Chapter VI: Part 6

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

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

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

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

TALK AT THE MARTELLO TOWER

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

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

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

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

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

“Like everybody else,” she snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AGAIN AT THE MARTELLO TOWER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At the Alhambra,” answered Patty, simply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SILENT STAGE

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

Let me explain. One of our more notable comedians (I purposely put it thus vaguely, partly out of discretion, partly with a bid for that interest which the mystery of anonymity is apt to confer upon an otherwise matter-of-fact narrative, as George Borrow well knew)—one of our most notable comedians, then, had asked me to accompany him to a “cinema” rehearsal wherein he was cast for the principal part. I eagerly accepted, because the art of the “cinema” is becoming so important in our daily life that one really ought to learn something about it, and, moreover, because the _cuisine_ of any art (see the Diary of the De Goncourts _passim_) is a fascinating thing in itself. Our rehearsal was to be miles away, in the far East of London, and the mere journey was a geographical adventure. The scene was a disused factory, and a disused factory has something of the romantic melancholy of a disaffected cathedral—not the romance of ruins, but the romance of a fabric still standing and valid, but converted to alien uses.

Our first question on arrival was, were we late? This question seems to be a common form of politeness with notable comedians, and is probably designed to take the wind out of the sails of possible criticism. No, we were not late—though everybody seemed to be suspiciously ready and, one feared, waiting. They were a crowd of ladies and gentlemen in elaborate evening dress, all with faces painted a rich _café au lait_ or else salmon-colour, and very odd such a crowd looked against the whitewashed walls and bare beams of the disused factory. The scenery looked even more odd. It presented the middle fragments of everything without any edges. There was a vast baronial hall, decorated with suits of armour and the heaviest furniture, but without either ceiling or walls. There was a staircase hung, so to speak, in the air, leading to a doorway, which was just the framework of a door, standing alone, let into nothing. It seemed uncanny, until you remembered the simple fact that the camera can cover just as much, or as little, of a scene as it chooses. Great glaring “cinema” lights—I had not seen them since the Beckett-Carpentier flight—cast an unearthly pallor upon the few unpainted faces. The crowd of painted ladies and gentlemen hung about, waiting for their scene with what seemed to me astonishing patience. But patience, I suspect, is a necessary virtue at all rehearsals, whether “spoken” or “silent.”

And that distinction brings me to the producer. It was for him that I should have liked to have thought of it. For he fell to talking to me about his art, the art of production, and of cinematography in general, and I found myself forced to make some comparisons with what I had, up to that moment, always thought of as the “regular” stage. But evidently, as Jeffery said of Wordsworth’s poem, this would never do. The producer might have thought I was reflecting upon his art, about which he was so enthusiastic, as something “irregular.” At last, after deplorable hesitation, I found my phrase—the “other” stage. Dreadfully tame, I admit, but safe; it hurt nobody. Even now, however, I have an uneasy feeling that the producer was not quite satisfied with it. I ought perhaps to have accompanied it with a shrug, some sign of apology for so much as recognizing the existence of “other” stages of anything else, in short, than what was, at that moment and on that spot, _the_ stage, the “silent” stage, the stage of moving pictures. It was like speaking of Frith’s “Derby Day” in the presence of a Cubist. Artistic enthusiasts must be allowed their little exclusions.

If the producer was an enthusiast, there was certainly a method in his enthusiasm. His table was covered with elaborate geometrical drawings, which, I was told, were first sketches for successive scenes. On pegs hung little schedules of the artists required for each scene, and of the scenes wherein each of the principals was concerned. Innumerable photographs, of course—photographs of scenes actually represented on the “film,” and of others not represented, experiments for the actual, final thing. For it is to be remembered that the producer of a “film” is relatively more important than the producer of a “spoken drama.” He is always part, and sometimes whole, author of the play. He has to conceive the successive phases of the action in detail, and to conceive them in terms of photography. Even with some one else’s play as a datum he has, I take it, to invent a good deal. For while the “spoken drama” can only show selected, critical moments of life, the “silent stage” aims at continuity and gives you the intervening moments. On the one stage, when a lady makes an afternoon call, you see her hostess’s drawing-room, and she walks in; on the other stage you see her starting from home, jumping into her Rolls-Royce, dashing through the crowded streets, knocking at the front door, being relieved of her cloak by the flunkey, mounting the stairs to the drawing-room, etc., etc. Indeed, this mania for continuity is a besetting sin of the “silent stage”; it leads to sheer irrelevance and the ruin of all proportion. My enthusiastic producer, it is only fair to say, was far too good an artist to approve it.

