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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13928 ***
+
+PLAYS
+ACTING AND MUSIC
+
+A BOOK OF THEORY
+
+BY
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+
+
+LONDON
+
+
+1909
+
+
+
+_To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and admiration_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
+material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
+many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
+remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first;
+what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have
+been: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions
+which I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events,
+the programme was carried out.
+
+This book, I said then, 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 æsthetics, 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 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 æsthetics choose
+to confine themselves 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.
+
+1903, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+An Apology for Puppets                    3
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+Nietzsche on Tragedy                     11
+
+Sarah Bernhardt                          17
+
+Coquelin and Molière                     29
+
+Réjane                                   37
+
+Yvette Guilbert                          42
+
+Sir Henry Irving                         52
+
+Duse in Some of Her Parts                60
+
+Annotations                              77
+
+M. Capus in England                      93
+
+A Double Enigma                         100
+
+
+DRAMA
+
+Professional and Unprofessional         109
+
+Tolstoi and Others                      115
+
+Some Problem Plays                      124
+
+"Monna Vanna"                           137
+
+The Question of Censorship              143
+
+A Play and the Public                   148
+
+The Test of the Actor                   152
+
+The Price of Realism                    162
+
+On Crossing Stage to Right              167
+
+The Speaking of Verse                   173
+
+Great Acting in English                 182
+
+A Theory of the Stage                   198
+
+The Sicilian Actors                     213
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+On Writing about Music                  229
+
+Technique and the Artist                232
+
+Pachmann and the Piano                  237
+
+Paderewski                              258
+
+A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert     268
+
+The Dramatisation of Song               277
+
+The Meiningen Orchestra                 284
+
+Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten           290
+
+Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth             297
+
+
+Conclusion: A Paradox on Art            315
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+
+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 subordinate 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 certainly 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. 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 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.
+
+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. Losing, 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 instructive 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 that 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 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 manoeuvres 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 suggestion of magic
+in this beauty.
+
+Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
+marionettes," 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 Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to
+make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple
+a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic
+drama.
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+
+
+
+NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY
+
+
+I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy 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 Mænad, 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 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 rampart 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 contemplation, 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 spirit, 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 l'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 æsthetics 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic
+game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its
+joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital principle. "If it
+were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing 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."
+
+
+
+
+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
+Phèdre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, 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 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 Réjane 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 Camélias," 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
+attractiveness, as with Réjane; 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 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 Réjane; it is differently expressed, that is
+all. With Réjane 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 earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas
+fils 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 "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to
+realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre," 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 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 Phèdre Racine tells us that it
+is "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre." The
+word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phèdre
+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
+remoteness 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 "Phèdre" 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 actress must, in such parts, be
+conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in
+modern conversation? 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 Phèdre that she was eleven or
+twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias." Is it reality,
+is it illusion? Illusion, 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 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 significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem
+to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to
+an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always
+reminds me of a musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument
+of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
+One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente,
+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 savour 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 her, 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. 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 pleasure 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 Bernhardt. One
+sometimes forgets that Réjane 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.
+
+
+
+
+COQUELIN AND MOLIÈRE: SOME ASPECTS
+
+
+To see Coquelin in Molière is to see the greatest of comic actors at his
+best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a student, or
+anything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be compared with
+that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the training of nature.
+They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that Coquelin, with
+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 instrument of Sarah, which
+seems to go by itself, câline, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that
+wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate
+effect. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a
+disguise, never a revelation.
+
+I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their company at the Garrick
+Theatre. They did "Tartuffe," "L'Avare," "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,"
+"Les Précieuses Ridicules," and a condensed version of "Le Dépit
+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 Dépit
+Amoureux," and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Molière's
+day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Molière was not a
+poet, and he knew that he was not a poet. When he ventured to write the
+most Shakespearean of his comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le même
+préjugé," Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de
+Pierre,' parce qu'il était en prose, nuisit au succès de 'l'Avare.'
+Cependant le public qui, à la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par
+donner à cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il mérite. On comprit alors
+qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comédies 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. Molière was a great prose writer, but I do
+not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The
+temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. His
+worldly wisdom, his active 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-René; 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 Molière 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 Molière 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 of Molière or of the character of Coquelin. Probably there
+is no difference. We get Molière's vast, succulent farce of the
+intellect rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail,
+is not what Molière meant, then so much the worse for Molière.
+
+Molière 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 Précieuses 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 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 its
+head 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 interpretation. The part of Maître Jacques in "L'Avare," for
+instance, which I have just seen him perform with such gusto and such
+certainty, 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 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 independent 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
+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 a 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.
+
+
+
+
+RÉJANE
+
+
+The genius of Réjane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all the
+ingredients of the dish may be named without defining 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
+Verlaine'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: and I had to think twice, before I could
+remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which
+I had been almost cruelly enjoying.
+
+The art of Réjane accepts things as they are, without selection or
+correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall
+be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the
+shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is
+common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is
+leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose.
+To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where
+nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever
+form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
+untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
+toute entière à sa proie attachée," and she has all the brutality and
+all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious
+vice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in
+which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their
+own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the
+whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity
+which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every
+moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect;
+then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you
+will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done
+nothing with genius.
+
+Réjane 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. Réjane, 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 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 love. 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: here, in "Sapho," is a woman who
+flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himself
+before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt to
+win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
+herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of
+one who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to
+nature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion.
+Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a
+disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you
+will: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a
+blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think
+in one way. Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some
+thrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its
+attributes but some fundamental nobility, Réjane takes the big, foolish,
+dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit
+of acting?
+
+
+
+
+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, striped 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 beginning 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. André
+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
+  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 merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
+though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.
+
+It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly,
+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 conventional
+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, impersonal,
+dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it.
+
+Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an inflection 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
+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 expressionlessness of surprise. Her
+naïveté 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 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 of most
+service to her. 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 "Chérie," a
+creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at work
+somewhat abnormally in an anæmic 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 innocence. 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 endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant expression
+for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all that part
+of life which the conventions were intended 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 towards
+it. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vanné"; 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
+Bréda, praying to the one saint in her calendar, "Sainte Galette"; the
+_soûlarde_, 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 _métier_, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Goldsmith. 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 represents 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 movement; 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 permanent charm of a very natural nature, which
+has become deliciously sophisticated. 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
+not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment 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 limitations
+of the stage.
+
+Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." 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 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 was 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 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 chromolithographic
+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. In 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 may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating
+remains.
+
+Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
+"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
+spectacle. It is a play made up principally 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; 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 extravagant 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 conceived 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 Englishwoman 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
+consequences 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 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'a intention, and
+played brilliantly enough to distract 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 construction 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 naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it might
+be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse
+simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial 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 loathing 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 conscious art,
+an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. 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 movements 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 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 positive. 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 so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
+has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo 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 painfulness. 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 beautiful
+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 inexcusable 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 a failure of a
+far higher order than such successes 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 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
+Camélias," 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 sentiment 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 unnatural 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 sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
+the simple, 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 greatness, 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 reproachfulness, 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 Mlle. 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 intercourse
+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 "La Dame aux Camélias" 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.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
+Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." 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 "Fédora," 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 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 "Fédora." 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 unimaginative
+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
+disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
+medium of a masterpiece?
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Fédora" 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 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: "Fédora" 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 Fédora 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 movements, 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 Fédora can never be made to
+seem. In "Fédora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of stagecraft,
+without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, much
+less of 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 conception, 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 "Fédora" is as fine as anything she has done. It
+completes our admiration 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.
+
+
+
+
+ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY
+
+I. "PELLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE"
+
+
+"Pelléas and Mélisande" 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 "Pelléas and Mélisande" we have two innocent lovers, to
+whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and 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
+exquisite 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, has
+been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
+accompaniment of M. Fauré'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 Mélisande. At the beginning I thought
+she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the original
+performance; 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 perfection. 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 palpitating voice, in which there is something like the
+throbbing of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautiful
+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 Pelléas; 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 Pelléas: 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 monotonous, 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 "Everyman" deserves a
+place of its own among the stage 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 heat, 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. "Everyman" 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 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. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM
+
+
+In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
+best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
+was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, 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 meaning seems to have gone out
+of them; they are displaced, 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 that his red livery may have its full "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 to get in some more than indifferent 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 programme
+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:
+
+  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. 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS
+
+
+When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
+of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
+scarcely human oval which represents 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 expression 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
+convulsively, 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 instincts.
+With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geisha
+and the Knight," the effect is overwhelming; 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 instruments, and beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor
+their clothes have beauty, to the limited 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
+misunderstanding.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL
+
+
+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 ahead of all our competitors. I have no great
+admiration for most of our comic gentlemen 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 expressive 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
+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.
+
+The French "revue," as one sees it at the Folies-Bergère, 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND
+
+
+An excellent Parisian company from the Variétés 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 Réjane, she had none of
+Réjane's magnetism, none of Réjane'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 Mlle. Lavallière, with her brilliant
+eyes and her little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M.
+Numès, 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 pantomine, 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.
+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 Review_, 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, somewhat 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 presenting 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 take the luck which comes his way. The few,
+quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
+probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains;
+the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours,
+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
+à-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 naughtiness is so naïve, 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
+très bien vivre sans être 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 company worked with the effortless
+unanimity of a perfect piece of machinery.
+
+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 réchauffés! 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 company. 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 checkmate, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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, "Cæsar'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 Gérard de Gourgiran, are in their country
+house, with their two wives, Giselle and Léonore, 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
+Léonore? 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 Léonore gives
+way; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is some
+unnecessary moralising ("Là-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 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 Léonore have had a possibly quite harmless
+flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Léonore's
+room, he has merely been walking with Léonore 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 Léonore in the garden at midnight. 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. "Cæsar'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
+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 pièce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la tragédie des
+mâitres 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. Occasionally 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 Téléphone," 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 successful. 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 helpless to aid her,
+is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
+brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as
+uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has
+absolutely no 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 circumstances, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 committee 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, and therefore may be contrasted without
+the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was
+interpreted on the stage.
+
+Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and 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 circumstances? he says to himself: what would it be
+effective on 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 keyhole. 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, and 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
+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. 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 persistently, 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.
+
+
+
+
+TOLSTOI AND 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 part. In the drama we can only properly realise
+the soul's action through some corresponding 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 impressiveness partly
+to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
+chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the
+eternal 'Dame aux Camélias,' 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, 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 disappearance 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 interpretation of life, not a theorising about
+life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
+more consequence) 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 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 discovered.
+
+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 consummate 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 produced at the
+Odéon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
+dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
+Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
+Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was
+called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M.
+Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on
+est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
+pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. 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 himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the
+door of the jury-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
+preceding. 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 unparalleled 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
+a 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 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 "Resurrection," something which is
+not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a
+dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated.
+Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
+Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been
+left well alone?
+
+
+
+
+SOME 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" 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. The author, it
+is true, is an actor, but 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 knowledge 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 daylight. 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, 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, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding
+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 naïveté 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; 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 opposition 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 convinces 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
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"
+
+
+On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
+Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in
+his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not
+things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to
+believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for
+instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the
+footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the
+performance of the Stage Society. 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 seabirds 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 witchcraft 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.
+
+
+
+
+III. "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. François 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 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 I am ready to admit that it is justified if I find
+that the dramatic movement 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 Avariés," 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 suggestion 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. "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 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
+interesting 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. Tanqueray."
+
+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 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 like 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.
+
+
+
+
+"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 helplessness. 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
+significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.
+Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in
+an essay in "Le Trésor 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 Sélysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which
+there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
+people thought 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 Sélysette," 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 Destinée," Maeterlinck
+says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragédies ne nous offrent
+pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalité. Je
+crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragédie où la
+fatalité règne réellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas
+une où le héros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est
+jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the
+preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poètes tragiques osent très
+rarement permettre au sage de paraître un moment sur la scène. Ils
+craignent une âme haute parce que les événements 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 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," "Intérieur," and even
+"Pelléas et Mélisande," 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.
+
+
+The letter of protest which appeared in the _Times_ of June 30, 1903,
+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
+_Athenæum_, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and
+makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The _Morning
+Post_ is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunate
+censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting 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 "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 discriminating 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 dissevered, 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 license. 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 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
+censorship. 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?
+
+
+
+
+A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's
+Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for
+the stage have done without thinking about art at all.
+
+She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead
+of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead
+of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a
+comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of
+good manners. 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 hushed before they become disturbing. 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.
+
+Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
+to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the 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. 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 indefinitely 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?
+
+The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
+and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to
+understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "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
+admirably 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, and resented
+them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect 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 audience, 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 the 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE TEST OF THE ACTOR
+
+
+The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the
+capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really
+carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such
+a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The
+Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of
+letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a
+complimentary 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." Mr. Jones
+himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to
+give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he
+means by this peroration, which once closed 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 of 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?" Does Mr. Jones,
+I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of
+silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates,
+in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not
+to "rank as Literature"? 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 bewildering 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 exactitude. 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. "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. 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 it can be
+grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
+is wasted; only 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
+"Iolanthe," 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.
+
+And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
+insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, 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 was 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 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 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 representation
+of that part: a picture, not a man.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 "property."
+
+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 what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of
+the 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 hedgerow 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.
+
+What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
+background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the
+stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
+imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
+from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
+call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns,
+teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is
+carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the
+imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and
+painted gables.
+
+I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
+English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
+of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a
+new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
+have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on real
+Thames water.
+
+Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
+material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation
+of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
+spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play
+is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A
+poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage
+in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem,
+will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its
+essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical
+plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the
+secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He
+will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the
+manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of
+nature.
+
+
+
+
+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. Whenever 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 impression 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.
+
+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 momentary 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 knowing 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. 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 difference 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
+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?"
+
+
+
+
+THE SPEAKING OF VERSE
+
+
+Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
+verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it
+has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in
+vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far
+they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses
+were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to
+dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a
+kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not
+apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage
+traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular
+actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is
+not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in
+the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
+contorted species of prose.
+
+An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
+assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent
+an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
+Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
+has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
+between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
+Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
+experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
+translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
+definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech
+of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
+important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
+clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
+Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
+any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest
+essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that
+if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
+Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting
+all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his
+stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
+passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
+furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
+audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is
+precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to
+hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if
+he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to
+do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here,
+in the rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if
+he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the
+actor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of
+the "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had
+not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra.
+When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of
+even the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that
+poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?
+
+The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of
+over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the
+sound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard
+a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comédie Francaise, on
+the art of speaking on the stage.
+
+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
+Mendès, "est de ceux, bien rares au Théâtre Français, qu'on entend même
+lorsqu'ils par lent 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 and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a
+brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt 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, Molière 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 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,
+profoundly 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 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 something of
+what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
+Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach
+him to unlearn something 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.
+
+
+
+
+GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH
+
+
+Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
+We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
+individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic
+temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated
+like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a
+thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now
+living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius
+comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants
+us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have
+actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of
+useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of
+giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an
+interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of
+poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came
+to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern?
+
+The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor,
+is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
+conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
+bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
+conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
+subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
+the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual
+talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle
+insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen
+bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the
+'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would
+slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he
+rearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his own
+orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the
+horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly
+accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered
+the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he
+would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of
+an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The
+musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics
+and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet
+this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre
+whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is
+presented with any sort of public appeal.
+
+In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
+the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
+actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
+play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small,
+unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any
+sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and
+conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal
+vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves
+to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with
+show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a
+lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of
+imaginative work on the stage?
+
+It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management,
+of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet,"
+and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the
+whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most
+needed. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have
+lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And
+first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they
+give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. I
+have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should
+give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a
+solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally
+different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite,
+"Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever
+qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm
+from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music
+was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice
+to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented
+for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for
+Shakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's.
+
+And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare
+there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance
+of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well
+as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be
+acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the
+rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or
+that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is
+because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so
+beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an
+ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.
+The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the
+_ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic
+child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us
+outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an
+exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But
+Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I
+would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there
+are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans
+yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet
+and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he
+interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the
+universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen
+in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane
+Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was
+nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous
+representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of
+a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not
+less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic,
+tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's
+fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him
+living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental
+sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.
+And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before
+one's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the
+acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in
+England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
+said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
+the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
+chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental,
+everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that
+intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never
+uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as
+lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here
+are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.
+There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as
+these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this
+power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument,
+that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give
+us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful
+and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it
+sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but
+no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts,
+which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his
+loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives
+the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are accustomed to hear
+spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr.
+Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive
+reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable
+before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his
+thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and
+just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an
+understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing
+by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those
+words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely
+mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting in
+English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.
+
+What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get
+when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get
+from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking
+merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in
+the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look,
+for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate
+travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli.
+He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is
+motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous
+gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's
+troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with
+rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the
+immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and a
+happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of
+it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been
+allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.
+
+So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary
+principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted;
+only in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of
+the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal.
+Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken
+of her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her
+Ophelia. It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and
+merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of
+some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered
+among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple
+poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into
+it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere
+decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less
+woman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you,
+the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence.
+She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible
+thing.
+
+In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
+broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman
+let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art
+is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses
+into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern
+sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of
+romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which
+everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into
+a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and
+restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every
+requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.
+
+Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
+make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
+written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
+was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
+lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
+theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
+what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
+peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
+peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
+shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
+whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
+love, who makes war angelically.
+
+Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
+to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
+Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
+in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
+Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
+which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
+one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
+fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
+practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
+parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
+nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
+was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
+which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.
+
+An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preference
+to a single kind of _rôle_ is not properly an artist at all. It is the
+curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in
+any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to
+repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he
+is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist to
+be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When I
+have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I am
+content to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showed
+me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a part
+that she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of a
+rarer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it.
+Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of
+Catulle Mendès and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names
+of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them
+all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly
+varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural
+genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly
+trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at
+all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits and
+starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness of
+excess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seems
+to us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first really
+shows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seem
+colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. But
+Giorgione will always be the greater.
+
+I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
+of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about
+the "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in
+pained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had
+not, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless"
+person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily
+be made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs.
+Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a
+greater operatic singer than Mme. Calvé. What Miss Marlowe has is a
+great innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and
+a childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild
+beast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of the
+domestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to
+her perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere
+stealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable,
+unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit for
+cloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Réjane the flesh made Parisian,
+Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of
+life, the plenitude of sap in the tree.
+
+The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
+different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
+resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in
+his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
+actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of
+that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and
+engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to
+which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
+fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she
+is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and
+the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace,
+alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities
+that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the
+particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English,
+though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who
+are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage
+in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the
+same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.
+Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.
+
+
+
+
+A THEORY OF THE STAGE
+
+
+Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as you
+will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
+let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry,
+and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
+scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
+plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
+clothes that skeleton.
+
+The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
+represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
+represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work
+on any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of
+a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its
+appeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
+Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent,
+and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham," the play which
+Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his
+right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great
+little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the
+puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three
+centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
+inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
+there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse
+can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing
+but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the
+ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama
+begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell
+its secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can
+let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has
+been mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, and
+to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside
+of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to
+verse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has
+seemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his
+psychology far with it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a
+limiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than the
+drama of the poets. Only one modern writer has brought something which
+is almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The
+Powers of Darkness." The play is horrible and uncouth, but it is
+illuminated by a great inner light. There is not a beautiful word in it,
+but it is filled with beauty. And that is because Tolstoi has the vision
+which may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet. It is often
+said that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of the
+future must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whom
+the gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will be
+no more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but not
+essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which
+shall take in wider regions of the mind.
+
+Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of
+Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not
+more essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama.
+Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their best
+opportunities. Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to
+the drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and
+disabilities to the writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt
+wealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech
+builds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, without
+beginning or ending? It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice
+his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet" has been quoted against him.
+But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere
+lingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought which
+makes or waits on action. If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem to
+delay action, it does but deepen it. The poetry is the life blood, or
+runs through it. Only bad actors and managers think that by stripping
+the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body. The
+outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible melodrama, still
+irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it
+comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as a
+growth out of melodrama.
+
+The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist,
+however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his
+neglect of one or another of these two primary and essential
+requirements. There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement
+in Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann,
+as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets,
+like Hauptmann. I do not know them well enough to bring them into my
+argument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the
+endeavour is in the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find
+even so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there?
+Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles.
+At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is a
+marvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all the
+playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase,
+"vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one of the clichés of the
+minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him
+to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could
+no longer direct.
+
+Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for
+marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of
+limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
+"Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man
+whose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His later
+speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the
+conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought
+back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in
+exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future
+will have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright
+of our time. He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness,
+which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.
+
+In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all
+is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital
+passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in
+"Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the
+glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.
+Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the
+speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.
+
+We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim to
+be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art. Mr.
+Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul.
+He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not
+only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers
+in their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great
+talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted
+the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our
+only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his
+astonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a
+spirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the
+stage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty.
+Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of
+neglected altars. But those who amuse the world, no matter by what
+means, have their place in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a
+clock striking the hour.
+
+With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing but
+prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a
+more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not
+so long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became
+to Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond
+adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Camélias." The other plays
+are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of "Tue-là!" was
+the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which special
+pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is the dramatic
+motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with the
+coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La Femme de
+Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, is
+to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts of
+interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the
+attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in
+England, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights,
+apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr.
+Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to
+be associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and
+Mr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many
+more names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious
+playwright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our
+novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger
+generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us
+one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's,
+besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and
+taken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt
+to write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary
+Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers,
+each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose.
+Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps
+the limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for
+us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on
+the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?
+
+The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
+affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
+the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
+plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
+best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
+occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel
+expense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision
+beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need
+a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers.
+They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the
+entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in
+that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in
+prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a
+certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more
+civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are
+aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in
+Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who
+fumble at their lips for sea-magic.
+
+And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
+as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
+radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
+this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
+art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony
+has ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the
+past were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated
+in our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of
+what has come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and
+adequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render them
+more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, as
+prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part
+of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who,
+in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an
+adequate answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of
+something deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answer
+which would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.
+
+
+
+
+THE SICILIAN ACTORS
+
+I
+
+
+I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
+Paris, where, I read, "la passion paraît décidement," to a dramatic
+critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We
+are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an
+acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
+accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
+some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
+audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
+marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
+gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment
+to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new
+intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.
+
+It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
+crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
+thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the
+volcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage,
+rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at
+all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius,
+the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.
+
+Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes;
+her art is more nearly the art of Réjane. While both of these are great
+artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal
+energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress,
+like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
+snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions
+of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can
+be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her
+delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the
+soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out,
+turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her
+brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.
+Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among
+miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing
+out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion
+with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
+Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
+difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul.
+And if one thinks of Réjane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
+though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
+Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic
+gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of
+her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a
+great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi
+Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
+no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
+hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
+with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
+sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.
+
+Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
+moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
+Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
+I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
+against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
+as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
+the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
+Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
+utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
+downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with
+both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
+while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
+nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
+time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
+as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
+scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
+it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
+of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
+the whole being passed into its possession.
+
+And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
+catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant
+no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out
+of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a
+supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he
+has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should
+have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden
+fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark
+veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards
+her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one
+who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the
+woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an
+anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in
+the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those
+clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death,
+and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its
+last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling
+the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"
+and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and
+obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
+with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has
+been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words,
+especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a
+well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or
+with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. The
+acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to
+do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.
+
+The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
+which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
+hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
+of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
+which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
+reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with
+the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the
+language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;
+the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;
+the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and
+this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly
+contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we
+read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The
+beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
+understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright
+and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out
+the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of
+view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its
+aim.
+
+And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
+playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in
+this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than
+in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better
+writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great
+drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors
+like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to
+bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that
+he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge
+said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--not
+thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"
+
+That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
+have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of
+a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
+"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed
+no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that
+is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it
+from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio.
+What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or
+passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?
+
+And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
+finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
+which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is
+an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against
+all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
+admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
+suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these
+sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if
+naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and
+unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before
+them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is
+ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in
+symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this
+spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces,
+by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the
+source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature,
+absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see
+struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this
+woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the
+poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without
+passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once
+justified itself by being mere nature.
+
+And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
+occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
+the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What
+stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our
+big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
+the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But
+the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Réjane has
+done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
+artist. But not even Réjane has given us the whole animal, in its
+self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
+command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
+motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and
+the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia
+in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it
+would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing
+meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest
+between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch
+helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and
+swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me
+in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with
+the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.
+
+Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic
+whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a
+hesitating consciousness that "la passion paraît decidement avoir
+partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a
+magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
+gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
+through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
+authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
+And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.
+
+
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+
+
+
+ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC
+
+
+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 compromise.
+
+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 knowledge 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 generalisations, 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
+speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born
+in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.
+
+
+
+
+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 perfect. Artists who deal in
+materials less fragile than human 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 Bechstein 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+PACHMANN AND THE PIANO
+
+I
+
+
+It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
+it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
+only 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 its own voice.
+
+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 terms of your instrument, and the piano
+responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other
+pianists, has 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.
+
+Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
+than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
+sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. 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 interpreted 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.
+
+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, hammering.
+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 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.
+
+In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
+the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
+diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
+rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
+with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
+has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
+language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
+chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
+down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
+gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
+lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
+Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
+but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
+finds a kind of humour.
+
+In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
+executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or
+failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which,
+to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes
+tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through
+some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical
+disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to
+venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a
+simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less
+difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.
+With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their
+vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery
+which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached
+from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our
+ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach
+it to express human emotions, not its own.
+
+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, temperament, 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 imploring 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 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 innermost life of music. I do not think he has
+ever put an 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 difficulties 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.
+Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his
+hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult
+business. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All that
+violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His art
+begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo
+without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a
+run as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish,
+a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run
+you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life.
+With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that
+is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like
+Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz:
+he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the
+root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say in
+itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in which
+everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of
+such moments that Pachmann is the poet.
+
+And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
+Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
+the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
+alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of
+shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and
+clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most
+absolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto is
+the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to
+play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise
+softly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there
+was the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowing
+light and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not less
+appropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, the
+romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, a
+little luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopin
+followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopin
+had returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverish
+music, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to the
+centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a winged
+energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is in
+the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. The
+Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and not
+Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op.
+50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its
+secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone,
+gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the
+Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in
+Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the
+playing of the Etudes.
+
+Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
+like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
+lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
+coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
+creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
+which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet
+controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music
+before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain
+which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a
+precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and
+art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often
+wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the
+conscious act of thought while listening for the music.
+
+"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
+"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
+Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
+strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery
+ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a
+thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret
+of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a
+line like:
+
+  Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,
+
+can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced
+nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of
+suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art
+of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
+methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a
+statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
+themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
+everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
+Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
+Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some
+small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like
+Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and
+nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+  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?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and
+it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument,
+which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture
+him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
+dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
+swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
+which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
+listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
+from us visibly into that unholy company.
+
+Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
+interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
+than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
+a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
+requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
+cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
+played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
+On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
+time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
+and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
+the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
+players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with
+the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty
+web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out of
+moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
+Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
+the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all
+this is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
+wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about the
+faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and as
+music turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What he
+seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound:
+the music, in fact.
+
+It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
+that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret
+between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no
+one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it,
+becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a
+voice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of human
+intelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its own
+region, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we can
+apprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mocking
+the human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. When
+Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of
+saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky
+plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and
+quickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann's
+miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like an
+atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of a
+beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that are
+awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
+Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is
+it technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
+dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his
+own magic?
+
+He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience than
+others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch which
+is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tell
+you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and fly
+and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
+listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little he
+had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above
+all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he
+plays.
+
+When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
+pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon
+them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand
+they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's
+end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the
+straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey,
+having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his
+learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini
+variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as
+soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the
+notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if
+they were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry for
+them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the
+Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the
+magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor
+Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has
+set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'
+moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape
+in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you
+exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of
+form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form
+that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the
+outline.
+
+Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one
+most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
+think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
+greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
+intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done
+perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out
+of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those
+Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more
+wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed,
+as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of
+unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent,
+heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the
+trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its
+decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the
+whole tossing and eager sea of sound.
+
+Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
+peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in
+their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any
+essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what
+is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The
+sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very
+paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike
+deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is
+the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as
+sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast
+luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth,
+bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades
+not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric
+into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect
+lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.
+
+Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once
+thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the
+taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have
+whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a
+secret.
+
+
+
+
+PADEREWSKI
+
+
+I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
+Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
+noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to
+a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
+hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and
+played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own
+home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had
+been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the
+playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to
+be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself,
+in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and
+then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early
+morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled
+streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and
+dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of
+popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had
+been, for a few people, this divine escape.
+
+No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
+Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
+Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
+poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
+growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised,
+more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
+virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
+not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
+but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
+surprised awakening.
+
+The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the
+most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
+People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The
+word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.
+But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which
+physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to
+which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get
+from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski
+when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do
+the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball
+delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument,
+seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a
+scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection,
+marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since
+Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and
+Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with
+this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an
+inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as
+if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his
+thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as
+a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the
+piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother
+met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it
+to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he
+gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the
+instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under
+his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and
+under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The
+music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught
+together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are
+never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to
+passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others
+give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through
+clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully
+over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be
+gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are
+secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.
+
+In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
+was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
+brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for
+modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its
+perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the
+little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a
+bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;
+nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a
+faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or
+that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was
+there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known
+that it existed.
+
+Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
+original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if
+he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling
+is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the
+first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large
+contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was
+evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and
+die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were
+delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed
+to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.
+
+When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which
+the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski
+were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for
+the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it,
+it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great
+pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with
+Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a
+creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura
+disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
+in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
+tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
+luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
+by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
+astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
+hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
+spectacularly magnificent?
+
+Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
+anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
+not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
+smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
+dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
+his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
+only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
+his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
+transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
+instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
+in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
+mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the
+piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown
+person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there
+are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the
+test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it
+was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the
+Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have
+played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those
+limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and
+Paderewski has attained both limits.
+
+After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
+of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
+What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
+same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
+is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
+America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael
+of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
+mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
+notes?
+
+Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
+"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
+skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to
+compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an
+art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
+personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
+perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
+the creator of beautiful sounds?
+
+
+
+
+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
+harpsichord 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 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 fragment 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.
+
+I contrast him with 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 something 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 musician. 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 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
+suggestions 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 Mallarmé,
+of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves
+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 command. 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 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.
+
+An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a
+singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
+wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
+time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter
+between poetry and the world.
+
+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 surrounded 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 herself
+to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious 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 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 gives 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 Mallarmé 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 Mallarmé 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 holding 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 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 uninterrupted
+communion with herself.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA
+
+
+Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; 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
+appreciation 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 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 sunlight 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 straightforward 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 expression; but the something more, the vast heave
+and throb of the music, was not there. It was "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 Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner
+himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture
+to the "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 rendering of that we must go to
+Richter.
+
+Otherwise, in that third concert it would he 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 instruments, 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 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 "Leonore,"
+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 something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of
+passion.
+
+
+
+
+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-Theatre; and I stayed,
+on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberflöte." 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
+Meistersinger" 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 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 pinewoods 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 and his senses, in 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 Zauberflöte," is music
+without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the
+firm outlines of Dürer 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 Botticelli's "Spring"; 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.
+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 Zauberflöte" is
+really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which 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.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
+
+I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH
+
+
+Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the
+music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph
+not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember
+that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that
+only Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home,
+receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many
+doors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must
+always be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at its
+mercy, even after he has conquered its attention. The crowd never really
+loves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity;
+and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number of
+intelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon the
+resisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it is
+supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt. Bayreuth exists because
+Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcing
+his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than any
+other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he wanted, not always
+when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side,
+the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had the
+necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and at
+last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his own
+triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied.
+He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there were his
+works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called.
+
+And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth
+itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner wished it to be
+seen and heard. The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre
+at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly
+the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible
+orchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are
+even the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual and
+irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As at
+Bayreuth, 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 thus
+now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed,
+and not merely guessed at.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL
+
+
+The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me the
+most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
+have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
+that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
+ideas, of Wagner. The music itself 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; 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 religious 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. Watts-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 something of the same appeal as the 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 the first act 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 become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche
+says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic
+process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.
+
+"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
+soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
+be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than
+anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the
+sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the
+music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the
+visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one,
+the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
+convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm
+is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture,
+and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. 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. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
+settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
+stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
+time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
+every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
+reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
+for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
+action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
+aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
+is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
+in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
+not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
+make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
+restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
+realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
+these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
+frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
+least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
+us that it can be.
+
+Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
+new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's
+representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this
+world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand
+tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
+proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the
+Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of
+which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitary
+figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is
+the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which
+it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a
+reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!
+
+The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
+the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
+enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a
+change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on
+natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every
+wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is
+elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be
+formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out.
+And "Parsifal," which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it,
+in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort of
+supreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautiful
+drama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of
+leaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old
+hermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universal
+tenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, in
+some vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside
+the question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technically
+religious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and how
+far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's mind was the mind to which all
+legend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence;
+but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could never
+have been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in
+"Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, or
+did not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries. His music, his
+acting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and the
+acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of the
+solemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are in
+themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE ART OF WAGNER
+
+
+In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
+should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
+continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
+giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
+nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
+composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
+moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he
+does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a
+world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama
+live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their
+passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural
+sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less
+well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the
+realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers,
+at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not
+succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the
+Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery
+splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued,
+composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism,
+however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended
+with all the clairvoyance of emotion.
