A VICTORIAN BACKWATER.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 129, 22 August 1927, Page 11

A VICTORIAN BACKWATER.

[Written for The Sun.] IT is now three years since the stadium at Wembley rang with j the sound of the haka. By this time the wearers of the silver fern have made their first appearance at Lords. Everywhere the New Zealander Is engaged upon a kind of peaceful penetration. ‘You will encounter him on the stage of the theatre or on the concert platform. You may study his work as a painter in the galleries, or pick up his latest novel at Mudie’s. The Anglo-New Zealander is becoming a distinct class, like the Anglo-lDdian. I propose to give an infinitesimal example of this peaceful penetration by recalling an evening once spent at Leighton House; for on that occasion it seemed to me that two extremes of culture met. It is also very pleasant to write about Leighton House for its own sake; and if this column points the way to some intending visitor to England it will have served its purpose. There is no surer way of recapturing a Victorian atmosphere than to visit Leighton House. It is the memorial of a man who was preeminently a Victorian. It is situated in a part of London where the Victorian spirit dies hard. It is but 10 minutes’ walk from the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, upon -which so much Edwardian and Georgian humour has been expended. (I once met a man who -was bold enough to declare in public that he heartily admired the Albert Memorial, and I have admired the man, in a sneaking sort of fashion, ever since). Leighton House is almost within a stone’s throw of Kensington Palace, where you may still see Queen Victoria’s dolls and recall the very Vic torian dictum of the child summoned from bed to receive the homage of her Prime Minister-to-be: “I will be good.” Over the way you may visit John Barker’s, where your grandmother bought her antimacassars. T do not know whether you could buy one now. The place of her carriage at the kerbside (assuming that your grandmother was one of the ’’carriage folk”) is taken by 20th century traffic. You sigh for those more spacious days, and, if you are in a position to do so, you seek sanctuary in Leighton House by way of Melberry Road. There you are made the guest of a man, or of the ghost of a man, who may or may not have been “houseproud,” but who certainly inhabited a pleasaunce in the midst of a busy world. It was my lot to be a frequent guest at Leighton House, and I never found myself in that sheltered demesne without an uneasy feetlng that I was illegally on the premises. I do not think that my fellow-guests shared that view. They were far too pre occupied with some ailment or other to which they had probably been strangers when Leighton House was inhabited by a living and sentient host. The place has recently passed from the hands of certain trustees to the Kensington Borough Council; but I do not think that this change in directorship has altered the menage. For a very moderate rental (in London) one may hire either of the studios for concerts or lectures, and a friend and myself had the temerity to do this, hoping to inveigle our good-natured friends to a recital of my verse. We mercifully provided our guests with a singer, and it was to this singer that I referred when 1 spoke of the culture of the extreme ends of the earth meeting in Leighton House. Mr Ernest McKinley is becoming well known in artistic London as a singer of Maori and Hawaiian songs, for which his sweet, if not over-robust,-tenor voice is particularly suited. Mr McKinley’s setting that evening was the studio where, I suppose, some of Lord Leighton’s masterpieces were painted. One approached it by way of polished, uncarpeted stairs, and as one mounted one heard at one’s back the plashing of the fountain in the Arabian court below. I do not know whence Lord Leighton imported the tiles of peacock blue which decorate that court. No doubt he was very proud of them. They had been brought under contribution to enrich an age already rich in farsought decoration. The good Queen herself set the example in acquisitiveness by scouring the two hemispheres for things rich and rare, wherewith to garnish her palaces and lodges. But wherever those tiles had been baked, they had not come so far as Mr McKinley or his songs. I remember thinking whimsically that the gentleman to whom that house had belonged would have delighted to introduce those songs to a party of dinnerguests as “some new thing.” He would probably have considered my verses an impertinence, which they were. I cannot speak with first-hand knowledge of the pictures on the walls. My impressions of the place are all auditory or olfactory. I know that there is a portrait of William De Morgan on the left as one enters. Of the other treasures of Leighton House I must leave it to a sighted scribe to write. I would mention two of its amenities, which, I trust, are still in the land of the living. The first is a blackbird that sings, or used to sing, from one of the trees in Lord Leighton’s garden. With one ear acock for that blackbird I have sat and listened to Walter De La Mare talking of Christina Rossetti. There was a stab in its note which arose, I suppose, from the fact that I was there on sufferance, as indeed we all of us were. It seemed such a long way to go in order to hear a black bird sing, and yet I am sure that no bird has ever sung so. The place was ■ hick with ghosts. The lecturer droned over some of Christina’s most searching lyrics: Then must I knock or call when just in sight? They will not keep you. waiting at that inn. One was ‘aware that sanctuary was an illusion. The blackbird’s note seemed terribly relevant to the problem of how to get home at the close of the lecture. When Mr McKinley sang it was night, and there was no blackbird. The other inhabitant of •.he sanctuary I would like to mention Is the major-domo, who is, or was. a living refutation of the statement that the Victorian butler is as extinct as the Dodo. He is triumphantly Victorian in an age of jazz. I hope he will be there to welcome the hypothetical reader of this column when he visits Leighton House. Let him remember to alight at Melberry Road Holland Park. Perhaps to give him knowledge of his whereabouts the blackbird will be singing in one ot Lord Leighton’s trees. Perhaps they have cut the trees down to make way for a motor-garage. In that case 3 ./an only offer my visitor sincere apologies. C. R. ALLEN.