and sympathy and love, with powers far surpassing the intelligence of
other races: but mark how the English treat them. They set them on a
pinnacle, give them the admiration they despised, take none of their
sympathy, raise horrible statues to their memory, and, to protect
themselves against their thought, the mighty force of truth in their
souls, breed dwarfish imitations of them, whom they adore and love as
men can only love those of their own moral race. No other country less
deserves to have great men, and no other country has gotten greater.
This astonishing phenomenon has produced that complacency which is the
only check on the fury of England's adolescent energy. Without it,
without the Brummagem dignity in which such complacency takes form,
she would long ago have rushed to her destruction. With it she has a
political solidity to which graver and more intelligent nations can
never aspire.
But I should not talk politics to a politician. Nothing, I think you
will agree, can reconcile conceptions bred in the House of Commons
with those begot outside it. It has never yet been accomplished, and I
gather, from the few English journals I see, that the attempt to do so
is all but abandoned.
I am writing to you to-day because I wished to do so in Verona, but
was there too deep in an emotional flux to be able to write anything
but bad poetry or a crude expression of sympathy, which, as it would
have been gratuitous, must have been offensive. To-day, in Livorno
(which our sailors have chewed with their tobacco into Leghorn), I
found among my papers a letter written to you by Matilda nearly twelve
years ago. It belongs to you and I send it.
Yesterday in Livorno I found a marionette show and that set me
thinking of England and the theater and many other subjects which used
to absorb me during the hectic years of my life when I dwelt in Gray's
Inn. And I wished to communicate with England and could find no one to
whom I am so nearly attached as you. I was engaged to visit Elba, and
was there this morning, but was so distressed with the thought of the
extreme youthfulness of England's treatment of the great Napoleon that
I left my party and crossed over to Capraia, which you will find on
the map, and here, under the hot sun, with a green umbrella over my
bald head, I am writing. I can see Elba. With my mind's eye I can see
England, and, indeed, when soberly I turn the matter over, I conclude
that her treatment of Napoleon has not been nearly so shameful as her
treatment of Shelley or Shakespeare. Shelley wrote one play; it has
never openly been acted. Shakespeare wrote many plays; they have been
Butchered, reduced from the dramatic to the theatrical.
The marionettes stirred me greatly. The drama they played was
familiar--husband, wife, and lover--the treatment conventional, though
the dialogue had the freshness of improvisation. It was often bald as
my head, and in the more passionate moments almost heartbreakingly
inarticulate. It was a tragedy; the husband slew the lover, the wife
stabbed herself, the husband went mad, and they lay together in a limp
heap, while from the street outside--where, I felt sure, there were
gay puppets carelessly strolling--came the most comic, derisive little
tune played upon a reed. (It must have been a reed, for it was most
certainly puppet and no human music, and, for that, only the more
stirring.) The whole scene is as living to my mind as any experience
of my own, and, indeed, my own adventures in this life have been
illuminated by it. In the English theater I have never seen a
performance that did not thicken and obscure my consciousness. I could
not but contrast the two, and you find me sitting on an island
striving to explain it.
