Chapter VII (3)

In this limited compass and in the case of such a quantity of production it is almost impossible to specify--difficult to pick dozens of examples out of thousands. Daumier became more and more the political spirit of the _Charivari_, or at least the political pencil, for M. Philipon, the breath of whose nostrils was opposition--one perceives from here the little bilious, bristling, ingenious, insistent man--is to be credited with a suggestive share in any enterprise in which he had a hand. This pencil played over public life, over the sovereign, the ministers, the deputies, the peers, the judiciary, the men and the measures, the reputations and scandals of the moment, with a strange, ugly, extravagant, but none the less sane and manly vigor. Daumier’s sign is strength above all, and in turning over his pages to-day there is no intensity of force that the careful observer will not concede to him. It is perhaps another matter to assent to the proposition, put forth by his greatest admirers among his countrymen, that he is the first of all caricaturists. To the writer of this imperfect sketch he remains considerably less interesting than Gavarni; and/or a particular reason, which it is difficult to express otherwise than by saying that he is too simple. Simplicity was not Gavarni’s fault, and indeed to a large degree it was Daumier’s merit. The single grossly ridiculous or almost hauntingly characteristic thing which his figures represent is largely the reason why they still represent life and an unlucky reality years after the names attached to them have parted with a vivifying power. Such vagueness has overtaken them, for the most part, and to such a thin reverberation have they shrunk, the persons and the affairs which were then so intensely sketchable. Daumier handled them with a want of ceremony which would have been brutal were it not for the element of science in his work, making them immense and unmistakable in their drollery, or at least in their grotesqueness; for the term drollery suggests gayety, and Daumier is anything but gay. _Un rude peintre de moeurs_, M. Champfleury calls him; and the phrase expresses his extreme breadth of treatment.

Of the victims of his “rudeness” M. Thiers is almost the only one whom the present generation may recognize without a good deal of reminding, and indeed his hand is relatively light in delineating this personage of few inches and many episodes. M. Thiers must have been dear to the caricaturist, for he belonged to the type that was easy to “do;” it being well known that these gentlemen appreciate public characters in direct proportion to their saliency of feature. When faces are reducible to a few telling strokes their wearers are overwhelmed with the honors of publicity; with which, on the other hand, nothing is more likely to interfere than the possession of a countenance neatly classical. Daumier had only to give M. Thiers the face of a clever owl, and the trick was played. Of course skill was needed to individualize the symbol, but that is what caricaturists propose to themselves. Of how well he succeeded the admirable plate of the lively little minister in a “new dress”--tricked out in the uniform of a general of the First Republic--is a sufficient illustration. The bird of night is not an acute bird, but how the artist has presented the image of a selected specimen! And with what a life-giving pencil the whole figure is put on its feet, what intelligent drawing, what a rich, free stroke! The allusions conveyed in it are to such forgotten things that it is strange to think the personage was, only the other year, still contemporaneous; that he might have been met, on a fine day, taking a few firm steps in a quiet part of the Champs Élysées, with his footman carrying a second overcoat and looking doubly tall behind him. In whatever attitude Daumier depicts him, planted as a tiny boxing-master at the feet of the virtuous colossus in a blouse (whose legs are apart, like those-of the Rhodian), in whom the artist represents the People, to watch the match that is about to come off between Ratapoil and M. Berryer, or even in the act of lifting the “parricidal” club of a new repressive law to deal a blow at the Press, an effulgent, diligent, sedentary muse (this picture, by the way, is a perfect specimen of the simple and telling in political caricature)--however, as I say, he takes M. Thiers, there is always a rough indulgence in his crayon, as if he were grateful to him for lending himself so well. He invented Ratapoil as he appropriated Robert Macaire, and as a caricaturist he never fails to put into circulation, when he can, a character to whom he may attribute as many as possible of the affectations or the vices of the day. Robert Macaire, an imaginative, a romantic rascal, was the hero of a highly successful melodrama written for Frederick Lemaitre; but Daumier made him the type of the swindler at large in an age of feverish speculation--the projector of showy companies, the advertiser of worthless shares. There is a whole series of drawings descriptive of his exploits, a hundred masterly plates which, according to M. Champfleury, consecrated Daumier’s reputation. The subject, the legend, was in most cases, still according to M. Champfleury, suggested by Philipon. Sometimes it was very witty; as for instance when Bertrand, the muddled acolyte or scraping second fiddle of the hero, objects, in relation to a brilliant scheme which he has just developed, with the part Bertrand is to play, that there are constables in the country, and he promptly replies, “Constables? So much the better--they’ll take the shares!” Ratapoil was an evocation of the same general character, but with a difference of _nuance_--the ragged political bully, or hand-to-mouth demagogue, with the smashed tall hat, cocked to one side, the absence of linen, the club half-way up his sleeve, the swagger and pose of being gallant for the people. Ratapoil abounds in the promiscuous drawings that I have looked over, and is always very strong and living, with a considerable element of the sinister, so often in Daumier an accompaniment of the comic. There is an admirable page--it brings the idea down to 1851--in which a sordid but astute peasant, twirling his thumbs on his stomach and looking askance, allows this political adviser to urge upon him in a whisper that there is not a minute to lose--to lose for action, of course--if he wishes to keep his wife, his house, his field, his heifer and his calf. The canny scepticism in the ugly, half-averted face of the typical rustic who considerably suspects his counsellor is indicated by a few masterly strokes.

