called Zahda, or by the Russian Miniature Theatre, it would have been
hailed as a wonderful masterpiece of bizarre and original art, and all
the young freaks of London who frequent the Russian Ballet and sneer
at Gilbert and Sullivan would have flocked to see it and talked of
nothing else for months. As it is a product, however, of the despised
English--the English who have produced the greatest imaginative
literature of the world--and as also it has the misfortune to have been
in its book form enormously popular, there is little likelihood of its
being adequately appreciated. I must confess, however, that by the side
of Mr. J. V. Bryant's production of Miss Daisy Ashford's _The Young
Visiters_, the productions I have so far seen of the Zahda Art Council,
which includes men of ambitious mind, and of the Russian Miniature
Theatre have been distinctly _jejune_ and unexhilarating. _The Young
Visiters_ is the later Victorian world looked at from the eyes of a
child. It is, therefore, a fantasy, and the note of fantasy has been
admirably struck in the stage production. Those who have read the book
will naturally imagine that it is spoiled upon the stage, but they will
be wrong. It is even conceivable that some--there are such people--who
have not liked the book will enjoy the play immensely. They should,
at all events, not let any distaste of the book's vogue prevent their
seeing the play, if they have the opportunity. They will be rewarded
by Mr. Harold Anstruther's marvellous presentment of that wonderful
creation Bernard Clark. He is a masterpiece in costume, voice, gesture,
and make-up, and I expect I shall have to wait a good many years before
our Russian friends give us anything comparable for excellence with
him. Another perfect--the word perfect is accurate--presentment is
Mr. John Deverell's Earl of Clincham--the earl who thought that the
glories of this world were but "piffle before the wind." Mr. Lawrence
Hanray's Procurio is also perfect. I have never used the word perfect
about any acting before, so there is obviously some magic about _The
Young Visiters_ to have three parts played perfectly. I wish I could
say the same of that delightful person Mr. Salteena. Mr. Ben Field's
effort is by no means without merit, but he does not satisfy our
preconceived notion of what Mr. Salteena ought to be, as the others
do for Bernard Clark, Clincham, and Procurio. Nevertheless, as we get
more used to Mr. Field's Salteena we get more satisfied with him. We
never, unfortunately, became satisfied with Miss Edyth Goodall's Ethel
Morticue, clever as Miss Goodall undeniably is. Miss Goodall's Ethel
is sophisticated, Ethel was not. The Prince of Wales at the Levee was
excellent, and the Duchess's singing of _Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_ superb.
It was an inspiration to think of it.
Of Mr. Esmond's play, _Grierson's Way_, I should say no more if it were
not that it has been praised by the same critics who have written of
the "filth" of Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_. Those of us who pride
ourselves on a somewhat catholic taste, who can see the good points of
a revue, a musical comedy, a melodrama, a farce, and a tragedy, who
find that, although we may prefer Webster, Dryden, and Tchekhov to
Shaw, and Shaw to Arnold Bennett, and Arnold Bennett to Oscar Asche, we
are none the less able to be amused by the Pounds sisters in _Pretty
Peggy_, and to enjoy Alfred Lester in _The Eclipse_--those of us,
let me add, who do not turn scarlet at the sight of a bare back are
still--strange as it may appear to the pharisaical and the prudish--not
without moral sense. And _Grierson's Way_ is a play that offends
_our_ moral sense. It is, I would venture to add--using the word with
its true but not its current popular meaning--a thoroughly immoral
play. That is to say its ideas are false, its sentiment slobbery,
and thoroughly rotten with the rottenness of bad fruit. It is worth
discussing the play because so few people know a bad thing when they
see it. They judge by externals, not by the spirit, for the simple
reason that it is so very much easier. Their idea of morality is like
that of the old lady who overheard her gardener say "Damn" and said
"What a bad wicked man!" and dismissed him, although he was an honest,
good-hearted fellow, to put in his place a smooth-tongued, insincere
rogue who cheated her for the rest of her life. Of course it served her
right; men and women have no excuse to throw up the task of feeling and
thinking after real righteousness and beauty in Art or Life for the
easy rule-of-thumb method of judging everything by rote or formula.
