THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
PLAYS, ACTING, AND MUSIC.
PLAYS, ACTING, AND MUSIC : BY
ARTHUR SYMONS.
NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON ftf CO.
To Maurice Maeterlinck, in friendship and
admiration.
College
Library
Pf\)
021
1 395393
Most of these chapters, not quite in their present form,
appeared in the Academy during 1902 ; some in the Star,
during 1901 and 1902 ; and a few elsewhere. They
express some of my ideas about the theatre and about music,
and are not intended as a record of events. Thus I have
not arranged them in chronological order, because the dates
of particular performances have no longer any significance ;
but I have frankly left all references to " last week," and the
like, as I found them, because that will help to show that I
am speaking of a particular thing, immediately under my eyes.
That particular thing is sometimes of no interest in itself ;
but it is my peg, and I wish it to stand rmly in its place.
The book is intended to form part of a series, on which I
have been engaged for many years. I am gradually working
my way towards the concrete expression of a theory, or
system of aesthetics, of all the arts. In my book on " The
Symbolist Movement in Literature " I made a first attempt
to deal in this way with literature ; other volumes, now in
preparation, are to follow. The present volume deals
mainly with the stage, and, secondarily, with music ; it is to
be followed by a volume called " Studies in the Seven Arts,"
in which music will be dealt with in greater detail, side by
side with painting, sculpture, architecture, handicraft, dancing,
and the various arts of the stage. And, as life too is a form
of art, and the visible world the chief storehouse of beauty,
I try to indulge my curiosity by the study of places and of
people. A book on " Cities " is now in the press, and a
book of " imaginary portraits " is to follow, under the title of
" Spiritual Adventures." Side by side with these studies in
the arts I have my own art, that of verse, which is, after all,
my chief concern.
In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as
little abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so
much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they
may be discovered, alive and in effective action, in every
achieved form of art. I do not understand the limitation by
which so many writers on aesthetics choose to confine them-
selves to the study of artistic principles as they are seen in
this or that separate form of art. Each art has its own
laws, its own capacities, its own limits ; these it is the
business of the critic jealously to distinguish. Yet, in the
study of art as art, it should be his endeavour to master the
universal science of beauty.
July 1903.
A Paradox on Art : p. i .
Technique and the Artist: p. 5.
Nietzsche on Tragedy : p. 9.
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert: p. 13.
The Dramatisation of Song: p. 18.
The Speaking of Verse: p. 23.
Sarah Bernhardt: p. 27.
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin: p. 34.
Coquelin and Moliere: p. 39.
Rejane and Jane Hading : p. 44.
Sir Henry Irving: p. 48.
Duse in some of her Parts: p. 53.
Pachmann, "Parsifal," and the Pathetic Symphony: p. 64.
Pachmann and the Piano: p. 68.
Maeterlinck, " Everyman," and the Japanese Players: p. 72.
Music, Staging, and some Acting: p. 78.
The Test of the Actor : p. 84.
Tolstoi and the Others: p. 88.
Literary Drama: p. 94.
Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture: p. 99.
Some Plays and the Public: p. 105.
"Ben Hur" on the Stage: p. 109.
" Faust " at the Lyceum : p. 113.
Yvette Guilbert: p. 117.
The Paris Music Hall : p. 123.
An Actress and a Play: p. 127.
A Comedy of Fine Shades: p. 130.
Drama: Professional and Unprofessional: p. 134.
M. Capus in England: p. 138.
A Double Enigma: p. 142.
Three Problem Plays: p. 146.
" Monna Vanna " : p. 153.
The Question of Censorship : p. 157.
Music in the Theatre: p. 160.
On Crossing Stage to Right: p. 165.
Suggestions to Managers: p. 169.
The Price of Realism : p. 173.
On Musical Criticism: p. 177.
The Meiningen Orchestra: p. 181.
The New Bayreuth: p. 185.
Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten : p. 189.
An Apology for Puppets: p. 193.
Eleonora Duse at 22. From a photograph by Bettini,
Leghorn : frontispiece.
Ysaye. From a lithograph by Emil Fuchs : to face p. 5.
Georgette Leblanc. From a photograph by Gerschel, Paris :
to face p. 1 8.
Sarah Bernhardt. From a photograph : to face p. 27.
Coquelin ain6. From a lithograph by W. Rothenstein : to
face p. 39.
Rejane. From a photograph by Reutlinger : to face p. 44.
Jane Hading. From a photograph by Chalot, Paris : to
face p. 46.
Wladimir von Pachmann. From a photograph by Paul
Gericke, Berlin : to face p. 68.
Sada Yacco. From a photograph by George Hooper,
London : to face p. 76.
Yvette Guilbert. From a photograph by Chalot, Paris : to
face p. 117.
A Paradox on Art.
Is it not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art,
a little narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic
spirit, or, at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of
the values of the several arts, a little unnecessarily ? Litera-
ture, painting, sculpture, music, these we admit as art, and
the persons who work in them as artists ; but dancing, for
instance, in which the performer is at once creator and inter-
preter, and those methods of interpretion, such as the playing
of musical instruments, or the conducting of an orchestra,
or acting, have we scrupulously considered the degree to
which these also are art, and their executants, in a strict sense,
artists ?
If we may be allowed to look upon art as something
essentially independent of its material, however dependent
upon its own material each art may be, in a secondary sense,
it will scarcely be logical to contend that the motionless and
permanent creation of the sculptor in marble is, as art, more
perfect than the same sculptor's modelling in snow, which,
motionless one moment, melts the next, or than the dancer's
harmonious succession of movements which we have not
even time to realise individually before one is succeeded by
another, and the whole has vanished from before our eyes.
Art is the creation of beauty in form, visible or audible, and
the artist is the creator of beauty in visible or audible form.
But beauty is infinitely various, and as truly beauty in the
voice of Sarah Bernhardt or the silence of Duse as in a face
painted by Leonardo or a poem written by Blake. A dance,
performed faultlessly and by a dancer of temperament, is as
A Paradox on Art.
beautiful, in its own way, as a performance on the violin by
Ysaye or the effect of an orchestra conducted by Richter.
In each case the beauty is different, but, once we have really
attained beauty, there can be no question of superiority.
Beauty is always equally beautiful ; the degrees exist only
when we have not yet attained beauty.
And thus the old prejudice against the artist to whom
interpretation in his own special form of creation is really
based upon a misunderstanding. Take the art of music.
Bach writes a composition for the violin : that composition
exists, in the abstract, the moment it is written down upon
paper, but, even to those trained musicians who are able to
read at sight, it exists in a state at best but half alive ; to all
the rest of the world it is silent. Ysaye plays it on his
violin, and the thing begins to breathe, has found a voice
perhaps more exquisite than the sound which Bach heard
in his brain when he wrote down the notes. Take the
instrument out of Ysaye's hands, and put it into the hands of
the first violin in the orchestra behind him ; every note will
be the same, the same general scheme of expression may be
followed, but the thing that we shall hear will be another
thing, just as much Bach, perhaps, but, because Ysaye is
wanting, not the work of art, the creation, to which we have
just listened.
That such art should be fragile, evanescent, leaving only
a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic
and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young.
To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They
work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, with
a supremely prodigal magnanimity. Old people tell us that
A Paradox on Art.
they have seen Descl6e, Taglioni ; soon, no one will be old
enough to remember those great artists. Then, if their
renown becomes a matter of charity, of credulity, if you will,
it will be but equal with the renown of all those poets and
painters who are only names to us, or whose masterpieces
have perished.
Beauty is infinitely various, always equally beautiful,
and can never be repeated. Gautier, in a famous poem, has
wisely praised the artist who works in durable material :
Oui, 1'ceuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, email.
No, not more beautiful ; only more lasting.
Tout passe. L'art robuste
Seul a 1'eternite'.
Le buste
Survit a la cite.
Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it
curiously, a certain selfishness, even, in this desire to per-
petuate oneself or the work of one's hands ; as the most
austere saints have found selfishness at the root of the soul's
too conscious, or too exclusive, longing after eternal life ?
To have created beauty for an instant is to have achieved an
equal result in art with one who has created beauty which
will last many thousands of years. Art is concerned only
with accomplishment, not with duration. The rest is a
question partly of vanity, partly of business. An artist to
3
A Paradox on Art.
whom posterity means anything very definite, and the
admiration of those who will live after him can seem to
promise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to
waste his time, as it seems to him, over temporary successes.
Or he may shrink from the continuing ardour of one to
whom art has to be made over again with the same energy,
the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage or
draws music out of his instrument. One may indeed be
listless enough to prefer to have finished one's work, and to
be able to point to it, as it stands on its pedestal, or comes
to meet all the world, with the democratic freedom of the
book. All that is a natural feeling in the artist, but it has
nothing to do with art. Art has to do only with the
creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or
colour, or outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man
who writes music is no more truly an artist than the man
who plays that music, the poet who composes rhythms in
words no more truly an artist than the dancer who
composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no more
to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be
preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in
those forms of art which we have agreed to recognise as of
equal value.
Technique and the Artist.
TECHNIQUE and the artist : that is a question, of interest to
the student of every art, which was brought home to me
with unusual emphasis the other afternoon, as I sat in the
Queen's Hall, and listened to Ysaye and Busoni. Are we
always quite certain what we mean when we speak of an
artist ? Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent
to which technique must go to the making of an artist,
and the point at which something else must be superadded ?
That is a matter which I often doubt, and the old doubt
came back to my mind the other afternoon, as I listened
to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over the
newspapers.
I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the
violinist and the pianist are " a perfectly matched pair " ;
the applause, at the concert, was even more enthusiastic for
Busoni than for Ysaye. I hear both spoken of as artists,
as great artists ; and yet, if words have any meaning, it
seems to me that only one of the two is an artist at all, and
the other, with all his ability, only an executant. Admit,
for a moment, that the technique of the two is equal, though
it is not quite possible to admit even that, in the strictest
sense. So far, we have made only a beginning. Without
technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration
in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect
in technique before he appears on the stage at all ; in his
case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death
perhaps ; his art begins when his technique is already per-
fect. Artists who deal in materials less fragile than human
Technique and the Artist.
life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility
to themselves and to art. But the performance comes
afterwards, and it is the performance with which we are
concerned. Of two acrobats, each equally skilful, one
will be individual and an artist, the other will remain
consummately skilful and uninteresting; the one having
begun where the other leaves off. Now Busoni can
do, on the pianoforte, whatever he can conceive ; the
question is, what can he conceive ? As he sat at the
piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, of the Bech-
stein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other
extraneous things, never of Chopin. I saw the pianist
with the Christ-like head, the carefully negligent elegance
of his appearance, and I heard wonderful sounds coming
out of the Bechstein piano ; but, try as hard as I liked,
I could not feel the contact of soul and instrument, I
could not feel that a human being was expressing himself
in sound. A task was magnificently accomplished, but a
new beauty had not come into the world. Then the
Kreutzer Sonata began, and I looked at Ysaye, as he stood,
an almost shapeless mass of flesh, holding the violin
between his fat fingers, and looking vaguely into the air.
He put the violin to his shoulder. The face had been
like a mass of clay, waiting the sculptor's thumb. As
the music came, an invisible touch seemed to pass over
it ; the heavy mouth and chin remained firm, pressed
down on the violin ; but the eyelids and the eyebrows
began to move, as if the eyes saw the sound, and were
drawing it in luxuriously, with a kind of sleepy ecstasy,
as one draws in perfume out of a flower. Then, in that
6
Technique and the Artist.
instant, a beauty which had never been in the world
came into the world ; a new thing was created, lived,
died, having revealed itself to all those who were capable
of receiving it. That thing was neither Beethoven nor
Ysaye, it was made out of their meeting ; it was music,
not abstract, but embodied in sound ; and just that miracle
could never occur again, though others like it might
be repeated for ever. When the sound stopped, the
face returned to its blind and deaf waiting ; the interval,
like all the rest of life probably, not counting in the
existence of that particular soul, which came and went with
the music.
And Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not
because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins
to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves
off. With him, every faculty is in harmony ; he has not
even too much of any good thing. There are times when
Busoni astonishes one ; Ysaye never astonishes one, it seems
natural that he should do everything that he does, just as he
does it. Art, as Aristotle has said finally, should always
have "a continual slight novelty"; it should never
astonish, for we are astonished only by some excess or
default, never by a thing being what it ought to be. It is a
fashion of the moment to prize extravagance and to be
timid of perfection. That is why we give the name of
artist to those who can startle us most. We have come to
value technique for the violence which it gives into the
hands of those who possess it, in their assault upon our
nerves. We have come to look upon technique as an end in
itself, rather than as a means to an end. We have but
Technique and the Artist.
one word of praise, and we use that one word lavishly.
An Ysaye and a Busoni are the same to us, and it is to
our credit if we are even aware that Ysaye is the equal of
Busoni.
Nietzsche on Tragedy.
I HAVE been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy, in
the admirable French translation published under the care of
M. Henri Albert by the " Mercure de France " : " L'Origine
de la Tragedie, ou, Hellnisme et Pessimisme." The book
was written at the age of twenty-eight, and we have
Nietzsche's "criticism of himself" by way of preface,
sixteen years later, and an autobiographical fragment,
written two years later still, which M. Albert has extracted
from one of the posthumous volumes. I have been reading
all that with the delight of one who discovers a new world,
which he has seen already in a dream. I never take up
Nietzsche without the surprise of finding something familiar.
Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have
only asked ; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed
at the answer. And, in his restless energy, his hallucinatory
vision, the agility of this climbing mind of the mountains, I
find that invigoration which only a "tragic philosopher'*
can .give. "A sort of mystic soul," as he says of himself,
" almost the soul of a Maenad, who, troubled, capricious,
and half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out
something in a foreign tongue."
The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the
Greeks, as it arose out of music through the medium of the
chorus. We are apt to look on the chorus in Greek plays
as almost a negligible part of the structure ; as, in fact,
hardly more than the comments of that " ideal spectator "
whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the German
consciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the
Nietzsche on Tragedy.
original nucleus of the play, that the action on which it
seems only to comment is no more than a development of
the chorus. Here is the problem to which Nietzsche
endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike the
learned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of
things, in the very making of the universe. Art arises, he
tells us, from the conflict of the two creative spirits,
symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods, Apollo and
Dionysus ; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit,
which we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac
spirit, which we see in music. Apollo is the god of dreams,
Dionysus the god of intoxication ; the one represents for us
the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice
of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose out
of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital
ecstasy ; the drama is the projection into vision, into a
picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms. " We
now see that the stage and the action are conceived only as
vision : that the sole ' reality ' is precisely the chorus, which
itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid of the
whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word." In the
admirable phrase of Schiller, the chorus is " a living ram-
part against reality," against that false reality of daily life
which is a mere drapery of civilisation, and has nothing to
do with the primitive reality of nature. The realistic drama
begins with Euripides ; and Euripides, the casuist, the
friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true
decadent, an " instrument of decomposition," the slayer of
art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end,
as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contempla-
10
Nietzsche on Tragedy.
tion, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy.
" Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist
dialectic drives the music out of tragedy : that is to say,
destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be
interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of
Dionysiac states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-
world of a Dionysiac intoxication."
There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, in
which Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very
much in the spirit of Nietzsche ; with that problem, for
instance, of the " blitheness and serenity " of the Greek
spirt, and of the gulf of horror over which it seems to rest,
suspended as on the wings of the condor. That myth of
Dionysus Zagreus, " a Bacchus who had been in hell,'*
which is the foundation of the marvellous new myth of
" Denys 1'Auxerrois," seems always to be in the mind of
Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it but once, and
passingly. Pater has shown, as Nietzsche shows in greater
detail and with a more rigorous logic, that this " serenity "
was but an accepted illusion, and all Olympus itself but
" intermediary," an escape, through the aesthetics of religion,
from the trouble at the heart of things ; art, with its tragic
illusions of life, being another form of escape. To
Nietzsche the world and existence justify themselves only as
an aesthetic phenomenon, the work of a god wholly the
artist; "and in this sense the object of the tragic myth is
precisely to convince us that even the horrible and the
monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game, played with
itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its joy."
" The Will " is Schopenhauer's " Will," the vital principle.
n
Nietzsche on Tragedy.
" If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonish-
ing figures of speech, " to imagine a dissonance becoming a
human being (and what is man but that ?), in order to
endure life, this dissonance would need some admirable
illusion to hide from itself its true nature, under a veil of
beauty. " This is the aim of art, as it calls up pictures of
the visible world and of the little, temporary actions of men
on its surface. The hoofed satyr of Dionysus, as he leaps
into the midst of these gracious appearances, drunk with
the young wine of nature, surly with the old wisdom of
Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth of things
suddenly into the illusion ; and is gone again, with a shrill
laugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than
we can bear.
I have but touched on a few points in an argument which
has itself the ecstatic quality of which it speaks. A good
deal of the book is concerned with the latest development of
music, and especially with Wagner. Nietzsche, after his
change of sides, tells us not to take this part too seriously :
" what I fancied I heard in the Wagnerian music has nothing
to do with Wagner." Few better things have been said
about music than these pages; some of them might be
quoted against the " programme " music which has been
written since that time, and against the false theory on which
musicians have attempted to harness music in the shafts of
literature. The whole book is awakening ; in Nietzsche's
own words, " a prodigious hope speaks in it."
12
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert.
THE interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one
of those rare magicians who are able to make roses blossom
in mid-winter. While music has been modernising itself
until the piano becomes an orchestra, and Berlioz requires
four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange man of
genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered
for himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing
like a fresco peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in
libraries and found unknown manuscripts like a savant,
he has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a
way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first
found out how to restore and then how to make over again
harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those
instruments which had become silent curiosities in
museums.
It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical
people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses
at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on
the modern grand piano ; that the exquisite music of
Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of
Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsi-
chord and the viols ; and that there exists, far earlier than
these writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme
beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it
has never been played on it. To any one who has once
touched a spinet, harpsichord, or clavichord, the piano must
always remain a somewhat inadequate instrument ; lacking
in the precision, the penetrating charm, the infinite definite
13
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert.
reasons for existence of those instruments of wires and jacks
and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so
entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have
once touched it, feeling the softness with which one's
fingers make their own music, like wind among the reeds, is
to have lost something of one's relish even for the music of
the violin, which is also a windy music, but the music of
wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such
instruments that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us ; and he plays
to us also on the lute, the theorbo, the viola da gamba,
the viola d' amore, and I know not how many varieties
of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to
most of us from the early Italian pictures in which
whimsical little angels with crossed legs hold them to
their chins.
Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who
can read lute-music and play on the lute, an instrument of
extraordinary beauty, which was once as common in England
as the guitar still is in Spain. And, having made with his
own hands the materials of the music which he has recovered
from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught
others to play this music on these instruments and to sing
it to their accompaniment. In a music room, which is
really the living room of a house, with viols hanging on the
walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in
another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this
music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one
in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly
voices. It is a house of peace, where music is still that
refreshment which it was before it took fever, and became
14
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert.
accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought the
clamour of the world into its seclusion.
Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky
concert at the Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch,
not so much passionate as feverish. The rushing of his
violins, like the rushing of an army of large winged birds ;
the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra ; the
riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in
their country dances, which his dance measures call up
before one ; those sweet solid harmonies in which (if I may
quote the voluptuous phrase of a woman) one sets one's
teeth as into nougat ; all this is like a very material kind of
pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul.
For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of
discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which
comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music ?
All modern music is pathetic ; discontent (so much idealism
as that !) has come into all modern music, that it may be
sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And
Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch
of unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern
art. There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion
Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of
Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is
unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He
is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast,
curses the daylight ; he sees only the misery of the moment,
and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless
and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy can
realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy.
15
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert.
In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought.
The only healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and
he can never get far enough from his nerves to look calmly
at his own discontent. All those wild, broken rhythms,
rushing this way and that, are letting out his secret all the
time : " I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy ;
I want, but I know not what I want." In the most
passionate and the most questioning music of Wagner there
is always air ; Tschaikowsky is suffocating. It is himself
that he pities so much, and not himself because he shares in
the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan and Isolde
the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in
their love ; they know only the absolute. Even suffering
does not bring nobility to Tschaikowsky.
I speak of Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner,
alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed
he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them,
has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to
be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the
musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music
was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too
disturbing presence of emotion ; emotion is there always,
whenever the music is fine music ; but the music is some-
thing much more than a means for the expression of
emotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to
a law, it is music made for music's sake, with what might
be called a more exclusive devotion to art than that of our
modern musicians. This music aims at the creation of beauty
in sound ; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing which
cannot exist outside order and measure ; it has not yet come
16
A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert.
to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty.
It does not even desire liberty, but is content with loving
obedience. It can express emotion, but it will never
express an emotion carried to that excess at which the
modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all its sugges-
tions of pain, grief, melancholy, it will remain, for us at
least, happy music, voices of a house of peace. Is there,
in the future of music, after it has expressed for us all our
emotions, and we are tired of our emotions, and weary
enough to be content with a little rest, any likelihood of
a return to this happy music, into which beauty shall
come without the selfishness of desire ?
The Dramatisation of Song.
ALL art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to
be foregone must be left somewhat to the discretion of
nature. When the sculptor foregoes colour, when the
painter foregoes relief, when the poet foregoes the music
which soars beyond words and the musician that precise
meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of
necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-
made for him. But there will always be those who are
discontented with no matter what fixed limits, who dream,
like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarme, of an impos-
sible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for them-
selves a compromise which has not yet come into the world,
a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall
bear so much additional weight without trembling. But
nature is not always obedient to this too autocratic com-
mand.
Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art of the
voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The
same note is produced in the same way ; the expression
given to that note, the syllable which that note renders, are
quite different things. Song does not in itself require words
in order to realise even the utmost of its capacities. The
voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in need
of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the
ideal of singing would be attained when a marvellous voice,
which had absorbed into itself all that temperament and
training had to give it, sang inarticulate music, like a violin
which could play itself. There is nothing which such an
18
The Dramatisation of Song.
instrument could not express, nothing which exists as pure
music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice,
with the least possible compromise.
The compromise is already far on its way when words
begin to come into the song. Here are two arts helping
one another; something is gained, but how much is lost?
Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose
something also, in its directness of appeal ? Add acting to
voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise,
opera, in which other arts as well have their share, and in
which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art.
Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps
for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, ,in
order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he
sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a
sick man. For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and
even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold
means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in the
gain, by all means ; but not without some consciousness of
the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution
of the problem has been found.
I have just been seeing and hearing in Paris a very
curious experiment in the combination of the arts, about
which I am the more anxious to say a few words as it is quite
likely that we may, one of these days, have an opportunity
of seeing and hearing it in London. Madame Georgette
Leblanc, a singer who is known for her creations of
Carmen and of Charlotte Corday, at the Opera-Comique,
has developed a method of her own for singing and acting
at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but in the
'9
The Dramatisation of Song.
interpretation of separate songs, the songs of Schumann and
Schubert, for instance, and of songs written for the words of
Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and others, by Gabriel Faure, Gabriel
Fabre, and other musicians. If she comes to London she
will take one of the smaller halls, where the effect at which
she aims could be best realised ; when I heard her in Paris, it
was in a private house, with the accompaniment on the
piano of M. Fabre, the composer of a good many of the
songs.
Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah
Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like
either ; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is sur-
rounded by masses of loosely twisted blonde hair ; she has
large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or passionate,
or cruel, or watchful ; a large nose, an intent, eloquent
mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of
the figure vaguely, supple to every movement. When she
sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit,
or on which she can lean. When I heard her, there was a
mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her ; she
saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered her-
self to the possession of the song, but she was always con-
scious of that image of herself which came back to her out
of the mirror : it was herself watching herself, in a kind of
delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words,
notes, and expressive movement.
Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the
voice of a born singer ; her acting is even more the acting of
a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that
flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being
20
The Dramatisation of Song.
violently and delicately before you. She makes a drama of
each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her
rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music.
It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice,
that she evokes the melody of a picture ; it is a picture that
sings, and that sings in all its lines. There is something in
her aspect, what shall I call it ? tenacious ; it is a woman
who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in
energy at all her senses and give out energy at all her
senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some
mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love -songs
of Charles van Lerberghe. As one looked and listened
it was impossible to think more of the words than of the
music or of the music than of the words. One took them
simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the
perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarme had
seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams.
Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts,
in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarm it was the
more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad
general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions
of things.
This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly,
less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I
am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the
official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress hold-
ing sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing
the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability.
Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she
has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because
21
The Dramatisation of Song.
it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in
vibration. What she feels as a woman she can render as an
artist ; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate
because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a
woman who is essentially a woman, to be so. I imagine her
always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her
own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to
what the song is saying through her because of that uninter-
rupted communion with herself.
22
The Speaking of Verse
A VERY interesting lecture was given on Thursday, May 22,
at the Coronet Theatre, by M. Silvain, of the Comedie
Franchise, on the art of speaking, or, as it might more
correctly have been called, on the art of speaking verse. I
had just been to a small private gathering in the committee-
room of Clifford's Inn, to hear some verse spoken to the
psaltery by Miss Florence Farr. Mr. Yeats has written, in
the May number of the Monthly Ifjview, on this attempt,
made by him with the assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch, at the
revival of an old art : the art of speaking verse to a pitch
sounded by a musical instrument. He has also lectured on
the subject in public, and talked much about it in private,
and has found disciples, and had psalteries made for him by
Mr. Dolmetsch, and found persons with voices to chant
verse to the accompaniment of the psaltery. I have heard
some of these performances, but in these pages I must limit
myself to what I heard at the rehearsal in Clifford's Inn, and to
Mr. Yeats' contentions in his article in the Monthly Review.
The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor,
is Professor of Declamation at the Conservatoire) is the
method of the elocutionist, but of the elocutionist at his
best. He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which
he has perfect command. " M. Silvain," says M. Catulle
Mendes, " est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Fran^ais, qu'on
entend me'me lorsqu'ils parlent bas." He has trained his
voice to do everything that he wants it to do ; his whole
body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of
every word ; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous
23
The Speaking of Verse.
and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a
brilliant executant adores his violin ; he has an excellent con-
tempt for prose, as an inferior form. In all his renderings
of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech,
the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing
with its own reasons for existence. He gave La Fontaine in
one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some
poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the
same attempt : to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is
to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In
a tirade from Corneille's " Cinna," he followed the angry
reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers : one, two,
three, as if he were underlining the important words of each
clause. The danger of this method is that it is apt to
turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely,
is the danger of the French conception of poetry, and
M. Silvain's method brings out the worst faults of that
conception.
Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats
would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger.
Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that verse is first of all
song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present
chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which
demands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set
to music," but when it is said aloud. Every poet, when
he reads his own verse, reads it with certain inflections of
the voice, in what is often called a " sing-song " way,
quite different from the way in which he would read prose.
Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the
atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at
24
The Speaking of Verse.
emphasising individual meanings. They give, in the
musician's sense, a " reading " of the poem, an interpretation
of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats thinks that this
kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, the pitch
noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help
of a simple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr
repeated one of Mr. Yeats' lyrics, as nearly as possible in
the way in which Mr. Yeats himself is accustomed to say it.
She took the pitch from certain notes which she had written
down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch's psaltery.
Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling
for the beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most
people would have said them, but, to be quite frank, did
she say them so as to produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself
produces whenever he repeats those lines ? The difference
was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, pro-
foundly felt ; the other, a deliberate imitation, in which the
fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good
or bad, impossible.
I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is
so deplorable that there is much to be said for a purely
mechanical method, even if it should turn actors into little
more than human phonographs. Many actors treat verse
as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim
in saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it
is not prose. They think of nothing but what they take to
be the expression, and when they come to a passage of
purely lyric quality they give it as if it were a quotation,
having nothing to do with the rest of the speech. Anything
is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either
25
The Speaking of Verse.
M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats'
method would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel
that it is possible to do much good by a ready-made method
of any kind. Let the actor be taught how to breathe, how
to articulate, let his voice be trained to express what he
wants to express, and then let him be made to feel some-
thing of what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all
means, study one of Mr. Yeats' readings, interpreted to him
by means of the notes ; it will teach him to unlearn some-
thing and to learn something more. But then let him
forget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make
verse live on the stage.
26
Sarah Bernhardt.
I AM not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not
the moment of what is called decadence. The first energy
of inspiration is gone ; what remains is the method, the
mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one
can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of
life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of
the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased
to happen, is precisely all that was consciously skilful in the
performance of an art. To see all this mechanism left
bare, as the form of the skeleton is left bare when age thins
the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all that is to be
learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has
hitherto concealed with its merciful covering.
