Chapter III: Part 3

But is not this attempt to distinguish between conventional morality and an ideal of the good life, æsthetically formed, rather specious? At any rate, the world at large, for a good many centuries, has applauded, or discountenanced, Greek criticism as essentially moralistic—as importing into the region of æsthetics the standards of ordinary, conventional morality. That is, surely, a commonplace about Aristotle. His ideal tragic hero is to be neither saint nor utter villain, but a character between these two extremes. Further, he must be illustrious, like Œdipus or Thyestes (Poetics, ed. Butcher, XIII. 3). Again, tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level (XV. 8). It seems to me that the standards applied here are those of our ordinary, or conventional, morality, and I am only confused by the introduction of the mysterious “ideal of the good life.” It seems to me—that may be my stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.”

This “ideal of good life” leads our leader-writer far—away up into the clouds. Among the activities of the human spirit art takes “the place of sovereignty.” It “is the manifestation of the ideal in human life.” This attitude, of course, will not be altogether unfamiliar to students of æsthetics. Something not unlike it has been heard before from the “mystic” æstheticians of a century ago. It leaves me unconvinced. I cannot but think that that philosophy makes out a better case which assigns to art, as intuition-expression, not the “place of sovereignty” but the place of foundation in the human spirit; for which it is not flower nor fruit, but root. You see, Croce, like “cheerfulness” in Boswell’s story of the other philosopher, will come “breaking in.”

COTERIE CRITICISM

A young critic was recently so obliging as to send me the proof of an article in the hope that I might find something in it to interest me. I did, but not, I imagine, what was expected. The article discussed a modern author of European reputation, and incidentally compared his mind and his style with that of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. These three, it appeared, were contemporary English novelists, and—here was the interesting thing to me in our young critic’s article—I had never heard of one of them. They were evidently “intellectuals”—the whole tenor of the article showed that—the idols of some young and naturally solemn critical “school,” familiar classics, I dare say, in Chelsea studios and Girton or Newnham rooms. One often wonders what these serious young people are reading, and here, it seemed, was a valuable light. They must be reading, at all events, Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. Otherwise, our young critic would never have referred to them with such gravity and with so confident an assumption that his particular set of readers would know all about them. And yet the collocation of these three names, these coterie classics, with that of the great European author, famous throughout the whole world of polite letters, struck one as infinitely grotesque. It showed so naïve a confusion of literary “values,” so queer a sense of proportion and congruity. It was, in short, coterie criticism.

There seems to be a good deal of that about just now. One sees innumerable reviews of innumerable poets, which one supposes to be written by other poets, so solemnly do the writers take their topic and their author and themselves. And for the most part this writing bears the mark of “green, unknowing youth”—the bland assumption that literature was invented yesterday, and that, since the Armistice, we cannot but require a brand-new set of literary canons, estimates, and evaluations. Evidently our young warriors have come back from the front with their spirit of _camaraderie_ still glowing within them. Well, youth will be served, and we must resign ourselves, with a helpless shrug, to a deluge of crude over-estimates, enthusiastic magnifications of the ephemeral, and solemn examinations of the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And we must be prepared to see the old reputations going down like a row of ninepins. We shall have to make a polite affectation of listening to the young gentlemen who dismiss Meredith as “pretentious” and tell us that Hardy “can’t write” and that Anatole France is _vieux jeu_. For if you are always adoring the new because it is new, then you may as well make a complete thing of it by decrying the old because it is old. The breath you can spare from puffing the “Georgians” up you may as well use for puffing the “Victorians” out. And thus the world wags.

What is more, it is thus that the history of literature gets itself evolved. For it is time that I tried to see what good can be said of the coteries, as well as what ill, and this, I think, can be said for them—that they keep the ball rolling. It is they, with their foolish face of praise, who discover the new talents and begin the new movements. If you are always on the pounce for novelties you must occasionally “spot a winner” and find a novelty that the outer world ratifies into a permanency. The minor Elizabethan dramatists were once the darlings of a coterie, but Webster and one or two others still survive. The Lakists were once coterie poets, and, if Southey has petered out, Wordsworth remains. Of course they make awful “howlers.” A coterie started the vogue of that terribly tiresome “Jean Christophe,” of Romain Rolland, and where is it now? On the other hand, a coterie “discovered” Pater, and it was a real find; the world will not willingly let die “Marius” or the “Renaissance.” Henry James began as the idol of a coterie, and “The Golden Bowl” is not yet broken. It may be—who knows?—that the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. will by and by range themselves proudly on our shelves alongside Fielding and Jane and Meredith and Hardy.

