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characterised the after-war decade's climax. It has been a
pageant of contemporary affairs that has never ceased to
go on, the multi-coloured, inimitable essence of the time
which found its stage on the sophisticated ground of Regent
Street. For it was to the Circus and Quadrant that people
returned from the ends of the world, seeking there renewed
glimpses of the most vivid of life as it was being lived.
But in the tale of all the various characters and types
who have laughed or yarned or stormed or joked thereabout,
the pictorial cavalcade of the Cafe Royal can tell only about
the few which have been most obvious and easy to record.
They may be enough to show the rich pattern of genius and
jest which has gone to make the days of the Cafe Royal
memorable. Its enduring glory was consecrated by all the
practitioners of all the arts.
Was there a prank to play ? The Cafe Royal would be
the stage. If Aubrey Beardsley would parade his pet
skeleton, who played duets with him at the piano, it must
be there; did a young actress just back from Spain want
to try a new dance she could essay its steps on the table top
at the Cafe. The greatest talkers were habitues, and with
them bores were silent or found wit for the nonce. When
Wilde, Whistler, Frank Harris and G. B. Shaw crossed
verbal swords, when Yeats, Augustus John, Orpen and their
crowd sat round the Cafe tables the new century's art shaped
itself in the imaginations of the younger men.
And all the wit was not necessarily verbal, nor all the
talk about painting and poetry. Every genius has its own
ways of expression. Like the wronged young lady who
turned on the man in the case and showed her skill at fencing
with the end of her parasol, to be desperately warded off
with a walking cane. Or the two Oriental beauties who
arrived with serpents round their necks instead at the
conventional feather boas. All was not wild melodrama or