"Like to see Lauder? Of course I should like to see Harry Lauder. But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord Devonport putting us on , with every telling me that extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every I have, as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do you realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls, buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to——"  
"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has £52,000 to the War Loan. In going to see him, therefore, you are to the War Loan. You are making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him and he passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a duty to go and see Harry Lauder."
 
I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went. It was a poor setting for the great man—one of those things called revues, that are neither comedies nor , nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry without these accompaniments. I like him to have the stage to himself. I like Miss Ethel to be somewhere else when he is about. I do not want anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time with his foot and humming the melody.
 
And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed by any and alien note. And it is this of creating a state of feeling, an atmosphere of his own, that is the characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the extraordinary influence he exercises over his public. If you are to that influence the entrance of the figure in the cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike anything else on the stage or in life. Like Bottom, you are translated. Your defences are carried by storm, your severities like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other boys to the piping of the magician. The burden has fallen off your back, the dark mountain has opened like a into the realms of light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the sunshine.
 
This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of in the professional sense. It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is not an actor at all. Contrast him with the other great figure of the music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will understand what I mean. Chevalier is never himself, but always somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real—an incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor............