Toward the end of You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, W.C. Fields, as Larsen E. Whipsnade, attends a reception for his daughter in the mansion of the Bel-Goodies, where he turns on his charm and succeeds in ruining his daughter's prospective marriage to wealthy young Bel-Goodie, and in consequence his own last hope of saving the insolvent circus of which he is the proprietor and chief con artist. Turned out by his hosts, Fields picks up his top hat and cape with injured dignity, and as he makes his exit he calls out to his son and daughter, "On to the Grampian Hills, children." They flee from failure and rebuff in a Roman chariot that Fields has appropriated from the circus, with the sheriff in hot but futile pursuit. "Where are those Grampian Hills, Dad?" his daughter asks as the chariot careens along a country road. "I wonder, I wonder," says Fields.

No one in the audience would be likely to wonder, and if by remote chance someone in the darkened theater was startled by what sounded like a literary echo, he would have dismissed the thought. The Grampian Hills, along with Whipsnade and Bel-Goodie, had to be just another of Fields's characteristic odd, freakish, and amusing names. After all, popular comedians, especially the products of the old vaudeville circuit, are not supposed to play around with allusions that baffle and are not recognized by their audiences. But the very next film, My Little Chickadee, raises a suspicion that this particular name was in a category by itself, for it pops up again at the conclusion. In this film, Mae West outsmarts and exploits Fields, but she saves him from a wild West hanging for cheating at cards, and before leaving town he bids her a courtly farewell: "If you get up around the Grampian Hills, come up and see me sometime." An engaging line, for it combines a phrase made familiar by Mae West and inevitably associated with her, and Fields's own very private allusion.

Fields seems to have had the Grampian Hills on his mind when these films were being made, as we learn from a conversation which Edgar Bergen had with Carlotta Monti, reported in her book W. C. Fields and Me: "When we were making You Can't Cheat an Honest Man," Bergen recalled, "we were going somewhere on location, and he said, "If we get separated, let us all meet at the Grampian Hills.' Fields claimed that the amusing names he used, although they sounded as if he had made them up, were always names he had come upon somewhere. The Grampian Hills can be found on a map, which is where Edgar Bergen finally discovered them. "I wondered about the name," he explained to Miss Monti, "and years later, while traveling in England, I chanced to scan a map of Scotland, and there, between the Lowlands and the Highlands, were the Grampian Hills." Fields had been to England a number of times in the days of his international travel as a successful juggler, and it would be surprising if some of the odd place-names in the British Isles had failed to appeal to him. What is puzzling about Bergen's explanation is that although Field's mention of the Grampian Hills on location impressed him enough to have stayed in his mind for years, he seemed unaware of the reference to them at the end of the film he had made with Fields. And somehow the geography of Scotland does not quite account for the effect of the final dialogue, especially "I wonder, I wonder."

Only Fields could have revealed the circumstances that brought the name to his attention and gave it its personal meaning, and he seems not to have done so. "The archives of his mind," Bergen told Miss Monti, "are loaded with trivia that amuse him and confound others." The most likely source for the name is literary, and although the tracks are faint, they lead ultimately, if improbably, to an obscure eighteenth-century play, Douglas, by John Home. The play was once greatly admired—Walter Scott referred to it as "Home's celebrated tragedy"—and it earned for its author the dubious compliment of being regarded as the Scottish Shakespeare. It had its first performance in Edinburgh in 1756, but its big successes were in London, where the two principal roles were played by the leading actors of the day, including Sarah Siddons and William Macready. In America there are records of performances as early as 1759 and as late as 1853. Even after the play had faded from the stage during the last half of the nineteenth century, its fame survived through one speech, like some outdated opera known only through occasional performances and recordings of one aria. The speech occurs after Lord Randolph brings to his castle a Stranger, apparently of lowly birth, who had just saved Lord Randolph's life by fearlessly attacking four armed assassins. In bearing and conduct the Stranger seems above his station, and Lord and Lady Randolph, admiring him as one "ordained / And stamped a hero by the sovereign hand/ Of Nature," prevail upon him to declare who he is. The Stranger begins:

My name is Norval: on the Grampian Hills
My father feeds his flocks, a frugal swain
Whose constant cares were to increase his store,
And keep his only son, myself, at home.
For I had heard of battles, and I longed
To follow to the field some warlike lord.