This is what the student of Daumier recognizes as his science, or, if the word has a better grace, his art. It is what has kept life in his work so long after so many of the occasions of it have been swept into darkness. Indeed, there is no such commentary on renown as the “back numbers” of a comic journal. They show us that at certain moments certain people were eminent, only to make us unsuccessfully try to remember what they were eminent _for_. And the comparative obscurity (comparative, I mean, to the talent of the caricaturist) overtakes even the most justly honored names. M. Berryer was a splendid speaker and a public servant of real distinction and the highest utility; yet the fact that to-day his name is on few men’s lips seems to be emphasized by this other fact that we continue to pore over Daumier, in whose plates we happen to come across him. It reminds one afresh how Art is an embalmer, a magician, whom we can never speak too fair. People duly impressed with this truth are sometimes laughed at for their superstitious tone, which is pronounced, according to the fancy of the critic, mawkish, maudlin or hysterical. But it is really difficult to see how any reiteration of the importance of art can overstate the plain facts. It prolongs, it preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. It conciliates, charms, bribes posterity; and it murmurs to mortals, as the old French poet sang to his mistress, “You will be fair only so far as I have said so.” When it whispers even to the great, “You depend upon me, and I can do more for you, in the long-run, than any one else,” it is scarcely too proud. It puts method and power and the strange, real, mingled air of things into Daumier’s black sketchiness, so full of the technical _gras_, the “fat” which French critics commend and which we have no word to express. It puts power above all, and the effect which he best achieves, that of a certain simplification of the attitude or the gesture to an almost symbolic generality. His persons represent only one thing, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of it abides with us, unaccompanied with timid detail. It may really be said that they represent only one class--the old and ugly; so that there is proof enough of a special faculty in his having played such a concert, lugubrious though it be, on a single chord. It has been made a reproach to him, says M. Grand-Carteret, that “his work is lacking in two capital elements--_la jeunesse et la femme_;” and the commentator resents his being made to suffer for the deficiency--“as if an artist could be at the same time deep, comic, graceful and pretty; as if all those who have a real value had not created for themselves a form to which they remain confined and a type which they reproduce in all its variations, as soon as they have touched the æsthetic ideal that has been their dream. Assuredly humanity, as this great painter saw it, could not be beautiful; one asks one’s self what maiden in her teens, a pretty face, would have done in the midst of these good, plain folk, stunted and elderly, with faces like wrinkled apples. A simple accessory most of the time, woman is for him merely a termagant or a blue-stocking who has turned the corner.”

When the eternal feminine, for Daumier appears in neither of these forms he sees it in Madame Chaboulard or Madame Fribochon, the old snuff-taking, gossiping portress, in a nightcap and shuffling _savates_, relating or drinking in the wonderful and the intimate. One of his masterpieces represents three of these dames, lighted by a guttering candle, holding their heads together to discuss the fearful earthquake at Bordeaux, the consequence of the government’s allowing the surface of the globe to be unduly dug out in California. The representation of confidential imbecility could not go further. When a man leaves out so much of life as Daumier--youth and beauty and the charm of woman and the loveliness of childhood and the manners of those social groups of whom it may most be said that they _have_ manners--when he exhibits a deficiency on this scale it might seem that the question was not to be so easily disposed of as in the very non-apologetic words I have just quoted. All the same (and I confess it is singular), we may feel what Daumier omitted and yet not be in the least shocked by the claim of predominance made for him. It is impossible to spend a couple of hours over him without assenting to this claim, even though there may be a weariness in such a panorama of ugliness and an inevitable reaction from it. This anomaly, and the challenge to explain it which appears to proceed from him, render him, to my sense, remarkably interesting. The artist whose idiosyncrasies, whose limitations, if you will, make us question and wonder, in the light of his fame, has an element of fascination not attaching to conciliatory talents. If M. Eugene Montrosier may say of him without scandalizing us that such and such of his drawings belong to the very highest art, it is interesting (and Daumier profits by the interest) to put one’s finger on the reason we are not scandalized.