In the first place the performance of these marionettes compelled my
whole-hearted interest because the play was detached from life, was
not palpably unreal under the artificial light, and therefore could
begin to reflect and be a comment upon life in a degree of success
dependent, of course, upon the mind behind it. It was a common but a
simple mind, skilled in the uses of the tiny theater, versed in its
tradition, and always nice in its perception of the degrees of emotion
proper to be loosed for the building up of the dramatic scenes. It was
not truly an imaginative mind, not a genuinely dramatic mind, but it
was thoroughly loyal to the imagination which has created and
developed the theater of the marionettes. Except that the showman had
a marked preference for the doll who played the husband, the balance
of the play was excellently maintained, and the marionettes did
exactly as they were bid. Thus between the controlling mind of the
theater, the mind in its tradition, and my own there was set up a
continuous and unbroken communication, and my brain was kept most
exaltingly busy drawing on those forces and passions, those powers of
selection and criticism which make of man a reasoning and then a
dramatic animal. You may be sure that I fed the drama on the stage
with that other drama, through which you and I floundered so many
years ago. I longed to cry out to the husband that he should think
less of himself and what the neighbors would say and more of his wife,
who, being between two men, enamored of one and dedicated to the
other, was in a far worse plight than himself, who was torn only
between his affection and his pride. But tradition and convention and
his own brainless subservience to his passion were too strong for him,
and he killed the lover; would have killed the woman, too, but she was
too quick for him. I wept, I assure you. I was sorrowful. Judge, then,
of my relief and delight when the curtain rose again and those same
three puppets, with others, played the merriest burlesque, a
starveling descendant, I fancy, of the _commedia dell' arte._ Where
before they had surrendered to their passions, now my three puppets
played with them at nimble knucklebones. The passion was no less
genuine, but this time they were its masters, not its slaves, they had
it casked and bunged and could draw on it at will. My lady puppet
coquetted with the two gentlemen, set them wrangling for her,
wagering, dicing, singing, dancing, vying with each other in
mischievous tricks upon the town, and at last, owing, I suspect, to
the showman's partiality, she sank into the husband puppet's arms and
the lover puppet was propelled by force of leg through the window.
(Pray, my dear Panoukian, admire the euphemism to spare both our
feelings.) And now I laughed as healthily and heartily as before I
wept. . . . Now, said I to myself, in England I should have been
tormented with a picture, cut up by the insincerity of the actors into
"effective" scenes and episodes, of three eminently respectable
persons shaking themselves to bits with a passion they had never had;
or, for comedy, there would have been the ribaldry of equally
respectable persons twisting themselves into knots in their attempts
to frustrate the discovery of a mis-spent night. Now, thought I, this
brings me near the heart of the mystery. There are few men and women
born without the kernel of passion. There are forty millions of men
and women in the British Isles; what do they do with their passion?
What, indeed--let us be frank--had I done with my own?
Now do you perceive why I am writing to you?
First of all, let us agree that boyhood is the least zestful part of a
man's life. His existence is not then truly his own, he is a
spectator; he is absorbed in gazing upon the great world which at a
seemingly remote period he is to enter. Then he is apprenticed,
initiated by the brutal test of a swift growth and physical change;
easily he learns the ways, the manners, the pursuits of men; the
conduct of the material world, the common life, is all arranged; he
has but to slip into it. That is easy. But his own individual life,
that is not so easy. He soon perceives, confusedly and mistily, that
into that he can only enter through his passion, through its
spontaneous and inevitable expression. He knows that; you know it. I
know it. They are a miserable few who do not know it. But in England
he can find none to share his knowledge. He is left alone with his
dread, with so much sick hope thrust back in him, for want of a
generous salute from those who have gone before, that it rots away in
him and eats into his natural faith. He asks for a vision of manhood
and is given a dull imitation of man, strong, silent, brutal, and
indifferent. He must admire it, for on all sides it is admired. As a
child he has been taught to babble of gentle Jesus; as a youth he
finds that same Jesus turned--by the distorting English
atmosphere--into a hard Pharisee, blessing the money changers. His
passion racks his bones and blisters his soul. His inmost self yearns
to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the
ever-creating love. He dare not so much as whisper his need, for none
but shameful words are given him to express it. "All's well with the
world," he is told. "All's wrong with myself," he begins to think. In
other men, older men, he can find no trace of passion, only temper and
lewdness, with a swagger to both. They bear both easily. His passion
becomes hateful to him; he begins to chafe against it, to spurn it, to
live gaily enough in the common life, to choke the vision of his own
life. So it has been with you, with me, with all of us.
