bowdlerize Dryden on that ground. Dryden--even more than Congreve--is
inoffensive. There are dramatists with dirty minds; we often have had
their works performed in London--adapted from the French or in their
native English--but even these no one, I hope, would suppress. Dryden
emphatically is not one of this class. A cleaner, more wholesome writer
never put pen to paper, and the morbid squeamishness that objects
to Dryden is the squeamishness of ill-health. It is a case for the
doctor, for it is expressive of a pathological malady. On the subject
as a whole it would seem an apt occasion to quote some sentences of
Lamb's celebrated defence of Congreve, Farquhar, and Wycherley, as
there appear to be people who have not heard of it. Lamb explains that
these comedies have disappeared from the stage of his day--and he
lived at the beginning of the age of Mrs. Grundy--because "the times
cannot bear them." It is not alone, he adds, the occasional licence
of the dialogue, it is that they will not stand the moral test that
is so ridiculously applied to them. The age screws everything up to
that. "Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of
an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent
or a guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests
left." Pursuing this idea, he adds: "We carry our fireside concerns
to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors,
to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our
experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.
We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades." Here Lamb with
the extraordinary penetration characteristic of that rare mind hit
upon one of the principal causes of the bankruptcy of the theatre
during the hundred years that were to follow him. We are, even at this
moment, struggling to get free from that literal-mindedness which is
the soul of materialism and which would fetter us down to what it
calls realism and will have no extravagance of thought or language,
and for whom an escape into the free speech of the theatre--an escape
most necessary and most salutary--is, if you please, filth! "All that
neutral ground of character," laments Lamb, "that happy breathing-place
from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning--the sanctuary and
quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry--is broken up and disenfranchised, as
injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are
taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong.
We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the
scenic representation of disorder and fear a painted pustule. In our
anxiety that our morality should not take cold we wrap it up in a great
blanket just out of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine. I
confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I
am glad of a reason to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict
conscience--not to live always in the precincts of the law courts--but
now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no
meddling restrictions--to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot
follow me." And concludes Lamb, with fine common sense, "I come back
to my cage and my restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I
wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an
imaginary freedom."
It is not often given to any one man to have said the last word on
a subject, but I think that on this question Charles Lamb has said
the last word. Modern science lends its support to his judgment. The
psycho-analyst is beginning to realise that the damage inflicted by
socially necessary inhibitions can only be cured by art. It is to be
hoped that we will hear less and less of this canting nonsense of
"filth" applied to such noble and beautiful work as Dryden's. It is
also to be hoped that the Phœnix Society may have a long life, for in
the two productions it has so far given us it has more justified its
existence than has any society I know of founded in the last dozen
years.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
The National Gallery
The National Gallery nowadays is a constant source of novelty. The
familiar pictures which have been hidden so long are reappearing in
brighter and more deliberate surroundings, and we are compelled to see
them anew instead of merely battening on our past impressions. Not all
the rooms are equally successful in their mural decoration, but nearly
everywhere an improvement has been effected on the old gloomy colours.
The function of decorations in a gallery is unostentatiously to show
the works of art in the best contemporary light. For it is one of the
paradoxes of classical art that, although its beauty is immortal,
each generation sees this beauty from its own point of view. In fact,
the immortality consists precisely in the possibility of continual
recreation, and the environment is an outward assistance to such a
process. Mr. C. J. Holmes is only obeying the spirit of the period
in introducing the clear colours of full daylight. It is to be hoped
that the British Museum authorities will follow suit and make their
sculpture rooms slightly more exhilarating.
Among the most interesting recent additions are the purchases made
at the sale of the Degas Collection in 1918. Many of them have been
exhibited already for some time, but a few have only appeared lately,
and several are still in the background. The later appearances include
the large and rather prosaic study of soldiers, by Manet, and a
finely-drawn but photographically-painted portrait by Ingres. In the
neighbourhood of the Manet is an interesting comparison between two
Corots, one painted in Italy early in his career, the other in his
later, more typical period. The early landscape reveals an aspect of
Corot that is little known in England. The conception has a clearness
and thoroughness that is often lacking in his twilight fantasies, which
are inclined to be stereotyped. From the Studd Bequest we have two
interesting but oversweet figure and landscape sketches by Puvis de
Chavannes.