“At the first whistle, get ready,” shouted the producer, “at the second, slow waltz, please.” And then the baronial hall was filled by the crowd of exemplary patience and they danced with unaffected enjoyment, these gay people, just as though no camera were directed on them. The heroine appeared (she was the daughter of the house, and this was her first ball—indicated by a stray curl down her back), and her ravishing pink gown, evidently a choice product of the West-end, looked strange in a disused East-end factory. Of course she had adopted the inexorable “cinema” convention of a “Cupid’s bow” mouth. Here is the youngest of the arts already fast breeding its own conventions. Surely the variety of female lips might be recognized! Women’s own mouths are generally prettier, and certainly more suitable to their faces, than some rigidly fixed type. It would be ungallant to say that the leading lady’s “Cupid’s bow” did not become her, but the shape of her own mouth, I venture to suggest, would have been better still. And where was my friend the notable comedian all this time? Rigging himself out in evening clerical dress for the ball (he was the vicar of the parish), and evidently regarding his momentary deviation into “film” work (for the benefit of a theatrical charity) as great fun. Will the heroes of the “silent stage,” I wonder, ever deviate into “spoken drama”? It would be startling to hear Charlie Chaplin speak.

THE MOVIES

All is dark and an excellent orchestra is playing a Beethoven symphony. The attendant flashes you to your seat with her torch, you tumble over a subaltern, and murmur to yourself, with Musset’s Fantasio, “Quelles solitudes que tous ces corps humains!” For that is the first odd thing that strikes you about the movies; the psychology of the audience is not collective, but individual. You are not aware of your neighbour, who is shrouded from your gaze, and you take your pleasure alone. Thus you are rid of the “contagion of the crowd,” the claims of human sympathy, the imitative impulse, and thrown in upon yourself, a hermit at the mercy of the hallucinations that beset the solitary. You never applaud, for that is a collective action. What with the soothing flow of the music, the darkness, and the fact that your eye is fixed on one bright spot, you are in the ideal condition for hypnotism. But the suspected presence of others, vague shadows hovering near you, give your mood the last touch of the uncanny. You are a prisoner in Plato’s cave or in some crepuscular solitude of Maeterlinck. Anything might happen.

According to the programme what happens is called _The Prodigal Wife_. Her husband is a doctor and she pines for gaiety while he is busy at the hospital. It is her birthday and he has forgotten to bring her her favourite roses, which are in fact offered to her by another gentleman with more leisure and a better memory. Our own grievance against the husband, perhaps capricious, is his appalling straw hat—but then we equally dislike the lovers tail-coat, so matters are even, and the lady’s preference of No. 2 to No. 1 seems merely arbitrary. Anyhow, she goes off with No. 2 in a motor-car, “all out,” leaving the usual explanatory letter behind her, which is thrown on the screen for all of us to gloat over.

Here let me say that this profuse exhibition on the screen of all the correspondence in the case, letters, telegrams, copies of verses, last wills and testaments, the whole _dossier_, strikes me as a mistake. It under-values the intelligence of the audience, which is quite capable of guessing what people are likely to write in the given circumstances without being put to the indelicacy of reading it. As it is, you no sooner see some one handling a scrap of paper than you know you are going to have the wretched scrawl thrust under your nose. As if we didn’t know all about these things! As if it wouldn’t be pleasanter to leave the actual text to conjecture! I remember in _Rebellious Susan_ there is a packet of compromising letters shown to interested parties, whose vague comments, “Well, after _that_,” etc., sufficiently enlighten us without anything further. But now, when Lady Macbeth reads her lord’s letter, up it goes on the screen, blots and all. This is an abuse of the film, which finds it easier to exhibit a letter than to explain why it came to be written. As things are, the lady seems to have eloped in a hurry without sufficient grounds. No. 2 presents his roses, and, hey presto! the car is round the corner. No. 1 takes it very nobly, hugs his abandoned babe to his bosom, and pulls long faces (obligingly brought nearer the camera to show the furrows). The mother’s sin shall ever be hidden from the innocent child, and to see the innocent child innocently asking, “Where’s muvver?” and being answered with sad headshakes from the bereaved parent (now bang against the camera) is to bathe in sentimental photography up to the neck.