There are works of art, it is true. Grown men understand them;
adolescents hate them, for works of art reveal always the fulfilment
of passion; they begin to flower at the point to which passion has
raised the soul; they are the record and the landmarks of its
after-journeyings, its own free traveling. To the soul in bondage all
that is but babble and foolish talk, just as, to the adolescent, the
simplicity of the grown man is folly. That a man should believe in
human nature--as he must if he believes in himself--is, in adolescent
eyes, suspect. . . . Have you not heard intelligent Englishmen say
contemptuously of a man that he is an idealist, as who should say
idiot?
Passion leads to idealism, to belief that there is a wisdom greater
than the wisdom of men, a knowledge of which the knowledge of men is
but a part, a pulse in the universe by which they may set the beat of
their own.
What do the English do with their passion? They strangle it.
What did I do with my own? I let it ooze and trickle away. I accepted
my part in the common life, and of my own life preserved only certain
mild delights and dull passive joys, which became milder and duller as
the years went by. I was engaged in educating the young. I shudder to
think of it now. When I think of the effect those years, and that
curriculum, had upon my own mind I turn sick to imagine the harm it
must have done to the young, eager minds--(the dullest child's mind is
eager)--entrusted to my care by their confiding, worthy, and
adolescent parents. It is a horror to me to look back on it, and I
look back as little as may be.
But to-day, in the security of glorious weather, the impregnable peace
of my island slung between blue sea and sky, I can look back with
amused curiosity, setting my infallible puppets against the blustering
half-men whom I remember to have inhabited those portions of England
that I knew. I do not count myself a freeman, but one who has escaped
from prison and still bears the marks of it in his mind; it is to rid
myself of those marks that I am thus wrapt in criticism, and not to
condemn the lives of those who are left incarcerated. Impossible to
condemn without self-condemnation. No doubt they are making the best
of it. . . . I find that I cannot now think of anything in the world
as separate from myself; the world embraces all things, and so must I;
but to do so comfortably I must first understand everything that is
sufficiently imaged to be within the range of my apprehension. Neither
more nor less can I attempt. If more, then I am plunged in error and
confusion; if less, then am I the captive of my own indolence, and
such for the greater part of my life I have been.
When I look back on my experience in London I cannot but see that I
never became a part of it, never truly lived in its life. That may
have been only because a quarter of a century spent as an autocrat
among small boys is not perhaps the ideal preparation for living in a
crowd, a herd without a leader, in which there is no rule of manners
but: Be servile when you must, insolent when you can. Possibly the
majority are so bred and trained that such a flurry and scurry seem to
them normal and inevitable. I am sure very many are convinced that
without intrigue and wirepulling they cannot get their bread, or the
position which will ensure a continued supply. There they certainly
are; wriggling and squirming and pushing; they like it; they make no
move to get out of it; their existence is bound up in it and they
fight to preserve it without looking further. They will tell you that
they are assisting "movements," but they are only following fashions.
. . . What movement are you in?
Matilda, I gather, is a fashion. I never knew her follow anything but
her own desire, and as her desires are human and reasonable she has
risen by the law of gravity above the rout, above the difficulties of
her own nature, above any incongruities that arise between her
individuality and the conventions of the common life of England. And
of course she rises above the work she has to do, the idiotic songs
written for her, the meaningless dances devised to sort with the
pointless tunes. And when she suffers from the emptiness of it all,
she has you, and she has the memory of myself to guard her against the
filthy welter from which she sprang. She used me--(you will let her
read this)--and I am proud to have served her.
There are many people like Matilda, comedians and entertainers, who
develop a certain strength of personality in their revolt against the
conditions of their breeding. It is impossible to educate them. Their
intentions are too direct. . . . Not all of them succeed, or have the
luck to become the fashion. You are one of them yourself, my dear
Panoukian, and in the days when I was living with you two I used
excitedly to think that there was a whole generation of them; that the
young men and women of England were at last insisting on growing out
of adolescence. Sometimes I felt very sure of it, but I was too
sanguine. Life does not act like that; there are no sudden general
growths. There are violent reactions, but they are soon swallowed up
in the great forward flow.