But while these young reputations are still to make in the great world, let us not, as Mrs. Gamp says, proticipate; let us keep our high estimate of them modestly to ourselves, and not stick them up on the classic shelf among the best bindings before their time. What makes it worse is that the coteries are apt to have no classic shelf. Their walls are lined and their boudoir tables littered with new books, and nothing but new books. Women are great offenders in this way, especially the women whom American journals call “Society Ladies”—who are accustomed, in the absence of contradiction and criticism and other correctives (tabooed as “bad form”), to mistake their wayward fancies for considered judgments. We want a modern Molière to write us another _Femmes Savantes_. (I present the idea to Mr. Bernard Shaw. They have dubbed him “the English Molière.” Well, here’s a chance for him to make good.) There is Lady Dulcibella. She is always recommending you a new book that nobody else has ever heard of. “Oh, how perfectly sweet of you to call on this horrid wet afternoon! _Have_ you read ‘Mes Larmes’? It’s written by a Russian actress with such wonderful red hair, you can’t think, and they say she was a princess, until those dreadful Bolshevists, you know. We met her at Florence in the winter, and everybody said she was just like one of the Botticellis in the Accademia. They _do_ say that Guido da Verona—or D’Annunzio, or somebody (don’t you think that horrid little D’Annunzio is just like a frog?)—was quite mad about her. But ‘Mes Larmes’ is perfectly _sweet_, and don’t forget to order it. Two lumps or three?” And listen to the chatter of some of those wonderfully bedizened ladies who variegate, if they don’t exactly decorate, the stalls of one of our Sunday coterie theatres. The queer books they rave about! The odd Moldo-Wallachian or Syro-Phœnician dramatists they have discovered!

All this, it is only fair to remember, may leave our young critic inviolate. After all, he may belong to no coterie, or only to a coterie of one; he may have sound critical reasons for the faith that is in him about Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And even if he does represent a coterie, he might, I suppose, find a fairly effective retort to some of my observations. “You talk of our love of novelties for novelty’s sake. But you have admitted that, if we always go for the new, we must sometimes light on the true. What we really go for is life. The new is more lively than the old. The actual, the present, the world we are at this moment living in, has more to say to us in literature than the old dead world, the ‘sixty years since’ of your classic Scott. The classic, as Stendhal said, is what pleased our grandfathers; but I am out to please my grandfather’s grandson. And our coteries, I dare say, are often kept together by the mere docility of mind, the imitative instinct, of their members. But is there not a good deal of mere docility among the old fogey party, the people who reject the new because it is new and admire the old because it is old? Is not this mere imitative instinct at work also among the upholders of literary traditions and the approved classics? Absurdity for absurdity, the youthful coterie is no worse than the old fogey crowd.” To put all straight I will now go and read the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z.

CRITICISM AND CREATION

A play of Dryden’s has been successfully revived by the Phœnix Society. One or two others might be tried, but not many. For most of Dryden’s plays, as the curious may satisfy themselves by reading them, are as dead as a doornail. They bore us in the reading, and would simply drive us out of the theatre. Some of Dryden’s non-dramatic poems still permit themselves to be read, but the permission is rarely sought by modern readers, apart from candidates for some academic examination in English literature, who have no choice. Yet we all render him lip service as a great poet. How many are there to pay him proper homage as a great critic? For a great critic he was, and, moreover, our first dramatic critic in time as well as in importance. He discussed not the details of this or that play, but the fundamental principles of drama. He abounded in ideas, and expressed them with a conversational ease which, in his time, was an entirely new thing. But it would be impertinent to praise Dryden’s prose style after Johnson’s exhaustive eulogy and the delicate appreciations of Professor Ker. What I would point out is that all Dryden’s critical work can still be read with pleasure, while most of his dramatic work cannot be read at all. And the humour of it is that I shall at once be told the dramatic work was “creative,” while the critical was not.

This distinction, an essentially false one, as I shall hope to show, is still a great favourite with our authors of fiction; they “create,” their critics do not. Authors who write, in Flaubert’s phrase, like _cochers de fiacre_, and who are particularly given to this contrast, it would be cruel to deprive of a comforting illusion; but authors of merit and repute also share it, and to them I would urge my modest plea for a reconsideration of the matter.

What does the dramatist, or writer of fiction in general, create? Actions and characters? Not so, for these are only created in real life, by the contending volitions of real men and the impact between their volitions and external reality. The author creates images of actions and characters, or, in other words, expresses his intuitions of life. When the intuition is vivid, when the image is a Falstaff, a Baron Hulot, a Don Quixote, a Colonel Newcome, we are apt to think of it as a real person. And they are, in truth, as real to us as anybody in the actual world whom we have never met but only know of. For the historic person, unmet, is, just like the imaginary person, only a bundle for us of our intuitions. Julius Cæsar was a real person, but we can only know of him, as we know of Mr. Pickwick, by hearsay. These vivid intuitions are what your author likes to call “creations.” So they are. That is the magic of art.

