Art is art because it is not nature, is the motto of the Idealisti; Art
is but the imitation of nature, say the Naturalisti. The truth lies
between the two. Art is neither nature alone, nor can it do without
nature. No imitation, however accurate, for imitation’s sake makes a
good work of art in any other than a mechanical sense. And every work
of art in which the objects represented are inaccurately or imperfectly
imitated is in so far deficient. But art works by suggestion as well
as by imitation. Whatever is untrue to the imagination fails to
produce its proper effect, however true it be to the fact. The most
absolute realism will not answer the higher demand of the imagination
for ideal truth. Art is not simply the reproduction of nature, but
nature as modified and colored by the spirit of the artist. It is a
crystallization out of nature of all elements and facts related by
affinity to the idea intended to be embodied. These solely it should
eliminate and draw to itself, leaving the rest as unessential. A
literal adherence to all the accidents of nature is not only not
necessary in art, but may even be fatal. The enumeration of all the
leaves in a tree does not reproduce a tree to the imagination, while a
whole landscape may be compressed into a single verse.
Between the ideal and the natural school there is a perpetual struggle.
Under the purely ideal treatment art becomes vague and insipid; under
the purely natural treatment it becomes literal and prosaic. The
Pre-Raphaelites, in protesting against weak sentimentalism and vague
generalization, and demanding an honest study of nature, have fallen
into the error of exaggerating the importance of minute detail, and, by
insisting too strongly on literal truth, have sometimes lost sight of
that ideal truth which is of higher worth. But their work was needed,
and it has been bravely done. They have roused the age out of that dull
conventionalism in which it had fallen asleep. They have stimulated
thought, revivified sentiment, and reasserted with word and deed the
necessity of nature as a true basis of art.
As in the arts of painting and sculpture, so in the drama and on
the stage a strong reaction is taking place against the stilted
conventionalism and elaborate artifice of the last generation. Such
plays as the “Nina Sforza” of Mr. Troughton, the “Legend of Florence”
of Mr. Leigh Hunt, and the “Blot in the ‘Scutcheon” and “Colombe’s
Birthday” of Mr. Browning, are vigorous protests against the feeble
pretensions and artificial tragedies of the previous century. The poems
and plays of Mr. Browning breathe a new life; and if as yet they have
only found “fit audience though few,” they are stimulating the best
thought of this age, and slowly infusing a new life and spirit into it.
But the traditions of the stage are very strong in England, and are not
easily to be rooted out. The English public has become accustomed to
certain traditional and conventional modes of acting, which interfere
with the freedom of the actor, and cramp his genius within artificial
forms. There is almost no attempt on the English stage to represent
life as it really is. Tradition and convention stand in the stead of
nature. From the moment an actor puts his foot on the stage he is
taught to mouth and declaim. He studies rather to make telling points
than to give a consistent whole to the character he represents. His
utterance and action are false and “stagey.” In quiet scenes he is
pompous and stilted; in tragic scenes, ranting and violent. He never
forgets his audience, but, standing before the footlights, constantly
addresses himself to them as if they were personages in the play.
Habit at last becomes a second nature; his taste becomes corrupted,
and he ceases to strive to be simple and natural. There is, in a
word, no defect against which Hamlet warns the actor which is not a
characteristic feature of English acting. It never “holds the mirror
up to nature,” but is always “overdone,” without “temperance,” full
of mouthing, strutting, bellowing, and noise. It “tears a passion to
tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.” And
“there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and
that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, having neither the accent
of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor Turk, have so
strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen
had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so
abominably;” and this needs to be reformed altogether.
These words of Shakespeare show that even in his time the inflated,
pompous, and artificial style still in vogue on the English stage
was a national characteristic. We have scarcely improved, since old
traditions cling and hold the stage in mortmain. Reform moves slowly
everywhere in England; but the two institutions which oppose to it the
most obstinate resistance are the church and the theatre. In both of
these tradition stands for nearly as much as revelation. Each adheres
to its old forms, as if they contained its true essence; each believes
that those forms once broken, the whole spirit would be lost; just
as if they were phials which contained a precious liquid, and must
be therefore preserved at all costs. The idea that the liquid can be
quite as well, and perhaps better, kept in different phials has never
occurred to them. They will die for the phial.
