Part 10

But is this treating the play fairly? Is it just a story, the story of Carlotta and Diaz? Suppose we look at it in another way, suppose we consider it as a study of modern love, or, more particularly, of the modern woman in love. Then the play at once looks much more shipshape. It is the _éducation sentimentale_ of Carlotta. The second act ceases to be episodical; it is one of the stages in Carlotta’s “love-life” (as Ibsen’s Ella Rentheim calls it). The miracle of Diaz’s reclamation between the acts ceases to worry us; it only prepares another stage in Carlotta’s love-life. And, from this point of view, I think Mr. Bennett has achieved something much better than the construction of a well-made play. He has given us, in his downright matter-of-fact way, a close study of modern love in the case of a woman made for love, living for it, able to dominate it and to turn it to heroic purpose. She starts her career of love by “giving herself” to a man who is almost a stranger. I suppose this is considered a “bold” scene. But it is, evidently, there from no cheap purpose of “audacity,” it is no calculated fling at the proprieties. Mr. Bennett—it is his way—indifferently depicts human nature as he sees it, and the girl’s “fall” is natural enough. In a _milieu_ of prosaic provincialism (if one may venture so to qualify the Five Towns) she is thrown into contact with a romantic figure from the great world, a famous pianist who has just enraptured her with his music, the embodiment of all her artistic ideals. She is of an amorous temperament (and since Mr. Bennett is undertaking a study of love, it would be no use choosing an ascetic heroine). The inevitable happens. When next seen, she has not seen or heard of the man for years since their one meeting. They have been years of strenuous labour, and she is a successful novelist. But she has not parted with her temperament, and she falls in love with, so to speak, the nearest man. He seems a poor creature for so superior a woman to choose—but such a choice is one of the commonplaces of life. When she realizes the misery she is causing to the man’s wife she promptly renounces him. (The wife has a little past love-history of her own—Mr. Bennett neglects no facet of his subject.) Then Carlotta hears of Diaz and his morphinomania, conceives forthwith her heroic project of rescuing him, takes up her lot with him again, and pulls him through. When he is himself again, he reveals the egoism of the absolute artist. Carlotta must not accompany him to the concert, because she would make him nervous. She obeys, and is left in an agony of suspense at home. When the concert has ended in triumph, he must be off (without his wife) to an influential patron’s party. She acquiesces again, not without tears. The men she loves are not worthy of her; but she must love them, she was made for love. There is talk of marriage at the end. It seems an anti-climax.

I find that I have been discussing Mr. Bennett’s play instead of the general question into which I proposed to inquire—the treatment of love by our dramatists of to-day. It looks, I fear, like the familiar device of a reviewer for running away from his subject—“unfortunately, our space will not permit, &c.”—always very useful when the subject is getting ticklish. But the fact that I have had to dwell on Mr. Bennett’s case rather shows how rare that case is with us. The general treatment of love on our stage is, it seems to me, inadequate. Either it is a mere _ficelle_, an expedient for a plot, or it is apt to be conventional, second-hand, unobserved. We want fresh, patient, and fearless studies of it on our stage. I am not asking for calculated “audacity” or salacity (there has never been any dearth of that), but for veracity. Though the subject is the oldest in the world, it is always becoming new. There are subtleties, fine shades, in our modern love that cannot have been known to the Victorians; yet most of our stage-love to-day remains placidly Victorian. Was it Rochefoucauld or Chamfort who spoke of the many people who would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard it talked about? But think how we of to-day have all heard it talked about, what books we have read about it! The old passion has put on a new consciousness, and calls for a new stage-treatment. Where is our Donnay or our Porto-Riche? They, perhaps, pursue their inquiries a little farther than would suit our British delicacy; but our playwrights might at least take a leaf out of their book in the matter of veracity, instead of mechanically repeating the old commonplaces.

H. B. IRVING

There is a commonplace about the evanescent glory of actors that will hardly bear close scrutiny. It is said that, as they live more intensely than other men, enjoying their reward on the spot, so they die more completely, and leave behind nothing but a name. Even so, are they worse off than the famous authors whom nobody ever reads? Or than the famous painters whose works have disappeared? Which is the more live figure for us to-day, John Kemble, who played in the _Iron Chest_, or William Godwin, who wrote the original story? Is Zeuxis or Apelles anything more than a name? It is said that whereas other artists survive in their work, the actor’s dies with him. But we make of every work of art a palimpsest, and it is for us what we ourselves have written over its original text—so that the artist only lives vicariously, through our own life—while the dead actor’s work stands inviolate, out of our reach, a final thing. Lamb says of Dodd’s Aguecheek, “a part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.” Nothing can alter that forehead now; but if Dodd could have left it behind him, we should be all agog to revise the verdict. So Mrs. Siddons was famous for her graceful manner of dismissing the guests at Macbeth’s banquet. Nothing can impair that grace now; could it have been handed down, we should be having two opinions about it. Dead actors, then, live again in the pages that commemorate them, and they live more securely than the artists whose works survive. They are no longer the sport of opinion.

