the titles of _Scientific Papers (Oceanographical)_ and _Comptes Rendus
of Observation and Reasoning_. This third volume, with an English
modification of the title of the latter work, continues the plan of
that book. The papers are very varied in character, including chemical
studies, accounts of physical determinations, addresses on geography
and oceanography, more technical geographical writings, and short
articles on topics of general interest, reprinted from _Nature_, the
_Times_, and other periodicals. Many of the latter recall events of our
generation important, but already half forgotten, such as the stranding
of the _Sultan_ and the wreck of _Santos Dumont 6_. An excellent
feature of the author's _Comptes Rendus_ was the detailed summary,
with page references, provided for every article, and the same plan
is followed in this work. The author's work on oceanography is too
well known to need commendation--he was chemist and physicist to the
_Challenger_ expedition. His "Retrospect," the second article in the
book, gives a fascinating summary of the work done on that expedition,
and the other papers on oceanographical subjects are of great general
interest, and incidentally recall the great services of the Prince of
Monaco to that science. His general outlook, which lends such freshness
to all his writings, cannot be better expressed than in his own words
in a former book: "It was conveyed to me through an old friend and
former colleague that this contribution ... had done much to retard the
standardisation of research. I took it as a compliment. To standardise
research is to limit its freedom and to impede discovery. Originality
and independence are the characteristics of genuine research, and it
is stultified by the acceptance of standards and by the recognition of
authority."
It throws much light on the recent increase in the expenses of
publishing that, whereas the _Comptes Rendus_ was published in 1917 at
7_s._ 6_d._, the present volume of similar size and form is published
at 21_s._
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
The _Studio_ special number, "Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs, by
British and French Artists," with Commentary by M. C. Salaman, is the
first collection, with any claim to comprehensiveness, of the artistic
work of the present renaissance of the woodcut. The woodcut has a
twofold employment: it may be used for pictorial broadsides or for book
illustration. It concerns us here as a means--I wonder if I ought not
to write the means?--of book illustration. Notwithstanding the great
technical advances made in line and half-tone photo-process engraving,
there is a tendency to return to the use of the woodcut for certain
kinds of catalogue illustrations, and, to a still greater extent, for
book illustration and decoration.
The half-tone process involves the use of so-called "art" paper,
_i.e._, a wood pulp or grass pulp paper as a centre, coated over with
kaolin or china clay, with a high finish, the glazed polish of which
reflects the light very unpleasantly. This objectionable paper, apart
from the incongruity of wash drawings or photographs with typography,
relegates this method of book illustration to utilitarian ends. The
line process is far preferable for book illustration, but in itself
it has no pleasant quality, usually very much the reverse, and pen
drawings are no more directly suitable for book illustration than pen
lettering is for use with type. The woodcut modifies the character
of the drawing with a discipline which produces a character more
in sympathy with that which type has acquired at the hands of the
punch-cutter and type-founder in its passage from writing; and the
same discipline modifies the artist's vision as well as the drawing.
Material, too, has its own character, and when the user is not too
clever this character becomes active in the work, not merely passive.
The wood block itself can contribute a valuable quality, and either the
knife or the graver is a responsive tool. The corresponding elements
in line process work are the zinc plate and etching acid, and they do
contribute something of their quality to the work; but it is not an
attractive quality.
The rediscovered qualities of the wood block have attracted many
artists to its use. They are producing work of great variety of
interest, but it is rather in the pictorial direction than as book
illustration. The work of Valloton elsewhere, and of Jane Bouquet and
Brangwyn, of Sydney Lee and Verpilleux in this _Studio_ special number
are examples of this. The work of Lucien Pissaro, of Charles Shannon,
and Charles Ricketts shows the right use of the woodcut as decorative
illustration, but their work belongs to the early days of this revival.
Dürer, Holbein, and the Polyphilus printed by Aldus are the great
exemplars for a pre-Bewick Brotherhood of the decorative woodcut. Where
work of a freer quality is desirable, Miss Jackson's on page 13 shows
the texture that goes with type satisfactorily. Miss Gribble has given
the right degree of formal treatment to the pastoral motives she has
chosen for tail-pieces, and makes them decorative without letting them
lose their interest and so become vapid conventions. Both Miss Jackson
and Miss Gribble are pupils of Mr. Noel Rooke, who has done so much for
the right use of the woodcut for decorative illustration.
