I had never heard of Frank Burnand, but one night I dropped in to see his burlesque of Blue Beard. The play was worse than absurd, incredibly trivial.
Mr. Burnand's hero keeps a note book for jotting down the names and addresses of interesting young women; otherwise he is not much of a monster.
His mysterious Blue Chamber contains nothing more terrible than hair-dyes.
He is a beardless lad of one-and-twenty; has, however, a blue lock to show; but it's a fraud. His wife and his father-in-law are to lose their heads for discovering his secret; the catastrophe is averted by the timely arrival of troops of young ladies in fantastic martial costumes that reveal most shapely figures.
The dancing and singing, and above all the astonishing plastic beauty of the chorus girls, gave me a foretaste of London, for in Paris the chorus women were usually hags.
Miss Nelly Farren is the Baron Abomelique de Barbe Bleue and Miss Vaughan, Kate Vaughan is Lili, the Baron's bride. Here is the first verse of her song in the second act:
French language is a bother,
To learn it I don't care,
Don't like to hear my mother
Called by the French a mere.
I like a husband to myself
But the dear one is my cher
Though I've only got one father
Yet they swear he is a pere.
Then Kate danced as no one ever danced before or since, with inimitable grace, and the way she picks up her dress and shows dainty ankles and hint of lovely limbs is a poem in itself; and all about her beautiful, smiling girls, in costumes that reveal every charm, sway or turn or dance, as if inspired by her delightful gaiety. In another scene she imitates Sarah Bernhardt and there is infinite humour in her piquant caricature; some one else mimics Irving, and all this in a rain of the most terrible puns and verbal acrobatics ever heard on any stage-an unforgettable evening which made me put Burnand down as one of the men I must get to know as soon as possible, for he was evidently a force to count with, a verbal contortionist, at least, of most extraordinary agility.
I will give one proof of his quality from my memories of ten years or so later, just to give handsome little Frank his proper standing, for he was as kindly pleasant as he was good-looking and witty, and that's saying a good deal.
In the London New York Herald, a weekly paper, there had appeared the story of Lord Euston's arrest, so detailed that it was almost as libellous as the account in the Star, the ha' penny Radical evening paper, of which Ernest Parke was the editor. I knew Euston pretty well and he had told me that he meant to make it "hot" for anyone who traduced him. He was a big, wellmade fellow of perhaps thirty, some six feet in height and decidedly manlylooking, the last person in the world to be suspected of any abnormal propensities. The story in the Star was detailed and libellous: Lord Euston was said to have gone in an ill-famed house in the West Central district; and the account in the Sunday Herald was just as damning. On the Monday following, Burnand came to lunch with me in Park Lane and by chance another guest was the Reverend John Verschoyle, whose talent for literature I have already described.
For some reason or other Verschoyle at table had condemned those who married their deceased wife's sister, evidently ignorant of the fact that Burnand had committed this offence against English convention. A little later, after the ladies had left the table, Verschoyle brought the conversation on the article in the New York Herald about Lord Euston; he was positive that a Sunday paper, by even mentioning such an affair, had killed itself in London. Burnand remarked, smiling, that he could not agree with such a verdict; surely it was the function of a newspaper to publish "news," and everyone was talking of this incident. But Verschoyle, purity-mad, stuck to his guns. "How could you explain such an 'incident'," he insisted, "to your wife or daughter, if she asked you what it was all about?"
"Very easily," retorted Burnand, still smiling, but with keen antagonism in his sharp enunciation; "I'd say: 'my dear, Lord Euston feels himself above the ordinary law, and having nothing better to do, went to this notorious gambling house to play. He thought the game was going to be poker, but when he found it was baccarat he came away.' "
No wittier explanation could be imagined; even Verschoyle had to try to smile. Curiously enough, in the libel action which Lord Euston brought against the Star newspaper, and which resulted in the condemnation of Ernest Parke, the editor, to a year's imprisonment, the explanation of Lord Euston was something like Burnand's excuse for him. He said that someone in the street had given him a card with poses plastiques on it; as he was at a loose end that night, he went to the address indicated. When he found that there were no poses plastiques, he came away.
One may say that burlesques and wit like Burnand's could also be found in Paris, but the comic humour, plus the physical beauty of the chorus girls, were not to be found there, nor the tragedy. Ernest Parke was a convinced Radical and a man of high character, yet he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for reproducing, so he told me, a police inspector's statement, and one which in any case did Lord Euston no harm at all. Yet no one in London expostulated or thought of criticizing the judge, though it seemed to me an infamous and vindictive sentence only possible in England. The preposterous penalty discovers a weak and bad side of the aristocratic constitution of English society. The judges almost all come from the upper middle class and invariably, in my experience, toady to aristocratic sentiment. Every judge's wife wants to be a Lady (with a capital, please, printer!), and her husband as a rule gets ennobled the quicker the more he contrives to please his superiors in the hierarchy. If Lord Euston had been Mr.
Euston of Clerkenwell, his libeller would have been given a small fine, but not imprisoned, though the imputation even of ordinary immorality would have injured him in purse and public esteem grievously, whereas it could not damage Lord Euston in any way.
And now for a contrast.
It was early in the eighties-I know it was a cold, windy day-that I went up to Haverstock Hill to call upon Dr. Karl Marx at his modest home in Maitland Park Road. We had met some time before, after one of Hyndman's meetings, and were more or less friends. Hyndman had contradicted something I had said, and when I quoted Engels as on my side, he told me that he knew Engels and spoke German as well as English. Seeing that a large part of the audience was German, I challenged him to reply to me and began speaking in German. When the meeting was over a German came up and congratulated me and asked me would I like to know Karl Marx? I replied that nothing would give me greater pleasure and he took me out and introduced me to the famous doctor. He was by no means so famous then as he is now forty years later, though he well deserved to be.
I had read Das Kapital some years before. The first book, indeed, all the theoretical part, seemed to be brain-cobwebs loosely spun; but the second book and the whole criticism of the English factory system was one of the most relentless and convincing indictments I had ever seen in print. No one who ignores it should be listened to on social questions. When I had absorbed it, I sent for Marx's other books, A Life of Lord Palmerston and Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. The Palmerston is written by one who had no feeling for character: the hero, an Irishman alive to his finger-tips, is buried under an erudition that prevents one seeing the forest for the trees; but the Revelations contain the best picture extant of the progress of Russia from the time she threw off the Tartar yoke to the latter half of the eighteenth century.