The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very
conscious art, but it spoke to us, once, with so electrical a
shock, as if nerve touched nerve, or the mere " contour
subtil " of the voice were laid tinglingly on one's spinal
cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She was
Phedre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur,
Fedora, La Tosca, the actual woman, and she was also that
other actual woman, Sarah Bernhardt. Two magics met
and united, in the artist and the woman, each alone of its
kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre ;
one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen ;
there was almost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such
as one feels when the lioness leaps into the cage, on the other
side of the bars. And the acting was like a passionate
declaration, offered to some one unknown ; it was as if the
27
Sarah Bernhardt.
whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out of it
and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered
the single, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the
woman. And so, in its way, this very artificial acting
seemed the mere instinctive, irresistible expression of a
temperament ; it mesmerised one, awakening the senses and
sending the intelligence to sleep.
After all, though Rejane skins emotions alive, and
Duse serves them up to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah
Bernhardt who prepares the supreme feast. In " La Dame
aux Camelias," still, she shows herself, as an actress, the
greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting ; there
is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canaille attrac-
tiveness, as with Rejane; the thing is plastic, a modelling
of emotion before you, with every vein visible ; she leaves
nothing to the imagination, gives you every motion, all the
physical signs of death, all the fierce abandonment to every
mood, to grief, to delight, to lassitude. When she suffers,
in the scene, for instance, where Armand insults her, she is
like a trapped wild beast which some one is torturing, and
she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole flesh
suffers with her flesh ; her voice caresses and excites like a
touch ; it has a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks
deliciously, which pauses suspended, and then resolves itself
in a perfect chord. Her voice is like a thing detachable
from herself, a thing which she takes in her hands like a
musical instrument, playing on the stops cunningly with her
fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse,
with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of
human poetry. Her whisper is heard across the whole
28
Sarah Bernhardt.
theatre, every syllable distinct, and yet it is really a whisper.
She comes on the stage like a miraculous painted idol, all
nerves ; she runs through the gamut of the sex, and ends
a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite
back to that deep infantile part of woman. She plays the
part now with the accustomed ease of one who puts on and
off an old shoe. It is almost a part of her ; she knows it
through all her senses. And she moved me as much last
night as she moved me when I first saw her play the part
eleven or twelve years ago. To me, sitting where I was,
not too near the stage, she might have been five-and-twenty.
I saw none of the mechanism of the art, as I saw it in
" L'Aiglon " ; here art still concealed art. Her vitality
was equal to the vitality of Rejane ; it is differently ex-
pressed, that is all. With Rejane the vitality is direct ; it
is the appeal of Gavroche, the sharp, impudent urchin of
the streets ; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality is electrical, and
shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways.
In form it belongs to an older period, just as the writing
of Dumas fi Is belongs to an earlier period than the writing of
Meilhac. It comes to us with the tradition to which it has
given life ; it does not spring into our midst, unruly as nature.
But it is in " Phedre " that Sarah Bernhardt must be
seen, if we are to realise all that her art is capable of. In
writing " Phedre," Racine anticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If
the part had been made for her by a poet of our own days,
it could not have been brought more perfectly within her
limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits
to their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in
poetical drama, and it is written with a sense of the stage
29
Sarah Bernhardt.
not less sure than its sense of dramatic poetry. There was
a time when Racine was looked upon as old-fashioned, as
conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that his
verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his
language is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is
one of the most passionate of poets. Of the character of
Phedre Racine tells us that it is " ce que j'ai peut-etre mis
de plus raisonnable sur le theatre." The word strikes oddly
on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phedre is
indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the
Greeks themselves, could make it. The passion itself is an
abnormal, an insane thing, and that passion comes to us
with all its force and all its perversity ; but the words in
which it is expressed are never extravagant, they are always
clear, simple, temperate, perfectly precise and explicit. The
art is an art exquisitely balanced between the conventional
and the realistic, and the art of Sarah Bernhardt, when she
plays the part, is balanced with just the same unerring skill.
She seems to abandon herself wholly, at times, to her
" fureurs " ; she tears the words with her teeth, and spits
them out of her mouth, like a wild beast ravening upon
prey ; but there is always dignity, restraint, a certain re-
moteness of soul, and there is always the verse, and her
miraculous rendering of the verse, to keep Racine in the
right atmosphere. Of what we call acting there is little,
little change in the expression of the face. The part is a
part for the voice, and it is only in " Phedre " that one can
hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty.
In her modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to
use only a few of the instruments of the orchestra : an
30
Sarah Bernhardt.
actress must, in such parts, be conversational, and for how
much beauty or variety is there room in modern conversa-
tion ? But here she has Racine's verse, along with Racine's
psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer the
voice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words,
her lines, with a kind of joyful satisfaction ; all the artist
in her delights in the task. Her nerves are in it, as well as
her intelligence ; but everything is coloured by the poetry,
everything is subordinate to beauty.
Well, and she seems still to be the same Phedre that
she was eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same
" Dame aux Camelias." Is it reality, is it illusion ? Illu-
sion, perhaps, but an illusion which makes itself into a very
effectual kind of reality. She has played these pieces until
she has got them, not only by heart, but by every nerve and
by every vein, and now the ghost of the real thing is so like
the real thing that there is hardly any telling the one from
the other. It is the living on of a mastery once absolutely
achieved, without so much as the need of a new effort.
The test of the artist, the test which decides how far the
artist is still living, as more than a force of memory, lies in
the power to create a new part, to bring new material to
life. Last year, in " L'Aiglon," it seemed to me that Sarah
Bernhardt showed how little she still possessed that power,
and this year I see the same failure in "Francesca da Rimini.'*
The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly poor,
common, melodramatic, without atmosphere, without
nobility, subtlety, or passion ; it degrades the story which
we owe to Dante and not to history (for, in itself, the
story is a quite ordinary story of adultery : Dante and the
Sarah Bernhardt.
flames of his hell purged it), it degrades it almost out of
all recognition. These middle-aged people, who wrangle
shrewishly behind the just turned back of the husband and
almost in the hearing of the child, are people in whom it is
impossible to be interested, apart from any fine meanings
put into them in the acting. And yet, since M. de Max
has made hardly less than a creation out of the part of
Giovanni, filling it, as he has, with his own nervous force
and passionately restrained art, might it not have been
possible once for Sarah Bernhardt to have thrilled us even
as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford ? I think so ;
she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn
them to her own purpose, and she has been as triumphant,
if not as fine, in bad plays as in good ones. Now her
Francesca is lifeless, a melodious image, making meaningless
music. She says over the words, cooingly, chantingly, or
frantically, as the expression-marks, to which she seems to
act, demand. The interest is in following her expression-
marks.
The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free
to watch it coolly, is the way in which she subordinates
effects to effect. She has her crescendos, of course, and it
is these which people are most apt to remember, but the
extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from the
smooth and level manner in which the main part of the
speaking is done. She is not anxious to make points at
every moment, to put all the possible emphasis into every
separate phrase ; I have heard her glide over really signifi-
cant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem to
deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely
32
Sarah Bernhardt.
subordinated to an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah
Bernhardt's acting always reminds me of a musical per-
formance. Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and
she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
The movements of her body, her gestures, the expression of
her face, are all harmonious, are all parts of a single harmony.
It is not reality which she aims at giving us, it is reality
transposed into another atmosphere, as if seen in a mirror,
in which all its outlines become more gracious. The plea-
sure which we get from seeing her as Francesca or as
Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure, never
completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bern-
hardt. One sometimes forgets that Rejane is acting at all ;
it is the real woman of the part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta,
who lives before us. Also one sometimes forgets that Duse
is acting, that she is even pretending to be Magda or Silvia ;
it is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage. But Sarah
Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when
she is at her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness
of the one does not disturb our possession by the other.
When she is not at her best, we see only the actress, the
incomparable craftswoman openly labouring at her work.
33
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin.
M. ROSTAND is one of the cleverest of contemporary
writers. He appeals to the readers and audiences of to-
day as a millionaire appeals to society. He enters every
door. Critics praise him, the Academy elects him, he sells
by the thousand ; French actors make fortunes by him at
home, and take him over the world in one long triumph.
He is translated, and played in all the native languages of
the countries where he has already been played in French.
The greatest living French actress and the greatest living
French actor join together to increase his fame and their
own. At this moment Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin are in
London, at Her Majesty's, and they have come chiefly in
order to act " L'Aiglon," his latest success, and, we are
assured, his latest masterpiece. Well, a fame of this kind,
the conquering, on whatever terms, of so much of the world,
means something. It means that M. Rostand has known
exactly what he wanted to do, and has done it. With an
exquisite agility of mind he has run between many dangers:
he has been poetic, but not too poetic ; extravagant, but not
too extravagant ; humorous, but not too humorous ; just
sufficiently simple, precious, modern, archaic, cynical, and
sentimental, to please all tastes. He has learnt declamation
from Victor Hugo, the swing of sword and cape from
Dumas, the art of tight-rope dancing on the cord of French
verse from Banville ; he has learnt, from some business-like
quality of his own mind, how to avoid Realism and Symbolism
and every other good or bad poetical school of the day. He
writes melodrama with so neat a finish to the flourish that it
34
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin.
can easily be passed off as tragedy ; and he writes verse
with so deceptive a glitter that it can easily be passed off as
poetry.
In fact, if I could get one obstinate conviction out of my
head, perhaps I might enjoy " Cyrano de Bergerac."
M. Rostand's play is written in verse : anything which is
written in verse must, to my thinking, be poetry, or it is
nothing ; M. Rostand's verse is enormously clever, but it is
not poetry. Now I notice, by the enthusiasm with which
" Cyrano " was received, both in France and England,
when it made its first appearance, that there are a great
many people who do not limit their pleasures as I do ; who
disagree with me in thinking that verse need necessarily be
poetry. I quite understand such people admiring " Cyrano."
I also understand the feeling of those who consider that
" Cyrano " is poetry of a particularly novel and a particu-
larly exquisite kind. They are the people who once admired
the " Love-Letters of a Violinist " and who now admire
the " Love-Letters of an Englishwoman." They are the
people who admire the imitation of the real thing more than
the real thing. " Cyrano " is as much like poetry as the
brilliants of the stage are like diamonds. It is made to
flash, and to take in the ignorant. It has sentimentality for
the sentimental, artificial fun for the vulgar, preciosity for
the pretender to taste, clatter for the nursery delight of the
juvenile-minded, rope-dancing agility for the admiration of
the sportsman in art. We have been told solemnly, by
critics too old to know any better, that the play marks the
renaissance of the genuine French spirit ; that it is a
triumphant revolt against the Northern blasts, the Decadent
35
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin.
miasmas, the Symbolist fogs, which have been making France
unfruitful. If to possess the French spirit is to be lacking
in ideas, in the sense of reality, in sincerity, in passion, in
poetry ; if it is to be rhetorical, frigidly artificial, cheap in
effect, spendthrift in display ; then, and then only, can
" Cyrano " be accepted on the terms of its admirers.
With Coquelin and Sarah Bernhardt it receives a splendid
illumination. The part of Roxane is a secondary part, and
Sarah for once is secondary in the play in which she acts.
She is young, beautiful, and a little ordinary ; amazingly
young, and condemned by her part to be a little ordinary.
In a piece all charades and stage directions she has no chance
to be any one of her finer selves, and to see her in " Cyrano "
immediately after seeing her in " Phedre " is to realise the
ability of the artist, and how much the artist is at the
command of the actress. She gives one no creation ; there
is no creative material in the play ; but all there is to do
she does exquisitely. As for Coquelin, what a lesson he was
to our gasconading actors ! Here, in a piece infinitely
cleverer than the sword and cape pieces in which Mr. Lewis
Waller and other clever English actors do their best to be
humorously heroic, one saw the blusterer of resource, the
sad wit, the tender-hearted spadassin. Coquelin has the
voice, the manner, the mimicry, everything that is needed
to carry such a part through with a rush ; it is a part
for the elocutionist, and Coquelin is an incomparable
elocutionist.
On the night on which I saw it, " L'Aiglon " went on
until after midnight, which was not entirely the fault of the
play. It was a fatiguing performance, which was not
36
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin.
entirely the fault of the intervals. Once more I admired
M. Rostand's cleverness, as I saw how skilfully it had been
written to be acted, and to be acted by just these two people.
Scrutinise even the first act, and you will see that it has been
composed like a piece of music, to be played by one per-
former, Sarah Bernhardt. To Sarah Bernhardt acting is a
performance on a musical instrument. One seems to see the
expression marks : piano, pianissimo, allargando, and just
where the tempo rubato comes in. She never forgets that
art is not nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is
not talking prose. She speaks with a liquid articulation of
every syllable, like one who loves the savor of words on the
tongue, giving them a beauty and an expressiveness often
not in them themselves. Her face changes less than you
might expect ; it is not over-possessed by detail, it gives
always the synthesis. The smile of the artist, a wonderful
smile which has never aged with jher, pierces through the
passion or languor of the part. It is often accompanied by
a suave, voluptuous tossing of the head, and is like the
smile of one who inhales some delicious perfume, with half-
closed eyes. All through the level perfection of her acting
there are little sharp snaps of the nerves ; and these are but
one indication of .^that perfect mechanism which her art
really is. Her finger is always upon the spring ; it touches
or releases it, and the effect follows instantaneously.
Coquelin, in his equal perfection, his ripe, mellow art, his
passion of humour, his touching vehemence, makes himself
seem less a divine machine, more a delightfully faulty
person. His voice is firm, sonorous, flexible, a human,
expressive, amusing voice, not the elaborate musical instru-
37
Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin.
ment of Sarah, which seems to go by itself, caline, cooing,
lamenting, raging, or in that wonderful swift chatter which
she uses with such instant and deliberate effect. His face is
the face of his part, always a disguise, never a revelation.
He is not a temperament, nor a student, nor anything apart
from the art of the actor ; he is the actor, consummately
master of his metier. And how much the master of them-
selves are all these French actors, whom it is so instructive
for us to see ! Movement, gesture, excitement, are natural
to them, and, so far from needing to be forced, can be
vividly and temperately repressed. With most of them
acting is a kind of second nature, and a nature capable of
training. With Sarah and with Coquelin also, nature has
been trained with infinite care ; but then nature, with them,
happens to be genius.
Coquelin and Moliere: Some Aspects.
I SPENT nearly all the evenings of last week at the Garrick
Theatre, where the three Coquelins and their company were
acting in Moliere and in some famous modern pieces. Of
Moliere I saw " Tartuffe," "L'Avare," " Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme," " Les Precieuses Ridicules," and a condensed
version of "Le Depit Amoureux," in which the four acts of
the original were cut down into two. Of these five plays
only two are in verse, " Tartuffe " and " Le Depit
Amoureux," and I could not help wishing that the fashion
of Moliere's day had allowed him to write all his plays in
prose. Moliere was not a poet, and he knew that he was
not a poet. When he ventured to write the most Shakes-
pearean of his comedies, " L'Avare," in prose, " le meme
prejuge," Voltaire tells us, " qui avait fait tomber 4 le Festin
de Pierre,' parcequ'il etait en prose, nuisit au succes de
* FAvare.' Cependant le public qui, a la longue, se rend
toujours au bon, finit par donner a cet ouvrage les applau-
dissements qu'il merite. On comprit alors qu'il peut y
avoir de forts bonnes comedies en prose." How infinitely
finer, as prose, is the prose of " L'Avare " than the verse of
"Tartuffe" as verse! In "Tartuffe" all the art of the
actor is required to carry you over the artificial jangle of the
alexandrines without allowing you to perceive too clearly
that this man, who is certainly not speaking poetry, is
speaking in rhyme. Moliere was a great prose writer, but
I do not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work
in verse. The whole temper of his mind was the temper of
mind of the prose-writer. His wordly wisdom, his active
39
Coquelin and Moliere: Some Aspects.
philosophy, the very mainspring of his plots, are found,
characteristically, in his valets and his servant-maids. He
satirises the miser, the hypocrite, the bas-bleu, but he
chuckles over Frosine and Gros-Ren6 ; he loves them for
their freedom of speech and their elastic minds, ready in
words or deeds. They are his chorus, if the chorus might
be imagined as directing the action.
But Moliere has a weakness, too, for the bourgeois, and
he has made M. Jourdain immortally delightful. There is
not a really cruel touch in the whole character ; we laugh
at him so freely because Moliere lets us laugh with such
kindliness. M. Jourdain has a robust joy in life ; he carries
off his absurdities by the simple good faith which he puts
into them. When I speak of M. Jourdain I hardly know
whether I am speaking of the character in Moliere or of the
character in Goquelin. Probably there is no difference.
We get Moliere's vast, succulent farce of the intellect
rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail,
is not what Moliere meant, then so much the worse for
Moliere.
Moliere is kind to his bourgeois, envelops him softly in
satire as in cotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby ; and
Coquelin is without bitterness, stoops to make stupidity
heroic, a distinguished stupidity. A study in comedy so
profound, so convincing, so full of human nature and of the
art-concealing art of the stage, has not been seen in our
time. As Mascarille, in " Les PreVieuses Ridicules,"
Coquelin becomes delicate and extravagant, a scented
whirlwind ; his parody is more splendid than the thing
itself which he parodies, more full of fine show and nimble
40
Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects.
bravery. There is beauty in this broadly comic acting, the
beauty of subtle (detail. Words can do little to define a
performance which is a constant series of little movements
of the face, little intonations of the voice, a way of
lolling in the chair, a way of speaking, of singing, of
preserving the gravity of burlesque. In " Tartuffe " we
get a form of comedy which is almost tragic, the horribly
serious comedy of the hypocrite. Coquelin, who remakes
his face, as by a prolonged effort of the muscles, for every
part, makes, for this part, a great fish's face, heavy,
suppressed, with lowered eyelids and a secret mouth, out of
which steals at times some stealthy avowal. He has the
movements of a great slug, or of a snail, if you will,
putting out itsjhead and drawing it back into its shell.
The face waits and plots, with a sleepy immobility, covering
a hard, indomitable will. It is like a drawing of Daumier,
if you can imagine a drawing which renews itself at every
instant, in a series of poses to which it is hardly necessary
to add words.
I am told that Coquelin, in the creation of a part, makes
his way slowly, surely, inwards, for the first few weeks of
his performance, and that then the thing is finished, to the
least intonation or gesture, and can be laid down and taken
up at will, without a shade of difference in the interpreta-
tion. The part of Maitre Jacques in " L'Avare," for
instance, which he performed with such gusto and such
certainty on Friday night, had not been acted by him for
twenty years, and it was done, without rehearsal, in the
midst of a company that required prompting at every
moment. I suppose this method of moulding a part, as if
41
Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects.
in wet clay, and then allowing it to take hard, final form,
is the method natural to the comedian, his right method.
I can hardly think that the tragic actor should ever allow
himself to become so much at home with his material ; that
he dare ever allow his clay to become quite hard. He has
to deal with the continually shifting stuff of the soul and of
the passions, with nature at its least generalised moments.
The comic actor deals with nature for the most part
generalised, with things palpably absurd, with characteristics
that strike the intelligence, not with emotions that touch
the heart or the senses. He comes to more definite and to
more definable results, on which he may rest, confident that
what has made an audience laugh once will make it laugh
always, laughter being a physiological thing, wholly inde-
pendent of mood.
In thinking of some excellent comic actors of our own, I
am struck by the much greater effort which they seem to
make in order to drive their points home, and in order to
get what they think variety. Sir Charles Wyndham is the
only English actor I can think of at the moment who does
not make unnecessary grimaces, who does not insist on
acting when the difficult thing is not to act. In
" Tartuffe " Coquelin stands motionless for five minutes
at a time, without change of expression, and yet nothing
can be more expressive than his face at those moments.
In Chopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held
for three bars, and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne,
says Mr. Huneker in his instructive and delightful book
on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, " by some miraculous
means," so that " it swelled and diminished, and went
42
Coquelin and Moliere : Some Aspects.
singing into D, as if the instrument were an organ." It is
that power of sustaining an expression, unchanged, and yet
always full of living significance, that I find in Coquelin.
It is part of his economy, the economy of the artist. The
improviser disdains economy, as much as the artist cherishes
it. Coquelin has some half-dozen complete variations of
the face he has composed for Tartuffe ; no more than that,
with no insignificances of expression thrown away ; but
each variation is a new point of view, from which we see
the whole character.
43
Rejane and Jane Hading.
THE genius of Rejane is a kind of finesse : it is a flavour,
and all the ingredients of the dish may be named without
denning it. The thing is Parisian, but that is only to say
that it unites nervous force with a wicked ease and mastery
of charm. It speaks to the senses through the brain, as
much as to the brain through the senses. It is the feminine
equivalent of intellect. It " magnetises our poor vertebrae,"
in Baudelaire's phrase, because it is sex and yet not instinct.
It is sex civilised, under direction, playing a part, as we say
of others than those on the stage. It calculates, and is
unerring. It has none of the vulgar warmth of mere passion,
none of its health or simplicity. It leaves a little red sting
where it has kissed. And it intoxicates us by its appeal to
so many sides of our nature at once. We are thrilled, and
we admire, and are almost coldly appreciative, and yet aglow
with the response of the blood. I have found myself
applauding with tears in my eyes. The feeling and the
critical approval came together, hand in hand : neither
counteracted the other.
Rejane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar : she has all the
instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom
man will never quite civilise. There is no doubt of it,
nature lacks taste ; and woman, who is so near to nature,
lacks taste in the emotions. Rejane, in " Sapho " or in
" Zaza " for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving
and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross,
pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that
of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in
44
Rejane and Jane Hading.
which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress
she is the human animal without disguise or evasion ; with
all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In
" Sapho " or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses,
no more ; and her acting reminds you of all that you may
possibly have forgotten of how the senses speak when they
speak through an ignorant woman in Idve. It is like an
accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth,
before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the
flesh. Scepticism is no longer possible : the thing is before
you, abominably real, a disquieting and irrefutable thing,
which speaks with its own voice, as it has never spoken on
the stage through any other actress.
In " Zaza," a play made for Rejane by two playwrights
who had set themselves humbly to a task, the task of fitting
her with a part, she is seen doing " Sapho " over again, with
a difference. Zaza is a vulgar woman, a woman without
instruction or experience ; she has not known poets and been
the model of a great sculptor ; she comes straight from the
boards of a cafe-concert to the kept woman's house in the
country. She has caught her lover vulgarly, to win a bet ;
and, to the end, you realise that she is, well, a woman who
would do that. She has no depth of passion, none of Sapho's
roots in the earth ; she has a " beguin " for Dufresne, she will
drop everything else for it, such as it is, and she is capable
of good, hearty suffering. Rejane gives her to us as she is,
in all her commonness. The picture is full of humour ; it
is, as I so often feel with Rejane, a Forain. Like Forain,
she uses her material without ever being absorbed by it,
without relaxing her impersonal artistic energy. In being
45
Rejane and Jane Hading.
Zaza, she is so far from being herself (what is the self of a
great actress ?) that she has invented a new way of walking,
as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an effect in
the play which she has not calculated ; only, she has calcu-
lated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.
When you watch Mme. Jane Hading, you see her effects
coming, several seconds before they are there ; when they
come, they come neatly, but with no surprise in them, and
therefore with no conviction. There lies all the difference
between the actress who is an actress equally by her tempera-
ment and by her brain and the actress who has only the
brain (and, with Mme. Hading, beauty) to rely on. Every-
thing that Rejane can think of she can do ; thought
translates itself instantly into feeling, and the embodied
impulse is before you. Mme. Hading knows so well
how everything should be done ; she knows just how
Sarah Bernhardt, if not nature, would do it ; and she
gives you a series of the most admirable lifeless studies, in
which only her eyes live with a vehement personal life of
their own.
In watching Mme. Hading I am sometimes reminded of
Mrs. Kendal. Mme. Hading is a woman of strange, attrac-
tive beauty. There is the mass of bronze hair, there are the
square lines of the face, the level eyebrows, and sullen,
suppressed eyes, the square shoulders, the fine, heavy lines
of the neck and chin. And it is no empty or expression-
less beauty, it is a beauty full of some enigmatical meaning.
But Mrs. Kendal is the better actress, because she is able to
persuade a greater number of people that her deliberation is
instinctive, although in both there is the same essential
46
Rejane and Jane Hading.
artificiality. Both try to do by a careful method what can only
be done, as Rejane does it, by a method plus something else.
That something else is genius, perhaps ; but if the word
genius sounds a little vague, let me say that it is vitality,
temperament, sincerity. When Mme. Hading is perfectly
quiet, when she is thinking, making up her mind,
she is often admirable ; but see her when she has to show
acute emotion. There is, first, the contraction of the cat
about to spring, and there is a very splutter of simulated
energy, with the elegant collapse at the end. Now she
turns on her voice, now she turns it off; she seems to
be doing just what an excited woman would do, and yet
you are never sorry, never even interested. You say :
" Yes, that was really very well done," but you say it
coldly ; the actress has only acted. When Rejane is Zaza,
she acts, and is the woman she acts ; and you have to think,
before you remember how elaborate a science goes to the
making of that thrill which you are almost cruelly enjoying.
47
Sir Henry Irving.
As I watched, at the Lyceum, the sad and eager face of
Duse, leaning forward out of a box, and gazing at the eager
and gentle face of Irving, I could not help contrasting the
two kinds of acting summed up in those two faces. The
play was " Olivia," W. G. Wills' poor and stagey version
of " The Vicar of Wakefield," in which, however, not even
the lean intelligence of a modern playwright could quite
banish the homely and gracious and tender charm of Gold-
smith. As Dr. Primrose, Irving was almost at his best ;
that is to say, not at his greatest, but at his most equable
level of good acting. All his distinction was there, his
nobility, his restraint, his fine convention. For Irving re-
presents the old school of acting, just as Duse represents
the new school. To Duse, acting is a thing almost wholly
apart from action ; she thinks on the stage, scarcely moves
there ; when she feels emotion, it is her chief care not to
express it with emphasis, but to press it down into her soul,
until only the pained reflection of it glimmers out of her
eyes and trembles in the hollows of her cheeks. To Irving,
on the contrary, acting is all that the word literally means ;
it is an art of sharp, detached, yet always delicate, move-
ment ; he crosses the stage with intention, as he intentionally
adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highly conventional elocution
of his own ; he is an actor, and he acts, keeping nature, or
the too close resemblance of nature, carefully out of his
composition.
With Miss Terry there is only the personal charm of a
very natural nature, which has become deliciously sophisti-
48
Sir Henry Irving.
cated. She is the eternal girl, and she can never grow old ;
one might say, she can never grow up. She learns her part,
taking it quite artificially, as a part to be learnt ; and then,
at her frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into
delight, though never into conviction, by a gay abandon-
ment to the self of a passing moment. Irving's acting is
almost a science, and it is a science founded on tradition.
It is in one sense his personality that makes him what he
is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of
genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art
wholly personal, wholly new ; his acting is no interruption
of an intense inner life, but a craftsmanship into which he
has put all he has to give. It is an art wholly of rhetoric,
that is to say wholly external ; his emotion moves to slow
music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-
out word. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is
expected, to our accustomed sense of the logic, not of life,
but of life as we have always seen it on the stage, by his way
of taking snuff; of taking out his pocket-handkerchief, of
lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. He has observed life
in order to make his own version of life, using the stage as
his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limita-
tions of the stage.
Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XL' r
His Louis XI. is a masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a
study in senility, and it is the grotesque art of the thing
which saves it from becoming painful. This shrivelled
carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all the
flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn
and cracked covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable
49
Sir Henry Irving.
in its irreverent copy of age if it were not so obviously a
picture, with no more malice than there is in the delicate
lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure is at once
Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners ; it distracts
one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether
absorbing ; one watches it as one would watch some feeble
ancient piece of mechanism, still working, which may snap
at any moment. In such a personation, make-up becomes
a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises us,
and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement ;
the hands act almost by themselves, as if every finger were
a separate actor. The passion of fear, the instinct of craft,
the malady of suspicion, in a frail old man who has power
over every one but himself : that is what Sir Henry Irving
represents, in a performance which is half precise physiology,
half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in
art.
See him in " The Merchant of Venice." His Shylock is
noble and sordid, pathetic and terrifying. It is one of his
great parts, made up of pride, stealth, anger, minute and
varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical subtlety. Whether
he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of his
stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or
shakes with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the
great part and the great actor. See him as Mephistopheles in
" Faust." The Lyceum performance is a superb pantomime,
with one overpowering figure drifting through it and in
some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil Mephistopheles,
who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes
a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy
5
Sir Henry Irving.
pride, holding himself up to the laughter of inferior beings,
with the old acknowledgment that " the devil is an ass."