Our collection of French paintings is growing, but we want many
more--if not permanently, then on loan; why not?
The most notable English additions during 1919 are the three Whistlers
from the Studd Bequest. The _Lady with the Fan_ is inclined to be
sentimental; the _River Nocturne_ has considerable charm, but it is
on too large a scale for so slender a theme. The _Nocturne_ with the
fireworks is the most nearly perfect.
When the rearrangement of the Gallery is complete many pictures may
have to be kept downstairs. There are several at present on view in
the English rooms which one hopes will be reserved for the curious and
the importunate. There is also a large and unfortunate compilation
by Holman Hunt hung in one of the approaches which might be better
elsewhere.
The new El Greco is a very important acquisition, although it was
probably not a quarter the price of the family group by Romney. It
contains the quintessence of El Greco's nervously hard and dramatically
intense vision (no, Mr. Roger Fry,[29] not melodramatic!), and it is
not subject to exotic Venetian influences, as is his other composition
on the same wall. It has been carefully cleaned, and the result is
a triumph. Apparently under the old blackened varnish the colours
were preserved with all their original purity and poignancy. The
picture looks as though it were painted yesterday. In another sense
too it is very modern. I say this reluctantly because I am opposed
to an arbitrary division into ancient and modern, which implies an
unwarranted depreciation of the "ancient." Obviously the "modern" is
a mere passing phase, a torch which is hurried through the darkened
rooms of the past, lighting up now this room, now that. It is in fact a
question of temporary interest and relevancy, not of objective merit,
although the latter may only be fully understood through the medium of
the former.
[29] Mr. Fry is compelled to admit a dramatic content. But,
he says, it is "melodramatic" (implying it should not
be there). This is a subtle evasion. For what if it
were not melodramatic?
Recent Sculpture by Jacob Epstein: Leicester Galleries
Mr. Epstein is a great portrait sculptor. He has a wonderful power of
"living into" his models. He produces not only a likeness, but also
that kind of likeness which we can enjoy without knowing the original,
and in a certain sense even more than the original when known. For
he sees what we should scarcely be able to see without his vigorous
assistance. Standing before one of his portrait heads we have the
consciousness of some magnetising influence, evoking all kinds of
subterranean thoughts and emotions; we are drawn out of ourselves into
our external objective vortex.
It is objective and yet essentially the creation of Mr. Epstein's
"realistic" vision. Realistic is a difficult and dangerous word, but we
know what is meant by it, although often when we try to explicate that
knowledge still further we arrive at something which the word does not,
or should not, or need not, mean. It should not mean, for instance,
photographic, or immoral, or ugly. It may contain a consciousness of
all these elements without being them, for to be conscious of them
surely means to supersede and dominate them. "Realistic," of course,
might be extended so as to cover everything, but in the present
instance of ordinary usage it is limited to one particular aspect of
things, which, curiously enough, is rather a negative than a positive
one. It is the positive consciousness of negatives such as difficulty,
failure, struggle, pain: it is the intense and overpowering desire to
know them fully, to drain the imaginative experience of them to the
dregs, because once they have taken a hold on our awareness, only by
that means can we triumph over them.
Not only does Mr. Epstein endeavour to bring home to himself and to us
in his character studies a sense of individualised conflict (though
he is never gloomy), he often approves of sternness and ruggedness as
good in themselves; he enjoys the titanic groping of life. And it is
perfectly true that without some sort of a fight existence would be
hopelessly inert and hyper-æsthetic; but we do want sometimes the calm
and untroubled pleasure of attainment. Indeed only the complete process
conjoining the two opposites is completely good, yet we inevitably
stress now the one, now the other facet, placing in the centre of our
consciousness either the fact of struggle and failure or the fact of
success: for art is itself part of the process. And Mr. Epstein's art
stresses the "realistic" side, not only in the sense that he is in
desire revolting from it, but also that he appreciates it, enjoying
the process as much as the arrival at the goal. For instance, he has
made several studies of his own baby, over whom he has kept his head
severely. Indeed he seems to have been too ferociously interested in
the animalism and precocious ugliness of a small baby to have been at
all tempted to idealise; at the same time he is impressed with the
baby's vigour and vitality.
