bodice being of old lace. Lecpnte de l'lsle, who had only seen me rehearse in classical tragedy, — Racine and Cor* neille, — had not been able to imagine me in a modern part. He said it made him quite unhappy, and puz- zled him to see me acting that role. I told him that when actors impersonate evil characters, it is criti- cism or pity; when they portray the grand souls, it is worship. I soon began rehearsing Hermione in Racine's "Andromaque." That role was the most difficult and the most interesting study of my stage experi- ence, with the exception of "Lady Macbeth," which I played after my return to England from Paris. Hermione was to be my last stage effort in the French tongue, and I desired to make the compre- hensive and final studies of that great part in soli- tude and in some spot where I could walk in the for- est or among the hills. Mme. Germaine Le Mulier and I went to Arcachon for that purpose, where the pines planted by Napoleon I and Napoleon III to reclaim the vast shifting sand-dunes of the Landes form far-stretching forests of aromatic fragrance and beauty. We went to live in a convent — a con- vent of original characteristics. It was a big, square pine structure, as fresh as if new, that had been built by the famous atheist, the geographer Reclus. The few rooms were very spacious, with high ceilings, full of air and light on all sides, The #79 PLEASURES AND PALACES sun streamed in through its long, wide windows, sifting through the tall pines. My own windows looked east and north. There was no proper garden about the house, though to the wild flowers growing in the clean sweet sand had been added clumps and patches of old-fashioned garden blossoms, which were left hap- hazard here and there, reverting to the style of their little wild companions amid furze and gorse and bracken. There were no other guests at the con- vent till near the end of our long stay, when a mother arrived with her beautiful young daughter, who was dying of a broken heart. Her fiance had been killed on the eve of their marriage, and she simply faded out of existence, as she desired to do, believing that she would find her beloved in the beyond. Mme. Le Mulier and I used to spend the main part of the day far out among the pines, sometimes on a hillside near the sea, where often, as the day fell, we used to look down and see a man walking along the edge of the waters playing to them on a clarionette, evidently enjoying the wonderful echoes which the waves gave back. One night at Arcachon I dreamed that the old marquise, who had died shortly before we left Paris, came to me, smiling and caressing me with great sweetness of speech, pleading with me to render her a great service; and when I gave her my promise, she kept on insisting and saying, "But I am afraid you will forget ; and you won't think of it seriously. 280 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE But, oh, do, do promise me, my dearest, dearest Eleanore!" "Only tell me what it is and I will do it," I said. "I promise you." "I want you to lend me two francs," was her answer. Just as it might have been in waking-time, I laughed and replied: "Why, I will lend you ten francs." But she kept on: "No, no, just two francs, no more." Then, looking a little piteous, she insisted once again, "But, oh, don't forget!" "What shall I do with the two francs?" I asked her, suddenly realizing that it was a dream. She said: "Ask Germaine; she will understand." The next morning, while the charming little nuns were fluttering about the breakfast table in the sun- shine, bringing us the most delicious things to eat, which they had prepared with their own hands, I told my dream. It brought every one to a pause. Madame Germaine began to catch her breath in sharp sighs. The nuns panted as they listened. When I had finished, I handed the two francs to Mme. Le Mulier, who said: "Two francs, the price of a mass. She knew I would understand, dear maman!" The following morning, at early daybreak, I awoke as my door leading into the wide corridor on the landing of the stairway was softly opened and left ajar by one of the nuns, who evidently did not 281 PLEASURES AND PALACES know whether I still slept or not. As I lay there, seeing the east brighten and redden past the pines through my great open window, the low chanting of a mass was heard through the partly closed door. The celebrants were priests from the famous cath- olic boys' school from over the ridge in the town of Arcachon. Some of those ecclesiastics came to call on us sev- eral times during our stay, and we visited their mag- nificent school. One of them seemed to me one of the simplest and finest characters I had ever met. Another of them, the head of the school, had been, I was told, a prince in the world. He was a man of exquisite culture and manner; I used to enjoy the conversations with him exceedingly. He made some pithy remarks about vanity in dress. My clothes were generally severe in line and quiet and uniform in tone, but I always liked to have dainty silken linings. In answer to his contentions, I told him that to dress beautifully meant simply showing appreciation of the beauty God had made; in fact, that a beautiful gown was a paean of praise. The fancy amused him, and the next time I saw him, on the occasion of our visit to his college, he very subtly smiled as he pointed to the white silk, sprinkled with tiny pale rosebuds which lined my white woolen jacket, and said, "Fermettez — moi, Mademoiselle, df admirer ce beau cantique." (Allow me to admire this beautiful "hymn!") During our stay at the convent my study was Strenuous, its main object being Hermione. I PHASES OF PARIS LIFE worked out a scheme for the classical staging of the whole play of "Andromaque," in which that char- acter occurs. It was to represent a Homeric scene and costumes, using the Schliemann finds, and the paintings on the early Greek vases in the Louvre that the famous archaeologist, Dr. Heuzey, keeper of those precious objects, which are not on view to the general public, allowed me to inspect. He also gave me most valuable assistance in the realization of my plan. Under his instruction the necessary drawings were made for my use by archaeological experts. "The play 's the thing," and the acting of it is, of course, the player's chief preoccupation in regard to a public presentation of these great masterpieces. Still, there is a distinct sense of harmony conveyed by the perfection and appropriateness of the non- essential details, such as scenery and costume. My stage-setting, which reconstituted an old Greek room, was one stone chamber of moderate dimen- sions, having an open doorway of ordinary size showing the sunlit blue sea almost lapping the threshold, and another small door in the wall to the spectator's right. There was a single seat copied from the antique, placed rather to the right of the center-line of the room. That seat, which was large enough to accommodate two persons, repre- sented a greenish gray marble, roughly and slightly sculptured on the solid front and along the back. It was without arms. The costumes, drawn from vase-paintings, supposed to represent the Mycen- 283 PLEASURES AND PALACES jean Age, were also severe, but beautiful. One of them, taken from a vase belonging to Germany, was a pale greenish blue, and the silken material of it was brought from the far Orient, while from mid- Asia came the stuff of the other dress, which was of thick, soft linen, ivory-colored with age and as sup- ple as silk. Hermione, it must be remembered, was supposed to be the daughter of Helen of Troy. This dress was narrow, heavily embroidered at the bottom, which touched the floor, the tops doubled back flatly, biblike, front and back, after the fashion of that early age. Those bibs were embroidered in colors and gold, copied from archaic paintings, representing a sacrifice to the gods and a hunt after wild animals. With both dresses plain draperies of the same materials were worn, and the very few gestures made in acting the play, modified the folds of these draperies, harmonizing with the sense of the accompanying words, suggestive of a series of classical figures or statues. The actors cast for the parts were chosen partly from the Theatre Francais and partly from the Odeon. Paul Mounet- Sully played the love-mad Orestes. At my request the Andromaque was a younger actress who interested me not only be- cause of her fine work, but because I had acciden- tally become aware of a circumstance connected with her affairs which proved her to possess a proud ideal of life and a truly admirable character. As before stated, the lady who, during most of the time, rehearsed the part of Hermione's suivante, Marie ELEANOR CALHOUN AS ' HERMIONE PHASES OF PARIS LIFE Laurent, had as a young girl played the part with Rachel. She was at the last prevented by illness from appearing in the part with me, but it was per- fectly taken by another actress of the Francais. The two brothers, Mounet-Sully, the special glo- ries of the Theatre Francais in the great roles of classical tragedy and the poetical drama, are per- sonalities that, as actors and as men, could form the fruitful subjects of a book. Lovable, unaffected, modest, the one deeply dreamy, the other more bronze-like, they belong to staunch old Huguenot stock. "Our grandmother," they said, "sentait le bucher" meaning, "made you think of the days when men burned one another at the stake for the love of God." These brothers had married sisters of Italian origin, occupying two neighboring floors in the same house, and there was simple, homely poetry in their intimate domestic lives. The two children of the elder were both at one fell blow swept away within a few hours by diphtheria, a sorrow which imparts to that actor's scene with the two little children in the "CEdipus" of Sophocles, a depth of tragedy that carries the beholder to the confines of human endur- ance of grief. There is in Paul Mounet-Sully's embodiment of the great classical characters something of the same impression as that conveyed by an antique bronze of Hellas. The feeling inspired by the acting of these two men in their highest moments of attainment is awe-inspiring and purifying to the spirit, thus ful- 287 PLEASURES AND PALACES filling the aim of tragedy. Paul Mounet's one child, a daughter, so strong and handsome that, since growing up to young girlhood, she has been awarded a prize for beauty and perfection of form, used as a little thing of ten or twelve to go about with a big Bible in her arms; and her heart was so full of hu- man love and heavenly worship that her one ambi- tion, as she informed me, was to marry a missionary when she grew up. Paul Mounet could wear mod- ern dress with a certain amount of ease, but the first time I spent an evening at the home of the Mounet- Sullys I could hardly refrain from laughing at the incongruous figure of the elder brother in modern attire. His whole life, as the public has seen him, has been passed in guises of Greek and Roman dress, and in the poetical garb of princely knight or troubadour. He inquired as to my opinion of his Hamlet (in French). I told him I thought his only mistake was to suppose that the play is about a man seeking to avenge a murdered father. It was supposed that, with the exception of his brother, Paul Mounet-Sully, who, at this writing, is winning added renown as Macbeth at the Fran- cais, was the only classical actor in Paris having suf- ficient authority to play the role of Orestes in "An- dromaque." Hermione, it was said, had not been played in Paris by any famous actress, not even Sa- rah Bernhardt, since Rachel. The play is founded on fundamental characteristics of human nature. In it the author depicts the power and ravages of 288 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE the primal passions of love and hate, of jealousy and pride, and also satirizes traits that are parts of the common heritage, exposing certain depths of nature by a keen and often bitter psychology, his means of reflecting the ancient sense of fate. For, with all its classic intention, this play, like others of Racine, belongs to an age ahead of itself — to the period of psychological analysis rather than to antiquity. It is modern method and conclusion in a mask of clas- sic mold. These plays have been called pseudo- classic, yet, it seems to me, that the word "classic," as referring to means of expression, can be applied rightly to them and to the masterpieces of Corneille, in that they achieve a reserve and purity of form, a severity of medium, such as alone possesses the bronze and marble strength to contain the fiercest fires of the human soul. The more stupendous the emotion or idea to be