A head like the head of Dante, shown up by coloured
lights, and against chromo-lithographic backgrounds, while
all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the cheap triumph
of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay
with a gimlet out of an inn table : it is partly Goethe's fault,
and partly the fault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick
of the stage. Mephistopheles is not really among Irving's
great parts, but it is among his picturesque parts. With
his restless strut, a blithe and aged tripping of the feet to
some not quite human measure, he is like some spectral
marionette, playing a game only partly his own. For such
a part no mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image
with its solemn mask lives in a kind of galvanic life of its
own, seductively, with some mocking suggestion of his
" cousin the snake." Here and there some of the old power
is now lacking ; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating
remains.
Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spec-
tacle, and " Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there,
was a magnificent spectacle. It is a play made up princi-
pally of one character and a crowd, the crowd being a sort
of moving background, treated in Shakespeare's large and
scornful way. A stage crowd at the Lyceum always gives
one a sense of exciting movement, and this Roman rabble
did all that was needed to show off the almost solitary
splendour of Coriolanus. He is the proudest man in
Shakespeare, and Sir Henry Irving is at his best when he
embodies pride. His conception of the part was masterly :
Sir Henry Irving.
it had imagination, nobility, quietude. With opportunity
for ranting in every second speech, he never ranted, but
played what might well have been a roaring part with a
kind of gentleness. With every opportunity for extrava-
gant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about
him, like a rock against which the foam beats. Made up
as a kind of Roman Moltke, the lean, thoughtful soldier, he
spoke throughout with a slow, contemptuous enunciation,
as of one only just not too lofty to sneer. Restrained in
scorn, he kept throughout an attitude of disdainful pride,
the face, the eyes, set, while only his mouth twitched,
seeming to chew his words, with the disgust of one swallowing
a painful morsel. Where other actors would have raved,
he spoke with bitter humour, a humour that seemed to
hurt the speaker, the concise, active humour of the soldier,
putting his words rapidly into deeds. And his pride was
an intellectual pride ; the weakness of a character, but the
angry dignity of a temperament. I have never seen Irving'
so restrained, so much an artist, so faithfully interpretative
of a masterpiece. Something of energy, no doubt, was
lacking ; but everything was there, except the emphasis
which I most often wish away in acting.
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
I.
THE acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away
under it, as under a solvent acid. Not one of the plays
which she has brought with her is a play on the level of
her intelligence and of her capacity for expressing deep
human emotion. Take " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." It
is a very able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a
particular kind of character, but it is only able, and it is
only a glimpse. Paula, as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a
thoroughly English type of woman, the nice, slightly morbid,
somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has "gone
wrong," and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to
go right when the chance is offered to her. She is observed
from the outside, very keenly observed ; her ways, her surface
tricks of emotion, are caught; she is a person whom we
know or remember. But what is skin-deep in Paula as con-
ceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real human being, a human
being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse. Paula
as played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the English-
woman is only irritable ; she has the Italian simplicity and
directness in place of that terrible English capacity for
uncertainty in emotion and huffiness in manner. She brings
profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which has sinned
and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from the conse-
quences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their
ruin of material happiness. And, frankly, the play cannot
stand it. When this woman bows down under her fate in
53
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
so terrible a spiritual loneliness, realising that we cannot
fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the inevitable
choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words
which shall render so great a situation ; and no splendid
words come. The situation, to the dramatist, has been
only a dramatic situation. Here is Duse, a chalice for the
wine of imagination, but the chalice remains empty. It is
almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do
not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her
hands, and in her voice, only not in the words that she
says or in the details of the action which she is condemned
to follow.
See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing " The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray," and you will see it played exactly according to
Mr. Pinero's intention, and played brilliantly enough to dis-
tract our notice from what is lacking in the character. A
fantastic and delightful contradiction, half gamine, half
Burne-Jones, she confuses our judgment, as a Paula in real
life might, and leaves us attracted and repelled, and, above
all, interested. But Duse has no resources outside simple
human nature. If she cannot convince you by the thing
in itself, she cannot disconcert you by a paradox about it.
Well, this passionately sincere acting, this one real person
moving about among the dolls of the piece, shows up all
that is mechanical, forced, and unnatural in the construc-
tion of a play never meant to withstand the searchlight of
this woman's creative intelligence. Whatever is theatrical
and obvious starts out into sight. The good things are
transfigured, the bad things merely discovered. And so, by
a kind of naivete in the acceptance of emotion for all it
54-
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
might be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost
perverse simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a super-
ficial and insincere character, Duse plays " The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray " in the grand manner, destroying the illusion
of the play as she proves over again the supremacy of her
own genius.
II.
WHILE I watch Duse's Magda, I can conceive, for the time,
of no other. Realising the singer as being just such an
artist as herself, she plays the part with hardly a suggestion
of the stage, except the natural woman's intermittent loath-
ing for it. She has been a great artist ; yes, but that is
nothing to her. " I am I," as she says, and she has lived.
And we see before us, all through the play, a woman who
has lived with all her capacity for joy and sorrow, who has
thought with all her capacity for seeing clearly what she is
unable, perhaps, to help doing. She does not act, that is,
explain herself to us, emphasise herself for us. She lets us
overlook her, with a supreme unconsciousness, a supreme
affectation of unconsciousness, which is of course very con-
scious art, an art so perfect as to be almost literally decep-
tive. I do not know if she plays with exactly the same
gestures night after night, but I can quite imagine it. She
has certain little caresses, the half awkward caresses of real
people, not the elegant curves and convolutions of the
stage, which always enchant me beyond any mimetic move-
ments I have ever seen. She has a way of letting her voice
apparently get beyond her own control, and of looking as if
emotion has left her face expressionless, as it often leaves
55
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusion of reality
almost further than it is possible to carry it, only never
quite.
I was looking this afternoon at Whistler's portrait of
Carlyle at the Guildhall, and I find in both the same final
art : that art of perfect expression, perfect suppression,
perfect balance of every quality, so that a kind of negative
thing becomes a thing of the highest achievement. Name
every fault to which the art of the actor is liable, and you
will have named every fault which is lacking in Duse.
And the art of the actor is in itself so much a compound of
false emphasis and every kind of wilful exaggeration, that
to have any negative merit is to have already a merit very
positi/e. Having cleared away all that is not wanted, Duse
begins to create. And she creates out of life itself an art
which no one before her had ever imagined : not realism,
not a copy, but the thing itself, the evocation of thoughtful
life, the creation of the world over again, as actual and
beautiful a thing as if the world had never existed.
III.
"LA GIOCONDA " is the first play in which Duse has had
beautiful words to speak, and a poetical conception of
character to render ; and her acting in it is more beautiful
and more poetical than it was possible for it to be in
" Magda," or in " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." But the
play is not a good play ; at its best it is lyrical rather than
dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar
material horror. The end of " Titus Andronicus " is not
56
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
so revolting as the end of " La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leon-
ardo da Vinci : " Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte,"
and the action of the play is intended as a symbol of the
possessing and destroying mastery of art and of beauty.
But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror,
and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the
words cannot redeem a conclusion so inartistic in its pain-
fulness. But, all the same, the play is the work of a poet,
it brings imagination upon the stage, and it gives Duse an
opportunity of being her finest self. All the words she
speaks are sensitive words, she moves in the midst of beau-
tiful things, her whole life seems to flow into a more
harmonious rhythm, for all the violence of its sorrow and
suffering. Her acting at the end, all through the inexcus-
able brutality of the scene in which she appears before us
with her mutilated hands covered under long hanging
sleeves, is, in the dignity, intensity, and humanity of its
pathos, a thing of beauty, of a profound kind of beauty,
made up of pain, endurance, and the irony of pitiable things
done in vain. Here she is no longer transforming a foreign
conception of character into her own conception of what
character should be ; she is embodying the creation of an
Italian, of an artist, and a creation made in her honour.
D'Annunzio's tragedy is, in the final result, bad tragedy,
but it is the failure of a far higher order than such suc-
cesses as Mr. Pinero's. It is written with a consciousness
of beauty, with a feverish energy which is still energy, with
a sense of what is imaginative in the facts of actual life.
It is written in Italian which is a continual delight to the
57
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
ear, prose which sounds as melodious as verse, prose to
which, indeed, all dramatic probability is sacrificed. And
Duse seems to acquire a new subtlety, as she speaks at last
words in themselves worthy of her speaking. It is as if she
at last spoke her own language.
IV.
DUMAS fils has put his best work into the novel of " La
Dame aux Camelias," which is a kind of slighter, more
superficial, more sentimental, more modern, but less universal
" Manon Lescaut." There is a certain artificial, genuinely
artificial kind of nature in it : if not " true to life," it is
true to certain lives. But the play lets go this hold, such
as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention as
it crosses the footlights ; a convention which is touching,
indeed, far too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated
way, but no longer to be mistaken, by the least sensitive of
hearers, for great or even fine literature. And the senti-
ment in it is not so much human as French, a factitious
idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with
Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman
who sins and loves, and becomes regenerated by an un-
natural kind of self-sacrifice, done for French family reasons.
She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt impersonates
perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate manner which
is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always,
turns her into quite another kind of woman ; not the light
woman, to whom love has come suddenly, as a new senti-
ment coming suddenly into her life, but the simple,
58
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of the
demi-monde, only the natural woman in love. Throughout
the play she has moments, whole scenes, of absolute great-
ness, as fine as anything she has ever done : but there are
other moments when she seems to carry repression too far.
Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of the scene
of the reception, where she repeats the one word " Armando "
over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproach-
fulness, is of the finest order of pathos. She appeals to us
by a kind of goodness, much deeper than the sentimental
goodness intended by Dumas. It is love itself that she
gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything but itself,
uncontaminated, unspoilt. She is Mile, de Lespinasse
rather than Marguerite Gautier ; a creature in whom ardour
is as simple as breath, and devotion a part of ardour. Her
physical suffering is scarcely to be noticed ; it is the suffering
of her soul that Duse gives us. And she gives us this as if
nature itself came upon the boards, and spoke to us without
even the ordinary disguise of human beings in their inter-
course with one another. Once more an artificial play
becomes sincere ; once more the personality of a great
impersonal artist dominates the poverty of her part ; we get
one more revelation of a particular phase of Duse. And it
would be unreasonable to complain that <c La Dame aux
Camelias " is really something quite different, something
much inferior ; here we have at least a great emotion, a
desperate sincerity, with all the thoughtfulness which can
possibly accompany passion.
59
Duse in Some of Her Parts,
v.
DUMAS, in a preface better than his play, tells us that
" La Princesse Georges " is " a Soul in conflict with In-
stincts." But no, as he has drawn her, as he has placed
her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflict with the
mechanical devices of a plot. All these characters talk as
they have been taught, and act according to the tradition of
the stage. It is a double piece of mechanism, that is all ;
there is no creation of character, there is a kind of worldly
wisdom throughout, but not a glimmer of imagination ;
argument drifts into sentiment, and sentiment returns into
argument, without conviction ; the end is no conclusion, but
an arbitrary break in an action which we see continuing,
after the curtain has fallen. And, as in " Fedora," Duse
comes into the play resolved to do what the author has not
done. Does she deliberately choose the plays most obviously
not written for her in order to extort a triumph out of her
enemies ? Once more she acts consciously, openly, making
every moment of an unreal thing real, by concentrating
herself upon every moment as if it were the only one. The
result is a performance miraculous in detail, and, if detail
were everything, it would be a great part. With powdered
hair, she is beautiful and a great lady ; as the domesticated
princess, she has all the virtues, and honesty itself, in her
face and in her movements ; she gives herself with a kind
of really unreflecting thoughtfulness to every sentiment
which is half her emotion. If such a woman could exist,
and she could not, she would be that, precisely that. But
just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in
the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid, or the valet
60
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodrama
again, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where
are the three stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which
Dumas offers to us in his preface as the three stages by
which a work of dramatic art reaches perfection ? Shown
us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes ; but in the
piece, no, scarcely more than in " Fedora." So fatal is it
to write for our instruction, as fatal as to write for our
amusement. A work of art must suggest everything, but
it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work like " La
Gioconda " is really, in its way, better than this unimagina-
tive and theoretical falseness to life ; for it at least shows us
beauty, even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes.
And Duse, of all actresses the nearest to nature, was born
to create beauty, that beauty which is the deepest truth of
natural things. Why does she after all only tantalise us,
showing us little fragments of her soul under many dis-
guises, but never giving us her whole self through the
revealing medium of a masterpiece ?
VI.
"FEDORA" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the
writer of plays for Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the
usual ingredients of that particular kind of sorcery : a
Russian tigress, an assassination, a suicide, exotic people
with impulses in conflict with their intentions, good working
evil and evil working good, not according to a philosophical
idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot. As
artificial, as far from life on the one hand and poetry on the
61
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
other, as a jig of marionettes at the end of a string, it has
the absorbing momentary interest of a problem in events.
Character does not exist, only impulse and event. And
Duse comes into this play with a desperate resolve to fill it
with honest emotion, to be what a woman would really
perhaps be if life turned melodramatic with her. Visibly,
deliberately, she acts ; " Fedora " is not to be transformed
unawares into life. But her acting is like that finest kind
of acting which we meet with in real life, when we are able
to watch some choice scene of the human comedy being
played before us. She becomes the impossible thing that
Fedora is, and, in that tour de force, she does some almost
impossible things by the way. There is a scene in which
the blood fades out of her cheeks until they seem to turn to
dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. She makes triumphant
point after triumphant point (her intelligence being free to
act consciously on this unintelligent matter), and we notice,
more than in her finer parts, individual moments, gestures,
tones : the attitude of her open hand upon a door, certain
blind caresses with her fingers as they cling for the last time to
her lover's cheeks, her face as she reads a letter, the art of
her voice as she almost deliberately takes us in with
these emotional artifices of Sardou. When it is all
over, and we think of the Silvia of "La Gioconda," of
the woman we divine under Magda and under Paula
Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of waste ; for even
Paula can be made to seem something which Fedora can
never be made to seem. In " Fedora " we have a sheer,
undisguised piece of stage-craft, without even the amount
of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, much less of
62
Duse in Some of Her Parts.
Sudermann. It is a detective story with horrors, and it is
far too positive and finished a thing to be transformed into
something not itself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster ; he chains
his slaves. Without nobility or even coherence of concep-
tion, without inner life or even a recognisable semblance of
exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork ; you cannot make
the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day into
agreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a
great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with
contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill upon.
As a piece of technical skill, Duse's acting in " Fedora " is
as fine as anything she has done. It completes our admira-
tion of her genius, as it proves to us that she can act to
perfection a part in which the soul is left out of the
question, in which nothing happens according to nature,
and in which life is figured as a long attack of nerves,
relieved by the occasional interval of an uneasy sleep.
Pachmann, " Parsifal," and the " Pathetic
Symphony."
THERE were no plays last week, and I was free to follow
my own bent, and hear music instead. I went to two
concerts, both of which interested me greatly : Mr. Robert
Newman's Symphony Concert at the Queen's Hall on Ash
Wednesday, and the Saturday Popular Concert at St. James's
Hall. At the former I heard the Prelude, the Good Friday
music, the Flower music, and the end of the music to the first
act of " Parsifal," together with the "Pathetic Symphony"
of Tschaikowsky ; at the latter the Hess string quartet
played Brahms and Schumann with admirable energy and
precision, Mr. Plunket Greene sang Bach and Brahms finely,
and M. de Pachmann played on the piano a Rondo of
Mozart, the eighth Nocturne, and the first Impromptu of
Chopin. I had gone to this latter concert entirely to hear
Pachmann, because it seems to me that he is the only pianist
who plays the piano as it ought to be played. I admit his
limitations, I admit that he can only play certain things, but
I contend that he is the greatest living pianist because he
can play those things better than any other pianist can play
anything. Pachmann is the Verlaine of pianists, and when
I hear him I think of Verlaine reading his own verse, in a
faint, reluctant voice, which you overheard. Other players
have mastered the piano, Pachmann absorbs its soul, and it
is only when he touches it that it really speaks in its own
voice. Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect
sense of his instrument than any other composer, and Pach-
64
" Parsifal " and the Pathetic Symphony.
mann plays Chopin with an infallible sense of what Chopin
meant to express in his music. He seems to touch the
notes with a kind of agony of delight ; his face twitches
with the actual muscular contraction of the fingers as they
suspend themselves in the very act of touch. I am told
that Pachmann plays Chopin in a morbid way. Well,
Chopin was morbid ; there are fevers and cold sweats in his
music ; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be inter-
preted in a robust way. It must be played, as Pachmann plays
it, somnambulistically, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity,
as if it were a living thing on whose nerves one were
operating, and as if every touch might mean life or death.
When I heard " Parsifal " at Bayreuth it seemed to me
that this, more than any of Wagner's music, must lose in
being heard in the concert-hall, without its accompaniment
of drama and spectacle. And I missed something, certainly,
when I heard those extracts from it at the Queen's Hall.
The music was always beautiful music; it was, as good music
must be, sufficient to itself; but as I listened to it I
found myself unconsciously remembering the stage at Bay-
reuth, and the remembrance helped me to enjoy it. When
I could not remember, I enjoyed it a little less.
The music of " Parsifal " has the abstract quality of
Coventry Patmore's odes. I cannot think of it except in
terms of sight. Light surges up out of it, as out of
unformed depths ; light descends from it, as from the sky ;
it breaks into flashes and sparkles of light, it broadens out
into a vast sea of light. It is almost metaphysical music ;
pure ideas take visible form, humanise themselves in a new
kind of ecstasy. The ecstasy has still a certain fever in it ;
65
" Parsifal " and the Pathetic Symphony.
these shafts of light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword ;
it is not peace, the peace of Bach, to whom music can give
all he wants ; it is the unsatisfied desire of a kind of flesh
of the spirit, and music is but a voice. " Parsifal " is reli-
gious music, but it is the music of a religion which had
never before found expression. I have found in a motet of
Vittoria one of the motives of " Parsifal," almost note for
note, and there is no doubt that Wagner owed much to
Palestrina and his school. But even the sombre music of
Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The
outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of
Amfortas, the despair of Kundry. This abstract music has
human blood in it.
What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and
the senses, to render mysticism through the senses. Mr.
Wath-Dunton has pointed out that that is what Rossetti tried
to do in painting. That mysterious intensity of expression
which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest pictures has some-
thing of the same appeal as that insatiable crying-out of a carnal
voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.
In " Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his
work, Wagner realised the supreme importance of monotony,
the effect that could be gained by the incessant repetition of
a few ideas. All that music of the closing scene of Act I.
is made out of two or three phrases, and it is by the finest
kind of invention that those two or three phrases are
developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid
a tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity,
what bareness almost ! It is in their return upon themselves,
their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance
66
" Parsifal " and the Pathetic Symphony.
become revealed ; and if, as Neitzsche says, they end by
hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a
cunning absorption of the will of another.
To pass from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from " Parsifal "
to the Pathetic Symphony, is like passing from a church in
which priests are offering mass to a hut in which peasants
are quarrelling, dancing, and making love. Tschaikowsky
has both force and sincerity, but it is the force and sincerity
of a ferocious child. He takes the orchestra in both hands,
tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a frag-
ment of it there, masters it like an enemy ; he makes it do
what he wants. But he uses his fist where Wagner touches
with the tips of his fingers ; he shows ill-breeding after the
manners of the supreme gentleman. Wagner can use the
whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise : he
never ends on a bang. But Tschaikowsky loves noise for
its own sake ; he likes to pound the drum, and to hear the
violins running up and down scales like acrobats. Wagner
takes his rhythms from the sea, as in " Tristan," from fire,
as in parts of the " Ring," from light, as in " Parsifal." But
Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with the
caprices of half-civilised impulses. He puts the frog-like
dancing of the Russian peasant into his tunes ; he cries and
roars like a child in a rage. He gives himself to you just
as he is ; he is immensely conscious of himself and of his
need to take you into his confidence. In your delight at
finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him
without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not
necessarily a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist,
he is not a satisfactory man of genius.
67
Pachmann and the Piano.
WHEN I once wrote about Pachmann that he is the greatest
living pianist, because he can play certain things better
than any other pianist can play anything, I am convinced
that I was strictly accurate. I have heard him again, at
St. James's Hall, in a recital of nothing but Chopin music,
and nothing but the best of Chopin. There was the
Funeral March Sonata, the first Ballade, the Fantasia, the
Berceuse, the most beautiful of the Nocturnes (Op. 37,
No. 2), an exquisite Valse, there were three Mazurkas, three
Preludes, and two Etudes. There were encores, interspersed
with conversation, and there was the horrible tour de force of
playing two pieces at the same time. Chopin's music, un-
like most other piano music, exists on terms of perfect
equality with the piano. And Pachmann, unlike most other
pianists, exists on terms of perfect equality with Chopin's
music. I have heard pianists who played Chopin in what
they called a healthy way. The notes swung, spun, and
clattered, with a heroic repercussion of sound, a hurrying
reiteration of fury, signifying nothing. The piano stormed
through the applause ; the pianist sat imperturbably, hammer-
ing. Well, I do not think any music should be played like that,
not Liszt even. Liszt connives at the suicide, but with
Chopin it is a murder. When Pachmann plays Chopin the
music sings itself, as if without the intervention of an
executant, of one who stands between the music and our
hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can
play with it ; then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very
serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His
68
.
Pachmann and the Piano.
fingers have in them a cold magic, as of soulless elves who
have sold their souls for beauty. And this beauty, which is
not of the soul, is not of the flesh ; it is a sea-change, the
life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it transports
him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and
heaven, where he hangs, listening. He listens at all his
senses. The dew, as well as the raindrop, has a sound for
him.
Pachmann gives you pure music, not states of soul or of
temperament, not interpretations, but echoes. He gives
you the notes in their own atmosphere, where they live for
him an individual life, which has nothing to do with
emotions or ideas. Thus he does not need to translate out
of two languages : first, from sound to emotion, tempera-
ment, what you will ; then from that back again to sound.
The notes exist ; it is enough that they exist. They mean
for him just the sound and nothing else. You see his fingers
feeling after it, his face calling to it, his whole body implor-
ing it. Sometimes it comes upon him in such a burst of
light that he has to cry aloud, in order that he may endure
the ecstasy. You see him speaking to the music ; he lifts
his finger, that you too may listen for it not less attentively.
But it is always the thing itself that he evokes for you, as it
rises flower-like out of silence, and comes to exist in the
world. Every note lives, with the whole vitality of its
existence. To Swinburne every word lives, just in the same
way; when he says "light," he sees the sunrise; when
he says " fire," he is warmed through all his blood. And so
Pachmann calls up, with this ghostly magic of his, the inner-
most life of music. I do not think he has ever put an
69
Pachmann and the Piano.
intention into Chopin. Chopin had no intentions. He was
a man, and he suffered ; and he was a musician, and he wrote
music ; and very likely George Sand, and Majorca, and his
disease, and Scotland, and the woman who sang to him when
he died, are all in the music ; but that is not the question.
The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife, caress you
like the fur of a cat ; and are beautiful sound, the most
beautiful sound that has been called out of the piano.
Pachmann calls it out for you, disinterestedly, easily, with
ecstasy, inevitably ; you do not realise that he has had diffi-
culties to conquer, that music is a thing for acrobats and
athletes. He smiles to you, that you may realise how
beautiful the notes are, when they trickle out of his fingers
like singing water ; he adores them and his own playing, as
you do, and as if he had nothing to do with them but
to pour them out of his hands.
The art of the pianist, after all, lies mainly in one thing,
touch. It is by the skill, precision, and beauty of his touch
that he makes music at all ; it is by the quality of his touch
that he evokes a more or less miraculous vision of sound for
us. Touch gives him his only means of expression ; it is to
him what relief is to the sculptor or what values are to the
painter. To "understand," as it is called, a piece of music, is
not so much as the beginning of good playing ; if you do not
understand it with your fingers, what shall your brain profit
you ? In the interpretation of music all action of the brain
which does not translate itself perfectly in touch is useless.
You may as well not think at all as not think in the terms
of your instrument, and the piano responds to one thing
only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other pianists, has
70
Pachmann and the Piano.
this magic. When he plays it, the piano ceases to be a
compromise. He makes it as living and penetrating as the
violin, as responsive and elusive as the clavichord.
And now, if I am to suggest the last shade of what I want
to suggest, if I am to evoke Pachmann as I seem to realise
him, I must be allowed to change my medium of expression.
This, which may be called "The Chopin-Player," is an
attempt at a somewhat closer interpretation than I can give
in prose :
The sounds torture me : I see them in my brain ;
They spin a flickering web of living threads,
Like butterflies upon the garden beds,
Nets of bright sound. I follow them : in vain.
I must not brush the least dust from their wings :
They die of a touch ; but I must capture them,
Or they will turn to a caressing flame,
And lick my soul up with their flutterings.
The sounds torture me : I count them with my eyes,
I feel them like a thirst between my lips ;
Is it my body or my soul that cries
With little coloured mouths of sound, and drips
In these bright drops that turn to butterflies
Dying delicately at my finger tips ?
Maeterlinck, " Everyman " and the
Japanese Players.
I. " Pelleas and Melisande."
" Pelleas and Melisande " is the most beautiful of
Maeterlinck's plays, and to say this is to say that it is the
most beautiful contemporary play. Maeterlinck's theatre of
marionettes, who are at the same time children and spirits,
at once more simple and more abstract than real people, is
the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prose
theatre of Ibsen, into which life comes nakedly, cruelly,
subtly, but without distinction, without poetry. Maeterlinck
has invented plays which are pictures, in which the crudity of
action is subdued into misty outlines. People with strange
names, living in impossible places, where there are only
woods and fountains, and towers by the sea-shore, and
ancient castles, where there are no towns, and where the
common crowd of the world is shut out of sight and
hearing, move like quiet ghosts across the stage, mysterious
to us and not less mysterious to one another. They are all
lamenting because they do not know, because they cannot
understand, because their own souls are so strange to them,
and each other's souls like pitiful enemies, giving deadly
wounds unwillingly. They are always in dread, because
they know that nothing is certain in the world or in their
own hearts, and they know that love most often does the
work of hate and that hate is sometimes tenderer than love.
In " Pelleas and Melisande " we have two innocent lovers,
to whom love is guilt ; we have blind vengeance, aged and
72
Maeterlinck.
helpless wisdom ; we have the conflict of passions fighting
in the dark, destroying what they desire most in the world.
And out of this tragic tangle Maeterlinck has made a play
which is too full of beauty to be painful. We feel an exqui-
site sense of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing,
as if our own sympathy had somehow set right the wrongs
of the play.
And this play, translated with delicate fidelity by Mr.
Mackail, was acted yesterday afternoon by Mrs. Patrick
Campbell, Mr. Martin Harvey, and others, to the accom-
paniment of M. Faure's music, and in the midst of scenery
which gave a series of beautiful pictures, worthy of the
play. Mrs. Campbell, in whose art there is so much that is
pictorial, has never been so pictorial as in the character of
Melisande. At the beginning I thought she was acting
with more effort and less effect than in the original per-
formance ; but as the play went on she abandoned herself
more and more simply to the part she was acting, and in the
death scene had a kind of quiet, poignant, reticent perfec-
tion. A plaintive figure out of tapestry, a child out of a
nursery tale, she made one feel at once the remoteness and
the humanity of this waif of dreams, the little princess who
does know that it is wrong to love. In the great scene by
the fountain in the park, Mrs. Campbell expressed the
supreme unconsciousness of passion, both in face and voice,
as no other English actress could have done ; in the death
scene she expressed the supreme unconsciousness of innocence
with the same beauty and the same intensity. Her palpi-
tating voice, in which there is something like the throbbing
of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautiful
73
Maeterlinck.
words as if they had never been said before. And that
beauty and strangeness in her, which make her a work of
art in herself, seemed to find the one perfect opportunity
for their expression. The only actress on our stage whom
we go to see as we would go to see a work of art, she acts
Pinero and the rest as if under a disguise. Here, dressed in
wonderful clothes of no period, speaking delicate, almost
ghostly words, she is herself, her rarer self. And Mr.
Martin Harvey, who can be so simple, so passionate, so full
of the warmth of charm, seemed until almost the end of the
play to have lost the simple fervour which he had once
shown in the part of Pellas ; he posed, spoke without
sincerity, was conscious of little but his attitudes. But
in the great love scene by the fountain in the park he had
recovered sincerity, he forgot himself, remembering Pelleas ;
and that great love scene was acted with a sense of the
poetry and a sense of the human reality of the thing, as no
one on the London stage but Mr. Harvey and Mrs. Campbell
could have acted it. No one else, except Mr. Arliss as the old
servant, was good ; the acting was not sufficiently monoto-
nous, with that fine monotony which is part of the secret of
Maeterlinck. These busy actors occupied themselves in
making points, instead of submitting passively to the passing
through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of
these emotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling
words.