But this is only casuistry, the vain effort to seek consolation for the death of a friend. I am not speaking of a boon companion, but of something much better, of that ideal, disinterested friend which every actor is for us on the stage, giving us his mind and heart and temperament and physical being, immolating his very self for us, and at the end (I can see Henry Irving the elder standing before the curtain as he uttered the words) our “obliged, respectful, loving servant.” This is pure friendship, purer than any private intimacy, with its inevitable contacts and reserves of different egoisms. Why does my mind go back to the elder Irving? Because I am thinking of his son Harry, who was so like him (too like him, it was a perpetual handicap), and never more like him than in that pride which does not ape humility but feels it—the pride of the artist in his art and the humility of the devotee in the temple of art. Indeed, I think Harry Irving had an almost superstitious reverence for his profession. He had it perhaps not merely because he was his father’s son, but also because he was his father’s son with a difference, an academic difference; he was one of a little band of Oxford men whose adoption of the stage was, in those days, a breach with orthodox Oxford tradition. All that, I daresay, is altered now. In an Oxford which has widened Magdalen Bridge and built itself new Schools anything is possible. But in those days undergraduates were not habitually qualifying for the stage; indeed, the old “Vic” in term-time was out of bounds. The old “Vic” had only just disappeared when I went up to see young Irving as Decius Brutus in _Julius Cæsar_, and H. B. was still very much an undergraduate. Heavens! the pink and green sweets we ate at supper not far from Tom Tower after the show—the sweets that only undergraduates can eat! If I remember the sweets better than the Decius Brutus, it will be indulgent to infer that Harry Irving’s _début_ was not of the most remarkable. But his reverence for the histrionic art was, even then. I teazed him (youthful critics have a crude appetite for controversy) by starting an assault, entirely theoretical and Pickwickian, on that reverential attitude; we beat over the ground from Plato to Bossuet; and I think it took him some time to forgive me.

In his earlier years on the stage he was a little stiff and formal—characteristics which were not at all to his disadvantage in the young prig of _The Princess and the Butterfly_ and the solemn young man-about-town of _Letty_ (though the smart Bond Street suit and patent leather shoes of the man-about-town were obviously a sore trial to a boy who, from his earliest years, dressed after his father). I imagine his Crichton (1902) was his first real success in London, and an admirable Crichton it was, standing out, as the play demanded, with that vigour and stamp of personal domination which he had inherited from his father. His Hamlet, though his most important, was hardly his best part. It was too cerebral. But is not Hamlet, some one will ask, the very prince of cerebrals? Yes, but Hamlet has grace as well as thought, sweetness as well as light. Harry Irving’s Hamlet (of 1905, he softened much in the later revival) was a little didactic, almost donnish. He hardened the hardness of Hamlet—particularly his hardness to women, Ophelia and Gertrude, which we need not be sickly sentimentalists to dislike seeing emphasized. In a word he was impressive rather than charming—was perhaps almost harsh after the conspicuously charming Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. Nevertheless, if Harry Irving’s Hamlet was second to Forbes-Robertson’s, it was a very good second.

He had his father’s rather Mephistophelean humour—but I am annoyed to find myself always harping on his father. It is a tiresome obsession. None suffered from it more than the son himself, at once hero and martyr of filial piety. He invited comparison, playing as many as possible of his father’s old parts, all ragged and threadbare as they had become. But he lacked the quality which originally saved them, the romantic flamboyant _baroque_ quality of his father’s genius. Sir Henry impressed himself upon his time by sheer force of individuality and by what Byron calls “magnoperation.” He was a great manager as well as a great actor, doing everything on a gigantic scale and in the grand style. He was a splendid figure of romance, off as well as on the stage. It was hopeless to provoke comparison with such a being as this. Though the son showed the family likeness he was naturally a reasonable man, a scholar, a man of discursive analytic mind rather than of the instinctive perfervid histrionic temperament. It was always a pleasure to swop ideas with him, to talk to him about the principles of his art, the great criminals of history, or the latest murder trial he had been attending at the Old Bailey; but I suspect (I never tried) conversation with his father, in Boswell’s phrase, a “tremendous companion,” must have been a rather overwhelming experience.... And, after all, the wonderful thing is that the son stood the comparison so well, that he was not utterly crushed by it—that the successor of so exorbitant an artist could maintain any orbit of his own. That is a curious corner of our contemporary society the corner of the second generation, where the son mentions “my father” quickly, with a slight drop of the voice, out of a courteous disinclination to let filial respect become a bore to third parties. There is an academician of the second generation in Pailleron’s play who is always alluding to _mon illustre père_, and as the ill-natured say _joue du cadavre_. In our little English corner there is never any such lapse from good taste, Harry Irving was greatly loved there; and will be sadly missed.

