Robert Jones

“ Sir Robert he walked beside me as I worked her down to the mark;
"There's money on this, my lad," said he, "and most of 'em's
running dark;
But ease the sheet if you're bunkered, and pack the scrummages
tight,
And use your slide at the distance, and we'll drink to your health
to-night!"
But I bent and tightened my stretcher. Said I to myself, said I—
"John Jones, this here is the Jubilee Cup, and you have to do or
die."
And the words weren't hardly spoken when the umpire shouted
"Play!" ”

“ Mr Jones was exceedingly fond of reading, particularly poetry; and about this time he began “to torment the Awen” (Muse) , as he used to say; and wrote several things both in Welsh and English. In 1789 he was elected a member of the Gwyneddigion, and shortly afterwards he became secretary to the society. At the time when it was regularly attended by Owain Jones, Myfyr, Dr. W. O. Pughe, &c., who encouraged the young bard, and gave him much valuable advice. In 1794 we find his name as one of the stewards of the festival of Ancient Britons, and in 1801, as llywydd (chairman) of the Gwyneddigion. ”

“ The increasing demand of the war necessitated the augmentation of the local and independent companies of engineer workmen, and Jones was occupied till the following year in reorganising them into one regular corps.
In July 1808 Major Lefebure and Jones were selected to serve as the two assistant-commissioners under General Leith, appointed military and semi-diplomatic agent to the junta of the northern provinces of Spain. Jones was attached to the army of the Marquis de la Romana, and conceived a great affection for its commander. ”

“ On the disembarkation of the troops at Alicante, Jones received an appointment on the staff as assistant quartermaster-general, there being already an engineer officer senior to himself in command of the engineers. Owing to differences between the commanders of the allied forces, Jones was sent on a special mission to Madrid, to explain to Wellington the position of affairs. Travelling by night and avoiding roads, Jones reached Madrid safely, and was warmly received by Wellington, who, sending instructions by a courier, kept Jones to accompany him to the north to the siege of Burgos. ”

“ At the siege of Badajoz Fletcher, the commanding engineer, was wounded, but at the express wish of Wellington retained his command, and the active duties therefore devolved upon Jones, his staff officer. In the assault of Fort Picuriaz Jones saved the life of Captain Holloway of the engineers, who had been shot down on the parapet and fell on to the fraise. For his exertions at the siege Jones was gazetted on 27 April 1812 brevet lieutenant-colonel, and he thereupon resigned his appointment as brigade-major. ”

“ In 1814 Jones visited the Netherlands, examined the principal fortresses, and afterwards met Wellington at Paris. Wellington told him that he had appointed him, with Brigadier-general (afterwards Sir) Alexander Bryce [q. v.] and another engineer officer, to report on the system of defence for the new kingdom of the Netherlands. The commissioners arrived in Brussels 21 March 1815. On 4 June 1815 Jones was made a C.B. On the appointment of Wellington to the command in the Netherlands, Jones accompanied him round some of the principal points of defence. ”

“ While in India, he wrote numerous translations from the Hindostanee, and formed there a society, similar to the Royal Society of London, of which he was chosen the first president. He next undertook to compile a complete digest of the Hindoo and Mohammedan laws, which was not however completed by him. In 1794, he was seized with an inflammation of the p. 31liver, and died on the 27th of April, in the forty-eighth year of his age. Few men have died more respected and lamented than Sir William Jones: his genius and profound learning had attracted the praise of all ”

“ In 1807, his library, consisting of the finest typographical productions, and containing a number of valuable Welsh manuscripts, was burnt in a fire which nearly destroyed the whole house. He died in 1816.
Edward Jones, D.D., was born near the town of Montgomery, and was educated at Westminster School, whence he was elected to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was chosen fellow in 1667. He became master of Kilkenny College, and dean of Lismore, in Ireland, and was made bishop of Cloyne, and in 1692 he was translated to the see of St. Asaph. His translation p. ”

“ Jones, formed the Gwyneddigion Society, for the purpose of patronizing the Bards of Wales, and promoting the study of the Welsh language; and this excellent society annually offers prize medals, and other rewards for compositions on various subjects. After a most useful and active life, p. 27this amiable man, whose zeal was only equalled by his private worth, died at his house in Thames-street, London, September, 1814, in the seventy-third year of his age. ”

“ Sometimes when the great fire-fountains toss their spray so high that it flies above the level of the cliffs, the breeze catches it sportively and carries it far away over the island; and the birds line their nests with this silky volcanic hair. ”

“ Owen Jones, the distinguished Welsh antiquary, whose name will be ever associated with the Welsh language, was born in Llanvihangel Glyn-y-myvyr, Denbighshire, in 1741. In early life he removed to London, and entered the employment of an eminent furrier, whom he eventually succeeded. Being enthusiastically interested in the antiquities of his native country, he devoted a great portion of his time to the collecting of Welsh manuscripts; and the result of his disinterested patriotism has been the publication of the “Archaiology of Wales,” in three volumes, entirely at his own expense. ”

“ There is one thing very beautiful in Judith and in this theater. It is the way a player can come forward to the edge of the forestage, and stand there alone, stabbed at by a great white light, surrounded first by emptiness, and beyond that by crowds, a brave figure alone in a great dim space. ”