conveyed by art — the actor's art, not less than the poet's and the sculptor's — the more must that art be reserved and reposeful, the more severe in structure and the more indestruc- tible in material must be the means and medium of expression. The entirely unutterable and incon- ceivable can be expressed only by the static, the cen- tral source of classic might. In Hermione love is potentially half-hate, and her hate of Pyrrhus is love. Her being is flame-swept under the power of either, and both at once. The war of these elements, if conceived in any other than the classic vein, or interpreted by any other than classic means, would degenerate into hysterical nerve crisis, representing 289 PLEASURES AND PALACES only the local and ephemeral markings of human nature, but not portraying or suggesting man's im- mortal attributes, — the summits of his capacity for grief and bliss, themselves doors to the infinite. In exposition of this principle, the Shaksperian trag- edies and .their heroes, Hamlet, Lear, Lady Mac- beth, stand side by side with the creations of iEschy- lus and Sophocles. Hermione, this French Home- rian princess of the seventeeth century, already po- tential of the twentieth, never ceases to be human to the uttermost, not even in those involuntary and unconscious perfidies of nature, more to be feared, more relentless and deaf to pity, than any that ever enter with deliberate resolve into the heart of man or woman. At one of the last rehearsals for Hermione, on the stage of the Francais, I suddenly felt as if a battle- ax had cleft my skull in two. The world turned black ; the actors rushed forward to prevent me from falling. Mme. Le Mulier cried out, "What 's the matter, child? You are as white as death!" and her arms were about me in an instant. They put me into a carriage, and she took me home, put me to bed, and sent for a doctor. For several hours I hardly knew what was going on. I had been stricken with a terrible fever, which the doctor watched, trying to discover its nature. By the next morning all the symptoms of small- pox were apparent. As the doctor informed me of the truth, saying that Paris was at that time full of the disease, and I saw Mme. Le Mulier and my 290 HUDSON MAXIM AT LAKE HOPATCOXG With Stevnn and Doushan Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich PHASES OF PARIS LIFE little sisters of France about my bed, I remem- bered vaguely that they were "old-fashioned" and had never been vaccinated, as I had heard them say. I implored them to leave the room at once and have me conveyed to a hospital. Mme. Le Mulier, with the quiet force of a general on the field, simply an- swered: "My child, you are here in my house. I and your little sisters of France will take care of you, confid- ing in the goodness of God. Make no resistance; there is no more to be said." I was half out of my mind. The instant I was alone, I prayed one prayer with all the senses I could summon. I asked that my friends might not take the contagion, and for myself said, that if my time had come to go, well and good; but that if I had yet to live in this world, I begged that I might not be scarred by the dread malady. Then I re- laxed into quiescence with whatever should come. I heard the family, day after day, night after night, praying for me in the adjoining room. They took sole care of me. Marie, moving softly in the dark- ened chamber, lighted by a candle that stood behind a screen, came in and out, attending to every odious duty like a tender saint. Every morning persons from the municipality came to my door with a sealed bag in which they brought fresh sterilized linen sheets, pillow-cases, serviettes^ and all other neces- sary pieces and garments, and carried away that which had been twenty-four hours in my room. Daily, Marie wiped over the bedstead and the PLEASURES AND PALACES whole room with cloths moistened in a disinfect- ant. The doctor said he had never known a case so wonderfully nursed. I cannot say I had faith my prayer would be answered. My thought was, "It will be strange if it is answered." As the malady progressed, especially at a stage particularly alarm- ing from the point of view of the skin's appearance, when it seemed almost incredible that one could again ever look like a human being, my thought was, "Of course He could change every essence of my be- ing, yet it will be strange if He answers my prayer — a strange thing." After the end of the mal- ady, by swift degrees, smoothness came. It was astounding. In a short time the redness, too, was gone, and my skin became normal, only clearer than before. When I realized that my prayer had been answered, that a thought of mine had certainly reached the divine source of existence and met re- sponse, my soul was flooded with a sense of a sweet awe beyond words to express. As I had been kept on next to no rations, I was very thin for some time, until potatoes and cream had restored to me most of my former weight. Within about three days after I was going about, the rehearsals of "Andro- maque" were resumed at the Odeon. I was very weak; the water streamed from every pore of my body, and driving home in that heated condition, I caught a violent cold, suffered a complete loss of voice, and was told by the doctor that I must post- pone any further efforts until strength was entirely 294 PHASES OF PARIS LIFE reestablished. Again I sought the pines of Arca- chon — staying that time with the sister-in-law of Madame Waddington's stepson. On my return to Paris, several weeks afterward, in June, the Odeon had closed its doors for the sea- son, but "Andromaque" was given at the Comedie Parisienne, with the players of the Odeon and of the Comedie Francaise, as had originally been planned, the French Government granting special permission for members of the Francois to act in another house in Paris than the national theater. So that, before returning to England, as I had de- cided to do, I had the satisfaction of acting the great part of Hermione with that illustrious collabora- tion. There was a magnificent audience representative of the great world of politics, art, literature, and so- ciety. Every seat in the house had been sold in ad- vance, which caused something in the nature of a riot by persons vainly trying to obtain places at the hour of the performance. All went well. Toward the close of the great act which ends the tragedy, after Hermione. turns in despairing wrath on Ores- tes, cursing him for fulfilling her commands to kill PyrrhuSj given in a moment of vengeful wildness, she rushes from the stage to hurl herself into eter- nity, leaving Orestes amazed and on the verge of the madness which presently overwhelms him. At my exit from the stage the theater was filled with an uproar of applause that did not abate during at least ten minutes. Then the stage-manager came to 295 PLEASURES AND PALACES fetch me, saying that I must return to the stage, as the audience was still shouting for me. I re- fused point-blank to do anything so dreadful while the act was still in progress (especially when the character I was impersonating was supposed to be already half-way across the Styx!). But I was finally forced actually to show myself in the open doorway against the sea. I did so by letting Hermione be seen an instant in profile only, gliding past like a ghost, her face and head, which were averted, being entirely shrouded and veiled in the long draperies. Meanwhile Orestes (Paul Mounet- Sully) had stood motionless, as if struck to stone, from the time of my exit, and after that strange call for Hermione was finally ended, he went on with his great scene, not having "let it down" an iota. During the applause and excitement in the theater, in the entre-acte M. Laugier, one of the distin- guished members of the Comedie Francaise, who was in the audience, arose and made an impassioned speech to the people, which was in fact a eulogy of my performance. Among incidents of my experience which I cher- ish with pleasure and pride, was the official visit of the minister of fine arts, who conveyed to me the congratulations of the French Government, ex- pressed not only to me, but to my country, on my achievements in France. CHAPTER V "lady macbeth" at Stratford-on-avon ON the occasion of my first visit to Stratford-on- Avon, where my sister Virginia and I went as sight-seers, the place was shown to us by that famous old Shakespearian critic, poet himself, William Winter, whose lifelong anathema against the ugly and sordid appears to have been based upon his wor- ship of the glory and grandeur, which have be- longed not alone to Greece and Rome, but which in our modern age shine to the world from the banks of Sweet Avon. As we walked down the quaint street toward Shakespeare's house, a boy, after pennies, ran around us, holding up his hand for the coin, and re- peating: "Show you the house, sir? show you the house, sir?" I asked whose house. "His house," the boy answered. "Who?" "He — he," the boy answered again. "What did he do in that house?" I asked. "He was bornded in it." "But what else did he do?" "He was bornded there." And that was all his 297 PLEASURES AND PALACES store and all his lore, for not another idea did he have. I can imagine no more thrilling experience to one who, as it were, learned to read out of Shakespeare and to whom his mind has always been a part of this world, than to stand at his tomb at Stratford-on- Avon, visit the house where he grew up, see the room where he first saw the light, pass through the door he passed through, look upon all that remains of his environment — the school-room where he got his little Latin and less Greek, the quaint cottage in its old- fashioned gardens where he wooed his wife, the bed he slept in, the chimney-corner, and the wooden seat in it, where he must have sat, the big family Bible in that house which he probably had opened, — which, as the old, old woman, still tall and bright-eyed when we were there, a descendant of the Hatha- ways, piped out, as she showed the book to us, "It will become valuable in time through age." To come to the place where his great spirit still hovers and to be called upon to there give form and voice and visible presence to one of the most gigantic creatures of his imagination, and that before a thea- ter full of Shakespearian lovers and students, pil- grims from the four corners of the earth, no moment connected with the works of the mind could be more inspiring. That experience was mine after my re- turn to England from Paris, when I was asked to play Lady Macbeth at Stratford during memorial week. There was no regular Shakespearian theater in 298 "LADY MACBETH" London, and the production of his plays was spo- radic, depending upon the desire of actors or actresses who managed their own theaters to pro- duce one or other of the works in order to make an opportunity for themselves of portraying some parts in which they were especially interested. Thus I had no opportunity of testing my lifelong study of Lady Macbeth except on memorial occa- sions, and had only acted the part in all some seven or eight times before the Stratford-on-Avon per- formance. Power came easily to me in this role. It contin- ually grew of itself; all I had to do was to watch, to take note, and to be humble. This fateful woman, each time I beheld her, stood forth with accrued might, which she had gathered while I slept. In see- ing her I always thought of iEschylus, as well as of her Elizabethan creator. She was as tall as Cly- temnestra, and more impressive — akin to Prometheus rather. As in Hamlet, her tragedy is not in the clash of outer action, that objective, local, temporal bearing, interesting only to the police and criminal law, but is within the soul, subjective. All that per- tains to the flesh falls with the flesh, as hers is con- sumed by the imperishable one within, whom it is madness for man to offend. It is the "pale she- hounds of hell" that gnaw her bones — the Erinyes; that drain her dry of all joy and, finally, of life itself. Even her love for Macbeth and his for her is sickened o'er and lies in blight, through the mutual, murderous knowledge that binds them already in 299 PLEASURES AND PALACES the circle of lost souls, that divides their eyes from each other, causes the king "to keep alone," and fills the queen with moan uttered only to herself as she wanders through the empty world of her royal castle : "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content." In my rendition of that small fragment of a scene, like a straw on the waters showing how life's river flows, Macbeth and the queen move slowly, grief- freighted, stand apart, the sweetness gone from touch of hands that do not meet, and from eyelids