Thereafter the innocent child grows like (and actually inside) a rosebud till, as the petals fall off, she is revealed as a buxom young woman—the familiar photographic trick of showing one thing _through_ another being here turned to something like poetic advantage. But then the film again bolts with the theme. There is running water and a boat, things which no film can resist. Away go the girl and her sweetheart on a river excursion, loosening the painter, jumping in, shoving off, performing, in short, every antic which in photography can be compassed with a stream and a boat. We have forgotten all about the prodigal wife. But here she is again, her hair in grey _bandeaux_ and her lips, as the relentless camera shows you at short range, rouged with a hard outline. She has returned to her old home as the family nurse. For there is now another innocent babe, the doctor’s grandchild, to wax and wane with the advancing and receding camera, and to have its little “nightie” blown realistically by the usual wind as it stands on the stair-head. The doctor himself is as busy as ever, making wonderful pharmacological discoveries (newspaper extracts exhibited on the screen) in a laboratory blouse and dictating the results (notes shown on the screen) to an enterprising reporter.

And here there is another “rushed” elopement. “The art of drama,” said Dumas, “is the art of preparations.” But nothing has prepared us (save, perhaps, heredity) for the sudden freak of the prodigal wife’s daughter in running away with a lover so vague that you see only his hat (another hideous straw—_il ne manquait que ca_!) and the glow of his cigarette-end. Family nurse to the rescue! Tender expostulations, reminders about the innocent babe, and nick-of-time salvation of the “intending” runaway. Ultimate meeting of nurse and doctor; he is all forgiveness, but prodigal wives are not to be forgiven like that. No, she must go out into the snow, and you see her walking down the long path, dwindling, dwindling, from a full-sized nurse into a Euclidean point.

To sum up. The camera would do better if it would learn self-denial and observe the law of artistic economy, keep its people consistently in one plane and out of boats and motor cars, _soigner_ its crises a little more, and avoid publishing correspondence. And it should slacken its pace a bit. You may take the Heraclitean philosophy—πάντα χωρεῖ—a little too literally. The movies would be all the more moving for moving slower.

For the real fun of rapid motion, appropriately used, give me _Mutt and Jeff_. Mutt, buried in the sand, with a head like an egg, prompts an ostrich to lay another egg, from which emerges a brood of little ostriches. Jeff goes out to shoot them, but his shots glance off in harmless wreaths of smoke. When Mutt and Jeff exchange ideas you see them actually travelling like an electric spark along the wire, from brain to brain. The ostrich hoists Mutt out of the sand by the breeches. Collapse of Jeff. It suggests a drawing by Caran d’Ache in epileptic jerks. The natural history pictures, too, the deer and the birds, strike one as admirable examples of what animated photography can do for us in the way of instruction as well as amusement.... And the orchestra has been playing all this time, Beethoven and Mozart, a “separate ecstasy.” And again I stumble over the subaltern, and wonder to find people moving so slowly in Piccadilly Circus.

