ance, all familiar with you, all longing
to meet you again, and all applauding you before you have done anything
but just walk on. They shout "Good Boy!" or "Bravo, Harry!" or George,
or Ernest. It must indeed be splendid. You are all so--what is the
word?--matey, isn't it? Yes, that's the note of the London
hall--mateyness. You, up there, singing or dancing, have brought men and
women together as nothing else, not even the club or saloon bar, can do;
and they sit before you, enjoying you and themselves and each other.
Strangers have been known to speak to one another under the mellow
atmosphere which you have created by singing to them of the universal
things: love, food, drink, marriage, birth, death, misfortune, festival,
cunning, frivolity and--oh, the thousand things that make up our daily
day.

There is just one man still among us who renders these details of the
Cockney's daily day in more perfect fashion than any of his peers. He is
of the old school, I admit, but he is nevertheless right on the spot
with his points and his psychology. His name is Harry Champion. Perhaps
you have seen him and been disgusted with what you would call the
vulgarity of his songs. But what you call his vulgarity, my dears, is
just everyday life; and everyday life is always disgusting to the funny
little Bayswaterats, who are compact of timidity and pudibonderie. The
elderly adolescent has no business at the music-hall; his place is the
Baptist Chapel or some other place remote from all connection with this
splendid world of London, tragic with suffering and song, high endeavour
and defeat. It is people of this kidney who find Harry Champion vulgar.
His is the robust, Falstaffian humour of old England, which, I am glad
to think, still exists in London and still pleases Londoners, in spite
of efforts to Gallicize our entertainments and substitute obscenity and
the salacious leer for honest fun and the frank roar of laughter. If you
want to hear the joy of living interpreted in song and dance, then go to
the first hall where the name of Harry Champion is billed, and hear him
sing "Boiled Beef and Carrots," "Baked Sheep's Heart stuffed with Sage
and Onions," "Whatcher, me Old Brown Son!" "With me old Hambone,"
"William the Conqueror," "Standard Bread." If you are sad, you will feel
better. If you are suicidal, you will throw the poison away, and you
will not be the first man whose life has been saved by a low comedian.
You may wonder why