Part 14

All this, of course, is as plain as a pikestaff. The Futurist aim is simply to run counter to tradition, to go by rule of contrary, to say No when everybody for centuries has been saying Yes, and Yes when everybody has been saying No. But when it comes to putting this principle into practice we see at once there are limitations. Thus, take the Marinetti’s first example, the “Aviation” dance. The dancer will dance on a big map (which would have pleased the late Lord Salisbury). She must be a continual palpitation of azure veils. On her breast she will wear a (celluloid) screw, and for her hat a model monoplane. She will dance before a succession of screens, bearing the announcements 800 metres, 500 metres, etc. She will leap over a heap of green stuffs (indicating a mountain). “Organized noises” will imitate rain and wind and continual interruptions of the electric light will simulate lightning, while the dancer will jump through hoops of pink paper (sunset) and blue paper (night). And so forth.

Was there ever such a lame and impotent conclusion? The new dancing, so pompously announced, proves to be nothing but the crude symbolism to be seen already in every Christmas pantomime—nay, in every village entertainment or “vicar’s treat.” And we never guessed, when our aunts took us to see the good old fun, that we were witnessing something dynamic and _motlibriste!_

I turn to the Soffici. He finds the philosophy of Futurism in the clown, because the clown’s supreme wisdom is to run counter to common sense. “The universe has no meaning outside the fireworks of phenomena—say the tricks and acts and jokes of the clown. Your problems, your systems, are absurd, dear sirs; all’s one and nothing counts save the sport of the imagination. Let us away with our ergotism, with the lure of reason, let us abandon ourselves entirely to the frenzy of innovations that provoke wonder.” It is this emancipation, adds the Soffici, this artificial creation of a lyric reality independent of the _nexus_ of natural manifestations and appearances, this gay symbolism, that our æsthetic puts forward as the aim for the new artist.

Well, we have seen how gay was the symbolism devised by the Marinetti. And how inadequate, how poor in invention. Dancing that has to be eked out by labelled screens and paper hoops and pyramids of stuffs! That is what we get from the new artist. The old artists had a different way; when they had to symbolize, they did it by _dancing_, without extraneous aid. When Karsavina symbolized golf, she required no “property” but a golf-ball. All the rest was the light fantastic toe. When Genée symbolized Cinderella’s kitchen drudgery, she just seized a broom and danced, divinely, with it. But that was before the Marinetti made his grand discovery that music is too nostalgic for dancing purposes and that the one thing needful is organized noise—as organized by Luigi Russolo.... No, it is no use trying; I remain an incorrigible Pastist.

HROSWITHA

Writing about Hroswitha’s _Callimachus_, as performed by the Art Theatre, I touched upon the unintentionally comic aspect of a tenth-century miracle play to a twentieth-century audience. Naturally this is not an aspect of the matter which recommends itself to a lady who is about to publish a translation of Hroswitha’s plays with a preface by a cardinal, and in a published letter she protests that the fun which the Art Theatre got out of _Callimachus_ was not justified by the text. Let me hasten to acquit the Art Theatre of the misdemeanour attributed to it by Miss Christopher St. John. There was nothing intentionally funny in its performance. The players acted their parts with all possible simplicity and sincerity. The smiling was all on our side of the footlights. But I said that the smile was “reverent,” because of the sacred nature of the subject-matter.

