Part 12

and its intuition and expression assume a special type in accordance with the medium it delights in, and necessarily develop certain capacities and acknowledge, however tacitly, certain limitations.” Who denies anything so obvious? Certainly not Croce. What he denies, I take it, is that these considerations, however valuable in their right place, are proper to a philosophy of art. They are classifications and generalizations, he would say, and philosophy deals not with _generalia_ but with universals. To say that art is one is not to say that Raphael and Mozart are one. There are no duplicates in human life and no two artists have the same activity of intuition-expression. You may classify them in all sorts of ways; those who express themselves in paint, those who express themselves in sounds, and so forth; or sub-classify them into landscapists, portraitists, etc., etc.; or sub-sub-classify them into “school” of Constable, “school” of Reynolds, etc., etc. But you are only getting further and further away from anything like a philosophy of art, and will have achieved at best a manual or history of technique. In a philosophic theory Dr. Bosanquet’s “affinities of the spirit” are a will-o’-the-wisp. Thereupon he says, crushingly, “if you insist on neglecting these affinities of the spirit, your theory remains abstract, and has no illuminating power.” Well, Croce’s theory is certainly “up there,” it inhabits the cold air of pure ideas; it will not be of the least practical use at the Academy Schools or the Royal College of Music; but when a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet finds no illumination in a theory which unifies the arts, gives a comprehensible definition of beauty and, incidentally, constructs, to say the least of it, a plausible “cycle of reality,” I can but respectfully wonder.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

I was, perhaps rather naïvely, surprised the other day to hear an actor asking for Hazlitt’s “View of the English Stage.” Actors in general, whether correctly or incorrectly I cannot say, are reputed to be not enthusiastically given to reading. On the face of it, the thing seems likely enough. Their business is to be men of action and talk and the busy world—not sedentary contemplative, cloistered students. Your bookworm is as a rule a shy, retiring solitary; the very opposite of your actor who must not only boldly show himself but take a pride in being stared at. Logically, then, I ought not to have been as shocked as I was when the late Henry Neville some years ago roundly declared to me that an actor “should never read.” Yet the thought of a life without literature seemed so appalling! It is possible, however, to be a reader, and a voracious reader, yet not to read Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. The epoch is gone. Kean is long since dead. Our theatrical interests to-day are widely different from those of our ancestors a century ago. And Hazlitt’s criticisms have not the loose, discursive, impressionistic, personal, intimate charm of his other essays, his “Table Talk,” his “Round Table,” or his “Plain Speaker.” They simply show him in the “dry light” of the specialist, the closet-student turned playgoer, but these give a warm, coloured, speaking likeness of the whole man. I was surprised, then, to hear my friend the actor asking for Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. I venture to inquire what, particularly, he wanted them for. “Oh,” he said, “I like to read about Kean.”

And certainly if you want to read about Kean, Hazlitt is your man. It has been said, over and over again, that it was good luck for both actor and critic that Hazlitt had just begun his theatrical work on the _Morning Chronicle_ when Kean made his first appearance as Shylock at Drury Lane. Hazlitt helped to make Kean’s reputation and Kean’s acting was an invaluable stimulant to Hazlitt’s critical faculties. It is said, by the way, that Kean was originally recommended to Hazlitt’s notice by his editor, Perry. Things of this sort may have happened in that weird time of a century ago, but the age of miracles is passed. Editors of daily newspapers in our time are not on the look-out for unrevealed histrionic genius. They have other fish to fry. But Perry seems to have been a most interfering editor. He plagued his critic with his own critical opinions. Hazlitt’s first “notice” in the _Chronicle_ was about Miss Stephens as Polly in _The Beggar’s Opera_. “When I got back, after the play” (note that he had meditated in advance his “next day’s criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so interesting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation”—happy Hazlitt!) “Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice, ‘Well, how did she do?’ and on my speaking in high terms, answered that ‘he had been to dine with his friend the Duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true _sostenuto_ style; but as I had written the article’ (holding my peroration on _The Beggar’s Opera_ carelessly in his hand), ‘it might pass.’... I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the Editor’s room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account of her.” That “carelessly” is a delicious touch, which will come home to every scribbler. But Perry and his friend the Duke and that glimpse of a petticoat whisking out of the editor’s room! What a queer, delightful, vanished newspaper-world! There were, however, even in those days, editors who did not interfere. Hazlitt was, for a brief period, dramatic critic of _The Times_ (his most notable contribution was his notice of Kemble’s retirement in _Coriolanus_, June 25th, 1817), and was evidently well treated, for in his preface to the “View” (1818) he advises “any one who has an ambition to write, and to write _his best_ in the periodical Press, to get, if he can, a position in _The Times_ newspaper, the editor of which is a man of business and not a man of letters. He may write there as long and as good articles as he can, without being turned out for it.” One can only account for Hazlitt’s singular ideal of an editor as Johnson accounted for an obscure passage in Pope, “Depend upon it, Sir, he wished to vex somebody.” Hazlitt only wanted to be disagreeable to Perry.