The lithographs suffer much more than the woodcuts by reproduction. To
begin with, they are very much reduced in size, and they are printed
by a letterpress method (_i.e._, from a relief surface) instead of
from the plain surface for which they were drawn. The loss which they
suffer by these changes can only be appreciated by those who know the
originals. Both Mr. and Mrs. Hartrick's fine examples suffer through
the loss of the rich lithographic black.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
G. K. CHESTERTON
_Verse_
GREYBEARDS AT PLAY. Brimley Johnson. 1900.
THE WILD KNIGHT. Grant Richards. 1900. Enlarged Edition. Dent. 1914.
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE. Methuen. 1911.
POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1915.
WINE, WATER, AND SONG. Methuen. 1915.
[A reprint of the songs from _The Flying Inn_.]
_Prose_
THE DEFENDANT. Brimley Johnson. 1901. Cheap Edition in Dent's
_Wayfarer's Library_, 1914.
TWELVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1902.
G. F. WATTS. Duckworth. 1902.
ROBERT BROWNING. Macmillan. (English Men of Letters Series.) 1903.
THE PATRIOTIC IDEA. Brimley Johnson. 1904.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. John Lane. 1904.
THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES. Harper. 1905. Cheaper Edition. Hodder &
Stoughton. 1912.
HERETICS. John Lane. 1905.
CHARLES DICKENS. Methuen. 1906. Popular Edition. 1913.
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. Arrowsmith. 1908.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Methuen. 1908.
ORTHODOXY. John Lane. 1908.
TREMENDOUS TRIFLES. Methuen. 1909.
ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS. Methuen. 1910.
FIVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1910. (Reprinted from _Twelve Types_.
1905.)
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Cassell. 1910.
WILLIAM BLAKE. Duckworth. 1910.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. John Lane. 1910.
THE BALL AND THE CROSS. Wells Gardner, Darton. 1910.
APPRECIATIONS OF DICKENS. Dent. 1911. (Prefaces from Everyman Series of
Dickens reprinted.)
THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1911.
SIMPLICITY AND TOLSTOY. A. L. Humphreys. 1912.
A MISCELLANY OF MEN. Methuen. 1912.
MANALIVE. Nelson. 1912.
MAGIC: A PLAY. Martin Secker. 1913.
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE. Williams & Norgate. 1913. (Home
University Library Series.)
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1914.
THE FLYING INN. Methuen. 1914.
THE BARBARISM OF BERLIN. Cassell. 1914.
LETTERS TO AN OLD GARIBALDIAN. Methuen. 1914.
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND. Palmer. 1915.
A SHILLING FOR MY THOUGHTS. Methuen. 1916.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Chatto & Windus. 1917.
IRISH IMPRESSIONS. Collins. 1919.
[He has also written prefaces to the following:--Carlyle's _Past and
Present_; Extracts from Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; _The Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table_; _Sartor Resartus_; _The Pilgrim's Progress_;
_Creatures that Once Were Men_, by Maxim Gorky; _Dickens's Works_;
_Essays_, by Matthew Arnold; _Literary London_; _The Book of Job_;
_From Workhouse to Westminster_; _Ruskin's Poems_; _The Cottage Homes
of England_; _A Vision of Life_; _Meadows of Play_; _Selections from
Thackeray_; _Eyes of Youth_ (an anthology); _Extracts from Samuel
Johnson_; _The Book of Snobs_; _Famous Paintings Reproduced in Colour_;
_The English Agricultural Labourer_; _Æsop's Fables_; _Dickens's
Christmas Carol_; _Bohemia's Claim for Freedom_.
He has also illustrated the following books:--_Nonsense Rhymes_; _The
Great Enquiry_; _Emmanuel Burden_; _Biography for Beginners_; _The
Green Overcoat_.]
JOHN FREEMAN
_Verse_
TWENTY POEMS. Gay & Hancock. 1909.
[Out of print.]
FIFTY POEMS. Herbert & Daniel. 1911. New Edition, Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
STONE TREES AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
PRESAGE OF VICTORY AND OTHER POEMS OF THE TIME. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD. Morland Press. 1918.
[No. 1 of _Green Pastures_ Series. Cover and frontispiece by James
Guthrie.]
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1919.
[Includes the twelve poems published in the last-named.]
_Prose_
THE MODERNS. Robert Scott. 1916.