II. " Everyman."
THE Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of " Every-
man " deserves a place of its own among the stage
74
" Everyman."
performances of our time. " Everyman " took one into
a kind of very human church, a church in the midst of
the market-place, like those churches in Italy, in which
people seem so much at home. The verse is quaint, homely,
not so archaic when it is spoken as one might suppose in
reading it ; the metre is regular in beat, but very irregular
in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke it so
admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been
trained to scan it as well as they articulated it. " Every-
man " may be read, not quite in its entirety, in Mr. Pollard's
collection of " Moralities and Miracle Plays," and I hope
this performance will send readers to that well-packed
storehouse. The piece is certainly the finest, simplest,
gravest of all the moralities in the book ; it is a kind of
" Pilgrim's Progress," conceived with a daring and reverent
imagination, so that God himself comes quite naturally upon
the stage, and speaks out of a clothed and painted image.
Death, lean and bare-boned, rattles his drum and trips
fantastically across the stage of the earth, leading his dance ;
Everyman is seen on his way to the grave, taking leave of
Riches, Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods (each personified
with his attributes), escorted a little way by Strength,
Discretion, Beauty, and the Five Wits, and then abandoned
by them, and then going down into the grave with no other
attendance than that of Knowledge and Good Deeds. The
pathos and sincerity of the little drama were shown finely
and adequately by the simple cloths and bare boards of a
Shakespearean stage, and by the solemn chanting of the
actors and their serious, unspoilt simplicity in acting. Miss
Wynne-Matthison in the part of Everyman acted with
75
" Everyman."
remarkable power and subtlety ; she had the complete
command of her voice, as so few actors or actresses have,
and she was able to give vocal expression to every shade
of meaning which she had apprehended.
III. The Japanese Players.
WHEN I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered
the meaning of J apanese art, so far as it represents human
beings. You know the scarcely human oval which repre-
sents a woman's face, with the help of a few thin curves for
eyelids and mouth. Well, that convention, as I had always
supposed it to be, that geometrical symbol of a face, turns
out to be precisely the face of the Japanese woman when
she is made up. So the monstrous entanglements of men
fighting, which one sees in the pictures, the circling of the
two-handed sword, the violence of feet in combat, are seen
to be after all the natural manner of Japanese warfare.
This unrestrained energy of body comes out in the expres-
sion of every motion. Men spit and sneeze and snuffle,
without consciousness of dignity or hardly of humanity,
under the influence of fear, anger or astonishment. When
the merchant is awaiting Shylock's knife he trembles con-
vulsively, continuously, from head to feet, unconscious of
everything but death. When Shylock has been thwarted,
he stands puckering his face into a thousand grimaces, like
a child who has swallowed medicine. It is the emotion of
children, naked sensation, not yet clothed by civilisation.
Only the body speaks in it, the mind is absent ; and the
body abandons itself completely to the animal force of its
76
The Japanese Players.
instincts. With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death
scene of " The Geisha and the Knight," the effect is over-
whelming ; the whole woman dies before one's sight, life
ebbs visibly out of cheeks and eyes and lips ; it is death as
not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death. There are
moments, at other times and with other performers, when
it is difficult not to laugh, at some cat-like or ape-like trick
of these painted puppets who talk a toneless language,
breathing through their words as they whisper or chant
them. They are swathed like barbaric idols, in splendid
robes without grace ; they dance with fans, with fingers,
running, hopping, lifting their feet, if they lift them, with
the heavy delicacy of the elephant ; they sing in discords,
striking or plucking a few hoarse notes on stringed instru-
ments, and beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor
their clothes have beauty, to a Western taste ; they have
strangeness, the charm of something which seems to us
capricious, almost outside Nature. In our ignorance of
their words, of what they mean to one another, of the very
way in which they see one another, we shall best appreciate
their rarity by looking on them frankly as pictures, which
we can see with all the imperfections of a Western mis-
understanding.
77
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
THE Purcell Society deserves gratitude for giving us, at the
Great Queen Street Theatre, Purcell's " Masque of Love "
and Handel's " Acis and Galatea." It would have deserved
a less carefully limited gratitude if it had given us the music
as it was originally written, for a thin orchestra of strings
and wood-wind, and a harpsichord filling up the harmonies.
Mr. Martin Shaw has done in the case of Purcell, it is true,
only what Mozart did before him in the case of Handel.
Well, no less a poet than Dryden re-wrote Chaucer, and we
no longer read Dryden's version. This bringing of the
orchestra up to date is precisely the same as the modernising
of Chaucer. It may be done as carefully as you please ;
something, colour, atmosphere, some really interesting
technical quality, is sure to go. Again, an orchestra only
half trained to play together, and singers only half trained
to keep with the orchestra, are not likely to do full justice
to the music which they do their best to interpret.
But, after all, it was not so much for the music
as for the staging that I went twice in the week to
the Great Queen Street Theatre. Mr. Gordon Craig
has already staged an opera of Purcell, the " Dido and
^Eneas," and he is now presenting the " Masque of Love "
for the second time. The critics, I am told, have been
making merry over this new art which comes so suddenly
upon them ; they have complained that Handel did not
intend his music to be staged in a conventional manner. I
do not suppose Handel cared how his music was staged ;
his music, certainly, is not heard to advantage on any con-
78
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
ceivable kind of stage, because it was written to fit a cramped
form, and with only occasional suggestions of real dramatic
feeling. But there is no doubt that Mr. Craig's method of
draping the stage with plain cloths, of lighting it from the
top, of doing away with realistic imitations of scenery, and
tailor-made imitations of clothes, is a method capable of
infinite extension, capable already of giving infinite delight
to the eye. His arrangement of the " Masque of Love,"
an arrangement at once simple and fantastic, always new
and surprising, has a touch of genius. Here he comes into
competition with no realities, has no author's intentions to
be uncertain about, and is therefore wholly himself, and
wholly delightful.
I was interested to hear some of Handel's and of Purcell's
music, so soon after hearing the concert at the Queen's Hall
on March 8, when Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was very
well and solidly rendered by Mr. Wood (despite some
uncertainty among the singers in the quartet), a firework
concerto of Saint-Saens' done more than justice to by Mr.
Mark Hambourg, and (here was the more piquant part of
the contrast) the orchestral fantasia of Richard Strauss,
" Don Juan," played for only the second time, I think, in
England. The new problem in music, which has only just
reached us from Germany, where it has long been discussed
with strenuous seriousnesss, is the problem of Richard
Strauss. Books have been written about him in Germany,
enthusiasts have accepted his music as the new music. I
had not heard anything of his until this performance of
"Don Juan" at the Queen's Hall. Mr. Henry Wood
gave it admirably ; it interested me while it was going on,
79
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
and yet I came away puzzled. It had ideas, and it rendered
sensations. But were those ideas very profound, very sincere,
very personal ? and were those sensations really musical
sensations? Strauss gives a quotation from Lenau at the
beginning of his score, and from this we know that we
have to expect two motives : the motive of passion and the
motive of loneliness. Knowing this, I felt the passion and
the loneliness in the music. But when I had come away,
and all the notes of the music had evaporated like
bubbles, I began to wonder whether I had only felt them in
a literary way, whether I had not put them for myself into
a certainly somewhat formless mass which the composer
had handed over to me, perhaps for my own shaping. The
music was not a wholly new thing ; it reminded me of both
Wagner and Tschaikowsky ; though it had more of the
wind of Tschaikowsky than of the waves of Wagner.
And, what was distressing, it reminded me sometimes of
"L'Enfant Prodigue," of that crude noting of sensation,
one nervous thrill following another, in a merely clever
imitation of natural things. That emphatic, heavy-handed
way with the orchestra, was it masterly, or was it the wrong
kind of emphasis, the mere point and pungency of antithesis ?
I have not yet quite made up my mind ; I must hear more
of Strauss, if Mr. Wood will let me ; we should certainly
hear more of Strauss. Of one thing I am certain : that he
is not an overwhelming genius. But he is interesting, he is
worth the trouble of investigating ; he has attempted serious
work, and he demands serious attention, and, for the time,
a suspended judgment.
The one play of the week has been " The Princess's
80
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
Nose " of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, at the Duke of York's
Theatre. Mr. Jones is an ambitious man. He once
observed, at the close of an article in the Nineteenth Century .-
" O human life ! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and
subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of
silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell and insight, who of
us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages,
to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy
eternal mystery ? " In other words, he has thought about
life, and would like to give some representation of life in
his plays. A distinguished dramatic critic, writing a com-
plimentary preface, has said: "The claim of Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones's more ambitious plays to rank as literature
may have been in some cases grudgingly allowed, but has
not been seriously contested." In other words, some people
have taken Mr. Jones as seriously as he takes himself. Does
Mr. Jones, I wonder, really hear any " soft proclaim of silver
flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enume-
rates, in " The Princess's Nose " ? Will any dramatic critic
come forward to assert that " The Princess's Nose " has
claims " to rank as literature " ? Who knows ? The
audience, for once, was unanimous. Mr. Jones was not
encouraged to appear. And yet there had been applause,,
prolonged applause, at many points throughout this be-
wildering evening. The applause was meant for the actors.
If Mr. Jones had shown as much tact in the construction
of his play as in the selection of his cast, how admirable
the play would have been ! I have rarely seen a play in
which each actor seemed to fit into his part with such exac-
titude. Not only was Miss Irene Vanbrugh perfect as the
81 F
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
Princess, Miss Gertrude Kingston admirable as Mrs. Malpas,
and Mr. H. B. Irving at his best as the Prince, but the
secondary characters were made the most of by Mr. Pawle
as Mr. Malpas, Mr. Cosmo Stuart, a finished study in farce,
as Mr. Eglinton-Pyne, Miss Carlotta Addison as old Lady
Eggerdon, and Miss Ethelwyn Arthur-Jones, who exagge-
rated in quite a promising way, as Daphne Langrish. But
the play ! Well, the play began as a comedy, continued as
a tragedy, and ended as a farce. It came to a crisis every
five minutes, it suggested splendid situations, and then
caricatured them unintentionally, it went shilly-shallying
about among the emotions and sensations which may be
drama or melodrama, whichever the handling makes them.
The much-discussed name turns into a piece of vulgar irony :
" You see there is a little poetical justice going about the
world," says the Princess, when she hears that her rival,
against whom she has fought in vain, has been upset by
Providence in the form of a motor-car, and the bridge of
her nose broken. Yes, the broken nose is Mr. Jones's
symbol for poetical justice ; it indicates his intellectual
attitude. There are many parts of the play where he shows,
as he has so often shown, a genuine skill in presenting and
manipulating humorous minor characters. As usual, they
have little to do with the play, but they are amusing for
their moment. It is the serious characters who will not be
serious. They are meant well, the action hovers about
them with little tempting solicitations, continually offering
them an opportunity to be fine, to be genuine, and then
withdrawing it before is can be grasped. The third act has
all the material of tragedy, but the material is wasted ; only
82
Music, Staging, and Some Acting.
the actress makes anything of it. We know how Sullivan
will take a motive of mere farce, such words as the " O
Captain Shaw ! " of " lolanthe," and will write a lovely
melody to go with it, fitting his music to the feeling which
the words do but caricature. That is how Miss Irene
Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones's unshapen material. By the
earnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and
gaiety of her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr.
Jones had not made. Mr. Jones would set his character in
some impossible situation, and Miss Vanbrugh would make
us, for the moment, forget its impossibility. He would
give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do,
and she would do it with distinction. She had force in
lightness, a vivid malice, a magnetic cheerfulness ; and she
could suffer silently, and be sincere in a tragedy which
had been conceived without sincerity. If acting could save
a play, <{ The Princess's Nose " would have been saved. It
was not saved.
The Test of the Actor.
THE interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford
of the capability of actors. As we have just seen, in the
case of Mr. Jones and his company, the actors cannot save a
play which insists on defeating them at every turn. But, as
we may realise any day when Sarah Bernhardt acts before us,
there is a certain kind of frankly melodramatic play which
can be lifted into at all events a region of excited and
gratified nerves. I have lately been to see a melodrama,
called "The Heel of Achilles," which Miss Julia Neilson
has been giving at the Globe Theatre. The play is meant
to tear at one's susceptibilities, much as "La Tosca" tears
at them. " La Tosca " is not a fine play in itself, though it
is a much better play than "The Heel of Achilles.'*
But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardt
which gives one all the shudders. " The Heel of Achilles "
did not give me a single shudder, not because it was not
packed with the raw material of sensation, but because Miss
Julia Neilson went through so many trying experiences with
nerves of marble.
I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-
knowledge in actors. Here is a play, which depends for a
great deal of its effect on a scene in which Lady Leslie, a
young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marry a Russian
prince whom she hates, in order to save her betrothed lover
from being sent to Siberia. The lover is shut in between
two doors, unable to get out ; he is the bearer of a State
secret, and everything depends on his being able to catch
the eleven P.M. train for Berlin. The Russian prince stands
84
The Test of the Actor.
before the young Englishwoman, offering her the key of
the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in
marriage. Now, she has to express by her face and her
movements all the feelings of astonishment, horror, suspense,
love, hatred, distraction, which such a situation would call
up in her. If she does not express them the scene goes for
nothing. The actress stakes all on this scene.
Now, is it possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined
herself to be capable of rendering this scene as it should be
rendered ? It is a scene that requires no brains, no subtle
emotional quality, none of the more intellectual merits of
acting. It requires simply a great passivity to feeling, the
mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the
body like drenching waves. The actress need not know
how she does it ; she may do it without an effort, or she
may obtain her spontaneity by an elaborate calculation.
But to do it at all she must be the actress in every fibre of
her body ; she must be able to vibrate freely. If the
emotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us
through her, it will all go for nothing. Well, Miss Neilson
sat, and walked, and started, and became rigid, and glanced
at the clock, and knelt, and fell against the wall, and cast
her eyes about, and threw her arms out, and made her voice
husky ; and it all went for nothing. Never for an instant
did she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after
the first moment of disappointment the mind was left calmly
free to watch her attempt as if it were speculating round a
problem.
How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been
capable of dealing adequately with such a scene as that ? I
The Test of the Actor.
take it, not because it is a good scene, but because it affords
so rudimentary a test of the capacity for acting. The test
of the capacity for acting begins where words end ; it is
independent of words ; you may take poor words as well
as fine words ; it is all the same. The embodying
power, the power to throw open one's whole nature to an
overcoming sensation, the power to render this sensation in
so inevitable a way that others shall feel it : that is the one
thing needful. It is not art, it is not even the beginning
of art ; but it is the foundation on which alone art can be
built.
The other day, in " Ulysses," there was only one piece of
acting that was quite convincing : the acting of Mr. Brough
as the Swineherd. It is a small part and an easy part, but
it was perfectly done. Almost any other part would have
been more striking and surprising if it had been done as
perfectly, but no other part was done as perfectly. Mr.
Brough has developed a stage-personality of his own, with
only a limited range of emotion, but he has developed it
until it has become a second nature with him. He has only
to speak, and he may say what he likes ; we accept him after
the first word, and he remains what that first word has shown
him to be. Mr. Tree, with his many gifts, his effective
talents, all his taste, ambition, versatility, never produces just
that effect : he remains interestingly aside from what he is
doing ; you see his brain working upon it, you enjoy his by-
play ; his gait, his studied gestures, absorb you ; " How
well this is done ! " you say, and " How well that is done ! "
and, indeed, you get a complete picture out of his repre-
sentation of the part : a picture, not a man.
S6
The Test of the Actor.
I am not sure that melodrama is not the hardest test of
the actor : it is, at least, the surest. All the human emotions
throng noisily together in the making of melodrama : they
are left there, in their naked muddle, and they come to no
good end ; but there they are. To represent any primary
emotion, and to be ineffective, is to fail in the fundamental
thing. All actors should be sent to school in melodrama.,
as all dramatic authors should learn their trade there.
Tolstoi and the Others.
THERE is little material for the stage in the novels of
Tolstoi. Those novels are full, it is true, of drama ; but
they cannot be condensed into dramas. The method of
Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly unemphatic ; he
works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of
painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense,
monotonous, and it is meant to be monotonous. Tolstoi
endeavours to give us something more nearly resembling
daily life than any one has yet given us ; and in daily life
the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in
which external action takes place. In the drama we can
only properly realise the soul's action through some corres-
ponding or consequent action which takes place visibly
before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work, many
striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can
bear detachment from that network of detail which has led
up to it and which is to come out of it. Often the scene
which most profoundly impresses one is a scene trifling in
itself, and owing its impressive ness partly to that very
quality. Take, for instance, in " Resurrection," Book II.
ch. xxviii., the scene in the theatre " during the second act
of the eternal * Dame aux Camelias,' in which a foreign
actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how
women died of consumption." The General's wife, Mariette,
smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in the street,
another woman, the other " half-world," smiles at him,
just in the same way. That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is
one of the great crises of his life. He has seen something,
38
Tolstoi and the Others.
for the first time, in what he now feels to be its true light,
and he sees it "as clearly as he saw the palace, the sentinels,
the fortress, the river, the boats and the Stock Exchange. And
just as on this northern summer night there was no restful
darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming
from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was
no longer the restful darkness, ignorance." The chapter is
profoundly impressive ; it is one of those chapters which no
one but Tolstoi has ever written. Imagine it transposed to
the stage, if that were possible, and the inevitable disappear-
ance of everything that gives it meaning !
In Tolstoi the story never exists for its own sake, but for
the sake of a very definite moral idea. Even in his later
novels Tolstoi is not a preacher ; he gives us an interpreta-
tion of life, not a theorising about life. But, to him, the
moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of more con-
sequence) it gives a great part of its value to his " realism "
of prisons and brothels and police courts. In all forms of
art, the point of view is of more importance than the subject-
matter. It is as essential for the novelist to get the right
focus as it is for the painter. In a page of Zola and in a
page of Tolstoi you might find the same gutter described
with the same minuteness ; and yet in reading the one you
might see only the filth, while in reading the other you
might feel only some fine human impulse. Tolstoi " sees
life steadily " because he sees it under a divine light ; he
has a saintly patience with evil, and so becomes a casuist
through sympathy, a psychologist out of that pity which is
understanding. And then, it is as a direct consequence of
this point of view, in the mere process of unravelling
89
Tolstoi and the Others.
things, that his greatest skill is shown as a novelist. He
does not exactly write well ; he is satisfied if his words
express their meaning, and no more ; his words have neither
beauty nor subtlety in themselves. But, if you will only
give him time, for he needs time, he will creep closer and
closer up to some doubtful and remote truth, not knowing
itself for what it is : he will reveal the soul to itself, like
" God's spy."
If you want to know how daily life goes on among
people who know as little about themselves as you know
about your neighbours in a street or drawing-room, read
Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will be perfectly satisfied.
But if you want to know why these people are happy or
unhappy, why the thing which they do deliberately is not
the thing which they either want or ought to do, read
Tolstoi ; and I can hardly add that you will be satisfied.
I never read Tolstoi without a certain suspense, sometimes
a certain terror. An accusing spirit seems to peer between
every line ; I can never tell what new disease of the soul
those pitying and unswerving eyes may not have dis-
covered.
Such, then, is a novel of Tolstoi ; such, more than almost
any of his novels, is " Resurrection," the masterpiece of his
old age, into which he has put an art but little less consum-
mate than that of " Anna Karenina," together with the
finer spirit of his later gospel. Out of this novel a play
in French was put together by M. Henry Bataille and pro-
duced at the Odeon on November 14 of last year. A play
in English, said to be by MM. Henry Bataille and
Michael Morton, has been produced this week by Mr. Tree
90
Tolstoi and the Others.
at Her Majesty's Theatre ; and the play is called, as the
French play was called, Tolstoi's " Resurrection." I do not
know if Mr. Morton has translated M. Bataille, or merely
adapted him. I have read in a capable French paper that
" Ton est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment
noble, vraiment pure," in the play of M. Bataille. Are
those quite the words one would use about the play in
English ?
They are not quite the words I would use about the play
in English. It is a melodrama with one good scene, the
scene in the prison ; and this is good only to a certain
point. There is another scene which is amusing, the scene
of the jury, but the humour is little more than clowning,
and the tragic note, which should strike through it, is only
there in a parody of itself. Indeed the word parody is the
only word which can be used about the greater part of the
play, and it seems to me a pity that the name of Tolstoi
should be brought into such dangerous companionship with
the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I
heard people around me confessing that they had not read
the book. How terrible must have been the disillusion of
those people, if they had ever expected anything of Tolstoi,
and if they really believed that this demagogue Prince, who
stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of
prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief,
was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple
little gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I
should be inclined to define him ; but I must give Mr.
Tree his full credit in the matter. When he crucifies him-
self, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-
9 1
Tolstoi and the Others.
room, remarking in his slowest manner : " The bird flutters
no longer ; I must atone, I must atone ! " one is, in every
sense, alone with the actor. Mr. Tree has many arts, but
he has not the art of sincerity. His conception of acting
is, literally, to act, on every occasion. Even in the prison
scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good, until she begins
to shout and he to rant, " and then the care is over," Mr.
Tree cannot be his part without acting it.
That prison-scene is, on the whole, well done, and the
first part of it, when the women shout and drink and
quarrel, is acted with a satisfying sense of vulgarity which
contrasts singularly with what is meant to be a suggestion
of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene pre-
ceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is
the first act. This act takes the place of those astounding
chapters in the novel in which the seduction of Katusha is
described with a truth, tact, frankness, and subtlety, un-
paralleled in any novel I have ever read. I read them over
before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the theatre
I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a
foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised
hardly more than one sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought
in in the wrong place), and, in short, the old make-believe
of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and
put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at which one can
only marvel (" a thing imagination boggles at ") as an
" adaptation " from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated
by some translators and by many critics ; in his own country,
if you mention his name, you are as likely as not to be met
by a shrug and an "Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu ! " In
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Tolstoi and the Others.
his own country he has the censor always against him ; some
of his books he has never been able to print in full in
Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre
we have, in what is boldly called Tolstoi's " Resurrec-
tion," something which is not Tolstoi at all. There is
M. Bataille, who might take the responsibility of it, or there
is Mr. Morton, who may have done more than merely trans-
late M. Bataille, or there is Mr. Tree, who may have exercised
the supervision of an actor-manager ; but Tolstoi, might not
the great name of Tolstoi be left well alone ?
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Literary Drama.
ON the first night of Mr. Anthony Hope's new comedy at
the Garrick Theatre, a critic, who is himself a man of
letters, surprised me by saying that, though the play was
not dramatic, it was still literary. He meant it to be, in its
way, a compliment, though he discriminated by saying, as
a higher compliment, that Ibsen was not literary. I have
never been able to see that any written work can be, in a
true sense, literature, if it does not precisely answer the
purpose of its existence. Now, a play is written to be acted,
and it will not be literature merely because its sentences are
nicely written. It will be literature, dramatic literature, if,
in addition to being nicely written, it has the qualities
which make a stage-play a good stage-play. Ibsen's plays
are in the best sense of the word literary, because they
express their ideas through a perfectly successful use of
the conditions of the stage, because they deal profoundly
with life through the medium which they have chosen for
expression.
I allow to Mr. Anthony Hope's comedy all kinds of
negative merits, and a few slight merits of a positive kind.
It is not, sentence by sentence, badly written ; the sentences
are neatly turned, with a neatness which Mr. Pinero, for
instance, has never acquired. It is not without ideas ; and
the ideas, so far as they go, have a certain acuteness. It is
entirely without vulgarity, or any kind of bad form. In the
last act it moves swiftly, becomes really amusing, suggests
an ironical outlook on things. But think for an instant of
a play like " The Importance of Being Earnest," which has
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Literary Drama.
been revived with such an instant and inevitable success
at the St. James's. Oscar Wilde was a philosopher in
masquerade, and he had perfected one art : the art of
the stage. It is not because every sentence is amusing
in itself that people go to see his comedies ; it is because the
" fundamental brain-work " of his comedies is adequate ;
it is because they do exactly what they aim at doing. There
is the genuine literary faculty, making drama : how different
a thing from the amusing and correctly-expressed by-play
of such stage trifles as " Pilkerton's Peerage," which we
are all so ready to call literary merely because they are
not illiterate !
But it is, after all, in the other play of the week that the
question of literary drama presents itself most significantly.
Mr. Tree's production of Mr. Stephen Phillips's "Ulysses,"
at His Majesty's Theatre, is full of interest for all to whom
the poetic drama is of interest. The play was sumptuously
staged, capably acted, the verse was spoken with care, and,
if it was drawled a little beyond measure, that is a fault far
more pardonable than the customary prose gabble. Mr.
Phillips, as we know, is a writer of careful and often felicitous
verse ; he has a temperate charm, a graceful sense of epithet,
a genuine poetic feeling ; and he has a firm hold on his
material : he can make his poetry hold the stage. Here, it
might seem, is the true literary drama, drama and literature
at once. There is an action that moves ; there are plausible
characters, who speak in clear and elegant verse. What
more do we want ?
We want something more, and, if we are to have great
poetic drama, we must have this something more. Poetry
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Literary Drama.
is one thing, stagecraft is another ; and there are different
kinds of poetry as there are different kinds of stagecraft.
The action of " Ulysses " is theatrical, the language is
idyllic. The two tendencies struggle throughout the play,
the action breaking away from the words wherever the words
are fine, and the words stopping the action to give utterance
to a recitation. Here and there a fine line corresponds
with a fine dramatic moment, as when Telemachus, urged
by Athene to rise up against the Suitors, his enemies, and
answering : " Goddess, I am but one, and they are many,"
is answered by Athene : " Thou art innumerable as thy
wrongs." But take the end of the second act, the escape
from Hades, and see how that opportunity for fine dramatic
poetry is wasted in theatrical shrieks: "I come I come
I stagger up to thee," and the like ; in descriptive asides :
f< O whirling dead ! And a great swirl of souls," and the
like ; and in mere squabbles with ghosts, who " circle over
Ulysses with cries, obscuring him." Again, the one great
emotional opportunity in the play, the one great opportunity
for passion, the scene on the island of Ogygia between
Ulysses and Calypso, has many touches of meditative pretti-
ness, but not a single note of passion. Throughout, every
character speaks as he is told, and he speaks as Mr. Phillips
speaks, in narrative or idyllic verse. The poetry might be
detached from the dramatic framework and the framework
would stand exactly as it did before. Now, true dramatic
poetry is an integral part of the dramatic framework, which,
indeed, at its best, it makes. " Ulysses " is a spectacle-
drama, with a commentary in verse. At its best it reaches
only what Coleridge, contrasting Schiller with Shakespeare,
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Literary Drama.
called " the material sublime." It has not flowered up out
of a seed of hidden beauty ; such beauty as it has, and it has
beauty, is wrought from without, and presents itself to us as
decoration.
Mr. Phillips is at his best when dealing with Greek
subjects ; he loves clear outline, simplicity of action. But
his Ulysses is not a Greek of the heroic age ; he is, as
Dr. Todhunter, speaking of Mr. Phillips, acutely says
in the Fortnightly Review, " classical in the decorative
sense in which Lord Leighton's work was classical." He
goes through many adventures successfully, commenting on
them by the way. Athene praises him for his craft, but he
is without that wisdom which, in the Greek conception of
prudence, went hand in hand with craft. Contrast him, I
will not say with Homer, but with the lofty poetry of Mr.
Bridges, the grave and strenuous poetry of Tennyson. He
is a well-constructed figure of a man ; but prick him, and
the sawdust would run out.
The poetic drama, if it is to become a genuine thing,
must be conceived as drama, and must hold us, as a
play of Ibsen's holds us, by the sheer interest of its repre-
sentation of life. It must live, and it must live in poetry,
as in its natural atmosphere. The verse must speak as
straight as prose, but with a more beautiful voice. It
must avoid rhetoric as scrupulously as Ibsen avoids
rhetoric. It must not " make poetry," however good
in its way. Here, for instance, is one of the most effec-
tive speeches in " Ulysses," for effective it certainly was,
just as the Italian aria was effective in the opera which it
interrupted :
97 G
Literary Drama.
Then have the truth ; I speak as a man speaks ;
Pour out my heart like treasure at your feet.