THE PUPPETS

At the corner of a Bloomsbury square I found my path blocked by a little crowd of children who were watching a puppet show of an unusual kind. The usual kind, of course, is _Punch and Judy_, which has become a degenerate thing, with its puppets grasped in the operator’s hand; these puppets were wired, in the grand manner of the art, and had a horse and cart, no less, for their transport. The show, though lamentably poor in itself—the puppets merely danced solemnly round and round without any attempt at dramatic action—was rich in suggestion. Do we not all keep a warm corner of our hearts for the puppets, if only for their venerable antiquity and their choice literary associations? Why, in the grave pages of the _Literary Supplement_ learned archæologists have lately been corresponding about the Elizabethan “motions,” and Sir William Ridgeway has traced the puppets back to the Syracuse of Xenophon’s day, and told us how that author in his “Symposium” makes a famous Syracusan puppet player say that he esteems fools above other men because they are those who go to see his puppets (νευρόσπαστα). My own recollections connect Xenophon with parasangs rather than puppets, but I am glad to be made aware of this honourable pedigree, though I strongly resent the Syracusan’s remark about the amateurs of puppets. I share the taste of Partridge, who “loved a puppet show of all the pastimes upon earth,” and I sympathize with the showman in “Tom Jones” who could tolerate all religions save that of the Presbyterians, “because they were enemies to puppet shows.” And so I lingered with the children at the corner of the Bloomsbury square.

Puppets, someone has said, have this advantage over actors: they are made for what they do, their nature conforms exactly to their destiny. I have seen them in Italy performing romantic drama with a dash and a _panache_ that no English actor in my recollection (save, perhaps, the late Mr. Lewis Waller) could rival. Actors, being men as well as actors, and therefore condemned to effort in acting, if only the effort of keeping down their consciousness of their real, total self, cannot attain to this clear-cut definiteness and purity of performance. But the wire-puller must be a true artist, his finger-tips responsive to every emotional thrill of the character and every _nuance_ of the drama; indeed, the ideal wire-puller is the poet himself, expressing himself through the motions of his puppets and declaiming his own words for them.

It was with this thought in my mind that I ventured, when Mr. Hardy first published _The Dynasts_, to suggest that the perfect performance of that work would be as a puppet show, with Mr. Hardy reading out his own blank verse. I pointed out the suggestive reference to puppets in the text. One of the Spirits describes the human protagonists as “mere marionettes,” and elsewhere you read:—

Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear As puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.

Further, at the very core of Mr. Hardy’s drama is the idea that these Napoleons and Pitts and Nelsons are puppets of the Immanent Will. If ever there was a case for raising a puppet show to the highest literary dignity, this was one.

But it was all in vain. Either Mr. Hardy was too modest to declaim his own verse in public, or else the actors pushed in, as they will wherever they can, and laid hands on as much of his work as they could manage. And so we had Mr. Granville Barker’s version early in the war and only the other day the performance at Oxford, and I have nothing to say against either, save that they were, and could only be, extracts, episodes, fragments, instead of the great epic-drama in its panoramic entirety. A puppet show could embrace the whole, and one voice declaiming the poem would to be sure not give the necessary unity of impression—that singleness must be first of all in the work itself—but would incidentally emphasize it.

The puppet presentation would, however, do much more than this. It would clarify, simplify, attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is, of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living, bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact, realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in their imagination. There is the notorious instance of Charles Lamb, with his objection to seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies acted. He complained that the gay and witty Richard III. was inevitably materialized and vulgarized by the actor. Lamb, as we all know, was capricious, and indeed made a virtue of caprice, but what do you say to so serious and weighty a critic as Professor Raleigh? Talking about the Shakespearean boy-actors of women, he commits himself to this:—“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare has not suffered more than he has gained by the genius of later-day actresses, who bring into the plays a realism and a robust emotion which sometimes obscure the sheer poetic value of the author’s conception. The boys were no doubt very highly trained, and amenable to instruction; so that the parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which served as a transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own talent and passions by those who are its ministers. With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic drama died in England, and it has had no second life.”

