BOOKS
Wherefore Does He Why ?
By COLIN MAcINNES
ACTING exists by being heard and seen; yet it is extraordinary how great actors of the past have survived as living presences despite our knowing nothing of what was most essential about them—the exact nature of their perfor- mance. From this century onwards, films and recordings will preserve a vision in some ways more tangible; though we may wonder if these contrivances will give, in time, to modern actors, the legendary quality which has made older reputations endure for centuries. May not one essence of a legend be that it is based on a popu- lar memory, transformed and nourished by generations of largely oral repetition and inquiry?
Dan Leno, who was born a hundred years ago this week and who died in 1904, may be the last great actor whose repute, if it continues to survive, will chiefly reside in an unconfirm- able legend. Although the Biograph existed during his latter years, I cannot trace that he was ever filmed. There are plenty of photographs, and there are even some reedy but perfectly audible recordings of his 'sketches.' His scripts, which he wrote himself, have also been preserved —as they have not in the case of his even more celebrated precursor, 'Joey' Grimaldi. But his real fame is still based on the two factors that seem best to sustain a dead actor's memory: the writings of contemporary admirers, and a living reputation in his own profession.
As to the second, Dan's dressing-room' is shown today with reverence to anyone who goes back stage at Drury Lane; and among variety artists whom I questioned when writing a 'pro- gramme' about him in 1952, I found that his name was as entirely familiar as it was esteemed. As to the literary testimony, it is overwhelming. It begins with Dickens, who 'discovered' Leno as a boy actor in Belfast and compared him to the great 'Joey,' about whom he had written. What is unquestionably Max Bcerbohm's finest essay (and perhaps the only one in which he utterly commits himself) is his valedictory account of Dan. Gordon Craig admired him, so did Nellie Melba. And so, most emphatically, did not George Bernard Shaw : whose hostile account is equally significant (dismally futile .. . abject resourcelessness . . . barren acres of gag'). The profession of his day was, in all its branches, unanimous. Tree said, 'If ever Dan Leno plays Richard it will be the greatest performance of the part we have ever seen.' Seymour Hicks—whose essay, though not so ecstatic and enamelled as Max Beerbohm's, is I think more acute and sensitive--spoke of a face 'human beyond description' and of 'a thin husky voice 'which reached every corner of the audi- torium.' Most decisive is the adulation of his fellow actors of the Halls: of Herbert Campbell (usually King to his Queen at Drury Lane), and particularly of Marie Lloyd, an extremely severe judge who unreservedly admired only two
other music hall artists (the second was George Formby senior).
Outside the theatre, his following was no less universal. His most illustrious fan was Edward VII who commanded him to Sandringham and gave him, directly, a gold pin and, indirectly, the title of 'The King's Jester' (and who thus, in Dan's art, shared at least one taste with Beerbohm). His thousands of unillustrious fans were the working-class public which was the mainstay of the 800 Halls that once flourished in the capital alone. The secret of this popularity can be guessed by reading Leno's scripts. They are all about underdogs: but—and this, I think, is important because it explains why Leno was the rare, authentic clown and not merely a comedian—about the underdog who bites back, incorrigibly undefeated. For the clown belongs to a world of tragi-comedy: of which the emblem is his own twin grimace, with its groaning grin and its cheerful agony. It is the essence of the true clown that he is subversive, however much in appearance 'put upon' and momentarily defeated. He challenges completely the common-sense view of life: delights his audience, but disturbs it. Anyone who saw Grock—and how he kept his public at arm's length while he provoked it to jeer at him—will know the uneasy merriment a real clown can engender. Or even W. C. Fields: perhaps one of the last of this great species in the Western world, since (for a multitude of reasons--some of them, like the conquest of sickness and poverty, positive and healthy) our own age, though tragic enough, has largely lost the sense of tragedy.