This odorous amorous isle of violets,
That leans all leaves into the glassy deep,
With brooding music over noontide moss,
And low dirge of the lily-swinging bee,
Then stars like opening eyes on closing flowers,
Palls on my heart. Ah God ! that I might see
Gaunt Ithaca stand up out of the surge,
Yon lashed and streaming rocks, and sobbing crags,
The screaming gull and the wild-flying cloud :
To see far off the smoke of my own hearth,
To smell far out the glebe of my own farms,
To spring alive upon her precipices,
And hurl the singing spear into the air ;
To scoop the mountain torrent in my hand,
And plunge into the midnight of her pines ;
To look into the eyes of her who bore me,
And clasp his knees who 'gat me in his joy,
Prove if my son be like my dream of him.
Some of that is good descriptive verse, but it is all
declamation, none of it is speech. Now, between declama-
tion and dramatic poetry there is a great gulf. The actor
loves declamation, because it gives him an opportunity to
recite, and every actor loves to recite poetry. It provides
him with a pulpit. He does not like to realise, any more
than his author likes to realise, that every line of poetry
which is not speech is bad dramatic poetry.
98
Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
IN the afternoon I went to the Coronet Theatre to hear
M. Gustave Larroumet lecture on the modern French
drama. M. Larroumet is that curious type, unknown over
here, the professor as dramatic critic. He lectures at the
Sorbonne, he is a member of the Institut, he is Perpetual
Secretary of the Acadmie des Beaux-Arts, and he is also
the dramatic critic of Le Temps, where he has taken the
place left vacant by the death of Francisque Sarcey. He
has written a book on Racine, and another book on Mari-
vaux ; he has published volumes of literary and dramatic
criticism, and criticism of painting and sculpture. He
knows the literatures of many countries ; he has travelled,
observed, and, as we have seen, lectured. And he has
opinions. He believes, for instance, that there are certain
wicked abstractions, Wagnerism, Tolstoi-ism, Ibsenism,
which must be vigorously opposed, as well as certain artists,
Wagner, Tolstoi, Ibsen, who have, at all events, some
technical merits as well as serious errors of substance. He
believes that Nordau has explained, on his theory of
degeneration, " the vogue of M. Verlaine," and why
" M. Maeterlinck was famous among us for several months."
He believes that Richepin and Rostand have revived French
poetry ; he believes that Tennyson was a symbolist ; he
believes many other things. In his lecture he chose
discreetly from among his beliefs, and in many parts of it
was admirably sane and sober, and discriminated carefully
between the qualities of Scribe, Augier, and Dumas fils, and
between the qualities of M. Brieux and M. Hervieu. He
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Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
began by dismissing Romanticism as an accident, a deviation,
a " mere French Revolution." Hugo and the others were
condemned by their poetic vision to see life unsteadily, and
to see it in parts. However, " M. Scribe," as, with some
excess of politeness, they were accustomed to call him, set
all that to rights by inventing {'intrigue. Scribe, " un homme
de genie ^ incontestablement" began the modern drama ;
Augier, Dumas fils, and Sardou added realism of detail to
his method of bewildering theatrical dexterity, and all went
well until the arrival of another " accident," the accident of
1870-71. A new direction began to be seen ; in the novel
the school of Naturalists had invented a new form of art,
but Flaubert, Zola, and Daudet (whom M. Larroumet
prefers for his " charm "), failed in their attempt to trans-
port the Naturalistic novel, just as it was, to the stage. It
was Henri Becque who, almost accidentally, invented the
new form for Naturalism at the theatre. " Les Corbeaux "
and " La Parisienne " were taken straight out of his own
life, his own experience ; he painted life grey because he
say/ it grey ; he was pitiless towards humanity because he
had found no pity in men and women ; he subordinated
plot to the exact rendering of fact because he had not come
out of any theatrical training-school. Just then Antoine
founded the Thatre-Libre, the young men of the cabarets
of Montmartre added a little bitter gaiety to this sad and
sordid realism, and the new formula was at work. First
came Jules Lemaitre, with " Revoltee " ; then Georges de
Porto-Riche, with " Amoureuse " ; then Henri Lavedan,
with his dialogues in " La Vie Parisienne," and his brilliant
theatrical success ; then Brieux, with " Blanchette " (which
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Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
was to be followed by "La Robe Rouge ") ; then Hervieu,
with " Les Paroles Restent," " Les Tenailles," " La Course
du Flambeau " (which seems to M. Larroumet " one of the
finest things in all dramatic literature "), and " L'Enigme,"
which we were seeing the other week ; finally, Capus, the
one optimist, with " La Veine " and " Les Deux Ecoles."
At the end M. Larroumet talked a little about " Cyrano
de Bergerac," which his audience seemed to recognise with
a start of delight, and Foiseau bleu and Mdeal were
mentioned. Then, with a hope for the return of more
cheerfulness and more plot, the lecture came to an end. It
had been interesting ; it gave one some solid information,
and suggested the limitations of the professor as dramatic
critic. The afternoon had been profitably spent.
In the evening, after the briefest interval, I found myself
at the St. James's Theatre, where Mr. Stephen Phillips'
first play, " Paolo and Francesca," was at last, after its long
delay, to be given. Let me say at once that it was given
admirably, that it was given as a poetic play should be given.
Mr. Alexander has perhaps never attempted a more ambi-
tious piece of acting ; I cannot think of any significant
moment in which he did not seem to me to be doing exactly
what the author meant him to do. If his part was rather a
series of detached moods than the realisation of a single
character, that was Mr. Phillips' fault, not Mr. Alexander's.
And Miss Robins as Lucrezia acted with no less care and
intelligence ; she did all she could to transform a melo-
dramatic part into a tragic part. Miss Evelyn Millard as
Francesca looked and moved and spoke beautifully : she
made pictures whenever she crossed the stage. Mr. Ainley
ICI
Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
as Paolo had the necessary good looks, and, though a little
stiff and a little sulky at times, embodied the character as
we find it in the book not altogether inadequately. He was
rhetorical, but so is the part ; he fell into attitudes, but so
does the part; he spoke to the audience rather than to
Francesca, but so the part insists on his speaking. For,
there is no doubt, in all this beautiful talking and moving,
in these picturesque scenes which look so well on the stage,
there is no real life, no real dramatic life, but always, in the
fatal sense, "literature." The fundamental human proba-
bilities are not observed; the whole structure, with its elegance
and charm, is built on an unsound basis. I very rarely
happen to see a newspaper, but I did happen to see the
Morning Post on the day after this performance, and I
was struck by the sagacity of the Jong notice which I found
there. It was an analysis of the human probabilities of the
piece, and it showed clearly and without prejudice, allowing
for merit wherever merit was to be found, that the piece
was constructed entirely with a view to effectiveness,
superficial effectiveness, on the stage, and not according to
the variable but quite capturable logic of human nature. I
found myself in agreement with almost every word of the
notice, and I thought how wise it was to take the play just
on those grounds, to examine it where its real strength or
weakness was bound to reveal itself. Take any separate
scene, and you will find that it has its merits ; no, not quite
any scene, but many of the scenes. Then examine that
scene as a natural or probable occurrence, as a scene made
by the characters who appear in it, and not made to show
them off on a certain chosen side. Take, for instance, the
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Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
scene in the drugseller's shop. That was very picturesque
and effective, and it did the stage business which needed to
be done. But, taken as human truth and not as stage
mechanism, every word was a betrayal rather than a revela-
tion of character, every action was the exact contrary of the
action natural under the circumstances.
It would be interesting to compare in detail Mr. Phillips*
" Paolo and Francesca " and d'Annunzio's " Francesca da
Rimini," but I will only take one scene, which is typical of
each writer : the scene of the reading, the scene which
Dante has made difficult and inevitable for every dramatist
who deals with the subject. In " Paolo and Francesca " it
takes place in a garden ; the book is held on the lovers'
knees ; it is passed to and fro without the slighest reason
except the author's wish to give some lines to each ; the
lines they read are modern and sentimental ; the book has
to be laid down awkwardly in order that the kiss may be
elegant; and Francesca, as she "droops towards" Paolo,
cries, as he kisses her : " Ah ! Launcelot ! " Now, in
d'Annunzio, the scene takes place in a room ; there is a
reading-desk beside a window-seat ; the alternation of the
readers is arranged with a probability which makes its own
effectiveness ; the lines they read are taken word for word
from the original French prose romance of " Lancelot du
Lac " ; and when Paolo kisses Francesca her cry is not, like
the English Francesca's, a literary reminiscence, but the cry
which would instinctively and inevitably come to every
woman's lips at such a moment : " No, Paolo ! " The
reason is that d'Annunzio, whose play has many faults, but
this conspicuous merit, has conceived his play as a thing
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Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture.
that once really happened, and that must happen over again
on the stage with the same energy of life ; while Mr. Phillips
has conceived his play, gracious, decorative, full of poetical
feeling though it is, as a literary thing, and as a thing to be
acted ; not as life, not as drama.
104
Some Plays and the Public.
THERE was only one new play last week, "Memory's
Garden," by Mr. Albert Chevalier and Mr. Tom Gallon,
at the Comedy, but there were two revivals, " Little Lord
Fauntleroy" at the Avenue, and "Sweet Nell of Old
Drury " at the Globe. Of these, " Little Lord Fauntle-
roy " was certainly the best play, and " Sweet Nell of Old
Drury " certainly the worst. " Memory's Garden " fell
between quite a number of stools, but it aroused a certain
sympathy as it tottered. I wish Mr. Chevalier had relied
entirely on himself for his work, and not called in a
theatrical joiner to fit his scenes together. I remember
that in some of those coster songs which he used to sing
there was sometimes a touch of the romantic and senti-
mental, but also much genuine human feeling. He did
not write all his songs, but he wrote the best of them, and
sometimes the music of them, and when he sang them the
maker and the executant became one. There, I always
felt, was a genuine artist. He had not the range, the
poignancy, or the subtlety of Yvette Guilbert, but in many
ways he was better than Paulus (who had, of course, a
sprightly finish of his own), better than Mr. Arthur Roberts
(who could carry things before him with a more swift and
irresistible comic dash), better than Mr. Dan Leno (who at
his best has an inimitable plausibility of manner). He gave
the music-hall stage something it had never had in England,
something which it has lost since he retired to the chamber-
concert atmosphere of the Queen's Hall. I have not seen
him since he has been at the Queen's Hall, but I have been
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Some Plays and the Public.
told that he has extended his ground without losing any
of the ground that he had already made his own. Only
the other day he published an autobiography. Now he
comes before us with a play.
There was a queer sentence in it somewhere, rather to
this effect : " Memory is a garden, and the flowers in it are
immortal." Well, in the play we get the weeds along with
the flowers. It was an old story, with a few new details,
and there were tedious and trivial things in it. But the
later part of the second act, the scene between the seduced
woman and the father of her seducer, and then the scene
between father and son, had a certain grip on reality; true
words were said in the midst of some merely conventional
words. The acting of this scene, though very emphatic,
was undoubtedly powerful. Mr. Mackintosh and Miss
Norah Lancaster were both sincere, they carried our sym-
pathies over the difficult moments. For there were difficult
moments. These moved and troubled people did not
speak always the spontaneous language of their emotion.
They were sometimes aware that an audience was listening.
But they spoke like human beings, and not like the
murderous puppets of "The Heel of Achilles." And
elsewhere in the play, where it was much weaker, there
were incidental passages that suggested real people, such as
the humorous scene which enlivened the dragging third
act, the episode of the old blind man and his dog.
The humanity which we find in " Little Lord Fauntle-
roy " is a more consistent kind of humanity, and, acted as
it is, excellently, by Miss Marion Terry and Master Vyvian
Thomas, I have been able to see it twice, with pleasure,
1 06
Some Plays and the Public.
within the limit of a few months, because it has real feeling
in it, and words that say what they mean. Mrs. Hodgson
Burnett is a writer of genuine talent, and she has put her
best work into this play. It is the only play about children
that I know which does not sicken me, with the exception
of Jules Renard's " Carrots." " Carrots," of course, is
finer ; it has more atmosphere, it is more purely a piece of
literature. " Little Lord Fauntleroy " is not quite litera-
ture, in the fine sense ; it has not the terrible directness of
naked truth. It is truth in velvet knickerbockers. But,
up to a certain point, how good it is, how full of tenderly
humorous observation ! And Miss Marion Terry, an
actress of much greater capacity than the famous sister who
has played so enchantingly at acting, takes up Mrs. Bur-
nett's work where she left it, and completes it. Then,
what a pleasure it is to see a boy played by a boy ! This
particular boy seems to me astonishingly clever, already a
finished artist, doing everything naturally, and knowing
why he does it.
At "Sweet Nell of Old Drury" I happened to be in the
last row of the stalls. My seat was not altogether well
adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was admir-
ably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my
attention to my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke
was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell,
the orange girl, stuttered with laughter or romped heavily
across the stage, the pit thrilled and quivered with delight.
At every piece of clowning there was the same responsive
gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that I
should have thought a child would have seen through them,
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Some Plays and the Public.
and resented them as an imposition, were accepted in per-
fect good faith, and gloated over. I was turning over
the matter in my mind afterwards, when I remembered
something that was said to me the other day by a young
Swedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he
had been to most of the theatres, and he had been surprised
to find that the greater part of the pieces which were played
at the principal London theatres were such pieces as would
be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower class theatres,
and that nobody here seemed to mind. The English audi-
ence, he said, reminded him of a lot of children ; they took
what was set before them with ingenuous good temper,
they laughed when they were expected to laugh, cried when
they were expected to cry. But of criticism, preference,
selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been
told that London was a centre of civilisation. Well, in
future I shall try to remember, when I hear an audience
clapping its hands wildly over some bad play, badly acted :
it is all right, it is only the children.
108
" Ben Hur " on the Stage.
THE novel of "Ben Hur," notwithstanding its enormous
popularity, has merit. It distinguishes itself from other
books of the kind by a certain homely simplicity, and by
the distinctness with which the writer sees what he is writing
about. It is called " a tale of the Christ," and it begins
with the meeting of the three Wise Men in the desert, on
their way to Bethlehem, and ends with the Crucifixion.
General Wallace has been wise in making the main part of
his story independent of the story of the life of Christ.
Christ is seen, in passing, two or three times ; but, until the
end, that is all. The only words which he speaks are the
words recorded in the Gospels. He heals two lepers, who
are the lost mother and sister of Ben Hur. Ben Hur watches
him die, and afterwards builds the catacomb of San Calixto
in Rome, as a refuge for the Christians. " Out of that vast
tomb," says the author in his last sentence, " Christianity
issued to supersede the Caesars."
Strictly speaking, the book is not written at all. The
language is awkward, uncomfortable, like the language of
a man who is taking up his pen for the first time. We
come constantly upon such phrases as : " The goodness of
the reader is again besought in favour of an explanation " ;
or, " With this plain generalisation in mind, all further
desirable knowledge upon the subject can be had by follow-
ing the incidents of the scene occurring." A Bacchante in
the grove of Daphne, trying to talk poetically, talks after
this fashion : " The winds which blow here are respirations
of the gods. Let us give ourselves to waftage of the winds."
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" Ben Hur " on the Stage.
But this childishness of style cannot conceal the thought,
knowledge, and sympathy which General Wallace has put
into his book. The description of the desert, at the begin-
ning, clumsily though it is written, is sensitively felt ; these
halting sentences do, after all, what they are meant to do ;
they give us the sensation of the desert, the camel, and the
travellers. The description of the Arab horses, in the
fourth book, is that of a man who knows and loves horses ;
the fight at sea between the galleys, the whole episode of
the galley-slaves, is vividly realised in every detail ; the life
of the desert and of the cities, the different lives of the
nations swarming together without mingling, are indicated
with not too obvious a purpose. The story itself is a series
of adventures, chosen for their effectiveness, and certainly
effective. Without being literature, it is something more
than a sensation novel of the first century.
Now turn to the play, as it is to be seen at Drury Lane.
The atmosphere, suggested in the book, is painted crudely
upon moving canvases ; there is the real camel, indeed a
delightful beast, who went through his part meekly, but
with ironical grimaces ; there is a cunning floor which
runs one way under the horses' feet while the horses
run the other way, and you see the chariot race in the
arena ; there is a search-light from the level of the upper
boxes, to represent the glory of the face of Christ, cleansing
lepers. The lepers themselves are before you, quite neat
and clean, their faces chalked a little, but, luckily, not at all
as General Wallace describes them in the novel. The dis-
tressing " thee " and " thou " of the novel remain, and
much of the distressing dialogue. But the adventures, which
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" Ben Hur " on the Stage.
seemed a little detached even there, present themselves now
without any obvious link of connection ; the characters,
somewhat vague and somewhat generalised though they were,
have turned rigid and stamped themselves in some few crude
gestures. Beauty, as well as strangeness, is suggested in the
novel ; there is little beauty, and only at times a really
interesting strangeness, in what Drury Lane has to show us.
The fact is, romance of this remote kind cannot be finely
brought before us in the crude way of our modern spectacular
theatres. The flash-light rationalises Christ into a synonym
for the latest electric cure of leprosy. I thought it grotesque,
from the point of view of artistic or of religious reverence.
Now the draped and painted figure, like a Russian ikon,
which stood for God the Father in the Elizabethan Stage
Society's representation of " Everyman," seemed to me
quite reverently conceived and rendered. If we are to deal
with great subjects we must deal with them straightforwardly.
Let us bring any deific or angelic being on the stage if we
will do it simply, as the peasants do at Ober-Ammergau. I
once saw Sarah Bernhardt hissed off the stage in Paris for
taking the part of the Virgin Mary in a dramatic poem
of Edmond Haraucourt, a poet of at least serious inten-
tions. It was not that the verses of " La Passion " had
any irreverence in them, it was merely tint Sarah Bern-
hardt was a Jewess, and there is a feeling in France against
the Virgin Mary being associated with persons of her own
race. In the novel Ben Hur watches the Crucifixion ; the
adaptor stayed his hand in time, and we are left with
an Edwin Long picture of women and children, holding
olive branches in their hands, and singing, " Hosanna !
i ii
" Ben Hur " on the Stage.
Hosanna ! Hosanna in the highest ! " as they come down
from Mount Olivet.
In the scene which preceded this one, the scene of the
miracle, there was some attempt to produce one of those
effects which only Mr. Gordon Craig seems able to produce
satisfactorily. The stage was in darkness, gradually a little
light stole in, and a tossing crowd was seen dimly, waving
its hands in the air. So far so good, but the light, I
suppose to suggest miraculous methods, which it did not
suggest, increased rapidly, and the effect was gone almost
before we had time to realise it. The crowd, when seen,
was an ordinary stage-crowd, and, though all the faces
should have been turned in the direction from which Christ
was supposed to be approaching, half of them were turned
in the opposite direction. The reason was that a chorus was
being sung, and the chorus ladies and gentlemen had evidently
been told to keep their eyes fixed on the electrically lighted
baton of the conductor. They did, but the stage-picture
was spoilt, and there was nothing in the music to make
amends for it.
I 12
" Faust " at the Lyceum.
SIR HENRY IRVING has revived the version of Goethe's
" Faust " which W. G. Wills made for him some twenty
years ago, and is now playing it at the Lyceum, with Miss
Cecilia Loftus instead of Miss Ellen Terry as Margaret.
The piece has no longer novelty, the technique of its stage
managing is no longer surprising ; Miss Loftus is good, but
not startlingly good ; Sir Henry is much the same as he has
always been, and one is inclined to wonder whether the piece,
taken more or less on its own merits, is likely to repeat its
old, almost unparalleled successes.
Wills' adaptation begins with the third scene of " Faust,"
the scene of the study, the poodle, Mephistopheles, and the
student. The scene of the Witches' Kitchen comes next,
and the scene in Auerbach's cellar is transferred, in a some-
what mutilated shape, to the Lorenz-Platz at Nuremberg.
The two street scenes between Faust and Mephistopheles
are condensed into one, which takes place on the city wall,
against a curtain giving a red-roofed view of Nuremberg.
The spinning-wheel is transferred from Margaret's room to
Martha's garden. Otherwise the adaptation follows the
original scene by scene. Unfortunately Wills was not as
well satisfied with Goethe's verse as with his construction,
though it happens that the verse is distinctly better than the
construction. He kept the shell and threw away the kernel.
Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he gives his
name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet.
Here he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where
Goethe's words are followed, in a literal translation, the
113 H
" Faust " at the Lyceum.
meaning seems to have gone out of them; they are dis-
placed, they no longer count for anything. The Walpurgis
Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is
emptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' Kitchen brews
messes without magic, lest the gallery should be bewildered.
The part of Martha is extended, in order to get in some
more than indifferent " comic relief." Mephistopheles
throws away a good part of his cunning wit, in order
that he may shock no prejudices by seeming to be cynical
with seriousness, and in order that his red livery may have
its full spectral effect. Margaret is to be seen full length ;
the little German soubrette does her best to be the Helen
Faust takes her for ; and we are meant to be profoundly
interested in the love-story. " Most of all," the pro-
gramme assures us, Wills " strove to tell the love-story
in a manner that might appeal to an English-speaking
audience."
Now if you take the philosophy and the poetry out of
Goethe's " Faust," and leave the rest, it does not seem to me
that you leave the part which is best worth having. In
writing the First Part of " Faust " Goethe made free use of
the legend of Dr. Faustus, not always improving that legend
where he departed from it. If we turn to Marlowe's " Dr.
Faustus " we shall see, embedded among chaotic fragments
of mere rubbish and refuse, the outlines of a far finer,
a far more poetic, conception of the legend. Marlowe's
imagination was more essentially a poetic imagination
than Goethe's, and he was capable, at moments, of more
satisfying dramatic effects. When his Faustus says to
Mephistopheles :
114
" Faust " at the Lyceum.
One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart's desire :
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late ;
and when, his prayer being granted, he cries :
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium ?
he is a much more splendid and significant person than the
Faust of Goethe, who needs the help of the devil and of an
old woman to seduce a young girl who has fallen in love
with him at first sight. Goethe, it is true, made what
amends he could afterwards, in the Second Part, when much
of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world
was not active enough to replace it. Helen has her share,
among other abstractions, but the breath has not returned
into her body, she is glacial, a talking enigma, to whom
Marlowe's Faustus would never have said with the old
emphasis :
And none but thou shalt be my paramour !
What remains, then, in Wills' version, is the Gretchen
story, in all its detail, a spectacular representation of the not
wholly sincere witchcraft, and the impressive outer shell of
Mephistopheles, with, in Sir Henry Irving's pungent and
acute rendering, something of the real savour of the denying
spirit. Mephistopheles is the modern devil, the devil of
culture and polite negation ; the comrade, in part the master,
of Heine, and perhaps the grandson and pupil of Voltaire.
"5
<c Faust " at the Lyceum.
On the Lyceum stage he is the one person of distinction, the
one intelligence ; though so many of his best words have
been taken from him, it is with a fine subtlety that he says
the words that remain. And the figure, with its lightness,
weary grace, alert and uneasy step, solemnity, grim laughter,
remains with one, after one has come away and forgotten
whether he told us all that Goethe confided to him.
116
Yvette Guilbert.
I.
SHE is tall, thin, a little angular, most winningly and
girlishly awkward, as she wanders on to the stage with
an air of vague distraction. Her shoulders droop, her
arms hang limply. She doubles forward in an automatic
bow in response to the thunders of applause, and that
curious smile breaks out along her lips and rises and dances
in her bright light-blue eyes, wide open in a sort of child-
like astonishment. Her hair, a bright auburn, rises in soft
masses above a large pure forehead. She wears a trailing
dress, stripped yellow and pink, without ornament. Her
arms are covered with long black gloves. The applause
stops suddenly ; there is a hush of suspense ; she is begin-
ning to sing.
And with the first note you realise the difference between
Yvette Guilbert and all the rest of the world. A sonnet by
Mr. Andre Raffalovich states just that difference so subtly
that I must quote it to help out my interpretation :
If you want hearty laughter, country mirth
Or frantic gestures of an acrobat,
Heels over head or floating lace skirts worth
I know not what, a large eccentric hat
And diamonds, the gift of some dull boy
Then when you see her do not wrong Yvette,
Because Yvette is not a clever toy,
A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set ....
And should her song sound cynical and base
At first, herself ungainly, or her smile
Monotonous wait, listen, watch her face :
The sufferings of those the world calls vile
117
Yvette Guilbert.
She sings, and as you watch Yvette Guilbert,
You too will shiver, seeing their despair.
Now to me Yvette Guilbert was exquisite from the first
moment. " Exquisite ! " I said under my breath, as I first
saw her come upon the stage. But it is not by her personal
charm that she thrills you, and I admit that her personal
charm could be called in question. It must be said, too,
that she can do pure comedy, that she can be merely,
deliciously, gay. There is one of her songs in which she
laughs, chuckles, and trills a rapid flurry of broken words
and phrases, with the sudden, spontaneous, irresponsible
mirth of a bird. But where she is most herself is in a
manner of tragic comedy which has never been seen on the
music-hall stage from the beginning. It is the profoundly
sad and essentially serious comedy which one sees in Forain's
drawings, those rapid outlines which, with the turn of a
pencil, give you the whole existence of those base sections
of society which our art in England is mainly forced to
ignore. People call the art of Forain immoral, they call
Yvette Guilbert's songs immoral. That is merely the conven-
tional misuse of a conventional word. The art of Yvette
Guilbert is certainly the art of realism. She brings before
you the real life-drama of the streets, of the pot-house ;
she shows you the seamy side of life behind the scenes ;
she calls things by their right names. But there is not a
touch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated nor
contaminating by what she sings ; she is simply a great, imper-
sonal, dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it.
Her gamut in the purely comic is wide ; with an inflection
its
Yvette Guilbert.
of the voice, a bend of that curious long thin body which
seems to be embodied gesture, she can suggest, she can
portray, the humour that is dry, ironical, coarse (I will
admit), unctuous even. Her voice can be sweet or harsh ;
it can chirp, lilt, chuckle, stutter ; it can moan or laugh, be
tipsy or distinguished. Nowhere is she conventional ;
nowhere does she even resemble any other French singer.
Voice, face, gestures, pantomime, all are different, all are
purely her own. She is a creature of contrasts, and suggests
at once all that is innocent and all that is perverse. She
has the pure blue eyes of a child, eyes that are cloudless,
that gleam with a wicked ingenuousness, that close in the utter
abasement of weariness, that open wide in all the expression-
lessness of surprise. Her naivete is perfect, and perfect,
too, is that strange subtle smile of comprehension that
closes the period. A great impersonal artist, depending as
she does entirely on her expressive power, her dramatic
capabilities, her gift for being moved, for rendering the
emotions of those in whom we do not look for just that
kind of emotion, she affects one all the time as being, after
all, removed from what she sings of ; an artist whose
sympathy is an instinct, a divination. There is something
automatic in all fine histrionic genius, and I find some of
the charm of the automaton in Yvette Guilbert. The real
woman, one fancies, is the slim bright-haired girl who looks
so pleased and so amused when you applaud her, and whom
it pleases to please you, just because it is amusing. She
could not tell you how she happens to be a great artist ;
how she has found a voice for the tragic comedy of cities ;
how it is that she makes you cry when she sings of sordid
119
Yvette Guilbert.
miseries. " That is her secret," we are accustomed to say ;
and I like to imagine that it is a secret which she herself
has never fathomed.
II.
The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every one
else on the music-hall stage is precisely the difference
between Sarah Bernhardt and every one else on the stage of
legitimate drama. Elsewhere you may find many admirable
qualities, many brilliant accomplishments, but nowhere else
that revelation of an extraordinarily interesting personality
through the medium of an extraordinarily finished art.
Yvette Guilbert has something new to say, and she has
discovered a new way of saying it. She has had precursors,
but she has eclipsed them. She sings, for instance, songs of
Aristide Bruant, songs which he had sung before her, and
sung admirably, in his brutal and elaborately careless way.
But she has found meanings in them which Bruant, who
wrote them, never discovered, or, certainly, could never
interpret ; she has surpassed him in his own quality, the
macabre ; she has transformed the rough material, which
had seemed adequately handled until she showed how much
more could be done with it, into something artistically fine
and distinguished. And just as, in the brutal and macabre
style, she has done what Bruant was only trying to do, so,
in the style, supposed to be traditionally French, of delicate
insinuation, she has invented new shades of expression, she
has discovered a whole new method of suggestion. And it
is here, perhaps, that the new material which she has known,
by some happy instinct, how to lay her hands on, has been
1 20
Yvette Guilbert.
of most service to jher. She sings, a little cruelly, of the
young girl ; and the young girl of her songs (that demoiselle
de pensionnat who is the heroine of one of the most
famous of them) is a very different being from the fair
abstraction, even rosier and vaguer to the French mind than
it is to the English, which stands for the ideal of girlhood.
It is, rather, the young girl as Goncourt has rendered her in
" Cherie," a creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensa-
tions, already at work somewhat abnormally in an ansemic
frame, with an intelligence left to feed mainly on itself.
