Part 9

In any case, we ought to be able now, if ever, to put it to the “acid test.” The leading nations of the world have just fought the biggest of all their wars. Has the promised sequel followed? Is there any sign at home or abroad of a fresh outburst of dramatic energy? In Germany they seem to be merely “carrying on,” or tending to be a little more pornographic than usual. In Vienna they are still translating Mr. Shaw. No new dramatic masterpiece is reported from Italy, D’Annunzio being “otherwise engaged,” Mr. Boffin. Paris is still producing its favourite little “spicinesses” or, for the high brows, translating Strindberg. (Outside the theatre the effect of the war on Paris seems not merely negative but stupefying. They have achieved Dadaism and, so I read in a recent _Literary Supplement_, a distaste for the works of M. Anatole France!) In America the drama is in no better case than before the war.

And what about London? An absolutely unprecedented dearth of not merely good but of actable plays. People will give you other causes, mainly economic, for the theatrical “slump.” They will tell you, truly enough, that playgoers have less money to spend, and that the cheaper “cinema” is diverting more and more money from the theatre. And yet, whenever the managers produce anything really worth seeing there is no lack of people to see it.

There is nothing, then, to discourage the aspiring dramatist. Only he won’t aspire! Or his aspiration is not backed by talent! It seems as though the war, instead of stimulating dramatic energy, had repressed and chilled it. What on earth (if I may use a colloquialism condemned by Dr. Johnson) would poor M. Brunetière have said if he had lived to see his pet theory thus falsified? Probably he would have invented a new one. He would have said that wars mustn’t be _too_ big to fit into a law devised only for usual sizes. Also he might have said, wait and see. The war is only just over; give your young dramatists a little breathing time. Shakespeare’s plays didn’t immediately follow the Armada. The French Romantic Drama didn’t begin till a good dozen years after Waterloo.

Well, we can’t afford to wait. While we playgoers are waiting for good plays, our young men are all frittering away their talent in minor poetry, which war seems to bring as relentlessly in its train as shell-shock. But the victims of both maladies ought by now to be on the high-road to recovery, and it is time that the young minor poets turned their attention to something useful, _e.g._, the reintroduction of the British drama. They have a capital opportunity, since most of our old stalwarts seem to have left the field. Sir Arthur Pinero gives us nothing. Mr. Arthur Henry Jones gives us nothing. Mr. Maugham is, I am told, far away in Borneo, so now is the chance for the young aspirants; the world is all before them where to choose. Of course it is understood that they will drop their verse. That used to be the natural form for plays over two centuries ago. It may come into fashion again, you never can tell, but, quite clearly, the time is not yet. I have heard people ask, “What are the chances for a revival of poetic drama?” They really mean verse-drama, but the answer is, that the essence of poetry is not verse, which is merely ornament, but the expression of a certain spiritual state, a certain _état d’âme_, and that there is always room for poetic plays. _Dear Brutus_ contained much of the poetic essence; so does _Mary Rose_. But their language is prose, and our young aspirants may be recommended to write in prose, for which their previous verse-exercises will have been a useful preparation. Only let them hurry up! Let their hearts swell with the proud hope of creating that magnificent affair, which demands capital letters, the Drama of the Future. Mr. Bergson told us at Oxford that when an interviewer invited him to forecast the drama of the future he answered, “If I could do that I’d write it.” So we can only wonder what it will be like. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson to Boswell who was “wondering,” “you _may_ wonder.”

DISRAELI AND THE PLAY

We have all been reading Mr. Buckle’s concluding volumes, and when we have recovered from the fascination of the great man and the splendid historical pageant they present to us, we dip into them again in search of trifles agreeable to our own individual taste. And I shall make no apology for turning for a moment from Disraeli in robes of ceremony, the friend of Sovereigns, the hero of Congresses, the great statesman and great Parliament man, to Disraeli the playgoer. That dazzling figure is not readily thought of as a unit in the common playhouse crowd. Yet it is with a feeling of relief from the imposing spectacle of great mundane affairs that you find Disraeli, after receiving in the afternoon the “awful news” of the Russian ultimatum to Turkey (October, 1876), going in the evening with his Stafford House hosts to see _Peril_ at the Haymarket, and pleased with the acting of Mrs. Kendal. The play, he tells his correspondent, Lady Bradford, is—

“An adaptation from the French _Nos Intimes_—not over-moral, but fairly transmogrified from the original, and cleverly acted in the chief part—a woman whom, I doubt not, you, an _habituée_ of the drama, know very well, but quite new to me. Now she is married, but she was a sister of Robertson, the playwright. She had evidently studied in the French school. The whole was good and the theatre was ventilated; so I did not feel exhausted, and was rather amused, and shd. rather have enjoyed myself had not the bad news thrown its dark shadow over one’s haunted consciousness....”

