Part 7
On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself--as indeed I expected to find it--far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing, though--would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L’Assommoir_ was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of horror in Charles Reade’s version _Drink_. The version of _Thérèse Raquin_--executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but overlooked by Mr. George Moore--does not widely depart from the original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage, have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly discarding the original at a certain point--when the bare but real equivalent of that original has once been secured--of forgetting, from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_ is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing--that is--has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.
_Thérèse Raquin_ occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In point of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem in itself less interesting than the problem of the _Page d’Amour_ is, in _Thérèse Raquin_, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy which gives the _Page d’Amour_ so much of its value. _Thérèse Raquin_ contains only one or two sentences--they are those in which the wicked little _bourgeoise_ expresses her desire to live for ever in the sunshine--which permit one to realise that its author is the author of the passionate idyl _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_. But, on the other hand, in _Thérèse Raquin_ we are not face to face with the superfluous and unveracious hideousness of _La Terre_; and the view of humanity is not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in _Nana_. No; in these respects we may rank _Thérèse Raquin_ rather with _L’Assommoir_ itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the skies. In both--as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola writes--an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own punishment.
If _Thérèse Raquin_ were simply the melodrama some of its opponents have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the interval between two acts--the first of which ends and the second of which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour--but in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which, in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts--different slightly from the interest of the later ones--is the interest of mental analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, _The Ring and the Book_ is a ‘shocker.’
The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see _Thérèse Raquin_, comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition of several bitter truths--an exposition made by M. Zola with power and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’--this avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection are of the very essence of Art--commends itself, as I understand, to a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the capacity of its professors for critical preachment.
(_Academy_, 24th October 1891.)
‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING
I question if _Macbeth_ can ever, in the hands of _any_ tragedian, make the same mark as _Hamlet_. _Hamlet_, as far as the opportunities for the display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have been written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy. Most of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it is a point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he brings into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the remains of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed to him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own; admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute than his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the grooms; his righteous satire--‘your spirits shine through you’--on the hired murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and pitying warning to Macduff--
‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged With blood of thine already’--
all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities that have given _Macbeth_ a name, are more conspicuous and abundant: at all events are more upon the surface; and the art is great that knows how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does much to modify the popular conception.
It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in _Macbeth_ is to show the deterioration of character through one crime that brings another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show something of the higher nature with which the character began. I think I note also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural over him. The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a destiny. His crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them from without, by a something not himself, making for Evil.
And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural power, this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for Evil, has upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of the play, from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these, indeed, are set before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in their profession; but as men rendered desperate: the one
‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world Have so incensed, that I am reckless what I do to spite the world’:
the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,
‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, That I would set my life on any chance, To mend it or be rid on ’t.’
Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate--for the play itself indicates it a hundred times--how much Macbeth is separated from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on, the gradual sinking to that level of theirs--the fact that the distance that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said “God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than--
‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’--
words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending frenzy--and when his final and bloody resolution--
‘Yet I will try the last,’
is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’ own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished.
(_Academy_, 23rd December 1876.)
‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’
The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared, displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of _The Duchess of Malfi_. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once, at least, before, the Independent Theatre--eschewing mere eccentricity and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the unseemly)--once before was it occupied with work of genius and high literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?
And now, after a _régime_ more or less of the experimental and unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster--Webster, it is true, with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the modern taste. But still a classic--a giant in conception and writing--a strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr. Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’ Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that _The Duchess of Malfi_ is ‘a masterpiece excelled only by _King Lear_.’ And, if I take down my volumes of Lamb’s _Specimens_, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’ And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’
But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time, along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor events--these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will, of his time, were--one need hardly say it, but that it affects his acceptability upon the modern stage--the permitted coarseness, the absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from scene to scene within the compass of a single act--a point in which no English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of construction of our own time.
Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be--‘rearranged for the modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it, that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors--the modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to _them_--as on account of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style. The similes of Webster--pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of the imagery of his contemporaries--are rather lost upon a public and upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately simplicity--born writer, rather than playwright--requires to be heard by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures so characteristic of the Italian temperament--a temperament never more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty--when these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess--when crazy folk yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one--an audience without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.
Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence--for such appears to be Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation--the forces of the Church in its bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure. And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon--a learned, helpful student of the time--had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the _macabre_. Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity; but the Independent Theatre--sometimes too little in touch with the main-stream of English life and thought--may well permit itself to give a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are unburdened with Literature?
(_Academy_, 29th October 1892.)
REMBRANDT
It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,--and the saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional--that if the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges, a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really, which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by which that vision is expressed.’
In the case of a writer, language is the instrument, and Sterne’s or Molière’s perception and sensitiveness are made evident in words. In the case of a pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil--or the instrument may be that which was Rembrandt’s more than any other’s: it may be the needle of the etcher.
I hope that, in my enumeration of the qualities of intellect and craftsmanship that make for excellence in creative Literature and in pictorial Design, I have cut the ground from under the feet of those who advocate the work of craftsmen merely--those who consider that in _technique_ lies the end as well as the beginning of success. Even to the most casual of the students of the Arts--to the most superficial observer of the means whereby the several performers may produce their effects, in story, drawing, print--it can scarcely be necessary to say that a command of _technique_ must be demanded by the severe and accurate judge. But the genius of a man of the first order--a Goethe, Coleridge, Balzac, Rembrandt, Turner--is, as it seems to me, misunderstood altogether, if the flexibility and freshness of spirit and the originality of vision are not remembered and praised when we praise too the excellent command of technical means. And in the case of Rembrandt, the character and charm of whose three hundred etchings are the theme of my discourse, the first thing to take account of is that we have to deal not only with a conjurer of the brush and a magician of the needle, but with a deep soul. An _âme d’élite_--that is the true phrase for it: a being not above human faults, but above average human excellence; a reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye for the large lines of simple landscape; an artist who, with masculine perception of the import of material things, was alive, constantly and keenly, also to the concerns of the spirit; a judge of character, who understood and who dissected all that he portrayed; a man of feeling, who rendered to the full the pathos of age, of suffering, and of Death--who somehow rendered also, as in the wistful portrait of the Prince of Orange, the incommunicable pathos of Youth.
Over all Rembrandt’s work, from the beginning to the end of it, as much on canvas as in drawing, as much in drawing as in etching, there reigns an absolute sincerity. It was himself that he expressed. Warped by no prejudice, modified by no fashion, his art, during the generation and a half in which he did his joyful labour--in the midst of personal triumph, in the midst, too, of personal disaster--recorded his own unaffected perception of the outward world and his own profound vision of the souls and the experiences of men. To study his work, therefore, is, if we have the wit, to have the opportunity to glean from it that which it is open to us to glean always from the greatest Classics--the richer harvest of a familiarity not alone with technical achievement, but with the great, deep way of apprehending Life and the world.
From youth to age, with art delightful and supreme, Rembrandt expressed himself in Etching. One of his first prints--the subject known to many by Wilson’s title of it, ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’--is the earliest of his known portraits of his mother; and that shows already mastery of character and mastery of line, as the lady, with the pardonable vanity of the handsome, the pardonable self-appreciation of one who was scarcely less a woman of the world because she was _bourgeoise_ by station, smiles her sagacious, kindly, genial smile, and lives with Whistler’s ‘Portrait of his Mother,’ with Holbein’s ‘Erasmus,’ with Latour’s pastels that glow sober yet vivid on the walls of the Museum of Saint-Quentin. It is a sketch, and consummate. His very last print--so it is generally accepted--is that ‘Woman with the Arrow’ which, unless the place be given to the print often called ‘_Négresse couchée_,’ is the most tolerable of his nudities. It is not faultless in draughtsmanship; or, if it is faultless in draughtsmanship, then how deficient was the model in perfection of form! But, in a fine impression--and in Etching, if the impression be not fine, the work does not exist--how alive is the figure! The flesh, how supple! The pose--the grace of the faulty. The light, how glowing, and the shade, how velvety! You forgive--it may be rather that you scarcely notice--the inexplicable mixture of realism with the classic. The side of a bed, the young thing sitting on it: Degas might have conceived the figure thus. But it is not pure realism, for she holds an arrow--suggests some light allegory, as much, save for her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s--just that touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant, than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam to show.