No doubt it is terribly difficult for many of them to feel either
beauty or ugliness, good or evil, but without that sensitiveness of the
intelligence they can never hope to criticise the productions of the
human mind. The foot-rule, whether it is a rule for measuring "damns"
or split infinitives, or rapes or murders, or the number of bare backs
in a play, is useless for measuring its artistic quality, and a play
can have no other quality, provided its murders are not real and its
indecencies not practised before our eyes.
In _Grierson's Way_ we have the story of a girl who is loved by a
middle-aged bachelor who has a maundering delight in bad music, and
also by a once famous violinist, who has lost an arm in an accident,
and now is a doddering drunkard, who talks of Art and his soul in the
approved manner of the sentimentalist who does not realise what an
offence his sickly, insincere slobber is to any profoundly-feeling,
austere, and clear-brained artist. The girl has fallen in love with an
Army man of the conventional novelette type, who is already married;
she is about to have a child by him when she gets a letter from him to
say that he is going away and will never see her again. The middle-aged
bachelor offers to marry her as a way out of the difficulty; she
accepts. The man she loves returns, his wife having died, and the
husband, at the instigation of the violinist, commits suicide. The
curtain falls leaving this creature expressing with sickly gusto his
opinion that the dead husband will now stand for ever between her
and her happiness. This account of the play's theme can give no idea
of the false sentiment, the maudlin splutter of fine words, and the
melodramatic rant with which the play is loaded. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt
strove to preserve some personal dignity in the foul mush of words that
flowed from the invertebrate jelly-fish around her, but nothing she
could do could redeem the play, which is, frankly, disgusting.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. By CLAYTON HAMILTON. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._
6_d._
This is a book by an American critic, and it ranges over almost the
whole field of dramatic art. Although it consists mainly of articles
reprinted from American magazines, it is on a much higher general
level of intelligence and taste than we are accustomed to expect from
work of this kind. Mr. Hamilton discusses all the modern English
dramatists, and, although he is not free from his countrymen's tendency
to exaggerated praise--for instance, few English critics of reputation
would endorse his opinion that _Hindle Wakes_ is "a great work"--yet
he is far from being undiscriminating, and his criticism of Mr. Shaw
and Mr. Galsworthy is penetrating and fresh. Mr. Hamilton has the great
merit of thinking for himself instead of merely repeating the current
catchwords of the day. He is not afraid to argue that Henry Arthur
Jones and Pinero are finer dramatists than Mr. Bernard Shaw, but, on
the other hand, he can appreciate Mr. Chesterton and Lord Dunsany.
Again, he is full of ingenious suggestions on the subject of dramatic
construction, but he is far more conscious of the foolishness of
dogmatising and laying down hard-and-fast rules than such a good critic
even as Mr. William Archer, to whom his book is dedicated. On the
subject of American plays, as represented by the work of Mr. George M.
Cohan, he is scathingly severe, and that is a good omen for the future
of the drama in America.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
AUGUSTE RENOIR
Renoir is admired by almost all schools of taste, both conservative
and radical, and naturally each school endeavours to claim him as
its own. The impressionists, for instance, emphasise his adoption of
the impressionist palette, his studies in the manner of Monet and
Pisarro, his general preoccupation with atmosphere and sunlight;
the anti-impressionists point out his deviation from the stippled
technique, with its juxtaposition of the colours of the spectrum,
his increasing interest in form and composition as contrasted with
atmosphere, and his own disclaimer of adherence to the naturalistic
principle: "Avec la Nature on fait ce qu'on veut et on aboutit
necessairement a l'isolement. Moi, je reste dans le rang"; also the
famous reply to the question, where one should learn painting: "Au
musée, parbleu!"