Still it is plain that a strong reaction against this bigoted
admiration of traditional and conventional forms is now perceptible.
The facilities of travel and intercourse with other nations have
engendered new notions and modified old ones. It is impossible to
compare the French and Italian stage with the English, and not
perceive the vast inferiority of the latter. In the one we see nature,
simplicity, and life; in the other, the galvanism of artificial
convention. It cannot be denied that the recent acting of Hamlet by
Fechter was to the English mind a daring and doubtful innovation. It
was something so utterly different in spirit and style from that to
which we have been accustomed that it created a sensation; and while it
found many ardent admirers, it found quite as many vehement opposers.
The public ranged themselves in two parties; the one insisting that
the traditional and artificial school, as represented by Garrick, the
elder Kean, and Cooke, was the only safe guide for the tragic actor;
and the other arguing that as the true function of the stage was to
hold up the mirror to nature, acting should be as much like life and
as little like acting as possible. The former, at the head of which
were the friends of Mr. Charles Kean, made a public demonstration in
his behalf, and scouted these newfangled French notions of acting. Was
it to be supposed that any school of acting could be superior to that
created and established in England by the genius of such actors as
Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke? Should foreigners presume to teach
us how to interpret and represent plays which had been the study of the
English people for centuries? To this it was opposed that, however
mortifying to us, it was a fact that the Germans had led the way to a
profounder and more metaphysical study of Shakespeare, and had taught
us in many ways how to understand his plays, and that therefore there
was no reason why foreigners might not teach us how to act them. The
very fact that their eyes were not blinded, nor their tongues tied by
traditional conventions, enabled them to study Shakespeare with more
freedom and directness. There was no deep rut of ancient usage out
of which they were forced to wrench themselves. And, besides, it was
affirmed, and with truth, that the English stage is the jeer of the
world, and needs thorough reform.
We have indeed made little progress in reforming the stage. Mr. Charles
Kean has devoted his talents to improving the wardrobe and scenery, and
has so far done good service; but in the essential matter of acting we
are nearly where we were in the past century. While the background and
dresses are reformed, and the bag-wig in which Garrick played Hamlet is
thrown aside, we have carefully preserved all the old points, all the
stage-tricks, and all the stilted intonations of the artificial school;
and the consequence is, that the sole reality is in that which is the
least essential. The attention is thus withdrawn from the actor to the
scenery, and we have a spectacle instead of a tragedy. The background
is real, but the actor is conventional; the blanket has usurped the
prominent place, and Shakespeare has retired behind it. The bursts of
genius with which Garrick startled the house, and made the audience
forget his bag-wig, are wanting, but all his tricks are preserved; the
corpse is still there, but the spirit he put into it is gone.
In comedy there is as little resemblance to real life as in tragedy;
humor and wit are travestied by buffoonery and grimace. Instead of
pictures of life as it is, we have grotesque daubs and caricatures, so
exaggerated and farcical in their character as to “make the judicious
grieve.” The actor and the audience react upon each other. The audience
are generally uneducated, and for the most part agree with Partridge in
his comment on “Hamlet:” “Give me the king for my money,” says he. The
actors must bow to this low taste,—
“For they who live to please must please to live.”
But tradition has worse sins to answer for. It has not only ruined our
national acting, but in some cases has overshadowed the drama itself,
and perverted the meaning of some of the greatest plays of Shakespeare.
Hamlet is not Hamlet on the English stage; he is the tall, imposing
figure of John Kemble; dark, melodramatic, and dressed in black velvet.
Strive as we will, we cannot imagine him as the light-haired Dane,
easy and dreamy of temperament, “fat and scant of breath,” essentially
metaphysical, hating physical action, and wanting energy to put his
thoughts into deeds. The whole spirit of the acted Hamlet is southern;
that of the real Hamlet is purely northern. We have indeed broken
through an old tradition, according to which, incredible as it may
seem, Shylock used to be acted as a comic character, though we are
still far from a real understanding of his character. But of all the
plays of Shakespeare none is so grossly misunderstood as “Macbeth.”