TIME AND THE FILM

There was a gentleman in Molière, frequently mentioned since and now for my need to be unblushingly mentioned again, who said to another gentleman, about never mind what, that _le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire_. But Molière belonged to that effete art the “spoken drama,” which we learn, from America, has sunk to be used mainly as an advertisement of the play which is subsequently to be filmed out of it. He wrote in the dark or pre-film ages, and could not know what an all-important part _le temps_ was to play in _l’affaire_ of the film. Among its innumerable and magnificent activities the film is an instructor of youth, and it seems, from a letter which the Rev. Dr. Lyttelton has written to _The Times_, it instructs at a pace which is a little too quick for the soaring human boy. “Elephants,” the reverend Doctor pathetically complains, “are shown scuttling about like antelopes,” and so the poor boy mixes up antelopes and elephants and gets his zoology all wrong. I should myself have innocently supposed that this magical acceleration of pace is one of the great charms of the film for the boy. It not only provides him with half-a-dozen pictures in the time it would have taken him to read one of them in print (to say nothing of his being saved the trouble of reading, learning the alphabet, and other pedagogic nuisances altogether), but it offers him something much more exciting and romantic than his ordinary experience. He knows that at the Zoo elephants move slowly, but here on the film they are taught, in the American phrase, to “step lively,” and are shown scuttling about like antelopes. A world wherein the ponderous and slow elephant is suddenly endowed by the magician’s wand with the lightness and rapidity of the antelope—what enhancement for boys, aye, and for grown-ups too!

Indeed, it seems to me that the greatest achievement of the film is its triumph over time. Some amateurs may find its chief charm in the perfect “Cupid’s bow” of its heroines’ mouths; others in the remarkable English prose of its explanatory accompaniments; others, again, in its exquisite humour of protagonists smothered in flour or soap-lather or flattened under runaway motor-cars. I admit the irresistible fascination of these delights and can quite understand how they come to be preferred to the high-class opera company which has been introduced at the Capitol, New York, to entertain “between pictures.” But I still think the prime merit of the film—the real reason for which last year more than enough picture films to encircle the earth at the Equator left the United States of America for foreign countries—lies in its ability to play as it will with time. The mere acceleration of pace (which is the ordinary game it plays)—the fierce galloping of horses across prairies, the miraculous speed of motor-cars, elephants scuttling about like antelopes—gives a sharp sense of exhilaration, of victory over sluggish nature. And even here there is an educational result that ought to console Dr. Lyttelton. The rate of plant growth is multiplied thousands of times so that we are enabled actually to see the plants growing, expanding from bud to flower under our eyes. But there is also the retardation of pace, which is even more wonderful. A diver is shown plunging into the water and swimming at a rate which allows the minutest movement of the smallest muscle to be clearly seen. This is an entirely beautiful thing; but I should suppose that the film, by its power of exhibiting movements naturally too quick for the eye at whatever slower rate is desired, must have extraordinary use for scientific investigations. This, at any rate, is a better use for the film than that sometimes claimed for it in the field of morality. I look with suspicion on those films, as I do on those “spoken” plays, that propose to do us good by exhibiting the details of this or that “social evil.” Some philanthropic societies, I believe, have introduced such pictures in all good faith. But many of their producers are, like the others, merely out to make money, and in every case I imagine their patrons to be drawn to them not by any moral impulse, but by a prurient curiosity—the desire to have a peep into the forbidden.

But to return to the question of time. It has its importance, too, in the “spoken drama,” but it ceases to be a question of visible pace. You cannot make real men and women scuttle about like antelopes. You can only play tricks with the clock. The act-drop is invaluable for getting your imaginary time outstripping your real time:—

jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.

In a moment it bridges over for you the gap between youth and age, as in _Sweethearts_. But there is another way of playing tricks with the clock, by making it stand still for some of your personages, while it ticks regularly for the rest. A. E. W. Mason, in one of his stories, gave an extra quarter of an hour now and then to one of the characters—that is to say, the clock stopped for them during that period, but not for him—and while _outside_ time, so to speak, he could do all sorts of things (if I remember rightly he committed a murder) without risk of detection. But the great magician of this kind is Barrie. The heroine of his _Truth about the Russian Dancers_ had a sudden desire for an infant, and within a half-hour was delivered of one; a remarkably rapid case of _parthenogenesis_. The infant was carried out and returned the next moment a child of ten. “He grows apace,” said somebody. These were cases of the clock galloping. With the heroine of _Mary Rose_ on the island it stands still, so that she returns twenty-five years later to her family precisely the same girl as she left them. We all know what pathetic effects Barrie gets out of this trick with the clock. But he has, of course, to assume supernatural intervention to warrant them. And there you have the contrast with the film. In the “spoken drama,” poor, decrepit old thing, they appeal to that silly faculty, the human imagination; whereas the film has only to turn some wheels quicker or slower and it is all done for you, under your nose, without any imagination at all. Elephants are scuttling about like antelopes and divers plunging into the water at a snail’s pace. No wonder that, according to our New York advices, “film magnates have made so much money that they have been able to buy chains of theatres throughout the country,” and that “everybody talks films in the United States.”