+
+Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all
+its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
+onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
+human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A
+few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
+awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
+ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were
+to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an
+abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know
+is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it
+must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before
+which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness
+afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less
+conscious of its passing hour.
+
+And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
+drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
+narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
+Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
+Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
+the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as
+powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening
+to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for
+this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of
+memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action
+of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
+preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
+their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
+effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
+materialising both.
+
+Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by
+his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
+circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as
+a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
+flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
+poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood
+and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the
+nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole
+expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
+person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.
+
+It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
+distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
+too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
+and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
+personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations
+of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried,
+Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi
+humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without
+disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman
+passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of
+the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite
+devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song,
+for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual
+speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which
+realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a
+spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.
+
+And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
+dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
+almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
+painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
+thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
+without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
+note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
+without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
+"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
+obey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an
+immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a
+great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
+silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
+with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of
+the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
+Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives
+him to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and to
+him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and
+returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as
+if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of
+the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the
+music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts
+and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow
+rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards
+from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening
+notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an
+infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.
+
+And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
+things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
+other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think
+of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to
+a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous,
+or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women.
+Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering
+his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
+remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in
+Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+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? Literature, 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 interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, 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 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 it 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
+they have seen Desclée, 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, l'oeuvre sort plus gelle
+  D'une forme au travail
+  Rebelle,
+  Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
+
+No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.
+
+  Tout passe. L'art robuste
+  Seul à l'éternité.
+     Le buste
+  Survit à la cité.
+
+Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a
+certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate 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 whom posterity means anything very definite, and
+to whom 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.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME WRITER
+
+
+Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.
+
+Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.
+
+The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.
+
+Cities, 1903.
+
+Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.
+
+A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.
+
+Spiritual Adventures, 1905.
+
+The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.
+
+Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.
+
+William Blake, 1907.
+
+Cities of Italy, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13928 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13928 ***</div>
+
+<div class="centerwrapper">
+<h1><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_i">[i]</a></span>PLAYS</h1>
+
+<!-- Page i -->
+<h1>ACTING AND MUSIC</h1>
+
+<h2>A BOOK OF THEORY</h2>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>ARTHUR SYMONS</h3>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<h5>LONDON<br />
+CONSTABLE &amp; COMPANY LTD<br />
+1909</h5>
+
+<!-- Page ii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_ii">[ii]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page iii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_iii">[iii]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page iv --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_iv">[iv]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page v --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_v">[v]</a></span>
+
+<div class="centerme"><i>To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and
+admiration</i></div>
+
+<!-- Page vi --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page vii --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span>
+<a name="PREFACE"></a>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
+material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
+many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
+remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first; what
+I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have been: a
+book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions which I
+made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events, the
+programme was carried out.</p>
+
+<p>This book, I said then, 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 &aelig;sthetics, of all
+the arts.</p>
+
+<p>In my book on "The Symbolist Movement <!-- Page viii --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page ix --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_ix">[ix]</a></span>effective action, in every achieved form of art.
+I do not understand the limitation by which so many writers on
+&aelig;sthetics choose to confine themselves 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.</p>
+
+<p>1903, 1907.</p>
+
+<!-- Page x --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_x">[x]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="CONTENTS"></a>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<br />
+<!-- Page xi --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span>
+
+<table class="center" frame="void" cellspacing="0" rules="groups" border=
+"0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<colgroup>
+<col width="400" />
+<col width="236" /></colgroup>
+
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>INTRODUCTION</h4>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_3'>An Apology for Puppets</a></td>
+<td align="right">3</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>PLAYS AND ACTING</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_11'>Nietzsche on Tragedy</a></td>
+<td align="right">11</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_17'>Sarah Bernhardt</a></td>
+<td align="right">17</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_29'>Coquelin and Moli&egrave;re</a></td>
+<td align="right">29</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_37'>R&eacute;jane</a></td>
+<td align="right">37</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_42'>Yvette Guilbert</a></td>
+<td align="right">42</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_52'>Sir Henry Irving</a></td>
+<td align="right">52</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_60'>Duse in Some of Her Parts</a></td>
+<td align="right">60</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_77'>Annotations</a></td>
+<td align="right">77</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_93'>M. Capus in England</a></td>
+<td align="right">93</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_100'>A Double Enigma</a></td>
+<td align="right">100</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>DRAMA</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_109'>Professional and
+Unprofessional</a></td>
+<td align="right">109</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_115'>Tolstoi and Others</a></td>
+<td align="right">115</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_124'>Some Problem Plays</a></td>
+<td align="right">124</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_137'>"Monna Vanna"</a>
+<!-- Page xii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_xii">[xii]</a></span></td>
+<td align="right">137</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_143'>The Question of Censorship</a></td>
+<td align="right">143</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_148'>A Play and the Public</a></td>
+<td align="right">148</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_152'>The Test of the Actor</a></td>
+<td align="right">152</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_162'>The Price of Realism</a></td>
+<td align="right">162</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_167'>On Crossing Stage to Right</a></td>
+<td align="right">167</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_173'>The Speaking of Verse</a></td>
+<td align="right">173</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_182'>Great Acting in English</a></td>
+<td align="right">182</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_200'>A Theory of the Stage</a></td>
+<td align="right">200</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_213'>The Sicilian Actors</a></td>
+<td align="right">213</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>MUSIC</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_229'>On Writing about Music</a></td>
+<td align="right">229</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_232'>Technique and the Artist</a></td>
+<td align="right">232</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_237'>Pachmann and the Piano</a></td>
+<td align="right">237</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_258'>Paderewski</a></td>
+<td align="right">258</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_268'>A Reflection at a Dolmetsch
+Concert</a></td>
+<td align="right">268</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_277'>The Dramatisation of Song</a></td>
+<td align="right">277</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_284'>The Meiningen Orchestra</a></td>
+<td align="right">284</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_290'>Mozart in the
+Mirabell-Garten</a></td>
+<td align="right">290</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_297'>Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth</a></td>
+<td align="right">297</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+<td><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_315'>Conclusion: A Paradox on Art</a></td>
+<td align="right">315</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<!-- Page 1 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_1">[1]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="INTRODUCTION"></a>
+
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 2 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 3 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="AN_APOLOGY_FOR_PUPPETS"></a>
+
+<h2>AN APOLOGY FOR PUPPETS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 subordinate 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 <!-- Page 4 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_4">[4]</a></span>his
+part (we are all human) will certainly 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. 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 <!-- Page 5 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_5">[5]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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, <!-- Page 6 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_6">[6]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. Losing, 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 <!-- Page 7 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_7">[7]</a></span>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 instructive for us to consider
+that we could not give a play of Ibsen's to marionettes, but that we could
+give them the "Agamemnon."</p>
+
+<p>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 that 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 moment, the emotion
+to which that gesture corresponds. In our marionettes, then, we get
+personified gesture, and the gesture, like all other <!-- Page 8 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_8">[8]</a></span>forms of emotion,
+generalised. The appeal in what seems to you these childish manoeuvres 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 suggestion of magic in this beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
+marionettes," 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 Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to make, we may suppose,
+the drama of the future, is content with as simple a mouthpiece as Fate
+and the great passions, which were the classic drama.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 9 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PLAYS_AND_ACTING"></a>
+
+<h2>PLAYS AND ACTING</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 10 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 11 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="NIETZSCHE_ON_TRAGEDY"></a>
+
+<h2>NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy 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 M&aelig;nad, who, troubled, capricious, and
+half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a
+foreign tongue."</p>
+
+<p>The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it
+arose out <!-- Page 12 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_12">[12]</a></span>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 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
+<!-- Page 13 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_13">[13]</a></span>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 rampart 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
+contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed
+with the scourge of its <!-- Page 14 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_14">[14]</a></span>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 spirit, 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
+l'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, <!-- Page 15 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_15">[15]</a></span>through the &aelig;sthetics 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 &aelig;sthetic 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 &aelig;sthetic game played with itself by the Will in the eternal
+plenitude of its joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital
+principle. "If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his
+astonishing 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 <!-- Page 16 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_16">[16]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<!-- Page 17 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SARAH_BERNHARDT"></a>
+
+<h2>SARAH BERNHARDT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it
+spoke to <!-- Page 18 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_18">[18]</a></span>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 Ph&egrave;dre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne
+Lecouvreur, F&eacute;dora, 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 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
+<!-- Page 19 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_19">[19]</a></span>mesmerised one, awakening the senses and sending
+the intelligence to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>After all, though R&eacute;jane 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 Cam&eacute;lias," 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 attractiveness,
+as with R&eacute;jane; 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 <!-- Page 20 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_20">[20]</a></span>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 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 <!-- Page 21 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_21">[21]</a></span>vitality of R&eacute;jane; it is differently
+expressed, that is all. With R&eacute;jane 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 earlier period, just as
+the writing of Dumas fils 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.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in "Ph&egrave;dre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we
+are to realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Ph&egrave;dre,"
+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 not less sure than its sense of dramatic
+<!-- Page 22 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_22">[22]</a></span>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 Ph&egrave;dre Racine tells us
+that it is "ce que j'ai peut-&ecirc;tre mis de plus raisonnable sur le
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre." The word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage
+of the passion of Ph&egrave;dre 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
+<!-- Page 23 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_23">[23]</a></span>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 remoteness 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 "Ph&egrave;dre" 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 actress must, in
+such parts, be conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there
+room in modern conversation? 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
+<!-- Page 24 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_24">[24]</a></span>coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate
+to beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Well, and she seems still to be the same Ph&egrave;dre that she was
+eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias."
+Is it reality, is it illusion? Illusion, 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."</p>
+
+<p>The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly <!-- Page 25 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_25">[25]</a></span>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
+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 <!-- Page 26 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_26">[26]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem to deserve more
+consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to an overpowering
+effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always reminds me of a
+musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and she
+plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
+<!-- Page 27 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_27">[27]</a></span>One
+seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente, 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
+savour 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 her,
+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 <!-- Page 28 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_28">[28]</a></span>it, and the effect follows instantaneously. 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
+pleasure 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 Bernhardt. One sometimes forgets that
+R&eacute;jane 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 29 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="COQUELIN_AND_MOLIERE_SOME_ASPECTS"></a>
+
+<h2>COQUELIN AND MOLI&Egrave;RE: SOME ASPECTS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>To see Coquelin in Moli&egrave;re is to see the greatest of comic
+actors at his best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a
+student, or anything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be
+compared with that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the
+training of nature. They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that
+Coquelin, with 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 instrument of Sarah, which seems
+to go by itself, c&acirc;line, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that
+wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate
+effect. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a
+disguise, never a revelation.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 30 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_30">[30]</a></span>I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their
+company at the Garrick Theatre. They did "Tartuffe," "L'Avare," "Le
+Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "Les Pr&eacute;cieuses Ridicules," and a condensed
+version of "Le D&eacute;pit 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 D&eacute;pit Amoureux," and I could not help
+wishing that the fashion of Moli&egrave;re's day had allowed him to write
+all his plays in prose. Moli&egrave;re was not a poet, and he knew that he
+was not a poet. When he ventured to write the most Shakespearean of his
+comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le m&ecirc;me pr&eacute;jug&eacute;,"
+Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de Pierre,' parce
+qu'il &eacute;tait en prose, nuisit au succ&egrave;s de 'l'Avare.'
+Cependant le public qui, &agrave; la longue, se rend toujours au bon,
+finit par donner &agrave; cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il
+m&eacute;rite. On comprit alors qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes
+com&eacute;dies en prose." How infinitely finer, as prose, is the prose of
+"L'Avare" than the verse of "Tartuffe" <!-- Page 31 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_31">[31]</a></span>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.
+Moli&egrave;re was a great prose writer, but I do not remember a line of
+poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The temper of his mind was the
+temper of mind of the prose-writer. His worldly wisdom, his active
+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-Ren&eacute;; 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.</p>
+
+<p>But Moli&egrave;re 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 Moli&egrave;re
+lets us <!-- Page 32 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_32">[32]</a></span>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 of Moli&egrave;re or of the
+character of Coquelin. Probably there is no difference. We get
+Moli&egrave;re's vast, succulent farce of the intellect rendered with an
+art like his own. If this, in every detail, is not what Moli&egrave;re
+meant, then so much the worse for Moli&egrave;re.</p>
+
+<p>Moli&egrave;re 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 Pr&eacute;cieuses 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
+<!-- Page 33 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_33">[33]</a></span>show and nimble 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 its
+head 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 34 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_34">[34]</a></span>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 interpretation. The part of Ma&icirc;tre
+Jacques in "L'Avare," for instance, which I have just seen him perform
+with such gusto and such certainty, 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 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 <!-- Page 35 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_35">[35]</a></span>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 independent of mood.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 36 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_36">[36]</a></span>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 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 a 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 37 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="REJANE"></a>
+
+<h2>R&Eacute;JANE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The genius of R&eacute;jane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and
+all the ingredients of the dish may be named without defining 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 Verlaine'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
+<!-- Page 38 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_38">[38]</a></span>have found myself applauding with tears in my
+eyes. The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand:
+neither counteracted the other: and I had to think twice, before I could
+remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which I
+had been almost cruelly enjoying.</p>
+
+<p>The art of R&eacute;jane accepts things as they are, without selection
+or correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall
+be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the
+shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is
+common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is
+leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose. To
+her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where
+nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever
+form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
+untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
+toute <!-- Page 39 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_39">[39]</a></span>enti&egrave;re &agrave; sa proie
+attach&eacute;e," and she has all the brutality and all the clinging
+warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious vice, vice plus
+passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in which all the
+passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their own language,
+almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the whole face
+suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity which cuts more
+sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every moment to throw away
+her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect; then, when the moment
+seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you will find that the
+moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done nothing with
+genius.</p>
+
+<p>R&eacute;jane 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. R&eacute;jane, in
+"Sapho" or in "Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving
+and suffering <!-- Page 40 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_40">[40]</a></span>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 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 love. 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: here, in "Sapho," is a
+woman who flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates
+himself before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt
+to win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
+herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of one
+who is going to be <!-- Page 41 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_41">[41]</a></span>sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to nature,
+the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion. Here, as
+elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a disturbing
+atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you will: it is
+no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a blind force; she
+is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think in one way. Where
+Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some thrilling effect of
+art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its attributes but some
+fundamental nobility, R&eacute;jane takes the big, foolish, dirty thing
+just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit of acting?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 42 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="YVETTE_GUILBERT"></a>
+
+<h2>YVETTE GUILBERT</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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, striped 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 beginning to sing.</p>
+
+<p>And with the first note you realise the difference between Yvette
+Guilbert and all the rest of the world. A sonnet by Mr. Andr&eacute;
+Raffalovich states just that difference so <!-- Page 43 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_43">[43]</a></span>subtly that I must quote it to
+help out my interpretation:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="sonnet by Andre Raffalovich">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">If you want hearty
+laughter, country mirth&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Or frantic gestures of an
+acrobat,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Heels over head&mdash;or floating lace
+skirts worth</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">I know not what, a large eccentric
+hat</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And diamonds, the gift of some dull
+boy&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Then when you see her do not wrong
+Yvette,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Because Yvette is not a clever
+toy,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set
+...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And should her song sound cynical and
+base</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">At first, herself ungainly, or her
+smile</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Monotonous&mdash;wait, listen, watch her
+face:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The sufferings of those the world calls
+vile</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">She sings, and as you watch Yvette
+Guilbert,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">You too will shiver, seeing their
+despair.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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 merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
+though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly,
+deliciously, gay. There is one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles,
+and trills a rapid <!-- Page 44 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_44">[44]</a></span>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 conventional 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, impersonal, dramatic artist, who sings
+realism as others write it.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 45 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_45">[45]</a></span>Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an
+inflection 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 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 expressionlessness of surprise.
+Her na&iuml;vet&eacute; 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 <!-- Page 46 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_46">[46]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every one else on the
+music-hall stage is precisely the difference between Sarah
+<!-- Page 47 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_47">[47]</a></span>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 <i>macabre</i>; 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 <i>
+macabre</i> style, she has done what Bruant was only trying to do, so, in
+the style, supposed to be traditionally <!-- Page 48 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_48">[48]</a></span>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 of most service to her. She sings, a little cruelly, of the
+young girl; and the young girl of her songs (that <i>demoiselle de
+pensionnat</i> 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
+"Ch&eacute;rie," a creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations,
+already at work somewhat abnormally in an an&aelig;mic 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 <!-- Page 49 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_49">[49]</a></span>in it all, a malicious
+insistence on the other side of innocence. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant
+expression for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all
+that part of life which the conventions were intended 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 towards it.
+It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vann&eacute;"; it
+is, for the most part, weary of itself, without rest,
+<!-- Page 50 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_50">[50]</a></span>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 <i>rouleuse</i> of
+the Quartier Br&eacute;da, praying to the one saint in her calendar,
+"Sainte Galette"; the <i>so&ucirc;larde</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is all a question of <i>m&eacute;tier</i>, 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 <!-- Page 51 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_51">[51]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 52 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SIR_HENRY_IRVING"></a>
+
+<h2>SIR HENRY IRVING</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 Goldsmith. 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 represents 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 <!-- Page 53 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_53">[53]</a></span>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
+movement; 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.</p>
+
+<p>With Miss Terry there is permanent charm of a very natural nature,
+which has become deliciously sophisticated. 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
+not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of a passing
+moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science founded
+on tradition. <!-- Page 54 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_54">[54]</a></span>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 limitations of the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." His Louis XI. is a
+masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the
+grotesque art of the thing <!-- Page 55 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_55">[55]</a></span>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 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 <!-- Page 56 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_56">[56]</a></span>which is half precise
+physiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in
+art.</p>
+
+<p>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 was 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 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
+chromolithographic <!-- Page 57 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_57">[57]</a></span>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. In 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
+may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating remains.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
+"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
+spectacle. It is a play made up principally of one character and a crowd,
+the <!-- Page 58 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_58">[58]</a></span>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; 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 extravagant 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 <!-- Page 59 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_59">[59]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 60 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="DUSE_IN_SOME_OF_HER_PARTS"></a>
+
+<h2>DUSE IN SOME OF HER PARTS</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 61 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_61">[61]</a></span>know or remember. But what is skin-deep in Paula
+as conceived 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 Englishwoman 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 consequences 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 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 <!-- Page 62 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_62">[62]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," and you
+will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero'a intention, and played
+brilliantly enough to distract 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 construction of a play never meant to withstand the
+searchlight of <!-- Page 63 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_63">[63]</a></span>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
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; in the acceptance of emotion for all it might be,
+instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse simplicity and
+sincerity in the treatment of a superficial 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 loathing 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
+<!-- Page 64 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_64">[64]</a></span>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 conscious art, an
+art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. 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 movements 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
+the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusion of reality almost
+further than it is possible to carry it, only never quite.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 65 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_65">[65]</a></span>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 positive. 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"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." <!-- Page 66 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_66">[66]</a></span>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 so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
+has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo 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 painfulness. 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 beautiful 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 inexcusable brutality of the scene in which she appears
+<!-- Page 67 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_67">[67]</a></span>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 a failure of a far
+higher order than such successes 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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 68 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Dumas fils has put his best work into the novel of "La Dame aux
+Cam&eacute;lias," 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 sentiment 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 unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
+done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
+impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate
+<!-- Page 69 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_69">[69]</a></span>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 sentiment coming
+suddenly into her life, but the simple, 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 greatness,
+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
+reproachfulness, 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 Mlle. de Lespinasse
+rather than Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as
+<!-- Page 70 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_70">[70]</a></span>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 intercourse 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 "La Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias" 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
+Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." But no, as he has drawn
+her, as he has placed her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflict
+<!-- Page 71 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_71">[71]</a></span>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 "F&eacute;dora," 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 <!-- Page 72 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_72">[72]</a></span>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
+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
+"F&eacute;dora." 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 unimaginative and theoretical falseness to life;
+for it at least <!-- Page 73 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_73">[73]</a></span>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 disguises, but never giving us her
+whole self through the revealing medium of a masterpiece?</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"F&eacute;dora" 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 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 <!-- Page 74 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_74">[74]</a></span>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:
+"F&eacute;dora" 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 F&eacute;dora 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 movements, 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
+<!-- Page 75 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_75">[75]</a></span>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 F&eacute;dora can never be made
+to seem. In "F&eacute;dora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of
+stagecraft, without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr.
+Pinero, much less of 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 conception, 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 <!-- Page 76 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_76">[76]</a></span>skill upon. As a piece of technical skill,
+Duse's acting in "F&eacute;dora" is as fine as anything she has done. It
+completes our admiration 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 77 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="ANNOTATIONS_BY_THE_WAY"></a>
+
+<h2>ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY</h2>
+
+<h3>I. "PELL&Eacute;AS AND M&Eacute;LISANDE"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande" 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, <!-- Page 78 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_78">[78]</a></span>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
+"Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande" we have two innocent lovers, to whom
+love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and 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 exquisite sense
+of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing, as if our own sympathy had
+somehow set right the wrongs of the play.</p>
+
+<p>And this play, translated with delicate <!-- Page 79 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_79">[79]</a></span>fidelity by Mr. Mackail, has
+been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
+accompaniment of M. Faur&eacute;'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 M&eacute;lisande. At the beginning I
+thought she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the
+original performance; 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 perfection. 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 <!-- Page 80 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_80">[80]</a></span>the supreme unconsciousness of
+innocence with the same beauty and the same intensity. Her palpitating
+voice, in which there is something like the throbbing of a wounded bird,
+seemed to speak the simple and beautiful 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 Pell&eacute;as; 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, <!-- Page 81 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_81">[81]</a></span>remembering Pell&eacute;as: 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 monotonous, 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. "EVERYMAN"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of "Everyman" deserves a
+place of its own among the stage 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 <!-- Page 82 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_82">[82]</a></span>archaic when it is spoken as
+one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, 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. "Everyman" 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 <!-- Page 83 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_83">[83]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
+best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
+was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, 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 meaning seems to have gone out of
+them; they are displaced, <!-- Page 84 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_84">[84]</a></span>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
+that his red livery may have its full "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 to get
+in some more than indifferent 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 programme assures us, Wills "strove to tell
+the love-story in a manner that might appeal to an English-speaking
+audience."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 85 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_85">[85]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Faustus quote to Mephistopheles">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">One thing, good servant,
+let me crave of thee,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To glut the longing of my heart's
+desire:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That I may have unto my
+paramour</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That heavenly Helen which I saw of
+late;</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>and when, his prayer being granted, he cries:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Faustus quote after prayer is granted">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was this the face that
+launched a thousand ships,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And burned the topless towers of
+Ilium?</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 86 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_86">[86]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="And none but thou shalt be my paramour">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And none but thou shalt
+be my paramour!</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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. On the Lyceum stage he is
+the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; though so many of his
+best words have been taken <!-- Page 87 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_87">[87]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
+of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
+scarcely human oval which represents 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 <!-- Page 88 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_88">[88]</a></span>energy of body comes out in the expression 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
+convulsively, 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 instincts. With a great
+artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geisha and the Knight,"
+the effect is overwhelming; 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
+<!-- Page 89 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_89">[89]</a></span>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 instruments, and
+beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor their clothes have beauty, to
+the limited 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 misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It is not always realised by Englishmen that England is really the
+country of the music-hall, the only country where it has
+<!-- Page 90 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_90">[90]</a></span>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!</p>
+
+<p>And it is not only in regard to the ballet, but in regard also to the
+"turns," that we are ahead of all our competitors. I have no great
+admiration for most of our comic gentlemen and ladies in London, but I
+find it still more difficult to take any interest in the comic gentlemen
+and ladies <!-- Page 91 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_91">[91]</a></span>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 expressive 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
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The French "revue," as one sees it at the Folies-Berg&egrave;re, done
+somewhat roughly <!-- Page 92 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_92">[92]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 93 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="M_CAPUS_IN_ENGLAND"></a>
+
+<h2>M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>An excellent Parisian company from the Vari&eacute;t&eacute;s 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 R&eacute;jane, she had none of
+R&eacute;jane's magnetism, none of R&eacute;jane's exciting
+naturalness.</p>
+
+<p>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 Mlle. Lavalli&egrave;re, <!-- Page 94 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_94">[94]</a></span>with her brilliant eyes and her
+little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M. Num&egrave;s, 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 pantomine, 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. 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 <i>Saturday Review</i>, and I hasten to say that I quite agree with
+his defence. Above <!-- Page 95 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_95">[95]</a></span>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,
+somewhat 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 presenting 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 <!-- Page 96 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_96">[96]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 take the luck which comes his way. The few,
+quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
+probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains; the
+people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours, 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
+&agrave;-propos.</p>
+
+<p>In "Les Deux Ecoles" the philosophy which could be discerned in "La
+Veine," that <!-- Page 97 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_97">[97]</a></span>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 naughtiness is so
+na&iuml;ve, 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 tr&egrave;s bien vivre sans &ecirc;tre 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 company worked with the effortless unanimity of
+a perfect piece of machinery.</p>
+
+<p>A few days after seeing "La Veine" I <!-- Page 98 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_98">[98]</a></span>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 r&eacute;chauff&eacute;s! 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 company. 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 checkmate, <!-- Page 99 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_99">[99]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 100 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_DOUBLE_ENIGMA"></a>
+
+<h2>A DOUBLE ENIGMA</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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, "C&aelig;sar'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.</p>
+
+<p>Two brothers, Raymond and G&eacute;rard de Gourgiran, are in their
+country house, with their two wives, Giselle and L&eacute;onore,
+<!-- Page 101 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_101">[101]</a></span>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 L&eacute;onore? 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 L&eacute;onore gives way; she avows all in
+a piercing shriek. After that there is some unnecessary moralising
+("L&agrave;-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots de captive!" and the like),
+but the play is over.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very
+intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking 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 <!-- Page 102 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_102">[102]</a></span>Vivarce and L&eacute;onore have had a possibly
+quite harmless flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way
+from L&eacute;onore's room, he has merely been walking with L&eacute;onore
+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 L&eacute;onore in the
+garden at midnight. 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 <!-- Page 103 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_103">[103]</a></span>from the certainty of the
+fact and the uncertainty of the person responsible for it. "C&aelig;sar'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 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 pi&egrave;ce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la
+trag&eacute;die des m&acirc;itres 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. Occasionally
+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
+<!-- Page 104 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_104">[104]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version
+of "Au T&eacute;l&eacute;phone," 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 successful. 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 helpless to aid her, is
+as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
+brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as uncomfortable
+as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has absolutely no artistic
+value, because terror without beauty and without significance is
+<!-- Page 105 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_105">[105]</a></span>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
+circumstances, 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
+<!-- Page 106 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_106">[106]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 107 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="DRAMA"></a>
+
+<h2>DRAMA</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 108 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 109 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PROFESSIONAL_AND_UNPROFESSIONAL"></a>
+
+<h2>PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 committee 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, and therefore may be contrasted without the
+necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was interpreted
+on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye for
+what is telling, <!-- Page 110 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_110">[110]</a></span>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 circumstances? he says to himself: what would it
+be effective on 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
+keyhole. We have seen a picturesque and amusing exterior, and that is all.
+Lord <!-- Page 111 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_111">[111]</a></span>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, and 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 of <!-- Page 112 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_112">[112]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 113 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_113">[113]</a></span>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. 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 persistently, you will not get to your destination at all. The
+playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath out of
+life <!-- Page 114 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_114">[114]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 115 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="TOLSTOI_AND_OTHERS"></a>
+
+<h2>TOLSTOI AND OTHERS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 part. In the drama we can only properly realise the soul's
+action through some corresponding 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 <!-- Page 116 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_116">[116]</a></span>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 impressiveness partly to that very
+quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II., chapter
+xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the eternal
+'Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias,' 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, 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."
+<!-- Page 117 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_117">[117]</a></span>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
+disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!</p>
+
+<p>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 interpretation of life, not a theorising about
+life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
+more consequence) 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 <!-- Page 118 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_118">[118]</a></span>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 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 119 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_119">[119]</a></span>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 discovered.</p>
+
+<p>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 consummate 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 produced at the
+Od&eacute;on. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
+dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
+Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
+Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was called,
+Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M. Bataille I
+cannot <!-- Page 120 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_120">[120]</a></span>say. I have read in a capable French paper that
+"l'on est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
+pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite the
+words one would use about the play in English?</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 121 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_121">[121]</a></span>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
+himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 122 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_122">[122]</a></span>contrasts singularly with what is meant to be a
+suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene
+preceding. 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 unparalleled 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 a 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 "<!-- Page 123 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_123">[123]</a></span>Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In 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
+"Resurrection," something which is not Tolstoi at all. There is M.
+Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a dramatist who has created a new
+form of drama: let him be exonerated. Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them
+may have been the spoilers of M. Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the
+great name of Tolstoi have been left well alone?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 124 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SOME_PROBLEM_PLAYS"></a>
+
+<h2>SOME PROBLEM PLAYS</h2>
+
+<h3>I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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" 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. The author, it is true,
+is an actor, but 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 knowledge 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 <!-- Page 125 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_125">[125]</a></span>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 daylight. 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, 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, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one's
+mind in suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family,
+and he interests <!-- Page 126 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_126">[126]</a></span>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 na&iuml;vet&eacute; 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
+<!-- Page 127 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_127">[127]</a></span>scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on
+the stage, full of truth within its own limits; 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 opposition 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
+convinces the world. Mr. Barker is young: he will <!-- Page 128 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_128">[128]</a></span>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
+themselves.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
+Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his
+stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not things
+in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, in
+the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for instance, lose a little
+in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights? That is the
+question which I was asking myself as I saw the performance of the Stage
+Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the
+problem is the problem of all Ibsen's <!-- Page 129 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_129">[129]</a></span>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 seabirds 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 witchcraft 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
+<!-- Page 130 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_130">[130]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. "THE NEW IDOL"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.
+Fran&ccedil;ois 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 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, <!-- Page 131 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_131">[131]</a></span>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 I am ready to admit that it is justified if I
+find that the dramatic movement 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 Avari&eacute;s," 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 suggestion of love interests, which come to nothing,
+and have no real bearing on the <!-- Page 132 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_132">[132]</a></span>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
+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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 133 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV. "MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 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 <!-- Page 134 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_134">[134]</a></span>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 interesting 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
+<!-- Page 135 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_135">[135]</a></span>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. Tanqueray."</p>
+
+<p>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 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 like 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 <!-- Page 136 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_136">[136]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 137 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MONNA_VANNAquot"></a>
+
+<h2>"MONNA, VANNA"</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 helplessness. Pity and terror had indeed
+gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more literal than
+Aristotle's.</p>
+
+<p>In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the
+words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the
+<!-- Page 138 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_138">[138]</a></span>words of peasants or children. They were rarely
+beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a
+singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a
+pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was
+everything; and in an essay in "Le Tr&eacute;sor des Humbles" Maeterlinck
+told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were
+not said which mattered.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With
+"Aglavaine et S&eacute;lysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which
+there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
+people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the
+morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.</p>
+
+<p>"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et S&eacute;lysette,"
+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
+<!-- Page 139 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_139">[139]</a></span>undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment
+of their happening.</p>
+
+<p>In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destin&eacute;e,"
+Maeterlinck says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes trag&eacute;dies
+ne nous offrent pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la
+fatalit&eacute;. Je crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule
+trag&eacute;die o&ugrave; la fatalit&eacute; r&egrave;gne
+r&eacute;ellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas une
+o&ugrave; le h&eacute;ros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce
+n'est jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on
+the preceding page, he says: "Observons que les po&egrave;tes tragiques
+osent tr&egrave;s rarement permettre au sage de para&icirc;tre un moment
+sur la sc&egrave;ne. Ils craignent une &acirc;me haute parce que les
+&eacute;v&eacute;nements 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
+<!-- Page 140 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_140">[140]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 141 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Int&eacute;rieur,"
+and even "Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande," 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 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
+<!-- Page 142 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_142">[142]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 143 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_QUESTION_OF_CENSORSHIP"></a>
+
+<h2>THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The letter of protest which appeared in the <i>Times</i> of June 30,
+1903, 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
+<i>Athen&aelig;um</i>, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon
+us, and makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The <i>
+Morning Post</i> is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the
+unfortunate censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting
+the most beautiful play of his time, and must live to be the
+laughing-stock of all sensible people."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 144 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_144">[144]</a></span>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 "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. <!-- Page 145 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_145">[145]</a></span>Is Mr. Redford capable
+of discriminating 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 dissevered, 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 <i>
+Times</i> 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 license. The fact is, that moral
+<!-- Page 146 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_146">[146]</a></span>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 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 <i>Times</i> 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 <!-- Page 147 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_147">[147]</a></span>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 censorship. 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?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 148 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_PLAY_AND_THE_PUBLIC"></a>
+
+<h2>A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The
+Bishop's Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many
+writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.</p>
+
+<p>She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom
+instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society
+instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The
+play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the
+control of good manners. 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 hushed before they become disturbing. 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. <!-- Page 149 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_149">[149]</a></span>Craigie's skill, in
+this play, seems to me to consist.</p>
+
+<p>Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
+to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the 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. 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 indefinitely 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?</p>
+
+<p>The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
+and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand
+it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of
+<!-- Page 150 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_150">[150]</a></span>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 admirably 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, and resented
+them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect 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
+<!-- Page 151 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_151">[151]</a></span>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 audience, 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 the 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 152 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_TEST_OF_THE_ACTOR"></a>
+
+<h2>THE TEST OF THE ACTOR</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the
+capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really
+carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such a
+play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The
+Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of
+letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a
+complimentary 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." Mr. Jones
+himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to
+give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he
+means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the <i>
+Nineteenth Century</i>: "O human life! so <!-- Page 153 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_153">[153]</a></span>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 of 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?" Does Mr. Jones, I
+wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of
+silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in
+"The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not to
+"rank as Literature"? 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 bewildering evening. The applause
+was meant for the actors.</p>
+
+<p>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 exactitude. But the play! <!-- Page 154 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_154">[154]</a></span>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. "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. 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 <!-- Page 155 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_155">[155]</a></span>offering them an opportunity
+to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be
+grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
+is wasted; only 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
+"Iolanthe," 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. <!-- Page 156 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_156">[156]</a></span>If acting could save a play,
+"The Princess's Nose" would have been saved. It was not saved.</p>
+
+<p>And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
+insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, 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 was 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
+<!-- Page 157 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_157">[157]</a></span>Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying
+experiences with nerves of marble.</p>
+
+<p>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 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.
