[From the introduction to the first edition, Thornton Butterworth, 1924; reprinted in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, pp. 20-22:]

I am somewhat embarrassed at the thought of writing an introduction to the memoirs of Charles Hawtrey, since I am conscious after reading them that the main interest of his life lay in a pursuit for which I care little and of which I know less. He was by passion a racing man and only by necessity an actor. I think that he forgot the name of half the characters he played, but never that of a horse he backed. The haphazard manner in which he went on the stage and his desultory training are astonishing when you reflect that he was the most finished comedian of his generation. For the most part men and women adopt the stage as a profession either from vanity, from an erroneous notion that it is an easy life, or (more rarely) from an innate instinct to act; they seldom adopt it, as did Charles Hawtrey, because they must make a living somehow and the chance offers. We hear much nowadays of the training which the actor of the old days received, and the survivor of that period complains at length which is sometimes tedious that the young people of the present can neither speak distinctly nor move with ease. He shrugs his shoulders with despair, and tells you that there is no hope until they are ‘put through the mill’ as he was. It is true that the stage is overcrowded with bad actors, and since they know nothing one is inclined to think that instruction might be of use to them. Schools have been established. But Charles Hawtrey seems to have received very little teaching: during his engagement in The Colonel he went to a stage manager every morning for an hour or so, and by him was shown how to walk and how to use his hands. Whatever else he learned he learned by playing. The fact is, of course, that he had that natural gift for acting the lack of which is so lamentably obvious in so many of the persons who seek to earn a living by its exercise. Those who practice the arts must resign themselves to the immortal fact that industry and goodwill contend unsuccessfully with talent. Charles Hawtrey had also a good education and a lively intelligence. They are evidently not essential to the actor, but they can never be a disadvantage to him.

He was, of course, an extremely good actor. The public worshipped him, but somewhat ignorantly, for his naturalness deceived them into thinking that there was little more in his acting that charm and ease. They said he was wonderfully life-life and thought it was due to a happy chance. But the naturalness of the realistic actor is as artificial as the plausibility of the realistic play. The foundation of the stage is illusion and its superstructure is make-believe. The natural actor is as far from the naked truth of fact as the ranting barnstormer. No one could say a line with the naturalness of Charles Hawtrey, so that whey you heard him you said, ‘He speaks exactly as though we were in a drawing-room, it is not acting at all’; and yet it was acting all the time, art and not nature, the result of his instinctive sense for the stage and his experience; and the line was said not as it would have been said in a drawing-room but as it needed to be said in order to get over the footlights.

[…]

I want to dwell a little on the fact that Charles Hawtrey was a polished, versatile, and ingenious actor because there is little in these pleasantly diffident memoirs to suggest it, and the narrow range of parts to which he confined himself tends to obscure it. He had a just, perhaps even an exaggerated, sense of his limitations; but within his scope he exercised more originality of invention and a greater variety of humorous observation than the public, with its strangely incomplete appreciation of acting, gave him credit for. (It never ceases to surprise those who have to do professionally with the theatre that not only the average audience, but even the critics find it so difficult to distinguish between the actor and his part.) The relation between the author and the actor should be a collaboration on equal terms, but too often the actor is no more than a sleeping partner. He is like a cash register: you press a key which says two and sixpence, and a disk pops up above which also says two and sixpence. He gives what he gets, but adds nothing to it. Charles Hawtrey added as much as he received and often much more. He built up a part, giving it a life of its own, and adding to it his own vitality, good humour and charm.

But he attached no great importance to his remarkable gift, and this gave him a modesty which is not common among the members of his profession. (I hasten to add that writers, with less justification, are as vain.) He knew that he was an admirable comedian, but he accepted the fact in the spirit of comedy. […] The nonchalance with which he took a popularity which often intoxicates was due, I suppose, to the circumstance that for him acting was always little more than a means of livelihood. It struck me as a singular that a man should excel in an art to which he was after all somewhat indifferent. His real interest was in life. In the course of his memoirs he speaks of it as a game: with many this is but a phrase; with him it meant a great deal. He was at Eton and at Rugby: he adhered all his days and with singular fidelity to the aims, ideals and ambitions of the public-school boy. They are generous and charming, and if it must be allowed that they are a trifle narrow, he tempered them personally with constant laughter. In talking about Rugby he says that his lessons did not prosper very much because he found so many things to laugh at; to the end of his life he preserved an admirable capacity for laughter. He underwent many vicissitudes, but I think his sense of the ridiculous never deserted him. He took neither life nor himself with unbecoming gravity.

In England laughter is never very respectable; our countrymen give their esteem more readily to those who bore them than to those who amuse. They find a certain pompous tediousness impressive and they can seldom laugh heartily without feeling a little ashamed of themselves. Charles Hawtrey knew this very well and it never failed to cause him a lively and good-natured amusement. He enjoyed himself, and he gave enjoyment to others. I can imagine no more pleasing recollection to leave the world.