[Critical Studies of Robert Bridges, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, etc.]
DRAMA
CHILDREN'S PLAYS
The hold of the Pantomime on the affections of the public is possibly
as strong as ever it was, but the character of those entertainments
has been slowly changing and with it the character of the audience.
Professedly I suppose the Pantomimes are for children, but except that
almost any entertainment will amuse children, owing to their extreme
curiosity, there is little in the modern Pantomime that seems to have
been devised for them. In fact, the Christmas Pantomime has of late
years come to have a particularly sophisticated and adult savour, which
is to be noticed in the treatment of the old fairy-tales--one or other
of which, in name at least, still forms the basis of every Christmas
Pantomime, although in a shape that would scarcely be recognised by the
compilers of _Grimm's Fairy Tales_.
This is particularly noticeable in the metamorphosis of the Witch who,
fatigued by the possession of mysteriously terrible powers, dwindles
into the obscene-faced mother-in-law. The sere old woman who turned
the seven white-horsed princesses into low stones, over which the moss
crept slowly, has become a gin-inoculated Widow Twankey, who dances
like a man and gloats over the highly-successful love-affairs of her
son as leading to more and better drink.
Pantomimes have always been less concerned with the imaginative, the
more-than-human, than with the extraordinarily actual. Some will
remember the artillery bombardment which was introduced one Christmas
during the war into a Pantomime at Drury Lane, which was, if I remember
rightly, superficially the story of _The Sleeping Beauty_. It was
good fun that bombardment, much better fun than are the majority of
these topical excrescences, but one felt that it had been introduced
because the principal comedian had got bored with the comparative sober
quietness of that land of imagination in which the inhabitants of a
fairy-tale progress as if seen in a glass darkly. He had, therefore,
deliberately pulled the story out of its semi-supernatural country
into the limelight, and was rewarded by instant mirth and vociferous
applause from nine-tenths of the audience. Only a few children
hesitated, feeling the pangs of a violent up-rooting, a being torn out
of a land, through which they had been slowly but with intense delight
travelling, into a mass of gesticulating faces ranged in circles
watching the elaborate and apparently comic contortions of two small
grotesque figures on what was obviously the stage.
I have no doubt at all that the instincts and judgment of children in
these matters is far superior to that of the majority of their elders.
The steady vulgarisation in the theatre of fairy-tales originally
the inventions of adult minds of phantasy and sensibility superior
to the general is a record of the debasing influence of the mass of
the inhabitants of our large cities, who are dissatisfied with less
than an instant reaction to the efforts of those whom they pay to
amuse them. They are too restless to submit to sit quietly and by slow
degrees receive the heritage of beauty accumulated by the ambages of
minds whose devious and amazed wanderings are like the apparently
directionless perambulation of bees who are, without pause, gathering
honey.
_Sinbad the Sailor_, _Aladdin_, _Ali Baba_--whatever they be, the
essence of these Pantomimes is something grosser than any fairy-tale,
and, whether borrowed from the brothers Grimm, or Andersen, or
any other source, their fragile and mysterious beauty is roughly
obliterated to give place to an obvious rough-and-tumble humour and
crude topicality of the kind that not one in a million could miss.
Of course the somewhat "hearty" atmosphere of Christmas-time is not
conducive to fineness of vision. The subtler outlines in which resides
the beauty of a fairy-tale, a girl, or a mountain are not to be grasped
by eyes slightly dazzled with the inner glow of good feeding--that glow
which has more heat than light. It is a time when a joke has to be
obvious to be seen, and the propensity to enormous girth perceptible in
the most popular characters of Pantomime may have a similar origin; but
I speak from a painful experience when I declare that for a Christmas
Pantomime nothing can be too crude, too stale, too trivial to be funny,
and that the best condition in which to go to the Pantomime would be
that in which you could see simultaneously the largest number of Moons.
The Change in the Pantomime
The Pantomime has become a sort of Christmas Revue, and parents
in large numbers have ceased taking their children to these
entertainments, appealing as they almost exclusively do to the
"grown-up." In their place we have had of late years a large number of
children's plays, of which Sir James Barrie's _Peter Pan_ is the best
known. It is years since I saw _Peter Pan_, but I was, I remember,
greatly taken with it, and went during that season five or six times.