that droop to cover eyes that cannot hear to look and see through the other's eyes the measureless des- olation that lies within those windows of the soul. As they stand so, with averted heads and bodies, the words they murmur are the old words. Mac- beth even uses a pet term of endearment, — "my dearest chuck," — but the words are dead — as dead men on a field. So crime slays the assassin. I doubt if any one devoid of a sharp sense of hu- mor is capable of writing or acting tragedy, just as the true comic writer or actor is generally found to possess a keen sense of the tragic, for is not tragedy itself a kind of high, dark comedy of some somber, inscrutable gods? There is in "Macbeth" almost a kind of grim, ex- alted comedy, such as Balzac meant in his expres- sion, "La Comedie Hutnaine" where pity, too, has place. In the tragic poem of Macbeth, amid the 300 "LADY MACBETH" strains of dirge for human frailty, amid the clamour of swords and shields resound harsh notes like clash of strange wits, echoing the vanity of successful wrongdoing, the vain, outrageous arrogance of the taker of life. Hecate prophetically flames this strident ridicule across the murky sky in the short sharp measure of her exultant words that ring with demon's scorn and ironic laugh, ending: "And we all know, security Is mortal's chief est enemy!" If I had ever played Lady Macbeth in an ideal production of the piece, guided wholly by myself, I should have taken the part of Hecate, too, though in complete disguise. I cannot explain the value of this point, but it is clear to my inner soul. It has something to do with the identification of the spirit by which Lady Macbeth is possessed in answer to her invocation of that obsession in the hour when, drunk with ambition, she asks and obtains a tem- porary extension of the faculties, by which, in that intoxication of the imagination, she overleaps and overrides everything in her path. I think Shake- speare means her to be drunk in the murder hour; that is, drunk with ambition and the pictured great- ness of the crown for Macbeth and herself. I think, too, he makes it clear that her mental exaltation in the hour of the deed is still further raised to the ut- most pitch by a "wee drappie of the craythur," which sent the king's guards into heavy sleep. For hear her say, as if the eye of her soul were swollen by 301 PLEASURES AND PALACES deadly nightshade, and in the spirit of scornful Hecate: "That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold, What hath quenched them, hath given me fire !" I used to enter the scene with a golden goblet in my hand. Only when the deed is done, and Hecate has rid- den away across the moon, does that fire begin to fall back out of her veins and the cold reality come down like snow — like an ice-wind from the frozen world. Then, because she was in verity great, a proud and royal soul, the glorious palaced realms of the self-intoxicated mind utterly vanish and are gone, flown like witches in the night, and simple hu- man truth remains, and takes her by all its bitter stony way down to the tomb. This performance of Lady Macbeth at Stratf ord- on-Avon was to be the last impressive moment which the stage was to give me, though at the time I was ignorant of that fact. The first of the few scattered occasions when I had an opportunity of embodying this great role was at Mr. Mulholland's Camberwell Theater, where, during a memorial week, I acted the part three or four consecutive times. I had designed my cos- tumes for Lady Macbeth from illuminations on an- cient scrolls in the Royal College of Arms, the Windsor Herald, Mr. Lindsay, and Mr. Lee, then Blue-Mantle Pursuivant, both aided me in the mat- ter. Through Mr. Lee's kindness, I obtained a 303 "LADY MACBETH" large drawing of the earliest heraldic form of the royal Scottish lion, and Lady Macbeih's royal man- tle, reproducing that escutcheon, was cloth of gold "or" covered completely with the gigantic creature in "gules" — red. The lining also was crimson of another shade. The dress was dull white, in long, clinging medieval lines overstrewn with golden fleur-de-lys of ancient pattern and edged with mini- ver. The stomacher was a richly embroidered jewel of amethysts and emeralds and the Scottish yellow stone in conventional design of the thistle. The crown, over the dark bunched hair, was a band of gold, with a single large, upstanding golden fleur- de-lys in front, taking root from a single large ruby. Upstanding at the sides of the band were wings, somewhat like those on Macbeih's helmet, the whole crown made like beaten gold. On the second evening the audience continued their applause abnormally after the scene of som- nambulism. The same intensity of emotion char- acterized it at each subsequent performance of the tragedy. The occurrence was similar to what had taken place in Paris, when I played Hermione. Of my Camberwell performance of Lady Mac- beth, the well-known critic, Mr. Addison Bright, wrote : "This Lady Macbeth is not modern, neither is she of the past only, but belongs to all time." Among the most valuable opinions of the work was that of the scholarly John Hay, then Ambassa- dor at the Court of St. James's. 303 PLEASURES AND PALACES I went to Stratford entirely alone, and at an hour when I could travel without finding myself with any persons who knew me, as I could not bear to be talked with on any other matter than the subject which filled my thoughts. On my arrival I shunned the hotels, which were full to overflowing with pil- grim-guests from all civilized countries. I had asked some one to find me a humble little place of lodging where I could be the sole guest. It was the house of a young carry-all driver, who plied be- tween the railway station and the hotels and took people for excursions, a little closed place just back of the church-yard walls, called Bull Street. I called it "Bulbul" Street, because in it was poetry. The neat little house was the honeymoon-home of the driver and his young wife. There was a great fireplace and hearth, and beyond that a lovely little orchard of fruit trees all in bloom. She was happy, and the place was sweet and peaceful. At the Memorial Theater the rehearsal was dis- mal, though every character was taken by a distin- guished player, such actors as Oscar Asche and his wife (Lily Brayton) acting two of the witches. I became so discouraged that I could not restrain my tears despite pride and every other obvious consid- eration. When I returned to my little lodging-place I went to sleep for two hours, but first offered up a prayer that the God who created Shakespeare and inspired him to write this great work would have mercy on me and pour the same understanding and "LADY MACBETH" spirit through my being. When I awoke I was en- tirely peaceful. That night, as the play went on from scene to scene, I found the way easy. I watched and found in it many new and potent reve- lations. I had on former occasions walked fever- ishly at one part of the sleep-walking scene, but that night I suddenly stopped and had no inclination to pace the room ; I felt that I must, instead of that, re- main where I was, without moving at all ; the power seemed to be in quietness. The idea formulated in my mind was that I must "let the scene alone"; that if I moved, I would disturb it. I made no ges- ture, took no further steps, and stood quite still for a time. I could not judge how long I stood there so, but it seemed to me a great while. The audience were as still as if they had been statues instead of people. After I left the stage at the end of the scene the dead silence in the audience continued for a full moment, then came a tremendous crash and roar of applause. When I went back that night to the little house in Bull Street, I stood in the front doorway while the young bride prepared supper for me. I felt a deep sense of calm, and as I looked at that blue, starry night, against which was silhouetted the spire and the tower of the church, mausoleum of the glorious dead, I gave thanks, and wondered, thinking of the mystery of prayer. The next day, as I passed along the streets of Stratford, many men and women who were stran- gers to me were full of emotion as they spoke to me of the previous evening; several persons wept when 305 PLEASURES AND PALACES they began to express the impression they had ex- perienced. Among those who spoke and wrote with intensity on this subject was Marie Corelli, who lives at Stratford. It was said in the press "that not in twenty years, not since the visit of Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), had Stratford-on-Avon been wrought to such a pitch of excitement" as my em- bodiment of Lady Macbeth occasioned. The emi- nent London critic Clement Scott went down to Stratford a few weeks later, and afterward wrote in his articles that he found my performance still an all- engrossing subject of general conversation in the place. My own impression of those performances of Lady Macbeth was that they indicated I might have hoped to attain great heights in the interpreta- tion should I ever have had the opportunity of play- ing the part consecutively a large number of times. These scenes are sweet memories of a time passed and gone from this life — a sealed book. 306 CHAPTER VI A NEW WORLD OP TITAL ACTION BEFORE recording the Shakespeare- Stratford- on-Avon experience, I should have mentioned several other parts that I played in England after my return from France. Peg Woffington, which I represented with a slight Irish hrogue, inserting scenes from Charles Reade's book, from which the play was dramatized. That study was full of de- light to me. Tides of ancestral Hibernian blood surged up in my veins. For the time I almost felt that I was Ireland in person; the Scotch, and French and Dutch in me were all forgotten. Ber- nard Shaw was good enough to praise my acting of the part. He said I was "so Irish that it seemed almost diabolical in one not born in Ireland." He thought, though, that the real Peg Woffington would have been something of a "sloven," which I was not. But is it not on record that great ladies of Peg's time took her for a criterion of distinction? Portia, in "The Merchant of Venice," should be mentioned, if for no other reason than to recall the exquisite and elegantly turned praise bestowed on her by Max Beerbohm; and among other roles, I acted "A Lady of Quality," by Mrs. Hodgson Bur- nett, an author beloved on both sides of the Atlantic. 307 PLEASURES AND PALACES I should also speak of the interest I took in my sister Virginia's performances with Mr. Poel's Lon- don Elizabethan Players, in Penthea, in the "Broken Heart," by Ford; Sakuntala, from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa; Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd, etc. Her work afterward bore fruit in the beautiful play based on Helen Hunt Jackson's California classic, "Ramona," which my sister wrote and played in California with great success, it being the first drama on a California subject by a native Calif or- nian author that was first produced in the land of its origin. It enshrined in words and songs and dances, in its characters and episodes, the poetry and chivalry of those early Spanish days, as well as the comedy and tragedy and religious fervor of the times, the center of which was the mission life. During discussions that raged for a while in Lon- don as to whether or not the heavy and gorgeous trappings of the modern Shakespearian revivals did not overburden the works and extinguish or deaden their inspiration, — arguments tested on the one side by Sir H. Beerbohm Tree's overwhelmingly ornate and magnificent presentations of several of the plays, and, on the other, by the same actor's per- formance of Hamlet without scenery, — I originated a plan for giving "Romeo and Juliet" in the spirit and environment of the golden youth and splendor of the Italian Renaissance, the rich after-glow of which shone fair in England, and the influence of which was all about when Shakespeare wrote his ver- sion of the great love-tale from Southern climes. 