+<!-- Page 158 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_158">[158]</a></span>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 <!-- Page 159 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_159">[159]</a></span>was left calmly free to watch
+her attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.</p>
+
+<p>How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of
+dealing adequately with such a scene as that? I 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 160 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_160">[160]</a></span>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
+representation of that part: a picture, not a man.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 161 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_161">[161]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 162 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_PRICE_OF_REALISM"></a>
+
+<h2>THE PRICE OF REALISM</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 163 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_163">[163]</a></span>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 "property."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 164 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_164">[164]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of the 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 hedgerow 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, <!-- Page 165 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_165">[165]</a></span>instead of abandoning
+ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the play
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
+background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the stage;
+he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
+imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
+from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
+call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns, teaching
+them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is carried
+right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the imagination with
+it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and painted
+gables.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
+English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
+of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a new
+quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
+<!-- Page 166 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_166">[166]</a></span>have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr.
+Tree's boats on real Thames water.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
+material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation of
+real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
+spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play is
+not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A poetical
+play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage in such a
+way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will
+envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its essence, is
+the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical plays. It is
+precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the secret of his
+own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He will make it his
+business to compete with the poet, and not, after the manner of Drury
+Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of nature.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 167 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="ON_CROSSING_STAGE_TO_RIGHT"></a>
+
+<h2>ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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. Whenever 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 168 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_168">[168]</a></span>lesson of Bayreuth, and when
+one comes away, the impression 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 169 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_169">[169]</a></span>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
+momentary 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?</p>
+
+<p>A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and
+how not to do <!-- Page 170 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_170">[170]</a></span>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.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference 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 <!-- Page 171 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_171">[171]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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
+<!-- Page 172 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_172">[172]</a></span>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?"</p>
+
+<!-- Page 173 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_SPEAKING_OF_VERSE"></a>
+
+<h2>THE SPEAKING OF VERSE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
+verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it has
+often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in vain
+over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far they
+were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses were
+written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to dances,
+because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a kind could
+have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not apparently expressive
+rhythms. In later times there have been stage traditions, probably
+developed from the practice of some particular actor, many conflicting
+traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad
+method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse
+<!-- Page 174 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_174">[174]</a></span>as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
+contorted species of prose.</p>
+
+<p>An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
+assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent an
+art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
+Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
+has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
+between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
+Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
+experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
+translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
+definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech of
+actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
+important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
+clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
+Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
+<!-- Page 175 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_175">[175]</a></span>any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says
+Lamb, in the profoundest essay which has ever been written on the acting
+of drama, "to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by
+some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story,
+but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of
+Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us
+enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss
+to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
+audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is
+precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to hear
+hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if he were
+conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to do it,
+bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here, in the
+rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if he is to
+remember that a play is acted, not for <!-- Page 176 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_176">[176]</a></span>the exhibition of the actor,
+but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of the
+"dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had not
+been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra. When do
+we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of even the
+"solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that poetry
+which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?</p>
+
+<p>The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of
+over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the sound.
+I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard a
+lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Com&eacute;die Francaise, on
+the art of speaking on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 177 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_177">[177]</a></span>Silvain," says M. Catulle
+Mend&egrave;s, "est de ceux, bien rares au Th&eacute;&acirc;tre
+Fran&ccedil;ais, qu'on entend m&ecirc;me lorsqu'ils par lent 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 and calculated. He adores verse,
+for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an
+excellent contempt 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, Moli&egrave;re 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 <!-- Page 178 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_178">[178]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 emphasising individual meanings. They
+give, in the musician's sense, a "reading" of the <!-- Page 179 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_179">[179]</a></span>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, profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in
+which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or
+bad, impossible.</p>
+
+<p>I admit that the way in which most actors <!-- Page 180 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_180">[180]</a></span>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 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 something of what verse
+means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr. Yeats'
+readings, interpreted to him by means of <!-- Page 181 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_181">[181]</a></span>notes; it will teach him to
+unlearn something 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 182 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="GREAT_ACTING_IN_ENGLISH"></a>
+
+<h2>GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in
+England? We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
+individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic temperament,
+really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated like a rare
+plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing
+beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now living,
+an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and
+goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants us, from time
+to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have actresses who have
+many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of useful talent; but have
+we in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so
+intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of
+Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering <!-- Page 183 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_183">[183]</a></span>any form of poetic drama on
+the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came to us in 1907 from
+America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern?</p>
+
+<p>The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor,
+is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
+conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
+bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
+conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
+subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
+the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents
+may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on
+having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen bars of the
+music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the 'cellos, in
+order that they might not add a mellowness which would slightly veil the
+acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he rearranged the
+composer's <!-- Page 184 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_184">[184]</a></span>score for the convenience of his own orchestra?
+What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the horn because
+he had not got one of the two or three perfectly accomplished horn-players
+in Europe? What should we say if he altered the time of one movement in
+order to make room for another, in which he would himself be more
+prominent? What should we say if the conductor of an orchestra committed a
+single one of these criminal absurdities? The musical public would rise
+against him as one man, the pedantic critics and the young men who smoke
+as they stand on promenade floors. And yet this, nothing more nor less, is
+done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any
+serious work of dramatic art, is presented with any sort of public
+appeal.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
+the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
+actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
+play, above all a poetic play, is not <!-- Page 185 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_185">[185]</a></span>put on by any but small,
+unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any sort
+of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and conditions of
+the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal vanity and the
+pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves to account for
+the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with show, poetry with
+the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a lack of this very
+sense of what is required in the proper rendering of imaginative work on
+the stage?</p>
+
+<p>It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management,
+of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and
+"Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the whole
+extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most needed. The
+mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our
+stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And first of all I
+would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play
+<!-- Page 186 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_186">[186]</a></span>as a whole by their way of setting it in
+action. I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage,
+should give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a
+solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally
+different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite,
+"Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever qualities
+of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from
+beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music was
+unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to
+the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented for
+its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare's
+sake, not for the actor-manager's.</p>
+
+<p>And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare
+there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance of
+"Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as
+the natural poetry of drama. But <!-- Page 187 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_187">[187]</a></span>I see that it only needs to be acted with
+genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric. I never
+knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it
+could be made so inevitably human. And this is because no one else has
+rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is
+passionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which
+glorifies and destroys Juliet. The decorative Juliet of the stage we know,
+the lovely picture, the <i>ingenue</i>, the prattler of pretty phrases;
+but this mysterious, tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a
+woman, is unknown to us outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr.
+Sothern's Romeo has an exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a
+lover's, and is alive. But Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as
+Juliet; she is Juliet. I would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the
+only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul
+unseized by the Germans yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how
+simple, how <!-- Page 188 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_188">[188]</a></span>much a poet and a gentleman! To what depth he
+suffers! How magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own
+soul, the main riddles of the universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper
+meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern
+was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of
+wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and
+piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no
+figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied
+and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen
+romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of
+"Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare
+saw him living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of
+fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all
+critics of life. And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy,
+moved before one's eyes like a religious service. <!-- Page 189 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_189">[189]</a></span>How is it that we get
+from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one
+in England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
+said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
+the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
+chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything
+obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the
+quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never uncontrolled.
+Intention without the power of achievement is almost as lamentable a thing
+as achievement not directed by intention. Now here are two players in whom
+technique has been carried to a supreme point. There is no actor on our
+stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors
+can. It is on this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as
+one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great
+acting depends. Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture,
+but the inner meaning, <!-- Page 190 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_190">[190]</a></span>of some beautiful and subtle passage in
+Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric, and
+another eagerly, as passionate speech, but no one with the precise accent
+of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his
+characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at
+Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are
+accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many
+rhetorical manners. Mr. Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair,
+exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their
+bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you
+overhear his thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be
+overheard, and just so casually. To render this on the stage requires,
+first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of
+producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of
+those words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely
+mastered those two first <!-- Page 191 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_191">[191]</a></span>requirements of acting? No one now acting in
+English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.</p>
+
+<p>What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we
+get when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we
+get from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking
+merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in
+the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look, for
+contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate travesty,
+done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli. He acts with
+his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with
+his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that
+self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's troubles upon him. It is a
+fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has
+its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece. The
+play is great and wild, a mockery and a happiness; and it is
+<!-- Page 192 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_192">[192]</a></span>all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery
+of it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been
+allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.</p>
+
+<p>So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary
+principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted; only
+in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of the
+actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal. Let us
+look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken of her
+Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her Ophelia. It
+is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and merely for the
+reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of some beautiful
+bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered among all other
+renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple poetry it makes of
+madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into it from a complete
+abandonment to what is essence, and not mere decoration, in the spoiled
+brain <!-- Page 193 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_193">[193]</a></span>of this kind, loving and will-less woman. She
+suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you, the very soul
+naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence. She makes the rage
+and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible thing.</p>
+
+<p>In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
+broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman let
+loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art is
+tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses into
+jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern sentiment
+which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of romance. She
+is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which everything is a kind
+of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into a matter destined to
+come right in the end. And so her delicate and restrained gaiety in
+masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every requirement, of what for
+the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.</p>
+
+<p>Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what <!-- Page 194 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_194">[194]</a></span>can be done with the modern
+make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
+written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject was
+made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
+lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and theatrical
+situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do; what, indeed,
+some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little peasant girl,
+perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the peasant saint,
+too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of shreds and patches
+one remembers only something which has given it its whole value: the vital
+image of a divine child, a thing of peace and love, who makes war
+angelically.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
+to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than Shakespeare,
+a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was in Flower."
+Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage. Even through
+<!-- Page 195 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_195">[195]</a></span>the silly disguises of this inconceivable
+production, which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent
+New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the
+fool's fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
+practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
+parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
+nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
+was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
+which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.</p>
+
+<p>An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or
+preference to a single kind of <i>r&ocirc;le</i> is not properly an artist
+at all. It is the curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased
+the public in any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into
+money, to repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does
+so, he is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of
+artist to be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself.
+When I <!-- Page 196 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_196">[196]</a></span>have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia,
+and as Viola, I am content to have seen her also in a worthless farce,
+because she showed me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly,
+safely, through a part that she despised: she did not spoil it out of
+self-respect; out of a rarer self-respect she carried it through without
+capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen,
+the Fiammetta of Catulle Mend&egrave;s and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do
+not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can
+imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but
+with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that
+she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and
+so subtly trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being
+genius at all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no
+fits and starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the
+attractiveness of excess. It is by excess that we for the most part
+distinguish what seems to us genius; and it is <!-- Page 197 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_197">[197]</a></span>often by its excess
+that genius first really shows itself. But the rarest genius is without
+excess, and may seem colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems
+beside Titian. But Giorgione will always be the greater.</p>
+
+<p>I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
+of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about the
+"strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in pained
+surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had not, she
+would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless" person, the
+Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily be made, and
+there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs. Kendal to Miss
+Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a greater operatic
+singer than Mme. Calv&eacute;. What Miss Marlowe has is a great innocence,
+which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and a childish and yet
+wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild beast, in whom there
+would always <!-- Page 198 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_198">[198]</a></span>be a charm far beyond that of the domestic
+creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to her
+perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere stealthily
+about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable, unconscious; without
+which we are tame christened things, fit for cloisters. Duse is the soul
+made flesh, R&eacute;jane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the
+flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of life, the plenitude
+of sap in the tree.</p>
+
+<p>The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
+different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
+resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in his
+own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
+actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of that
+attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and engaging, a
+way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the
+footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
+<!-- Page 199 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_199">[199]</a></span>fills and gladdens you with a sense of the
+single human being whom she is representing. And there is her strange
+beauty, in which the mind and the senses have an equal part, and which is
+full of savour and grace, alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with
+these personal qualities that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to
+emphasise is the particular kind of lesson which this acting, so
+essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America,
+should have for all who are at all seriously considering the lamentable
+condition of our stage in the present day. We have nothing like it in
+England, nothing on the same level, no such honesty and capacity of art,
+no such worthy results. Are we capable of realising the difference? If
+not, Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern will have come to England in
+vain.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 200 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_THEORY_OF_THE_STAGE"></a>
+
+<h2>A THEORY OF THE STAGE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as
+you will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
+let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry, and
+comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
+scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
+plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
+clothes that skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
+represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
+represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work on
+any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of a
+drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its appeal
+when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
+<!-- Page 201 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_201">[201]</a></span>Companies of marionette players still go about
+the villages of Kent, and among their stock pieces is "Arden of
+Feversham," the play which Shakespeare is not too great to have written,
+at some moment when his right hand knew not what his left hand was doing.
+Well, that great little play can hold the eyes of every child and
+villager, as the puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it
+after three centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
+inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
+there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse can
+we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing but
+beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an
+abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then
+words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Because
+poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can let out more of that
+secret than prose, the great drama of the past has been mainly drama in
+verse. The <!-- Page 202 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_202">[202]</a></span>modern desire to escape from form, and to get
+at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside of
+nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to verse,
+which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has seemed to do
+most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his psychology far with
+it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a limiting restraint, and his
+drama a thing less fundamental than the drama of the poets. Only one
+modern writer has brought something which is almost the equivalent of
+poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The Powers of Darkness." The play
+is horrible and uncouth, but it is illuminated by a great inner light.
+There is not a beautiful word in it, but it is filled with beauty. And
+that is because Tolstoi has the vision which may be equally that of the
+poet and of the prophet. It is often said that the age of poetry is over,
+and that the great forms of the future must be in prose. That is the
+"exquisite reason" of those whom the gods have not made poetical. It is
+like saying that there <!-- Page 203 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_203">[203]</a></span>will be no more music, or that love is out of
+date. Forms change, but not essence; and Whitman points the way, not to
+prose, but to a poetry which shall take in wider regions of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of
+Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not more
+essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama. Poets
+who have written plays for reading have wasted their best opportunities.
+Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to the drama before
+it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and disabilities to the
+writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt wealth than in the plays of
+Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech builds up no structure, but
+wavers in orchestral floods, without beginning or ending? It has been said
+that Shakespeare will sacrifice his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet"
+has been quoted against him. But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and
+whatever has seemed mere lingering meditation <!-- Page 204 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_204">[204]</a></span>will be recognised as a
+part of that thought which makes or waits on action. If poetry in
+Shakespeare may sometimes seem to delay action, it does but deepen it. The
+poetry is the life blood, or runs through it. Only bad actors and managers
+think that by stripping the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a
+more living body. The outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible
+melodrama, still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the
+play, though it comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us
+legitimately, as a growth out of melodrama.</p>
+
+<p>The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist,
+however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his neglect
+of one or another of these two primary and essential requirements. There
+is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement in Germany than in any
+other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann, as accomplished as the
+best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets, like Hauptmann. I do not
+know them well <!-- Page 205 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_205">[205]</a></span>enough to bring them into my argument, but I
+can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the endeavour is in
+the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find even so much as this,
+in more than a single writer here and there? Consider Ibsen, who is the
+subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles. At his best he has a firm
+hold on structural melodrama, he is a marvellous analyst of life, he is
+the most ingenious of all the playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he
+will give you a phrase, "vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one
+of the clich&eacute;s of the minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself
+upon him by bringing him to a no-man's land where there were clouds and
+phantasms that he could no longer direct.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for
+marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of
+limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
+"Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man whose
+gift is of another <!-- Page 206 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_206">[206]</a></span>kind: a visionary of the moods. His later
+speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the
+conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought
+back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in exile,
+among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future will have
+more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright of our time.
+He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness, which we had
+cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.</p>
+
+<p>In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all
+is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital
+passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in
+"Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the
+glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.
+Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the
+speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.</p>
+
+<p>We have in England one man, and one <!-- Page 207 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_207">[207]</a></span>only, who has some public
+claim to be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of
+art. Mr. Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a
+soul. He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not
+only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers in
+their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great
+talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted
+the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our
+only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his astonishing
+skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a spirit really
+intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the stage with
+undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty. Life gives up
+its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of neglected altars.
+But those who amuse the world, no matter by what means, have their place
+in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a clock striking the
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>With Mr. Shaw we come to the play <!-- Page 208 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_208">[208]</a></span>which is prose, and nothing
+but prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a
+more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not so
+long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became to
+Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond
+adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias." The other
+plays are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of
+"Tue-l&agrave;!" was the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in
+which special pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is
+the dramatic motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died
+with the coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La
+Femme de Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind
+it, is to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all
+sorts of interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the
+attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in
+England, we have no such folk to command; <!-- Page 209 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_209">[209]</a></span>our cleverest playwrights,
+apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr.
+Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to be
+associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and Mr.
+Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many more
+names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious playwright? Who
+is there that can be compared with our poets or our novelists, not only
+with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger generation, with a
+Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us one or two good
+realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's, besides giving Mr.
+Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and taken it in America. But
+is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt to write imaginative
+literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary Theatre has already,
+in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers, each wholly individual,
+one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose. Neither has yet reached
+the public, <!-- Page 210 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_210">[210]</a></span>in any effectual way, or perhaps the limits of
+his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for us to hope in, if
+we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on the great
+principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?</p>
+
+<p>The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
+affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
+the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
+plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
+best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
+occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel expense.
+These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision beyond their
+eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need a better form
+for expression than they could find in their newspapers. They discussed
+immortal problems as they would have discussed the entries in their
+ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in that play of
+Tolstoi's which I have called the <!-- Page 211 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_211">[211]</a></span>only modern play in prose
+which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a certain
+childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more civilised
+peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are aware, it
+stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in Tolstoi has more
+wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who fumble at their
+lips for sea-magic.</p>
+
+<p>And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
+as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
+radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
+this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
+art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony has
+ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the past
+were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated in our
+days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of what has
+come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and adequate
+treatment <!-- Page 212 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_212">[212]</a></span>of the primary emotions, because it can render
+them more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words,
+as prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part
+of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who, in
+a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an adequate
+answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of something deeper
+than thought, may let loose some part of that answer which would justify
+the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 213 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_SICILIAN_ACTORS"></a>
+
+<h2>THE SICILIAN ACTORS</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
+Paris, where, I read, "la passion para&icirc;t d&eacute;cidement," to a
+dramatic critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the
+stage. We are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded
+an acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
+accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
+some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
+audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
+marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
+gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment to
+so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of <!-- Page 214 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_214">[214]</a></span>drama. It was a new
+intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.</p>
+
+<p>It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
+crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
+thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the volcanoes
+of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by
+actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at all, but the real
+peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the
+company, who was much more real than reality.</p>
+
+<p>Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her
+attitudes; her art is more nearly the art of R&eacute;jane. While both of
+these are great artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods,
+of animal energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce
+caress, like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
+snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions of
+<!-- Page 215 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_215">[215]</a></span>fear and hate, but for the most part no more.
+In "La Folfaa" she can be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the
+first act, with her delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols,
+petulances, to the soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood
+comes out, turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband
+thrusts her brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow
+her lover. Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels
+among miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure,
+standing out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in
+motion with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
+Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
+difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul. And
+if one thinks of R&eacute;jane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
+though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
+Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic gesture
+of her apparently unconscious <!-- Page 216 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_216">[216]</a></span>hand, turning back the sleeve of her
+lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a great
+thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi Aguglia is a
+stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is no love in her
+heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable hate; and she is
+not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle with her lover on the
+church steps or in her plot against him which sends an unanticipated knife
+into his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
+moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
+Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that, I
+am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright against a
+frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and as one new
+shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of the tools
+drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves. Her face
+contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about
+<!-- Page 217 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_217">[217]</a></span>to utter shrieks which cannot get past her
+lips. She shivers slowly downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and
+clasps her knees with both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty
+several anguishes, while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a
+worm, nearer and nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that
+she repels time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body,
+hopping as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible
+in its scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would
+have it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean
+copy of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely
+has the whole being passed into its possession.</p>
+
+<p>And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
+catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant no
+more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out of
+his rhetoric this <!-- Page 218 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_218">[218]</a></span>woman has created the horror and beauty of a
+supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he has
+denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should have been
+his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden fetters taken
+off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark veil he had worn,
+and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards her martyrdom.
+Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one who knows the
+truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the woman, having willed
+beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an anguish that now flames
+before her in its supreme reality, strains in the irrationality of utter
+fear backward into the midst of those clutching hands that are holding her
+up in the attitude of her death, and, with a shiver in which the soul,
+succumbing to the body, wrings its last triumph out of an ignominious
+glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling the flames eternally upon her: "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" and thereat all evil seems to have
+been judged <!-- Page 219 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_219">[219]</a></span>suddenly, and obliterated, as if God had
+laughed once, and wiped out the world.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
+with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has been
+a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words, especially in
+verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a well-constructed
+play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or with words in a
+foreign language, which we may not understand. The acting, by the Sicilian
+actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to do something towards the
+solution of part at least of this problem.</p>
+
+<p>The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
+which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
+hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
+of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
+which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
+<!-- Page 220 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_220">[220]</a></span>reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it
+on the stage, acted with the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine
+oneself ignorant of the language and of the play. Suddenly the words have
+become unnecessary; the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in
+gesture and motion; the scene passes before you as if you were watching it
+in real life; and this primitively passionate acting, working on an action
+so cunningly contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the
+play, as we read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction.
+The beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
+understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright and
+his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out the
+calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of view of
+the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its aim.</p>
+
+<p>And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
+playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? <!-- Page 221 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_221">[221]</a></span>How is it that in this
+play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than in their
+realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better writer than
+Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than "Cavalleria
+Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great drama, and has the
+skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors like these, who come
+with their own life and ways upon it, in order to bring the men and women
+of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that he has fulfilled the
+great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge said, "dramatic poetry
+must be poetry hid in thought and passion&mdash;not thought or passion
+disguised in the dress of poetry?"</p>
+
+<p>That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
+have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of a
+performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that "it
+seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed no
+distinct shape," but that, "when <!-- Page 222 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_222">[222]</a></span>the novelty is past, we find to our cost
+that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought
+down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that is true of
+Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it from the
+impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio. What fine
+vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or passion was
+lost to us in its passage across the stage?</p>
+
+<p>And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
+finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
+which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is an
+exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against all
+accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
+admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
+suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these sinning,
+suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if naked before
+us, the image of our own <!-- Page 223 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_223">[223]</a></span>souls, visible for once, and unashamed, in the
+mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before them, and maybe laugh
+at the extravagance of their gestures, it is ourselves whom they are
+showing to us, caught unawares and set in symbolical action. Let not the
+base word realism be used for this spontaneous energy by which we are
+shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys
+us. Here is one part of life, the source of its existence: and here it is
+shown us crude as nature, absolute as art. This new, living art of the
+body, which we see struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself
+for once in this woman who expresses, without reticence and without
+offence, all that the poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft,
+animal desire, without passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art
+has for once justified itself by being mere nature.</p>
+
+<p>And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
+occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
+the others, acted <!-- Page 224 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_224">[224]</a></span>with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds.
+What stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at
+our big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
+the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But the
+play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. R&eacute;jane has
+done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
+artist. But not even R&eacute;jane has given us the whole animal, in its
+self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
+command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
+motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and the
+Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia in the
+scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it would have
+been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing meaningless and
+disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest between will and
+desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch helplessly from the
+shore every <!-- Page 225 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_225">[225]</a></span>plank as the sea tears if off and swallows it.
+"I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me in the theatre,
+speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with the woman, she
+meant, or in the woman's place.</p>
+
+<p>Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French
+critic whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration
+by a hesitating consciousness that "la passion para&icirc;t decidement
+avoir partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against
+a magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
+gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
+through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
+authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
+And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 226 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MUSIC"></a>
+
+<h2>MUSIC</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 227 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 228 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 229 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+<a name="ON_WRITING_ABOUT_MUSIC"></a>
+
+<h2>ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <i>pizzicato</i>, 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
+<!-- Page 230 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_230">[230]</a></span>these two methods? None, indeed, that can ever
+be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.</p>
+
+<p>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 knowledge 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 generalisations,
+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
+<!-- Page 231 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_231">[231]</a></span>what you say, but that he has no opinion in the
+matter.</p>
+
+<p>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 speaking as if it
+had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born in its own region,
+and is wholly ignorant of ours.</p>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 232 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+<a name="TECHNIQUE_AND_THE_ARTIST"></a>
+
+<h2>TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 233 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_233">[233]</a></span>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 perfect. Artists who deal in
+materials less fragile than human 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 <!-- Page 234 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_234">[234]</a></span>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 Bechstein 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, <!-- Page 235 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_235">[235]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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; <!-- Page 236 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_236">[236]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 237 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+
+
+<h2>PACHMANN AND THE PIANO</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
+it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
+only 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
+its own voice.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 238 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_238">[238]</a></span>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 terms of your
+instrument, and the piano responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann,
+beyond all other pianists, has 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.</p>
+
+<p>Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
+than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
+sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. 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 <!-- Page 239 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_239">[239]</a></span>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 interpreted 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, hammering.
+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;
+<!-- Page 240 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_240">[240]</a></span>then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very
+serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His 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.</p>
+
+<p>In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
+the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a diamond.
+Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and rightly, it
+is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat with our
+hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us, has
+nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a language
+which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination, chills us a
+little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks down for an
+instant <!-- Page 241 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_241">[241]</a></span>the too solid walls of the world, showing us
+the gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
+lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
+Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
+but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
+finds a kind of humour.</p>
+
+<p>In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
+executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or failure
+in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which, to music,
+is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes tranquilly. So
+remote is it from us that it can only be reached through some not quite
+healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical disquietude when he plays
+is but a sign of what it has cost him to venture outside humanity, into
+music. Yet in music this mystery is a simple thing, its native air; and
+the art of the musician has less difficulty in its evocation than the art
+of the poet or the painter. With what an effort do we persuade words or
+<!-- Page 242 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_242">[242]</a></span>colours back from their vulgar articulateness
+into at least some recollection of that mystery which is deeper than sight
+or speech. Music can never wholly be detached from mystery, can never
+wholly become articulate, and it is in our ignorance of its true nature
+that we would tame it to humanity and teach it to express human emotions,
+not its own.</p>
+
+<p>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, temperament, 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 imploring
+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
+<!-- Page 243 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_243">[243]</a></span>speaking to the music; he lifts his finger,
+that you 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 innermost life of music. I do not think he has ever put
+an 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, <!-- Page 244 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_244">[244]</a></span>easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you do not
+realise that he has had difficulties 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. Pachmann is
+less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his hands are stealthy
+acrobats, going quietly about their difficult business. They talk with the
+piano and the piano answers them. All that violence cannot do with the
+notes of the instrument, he does. His art begins where violence leaves
+off; that is why he can give you fortissimo without hurting the nerves of
+a single string; that is why he can play a run as if every note had its
+meaning. To the others a run is a flourish, a tassel hung on for display,
+a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run you realise that it may have its
+own legitimate sparkle of gay life. With him every note lives, has its own
+body and its own soul, <!-- Page 245 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_245">[245]</a></span>and that is why it is worth hearing him play
+even trivial music like Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music
+like Taubert's Waltz: he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty
+which is at the root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems
+to say in itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in
+which everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it
+is of such moments that Pachmann is the poet.</p>
+
+<p>And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
+Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
+the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
+alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of shading,
+like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and clarity, he
+envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most absolutely musical
+music in the world. The playing of this concerto is the greatest thing I
+have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to play Mozart I heard
+another only less beautiful <!-- Page 246 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_246">[246]</a></span>world of sound rise softly about me. There
+was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there was the nervous spring, the
+diamond hardness, as well as the glowing light and ardent sweetness. Yet
+another manner of playing, not less appropriate to its subject, brought
+before me the bubbling flow, the romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music
+that is a little showy, a little luscious, but with a gracious feminine
+beauty of its own. Chopin followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is
+as if the soul of Chopin had returned to its divine body, the notes of
+this sinewy and feverish music, in which beauty becomes a torture and
+energy pierces to the centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is
+reborn a winged energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur,
+and it is in the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most
+enduring work. The Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were
+Niagara and not Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second
+Mazurka of Op. 50 had that <!-- Page 247 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_247">[247]</a></span>boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy
+intimacy in its secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his
+playing alone, gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not
+sure that the Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most
+essential in Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in
+the playing of the Etudes.</p>
+
+<p>Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
+like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
+lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
+coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
+creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
+which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet controlling
+vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music before him
+that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain which comes from
+the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a precisely similar
+reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration <!-- Page 248 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_248">[248]</a></span>and art are more
+perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often wrote down his
+poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the conscious act of
+thought while listening for the music.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
+"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
+Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
+strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery ice,
+and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a thing
+whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret of the
+rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a line
+like:</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dans un palais, soie et or, dans
+Ecbatane,</span><br />
+
+
+<p>can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most
+experienced nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one
+wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like
+the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
+methods. But <!-- Page 249 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_249">[249]</a></span>is not all art a suggestion, an evocation,
+never a statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
+themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
+everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
+Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
+Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some small,
+essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like Whistler,
+like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and nothing
+else.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Poem beginning: The sounds torture me...">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sounds torture me: I
+see them in my brain;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They spin a flickering web of living
+threads,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Like butterflies upon the garden
+beds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nets of bright sound. I follow them: in
+vain.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I must not brush the least dust from their
+wings:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They die of a touch; but I must capture
+them,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or they will turn to a caressing
+flame,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And lick my soul up with their
+flutterings.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sounds torture me: I count them with
+my eyes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I feel them like a thirst between my
+lips;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is it my body or my soul that
+cries</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With little coloured mouths of sound, and
+drips</span><br />
+<!-- Page 250 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In these bright drops that turn to
+butterflies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dying delicately at my finger
+tips?</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil,
+and it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical
+instrument, which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds
+torture him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes
+them dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
+swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes which
+set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound, listens
+for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away from us
+visibly into that unholy company.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
+interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied than
+he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
+<!-- Page 251 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_251">[251]</a></span>a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of
+immense difficulty, requiring a technique quite different from the
+technique which alone he cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for
+twenty years, and he played it with exactly the right crackling splendour
+that it demanded. On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that
+no one of our time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems
+to be evoked, and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life
+which only the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of
+other players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays
+with the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that
+dainty web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber
+out of moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
+Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
+the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all this
+is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
+<!-- Page 252 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_252">[252]</a></span>wondering at the great walls and bars that have
+been set about the faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human
+in him, and as music turns towards humanity it slips from between his
+hands. What he seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate
+thing in sound: the music, in fact.</p>
+
+<p>It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
+that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret between
+the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no one has
+ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it, becomes a
+joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a voice which is
+music itself. To reduce music to terms of human intelligence or even of
+human emotion is to lower it from its own region, where it is Ariel. There
+is something in music, which we can apprehend only as sound, that comes to
+us out of heaven or hell, mocking the human agency that gives it speech,
+and taking flight beyond it. When Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all
+that Chopin was conscious of <!-- Page 253 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_253">[253]</a></span>saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it
+is all there, if Godowsky plays it; every note, every shade of expression,
+every heightening and quickening, everything that the notes actually say.
+But under Pachmann's miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes
+about it like an atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and
+ecstasy of a beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds
+that are awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
+Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is it
+technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
+dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his own
+magic?</p>
+
+<p>He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience
+than others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch
+which is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could
+tell you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and
+fly and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
+<!-- Page 254 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_254">[254]</a></span>listening face that smiles away from them, you
+would know how little he had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom
+Pachmann himself sets above all other pianists, what he has to tell us
+about the way in which he plays.</p>
+
+<p>When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
+pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon them,
+as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand they
+are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's end.
+They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the straight
+path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey, having done
+their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his learned
+gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini variations of
+Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as soulless as Paganini's
+may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the notes are living things, and
+tosses them about a little cruelly, as if they were a juggler's balls.
+They drop like stones; you are <!-- Page 255 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_255">[255]</a></span>sorry for them, because they are alive.
+How Chopin suffers, when he plays the Preludes! He plays them without a
+throb; the scholar has driven out the magic; Chopin becomes a
+mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor Rhapsody, you hear much more of
+what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has set strange shapes dancing, like
+the skeletons "in the ghosts' moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these
+bodiless things take shape in the music, as Godowsky plays it
+unflinchingly, giving it to you exactly as it is, without comment. Here
+his fidelity to every outline of form becomes an interpretation. But
+Chopin is so much more than form that to follow every outline of it may be
+to leave Chopin out of the outline.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the
+one most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
+think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
+greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
+intense measure, might have been thought less likely to
+<!-- Page 256 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_256">[256]</a></span>be done perfectly by Pachmann than such
+Coleridge in music, such murmurings out of paradise, as the Etude in F
+Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those Mazurkas in which Chopin is more
+poignantly fantastic in substance, more wild and whimsical in rhythm, than
+elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were
+strange and lovely gambols of unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he
+mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little
+freakish things and the trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning
+to every part of its decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and
+wave-like motion of the whole tossing and eager sea of sound.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
+peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in their
+fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any essential
+thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what is certainly
+a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The sharpened steel
+gains in what is most <!-- Page 257 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_257">[257]</a></span>vital in its purpose by this very paring away
+of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike deeper for the
+same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is the existence of
+Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as sharpness; these giants
+fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the
+"Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not
+only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in
+Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its
+lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the
+greatness of even a perfect drama.</p>
+
+<p>Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was
+once thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because
+the taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew
+have whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out
+like a secret.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 258 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PADEREWSKI"></a>
+
+<h2>PADEREWSKI</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
+Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
+noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to a
+rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
+hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and played
+the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own home.