Nevertheless, the _Chronicle_ had had the best of Hazlitt’s stage criticisms, his papers on Kean. Kean’s acting, as I have said, was invaluable to Hazlitt as a stimulus. It stimulated him to a sort of rivalry in Shakespearian interpretation, the actor fairly setting his own conception of the part against the actor’s rendering of it, giving him magnificent praise when the two agreed, and often finding carefully pondered reasons for disagreement. Hazlitt might have said of Kean what Johnson said of Burke: “This fellow calls forth all my powers.” The result is twofold. You get vivid descriptions of Kean’s acting, his voice, his figure, his gestures, his perpetual passionateness, in season and out of season (misrepresenting—_e.g._, Shakespeare’s Richard II., as Hazlitt said, as a character of passion instead of as a character of pathos). And at the same time you get the “psychology” (an inevitable _cliché_, cast since Hazlitt’s day) of the chief Shakespearian tragic characters, carefully “documented” by the text and elaborated and coloured by Hazlitt’s sympathetic vision. You see the same process at work in the criticisms of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons and Macready, but (remember the great Sarah had had her day before Hazlitt began to write) with a milder stimulant there was a milder response. In any case it was a gallery of portraits—a series of full-length figures partly from life and partly from the Shakespearean text. There was little background or atmosphere.

That is what makes Hazlitt’s criticism so unlike any modern sort. He wrote in an age of great histrionics, great interpretative art, but no drama, no creative art. His elaborate studies of dead-and-gone players have (except as illustrating Shakespeare) often a merely antiquarian interest. It is a curious detail that Kean’s Richard III. in early performances “stood with his hands stretched out, after his sword was taken from him,” and later “actually fought with his doubled fists like some helpless infant.” So it is a curious detail that Napoleon I. wore a green coat and clasped his hands behind his back. But compare this dwelling on the _minutiæ_ of an actor’s business or, to take a fairer example, compare Hazlitt’s analysis of the character of Iago (as a test of Kean’s presentation)—one of his acutest things—with the range and variety and philosophic depth of a criticism by Jules Lemaître. You are in a different world. Instead of the niggling details of how this man raised his arm at a given moment or delivered a classic speech in a certain way you get a criticism of life, all life, _quicquid agunt homines_. It is interesting, mildly interesting, to know that Kean’s Richard was (for Hazlitt) too grave and his Iago too gay, but after all we cannot be perpetually contemplating these particular personages of Shakespeare. We need fresh ideas, fresh creations, new views of society, anything for a change, so long as it is a thing “to break our minds upon,” We have no “great” Shakespearean actors now, but even if we had, should we care to devote to them the minute, elaborate attention paid by Hazlitt? One thinks of that time, a hundred years ago, of the great tragedy kings and queens as rather a stuffy world. Playgoing must have been a formidable enterprise ... but yet, you never can tell. There were frolicsome compensations. You might come back from the play to the office to learn your editor had been dining with a duke. And with luck next morning you might find a pretty actress at his door.