I think this reason is that, on the whole he is so peculiarly serious. This may seem an odd ground of praise for a jocose draughtsman, and of course what I mean is that his comic force is serious--a very different thin from the absence of comedy. This essential sign of the caricaturist may surely be anything it will so long as it is there. Daumier’s figures are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series of “Le Public du Salon,” old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is the very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolute bourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without poetic ironies, to whom a big cracked mirror has been given. His thick, strong, manly touch stands, in every way, for so much knowledge. He used to make little images, in clay and in wax (many of them still exist), of the persons he was in the habit of representing, so that they might constantly seem to be “sitting” for him. The caricaturist of that day had not the help of the ubiquitous photograph. Daumier painted actively, as well, in his habitation, all dedicated to work, on the narrow island of St. Louis, where the Seine divides and where the monuments of old Paris stand thick, and the types that were to his purpose pressed close upon him. He had not far to go to encounter the worthy man, in the series of “Les Papas,” who is reading the evening paper at the café with so amiable and placid a credulity, while his unnatural little boy, opposite to him, finds sufficient entertainment in the much-satirized _Constitutionnel_. The bland absorption of the papa, the face of the man who believes everything he sees in the newspaper, is as near as Daumier often comes to positive gentleness of humor. Of the same family is the poor gentleman, in “Actualités,” seen, in profile, under a doorway where he has taken refuge from a torrent of rain, who looks down at his neat legs with a sort of speculative contrition and says. “To think of my having just ordered two pairs of white trousers.” The _tout petit bourgeois_ palpitates in both these sketches.

I must repeat that it is absurd to pick half a dozen at hazard, out of five thousand; yet a few selections are the only way to call attention to his strong drawing. This has a virtuosity of its own, for all its hit-or-miss appearance. Whatever he touches--the nude, in the swimming-baths on the Seine, the intimations of landscape, when his _petits rentiers_ go into the suburbs for a Sunday--acquires relief and character, Docteur Véron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-Philippe, a Mæcenas of the hour, a director of the opera, author of the _Mémoires d’un Bourgeois de Paris_--this temporary “illustration,” who appears to have been almost indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us to-day had not Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to have represented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of naked inconsolable Vitellius. He renders the human body with a cynical sense of its possible flabbiness and an intimate acquaintance with its structure. “Une Promenade Conjugale,” in the series of “Tout ce qu’on voudra,” portrays a hillside, on a summer afternoon, on which a man has thrown himself on his back to rest, with his arms locked under his head. His fat, full-bosomed, middle-aged wife, under her parasol, with a bunch of field-flowers in her hand, looks down at him patiently and seems to say, “Come, my dear, get up.” There is surely no great point in this; the only point is life, the glimpse of the little snatch of poetry in prose. It is a matter of a few broad strokes of the crayon; yet the pleasant laziness of the man, the idleness of the day, the fragment of homely, familiar dialogue, the stretch of the field with a couple of trees merely suggested, have a communicative truth.

I perhaps exaggerate all this, and in insisting upon the merit of Daumier may appear to make light of the finer accomplishment of several more modern talents, in England and France, who have greater ingenuity and subtlety and have carried qualities of execution so, much further. In looking at this complicated younger work, which has profited so by experience and comparison, it is inevitable that we should perceive it to be infinitely more cunning. On the other hand Daumier, moving in his contracted circle, has an impressive depth. It comes back to his strange seriousness. He is a draughtsman by race, and if he has not extracted the same brilliancy from training, or perhaps even from effort and experiment, as some of his successors, does not his richer satiric and sympathetic feeling more than make up the difference?

However this question may be answered, some of his drawings belong to the class of the unforgetable. It may be a perversity of prejudice, but even the little cut of the “Connoisseurs,” the group of gentlemen collected round a picture and criticising it in various attitudes of sapience and sufficiency, appears to me to have the strength that abides. The criminal in the dock, the flat-headed murderer, bending over to speak to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, professional, anxious head to caution and remind him. tells a large, terrible story and awakes a recurrent shudder. We see the gray court-room, we feel the personal suspense and the immensity of justice. The “Saltimbanques,” reproduced in _L’Art_ for 1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a cruel series. M. Eugène Montrosier says of it that “The drawing is masterly, incomparably firm, the composition superb, the general impression quite of the first order.” It exhibits a pair of lean, hungry mountebanks, a clown and a harlequin beating the drum and trying a comic attitude to attract the crowd, at a fair, to a poor booth in front of which a painted canvas, offering to view a simpering fat woman, is suspended. But the crowd doesn’t come, and the battered tumblers, with their furrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in the void. The whole thing is symbolic and full of grim-ness, imagination and pity. It is the sense that we shall find in him, mixed with his homelier extravagances, an element prolific in indications of this order that draws us back to Daumier.