“ There is no more violence in it than the violence of life which rots an oak. There is no more distortion than is to be expected in light reflected from the troubled surface of life. And it is played with an almost utter perfection of realistic detail, complete impersonation, and rounded ensemble. ”

“ BLACK CURTAINS To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of direction and the actor.
If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the maze of to-day. ”

“ At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they have filled the air with recrimination. ”

“ They pin down a lively and meandering work of art at just the place where they want it. Two disputants, bent on exhibiting the more indecent side of human intelligence, can make the twilight of discussion into a pit of black confusion. ”

“ Yet if this is Realism we have never known Realism in our theater. It carries us through life and out on the other side. It drenches us with a mystic sense of existence. And when we read the text of the play and separate it from the extraordinary emotional actuality of the performance, we discover again and again and again speech that drives straight at free expression instead of resemblance, and action and character permeated with an almost religious symbolism. ”

“ For Gordon Craig, too, saw a gigantic vision of the break between this peepshow of ours and the next theater:
“I see a great building to seat many thousands of people. At one end rises a platform of heroic size on which figures of a heroic mold shall move. The scene shall be such as the world shows us, not as our own particular little street shows us. The movements of these scenes shall be noble and great: all shall be illuminated by a light such as the spheres give us, not such as the footlights give us, but such as we dream of.” ”

“ You may guess, therefore, that there was no butter on the tables of the middle classes, and no milk in the houses of those who, by a curious clairvoyance of language, are called the working people.
Two nights later three or four hundred citizens, with bits of bread and meat wrapped in paper and stowed in their pockets, could be seen seated in a great and splendid ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, under the light of crystal chandeliers and the glow of priceless Gobelins, watching the first performance, The Marriage of Figaro, in a theater a stride ahead of any in Europe. ”

“ As they sway, locked together hand in hand, like men on a sinking ship, and the old song mounts up against the distant rattle of machine guns, the scene brings the cold sweat of desperate excitement to the audience that fills the Volksbühne, and to comfortable, purse-proud Americans as much as to men who have fought in the streets of Berlin. Suddenly there is a louder rattle of arms. The noise sweeps through the air. It drives into the souls of the huddling men and women. They collapse, go down, fall in a tangled heap. ”

“ The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps the masses, and the woman submits. ”

“ The wedding of an utterly realistic performance with a play of mystic overtones is justified by the sense of an old and complete life which both possess. The intimacy of the actors with one another is as evident as the intimacy of the characters they play, and the intimacy of masters and servants in this Russian family. The welcome of the mistress on her return may be a matter of the clever rehearsal of off-stage noise—amazingly clever, you can believe; but when this adoration comes out of the wings and walks upon the stage, it is seen as the perfection of emotion and impersonation. ”

“ The Germans have been through capitalism with a vengeance, through materialism, through war, and through a revolution that blasted half the people and did not satisfy the rest. Here is the misery of capitalism, the misery of abortive revolution, the misery of defeat and black hunger. Berlin is in purgatory. And Berlin goes to Masse-Mensch. Before this play sit hundreds of quite ordinary men, who have only to hear some word shouted at them with the passion of this play, and they will leave the slow and loved routine of homes, and lie again behind sandbags on Unter den Linden. ”

“ There is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict, then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd clears for a moment. ”

“ The performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne in Berlin stands out because it manages to carry intensity of feeling to a point just short of violence, and then, with every excuse provided in this desperate story of thwarted revolution, to bring it up short at the right moment into high-pitched but beautiful vehemence. The outstanding impression must be the astounding diction of the mob that speaks clearly, rhythmically, and most movingly with a single common voice; it gives you a sudden vision of what the Greek chorus may have been, and why thirty thousand people listened. ”

“ Truths of Russian temperament, even Russian politics, are figured with the hidden yet revealing quality that so often rises out of life like an odor from old fields, freighted with memories and anticipations. Perhaps the simplest and most moving example of this comes at the very end of the play. Through it all has moved a mumbling, bent old man who has been the loving guardian of the household for two generations, one of those rare and ancient servants who, by sheer servility, have lifted themselves out of servantage and into a share in the family life. ”

“ When, therefore, the chief cashier one day informed him that the man was to be in London again⁠—this time as General Manager of the head office⁠—and said that he was charged to find a private secretary for him from among the best clerks, and further intimated that the selection had fallen upon himself, Jones accepted the promotion quietly, fatalistically, yet with a degree of inward loathing hardly to be described. For he saw in this merely another move in the evolution of the inevitable Nemesis which he simply dared not seek to frustrate by any personal consideration ”

“ Three months after this Jones went to England on leave, and took with him the sword, watch, and a few other things which had belonged to the deceased to deliver to his family. On arrival at Robertson's home, he was shown into the drawing-room. After waiting a few minutes, a lady entered—the same who had appeared to both of us in the jungle in India; it was Robertson's mother. She told Jones that she had had a vision that her son was dangerously ill, and had written the date, etc., down, and on comparing notes they found that the date, time, etc., agreed in every respect. ”