This opens up the question of the frame of mind in which we moderns ought to approach works of “early” art. The first effort of a critic—we must all be agreed about that—should be to put himself, imaginatively, in the artist’s place. He has to try to think himself back into the time, the place, the circumstances of the work, and into the artist’s temperament, intentions, and means of execution. We look at the Madonna of Cimabue in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and our first impulse is to find her ungainly, uncouth, without spiritual significance. It is only by thinking ourselves back among the Florentines of the thirteenth century that we can understand and appreciate Cimabue’s appeal. But consider how difficult—or, rather, impossible—that thinking-back process is. Consider what we have to unlearn. We have to make ourselves as though we had never seen the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; much more than that, we have mentally to wipe out six centuries of human history. Manifestly it cannot be done; we can never see the Cimabue picture as Cimabue himself saw it or as his Florentine contemporaries saw it. We have to try; but what we shall at best succeed in attaining is a palimpsest, the superimposition of new artistic interpretation on the old. And when we say that classics are immortal, we only mean that they are capable of yielding a perpetual series of fresh palimpsests, of being perpetually “hatched again and hatched different.” We cannot see Dante’s _Commedia_ as Dante or Dante’s first readers saw it. For us its politics are dead and its theology grotesque; it lives for us now by its spirituality, its majesty, and the beauty of its form. But with works that are not classics, works that are not susceptible of a perpetual rebirth, the case is even harder. They are inscriptions that we can no longer decipher; we cannot think ourselves, for a moment, back in the mind of the author. They have become for us curios.

And that is what Hroswitha’s _Callimachus_ has become: a curio. How can we put ourselves back in the mind of a nun in the Convent of Gandersheim in the age of Otho the Great? I say “we.” For nuns perhaps (having, I assume, a mentality nearer the tenth century than the rest of us) may take a fair shot at it. So, too, may cardinals, whose august mentality I do not presume to fathom. But it is certain that common worldly men, mere average playgoers, cannot do it.

But, it will be objected, are we not, or most of us, still Christians? Are we not still capable of understanding prayers, miracles, saintliness, raising from the dead, “conversion,” and all the other subject-matter of _Callimachus_? To be sure we are; hence my “reverent” smile. If Christianity were dead (or, as in Swift’s ironical pamphlet, abolished by Act of Parliament) _Callimachus_ would be simply meaningless for us, a nothing, mere mummery. It is not the matter of the play that provokes our smile; but its form. The “fun,” says Miss St. John, is “not justified by the text.” She is thinking of the matter, abounding in piety and tending to edification; but in point of fact the language, the “text”—at any rate in theatrical representation (far be it from me to prejudice her forthcoming book)—has its comic side. Callimachus’s abrupt declaration of his passion to Drusiana and the terms of her rejection of him are both, to a modern audience, irresistibly comic. They are not meaningless, but they are delightfully impossible: they are love-making as imagined by a nun, the very person who _ex hypothesi_ knows nothing about it. You have, in fact, precisely the same delicious absurdity, proceeding from an imagination necessarily uninstructed by experience, as you get in Miss Daisy Ashford’s book. (Several critics have made this comparison. I am really chagrined not to have thought of it myself. But it should show Miss St. John that I am, at any rate, not the only one who found _Callimachus_ comic.)

Further, and quite apart from the exquisite naïveties of its text, the form of the play is so childlike and bland as to be really funny. The players, when not engaged in the action, stand motionless in a semi-circle. Changes of scene are indicated by two performers crossing the stage in opposite directions—a genuine cricket “over.” Characters are understood to be stricken with death when they composedly lie down on their backs. Others trot in pairs round Drusiana’s prostrate form and you understand they are journeying to her tomb. All this, of course, is merely primitive “convention.” Could we put ourselves back into Hroswitha’s time, it would pass unnoticed. In our own time, with a different set of “conventions,” that make some attempt at imitation of reality, we naturally laugh at these old conventions. We laugh, but we are interested; our curiosity is being catered for, we like to see what the old conventions were. The curio, in short, is amusing in the fullest sense of the term.

And it leaves us with a desire to know more about Hroswitha, the “white rose” of the tenth century (if that be really the meaning of her name). Perhaps the Cardinal’s preface will tell us more. One remark occurs. It seems a little significant that a nun should have written all her plays on the one theme of chastity. It must have been an obsession with her, this virtue to which, as Renan said, nature attaches so little importance. And, in hunting her theme, this nun does not scruple to pursue it to the strangest places. She even puts courtesans upon the stage and houses of ill-fame. How on earth did the good lady imagine these unconventual topics? The question suggests some puzzles about the psychology of nuns. But one only has to see _Callimachus_ to know that Hroswitha must have been as pure as snow, or as a white rose, as innocently ignorant, in fact, of what she was writing about as Miss Daisy Ashford when she described an elopement.

