Chapter V: Part 5

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.

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

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

H. B. IRVING

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

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

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

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

THE PUPPETS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VICISSITUDES OF CLASSICS

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

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

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

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

Assuredly we of to-day can see more in _Hamlet_ than its first audience could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation selects from a classic what suits it. Few of the original colours are “fast”; some fade, others grow more vivid and then fade in their turn. The Jacobean playgoer was impressed by Webster’s heaped corpses, and we titter. He probably revelled in the mad scene of the “lycanthropic” Ferdinand, where we are bored. (The taste for mad scenes was long lived; it lasted from the Elizabethans, on through Betterton’s time—see Valentine in _Love for Love_—and Garrick’s time, as we know from Boswell’s anecdote about _Irene_, down to the moment when Tilburina went mad in white satin.) On the other hand, a scene which has possibly gained in piquancy for us of to-day, the proud contemporaries of Mr. Shaw, is that wherein the Duchess woos the coy Antonio and weds him out of hand. When we chance upon a thing like this in a classic we are apt, fatuously enough, to exclaim. “How modern!”

No one is likely to make that exclamation over another classic of momentary revival, _Le Malade Imaginaire_. There is not a vestige of “modernity” in Molière’s play. It is absolutely primitive. Or rather it seems, in all essentials, to stand outside time, to exhibit nothing of any consequence that “dates.” It has suffered no such mishap as has befallen Webster’s tragedy—a change of mental attitude in the audience which has turned the author’s desired effect upside down. At no point at which Molière made a bid for our laughter are we provoked, contrariwise, to frown. You cannot, by the way, say this about all Molière. Much, _e.g._, of the fun in _George Dandin_ strikes a modern audience as merely cruel. Both in Alceste and Tartuffe there has been a certain alteration of “values” in the progress of the centuries. But _Le Malade Imaginaire_ is untouched. We can enjoy it, I imagine, with precisely the same delight as its first audience felt. Some items of it, to be sure, were actual facts for them which are only history for us; the subservience of children to parents, for instance, and (though Mr. Shaw will not agree) the pedantic humbug of the faculty. But the point is, that the things laughed at, though they may have ceased to exist in fact, are as ridiculous as ever. And note that our laughter is not a whit affected by childish absurdities in the plot. Argan’s little girl shams dead and he immediately assumes she is dead. Argan shams dead and neither his wife nor his elder daughter for a moment questions the reality of his death. His own serving-wench puts on a doctor’s gown and he is at once deceived by the disguise. These little things do not matter in the least. We are willing to go all lengths in make-believe so long as we get our laughter.

Here, then, is a classic which seems to be outside the general rule. It has not had to make, in M. Proust’s phrase, its own posterity. It has escaped those vicissitudes of appreciation which classics are apt to suffer from changes in the general condition of the public mind.... But stay! If it has always been greeted with the same abundance of laughter, has the quality of that laughter been invariable? Clearly not, for Molière is at pains to apologize in his play for seeming to laugh at the faculty, whereas, he says, he has only in view “le ridicule de la médecine.” Between half-resentful, half-fearful laughter at a Purgon or Diafoirus who may be at your bedside next week and light-hearted laughter at figures that have become merely fantastic pantaloons there is considerable difference. And so we re-establish our general rule.

PERVERTED REPUTATIONS

Sir Henry Irving used to tell how he and Toole had gone together to Stratford, and fallen into talk with one of its inhabitants about his great townsman. After many cross-questions and crooked answers, they arrived at the fact that the man knew that Shakespeare had “written for summat.” “For what?” they enquired. “Well,” replied the man, “I do think he wrote for the Bible.”

This story illustrates a general law which one might, perhaps, if one were inclined to pseudo-scientific categories, call the law of perverted reputations. I am thinking more particularly of literary reputations, which are those I happen chiefly to care about. And literary reputations probably get perverted more frequently than others, for the simple reason that literature always has been and (despite the cheap manuals, Board schools, and the modern improvements) still is an unfathomable mystery to the outer busy world. But, to get perverted, the reputations must be big enough to have reached the ears of that outer world. What happens, thereafter, seems to be something like this. The man in the back street understands vaguely that so-and-so is esteemed a great man. Temperamentally and culturally incapable of appreciating the works of literary art, for which so-and-so is esteemed great, the back-streeter is driven to account for his greatness to himself on grounds suitable to his own comprehension, which grounds in the nature of the case have nothing to do with the fine art of literature. The general tendency is to place these grounds in the region of the marvellous. For the capacity for wonder is as universal as the capacity for literature is strictly limited.

Thus you have the notorious instance of Virgil figuring to the majority of men in the middle ages not as a poet but as a magician. Appreciation of his poetry was for the “happy few”; by the rest his reputation was too great to be ignored, so they gave it a twist to accommodate it to the nature of their own imaginations. In more recent times, indeed in our own day, there is the equally notorious instance of Shakespeare. The Stratford rustic knew nothing of Shakespeare’s plays, but did know (1) that there was a great man called Shakespeare, and (2) that there was a great book called the Bible. He concluded that Shakespeare must have written for the Bible. But I am thinking of a very different perversion of Shakespeare’s reputation. I am thinking of the strange people, exponents of the back-street mind, who, being incapable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry and dramatic genius—having in fact no taste for literature as such—have assigned his greatness to something compatible with their own prosaic pedestrian taste and turned him into a contriver of cryptograms. Again you see the old appetite for wonder reappearing. The imputed reputation, as in Virgil’s case, is for something _abscons_, as Rabelais would have said, something occult.

It is the old story. Superstition comes easier to the human mind than artistic appreciation. But superstition has played an odd freak in the case of Shakespeare. It is actually found side by side with artistic appreciation, of which it presents itself as the superlative, or ecstatic, degree. There is, for instance, an Oxford professor to whom the world is indebted for the most delicate, the most sympathetic, as well as the most scholarly appreciation of Shakespeare in existence. Yet this professor is so affronted by the flesh-and-blood domination of the actresses who play Shakespeare’s heroines, the dangerous competition of their personal charm with the glamour of the text, that he has committed himself to the startling proposition that poetic drama perished with Shakespeare’s boy actors! Jealousy for Shakespeare’s individual supremacy in artistic creation, which must “brook no rival near the throne,” has turned the professor into a misogynist. This I venture to call Shakespearian superstition. And there is another Oxford professor (oh, home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs!) who assures us that we can unravel all Shakespearian problems by a careful study of the text alone. Don’t trouble your minds about the actual facts in view of which the text had been written and in which it was to be spoken. Don’t ask where Shakespeare’s theatres were and what the audiences were like and what kind of shows they were used to and continued to expect. Don’t bother about the shape of the stage or its position in regard to the public. Stick to the text, and nothing but the text, and all shall be made plain unto you. It is this same professor who occasionally treats Shakespeare’s imaginary characters as though they were real persons, with independent biographies of their own. He obliges us with conjectural fragments of their biographies. “Doubtless in happier days he (Hamlet) was a close and constant observer of men and manners.” “All his life he had believed in her (Gertrude), we may be sure, as such a son would.” Shakespearian superstition again, you see, not merely alongside but actually growing out of artistic appreciation.

Literary critics, as a rule, have suffered less than so-called literary “creators” from perverted reputations. The reason is plain. The man in the back street has never heard of criticism. But what, it will be asked, about the strange case of Aristotle? Well, I submit that in his case the perversion arose from the second cause I have indicated—not from the ignorance of the multitude but from the superstitious veneration of the few. Who was it who began the game by calling Aristotle “the master of those who know”? A poet who was also a scholar. Who declared Aristotle’s authority in philosophy to equal St. Paul’s in theology? Roger Bacon (they say; I have not myself asked for this author at Mudie’s or _The Times_ Book Club). Who said there could be no possible contradiction between the Poetics and Holy Writ? Dacier, an eminent Hellenist. Who declared the rules of Aristotle to have the same certainty for him as the axioms of Euclid? Lessing, an esteemed “highbrow.” The gradual process, then, by which the real Aristotle, pure thinker, critic investigating and co-ordinating the facts of the actual drama of his time, was perverted into the spurious Aristotle, Mumbo Jumbo of criticism, mysteriarch, depositary of the Tables of the Law, was the same process that we have seen at work in the case of Shakespeare—enthusiastic appreciation toppling over into superstition.

But none of us can afford to put on airs about it. _Mutato nomine de te._ For, after all, what are these various cases but extreme instances of the “personal equation” that enters into every, even the sanest opinion? Can any one of us do anything else towards appreciating a work of art than remake it within himself? So, if we are to avoid these absurd extremes, let us look to ourselves, do our best to get ourselves into harmony with the artist, and “clear our minds of cant.”

THE SECRET OF GREEK ART

Mathematics may be great fun. Even simple arithmetic is not without its comic side, as when it enables you to find, with a little management, the Number of the Beast in the name of any one you dislike. Then there is “the low cunning of algebra.” It became low cunning indeed when Euler drove (so the anecdotist relates) Diderot out of Russia with a sham algebraical formula. “Monsieur,” said Euler gravely, “_(a + bⁿ)/n = x, donc Dieu existe; répondez_.” Diderot, no algebraist, could not answer, and left.