Part of the attraction it had for me lay in the charming personality
of Peter himself, as played by Miss Pauline Chase, whose postcard
portraits I bought in large numbers and gazed on adoringly for long
intervals in the seclusion of my own room. But the very fact that
the play gave scope to a young actress to embody a figure of such
originality and charm as Peter must be accounted as a virtue in the
author.
I know there are people who object to fairy-tales. They have lately
been greatly cheered by the public confession of Madame Montessori that
she belongs to them. Apparently the essence of their and also of her
objection to such seemingly innocent and delightful inventions of the
human brain is that the most desperate need of children is for a steady
inculcation of facts. Having schooled your child in facts--writes
in a letter to the _Observer_ the gentleman who knows the Secret of
Human Power--in the pleasantest manner possible up to the age of, say,
sixteen, then the lessons to be derived from fiction may be gently
and cautiously dealt with. The spectacle of an adult dealing "gently
and cautiously" with a fairy-tale is one of those which seem to have
been invented as a subject for a Max Beerbohm cartoon; but it is
curious that anyone should have such a narrow conception of reality
as to think that it is compassed in material facts. How one is to
present love, honour, bravery, beauty, virtue, daring, adventurousness,
and all the other qualities of the human mind except by imaginative
creation, when they are purely creations of men's minds, I cannot
see. Perhaps these deluded realists imagine that they are abstract
nouns. They would have us say: "Here, dear children, are a number of
abstract nouns; contemplate them as you would marbles, but remember
that they are not marbles or even peanuts but nouns. You cannot play
with them, you cannot eat them, and what good they are nobody knows,
but everybody is supposed to know their names, as there is no other way
of distinguishing them one from another." This same champion of Madame
Montessori's Anti-Fairy-Tale Campaign writes further in his letter to
the _Observer_ that Shakespeare's plays "were not written specially
for children, but as morality incentives distinctly for adults." This
is a pitiful notion for any intelligent adult to have, and one that no
child with a mind not distorted by unnatural virtue could be expected
to understand. It is most expressive of that horrible "seriousness"
which seizes some minds like a cramp until the sufferer drowns himself
in an ocean of blithering nonsense, refusing all the ropes which the
onlookers on _terra firma_ throw him, because their faces are convulsed
with laughter. "Morality incentives"--to cling to the shocking
expression of Madame Montessori's disciple--are of two kinds. They are
either negative or positive. The negative class is the only one that
an Anti-Fairy-Tale League could put in its syllabus. It consists of a
series of ejaculations: Do not drink! Do not swear! Do not tell lies!
etc. Drawn up in an amended form suitable for children, it might read
like this:
(1) Do not drink your brother's ginger-beer.
(2) and (3), etc. Do not imitate your parents.
It may appear excellent advice, but virtue--as many religious teachers
have suspected and modern science is proving--does not reside in
turning oneself into a van-load of inhibitions. Virtue is wholly
positive, it is an expression of the spirit. He that imagines virtue
is virtuous, and no other. It is a fairy-tale that men are trying to
live in the world, and it can only be expressed in art. There is no
virtue in a mere exhortation to be virtuous. Nobody takes any notice
of exhortations, and quite rightly; but men who have seen a vision
will try to capture it. What the creative artist does is to give men a
vision of virtue, of beauty (for beauty is virtue), and it is just this
vision which the Montessori teachers would have us put behind the backs
of children while they glue their eyes to material things.
Not only would this practice be pernicious, it would be impossible to
carry out, for, brought to its logical conclusion, the theory would
demand the abolition of the teaching of mathematics and of science, as
well as of poetry and of drama; or rather it would reduce mathematics
to the counting of beads, science to the naming of smells (a return to
"stinks" from which the schools are just escaping), poetry to this sort
of thing:
Last night in pulling off a sock
I gave my little nose a knock.
To-day in jumping to get up
I fell across my brindle pup.
That is to say, poetry would vanish, and as for drama, the only drama
we could have would be by taking a proscenium into the park and putting
it up in front of two lovers kissing on a seat; but the moment the
lovers saw us the "drama" would cease, and we could not pay them to go
on with it for our amusement, for that would be deception, that would
be make-believe.