And because, to the vast majority of men, their intuitions (in the case of actual reality encountered, their perceptions) of other men and their actions are their most interesting experience, art is allowed without challenge to arrogate to itself this quality of “creation.” There is a biographical dictionary of Balzac’s personages—some 2,000, if I remember rightly—of whom a few are actual historical people. But, in fact, you make no distinction. The one set are as real to you as the others. In this way the _Comédie Humaine_ does, as its author said, compete with the _État Civil_. There are few ideas, speculations, judgments in Balzac that are worth a rap; when he tried abstract thought he was apt to achieve nonsense. But very few readers want abstract thought. They want “to know people,” “to see people.” Balzac makes “people,” tells you all about their families, their incomes, their loves and hates, “splendours and miseries,” their struggles, their orgies, their squalor, their death. That is “creative” art. Let us admire it. Let us revel in it. Let us be profoundly thankful for it.

But when, as so frequently happens, one hears some fourteenth-rate yarn-spinner, who also makes “people,” but people who were not worth making, people who are puppets or the mere phantoms of a greensick brain—when one hears this gentleman claiming kinship with Balzac or with my friend the distinguished novelist and real artist already mentioned, as a “creator” one is inclined to smile. “Creation” is a blessed word. But the thing created may be quite valueless.

And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also “creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is, it builds up something new out of the artist’s intuitions and exhibits the relations between them. Here, in the conceptual world, we are in a different region from the intuitional world of the artist. Those who care to enter it, who feel at home in it, are comparatively few; the absence of personal interest, of “people,” makes it seem cold to the average, gregarious man. “People” are a natural, ideas an acquired, taste. But the one set are just as much a “creation” as the other. And in the one set just as in the other the thing created may not be worth creating. Ideas, expositions, illustrations in criticism have a distressing habit of being as poor and conventional and mechanical as many a novelist’s or playwright’s characters and life histories. There is not a pin to choose between them. For as the one thing that matters in art is the artist behind it, so the critic behind it is the one thing that matters in criticism.

These are elementary commonplaces. But they need restating from time to time. For the average man, with all his interest in life fixed on “people,” is always falling into the error that the novelist or playwright makes something, while the critic makes nothing. And your fourteenth-rate author, sharing the temperament of the average man, falls into the same error and seems, indeed, inordinately proud of it. He seems to say: “Why, you, good master critic, couldn’t even begin to do what _I_, the ‘creative’ artist, do”; and he would probably be surprised by the answer that it is the critic’s very critical faculty, his endowment of judgment and taste, which makes the writing of bad plays or novels impossible, because repugnant to him. It is precisely because the critical faculty is so rare a thing that so many bad novels and plays get themselves written.

But enough of these sharp distinctions between the “creation” of images and the “creation” of concepts! Is not a union of the two, like the union of butler and lady’s-maid, as described by Mr. Crichton, “the happiest of all combinations”? Who does not feel how immensely the mere story part of “Tom Jones” gains by the critical chapter introductions? And, on the other hand, how the mere critical part of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” gains by the little touches of story, from the opening moment when “they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently” to the close at Somerset Stairs, where “they went up through a crowd of French people, who were merrily dancing in the open air”?

ACTING AND CRITICISM

A veteran who has been regaling the readers of _The Times_ with his recollections of the London stage has dropped by the way a remark on modern theatrical criticism. For it, he says, “the play is everything, and the leading actor or actress has often to be content with a few lines.” Dean Gaisford began a sermon, “Saint Paul says, and I partly agree with him.” I partly agree with the veteran. Criticism has occasionally to deal with plays that cannot be “everything” for it. There are new plays that are merely a vehicle for the art of the actor, who must then get more than a few lines. There are old plays revived to show a new actor in a classic part, and the part is then greater than the whole. This, I think, accounts for “the space devoted to the acting in London criticisms at the time Henry Irving rose to fame.” Either he appeared in new plays of little intrinsic merit, like _The Bells_, or else in classic parts of melodrama (made classic by Frédéric Lemaître) or of Shakespeare. In these conditions criticism must always gravitate towards the acting. It did so, long before Irving’s time, with Hazlitt over Edmund Kean. It has done so, since Irving’s time, over Sarah and Duse, and must do so again over every new Shylock or Millamant or Sir Peter.

But these conditions are exceptional, and it is well for the drama that they are. For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is “made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its duty.

But that, I hasten to add, is its luck rather than its merit. One must not ride the high ethical horse, and I should be sorry to suggest that good criticism is ever written from a sense of duty, any more than a good play or any other piece of good literature. Good criticism is written just because the critic feels like that—and bad, it may be added, generally because the critic has been trying to write something which he supposes other people will feel like. The good critic writes with his temperament—and here is a reason why, in the long run, plays will interest him more than players. For are we not all agreed about the first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of the artist criticized, to adopt his point of view, to recreate his work within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas, and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors. And they have in common the literary temperament. Now the literary temperament and the histrionic are two very different things.