And for some thirty lines he recounts how he led an expedition with a few friends against "a band of barbarians" who had made away with their flocks and herds, and how he slew their leader, whose arms and armor he took, and left home to join the king's warriors against the invading Dane. It must follow, of course, that Norval is no ordinary shepherd but the son of the famed Douglas who was killed in battle before "Norval" was born, and that his mother is none other than Lady Randolph. How happily all this might have ended, but for the machinations of the villainous Glenalvon!

It is difficult today to discern beyond the stilted rhetoric and worn sentiments of Norval's speech the qualities that once made it much admired. It acquired a life of its own, independent of the play, and became widely known through public recitations, lessons in speech, school memorizations, and the like (a friend remembers his mother reciting the speech when he was a boy). Books on elocution included it as a set piece. An early instance, published in London in 1774, was William Enfield's The Speaker; or, Miscellaneous Pieces Selected from the Best English Writers . . . With a View to Facilitate the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking. To which Is Prefixed an Essay on Elocution. This book was often reprinted, the last edition in 1858. Norval's speech also appears as an exercise in one of the most widely used and frequently reprinted texts in the United States during the nineteenth century, C. P. Branson's Elocution; or, Mental and Vocal Philosophy. The first edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1855) included the opening lines, which have appeared in every subsequent edition. Besides their usefulness as training for the young, recitations had a place in family entertainment. Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park (1814), provides a glimpse of how it was. Tom and Edmund Bertram are arguing over whether their absent father would approve of their putting on a contemporary play, and Tom defends the project by reminding Edmund how often they declaimed for the elder Bertram:

Nobody is fonder of exercise of talent in young people, or promotes it more than my father, and for anything of the acting, spouting, reciting kind, I think he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys. How many a time have we mourned over the dead body of Julius Caesar, and to be'd and not to be'd, in this very room, for his amusement? And I am sure, my name was Norval, every day of my life through one Christmas holidays.

There among the perennial Shakespearian favorites is Norval's speech.

How familiar it had become we can guess from casual allusions and quotations. In Dombey and Son, for instance, Dickens says of Captain Cuttle's frugal way with words, "he had better, like young Norval's father, "increase his store.' It is not a very illuminating analogy, but for that very reason it attests to the currency of Norval's speech, since it does little more than flatter the reader who catches on as one who shares with the author a common cultural experience. One of the liveliest allusions occurs in Shaw's You Never Can Tell, when the irrepressible Clandon twins are being introduced to the family solicitor:

Philip. I was christened in a comparatively prosaic mood. My name is—
Dolly [completing his sentence for him declamatorily]. "Norval. On the Grampian Hills—"
Philip [declaiming gravely]. "My father feeds
his flocks a frugal swain—"

in 1897, when this play appeared, a performance of Douglas was very unlikely, but Shaw apparently assumed that an appreciable number of his audience would be familiar with Norval's speech, for the full effect of the twins' performance depends on the pleasure of recognition. However, the mocking way in which the twins play with the lines implies that the days when they could be taken seriously were already numbered.

Shaw's stage directions confirm the status of Norval's speech as a recitation piece, but the finest illustration of the flavor and resonance that it once had is preserved in Lionel Barrymore's description—as reported in Good Night, Sweet Prince, Gene Fowler's biography of John Barrymore—of his actor-father giving Norval's speech the full treatment:

It was during our childhood that we first heard from Papa himself concerning the Grampian Hills. Papa used to stride up and down the room in his zebra undershirt, his eyes bright, his long forefinger leveled at some fabulous world unseen by mere mortals, and recite:

"My name is Norval; on the Grampian Hills My father feeds his flocks, a frugal swain . . ."