+After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had been in
+hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the playing. I
+would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to be nothing
+but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the
+marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and then the
+exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early morning,
+when, as I <!-- Page 259 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_259">[259]</a></span>went home through the still garrulous and
+peopled streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between
+night and dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross
+way of popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there
+had been, for a few people, this divine escape.</p>
+
+<p>No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
+Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
+Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
+poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
+growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised, more
+than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
+virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
+not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
+but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
+surprised awakening.</p>
+
+<p>The art of Paderewski recalls to me the <!-- Page 260 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_260">[260]</a></span>art of the most skilled and
+the most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
+People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The word
+conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate. But there
+is much in common between two forms of an art in which physical dexterity
+counts for so much, and that passionate precision to which error must be
+impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get from Cinquevalli when
+he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski when he brings a
+continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do the same things, but
+no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball delicately. And Paderewski, in
+his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult
+things without difficulty, with a scornful ease, an almost accidental
+quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it. It is
+difficult to imagine that anyone since Liszt has had so complete a mastery
+of every capacity of the piano, and Liszt, though probably even more
+brilliant, can <!-- Page 261 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_261">[261]</a></span>hardly be imagined with this particular kind of
+charm. His playing is in the true sense an inspiration; he plays nothing
+as if he had learned it with toil, but as if it had come to him out of a
+kind of fiery meditation. Even his thunder is not so much a thing
+specially cultivated for its own sake as a single prominent detail in a
+vast accomplishment. When he plays, the piano seems to become thrillingly
+and tempestuously alive, as if brother met brother in some joyous triumph.
+He collaborates with it, urging it to battle like a war-horse. And the
+quality of the sonority which he gets out of it is unlike that which is
+teased or provoked from the instrument by any other player. Fierce
+exuberant delight wakens under his fingers, in which there is a
+sensitiveness almost impatient, and under his feet, which are as busy as
+an organist's with the pedals. The music leaps like pouring water, flood
+after flood of sound, caught together and flung onward by a central
+energy. The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments;
+all the expression goes to passage <!-- Page 262 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_262">[262]</a></span>after passage, realised
+acutely in their sequence. Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he
+gives you thunder as if heard through clouds. And he is full of leisure
+and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if
+loth to let them pass over and be gone. And he seems to play out of a
+dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that
+meaning with entire felicity.</p>
+
+<p>In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
+was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
+brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for modern
+players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its perfection of
+fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the little sharp
+movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a bird. The ear
+waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation; nothing was
+missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a faithful and
+obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or that it was
+<!-- Page 263 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_263">[263]</a></span>anybody in particular who was playing: the
+sonata was there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had
+known that it existed.</p>
+
+<p>Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
+original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if he
+were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling is
+altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first
+time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its
+Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it
+might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white
+rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated
+and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed to watch over them like a
+Loge of celestial ingenuity.</p>
+
+<p>When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in
+which the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if
+Paderewski were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show
+piece <!-- Page 264 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_264">[264]</a></span>for the piano, this was it, and if ever there
+was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski. You felt at once the
+personal sympathy of the great pianist for the great pianist. He was no
+longer reverential, as with Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part,
+sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in
+the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or
+obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous,
+explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in
+what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real
+worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
+astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
+hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
+spectacularly magnificent?</p>
+
+<p>Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
+anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
+not so wholly satisfactory as in the <!-- Page 265 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_265">[265]</a></span>ease of Chopin, who, with a
+smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never dazzles,
+Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to his own
+genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are only now
+beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in his work.
+How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless transfiguring
+triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in
+"Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is
+no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious
+fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the piano Liszt
+certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown person, who was
+to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there are no depths,
+though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the test rather of the
+virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it was so infinitely
+more important that Paderewski should have played the Beethoven sonata as
+impersonally <!-- Page 266 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_266">[266]</a></span>as he did than that he should have played the
+Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those limits there
+seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and Paderewski has
+attained both limits.</p>
+
+<p>After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
+of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
+What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
+same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
+is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
+America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael of
+the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
+mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
+notes?</p>
+
+<p>Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
+"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
+skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to compel
+<!-- Page 267 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_267">[267]</a></span>universal sympathy is to succeed in the last
+requirements of an art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he
+perpetuates his personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds
+it, like a perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever
+given to the creator of beautiful sounds?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 268 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_REFLECTION_AT_A_DOLMETSCH_CONCERT"></a>
+
+<h2>A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 269 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>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 harpsichord 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 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
+<!-- Page 270 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_270">[270]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 271 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_271">[271]</a></span>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 accomplice and
+not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its
+seclusion.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 272 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_272">[272]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only
+healing for <!-- Page 273 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_273">[273]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 274 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_274">[274]</a></span>in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a
+fragment of it here, a fragment 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, <!-- Page 275 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_275">[275]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>I contrast him with 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 something 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 musician. This music aims at the
+creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing
+which cannot exist <!-- Page 276 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_276">[276]</a></span>outside order and measure; it has not yet come
+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 suggestions 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?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 277 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_DRAMATISATION_OF_SONG"></a>
+
+<h2>THE DRAMATISATION OF SONG</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 Mallarm&eacute;, of an impossible,
+fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves 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 command.
+<!-- Page 278 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_278">[278]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 279 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_279">[279]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by
+a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
+wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
+time, not as a character in an <!-- Page 280 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_280">[280]</a></span>opera, but as a private interpreter
+between poetry and the world.</p>
+
+<p>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 surrounded 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 herself to the possession of the
+song, but she was always conscious 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<!-- Page 281 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_281">[281]</a></span>. 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 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 gives 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, <!-- Page 282 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_282">[282]</a></span>as one feels at once the softness and the
+perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarm&eacute; 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&eacute; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 holding 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 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 <!-- Page 283 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_283">[283]</a></span>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 uninterrupted communion with herself.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 284 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_MEININGEN_ORCHESTRA"></a>
+
+<h2>THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; 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
+appreciation 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 <!-- Page 285 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_285">[285]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from
+"Rosamunde," and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but
+rather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifully
+played. I could only think of the <!-- Page 286 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_286">[286]</a></span>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 straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and various life
+which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the complete thing,
+completely rendered.</p>
+
+<p>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 expression; but the something more, the vast heave and
+throb of the music, was not there. It was "classical" rendering of what is
+certainly not "classical" music. Hear that <!-- Page 287 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_287">[287]</a></span>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 Brahms, or like
+overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner himself, an energy which works
+within known limits, as in the overture to the "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
+rendering of that we must go to Richter.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, in that third concert it would he 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
+instruments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the most delightful
+music in the world. The music of Mozart is, no <!-- Page 288 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_288">[288]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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
+<!-- Page 289 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_289">[289]</a></span>the walls. I noticed it first in the overture
+to "Leonore," the first piece which they played; an unparalleled effect
+and one of surprising beauty.</p>
+
+<p>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
+something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of passion.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 290 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MOZART_IN_THE_MIRABELL_GARTEN"></a>
+
+<h2>MOZART IN THE MIRABELL-GARTEN</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>They are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at the Hof-Theater,
+to follow the Wagner operas at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre; and I stayed,
+on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberfl&ouml;te." 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 Meistersinger"
+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 <!-- Page 291 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_291">[291]</a></span>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
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music,
+which played round <!-- Page 292 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_292">[292]</a></span>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
+pinewoods 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, <!-- Page 293 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_293">[293]</a></span>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 and his senses, in 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
+<!-- Page 294 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_294">[294]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberfl&ouml;te," is
+music without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has
+the firm outlines of D&uuml;rer 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 Botticelli's "Spring"; 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. Mozart
+<!-- Page 295 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_295">[295]</a></span>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 Zauberfl&ouml;te"
+is really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which 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 <!-- Page 296 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_296">[296]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 297 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="NOTES_ON_WAGNER_AT_BAYREUTH"></a>
+
+<h2>NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH</h2>
+
+<h3>I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the
+music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph not
+less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember that
+every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that only
+Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home, receiving the
+world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many doors, offering an
+entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must always be at cautious
+enmity with his public, always somewhat at its mercy, even after he has
+conquered its attention. The crowd never really loves art, it resents art
+as a departure from its level of mediocrity; and fame comes to an artist
+only when there is a sufficient <!-- Page 298 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_298">[298]</a></span>number of intelligent individuals in the
+crowd to force their opinion upon the resisting mass of the others, in the
+form of a fashion which it is supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt.
+Bayreuth exists because Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he
+succeeded in forcing his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and
+action than any other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he
+wanted, not always when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had
+Liszt on his side, the one musician of all others who could do most for
+him; he had the necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the
+crowd; and at last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent
+of his own triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly
+satisfied. He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there
+were his works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was
+called.</p>
+
+<p>And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth
+itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner
+<!-- Page 299 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_299">[299]</a></span>wished it to be seen and heard. The square,
+plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre at Munich is an improved copy
+of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the same ampitheatrical
+arrangement of seats, the same invisible orchestra and vast stage.
+Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are even the three "fanfaren" at
+the doors, with the same punctual and irrevocable closing of the doors at
+the beginning of each act. As at Bayreuth, 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 thus now two theatres in the world in which music and
+drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 300 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me
+the most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
+have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
+that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
+ideas, of Wagner. The music itself 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; 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 religious
+music, but it is the music of a religion which had never
+<!-- Page 301 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_301">[301]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to
+render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-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
+something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out of a carnal
+voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 302 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_302">[302]</a></span>repetition of a few ideas. All that music of
+the closing scene of the first act 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 become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they
+end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a
+cunning absorption of the will of another.</p>
+
+<p>"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
+soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
+be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than anything
+I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the sea or the
+wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the music, as one
+watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the visible picture
+there. And, so perfectly do all the <!-- Page 303 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_303">[303]</a></span>arts flow into one, the
+picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
+convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm is
+everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and
+every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. 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. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be settled
+as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the stage is
+(more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the time of a
+song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also, every gesture
+is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its reticence. It is
+difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time,
+people really motionless on the stage. After all, action, as it has been
+said, is only a way of spoiling something. The aim of
+<!-- Page 304 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_304">[304]</a></span>the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama
+of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like
+most people in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors,
+when they are not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically
+trying to make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not
+what restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
+realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
+these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
+frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
+least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown us
+that it can be.</p>
+
+<p>Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
+new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's
+representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this
+world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand
+tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
+<!-- Page 305 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_305">[305]</a></span>proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as
+that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual,
+through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all.
+How that solitary figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown
+to himself, he is the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of
+remoteness, which it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the
+action into a reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is
+watching it!</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
+the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
+enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a change
+is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on natural
+truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every wrinkle of
+its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is elaborately departed
+from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be formed out of those
+outlines, all but those outlines being left out. <!-- Page 306 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_306">[306]</a></span>And "Parsifal," which
+is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it, in its very essence,
+that hieratic character which it is the effort of supreme art to attain.
+At times one is reminded of the most beautiful drama in the world, the
+Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of leaves, brought in so
+touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old hermit watering his flowers.
+There is something of the same universal tenderness, the same religious
+linking together of all the world, in some vague enough, but very
+beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside the question to discuss how far
+Wagner's intentions were technically religious: how far Parsifal himself
+is either Christ or Buddha, and how far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's
+mind was the mind to which all legend is sacred, every symbol of divine
+things to be held in reverence; but symbol, with him, was after all a
+means to an end, and could never have been accepted as really an end in
+itself. I should say that in "Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but
+not because he intended, or did <!-- Page 307 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_307">[307]</a></span>not intend, to shadow the Christian
+mysteries. His music, his acting, are devout, because the music has a
+disembodied ecstasy, and the acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce
+in us something of the solemnity of sensation produced by the service of
+the Mass, and are in themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. THE ART OF WAGNER</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
+should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
+continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
+giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
+nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
+composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
+moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does
+but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a world, the
+natural world in the midst of which his people of the
+<!-- Page 308 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_308">[308]</a></span>drama live their passionate life, and a world
+in sympathy with all their passion. And in his audible representation of
+natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have
+only tried, more or less well, to do. When, in the past at least, the
+critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that
+all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as
+imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in
+his painting, is the Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically
+exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not
+arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of
+no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is,
+apprehended with all the clairvoyance of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with
+all its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
+onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
+human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in <!-- Page 309 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_309">[309]</a></span>the midst of a great sea. A
+few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
+awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
+ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were to
+be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an abandonment
+to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know is futile.
+Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it must compass
+all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before which there is
+only a great darkness, and only a great darkness afterwards. Sorrow is so
+lofty and so consoling because it is no less conscious of its passing
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
+drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
+narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
+Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
+Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
+the instant of realisation. <!-- Page 310 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_310">[310]</a></span>Siegfried is living with at least as
+powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening to
+the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for this
+that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of memory,
+were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action of the
+drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
+preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
+their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
+effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
+materialising both.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped
+by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
+circumscribes itself like Giotto's <i>O</i> is almost as tangible a thing
+as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
+flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
+poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and
+wind, <!-- Page 311 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_311">[311]</a></span>is more than a mere heightening of speech: it
+partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the
+whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
+person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.</p>
+
+<p>It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
+distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
+too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
+and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
+personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations of
+humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal,
+have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi humanity. Their
+place in a national legend permits them, without disturbing our critical
+sense of the probability of things, a superhuman passion; for they are
+ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of the bravery, that of the
+purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite devices to give them more
+and more of verisimilitude; <!-- Page 312 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_312">[312]</a></span>modulating song, for instance, into a kind
+of chant which we can almost take for actual speech. It is thus the more
+interesting to note the point to which realism conducts him, the limit at
+which it stops, his conception of a spiritual reality which begins where
+realism leaves off.</p>
+
+<p>And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
+dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
+almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
+painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
+thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
+without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
+note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
+without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
+"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
+obey it. When Br&uuml;nnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is
+an immense thanksgiving for light, and all her <!-- Page 313 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_313">[313]</a></span>being finds expression
+in a great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
+silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
+with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of the
+depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
+Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives him
+to drink; Siegfried, when Br&uuml;nnhilde awakens to the world and to him:
+it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and returned.
+And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as if love and
+the thought of death came always together, the thought of the only ending
+of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the music as no
+Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts and the
+excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow rhythm, which in
+Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards from its first
+breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening notes of the "Ring,"
+seems to broaden outwards like <!-- Page 314 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_314">[314]</a></span>ripples on an infinite sea, throughout the
+whole work of Wagner.</p>
+
+<p>And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
+things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
+other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think of
+Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to a
+little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or
+someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here
+music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering his
+supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
+remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in Wagner
+does God speak to men in his own language.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 315 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="CONCLUSION"></a>
+
+<h2>CONCLUSION</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 316 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_316">[316]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page 317 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_PARADOX_ON_ART"></a>
+
+<h2>A PARADOX ON ART</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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? Literature, 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
+interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, 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?</p>
+
+<p>If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentially
+independent of its material, however dependent upon its own material
+<!-- Page 318 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_318">[318]</a></span>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 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. <!-- Page 319 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_319">[319]</a></span>Beauty is always equally beautiful; the degrees
+exist only when we have not yet attained beauty.</p>
+
+<p>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 it 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 <!-- Page 320 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_320">[320]</a></span>the work of art, the creation, to which we have
+just listened.</p>
+
+<p>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 they have
+seen Descl&eacute;e, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Poem by Gautier">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus
+gelle</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'une forme au travail</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rebelle,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vers, marbre, onyx,
+&eacute;mail.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><!-- Page 321 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_321">[321]</a></span>No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="More poem by Gautier">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tout passe. L'art
+robuste</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Seul &agrave;
+l'&eacute;ternit&eacute;.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le buste</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Survit &agrave; la
+cit&eacute;.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a
+certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate 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 whom posterity means anything very definite, and to whom 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 <!-- Page 322 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_322">[322]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 323 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<h3>BY THE SAME WRITER</h3>
+
+<br />
+<div class="centerme">
+<p>Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.</p>
+
+<p>An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Cities, 1903.</p>
+
+<p>Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual Adventures, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>William Blake, 1907.</p>
+
+<p>Cities of Italy, 1907.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13928 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+
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+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13928 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13928)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Plays, Acting and Music
+       A Book Of Theory
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: November 2, 2004 [EBook #13928]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS, ACTING AND MUSIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Leah Moser and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS
+ACTING AND MUSIC
+
+A BOOK OF THEORY
+
+BY
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+
+
+LONDON
+
+
+1909
+
+
+
+_To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and admiration_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
+material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
+many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
+remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first;
+what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have
+been: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions
+which I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events,
+the programme was carried out.
+
+This book, I said then, 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 æsthetics, 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 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 æsthetics choose
+to confine themselves 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.
+
+1903, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+An Apology for Puppets                    3
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+Nietzsche on Tragedy                     11
+
+Sarah Bernhardt                          17
+
+Coquelin and Molière                     29
+
+Réjane                                   37
+
+Yvette Guilbert                          42
+
+Sir Henry Irving                         52
+
+Duse in Some of Her Parts                60
+
+Annotations                              77
+
+M. Capus in England                      93
+
+A Double Enigma                         100
+
+
+DRAMA
+
+Professional and Unprofessional         109
+
+Tolstoi and Others                      115
+
+Some Problem Plays                      124
+
+"Monna Vanna"                           137
+
+The Question of Censorship              143
+
+A Play and the Public                   148
+
+The Test of the Actor                   152
+
+The Price of Realism                    162
+
+On Crossing Stage to Right              167
+
+The Speaking of Verse                   173
+
+Great Acting in English                 182
+
+A Theory of the Stage                   198
+
+The Sicilian Actors                     213
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+On Writing about Music                  229
+
+Technique and the Artist                232
+
+Pachmann and the Piano                  237
+
+Paderewski                              258
+
+A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert     268
+
+The Dramatisation of Song               277
+
+The Meiningen Orchestra                 284
+
+Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten           290
+
+Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth             297
+
+
+Conclusion: A Paradox on Art            315
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+
+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 subordinate 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 certainly 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. 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 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.
+
+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. Losing, 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 instructive 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 that 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 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 manoeuvres 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 suggestion of magic
+in this beauty.
+
+Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
+marionettes," 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 Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to
+make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple
+a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic
+drama.
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+
+
+
+NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY
+
+
+I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy 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 Mænad, 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 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 rampart 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 contemplation, 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 spirit, 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 l'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 æsthetics 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic
+game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its
+joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital principle. "If it
+were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing 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."
+
+
+
+
+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
+Phèdre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, 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 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 Réjane 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 Camélias," 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
+attractiveness, as with Réjane; 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 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 Réjane; it is differently expressed, that is
+all. With Réjane 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 earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas
+fils 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 "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to
+realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre," 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 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 Phèdre Racine tells us that it
+is "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre." The
+word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phèdre
+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
+remoteness 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 "Phèdre" 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 actress must, in such parts, be
+conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in
+modern conversation? 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 Phèdre that she was eleven or
+twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias." Is it reality,
+is it illusion? Illusion, 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 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 significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem
+to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to
+an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always
+reminds me of a musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument
+of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
+One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente,
+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 savour 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 her, 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. 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 pleasure 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 Bernhardt. One
+sometimes forgets that Réjane 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.
+
+
+
+
+COQUELIN AND MOLIÈRE: SOME ASPECTS
+
+
+To see Coquelin in Molière is to see the greatest of comic actors at his
+best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a student, or
+anything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be compared with
+that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the training of nature.
+They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that Coquelin, with
+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 instrument of Sarah, which
+seems to go by itself, câline, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that
+wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate
+effect. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a
+disguise, never a revelation.
+
+I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their company at the Garrick
+Theatre. They did "Tartuffe," "L'Avare," "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,"
+"Les Précieuses Ridicules," and a condensed version of "Le Dépit
+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 Dépit
+Amoureux," and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Molière's
+day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Molière was not a
+poet, and he knew that he was not a poet. When he ventured to write the
+most Shakespearean of his comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le même
+préjugé," Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de
+Pierre,' parce qu'il était en prose, nuisit au succès de 'l'Avare.'
+Cependant le public qui, à la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par
+donner à cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il mérite. On comprit alors
+qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comédies 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. Molière was a great prose writer, but I do
+not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The
+temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. His
+worldly wisdom, his active 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-René; 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 Molière 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 Molière 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 of Molière or of the character of Coquelin. Probably there
+is no difference. We get Molière's vast, succulent farce of the
+intellect rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail,
+is not what Molière meant, then so much the worse for Molière.
+
+Molière 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 Précieuses 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 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 its
+head 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 interpretation. The part of Maître Jacques in "L'Avare," for
+instance, which I have just seen him perform with such gusto and such
+certainty, 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 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 independent 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
+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 a 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.
+
+
+
+
+RÉJANE
+
+
+The genius of Réjane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all the
+ingredients of the dish may be named without defining 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
+Verlaine'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: and I had to think twice, before I could
+remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which
+I had been almost cruelly enjoying.
+
+The art of Réjane accepts things as they are, without selection or
+correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall
+be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the
+shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is
+common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is
+leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose.
+To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where
+nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever
+form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
+untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
+toute entière à sa proie attachée," and she has all the brutality and
+all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious
+vice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in
+which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their
+own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the
+whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity
+which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every
+moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect;
+then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you
+will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done
+nothing with genius.
+
+Réjane 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. Réjane, 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 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 love. 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: here, in "Sapho," is a woman who
+flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himself
+before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt to
+win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
+herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of
+one who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to
+nature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion.
+Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a
+disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you
+will: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a
+blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think
+in one way. Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some
+thrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its
+attributes but some fundamental nobility, Réjane takes the big, foolish,
+dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit
+of acting?
+
+
+
+
+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, striped 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 beginning 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. André
+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
+  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 merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
+though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.
+
+It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly,
+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 conventional
+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, impersonal,
+dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it.
+
+Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an inflection 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
+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 expressionlessness of surprise. Her
+naïveté 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 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 of most
+service to her. 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 "Chérie," a
+creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at work
+somewhat abnormally in an anæmic 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 innocence. 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 endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant expression
+for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all that part
+of life which the conventions were intended 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 towards
+it. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vanné"; 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
+Bréda, praying to the one saint in her calendar, "Sainte Galette"; the
+_soûlarde_, 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 _métier_, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Goldsmith. 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 represents 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 movement; 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 permanent charm of a very natural nature, which
+has become deliciously sophisticated. 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
+not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment 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 limitations
+of the stage.
+
+Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." 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 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 was 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 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 chromolithographic
+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. In 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 may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating
+remains.
+
+Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
+"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
+spectacle. It is a play made up principally 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; 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 extravagant 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 conceived 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 Englishwoman 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
+consequences 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 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'a intention, and
+played brilliantly enough to distract 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 construction 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 naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it might
+be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse
+simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial 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 loathing 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 conscious art,
+an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. 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 movements 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 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 positive. 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 so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
+has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo 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 painfulness. 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 beautiful
+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 inexcusable 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 a failure of a
+far higher order than such successes 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 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
+Camélias," 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 sentiment 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 unnatural 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 sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
+the simple, 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 greatness, 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 reproachfulness, 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 Mlle. 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 intercourse
+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 "La Dame aux Camélias" 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.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
+Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." 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 "Fédora," 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 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 "Fédora." 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 unimaginative
+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
+disguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealing
+medium of a masterpiece?
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Fédora" 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 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: "Fédora" 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 Fédora 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 movements, 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 Fédora can never be made to
+seem. In "Fédora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of stagecraft,
+without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, much
+less of 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 conception, 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 "Fédora" is as fine as anything she has done. It
+completes our admiration 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.
+
+
+
+
+ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY
+
+I. "PELLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE"
+
+
+"Pelléas and Mélisande" 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 "Pelléas and Mélisande" we have two innocent lovers, to
+whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and 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
+exquisite 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, has
+been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
+accompaniment of M. Fauré'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 Mélisande. At the beginning I thought
+she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the original
+performance; 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 perfection. 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 palpitating voice, in which there is something like the
+throbbing of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautiful
+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 Pelléas; 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 Pelléas: 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 monotonous, 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 "Everyman" deserves a
+place of its own among the stage 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 heat, 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. "Everyman" 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 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. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM
+
+
+In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
+best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
+was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, 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 meaning seems to have gone out
+of them; they are displaced, 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 that his red livery may have its full "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 to get in some more than indifferent 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 programme
+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:
+
+  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. 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS
+
+
+When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
+of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
+scarcely human oval which represents 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 expression 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
+convulsively, 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 instincts.
+With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geisha
+and the Knight," the effect is overwhelming; 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 instruments, and beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor
+their clothes have beauty, to the limited 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
+misunderstanding.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL
+
+
+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 ahead of all our competitors. I have no great
+admiration for most of our comic gentlemen 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 expressive 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
+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.
+
+The French "revue," as one sees it at the Folies-Bergère, 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND
+
+
+An excellent Parisian company from the Variétés 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 Réjane, she had none of
+Réjane's magnetism, none of Réjane'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 Mlle. Lavallière, with her brilliant
+eyes and her little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M.
+Numès, 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 pantomine, 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.
+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 Review_, 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, somewhat 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 presenting 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 take the luck which comes his way. The few,
+quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
+probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains;
+the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours,
+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
+à-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 naughtiness is so naïve, 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
+très bien vivre sans être 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 company worked with the effortless
+unanimity of a perfect piece of machinery.
+
+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 réchauffés! 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 company. 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 checkmate, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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, "Cæsar'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 Gérard de Gourgiran, are in their country
+house, with their two wives, Giselle and Léonore, 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
+Léonore? 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 Léonore gives
+way; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is some
+unnecessary moralising ("Là-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 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 Léonore have had a possibly quite harmless
+flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Léonore's
+room, he has merely been walking with Léonore 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 Léonore in the garden at midnight. 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. "Cæsar'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
+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 pièce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la tragédie des
+mâitres 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. Occasionally 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 Téléphone," 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 successful. 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 helpless to aid her,
+is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
+brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as
+uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has
+absolutely no 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 circumstances, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 committee 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, and therefore may be contrasted without
+the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was
+interpreted on the stage.
+
+Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and 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 circumstances? he says to himself: what would it be
+effective on 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 keyhole. 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, and 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
+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. 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 persistently, 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.
+
+
+
+
+TOLSTOI AND 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 part. In the drama we can only properly realise
+the soul's action through some corresponding 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 impressiveness partly
+to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
+chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the
+eternal 'Dame aux Camélias,' 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, 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 disappearance 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 interpretation of life, not a theorising about
+life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
+more consequence) 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 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 discovered.
+
+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 consummate 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 produced at the
+Odéon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
+dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
+Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
+Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was
+called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M.
+Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on
+est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
+pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. 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 himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the
+door of the jury-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
+preceding. 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 unparalleled 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
+a 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 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 "Resurrection," something which is
+not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a
+dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated.
+Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
+Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been
+left well alone?
+
+
+
+
+SOME 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" 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. The author, it
+is true, is an actor, but 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 knowledge 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 daylight. 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, 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, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding
+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 naïveté 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; 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 opposition 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 convinces 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
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"
+
+
+On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
+Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in
+his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not
+things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to
+believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for
+instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the
+footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the
+performance of the Stage Society. 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 seabirds 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 witchcraft 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.
+
+
+
+
+III. "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. François 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 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 I am ready to admit that it is justified if I find
+that the dramatic movement 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 Avariés," 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 suggestion 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. "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 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
+interesting 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. Tanqueray."
+
+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 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 like 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.
+
+
+
+
+"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 helplessness. 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
+significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.
+Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in
+an essay in "Le Trésor 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 Sélysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which
+there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
+people thought 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 Sélysette," 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 Destinée," Maeterlinck
+says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragédies ne nous offrent
+pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalité. Je
+crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragédie où la
+fatalité règne réellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas
+une où le héros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est
+jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the
+preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poètes tragiques osent très
+rarement permettre au sage de paraître un moment sur la scène. Ils
+craignent une âme haute parce que les événements 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 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," "Intérieur," and even
+"Pelléas et Mélisande," 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.
+
+
+The letter of protest which appeared in the _Times_ of June 30, 1903,
+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
+_Athenæum_, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and
+makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The _Morning
+Post_ is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunate
+censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting 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 "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 discriminating 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 dissevered, 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 license. 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 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
+censorship. 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?
+
+
+
+
+A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's
+Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for
+the stage have done without thinking about art at all.
+
+She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead
+of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead
+of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a
+comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of
+good manners. 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 hushed before they become disturbing. 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.
+
+Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
+to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the 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. 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 indefinitely 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?
+
+The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
+and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to
+understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "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
+admirably 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, and resented
+them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect 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 audience, 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 the 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE TEST OF THE ACTOR
+
+
+The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the
+capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really
+carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such
+a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The
+Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of
+letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a
+complimentary 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." Mr. Jones
+himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to
+give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he
+means by this peroration, which once closed 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 of 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?" Does Mr. Jones,
+I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of
+silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates,
+in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not
+to "rank as Literature"? 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 bewildering 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 exactitude. 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. "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. 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 it can be
+grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
+is wasted; only 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
+"Iolanthe," 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.
+
+And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
+insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, 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 was 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 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 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 representation
+of that part: a picture, not a man.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 "property."
+
+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 what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of
+the 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 hedgerow 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.
+
+What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
+background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the
+stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
+imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
+from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
+call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns,
+teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is
+carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the
+imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and
+painted gables.
+
+I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
+English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
+of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a
+new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
+have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on real
+Thames water.
+
+Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
+material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation
+of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
+spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play
+is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A
+poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage
+in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem,
+will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its
+essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical
+plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the
+secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He
+will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the
+manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of
+nature.
+
+
+
+
+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. Whenever 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 impression 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.
+
+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 momentary 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 knowing 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. 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 difference 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
+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?"
+
+
+
+
+THE SPEAKING OF VERSE
+
+
+Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
+verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it
+has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in
+vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far
+they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses
+were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to
+dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a
+kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not
+apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage
+traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular
+actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is
+not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in
+the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
+contorted species of prose.
+
+An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
+assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent
+an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
+Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
+has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
+between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
+Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
+experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
+translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
+definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech
+of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
+important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
+clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
+Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
+any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest
+essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that
+if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
+Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting
+all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his
+stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
+passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
+furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
+audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is
+precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to
+hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if
+he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to
+do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here,
+in the rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if
+he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the
+actor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of
+the "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had
+not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra.
+When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of
+even the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that
+poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?
+
+The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of
+over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the
+sound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard
+a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comédie Francaise, on
+the art of speaking on the stage.
+
+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
+Mendès, "est de ceux, bien rares au Théâtre Français, qu'on entend même
+lorsqu'ils par lent 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 and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a
+brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt 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, Molière 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 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,
+profoundly 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 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 something of
+what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
+Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach
+him to unlearn something 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.
+
+
+
+
+GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH
+
+
+Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
+We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
+individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic
+temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated
+like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a
+thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now
+living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius
+comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants
+us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have
+actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of
+useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of
+giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an
+interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of
+poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came
+to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern?
+
+The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor,
+is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
+conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
+bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
+conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
+subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
+the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual
+talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle
+insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen
+bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the
+'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would
+slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he
+rearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his own
+orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the
+horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly
+accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered
+the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he
+would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of
+an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The
+musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics
+and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet
+this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre
+whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is
+presented with any sort of public appeal.
+
+In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
+the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
+actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
+play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small,
+unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any
+sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and
+conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal
+vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves
+to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with
+show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a
+lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of
+imaginative work on the stage?
+
+It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management,
+of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet,"
+and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the
+whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most
+needed. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have
+lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And
+first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they
+give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. I
+have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should
+give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a
+solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally
+different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite,
+"Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever
+qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm
+from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music
+was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice
+to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented
+for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for
+Shakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's.
+
+And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare
+there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance
+of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well
+as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be
+acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the
+rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or
+that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is
+because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so
+beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an
+ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.
+The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the
+_ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic
+child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us
+outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an
+exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But
+Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I
+would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there
+are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans
+yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet
+and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he
+interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the
+universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen
+in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane
+Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was
+nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous
+representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of
+a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not
+less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic,
+tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's
+fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him
+living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental
+sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.
+And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before
+one's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the
+acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in
+England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
+said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
+the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
+chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental,
+everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that
+intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never
+uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as
+lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here
+are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.
+There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as
+these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this
+power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument,
+that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give
+us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful
+and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it
+sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but
+no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts,
+which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his
+loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives
+the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are accustomed to hear
+spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr.
+Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive
+reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable
+before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his
+thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and
+just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an
+understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing
+by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those
+words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely
+mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting in
+English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.
+
+What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get
+when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get
+from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking
+merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in
+the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look,
+for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate
+travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli.
+He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is
+motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous
+gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's
+troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with
+rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the
+immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and a
+happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of
+it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been
+allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.
+
+So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary
+principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted;
+only in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of
+the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal.
+Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken
+of her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her
+Ophelia. It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and
+merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of
+some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered
+among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple
+poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into
+it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere
+decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less
+woman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you,
+the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence.
+She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible
+thing.
+
+In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
+broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman
+let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art
+is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses
+into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern
+sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of
+romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which
+everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into
+a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and
+restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every
+requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.