PAGELLO

Long before _Madame Sand_ was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre more had been written all the world over about the trip of George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Venice in 1833-4 than about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or the campaigns of the Great War. A heavy fine should be imposed on any one who needlessly adds a drop of ink to the vast mass of controversy that has raged round that subject, and I promise to leave the main story, which must be known to every adult man and woman in the two hemispheres, severely alone. But there is a subordinate actor in the story, to whom injustice, I think, has been done on all hands, and whose case it would be an act of the merest decency to reconsider. I mean Pietro Pagello.

His case was prejudiced from the first by the dissemination of an atrocious libel. When a patient alleges scandalous behaviour between doctor and nurse, it is well to be sure of the witness’s mental condition. Now Musset was suffering, not, as Pagello politely put it, from typhoid fever, but from _delirium tremens_. This would at once disqualify him as an eye-witness. But the fact is Musset himself never made the allegation; the story was spread about by brother Paul, a terrible liar. Pagello had been called in first to attend not Alfred, but George herself, for severe headache. Half a century later he remembered that her lips were thick and ugly, and her teeth discoloured by the cigarettes she was perpetually smoking; but she charmed him by her wonderful eyes: _per gli occhi stupendi_. After they had both nursed Alfred to convalescence the _occhi stupendi_ made short work with the young doctor. In the common phrase, George threw herself at him. People who don’t study the facts talk of the new arrangement as though it were a betrayal; but observe that it was of the highest convenience not only to George, but to Alfred. It enabled the poet to get away alone to Paris with an easier conscience; it provided George, compelled to stay on in Venice to complete her tale of “copy,” with a protector. But we are in 1834, with romanticism at its most ecstatic and “sublime.” So the convenience of the situation is draped in phrases and bedewed with tears. Alfred shed them with enthusiasm, while Pagello swore to him to look after the happiness of George. “Il nostro amore per Alfredo” was Pagello’s delightful way of putting it. A singular trio! Evidently poor Pagello was George’s slave. What was a poor young Venetian medical gentleman to do? A foreign lady with _occhi stupendi_ (and a habit of writing eight or nine hours a day on end) handed over to him, with tears of enthusiasm, by a grateful patient! Anyhow, Pagello showed his sense by removing the lady to cheaper lodgings. When Venice grew a little too hot he escorted her on a trip to Tirol, taking her on the way (such were the pleasing manners of the time) to see his father! He was a little short with me, says the son, but he received her with _cortesi ospitalita_, and the pair discussed French literature. Mr. Max Beerbohm should draw the picture.

It has been the fashion to dismiss Pagello as a mere nincompoop. But if he had been that, a George Sand would not have cared a rap for him, and he would have been terrified by George. As it was, when she asked him to take her back to Paris he “chucked” his practice and cheerfully parted with his pictures and plate to provide funds for the journey. He was, at any rate, a disinterested lover; but the truth seems to be he was not passionate enough for George. “Pagello is an angel of virtue,” she writes to Musset, “he is so full of sensibility and so good ... he surrounds me with care and attention.... For the first time in my life I love without passion.... Well, for my part, I feel the need to suffer for some one. Oh! why couldn’t I live between the two of you and make you happy without belonging to either?” But by the time she had reached Paris she was already thinking of belonging to Alfred again, and “door-stepped” Pagello. Her Parisian set, of course, made fun of him. The poor gentleman’s situation was, indeed, sufficiently awkward. But it is not true, as it is the fashion to say, that he was “sent straight back.” George, who had retreated to Nohant, invited him there, but he had the good sense to decline. She was afraid he might be in want of money, and wrote to a friend, “he will never take it from a woman, even as a loan.” She, at any rate, knew he was a gentleman. But the Italians, with all their romantic traditions, are a practical people. Finding himself adrift in Paris, Pagello remembered his profession, and stayed on as long as he could to study surgery, with such substantial result that he subsequently became one of the chief surgeons in Italy, and gained a special reputation, it is said, in lithotomy. Thus may a fantastic love adventure be turned to good account.

