Sir Edward Abbott Parry

“ About the only thing an average Box Office cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the vox populi, which is far [3] nearer the vox Dei than the voice of the expert witness. ”

“ How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy and at length is rewarded by success.
There is plenty of comedy and laughter about a baby as well as sleepless melodrama in the middle of the night—but it must be your own baby. There is no fun in next-door babies except when the Clown gets hold of them in a pantomime. ”

“ Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation. ”

“ I have asked many living writers whether they have ever knowingly written anything purely from motives of vanity and conceit. They all answer me in a pained and haughty negative. For myself, I rather glory in it. It is good to have done something [241] that nobody else has achieved. It is a big thing to have written at least one book that does not lie on the shelves of the British Museum, a book the original edition of which no gold can buy, a book that has given, to one reader at least, moments of more thrilling joy than any book that was ever printed. ”

“ There are no streets in Rhoscolyn, nor has it any centre square. It is a parish rather than a village, and its few hundred inhabitants live in scattered farms and cottages. There are generally a few artist visitors, for Rhoscolyn is almost another Sark for the rock-painter, and one or two families find summer homes in the neighbouring farms. There is bathing out of your tent, which you leave on the grass at the edge of the tiny bay, at the mercy of the winds and the little black bullocks that roam about in the flat marshes inland. There are rambles among the cliffs and the heather. ”

“ One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts, accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place whatever in the schoolroom. ”

“ An actor can only appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at all?
So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor, my position was indisputable. ”

“ In the education of the young the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as music or drawing. ”

“ I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster? ”

“ Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth. ”

“ It would be interesting to enquire what it is that keeps a book alive through after-generations. I think that this capacity of “touching the heart” has much to do with it. Shakespeare, Dickens and Goldsmith had this quality; so in a different way had Izaak Walton and Samuel Pepys. It may be that this magic power is the salt that keeps a man’s writings sweet among the varied temperatures of thought through which they survive. Qualities of brain and intellect vary century by century, but what we call the heart of man is the same to-day as it was when King David wrote his psalms. ”

“ Free law is, of course, a grand ideal, and may again attract legal reformers; but, without attaining that ideal, it might be possible to abandon in a great measure the fees collected from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and surgery, might be free to the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who are unable to pay fees and costs without running into debt. It will take a Savonarola to convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing subject for a youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed of what the insurance world calls “a good life.” ”

“ Why should taxes be imposed and work done at the public [145] expense to enable a jeweller to persuade a man to buy a watch he does not want? Why should the State collect the jeweller’s money for him by imprisonment for debt? If there had been no imprisonment for debt the jeweller’s business wouldn’t pay, and the workman would have one chance less of mortgaging his wages for the immediate delight of possessing a third-rate piece of jewellery. This would be better for the State and the workman, and for everybody but the jeweller. ”

“ I know that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-place for microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer sees in it only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary disputes, whilst the facile reporter comes there to wash from its social dirt a few ounces of golden humour for his latest headline. These are but surface views. I went there like the poet, “whose seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore, and I was overwhelmed. ”

“ Now, more and more, Parliament has become a machine for registering the decrees of the prevailing party and one cannot find that the poor are in any way directly represented in Parliament and business men only in a small degree, whilst the interests of the rich and of men of leisure have an overwhelming representation. Moreover Legal Reform has to fight for its hand against that band of brothers, the lawyers in Parliament, who from generation to generation we find stalwart and faithful in their clear-sighted optimism that all is well with the law—and lawyers. ”

“ But the way to see funny things and to enjoy them is to keep your heart like the heart of a little child, for it is only children who are moved to the purest and healthiest laughter as the trees are moved in the breeze by a power they know nothing of. And of course if you have never been a child—and some poor people are born grown up—you will never have been able to see the funniest thing you ever saw. ”

“ The boards and committees should interfere as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster, of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into the rivers of life. ”

“ The eighteenth century was a golden age in the literature of cookery, and the works of Charlotte Mason, Sarah Harrison’s “Housekeeper’s Pocket Book,” and Elizabeth Marshall’s “Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery,”—these are books that should be in every polite library. For myself I prefer what may be called the Archæology of Cookery and the study of “The Proper New Book of Cookery, 1546,” or Partridge’s “Treasury of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets, 1580?” will have a charm for all who like to pierce the veil that hides the old world from us. ”

“ But greed to-day means something quite otherwise. When I speak of greed as the main motive of authorship I use the word, not with any old-fashioned dictionary meaning, but in an up-to-date, clear-sighted, clarion, socialist sense. You speak to-day—those of you who are in the movement—of the greed of the capitalist, the greed of the employer. In this way I speak of the greed of the author. The greed of anyone to-day is the greed which urges him to endeavour to enrich himself and provide for himself and his family by using his brains in producing things. ”

“ There will always be a few miscellaneous cases, but the trivial round and common task of the day is collecting the debts of small tradesmen from the working class.
I have no doubt that a County Court Judge gets an exaggerated view of the evils of the indiscriminate credit given to the poor. They seem to paddle all their lives ankle-deep in debt, and never get a chance of walking the clean parapet of solvency. But that is because one sees only the seamy side of the debt-collecting world, and knows nothing of the folk who pay without process. ”

“ And playwriting is a game like chess or cricket or many another great game and many a duffer can learn its elementary moves and rules and the more studious can master its gambits and strategy, but not even the greatest can succeed at the game, or understand what the game is about if they will not learn the rules. This is an age in which quackery and slush and conceit are having a long innings, and it is a common boast that some new genius has found a new way of saving souls, or painting pictures or making plays that is to revolutionise the practice of these things. ”

“ Therefore, unless our writings appeal to the heart it is impossible for them to attain everlasting life. Much of the literature of to-day is, I fear, as Touchstone says—“damned like an ill-roasted egg all on one side.” For the fashion of the hour is to despise the heart and to sneer at the simple folk whose hearts still beat in harmony with the silly domestic notions of love and honour and charity and family life. ”

“ You would hesitate to trust yourself to it if it had no hub, no spokes, no tyres—none of the attributes of a wheel, and you would certainly be utterly disgusted if it did not run. But a playwright who makes his play without dramatic hubs or spokes or tyres, is often accredited a genius by those who have never learned how, and how only, a play can be made, and the fact that his play does not run is set down to the centrifugal ignorance of the spectators by the side of the road who came there desiring to see it run. ”

“ No doubt the younger writers of to-day have been led into their contempt for the business they have undertaken by the success that has enriched Mr. Bernard Shaw. They should remember, however, that he is more of a preacher and society entertainer than a playwright, winning the game by his delightful personality or personalities. He is an earnest religious man, with a great hatred of the theatre, the stage, and entertainment, to use his own words, “the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience.” ”