We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
66 THE GREAT GOD PAN
thoughtful and there was more than a touch of philosophical resignation in that remorseless stream of patter. "If he goes on in this way," thundered The Times, "criticism will have to rank him among the 'thoughtful' and that may be an honor embarrassing to him as 'taking silk' is to some members of the outer Bar. It would hardly do for Mr Leno to be regarded merely as an intellectual treat." The progress was probably inevitable: the line which separates the very comic from the tragic is thin as a hair, and in the end Dan Leno went mad. Just before he went mad he wrote a brief account of his life. There he discussed some of the same problems which fascinated Kierkegaard, and speaking of his childhood at No. 4 East Court, St Pancras, he said:
Here I spent my happy childhood hours. Ah! What is man? Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Wither is he withering? . . . Then the guard yelled out: Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool!
Perhaps, he seemed to be saying, the blast of the guard's whistle and the recital of the towns of England was sufficient explanation for life.
Though he went mad, there were intervals when sanity returned, long periods when he walked the music-halls or played the dame part in pantomimes. Gentleness had descended on him. He was a wraith of a man, but with grease paint the ghost could be made to assume flesh and blood. He still hurried onto the stage with an air of wild determination, but the fire had gone. There were moments when he would pause in his lines and smile sweetly at the audience, and no one knew whether to laugh or cry, or whether he had forgotten his lines, or what the smile meant. When he died in the autumn of 1904, chiefly of grief over the death of one of his stage companions, The Times commented that no one had ever seen his like before and it would be necessary to go back to the Commedia dell' Arte to see his like again.
The music-halls continue in England, shorn of their former magnificence, but the great days were over long before