I take my facts about Pagello from Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s “George Sand” (1899-1912), the one authentic and exhaustive work on the subject. He died, over 90 years of age, after the first two of her three volumes were published, and what one likes most of all about him is that, till very near the end of his life, he kept his mouth tight shut about the great adventure of his youth. A mere nincompoop could not have done that. In 1881 the Italian Press happened to be reviving the story of the Venetian amour, and they succeeded in getting from Pagello a few of George’s letters and some modest, manly reminiscences. He had no piquant scandals to disclose, and merely showed, quite unconsciously, that he was far the most decent of the strange three involved in the Venetian adventure.

As for the Pagello of the new play, the American dramatist has made him just a tame, hopelessly bewildered donkey. He is provided with a fierce Italian sweetheart, to bring him back safe, if scolded, from Paris to Italy. He lives freely on other people’s money, George’s—when it isn’t Alfred’s. After all, it doesn’t matter, for all the people of the play are mere travesties of the originals, turned (in the published book of the play, though not at the Duke of York’s) into modern American citizens. Buloz talks of “boosting” his subscriptions. Alfred says George is “like a noisy old clock that won’t stop ticking.” Oh dear!

STENDHAL

In reviewing the performance by the New Shakespeare Company of _King Henry V._ I was reminded by one of Henry’s lines at Agincourt,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,

to speak, it may have seemed a trifle incongruously, of Stendhal. But it was Stendhal who said, “je n’écris que pour les _happy few_.” No quotation could have been more appropriate. Stendhal’s readers have always been few, but they have been enthusiastic. In his lifetime he was hardly read at all, though Balzac gave him a magnificent “puff”—so magnificent that even Stendhal himself was taken aback by it and infused a little irony into his thanks. He supposed himself to be ahead of his time, and in 1840 said he would be understood somewhere about 1880. It was rather a good shot, for somewhere about that date there came into being the fierce tribe of Stendhalians, who founded the “Stendhal Club” and included in their number no less a man than M. Paul Bourget. But the vicissitudes of literary reputations are as uncertain as anything in this world, and M. Bourget wondered what would be thought of Stendhal in another forty years—namely, in 1920. Well, 1920 has arrived, as the years have the habit of doing with abominable rapidity, and any one who likes can seek for an answer to M. Bourget’s question. I will hazard a guess. I doubt if in the interval there has been very much change in Stendhal’s position. Now, as in 1880, Stendhal is read, and immoderately loved, by the “happy few,” and ignored or detested by the rest. But, in enjoying him, the happy few contrive to take him a little less seriously than did the Stendhal Club. That process goes on with even greater reputations. Croce, we are told, takes Dante more lightly than has been the habit of Italian critics in the last half-century. We English are gradually learning to discuss Shakespeare as a human being. And here, pat to the occasion, is a paper on Stendhal in the _Revue de Paris_ by M. Anatole France, which handles its subject with the easy Anatolian grace we all know and does, perhaps, at the same time indicate what the readers of 1920 think of Stendhal, though none of them would express their thought of him with the same charm.

It would probably occur to none of them, for instance, as it does to Anatole France, to begin an appreciation of Stendhal with the statement that he “had a leg.” Modern costume has abolished this advantage, but Stendhal lived, at any rate for the greater part of his life, in the knee-breeches period, when calves were on exhibition. Unluckily, Stendhal’s calves do not appear in the portrait prefixed to the Correspondence, but only the head, which is rather quaintly ugly. Quaint ugliness in men is not displeasing to women (or where would most of us be?), but what ne’er won fair lady is faint heart, and Stendhal was timid. Thus, as a young man Stendhal is said to have loved Mlle. Victorine Monnier for five years before he spoke to her. He was not sure that even then she knew who he was. And this was the man who wrote a treatise “De l’Amour” (a delightful book to skim through, nevertheless), and preaches that every woman can be captured by direct assault! I remember once talking to the wife of a popular novelist, a great enthusiast for love, about her husband’s variety and virtuosity on this subject. She replied without enthusiasm: “Yes, in his books.” On the same point, M. France reports a capital _sub rosâ_ saying of Renan’s:—“Les Européens font preuve d’une déplorable indécision en tout ce qui concerne la conjonction des sexes.”