The actor, as his very name imports, is an active man, a man of action. At his quietest, he perambulates the stage. But violent physical exercise is a part of his trade. He fights single combats, jumps into open graves, plunges into lakes, is swallowed down in quicksands, sharpens knives on the sole of his boot, deftly catches jewel caskets thrown from upper windows, wrestles with heavy-weight champions, knouts or is knouted, stabs or is stabbed, rolls headlong down staircases, writhes in the agonies of poison, and is (or at any rate in the good old days was) kicked, pinched, and pummelled out of the limelight by the “star.” And all this under the handicap of grease-paint and a wig! It must be very fatiguing. But then he enjoys the physical advantages of an active life. He has Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg (under trousers that never bag at the knee, and terminating in boots of the shiniest patent leather), and all the rest to match. As becomes a man of action, he is no reader. I have heard the late Mr. Henry Neville declare that an actor should never be allowed to look at a book. This may seem to the rest of us a sad fate for him, but look at his compensations! He spends much, if not most, of his stage-life making love to pretty women, wives, widows, or _ingénues_. Frequently he kisses them, or seems to—for he will tell you, the rogue, that stage-kisses are always delivered in the air. Let us say then that he is often within an inch of kissing a pretty woman—which is already a considerable privilege. When he is not kissing her (or the air, as the case may be), he is sentimentally bidding her to a nunnery go or dying in picturesque agonies at her feet. Anyhow he goes through his work in the society and with the active co-operation of pretty women. And note, for it is an enormous advantage to him, that that work is a fixed, settled thing. His words have been invented for him and written out in advance. He has rehearsed his actions. He knows precisely what he is going to do.

Contrast with this alluring picture the temperament and working habits of the critic. He is a man, not of action, but of contemplation. His pursuit is sedentary, and with his life of forced inaction he risks becoming as fat as Mr. Gibbon, without the alleviation of the Gibbonian style. Personal advantages are not aids to composition, and he may be the ugliest man in London, like G. H. Lewes, whose dramatic criticisms, nevertheless, may still be read with pleasure. His fingers are inky. His face is not “made up,” but sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. No pretty women help him to write his criticisms. Indeed, if Helen of Troy herself, or Aphrodite new-risen from the sea came into his study he would cry out with writer’s petulance (a far more prevalent and insidious disease than writer’s cramp), “Oh, do please go away! Can’t you see I’m not yet through my second slip?” (She will return when he is out, and “tidy up” his desk for him—a really fiendish revenge). Books, forbidden to the actor, are the critic’s solace—and also his despair, because they have said all the good things and taken the bread out of his mouth. And, unlike the actor, he is working in the unknown. His head is filled with a chaos of half-formed ideas and the transient embarrassed phantoms of logical developments. Will he ever be able to sort them out and to give them at any rate a specious appearance of continuity? Nay, can he foresee the beginning of his next sentence, or even finish this one? Thus he is perpetually on the rack. “Luke’s iron crown and Damien’s bed of steel” are nothing to it. It is true that his criticism does, mysteriously, get itself completed—mysteriously, because he seems to have been no active agent in it, but a mere looker-on while it somehow wrote itself.

Is it surprising that it should generally write itself about the play (which, I daresay, writes itself, too, and with the same tormenting anxiety) rather than about the playing, which proceeds from so different a temperament from the critic’s and operates in conditions so alien from his? But, let me add for the comfort of our veteran, there are critics and critics. If some of us displease him by too often sparing only a few lines for the leading actor or actress, there will always be plenty of others who are more interested in persons than in ideas and images, who care less for transpositions of life than for Sarah’s golden voice and Duse’s limp, and “Quin’s high plume and Oldfield’s petticoat.” These will redress the balance.

ACTING AS ART

Nothing could be more characteristically English than the circumstances which gave rise the other day to the singular question, “Is acting an art?” There was a practical issue, whether the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was or was not entitled to exemption under an Act of 1843 from the payment of rates. Sir John Simon argued it, of course, as a practical question. He dealt with custom and precedent and authority, dictionary definitions and judicial decisions. He had to keep one eye on æsthetics and the other on the rates. This is our traditional English way. We “drive at practice.” Nevertheless, this question whether acting is an art is really one of pure æsthetics, and is in no way affected by any decision of the Appeal Committee of the London County Council.

You cannot answer it until you have made up your mind what you mean by art. Sir John Simon seems to have suggested that art was something “primarily directed to the satisfaction of the æsthetic sense.” But is there any such thing as a special “æsthetic sense”? Is it anything more than a name for our spiritual reaction to a work of art, our response to it in mind and feeling? And are we not arguing in a circle when we say that art is what provokes the response to art? Perhaps it might amuse, perhaps it might irritate, perhaps it might simply bewilder the Appeal Committee of the London County Council to tell them that art is the expression of intuitions. They might reply that they cannot find intuitions in the rate-book, and that the Act of 1843 is silent about them. Yet this is what art is, and you have to bear it in mind when you ask, “Is the actor an artist?” Art is a spiritual activity, and the artist’s expression of his intuitions (the painter’s “vision,” the actor’s “conception” of his part) is internal; when he wishes to externalize his expression, to communicate it to others, he has to use certain media—paint and canvas, marble and brick, musical notes, words and gestures. But it is the spiritual activity, the intuition-expression, that makes the artist. The medium is no part of his definition.