308 SISTER VIRGINIA AS RAMON A In her play of that name which she based on Helen Hunt's famous novel A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION The design was to adapt to the play's setting the full-pulsed convention of Veronese, not shrinking from any freedom of that convention. This back- ground and frame were to be, however, only inter- pretative of luminous atmosphere and in order to liberate, rather than confine, both story and passion and the author's own most gloriously wrought-out convention in the telling of it. I invented and sub- mitted to several friends, persons of authority in the land, a model for stage and style of scenery that would change almost like a dissolving view, so that the play could proceed without being split into acts. I followed the early folios, lent to me by War- wick Bond, the eminent Elizabethan scholar, and also made use of the 1623 edition. All modern re- source was to be employed to produce this splendor in simplicity. Following the text of the play, be- fore the later insertion of stage-directions, it was to show without interruption the wondrous light of all the hours from dawn to evening, to melting, magic night, when the lovers speak the music of the serena, the cadence of that hour and of the night- ingale. For in that scene Shakespeare follows the serena in cadence and intent. Then came on the dim morning twilight, when, in unison, their strained, wild hearts find utterance in the alba, their dawn song and their death, breathed passionately low in that hush before the birds awaken. These were Shakespeare's renditions of the serena and the alba, forms which, like the story of Juliet, came to 311 PLEASURES AND PALACES Elizabethan England from Italy and Spain. It is wonderful what is gained by this continuous pageant of the poem in the unlooked-for influences of the passing time, the meaning of the hours in their changing light, the unmolested evocation. So the author first recorded it on his pages. Persons of the highest rank and representative of the finest ideals of life and culture in England were interested in this formulation which I began to pre- pare. Out of this work grew another, a greater proposition; namely, to found an International Classic Theater, in which successively the master- pieces of the world, both tragedy and comedy, should be interpreted by their most famous expo- nents. Among the persons ready to help me put into the concrete form both of these conceptions was Lady Grosvenor, mother of the Duke of West- minster, a woman of peculiar charm, a poetic per- sonality, proud and pure in spirit, yet typical in the great world of what might almost be called "a worldling," if that term had not been brought down to a wholly heartless meaning. In her was exqui- site womanly sympathy and all the gracious qual- ities of a woman of the beau-monde. I name her "because I would be speaking of her," though I am not at liberty to mention some of the other person- ages interested in my plans. This international theater was to have been built in pure classic style, a white temple of beauty itself; my intention being to seek in its construction the collaboration of the world's finest sculptors, architects, and painters. It 312 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION was believed that the ground would be given for its site not far from Hyde Park Corner. My Italian Renaissance presentation of "Romeo and Juliet" aimed at drilling the most talented and handsomest young actors and actresses that could be found for the various parts, the ideal to be the speaking of the verse correctly, lightly, with its music, and with delight in the meaning and per- fection of form, as servitor of the passion and thought embodied in the play. In addition to War- . wick Bond and Watts-Dunton, other exponents of poetry and the Elizabethan Age were interested in my idea, among them Israel Golancz. That re- nowned Shakespearian and Elizabethan scholar made journeys to London to see me, and placed the rich treasure-house of his mind at my disposal. Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig Mond, lovers of art and cul- ture, and owners of the most precious, probably, of all Titian's works, his peerless "Madonna," were also among the first patrons of this project. The action on the stage was to take place within a golden frame. The varied scenes, passing like parts of a brilliant pageant, drew on all the glories of the Renaissance, yet left large, free spaces and planes where needed. There were both naivete and realism in the picture as in the Italian masterpieces; these touches of nature quaintly amusing or else deepening the scene suddenly in contrast with the elegant and conventional ceremonial. There were pages bearing torches, and others going gaily be- fore their young masters with flutes and tam- 313 PLEASURES AND PALACES bours and stringed lutes, according to the fashion of those days. In the masque at Capulefs house the music of the age was played on its own old instruments for the dances, with gay foolings of the very time. Mr. Percy Anderson, under my instructions, painted pictures for me from the old Italian master- pieces for all the costumes and characters and other paraphernalia of the epoch. Owners of the most famous tapestries allowed me to have my painter copy them. That painter, Mr. A. Dixon, was a curious genius, an unsuccessful child of the world. Business and he were twain, but he was a true artist, of exquisite feeling, could make beauty chant on the canvas, and did so for me in these tapestries. I have read the original letters written by Ruskin about his pictures, which Ruskin had seen in a Royal Academy exhibition, in which he accorded to Dixon praise that any painter would hold precious. One of the tapestries which he painted for me in colors, that were lovely by day as well as by night, was a copy of Mr. Salting's famous tapestry, drawn by Julio Romano, representing a host of little loves gathering ripe vintage from a grape-covered arbor, through which the distant landscape shows, the whole being suffused with a golden glow of sun- shine and pleasure. Mr. Salting gave me the only permission, I believe, ever granted, to have his pre- cious work copied, and a most beautiful result did Mr. Dixon obtain for me. The tragedy lost nothing of its depth and fateful 314 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION shadow by the splendor of this Renaissance sun- shine but, rather, gained by contrast, in the spirit of the author who makes Romeo, on his return in the bright morning to claim his love, express exul- tant confidence and hope. No warning instinct told the boy that even then his lady lay among the dying roses of her bier, where he soon would be. So in my designs, delight of youth, gladness in earthly beauty, or the contrivances of joyous ex- pression, the brightness and gorgeous color of life, and all the songs of the heart, were to find form in this depiction of Juliet and Romeo. In fulfilment of the main plan, a pure white temple was to arise, dedicated to all works of the theater conceived and written in the classic spirit. But all these visions and works were halted, and melted back into the vast dream of all dreams — to the place where all worlds are, before ever they come to be fire-mist or any thing the eye can see. My life one day turned differently. I met a person who talked to me of a living drama of human beings, and who put between me and my vision of the mind a picture of peoples down- trodden, almost trampled out of their individual souls, through the violation of the most primitive rights of existence, the most fundamental feelings, such as even a dog has. They were the inhabitants of old Macedonia and other parts of what was then European Turkey. And these peoples, so ground down to the dust by a ruthless foreign master, were very far by nature from the mere brute, or even 315 PLEASURES AND PALACES from the savages or barbarians, such as are still found to-day in some parts of the world. They were Greeks, — a word of inspiring import; — Bul- garians, — a word connected vaguely with some awful Turkish atrocities of which we had read at school, — but these Bulgarians, according to what this new acquaintance said, were a fine people. In another of these oppressed regions the people were Serbs ; in another Albanians, who were also working for their freedom. He told me much about the Serbs, whom I had heard of only once in a while, remotely, as the half-civilized inhabitants of a small district somewhere to the east that was generally in ferment over the domestic troubles of its rulers. For some cause or other, the press of the world at that time, and for long afterward, generally men- tioned the Serbs lightly or scornfully. These Serbs were his own people ; and though he said that liberty and justice, if it came at all, "must come to all these races equally," the people of his heart were the Serbs, and the object of his lifelong efforts was the freeing from the Turks of that part of Macedonia adjoining the southern borders of the Serb state lying between them and the JEgean Sea, known for well nigh a thousand years as Old Serbia. Its towns and rivers and mountains had borne Ser- bian names since ancient times, before ever the Turk was heard of in Europe, and its inhabitants spoke the Serb tongue, and were the descendants, miser- able and despoiled at the time when he spoke of them to me, of one of the proudest and freest 316 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION races of history. Their beautiful old churches had been desecrated and turned to vile uses, their im- perial cities, like Skoplyia (renamed by the Turks, Uskub), where the Serb Emperor Doushan was crowned, and Seres, where the same Serb ruler was first proclaimed, were wrecked and brought to deso- lation and decay. This fierce and terrible picture of actual life, where races were in peril of body and soul, had power to veil my world of dreams, to make it appear, in comparison, almost like a vanity of the imagination, and to blot it out of my heart's desire. The more I learned of these peoples, the more did their cause lay hold of my thoughts, the more did that region appear to me as the scene of the most tremendous and terrific drama of modern earth. I came to know, through my new friend, of the past of those peoples, especially of the Serbs — of the civilization they had evolved not by revolts and social revolution, but through a normal, steady development, guided by their rulers and wrought out in common accord. I discovered that they were democratic, and had always been so, having from earliest times had some form of representative gov- ernment, long before Magna Charta, and trial by jury before that institution was truly in use in Western Europe; that their institutions from of old took note of individual human dignity. I learned of their pure home ideals, of the nobility and devotion of their women, of their unaffected and natural religious conceptions, of their old ballads, betokening a highly cultural and poetic apprecia- 317 PLEASURES AND PALACES tion, of their courage, their undying national faith, through the black oppression of centuries under the Turkish yoke. Finally I learned that they alone of all European nations had never admitted slavery during the Middle Ages, when it was general else- where, but had proclaimed themselves against it even to other governments. The Serbs are to-day the only people who have avoided having a pauper class in their state; when I was led into this realm of new knowledge, I realized that this race is of distinct value to the rest of the world. They became more and more profoundly interesting to me. My marriage to that promulgator and defender of their cause came about in this way: the minister plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Serbia to Great Britain, a distinguished writer and diplomat, who had been talking with me in a crowded London room, interrupted what he was saying upon the ar- rival among the guests of a gentleman, rather slen- der and youthful in appearance, of military bear- ing, with rather light-colored hair and gray eyes. "Some British officer in 'mufti,' " I thought. The old diplomat rose, excused himself, and went to join the new-comer, whom he afterward brought up and introduced to me. In the course of our conversa- tion, Prince Lazarovich, for it was he, made the odd remark that he disliked the theater extremely, and never went to see a play. He had not caught my name and remained unaware of my identity through- out our conversation. 