This reminiscence had come about because Fowler asked Lionel to explain the significance of an allusion to the Grampian Hills in a letter John Barrymore had written to Fowler's son in 1937:

We have found a house [John wrote] which, if we can only get it—as the owner is in Mexico, probably being shot—will have a murderer's room with a concrete base, where you and I, and those cognoscenti of whom we approve (I need scarcely say an excessively attenuated roster!) can cavort and have our being undisturbed. It will also have a swimming pool that will wind tortuously among overhanging trees. And a pool table, at which we will fleece the neighboring bumpkins! Give my best love to your father and mother and the rest of the family. Soon I trust we will all be tending our flocks together on the Grampian Hills—where the cows really do come home.

Fowler's attempts to find in Scottish geography and Home's play a clue to the implications of the speech for John were dismissed by Lionel:

It's news to me what it is or where it comes from. It didn't matter to us then nor would it now; we were not a family for research. Jack never knew what the Grampian Hills actually were; but he knew what they meant. What they meant to him. Our father's grand inflections made them appear to us what Utopia must have meant to Sir Thomas More; what the Promised Land, Arcadia, the Elysian Fields, the Garden of the Hesperides, Zion and all the rest rolled together, meant to the groping, dreaming men of all the ages. It was a place where caravans rested; where time itself stood still.

The elder Barrymore's recitations must have been stirring and powerful, but none of the heroic and warlike aspirations of Norval seem to have left an impression on the sons, only the strange place-name and its evocative pastoral associations. Detached from the play and even from its own immediate context of meanings, the speech nevertheless conveyed rich, even magical overtones.

Fields knew the Barrymores well, and in some important respects he and John were compatible. Among random notes that Fields had accumulated for a possible column for the Bell Syndicate there is the following item: "When the Government needed 75,000 more tanks, John Barrymore and W. C. Fields immediately offered their services." Robert Lewis Taylor, in his biography of Fields, tells about one memorable convivial occasion during the war when Gene Fowler, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Fields were moved to enlist and drove to a recruiting station, with Lionel in his wheelchair, to offer their services. ("Who sent you, the enemy?" asked the woman in charge.) In circumstances such as these, Fields may have heard John mention the Grampian Hills with feeling, for Fowler reports that "whenever Jack spoke of those hills a far-away spell would possess him." It is, of course, just as likely that during the years at the turn of the century when Fields was performing in all sorts of theaters in this country and around the world, he might have encountered an old-time actor who, like Maurice Barrymore, would tune up with "My name is Norval." The Barrymore story does not settle the question of the source of the allusions to the Grampian Hills in the two Fields films, but it does provide a significant clue to their meaning, one that points to something basic in his character and his comedy.

Fields played many roles, but they all had an essentially similar central core, and in many respects the character he created was an extension of himself. He was on the way to success even in his teens, but his boyhood was harsh and unhappy, and during his early career he was sometimes cheated by unscrupulous or desperate theatrical managers. Even in the days when he was celebrated and wealthy he never got over the uneasy feeling that he was engaged in a very precarious calling, that success was ephemeral, that banks were untrustworthy, that people were unpredictable and generally unscrupulous, and that every move required his utmost in cunning and sleight of hand. He could be affectionate, friendly, and even generous, but he was chronically suspicious and cranky. Yet he seemed aware of the absurdity of it all. He achieved his initial success as a juggler who dressed as a tramp and who would falter or miss in a routine only to make a desperate recovery that was technically brilliant and funny at the same time. This was his prototype, a metaphor for his comic art and his view of the human condition. In his films his elegant phrases, his fastidious manners, his self-conscious dignity all betray constant vigilance against the imminent possibility of defeat and humiliation, but he seems never lacking in will and resources for a comeback.