+
+Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
+make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
+written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
+was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
+lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
+theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
+what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
+peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
+peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
+shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
+whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
+love, who makes war angelically.
+
+Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
+to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
+Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
+in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
+Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
+which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
+one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
+fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
+practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
+parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
+nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
+was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
+which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.
+
+An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preference
+to a single kind of _rôle_ is not properly an artist at all. It is the
+curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in
+any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to
+repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he
+is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist to
+be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When I
+have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I am
+content to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showed
+me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a part
+that she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of a
+rarer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it.
+Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of
+Catulle Mendès and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names
+of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them
+all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly
+varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural
+genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly
+trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at
+all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits and
+starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness of
+excess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seems
+to us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first really
+shows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seem
+colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. But
+Giorgione will always be the greater.
+
+I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
+of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about
+the "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in
+pained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had
+not, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless"
+person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily
+be made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs.
+Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a
+greater operatic singer than Mme. Calvé. What Miss Marlowe has is a
+great innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and
+a childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild
+beast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of the
+domestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to
+her perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere
+stealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable,
+unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit for
+cloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Réjane the flesh made Parisian,
+Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of
+life, the plenitude of sap in the tree.
+
+The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
+different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
+resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in
+his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
+actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of
+that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and
+engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to
+which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
+fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she
+is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and
+the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace,
+alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities
+that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the
+particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English,
+though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who
+are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage
+in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the
+same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.
+Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.
+
+
+
+
+A THEORY OF THE STAGE
+
+
+Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as you
+will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
+let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry,
+and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
+scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
+plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
+clothes that skeleton.
+
+The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
+represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
+represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work
+on any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of
+a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its
+appeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
+Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent,
+and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham," the play which
+Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his
+right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great
+little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the
+puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three
+centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
+inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
+there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse
+can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing
+but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the
+ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama
+begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell
+its secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can
+let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has
+been mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, and
+to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside
+of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to
+verse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has
+seemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his
+psychology far with it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a
+limiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than the
+drama of the poets. Only one modern writer has brought something which
+is almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The
+Powers of Darkness." The play is horrible and uncouth, but it is
+illuminated by a great inner light. There is not a beautiful word in it,
+but it is filled with beauty. And that is because Tolstoi has the vision
+which may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet. It is often
+said that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of the
+future must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whom
+the gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will be
+no more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but not
+essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which
+shall take in wider regions of the mind.
+
+Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of
+Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not
+more essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama.
+Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their best
+opportunities. Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to
+the drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and
+disabilities to the writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt
+wealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech
+builds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, without
+beginning or ending? It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice
+his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet" has been quoted against him.
+But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere
+lingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought which
+makes or waits on action. If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem to
+delay action, it does but deepen it. The poetry is the life blood, or
+runs through it. Only bad actors and managers think that by stripping
+the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body. The
+outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible melodrama, still
+irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it
+comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as a
+growth out of melodrama.
+
+The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist,
+however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his
+neglect of one or another of these two primary and essential
+requirements. There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement
+in Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann,
+as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets,
+like Hauptmann. I do not know them well enough to bring them into my
+argument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the
+endeavour is in the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find
+even so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there?
+Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles.
+At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is a
+marvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all the
+playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase,
+"vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one of the clichés of the
+minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him
+to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could
+no longer direct.
+
+Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for
+marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of
+limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
+"Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man
+whose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His later
+speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the
+conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought
+back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in
+exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future
+will have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright
+of our time. He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness,
+which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.
+
+In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all
+is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital
+passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in
+"Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the
+glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.
+Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the
+speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.
+
+We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim to
+be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art. Mr.
+Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul.
+He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not
+only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers
+in their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great
+talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted
+the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our
+only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his
+astonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a
+spirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the
+stage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty.
+Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of
+neglected altars. But those who amuse the world, no matter by what
+means, have their place in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a
+clock striking the hour.
+
+With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing but
+prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a
+more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not
+so long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became
+to Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond
+adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Camélias." The other plays
+are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of "Tue-là!" was
+the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which special
+pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is the dramatic
+motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with the
+coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La Femme de
+Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, is
+to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts of
+interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the
+attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in
+England, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights,
+apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr.
+Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to
+be associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and
+Mr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many
+more names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious
+playwright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our
+novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger
+generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us
+one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's,
+besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and
+taken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt
+to write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary
+Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers,
+each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose.
+Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps
+the limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for
+us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on
+the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?
+
+The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
+affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
+the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
+plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
+best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
+occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel
+expense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision
+beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need
+a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers.
+They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the
+entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in
+that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in
+prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a
+certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more
+civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are
+aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in
+Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who
+fumble at their lips for sea-magic.
+
+And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
+as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
+radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
+this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
+art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony
+has ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the
+past were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated
+in our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of
+what has come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and
+adequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render them
+more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, as
+prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part
+of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who,
+in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an
+adequate answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of
+something deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answer
+which would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.
+
+
+
+
+THE SICILIAN ACTORS
+
+I
+
+
+I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
+Paris, where, I read, "la passion paraît décidement," to a dramatic
+critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We
+are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an
+acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
+accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
+some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
+audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
+marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
+gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment
+to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new
+intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.
+
+It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
+crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
+thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the
+volcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage,
+rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at
+all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius,
+the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.
+
+Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes;
+her art is more nearly the art of Réjane. While both of these are great
+artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal
+energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress,
+like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
+snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions
+of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can
+be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her
+delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the
+soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out,
+turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her
+brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.
+Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among
+miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing
+out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion
+with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
+Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
+difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul.
+And if one thinks of Réjane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
+though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
+Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic
+gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of
+her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a
+great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi
+Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
+no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
+hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
+with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
+sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.
+
+Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
+moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
+Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
+I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
+against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
+as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
+the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
+Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
+utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
+downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with
+both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
+while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
+nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
+time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
+as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
+scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
+it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
+of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
+the whole being passed into its possession.
+
+And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
+catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant
+no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out
+of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a
+supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he
+has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should
+have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden
+fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark
+veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards
+her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one
+who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the
+woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an
+anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in
+the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those
+clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death,
+and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its
+last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling
+the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"
+and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and
+obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
+with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has
+been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words,
+especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a
+well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or
+with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. The
+acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to
+do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.
+
+The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
+which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
+hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
+of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
+which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
+reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with
+the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the
+language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;
+the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;
+the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and
+this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly
+contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we
+read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The
+beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
+understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright
+and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out
+the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of
+view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its
+aim.
+
+And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
+playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in
+this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than
+in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better
+writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great
+drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors
+like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to
+bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that
+he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge
+said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--not
+thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"
+
+That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
+have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of
+a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
+"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed
+no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that
+is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it
+from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio.
+What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or
+passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?
+
+And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
+finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
+which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is
+an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against
+all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
+admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
+suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these
+sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if
+naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and
+unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before
+them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is
+ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in
+symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this
+spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces,
+by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the
+source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature,
+absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see
+struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this
+woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the
+poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without
+passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once
+justified itself by being mere nature.
+
+And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
+occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
+the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What
+stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our
+big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
+the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But
+the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Réjane has
+done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
+artist. But not even Réjane has given us the whole animal, in its
+self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
+command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
+motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and
+the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia
+in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it
+would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing
+meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest
+between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch
+helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and
+swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me
+in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with
+the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.
+
+Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic
+whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a
+hesitating consciousness that "la passion paraît decidement avoir
+partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a
+magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
+gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
+through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
+authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
+And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.
+
+
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+
+
+
+ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC
+
+
+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 compromise.
+
+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 knowledge 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 generalisations, 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
+speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born
+in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.
+
+
+
+
+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 perfect. Artists who deal in
+materials less fragile than human 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 Bechstein 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+PACHMANN AND THE PIANO
+
+I
+
+
+It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
+it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
+only 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 its own voice.
+
+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 terms of your instrument, and the piano
+responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other
+pianists, has 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.
+
+Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
+than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
+sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. 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 interpreted 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.
+
+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, hammering.
+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 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.
+
+In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
+the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
+diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
+rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
+with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
+has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
+language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
+chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
+down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
+gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
+lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
+Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
+but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
+finds a kind of humour.
+
+In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
+executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or
+failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which,
+to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes
+tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through
+some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical
+disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to
+venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a
+simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less
+difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.
+With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their
+vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery
+which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached
+from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our
+ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach
+it to express human emotions, not its own.
+
+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, temperament, 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 imploring 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 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 innermost life of music. I do not think he has
+ever put an 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 difficulties 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.
+Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his
+hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult
+business. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All that
+violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His art
+begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo
+without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a
+run as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish,
+a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run
+you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life.
+With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that
+is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like
+Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz:
+he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the
+root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say in
+itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in which
+everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of
+such moments that Pachmann is the poet.
+
+And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
+Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
+the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
+alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of
+shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and
+clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most
+absolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto is
+the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to
+play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise
+softly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there
+was the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowing
+light and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not less
+appropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, the
+romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, a
+little luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopin
+followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopin
+had returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverish
+music, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to the
+centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a winged
+energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is in
+the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. The
+Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and not
+Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op.
+50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its
+secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone,
+gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the
+Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in
+Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the
+playing of the Etudes.
+
+Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
+like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
+lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
+coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
+creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
+which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet
+controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music
+before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain
+which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a
+precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and
+art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often
+wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the
+conscious act of thought while listening for the music.
+
+"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
+"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
+Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
+strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery
+ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a
+thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret
+of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a
+line like:
+
+  Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,
+
+can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced
+nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of
+suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art
+of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
+methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a
+statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
+themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
+everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
+Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
+Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some
+small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like
+Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and
+nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+  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?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and
+it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument,
+which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture
+him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
+dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
+swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
+which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
+listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
+from us visibly into that unholy company.
+
+Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
+interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
+than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
+a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
+requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
+cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
+played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
+On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
+time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
+and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
+the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
+players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with
+the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty
+web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out of
+moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
+Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
+the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all
+this is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
+wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about the
+faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and as
+music turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What he
+seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound:
+the music, in fact.
+
+It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
+that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret
+between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no
+one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it,
+becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a
+voice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of human
+intelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its own
+region, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we can
+apprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mocking
+the human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. When
+Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of
+saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky
+plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and
+quickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann's
+miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like an
+atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of a
+beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that are
+awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
+Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is
+it technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
+dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his
+own magic?
+
+He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience than
+others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch which
+is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tell
+you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and fly
+and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
+listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little he
+had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above
+all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he
+plays.
+
+When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
+pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon
+them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand
+they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's
+end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the
+straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey,
+having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his
+learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini
+variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as
+soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the
+notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if
+they were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry for
+them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the
+Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the
+magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor
+Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has
+set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'
+moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape
+in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you
+exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of
+form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form
+that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the
+outline.
+
+Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one
+most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
+think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
+greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
+intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done
+perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out
+of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those
+Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more
+wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed,
+as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of
+unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent,
+heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the
+trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its
+decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the
+whole tossing and eager sea of sound.
+
+Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
+peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in
+their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any
+essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what
+is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The
+sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very
+paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike
+deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is
+the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as
+sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast
+luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth,
+bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades
+not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric
+into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect
+lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.
+
+Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once
+thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the
+taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have
+whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a
+secret.
+
+
+
+
+PADEREWSKI
+
+
+I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
+Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
+noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to
+a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
+hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and
+played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own
+home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had
+been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the
+playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to
+be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself,
+in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and
+then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early
+morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled
+streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and
+dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of
+popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had
+been, for a few people, this divine escape.
+
+No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
+Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
+Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
+poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
+growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised,
+more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
+virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
+not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
+but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
+surprised awakening.
+
+The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the
+most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
+People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The
+word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.
+But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which
+physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to
+which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get
+from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski
+when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do
+the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball
+delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument,
+seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a
+scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection,
+marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since
+Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and
+Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with
+this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an
+inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as
+if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his
+thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as
+a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the
+piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother
+met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it
+to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he
+gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the
+instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under
+his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and
+under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The
+music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught
+together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are
+never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to
+passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others
+give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through
+clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully
+over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be
+gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are
+secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.
+
+In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
+was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
+brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for
+modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its
+perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the
+little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a
+bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;
+nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a
+faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or
+that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was
+there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known
+that it existed.
+
+Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
+original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if
+he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling
+is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the
+first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large
+contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was
+evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and
+die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were
+delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed
+to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.
+
+When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which
+the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski
+were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for
+the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it,
+it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great
+pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with
+Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a
+creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura
+disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
+in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
+tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
+luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
+by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
+astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
+hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
+spectacularly magnificent?
+
+Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
+anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
+not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
+smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
+dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
+his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
+only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
+his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
+transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
+instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
+in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
+mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the
+piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown
+person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there
+are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the
+test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it
+was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the
+Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have
+played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those
+limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and
+Paderewski has attained both limits.
+
+After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
+of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
+What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
+same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
+is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
+America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael
+of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
+mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
+notes?
+
+Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
+"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
+skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to
+compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an
+art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
+personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
+perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
+the creator of beautiful sounds?
+
+
+
+
+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
+harpsichord 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 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 fragment 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.
+
+I contrast him with 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 something 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 musician. 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 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
+suggestions 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 Mallarmé,
+of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves
+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 command. 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 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.
+
+An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a
+singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
+wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
+time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter
+between poetry and the world.
+
+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 surrounded 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 herself
+to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious 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 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 gives 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 Mallarmé 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 Mallarmé 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 holding 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 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 uninterrupted
+communion with herself.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA
+
+
+Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; 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
+appreciation 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 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 sunlight 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 straightforward 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 expression; but the something more, the vast heave
+and throb of the music, was not there. It was "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 Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner
+himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture
+to the "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 rendering of that we must go to
+Richter.
+
+Otherwise, in that third concert it would he 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 instruments, 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 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 "Leonore,"
+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 something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of
+passion.
+
+
+
+
+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-Theatre; and I stayed,
+on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberflöte." 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
+Meistersinger" 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 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 pinewoods 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 and his senses, in 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 Zauberflöte," is music
+without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the
+firm outlines of Dürer 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 Botticelli's "Spring"; 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.
+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 Zauberflöte" is
+really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which 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.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
+
+I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH
+
+
+Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the
+music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph
+not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember
+that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that
+only Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home,
+receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many
+doors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must
+always be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at its
+mercy, even after he has conquered its attention. The crowd never really
+loves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity;
+and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number of
+intelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon the
+resisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it is
+supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt. Bayreuth exists because
+Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcing
+his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than any
+other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he wanted, not always
+when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side,
+the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had the
+necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and at
+last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his own
+triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied.
+He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there were his
+works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called.
+
+And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth
+itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner wished it to be
+seen and heard. The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre
+at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly
+the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible
+orchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are
+even the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual and
+irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As at
+Bayreuth, 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 thus
+now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed,
+and not merely guessed at.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL
+
+
+The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me the
+most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
+have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
+that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
+ideas, of Wagner. The music itself 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; 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 religious 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. Watts-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 something of the same appeal as the 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 the first act 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 become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche
+says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic
+process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.
+
+"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
+soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
+be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than
+anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the
+sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the
+music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the
+visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one,
+the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
+convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm
+is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture,
+and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. 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. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
+settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
+stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
+time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
+every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
+reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
+for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
+action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
+aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
+is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
+in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
+not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
+make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
+restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
+realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
+these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
+frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
+least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
+us that it can be.
+
+Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
+new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's
+representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this
+world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand
+tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
+proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the
+Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of
+which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitary
+figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is
+the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which
+it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a
+reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!
+
+The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
+the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
+enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a
+change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on
+natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every
+wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is
+elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be
+formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out.
+And "Parsifal," which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it,
+in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort of
+supreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautiful
+drama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of
+leaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old
+hermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universal
+tenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, in
+some vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside
+the question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technically
+religious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and how
+far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's mind was the mind to which all
+legend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence;
+but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could never
+have been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in
+"Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, or
+did not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries. His music, his
+acting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and the
+acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of the
+solemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are in
+themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE ART OF WAGNER
+
+
+In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
+should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
+continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
+giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
+nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
+composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
+moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he
+does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a
+world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama
+live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their
+passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural
+sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less
+well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the
+realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers,
+at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not
+succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the
+Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery
+splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued,
+composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism,
+however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended
+with all the clairvoyance of emotion.
+
+Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all
+its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
+onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
+human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A
+few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
+awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
+ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were
+to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an
+abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know
+is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it
+must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before
+which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness
+afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less
+conscious of its passing hour.
+
+And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
+drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
+narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
+Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
+Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
+the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as
+powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening
+to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for
+this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of
+memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action
+of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
+preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
+their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
+effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
+materialising both.
+
+Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by
+his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
+circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as
+a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
+flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
+poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood
+and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the
+nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole
+expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
+person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.
+
+It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
+distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
+too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
+and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
+personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations
+of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried,
+Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi
+humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without
+disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman
+passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of
+the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite
+devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song,
+for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual
+speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which
+realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a
+spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.
+
+And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
+dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
+almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
+painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
+thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
+without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
+note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
+without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
+"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
+obey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an
+immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a
+great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
+silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
+with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of
+the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
+Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives
+him to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and to
+him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and
+returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as
+if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of
+the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the
+music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts
+and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow
+rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards
+from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening
+notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an
+infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.
+
+And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
+things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
+other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think
+of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to
+a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous,
+or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women.
+Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering
+his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
+remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in
+Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+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? Literature, 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 interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, 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 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 it 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
+they have seen Desclée, 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, l'oeuvre sort plus gelle
+  D'une forme au travail
+  Rebelle,
+  Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
+
+No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.
+
+  Tout passe. L'art robuste
+  Seul à l'éternité.
+     Le buste
+  Survit à la cité.
+
+Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a
+certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate 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 whom posterity means anything very definite, and
+to whom 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.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME WRITER
+
+
+Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.
+
+Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.
+
+The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.
+
+Cities, 1903.
+
+Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.
+
+A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.
+
+Spiritual Adventures, 1905.
+
+The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.
+
+Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.
+
+William Blake, 1907.
+
+Cities of Italy, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Plays Acting and Music, by Arthur
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Plays, Acting and Music
+       A Book Of Theory
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: November 2, 2004 [EBook #13928]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS, ACTING AND MUSIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Leah Moser and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="centerwrapper">
+<h1><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_i">[i]</a></span>PLAYS</h1>
+
+<!-- Page i -->
+<h1>ACTING AND MUSIC</h1>
+
+<h2>A BOOK OF THEORY</h2>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>ARTHUR SYMONS</h3>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<h5>LONDON<br />
+CONSTABLE &amp; COMPANY LTD<br />
+1909</h5>
+
+<!-- Page ii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_ii">[ii]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page iii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_iii">[iii]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page iv --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_iv">[iv]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page v --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_v">[v]</a></span>
+
+<div class="centerme"><i>To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and
+admiration</i></div>
+
+<!-- Page vi --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page vii --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span>
+<a name="PREFACE"></a>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
+material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
+many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
+remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first; what
+I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have been: a
+book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions which I
+made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events, the
+programme was carried out.</p>
+
+<p>This book, I said then, 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 &aelig;sthetics, of all
+the arts.</p>
+
+<p>In my book on "The Symbolist Movement <!-- Page viii --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page ix --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_ix">[ix]</a></span>effective action, in every achieved form of art.
+I do not understand the limitation by which so many writers on
+&aelig;sthetics choose to confine themselves 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.</p>
+
+<p>1903, 1907.</p>
+
+<!-- Page x --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_x">[x]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="CONTENTS"></a>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<br />
+<!-- Page xi --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span>
+
+<table class="center" frame="void" cellspacing="0" rules="groups" border=
+"0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<colgroup>
+<col width="400" />
+<col width="236" /></colgroup>
+
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>INTRODUCTION</h4>
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_3'>An Apology for Puppets</a></td>
+<td align="right">3</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>PLAYS AND ACTING</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_11'>Nietzsche on Tragedy</a></td>
+<td align="right">11</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_17'>Sarah Bernhardt</a></td>
+<td align="right">17</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_29'>Coquelin and Moli&egrave;re</a></td>
+<td align="right">29</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_37'>R&eacute;jane</a></td>
+<td align="right">37</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_42'>Yvette Guilbert</a></td>
+<td align="right">42</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_52'>Sir Henry Irving</a></td>
+<td align="right">52</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_60'>Duse in Some of Her Parts</a></td>
+<td align="right">60</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_77'>Annotations</a></td>
+<td align="right">77</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_93'>M. Capus in England</a></td>
+<td align="right">93</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_100'>A Double Enigma</a></td>
+<td align="right">100</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>DRAMA</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_109'>Professional and
+Unprofessional</a></td>
+<td align="right">109</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_115'>Tolstoi and Others</a></td>
+<td align="right">115</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_124'>Some Problem Plays</a></td>
+<td align="right">124</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_137'>"Monna Vanna"</a>
+<!-- Page xii --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_xii">[xii]</a></span></td>
+<td align="right">137</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_143'>The Question of Censorship</a></td>
+<td align="right">143</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_148'>A Play and the Public</a></td>
+<td align="right">148</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_152'>The Test of the Actor</a></td>
+<td align="right">152</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_162'>The Price of Realism</a></td>
+<td align="right">162</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_167'>On Crossing Stage to Right</a></td>
+<td align="right">167</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_173'>The Speaking of Verse</a></td>
+<td align="right">173</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_182'>Great Acting in English</a></td>
+<td align="right">182</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_200'>A Theory of the Stage</a></td>
+<td align="right">200</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_213'>The Sicilian Actors</a></td>
+<td align="right">213</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" align="left">
+<h4>MUSIC</h4>
+</td>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_229'>On Writing about Music</a></td>
+<td align="right">229</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_232'>Technique and the Artist</a></td>
+<td align="right">232</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_237'>Pachmann and the Piano</a></td>
+<td align="right">237</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_258'>Paderewski</a></td>
+<td align="right">258</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_268'>A Reflection at a Dolmetsch
+Concert</a></td>
+<td align="right">268</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_277'>The Dramatisation of Song</a></td>
+<td align="right">277</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_284'>The Meiningen Orchestra</a></td>
+<td align="right">284</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_290'>Mozart in the
+Mirabell-Garten</a></td>
+<td align="right">290</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_297'>Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth</a></td>
+<td align="right">297</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><br />
+</td>
+<td><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><a href='#Page_315'>Conclusion: A Paradox on Art</a></td>
+<td align="right">315</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<!-- Page 1 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_1">[1]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="INTRODUCTION"></a>
+
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 2 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 3 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="AN_APOLOGY_FOR_PUPPETS"></a>
+
+<h2>AN APOLOGY FOR PUPPETS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 subordinate 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 <!-- Page 4 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_4">[4]</a></span>his
+part (we are all human) will certainly 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. 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 <!-- Page 5 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_5">[5]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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, <!-- Page 6 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_6">[6]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. Losing, 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 <!-- Page 7 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_7">[7]</a></span>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 instructive for us to consider
+that we could not give a play of Ibsen's to marionettes, but that we could
+give them the "Agamemnon."</p>
+
+<p>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 that 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 moment, the emotion
+to which that gesture corresponds. In our marionettes, then, we get
+personified gesture, and the gesture, like all other <!-- Page 8 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_8">[8]</a></span>forms of emotion,
+generalised. The appeal in what seems to you these childish manoeuvres 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 suggestion of magic in this beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
+marionettes," 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 Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to make, we may suppose,
+the drama of the future, is content with as simple a mouthpiece as Fate
+and the great passions, which were the classic drama.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 9 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PLAYS_AND_ACTING"></a>
+
+<h2>PLAYS AND ACTING</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 10 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 11 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="NIETZSCHE_ON_TRAGEDY"></a>
+
+<h2>NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy 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 M&aelig;nad, who, troubled, capricious, and
+half irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in a
+foreign tongue."</p>
+
+<p>The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as it
+arose out <!-- Page 12 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_12">[12]</a></span>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 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
+<!-- Page 13 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_13">[13]</a></span>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 rampart 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
+contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed
+with the scourge of its <!-- Page 14 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_14">[14]</a></span>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 spirit, 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
+l'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, <!-- Page 15 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_15">[15]</a></span>through the &aelig;sthetics 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 &aelig;sthetic 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 &aelig;sthetic game played with itself by the Will in the eternal
+plenitude of its joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital
+principle. "If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his
+astonishing 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 <!-- Page 16 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_16">[16]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<!-- Page 17 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SARAH_BERNHARDT"></a>
+
+<h2>SARAH BERNHARDT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but it
+spoke to <!-- Page 18 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_18">[18]</a></span>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 Ph&egrave;dre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne
+Lecouvreur, F&eacute;dora, 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 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
+<!-- Page 19 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_19">[19]</a></span>mesmerised one, awakening the senses and sending
+the intelligence to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>After all, though R&eacute;jane 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 Cam&eacute;lias," 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 attractiveness,
+as with R&eacute;jane; 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 <!-- Page 20 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_20">[20]</a></span>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 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 <!-- Page 21 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_21">[21]</a></span>vitality of R&eacute;jane; it is differently
+expressed, that is all. With R&eacute;jane 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 earlier period, just as
+the writing of Dumas fils 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.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in "Ph&egrave;dre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we
+are to realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Ph&egrave;dre,"
+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 not less sure than its sense of dramatic
+<!-- Page 22 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_22">[22]</a></span>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 Ph&egrave;dre Racine tells us
+that it is "ce que j'ai peut-&ecirc;tre mis de plus raisonnable sur le
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre." The word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage
+of the passion of Ph&egrave;dre 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
+<!-- Page 23 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_23">[23]</a></span>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 remoteness 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 "Ph&egrave;dre" 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 actress must, in
+such parts, be conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there
+room in modern conversation? 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
+<!-- Page 24 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_24">[24]</a></span>coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate
+to beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Well, and she seems still to be the same Ph&egrave;dre that she was
+eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias."
+Is it reality, is it illusion? Illusion, 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."</p>
+
+<p>The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly <!-- Page 25 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_25">[25]</a></span>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
+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 <!-- Page 26 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_26">[26]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem to deserve more
+consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to an overpowering
+effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always reminds me of a
+musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument of music, and she
+plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
+<!-- Page 27 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_27">[27]</a></span>One
+seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente, 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
+savour 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 her,
+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 <!-- Page 28 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_28">[28]</a></span>it, and the effect follows instantaneously. 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
+pleasure 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 Bernhardt. One sometimes forgets that
+R&eacute;jane 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 29 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="COQUELIN_AND_MOLIERE_SOME_ASPECTS"></a>
+
+<h2>COQUELIN AND MOLI&Egrave;RE: SOME ASPECTS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>To see Coquelin in Moli&egrave;re is to see the greatest of comic
+actors at his best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a
+student, or anything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be
+compared with that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the
+training of nature. They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that
+Coquelin, with 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 instrument of Sarah, which seems
+to go by itself, c&acirc;line, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in that
+wonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberate
+effect. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a
+disguise, never a revelation.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 30 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_30">[30]</a></span>I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their
+company at the Garrick Theatre. They did "Tartuffe," "L'Avare," "Le
+Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "Les Pr&eacute;cieuses Ridicules," and a condensed
+version of "Le D&eacute;pit 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 D&eacute;pit Amoureux," and I could not help
+wishing that the fashion of Moli&egrave;re's day had allowed him to write
+all his plays in prose. Moli&egrave;re was not a poet, and he knew that he
+was not a poet. When he ventured to write the most Shakespearean of his
+comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le m&ecirc;me pr&eacute;jug&eacute;,"
+Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de Pierre,' parce
+qu'il &eacute;tait en prose, nuisit au succ&egrave;s de 'l'Avare.'
+Cependant le public qui, &agrave; la longue, se rend toujours au bon,
+finit par donner &agrave; cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il
+m&eacute;rite. On comprit alors qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes
+com&eacute;dies en prose." How infinitely finer, as prose, is the prose of
+"L'Avare" than the verse of "Tartuffe" <!-- Page 31 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_31">[31]</a></span>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.
+Moli&egrave;re was a great prose writer, but I do not remember a line of
+poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The temper of his mind was the
+temper of mind of the prose-writer. His worldly wisdom, his active
+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-Ren&eacute;; 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.</p>
+
+<p>But Moli&egrave;re 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 Moli&egrave;re
+lets us <!-- Page 32 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_32">[32]</a></span>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 of Moli&egrave;re or of the
+character of Coquelin. Probably there is no difference. We get
+Moli&egrave;re's vast, succulent farce of the intellect rendered with an
+art like his own. If this, in every detail, is not what Moli&egrave;re
+meant, then so much the worse for Moli&egrave;re.</p>
+
+<p>Moli&egrave;re 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 Pr&eacute;cieuses 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
+<!-- Page 33 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_33">[33]</a></span>show and nimble 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 its
+head 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.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 34 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_34">[34]</a></span>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 interpretation. The part of Ma&icirc;tre
+Jacques in "L'Avare," for instance, which I have just seen him perform
+with such gusto and such certainty, 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 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 <!-- Page 35 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_35">[35]</a></span>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 independent of mood.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 36 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_36">[36]</a></span>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 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 a 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 37 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="REJANE"></a>
+
+<h2>R&Eacute;JANE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The genius of R&eacute;jane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and
+all the ingredients of the dish may be named without defining 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 Verlaine'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
+<!-- Page 38 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_38">[38]</a></span>have found myself applauding with tears in my
+eyes. The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand:
+neither counteracted the other: and I had to think twice, before I could
+remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which I
+had been almost cruelly enjoying.</p>
+
+<p>The art of R&eacute;jane accepts things as they are, without selection
+or correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall
+be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the
+shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is
+common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is
+leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose. To
+her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where
+nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever
+form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
+untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
+toute <!-- Page 39 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_39">[39]</a></span>enti&egrave;re &agrave; sa proie
+attach&eacute;e," and she has all the brutality and all the clinging
+warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious vice, vice plus
+passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in which all the
+passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their own language,
+almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the whole face
+suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity which cuts more
+sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every moment to throw away
+her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect; then, when the moment
+seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you will find that the
+moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done nothing with
+genius.</p>
+
+<p>R&eacute;jane 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. R&eacute;jane, in
+"Sapho" or in "Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving
+and suffering <!-- Page 40 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_40">[40]</a></span>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 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 love. 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: here, in "Sapho," is a
+woman who flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates
+himself before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt
+to win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
+herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of one
+who is going to be <!-- Page 41 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_41">[41]</a></span>sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to nature,
+the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion. Here, as
+elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a disturbing
+atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you will: it is
+no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a blind force; she
+is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think in one way. Where
+Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some thrilling effect of
+art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its attributes but some
+fundamental nobility, R&eacute;jane takes the big, foolish, dirty thing
+just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit of acting?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 42 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="YVETTE_GUILBERT"></a>
+
+<h2>YVETTE GUILBERT</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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, striped 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 beginning to sing.</p>
+
+<p>And with the first note you realise the difference between Yvette
+Guilbert and all the rest of the world. A sonnet by Mr. Andr&eacute;
+Raffalovich states just that difference so <!-- Page 43 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_43">[43]</a></span>subtly that I must quote it to
+help out my interpretation:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="sonnet by Andre Raffalovich">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">If you want hearty
+laughter, country mirth&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Or frantic gestures of an
+acrobat,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Heels over head&mdash;or floating lace
+skirts worth</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">I know not what, a large eccentric
+hat</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And diamonds, the gift of some dull
+boy&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Then when you see her do not wrong
+Yvette,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Because Yvette is not a clever
+toy,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set
+...</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And should her song sound cynical and
+base</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">At first, herself ungainly, or her
+smile</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Monotonous&mdash;wait, listen, watch her
+face:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The sufferings of those the world calls
+vile</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">She sings, and as you watch Yvette
+Guilbert,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">You too will shiver, seeing their
+despair.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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 merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
+though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly,
+deliciously, gay. There is one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles,
+and trills a rapid <!-- Page 44 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_44">[44]</a></span>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 conventional 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, impersonal, dramatic artist, who sings
+realism as others write it.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 45 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_45">[45]</a></span>Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an
+inflection 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 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 expressionlessness of surprise.
+Her na&iuml;vet&eacute; 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 <!-- Page 46 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_46">[46]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every one else on the
+music-hall stage is precisely the difference between Sarah
+<!-- Page 47 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_47">[47]</a></span>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 <i>macabre</i>; 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 <i>
+macabre</i> style, she has done what Bruant was only trying to do, so, in
+the style, supposed to be traditionally <!-- Page 48 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_48">[48]</a></span>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 of most service to her. She sings, a little cruelly, of the
+young girl; and the young girl of her songs (that <i>demoiselle de
+pensionnat</i> 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
+"Ch&eacute;rie," a creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations,
+already at work somewhat abnormally in an an&aelig;mic 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 <!-- Page 49 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_49">[49]</a></span>in it all, a malicious
+insistence on the other side of innocence. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant
+expression for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all
+that part of life which the conventions were intended 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 towards it.