Sometimes it seems to me he loses sight of the whole in the elaboration
of expressive detail. In the bust of Lord Fisher in the War Museum
Exhibition he has obviously attempted to produce the leathery, wrinkled
texture of an old man's skin, because he saw it as a significant
feature. But in the effort to get this difficult effect he has lost
sight of the significance and produced a mere verisimilitude of
wrinkledness. Similarly in his _Christ_, the feature which arrests
us most is the clay-like gruesomeness of the loosened wrappings. We
shudder at the faint suggestion of decomposition and we are wounded
by the slit in the opened palm of the hand. But practically the whole
force of the composition has spent itself in these subsidiary details.
Paintings by Duncan Grant: Wm. B. Paterson and Carfax & Co. Ltd., 5 Old
Bond Street
This is a very important exhibition, and confirms the report which
has been current for some time that Mr. Duncan Grant is an artist of
unusual originality. I am deliberately emphatic, not only because I
am very enthusiastic about some of these pictures, but also because
I feel sure that many people will have been "put off" from the first
by a few of them, in which Mr. Duncan Grant, under the influence of
the modern abstractionist and pattern-making theories, has taken
undue liberties with the human body. Even in these pictures there is
much that is very fine, but it is quite independent of the stupid
distortions which only have a marring or comic effect. But consider,
for instance, the Still Life No. 23, _Bowl, Skull, and Jar_. Whatever
other criticism may be levelled against it, it is immune from the
charge of arbitrariness. Personally, I have nothing but praise for it,
as being a magnificent piece of lyrical painting. There are several
other pictures--landscapes, still lives, interiors--possessing the same
exquisite qualities, notably Nos. 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 21. The last named,
styled _Juggler and Tight Rope Walker_, which is in many ways the most
brilliant of the whole collection, does evince here and there a certain
exaggeration. This, however, can be overlooked because it does not
rivet our attention.
On the other hand, in No. 29, _Venus and Adonis_, the placing of the
lady's neck on her left-hand shoulder, with the consequent elongation
of the right-hand shoulder, stirs up in our minds a whole swarm of
general reflections, so that our æsthetic enjoyment of other real
values in the picture is practically swamped. It is true that in
caricatures we allow without cavil all sorts of liberties. But only
because the result is expressive, and actually where we appreciate
the caricature we do not notice any distortion, we see the work as
convincingly _true_.
The Black Country. Drawings by Edward Wadsworth: The Leicester
Galleries. (January.)
Mr. Wadsworth has almost found himself in his Black Country pictures,
or better he has found a real object which coincides with his
particular "vorticist" predilection. Continually is he obsessed with a
certain forked-lightning pattern which zigzags over the world. Where
it does not he often puts it there and, partially removing the world,
leaves a pattern. However, in the slag heaps and belching chimneys
and curved canals and splintered roofs of the Black Country, at any
rate sometimes, this pattern comes back to earth, and the result is a
striking picture. Vorticism and Futurism, in so far as they are art
tendencies, represent the scientist and business man of the nineteenth
century emerging painfully into emotional expression. Mr. Wadsworth
and the "Futurists" have not been the first to discover science and
industry artistically, but hitherto stress has been laid on the general
impressiveness, the mystery and atmospheric volume of the subject. Mr.
Wadsworth's particular contribution concerns the sheer joy in brutal
mechanical movement and in the deadly bulk and solidity of industrial
products and by-products. His best drawings are of ladle slag heaps,
consisting of metallic-looking boulders hurled out into a desolation
that yet teems with the energy that made and discarded them.