AFTER THE PLAY

The play was not over when the curtain fell, four months ago; it was continued in a supplementary act or epilogue which took place immediately afterwards. “Come home to tea,” Florentia said to certain friends who had stopped to speak to her in the lobby of the little theatre in Soho--they had been present at a day performance by the company of the Theatre Libre, transferred for a week from Paris; and three of these--Auberon and Dorriforth, accompanying Amicia--turned up so expeditiously that the change of scene had the effect of being neatly executed. The short afterpiece--it was in truth very slight--began with Amicia’s entrance and her declaration that she would never again go to an afternoon performance: it was such a horrid relapse into the real to find it staring at you through the ugly daylight on coming out of the blessed fictive world.

Dorriforth. Ah, you touch there on one of the minor sorrows of life. That’s an illustration of the general change that comes to pass in us as we grow older, if we have ever loved the stage: the fading of the glamour and the mystery that surround it.

Auberon. Do you call it a minor sorrow? It’s one of the greatest. And nothing can mitigate it.

Amicia. Wouldn’t it be mitigated a little if the stage were a trifle better? You must remember how that has changed.

Auberon. Never, never: it’s the same old stage. The change is in ourselves.

Florentia. Well, I never would have given an evening to what we have just seen. If one could have put it in between luncheon and tea, well enough. But one’s evenings are too precious.

Dorriforth. Note that--it’s very important.

Florentia. I mean too precious for that sort of thing.

Auberon. Then you didn’t sit spellbound by the little history of the Due d’Enghien?

Florentia. I sat yawning. Heavens, what a piece!

Amicia. Upon my word I liked it. The last act made me cry.

Dorriforth. Wasn’t it a curious, interesting specimen of some of the things that are worth trying: an attempt to sail closer to the real?

Auberon. How much closer? The fiftieth part of a point--it isn’t calculable.

Florentia. It was just like any other play--I saw no difference. It had neither a plot, nor a subject, nor dialogue, nor situations, nor scenery, nor costumes, nor acting.

Amicia. Then it was hardly, as you say, just like any other play.

Auberon. Florentia should have said like any other _bad_‘one. The only way it differed seemed to be that it was bad in theory as well as in fact.

Amicia. It’s a _morceau de vie_, as the French say.

Auberon. Oh, don’t begin on the French!

Amicia. It’s a French experiment--_que voulez-vous?_

Auberon. English experiments will do.

Dorriforth. No doubt they would--if there _were_ any. But I don’t see them.

Amicia. Fortunately: think what some of them might be! Though Florentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby “Due d’Enghien,” coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have to be so big on the i’s, with its barely audible note of originality. It appealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the way things happen in life.

Auberon. In life they happen clumsily, stupidly, meanly. One goes to the theatre just for the refreshment of seeing them happen in another way--in symmetrical, satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect and just at the right moment.

Dorriforth. It shows how the same cause may produce the most diverse consequences. In this truth lies the only hope of art.

Auberon. Oh, art, art--don’t talk about art!

Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!

Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make bold to say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we read a novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; and according as we look for the particular thing we find it.

Auberon. That’s a profound remark.

Florentia. We go to find amusement: that, surely, is what we all go for.

Amicia. There’s such a diversity in our idea of amusement.

Auberon. Don’t you impute to people more ideas than they have?

Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn’t talk about them. We go to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, to give ourselves up, in short, to a charm.

Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary.

Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what we know, what we feel.

Dorriforth. See already how you differ.

“SO!”

What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense of life.

Amicia. The first thing is to believe.

Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to _dis_believe.

Auberon. Lord, listen to them!

Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio--to care.

Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget.

Amicia. To forget what?

Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautiful more exciting: into fable and romance.

Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it’s about _us_, about you and me--or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we _live_ their experience, for the time, and that’s hardly escaping from life.

Florentia. I’m not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it an escape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate.

Dorriforth. You couldn’t put it better. That’s the life that art, with Auberon’s permission, gives us; that’s the distinction it confers. This is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar fellow--the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand. Then what becomes of our escape?

Florentia. It’s precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us into foul and dreary places--into flat and foolish deserts.

Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things: that’s the only place into which the poet _can_ lead us. It’s there that he finds “As You Like It,” it is there that he finds “Comus,” or “The Way of the World,” or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us, after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can’t keep from us that we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on the walls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us.

Amicia. That’s what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. There was an artistic intention, and the little room wasn’t bare: there was sociable company in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they were common--

Auberon. Ah, when the French give their mind to that--!

Amicia. Nevertheless they struck me as recruits to an interesting cause, which as yet (the house was so empty) could confer neither money nor glory. They had the air, poor things, of working for love.

Auberon. For love of what?

Amicia. Of the whole little enterprise--the idea of the Théâtre Libre.

Florentia. Gracious, what you see in things! Don’t you suppose they were paid?

Amicia. I know nothing about it. I liked their shabbiness--they had only what was indispensable in the way of dress and scenery. That often pleases me: the imagination, in certain cases, is more finely persuaded by the little than by the much.

Dorriforth. I see what Amicia means.

Florentia. I’ll warrant you do, and a great deal more besides.

Dorriforth. When the appointments are meagre and sketchy the responsibility that rests upon the actors becomes a still more serious thing, and the spectator’s observation of the way they rise to it a pleasure more intense. The face and the voice are more to the purpose than acres of painted canvas, and a touching intonation, a vivid gesture or two, than an army of supernumeraries.

Auberon. Why not have everything--the face, the voice, the touching intonations, the vivid gestures, the acres of painted canvas, _and_ the army of supernumeraries? Why not use bravely and intelligently every resource of which the stage disposes? What else was Richard Wagner’s great theory, in producing his operas at Bayreuth?

Dorriforth. Why not, indeed? That would be the ideal. To have the picture complete at the same time the figures do their part in producing the particular illusion required--what a perfection and what a joy! I know no answer to that save the aggressive, objectionable fact. Simply look at the stage of to-day and observe that these two branches of the matter never do happen to go together. There is evidently a corrosive principle in the large command of machinery and decorations--a germ of perversion and corruption. It gets the upperhand--it becomes the master. It is so much less easy to get good actors than good scenery and to represent a situation by the delicacy of personal art than by “building it in” and having everything real. Surely there is no reality worth a farthing, on the stage, but what the actor gives, and only when he has learned his business up to the hilt need he concern himself with his material accessories. He hasn’t a decent respect for his art unless he be ready to render his part as if the whole illusion depended on that alone and the accessories didn’t exist. The acting is everything or it’s nothing. It ceases to be everything as soon as something else becomes very important. This is the case, to-day, on the London stage: something else is very important. The public have been taught to consider it so: the clever machinery has ended by operating as a bribe and a blind. Their sense of the rest of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you may perceive when you hear a couple of occupants of the stalls talking, in a tone that excites your curiosity, about a performance that’s “splendid.”

Amicia. Do you ever hear the occupants of the stalls talking? Never, in the _entr’actes_, have I detected, on their lips, a criticism or a comment.

Dorriforth. Oh, they say “splendid”--distinctly! But a question or two reveals that their reference is vague: they don’t themselves know whether they mean the art of the actor or that of the stage-carpenter.

Auberon. Isn’t that confusion a high result of taste? Isn’t it what’s called a feeling for the _ensemble?_ The artistic effect, as a whole, is so welded together that you can’t pick out the parts.

Dorriforth. Precisely; that’s what it is in the best cases, and some examples are wonderfully clever.

Florentia. Then what fault do you find? Dorriforth. Simply this--that the whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic one. There is something indeed that you can’t pick out, for the very good reason that--in any serious sense of the word--it isn’t there.

Florentia. The public has taste, then, if it recognizes and delights in a fine picture.

Dorriforth. I never said it hadn’t, so far as that goes. The public likes to be amused, and small blame to it. It isn’t very particular about the means, but it has rather a preference for amusements that I believes to be “improving,” other things being equal. I don’t think it’s either very intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear old public it takes humbly enough what is given it and it doesn’t cry for the moon. It has an idea that fine scenery is an appeal to its nobler part, and that it shows a nice critical sense in preferring it to poor. That’s a real intellectual flight, for the public.

Auberon. Very well, its preference is right, and why isn’t that a perfectly legitimate state of things?

Dorriforth. Why isn’t it? It distinctly _is!_ Good scenery and poor acting are better than poor scenery with the same sauce. Only it becomes then another matter: we are no longer talking about the drama.

Auberon. Very likely that’s the future of the drama, in London--an immense elaboration of the picture.