Mrs. Kendal’s training was, I fancy, entirely English, but her acting was on a level with the best of “the French school.” Disraeli was an old admirer of French acting, as we know from “Coningsby,” and I think it is pretty clear from the same source that he particularly liked Déjazet. For he had Déjazet in mind, I guess, in the member of Villebecque’s troop of French comedians engaged for the delectation of Lord Monmouth, “a lady of maturer years who performed the heroines, gay and graceful as May.” This was the lady, it will be remembered, who saved the situation when Mlle. Flora broke down. “The failure of Flora had given fresh animation to her perpetual liveliness. She seemed the very soul of elegant frolic. In the last scene she figured in male attire; and in air, fashion, and youth beat Villebecque out of the field. She looked younger than Coningsby when he went up to his grandpapa.” This is Déjazet to the life. The whole episode of the French players in “Coningsby” shows Disraeli as not only an experienced playgoer but a connoisseur of the theatre. His description of the company is deliciously knowing—from the young lady who played old woman’s parts, “nothing could be more garrulous and venerable,” and the old man who “was rather hard, but handy; could take anything either in the high serious or the low droll,” to the sentimental lover who “was rather too much bewigged, and spoke too much to the audience, a fault rare with the French; but this hero had a vague idea that he was ultimately destined to run off with a princess.”

In “Tancred” there is another, and an entirely charming, glimpse of French strolling players or strollers who played in French, the Baroni family—“Baroni; that is, the son of Aaron; the name of old clothesmen in London, and of Caliphs in Baghdad.” There is no more engaging incident in the romantic career of Sidonia than his encounter with this family in a little Flanders town. They played in a barn, to which Sidonia had taken care that all the little boys should be admitted free, and Mlle. Josephine advanced warmly cheered by the spectators, “who thought they were going to have some more tumbling.” It was Racine’s “Andromaque,” however, that she presented, and “it seemed to Sidonia that he had never listened to a voice more rich and passionate, to an elocution more complete; he gazed with admiration on her lightning glance and all the tumult of her noble brow.” Sidonia played fairy godmother to the whole family, and “Mlle. Josephine is at this moment [1849] the glory of the French stage; without any question the most admirable tragic actress since Clairon, and inferior not even to her.” If for Josephine we read Rachel, we shall not be far wrong.

Anyhow, it is evident that, when Disraeli thought Mrs. Kendal must have studied in the French school, he was paying her the highest compliment at his disposal. It is disappointing that we have no criticism from Disraeli of Sarah Bernhardt. Matthew Arnold said that Sarah left off where Rachel began. Disraeli says nothing, which is perhaps significant, for he did see Sarah. He was first asked to see her play at a party at Lord Dudley’s, but declined, as he “could not forgo country air.” A few weeks later, however, he was at the Wiltons’, where “the principal saloon, turned into a charming theatre, received the world to witness the heroine of the hour, Sarah Bernhardt.” And that is all. A playgoer of seventy-five is hardly disposed to take up with new favourites—which accounts, perhaps, for Disraeli’s verdict on Irving. “I liked the _Corsican Brothers_ as a melodrama,” he writes to Lady Bradford (November, 1880), “and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving whom I saw for the first time, is third-rate, and never will improve, but good eno’ for the part he played, tho’ he continually reminded me of Lord Dudley....” Why “though”?

On another popular favourite he was even harder. Writing again to Lady Bradford, he says:—“Except at Wycombe Fair, in my youth, I have never seen anything so bad as _Pinafore_. It was not even a burlesque, a sort of provincial _Black-eyed Susan_. Princess Mary’s face spoke volumes of disgust and disappointment, but who cd. have told her to go there?” Staying later at Hatfield, however, he found all the Cecil youngsters singing the _Pinafore_ music. A few years earlier he tells Lady Bradford a story he had just heard from a friend of a visit paid by a distinguished Opposition party to _The Heir at Law_ at the old Haymarket. “Into one of the stalls came Ld. Granville; then in a little time, Gladstone; then, at last, Harty-Tarty! Gladstone laughed very much at the performance; H.-T. never even smiled. 3 conspirators....” Another remarkable trio figures in another story. Disraeli had been to the Aquarium to see a famous ape and the lady who used to be shot out of a cannon. “Chaffed” (if the word is not improper) about this by the Queen at the Royal dinner table, Disraeli said, “There were three sights, madam; Zazel, Pongo, and myself.”