318 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION Wherever I went during the succeeding days, there was my new Serb acquaintance, and he talked to me as much of the time as was possible. He afterward told me he had formed almost im- mediately the purpose to annex my existence to his own. At first he talked with me only on general topics, and then began to depict with vivid force the near-Eastern conditions, his work in Macedonia, and to tell me about the Serb people. When he came later to speak personally, he frankly showed me the difficulties and peculiar trials of his own situation, hiding nothing of its hardships. The Serb Minister and his wife called and invited me to the Serb lega- tion, and told me much about Lazarovich's parents, his lineage, and of matters involving that phase of his personality. Later the Serb Minister and his wife came to pay me a formal visit of congratulation on my en- gagement to Lazarovich, and remained with me for two or three hours, during which time the diplomat made for my benefit a most brilliant expose of the political situation in central Europe as it affected Serbia and the Serb people generally. He and his wife spoke with the greatest warmth and sym- pathy. His Excellency advised me that Lazaro- vich, who was not present during the interview, ought to ally himself with Austria as the best friend of Serbia, a course which I knew was directly op- posed to Lazarovich's own ideas on the subject. The lady, on the other hand, a person of much cul- ture and intelligence, who had translated many of 319 PLEASURES AND PALACES the old Serb ballads into English, took the opposite stand, and expressed ardent belief in all of Lazaro- vich's views, including those concerning Russia. At the period of our marriage various paragraphs and articles that appeared in the British and Euro- pean press made reference to Lazarovich as a pos- sible pretender to the throne of Serbia. He finally took the occasion to answer them by writing a reply to one of these paragraphs — which appeared in the "Pall Mall Gazette" in October, 1903, I think — in which he made a simple and direct statement under his signature, naming the nature and specific objects of his ambitions and efforts; namely, to drive the Turk out of Europe!, so freeing the old Serb lands, and to work for the unification of the whole Serb nation and its territories into one great state. He also distinctly stated that his endeavours and desires were in no way aimed at disturbing the peace of the Karageorges or any other Serb ruler. Since early manhood Lazarovich's thoughts and efforts had been bound up in the Macedonian work, Serb unification interests, and the development by all possible means of the idea of a Balkan league to include all the Balkan States. He believed that such united strength would be their only hope for individual and collective development and the power to escape from their position as pawns of the great powers and objects of their ambitions of conquest. Indeed, he had come to England for the purpose of promulgating those ideas. Lazarovich had also deeply at heart the plan for a commercial water- 330 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION way to be formed of the Morava and Vardar rivers, connecting the Danube and the iEgean Sea, open- ing up a short route between the North Sea and the Suez, giving Serb lands economical freedom and power of development. That canal project he has, since our marriage, been able to put under way. His ambitions were concerned with these plans alone, quite enough to fill the lifetime of any man, and had nothing whatever to do with political schemes involving Belgrade. He looked upon such suggestions, indeed, as petty and mischievous and strongly inimical to the possible success of his work. Before consenting to marry Lazarovich, who was a widower, I felt I must make the acquaintance of his three small children, and for that purpose I went down to the country, Lazarovich remaining in town. On my arrival at the railway-station, by chance I crossed the platform lower than the building, find- ing myself immediately in the place where the car- riages were drawn up, thus missing the governess, who was at that moment looking for me in the com- partments of the train. I came out just opposite an open carriage in which sat two little fellows about five or six years old in white canvas Russian blouses, with black belts and high top-boots, beside a dark-eyed little lady aged three or four. I recog- nized them at once from their photographs, and went and leaned against the side of the carriage and looked at them. They, too, looked at me, each in his or her own species of intensity. Their eyes seemed to search out my very soul; then with a 321 PLEASURES AND PALACES sudden common impulse they all rushed at me, and threw their arms about my neck. It was one of the sweetest things that could ever happen. From that moment to this we have always understood one an- other. One morning in early June, 1903, at about six o'clock, I was awakened by my dear friend, Sevilla Ford, who came to tell me that her husband, I. N. Ford, London editor of the "New York Tribune," had received a European telegram saying that the whole royal family of Serbia had been assassinated at Belgrade during the night. Mr. Ford was anx- ious to have Lazarovich's address and see him at once. I hurriedly dressed and took a hansom cab to his hotel, and had him called up. During the next ten days I became acquainted with the astonishing ways and manners of the politi- cal adversaries of a man with the potential relation to a country's affairs such as that which the accident of birth and personal endowment had bestowed upon Lazarovich. There were certain chancelleries and diplomatic representatives involved in these procedures, some of which were direct and bold, and others underhand, all amazing experiences to me. I realized what it was to become the center of intrigue. However, if some of these dealings were disagreeable and menacing, others were less unpleasantly eventful, and were suggestive by im- plication of considerations of import such as had not before then entered into my life. On account of these intrigues, which became very 322 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION active immediately after the Belgrade assassina- tions, Lazarovich urged that our wedding should take place at once and as quietly as possible. In accordance with his desire, we were married by the Bishop of London's special licence at St. Mar- garet's, Westminster, in the presence only of several friends as witnesses, who were summoned by mes- senger on the same morning. One of these, Lady St. Helier, was just getting into her carriage, she said, when our messenger arrived, and her coach- man was surprised to hear her change the orders to "Drive to St. Margaret's, Westminster." I had no time for the preparation of a wedding- dress, but I chanced to possess a gown of a unique character and history, and I wore that in this im- promptu ceremony. Though simple, it was exqui- site and rare, hand-spun, of the finest silken film that the earth can weave, moon-white, embroidered at the edge with delicate traceries of gold and threads of black in a design of antique geometric scrolls, and with sacred words of the Orient invoca- tive of blessing upon its wearer. It had been woven, as part of a nation's love-gift for a great em- press — Queen Victoria — by the fingers of young Hindu girls in far India. The fates wove it, too, for me, as it would appear, for it came as a gift to me, and was never worn by any other person. This tissue of "woven moon-beams," as the same fabric is referred to by Kalidasa, the ancient Sanscrit poet and dramatist, has always, since far antiquity, been woven with consecrated ceremony by young Indian 323 PLEASURES AND PALACES maidens for the nuptial garments of royal Hindu brides. I saw many persons from the Balkans connected with my husband's Macedonian business, but my very first intimate initiation into their inner mode of feeling, my first view of their hearts laid bare, was on the occasion of a dinner, a veritable banquet which was prepared and given in our honor by some Albanians, whose other guests were Serbs from Old Serbia in Macedonia, and Greeks, also from the lands then still in Turkish thrall. I had already been at the beautiful house of Prince Aladro-Castriota in Paris, a descendant of the great Albanian Skender-Beg. There, inciden- tally, I had observed on a mantelpiece a photograph of the Austrian foreign minister, Count Goluchow- sky, inscribed to his "dear friend, Prince Aladro- Castriota." But these London Albanians, in exile for deeds of insurrection against Turkey, descend- ants of an old noble Albanian family, the Goulyias, were in London just prosperous restaurant-keepers in the busiest quarter of the business region of the city, where they called themselves "Precha," dis- daining to use their old name of "Goulyia" in their catering business. The feast to us was not given in their restaurant, but at Wimbledon, where they had a house. We were asked for twelve o'clock, and sat down to table at about one, the intervening time being used in conversation among the men, with whom my husband talked in a language I did not under- A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION stand. The lady of the house, meanwhile, opened chestfuls of wonderful things from their homeland for my inspection. There were dresses, picturesque costumes embroidered in gold and silver, some of them studded here and there with fine coral and pearls, fine, thin stuffs embroidered in colors; and wonderful linens, all hand-woven and hand-em- broidered by herself and the members, or friends, of her family in Albania. There were also beauti- fully wrought jewels, clasps, buckles, bracelets, and necklets of filigree or beaten metals; enchasing un- cut stones and coral; and there were some odd talis- mans the powers of which she declared to me. She spoke in a precarious English, and I was never sure whether my own words conveyed my meaning, or the reverse, or some other thing altogether; for sev- eral times I was surprised, though pleased, to see the unusual effect of some simple remark of mine. I wished I could know just what it was that I was saying to her. When we went down to the dining-room, we found the most marvelous repast it has ever been my lot to partake of, and the most delicious, if I except the quail, eaten with a little salt and dry bread, which we used to roast on long, green oak- branches in the coals of some burning fallen tree out in the woods in the mountain days of child- hood. This Albanian family had killed the animals and fowls expressly for the feast, beginning two days earlier, and preparing every dish of it themselves. 325 PLEASURES AND PALACES There was a young kid, — roasted or barbecued, I could not say which,- — but it possessed a delicious flavor not met with on any table in our Western world. The chickens, too, tasted as no chickens had ever tasted since childhood's wholesome days. The vegetables were fresh and savory, and the various fruits and great cakes and enormous confections of apples and plums and cream were the lightest and the most melting dainties I ever ate. There was, too, the famous meat dish, tjebab, and the sweet- meat Baklava, a honeyed sugar-puff, browned in un- salted butter, not to mention lesser goodies and wines. Munich beer was also served, and fragrant coffee, made at the time of serving in a brass Balkan coffee-kettle. In their hearty hospitality they in- sisted on our eating something of every dish. It was almost an impossibility, but considering the spirit in which they had prepared the feast, and the words of good wishes, and the hope in Lazarovich's work which went with every lifting of a wine-glass, we could not refuse. When they discovered after the repast that we were intending to catch a certain train back to town, they were inconsolable and fell to mourning. They had expected us to stay all day and "make a night of it," in the heroic fashion of their country. We had important engagements in town, and had to return, but they all accompanied us to the railway station, and seeing the tears in their eyes and some- thing like a tragedy in their feelings, almost as if the Turks had swooped down upon one of their vil- 326 LAZAROVICH-HREBELIANOVICH A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION lages and burned it to the ground, we yielded to their entreaties to return in the evening. We ar- rived, to find them at the station waiting for us at half -past seven, happy that we had returned to the feast. As the hours went by, I understood how great a loss it would have been to have missed that second part of the day. At about nine o'clock a further contingent of Macedonian-Serbs, Greeks, and Al- banians came in. I was told the meaning of the words, and heard songs of soul's wail and menace such as I had never heard before, and saw dances that justified the expression, "curdled the blood." These dances were expressions of sly and savage reprisal, ending with a low, scythe-movement, a mowing gesture, with looks of demoniac glee and piteous baring of strained, pinched souls. These songs were heartrending beyond all power to depict in words. They recounted intimate domestic catas- trophe — the love, shattered and slain, the tears and murmurs for wife and innocent babe, the shame for the beloved, the wild sworn vengeance, the help- lessness, the long, long hatred of the oppressor, bred and in-bred until every power and faculty of mind and body and spirit seemed to be centered, shriveled up and withered in that thought alone, perished away in all but that sullen, single notion and image of revenge. In these songs there were always plain- tive echoes, as if from over the hills, far-heard minor cadences lapsing into sudden discordant and strange endings, seeming to moan, "Oh, the pity of it! the 329 PLEASURES AND PALACES pity of it! Pity for the lost souls, for the dead souls!" I sat and sobbed and sobbed, unable utterly to re- strain my tears. I understood that the centuries- long murder in that old peninsula was not alone in spilt blood and burned homes, but in the gradual wreckage and eternal destruction and desolation of human souls. The men chanted or wailed out a ballad of Kos- sovo, from the cycle of songs called "Lazaritza," taught from generation to generation, and repeated in every Serbian home day after day, uttering the old faith that after five hundred years the Serbs would come again to Kossovo and free the old lands from the Turks. That night Serbs, Greeks, Al- banians, all men of Macedonia, said that freedom must come soon, for the five hundred years were now ended. A small trait of character such as I had not be- fore observed in any other people was manifested in the Albanian, our host, who there among his peo- ple, telling of old hill fights against the Turks, was changed in the whole aspect of his being. The commonplace restaurant-keeper in him disap- peared, and in his place was a soldier, erect, alert, daring, using straight, short words, projecting a power of pride — a man to fear and trust and to be led by. It was a stranger and more impressive metamorphosis than that my mother and I had sev- eral years previously witnessed in Parnell the day in Sir George Lewis's office. 