"Comedians and entertainers" I said just now. You are all that, all
you public characters. You depend upon the crowd, you are too near
them. You are in dread of falling back, and also you are aware that
the size of a man can only be gauged at a distance, and you have to
contend with the charlatan. A better comedian you may be, but he has
not your scruples, your sensitiveness, and is therefore more dexterous
at drawing the crowd's attention. . . . Again I turn with relief to my
puppets; they have no temptation to insincerity; they obey the
strings, play their parts, and are put back into their boxes. They
need no bread for body or mind. They have no life except the common
life of the stage, no individuality and no torturing need of
fulfilling it.
But you comedians--writers, actors, politicians, divines--are raised
above the common life by the degree in which you have developed your
individual lives, including your talents, by work, by energy,
sometimes deplorably by luck. The validity of your claims is tested by
your ability to break with the common life, and pass on to creation
and discovery which shall bring back into the common life power to
make it more efficient.
I must define. By the common life I mean the pooling of energy which
shall provide all members of the community with food, clothing, house
room, transport, the necessaries of existence, and such luxuries as
they require. Its concern is entirely material. Where it governs
moral, ethical, and spiritual affairs it is an injurious infringement,
and cannot but engender hypocrisy. How can you pool religion, or
morality, without degrading compromise? The world has discarded
kingcraft and priestcraft and come to mobcraft. That will have its
day. Mobcraft is and cannot but be theatrical. In a community of human
beings who are neither puppets nor men there is a perpetual shuffling
of values among which to live securely there is in all relations an
unhealthy amount of play-acting;--take any husband and wife, father
and son, mother and daughter, lover and lover, or, Panoukian,
schoolmaster and pupil. Life is then too like the theater for the
theater to claim an independent existence. And that, I think, is why
there is no drama in England. That is why the play-actors have columns
and columns in the newspapers devoted to their doings, their portraits
in shops and thoroughfares, their private histories (where presentable
or in accordance with the public morality of the common life) laid
bare.
That view of English life so freezes me that I lie back under my
umbrella and thank God for the Italian sun.
Has it always been so in England? I think not. Garrick was a
self-respecting, if a conceited, individual. He believed in his work
and he had some dramatic sense. The theater had no credit then; even
his genius could not raise it to the level of English institutions.
But his genius made him independent, and still the theater was
parasitic upon the Court. Subsequently the English Court, which, never
since Charles II, had taken any genuine interest in it, repudiated the
theater which then had healthily to struggle for its existence. I
fancy that in Copas--(Matilda's uncle)--I found the last genuine
survivor of the race of mummers of which Henry Irving was the last
triumphant example. They strangled the theater with their own
personalities, for only by the strength of their personalities could
they force themselves upon the attention of an England huddled away in
dark houses, grimly, tragically, in secrecy, play-acting. With every
house a playhouse, how can the theater be taken seriously? With so
much engrossing pretence in their homes, men have no need of
professional mummers; with a fully developed Nonconformist conscience,
an Englishman can be his own playwright, mummer, and audience. He
grudges the money paid to professional actors, despises any
contrivance they can show him, spurns the whole affair as a light
thing, wantonness, a dangerous toy that may upset the valuations by
which he arrives at his own theatrical effect.
There was a time when the Englishman's home was his theater. My own
home was like that: year in, year out there was a tremendous groveling
before God, and a sweaty wrestling with the Devil, and a barometrical
record of prowess in both was kept. Human relations sneaked in when no
one was looking, took the stage when the curtain was down; I was
lucky, and on the whole had a good time in spite of the show, which, I
am bound to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. My father was a very fine man
at the groveling and the wrestling (and knew it), but in his human
relations he was awkward, heavy, and blundering in the very genuine
tenderness which he could not always escape;--and I think he knew
that, too, poor wretch.