* * * * *
We have to congratulate Mr. D. Y. Cameron and Mr. George Henry on their
election as Associates of the Royal Academy.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
THE RESURRECTION OF AN OPERA
It was Dr. Vaughan Williams who, sometime about 1912 or 1913, suggested
Purcell's opera _The Fairy Queen_ for performance at Cambridge. In
1911 Mr. Clive Carey and a few others had organised at Cambridge a
performance of _The Magic Flute_. Mozart's last and greatest work for
the stage was in those days not so familiar to English audiences as it
is now. It had not been seen in this country, as far as I am aware,
since it was given by the students of the Royal College of Music about
twenty years ago. That it should be attempted by Cambridge amateurs
was regarded as preposterous--even Covent Garden had shied at it. But
the promoters of the Cambridge opera were less nervous. If they had
confidence, it was a confidence in Mozart and in the opera rather than
in themselves. They knew the opera intimately enough to have convinced
themselves that the chief difficulty of _The Magic Flute_ lay not in
the extreme compass of the two parts of Sarastro and the Queen of
Night, but first in the necessity for a clear and logical exposition of
the story, secondly in the complication of the ensemble numbers, and
thirdly perhaps in the psychology of what is really the most difficult
part of all, the Orator (Der Sprecher). If singers could be found
who were prepared to sing the parts of Gabriel and Raphael in _The
Creation_, they could make at least a decent show of Sarastro and the
Queen. Ensemble singing was merely a matter of musicianship and hard
work; the personality of the Orator was of necessity a question largely
of luck in finding the right man and coaching him intelligently. The
producers of the Cambridge performance were guided by two principles,
to aim at clearness and unity of style rather than at magnificence, and
to pin their faith to a great dramatic composer rather than to a star
cast.
The reception given to _The Magic Flute_ encouraged them to consider
the possibility of performing another opera in 1914. Several operas
had been passed in review when Dr. Vaughan Williams made his brilliant
suggestion, a suggestion which was very quickly adopted. The opera was
prepared for performance and put into rehearsal in the summer of 1914,
with a view to bringing it out in December of that year. The musical
portions of the first three acts were well in hand and most of the
dresses designed at the moment when war was declared. As soon as the
war was definitely over, and Cambridge had begun to resume something of
its normal aspect, the opera was resumed, although a bare half-dozen of
the original cast remained, and _The Fairy Queen_ was finally presented
for the first time to a modern audience on February 10th of this year.
Purcell and Shakespeare
It may be of interest to those who witnessed the performance to learn
something of the peculiar problems which confronted the producers and
of the principles on which they tried to solve them. The only material
available at that time was the Purcell Society's full score and a
copy of the original libretto of 1692. The British Museum possessed
also the second edition of the libretto (1693). The first thing to
do was to prepare and print an acting version and a vocal score. It
must not be supposed that _The Fairy Queen_ is an opera in the modern
sense, like _Dido and Æneas_. It is an abridged and altered version
of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, into each act of which is introduced
a sort of _ballet-divertissement_ with songs and choruses. These
musical episodes have practically nothing to do with the play. In Act
I. Titania enters with her fairies and orders music to entertain the
Indian Boy. This is interrupted by the appearance of a drunken poet,
who is blindfolded and pinched by the fairies. In Act II., instead of
"Ye Spotted Snakes," there is a long allegorical scene introducing
Night, Secrecy, Mystery, and Sleep. In Act III. a _divertissement_ of
a broadly comic character is commanded by Titania for the amusement of
Bottom. In Act IV. Oberon summons up a pageant of Phœbus and the Four
Seasons in honour of his reconciliation with Titania, and lastly the
fairies provide in Act V. the most magnificent and extravagant show of
all to celebrate the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta. It will be seen
that there is a certain amount of dramatic reason and also of artistic
unity and contrast about these musical episodes. The first, for the
Indian Boy, is fantastic and childlike; the second, for Titania,
voluptuous and mysterious; the third, for Bottom, half-comic and
half-erotic; the fourth, for Oberon, is a sort of Sun-God's festival;
the last, for Theseus and Hippolyta, an epithalamium.