330 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION Not long ago remembrance of that Albanian evening came vividly back to me, with its impres- sions of mental and spiritual devastation, the starved lives, the battered, beaten remains of once proud races, when a Serb soldier, returning to New York at the close of the recent wars, came to tell me that he had fulfiled a request I had made when he bade us good-by in going over, which was to stick for me a tiny Serb flag, which I had given him, in the reconquered earth of Kossovo battlefield. He told me he had done so, and told me where, of his own accord, he had also planted there three young pine-trees (my name in Serb is the same as the word for pine-tree). This soldier, an unedu- cated man, in giving us an account, in his own man- ner of speech, of the people's delirious joy at finding themselves the free owners of the lands of their forefathers, and in possession of their old cities and their old churches, the ruins of which they reconse- crated and in them returned praise to God, said: "No one can imagine their joy. Even the little new graves of the soldiers are happy." That sense of eternality in the Serbs was strange, as was, too, their centering of Serb love and hopes in old Kosovo, the tomb of the ancient empire, and their steady watching for the national resurrection morn. A breath of that poignant romance exhales from old papers, handed down during centuries from father to son in the Lazarovich family, referring to a hidden treasure belonging to them. At the time of 331 PLEASURES AND PALACES the Turkish invasion, about five hundred years ago, this treasure was buried in Serbia, and, as indicated, should contain the ancient Serb regalia of the im- perial and royal crowns, scepter, mace, sword of state, certain archives, weapons and armor, and some small personal relics. My husband's grandfather traveled in the early fifties through Serbia and Turkey and passed the place where, according to the family chart, the treas- ure lies entombed. He was able to identify the spot, which appeared never to have been disturbed. Among heirlooms in my husband's possession is a richly illuminated parchment book in royal purple silk, gold embossed, that prominent Serbs and Croats of Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia gave to my husband's grandfather, Lazarovich-Hrebeliano- vich. In this book, appended to an address, are many pages of signatures, among which can be read the names of the great Croat patriot Bishop Stross- mayer, the Serb Septemvir Velitchkovich (Judge of the Croat Supreme Bench), Count Drashkovich, the two Croat patriot and poet brothers Vukotinovich, who with Ludevit Gaj and others were in the front ranks of the movement for southern Slav renaissance and Croat political independence. With this address they presented to him a golden loving-cup which is one of the most beautiful pieces of workmanship I have ever seen. It is about two feet high, of richly wrought repousse in a laurel de- sign of dull and polished gold, studded with non- faceted amethysts, white crystals, and fire red MARA LAZAROVICH-HREBELIANOVICH A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION garnets. On one side it bears the Lazarovich coat- of-arms, enameled, and on the other the arms of Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia. On the summit of the lid is a warrior's statuette in old Croat costume, his left hand gripping his sword, and his right lifting high his calpac in cheering salute. In presenting this magnificent chalice, the dele- gates each poured into it a small flask of wine from his own district, these many wines intermingled in a single cup expressing a symbolism the meaning of which is apparent. No pleasure was ever keener to me than that I experienced in collaborating with my husband in the two volumes of Serb history, "The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny," which was published in America in 1910 and in London in 1911. It was a labor of love to us both. Another more recent work of my husband's, "The Orient Ques- tion," also deals with the situation and affairs of those near-Eastern peoples whose fortunes, since my marriage, have formed the supremely absorbing in- terest of my existence. Among the personalities with whom I made ac- quaintance in connection with these new interests, none gave me more the sense of a manner of mind before unknown to me than the Turkish ambassador in London, Musurus Pasha, whom I had met so- cially in a casual way. Initiatory to some steps taken by me during the Macedonian insurrection of 1903, toward opening the way for negotiations between the insurgents and PLEASURES AND PALACES the Sublime Porte, which could not be approached by my husband as the empowered representative of the insurgents, I called upon the Turkish ambas- sador. His Excellency began by stating that he could receive me only as "plain Mr. Musurus" ; for, speaking in his official capacity, "he was not aware of any trouble in European Turkey; there was no insurrection." There was consequently nothing to say. I had the kind advice of Sir Henry Drum- mond Wolff, the best-qualified diplomat and states- man, in England concerning near-Eastern affairs. After several futile attempts, I managed to set forth to "plain Mr. Musurus" the proposals of the insurgents "who did not exist," and to make them appear worth the sultan's attention. It was neces- sary to obtain the Ottoman ruler's consent to have the matter placed before him; but how? For "Mr. Musurus" insisted that even the Turkish ambassa- dor, "Mr." Musurus himself, mind you, could not listen to the matter, which would be tantamount to recognizing the existence of an insurrection and of insurgents, who would not fail to assume airs of recognized belligerents. The plan in question had been organized by La- zarovich to lighten the agrarian troubles and to miti- gate the abuses of tax-collection by the Turks, which was the font of all the bitterest woes of the Chris- tians. His scheme involved a loan to Turkey of five million pounds sterling, the underwriting of which was already assured in London, and the serv- ice for which would be furnished by the agrarian 336 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION rehabilitation. There were aspects of my argument which appealed forcibly to Musurus Pasha, but he regretted all the more that there appeared to be no modus whatever of getting the matter before even the Turkish ambassador without, accidentally, as it were, recognizing the belligerency of the insur- gents. I ventured to say : "You are acquainted with His Excellency, you are aware of how much to the advantage of His Maj- esty the sultan and of every one concerned, the pro- posed settlement would be. You are one of the most skilful diplomats. Could n't you yourself sug- gest a modus?" His answer was: "True, I have access to His Majesty the sultan's ambassador himself. I might, as plain Mr. Musu- rus, contrive to bring the matter to His Excellency's knowledge; and he could then without indiscretion ascertain the views of the Sublime Porte." This little oriental comedy at which I laughed, but during which the ambassador kept a serious countenance, initiated the desired negotiations be- tween my husband, representing the Macedonian in- surgents, and the Turkish Government. I also met Saraffof and other leaders of the Bul- garian committee, as well as the men of my hus- band's Macedonian organization, which, by the way, antedated that of the Bulgarians by seven years. Saraffof was rather under medium height, thick- shouldered and slightly heavy in manner; there was 337 PLEASURES AND PALACES nothing of the romantic type of hero or of bandit about him. He gave the impression of being un- educated, though as a matter of fact he had received a military education, having been a lieutenant in the Bulgarian army. During the insurrections he was led to believe that a brilliant Bulgarian posi- tion was to be his as a result of certain Bulgaro- Macedonian plans of a rather secret nature. Those plans, in reality, were put in his path by a Sofia influence that would have appeared to him the very last from which to expect such an instigation. However, he did his work well for Bulgaria. When his task was finished, it happened that he was shot and killed in a cafe in Sofia. The affairs of my husband, as directing head of the organization for the liberation of Macedonia and Albania, necessitating trips to Paris, Berlin, Rome, and other places, revealed the old workaday world in a fresh guise not only in regard to personalities met for the first time, but also developed the pres- ence of rather surprising aspects and activities in persons with whom I had previously been ac- quainted. It was no longer the old Paris or the old Berlin or the old Rome, but I suddenly saw in these places the centers of the vast travail of nations, intense, as in a furnace. All outer existence became, as it were, but the conventional, convenient gesture of that true inner and ardent life of which all these people were mutually aware. On the occasion of a visit to Rome I was the guest ■s »■ - ♦ .' '.-..