And yet, I suggest, it is the peculiarity of the actor’s medium that has often withheld from him, at any rate with unthinking people, his title to rank as an artist. He is his own medium, his own paint and canvas, his own brick and marble. The works of other artists, the picture, the poem, the sonata, have an independent life, they survive their authors; the actor’s works are inseparable from his actual presence, and die with him. Hence a certain difficulty for the unsophisticated in distinguishing the artist from what the philosophers call the empirical man; the Edmund Kean whose genius is illuminating and revitalizing Shylock from the Edmund Kean who is notoriously fond of the bottle and who has lately got into trouble with an alderman’s wife. The physique, the temperament, of the empirical man furnish the medium for the artist. He arrives at the theatre in a taxi, or his own Rolls-Royce, smoking a big cigar, every inch of him a man of to-day; the next moment he is pretending to be an old mad King of Britain. This confusion is behind Johnson’s “fellow who claps a hump on his back and calls himself Richard the Third.” It leaves out of account the imaginative side of him, the artist. Johnson might just as well have dismissed Shakespeare as a “fellow who supposed a hump clapped on the back of one of his fancies, which he calls Richard the Third.” Lamb raised another objection, that the bodily presence of the actor materialized, coarsened, the finer elements of the part—hid from sight “the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard.” The medium, in other words, is a hindrance to the art, not so much a medium as a nuisance.

These are the objections of ignorance or of whim. Certainly the peculiarity of his medium imposes peculiar restrictions on the actor. If the painter lacks a certain pigment he can get it at the colour-man’s. If the composer needs a certain _timbre_ he can add the necessary instrument to his orchestra. All the quarries are open to the architect. But no “make up” box will furnish a resonant voice to a shrill-piped actor or make Garrick six feet high. An actress may be at the height of her powers, and yet too old to play Juliet. Sir Henry Irving’s physical oddities went far to ruin some of his impersonations. But these limitations of the medium do not affect the actor’s status as an artist. They only restrict the range in which he may exercise his art.

And can it be gainsaid that what he exercises is true art, a spiritual activity, the expression of his intuitions? People, comparing his work with the “creations” of the playwright, are apt to speak of him as a mere “interpreter.” He has his words given him, they say, and his significant acts prescribed for him in advance. The truth is, “creation” and “interpretation” are figurative terms; it would be quite reasonable to interchange them. Shakespeare “interprets” life by giving form to it, by piecing together, say, certain scraps of actual observation along with the image of his fancy into the character of Falstaff. With the printed words and stage-directions as data, the actor re-imagines Falstaff, brings his own temperament and feelings and sympathetic vision to the service of Shakespeare’s indications, and “creates” the living, moving man. True, the processes are at different stages, and may be of different importance. Shakespeare has intuited and expressed life, the actor has intuited and expressed Shakespeare. But both expressions are art.

And note that while Shakespeare “created” Falstaff, no playgoer has ever seen or ever will see Shakespeare’s Falstaff. For the image formed in Shakespeare’s mind has always on the stage to be translated for us in terms of other minds which can never be identical with his—is, in fact, “re-created” by each actor in turn. It is the actor who converts the “cold print” of the text into vivid, concrete life. Life! that is the secret of the actor’s “following,” a much more notable fact in the world of the theatre than the “following” of this or that playwright. The actor, like all who, in Buffon’s phrase, “_parlent au corps par le corps_,” expresses a temperament, a personality, himself; imposes himself on his part and on us. People “follow” a favourite actor in all his impersonations because his art gives them more pleasure than the playwright’s, or because his art must be added to the playwright’s before they will care about that.

When I say “people” I don’t mean “littery gents.” The typical playgoer prefers life to literature. He is as a rule no great reader. Nor are the actors. There has always been a certain coolness between the men of letters and the actors—their temperaments are so opposed. I have quoted from Lamb. Anatole France said much the same thing of the Comédie Française— “_Leur personne efface l’œuvre qu’ils représentent._” Views like these merely express a preference for one art over another. They do not contest the actor’s right to rank as an artist. That, to speak rigorously, is a rank held by many people “for the duration”—_i.e._, while and whenever they express their intuitions. But it would be impolitic to insist on this strict view. The rate-payers’ list might be seriously affected and much uneasiness occasioned to the Appeal Committee of the London County Council.

AUDIENCES

Audiences may be divided into first-nighters, second-nighters, and general playgoers. All audiences are important, but first-nighters most of all. Without them the acted drama would not begin to exist. For obvious reasons, I have nothing but good to say of them. I wish to live at peace with my neighbours. And I do not believe the malicious story told about a manager, now dead, that he liked to fill the second row of his stalls on first-nights with his superannuated sweethearts. Nobody is fat or old in Ba-ath, and there are no superannuitants among first-nighters.