And Yvette herself, with her bright hair, the sleepy gold
fire of her eyes, her slimness, her gracious awkwardness,
her air of delusive innocence, is the very type of the
young girl of whom she sings. There is a certain malice
in it all, a malicious insistence on the other side of inno-
cence. But there it is, a new figure ; and but one among
the creations which we owe to this " comic singer," whose
comedy is, for the most part, so serious and so tragic.
For the art of Yvette Guilbert is of that essentially
modern kind which, even in a subject supposed to be comic,
a subject we are accustomed to see dealt with, if dealt with
at all, in burlesque, seeks mainly for the reality of things
(and reality, if we get deep enough into it, is never comic),
and endeavours to find a new, searching, and poignant ex-
pression for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part,
with all that part of life which the conventions were
invented to hide from us. We see a world where people
are very vicious and very unhappy ; a sordid, miserable
world which it is as well sometimes to consider. It is a side
of existence which exists ; and to see it is not to be attracted
121
Yvette Guilbert.
towards it. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of
" Eros vann6 " ; it is, for the most part, weary of itself,
without rest, and without escape. This is Yvette Guilbert's
domain ; she sings it, as no one has ever sung it before,
with a tragic realism, touched with a sort of grotesque irony,
which is a new thing on any stage. The rouleuse of the
Quartier Br6da, praying to the one saint in her calendar,
" Sainte Galette " ; the soularde, whom the urchins follow and
throw stones at in the street ; the whole life of the slums and
the gutter : these are her subjects, and she brings them, by
some marvellous fineness of treatment, into the sphere of art.
It is all a question of m&tier^ no doubt, though how far
her method is conscious and deliberate it is difficult to say.
But she has certain quite obvious qualities, of reticence, of
moderation, of suspended emphasis, which can scarcely be
other than conscious and deliberate. She uses but few
gestures, and these brief, staccato, and for an immediate
purpose ; her hands, in their long black gloves, are almost
motionless, the arms hang limply ; and yet every line of the
face and body seems alive, alive and repressed. Her voice
can be harsh or sweet, as she would have it, can laugh or
cry, be menacing or caressing ; it is never used for its own
sake, decoratively, but for a purpose, for an effect. And
how every word tells ! Every word comes to you clearly,
carrying exactly its meaning ; and, somehow, along with the
words, an emotion, which you may resolve to ignore, but
which will seize upon you, which will go through and
through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, the power to
make you feel intensely ; and that is precisely the final test
of a great dramatic artist.
122
The Paris Music-Hail.
IT is not always realised by Englishmen that England is
really the country of the music-hall, the only country where
it has taken firm root and flowered elegantly. There is
nothing in any part of Europe to compare, in their own
way, with the Empire and the Alhambra, either as places
luxurious in themselves or as places where a brilliant
spectacle is to be seen. It is true that, in England, the art
of the ballet has gone down ; the prima ballerina assoluta
is getting rare, the primo uomo is extinct. The training
of dancers as dancers leaves more and more to be desired,
but that is a defect which we share, at the present time,
with most other countries; while the beauty of the spectacle,
with us, is unique. Think of " Les Papillons " or of
" Old China " at the Empire, and then go and see a fantastic
ballet at Paris, at Vienna, or at Berlin ! And it is not only
in regard to the ballet, but in regard also to the "turns,'*
that we are so far ahead of all our competitors. I have
just been spending a couple of evenings at two of the most
characteristic Parisian music-halls, the Folies-Bergere and
La Scala. The " chief attraction " of the former was " Une
Revue aux Folies-Bergere," a pantomimic show with some
dancing ; at the latter, " Messalinette," a " revue," with no
dancing at all. There were other turns : vocalists at the
Scala, jugglers, and American eccentrics, and the like, at
the Folies-Bergere. To see the typical Paris singer you
must go to the Scala ; but for everything else the Folies-
Bergere is certainly to be preferred.
I have no great admiration for most of our comic gentle-
I2 3
The Paris Music-Hall.
men and ladies in London, but I find it still more difficult
to take any interest in the comic gentlemen and ladies of
Paris. Take Marie Lloyd, for instance, and compare with
her, say, Marguerite Deval at the Scala. Both aim at much
the same effect, but, contrary to what might have been
expected, it is the Englishwoman who shows the greater
finesse in the rendering of that small range of sensations to
which both give themselves up frankly. Take Polin, who
is supposed to express vulgarities with unusual success.
Those automatic gestures, flapping and flopping ; that
dribbling voice, without intonation ; that flabby droop and
twitch of the face ; all that soapy rubbing-in of the expres-
sive parts of the song : I could see no skill in it all, of a
sort worth having. The women here sing mainly with their
shoulders, for which they seem to have been chosen, and
which are often undoubtedly expressive. Often they do not
even take the trouble to express anything with voice or face ;
the face remains blank, the voice trots creakily. It is a doll
who repeats its lesson, holding itself up to be seen.
There was one woman at the Folies-Bergere who had
genuine talent, Louise Balthy. She reminded me a little
of Miss Effie Fay. She was the principal performer in the
" Revue aux Folies-Bergere," and she did a parody of Sarah
Bernhardt in " Theodora." She was " Miss Barnum," the
Music-Hall, and the Dance. In the last she did a series of
quick changes (partly on the stage), and indicated, with a
vivid skill of parody, Italian, Russian, Spanish, English,
and French ways of dancing. She galloped through all her
parts with astonishing celerity, putting sharp meanings into
things with a gesture, an intonation, a fling or twist of her
124
The Paris Music-Hall.
long, supple body. And she had a voice which she knew
how to use for her own purposes. No one else showed any
real, distinguishable ability. The amusement of the piece
was all contained in its costumes and scenery, in the indis-
cretions of the costumes and the piquant changes of the
scenery. We saw the roofs at midnight, with some human
cats, the Cirque d'Ete, a " seance mouvementee " at a
political club, and the house of " la Pai'va," the famous
courtesan of whom the Goncourts give so interesting an
account in their journal. La Pa'fva is seen taking her bath ;
she is seen, scarcely more dressed, as the centre of a fte
under the Second Empire. And all this rattles and glitters
with the regular French clatter of music in the orchestra
during all but the fourth and fifth scenes, for which M.
Louis Ganne had written music. We are to hear M. Ganne's
music, as I have always wanted to hear it, in London,
accompanying a Japanese ballet at the Alhambra. It is
essentially ballet music, full of clear colour, of gracious
movement, with a definite, yet not too emphatic, rhythm,
beating out the dancing steps gaily.
The French " revue," as one sees it here, done somewhat
roughly and sketchily, strikes one most of all by its curious
want of consecution, its entire reliance on the point of this
or that scene, costume, or performer. It has no plan, no
idea ; some ideas are flung into it in passing ; but it remains
as shapeless as an English pantomime, and not much more
interesting. Both appeal to the same undeveloped instincts,
the English to a merely childish vulgarity, the French to a
vulgarity which is more frankly vicious. Really, I hardly
know which is to be preferred. In England we pretend
125
The Paris Music-Hall.
that fancy dress is all in the interests of morality ; in France
they make no such pretence, and, in dispensing with
shoulder-straps, do but make their intentions a little
clearer. Go to the Moulin-Rouge and you will see a still
clearer object-lesson. The goods in the music-halls are
displayed, so to speak, behind glass, in a shop window ; at
the Moulin-Rouge they are on the open booths of a street
market.
126
An Actress and a Play.
IF you would see how far acting can go in the direction of
greatness without ever becoming great, go to the Adelphi
and see Miss Olga Nethersole in " Sapho." Do not con-
cern yourself much with the play, for good or evil. It is
Daudet's novel, adapted by Mr. Clyde Fitch, with the aid
of the French adaptation, in which Rejane was seen last
year at the Coronet. It does not make a good play, but I
am quite unable to understand why it brought Miss
Nethersole into trouble with the guardians of the stage
morality in America. Unless the mere fact of a collage is
not to be assumed on the stage, there is nothing even faintly
improper in it, and in England, at all events, we are not
unaccustomed to seeing that particular form of domesticity
on the stage. The piece is a crude piece, meant to give
emotional opportunities to an actress, and it does give those
opportunities. How does Miss Nethersole grapple with
them ?
Well, I find it difficult to say why she is so good and no
better. She begins by being ordinary and affected ; gradually
she becomes sincere, interesting, intense ; then she becomes
ordinary again, though not affected. Towards the end of
the second act she woke up suddenly for a few moments,
she had a fine outburst. But it was in the third act that
she was really good, and in this act she was good almost
throughout. Now Rejane, in the same part, was wonderful
from the first moment she entered the door to the last
moment when she closed the door behind her. She was
most wonderful, of course, in the moments of crisis, but
127
An Actress and a Play.
she held one's interest all the time, when she was doing
nothing, merely because she was there. That is what an
actress should do, and that is what Miss Nethersole did not
do. In the third act, it is true, she was good all through
the long scene of the supper, where she has to be merely
herself at ease ; but she was conspicuously poor in the
really very significant scene in the second act, when Sapho
comes to Jean Gaussin's rooms with the intention of remain-
ing. In that scene Rejane held one breathless. It was not
the calculated seduction of a man by a designing woman (as in
" Zaza "), it was a loving woman to whom it is life or death
to be loved. Miss Nethersole was the " girl from Maxim's,"
acting her own part. In the third act she was quite human,
she was so simple, direct, and powerful as to be really con-
vincing ; and yet, what was it that was wanting, if one
compared her with Rejane ? When I saw Rejane I felt an
actual physical sensation ; the woman took me by the
throat ; I felt, literally, as if some one were appealing straight
to me ; I seemed to be guilty of her tears. Miss Nether-
sole forced me to admire her, to accept her ; I felt that she
was very real, and, as I felt it, I said to myself: u She is
acting splendidly." With Rejane it was the feeling that
had possessed me ; here I was conscious that a certain feeling
was being appealed to, and I recognised the talent of the
actress.
After seeing this play, which exists only to be acted, it
was an interesting contrast to see, at the Stage Society's
performance in the Royalty Theatre, a play which exists at
least as much in the book as on the stage, Ibsen's " Lady
from the Sea." I wonder whether it loses a little in its
128
An Actress and a Play.
acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights ? That
is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the really
excellent performance, in which Miss Janet Achurch was at
her best, fine, subtle, sensitive, mysterious, and the other
people were for the most part quite adequate. The play
is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the problem
is the problem of all Ibsen's plays : the desire of life, the
attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only, we see the
eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls
to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland
home ; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant
life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes
form in a vague Stranger, who has talked to her of the sea-
birds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes seem to her
to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable
symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on
his back climbs over the garden wall and says : " I have
come for you ; are you coming ? " and then tells the woman
that he has read of her marriage in the newspaper, it seemed
as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its meaning in the
gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is,
but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witch-
craft if the Stranger had never appeared upon the stage.
Just as Wagner insisted upon a crawling and howling dragon,
a Fafner with a name of his own and a considerable presence,
so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the subconscious a little
crudely into the midst of his persons of the drama. To
use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable
way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of
allegory.
129 i
A Comedy of Fine Shades.
IN " The Bishop's Move," a comedy in three acts by John
Oliver Hobbes and Murray Carson, given at a special per-
formance at the Garrick Theatre, we have an attempt to do
artistically what so many writers for the stage have done
without thinking about art at all. There can be little
doubt that the story is due to Mr. Carson, and that the
writing is Mrs. Craigie's. Mrs. Craigie, no doubt, has
given her own turn to the story, which deals, in her
favourite way, with priestly and aristocratic persons, but
the actual point of sentiment out of which the story
is made is scarcely likely to have been deliberately chosen
by a writer who has usually set herself problems at once
harder and more interesting. Will the young man choose
the sweet young woman or the fascinating older woman, or,
as his novice's dress suggests, the church ? Will the Bishop
move in favour of the one or the other lady, and will his
move be determined by the temporal interests of his abbey
or by the real interests of these three people ? The " usual
three " stand in the usual relation to one another ; the deus
ex machind only differs from others of his kind in being a
Catholic Bishop ; the situation, in a word, is the normal
situation of " genteel comedy." We know how either of
the captains of the drama, Captain Marshall or Captain
Hood, would handle it ; we see the false sentiment, the
tears, the solemn absurdity of the whole thing. Also, we
hear the shouts of pit and gallery at the fall of every
curtain. How has Mrs. Craigie handled this very ordinary
material ? The story she has taken frankly, not rejecting
130
A Comedy of Fine Shades.
the aid of her symbolical chess-board, on which people
literally move pieces at the critical moments of the play.
She has used all sorts of clever little devices for making
people do something definite on the stage, one of the most
difficult of the playwright's tasks in modern drama. There
are organ pipes to be taken to pieces, and we are shown in
one act the front of the organ, resting against the side-
wall of the drawing-room, and in another act the back of
the organ, on the other side of the wall, in the morning-
room. There is an amateur printing-press, and a marvel-
lously disarranged proof, for which it is responsible. There
are deputations, illuminated addresses, a fresco, a pulpit.
So far we have got nothing which the professional play-
wright could not have given us. But what Mrs. Craigie
has done is to give us good writing instead of bad, delicate
worldly wisdom instead of vague sentiment or vague cyni-
cism, and the manners of society instead of an imitation of
some remote imitation of those manners. Her people are
drawn lightly, but they are drawn with a sure hand ; they
are not strung up to any tragic heights of emotion, but
they feel and think and speak just as clever people of our
acquaintance seem to feel and think, and certainly speak,
when we are brought into not too poignant relations with
them. The play is a comedy, and the situations are not
allowed to get beyond the control of good manners. We
are just enough interested in the people to take a keen
notice of what they are doing and saying, without losing
our interest in the game as a game. The game is after all
the thing, and the skill of the game. When the pawns
begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns, they are
131
A Comedy of Fine Shades.
hushed before they become disturbing. Barbara, the young
girl, is drawn with delicate truth to nature, and one has
only to hear her when she lets out her secret so ingenuously
to everybody in turn, and then to think of what she would
have been if we had come upon her in a " Second in Com-
mand " or a " Sweet and Twenty." The shy and rather
foolish young man is never foolish without intention; it
never occurs to the Duchess that her part requires her to be
always explaining herself; the Bishop allows himself the
leisure to comment with wise humour on his fellow
characters. We are never far from nature, while we seem
all the time to be but obeying the rules of the game. It
is in this power to play the game on its own artificial lines,
and yet to play with pieces made scrupulously after the
pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's skill, in this play,
seems to me to consist.
How this kind of work will appeal to the general public
I can hardly tell. When I saw " Sweet and Twenty " on
its first performance, I honestly expected the audience to
burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled
with delight, and audience after audience went on indefi-
nitely thrilling with delight. If the caricature of the
natural emotions can give so much pleasure, will a delicate
suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean very much
to the public ? When humour is always at hand to keep
pathos in its place, so that you have no need to be ashamed
of the people who are so unconsciously making such fools
of themselves, can one expect that an audience will be at all
thankful for this reserve, this rejection of the easy tribute
of tears ? I am afraid the general public cannot do without
132
A Comedy of Fine Shades.
its pocket handkerchief, to stifle laughter or to stifle sobs.
Here is a play which makes no demands on the pocket
handkerchief, but in which a dramatic writer is seen treating
the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of
the play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen.
Drama: Professional and Unprofessional.
LAST week gave one an amusing opportunity of contrasting
the merits and the defects of the professional and the
unprofessional kind of play. " The Gay Lord Quex " was
revived at the Duke of York's Theatre, and Mr. Alexander
produced at the St. James's Theatre a play called " The
Finding of Nancy," which had been chosen by the com-
mittee of the Playgoers' Club out of a large number of
plays sent in for competition. The writer, Miss Netta
Syrett, has published one or two novels or collections of
stories ; but this, as far as I am aware, is her first attempt
at a play. Both plays were unusually well acted ; Miss
Irene Vanbrugh was brilliant, masterly, and effective as
Sophy Fullgarney, and Mr. Hare admirably sure and
finished as Lord Quex ; while Miss Lilian Braithwaite has
never acted so well as in the part of Nancy, and Mr. Aubrey
Smith was quite good in the part of her lover. The two
plays, therefore, may be contrasted without the necessity of
making allowances for the way in which they were inter-
preted on the stage.
Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the
stage, an eye for what is telling, a cynical intelligence which
is much more interesting than the uncertain outlook of
most of our playwrights. He has no breadth of view,
but he has a clear view ; he makes his choice out of human
nature deliberately, and he deals in his own way with the
materials that he selects. Before saying to himself: what
would this particular person say or do in these circum-
stances ? he says to himself : what would it be effective on
'34
Drama: Professional and Unprofessional.
the stage for this particular person to do or say ? He
suggests nothing, he tells you all he knows ; he cares to
know nothing but what immediately concerns the purpose
of his play. The existence of his people begins and ends
with their first and last speech on the boards ; the rest is
silence, because he can tell you nothing about it. Sophy
Fullgarney is a remarkably effective character as a stage-
character, but, when the play is over, we know no more
about her than we should know about her if we had spied
upon her, in her own way, from behind some bush or key-
hole. We have seen a picturesque and amusing exterior,
and that is all. Lord Quex does not, I suppose, profess to
be even so much of a character as that, and the other people
are mere " humours," quite amusing in their cleverly
contrasted ways. When these people talk, they talk with an
effort to be natural and another effort to be witty ; they are
never sincere and without self-consciousness ; they never say
inevitable things, only things that are effective to say. And
they talk in poor English. Mr. Pinero has no sense of
style, of the beauty or expressiveness of words. His
joking is forced and without ideas ; his serious writing is
common. In "The Gay Lord Quex" he is continually
trying to impress upon his audience that he is very
audacious and distinctly improper. The improprieties are
childish in the innocence of their vulgarity, the audacities
are no more than trifling lapses of taste. He shows you
the interior of a Duchess's bedroom, and he shows you the
Duchess's garter, in a box of other curiosities. He sets his
gentlemen and ladies talking in the allusive style which you
may overhear whenever you happen to be passing a group
'35
Drama: Professional and Unprofessional.
_of London cabmen. The Duchess has written in her
diary, " Warm afternoon." That means that she has
spent an hour with her lover. Many people in the
audience laugh. All the cabmen would have laughed.
Now look for a moment at the play by the amateur and
the woman. It is not a satisfactory play as a whole, it is
not very interesting in all its developments, some of the
best opportunities are shirked, some of the characters (all
the characters who are men) are poor. But, in the first
place, it is well written. Those people speak a language
which is nearer to the language of real life than that used
by Mr. Pinero, and when they make jokes there is generally
some humour in the joke and some intelligence in the
humour. They have ideas and they have feelings. The
ideas and the feelings are not always combined with faultless
logic into a perfectly clear and coherent presentment of
character, it is true. But from time to time we get some
of the illusion of life. From time to time something is
said or done which we know to be profoundly true. A
woman has put into words some delicate instinct of a
woman's soul. Here and there is a cry of the flesh, here
and there a cry of the mind, which is genuine, which is
a part of life. Miss Syrett has much to learn if she is
to become a successful dramatist, and she has not as yet
shown that she knows men, as well as women ; but at
least she has begun at the right end. She has begun
with human nature and not with the artifices of the stage,
she has thought of her characters as people before thinking
of them as persons of the drama, she has something to
say through them, they are not mere lines in a pattern.
136
Drama: Professional and Unprofessional.
I am not at all sure that she has the makings of a
dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will be
better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your
destination by taking the right turning at the beginning
of the journey. The one certain thing is that if you take
the wrong turning at the beginning, and follow it per-
sistently, you will not get to your destination at all. The
playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes
the breath out of life before he has suited it to his purpose,
is at the best only playing a clever game with us. He may
amuse us, but he is only playing ping-pong with the
emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think,
any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as
it is does not always come into the picture.
'37
M. Capus in England.
LAST week an excellent Parisian company from the Variets
has been playing "La Veine " of M. Alfred Capus, and
this week it is playing " Les Deux Ecoles " of the same
entertaining writer. The company is led by Mme. Jeanne
Granier, an actress who could not be better in her own way
unless she acquired a touch of genius, and she has no
genius. She was thoroughly and consistently good, she was
lifelike, amusing, never out of key; only, while she
reminded one at times of Rejane, she had none of Rejane's
magnetism, none of Rejane's exciting naturalness.
The whole company is one of excellent quality, which
goes together like the different parts of a piece of machinery.
There is Mme. Marie Magnier, so admirable as an old lady
of that good, easy-going, intelligent, French type. There is
Mile. Lavalli&re, with her brilliant eyes and her little
canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M. Numes, M.
Guy, M. Guitry. M. Guitry is the French equivalent of Mr.
Fred Kerr, with all the difference that that change of
nationality means. His slow manner, his delaying panto-
mime, his hard, persistent eyes, his uninflected voice, made
up a type which I have never seen more faithfully presented
on the stage. And there is M. Brasseur. He is a kind of
French Arthur Roberts, but without any of that extravagant
energy which carries the English comedian triumphantly
through all his absurdities. M. Brasseur is preposterously
natural, full of aplomb and impertinence. He never flags,
never hesitates ; it is impossible to take him seriously, as
we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life.
138
M. Capus in England.
I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as
to whether " La Veine " is a fit play to be presented to the
English public. " Max" has defended it in his own way in
the Saturday < J^eview t and I hasten to say that I quite agree
with his defence. Above all, I agree with him when he
says : " Let our dramatic critics reserve their indignation
for those other plays, in which the characters are self-
conscious, winkers and gigglers over their own misconduct,
taking us into their confidence, and inviting us to wink and
giggle with them." There, certainly, is the offence ; there
is a kind of vulgarity which seems native to the lower
English mind and to the lower English stage. M. Capus is
not a moralist, but it is not needful to be a moralist. He
is a skilful writer for the stage, who takes an amiable, some-
what superficial, quietly humorous view of things, and he
takes people as he finds them in a particular section of the
upper and lower middle classes in Paris, not going further
than the notion which they have of themselves, and present-
ing that simply, without comment. We get a foolish
young millionaire and a foolish young person in a flower
shop, who take up a collage together in the most casual way
possible, and they are presented as two very ordinary people,
neither better nor worse than a great many other ordinary
people, who do or do not do much the same thing. They
at least do not " wink or giggle " ; they take things with
the utmost simplicity, and they call upon us to imitate their
bland unconsciousness.
" La Veine " is a study of luck, in the person of a very-
ordinary man, not more intelligent or more selfish or more
attractive than the average, but one who knows when to
M. Capus in England.
take the luck which comes his way. The few, quite
average, incidents of the play are put together with neat-
ness and probability, and without sensational effects, or
astonishing curtains ; the people are very natural and
probable, very amusing in their humors, and they often
say humorous things, not in so many set words, but by a
clever adjustment of natural and probable nothings.
Throughout the play there is an amiable and entertaining
common sense which never becomes stage convention ; these
people talk like real people, only much more a-propos.
In " Les Deux Ecoles " the philosophy which could be
discerned in " La Veine," that of taking things as they are
and taking them comfortably, is carried to a still further
development. I am prepared to be told that the whole
philosophy is horribly immoral ; perhaps it is ; but the
play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughti-
ness is so na'fve, so tactfully frank, that even the American
daughter might take her mother to see it, without fear of
corrupting the innocence of age. " On peut tres bien
vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes " : that is one
of the morals of the piece ; and, the more you think over
questions of conduct, the more you realise that you might
just as well not have thought about them at all, might be
another. The incidents by which these excellent morals
are driven home are incidents of the same order as those
in " La Veine/' and not less entertaining. The mounting,
simple as it was, was admirably planned ; the stage-pictures
full of explicit drollery. And, as before, the whole com-
pany worked with the effortless unanimity of a perfect piece
of machinery.
140
M. Capus in England.
A few days after seeing " La Veine," I went to
Wyndham's Theatre to see a revival of Sir Francis
Burnand's " Betsy." " Betsy," of course, is adapted from
the French, though, by an accepted practice which seems to
me dishonest, in spite of its acceptance, that fact is not
mentioned on the play-bill. But the form is undoubtedly
English, very English. What vulgarity, what pointless
joking, what pitiable attempts to serve up old impromptus
rechauffes ! I found it impossible to stay to the end.
Some actors, capable of better things, worked hard ; there
was a terrible air of effort in these attempts to be sprightly
in fetters, and in rusty fetters. Think of " La Veine " at
its worst, and then think of "Betsy"! I must not ask
you to contrast the actors ; it would be almost unfair. We
have not a company of comedians in England who can be
compared for a moment with Mme. Jeanne Granier's com-
pany. We have here and there a good actor, a brilliant
comic actor, in one kind or another of emphatic comedy ;
but wherever two or three comedians meet on the English
stage, they immediately begin to check-mate, or to outbid,
or to shout down one another. No one is content, or no
one is able, to take his place in an orchestra in which it is
not allotted to every one to play a solo.
141
A Double Enigma.
WHEN it was announced that Mrs. Tree was to give a
translation of " L'Enigme " of M. Paul Hervieu at
Wyndham's Theatre, the play was announced under the
title " Which ? " and as " Which ? " it appeared on the
placards. Suddenly new placards appeared, with a new
title, not at all appropriate to the piece, " Caesar's Wife."
Rumours of a late decision, or indecision, of the censor
were heard. The play had not been prohibited, but it had
been adapted to more polite ears. But how ? That was
the question. I confess that to me the question seemed
insoluble. Here is the situation as it exists in the play ;
nothing could be simpler, more direct, more difficult to
tamper with. Two brothers, Raymond and Gerard de
Gourgiran, are in their country house, with their two wives,
Giselle and L6onore, and two guests, the old Marquis de
Neste and the young M. de Vivarce. The brothers surprise
Vivarce on the stairs : was he coming from the room of
Giselle or of Leonore ? The women are summoned ; both
deny everything ; it is impossible for the audience, as for
the husbands, to come to any conclusion. A shot is heard
outside : Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save
the reputation of the woman he loves. Then the self-
command of Leonore gives way ; she avows all in a piercing
shriek. After that there is some unnecessary moralising
(" La-bas un cadavre ! Ici, des sanglots de captive ! " and
the like), but the play is over.
Now, the situation is perfectly precise ; it is not, perhaps,
very intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking
142
A Double Enigma.
dramatic situation. Above all, it is frank ; there are
no evasions, no sentimental lies, no hypocrisies before facts.
If adultery may not be referred to on the English stage
except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, then such
a play becomes wholly impossible. Not at all : listen.
We are told to suppose that Vivarce and Leonore have had
a possibly quite harmless flirtation ; and instead of Vivarce
being found on his way from Leonore's room, he has merely
been walking with Leonore in the garden : at midnight,
remember, and after her husband has gone to bed. In
order to lead up to this, a preposterous speech has been
put into the mouth of the Marquis de Neste, an idiotic
rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forget what else,
which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce's
sentiments as he walks with Leonore in the garden at mid-
night. But all these precautions are in vain ; the audience
is never deceived for an instant. A form of words has
been used, like the form of words by which certain lies
become technically truthful. The whole point of the play :
has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife's lover
if he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him ? is
obviously not a question of whether a husband may kill a
gentleman who has walked with his wife in the garden,
even after midnight. The force of the original situation
comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and the
uncertainty of the person responsible for it. " Cassar's
Wife " may lend her name for a screen ; the screen is no
disguise ; the play remains what it was in its moral bearing ;
a dramatic stupidity has been imported into it, that is all.
Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play, is a
H3
A Double Enigma.
second, not so easily explained, enigma : the enigma of the
censor, and of why he " moves in a mysterious way his
wonders to perform." The play, I must confess, does not
seem to me, as it seems to certain French critics, " une piece
qui tient du chef-d'ceuvre ... la tragedie des maitres antiques
et de Shakespeare." To me it is rather an insubstantial kind
of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle. As a tragic
episode, the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force
and simplicity, the admirable quality of directness. Occa-
sionally the people are too eager to express the last shade
of the author's meaning, as in the conversation between
Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides to commit
suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action
is really at an end. But I have never seen a piece which
seemed to have been written so kindly and so consistently
for the benefit of the actors. There are six characters of
equal importance ; and each in turn absorbs the whole flood
of the limelight.
The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting
was a version of " Au Telephone," one of Antoine's recent
successes at his theatre in Paris. It was brutal and realistic,
it made just the appeal of an accident really seen, and,
so far as success in horrifying one is concerned, it was suc-
cessful. A husband hearing the voice of his wife through
the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians
are breaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and help-
less to aid her, is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as
can well be imagined. It is brought before us with un-
questionable skill ; it makes us as uncomfortable as it
wishes to make us. But such a situation has absolutely no
144
A Double Enigma.
artistic value, because terror without beauty and without
significance is not worth causing. When the husband, with
his ear at the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one
is forcing the window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it
is true, a certain sympathetic suspense ; but compare this
crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and
delicious terror that we experience when, in "La Mort de
Tintagiles " of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the
door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death.