- -•* r *Tr$ A :. ■ ** -■■ _ ' • - -..' PRINCE AND PRINCESS LAZAROVICH-HREBELIANOVICH Photographed at the birthplace of the author, Visalia, California A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION of my dear friend of pre-marriage days, the Mar- chesa de Viti de Marco, at the Palazzo Orsini, which had always been her residence in Rome, but which she soon afterward exchanged for the splendid villa which the marchese and she were then reconstruct- ing from the ancient Villa Albani. That house had borne the name prior to the building of the present famous palace known as Villa Albani, the pictur- esque terraces and ancient cedars of which form part of the view of the present De Viti de Marco home. At the old Palazzo Orsini, built within the ancient theater of Marcellus, the fortress-like walls of which form its western side, the lofty ceilings of my stately room were crossed by heavy, blackened oak beams, covered with antique arabesques of gold, and its walls were hung with a faded golden tissue. The room looked out upon the yellow Tiber. I met there Mr. and Mrs. Gay, who also occupy a splendid part of the palace, where the distinguished historian has lined walls and corridors with the precious vel- lum-bound historical documents and archives col- lected for his history of the "Risorgimento." Within the inner palace patio is a small grove of tangerines, the red-gold fruit of which in the melting moonlight gives a dreamy aspect to this romantic spot, which knows all that Rome has known throughout the ages. The Marchesa de Viti de Marco, a woman of broad human sympathy and culture, has brought many blessings of permanent economic and artistic value to the storied land of her children and her husband, a man of distinguished Ul PLEASURES AND PALACES parts, member of parliament, professor of econom- ics at the University of Rome, and inheritor, through an ancient line, of the old Castle of Otranto. Collectors of eighteenth century books will call to mind Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," the fly-leaf of which bears an engraving of this old castle. The marchesa has established works reviving the antique art of lace-making, in order to give an aim and an interesting and lucrative occupation to hun- dreds of young girls who were languishing in help- less inertia in the remote and stagnant districts of Apulia. They turn out pieces of delicate and rare work, and her ateliers and their clubs form an im- portant arm of the wide Industrie Feminile move- ment in Italy, to which the devoted endeavors of many women of the nobility have contributed (no- tably the late Contessa de Brazza) , and at the head of which is the great moving spirit, the Contessa de Taverna, one of the most able and enlightened women of her day. Etta de Viti de Marco counts also among her creations for the benefit of those who have the misfortune to be lacking in this world's goods a loan-bank that lends small sums without security to meet cases of peculiar urgency. This foundation, which is not a charity, though it is "a good work" in the truest sense, is self-supporting and successful. I went with the marchesa to a reception at the palace of the Tavernas, where, amid other treas- ures of the Renaissance, — pictures and statues, pre- A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION cious tapestries and old brocades,' — are priceless pillars of purple porphyry (the alliteration is un- avoidable) ravished in early centuries from the Colis- seum, as they told me, by Taverna ancestors. Many others of the stately and gorgeous palaces of Rome contain glories stripped in the same way from the Colosseum. I met there that night Signor Tittoni, then prime minister of Italy. At the moment of his introduc- tion, I heard some one remark, "Now something will be said about the Balkans — probably Albania." Whereupon a little semicircle formed immediately in front of the sofa where the prime minister and I sat down to talk. I at once asked His Excellency's opinion of the difference between parliamentary pro- cedure and principles in England and those of Italy, and his brilliant and witty answer of that ques- tion formed the chief basis of our conversation. I never allowed myself to drift away from western Europe. Lord Aberdeen was present that night, resplen- dent with many decorations and orders. The wife of the American ambassador, Mrs. Henry White, whose fragile and exquisite personality always ex- pressed the acme of distinction, was, in her gown of coral-rose velvet and old Venetian lace and pearls, a vision to be painted by Sargent with his subtlest brush. One of that painter's masterpieces is the portrait made early in his career of the Mar- chesa de Viti de Marco. Sargent himself looks to- day with wonder upon its marvelous flesh tints. PLEASURES AND PALACES Passing the beautiful Palazzo Barberini, once the home of W. W- Story, the old American sculptor and poet, I remembered an incident he told me in London. It was, it seems, at that time almost im- possible for a man to pass through the streets of Rome with anything in his coat pocket and not miss it on returning home. The little lazzaroni thought it their right to see to that. Several times he and friends tried to keep watch and surprise the opera- tion at the instant of its performance, but in vain; the beggars were too sly and swift. One day Mr. Story cut a red silk bandana into strips and left a tiny edge of it peeping out of his coat pocket as he and a friend started out. It was hardly a moment before a ragged, brown-legged little imp ran in front of them, flaunting the tattered bandana in their faces and screaming angrily, "Mean I mean! Shame! shame!" At Rome I first saw Queen Elena of Italy on an evening when the court were invited to hear the Duke of Abruzzi lecture on his exploring trip in Italian East Africa and show the photographs he had brought back. When royal romance is mentioned in times to come, no figure will have greater power to stir the heart than that of this Serbian Queen of Italy. Of perfect poise of race and grace, of health and mar- velous beauty, she is called the most beautiful queen, except the world-beloved Queen Alexandra, and the Empress Eugenie when she was young. There has been a large and even course of development in Queen Elena's life, a natural, reposeful unfolding. 344 .y :;;,-. :: ELEANOR LAZAROVICH-HREBELIANOVICH Photographed by Falk, August 15, 1915 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION This has been true through all its vicissitudes, since the simple days when, as a tall young girl with a gun, she went out for game with her broth- ers among her native Montenegrin crags, — then, when she shone as an accomplished and brilliant princess at the splendid Russian court, where she was educated; when she came to Venice and fell in love with the austere young Prince of Piedmont, who had coldly turned away from every European princess who had been proposed to him as consort, but who, upon beholding the young Serb Diana, had been instantly enraptured with her beauty and her stateliness of character; later, as the beauteous and tender mother of a family inheriting her graces as well as those of Savoy; as an angel of succor to the poor and suffering, going to their humble homes throughout the land wherever they were overtaken with disaster or calamity; and finally, among the falling walls and columns of the Messina earthquake, exposed to all its perils and terrors as she helped rescue the wounded and the dying from the wreck- age, Queen Elena has come to be in the minds of the Italian people an image of saintly love and true majesty. She has shown herself able to under- stand womanhood, manhood, and childhood in their essential dignity, and has given a new and more exalted meaning to the word "queen." In her beautiful natural way she has helped all social in- terests and performed service to the state, for in her person has many a golden bond been welded for the perfecting of Italian unity. 347 PLEASURES AND PALACES The day has not yet passed when queens have power to help make or mar their husband's work. The endeavor of a people or any one of its states- men or rulers to bring its national ideals to fulfil- ment is one of the most thrilling spectacles on earth. In that connection, what might almost be called the life campaign of the present Queen Mary of Eng- land, directed to a tightening up of slackened hal- yards and a maintenance of some of the old British ideals of virtuous and decorous existence, is keenly interesting. That queen of non-royal grand par- entage, and having as a girl known what it is to be poor, has the soul of a reformer. The central passion of her life is, and has been since early child- hood, her love of England, an intense passion, whose dynamic force may have been stored up within her from the days when her Magyar ancestors rode into fierce battles for their country. Because of that inner patriotic fervor, under a mask of cold- ness such as is familiar to persons acquainted with the races of the far-Orient, she has, since girlhood, hated with fierceness all ideas and conduct which might be destructive of British fiber, and has not always hidden that hatred, which often in young girlhood made her harsh and sour of countenance. Queen Victoria perceived and understood this nature in her, and decided that she was the one above all others to be Britain's future queen. I used to hear this said in those early days by those who knew. That version of the situation was emphasized at the time of the death of the heir presumptive to the 348 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION throne, the Duke of Clarence, to whom she was first affianced, followed by her betrothal to that prince's successor, his brother, the present King George V. She has often been made to tread the red-hot stones which pave the way of the passionate reformer. Persons whose ways .she deems disastrous to English prestige give her back hate for hate. She has made mistakes in method, it is said, yet "who ever made them not, whoe'r made aught?" Whether her genius in the execution of her ideas will match their inspi- ration the future alone can disclose. But any one having lived in England, and seen the times amid which she has grown up, and known the conditions she has to front, must realize that Queen Mary is an element of constructive might in her age. It would be impossible to speak of England dur- ing the last quarter of a century and leave unnamed her who has been called "the peerless one." I once asked a friend, herself one of England's greatest ladies, what woman she considered to be the most perfect grande dame in type in Europe. After an instant's reflection, she answered, "Queen Alex- andra." Of faultless elegance and nobility of simplicity in manner, dress, and all outer expression, as well as possessing those inner graces of sincerity and trained judgment that make the ideal gentlewoman the se- cure repository of austere honor, loyalty, and that intelligent, never-failing sympathy which is quick to recognize and reward value, swift to detect and scorn hypocrisy, — for the real grande dame is seldom 349 PLEASURES AND PALACES the dupe of "Tartuffism," — Queen Alexandra has indeed found a deep place in the hearts of peo- ple everywhere as an example of true womanly grandeur. I ought to record an occurrence of the period of my first meeting with my husband, which was cer- tainly one of the strangest of all the unusual experi- ences of my life. The description of the incident, in form of affidavits of the persons present, has been since that time printed in every language, I believe, under the sun, where there is a printing press, in- cluding, as I have been told, Chinese. The late W. T. Stead had invited a number of persons, all well known and some of them among the most distinguished men and women of the day, to be present at a test of the psychic powers of a woman of whom he had heard remarkable accounts. He himself had never met her, and the general im- pression was that she never before had been in London, but lived in a provincial town, where she exercised her gifts sympathetically and reverently among the people of her own neighborhood. She did not exploit her powers financially, but was a modest, God-fearing woman. I had not at first accepted Mr. Stead's invitation, for, although I had become aware through several experiences of forces beyond the bounds of what appears to be simple, every-day existence, I had never, and have never since then, attended a spiritualistic seance or any meeting for the conjuring up of spirits or exhibi- tions of occult forces. All that is not clear and 350 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION open as the day, all that does not partake of the order of what is generally understood hy the term "wholesome," or that is not health-giving to mind and body, has always been repugnant to me. On the day I speak of, Mr. Stead's offices were crowded. The good woman, Mrs. Burchell, failed for some time to put in an appearance, having missed her train up to London. When she did arrive, she was nervous and somewhat confused, having to make her way through a mass of persons who had become impatient, and many, perhaps most, of them open scoffers at Mr. Stead's spiritual- istic views and investigations of the occult. It is humiliating to record that, notwithstanding the dis- tinguished composition of the assemblage, the most abominable bad manners prevailed. Titters and ironical murmurs were only half suppressed. I chanced to be sitting near the small table upon which were heaped envelops containing various objects, historical or personal, which had been brought by Mr. Stead's guests, at his request, to be used as touchstones of Mrs. Burchell's psychic power. She was to receive from each, as she picked it up and held it in her hands, an impression enabling her to describe either it or some events in which it had figured. To begin with, she seemed to quiver under the lash of the ill-suppressed, sarcastic humor which she felt on all sides as she made her way to the table. There she first addressed a solemn invocation to the Al- mighty, using a strongly biblical language, which 351 PLEASURES AND PALACES made bad manners worse. I could see how the poor woman suffered. She said she might not be able to receive any impressions on account of the unkind attitude of those present. That remark called forth several very