TALK AT THE MARTELLO TOWER

Our boatman with blue eyes and red cheeks is not more skilful with the oar than any of his fellows or more ready to give you change out of a shilling when he has rowed you across the harbour, though the notice board says the fare is twopence. But the ladies love primary colours, and we had to have him. We all three had our novels, and the blue eyes glanced at them, especially the yellow-back, with disfavour. He is a Swedenborgian—our little port, like most, is rich in out-of-the-way religions—and presumably regards all modern literature as on the wrong tack. It was not until we had parted with him at the Martello tower that we dared open our books.

Selina had grabbed Patty’s, the yellow-back, but she soon laid it down, and made a face. “My dear Patty,” she said wearily, “how _can_ you go on reading Gyp? Don’t you see that the silly woman doesn’t even know how to tell her own silly stories?”

Patty slightly flushed. She knew Gyp was a countess and great-granddaughter of Mirabeau-Tonneau, and felt it was almost Bolshevist manners to call so well-born a woman silly. Nothing could have been more frigid than her “What on earth do you mean, Selina?”

“I mean,” said Selina, “that the poor woman is dreadfully _vieux jeu_. I’m not thinking of her social puppets, her vicious clubmen, her languid swells, her anti-Semite Hebrews, her fashionable ladies who are no better than they should be though, goodness knows, these are old-fashioned enough. She began making them before I was born.” (Selina is no chicken, but it was horrid of Patty to raise her eyebrows.) “What I mean is, that she is at the old worn-out game of playing the omniscient author. Here she is telling you not only what Josette said and did when La Réole attacked her, but what La Réole said and did when Josette had left him, and so on. She ‘goes behind’ everybody, tells you what is inside everybody’s head. Why can’t she take her point of view, and stick to it? Wasn’t her obvious point of view Josette’s? Then she should have told us nothing about the other people but what Josette could know or divine about them.”

“Ah, Selina,” I interrupted, “your ‘goes behind’ gives you away. You’ve been reading Henry James’s letters.”

“Like everybody else,” she snapped.

“Why, to be sure, oh Jacobite Selina, but one may read them without taking their æsthetics for law and gospel. I know that the dear man lectured Mrs. Humphry Ward about the ‘point of view,’ when she was writing ‘Elinor,’ and got, I fancy, rather a tart answer for his pains. But you are more intransigent than the master. For he admitted that the point of view was all according to circumstances, and that some circumstances—for instance, a big canvas—made ‘omniscience’ inevitable. What about Balzac and Tolstoy? Both took the omniscient line, and, as novelists, are not exactly to be sneezed at.”

“Yes, but Gyp’s isn’t a big canvas,” said Selina, “and it seems to me _n’en déplaise à votre seigneurie_, that this precious story of hers called aloud for Josette’s point of view, and nothing but Josette’s. She is the one decent woman in the book, according to Gyp’s queer standards of decency” (Patty sniffed), “and the whole point, so far as I can make out, is the contrast of her decent mind with the highly indecent people round her. She is as innocent as Maisie, but a Maisie grown up and married. What a chance for another ‘What Maisie knew’!”

“I only wish _I_ knew what you two are talking about,” pouted Patty.

“That is not necessary, dear child,” I said, in my best avuncular manner. “You are a Maisie yourself—a Maisie who reads French novels. But, Selina, dear, look at your own Henry James’s own practice. He didn’t always choose his point of view and stick to it. He chose two in ‘The Golden Bowl,’ and three in ‘The Wings of the Dove,’ and I’m hanged if I know whether he took several, or none at all, in ‘The Awkward Age.’”

“Well,” rejoined Selina, “and isn’t that just why those books don’t quite come off? Don’t you feel that ‘The Golden Bowl’ is not one book but two, and that ‘The Wings’ is almost as kaleidoscopic” (Patty gasped) “as ‘The Ring and the Book’? I mentioned ‘Maisie,’ but after all that was a _tour de force_, it seemed to have been done for a wager. If you challenge me to give you real perfection, why, take ‘The Ambassadors’ and ‘The Spoils of Poynton.’ Was ever the point of view held more tight? Everything seen through Strether’s eyes, everything through Fleda’s!”

