to look noble and spotless; his runnerup in the contest for the title of Most Respectable-Looking Victorian was, of course, Mr. Gladstone, and it is a well-known fact that the heads of the Landseer lions in Trafalgar Square are a composite portrait of Gladstone and Irving.
• O F C URIOUS M EDICAMENTS •
T HE LADY ON MY LEFT was telling me a few minutes ago two “cures” which were highly esteemed in the time of her grandmother (who was born in 1800). The first was a cure for “gathered face” (what we now call an abscessed tooth) and it consisted of digging up the skull of a dead horse and carrying it under the arm for a few days, or until the gathered face ungathered itself. The second was a sure cure for goitre, which was brought about by stroking the goitre six times with the hand of a dead Negro. In spite of occasional evidence to the contrary it seems to me that medicine has advanced a good deal in Ontario during the past 150 years. Hand a horse’s skull to a modern doctor, and he probablywouldn’t recognize it as a valuable medicament at all; very likely he would make an ash tray out of it.… You wish I wouldn’t speak of such things? Very well, eat your sautéed brains in silence, madam.
• O F S PLENDID A CTING •
I WENT TO SEE John Gielgud’s production of
Love For Love
last evening, and was carried away by the brilliance and artistic completeness with which it was presented. The drama, in its finest flights, gives me a satisfaction, an elation and a re-creation which makes the pleasures of the greatest music seem thin and chilly in comparison. Music is an intellectual extract of life; drama is life itself, raised to the highest pitch. I reflected also that great acting (and there were some rare examples of it in this play) makes heavy physical demands on the actor. To move with grace and vigour, to speak complex prose so as to be heard and understood everywhere in a large theatre, and to look exactly right at every moment of a long part requires no mean athletic equipment and physical stamina. How hard these actors worked, and yet how easy and inevitable seemed everything that they did! How strong an actor has to be, in every muscle, in order to be graceful without seeming affected! It is in this physical aspect of acting, as well as in imaginative grasp that our amateurs are disappointing.… It is not often that we see a play perfectly done in Canada, but when we do we chew the cud on it for months and sometimes for years.
O F H IS H OLIDAY •
(A Boring Account)
I visited many antique shops by the wayside—not to buy, but to study the pathology of the antique business. I was interested to observe the emergence of the oldcoal-oil lamp as an antique. Hideous brass contraptions with scrofulous shades were being offered at prices ranging upward from $10. I was staggered also to see that a particularly disagreeable type of lampshade, made apparently from vitrified mucous, which used to be seen hanging over the dining tables of misguided people, had acquired antique status. I nearly bought a marble statue about five feet tall of a girl clothed in the underwear of the ‘nineties (all painstakingly wrought in marble) for the garden at Marchbanks Towers, but did not do so, reflecting that it might inflame the passions of my neighbours, and that they might hurt their fingers attempting to pinch her marble prominences. I could, of course, keep her veiled in sacking except when my guests were those in whom the fires of passion had sunk to a mere clinker; they alone could view her unmoved.
As I left my hotel in Tarry town a boy carried my luggage to my car, making three journeys and puffing and blowing painfully. But when I handed him a tip he shrank back saying, “Oh no, I don’t want anything.” When I recovered my senses I grasped his hand, crying, “My boy, accept this $10 bill from S. Marchbanks, for you are a boy in a million; when you want to go to college, boy, or when you have to have an
• O F C URIOUS M EDICAMENTS •
T HE LADY ON MY LEFT was telling me a few minutes ago two “cures” which were highly esteemed in the time of her grandmother (who was born in 1800). The first was a cure for “gathered face” (what we now call an abscessed tooth) and it consisted of digging up the skull of a dead horse and carrying it under the arm for a few days, or until the gathered face ungathered itself. The second was a sure cure for goitre, which was brought about by stroking the goitre six times with the hand of a dead Negro. In spite of occasional evidence to the contrary it seems to me that medicine has advanced a good deal in Ontario during the past 150 years. Hand a horse’s skull to a modern doctor, and he probablywouldn’t recognize it as a valuable medicament at all; very likely he would make an ash tray out of it.… You wish I wouldn’t speak of such things? Very well, eat your sautéed brains in silence, madam.
• O F S PLENDID A CTING •
I WENT TO SEE John Gielgud’s production of
Love For Love
last evening, and was carried away by the brilliance and artistic completeness with which it was presented. The drama, in its finest flights, gives me a satisfaction, an elation and a re-creation which makes the pleasures of the greatest music seem thin and chilly in comparison. Music is an intellectual extract of life; drama is life itself, raised to the highest pitch. I reflected also that great acting (and there were some rare examples of it in this play) makes heavy physical demands on the actor. To move with grace and vigour, to speak complex prose so as to be heard and understood everywhere in a large theatre, and to look exactly right at every moment of a long part requires no mean athletic equipment and physical stamina. How hard these actors worked, and yet how easy and inevitable seemed everything that they did! How strong an actor has to be, in every muscle, in order to be graceful without seeming affected! It is in this physical aspect of acting, as well as in imaginative grasp that our amateurs are disappointing.… It is not often that we see a play perfectly done in Canada, but when we do we chew the cud on it for months and sometimes for years.
O F H IS H OLIDAY •
(A Boring Account)
I visited many antique shops by the wayside—not to buy, but to study the pathology of the antique business. I was interested to observe the emergence of the oldcoal-oil lamp as an antique. Hideous brass contraptions with scrofulous shades were being offered at prices ranging upward from $10. I was staggered also to see that a particularly disagreeable type of lampshade, made apparently from vitrified mucous, which used to be seen hanging over the dining tables of misguided people, had acquired antique status. I nearly bought a marble statue about five feet tall of a girl clothed in the underwear of the ‘nineties (all painstakingly wrought in marble) for the garden at Marchbanks Towers, but did not do so, reflecting that it might inflame the passions of my neighbours, and that they might hurt their fingers attempting to pinch her marble prominences. I could, of course, keep her veiled in sacking except when my guests were those in whom the fires of passion had sunk to a mere clinker; they alone could view her unmoved.
As I left my hotel in Tarry town a boy carried my luggage to my car, making three journeys and puffing and blowing painfully. But when I handed him a tip he shrank back saying, “Oh no, I don’t want anything.” When I recovered my senses I grasped his hand, crying, “My boy, accept this $10 bill from S. Marchbanks, for you are a boy in a million; when you want to go to college, boy, or when you have to have an
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