I find, from Mr. Max Beerbohm’s entirely delightful book “Seven Men,” that it is possible to get tired of first-nighters. I should never have guessed it myself. But this is what he says:—“I was dramatic critic for the _Saturday Review_, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over and over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the managers, asking that I might have seats for second nights instead.” But mark what follows:—“I found that there existed as distinct and invariable a lot of second-nighters as of first-nighters. The second-nighters were less ‘showy’; but then, they came more to see than to be seen, and there was an air that I liked of earnestness and hopefulness about them. I used to write a good deal about the future of the British drama, and they, for their part, used to think and talk a great deal about it. Though second-nighters do come to see, they remain rather to hope and pray.” Because I have quoted I must not be understood as accepting Mr. Beerbohm’s implied aspersion on first-nighters. It is all very well for him. He has retired (the more’s the pity) from dramatic criticism. But I take his account of second-nighters on trust, because the exigencies of a daily newspaper prevent me from observing them for myself. Evidently they, no more than first-nighters, are average playgoers.

Not that I would disparage the general playgoer. Indeed, I am not sure that he is not, in another sense than Labiche’s, _le plus heureux des trois_. I can speak for myself. Mind, I am saying nothing against first-nighters. They are entirely admirable persons—I could never bring myself, like Mr. Beerbohm, to call them a lot. But oh! the joy of being, on holiday occasions, a general playgoer, of throwing one’s considering cap over the mills, of garnering no impressions for future “copy,” of blithely ignoring one’s better judgment, of going comfortably home from the play, like everybody else, instead of dashing madly into a taxi for the newspaper office! The play will be well on in its run, the comedian will have polished up his jokes, the superfluities will have been cut out, the programme girls will long since have given up leading the applause, you won’t know a soul, and you won’t even bother to look at the author’s name. You surrender your individuality and drift with the crowd, or, in more pretentious language, merge yourself in the collective consciousness.

Which reminds me. The general playgoer just because he is general, is what Henry James called George Sand: remarkably accessible. Everybody knows him. He is a public theme. Theorists won’t leave him alone. In particular, the collective psychologists have marked him for their prey. For them he typifies the theatrical “crowd,” with the peculiar crowd characteristics these theorists profess to have scientifically classified. Sarcey began it. Lemaître followed. And comparatively obscure scribes have devoted attention to the general playgoer. They have said that he is no philosopher; he cannot adopt a detached, impersonal, disinterested view of life; he must take sides. Hence the convention of the “sympathetic personage.” He has not the judicial faculty, is not accustomed to sift evidence or to estimate probabilities. Hence the convention of the “long arm of coincidence” and the convention that the wildest improbability may be taken as the starting-point of a play. The general playgoer, as such, is virtuous and generous; for we are all on our best behaviour in public. And he insists upon a strict separation of virtue and vice. He wants his personages all of a piece. The composite characters, blends of good and evil, he refuses to recognize. Hence the conventions of “hero” and “villain,” of “poetic justice” and of “living happy ever afterwards.” Further, it has been suggested that a crowd of general playgoers, having an individuality of its own, cannot but be interested in that individuality, apart from all reference to the cause which brought it together. Once assembled, it becomes self-conscious, self-assertive. It finds itself an interesting spectacle. And the general playgoer is not of the cloistered but of the gregarious type of mankind; he must have bustle, the sense of human kinship brought home to him by sitting elbow by elbow with his neighbours. The faculty of intellectual attention is seldom high in such a temperament as this. Hence the playwright has to _force_ the attention of a temperamentally inattentive audience. Mark, once more, that I am not speaking of first-nighters. Their individuality is too strong to be crowd-immersed. I would not for worlds speak of them as a crowd at all. They are an assemblage, a constellation, a galaxy. Admirable persons!

But there is one thing for which I envy the general playgoer above all. I mean his freedom and pungency of criticism. Anonymity gives him irresponsibility, and, his resentment at being bored not being subject to the cooling process of literary composition, his language is apt to be really terrible. Talk of printed criticism! Actors and authors do talk of it often enough, and on the whole don’t seem to like it; but let them mingle with the general playgoer and keep their ears open! Who was the man in Balzac who said that it was absurd to speak of the danger of certain books when we all had the corrupt book of the world open before us, and beyond that another book a thousand times more dangerous—all that is whispered by one man to another or discussed behind ladies’ fans at balls? So the general playgoer is the great purveyor of secret criticism. Disraeli, or another, said that the secret history of the world, which never got into the history books, was the only true history. Let us hope that secret criticism is not the only true sort, but it is certainly the most live. It is free from the literary bias, the cant of criticism, the smell of the lamp. And it is the most potent of persuasives. Published criticism is powerless against it. The fate of a play is not decided by newspaper criticisms (thank goodness! I should be miserable if it were), but by what the general playgoers say to one another and pass on to their friends. How many plays with “record” runs have been dismissed by the newspapers on the morrow of the first night with faint praise or positive dispraise? The general playgoer has said his say, and what he says “goes.” I know he is giving many worthy people just now much uneasiness. They form little theatrical societies _à côté_ to keep him out. They deplore his taste and organize leagues for his education and improvement. I rather fancy he is like the young lady in the play who “didn’t want to have her mind improved.” But that is another story. What I have been envying him for is not his taste but the heartiness with which he “abounds in his own sense” and his freedom in expressing it. After all, perhaps criticism that is so free and so pervasive and so potent is not exactly to be called “secret.” I seek the _mot juste_. Or I would if that were not a back-number. Has not Mr. Beerbohm finally put it in its place as the Holy Grail of the nineties?