Dorriforth. My dear fellow, you take the words out of my mouth. An immense elaboration of the picture and an immense sacrifice of everything else: it would take very little more to persuade me that that will be the only formula for our children. It’s all right, when once we have buried our dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part of the art, remarkable as some of its achievements already appear to us, is only in its infancy, and that we are destined to see wonders done that we now but faintly conceive. The probable extension of the mechanical arts is infinite. “Built in,” forsooth! We shall see castles and cities and mountains and rivers built in. Everything points that way; especially the constitution of the contemporary multitude. It is huge and good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects; it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It’s in a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can’t portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre, inevitably accommodating itself, will be at last a landscape without figures. I mean, of course, without figures that count. There will be little illustrations of costume stuck about--dressed manikins; but they’ll have nothing to say: they won’t even go through the form of speech.

Amicia. What a hideous prospect!

Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: we shall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it’s cruel, because our old ideals are only dying, they are _in extremis_, they are virtually defunct, but they are above-ground--we trip and stumble on them. We shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because it’s a moment of transition, and we still _miss_ the old superstition, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are conscious of a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn’t. But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we have accepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, and the real one as having nothing to do with it.

Florentia. I don’t follow you. As I’m one of the squeezed, gaping public, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immense injustice to that body. They do care for character--care much for it. Aren’t they perpetually talking about the actor’s conception of it?

Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of their ineptitude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only things they understand? The vanity of wasting time over that! Auberon. Over what? Dorriforth. The actor’s conception of a part. It’s the refuge of observers who are no observers and critics who are no critics. With what on earth have we to do save his execution?

Florentia. I don’t in the least agree with you.

Amicia. Are you very sure, my poor Dorriforth?

Auberon. Give him rope and he’ll hang himself.

Dorriforth. It doesn’t need any great license to ask who in the world holds in his bosom the sacred secret of the right conception. All the actor can do is to give us his. We must take that one for granted, we make him a present of it. He must impose his conception upon us--

Auberon (interrupting). I thought you said we accepted it.

Dorriforth. Impose it upon our _attention_. clever Auberon. It is because we accept his idea that he must repay us by making it vivid, by showing us how valuable it is. We give him a watch: he must show us what time it keeps. He winds it up, that is he executes the conception, and his execution is what we criticise, if we be so moved. Can anything be more absurd than to hear people discussing the conception of a part of which the execution doesn’t exist--the idea of a character which never arrives at form? Think what it is, that form, as an accomplished actor may give it to us, and admit that we have enough to do to hold him to this particular honor.

Auberon. Do you mean to say you don’t think some conceptions are better than some others?

Dorriforth. Most assuredly, some are better: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The best are those which yield the most points, which have the largest face; those, in other words, that are the most demonstrable, or, in other words still, the most actable. The most intelligent performer is he who recognizes most surely this “actable” and distinguishes in it the more from the less. But we are so far from being in possession of a subjective pattern to which we have a right to hold him that he is entitled directly to contradict any such absolute by presenting us with different versions of the same text, each completely colored, completely consistent with itself. Every actor in whom the artistic life is strong must often feel the challenge to do that. I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress’s right to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me.

Auberon. A reading, as they say, either commends itself to one’s sense of truth or it doesn’t. In the one case--

Dorriforth. In the one case I recognize--even--or especially--when the presumption may have been against the particular attempt, a consummate illustration of what art can do. In the other I moralize indulgently upon human rashness.

Florentia. You have an assurance _à taute épreuve_; but you are deplorably superficial. There is a whole group of plays and a whole category of acting to which your generalizations quite fail to apply. Help me, Auberon.

Auberon. You’re easily exhausted. I suppose she means that it’s far from true everywhere that the scenery is everything. It may be true--I don’t say it is!--of two or three good-natured playhouses in London. It isn’t true--how can it be?--of the provincial theatres or of the others in the capital. Put it even that they would be all scenery if they could; they can’t, poor things--so they have to provide acting.

Dorriforth. They have to, fortunately; but what do we hear of it?

Florentia. How do you mean, what do we hear of it?

Dorriforth. In what trumpet of fame does it reach us? They do what they can, the performers Auberon alludes to, and they are brave souls. But I am speaking of the conspicuous cases, of the exhibitions that draw.

Florentia. There is good acting that draws; one could give you names and places.

Dorriforth. I have already guessed those you mean. But when it isn’t too much a matter of the paraphernalia it is too little a matter of the play. A play nowadays is a rare bird. I should like to see ¦ one. Florentia. There are lots of them, all the while--the newspapers talk about them. People talk about them at dinners.

Dorriforth. What do they say about them?