rude and jeering comments, which caused her to tremble from head to foot. The situa- tion was unbearable. Her first attempt failed. Remarks like "I told you so," "It is always the same with these people; they need dark rooms and believers like Stead," were made aloud all over the room. People were be- ginning to move about. Just then Mrs. Burchell said of an envelop she held in her hand, "I see a fat old woman in a four-post bedstead." The envelop was handed across the room to Mr. Stead, who stood by the door. He drew from it an elegant gold cigarette-case, and said in despairing tones, "The property of the Rt. Hon. George Wyndham," one of the handsomest and most intellectual statesmen in England. Ironical laughter filled the room. The poor woman broke down, and in her confusion and reproach flashed forth general accusations, which were particularly bitter against Mr. Stead, of all people. She had never seen him before, did not know who he was, and cried out, pointing at him: "Nobody wants me to succeed. You — you over there — you are against me!" Of course these words were met by howls of de- risive laughter as poor Mr. Stead held up his hands towards heaven, rolled up his blue eyes, and said, in 352 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION as kind a groan as possible and half laughing at his own grotesque failure: "Take her away! Take her away!" The poor wdhian found strength to say: "Put me in a room alone and send in a few of them at a time, — the worst of them, — and I shall be able to tell them something." Mr. Stead in hope- less, but kind, tones gave orders for her to be con- ducted to a room in an upper story of the house, and let her have her way. It is fair to record that it was discovered long afterward that the gold cigarette-case had been a last gift to the Rt. Hon. George Wyndham from Queen Victoria and was so inscribed on the inside. So, after all, the four-post bedstead and the old lady of proportions may have been an image of the royal sickbed, whence the old queen was never more to arise. As I was leaving Mr. Stead's party, I met Lord Grey and his dai^hter just ascending the doorsteps. He asked what had happened, and when he heard, he insisted on my going back with them up-stairs to see the psychic. She had regained her com- posure, and had already turned out several batches of people. Lord Grey gave her a little trinket to hold. Her first words were: "You are a peer of the realm, and ought to be in your seat this mo- ment." "By Jove!" I think it was he said, "right you are!" He was risking a fine for being out of his seat, as he had played truant and left the House of Lords to run up to Mr. Stead's. She told him other PLEASURES AND PALACES things, but that is his story, not mine. I was so rejoiced at the poor woman's success and rehabilita- tion that I made Lord Grey promise me, despite his protests that he must hurry back at once to the House, that he would stop on his way out and tell Mr. Stead of his protegee's triumph. As we were leaving the room, Mrs. Burchell in- sisted on telling me something; so I stayed with her. She took the warm gloves from my hands and held them in her palms, and began to speak rapidly and clearly, with her eyes tightly shut. What she saw for me was mostly future. I was deeply touched by her evident appreciation of the poignant sym- pathy she must have noticed I felt for her while she was being tortured. She had risen to her feet swiftly in beginning to speak. When I interrupted her at one moment, she said: "No, no, don't inter- rupt me. It will be as I say." In the goodness of her heart she appeared to want to give me the uni- verse. I wrote the whole thing to a friend after- ward as a curious experience, not because I had any idea of giving credence to her prognostications. I must say, though, in justice to her, that much of what she said has come true, and began to be ful- filled within ten minutes after I left her. What she said related in the main to gravest mat- ters of this life, but one of the unimportant things she foretold, which I can cite as an instance of the swift fulfilment of her words, was, "I see you very soon — immediately — in a magnificent robe of vel- vet, richly embroidered all over." Within ten min- utes, such a robe, one the existence of which I had 354. A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION not before been aware of, was actually on my shoul- ders. When I went down to the room where Mr. Stead was, with some few lingering friends, they were at that moment examining some of the treas- ures that had been brought for the psychic test. One of them was this beautiful blue-purple velvet robe richly embroidered all over in a trellis of dull- silver roses. As I entered the room, the sight of it was calling forth exclamations of admiration. "Put it on somebody, and see how it would look," was being said. It was my lot to have the robe placed on my shoulders, and I trailed about the room in it. Only afterward, in recording the day's events in writing, did I remember that slight part of Mrs. Burchell's sayings to me, and reflected that the thing had actually occurred. But the strangest, indeed, the momentous, part of this experience was developed later on in the eve- ning. Mr. Stead, delighted at Mrs. Burchell's recovery of herself and at her success, especially in Lord Grey's case, invited all who had stayed to join him at an impromptu dinner at an Italian restau- rant near by. He had secured a large upper room, where he and his guests dined in privacy. After dinner, to insure non-interruption, the door was locked. Mrs. Burchell was seated in a chair in the empty part of the room, and we all, some four- teen or fifteen persons, circled before her, a few feet away. At Mr. Stead's request, she began to give further impressions connected with the guests. There was 355 PLEASURES AND PALACES a comic turn to the matter at one moment, as Mrs. Burchell went straight ahead, regardless of the ef- fect she was producing, and said what she had to say. Mr. Stead thought it wise to intervene in the case of threatened revelations concerning a certain gentleman's past, and hastened to rescue him, allow- ing her to try her powers on another. Mr. Stead had at the beginning of the evening, before she had been added to the party, asked that no one's name should be pronounced, and that care should be taken in conversation not to refer to any matter that might give an inkling of any facts connected with persons present. As Mrs. Burchell had already spoken with me, I did not have her try her powers any further on my account, but when Lazarovich's turn came, she lay her hand on him, and her first words were, "If any- body in this room has blue blood, it 's you." She then made an important statement concerning his future, which would not have fitted any other person whom she would have ever been apt to meet in the course of her existence. She also foretold that he must undergo certain hardships, during a few years. Other matters which she said concerning him were exact. After she had made several other tests with per- sons present, Mr. Stead took from his pocket two or three white envelops, all alike and closed, which Lazarovich had previously given him. When Mr. Stead had handed her one of these, he himself not being aware of its contents, she sat a moment, hold- 356 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION ing the closed envelop between thumb and fingers, gently pressing it in a natural way, then said, "This is from a person of importance — a king." Mr. Stead asked her to describe him. She then gave a very good description of King Alexander of Serbia, though she could not tell his name or his country. Suddenly she leaped up and started forward in a dramatic movement, her eyes shut tight, her face white, and behaving and speaking exactly as though she were in the midst of a real scene that was occur- ring, she described the assassination of this king and his queen. She seemed to see the officers break in, and witnessed the terror of the royal pair. Mr. Stead asked what soldiers they were and of what race, but she answered : "I don't know, I never saw such people. Their uniforms resemble the Russians somewhat, but they are not Russians." Then she uttered exclamations of horror, and said, "O Mr. Stead, let me not go on!" Mr. Stead insisted gently: "Go on! go on! Tell us all you see." "Oh," she cried, "there is too much blood!" She herself pleaded passionately, wildly, for the queen's life, and said, "See that poor little child over there in the corner!" She heard shots, and saw the sword-wounds, and depicted the revolting horror and anguish of tthe whole scene, and finally half sank, as if in collapse. Mr. Stead ran to her sup- port, and she was placed back in her chair. Mr. Stead asked, "When will all this be?" Her answer was, "I do not know, but it will be ere long." 357 PLEASURES AND PALACES Mr. Stead then took from her crisped-up hand the crumpled envelop and drew from it a slip of paper — the end of a letter that bore the signature in Cyrillic script of King Alexander of Serbia. The date of that extraordinary scene was March 20, 1903. Within three months of that day, on the night of June tenth to eleventh, the Serbian king and queen were assassinated in the royal palace at Belgrade, the details of the occurrence evidently corresponding very closely with Mrs. Burchell's vision of March 20, except that in the real scene there was no "little child in the corner." The future seems to peer more easily through the curtains of the invisible in some countries than in others, and Serbia seems to be one of those lands. For there another famous prophecy, foretelling a series of events to extend over half a century, was uttered by a simple Serb shepherd named Mata (Matthias) from Kremna, in the hills near Ouzhitze, in southwestern Serbia. He ran into the market- place and excitedly told of the assassination at Bel- grade of the then ruling Prince Michael Obrenovich at the hour of its happening, Ouzhitza then being at the furthest extremity of the principality of Serbia from Belgrade. When Mata was subsequently brought before the authorities, who desired to sound the nature of his knowledge of the tragedy, he easily cleared himself of all suspicion, and proceeded, in answering their interrogatories, to make further prognostications of the future. He foretold, very closely, the Serbian history from that day to this and 358 A NEW WORLD OF VITAL ACTION beyond it: the marriage of King Milan, the birth of Alexander, the Serbo- Turkish wars, the Bul- garian war of 1886, the territorial aggrandizements, King Milan's divorce, his abdication, the marriage of Alexander, and the obliteration of the Obreno- vich dynasty, through the assassination of Alexan- der, the return of the Karageorgeviches, the last Serbo- Turkish and other wars and events, including Serbian dynastic vicissitudes. He foretold that the enemy would overrun Serbia and submit the inhabitants to horrors and misery beyond expression; so that people passing by the graves would say, "Oh, that we were with you I" Then, that the country would be finally delivered from the foreign foe, all Serb lands liberated, and reunited in Great Serbia. Then those who went by the tombs of the dead would say, "Oh, that you were here to be happy with us !" This renowned prophecy, which the Serbian Government keeps sealed under lock and key, is well known in Europe, where several copies are extant. As often as one of the old man's sayings comes to pass,' — and all have been fulfilled up to this time according to his word, — the "Seer of Kremna," as he is called, is remembered, and his strange story is retold. It would seem that from the hour of that fateful evening at Mr. Stead's the tides of fulfilment began to roll over those old waiting lands ; for the Turk has been driven out of Macedonia, and Austrian armies have thrice marched to conquer the Serbian King- 359 PLEASURES AND PALACES dom. Once they almost reached the heart of the land and the whole Serb nation in arms — simple sol- diers in the trenches heading the onrush, even women and children doing their parts — hurled the enemy forth across the borders. The bitter foe brought horror and desolation with him, as the old Seer of Kremna said it would be. War's dread un- certainty still hangs over the land. Many of those who have suffered unspeakable mutilation at the hands of the cruel invader, or have been so crippled in the trenches by shot and shell that they are unable to fight further in defense of their homes, do already say in their hearts, as they look at the new graves, "Oh, that we were with you!" Now let us see if the rest of old Mata's words will come true. THE END 360