I
I HAVE been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in _News from
Nowhere_ might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into
our noisy time. One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and
red-tiled houses remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been
made not to make money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the
market houses that set the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it
among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements, but in a green garden by
a river side. Inside I have to be content for a while with a chair,
for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty seat but this; and yet
there is no one who has come merely because one must go somewhere after
dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or see an incongruous or noisy
thing, but spends the hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish
things men have said of them, in the library of the theatre, with its
oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of tinted glass; or one rows by
reedy banks and by old farm-houses, and by old churches among great
trees. It is certainly one’s fault if one opens a newspaper, for Mr.
Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need talk of nothing
but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams blackened by time
and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them. I have seen this
week _King John_, _Richard II._, the second part of _Henry IV._, _Henry
V._, the second part of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III._ played in their
right order, with all the links that bind play to play unbroken; and
partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the
way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done
before. That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring nobles,
of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has been
to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly energy.
I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore,
when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as
if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even
a little dust under one’s feet. The people my mind’s eye has seen have
too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art
before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem
more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.
In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one’s
head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting,
some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social
unity. But here he gives back one’s dream like a mirror. If we do not
talk of the plays, we talk of the theatre, and how more people may be
got to come, and our isolation from common things makes the future
become grandiose and important. One man tells how the theatre and the
library were at their foundation but part of a scheme the future is
to fulfil. To them will be added a school where speech, and gesture,
and fencing, and all else that an actor needs will be taught, and the
council, which will have enlarged its Festivals to some six weeks,
will engage all the chief players of Shakespeare, and perhaps of other
great dramatists in this and other countries. These chief players will
need to bring but few of their supporters, for the school will be able
to fill all the lesser parts with players who are slowly recovering
the lost tradition of musical speech. Another man is certain that
the Festival, even without the school, which would require a new
endowment, will grow in importance year by year, and that it may become
with favouring chance the supreme dramatic event of the world; and when
I suggest that it may help to break the evil prestige of London he
becomes enthusiastic.
Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love
the arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks
like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel,
which is always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end
by filling it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that
people are ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and
Ireland, and even from America, to live with their favourite art as
shut away from the world as though they were ‘in retreat,’ as Catholics
say. Nobody but an impressionist painter, who hides it in light and
mist, even pretends to love a street for its own sake; and could we
meet our friends and hear music and poetry in the country, none of us
that are not captive would ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear
something that we like some twice or thrice in a winter, and among
people who are thinking the while of a music-hall singer or of a member
of parliament, but there we would hear it and see it among people
who liked it well enough to have travelled some few hours to find it;
and because those who care for the arts have few near friendships
among those that do not, we would hear and see it among near friends.
We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and interests we
cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among people we
meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow serious
as the Ten Commandments.