Nor is this misapprehension confined to the stage; it prevails even
among those who have zealously studied and admired Shakespeare. As John
Kemble stands for Hamlet in our imaginations, so does Mrs. Siddons for
Lady Macbeth. She has completely transformed this wonderful creation
of Shakespeare’s, distorted its true features, and so stamped upon it
her own individuality, that when we think of one we have the figure of
the other in our minds. The Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons is the only
Lady Macbeth we know and believe in. She is the imperious, wicked,
cruel wife of Macbeth, urging on her weak and kindhearted husband to
abominable crimes solely to gratify her own ambitious and evil nature.
She is without heart, tenderness, or remorse. Devilish in character,
violent in purpose, she is the soul of the whole play; the plotter
and instigator of all its horrors; a fiend-like creature, who, having
a complete mastery over Macbeth, works him to madness by her taunts,
and relentlessly drives him on against his will to the commission of
his terrible crimes. We hate her, as we pity Macbeth. He is weak of
purpose, amiable of disposition, “full of the milk of human kindness,”
an unwilling instrument of all her evil designs, who, wanting force
of will and strength of character, yields reluctantly to her infernal
temptations.
Nothing could more clearly prove the great genius of Mrs. Siddons, than
that she has been able so to stamp upon the public mind this amazing
misconception, that, despite all the careful study which of late years
has been given to Shakespeare, this notion of the character of Lady
Macbeth and Macbeth should still prevail. Yet so deeply is it rooted,
and so universal, that whoever attempts to eradicate it will find his
task most difficult. But, believing it to be an utter distortion of
the characters as Shakespeare drew them, and so at variance with the
interior thought, conduct, and development of the play as not only
entirely to obscure its real meaning, but to obliterate all its finest
and most delicate features, we venture to enter upon this difficult
task.
Macbeth and his wife, so far from being the characters above described,
are their direct opposites. He is the villain, who can never satiate
himself with crimes. She, having committed one crime, dies of remorse.
She is essentially a woman—acts suddenly and violently, and then
breaks down, and wastes her life and thoughts in bitter repentance. He
is, on the contrary, essentially a man—who resolves slowly and with
calculation, but once determined and entered upon a course of action,
obstinately pursues it to the end, haunted by no remorse for his
crimes, and agitated by no regrets and doubts, so long as his wicked
plans do not miscarry. The spring of his nature is ambition;[28] and in
working out his ends he is cruel, pitiless, and bloody. He is without
a single good trait of character; and from the beginning to the end
of the play, at every step, he develops deeper abysses of cruelty and
inhumanity in his nature. When he is first presented to us, we, in
common with Lady Macbeth, are completely unaware of his baseness. He
is a thorough hypocrite, and deceives us, as he deceived her. We see
that he has a grasping ambition, but we believe that he is amiable and
weak of purpose, for so Lady Macbeth tells us; but as the play goes
on, his character develops itself, and at last we find that he has
neither heart nor tenderness for anybody or anything; that his will is
unconquerable; that he is utterly without moral sense, is hopelessly
selfish, and wickedly cruel. All he loves is power. His ambition is
insatiable. It grows by what it feeds on. The more he has, the more he
desires, and he is ready to commit every kind of horror for the sake
of attaining his object. He is restrained by no scruples of honor, by
no claims of friendship, by no sensitiveness of conscience. He murders
his sovereign, from whom he has just received large gifts and honors in
his own house; and then instantly compasses the death of his nearest
friend and guest, Banquo. Not content with this, he then seeks the life
of Macduff; and, enraged because he has fled, savagely and in cold
blood puts the whole of his family to the sword. There is a steady
growth of evil in his character from the beginning to the end, or
rather a steady development of his evil nature.
Malcolm and Macduff, who at first were his friends and companions,
afterwards, when they had learned to “know” him, call him “treacherous”
and “devilish.” So far from agreeing in the character given of him by
Lady Macbeth, they say,—
“_Macduff._ Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned
In evil to top Macbeth.
_Malcolm._ I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name.”