The Goddess by Robert Lynd summary, American Literature

THE GODDESS

by Robert Lynd

About Author:

    

    Robert Wilson Lynd (20 April 1879 – 6 October 1949) was an Irish author, editor of poetry, urbane literary essayist and strong Irish nationalist. He began his career as a journalist on "The Northern Whig" in Belfast.  

    Robert Lynd is a personal and autobiographical essayist. His essays reveal his personality, his humour, his light-heartedness, his philosophical, reflective and retrospective moods. Whatever be the subject, he gave personal touch to his essays.

    Humour, irony and satire are some important features of his essays. According to him humour is one of the saving graces of life. It is the support and sustenance of life. He beautifully exposes the frailties and foibles of mankind.

    He used the pseudonym Y.Y. in writing for the New Statesman. Some of his famous works are The Book of This and That (1915), "Y.Y." An Anthology of Essays (1933) and Essays on Life and Literature (1951).

Prose Summary:

    A famous actress died not long ago, and it was easy to see from the comments in the newspapers that many now middle-aged men in Fleet Street had been her adoring slaves in their youth.

   There are some people who are so much in love with the stage itself that they are ready to worship almost anybody who appears on it down to the little housemaid with the three-line part. They study the programme with such avidity that they could repeat months afterwards the names of the most insignificant actors and actresses who took part in the play. If you had told me: “There’s the chap who played Rosencranz last night going into the tobacconist’s,” I should have stared after him with a Cortesian awe.

   Even after personal adoration begins, it is true, one still continues, if not to admire all actors and actresses, at least to have particularly warm feelings for all the members of the company with whom the adored actress is playing.

    Night after night he will climb up to the gallery - I went six times in a single week to one musical comedy - and wait in the darkness for the sudden entrance from the wings, more glorious than a sunrise, and the entrancing singing of the always entrancing song, “There was once a merry monkey in a cosy little cage,” the chorus ending, as the adored finger is shaken at the gallery. Luckily, the glance did not last long, and the dance began, in which the most beautiful woman on earth gave the most delicious imitation of the antics of a monkey.

   As one sees the musical comedy again and again, however, one begins under her spell to discover unexpected beauties in the other parts of the performance. Even the sentimental songs that had always seemed to unadoring ears to be the bane of musical comedy are seen here to be of noble quality.

        Where’er you are, the sun is always shining,

        Where’er you are, the skies are always blue—

    Yes, as the tenor sings them, they do express the passion of love as it was never expressed in musical comedy before. And, as for the company, there was never such a company in the history of musical comedy. Then home with the book of words—if not the holy writ of beauty, at least a book to be preferred to it at this rapturous hour.

    Well, perhaps it was the music rather than the words that made it so poignant, so expressive of heartache. 

    How unlike the happy, laughing goddess who had sung “There was once a merry monkey” in the theatre! It is a terrific enough experience to love a goddess who appears to be perfectly happy. 

    It is a terrific enough experience to love a goddess who appears to be perfectly happy. But it is as nothing compared to the experience of loving a goddess who seems for some unaccountable reason to be miserable.

    There is a disinterested leap of the heart at sight of the words: “Cora Bandini brought the house down with her song ‘There was once a merry monkey,’ ” or “Cora Bandini, with her clever singing and dancing, established herself as a warm favourite,” or “A large audience encored Cora Bandini’s songs again and again.” When you can read sentences like that about anybody except yourself with rapture, believe me, you are in love.

    It contained a poem of which any poet would no doubt be ashamed, and an offer not only of devotion, but of help, should she ever need it. Not that there would have been any use in her sending for help in money (for there was no money) or for the help of a strong right arm (for there was no strong right arm). But help was offered, just plain, vague, honest help in whatever part of the world she happened to be when she needed it. It lasted, I suppose, for a year, but at the end of about a year the Stage lost one of its most ardent and assiduous subscribers.

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