Florentia. The newspapers?

Dorriforth. No, I don’t care for _them_. The people at dinners.

Florentia. Oh. they don’t say anything in particular.

Dorriforth. Doesn’t that seem to show the effort isn’t very suggestive?

Amicia. The conversation at dinners certainly isn’t.

Dorriforth. I mean our contemporary drama. To begin with, you can’t find it there’s no text.

Florentia. No text?

Auberon. So much the better!

Dorriforth. So much the better if there is to be no criticism. There is only a dirt prompter’s book. One can’t put one’s hand upon it; one doesn’t know what one is discussing. There is no “authority”--nothing is ever published.

Amicia. The pieces wouldn’t bear that.

Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist--if there were anything in them. Look at the novels!

Amicia. The text is the French _brochure_. The “adaptation” is unprintable.

Dorriforth. That’s where it’s so wrong, It ought at least to be as good as the original.

Auberon. Aren’t there some “rights” to protect--some risk of the play being stolen if it’s published?

Dorriforth. There may be--I don’t know. Doesn’t that only prove how little important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriously we take it, if we won’t even trouble ourselves to bring about decent civil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French _brochure?_ how does that help us to represent our own life, our manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world? Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London alone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the most magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn’t.

Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!

Dorriforth. I’m too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you that I’m not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am only reading the signs.

Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are altered, they are fitted.

Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants. They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that’s left out and all the naïveté that’s put in, they cease to place before us any coherent appeal or any recognizable society.

Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.

Dorriforth. They may; but they don’t make good plays to see or to hear. The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and the drama, and I don’t see how you can have it unless you have both, or how you can have either unless you have the other. They are the two blades of a pair of scissors.

Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of _strictly original_ plays--

Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters.

Auberon. I don’t know what they put on the posters; but the plays are written and acted--produced with great success.

Dorriforth. Produced--partly. A play isn’t fully produced until it is in a form in which you can refer to it. We have to talk in the air. I can refer to my Congreve, but I can’t to my Pinero. {*}

* Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero’s plays
have been published.

Florentia. The authors are not bound to publish them if they don’t wish.

Dorriforth. Certainly not, nor are they in that case bound to insist on one’s not being a little vague about them. They are perfectly free to withhold them; they may have very good reasons for it, and I can imagine some that would be excellent and worthy of all respect. But their withholding them is one of the signs.

Auberon. What signs?

Dorriforth. Those I just spoke of--those we are trying to read together. The signs that ambition and desire are folly, that the sun of the drama has set, that the matter isn’t worth talking about, that it has ceased to be an interest for serious folk, and that everything--everything, I mean, that’s anything--is over. The sooner we recognize it the sooner to sleep, the sooner we get clear of misleading illusions and are purged of the bad blood that disappointment makes. It’s a pity, because the theatre--after every allowance is made--_might_ have been a fine thing. At all events it was a pleasant--it was really almost a noble--dream. _Requiescat!_

Florentia. I see nothing to confirm your absurd theory. I delight in the play; more people than ever delight in it with me; more people than ever go to it, and there are ten theatres in London where there were two of old.

Dorriforth. Which is what was to demonstrated. Whence do they derive their nutriment?

Auberon. Why, from the enormous public.

Dorriforth. My dear fellow, I’m not talking of the box-office. What wealth of dramatic, of histrionic production have we to meet that enormous demand? There will be twenty theatres ten years hence where there are ten to-day, and there will be, no doubt, ten times as many people “delighting in them,” like Florentla. But it won’t alter the fact that our dream will have been dreamed. Florentia said a word when we came in which alone speaks volumes.

Florentia. What was my word?

Auberon. You are sovereignly unjust to native talent among the actors--I leave the dramatists alone. There are many who do excellent, independent work; strive for perfection, completeness--in short, the things we want.

Dorriforth. I am not in the least unjust to them--I only pity them: they have so little to put _sous la dent_. It must seem to them at times that no one will work for them, that they are likely to starve for parts--forsaken of gods and men.

Florentia. If they work, then, in solitude and sadness, they have the more honor, and one should recognize more explicitly their great merit.

Dorriforth. Admirably said. Their laudable effort is precisely the one little loop-hole that I see of escape from the general doom. Certainly we must try to enlarge it--that small aperture into the blue. We must fix our eyes on it and make much of it, exaggerate it, do anything with it tha may contribute to restore a working faith. Precious that must be to the sincere spirits on the stage who are conscious of all the other things--formidable things--that rise against them.

Amicia. What other things do you mean?