“Oh, I grant you the success of the method there, but, dear Selina” (I had lit my pipe and felt equal to out-arguing a non-smoker in the long run), “let us distinguish.” (Patty strolled away with her Gyp while we distinguished.) “The method of Henry James was good for Henry James. What was the ruling motive of his people? Curiosity about one another’s minds. Now, if he had just told us their minds, straightway, by ‘getting behind’ each of them in turn, in the ‘omniscient’ style, there would have been no play of curiosity, no chance for it even to begin, the cat would have been out of the bag. By putting his point of view inside one of his people and steadily keeping it fixed there, he turns all the other people into mere appearances—just as other people are for each one of us in real life. We have to guess and to infer what is in their minds, we make mistakes and correct them; sometimes they purposely mislead us. This is rather a nuisance, perhaps, in the real world of action, where our curiosity must have a ‘business end’ to it; but it is (for those who like it, as you and I do, Selina) immense fun in the world of fiction.”

“Now,” interjected Selina, “you are talking! That is precisely my case.”

“Stop a minute, Selina. I said the method was good for the writer whose temperament it suited. But so are other methods for other temperaments. You may tell your story all in letters, if you are a Richardson, or with perpetual digressions and statements that you are telling a story, if you are a Fielding or a Thackeray, or autobiographically, if your autobiography is a ‘Copperfield’ or a ‘Kidnapped.’ Every author, I suggest, is a law to himself. And I see no reason why we should bar ‘omniscience,’ as you apparently want to. Why forbid the novelist the historian’s privilege? Why rule out the novel which is a history of imaginary facts?”

“I can’t quite see Gyp as a historian,” said Selina.

“No more can I, thank goodness,” said Patty.

And so we were rowed back to the jetty, and the blue eyes didn’t blink over half-a-crown under the very notice board.

AGAIN AT THE MARTELLO TOWER

Now that regattas are over and oysters have come in again, our little port has returned to its normal or W. W. Jacobs demeanour. The bathers on the sand-spit have struck their tents. The Salvation Army band is practising its winter repertory. When our blue-eyed boatman rowed us over to the Martello tower again the other day, he almost looked as though he expected little more than his legal fare. Selina, who has the gift of management, suggested that Patty should try it on with him, on the ground, first, that women always do these things better than men, and, second, that Patty was blue-eyes’ favourite. I acquiesced, and Patty borrowed half-a-crown of me, so as to be prepared when the time came.

Meanwhile Selina began to read us extracts from Professor Henri Bergson on “Laughter.” Selina is a serious person without, so far as I have ever discovered, a grain of humour in her composition. These are just the people who read theories of laughter. It is a mystery to them, and they desire to have it explained. “A laughable expression of the face,” began Selina, “is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. One would say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallized into this particular cast of features.”

“I wonder whether Mr. George Robey’s whole moral life has,” dropped Patty, innocently.

“And who, pray,” said Selina, with her heavy eyebrows making semi-circles of indignant surprise, “is Mr. George Robey?”

I sat silent. I had just brought my niece back from a short but variegated stay in town. I knew, but I would not tell.

“Why, Selina, dear,” answered Patty, “you are the very image of him with your eyebrows rounded like that. He is always glaring at the audience that way.”

“_Will_ you, Patty,” said Selina, now thoroughly roused, “be good enough to tell me who he _is_?”

“Well, he’s an actor, who makes the very faces your Bergson describes. Uncle took me to see him in a” (catching my warning eye)—“in a sort of historical play. He was Louis XV., at Versailles, you know.”

“H’m,” said Selina, “it’s rather a doubtful period; and the very best historical plays do make such a hash of history. Was it in blank verse? Blank verse will do much to mitigate the worst period.”

“N-no,” answered Patty, “I don’t think it was in blank verse. I didn’t notice; did you, Uncle?”

I tried to prevaricate. “Well, you never know about blank verse on the stage nowadays, nearly all the actors turn it into prose. Mr. Robey may have been speaking blank verse, as though it were prose. The best artists cannot escape the fashion of the moment, you know.”

“But what did he do?” insisted Selina, “What was the action of the play?”