It will be seen that there are few records of Disraeli’s playgoing or show-going in his old age. Gladstone, we know, was to the last a frequent playgoer—and, I believe, an enthusiastic admirer of Irving. Disraeli, I take it, had become rather the book-lover than the playgoer. The humblest of us may share that taste with the great man, and even take refuge in his illustrious example for the habit, denounced by the austere, of reading over solitary meals. Mr. Buckle tells us that “over his solitary and simple dinner he would read one of his favourite authors, mostly classics of either Latin, Italian Renaissance, or English eighteenth century literature, pausing for ten minutes between each course.” That passage will endear Disraeli to many of us, simple, home-keeping people, unacquainted with Courts and Parliaments, who feel, perhaps, a little bewildered amid the processional “drums and tramplings” and the gorgeous triumphs of his public career.

HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATRE

Are not the friends of Henry James inclined to be a little too solemn when they write about him, perhaps feeling that they must rise to the occasion and put on their best style, as though he had his eye on them and would be “down” on any lapses? An admirable reviewer of the Letters in the _Literary Supplement_ seemed, indeed, so overcome by his subject as to have fallen into one of Henry James’s least amiable mannerisms—his introduction of elaborate “figures,” relentlessly worked out and at last lagging superfluous. And the editor of the Letters, admirably, too, as he has done his work, is just a little bleak, isn’t he?—wearing the grave face of the historian and mindful never to become familiar. “Thank Heaven!” one seems to hear these writers saying to themselves; “even _he_ could never have called this vulgar.” Such is the posthumous influence of the fastidious “master”! I daresay I am captious. One is never quite satisfied with what one sees in print about people one loved. One always thinks—it is, at any rate, a pleasing illusion—that one has one’s own key to that particular cipher, and to see the thing not merely given away but authoritatively expounded in print is rather a nuisance. Look at the number of fair ladies to whom Henry James wrote letters rich in intimate charm (oh! and, as he would have said, of a decorum!)—perhaps each of them thought she had the best corner of his heart. The most immaculate of women, young and old, matrons and maidens, _will_ sentimentalize their men friends in this way. How could Henry James have escaped? Well, if any one of these ladies had edited the Letters or reviewed them, wouldn’t each of the others have said: “No, that isn’t _my_ Henry James—_she_ never understood him, poor dear”? I apologize for this flippant way of putting it to the two refined writers I began by mentioning. But, as the lady says in _The Spoils of Poynton_, “I’m quite coarse, thank God!”

Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there, either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as with _Guy Domville_, or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,” as with his stage versions of _The American_ and _Covering End_. But not everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success, and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes, success in the theatre. He talks in his letters as though he actually needed the money, but it was really not so. He looked round the world and found it teeming with “best sellers,” idols of the multitude, who by any standards of his simply couldn’t “write,” didn’t artistically “exist.” And the most pathetic thing in his letters is their evidence that he began, aye! and went on, with the illusion that he, such as he was, the absolute artist, might some day become a “best seller.” Even so late as the days of his Collected Edition it came as a shock to him that the great public wouldn’t buy.

It is evident that he had good hopes, beforehand, of _Guy Domville_. And yet he hated the actual process of production. The rehearsal, he says, is “as amazing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theatre.” And when dire failure came, it wasn’t, he says, from any defect of technique. “I have worked like a horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of ‘technique’—I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket.” No, the fault must be in his choice of subject. “The question of realizing how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward the quality of things which might be a story in a book from his attitude toward the quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is another matter altogether. _That_ difficulty is portentous, for any writer who doesn’t approach it naïvely, as only a very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to _make_ oneself so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled.” “And yet,” he adds, pathetically enough (writing to his brother), “if you were to have seen my play!” He knew he had done good work, in his own way, and the plain fact that his way was a way which the gross theatre public would not understand or sympathize with was a terrible blow to him.