FIRST NIGHTS

There is a movement, I am told, in certain critical circles in favour of the system which obtains in Parisian theatres of the _répétition générale_. This, as most playgoers know, is a final “dress rehearsal” held on the evening (at the Français, where evening performances must be continuous, on the afternoon) of the day before the actual “first night” production, or _première_, of the play. The seats, including the exceptionally large number allotted in Paris to the Press, are filled by invitation. It is the real “first night”; only there is no “money” in the house. Notoriously, there is a formidable cohort of Parisians who regard their seat at a _répétition générale_ as a kind of vested interest, and who would be affronted by having to put up with the _première_. A very remarkable public this is, the public of the _répétition générale_, with its members virtually all known to one another, filling the _foyer_ with chatter and much scent, and patiently sitting through a performance which is apt to begin a good half-hour after the advertised time, and to end in the small hours of the morning. The inter-acts are of inordinate length, perhaps in the interests of the buffet, more likely because of the inveterate leisureliness of the Parisians. The whole thing, at any rate as I have found it, is a weariness to English flesh. But then the gentlemen (and ladies) of the Press have the advantage of being able to go home straight to bed, and of having all next day to think over their “notices.”

That is the reason, I suppose, why some critics would like to see the system introduced in London. They want more time. They want to sleep on it. They would write, they think, better in the morning. Let me leave that point, however, for the moment to turn to what an incorrigibly commercial world will probably think a more important one, the question of finance. To the theatrical manager the introduction of this system would mean the loss of a whole night’s receipts. With theatre rents and expenses at their present height, could they possibly contemplate so heavy a sacrifice? They are already complaining that theatre seats at their present prices do not pay—and here they would be giving away, for one night, the whole house. Further, however they might gratify the friends whom they invited, nothing could save them from the wrath of those who were left over. Some of these, perhaps, might be mollified by a subsequent invitation—for the “deadhead” habit becomes an insidious disease, and, I am told, the Paris theatres groan under the hordes of playgoers who consider themselves entitled to gratuitous admission. On the whole, I think our managers would be ill-advised to countenance the suggested change.

Another thing. The _répétition générale_ is a trial performance. Effects which don’t “tell,” incidents which shock or provoke ridicule, are often cut out next morning, so that the play actually presented at the _première_ differs, sometimes vitally, from that presented to the critics, so that the “notice” not seldom describes and criticizes various matters which the public are never shown. If the English manager imitated this example—and as a practical man of business he would be sure to imitate it—the unhappy critic after writing his notice would have to go to the play again, before printing it, in order to assure himself that it still represented the facts. It would have to be two bites at a cherry. Now, new plays are often produced on two nights running, in which case two bites at the same cherry would be impossible. In the most favourable case, two successive visits to a play would be a heavy addition to the burden of life.

But would criticism benefit in quality? I venture to doubt that, too. I think that theatrical “notices” are all the better for being piping hot. One’s impressions of the play are stronger, more definite in outline, richer in colour, when one leaves the theatre than next morning, when they have had time to cool and to fade into “second thoughts,” which in criticism are far from being always the best. When Jules Lemaître went from the _Débats_ to the _Deux Mondes_ he found that his thoughts about the play, instead of maturing with the longer interval for writing, were apt to become simply vague and general. If the play happened to be one “of ideas,” not so much harm was done, because ideas stick in the mind, and are revolved there. But a play of emotion or a play dependent on fine shades of acting is bound to suffer by the gradual waning of the first impression. And my own experience is that in writing about a play of which one has lost the first hot impression, and which one has to recall by an effort of memory, the proportions get altered, so that the criticism is thrown out of gear. Some point, a mere minor point, perhaps, that attracted one’s attention, remains in the mind and assumes an undue importance in relation to other details that have faded. I went to see _Grierson’s Way_ revived the other night after a quarter of a century. When I asked myself beforehand what I remembered of it, I could only answer that I had been originally much struck by its merits, but that the only one of these merits that remained in my mind was a conversation wherein, under a surface of small talk, two people were revealing depths of tragic emotion. I had forgotten the characters, the _motif_, the very story. And when my conversation turned up (in Act III.), though I was as delighted as ever, I saw, of course, that it was only an item, not the sole memorable thing in the play.