The first difficulty to be faced was that of the Shakespeare dialogue,
which is all spoken, not sung. Should the librettist's textual
alterations be kept, or the original restored? Had the textual
alterations been violent enough to stamp the whole play as belonging
definitely and unmistakably to the age of Dryden we should have had
no hesitation in sticking to them. We were quite clear from the start
that we meant to produce Purcell's opera and not Shakespeare's play.
But the alterations to the text of Shakespeare were just enough to
be irritating to an audience whom we assumed to be familiar with
Shakespeare, and troublesome to actors who were probably in the same
case. The chances were that the actors would forget the alterations
here and there and return unconsciously to the original, and that
the audience would merely suppose that they had not learnt their
parts properly. Besides, the opera was so long that drastic cuts
were imperative. Here again we at once decided that as far as was
practicable it should be Shakespeare and not Purcell that was to be
cut. We therefore started by restoring the original text of Shakespeare
in all the scenes which had not been cut altogether by the librettist,
and then proceeded to prune the Shakespeare down until we had reached
either our time-limit or the limit of intelligibility. The latter was
reached first, and on that we proceeded to cut down Purcell. An obvious
course was to adopt the version of 1692, rejecting the scene of the
Drunken Poet, and the two songs, _Ye Gentle Spirits_ and _The Plaint_,
which were added in 1693. But the scene of the Drunken Poet was too
good to throw away. The two songs we abandoned with some reluctance
on account of their singular beauty; but they could easily be spared
from the point of view of the stage. Indeed _The Plaint_ would have
been impossible to accept; it is dragged in for no reason by special
request of Oberon, and is not only extremely long, but profoundly
melancholy and totally inappropriate to the cheerful atmosphere of the
Epithalamium.
One of the librettist's alterations was to transfer the whole of
_Pyramus and Thisbe_ to the rehearsal scene in the wood. The players
act it "in our habits as we shall play it before the Duke," and the
interruptions of Theseus and the rest are assigned to Puck. Here again
we restored the original, if only to save time. The idea then occurred
to us to save the play by having it acted in dumb show during the
_Entry Dance_ of Act V. This solved the problem of what to do with
this particular dance-tune; it gave us additional time to prepare
the Chinese scene behind the tableau-curtain, it saved the time
occupied by the play, and spared us the very tedious mirth of all the
knockabout business which in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ has now become
traditional. Further, it brought the clowns in again at the appropriate
moment, and, what was more important, it associated Shakespeare more
closely with Purcell's music. The little pantomime was worked out at
rehearsal entirely by the actors themselves. They first walked through
the directions of the _Pyramus and Thisbe_ play; then the music was
played and the action tried with it. No further alteration was needed
at subsequent rehearsals, for it so happened that every one of the
actors was musical, and they stepped and moved to Purcell's notes by
natural instinct.
There remained still a few bits of music to be disposed of. In the
seventeenth century people had to sit in the theatre for a long time
before the play began, and to pass the time a concert was provided,
consisting of a _First Musick_, or _Second Musick_, and lastly the
_Overture_. Under modern conditions it would have been more in
accordance with the spirit of Purcell to send our orchestra out into
the street to play the First and Second Musick to the queue that was
waiting to enter the pit and gallery, but since we could not imagine
that police regulations would permit this, we utilised the four little
pieces at different points as incidental music to the play. In so doing
we knew that we were untrue to the strict traditions of Purcell's day;
but we did not wish to cut these pieces out altogether, and we further
thought that they would help to Purcellize the Shakespeare. We were
somewhat surprised to find that several of the audience seemed to
expect _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ in its entirety, once the play had
started. Our assumption, which apparently was wrong, was that everybody
knew Shakespeare's play practically by heart, and that we need do no
more than just indicate its outlines, leaving the rest to be filled up
by the imagination under the inspiration of Purcell's music.
Purcell and His Orchestra