But geometry furnishes the best sport. Here is a learned American archæologist, Mr. Jay Hambidge, lecturing to that august body the Hellenic Society and revealing to them his discovery that the secret of classic Greek art (of the best period) is a matter of two magic rectangles. I understand that the learned gentleman himself did not make this extreme claim about the “secret” of “Art,” but it was at any rate so described in the report on which my remarks are based. Mr. Hambidge appears to have devoted years of labour and ingenuity to his researches. The result is in any case of curious interest. But how that result can be said to be “the secret of Greek art revealed” I wholly fail to see.

Let us look first at his rectangles. His first is 2 × √5. It is said that these figures represent the ratio of a man’s height to the full span of his outstretched fingers. But what man? Of what race and age? Well, let us say an average Greek of the best period, and pass on. Mr. Hambidge has found this rectangle over and over again in the design of the Parthenon. “Closely akin” to it, says the report, is another fundamental rectangle, of which the two dimensions are in the ratio of Leonardo’s famous “golden section.” That ratio is obtained by dividing a straight line so that its greater is to its lesser part as the whole is to the greater. Let us give a mathematical meaning to the “closely akin.” Calling the lesser part 1 and the greater _x_, then—

_x_/1 = (_x_ + 1)/_x_ or _x_² - _x_ - 1 = 0

which gives you

_x_ = (√5 + 1)/2.

The square roots will not trouble you when you come to constructing your rectangles, for the diagonal of the first is √(5 + 4), or 3. If AB is your side 2, draw a perpendicular to it through B, and with A as centre describe the arc of a circle of radius 3; the point of intersection will give C, the other end of the diagonal. The second rectangle maintains AB, and simply prolongs BC by half of AB or 1. Just as the dimensions of the first rectangle are related to those of (selected) man, and to the plan of the Parthenon, so those of the second are related, it seems, to the arrangement of seeds in the sunflower and to the plan of some of the Pyramids. Sir Theodore Cook writes to _The Times_ to say that both the sunflower and the Pyramid discoveries are by no means new.

The fact is the theory of “beautiful” rectangles is not new. The classic exponent of it is Fechner, who essayed to base it on actual experiment. He placed a number of rectangular cards of various dimensions before his friends, and asked them to select the one they thought most beautiful. Apparently the “golden section” rectangle got most votes. But “most of the persons began by saying that it all depended on the application to be made of the figure, and on being told to disregard this, showed much hesitation in choosing.” (Bosanquet: “History of Æsthetic,” p. 382.) If they had been Greeks of the best period, they would have all gone with one accord for the “golden section” rectangle.

Nor have the geometers of beauty restricted their favours to the rectangle. Some have favoured the circle, some the square, others the ellipse. And what about Hogarth’s “line of beauty”? I last saw it affectionately alluded to in the advertisement of a corset manufacturer. So, evidently, Hogarth’s idea has not been wasted.

One sympathizes with Fechner’s friends who said it all depended upon the application to be made of the figure. The “art” in a picture is generally to be looked for inside the frame. The Parthenon may have been planned on the √5/2 rectangle, but you cannot evolve the Parthenon itself out of that vulgar fraction. Fechner proceeded on the assumption that art is a physical fact and that its “secret” could be wrung out of it, as in any other physical inquiry, by observation and experiment, by induction from a sufficient number of facts. But when he came to have a theory of it he found, like anybody else, that introspection was the only way.

And whatever rectangles Mr. Hambidge may discover in Greek works of art, he will not thereby have revealed the secret of Greek art. For rectangles are physical facts (when they are not mere abstractions), and art is not a physical fact, but a spiritual activity. It is in the mind of the artist, it is his vision, the expression of his intuition, and beauty is only another name for perfect expression. That, at any rate, is the famous “intuition-expression” theory of Benedetto Croce, which at present holds the field. It is a theory which, of course, presents many difficulties to the popular mind—what æsthetic theory does not?—but it covers the ground, as none other does, and comprehends all arts, painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and the rest, in one. Its main difficulty is its distinction between the æsthetic fact, the artist’s expression, and the physical fact, the externalization of the artist’s expression, the so-called “work” of art. Dr. Bosanquet has objected that this seems to leave out of account the influence on the artist’s expression of his material, his medium, but Croce, I think, has not overlooked that objection (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII., end), though many of us would be glad if he could devote some future paper in the _Critica_ to meeting it fairly and squarely. Anyhow, æsthetics is not a branch of physics, and the “secret” of art is not to be “revealed” by a whole Euclidful of rectangles.

But it is, of course, an interesting fact that certain Greeks, and before them certain Egyptians, took certain rectangles as the basis of their designs—rectangles which are also related to the average proportions of the human body and to certain botanical types. If Mr. Hambidge—or his predecessors, of whom Sir Theodore Cook speaks—have established this they have certainly put their fingers on an engaging convention. Who would have thought that the “golden section” that very ugly-looking (√5 + 1)/2 could have had so much in it? The builder of the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh knew all about it in 4700 B.C. and the Greeks of the age of Pericles, and then Leonardo da Vinci toyed with it—“_que de choses dans un menuet!_” It is really rather cavalier of Croce to dismiss this golden section along with Michael Angelo’s serpentine lines of beauty as the astrology of Æsthetic.