An interval of a quarter of a century is rather different from one of four-and-twenty hours? Undoubtedly; but my point is that one’s impressions begin to wane and to alter in “values” from the very outset. After all it is the business of critics not merely to criticize, analyse, and judge a play, to try and “place” it in the realm of art; they have also the perhaps minor but still important duty of acting as public “tasters.” They have to represent facts, to give the public a reasonably accurate notion of what they are likely to see. And they are in a much better position for doing this if they set down their facts and their views of the facts at once, while they are still quivering with the excitement (or yawning with the boredom) of them.

PLAYS WITHIN PLAYS

Representative arts will represent everything they can, including themselves. The theatre likes to show an image of its own life, life behind the scenes, actors acting on the stage, audiences listening, applauding, or interrupting in front. Hence the plays within plays which Shakespeare found so alluring. It was a comparatively simple problem of technique in his time because of the simplicity of the “platform” stage and of the Elizabethan playhouse.

A standing audience, as his for the most part was, is obviously easier to represent than a seated audience; it is just a crowd of “citizens” like any other stage crowd. The only important question for the stage-manager was the relative position of the mimic players and the mimic public. Clearly your mimic players must be seen by the real public, or what becomes of your play within a play? The position of your mimic public must have been more or less dependent on their importance in the action. But, I take it, the Elizabethan arrangement, in any case, must have been of a pre-Raphaelite symmetry. I presume the play scene in _Hamlet_ must have taken place in the lower part of the permanent erection at the back of the stage and that the mimic public was ranged down each side of the stage. The old arrangement has remained essentially unaltered. The mimic players are generally shown in some raised, arcaded terrace at the back of the stage; the King and Queen face Hamlet and Ophelia (in profile with respect to the real public) in front. It would obviously never do to let Hamlet and the King face the performers in the rear and so turn their backs on the real public, for the whole point of the scene is the effect of the mimic play on the King and on Hamlet watching the King. But I do not, for my part, see why more might not be made out of this “psychologic” effect by an arrangement which placed the mimic players nearer the front of the actual stage, on one side, so that the King might be turned full-face towards us as he watched them. If the King were played by an actor of the first importance (which he seldom or never is), with a gift of facial play, we may be sure that this would be done.

There is a somewhat similar scene in the first act of _Cyrano de Bergerac_. The chief centre of attraction here is not the mimic play itself, but the behaviour of the audience, disturbed by Cyrano’s interruption of the players. That is why I think that Coquelin’s arrangement with the players on one side and the audience in profile was better than Mr. Loraine’s, with the players in the rear and the mimic audience turning its back to the real one. But it is a point of comparative insignificance. As it was the old playhouse and the old standing audience that was being represented, the stage-management was essentially as simple as that of the play-scene in _Hamlet_.

So soon, however, as you come to represent the very different modern “picture” stage and the modern seated audience you see at once that the problem becomes immensely more difficult. Accordingly you find a revolution in the method of treating a play within a play. I do not know whether the Guitrys invented it or Reinhardt or whoever, but certainly the most conspicuous illustration we have had of it has been presented by the Guitrys. It is something much more than a mechanical change; it is psychological as well. The mimic stage, the stage of the play within the play, now occupies the whole of the actual stage, and the mimic audience is identified with the real audience.

We saw this startling innovation first in _Pasteur_. Pasteur is supposed to be addressing a meeting of the French Academy of Medicine. His rostrum is at the footlights, and he addresses _us_, the real audience. _We_ have to suppose ourselves the Academy of Medicine. To help us to this illusion one or two actors are scattered about the house, who interrupt, argue with Pasteur, and are personally answered by him. We find ourselves, in fact, at once listening to a debate, as real audience, and, in the thick of it, taking part in it, as supposed audience. There is a French proverb which says you cannot both join in a procession and look out of the window; but this experience upsets it. The result is a curious blend of sensations; you feel yourself both spectator and actor, _at_ a play and _in_ a play. But there is no doubt that the effect is much more vivid and exciting than that which would have attended the mere spectacle of Pasteur addressing a crowd upon the stage itself. You have, by the way, exactly the same effect in Mr. Galsworthy’s _Skin Game_, where an auctioneer addresses us, the public, who are supposed to represent the competing purchasers.

A still more striking instance has been seen in _L’Illusioniste_. Here the first act shows the stage of a music-hall and presents three actual “turns.” We, the actual audience, become the music-hall audience, and again there are actors scattered among us to help the illusion. They are addressed by the conjurer and answer him; a lady in a box throws him ardent glances which are returned with interest. But one of the “turns,” an act by acrobatic clowns, has absolutely nothing to do with the play; it is there purely for its own interest, a substantive performance. This shows, what we knew before, that revolutions run to excess. We are so engrossed by the clowns that we are tempted to forget what we are there for, to see a play. Anyhow, it is a most amusing innovation, this conversion of the actual stage into an imaginary stage within the play, and of the actual public into an imaginary public taking part in the play. It is a real enrichment of stage resources.