As might have been expected from a writer for the “happy few,” Stendhal did not suffer fools gladly. A man must have the social, the gregarious spirit for that, and Stendhal lived much to himself. That being so, he could not hope to escape boredom. An incurable _ennui_ lurks behind many of his pages; his enemies would say _in_ them. He even got bored with Italy, as so many others of a century ago, who began as enthusiastic lovers, got bored. Byron went to Greece—and Shelley took to yachting with the fatal result we know—because each was bored with Italy. But Stendhal in his later years had to put up with it at Civita Vecchia—which, for a “littery gent” must have been a deadly dull place in 1840, and would not, I imagine, be very lively even now. Indeed, his existence (after his early experiences with the Grand Army) seems to have been quiet, solitary, and slow. Perhaps that is why his books, his MSS., his letters, are so full of mysterious disguises, initials, pseudonyms, codes, erasures, as though he were being watched by censors and hunted by spies. It was a way of creating for himself an imaginary atmosphere of adventure.

M. France has some good things to say about Stendhal’s style. M. Bourget calls his prose algebraic, which is rather hard. But there are many ways of writing, says M. France, and one can succeed at it perfectly without any art, just as one can be a great writer without correctness, as Henri IV. was in his letters and Saint-Simon in his memoirs. No one would read “Le Rouge et le Noir” or “La Chartreuse de Parme,” as the Duchess in a Pinero play said she read her French novel, for the style. Anatole France commits himself to a very definite statement. No Frenchman, he says, in Stendhal’s time wrote well, the French language was altogether lost, and every author at the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote ill, with the sole exception of Paul Louis Courier. “The disaster to the language, begun in the youth of Mirabeau, increased under the Revolution, despite those giants of the tribune, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, compared with whom our orators of to-day seem noisy children, despite Camille Desmoulins, author of the last well-written pamphlet France was to read; the evil was aggravated under the Empire and the Restoration; it became a frightful thing in the works of Thiers and of Guizot.” This, from the greatest living master of French, is not without its interest. No one could say the same thing of our English prose in the same period—a period that gave us, to take a few instances at random, Cowper’s letters and Byron’s, and the Essays of Elia.

Stendhal, then, was not remarkable for style. But one gathers that, in the rare occurrence of congenial society, he was a good talker. One would give something to have been a third in the box at La Scala when Stendhal, a young officer of Napoleon, met an old, lanky, melancholy general of artillery—no other than Choderlos de Laclos, author, before the Revolution, of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Stendhal, as a child, had known the original of Laclos’s infamous Mme. de Merteuil, an original who appears to have been even worse than the copy. Some years later George Sand, on her way to Italy with Musset, met Stendhal on a Rhone steamer, and he told her a story which, she said, shocked her. She does not repeat it. One would really rather like to hear a story which could shock George Sand.

JULES LEMAÎTRE

It was in the first week of August, 1914. The crowd on the seafront was outwardly as gay as ever, only buying up the evening papers with a little more eagerness than usual to read the exciting news from Belgium. We had not had time to realize what war meant. Some one held out a paper to me and said, quite casually, “I see Lemaître’s dead.” This event seemed to me for the moment bigger than the war itself. At any rate it came more intimately home to me. The world in an uproar, nations toppling to ruin, millions of men in arms—these are only vague mental pictures. They disquiet the imagination, but are not to be realized by it. The death of your favourite author, the spiritual companion and solace of half a lifetime, is of an infinitely sharper reality, and you feel it as though it were a physical pang.