A POINT OF CROCE’S

Adverting to Mr. Jay Hambidge’s rectangles of beauty I had occasion to cite Croce and his distinction between the æsthetic fact of expression and the practical fact of externalization, to which distinction, I said, Dr. Bosanquet had objected that it ignored the influence upon the artist of his medium. Dr. Bosanquet has courteously sent me a copy of a communication, “Croce’s Æsthetic,” which he has made to the British Academy, and which deals not only with this point, but with his general objections to the Crocean philosophy of art. It is not all objection, far from it; much of it is highly laudatory, and all of it is manifestly written in a spirit of candour and simple desire to arrive at the truth. But I have neither the space nor the competence to review the whole pamphlet, and I will confine myself to the particular point with which I began. While suggesting, however, some criticisms of Dr. Bosanquet’s contentions, I admit the suspicion that I may resemble one of those disputants who, as Renan once said, at the bottom of their minds are a little of the opinion of the other side. That, indeed, was why I said that many of us would be glad to hear further on the point from Croce himself. But with Dr. Bosanquet’s pamphlet before me I cannot afford to “wait and see.” I must say, with all diffidence, what I can.

Dr. Bosanquet describes the Crocean view quite fairly. “The ‘work of art,’ then, picture, statue, musical performance, printed or spoken poem, is called so only by a metaphor. It belongs to the practical (economic) and not to the æsthetic phase of the spirit, and consists merely of expedients adopted by the artist as a practical man, to ensure preservation and a permanent possibility of reproduction for his imaginative intuition. The art and beauty lie primarily in his imagination, and secondarily in the imagination of those to whom his own may communicate its experience. The picture and the music are by themselves neither art nor beauty nor intuition-expression.”

But when Dr. Bosanquet goes on to make his inferences, I suggest that he infers too much. “Thus,” he says, “all embodiment in special kinds of physical objects by help of special media and special processes is wholly foreign to the nature of art and beauty.... There is nothing to be learned from the practical means by help of which intuitions of beauty receive permanence and communicability.” “Wholly foreign” and “nothing to be learned” are, I think, too strong. Though the practical means are distinct from art, they are part of the artist’s experience. The artist is not working _in vacuo_. He is a certain man, with a certain nature and experience, at a certain moment of time. His joy, say, in handling and modelling clay (I take this example from an old lecture of Dr. Bosanquet’s) will be one of the factors in his experience. In that sense it will not be “wholly foreign” to his art, and he will have “learned” something from it. It is not itself the art-impulse, the expressive activity, but it is, what Croce calls it, a _point d’appui_ for a new one.

For let us hear what Croce himself says on this point (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII.). “To the explanation of physical beauty as a mere aid for the reproduction of internal beauty, or expression, it might be objected, that the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting or carving, writing or composing; and that therefore physical beauty, instead of following, sometimes precedes æsthetic beauty. This would be a very superficial way of understanding the procedure of the artist, who, in reality, makes no stroke of the brush without having first seen it in his imagination; and, if he has not yet seen it, will make it, not to externalize his expression (which at that moment does not exist), but as it were on trial and to have a mere _point d’appui_ for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical _point d’appui_ is not physical beauty, instrument of reproduction, but a means that might be called _pedagogic_, like retiring to solitude or the many other expedients, often queer enough, adopted by artists and men of science and varying according to their various idiosyncrasies.” Can we not put it more generally and say that the artist’s historic situation is changing at every moment and his experience with his medium is part of that situation (just as is the date of his birth, his country, or the state of his digestion), or in other words, one of the influences that make him what he is and not some one else? But to admit that, it seems to me, is not at all to deny the independence of his spiritual activity in expression any more than the freedom of the will is denied by the admission that will must always be exercised in a definite historical situation.

What Dr. Bosanquet cannot abide is Croce’s great principle that in æsthetic philosophy there are no arts but only art. He says this “offers to destroy our medium of intercourse through the body and through natural objects.” Why “destroy”? Surely it is not a case of destruction but of removal; removal from the philosophy of art to that of practice. Croce is not quite so foolish as to offer to destroy things indestructible; he is only trying to put them in their place.

“The truth is, surely, that different inclinations of the spirit have affinities with different qualities and actions of body—meaning by body that which a sane philosophy accepts as concretely and completely actual in the world of sense-perception. The imagination of the particular artist is

like the dyer’s hand,
Subdued to what it works in,

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

WILLIAM HAZLITT