+It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vann&eacute;"; it
+is, for the most part, weary of itself, without rest,
+<!-- Page 50 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_50">[50]</a></span>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 <i>rouleuse</i> of
+the Quartier Br&eacute;da, praying to the one saint in her calendar,
+"Sainte Galette"; the <i>so&ucirc;larde</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is all a question of <i>m&eacute;tier</i>, 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 <!-- Page 51 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_51">[51]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 52 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SIR_HENRY_IRVING"></a>
+
+<h2>SIR HENRY IRVING</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 Goldsmith. 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 represents 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 <!-- Page 53 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_53">[53]</a></span>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
+movement; 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.</p>
+
+<p>With Miss Terry there is permanent charm of a very natural nature,
+which has become deliciously sophisticated. 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
+not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of a passing
+moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science founded
+on tradition. <!-- Page 54 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_54">[54]</a></span>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 limitations of the
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." His Louis XI. is a
+masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the
+grotesque art of the thing <!-- Page 55 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_55">[55]</a></span>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 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 <!-- Page 56 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_56">[56]</a></span>which is half precise
+physiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in
+art.</p>
+
+<p>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 was 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 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
+chromolithographic <!-- Page 57 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_57">[57]</a></span>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. In 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
+may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating remains.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
+"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
+spectacle. It is a play made up principally of one character and a crowd,
+the <!-- Page 58 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_58">[58]</a></span>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; 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 extravagant 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 <!-- Page 59 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_59">[59]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 60 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="DUSE_IN_SOME_OF_HER_PARTS"></a>
+
+<h2>DUSE IN SOME OF HER PARTS</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 61 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_61">[61]</a></span>know or remember. But what is skin-deep in Paula
+as conceived 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 Englishwoman 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 consequences 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 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 <!-- Page 62 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_62">[62]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," and you
+will see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero'a intention, and played
+brilliantly enough to distract 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 construction of a play never meant to withstand the
+searchlight of <!-- Page 63 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_63">[63]</a></span>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
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; in the acceptance of emotion for all it might be,
+instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse simplicity and
+sincerity in the treatment of a superficial 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 loathing 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
+<!-- Page 64 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_64">[64]</a></span>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 conscious art, an
+art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. 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 movements 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
+the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusion of reality almost
+further than it is possible to carry it, only never quite.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 65 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_65">[65]</a></span>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 positive. 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"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." <!-- Page 66 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_66">[66]</a></span>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 so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
+has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo 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 painfulness. 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 beautiful 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 inexcusable brutality of the scene in which she appears
+<!-- Page 67 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_67">[67]</a></span>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 a failure of a far
+higher order than such successes 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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 68 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Dumas fils has put his best work into the novel of "La Dame aux
+Cam&eacute;lias," 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 sentiment 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 unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
+done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
+impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate
+<!-- Page 69 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_69">[69]</a></span>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 sentiment coming
+suddenly into her life, but the simple, 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 greatness,
+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
+reproachfulness, 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 Mlle. de Lespinasse
+rather than Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as
+<!-- Page 70 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_70">[70]</a></span>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 intercourse 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 "La Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias" 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
+Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." But no, as he has drawn
+her, as he has placed her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflict
+<!-- Page 71 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_71">[71]</a></span>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 "F&eacute;dora," 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 <!-- Page 72 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_72">[72]</a></span>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
+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
+"F&eacute;dora." 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 unimaginative and theoretical falseness to life;
+for it at least <!-- Page 73 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_73">[73]</a></span>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 disguises, but never giving us her
+whole self through the revealing medium of a masterpiece?</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"F&eacute;dora" 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 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 <!-- Page 74 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_74">[74]</a></span>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:
+"F&eacute;dora" 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 F&eacute;dora 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 movements, 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
+<!-- Page 75 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_75">[75]</a></span>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 F&eacute;dora can never be made
+to seem. In "F&eacute;dora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of
+stagecraft, without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr.
+Pinero, much less of 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 conception, 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 <!-- Page 76 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_76">[76]</a></span>skill upon. As a piece of technical skill,
+Duse's acting in "F&eacute;dora" is as fine as anything she has done. It
+completes our admiration 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 77 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="ANNOTATIONS_BY_THE_WAY"></a>
+
+<h2>ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY</h2>
+
+<h3>I. "PELL&Eacute;AS AND M&Eacute;LISANDE"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>"Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande" 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, <!-- Page 78 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_78">[78]</a></span>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
+"Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande" we have two innocent lovers, to whom
+love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and 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 exquisite sense
+of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing, as if our own sympathy had
+somehow set right the wrongs of the play.</p>
+
+<p>And this play, translated with delicate <!-- Page 79 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_79">[79]</a></span>fidelity by Mr. Mackail, has
+been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
+accompaniment of M. Faur&eacute;'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 M&eacute;lisande. At the beginning I
+thought she was acting with more effort and less effect than in the
+original performance; 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 perfection. 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 <!-- Page 80 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_80">[80]</a></span>the supreme unconsciousness of
+innocence with the same beauty and the same intensity. Her palpitating
+voice, in which there is something like the throbbing of a wounded bird,
+seemed to speak the simple and beautiful 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 Pell&eacute;as; 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, <!-- Page 81 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_81">[81]</a></span>remembering Pell&eacute;as: 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 monotonous, 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. "EVERYMAN"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of "Everyman" deserves a
+place of its own among the stage 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 <!-- Page 82 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_82">[82]</a></span>archaic when it is spoken as
+one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, 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. "Everyman" 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 <!-- Page 83 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_83">[83]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
+best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
+was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, 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 meaning seems to have gone out of
+them; they are displaced, <!-- Page 84 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_84">[84]</a></span>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
+that his red livery may have its full "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 to get
+in some more than indifferent 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 programme assures us, Wills "strove to tell
+the love-story in a manner that might appeal to an English-speaking
+audience."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 85 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_85">[85]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Faustus quote to Mephistopheles">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">One thing, good servant,
+let me crave of thee,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To glut the longing of my heart's
+desire:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That I may have unto my
+paramour</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That heavenly Helen which I saw of
+late;</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>and when, his prayer being granted, he cries:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Faustus quote after prayer is granted">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was this the face that
+launched a thousand ships,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And burned the topless towers of
+Ilium?</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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, <!-- Page 86 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_86">[86]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="And none but thou shalt be my paramour">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">And none but thou shalt
+be my paramour!</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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. On the Lyceum stage he is
+the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; though so many of his
+best words have been taken <!-- Page 87 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_87">[87]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
+of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
+scarcely human oval which represents 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 <!-- Page 88 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_88">[88]</a></span>energy of body comes out in the expression 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
+convulsively, 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 instincts. With a great
+artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geisha and the Knight,"
+the effect is overwhelming; 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
+<!-- Page 89 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_89">[89]</a></span>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 instruments, and
+beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor their clothes have beauty, to
+the limited 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 misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It is not always realised by Englishmen that England is really the
+country of the music-hall, the only country where it has
+<!-- Page 90 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_90">[90]</a></span>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!</p>
+
+<p>And it is not only in regard to the ballet, but in regard also to the
+"turns," that we are ahead of all our competitors. I have no great
+admiration for most of our comic gentlemen and ladies in London, but I
+find it still more difficult to take any interest in the comic gentlemen
+and ladies <!-- Page 91 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_91">[91]</a></span>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 expressive 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
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The French "revue," as one sees it at the Folies-Berg&egrave;re, done
+somewhat roughly <!-- Page 92 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_92">[92]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 93 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="M_CAPUS_IN_ENGLAND"></a>
+
+<h2>M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>An excellent Parisian company from the Vari&eacute;t&eacute;s 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 R&eacute;jane, she had none of
+R&eacute;jane's magnetism, none of R&eacute;jane's exciting
+naturalness.</p>
+
+<p>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 Mlle. Lavalli&egrave;re, <!-- Page 94 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_94">[94]</a></span>with her brilliant eyes and her
+little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M. Num&egrave;s, 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 pantomine, 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. 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 <i>Saturday Review</i>, and I hasten to say that I quite agree with
+his defence. Above <!-- Page 95 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_95">[95]</a></span>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,
+somewhat 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 presenting 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 <!-- Page 96 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_96">[96]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 take the luck which comes his way. The few,
+quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
+probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains; the
+people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours, 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
+&agrave;-propos.</p>
+
+<p>In "Les Deux Ecoles" the philosophy which could be discerned in "La
+Veine," that <!-- Page 97 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_97">[97]</a></span>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 naughtiness is so
+na&iuml;ve, 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 tr&egrave;s bien vivre sans &ecirc;tre 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 company worked with the effortless unanimity of
+a perfect piece of machinery.</p>
+
+<p>A few days after seeing "La Veine" I <!-- Page 98 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_98">[98]</a></span>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 r&eacute;chauff&eacute;s! 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 company. 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 checkmate, <!-- Page 99 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_99">[99]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 100 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_DOUBLE_ENIGMA"></a>
+
+<h2>A DOUBLE ENIGMA</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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, "C&aelig;sar'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.</p>
+
+<p>Two brothers, Raymond and G&eacute;rard de Gourgiran, are in their
+country house, with their two wives, Giselle and L&eacute;onore,
+<!-- Page 101 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_101">[101]</a></span>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 L&eacute;onore? 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 L&eacute;onore gives way; she avows all in
+a piercing shriek. After that there is some unnecessary moralising
+("L&agrave;-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots de captive!" and the like),
+but the play is over.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very
+intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking 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 <!-- Page 102 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_102">[102]</a></span>Vivarce and L&eacute;onore have had a possibly
+quite harmless flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way
+from L&eacute;onore's room, he has merely been walking with L&eacute;onore
+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 L&eacute;onore in the
+garden at midnight. 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 <!-- Page 103 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_103">[103]</a></span>from the certainty of the
+fact and the uncertainty of the person responsible for it. "C&aelig;sar'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 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 pi&egrave;ce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la
+trag&eacute;die des m&acirc;itres 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. Occasionally
+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
+<!-- Page 104 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_104">[104]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version
+of "Au T&eacute;l&eacute;phone," 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 successful. 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 helpless to aid her, is
+as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
+brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as uncomfortable
+as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has absolutely no artistic
+value, because terror without beauty and without significance is
+<!-- Page 105 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_105">[105]</a></span>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
+circumstances, 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
+<!-- Page 106 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_106">[106]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 107 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="DRAMA"></a>
+
+<h2>DRAMA</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 108 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 109 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PROFESSIONAL_AND_UNPROFESSIONAL"></a>
+
+<h2>PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 committee 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, and therefore may be contrasted without the
+necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was interpreted
+on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye for
+what is telling, <!-- Page 110 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_110">[110]</a></span>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 circumstances? he says to himself: what would it
+be effective on 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
+keyhole. We have seen a picturesque and amusing exterior, and that is all.
+Lord <!-- Page 111 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_111">[111]</a></span>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, and 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 of <!-- Page 112 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_112">[112]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 113 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_113">[113]</a></span>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. 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 persistently, you will not get to your destination at all. The
+playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath out of
+life <!-- Page 114 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_114">[114]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 115 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="TOLSTOI_AND_OTHERS"></a>
+
+<h2>TOLSTOI AND OTHERS</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 part. In the drama we can only properly realise the soul's
+action through some corresponding 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 <!-- Page 116 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_116">[116]</a></span>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 impressiveness partly to that very
+quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II., chapter
+xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the eternal
+'Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias,' 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, 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."
+<!-- Page 117 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_117">[117]</a></span>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
+disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!</p>
+
+<p>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 interpretation of life, not a theorising about
+life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
+more consequence) 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 <!-- Page 118 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_118">[118]</a></span>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 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 119 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_119">[119]</a></span>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 discovered.</p>
+
+<p>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 consummate 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 produced at the
+Od&eacute;on. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
+dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
+Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
+Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was called,
+Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M. Bataille I
+cannot <!-- Page 120 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_120">[120]</a></span>say. I have read in a capable French paper that
+"l'on est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
+pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite the
+words one would use about the play in English?</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 121 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_121">[121]</a></span>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
+himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 122 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_122">[122]</a></span>contrasts singularly with what is meant to be a
+suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene
+preceding. 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 unparalleled 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 a 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 "<!-- Page 123 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_123">[123]</a></span>Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In 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
+"Resurrection," something which is not Tolstoi at all. There is M.
+Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a dramatist who has created a new
+form of drama: let him be exonerated. Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them
+may have been the spoilers of M. Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the
+great name of Tolstoi have been left well alone?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 124 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="SOME_PROBLEM_PLAYS"></a>
+
+<h2>SOME PROBLEM PLAYS</h2>
+
+<h3>I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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" 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. The author, it is true,
+is an actor, but 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 knowledge 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 <!-- Page 125 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_125">[125]</a></span>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 daylight. 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, 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, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one's
+mind in suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family,
+and he interests <!-- Page 126 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_126">[126]</a></span>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 na&iuml;vet&eacute; 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
+<!-- Page 127 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_127">[127]</a></span>scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on
+the stage, full of truth within its own limits; 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 opposition 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
+convinces the world. Mr. Barker is young: he will <!-- Page 128 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_128">[128]</a></span>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
+themselves.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
+Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his
+stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not things
+in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, in
+the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for instance, lose a little
+in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights? That is the
+question which I was asking myself as I saw the performance of the Stage
+Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the
+problem is the problem of all Ibsen's <!-- Page 129 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_129">[129]</a></span>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 seabirds 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 witchcraft 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
+<!-- Page 130 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_130">[130]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. "THE NEW IDOL"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.
+Fran&ccedil;ois 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 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, <!-- Page 131 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_131">[131]</a></span>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 I am ready to admit that it is justified if I
+find that the dramatic movement 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 Avari&eacute;s," 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 suggestion of love interests, which come to nothing,
+and have no real bearing on the <!-- Page 132 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_132">[132]</a></span>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
+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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 133 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>IV. "MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION"</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 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 <!-- Page 134 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_134">[134]</a></span>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 interesting 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
+<!-- Page 135 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_135">[135]</a></span>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. Tanqueray."</p>
+
+<p>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 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 like 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 <!-- Page 136 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_136">[136]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 137 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MONNA_VANNAquot"></a>
+
+<h2>"MONNA, VANNA"</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 helplessness. Pity and terror had indeed
+gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more literal than
+Aristotle's.</p>
+
+<p>In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the
+words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the
+<!-- Page 138 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_138">[138]</a></span>words of peasants or children. They were rarely
+beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a
+singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a
+pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was
+everything; and in an essay in "Le Tr&eacute;sor des Humbles" Maeterlinck
+told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were
+not said which mattered.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With
+"Aglavaine et S&eacute;lysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which
+there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
+people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the
+morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.</p>
+
+<p>"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et S&eacute;lysette,"
+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
+<!-- Page 139 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_139">[139]</a></span>undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment
+of their happening.</p>
+
+<p>In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destin&eacute;e,"
+Maeterlinck says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes trag&eacute;dies
+ne nous offrent pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la
+fatalit&eacute;. Je crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule
+trag&eacute;die o&ugrave; la fatalit&eacute; r&egrave;gne
+r&eacute;ellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas une
+o&ugrave; le h&eacute;ros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce
+n'est jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on
+the preceding page, he says: "Observons que les po&egrave;tes tragiques
+osent tr&egrave;s rarement permettre au sage de para&icirc;tre un moment
+sur la sc&egrave;ne. Ils craignent une &acirc;me haute parce que les
+&eacute;v&eacute;nements 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
+<!-- Page 140 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_140">[140]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 141 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Int&eacute;rieur,"
+and even "Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande," 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 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
+<!-- Page 142 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_142">[142]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 143 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_QUESTION_OF_CENSORSHIP"></a>
+
+<h2>THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The letter of protest which appeared in the <i>Times</i> of June 30,
+1903, 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
+<i>Athen&aelig;um</i>, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon
+us, and makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The <i>
+Morning Post</i> is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the
+unfortunate censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting
+the most beautiful play of his time, and must live to be the
+laughing-stock of all sensible people."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 144 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_144">[144]</a></span>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 "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. <!-- Page 145 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_145">[145]</a></span>Is Mr. Redford capable
+of discriminating 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 dissevered, 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 <i>
+Times</i> 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 license. The fact is, that moral
+<!-- Page 146 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_146">[146]</a></span>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 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 <i>Times</i> 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 <!-- Page 147 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_147">[147]</a></span>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 censorship. 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?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 148 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_PLAY_AND_THE_PUBLIC"></a>
+
+<h2>A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The
+Bishop's Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many
+writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.</p>
+
+<p>She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom
+instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society
+instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The
+play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the
+control of good manners. 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 hushed before they become disturbing. 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. <!-- Page 149 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_149">[149]</a></span>Craigie's skill, in
+this play, seems to me to consist.</p>
+
+<p>Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
+to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the 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. 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 indefinitely 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?</p>
+
+<p>The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
+and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand
+it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of
+<!-- Page 150 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_150">[150]</a></span>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 admirably 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, and resented
+them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect 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
+<!-- Page 151 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_151">[151]</a></span>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 audience, 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 the 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 152 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_TEST_OF_THE_ACTOR"></a>
+
+<h2>THE TEST OF THE ACTOR</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the
+capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really
+carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such a
+play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The
+Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of
+letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a
+complimentary 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." Mr. Jones
+himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to
+give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he
+means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the <i>
+Nineteenth Century</i>: "O human life! so <!-- Page 153 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_153">[153]</a></span>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 of 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?" Does Mr. Jones, I
+wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of
+silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in
+"The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not to
+"rank as Literature"? 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 bewildering evening. The applause
+was meant for the actors.</p>
+
+<p>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 exactitude. But the play! <!-- Page 154 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_154">[154]</a></span>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. "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. 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 <!-- Page 155 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_155">[155]</a></span>offering them an opportunity
+to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be
+grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
+is wasted; only 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
+"Iolanthe," 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. <!-- Page 156 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_156">[156]</a></span>If acting could save a play,
+"The Princess's Nose" would have been saved. It was not saved.</p>
+
+<p>And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
+insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, 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 was 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
+<!-- Page 157 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_157">[157]</a></span>Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying
+experiences with nerves of marble.</p>
+
+<p>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 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.
+<!-- Page 158 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_158">[158]</a></span>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 <!-- Page 159 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_159">[159]</a></span>was left calmly free to watch
+her attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.</p>
+
+<p>How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of
+dealing adequately with such a scene as that? I 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 160 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_160">[160]</a></span>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
+representation of that part: a picture, not a man.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 161 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_161">[161]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 162 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_PRICE_OF_REALISM"></a>
+
+<h2>THE PRICE OF REALISM</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 163 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_163">[163]</a></span>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 "property."</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 164 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_164">[164]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of the 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 hedgerow 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, <!-- Page 165 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_165">[165]</a></span>instead of abandoning
+ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the play
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
+background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the stage;
+he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
+imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
+from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
+call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns, teaching
+them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is carried
+right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the imagination with
+it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and painted
+gables.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
+English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
+of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a new
+quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
+<!-- Page 166 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_166">[166]</a></span>have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr.
+Tree's boats on real Thames water.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
+material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation of
+real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
+spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play is
+not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A poetical
+play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage in such a
+way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will
+envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its essence, is
+the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical plays. It is
+precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the secret of his
+own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He will make it his
+business to compete with the poet, and not, after the manner of Drury
+Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of nature.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 167 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="ON_CROSSING_STAGE_TO_RIGHT"></a>
+
+<h2>ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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. Whenever 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 168 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_168">[168]</a></span>lesson of Bayreuth, and when
+one comes away, the impression 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 169 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_169">[169]</a></span>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
+momentary 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?</p>
+
+<p>A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and
+how not to do <!-- Page 170 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_170">[170]</a></span>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.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference 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 <!-- Page 171 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_171">[171]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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
+<!-- Page 172 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_172">[172]</a></span>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?"</p>
+
+<!-- Page 173 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_SPEAKING_OF_VERSE"></a>
+
+<h2>THE SPEAKING OF VERSE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
+verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it has
+often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in vain
+over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far they
+were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses were
+written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to dances,
+because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a kind could
+have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not apparently expressive
+rhythms. In later times there have been stage traditions, probably
+developed from the practice of some particular actor, many conflicting
+traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad
+method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse
+<!-- Page 174 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_174">[174]</a></span>as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
+contorted species of prose.</p>
+
+<p>An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
+assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent an
+art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
+Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
+has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
+between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
+Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
+experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
+translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
+definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech of
+actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
+important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
+clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
+Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
+<!-- Page 175 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_175">[175]</a></span>any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says
+Lamb, in the profoundest essay which has ever been written on the acting
+of drama, "to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by
+some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story,
+but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of
+Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us
+enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss
+to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
+audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is
+precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to hear
+hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if he were
+conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to do it,
+bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here, in the
+rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if he is to
+remember that a play is acted, not for <!-- Page 176 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_176">[176]</a></span>the exhibition of the actor,
+but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of the
+"dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had not
+been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra. When do
+we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of even the
+"solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that poetry
+which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?</p>
+
+<p>The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of
+over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the sound.
+I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard a
+lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Com&eacute;die Francaise, on
+the art of speaking on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>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. <!-- Page 177 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_177">[177]</a></span>Silvain," says M. Catulle
+Mend&egrave;s, "est de ceux, bien rares au Th&eacute;&acirc;tre
+Fran&ccedil;ais, qu'on entend m&ecirc;me lorsqu'ils par lent 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 and calculated. He adores verse,
+for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an
+excellent contempt 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, Moli&egrave;re 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 <!-- Page 178 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_178">[178]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 emphasising individual meanings. They
+give, in the musician's sense, a "reading" of the <!-- Page 179 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_179">[179]</a></span>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, profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in
+which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or
+bad, impossible.</p>
+
+<p>I admit that the way in which most actors <!-- Page 180 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_180">[180]</a></span>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 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 something of what verse
+means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr. Yeats'
+readings, interpreted to him by means of <!-- Page 181 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_181">[181]</a></span>notes; it will teach him to
+unlearn something 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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 182 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="GREAT_ACTING_IN_ENGLISH"></a>
+
+<h2>GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in
+England? We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
+individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic temperament,
+really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated like a rare
+plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing
+beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now living,
+an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and
+goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants us, from time
+to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have actresses who have
+many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of useful talent; but have
+we in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so
+intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of
+Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering <!-- Page 183 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_183">[183]</a></span>any form of poetic drama on
+the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came to us in 1907 from
+America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern?</p>
+
+<p>The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor,
+is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
+conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
+bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
+conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
+subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
+the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents
+may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on
+having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen bars of the
+music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the 'cellos, in
+order that they might not add a mellowness which would slightly veil the
+acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he rearranged the
+composer's <!-- Page 184 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_184">[184]</a></span>score for the convenience of his own orchestra?
+What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the horn because
+he had not got one of the two or three perfectly accomplished horn-players
+in Europe? What should we say if he altered the time of one movement in
+order to make room for another, in which he would himself be more
+prominent? What should we say if the conductor of an orchestra committed a
+single one of these criminal absurdities? The musical public would rise
+against him as one man, the pedantic critics and the young men who smoke
+as they stand on promenade floors. And yet this, nothing more nor less, is
+done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any
+serious work of dramatic art, is presented with any sort of public
+appeal.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
+the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
+actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
+play, above all a poetic play, is not <!-- Page 185 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_185">[185]</a></span>put on by any but small,
+unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any sort
+of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and conditions of
+the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal vanity and the
+pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves to account for
+the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with show, poetry with
+the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a lack of this very
+sense of what is required in the proper rendering of imaginative work on
+the stage?</p>
+
+<p>It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management,
+of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and
+"Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the whole
+extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most needed. The
+mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our
+stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And first of all I
+would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play
+<!-- Page 186 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_186">[186]</a></span>as a whole by their way of setting it in
+action. I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage,
+should give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a
+solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally
+different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite,
+"Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever qualities
+of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from
+beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music was
+unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to
+the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented for
+its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare's
+sake, not for the actor-manager's.</p>
+
+<p>And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare
+there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance of
+"Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as
+the natural poetry of drama. But <!-- Page 187 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_187">[187]</a></span>I see that it only needs to be acted with
+genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric. I never
+knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it
+could be made so inevitably human. And this is because no one else has
+rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is
+passionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which
+glorifies and destroys Juliet. The decorative Juliet of the stage we know,
+the lovely picture, the <i>ingenue</i>, the prattler of pretty phrases;
+but this mysterious, tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a
+woman, is unknown to us outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr.
+Sothern's Romeo has an exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a
+lover's, and is alive. But Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as
+Juliet; she is Juliet. I would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the
+only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul
+unseized by the Germans yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how
+simple, how <!-- Page 188 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_188">[188]</a></span>much a poet and a gentleman! To what depth he
+suffers! How magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own
+soul, the main riddles of the universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper
+meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern
+was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of
+wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and
+piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no
+figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied
+and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen
+romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of
+"Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare
+saw him living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of
+fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all
+critics of life. And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy,
+moved before one's eyes like a religious service. <!-- Page 189 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_189">[189]</a></span>How is it that we get
+from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one
+in England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
+said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
+the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
+chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything
+obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the
+quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never uncontrolled.
+Intention without the power of achievement is almost as lamentable a thing
+as achievement not directed by intention. Now here are two players in whom
+technique has been carried to a supreme point. There is no actor on our
+stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors
+can. It is on this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as
+one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great
+acting depends. Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture,
+but the inner meaning, <!-- Page 190 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_190">[190]</a></span>of some beautiful and subtle passage in
+Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric, and
+another eagerly, as passionate speech, but no one with the precise accent
+of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his
+characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at
+Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are
+accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many
+rhetorical manners. Mr. Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair,
+exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their
+bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you
+overhear his thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be
+overheard, and just so casually. To render this on the stage requires,
+first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of
+producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of
+those words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely
+mastered those two first <!-- Page 191 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_191">[191]</a></span>requirements of acting? No one now acting in
+English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.</p>
+
+<p>What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we
+get when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we
+get from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking
+merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in
+the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look, for
+contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate travesty,
+done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli. He acts with
+his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with
+his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that
+self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's troubles upon him. It is a
+fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has
+its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece. The
+play is great and wild, a mockery and a happiness; and it is
+<!-- Page 192 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_192">[192]</a></span>all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery
+of it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been
+allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.</p>
+
+<p>So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary
+principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted; only
+in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of the
+actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal. Let us
+look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken of her
+Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her Ophelia. It
+is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and merely for the
+reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of some beautiful
+bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered among all other
+renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple poetry it makes of
+madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into it from a complete
+abandonment to what is essence, and not mere decoration, in the spoiled
+brain <!-- Page 193 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_193">[193]</a></span>of this kind, loving and will-less woman. She
+suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you, the very soul
+naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence. She makes the rage
+and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible thing.</p>
+
+<p>In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
+broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman let
+loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art is
+tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses into
+jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern sentiment
+which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of romance. She
+is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which everything is a kind
+of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into a matter destined to
+come right in the end. And so her delicate and restrained gaiety in
+masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every requirement, of what for
+the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.</p>
+
+<p>Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what <!-- Page 194 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_194">[194]</a></span>can be done with the modern
+make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
+written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject was
+made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
+lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and theatrical
+situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do; what, indeed,
+some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little peasant girl,
+perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the peasant saint,
+too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of shreds and patches
+one remembers only something which has given it its whole value: the vital
+image of a divine child, a thing of peace and love, who makes war
+angelically.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
+to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than Shakespeare,
+a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was in Flower."
+Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage. Even through
+<!-- Page 195 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_195">[195]</a></span>the silly disguises of this inconceivable
+production, which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent
+New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the
+fool's fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
+practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
+parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
+nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
+was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
+which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.</p>
+
+<p>An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or
+preference to a single kind of <i>r&ocirc;le</i> is not properly an artist
+at all. It is the curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased
+the public in any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into
+money, to repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does
+so, he is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of
+artist to be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself.
+When I <!-- Page 196 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_196">[196]</a></span>have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia,
+and as Viola, I am content to have seen her also in a worthless farce,
+because she showed me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly,
+safely, through a part that she despised: she did not spoil it out of
+self-respect; out of a rarer self-respect she carried it through without
+capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen,
+the Fiammetta of Catulle Mend&egrave;s and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do
+not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can
+imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but
+with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that
+she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and
+so subtly trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being
+genius at all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no
+fits and starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the
+attractiveness of excess. It is by excess that we for the most part
+distinguish what seems to us genius; and it is <!-- Page 197 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_197">[197]</a></span>often by its excess
+that genius first really shows itself. But the rarest genius is without
+excess, and may seem colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems
+beside Titian. But Giorgione will always be the greater.</p>
+
+<p>I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
+of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about the
+"strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in pained
+surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had not, she
+would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless" person, the
+Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily be made, and
+there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs. Kendal to Miss
+Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a greater operatic
+singer than Mme. Calv&eacute;. What Miss Marlowe has is a great innocence,
+which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and a childish and yet
+wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild beast, in whom there
+would always <!-- Page 198 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_198">[198]</a></span>be a charm far beyond that of the domestic
+creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to her
+perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere stealthily
+about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable, unconscious; without
+which we are tame christened things, fit for cloisters. Duse is the soul
+made flesh, R&eacute;jane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the
+flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of life, the plenitude
+of sap in the tree.</p>
+
+<p>The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
+different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
+resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in his
+own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
+actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of that
+attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and engaging, a
+way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the
+footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
+<!-- Page 199 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_199">[199]</a></span>fills and gladdens you with a sense of the
+single human being whom she is representing. And there is her strange
+beauty, in which the mind and the senses have an equal part, and which is
+full of savour and grace, alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with
+these personal qualities that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to
+emphasise is the particular kind of lesson which this acting, so
+essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America,
+should have for all who are at all seriously considering the lamentable
+condition of our stage in the present day. We have nothing like it in
+England, nothing on the same level, no such honesty and capacity of art,
+no such worthy results. Are we capable of realising the difference? If
+not, Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern will have come to England in
+vain.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 200 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_THEORY_OF_THE_STAGE"></a>
+
+<h2>A THEORY OF THE STAGE</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as
+you will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
+let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry, and
+comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
+scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
+plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
+clothes that skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
+represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
+represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work on
+any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of a
+drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its appeal
+when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
+<!-- Page 201 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_201">[201]</a></span>Companies of marionette players still go about
+the villages of Kent, and among their stock pieces is "Arden of
+Feversham," the play which Shakespeare is not too great to have written,
+at some moment when his right hand knew not what his left hand was doing.
+Well, that great little play can hold the eyes of every child and
+villager, as the puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it
+after three centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
+inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
+there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse can
+we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing but
+beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an
+abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then
+words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Because
+poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can let out more of that
+secret than prose, the great drama of the past has been mainly drama in
+verse. The <!-- Page 202 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_202">[202]</a></span>modern desire to escape from form, and to get
+at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside of
+nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to verse,
+which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has seemed to do
+most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his psychology far with
+it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a limiting restraint, and his
+drama a thing less fundamental than the drama of the poets. Only one
+modern writer has brought something which is almost the equivalent of
+poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The Powers of Darkness." The play
+is horrible and uncouth, but it is illuminated by a great inner light.
+There is not a beautiful word in it, but it is filled with beauty. And
+that is because Tolstoi has the vision which may be equally that of the
+poet and of the prophet. It is often said that the age of poetry is over,
+and that the great forms of the future must be in prose. That is the
+"exquisite reason" of those whom the gods have not made poetical. It is
+like saying that there <!-- Page 203 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_203">[203]</a></span>will be no more music, or that love is out of
+date. Forms change, but not essence; and Whitman points the way, not to
+prose, but to a poetry which shall take in wider regions of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of
+Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not more
+essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama. Poets
+who have written plays for reading have wasted their best opportunities.
+Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to the drama before
+it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and disabilities to the
+writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt wealth than in the plays of
+Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech builds up no structure, but
+wavers in orchestral floods, without beginning or ending? It has been said
+that Shakespeare will sacrifice his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet"
+has been quoted against him. But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and
+whatever has seemed mere lingering meditation <!-- Page 204 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_204">[204]</a></span>will be recognised as a
+part of that thought which makes or waits on action. If poetry in
+Shakespeare may sometimes seem to delay action, it does but deepen it. The
+poetry is the life blood, or runs through it. Only bad actors and managers
+think that by stripping the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a
+more living body. The outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible
+melodrama, still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the
+play, though it comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us
+legitimately, as a growth out of melodrama.</p>
+
+<p>The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist,
+however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his neglect
+of one or another of these two primary and essential requirements. There
+is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement in Germany than in any
+other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann, as accomplished as the
+best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets, like Hauptmann. I do not
+know them well <!-- Page 205 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_205">[205]</a></span>enough to bring them into my argument, but I
+can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the endeavour is in
+the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find even so much as this,
+in more than a single writer here and there? Consider Ibsen, who is the
+subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles. At his best he has a firm
+hold on structural melodrama, he is a marvellous analyst of life, he is
+the most ingenious of all the playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he
+will give you a phrase, "vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one
+of the clich&eacute;s of the minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself
+upon him by bringing him to a no-man's land where there were clouds and
+phantasms that he could no longer direct.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for
+marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of
+limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
+"Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man whose
+gift is of another <!-- Page 206 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_206">[206]</a></span>kind: a visionary of the moods. His later
+speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the
+conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought
+back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in exile,
+among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future will have
+more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright of our time.
+He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness, which we had
+cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.</p>
+
+<p>In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all
+is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital
+passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in
+"Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the
+glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.
+Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the
+speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.</p>
+
+<p>We have in England one man, and one <!-- Page 207 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_207">[207]</a></span>only, who has some public
+claim to be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of
+art. Mr. Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a
+soul. He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not
+only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers in
+their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great
+talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted
+the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our
+only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his astonishing
+skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a spirit really
+intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the stage with
+undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty. Life gives up
+its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of neglected altars.
+But those who amuse the world, no matter by what means, have their place
+in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a clock striking the
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>With Mr. Shaw we come to the play <!-- Page 208 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_208">[208]</a></span>which is prose, and nothing
+but prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a
+more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not so
+long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became to
+Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond
+adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Cam&eacute;lias." The other
+plays are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of
+"Tue-l&agrave;!" was the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in
+which special pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is
+the dramatic motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died
+with the coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La
+Femme de Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind
+it, is to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all
+sorts of interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the
+attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in
+England, we have no such folk to command; <!-- Page 209 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_209">[209]</a></span>our cleverest playwrights,
+apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr.
+Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to be
+associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and Mr.
+Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many more
+names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious playwright? Who
+is there that can be compared with our poets or our novelists, not only
+with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger generation, with a
+Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us one or two good
+realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's, besides giving Mr.
+Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and taken it in America. But
+is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt to write imaginative
+literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary Theatre has already,
+in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers, each wholly individual,
+one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose. Neither has yet reached
+the public, <!-- Page 210 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_210">[210]</a></span>in any effectual way, or perhaps the limits of
+his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for us to hope in, if
+we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on the great
+principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?</p>
+
+<p>The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
+affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
+the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
+plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
+best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
+occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel expense.
+These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision beyond their
+eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need a better form
+for expression than they could find in their newspapers. They discussed
+immortal problems as they would have discussed the entries in their
+ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in that play of
+Tolstoi's which I have called the <!-- Page 211 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_211">[211]</a></span>only modern play in prose
+which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a certain
+childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more civilised
+peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are aware, it
+stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in Tolstoi has more
+wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who fumble at their
+lips for sea-magic.</p>
+
+<p>And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
+as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
+radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
+this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
+art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony has
+ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the past
+were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated in our
+days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of what has
+come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and adequate
+treatment <!-- Page 212 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_212">[212]</a></span>of the primary emotions, because it can render
+them more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words,
+as prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part
+of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who, in
+a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an adequate
+answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of something deeper
+than thought, may let loose some part of that answer which would justify
+the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 213 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_SICILIAN_ACTORS"></a>
+
+<h2>THE SICILIAN ACTORS</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
+Paris, where, I read, "la passion para&icirc;t d&eacute;cidement," to a
+dramatic critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the
+stage. We are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded
+an acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
+accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
+some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
+audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
+marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
+gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment to
+so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of <!-- Page 214 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_214">[214]</a></span>drama. It was a new
+intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.</p>
+
+<p>It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
+crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
+thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the volcanoes
+of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by
+actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at all, but the real
+peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the
+company, who was much more real than reality.</p>
+
+<p>Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her
+attitudes; her art is more nearly the art of R&eacute;jane. While both of
+these are great artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods,
+of animal energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce
+caress, like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
+snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions of
+<!-- Page 215 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_215">[215]</a></span>fear and hate, but for the most part no more.
+In "La Folfaa" she can be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the
+first act, with her delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols,
+petulances, to the soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood
+comes out, turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband
+thrusts her brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow
+her lover. Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels
+among miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure,
+standing out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in
+motion with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
+Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
+difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul. And
+if one thinks of R&eacute;jane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
+though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
+Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic gesture
+of her apparently unconscious <!-- Page 216 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_216">[216]</a></span>hand, turning back the sleeve of her
+lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a great
+thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi Aguglia is a
+stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is no love in her
+heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable hate; and she is
+not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle with her lover on the
+church steps or in her plot against him which sends an unanticipated knife
+into his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
+moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
+Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that, I
+am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright against a
+frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and as one new
+shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of the tools
+drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves. Her face
+contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about
+<!-- Page 217 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_217">[217]</a></span>to utter shrieks which cannot get past her
+lips. She shivers slowly downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and
+clasps her knees with both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty
+several anguishes, while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a
+worm, nearer and nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that
+she repels time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body,
+hopping as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible
+in its scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would
+have it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean
+copy of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely
+has the whole being passed into its possession.</p>
+
+<p>And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
+catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant no
+more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out of
+his rhetoric this <!-- Page 218 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_218">[218]</a></span>woman has created the horror and beauty of a
+supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he has
+denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should have been
+his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden fetters taken
+off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark veil he had worn,
+and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards her martyrdom.
+Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one who knows the
+truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the woman, having willed
+beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an anguish that now flames
+before her in its supreme reality, strains in the irrationality of utter
+fear backward into the midst of those clutching hands that are holding her
+up in the attitude of her death, and, with a shiver in which the soul,
+succumbing to the body, wrings its last triumph out of an ignominious
+glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling the flames eternally upon her: "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" and thereat all evil seems to have
+been judged <!-- Page 219 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_219">[219]</a></span>suddenly, and obliterated, as if God had
+laughed once, and wiped out the world.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
+with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has been
+a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words, especially in
+verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a well-constructed
+play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or with words in a
+foreign language, which we may not understand. The acting, by the Sicilian
+actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to do something towards the
+solution of part at least of this problem.</p>
+
+<p>The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
+which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
+hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
+of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
+which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
+<!-- Page 220 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_220">[220]</a></span>reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it
+on the stage, acted with the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine
+oneself ignorant of the language and of the play. Suddenly the words have
+become unnecessary; the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in
+gesture and motion; the scene passes before you as if you were watching it
+in real life; and this primitively passionate acting, working on an action
+so cunningly contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the
+play, as we read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction.
+The beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
+understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright and
+his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out the
+calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of view of
+the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its aim.</p>
+
+<p>And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
+playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? <!-- Page 221 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_221">[221]</a></span>How is it that in this
+play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than in their
+realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better writer than
+Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than "Cavalleria
+Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great drama, and has the
+skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors like these, who come
+with their own life and ways upon it, in order to bring the men and women
+of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that he has fulfilled the
+great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge said, "dramatic poetry
+must be poetry hid in thought and passion&mdash;not thought or passion
+disguised in the dress of poetry?"</p>
+
+<p>That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
+have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of a
+performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that "it
+seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed no
+distinct shape," but that, "when <!-- Page 222 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_222">[222]</a></span>the novelty is past, we find to our cost
+that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought
+down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that is true of
+Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it from the
+impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio. What fine
+vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or passion was
+lost to us in its passage across the stage?</p>
+
+<p>And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
+finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
+which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is an
+exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against all
+accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
+admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
+suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these sinning,
+suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if naked before
+us, the image of our own <!-- Page 223 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_223">[223]</a></span>souls, visible for once, and unashamed, in the
+mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before them, and maybe laugh
+at the extravagance of their gestures, it is ourselves whom they are
+showing to us, caught unawares and set in symbolical action. Let not the
+base word realism be used for this spontaneous energy by which we are
+shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys
+us. Here is one part of life, the source of its existence: and here it is
+shown us crude as nature, absolute as art. This new, living art of the
+body, which we see struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself
+for once in this woman who expresses, without reticence and without
+offence, all that the poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft,
+animal desire, without passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art
+has for once justified itself by being mere nature.</p>
+
+<p>And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
+occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
+the others, acted <!-- Page 224 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_224">[224]</a></span>with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds.
+What stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at
+our big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
+the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But the
+play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. R&eacute;jane has
+done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
+artist. But not even R&eacute;jane has given us the whole animal, in its
+self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
+command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
+motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and the
+Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia in the
+scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it would have
+been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing meaningless and
+disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest between will and
+desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch helplessly from the
+shore every <!-- Page 225 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_225">[225]</a></span>plank as the sea tears if off and swallows it.
+"I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me in the theatre,
+speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with the woman, she
+meant, or in the woman's place.</p>
+
+<p>Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French
+critic whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration
+by a hesitating consciousness that "la passion para&icirc;t decidement
+avoir partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against
+a magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
+gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
+through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
+authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
+And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 226 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MUSIC"></a>
+
+<h2>MUSIC</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 227 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+<!-- Page 228 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 229 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+<a name="ON_WRITING_ABOUT_MUSIC"></a>
+
+<h2>ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 <i>pizzicato</i>, 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
+<!-- Page 230 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_230">[230]</a></span>these two methods? None, indeed, that can ever
+be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.</p>
+
+<p>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 knowledge 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 generalisations,
+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
+<!-- Page 231 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_231">[231]</a></span>what you say, but that he has no opinion in the
+matter.</p>
+
+<p>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 speaking as if it
+had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born in its own region,
+and is wholly ignorant of ours.</p>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 232 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+<a name="TECHNIQUE_AND_THE_ARTIST"></a>
+
+<h2>TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 233 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_233">[233]</a></span>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 perfect. Artists who deal in
+materials less fragile than human 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 <!-- Page 234 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_234">[234]</a></span>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 Bechstein 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, <!-- Page 235 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_235">[235]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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; <!-- Page 236 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_236">[236]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<!-- Page 237 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+
+
+<h2>PACHMANN AND THE PIANO</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
+it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
+only 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
+its own voice.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 238 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_238">[238]</a></span>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 terms of your
+instrument, and the piano responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann,
+beyond all other pianists, has 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.</p>
+
+<p>Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
+than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
+sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. 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 <!-- Page 239 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_239">[239]</a></span>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 interpreted 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, hammering.
+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;
+<!-- Page 240 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_240">[240]</a></span>then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very
+serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His 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.</p>
+
+<p>In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
+the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a diamond.
+Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and rightly, it
+is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat with our
+hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us, has
+nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a language
+which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination, chills us a
+little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks down for an
+instant <!-- Page 241 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_241">[241]</a></span>the too solid walls of the world, showing us
+the gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
+lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
+Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
+but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
+finds a kind of humour.</p>
+
+<p>In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
+executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or failure
+in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which, to music,
+is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes tranquilly. So
+remote is it from us that it can only be reached through some not quite
+healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical disquietude when he plays
+is but a sign of what it has cost him to venture outside humanity, into
+music. Yet in music this mystery is a simple thing, its native air; and
+the art of the musician has less difficulty in its evocation than the art
+of the poet or the painter. With what an effort do we persuade words or
+<!-- Page 242 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_242">[242]</a></span>colours back from their vulgar articulateness
+into at least some recollection of that mystery which is deeper than sight
+or speech. Music can never wholly be detached from mystery, can never
+wholly become articulate, and it is in our ignorance of its true nature
+that we would tame it to humanity and teach it to express human emotions,
+not its own.</p>
+
+<p>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, temperament, 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 imploring
+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
+<!-- Page 243 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_243">[243]</a></span>speaking to the music; he lifts his finger,
+that you 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 innermost life of music. I do not think he has ever put
+an 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, <!-- Page 244 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_244">[244]</a></span>easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you do not
+realise that he has had difficulties 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. Pachmann is
+less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his hands are stealthy
+acrobats, going quietly about their difficult business. They talk with the
+piano and the piano answers them. All that violence cannot do with the
+notes of the instrument, he does. His art begins where violence leaves
+off; that is why he can give you fortissimo without hurting the nerves of
+a single string; that is why he can play a run as if every note had its
+meaning. To the others a run is a flourish, a tassel hung on for display,
+a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run you realise that it may have its
+own legitimate sparkle of gay life. With him every note lives, has its own
+body and its own soul, <!-- Page 245 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_245">[245]</a></span>and that is why it is worth hearing him play
+even trivial music like Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music
+like Taubert's Waltz: he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty
+which is at the root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems
+to say in itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in
+which everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it
+is of such moments that Pachmann is the poet.</p>
+
+<p>And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
+Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
+the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
+alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of shading,
+like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and clarity, he
+envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most absolutely musical
+music in the world. The playing of this concerto is the greatest thing I
+have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to play Mozart I heard
+another only less beautiful <!-- Page 246 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_246">[246]</a></span>world of sound rise softly about me. There
+was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there was the nervous spring, the
+diamond hardness, as well as the glowing light and ardent sweetness. Yet
+another manner of playing, not less appropriate to its subject, brought
+before me the bubbling flow, the romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music
+that is a little showy, a little luscious, but with a gracious feminine
+beauty of its own. Chopin followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is
+as if the soul of Chopin had returned to its divine body, the notes of
+this sinewy and feverish music, in which beauty becomes a torture and
+energy pierces to the centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is
+reborn a winged energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur,
+and it is in the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most
+enduring work. The Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were
+Niagara and not Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second
+Mazurka of Op. 50 had that <!-- Page 247 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_247">[247]</a></span>boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy
+intimacy in its secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his
+playing alone, gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not
+sure that the Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most
+essential in Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in
+the playing of the Etudes.</p>
+
+<p>Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
+like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
+lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
+coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
+creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
+which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet controlling
+vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music before him
+that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain which comes from
+the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a precisely similar
+reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration <!-- Page 248 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_248">[248]</a></span>and art are more
+perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often wrote down his
+poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the conscious act of
+thought while listening for the music.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
+"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
+Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
+strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery ice,
+and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a thing
+whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret of the
+rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a line
+like:</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dans un palais, soie et or, dans
+Ecbatane,</span><br />
+
+
+<p>can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most
+experienced nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one
+wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like
+the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
+methods. But <!-- Page 249 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_249">[249]</a></span>is not all art a suggestion, an evocation,
+never a statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
+themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
+everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
+Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
+Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some small,
+essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like Whistler,
+like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and nothing
+else.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Poem beginning: The sounds torture me...">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sounds torture me: I
+see them in my brain;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They spin a flickering web of living
+threads,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Like butterflies upon the garden
+beds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nets of bright sound. I follow them: in
+vain.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I must not brush the least dust from their
+wings:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They die of a touch; but I must capture
+them,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or they will turn to a caressing
+flame,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And lick my soul up with their
+flutterings.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sounds torture me: I count them with
+my eyes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I feel them like a thirst between my
+lips;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is it my body or my soul that
+cries</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With little coloured mouths of sound, and
+drips</span><br />
+<!-- Page 250 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In these bright drops that turn to
+butterflies</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dying delicately at my finger
+tips?</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil,
+and it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical
+instrument, which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds
+torture him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes
+them dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
+swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes which
+set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound, listens
+for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away from us
+visibly into that unholy company.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
+interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied than
+he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
+<!-- Page 251 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_251">[251]</a></span>a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of
+immense difficulty, requiring a technique quite different from the
+technique which alone he cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for
+twenty years, and he played it with exactly the right crackling splendour
+that it demanded. On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that
+no one of our time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems
+to be evoked, and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life
+which only the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of
+other players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays
+with the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that
+dainty web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber
+out of moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
+Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
+the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all this
+is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
+<!-- Page 252 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_252">[252]</a></span>wondering at the great walls and bars that have
+been set about the faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human
+in him, and as music turns towards humanity it slips from between his
+hands. What he seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate
+thing in sound: the music, in fact.</p>
+
+<p>It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
+that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret between
+the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no one has
+ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it, becomes a
+joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a voice which is
+music itself. To reduce music to terms of human intelligence or even of
+human emotion is to lower it from its own region, where it is Ariel. There
+is something in music, which we can apprehend only as sound, that comes to
+us out of heaven or hell, mocking the human agency that gives it speech,
+and taking flight beyond it. When Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all
+that Chopin was conscious of <!-- Page 253 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_253">[253]</a></span>saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it
+is all there, if Godowsky plays it; every note, every shade of expression,
+every heightening and quickening, everything that the notes actually say.
+But under Pachmann's miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes
+about it like an atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and
+ecstasy of a beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds
+that are awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
+Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is it
+technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
+dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his own
+magic?</p>
+
+<p>He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience
+than others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch
+which is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could
+tell you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and
+fly and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
+<!-- Page 254 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_254">[254]</a></span>listening face that smiles away from them, you
+would know how little he had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom
+Pachmann himself sets above all other pianists, what he has to tell us
+about the way in which he plays.</p>
+
+<p>When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
+pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon them,
+as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand they
+are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's end.
+They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the straight
+path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey, having done
+their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his learned
+gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini variations of
+Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as soulless as Paganini's
+may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the notes are living things, and
+tosses them about a little cruelly, as if they were a juggler's balls.
+They drop like stones; you are <!-- Page 255 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_255">[255]</a></span>sorry for them, because they are alive.
+How Chopin suffers, when he plays the Preludes! He plays them without a
+throb; the scholar has driven out the magic; Chopin becomes a
+mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor Rhapsody, you hear much more of
+what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has set strange shapes dancing, like
+the skeletons "in the ghosts' moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these
+bodiless things take shape in the music, as Godowsky plays it
+unflinchingly, giving it to you exactly as it is, without comment. Here
+his fidelity to every outline of form becomes an interpretation. But
+Chopin is so much more than form that to follow every outline of it may be
+to leave Chopin out of the outline.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the
+one most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
+think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
+greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
+intense measure, might have been thought less likely to
+<!-- Page 256 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_256">[256]</a></span>be done perfectly by Pachmann than such
+Coleridge in music, such murmurings out of paradise, as the Etude in F
+Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those Mazurkas in which Chopin is more
+poignantly fantastic in substance, more wild and whimsical in rhythm, than
+elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were
+strange and lovely gambols of unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he
+mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little
+freakish things and the trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning
+to every part of its decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and
+wave-like motion of the whole tossing and eager sea of sound.</p>
+
+<p>Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
+peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in their
+fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any essential
+thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what is certainly
+a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The sharpened steel
+gains in what is most <!-- Page 257 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_257">[257]</a></span>vital in its purpose by this very paring away
+of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike deeper for the
+same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is the existence of
+Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as sharpness; these giants
+fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the
+"Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not
+only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in
+Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its
+lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the
+greatness of even a perfect drama.</p>
+
+<p>Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was
+once thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because
+the taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew
+have whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out
+like a secret.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 258 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="PADEREWSKI"></a>
+
+<h2>PADEREWSKI</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
+Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
+noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to a
+rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
+hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and played
+the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own home.
+After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had been in
+hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the playing. I
+would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to be nothing
+but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the
+marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and then the
+exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early morning,
+when, as I <!-- Page 259 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_259">[259]</a></span>went home through the still garrulous and
+peopled streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between
+night and dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross
+way of popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there
+had been, for a few people, this divine escape.</p>
+
+<p>No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
+Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
+Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
+poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
+growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised, more
+than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
+virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
+not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
+but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
+surprised awakening.</p>
+
+<p>The art of Paderewski recalls to me the <!-- Page 260 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_260">[260]</a></span>art of the most skilled and
+the most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
+People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The word
+conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate. But there
+is much in common between two forms of an art in which physical dexterity
+counts for so much, and that passionate precision to which error must be
+impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get from Cinquevalli when
+he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski when he brings a
+continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do the same things, but
+no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball delicately. And Paderewski, in
+his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult
+things without difficulty, with a scornful ease, an almost accidental
+quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it. It is
+difficult to imagine that anyone since Liszt has had so complete a mastery
+of every capacity of the piano, and Liszt, though probably even more
+brilliant, can <!-- Page 261 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_261">[261]</a></span>hardly be imagined with this particular kind of
+charm. His playing is in the true sense an inspiration; he plays nothing
+as if he had learned it with toil, but as if it had come to him out of a
+kind of fiery meditation. Even his thunder is not so much a thing
+specially cultivated for its own sake as a single prominent detail in a
+vast accomplishment. When he plays, the piano seems to become thrillingly
+and tempestuously alive, as if brother met brother in some joyous triumph.
+He collaborates with it, urging it to battle like a war-horse. And the
+quality of the sonority which he gets out of it is unlike that which is
+teased or provoked from the instrument by any other player. Fierce
+exuberant delight wakens under his fingers, in which there is a
+sensitiveness almost impatient, and under his feet, which are as busy as
+an organist's with the pedals. The music leaps like pouring water, flood
+after flood of sound, caught together and flung onward by a central
+energy. The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments;
+all the expression goes to passage <!-- Page 262 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_262">[262]</a></span>after passage, realised
+acutely in their sequence. Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he
+gives you thunder as if heard through clouds. And he is full of leisure
+and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if
+loth to let them pass over and be gone. And he seems to play out of a
+dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that
+meaning with entire felicity.</p>
+
+<p>In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
+was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
+brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for modern
+players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its perfection of
+fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the little sharp
+movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a bird. The ear
+waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation; nothing was
+missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a faithful and
+obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or that it was
+<!-- Page 263 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_263">[263]</a></span>anybody in particular who was playing: the
+sonata was there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had
+known that it existed.</p>
+
+<p>Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
+original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if he
+were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling is
+altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first
+time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its
+Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it
+might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white
+rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated
+and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed to watch over them like a
+Loge of celestial ingenuity.</p>
+
+<p>When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in
+which the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if
+Paderewski were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show
+piece <!-- Page 264 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_264">[264]</a></span>for the piano, this was it, and if ever there
+was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski. You felt at once the
+personal sympathy of the great pianist for the great pianist. He was no
+longer reverential, as with Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part,
+sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in
+the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or
+obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous,
+explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in
+what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real
+worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
+astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
+hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
+spectacularly magnificent?</p>
+
+<p>Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
+anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
+not so wholly satisfactory as in the <!-- Page 265 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_265">[265]</a></span>ease of Chopin, who, with a
+smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never dazzles,
+Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to his own
+genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are only now
+beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in his work.
+How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless transfiguring
+triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in
+"Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is
+no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious
+fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the piano Liszt
+certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown person, who was
+to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there are no depths,
+though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the test rather of the
+virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it was so infinitely
+more important that Paderewski should have played the Beethoven sonata as
+impersonally <!-- Page 266 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_266">[266]</a></span>as he did than that he should have played the
+Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those limits there
+seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and Paderewski has
+attained both limits.</p>
+
+<p>After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
+of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
+What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
+same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
+is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
+America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael of
+the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
+mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
+notes?</p>
+
+<p>Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
+"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
+skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to compel
+<!-- Page 267 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_267">[267]</a></span>universal sympathy is to succeed in the last
+requirements of an art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he
+perpetuates his personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds
+it, like a perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever
+given to the creator of beautiful sounds?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 268 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_REFLECTION_AT_A_DOLMETSCH_CONCERT"></a>
+
+<h2>A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 269 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+
+
+<p>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 harpsichord 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 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
+<!-- Page 270 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_270">[270]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 271 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_271">[271]</a></span>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 accomplice and
+not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its
+seclusion.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 272 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_272">[272]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only
+healing for <!-- Page 273 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_273">[273]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 274 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_274">[274]</a></span>in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a
+fragment of it here, a fragment 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, <!-- Page 275 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_275">[275]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>I contrast him with 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 something 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 musician. This music aims at the
+creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing
+which cannot exist <!-- Page 276 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_276">[276]</a></span>outside order and measure; it has not yet come
+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 suggestions 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?</p>
+
+<!-- Page 277 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_DRAMATISATION_OF_SONG"></a>
+
+<h2>THE DRAMATISATION OF SONG</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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 Mallarm&eacute;, of an impossible,
+fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves 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 command.
+<!-- Page 278 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_278">[278]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<!-- Page 279 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_279">[279]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by
+a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
+wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
+time, not as a character in an <!-- Page 280 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_280">[280]</a></span>opera, but as a private interpreter
+between poetry and the world.</p>
+
+<p>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 surrounded 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 herself to the possession of the
+song, but she was always conscious 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<!-- Page 281 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_281">[281]</a></span>. 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 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 gives 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, <!-- Page 282 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_282">[282]</a></span>as one feels at once the softness and the
+perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarm&eacute; 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&eacute; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 holding 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 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 <!-- Page 283 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_283">[283]</a></span>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 uninterrupted communion with herself.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 284 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="THE_MEININGEN_ORCHESTRA"></a>
+
+<h2>THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; 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
+appreciation 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 <!-- Page 285 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_285">[285]</a></span>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 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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from
+"Rosamunde," and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but
+rather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifully
+played. I could only think of the <!-- Page 286 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_286">[286]</a></span>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 straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and various life
+which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the complete thing,
+completely rendered.</p>
+
+<p>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 expression; but the something more, the vast heave and
+throb of the music, was not there. It was "classical" rendering of what is
+certainly not "classical" music. Hear that <!-- Page 287 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_287">[287]</a></span>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 Brahms, or like
+overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner himself, an energy which works
+within known limits, as in the overture to the "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
+rendering of that we must go to Richter.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, in that third concert it would he 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
+instruments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the most delightful
+music in the world. The music of Mozart is, no <!-- Page 288 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_288">[288]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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
+<!-- Page 289 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_289">[289]</a></span>the walls. I noticed it first in the overture
+to "Leonore," the first piece which they played; an unparalleled effect
+and one of surprising beauty.</p>
+
+<p>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
+something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of passion.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 290 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="MOZART_IN_THE_MIRABELL_GARTEN"></a>
+
+<h2>MOZART IN THE MIRABELL-GARTEN</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>They are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at the Hof-Theater,
+to follow the Wagner operas at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre; and I stayed,
+on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberfl&ouml;te." 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 Meistersinger"
+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 <!-- Page 291 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_291">[291]</a></span>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
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music,
+which played round <!-- Page 292 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_292">[292]</a></span>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
+pinewoods 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, <!-- Page 293 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_293">[293]</a></span>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 and his senses, in 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
+<!-- Page 294 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_294">[294]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberfl&ouml;te," is
+music without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has
+the firm outlines of D&uuml;rer 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 Botticelli's "Spring"; 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. Mozart
+<!-- Page 295 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_295">[295]</a></span>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 Zauberfl&ouml;te"
+is really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which 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 <!-- Page 296 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_296">[296]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 297 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="NOTES_ON_WAGNER_AT_BAYREUTH"></a>
+
+<h2>NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH</h2>
+
+<h3>I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the
+music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph not
+less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember that
+every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that only
+Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home, receiving the
+world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many doors, offering an
+entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must always be at cautious
+enmity with his public, always somewhat at its mercy, even after he has
+conquered its attention. The crowd never really loves art, it resents art
+as a departure from its level of mediocrity; and fame comes to an artist
+only when there is a sufficient <!-- Page 298 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_298">[298]</a></span>number of intelligent individuals in the
+crowd to force their opinion upon the resisting mass of the others, in the
+form of a fashion which it is supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt.
+Bayreuth exists because Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he
+succeeded in forcing his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and
+action than any other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he
+wanted, not always when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had
+Liszt on his side, the one musician of all others who could do most for
+him; he had the necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the
+crowd; and at last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent
+of his own triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly
+satisfied. He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there
+were his works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was
+called.</p>
+
+<p>And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth
+itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner
+<!-- Page 299 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_299">[299]</a></span>wished it to be seen and heard. The square,
+plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre at Munich is an improved copy
+of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the same ampitheatrical
+arrangement of seats, the same invisible orchestra and vast stage.
+Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are even the three "fanfaren" at
+the doors, with the same punctual and irrevocable closing of the doors at
+the beginning of each act. As at Bayreuth, 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 thus now two theatres in the world in which music and
+drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 300 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me
+the most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
+have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
+that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
+ideas, of Wagner. The music itself 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; 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 religious
+music, but it is the music of a religion which had never
+<!-- Page 301 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_301">[301]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to
+render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-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
+something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out of a carnal
+voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.</p>
+
+<p>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 <!-- Page 302 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_302">[302]</a></span>repetition of a few ideas. All that music of
+the closing scene of the first act 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 become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they
+end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a
+cunning absorption of the will of another.</p>
+
+<p>"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
+soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
+be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than anything
+I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the sea or the
+wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the music, as one
+watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the visible picture
+there. And, so perfectly do all the <!-- Page 303 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_303">[303]</a></span>arts flow into one, the
+picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
+convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm is
+everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and
+every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. 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. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be settled
+as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the stage is
+(more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the time of a
+song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also, every gesture
+is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its reticence. It is
+difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time,
+people really motionless on the stage. After all, action, as it has been
+said, is only a way of spoiling something. The aim of
+<!-- Page 304 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_304">[304]</a></span>the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama
+of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like
+most people in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors,
+when they are not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically
+trying to make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not
+what restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
+realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
+these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
+frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
+least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown us
+that it can be.</p>
+
+<p>Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
+new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's
+representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this
+world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand
+tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
+<!-- Page 305 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_305">[305]</a></span>proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as
+that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual,
+through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all.
+How that solitary figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown
+to himself, he is the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of
+remoteness, which it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the
+action into a reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is
+watching it!</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
+the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
+enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a change
+is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on natural
+truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every wrinkle of
+its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is elaborately departed
+from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be formed out of those
+outlines, all but those outlines being left out. <!-- Page 306 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_306">[306]</a></span>And "Parsifal," which
+is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it, in its very essence,
+that hieratic character which it is the effort of supreme art to attain.
+At times one is reminded of the most beautiful drama in the world, the
+Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of leaves, brought in so
+touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old hermit watering his flowers.
+There is something of the same universal tenderness, the same religious
+linking together of all the world, in some vague enough, but very
+beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside the question to discuss how far
+Wagner's intentions were technically religious: how far Parsifal himself
+is either Christ or Buddha, and how far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's
+mind was the mind to which all legend is sacred, every symbol of divine
+things to be held in reverence; but symbol, with him, was after all a
+means to an end, and could never have been accepted as really an end in
+itself. I should say that in "Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but
+not because he intended, or did <!-- Page 307 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_307">[307]</a></span>not intend, to shadow the Christian
+mysteries. His music, his acting, are devout, because the music has a
+disembodied ecstasy, and the acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce
+in us something of the solemnity of sensation produced by the service of
+the Mass, and are in themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.</p>
+
+<hr class="medline" />
+<h3>III. THE ART OF WAGNER</h3>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
+should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
+continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
+giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
+nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
+composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
+moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does
+but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a world, the
+natural world in the midst of which his people of the
+<!-- Page 308 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_308">[308]</a></span>drama live their passionate life, and a world
+in sympathy with all their passion. And in his audible representation of
+natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have
+only tried, more or less well, to do. When, in the past at least, the
+critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that
+all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as
+imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in
+his painting, is the Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically
+exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not
+arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of
+no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is,
+apprehended with all the clairvoyance of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with
+all its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
+onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
+human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in <!-- Page 309 --><span class=
+"newpage"><a name="Page_309">[309]</a></span>the midst of a great sea. A
+few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
+awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
+ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were to
+be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an abandonment
+to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know is futile.
+Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it must compass
+all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before which there is
+only a great darkness, and only a great darkness afterwards. Sorrow is so
+lofty and so consoling because it is no less conscious of its passing
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
+drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
+narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
+Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
+Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
+the instant of realisation. <!-- Page 310 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_310">[310]</a></span>Siegfried is living with at least as
+powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening to
+the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for this
+that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of memory,
+were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action of the
+drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
+preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
+their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
+effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
+materialising both.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped
+by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
+circumscribes itself like Giotto's <i>O</i> is almost as tangible a thing
+as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
+flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
+poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and
+wind, <!-- Page 311 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_311">[311]</a></span>is more than a mere heightening of speech: it
+partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the
+whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
+person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.</p>
+
+<p>It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
+distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
+too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
+and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
+personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations of
+humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal,
+have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi humanity. Their
+place in a national legend permits them, without disturbing our critical
+sense of the probability of things, a superhuman passion; for they are
+ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of the bravery, that of the
+purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite devices to give them more
+and more of verisimilitude; <!-- Page 312 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_312">[312]</a></span>modulating song, for instance, into a kind
+of chant which we can almost take for actual speech. It is thus the more
+interesting to note the point to which realism conducts him, the limit at
+which it stops, his conception of a spiritual reality which begins where
+realism leaves off.</p>
+
+<p>And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
+dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
+almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
+painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
+thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
+without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
+note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
+without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
+"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
+obey it. When Br&uuml;nnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is
+an immense thanksgiving for light, and all her <!-- Page 313 --><span
+class="newpage"><a name="Page_313">[313]</a></span>being finds expression
+in a great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
+silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
+with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of the
+depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
+Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives him
+to drink; Siegfried, when Br&uuml;nnhilde awakens to the world and to him:
+it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and returned.
+And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as if love and
+the thought of death came always together, the thought of the only ending
+of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the music as no
+Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts and the
+excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow rhythm, which in
+Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards from its first
+breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening notes of the "Ring,"
+seems to broaden outwards like <!-- Page 314 --><span class="newpage"><a
+name="Page_314">[314]</a></span>ripples on an infinite sea, throughout the
+whole work of Wagner.</p>
+
+<p>And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
+things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
+other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think of
+Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to a
+little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or
+someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here
+music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering his
+supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
+remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in Wagner
+does God speak to men in his own language.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 315 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="CONCLUSION"></a>
+
+<h2>CONCLUSION</h2>
+
+<!-- Page 316 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_316">[316]</a></span><br />
+<!-- Page 317 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<a name="A_PARADOX_ON_ART"></a>
+
+<h2>A PARADOX ON ART</h2>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>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? Literature, 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
+interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, 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?</p>
+
+<p>If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentially
+independent of its material, however dependent upon its own material
+<!-- Page 318 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_318">[318]</a></span>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 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. <!-- Page 319 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_319">[319]</a></span>Beauty is always equally beautiful; the degrees
+exist only when we have not yet attained beauty.</p>
+
+<p>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 it 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 <!-- Page 320 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_320">[320]</a></span>the work of art, the creation, to which we have
+just listened.</p>
+
+<p>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 they have
+seen Descl&eacute;e, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="Poem by Gautier">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus
+gelle</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'une forme au travail</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rebelle,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vers, marbre, onyx,
+&eacute;mail.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><!-- Page 321 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_321">[321]</a></span>No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.</p>
+
+<table class="center" summary="More poem by Gautier">
+<tr>
+<td align="left"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tout passe. L'art
+robuste</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Seul &agrave;
+l'&eacute;ternit&eacute;.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Le buste</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Survit &agrave; la
+cit&eacute;.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a
+certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate 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 whom posterity means anything very definite, and to whom 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 <!-- Page 322 --><span class="newpage"><a name=
+"Page_322">[322]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<!-- Page 323 --><span class="newpage"><a name="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
+
+
+<hr class="bigline" />
+<h3>BY THE SAME WRITER</h3>
+
+<br />
+<div class="centerme">
+<p>Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.</p>
+
+<p>An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.</p>
+
+<p>Cities, 1903.</p>
+
+<p>Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual Adventures, 1905.</p>
+
+<p>The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>William Blake, 1907.</p>
+
+<p>Cities of Italy, 1907.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Plays, Acting and Music
+       A Book Of Theory
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: November 2, 2004 [EBook #13928]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS, ACTING AND MUSIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Leah Moser and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS
+ACTING AND MUSIC
+
+A BOOK OF THEORY
+
+BY
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+
+
+LONDON
+
+
+1909
+
+
+
+_To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and admiration_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
+material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
+many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
+remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first;
+what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have
+been: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions
+which I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events,
+the programme was carried out.