Patty considered. “I don’t remember his doing anything, Selina, dear, but chuck the ladies of the Court under the chin. Oh, yes, and he made eyes at them affectionately.”

“A pretty sort of historical play, on my word!” exclaimed Selina.

“Oh, it wasn’t _all_ historical, Selina, dear,” said Patty, sweetly. “A lot of it was thoroughly modern, and Mr. Robey wore a frock coat, and such a funny little bowler hat, and another time he was a street musician in Venice with a stuffed monkey pinned to his coat-tails.”

Selina looked at me. There was a silent pause that would have made anybody else feel uncomfortable, but I was equal to the occasion. I snatched Selina’s book out of her hand, and said, cheerfully, “You see, Selina, it’s all explained here. Wonderful fellow, Bergson. ‘Something mechanical encrusted upon the living,’ that’s the secret of the comic. Depend upon it, he had seen George Robey and the stuffed monkey. And if Bergson, who’s a tremendous swell, member of the institute, and all that, why not Patty and I?”

“And where,” asked Selina, with a rueful glance at the Bergson book, as though she began to distrust theories of the comic, “where was this precious performance?”

“At the Alhambra,” answered Patty, simply.

“The Alhambra! I remember Chateaubriand once visited it,” said Selina, who is nothing if not literary, “but I didn’t know it was the haunt of philosophers.”

I looked as though it was, but Patty tactlessly broke in, “Oh, I wish you two wouldn’t talk about philosophers. Can’t one laugh at Mr. Robey without having him explained by Bergson? Anyhow, I don’t believe he can explain Mr. Nelson Keys.”

“Another of your historical actors?” inquired Selina with some bitterness.

“Yes, Selina, dear, and much more historical than Mr. Robey. He played Beau Brummell and they were all there, Fox and Sheridan and the Prince of Wales, you know, all out of your favourite Creevey, and they said ‘egad’ and ‘la’ and ‘monstrous fine,’ and bowed and congee’d like anything—oh, it was awfully historical.”

Selina, a great reader of memoirs, was a little mollified. “Come,” she said, “this is better—though the Regency is another dangerous period. I’m glad, however, that Londoners seem to be looking to the theatre for a little historical instruction.”

“Yes, Selina,” I said, feeling that it would be dangerous to let Patty speak just at that moment, “and there is a certain type of contemporary play, called _revue_, which recognizes that demand and seldom, if ever, fails to cater for it. In _revues_ I have renewed acquaintance with the heroes of classical antiquity, with prominent crusaders, with Queen Elizabeth, with the Grand Monarque—a whole course of history, in fact. Let Bergson explain that, if he can. And, what is more wonderful still, our _revue_ artists, whose talent is usually devoted to provoking laughter, seem willingly to forgo it for the honour of appearing as an historical personage. Mr. Robey and Mr. Keys, I should tell you, are both professional laughter-provokers, indeed are the heads of their profession, yet one is content to posture as Louis Quinze and the other as Beau Brummell without any real chance of being funny. So the past ever exerts its prestige over us. So the muse of history still weaves her spell.”

“Which was the muse of history, Patty, dear?” said Selina, whose equanimity was now happily restored.

“Oh, bother, I forget,” said Patty, “and, anyhow, I don’t think she has as much to do with _revues_ as uncle pretends. Give me the real muse of _revue_ who inspired Mr. Keys with his German waiter and his Spanish mandolinist and his Japanese juggler and——”

“This,” I said, to put an end to Patty’s indiscreet prattle, “must be the muse of geography.”

Patty gave me no change out of my half-crown. The boatman said he didn’t happen to have any. So much for Selina’s management!

THE SILENT STAGE

The spoken drama and the silent stage. I came across this dichotomy in _The Times_ the other day, not without a pang, for it was a day too late. It is not a true dichotomy. It does not distinguish accurately between the story told by living actors to our faces and the story told by successive photographs of such actors. For the “silent stage” would cover pantomime, a form of drama, and a very ancient form, acted by living actors. It is not true, but it is for practical uses true enough. In life we have to make the best of rough approximations. I would have used this one gratefully had it occurred to me in my moment of need. But it did not.