A little “steep,” is it not? Logically it is an objection to all acting of poetic drama. Boy-players of girls are only a half-way house. The transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos would be still more transparent if it were merely the medium of the printed page. Now this much is certain. Shakespeare conceived his plays, whatever poetry or wit or pathos he put into them, in terms of men and women (not boy-women). The ideal performance of Shakespeare would be by the men and women who grew in Shakespeare’s imagination. But they, unfortunately, do not exist in flesh and blood, but only in that imagination, and, to bring them on the stage, you have to employ ready-made men and women, who at the very best can only be rough approximations to the imaginary figures. In this sense it is not a paradox but a simple commonplace to say that no one has ever seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage, or ever will see. And the greater the “genius” of the actor, the more potent his personality—though he will be the darling of the majority, thirsting for realism, the immediate sense of life—the more will he get between the poet and imaginative students like Lamb and Professor Raleigh, who want their poetry inviolate.

This seems like a digression, but is really to my purpose. Flesh-and-blood actors we shall always have with us; they will take good care of that themselves. But for the imaginative souls who are for compromise, who are for half-way houses and look back fondly to the boy-players, I would say: Why not try the puppets? These also present a “transparent medium” for the author’s expression. And, further, the purely “lyrical” passages in which Shakespeare abounds and which seem so odd in the realism of the human actors (_e.g._, the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death) would gain immensely by being recited by the poet (or wire-puller). A puppet-show _Hamlet_ might be an exquisite experiment in that highest art whose secret is suggestion.

VICISSITUDES OF CLASSICS

Of Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_, revived by the Phœnix Society, I said that it was a live classic no longer, but a museum-classic, a curio for connoisseurs. Its multiplication of violent deaths in the last act (four men stabbed and one courtesan poisoned) could no longer be taken seriously, and, in fact, provoked a titter in the audience. This sudden change of tragic into comic effect was fatal to that unity of impression without which not merely a tragedy but any work of art ceases to be an organic whole. The change was less the fault of Webster than of the Time Spirit. Apparently the early Jacobeans could accept a piled heap of corpses at the end of a play without a smile, as “all werry capital.” Violent death was not so exceptional a thing in their own experience as it is in ours. They had more simplicity of mind than we have, a more childlike docility in swallowing whole what the playwright offered them. But Webster was not without fault. One assassination treads so hastily upon the heels of the other, the slaughter is so wholesale. _Hamlet_ closes with several violent deaths, yet Shakespeare managed to avoid this pell-mell wholesale effect.

But there is another element in Webster’s workmanship which, I think, has helped to deprive the play of life. I mean his obtrusive ingenuity. I am not referring to the ingenuity of the tortures practised upon the unhappy Duchess—the severed hand thrust into hers, the wax figure purporting to be her slain husband, and so forth. This fiendish ingenuity is proper to the character of the tyrant Ferdinand, and its exercise does add a grisly horror to the play. I mean the ingenuity of Webster himself, a perverted, wasted ingenuity, in his play-construction. He seems to have ransacked his fancy in devising scenic experiments. There is the “echo” scene. It is theatrically ineffective. It gives you no tragic emotion, but only a sense of amused interest in the author’s ingenuity, and you say, “How quaint!” Then there is the little device for giving a touch of irony to the Cardinal’s murder. He has warned the courtiers, for purposes of his own, that if they hear him cry for help in the night they are to take no notice; he will be only pretending. And so, when he cries for help in real earnest, he is hoist with his own petard, and the courtiers only cry, “Fie upon his counterfeiting.” Again the theatrical effect is small; you are merely distracted from the tragic business in hand by the author’s curious ingenuity. For any one interested in the theatrical _cuisine_ these experiments, of course, have their piquancy. Webster seems to have been perpetually seeking for “new thrills”—like the Grand Guignol people in our own day. He had some lucky finds. The masque of madmen, for instance, is a tremendous thrill, one of the biggest, I daresay, in the history of tragedy. But there were experiments that didn’t come off.

At any rate they fail with us. Webster, no doubt, had his true “posterity” (was it perchance contemporary with Pepys?), but we are his post-posterity. In a sense every masterpiece is in advance of its time. “The reason,” says Marcel Proust (“A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”)—

“The reason why a work of genius is admired with difficulty at once is that the author is extraordinary, that few people resemble him. It is his work itself that in fertilizing the rare minds capable of comprehending it makes them grow and multiply. Beethoven’s quartets (XII., XIII., XIV., and XV.) have taken fifty years to give birth and growth to the Beethoven quartet public, thus realizing like every masterpiece a progress in the society of minds, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the masterpiece appeared, that is to say, of beings capable of loving it. What we call posterity is the posterity of the work itself. The work must create its own posterity.”