There must be fewer such homes now, but still an enormous number. God
and Devil are not so potent, but the habit of posturing remains, has
been handed down and carried over into human relations--(at least God
and Devil did protect us from that!)--so that there is not one, not
the most intimate and sacred, but is made subtly the occasion of
self-indulgence, easy, complacent, and devastating; the epidemic
disease consequent on the airless years from the Reform Bill to the
South African War--(you will remember the histrionics before, during
and after that tragedy of two nations). The old English
home--theatrical and oleographic--has been destroyed by it, and I
rejoice as I rejoice to hear that the Chinese women are abandoning the
folly of stunting their feet. We used to stunt the soul, the
affections, human passions. Unbind the China woman's feet and she
suffers agonies, so that she cannot walk. Thus it has been with us; we
have suffered mortal agonies; we have been saved from madness by the
inherited theatrical habit, by which we have shuffled through the
human relationships enforced by our natural necessities and the
inconsiderate insistence upon being born of the next generation. We
have shuffled through them, I say, and we have made them charming, but
we have not yet--shall we ever?--made them beautiful. There has been
no true song in our hearts, only songs without words _à la_
Mendelssohn, nor yet a full music in our blood. We have imitated these
things, from bad models, drawn crude sketches of them. I, for
instance, play-acted myself into marriage; when it came to getting out
of it, play-acting was of no avail, though even for that emergency, as
you know, the English game has its rules. . . . I could not conform to
them, and in that I believe I shared in the general experience of the
race. I was pitchforked out of the old theatricality into the new and
found it ineffective. That must be happening every day, in thousands,
perhaps in millions, of cases. . . . I feel hopeful, and yet unhappy,
too, for my experience came to me too late. I have been able to
discard; but, for the new life--_vita nuova_--I have not wherewith to
grasp, to take into myself, to make my own. Even here on this island,
in this country of light, I do not seem to myself to be fully alive,
but am an outsider, a spectator, even as I was when a small boy, and I
shall go down into this warm earth hardly riper than I was when I was
born, nurtured only by one genuine experience and that negative. But
for that I am thankful. It has made it possible for me to ruminate, if
not to act, to rejoice in the possession of my uncomely and unwieldy
body, to be content with that small fragment of my soul which I have
mastered.
(It is really delightful to be writing to you again. It brings you
before me, as a boy, a little piping boy; as a posturing and conceited
youth--do you remember the cruel snub inflicted on you by Tallien, the
French master? I had sent you to him with a message, and he said:
"Tell Mr. Beenham I will take no message from his conceited puppy."
You! A prefect!--as a heated and quite too Stendhalian young man. It
is charming.)
But I am rueful when I reflect that I solved my difficulty, which,
after all, was a portion of the English difficulty, by leaving
England. I should have stayed; fought it out; wrestled through with it
until the three of us were properly and in all eyes established in
that new relation to which inevitably we should have come. I was too
old. I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too
English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and
finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly
conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an
unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my
sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make
the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both
successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go
triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon.
Are there children? I hope there are children!
And there begins my real difficulty. Not that I care about legitimacy.
No reasonable child will ask more than to be conceived in a healthy
body, born in a clean atmosphere, and bred in a decently ordered home.
But if there are children you should not be separated. Perhaps you are
not. Perhaps I have been long enough absent for your world to forget
my existence. But I have my doubts. I too much dread the English
atmosphere not to feel that it must have been too strong for you, and
you will have accepted your parts in the play.
But, if there are children, there should be no play-acting in their
immediate surroundings, in the love that brought them into being.
How I wish you could have seen my marionettes! We should then have an
emotional meeting point. As it is, I seem to be dancing round and
round you almost as agilely as though I were with you in England, in
the thick of polite London. That surely is what you need, on your
thickly populated island, a point at which the lower streams of
thought can converge, so that your existence may more resemble a noble
estuary than a swampy delta.