The reflections upon art of even the greatest artist are not
necessarily correct, and though an artist preaches one theory he may
actually practise another. Nor are these brief and pithy utterances
of Renoir's altogether unambiguous. In order to appreciate the real
meaning of any statement of theory it is necessary to bear in mind the
opposite view which it is combating. We cannot infer from Renoir's
objection to the indiscriminate realism of the later impressionist
doctrine that he was in favour of Cubism, for Cubism was not at the
time under discussion. Nor does his reference of students to the
old masters (_au musée_) imply in the least that he would abolish
painting from nature. There is, in fact, not the slightest need to
read into Renoir's simple, somewhat irritated replies any abstruse
semi-metaphysical meaning. They will bear a very normal interpretation,
which seems to me to be not only the true one, but also the truth.
Renoir did not believe in the chaotic and uninspired painting of
anything and everything, nor in the pretended complete severance with
tradition and the past. He knew that the study of the old masters had
assisted him in giving expression to his emotion, and he left the
matter at that. Actually all his life long he painted from nature, and
it is said that he hardly ever worked without a model. Indeed many of
the intellectualists have been compelled to class Renoir as a "naïf,"
who was content with the unmediated charms of the external world, and
never aspired to more deliberate abstract construction.
The Meaning of Impressionism
This distinction, however, between the realistic impressionist (Monet),
the naïf (Renoir and the _douanier_ Rousseau), and the intellectually
constructive artist, such as Cézanne, is apt to be thoroughly
misleading. It is true that the theory of impressionism, in its later
developments, was a scientific formula calculated to fetter rather
than help the artist, but it does not follow, nor is it by any means
true, that Monet and Pisarro were not sometimes very fine artists.
They elaborated a style which expressed admirably their own brisk
and vivacious sentiment, and the result was neither photographic nor
discontinuous with the past. Surely nothing but prejudice and the new
pedantry of hybrid abstract design could deny æsthetic value to Monet's
"Gare St. Lazare," and Pisarro's "Red Roofs," in the Luxembourg. Often,
however, Monet's work is distinctly laboured and only differentiated
from a photograph by the worried surface of the paint. He is more
monotonous and uninspired than his contemporaries, but he is none the
less the author of some remarkably good prose descriptions.
In short, impressionism has come to stand for two quite distinct
things: one a genuine attempt to articulate an emotion connected
with light and atmosphere, the other a scientific theory of colour
and light. With the latter, few of the important impressionists were
concerned. Seurat is the only one who seems to have been influenced to
any noticeable extent and yet to have remained an artist. But with the
former the whole group were more or less concerned, including Renoir
and Cézanne. They all revolted from the old sombre colours, expressive
of the worship of hoary antiquity, and astonished their contemporaries
by plunging into the brightness of the present. Their different modes
of reacting to this general tendency were the natural result of
eminently desirable differences in temperament. This is the essence of
the divergence between, say, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne. For the very
reason that they each possessed a personal vision their work differed,
both technically and in its content. It simply is a misrepresentation
to say that Cézanne indulged in Cubist deformations. To quote a
biographer of Cézanne:--"Ce sont ses disciples, ses plagiaires qui
raconte qu'il deforme. Ses deformations, que des cuistres voient si
bien, eux qui ne sont pas peintres, ce sont des gestes, des attitudes,
des contours _vrais_ pour Cézanne. Il ne voyait pas autrement."
Of course it is possible to soak oneself in Cézanne to such an extent
that almost everything else will seem uninteresting. But this is
not a magnetism peculiar to Cézanne; it is common to all artists of
any comprehensive range, not excepting Renoir. Pass quickly after
enjoying a collection of Renoir's completest and most lucid work to
some of Cézanne's paintings. Most probably they will appear wooden
and unattractive. But this will be a psychological illusion, due to
a sudden contrast and the fact that the whole of one's emotional
consciousness has been shaped to a certain form, and will not
immediately reshape itself. Our minds at any single moment are unable
to contain more than a few powerful conceptions and impressions, and
there must therefore be times of clashing and transition.