In his acting Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling ;
it would be difficult to say, under the circumstances, that
he was extravagant, for what extravagance, under the circum-
stances, would be improbable ? He had not, no doubt,
what I see described as " le jeu simple et terrible " of Antoine,
a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror ; he had the ready
abandonment to emotion of the average emotional man.
Mr. Warner has an irritating voice and manner, but he has
emotional power, not fine nor subtle, but genuine ; he feels,
and he makes you feel. He has the quality, in short, of the
play itself, but a quality more tolerable in the actor, who is
concerned only with the rendering of a given emotion, than
in the playwright, whose business it is to choose, heighten,
and dignify the emotion which he gives to him to render.
Three Problem Plays.
I. " The Marrying of Ann Leete."
IT was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville
Barker's that the Stage Society was founded, and it is doing
good service to the drama in producing them. " The
Marrying of Ann Leete," which was performed yesterday
afternoon at the Royalty Theatre, is the cleverest and most
promising new play that I have seen for a long time ; but it
cannot be said to have succeeded even with the Stage Society
audience, and no ordinary theatrical manager is very likely
to produce it. I am told that the author is a man of
twenty-three or twenty-four, and that he has been an actor
for many years. He is young ; his play is immature, too
crowded with people, too knotted up with motives, too
inconclusive in effect. He knows the stage, and his know-
ledge has enabled him to use the stage for his own purposes,
inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one or two
things which have never, or never so deftly, been done
before. But he is something besides all that ; he can think,
he can write, and he can suggest real men and women. The
play opens in the dark, and remains for some time brilliantly
ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-century people, talk
with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point ;
they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into day-
light. Some of the dialogue is, as the writer says of
politics, "a game for clever children, women, and fools";
it is a game demanding close attention. A courtly indolence,
an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air ; people walk,
146
Three Problem Plays.
as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on ; it
fills one with excitement, the excitement of following a
trail. It is a trail of ideas, these people think, and they act
because they have thought. They know the words they
use, they use them with deliberation, their hearts are in
their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting ; but
these people, they and their disconcerting actions, are
interesting, hold one's mind in suspense.
Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history
of a family, and he interests us in every member of that
family. He plays them like chessmen, and their moves
excite us as chess excites the mind. They express ideas ;
the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of
things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their
heads. They talk for effect, or rather for disguise ; it is
part of their keen sense of the game. They talk at cross-
purposes, as they wander in and out of the garden terrace ;
they plan out their lives, and life comes and surprises them
by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts,
sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naivete which seems
laughable ; and they act on sudden impulses, accepting the
consequences when they come. They live an artificial life,
knowing lies to be lies, and choosing them ; they are
civilised, they try to do their duty by society ; only, at every
moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their
path, and they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction.
They seem to go their own way, almost without guiding ;
and indeed may have escaped almost literally out of their
author's hands. The last scene is an admirable episode, a
new thing on the stage, full of truth within its own limits ;
H7
Three Problem Plays.
but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a solution.
Mr. Barker can write : he writes in short, sharp sentences,
which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing,
from every corner of the stage. He brings his people on
and off with an unconventionality which comes of knowing
the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the
traditions of its technique. The scene with the gardener in
the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has
the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions in
the play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker,
in doing the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite
strongly enough to carry it against opposition. The oppo-
sition is the firm and narrow mind of the British playgoer.
Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoy without crushing.
The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders the
world with what is novel in his art ; the great artist con-
vinces the world. Mr. Barker is young : he will come to
think with more depth and less tumult ; he will come to work
with less prodigality and more mastery of means. But he
has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and honest
in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to
move of themselves.
II. " The New Idol."
IT was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage
Society to give a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole," one of
those pieces by which M. Francois de Curel has reached that
very actual section of the French public which is interested in
ideas. "The New Idol" is a modern play of the most
148
Three Problem Plays.
characteristically modern type ; its subject-matter is largely
medical, it deals with the treatment of cancer ; we are shown
a doctor's laboratory, with a horrible elongated diagram of the
inside of the human body ; a young girl's lungs are sounded
in the doctor's drawing-room ; nearly every character talks
science, and very little but science. When they cease talking
science, which they talk well, with earnestness and with
knowledge, and try to talk love or intrigue, they talk badly,
as if they were talking of things which they knew nothing
about. Now, personally, this kind of talk does not interest
me ; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But 1 am ready to
admit that it is justified if I find that the dramatic move-
ment of the play requires it, that it is itself an essential part
of the action. In " The New Idol " I think this is partly
the case. The other medical play which has lately been
disturbing Paris, " Les Avaries," does not seem to me to
fulfil this condition at any moment : it is a pamphlet from
beginning to end, it is not a satisfactory pamphlet, and it
has no other excuse for existence. But M. de Curel has
woven his problem into at least a semblance of action ; the
play is not a mere discussion of irresistible physical laws ;
the will enters into the problem, and will fights against will,
and against not quite irresistible physical laws. The sugges-
tion of love interests, which come to nothing, and have no
real bearing on the main situation, seems to me a mistake ;
it complicates things, things which must appear to us so very
real if we are to accept them at all, with rather a theatrical
kind of complication. M. de Curel is more a thinker than
a dramatist, as he has shown lately in the very original,
interesting, impossible "Fille Sauvage." He grapples with
149
Three Problem Plays.
serious matters seriously, and he argues well, with a closely
woven structure of arguments ; some of them bringing a
kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of
thinking and closeness of seeing. In " The New Idol "
there is some dialogue, real dialogue, natural give-and-take,
about the fear of death and the horror of indestructibility
(a variation on one of the finest of Coventry Patmore's odes)
which seemed to me admirable : it held the audience because
it was direct speech, expressing a universal human feeling in
the light of a vivid individual crisis. But such writing as
this was rare ; for the most part it was the problem itself
which insisted on occupying our attention, or, distinct from
this, the too theatrical characters.
III. " Mrs. Warren's Profession."
THE Stage Society has shown the courage of its opinions
by giving an unlicensed play, " Mrs. Warren's Profession,"
one of the " unpleasant plays " of Mr. George Bernard
Shaw, at the theatre of the New Lyric Club. It was well
acted, with the exception of two of the characters, and the
part of Mrs. Warren was played by Miss Fanny Brough,
one of the cleverest actresses on the English stage, with
remarkable ability. The action was a little cramped by the
smallness of the stage, but, for all that, the play was seen
under quite fair conditions, conditions under which it could
be judged as an acting play and as a work of art. It is
brilliantly clever, with a close, detective cleverness, all made
up of merciless logic and unanswerable common sense. The
principal characters are well drawn, the scenes are constructed
150
Three Problem Plays.
with a great deal of theatrical skill, the dialogue is telling,
the interest is held throughout. To say that the characters,
without exception, are ugly in their vice and ugly in their
virtue ; that they all have, men and women, something of
the cad in them ; that their language is the language of
vulgar persons, is, perhaps, only to say that Mr. Shaw has
chosen, for artistic reasons, to represent such people just as
they are. But there is something more to be said. " Mrs.
Warren's Profession " is not a representation of life ; it is
a discussion about life. Now, discussion on the stage may
be interesting. Why not ? Discussion is the most interest-
ing thing in the world, off the stage ; it is the only thing
that makes an hour pass vividly in society ; but when
discussion ends art has not begun. It is interesting to see a
sculptor handling bits of clay, sticking them on here,
scraping them off there ; but that is only the interest of a
process. When he has finished I will consider whether his
figure is well or ill done ; until he has finished I can have no
opinion about it. It is the same thing with discussion on
the stage. The subject of Mr. Shaw's discussion is what is
called a " nasty " one. That is neither here nor there,
though it may be pointed out that there is no essential
difference between the problem that he discusses and the
problem that is at the root of " The Second Mrs. Tan-
queray."
But Mr. Shaw, I believe, is never without his polemical
intentions, and I should like, for a moment, to ask whether
his discussion of his problem, taken on its own merits, is
altogether the best way to discuss things. Mr. Shaw has
an ideal of life : he asks that men and women should be
Three Problem Plays.
perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their minds of
cant, and speak out everything that is in their minds. He
asks for cold and clear logic, and when he talks about right
and wrong he is really talking about right and wrong logic.
Now logic is not the mainspring of every action, nor is
justice only the inevitable working out of an equation.
Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves by clockwork ; and
must be regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed
simply in proportion to its exactitude in keeping time.
Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not move by clockwork,
and the ultimate justice will have to take count of more
exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of.
There is a great living writer who has brought to bear on
human problems as consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together
with something which Mr. Shaw disdains. Mr. Shaw's
logic is sterile, because it is without sense of touch, sense
of sight, or sense of hearing ; once set going it is warranted
to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's
logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness,
because it understands, and because to understand is,
among other things, to pardon. In a word, the difference
between the spirit of Tolstoi and the spirit of Mr. Shaw
is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit
of Euclid.
152
" Monna Vanna."
IN his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his
own, which was a sort of projection into space of the world
of nursery legends and of childish romances. It was at
once very abstract and very local. There was a castle by
the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a forest;
princesses with names out of the " Morte d'Arthur " lost
crowns of gold, and blind beggars without a name
wandered in the darkness of eternal terror. Death was
always the scene-shifter of the play, and destiny the
stage-manager. The people who came and went had the
blind gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their help-
lessness. Pity and terror had indeed gone to the making
of this drama, in a sense much more literal than
Aristotle's.
In all these plays there were few words and many
silences, and the words were ambiguous, hesitating, often
repeated, like the words of peasants or children. They
were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant,
but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and signifi-
cance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.
Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was
everything ; and in an essay in " Le Tresor des Humbles "
Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was
only the words that were not said which mattered.
Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme
of the play. With " Aglavaine et Selysette " we got a
drama of the inner life, in which there was little action,
little effective dramatic speech, but in which people thought
" Monna Varrna."
about action and talked about action, and discussed the
morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.
" Monna Vanna " is a development out of " Aglavaine et
Selysette," and in it for the first time Maeterlinck has
represented the conflicts of the inner life in an
external form, making drama, while the people who
undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of
their happening.
In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destinee,"
Maeterlinck says : " On nous affirme que toutes les grandes
tragedies ne nous oflfrent pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte
de 1'homme contre la fatalit6. Je crois, au contraire, qu'il
n'existe pas une seule tragMie ou la fatalite regne reelle-
ment. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas une ou le
heros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est
jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesss, qu'il attaque."
And, on the preceding page, he says: " Observons que
les poetes tragiques osent tres rarement permettre au sage
de parakre un moment sur la scene. Us craignent une ame
haute parce que les eVenements la craignent." Now it is
this conception of life and of drama that we find in " Monna
Vanna." We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the
old man Marco and in the instinctively wise Giovanna, with
the tragic folly personified in the husband Guido, who rebels
against truth and against life, and loses even that which he
would sacrifice the world to keep. The play is full of
lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against
the too ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of
morality. Here is a play in which almost every character
is noble, in which treachery becomes a virtue, a lie becomes
'54
" Monna Vanna."
more vital than truth, and only what we are accustomed to
call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even criminal. And
it is most like life, as life really is, in this : that at any
moment the whole course of the action might be changed,
the position of every character altered, or even reversed, by
a mere decision of the will, open to each, and that things
happen as they do because it is impossible, in the nature of
each, that the choice could be otherwise. Character, in the
deepest sense, makes the action, and there is something in
the movement of the play which resembles the grave and
reasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and
women deliberate wisely and not only passionately, in which
it is not only the cry of the heart and of the senses which
takes the form of drama.
In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in " Les Aveugles,"
"Interieur," and even " Pelleas et Melisande," he is
dramatic after a new, experimental fashion of his own;
"Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the
word. The action moves, and moves always in an interesting,
even in a telling, way. But at the same time I cannot but
feel that something has been lost. The speeches, which
were once so short as to be enigmatical, are now too long,
too explanatory ; they are sometimes rhetorical, and have
more logic than life. The playwright has gained experience,
the thinker has gained wisdom, but the curious artist has
lost some of his magic. No doubt the wizard had drawn
his circle too'small, but now he has stepped outside his circle
into a world which no longer obeys his formulas. In
casting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery
which alone could replace them ? " Monna Vanna " is a
" Monna Vanna."
remarkable and beautiful play, but it is not a masterpiece.
" La Mort de Tintagiles " was a masterpiece of a tiny, too
deliberate, kind ; but it did something which no one had
ever done before. We must still, though we have seen
" Monna Vanna," wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not
given us all that he is capable of giving us.
156
The Question of Censorship.
THE letter of protest which appeared in the 'Times of
Friday, June 30, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith,
and Mr. Hardy, the three highest names in contemporary
English literature, will, I hope, have done something to
save the literary reputation of England from such a fate as
one eminent dramatic critic sees in store for it. " Once
more," says the vAthenceum^ " the caprice of our censure
brings contempt upon us, and makes, or should make, us
the laughing-stock of Europe." The Morning Tost is
more lenient, and is " sincerely sorry for the unfortunate
censor," because "he has immortalised himself by pro-
hibiting the most beautiful play of his time, and must live
to be the laughing-stock of all sensible people."
Now the question is, which is really made ridiculous by
this ridiculous episode of the prohibition of Maeterlinck's
" Monna Vanna," England or Mr. Redford ? Mr. Redford
is a gentleman of whom I only know that he is not himself
a man of letters, and that he has not given any public
indication of an intelligent interest in literature as literature.
If, as a private person, before his appointment to the official
post of censor of the drama, he had expressed in print an
opinion on any literary or dramatic question, that opinion
would have been taken on its own merits, and would have
carried only the weight of its own contents. The official
appointment, which gives him absolute power over the
public life or death of a play, gives to the public no
guarantee of his fitness for the post. So far as the public
can judge, he was chosen as the typical " man in the street,"
The Question of Censorship.
the " plain man who wants a plain answer," the type of the
" golden mean," or mediocrity. We hear that he is honest
and diligent, that he reads every word of every play sent for
his inspection. These are the virtues of the capable clerk,
not of the penetrating judge. Now the position, if it is to
be taken seriously, must require delicate discernment as well
as inflexible uprightness. Is Mr. Redford capable of dis-
criminating between what is artistically fine and what is
artistically ignoble ? If not, he is certainly incapable of
discriminating between what is morally fine and what is
morally ignoble. It is useless for him to say that he is not
concerned with art, but with morals. They cannot be dis-
severed, because it is really the art which makes the morality.
In other words, morality does not consist in the facts of a
situation or in the words of a speech, but in the spirit which
informs the whole work. Whatever may be the facts of
" Monna Vanna " (and I contend that they are entirely
above reproach, even as facts), no one capable of discerning
the spirit of a work could possibly fail to realise that the
whole tendency of the play is noble and invigorating. All
this, all that is essential, evidently escapes Mr. Redford.
He licenses what the 'Times rightly calls " such a gross
indecency as ' The Girl from Maxim's.' ' But he refuses
to license "Monna Vanna," and he refuses to state his
reason for withholding the licence. The fact is, that moral
questions are discussed in it, not taken for granted, and the
plain man, the man in the street, is alarmed whenever people
begin to discuss moral questions. "The Girl from Maxim's"
is merely indecent, it raises no problems. " Monna Vanna"
raises problems. Therefore, says the Censor, it must be
158
The Question of Censorship.
suppressed. By his decision in regard to this play of
Maeterlinck, Mr. Redford has of course conclusively
proved his unfitness for his post. But that is only one
part of the question. The question is : could any one
man be found on whose opinion all England might safely
rely for its dramatic instruction and entertainment ? I
do not think such a man could be found. With Mr.
Redford, as the Times puts it, " any tinge of literary merit
seems at once to excite his worst suspicions." But with a
censor whose sympathies were too purely literary, literary
in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of some other
kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student
who cannot tolerate an innocent jesting with " serious "
things, scruples of the moralist who must choose between
Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio, between Tolstoi and Ibsen ?
I cannot so much as think of a man in all England who
would be capable of justifying the existence of the censor-
ship. Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made
ridiculous by this ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all,
England, which has given us the liberty of the press and
withheld from us the liberty of the stage ?
'59
Music in the Theatre.
IT is the constant endeavour of the arts to do one another's
work, to occupy one another's province. Literature, which,
as a working craft, is a compromise between speech and
song, does indeed, with some measure of success, steal from
both music and painting, while it can be correctly enough
qualified by terms drawn from sculpture and architecture.
But when painting tries to compete with music, as in the
Valkyries of Fantin-Latour and of Henry de Groux, or
when music tries to compete with painting, as in some of
the symphonies of Richard Strauss or the Nocturnes of
Claude Debussy, each art, it seems to me, loses in real
qualities what it gains in make-believe qualities. But the
worst example of this further kind of artistic adultery
consists in the indiscriminate mixing of words and music
which we hear in most theatres, in a crude form, during the
performance of a melodrama ; in some theatres, in a less
crude but not less objectionable form, during the perform-
ance of a tragedy ; and, finally, in its most pretentious
form of all, a would-be artistic creation, like Strauss'
"Enoch Arden."
We all know the few meek bars of soft music which
steal up from the orchestra at the most sentimental moments
of a sentimental piece at the Adelphi or the Vaudeville.
No one, I suppose, takes very seriously those feeble attempts
to fasten his wandering attention. They persist, like other
self-evident absurdities ; but no one defends them. But
when a musician like Mr. Coleridge-Taylor or Mr. Percy
Pitt writes " incidental " music for a play such as " Ulysses "
1 60
Music in the Theatre.
or " Paolo and Francesca," no one seems to realise that this
is merely the carrying of an absurdity to a still more absurd
length. Indeed, a critic in the Times of March 7 complains
that " unfortunately the authors of plays, and especially of
poetical plays, seem to have little sympathy for the sister
art of music, and appear to regard it as a harmful necessary
adjunct." This critic, speaking of Mr. Pitt's music (in-
cluding " persistent melodrame ") laments " the baneful
influence of managerial scissors." " Where," he asks, " was
the music in that other scene when, on Paolo's acknow-
ledging his love for his brother's wife, Giovanni hisses out
the words, ' Thou hast said it ! ' ? "
I am quite prepared to admit that a managerial scissors
which sheared at random, cutting here and sparing there,
can hardly be defended without reservations. But I contend
that the managerial scissors did not cut enough. When
the curtain is down let there be as much incidental music
as you please, whether specially written for the performance
by a composer of reputation like Mr. Pitt or Mr. Coleridge-
Taylor, or taken from the appropriate work of a composer,
like Tschaikowsky's music to " Hamlet," which I heard
with so much pleasure last week in the intervals of Mr.
Forbes-Robertson's performance. There is no real reason
why music of the most casual kind, so long as it is good
music, and there is a good orchestra to play it, should not
be played during the intervals of a play to which a musical
setting would be obviously absurd, like a farce, or a play of
Mr. Pinero. But the intrusion of a single note of music,
except when words are sung to that music, or when troops
are represented silently marching to music, or when a guitar
161 L
Music in the Theatre.
is supposed to be heard in the street, or for some similar
reason, is an intrusion of the most useless, objectionable,
and wholly inartistic kind.
A musical critic of my acquaintance complained to me,
at the first performance of " Paolo and Francesca," that he
could not hear the music properly, because the people on
the stage would talk while it was going on. His criticism
was perfectly just. Either you go to hear the words, and
then you do not want to be disturbed and annoyed by music
which clashes with those words, the spoken rhythm and the
musical rhythm being invariably contradictory, or else you
go to hear the music, and then you do not want to hear it
in snaps and gasps, with a great many unnecessary words
inserted. What would you think of a manager who pro-
vided a series of magic-lantern pictures as an accompaniment
to a serious play, and who called off your attention, at the
most serious moments of that play, by flashing a symbolical
representation of them on a curtain at the back of the stage ?
Yet that would be doing precisely what those managers are
doing who give us music in the orchestra during the per-
formance of a play on the stage.
It is one step further, along a downward path, when we
find a composer like Schumann writing music to be played
by the orchestra while Byron's " Manfred " is recited, or a
composer like Richard Strauss writing music for the piano
to be played while Tennyson's " Enoch Arden " is recited.
I had an opportunity of hearing both, only the other day,
on the occasion of Herr Strauss' visit to London. Schu-
mann's music suffered most, partly because it had so much
more to lose, but both performances were a torture to me.
162
Music in the Theatre.
Herr Strauss conducted the " Manfred " with great delicacy,
and I was .waiting anxiously for the most delicate passage
in the music, the lento at the beginning of Act III. It came;
I believe it was beautifully played, but while it was being
played, pianissimo, Herr von Possart was shouting in a
strenuous voice, and in German :
If that I did not know philosophy
To be of all our vanities the motliest,
The merest word that ever fooled the ear
From out the schoolman's jargon . . .
The delicate music was lost, buried under the weight of a
German voice and the dust of Byron's verses.
The systematic distortion of words by music and of music
by words seems to have culminated in Debussy's setting of
Maeterlinck's " Pelleas et Melisande," lately produced at
the Opera-Comique. I have not heard it, or seen the music,
but I have read accounts of it, written from every point of
view, and I have talked with people who have heard it. Miss
Alma-Tadema gives her impression of it, which seems to me
as if it must be a just one, in her article on " Monna Vanna "
in the Fortnightly Review. M. Vincent d'Indy, the com-
poser, in a very generous article in that excellent French
magazine V Occident, the best and most thoughtful of the
younger French reviews, has said all there is to be said in
its defence. It is an attempt to write music without either
melody or rhythm, in an "uninterrupted stream of
harmony," and to set this music murmuring in the orchestra
while the actors or singers speak or sing their words to
notes without sequence or connection. Of the voices, we
163
Music in the Theatre.
are told by M. Raymond Bouyer in the Nouvelle Revue,
" Le chant des acteurs n'est qu'une declamation des voix ;
cette declamation n'est qu'une psalmodie sans forme et sans
couleur, en une crpuscule." Of the orchestra, we are told
by M. Camille Bellaigue in the Revue des Deux Mondes,
" II fait peu de bruit, je 1'accorde, mais un vilain petit
bruit."
164
On Crossing Stage to Right.
IF you look into the actors' prompt-books, the most
frequent direction which you will find is this : " Cross
stage to right." It is not a mere direction, it is a formula ;
it is not a formula only, but a universal remedy. When-
ever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to become
weak or wordy, you must " cross stage to right " ; no matter
what is wrong with the play, this will set it right. We have
heard so much of the " action " of a play, that the stage-
manager in England seems to imagine that dramatic action
is literally a movement of people across the stage, even if
for no other reason than for movement's sake. Is the play
weak ? He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending
it out walking for its health.
If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well
as an improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main
requirements is that it should make pictures. That is the
lesson of Bayreuth, and when one comes away, the impres-
sion which remains, almost longer than the impression of
the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the
actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture
which has not been regulated for him ; there is none of that
unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these
people move like music, or with that sense of motion which
it is the business of painting to arrest. But here, of course,
I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not
aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck
should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention ;
but I admit that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.
165
On Crossing Stage to Right.
The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier's company
came over here to give us some lessons in acting, I watched
a little scene in " La Veine," which was one of the telling
scenes of the play : Guitry and Brasseur standing face to
face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then
waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in
which the whole temperament of each is summed up. One
is inclined to say : No English actor could have done it.
Perhaps ; but then, no English stage-manager would have
let them do it. They would have been told to move, to find
" business," to indulge in gesture which would not come
naturally to them. Again, in " Tartuffe," when, at the end,
the hypocrite is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin
simply turns his back on the audience, and stands, with
head sullenly down, making no movement ; then, at the
end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the
nearer side of the stage, giving you no more than a momen-
tary glimpse of a convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross,
raging mood. It would have taken Mr. Tree five minutes
to get off the stage, and he would have walked to and fro
with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one face, so
to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective,
that is to say, so real ?
A great part of the art of French acting consists in know-
ing when and how not to do things. Their blood helps
them, for there is movement in their blood, and they have
something to restrain. But they have realised the art there
is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as people do
when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words
they are saying and not on their antics while saying them.
1 66
On Crossing Stage to Right.
The other day, in the first act of " The Bishop's Move " at
the Garrick, there is a Duchess talking to a young novice
in the refectory of a French abbey. After standing talking
to him for a few minutes, with only such movements
as would be quite natural under the circumstances, she
takes his arm, not once only but twice, and walks him
up and down in front of the footlights, for no reason in
the world except to " cross stage to right." The stage
trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of
any pretence to reality.
The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the differ-
ence between what is dramatic and what is merely theatrical.
Drama is made to be acted, and the finest " literary " play
in the world, if it wholly fails to interest people on the
stage, will have wholly failed in its first and most essential
aim. But the finer part of drama is implicit in the words
and in the development of the play, and not in its separate
small details of literal " action." Two people should be
able to sit quietly in a room, without ever leaving their
chairs, and to hold our attention breathless for as long as the
playwright likes. Given a good play, French actors are able
to do that. Given a good play, English actors are not
allowed to do it.
Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the
English character which prevents our actors from ever sitting
or standing still on the stage ? We are a nation of travellers,
of sailors, of business people ; and all these have to keep for
ever moving. Our dances are the most vigorous and
athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage, with all
kinds of leaping and kicking movements. Our music-hall
167
On Crossing Stage to Right.
performers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to
this country, in which kicking and leaping are also a part of
the business. Our melodramas are constructed on more
movable planes, with more formidable collapses and
collisions, than those of any other country. Is not, then,
the persistent English habit of " crossing stage to right " a
national characteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a
matter of training ? It is this reflection which hinders
me from hoping, with much confidence, that a reform in
stage-management will lead to a really quieter and simpler
way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried ?
Might not some stage-manager come forward and say : " For
heaven's sake stand still, my dear ladies and gentlemen, and
see if you cannot interest your audience without moving
more than twice the length of your own feet ? "
168
Suggestions to Managers.
I HAVE been waiting for a quiet moment in which to make
a few complaints or suggestions about some practical matters
connected with the stage. I take them as they recur to my
memory.
One is this : Why is the hour at which performances
begin so rarely printed on the tickets ? An afternoon
performance may begin at two, at two-thirty, or at three ;
an evening performance at any quarter of the hour from
eight to nine, and occasionally even earlier. Very few
people live quite close to the theatres ; most have to time
themselves exactly according to the speed of the carriages,
cabs, omnibuses, or trains in which they travel. Thus the
exact hour of the performance is a matter of considerable
moment. Now perhaps one ticket in thirty which comes
into my hands as a dramatic critic contains the hour of the
performance. I live too far from the theatre to be able to
go and look at the placards outside the theatre doors ; if I
went, I should frequently find that the time was not
mentioned even on these placards. I suppose, as a rule,
people look at the advertisements in the newspapers. But
I happen to take in no newspaper, and often do not see one
for weeks together. Sometimes I buy an evening paper
for the special purpose of finding out the time of a
performance ; only to find no advertisement of the
theatre to which I have to go, or an advertisement which
mentions everything but the time. It seems to me that
it is part of the business of a theatre to print the time of
performance on every ticket, and so self-evident a part of
169
Suggestions to Managers.
its business that I cannot understand why it is not univer-
sally done.
Most theatres have by now abolished the old system of
paying for programmes: should not that system be
abolished in all theatres ? As a rule a dramatic critic is
not charged for his programme, and I am now speaking,
not for myself, but for the general public. The un-
expected demand for sixpence usually pulls up a man
on his difficult and painful struggle to get around knees
without treading on toes ; it keeps him fumbling in his
pocket, to the inconvenience of half a row of people,
some of whom are standing to let him pass. But in the
case of a lady it is worse. Two ladies who come to
the theatre together have either come in a carriage, without
thinking of bringing money with them, or else they have the
exact cab fare home in the palm of their gloves. They
have neither pockets nor purses. What can they do ? They
must go without a programme, because they have forgotten
that the theatre to which they have come is one of the
penny-wise and pound-foolish sort.
And now, having spoken for the public, let me speak for
myself. The custom seems to me to be increasing of giving
bad seats to the dramatic critics, or to all but those who
represent the two or three most influential papers. I have
never been able to understand the principle on which seats
are distributed. A few theatres reserve the best seats of the
first few rows of the stalls for the use of the critics ; but in
most of the theatres I am liable to be startled by the sight
of Mr. Archer, let us say, in the back row, and some
obscure person, whose name I cannot give because I do not
170
Suggestions to Managers.
know it, in the front row. Several theatres push back their
stalls half way into the pit for a first night, and give the
critics what are really no better than seats in the pit, while
the better part of the theatre is filled with showy " paper."