+
+This book, I said then, 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 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 themselves 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.
+
+1903, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+An Apology for Puppets                    3
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+Nietzsche on Tragedy                     11
+
+Sarah Bernhardt                          17
+
+Coquelin and Moliere                     29
+
+Rejane                                   37
+
+Yvette Guilbert                          42
+
+Sir Henry Irving                         52
+
+Duse in Some of Her Parts                60
+
+Annotations                              77
+
+M. Capus in England                      93
+
+A Double Enigma                         100
+
+
+DRAMA
+
+Professional and Unprofessional         109
+
+Tolstoi and Others                      115
+
+Some Problem Plays                      124
+
+"Monna Vanna"                           137
+
+The Question of Censorship              143
+
+A Play and the Public                   148
+
+The Test of the Actor                   152
+
+The Price of Realism                    162
+
+On Crossing Stage to Right              167
+
+The Speaking of Verse                   173
+
+Great Acting in English                 182
+
+A Theory of the Stage                   198
+
+The Sicilian Actors                     213
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+On Writing about Music                  229
+
+Technique and the Artist                232
+
+Pachmann and the Piano                  237
+
+Paderewski                              258
+
+A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert     268
+
+The Dramatisation of Song               277
+
+The Meiningen Orchestra                 284
+
+Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten           290
+
+Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth             297
+
+
+Conclusion: A Paradox on Art            315
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+
+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 subordinate 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 certainly 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. 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 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.
+
+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. Losing, 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 instructive 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 that 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 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 manoeuvres 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 suggestion of magic
+in this beauty.
+
+Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pour
+marionettes," 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 Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is to
+make, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simple
+a mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classic
+drama.
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS AND ACTING
+
+
+
+
+NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY
+
+
+I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy 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 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 rampart 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 contemplation, 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 spirit, 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 l'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. "If it
+were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing 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."
+
+
+
+
+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 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
+attractiveness, 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 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 expressed, 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 earlier period, just as the writing of Dumas
+fils 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 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
+remoteness 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 actress must, in such parts, be
+conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in
+modern conversation? 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? Illusion, 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 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 significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seem
+to deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated to
+an overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting always
+reminds me of a musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrument
+of music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra.
+One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente,
+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 savour 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 her, 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. 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 pleasure 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 Bernhardt. 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.
+
+
+
+
+COQUELIN AND MOLIERE: SOME ASPECTS
+
+
+To see Coquelin in Moliere is to see the greatest of comic actors at his
+best, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a student, or
+anything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be compared with
+that of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the training of nature.
+They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that Coquelin, with
+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 instrument 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. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always a
+disguise, never a revelation.
+
+I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their company at the Garrick
+Theatre. They did "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 Shakespearean of his comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le meme
+prejuge," Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de
+Pierre,' parce qu'il etait en prose, nuisit au succes de 'l'Avare.'
+Cependant le public qui, a la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par
+donner a cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il merite. On comprit alors
+qu'il peut y avoir de fort 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
+temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. His
+worldly wisdom, his active 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-Rene; 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 of Moliere or of the character of Coquelin. 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 Precieuses 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 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 its
+head 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 interpretation. The part of Maitre Jacques in "L'Avare," for
+instance, which I have just seen him perform with such gusto and such
+certainty, 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 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 independent 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
+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 a 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.
+
+
+
+
+REJANE
+
+
+The genius of Rejane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all the
+ingredients of the dish may be named without defining 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
+Verlaine'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: and I had to think twice, before I could
+remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which
+I had been almost cruelly enjoying.
+
+The art of Rejane accepts things as they are, without selection or
+correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall
+be nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which the
+shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is
+common or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is
+leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose.
+To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Where
+nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever
+form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an
+untrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venus
+toute entiere a sa proie attachee," and she has all the brutality and
+all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious
+vice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in
+which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their
+own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the
+whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity
+which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at every
+moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect;
+then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you
+will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done
+nothing with genius.
+
+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 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 love. 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: here, in "Sapho," is a woman who
+flagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himself
+before God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt to
+win him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she lets
+herself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement of
+one who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth to
+nature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion.
+Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without a
+disturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what you
+will: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like a
+blind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and think
+in one way. Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for some
+thrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all its
+attributes but some fundamental nobility, Rejane takes the big, foolish,
+dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme merit
+of acting?
+
+
+
+
+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, striped 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 beginning 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
+  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 merely by her personal charm that she thrills you,
+though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable.
+
+It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly,
+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 conventional
+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, impersonal,
+dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it.
+
+Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an inflection 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
+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 expressionlessness 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 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 of most
+service to her. 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 sensations, already at work
+somewhat abnormally in an anaemic 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 innocence. 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 endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant expression
+for that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all that part
+of life which the conventions were intended 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 towards
+it. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vanne"; 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
+Breda, 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 _metier_, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Goldsmith. 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 represents 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 movement; 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 permanent charm of a very natural nature, which
+has become deliciously sophisticated. 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
+not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment 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 limitations
+of the stage.
+
+Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." 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 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 was 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 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 chromolithographic
+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. In 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 may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating
+remains.
+
+Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
+"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
+spectacle. It is a play made up principally 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; 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 extravagant 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 conceived 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 Englishwoman 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
+consequences 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 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'a intention, and
+played brilliantly enough to distract 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 construction 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 might
+be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse
+simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial 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 loathing 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 conscious art,
+an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. 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 movements 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 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 positive. 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 so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio
+has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo 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 painfulness. 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 beautiful
+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 inexcusable 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 a failure of a
+far higher order than such successes 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 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 sentiment 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 unnatural 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 sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
+the simple, 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 greatness, 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 reproachfulness, 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 Mlle. 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 intercourse
+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 "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.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La Princesse
+Georges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts." 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 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 unimaginative
+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
+disguises, 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 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 movements, 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 stagecraft,
+without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, much
+less of 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 conception, 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 admiration 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.
+
+
+
+
+ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY
+
+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 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
+exquisite 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, has
+been acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to the
+accompaniment 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
+performance; 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 perfection. 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 palpitating voice, in which there is something like the
+throbbing of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautiful
+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 Pelleas; 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 monotonous, 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 "Everyman" deserves a
+place of its own among the stage 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 heat, 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. "Everyman" 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 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. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM
+
+
+In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
+best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
+was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, 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 meaning seems to have gone out
+of them; they are displaced, 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 that his red livery may have its full "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 to get in some more than indifferent 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 programme
+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:
+
+  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. 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS
+
+
+When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
+of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
+scarcely human oval which represents 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 expression 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
+convulsively, 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 instincts.
+With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geisha
+and the Knight," the effect is overwhelming; 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 instruments, and beating on untuned drums. Neither they nor
+their clothes have beauty, to the limited 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
+misunderstanding.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL
+
+
+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 ahead of all our competitors. I have no great
+admiration for most of our comic gentlemen 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 expressive 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
+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.
+
+The French "revue," as one sees it at the Folies-Bergere, 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND
+
+
+An excellent Parisian company from the Varietes 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 Mlle. Lavalliere, 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 pantomine, 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.
+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 Review_, 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, somewhat 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 presenting 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 take the luck which comes his way. The few,
+quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness and
+probability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains;
+the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours,
+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 naughtiness is so naive, 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 company worked with the effortless
+unanimity of a perfect piece of machinery.
+
+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 company. 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 checkmate, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Leonore, 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 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 midnight. 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. "Caesar'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
+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'oeuvre ... 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. Occasionally 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 successful. 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 helpless to aid her,
+is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
+brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as
+uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has
+absolutely no 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 circumstances, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 committee 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, and therefore may be contrasted without
+the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was
+interpreted on the stage.
+
+Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and 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 circumstances? he says to himself: what would it be
+effective on 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 keyhole. 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, and 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
+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. 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 persistently, 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.
+
+
+
+
+TOLSTOI AND 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 part. In the drama we can only properly realise
+the soul's action through some corresponding 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 impressiveness partly
+to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
+chapter xxviiii., 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, 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 disappearance 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 interpretation of life, not a theorising about
+life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
+more consequence) 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 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 discovered.
+
+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 consummate 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 produced at the
+Odeon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
+dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
+Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
+Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was
+called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M.
+Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on
+est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
+pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. 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 himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the
+door of the jury-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
+preceding. 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 unparalleled 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
+a 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 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 "Resurrection," something which is
+not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a
+dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated.
+Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
+Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been
+left well alone?
+
+
+
+
+SOME 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" 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. The author, it
+is true, is an actor, but 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 knowledge 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 daylight. 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, 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, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding
+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; 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 opposition 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 convinces 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
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"
+
+
+On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
+Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in
+his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not
+things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to
+believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for
+instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the
+footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the
+performance of the Stage Society. 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 seabirds 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 witchcraft 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.
+
+
+
+
+III. "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 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 I am ready to admit that it is justified if I find
+that the dramatic movement 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 suggestion 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+IV. "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 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
+interesting 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. Tanqueray."
+
+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 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 like 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.
+
+
+
+
+"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 helplessness. 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
+significance, 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 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 offrent
+pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalite. Je
+crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragedie ou la
+fatalite regne reellement. 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 sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the
+preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poetes tragiques osent tres
+rarement permettre au sage de paraitre un moment sur la scene. Ils
+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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.
+
+
+The letter of protest which appeared in the _Times_ of June 30, 1903,
+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
+_Athenaeum_, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and
+makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The _Morning
+Post_ is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunate
+censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting 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 "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 discriminating 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 dissevered, 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 license. 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 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
+censorship. 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?
+
+
+
+
+A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's
+Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for
+the stage have done without thinking about art at all.
+
+She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead
+of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead
+of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a
+comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of
+good manners. 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 hushed before they become disturbing. 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.
+
+Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
+to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the 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. 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 indefinitely 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?
+
+The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder
+and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to
+understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "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
+admirably 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, and resented
+them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect 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 audience, 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 the 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE TEST OF THE ACTOR
+
+
+The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the
+capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really
+carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such
+a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The
+Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of
+letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a
+complimentary 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." Mr. Jones
+himself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like to
+give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he
+means by this peroration, which once closed 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 of 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?" Does Mr. Jones,
+I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of
+silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates,
+in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not
+to "rank as Literature"? 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 bewildering 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 exactitude. 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. "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. 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 it can be
+grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material
+is wasted; only 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
+"Iolanthe," 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.
+
+And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which
+insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, 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 was 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 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 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 representation
+of that part: a picture, not a man.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 "property."
+
+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 what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of
+the 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 hedgerow 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.
+
+What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened
+background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the
+stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an
+imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting
+from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may
+call it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns,
+teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is
+carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the
+imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and
+painted gables.
+
+I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the
+English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns
+of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a
+new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would
+have given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on real
+Thames water.
+
+Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as
+material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation
+of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same
+spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play
+is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A
+poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage
+in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem,
+will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its
+essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical
+plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the
+secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He
+will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the
+manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of
+nature.
+
+
+
+
+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. Whenever 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 impression 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.
+
+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 momentary 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 knowing 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. 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 difference 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
+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?"
+
+
+
+
+THE SPEAKING OF VERSE
+
+
+Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
+verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it
+has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in
+vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far
+they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses
+were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to
+dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a
+kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not
+apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage
+traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular
+actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is
+not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in
+the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
+contorted species of prose.
+
+An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
+assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent
+an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
+Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
+has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
+between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
+Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
+experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
+translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
+definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech
+of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
+important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
+clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
+Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
+any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest
+essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that
+if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
+Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting
+all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his
+stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
+passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
+furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
+audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is
+precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to
+hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if
+he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to
+do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here,
+in the rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, if
+he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the
+actor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of
+the "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had
+not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra.
+When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of
+even the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that
+poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?
+
+The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of
+over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the
+sound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard
+a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, on
+the art of speaking on the stage.
+
+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 Francais, qu'on entend meme
+lorsqu'ils par lent 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 and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a
+brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt 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 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,
+profoundly 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 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 something of
+what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
+Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach
+him to unlearn something 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.
+
+
+
+
+GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH
+
+
+Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
+We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
+individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic
+temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated
+like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a
+thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now
+living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius
+comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants
+us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have
+actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of
+useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of
+giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an
+interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of
+poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came
+to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern?
+
+The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor,
+is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
+conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
+bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
+conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
+subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
+the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual
+talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle
+insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen
+bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the
+'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would
+slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he
+rearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his own
+orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the
+horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly
+accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered
+the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he
+would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of
+an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The
+musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics
+and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet
+this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre
+whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is
+presented with any sort of public appeal.
+
+In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
+the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
+actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
+play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small,
+unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any
+sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and
+conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal
+vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves
+to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with
+show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a
+lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of
+imaginative work on the stage?
+
+It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management,
+of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet,"
+and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the
+whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most
+needed. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have
+lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And
+first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they
+give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. I
+have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should
+give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a
+solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally
+different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite,
+"Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever
+qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm
+from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music
+was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice
+to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented
+for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for
+Shakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's.
+
+And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare
+there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance
+of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well
+as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be
+acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the
+rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or
+that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is
+because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so
+beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an
+ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.
+The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the
+_ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic
+child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us
+outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an
+exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But
+Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I
+would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there
+are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans
+yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet
+and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he
+interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the
+universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen
+in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane
+Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was
+nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous
+representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of
+a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not
+less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic,
+tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's
+fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him
+living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental
+sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.
+And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before
+one's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the
+acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in
+England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
+said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
+the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
+chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental,
+everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that
+intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never
+uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as
+lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here
+are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.
+There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as
+these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this
+power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument,
+that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give
+us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful
+and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it
+sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but
+no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts,
+which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his
+loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives
+the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are accustomed to hear
+spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr.
+Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive
+reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable
+before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his
+thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and
+just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an
+understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing
+by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those
+words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely
+mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting in
+English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.
+
+What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get
+when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get
+from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking
+merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in
+the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look,
+for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate
+travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli.
+He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is
+motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous
+gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's
+troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with
+rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the
+immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and a
+happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of
+it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been
+allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.
+
+So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary
+principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted;
+only in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of
+the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal.
+Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken
+of her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her
+Ophelia. It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and
+merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of
+some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered
+among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple
+poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into
+it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere
+decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less
+woman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you,
+the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence.
+She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible
+thing.
+
+In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
+broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman
+let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art
+is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses
+into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern
+sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of
+romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which
+everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into
+a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and
+restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every
+requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.
+
+Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
+make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
+written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
+was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
+lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
+theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
+what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
+peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
+peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
+shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
+whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
+love, who makes war angelically.
+
+Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
+to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
+Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
+in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
+Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
+which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
+one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
+fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
+practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
+parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
+nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
+was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
+which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.
+
+An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preference
+to a single kind of _role_ is not properly an artist at all. It is the
+curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in
+any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to
+repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he
+is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist to
+be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When I
+have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I am
+content to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showed
+me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a part
+that she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of a
+rarer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it.
+Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of
+Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names
+of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them
+all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly
+varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural
+genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly
+trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at
+all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits and
+starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness of
+excess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seems
+to us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first really
+shows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seem
+colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. But
+Giorgione will always be the greater.
+
+I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words
+of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about
+the "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in
+pained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had
+not, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless"
+person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily
+be made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs.
+Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a
+greater operatic singer than Mme. Calve. What Miss Marlowe has is a
+great innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and
+a childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild
+beast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of the
+domestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to
+her perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere
+stealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable,
+unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit for
+cloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Rejane the flesh made Parisian,
+Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of
+life, the plenitude of sap in the tree.
+
+The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very
+different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost
+resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in
+his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the
+actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of
+that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and
+engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to
+which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she
+fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she
+is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and
+the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace,
+alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities
+that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the
+particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English,
+though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who
+are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage
+in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the
+same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.
+Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and
+Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.
+
+
+
+
+A THEORY OF THE STAGE
+
+
+Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as you
+will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
+let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry,
+and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
+scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
+plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
+clothes that skeleton.
+
+The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
+represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
+represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work
+on any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of
+a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its
+appeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
+Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent,
+and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham," the play which
+Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his
+right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great
+little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the
+puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three
+centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
+inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
+there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse
+can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing
+but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the
+ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama
+begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell
+its secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can
+let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has
+been mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, and
+to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside
+of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to
+verse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has
+seemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his
+psychology far with it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a
+limiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than the
+drama of the poets. Only one modern writer has brought something which
+is almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The
+Powers of Darkness." The play is horrible and uncouth, but it is
+illuminated by a great inner light. There is not a beautiful word in it,
+but it is filled with beauty. And that is because Tolstoi has the vision
+which may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet. It is often
+said that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of the
+future must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whom
+the gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will be
+no more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but not
+essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which
+shall take in wider regions of the mind.
+
+Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of
+Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not
+more essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama.
+Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their best
+opportunities. Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to
+the drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and
+disabilities to the writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt
+wealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech
+builds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, without
+beginning or ending? It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice
+his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet" has been quoted against him.
+But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere
+lingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought which
+makes or waits on action. If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem to
+delay action, it does but deepen it. The poetry is the life blood, or
+runs through it. Only bad actors and managers think that by stripping
+the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body. The
+outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible melodrama, still
+irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it
+comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as a
+growth out of melodrama.
+
+The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist,
+however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his
+neglect of one or another of these two primary and essential
+requirements. There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement
+in Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann,
+as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets,
+like Hauptmann. I do not know them well enough to bring them into my
+argument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the
+endeavour is in the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find
+even so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there?
+Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles.
+At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is a
+marvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all the
+playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase,
+"vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one of the cliches of the
+minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him
+to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could
+no longer direct.
+
+Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for
+marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of
+limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.
+"Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man
+whose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His later
+speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the
+conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought
+back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in
+exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future
+will have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright
+of our time. He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness,
+which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.
+
+In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all
+is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital
+passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in
+"Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the
+glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.
+Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the
+speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.
+
+We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim to
+be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art. Mr.
+Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul.
+He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not
+only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers
+in their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great
+talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted
+the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our
+only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his
+astonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a
+spirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the
+stage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty.
+Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of
+neglected altars. But those who amuse the world, no matter by what
+means, have their place in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a
+clock striking the hour.
+
+With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing but
+prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a
+more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not
+so long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became
+to Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond
+adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Camelias." The other plays
+are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of "Tue-la!" was
+the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which special
+pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is the dramatic
+motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with the
+coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La Femme de
+Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, is
+to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts of
+interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the
+attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in
+England, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights,
+apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr.
+Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to
+be associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and
+Mr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many
+more names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious
+playwright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our
+novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger
+generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us
+one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's,
+besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and
+taken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt
+to write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary
+Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers,
+each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose.
+Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps
+the limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for
+us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on
+the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?
+
+The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist,
+affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of
+the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious
+plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his
+best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily
+occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel
+expense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision
+beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need
+a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers.
+They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the
+entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in
+that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in
+prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a
+certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more
+civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are
+aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in
+Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who
+fumble at their lips for sea-magic.
+
+And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is
+as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like
+radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as
+this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his
+art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony
+has ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the
+past were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated
+in our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of
+what has come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and
+adequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render them
+more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, as
+prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part
+of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who,
+in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an
+adequate answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of
+something deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answer
+which would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.
+
+
+
+
+THE SICILIAN ACTORS
+
+I
+
+
+I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from
+Paris, where, I read, "la passion parait decidement," to a dramatic
+critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We
+are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an
+acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are
+accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian,
+some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the
+audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so
+marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their
+gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment
+to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new
+intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.
+
+It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very
+crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living
+thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the
+volcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage,
+rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at
+all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius,
+the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.
+
+Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes;
+her art is more nearly the art of Rejane. While both of these are great
+artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal
+energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress,
+like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal,
+snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions
+of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can
+be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her
+delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the
+soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out,
+turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her
+brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover.
+Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among
+miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing
+out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion
+with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the
+Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the
+difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul.
+And if one thinks of Rejane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less,
+though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of
+Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic
+gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of
+her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a
+great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi
+Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
+no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
+hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
+with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
+sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.
+
+Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
+moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
+Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
+I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
+against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
+as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
+the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
+Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
+utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
+downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with
+both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
+while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
+nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
+time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
+as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
+scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
+it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
+of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
+the whole being passed into its possession.
+
+And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler
+catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La
+fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant
+no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out
+of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a
+supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he
+has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should
+have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden
+fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark
+veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards
+her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one
+who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the
+woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an
+anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in
+the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those
+clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death,
+and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its
+last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling
+the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"
+and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and
+obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered
+with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has
+been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words,
+especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a
+well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or
+with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. The
+acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to
+do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.
+
+The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
+which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
+hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
+of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
+which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
+reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with
+the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the
+language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;
+the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;
+the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and
+this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly
+contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we
+read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The
+beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
+understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright
+and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out
+the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of
+view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its
+aim.
+
+And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
+playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in
+this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than
+in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better
+writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great
+drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors
+like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to
+bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that
+he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge
+said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--not
+thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"
+
+That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
+have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of
+a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
+"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed
+no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that
+is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it
+from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio.
+What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or
+passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?
+
+And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their
+finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of
+which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is
+an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against
+all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it,
+admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to
+suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these
+sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if
+naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and
+unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before
+them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is
+ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in
+symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this
+spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces,
+by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the
+source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature,
+absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see
+struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this
+woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the
+poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without
+passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once
+justified itself by being mere nature.
+
+And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the
+occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and
+the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What
+stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our
+big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as
+the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But
+the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Rejane has
+done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater
+artist. But not even Rejane has given us the whole animal, in its
+self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and
+command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive
+motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and
+the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia
+in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it
+would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing
+meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest
+between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch
+helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and
+swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me
+in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with
+the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.
+
+Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic
+whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a
+hesitating consciousness that "la passion parait decidement avoir
+partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a
+magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him
+gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism
+through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible,
+authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets.
+And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.
+
+
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+
+
+
+ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC
+
+
+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 compromise.
+
+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 knowledge 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 generalisations, 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
+speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born
+in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.
+
+
+
+
+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 perfect. Artists who deal in
+materials less fragile than human 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 Bechstein 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+PACHMANN AND THE PIANO
+
+I
+
+
+It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
+it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
+only 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 its own voice.
+
+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 terms of your instrument, and the piano
+responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other
+pianists, has 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.
+
+Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
+than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
+sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. 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 interpreted 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.
+
+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, hammering.
+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 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.
+
+In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
+the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
+diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
+rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
+with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
+has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
+language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
+chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
+down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
+gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
+lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
+Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
+but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
+finds a kind of humour.
+
+In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
+executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or
+failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which,
+to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes
+tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through
+some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical
+disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to
+venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a
+simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less
+difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.
+With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their
+vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery
+which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached
+from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our
+ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach
+it to express human emotions, not its own.
+
+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, temperament, 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 imploring 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 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 innermost life of music. I do not think he has
+ever put an 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 difficulties 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.
+Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his
+hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult
+business. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All that
+violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His art
+begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo
+without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a
+run as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish,
+a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run
+you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life.
+With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that
+is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like
+Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz:
+he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the
+root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say in
+itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in which
+everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of
+such moments that Pachmann is the poet.
+
+And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
+Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
+the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
+alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of
+shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and
+clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most
+absolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto is
+the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to
+play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise
+softly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there
+was the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowing
+light and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not less
+appropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, the
+romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, a
+little luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopin
+followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopin
+had returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverish
+music, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to the
+centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a winged
+energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is in
+the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. The
+Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and not
+Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op.
+50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its
+secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone,
+gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the
+Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in
+Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the
+playing of the Etudes.
+
+Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
+like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
+lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
+coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
+creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
+which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet
+controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music
+before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain
+which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a
+precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and
+art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often
+wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the
+conscious act of thought while listening for the music.
+
+"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
+"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
+Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
+strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery
+ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a
+thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret
+of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a
+line like:
+
+  Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,
+
+can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced
+nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of
+suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art
+of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
+methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a
+statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
+themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
+everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
+Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
+Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some
+small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like
+Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and
+nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+  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?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and
+it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument,
+which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture
+him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
+dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
+swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
+which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
+listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
+from us visibly into that unholy company.
+
+Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
+interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
+than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
+a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
+requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
+cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
+played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
+On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
+time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
+and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
+the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
+players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with
+the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty
+web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out of
+moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
+Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
+the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all
+this is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
+wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about the
+faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and as
+music turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What he
+seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound:
+the music, in fact.
+
+It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
+that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret
+between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no
+one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it,
+becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a
+voice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of human
+intelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its own
+region, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we can
+apprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mocking
+the human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. When
+Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of
+saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky
+plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and
+quickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann's
+miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like an
+atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of a
+beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that are
+awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
+Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is
+it technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
+dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his
+own magic?
+
+He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience than
+others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch which
+is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tell
+you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and fly
+and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
+listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little he
+had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above
+all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he
+plays.
+
+When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
+pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon
+them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand
+they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's
+end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the
+straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey,
+having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his
+learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini
+variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as
+soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the
+notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if
+they were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry for
+them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the
+Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the
+magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor
+Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has
+set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'
+moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape
+in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you
+exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of
+form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form
+that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the
+outline.
+
+Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one
+most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
+think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
+greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
+intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done
+perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out
+of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those
+Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more
+wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed,
+as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of
+unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent,
+heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the
+trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its
+decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the
+whole tossing and eager sea of sound.
+
+Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
+peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in
+their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any
+essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what
+is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The
+sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very
+paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike
+deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is
+the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as
+sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast
+luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth,
+bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades
+not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric
+into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect
+lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.
+
+Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once
+thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the
+taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have
+whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a
+secret.
+
+
+
+
+PADEREWSKI
+
+
+I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
+Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
+noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to
+a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
+hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and
+played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own
+home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had
+been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the
+playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to
+be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself,
+in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and
+then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early
+morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled
+streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and
+dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of
+popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had
+been, for a few people, this divine escape.
+
+No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
+Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
+Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
+poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
+growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised,
+more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
+virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
+not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
+but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
+surprised awakening.
+
+The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the
+most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
+People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The
+word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.
+But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which
+physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to
+which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get
+from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski
+when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do
+the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball
+delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument,
+seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a
+scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection,
+marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since
+Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and
+Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with
+this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an
+inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as
+if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his
+thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as
+a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the
+piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother
+met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it
+to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he
+gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the
+instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under
+his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and
+under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The
+music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught
+together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are
+never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to
+passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others
+give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through
+clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully
+over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be
+gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are
+secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.
+
+In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
+was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
+brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for
+modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its
+perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the
+little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a
+bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;
+nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a
+faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or
+that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was
+there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known
+that it existed.
+
+Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
+original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if
+he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling
+is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the
+first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large
+contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was
+evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and
+die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were
+delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed
+to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.
+
+When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which
+the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski
+were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for
+the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it,
+it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great
+pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with
+Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a
+creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura
+disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
+in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
+tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
+luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
+by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
+astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
+hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
+spectacularly magnificent?
+
+Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
+anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
+not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
+smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
+dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
+his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
+only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
+his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
+transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
+instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
+in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
+mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the
+piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown
+person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there
+are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the
+test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it
+was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the
+Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have
+played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those
+limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and
+Paderewski has attained both limits.
+
+After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
+of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
+What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
+same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
+is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
+America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael
+of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
+mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
+notes?
+
+Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
+"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
+skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to
+compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an
+art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
+personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
+perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
+the creator of beautiful sounds?
+
+
+
+
+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
+harpsichord 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 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 fragment 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.
+
+I contrast him with 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 something 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 musician. 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 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
+suggestions 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 impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves
+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 command. 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 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.
+
+An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a
+singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
+wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
+time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter
+between poetry and the world.
+
+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 surrounded 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 herself
+to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious 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 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 gives 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 Mallarme 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 holding 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 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 uninterrupted
+communion with herself.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA
+
+
+Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; 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
+appreciation 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 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 sunlight 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 straightforward 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 expression; but the something more, the vast heave
+and throb of the music, was not there. It was "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 Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner
+himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture
+to the "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 rendering of that we must go to
+Richter.
+
+Otherwise, in that third concert it would he 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 instruments, 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 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 "Leonore,"
+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 something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of
+passion.
+
+
+
+
+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-Theatre; and I stayed,
+on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberfloete." 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
+Meistersinger" 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 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 pinewoods 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 and his senses, in 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 Zauberfloete," is music
+without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the
+firm outlines of Duerer 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 Botticelli's "Spring"; 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.
+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 Zauberfloete" is
+really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which 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.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
+
+I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH
+
+
+Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the
+music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph
+not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember
+that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that
+only Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home,
+receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many
+doors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must
+always be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at its
+mercy, even after he has conquered its attention. The crowd never really
+loves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity;
+and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number of
+intelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon the
+resisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it is
+supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt. Bayreuth exists because
+Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcing
+his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than any
+other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he wanted, not always
+when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side,
+the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had the
+necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and at
+last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his own
+triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied.
+He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there were his
+works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called.
+
+And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth
+itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner wished it to be
+seen and heard. The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre
+at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly
+the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible
+orchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are
+even the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual and
+irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As at
+Bayreuth, 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 thus
+now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed,
+and not merely guessed at.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL
+
+
+The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me the
+most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I
+have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
+that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
+ideas, of Wagner. The music itself 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; 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 religious 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. Watts-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 something of the same appeal as the 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 the first act 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 become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche
+says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic
+process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.
+
+"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music,
+soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and
+be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than
+anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the
+sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the
+music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the
+visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one,
+the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its
+convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm
+is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture,
+and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. 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. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
+settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
+stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
+time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
+every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
+reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
+for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
+action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
+aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
+is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
+in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
+not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
+make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
+restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
+realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
+these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
+frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
+least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
+us that it can be.
+
+Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a
+new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's
+representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this
+world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand
+tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
+proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the
+Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of
+which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitary
+figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is
+the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which
+it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a
+reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!
+
+The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course
+the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an
+enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a
+change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on
+natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every
+wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is
+elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be
+formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out.
+And "Parsifal," which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it,
+in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort of
+supreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautiful
+drama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of
+leaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old
+hermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universal
+tenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, in
+some vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside
+the question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technically
+religious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and how
+far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's mind was the mind to which all
+legend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence;
+but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could never
+have been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in
+"Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, or
+did not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries. His music, his
+acting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and the
+acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of the
+solemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are in
+themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE ART OF WAGNER
+
+
+In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
+should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
+continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
+giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
+nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
+composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
+moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he
+does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a
+world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama
+live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their
+passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural
+sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less
+well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the
+realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers,
+at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not
+succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the
+Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery
+splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued,
+composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism,
+however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended
+with all the clairvoyance of emotion.
+
+Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all
+its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
+onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
+human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A
+few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
+awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
+ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were
+to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an
+abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know
+is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it
+must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before
+which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness
+afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less
+conscious of its passing hour.
+
+And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
+drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
+narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
+Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
+Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
+the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as
+powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening
+to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for
+this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of
+memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action
+of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
+preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
+their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
+effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
+materialising both.
+
+Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by
+his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
+circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as
+a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
+flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
+poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood
+and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the
+nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole
+expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
+person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.
+
+It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
+distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
+too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
+and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
+personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations
+of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried,
+Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi
+humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without
+disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman
+passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of
+the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite
+devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song,
+for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual
+speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which
+realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a
+spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.
+
+And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
+dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
+almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
+painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
+thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
+without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
+note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
+without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
+"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
+obey it. When Bruennhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an
+immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a
+great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
+silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
+with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of
+the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
+Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives
+him to drink; Siegfried, when Bruennhilde awakens to the world and to
+him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and
+returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as
+if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of
+the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the
+music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts
+and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow
+rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards
+from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening
+notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an
+infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.
+
+And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
+things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
+other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think
+of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to
+a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous,
+or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women.
+Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering
+his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
+remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in
+Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+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? Literature, 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 interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, 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 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 it 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
+they have seen Desclee, 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, l'oeuvre sort plus gelle
+  D'une forme au travail
+  Rebelle,
+  Vers, marbre, onyx, email.
+
+No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.
+
+  Tout passe. L'art robuste
+  Seul a l'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 perpetuate 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 whom posterity means anything very definite, and
+to whom 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.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME WRITER
+
+
+Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.
+
+An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.
+
+Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.
+
+The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.
+
+Cities, 1903.
+
+Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.
+
+A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.
+
+Spiritual Adventures, 1905.
+
+The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.
+
+Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.
+
+William Blake, 1907.
+
+Cities of Italy, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons
+
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