But there is a sense in which Renoir might very well be described as
naïf and ingenuous. This would refer not to his method or technique,
but to the spiritual content of his work, what he means and has to say.
The centre of his enjoyment lay always in something charming, radiant,
opulent, and, if you like, sensuous. And so those who are ascetically
disposed, if not in their life, in their tastes, condemn Renoir as
pretty and sentimental. But often they go further and conclude that
he was facile, that he painted without difficulty or trouble, as the
birds sing. It may, however, have been as difficult for him to attain
a satisfactory expression of his emotion, which was _of_ facility,
as it was for Cézanne to express his intense consciousness of beauty
struck out of conflicting opposites. Indeed, very often there are
distinct indications of a struggle in Renoir, of inability to get
exactly what he was aiming at. A superficial glance might put this
down to bad elementary draughtsmanship. But one has only to consider
the technical proficiency of his earlier work (see "Le Cabaret de la
Mere Antony, Diane Chasseresse") to realise that the cause of this
apparent ineptitude must be deeper. It is the honesty of the artist who
is always developing and refuses to overcome difficulties by resort to
the camouflage of the obvious and the hackneyed. Consequently the very
failure has its appeal.
Different Periods
There is a great deal of difference of opinion as to the respective
value of Renoir's earlier and his later work, and this has afforded
an excellent opportunity for the conflicting schools, who all join
in admiring Renoir, to set up within this ostensible "union sacrée"
their old party divisions. The conservatives adhere, of course, to the
first great period from 1870-1881; that is to say between Renoir's
thirtieth and fortieth years. In the rest they see a gradual decline of
inspiration, an increasing predilection for rotund and almost coarse
sensuousness, a pathetic loss of technical power until, when tortured
by gout and hopelessly paralysed, the old master could only apply
chaotic dabs of hot and hotter colour, his work became worthless.
The extremists, on the other hand, see a steady, though uneven,
development. They admit readily the enchantment of the period of early
maturity when Renoir was at the height of his physical powers, but
they have an uncomfortable feeling that this kind of art is a trifle
too normal, it is something that practically anyone can enjoy with a
little effort. The later work is more difficult. Renoir never lost his
peculiar charm, even when painting the fattest of models (his model, I
think, just grew fatter), but he experimented in different directions,
passing from the study of light more and more to that of form.
Latterly, when an invalid, he was compelled to confine himself within
narrower bounds, and the appeal of his work has less volume in it.
Nevertheless, it is maintained these last are the two greatest periods,
if not in positive achievement, at any rate in intention.
I am disposed, if anything, to favour the work done in the first two
phases, between his thirtieth and sixtieth years, and I am not sure
that some of his most perfect pictures do not belong to the earlier of
the two. For he did not produce many perfect pictures; it is nearly
always possible to trace some defect. For instance, there has recently
been exhibited at the Eldar Gallery one of the remarkable series of
"Baigneuses." This particular canvas was painted in 1888. There is a
great deal that is very beautiful in it, but it is not a whole. It
is a "studio" picture, the nude and the landscape have no inevitable
connection, and little interest is displayed in the face. Further,
the body is cut off, or rather smoothed off, from its environment by
a swish of paint, which signifies nothing, except that Renoir became
too excited by the actual touch and feel and putting on of the paint,
and also that he had an _idée fixe_ about the gradual merging of
the outline into its surroundings. This was the sentimental echo of
his former genuine enthusiasm for _plein-air_ effects. In many of
his otherwise admirable figure studies this spongy film (especially
affecting the hands) spoils the precision of his rendering. Sometimes,
however, it is appropriate; for instance, in the famous picture, "La
Moulin de la Galette" (1876). Here the flowing atmospheric technique
and the significance coincide. The radiant coolness of the dappled
light and shade is expressed with a freedom and spontaneity which is
often lacking in Monet and Pisarro. Yet in spite of the unalloyed
delight of this dancing scene I always feel a lurking criticism. This
is not because of the kind of sentiment which might be mistaken for
sentimentality; it is due to something else, a sameness and repetition.