The process of turning himself into a simple-minded writer—that is, of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, was, of course, impossible. One doesn’t want to wallow in the obvious. But doesn’t it leap at the eyes that an artist who seeks to abandon his own temperament and point of view for another’s will forfeit all chance of that spontaneous joy without which there is no artistic creation? Fortunately, this theatrical malady of Henry James’s (though he had one or two recurrent twinges of it) never became chronic. The history of his real work is a history not of self-renunciation, but of self-development, of abounding, as the French say, in his own sense. As to the theatrical technique which he had put into his pocket he certainly kept it there. Like most laboriously acquired, alien techniques it was too technical, too “architectooralooral”—as any one can see who dips into his two forgotten volumes of “Theatricals.” His own proper technique was a very different thing, an entirely individual thing, and no reader of his books can have failed to notice how he gradually perfected it as he went along. It reached its highest point, to my thinking, in _The Ambassadors_, surely the greatest of his books (though over this question the fierce tribe of Jacobites will fight to their last gasp), when everything, absolutely everything, is shown as seen through the eyes of Strether. To see a thing so “done” as he would have said, an artistic difficulty so triumphantly mastered, is among the rarest and most exquisite pleasures of life. That was Henry James’s function, to give us rare and exquisite pleasures, of a quality never to be had in the modern theatre. He was no theatrical man, but he could, when he chose, be the most delicate of dramatic critics. Read what he says in these Letters about Rostand’s _L’Aiglon_ (“the man really has talent like an attack of small-pox”), about Bernstein’s _Le Secret_ as a “case,” about Ibsen, “bottomlessly bourgeois ... and yet of his art he’s a master—and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life.”

THEATRICAL AMORISM

“The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life, it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren; sometimes like a fury.” It is one of the few things the general reader is able to quote from Bacon, who goes on to make some pointed remarks about love in life, but drops all reference to love on the stage, which he would hardly have done had he been Shakespeare.

But the converse question, how far love is “beholding” to the stage—what treatment it has received there, what justice the stage has done to it—is certainly not without interest. Life is not long enough to deal with the whole question, ranging through the ages, but it may be worth while to consider for a moment what our contemporary English stage is doing with the theme. Are our playwrights addressing themselves to it with sincerity, with veracity, with real insight? Or are they just “muddling through” with it, repeating familiar commonplaces about it, not troubling themselves “to see the thing as it really is”? These questions have occurred to me in thinking over Mr. Arnold Bennett’s _Sacred and Profane Love_. Thinking it over! interrupts the ingenuous reader; but have you not already reviewed it? So it may be well to explain that one “notices” a play and then thinks it over. True, one’s “notice”—the virtually instantaneous record of one’s first impressions—sometimes wears a specious appearance of thought. But that is one of the wicked deceptions of journalism, mainly designed to appease eager people of the sort who rush up to you the moment the curtain is down on the First Act to ask: “Well, what do you think of it?” In reality, as the wily reader knows, it is at best only thought in the making, a casting about for thought. Not until you have read it yourself next morning can you begin (if you ever do begin) to think. So, as I say, I have been thinking over Mr. Bennett’s _Sacred and Profane Love_.

It is not what used to be called a “well-made” play. Its main interest is not cumulative, but is suspended for a whole act and, at its most critical point, relegated to an inter-act. In Act I. the young Carlotta gives herself to Diaz. In Act II. (seven years later) Diaz has dropped clean out. Carlotta, now a famous novelist, is in love with somebody else and shows herself strong enough to renounce her love. Act III. resumes the Carlotta-Diaz story. He has become an abject morphinomaniac; she heroically devotes herself, body and soul, to the terrible task of reclaiming him. _Between_ Acts III. and IV. (fourteen months) this terrible task is accomplished. We have to take it on trust, a rather “large order.” Act IV. ends the Carlotta-Diaz story in marriage. Obviously it is not a well-told story. It has a long digression, and the spectator’s attention is misled; it assumes a miracle behind the scenes, and the spectator’s credulity is over-taxed. Act II. is a play within a play; how Carlotta nearly ran away with her publisher. In Act IV. you cannot accept the alleged recovery of the morphinomaniac, you expect him to “break out” again at any moment. Of course, the story being what it is, there was no help for it. Years of rising to fame as a novelist, months of struggling with a drug victim, cannot be shown on the stage. Only, writers of well-made plays do not choose such stories.