I think it is time (and it would be great fun for someone) that a detailed critical study of the art of the English Halls be made. (All we have so far is Willson Disher's admirable Winkles and Chatnpagne, and such lamentably point-missing essays as Mr. Eliot's on Marie Lloyd.) The Halls flourished from about 1860 to 1910. They were, initially at any rate, an entirely spontaneous creation of English working-class actor-singers, to three of whom the term genius might be applied: to Leno himself, to Marie Lloyd and to Little Tich. It was an art sustained by scores of lyric-writers and musicians, also chiefly working- class, hundreds of whose songs still remain in the popular repertory, and dozens of whom wrote (often in inextricable collaboration) tunes which, though derivative (chiefly from diluted English folk songs and German lieder), are often ex- quisite and words that, most dexterously married to the music, are of wonderful economy and point : especially in the cherished field of the comic-sardonic number.
Until big business moved in on the Halls before the turn of the century and converted them into Palaces of Variety to which the re- spectable could then safely venture (abandoning the Nigger Minstrel shows of their earlier insipid predilection)—until, that is, the decadent Harry
Lauder era of unashamed sentiment and uplilliti" the music hall public were also working men al women who saw mirrored on the stage their 0, tribulations and snatched joys: who heard Vag; like Leno's The Moving Job' about the lodger's 'midnight flit,' or 'shooting the moor ; an obsessively recurrent theme in music b..Av ditties—or of the stolen pleasures of `S'cr11 Saturday Night.' What killed the Halls filla'; was not—as is so often said—the arrival of ti,„o Biograph, or ragtime, or revue, or even 13.ul (the Halls were stone dead, anyway, by the 111, radio came—'revivals' of old-timers were alrea'; taking place), but essential social factors of wally the chief were the Lloyd George reforms and Al:, upheavals of the 1914 war. The crud hard, homogeneous working-class world created and preserved this boisterous, imPerie:i art was itself vanishing by the 1920s: so that alj nostaliac who sheds tears for the Halls show spare a crocodile bucketful for the terrible sub life that made their whole art possible. Right in the stage centre of all this, at.! greatest period in the Eighties and Nine, stood Dan Leno. He was born in St. Pan, (underneath the station,' so he said—and they built it as his memorial). He made his debt) t) at three (Grimaldi was a year ahead of him lher, at the Cosmotheka, Bell Street, Paddington, 'Little George, the Infant Wonder, Contortionlj and Posturer.' He picked up the name Dan 13,110 something of a brogue) in Ireland, and 1-e', from his mother's second husband whose sta1 l name this was (Dan's real name was Galvin) became 'World Champion' in the North at.ti forgotten art of clog-dancing (or 'clog-walloP14; with its twizzles, shuffles and tip-tap-time)- West End debut was at the Middlesex (formed the Old Mogul or 'Old Mo,' latterly the 011.1ri,„ Garden) in Drury Lane—and he once flung Pl.„; self on the steps of the great theatre further de; the road and prayed he Might one day act IfIceo This he did thanks to the impresario Sir ALIO' Harris Druriolanus' (his apopleptic bustilf affixed to the façade) who spotted him in Sirot at the Old Surrey, brought him to the Lane as ,,I4 Baroness in Babes in the Wood, and kept 11,;ti! there for sixteen seasons—to the infinite dell'of of all our grandparents and the displeasurej, George Bernard Shaw. The end was terrible a'.:4 I suppose one must say, 'fitting': persecut; mania, forgotten lines, bouts of insaliej disastrous reappearances, even the dread 4. 'bird.' I went through nightmare times when „ was a lad,' he said; and, 'I've earned a good of butter to my bread—but I wish it had spread more evenly.'
It's only a little round white thing, but r can't tell what it's thinking about. You der kick it or drop it. It has got no face. You c get it to laugh. No, you simply look at it say. 'Egg!'
On himself :
Everybody—mark this—everybody has le o born. one way or another. There's no get away from it. You have to go through , inconvenience. You can't say you just hap to be passing, and you dropped in to see mother's getting on, now, can you?
On mankind:
Ah, what is man? Wherefore does he Whence did he whence? Whither 15 withering? In Leno's texts, buried among 'gags' 'of 'situations' that have inevitably dated, there °.11 be found startling instances of what the fretlio call 'dark humour.' Inanimate objects (as v:ifi W. C. Fields) have a disturbing way of taw life:
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