There is an absence of diversity in these light-hearted revellers; in
fact they are just one man and one woman duplicated many times over,
and flushed with exactly the same translucent emotion. Renoir did not
possess great constructive imaginative power, and he had very little
interest in character. This general limitation, however, only became
a concrete limitation (that is to say, a defect observable inside a
picture, instead of one of the infinite things that the picture is not)
when he was actually portraying some scene necessitating a variety of
individual characters.
It is in some of his landscapes, or in portrait heads such as that of
Madame Charpentier, or studies such as "La Loge," and some of the later
nudes that there is the completest fusion of the content and the form,
of the technique and the emotion. It is frequently said that Renoir
was not a landscape painter, but was _par excellence_ a painter of
women or of woman. The latter statement undoubtedly has some truth in
it, although the interest was not so much in woman as in a particular
roseate emotion, more evident in women than in men. But he was also
a very considerable landscape painter, and his figures of women are
usually placed in the open air, amid scenery possessing the same soft
and sweeping texture. Even when an invalid he still painted out of
doors, in a specially constructed glass house, while his model posed,
often naked, in his garden.
About 1881 he seems to have exhausted his direct interest in the
_plein-air_ movement. Incidentally, he took a journey to Italy, but
there is no evidence of any influence of this visit upon his work,
except that it may have served to throw into stronger relief the
peculiarities of the French school and his own kinship with it--that
school which (in his own phrase) "est si gentille, si clair, de si
bonne compagnie."
This, however, is least applicable to the artist towards whom his own
inner development seems to have guided him, namely Ingres. To put
it in the usual superficial and rather unsatisfactory way, he was
passing from the study of light to that of two dimensional form. The
actual result was a synthesis in which brilliant colour and light
played a part never dreamt of by Ingres. At first his work showed an
unusual hardness and lack of skill. He never possessed the sureness
of touch of Manet, which often was mere virtuosity; nor does one ever
feel behind his hand the overwhelming impetuosity of Van Gogh. He
feels his way gradually, producing a great deal, in fact too much,
and succeeding only in certain moments. The culmination was reached
in the large composition of the four bathers (which I have not seen)
in the collection of M. J. E. Blanche. Opinion seems to differ as to
its value, but, whatever defects it may possess, it is clearly of
a monumental character, and probably represents the highest point
that Renoir was able to attain in the attempt to bring together the
sculpturesque qualities of one of his first large compositions, "Diane
Chasseresse," and the luminosity and richness of the "Moulin de la
Galette."
Between the years 1885 and 1897 there followed a whole succession of
remarkable pictures, including "Les Enfants Benard," "Mère et Enfant,"
"Les Filles de Catulle Mendès," "Les Parapluies," and "Au Piano," of
which there are two examples, one being at the Luxembourg. Although
Renoir was moving away from his former softness and mistiness, as if in
dissatisfaction with the youthful joy in mere sensation, he never left
it right behind, he remained on the borderland and looked back on it,
contemplating it with maturer insight.
About 1900 to 1919
The last stage constituted a partial return to the first; he reverted
to his former freedom and suppleness of touch. But the method is more
direct and the content more realistic and crude, although there is
still the same lyrical tenderness. His colours are bolder and hotter,
and it is alleged that he strengthened them purposely with a view to
their being modified by time. This appears to me a most dangerous
doctrine. How could one ever be certain that the present wrong tones
would be altered by exposure to exactly the correct tones? And why
put oneself to such pain in the present for the sake of an uncertain
future? For it must be very painful to a sensitive artist to create
something out of tone, even on purpose. For these reasons (and
without the backing of any authority) I rather doubt whether there is
much truth in this intended excuse. And I doubt whether any excuse
is necessary. I believe that in the majority of cases Renoir meant
something by this hotter colour, and that in this respect the pictures
are their own justification. It is impossible to hail all of them as
masterpieces. Many definitely betray loss of vitality and imagination.
But I cannot agree that the work of this period is that of an invalided
old man who is living sentimentally on his past.