Those of us who are not by infirmity of constitution natural victims
to every new fad that is advertised will take pleasure in anticipating
a great growth in the supply of and demand for children's plays. They
offer great scope for development, and will increasingly appeal to
authors who have no desire to write the conventional stage play--a
thing without imagination or beauty, a mere artificial contrivance to
enable actors to exhibit their charm and skill. There is no possibility
of getting literary men of the highest class to write the plays we
see succeeding in our London theatres during the greater part of
the year. They could not possibly have any interest in work of that
kind, and they could not do it well, but the children's play is a
much more elastic and adaptable dramatic form. To-day, for instance,
even verse is used in successful children's plays, and managers do
not demand for this purpose work so conventional and stereotyped as
they require ordinarily. This Christmas there were three children's
plays produced in the West End: _Peter Pan_, _Once Upon a Time_, and
_Where the Rainbow Ends_. Of these only _Once Upon a Time_ was new,
and it was rather a series of fairy-tales--connected by the device
of an elf telling the stories to a goblin who captured her--than an
original work; but it was cleverly done by the author, Miss Wildig,
and delightfully produced by Miss Edith Craig. I must confess to
having enjoyed _Once Upon a Time_ far more than most of the plays
I had seen during the preceding year, but it was a pastiche not a
homogeneous invention, and it contained an absurd and very irritating
pseudo-patriotic melodrama called _The Woman of the Black Mountain_, as
well as an extremely amusing and rather savage burlesque of certain
marriage customs which are not yet quite extinct entitled _The Bone of
Contention_. This latter would make an excellent sketch for a Revue, or
possibly Mr. Oscar Asche will introduce it into _Chu Chin Chow_.
Demand and Supply
It is a great pity that the Pantomime has so degenerated now when it
had got rid of much of the knock-about farcical element, of a great
deal of the tyranny of the spectacular, and of the "transformation
scene," because it is a form that offers great possibilities to the
author, and if a genius came along he could do something wonderful
with it. Even without a genius or without waiting for him a great deal
could be done. If only those responsible for the annual Pantomimes at
Drury Lane and the Lyceum would leave the beaten track for once and
get into touch with the younger generation of writers and commission
them to produce a Pantomime we might get a valuable addition to our
dramatic literature. It involves very little commercial risk, and
holds the possibility of an immense financial success, apart from
other considerations. It may be asked why do not these young men write
a Pantomime on their own initiative? But the answer is simple. Our
young writers have no time to spend on work which has no prospect of
ever being looked at, much less produced; besides, a Pantomime is
essentially a thing for collaboration between two or three of them,
and they are nearly all as busy as they can be with bread-and-butter
journalism and with individual projects in those few spare hours that
remain to them. There is, however, little doubt that they could produce
a Pantomime which would draw all London for months, just as there is
little doubt that the Pantomime and the children's play are the most
promising and flexible of the dramatic forms which confront our young
writers. The Revue may be thought to offer almost equal opportunities,
and to be capable of development out of its present chaotic state,
but it is rather more restricted by the fact that it has such a large
public. To have the largest public is to have the least hope of
commanding the attention of your audience sufficiently for them to
appreciate what is not obvious. Besides, the Revue supplies a definite
demand which does not change from year to year. It is a demand for
pretty girls, pretty dresses, dancing and humour, and if there suddenly
appeared among us a greater dramatic genius than any that has ever
lived he would not be able to satisfy that demand as well as Mr. C. B.
Cochran, Mr. André Charlot, or Sir Alfred Butt do. It is the minority
that is not catered for in drama as it is catered for in literature.
Where are the thirty-five thousand readers of the _Times Literary
Supplement_ in the land of theatres? They are scattered in twos and
threes here and there, always dissatisfied and disgruntled. Whether
at a Pantomime, at a Revue, at a Comedy, or at a Drama they find the
entertainment a hundred per cent. below the standard they demand,
and their only pleasure is an occasional Shakespearean production or
a children's play. But they could be mobilised and brought together
to support solidly and without the fickleness of the large public a
theatre that gave them what they wanted. If the experiment were made
with children's plays they would be reinforced by the thousands of
parents who will not submit their children to the vulgarities of the
latter-day Pantomime.
* * * * *
The next performance of the Phœnix Society will take place on February
8th and 9th, when Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_ will be given.
* * * * *
It is rumoured that Mr. Henry Ainley's next production at the St.
James's will be Stephen Phillip's _Paolo and Francesca_, in which Mr.
Ainley made his first success.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
PROBLEMS OF THE ACTOR. By LOUIS CALVERT. Simpkin. 7_s._