Dorriforth. Why, for one thing, the grossness and brutality of London, with its scramble, its pressure, its hustle of engagements, of preoccupations, its long distances, its late hours, its nightly dinners, its innumerable demands on the attention, its general congregation of influences fatal to the isolation, to the punctuality, to the security, of the dear old playhouse spell. When Florentia said in her charming way--

Florentia. Here’s my dreadful speech at last.

Dorriforth. When you said that you went to the Théâtre Libre in the afternoon because you couldn’t spare an evening, I recognized the death-knell of the drama. _Time_, the very breath of its nostrils, is lacking. Wagner was clever to go to leisurely Bayreuth among the hills--the Bayreuth of spacious days, a paradise of “development.”

Talk to a London audience of “development!” The long runs would, if necessary, put the whole question into a nutshell. Figure to yourself, for then the question is answered, how an intelligent actor must loathe them, and what a cruel negation he must find in them of the artistic life, the life of which the very essence is variety of practice, freshness of experiment, and to feel that one must do many things in turn to do any one of them completely.

Auberon. I don’t in the least understand your _acharnement_, in view of the vagueness of your contention.

Dorriforth. My _acharnement_ is your little joke, and my contention is a little lesson in philosophy.

Florentia. I prefer a lesson in taste. I had one the other night at the “Merry Wives.”

Dorriforth. If you come to that, so did I!

Amicia. So she does spare an evening sometimes.

Florentia. It was all extremely quiet and comfortable, and I don’t in the least recognize Dorriforth’s lurid picture of the dreadful conditions. There was no scenery--at least not too much; there was just enough, and it was very pretty, and it was in its place.

Dorriforth. And what else was there?

Florentia. There was very good acting.

Amicia. I also went, and I thought it all, for a sportive, wanton thing, quite painfully ugly.

Auberon. Uglier than that ridiculous black room, with the invisible people groping about in it, of your precious “Duc d’Enghien?”

Dorriforth. The black room is doubtless not the last word of art, but it struck me as a successful application of a happy idea. The contrivance was perfectly simple--a closer night effect than is usually attempted, with a few guttering candles, which threw high shadows over the bare walls, on the table of the court-martial. Out of the gloom came the voices and tones of the distinguishable figures, and it is perhaps a fancy of mine that it made them--given the situation, of course--more impressive and dramatic.

Auberon. You rail against scenery, but what could belong more to the order of things extraneous to what you perhaps a little priggishly call the delicacy of personal art than the arrangement you are speaking of?

Dorriforth. I was talking of the abuse of scenery. I never said anything so idiotic as that the effect isn’t helped by an appeal to the eye and an adumbration of the whereabouts.

Auberon. But where do you draw the line and fix the limit? What is the exact dose?

Dorriforth. It’s a question of taste and tact.

Florentia. And did you find taste and tact in that coal-hole of the Théâtre Libre?

Dorriforth. Coal-hole is again your joke. I found a strong impression in it--an impression of the hurried, extemporized cross-examination, by night, of an impatient and mystified prisoner, whose dreadful fate had been determined in advance, who was to be shot, high-handedly, in the dismal dawn. The arrangement didn’t worry and distract me: it was simplifying, intensifying. It gave, what a judicious _mise-en-scène_ should always do, the essence of the matter, and left the embroidery to the actors.

Florentia. At the “Merry Wives,” where you could see your hand before your face, I could make out the embroidery.

Dorriforth. Could you, under Falstaff’s pasteboard cheeks and the sad disfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberon says. Why, Falstaff’s very person was nothing _but_ scenery. A false face, a false figure, false hands, false legs--scarcely a square inch on which the irrepressible humor of the rogue could break into illustrative touches. And he is so human, so expressive, of so rich a physiognomy. One would rather Mr. Beerbohm Tree should have played the part in his own clever, elegant slimness---that would at least have represented life. A Falstaff all “make-up” is an opaque substance. This seems to me an example of what the rest still more suggested, that in dealing with a production like the “Merry Wives” really the main quality to put forward is discretion. You must resolve such a production, as a thing represented, into a tone that the imagination can take an aesthetic pleasure in. Its grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictive scale, a scale of fainter tints and generalized signs. A filthy, eruptive, realistic Bardolph and Pistol overlay the romantic with the literal. Relegate them and blur them, to the eye; let their blotches be constructive and their raggedness relative.

Amicia. Ah, it was _so_ ugly!

Dorriforth. What a pity then, after all, there wasn’t more painted canvas to divert you! Ah, decidedly, the theatre of the future must be that.

Florentia. Please remember your theory that our life’s a scramble, and suffer me to go and dress for dinner.

1889.