Now the opinion of the critics must be considered of some
importance, or they would not be invited to attend ; and
their opinion must to some extent depend on their comfort,
on whether they have or have not to strain their eyes to see
what is going on on the stage, and their ears to hear what
is being said there. Is it not wise, as well as fair, to make
the critic's task as pleasant to him as you can ? Remember
that he does not come to the theatre for his pleasure, and
that he is the only person in the audience who has to
come alone.
A recent misadventure of Mr. Robert Newman, who has
done so much for music in England, has set me thinking
on the question of concert-giving, and I am convinced that
two things are mainly responsible for the financial losses of
concert-givers : one is that the seats are too expensive, and
the other is, that the concerts are too long. Now a reform
in one of these evils would lead necessarily to the reform
of the other. Mr. Newman may say, " I am obliged to
charge 155. for a stall, or I cannot pay my orchestra its
^200, and my soloists their various big prices." I would
answer : No one can enjoy the whole of such concerts as
you give ; cut them in two, charge half the price for each
half, and instead of having a hall made up of empty seats
and " paper," you will have every seat filled. In some of
the East End theatres and music halls there are two per-
formances an evening ; the performances are cheap and
171
Suggestions to Managers.
brief, and they are packed twice over. The East End has
much to teach us. Let an afternoon be divided into two
concerts, one following the other with a short interval, and
neither longer than an hour, or an hour and a quarter. The
first audience can have tea after its concert, the second
audience can have tea before its concert. Neither audience
will have a headache.
The fact is, that music cannot be listened to with any
real enjoyment when it is listened to hour after hour in a
heavy atmosphere. The ears listen mechanically, in a
kind of stupor ; the brain ceases to follow ; you can no longer
either criticise or enjoy. What we want is to have short
concerts, and short concerts will bring with them what are
rightly termed popular prices. Will not Mr. Newman or
some other businesslike enthusiast try the experiment ?
172
The Price of Realism.
MODERN staging, which has been carried in England to its
highest point of excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and
is, indeed, often beautiful in detail. But its real aim is not
at the creation of beautiful pictures, in subordination to the
words and actions of the play, but at supplementing words
and actions by an exact imitation of real surroundings.
... . ^
Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its attempt to
imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the
substitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory
indications of them. " Real water " we have all heard of,
and we know its place in the theatre ; but this is only the
simplest form of this anti-artistic endeavour to be real. Sir
Henry Irving will use, for a piece of decoration meant to be
seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation flowers,
exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where
two or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place
more effectively. When d'Annunzio's " Francesca da
Rimini " was put on the stage in Rome, a pot of basil was
brought daily from Naples in order that it might be laid on
the window-sill of the room in which Francesca and Paolo
read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published
in one of the English papers, d'Annunzio declared that he
had all his stage decorations made in precious metal by fine
craftsmen, and that he had done this for an artistic purpose,
and not only for the beauty of the things themselves. The
gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his lips a cup of
finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that of
the actor who uses a gilded u property."
173
The Price of Realism.
If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an
amateur. The true actor walks in a world as real in its
unreality as that which surrounds the poet or the enthusiast.
The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in the midst of which
he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him,
while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character,
as all the real grass and real woodwork with which the
manager will cumber the stage on the first night. As
little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the
gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround
him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are speaking
for them.
This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice
of the modern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be
said that it is really even when it pretends to be : a perfectly
deceptive imitation of a real thing ? I said once, to clinch
an argument against it, by giving it its full possible credit,
that the modern staging can give you the hour of the day
and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. But
can it ? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught
the miraculous lunar trick to the life ? Has the real hedge-
row ever brought a breath of the country upon the stage ?
I do not think so, and meanwhile, we have been trying
our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead of
abandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the
magic of the play itself.
When, on many occasions, I have praised Mr. Gordon
Craig's staging of " Acis and Galatea," " Dido and
Aeneas," and "The Masque of Love," for its beauty,
suggestion, and novel audacities, I have said a great deal.
174
On Musical Criticism.
LAST week, one of the Academy's essayists in little found
himself wondering why there were so few instructive and
delightful books about music, why, as a rule, or even as an
exception, there was so little instructive and delightful
musical criticism. But I think " M. M. B." exaggerates.
" Why," he laments, " is there so much written that is inter-
esting concerning books and writers, art and artists, science
and scientists, and so little appealing to the music-lover or
helping him in his art ? " Now it seems to me that, in
spite of the fact that music is much more difficult to write
about than any of the other arts, a great deal that is both
interesting and valuable has been written about music,
not only from a technical but from a general point of view.
Wagner's prose writings present us with a body of theory con-
cerning his art such as few poets or painters have ever given us
concerning theirs. Indeed, I think we can find a parallel only
in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Joshua Reynolds
on the one hand, and of Goethe and Coleridge on the other.
Then, among musicians, there was Schumann, who edited
musical papers and wrote the main part of them ; who
wrote, indeed, in only too literary a way, but always with
an eager and watchful insight, which was rarely deceived,
ready to discover a new genius before that genius had really
discovered himself. Liszt wrote with voluminous and
flowing eloquence, as in his book on Chopin ; Berlioz was
a musical critic for thirty years, besides writing one of the
most delightful and quite the most exhilarating of auto-
biographies; Saint-Saens, Bruneau, Vincent d'Indy, most
177 M
On Musical Criticism.
indeed of the contemporary French composers, have written
musical criticism, always in an attractive as well as a sound
and serious way. Gluck, who anticipated Wagner in his
music, anticipated him also in a theoretical preface which
sets forth very much the ideas which Wagner was afterwards
to develop. Then in regard to the musicians who have
written nothing for the public, how much splendid incidental
criticism do we not find in the letters which their biographers
have printed after their death ! For my part I know
hardly any biographical literature so full, various, and enter-
taining as the biographies of musicians. Few musicians
have not had at least one good biographer. And, as a
matter of interest, I contend that Grove's " Dictionary of
Musicians " is as good a companion for a wet day in the
country as any volume of Larousse or of the " Encyclopaedia
Britannica."
" The musical papers," says " M. M. B.," " fall far short
of their possibilities, and few critics are capable of really
illuminative articles." No doubt ; but remember that while
everybody, in a certain sense, can write about literature, only
musicians, or those who have made a special study of music,
can write about music, and a good musician is much better
employed in writing music. Think of the ecstasy with
which Berlioz, when at last he had made a little money by
his "Troyens," gave up his post on the Debats ! "At
last," he cries in his autobiography, " after thirty years'
bondage, I am free ! No more feuilletons to write, no more
commonplaces to excuse, no more mediocrities to praise, no
more indignation to suppress ; no more lies, no more
comedies, no more mean compromises I am free!" And
178
On Musical Criticism.
he gravely writes down : " Gloria in exce/sis Deo, et in terra
pax hominibus bon<e voluntatis"
The reason why music is so much more difficult to write
about than any other art, is because music is the one
absolutely disembodied art, when it is heard, and no more
than a proposition of Euclid, when it is written. It is
wholly useless, to the student no less than to the general
reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes
for which we pay sixpence at the concerts. " Repeated by
flute and oboe, with accompaniment for clarionet (in triplets)
and strings pizzicato, and then worked up by the full
orchestra, this melody is eventually allotted to the 'cellos,
its accompaniment now taking the form of chromatic
passages," and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a
rhapsody which has nothing to do with the notes, and to
present this as an interpretation of what the notes have
said in an unknown language. Yet what method is there
besides these two methods ? None, indeed, that can ever
be wholly satisfactory ; at the best, no more than a com-
promise.
In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which
makes it poetry must always evade expression, there yet
remain the whole definite meaning of the words, and the whole
easily explicable technique of the verse, which can be made
clear to every reader. In painting, you have the subject of
the picture, and .you have the colour, handling, and the like,
which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But
music has no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its
meaning as music ; and, to understand anything of what
is meant by its technique, a certain definite technical know-
179
On Musical Criticism.
ledge is necessary in the reader. What subterfuges are
required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion of what a
piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all,
beyond generalisation, which would apply equally to half a
dozen different pieces ! The composer himself, if you ask
him, will tell you that you may be quite correct in what you
say, but that he has no opinion in the matter.
Music has indeed a language, but it is a language in
which birds and other angels may talk, but out of which
we cannot translate their meaning. Emotion itself, how
changed becomes even emotion when we transport it into
a new world, in which only sound has feeling ! But I
am putting it as if it had died and been re-born there,
whereas it was born in its own region, and is wholly
ignorant of ours.
Now is there not some reason why musical criticism is
not always " illuminative," " instructive," or " delightful " ?
Is it not, on the other hand, surprising that so much
valuable writing about music does exist ? Of music as
music, perhaps no one has really written ; but theory and
anecdote, these remain, and when Berlioz writes it, even
a treatise on instrumentation can become as interesting as
a fairy-tale.
1 80
The Meiningen Orchestra.
OTHER orchestras give performances, readings, approxima-
tions ; the Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that
is, the thing itself. When this orchestra plays a piece of
music every note lives, and not, as with most orchestras,
every particularly significant note. Brahms is sometimes
dull, but he is never dull when these people play him ;
Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him.
What they do is precisely to put vitality into even those
parts of a composition in which it is scarcely present, or
scarcely realisable ; and that is a much more difficult thing,
and really a more important thing, for the proper apprecia-
tion of music, than the heightening of what is already fine,
and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality
of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while
it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there
at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing ; it
cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work
with meaning which never could have belonged to it.
Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new
vigour of life ; but Strauss, played by these sincere,
precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as he never could
show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre
stands from life. When I heard the " Don Juan " which
I had heard twice before, and liked less the second time
than the first, I realised finally the whole strain, pretence,
and emptiness of the thing. Played with this earnest
attention to the meaning of every note, it was like a trivial
drama when Duse acts it ; it went to pieces through being
181
The Meiningen Orchestra.
taken at its own word. It was as if a threadbare piece
of stuff were held up to the full sunlight ; you saw every
stitch that was wanting.
The " Don Juan " was followed by the Entr'acte and
Ballet music from " Rosamunde," and here the same sun-
light was no longer criticism, but rather an illumination. I
have never heard any music more beautifully played. I
could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann. The
faint, delicate music just came into existence, breathed a
little, and was gone. Here for once was an orchestra
which could literally be overheard. The overture to the
" Meistersinger " followed, and here, for the first time, I
got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressions
which that piece presents to one simultaneously. I heard
the unimpeded march forward, and I distinguished at the
same time every delicate impediment thronging the way.
Some renderings give you a sense of solidity and straight-
forward movement ; others of the elaborate and various life
which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the
complete thing, completely rendered.
I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture
to " Tristan." Here the notes, all that was so to speak
merely musical in the music, were given their just expres-
sion ; but the something more, the vast heave and throb of
the music, was not there. It was a " classical " rendering
of what is certainly not " classical " music. Hear that
overture as Richter gives it, and you will realise just where the
Meiningen orchestra is lacking. It has the kind of energy
which is required to render Beethoven's multitudinous
energy, or the energy which can be heavy and cloudy in
iSz
The Meiningen Orchestra.
Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner
himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in
the overture to the u Meistersinger." But that wholly
new, and somewhat feverish, overwhelming quality which
we find in the music of " Tristan" meets with something
less than the due response. It is a quality which people
used to say was not musical at all, a quality which does not
appeal certainly to the musical sense alone : for the render-
ing of that we must go to Richter.
Otherwise, in that third concert, it would be difficult to
say whether Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, or Beethoven was
the better rendered. Perhaps one might choose Mozart for
pure pleasure. It was the " Serenade " for wind instru-
ments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the most
delightful music in the world. The music of Mozart is, no
doubt, the most beautiful music in the world. When I
heard the serenade I thought of Coventry Patmore's epithet,
actually used, I think, about Mozart : " glittering peace."
Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven all seemed for
the moment to lose a little of their light under this pure
and tranquil and unwavering "glitter." I hope I shall
never hear the " Serenade " again, for I shall never hear it
played as these particular players played it.
The Meiningen orchestra is famous for its wind, and
when, at the first concert, I heard Beethoven's Rondino for
wind instruments, it seemed to me that I was hearing brass
for the first time as I had imagined brass ought to sound.
Here was, not so much a new thing which one had never
thought possible, as that precise thing which one's ears had
expected, and waited for, and never heard. One quite
183
The Meiningen Orchestra.
miraculous thing these wind players certainly did, in
common, however, with the whole orchestra. And that
was to give an effect of distance, as if the sound came
actually from beyond the walls. I noticed it first in the
overture to " Lenore," the first piece which they played ;
an unparalleled effect and one of surprising beauty.
Another matter for which the Meiningen orchestra is
famous is its interpretation of the works of Brahms. At
each concert some fine music of Brahms was given finely,
but it was not until the fourth concert that I realised, on
hearing the third Symphony, everything of which Brahms
was capable. It may be that a more profound acquaintance
with his music would lead me to add other things to this
thing as the finest music which he ever wrote ; but the third
Symphony certainly revealed to me, not altogether a new,
but a complete Brahms. It had all his intellect and some-
thing more ; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of
passion.
184
The New Bayreuth.
IN order to hear and see Wagner as Wagner wished to
be heard and seen it is no longer necessary to make the
pilgrimage to Bayreuth. There is now a new Bayreuth at
Munich, and at Munich one is not thrown so entirely on
one's own resources as at Bayreuth. One can spend the
morning at the Old Pinakothek with either Rubens or
Botticelli ; or at the Glyptothek among the marbles of
Aegina, as if among young children of the gods ; or even
at that <c Secession " exhibition, which can hardly be
neglected by an observer of the modern German as he is
and as he would be. Then, at half-past three, one drives
up the winding hill of the Gasteig to the square, plain,
grey and green Prinz-Regenten-Theater, which is an
improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the
same amphitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible
orchestra, the same vast stage, set far back, the same
entrances, the same system of numbering the seats and the
cloak-room seats on a single ticket. Inside, the house is
built of grey stone, with, in the main, simple decorations in
gold and green, but with a hideous pictorial roof, like the
roof of a hotel dining-room. There is a restaurant, opening
out of the circular corridor which runs round the building,
and, opening out of the restaurant, a square garden, green
and white, which, under either sunlight or electric light, is
like a garden in a picture.
Everything is done as at Bayreuth : there are even the
three " fanfaren " at the doors ; there is the same punctual
and irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of
185
The New Bayreuth.
each act. There are about 300 fewer seats in the theatre,
and the seats are a little more comfortable, though one
realises, after a few hours, that wood was not meant for
sitting on in its natural state. The solemnity of the whole
thing makes one almost nervous, for the first few minutes of
each act ; but, after that, how near one is, in this perfectly
darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the music surges
up out of the " mystic gulf," and the picture exists in all
the ecstasy of a picture on the other side of it, beyond
reality, how near one is to being alone, in the passive state
in which the flesh is able to endure the great burdening and
uplifting of vision ! There are now two theatres in the
world in which music and drama can be absorbed, and not
merely guessed at. That this second one exists is due
largely to the persistent energy of Herr von Possart,
Intendant of the Royal Bavarian Theatres, and to the
liberality of the Prince-Regent, who is continuing the great
tradition of the mad king of genius, Ludwig II., to whom
Wagner owed so much in his lifetime. I think we should
forgive Herr von Possart for his rendering of " Enoch
Arden" in German, to the too literal music of Richard
Strauss, on that recent, unsuccessful visit to London. He
has done a great work here in Munich, and all Europe should
be grateful to him.
I reached Munich in time to hear the two last perform-
ances of the series, "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger " ;
the former under Herr Franz Fischer, the Jatter under Herr
Hermann Zumpe. The orchestra, perhaps especially in
" Tristan," and the voices and chorus in " Die Meister-
singer," were equal to anything I have ever heard in a
186
The New Bayreuth.
theatre ; and Herr Lautenschlager's staging was quite the
best of its kind I have ever seen. " Tristan " was glorified
by Ternina, who is both a great singer and a fine actress,
profoundly passionate as both ; but the other singers, though
good, were not so good as others I have heard. But in
" Die Meistersinger " every singer seemed to be exactly suited
to the part, and every singer was excellent. Herr Knote,
with his great, vivid voice, seemed Walther himself, and
Herr Feinhals the actual Hans Sachs. Herr Geis was an
admirable Beckmesser ; Frl. Kloboth did charmingly all
that was to be done with Eva. And the music, as it rose
out of the depths, came, in " Tristan," wave after wave,
breaking and rebounding, in "Die Meistersinger" like the
weaving of a great loom, in patterns of delicate sound ;
music in which one heard the great sweep and snap of the
strings, and the voice of every wind, each distinct, if one
listened for it, and all swept together into a single army,
marching victoriously. Beyond this insurgent host, with its
cries and cannons, its armour and waving flags, moves the
picture, which at times reminded me of a Dilrer, as in the
group of sailors on Tristan's ship, when Brangaene draws
aside the curtain ; it was always a German picture, with
brilliant colours, vivid effects, and an amazing reality in its
buildings, rippling seas, costumes, moonlight and sunlight.
If we are to have realism on the stage, let it be done as it is
done here, so completely, so unobtrusively, with such excel-
lent taste and knowledge. I did not like the rippling sea in
the third act of " Tristan," but it was at least better done
than I have ever seen it done. In " Die Meistersinger " the
crowd at the end, and the apprentices' fight in the second
187
The New Bayreuth.
act, made all the attempts of Mr. Tree seem puny and
ineffectual. Here, better than at Bayreuth, was the typical
modern staging done perfectly ; it gave one a certain kind of
picture, with all the difference that exists, in painting itself,
between good and bad art, if one compares it with the best
English and French staging. And, above all, it was signifi-
cant, it all meant something, it all helped to bring out
Wagner's meaning.
It is only when Wagner is done in his own way that we
can realise exactly what it is that, he has achieved in
art. Here, undoubtedly, was unity of effect, and, here,
it could not be said that any one art interfered with any
other art. The music, as in Nietzsche's interpretation,
was the " Dionysiac " element, the vital principle ; the rest
was the picture, the human illusion, which the music held
back into its place, on the other side of the gulf. As I sat
in this grave and discreet theatre, I thought with horror of
the whole aspect of things at Covent Garden : the house,
constructed for fashionable display, with its light, noise,
and disturbance ; the emphatic orchestra, incapable of
either delicacy or precision, playing the music all in italics
and capitals ; the pinched and gaudy staging, the ludicrous
costumes, the scarecrow and crow-voiced chorus, the one
or two star singers ; the mangled scores, which must be
got through between dinner and midnight. When shall
we have a theatre in London which one can mention on the
same page with the Prinz-Regenten-Theater in Munich ?
188
Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten.
THEY are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at
the Hof-Theater, to follow the Wagner operas at the
Prinz-Regenten-Theater ; and I stayed, on my way to
Salzburg, to hear " Die Zauberflote." It was perfectly
given, with a small, choice orchestra under Herr Zumpe,
and with every part except the tenor's admirably sung
and acted. Herr Julius Zarest, from Hanover, was
particularly good as Papageno ; the Eva of " Die Meister-
singer " made an equally good Pamina. And it was staged,
under Herr von Possart's direction, as suitably and as
successfully, in its different way, as the Wagner opera had
been. The sombre Egyptian scenes of this odd story, with
its menagerie and its pantomime transformation, were turned
into a thrilling spectacle, and by means of nothing but a
little canvas and paint and limelight. It could have cost
very little, compared with an English Shakespeare revival,
let us say ; but how infinitely more spectacular, in the good
sense, it was ! Every effect was significant, perfectly in its
place, doing just what it had to do, and without thrusting
itself forward for separate admiration. German art of to-
day is all decorative, and it is at its best when it is applied
to the scenery of the stage. Its fault, in serious painting,
is that it is too theatrical, it is too anxious to be full of too
many qualities besides the qualities of good painting. It is
too emphatic, it is meant for artificial light. If Franz
Stuck would paint for the stage, instead of using his
vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction and
nightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would
189
Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten.
do, perhaps rather better, just what these scene-painters do,
with so much skill and taste. They have the sense of
effective decoration ; and German art, at present, is almost
wholly limited to that sense.
I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely
music, which played round the story like light transfiguring
a masquerade ; and now, by a lucky chance, I can brood
over it here in Salzburg, where Mozart was born, where he
lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera is to be
seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and
set down where it should always have been, high up among
the pine-woods of the Capuzinerberg. I find myself
wondering how much Mozart took to himself, how much
went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow
of great hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has
the air of a little toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square
in a clean, trim, perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat
roofs, packed close together on each side of a long, winding
river, which trails across the whole breadth of the plain.
From the midst of the town you look up everywhere at
heights ; rocks covered with pine-trees, beyond them hills
hooded with white clouds, great soft walls of darkness, on
which the mist is like the bloom of a plum ; and, right
above you, the castle, on its steep rock swathed in trees,
with its grey walls and turrets, like the castle which one has
imagined for all the knights of all the romances. All this,
no doubt, entered into the soul of Mozart, and had its
meaning for him ; but where I seem actually to see him,
where I can fancy him walking most often, and hearing
more sounds than elsewhere come to him through his eyes
190
Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten.
and his senses, is the Mirabell-Garten, which lies behind the
palace built by an Archbishop of Salzburg in the seventeenth
century, and which is laid out in the conventional French
fashion, with a harmony that I find in few other gardens.
I have never walked in a garden which seemed to keep itself
so reticently within its own severe and gracious limits. The
trees themselves seem to grow naturally into the pattern of
this garden, with its formal alleys, in which the birds fly in
and out of the trellised roofs, its square-cut bushes, its low
stone balustrades, its tall urns out of which droop trails of
pink and green, its round flower-beds, each of a single
colour, set at regular intervals on the grass, its tiny fountain
dripping faintly into a green and brown pool ; the long, sad
lines of the Archbishop's Palace, off which the brown paint
is peeling ; the whole sad charm, dainty melancholy, formal
beauty, and autumnal air of it. It was in the Mirabell-
Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart.
The music of Mozart, as one hears it in " Die Zauber-
flote," is music without desire, music content with beauty,
and to be itself. It has the firm outlines of Diirer or of
Botticelli, with the same constraint within a fixed form, if
one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and splendour
of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticell's " Entomb-
ment," which I had been seeing in the Munich Gallery ; in
hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian " Scourging of Christ."
Mozart has what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering
peace " : to Patmore that quality distinguished supreme art,
and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in its kind, supreme. It
has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need to look
outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself.
191
Mozart in the Mirabell- Garten.
Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express ;
but he cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses
everything, and, through the mere emotional power of the
notes themselves, he conveys to us all that he cares to
convey : awe, for instance, in those solemn scenes of the
priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with his
magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling
with Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth Night."
" Die Zauberflo'te " is really a very fine kind of pantomime,
to which the music lends itself in the spirit of the thing,
yet without condescending to be grotesque. The duet of
Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as
lovely as a duet of two birds, of less flaming feather. As
the lovers ascend through fires and floods, only the piping
of the magic flute is heard in the orchestra : imagine Wagner
threading it into the web of a great orchestral pattern ! For
Mozart it was enough, and, for his art, it was enough. He
gives you harmony which does not need to mean anything
outside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful ; and he
gives you beauty with a certain exquisite formality, not
caring to go beyond the lines which contain that reticent,
sufficient charm of the Mirabell-Garten.
192
An Apology for Puppets.
AFTER seeing a ballet, a farce, and the fragment of an
opera performed by the marionettes at the Costanzi
Theatre in Rome, I am inclined to ask myself why we
require the intervention of any less perfect medium between
the meaning of a piece, as the author conceived it, and
that other meaning which it derives from our reception of
it. The living actor, even when he condescends to sub-
ordinate himself to the requirements of pantomime, has
always what he is proud to call his temperament ; in other
words, so much personal caprice, which for the most
part means wilful misunderstanding ; and in seeing his
acting you have to consider this intrusive little personality
of his as well as the author's. The marionette may be
relied upon. He will respond to an indication without reserve
or revolt ; an error on his part (we are all human) will cer-
tainly be the fault of the author ; he can be trained to
perfection. As he is painted, so will he smile ; as the wires
lift or lower his hands, so will his gestures be ; and he will
dance when his legs are set in motion.
Seen at a distance, the puppets cease to be an amusing
piece of mechanism, imitating real people ; there is no
difference. I protest that the Knight who came in with his
plumed hat, his shining sword, and flung back his long
cloak with so fine a sweep of the arm, was exactly the same
to me as if he had been a living actor, dressed in the same
clothes, and imitating the gesture of a knight ; and that the
contrast of what was real, as we say, under the fiction
appears to me less ironical in the former than in the latter.
193 N
An Apology for Puppets.
We have to allow, you will admit, at least as much to
the beneficent heightening of travesty, if we have ever seen
the living actor in the morning, not yet shaved, standing
at the bar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in
that abandonment to laughter which has become, from
the necessity of his profession, a natural trick ; oh, much
more, I think, than if we merely come upon an always
decorative, never an obtrusive, costumed figure, leaning
against the wall, nonchalantly enough, in a corner of the
coulisses.
To sharpen our sense of what is illusive in the illusion of
the puppets, let us sit not too far from the stage. Choosing
our place carefully, we shall have the satisfaction of always
seeing the wires at their work, while I think we shall lose
nothing of what is most savoury in the feast of the
illusion. There is not indeed the appeal to the senses of
the first row of the stalls at a ballet of living dancers.
But is not that a trifle too obvious a sentiment for the true
artist in artificial things ? Why leave the ball-room ? It
is not nature that one looks for on the stage in this kind of
spectacle, and our excitement in watching it should remain
purely intellectual. If you prefer that other kind of illusion,
go a little further away, and, I assure you, you will find it
quite easy to fall in love with a marionette. I have seen the
most adorable heads, with real hair too, among the wooden
dancers of a theatre of puppets ; faces which might easily,
with but a little of that good-will which goes to all falling in
love, seem the answer to a particular dream, making all other
faces in the world but spoilt copies of this inspired piece of
painted wood.
194.
An Apology for Puppets.
But the illusion, to a more scrupulous taste, will consist
simply in that complication of view which allows us to see
wood and wire imitating an imitation, and which delights
us less when seen at what is called the proper distance,
where the two are indistinguishable, than when seen from
just the point where all that is crudely mechanical hides
the comedy of what is, absolutely, a deception. Loosing, as
we do, something of the particularity of these painted
faces, we are able to enjoy all the better what it is certainly
important we should appreciate, if we are truly to
appreciate our puppets. This is nothing less than a
fantastic, yet a direct, return to the masks of the Greeks ;
that learned artifice by which tragedy and comedy were
assisted in speaking to the world with the universal voice,
by this deliberate generalising of emotion. It will be a
lesson to some of our modern notions ; and it may be in-
structive for us to consider that we could not give a play
of Ibsen's to marionettes, but that we could give them the
"Agamemnon."
Above all, for we need it above all, let the marionettes
remind us that the art of the theatre should be beautiful
first, and then indeed what you will afterwards. Gesture
on the stage is the equivalent of rhythm in verse, and it can
convey, as a perfect rhythm should, not a little of the inner
meaning of words, a meaning perhaps more latent in
things. Does not gesture indeed make emotion, more
certainly and more immediately than emotion makes gesture ?
You may feel and you may suppress emotion ; but assume
a smile, lifted eyebrows, a clenched fist, and it is impossible
for you not to assume along with the gesture, if but for a
An Apology for Puppets.
moment, the emotion to which that gesture corresponds.
In our marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the
gesture, like all other forms of emotion, generalised. The
appeal in what seems to you these childish manceuvrers is to
a finer, because to a more intimately poetic, sense of things
than the merely rationalistic appeal of very modern plays.
If at times we laugh, it is with wonder at seeing humanity
so gay, heroic, and untiring. There is the romantic sugges-
tion of magic in this beauty.
Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes
" Drames pour marionnettes," no doubt to intimate his
sense of the symbolic value, in the interpretation of a
profound inner meaning, of that external nullity which the
marionette by its very nature emphasises. And so I find
my puppets, where the extremes meet, ready to interpret
not only the " Agamemnon," but " La Mort de Tinta-
giles " ; for the soul, which is to make, we may suppose,
the drama of the future, is content with as simple a mouth-
piece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic
drama.
196
By the same Writer.
Poems. (Collected Edition in two Volumes,)
An Introduction to the Study of Browning. (Out of
Print.)
Studies in Two Literatures. (Out of Print.)
The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
Cities. (In the Press.)
In Preparation :
Tristan and Iseult. A Tragedy in Verse, in Four Acts.
Spiritual Adventures.
Studies in the Seven Arts.
A History of English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.
Volume I., The Georgian Age.
Printed by
BALLANTYNE, HANSON <& Co.
London &" Edinburgh
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