FUTURIST DANCING

That amazing propagandist, Signor Marinetti, of Milan, who favours me from time to time with his manifestos, now sends “La Danse Futuriste.” I confess that I have not a ha’porth of Futurism in my composition. I am what Signor Marinetti would himself call a Passéiste, a mere Pastist. Hence I have generally failed to discover any meaning in these manifestos, and have thrown them into the waste-paper basket. But as the present one happens to arrive at the same time as another Futurist tract—Signor Ardengo Soffici’s “Estetica Futurista”—I have read the two together, to see if one throws any light on the other. It is right to say that “the” Soffici (to adopt an Italianism) disclaims any connexion with “the” Marinetti, explaining that he puts forward a doctrine, whereas official Futurism has no doctrine, but only manifestos. It couldn’t have, he rather unkindly adds, seeing that its very nature is “anticultural and instinctolatrous.” (Rather jolly, don’t you think, the rich and varied vocabulary of these Italian gentlemen?) Nevertheless, I have ventured to study one document by the light of the other; and, if the result is only to make darkness visible, it is a certain gain, after all, to get anything visible in such a matter.

And first for the Marinetti. His manifesto begins by taking an historical survey of dancing through the ages. The earliest dances, he points out, reflected the terror of humanity at the unknown and the incomprehensible in the Cosmos. Thus round dances were rhythmical pantomimes reproducing the rotatory movement of the stars. The gestures of the Catholic priest in the celebration of Mass imitate these early dances and contain the same astronomical symbol—a statement calculated to provoke devout Catholics to fury. (I should like to hear the learned author of “The Golden Bough” on the anthropological side of it.) Then came the lascivious dances of the East, and their modern Parisian counterpart—or sham imitation. For this he gives a quasi-mathematical formula in the familiar Futurist style. “Parisian red pepper + buckler + lance + ecstasy before idols signifying nothing + nothing + undulation of Montmartre hips = erotic Pastist anachronism for tourists.” Golly, what a formula!

Before the war Paris went crazy over dances from South America: the Argentine _tango_, the Chilean _zamacueca_, the Brazilian _maxixe_, the Paraguayan _santafé_. Compliments to Diaghileff, Nijinsky (“the pure geometry” of dancing), and Isadora Duncan, “whose art has many points of contact with impressionism in painting, just as Nijinsky’s has with the forms and masses of Cézanne.” Under the influence of Cubist experiments, and particularly under the influence of Picasso, dancing became an autonomous art. It was no longer subject to music, but took its place. Kind words for Dalcroze; but “we Futurists prefer Loie Fuller and the nigger cake-walk (utilization of electric light and machinery).” Machinery’s the thing! “We must have gestures imitating the movements of motors, pay assiduous court to wings, wheels, pistons, prepare the fusion of man and machine, and so arrive at the metallism of Futurist dancing. Music is fundamentally nostalgic, and on that account rarely of any use in Futurist dancing. Noise, caused by friction and shock of solid bodies, liquids, or high-pressure gases, has become one of the most dynamic elements of Futurist poesy. Noise is the language of the new human-mechanical life.” So Futurist dancing will be accompanied by “organized noises” and the orchestra of “noise-makers” invented by Luigi Russolo. Finally, Futurist dancing will be:—

Inharmonious—Ungraceful—Asymmetrical—Dynamic—_Motlibriste_.

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

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

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

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

HROSWITHA

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

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

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