The comic character that Fields created is, accordingly, not of the ludicrous kind that is exposed to ridicule for its follies and stupidities and punished for them with laughter. It belongs rather to that more amiable group of comic figures with whom we sympathize, who are masters in the art of survival, employing their talents in a lively gamble to win at the odds, in defiance of nature and the repressions and suspicions of society. It is the kind of comedy that has produced some of the most durable and endearing comic characters of fiction and drama, and includes such familiar comic heroes as Falstaff, Sancho Panza, the Good Soldier Schweik, Groucho, and Chaplin. Even when they find it expedient to employ shady means that we are too respectable to employ, we are on their side because we admire their zest for life, and because they seem to be fighting our battle and enjoying it. Behind their ebullience and bravado there is sometimes a suggestion of gravity, for the game they play must ultimately be lost, although it is not honorable to mention it. "I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well," says Falstaff just before the battle of Shrewsbury. The prince reminds him, "Why, thou owest God a death." But Falstaff turns aside this intrusive thought: ""Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day." The danger of failure is always there, whether immediate or remote, but that only sharpens their wits and seems to justify their outrageous practices and fanciful expedients. And because our sympathies are with them we do not want to see them lose—or, if they do, left without resources to try again. We want to preserve the mood of high spirits and laughter in their company without a turn to pathos at their total defeat.

In some of his films, especially the earlier ones, Fields ends up a success. A fraudulent scheme for selling dry oil wells prospers in an unexpected way when the wells bring in oil; an invention proves its worth after misadventures—the windshield is indeed shatterproof, the tire punctureproof; an orange ranch that turns out to be desert is then profitably sold for a racetrack. But in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man and My Little Chickadee success completely eludes him. After the usual pattern of brazen effronteries, clever evasions, and dignified yet desperate recoveries, Fields finds himself in a final situation where events are out of his control and there are no more moves left save to accept defeat and go on. But for the comic character that Fields created and the comic effect of which he was the master, there cannot be the implication of a permanent reversal. There must remain the possibility of some recovery, the expectation, at least, of coming upon new territory where the suckers will listen or his luck will turn. Of this ebullience of spirit, this refusal to despair, the Grampian Hills are a sign and a symbol. What makes the allusions to them in these two films especially intriguing is that they are hidden and deceptive. By the time the films appeared (1939 and 1940) Norval's speech had become a cultural fossil from another era, and the kind of recognition that Shaw took for granted could no longer be expected. Fields's references to the Grampian Hills thus amounted to a sly and private game, highly personal since Fields himself was largely responsible for the scripts. Only in the repetition of the allusion in My Little Chickadee is there a hint that something beyond the mere oddity of the name is involved—and in the fact that in both films the allusion enters in exactly the same way, as an accompaniment of Fields's departure with the strong suggestion that he is not through.

No matter how Fields came across Norval's speech, it would not have been in character for him to endow it with the romantic inflation of the Barrymores, but the wryly comic air in which he utters the name at the conclusion of the films does not exclude at least a hint of magic. In the landscape through which the chariot passes in the final scene of You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, the Grampian Hills can stand for some undetermined place down the road where the irrepressible Fields and his companions can get a fresh start. The conclusion of My Little Chickadee is less buoyant and animated. The idea of having Fields and Mae West teamed up in the same film may have sounded great in theory, but although the funniest scenes are those with Fields, Mae West controls the action and Fields is often, uncharacteristically, the victim. At the end his schemes have failed, he has been humiliated, he has barely escaped with his life, and his bravado is deflated. As he stands alone amid these ruins he is as close to down and out as we ever see him. He looks a little wistful as he bids Mae West farewell, but he does not lose his aplomb, and he drops a cryptic hint that he retains in his mind's eye the image of a quirky Utopia which is not shown on any map but which, with the help of some audacity and a little luck, he does not despair of finding.