for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the habit of
intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to
race-prejudices. Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a
German of the Germans. He loved his country—no man more so. Its people
were dear to him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon
trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. ‘How can one
write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how
could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a
nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
so great a part of my own cultivation?’ This note, sounded in the modern
world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the
cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate
race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the
variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation,
we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own
culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is
regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is
looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will of
course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it. They will not
say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but
because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than
those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us
the peace that springs from understanding.
Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final,
and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or
school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its
own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be
unattainable. How little we have of this temper in England, and how much
we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the
race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate
politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of
science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of
which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author
of the _Origin of Species_ had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If
one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can
but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We
are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful,
but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
ERNEST. Ah! what an antinomian you are!
GILBERT. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for
middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They
belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is
the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more
important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right
and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious
civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to
natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence
possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and
wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to
that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those
to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being
an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a
richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the
uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes;
it is dangerous—all ideas, as I told you, are so. But the night wearies,
and the light flickers in the lamp. One more thing I cannot help saying
to you. You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing. The
nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of
the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of
Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this
is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
of the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that
leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit
possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?
GILBERT. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive
Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are
blooming, he will sit contented ‘in that deep, motionless quiet which
mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.’ He will look out upon the world
and know its secret. By contact with divine things he will become
divine. His will be the perfect life, and his only.
ERNEST. You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You
have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the
world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the
highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the
artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a
thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is
unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer.
GILBERT. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find
his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before
the rest of the world.
ERNEST. His punishment?
GILBERT. And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw back the
curtains and open the windows wide. How cool the morning air is!
Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple
mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple.
It is too late to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the
roses. Come! I am tired of thought.
THE TRUTH OF MASKS
A NOTE ON ILLUSION
IN many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on
that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of
his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production of _Antony
and Cleopatra_, he would probably say that the play, and the play only,
is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella. While,
as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article
in the _Nineteenth Century_, has laid it down as a dogma of art that
archæology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of
Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest
pedantries of an age of prigs.
Lord Lytton’s position I shall examine later on; but, as regards the
theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the
costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare’s
method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French,
English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects
on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.
Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of
costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have
still his stage-directions for the three great processions in _Henry the
Eighth_, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
Anne Boleyn’s hair. Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager
to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed;
and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe
Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic character,
notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in
the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule
on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the French
Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M.
Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial
to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured. And
elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English
stage under Shakespeare’s influence was attacked by the contemporary
critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic
tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are
always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
certain dramatic effects. Many of his plays, such as _Measure for
Measure_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Two Gentleman of Verona_, _All’s Well
that Ends Well_, _Cymbeline_, and others, depend for their illusion on
the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the
delightful scene in _Henry the Sixth_, on the modern miracles of healing
by faith, loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and
the _dénoûment_ of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ hinges on the colour of
Anne Page’s gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the
instances are almost numberless. Posthumus hides his passion under a
peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears
the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in ‘all points as a
man’; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele;
Jessica flees from her father’s house in boy’s dress, and Julia ties up
her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry
the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim;
Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then
in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as
for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as
Herne the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?
Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
intensifying dramatic situation less numerous. After slaughter of
Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon
ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the
London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he
has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown
and George and Garter; the climax of _The Tempest_ is reached when
Prospero, throwing off his enchanter’s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and
rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in
_Hamlet_ changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and
as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in
her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare
arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault
‘a feasting presence full of light,’ turns the tomb into a bridal
chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo’s speech of the triumph
of Beauty over Death.
Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo’s
stockings, the pattern on a wife’s handkerchief, the sleeve of a young
soldier, and a fashionable woman’s bonnets, become in Shakespeare’s hands
points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of
the play in question is conditioned absolutely. Many other dramatists
have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly to
the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so
brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles,
whose dress, by the way, only an archæologist can understand; the fun of
a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of
shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine
clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups,
may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always
played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but
nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such
irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such
pathos, as Shakespeare himself. Armed cap-à-pie, the dead King stalks on
the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark;
Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded
and embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert—
Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
And I did never ask it you again;
and Orlando’s blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that
exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling that
underlies Rosalind’s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;
I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
That I kiss aught but he,
says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its
way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little Prince passing
to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s girdle; Duncan sends a
ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of
Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife’s comedy. The great
rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a
kind of colour-motive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimène in
the _Cid_; and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Cæsar’s
cloak:—
I remember
The first time ever Cæsar put it on.
’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
The day he overcame the Nervii:—
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
Our Cæsar’s vesture wounded?
The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic
as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’s wandering on
the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when
Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her
husband’s raiment, arrays himself in that husband’s very garb to work
upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of
modern French realism, nothing even in _Thérèse Raquin_, that masterpiece
of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
this strange scene in _Cymbeline_.
In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
suggested by costume. Rosalind’s
Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
and hose in my disposition?
Constance’s
Grief fills the place of my absent child,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth—
Ah! cut my lace asunder!—
are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of the finest
effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of
_Lear_, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and applying it to Cordelia’s
lips when he came to the line,
This feather stirs; she lives!
Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I
remember, some fur from his archæologically-incorrect ermine for the same
business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the
truer. And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of _Richard the
Third_ have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and terror of
his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and quiet that
preceded it, and the delivery of such lines as
What, is my beaver easier than it was?
And all my armour laid into my tent?
Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy—
lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last
words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching to
Bosworth:—
Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more
Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st.
As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to
be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness of
the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of the
want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most
elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking
pains about their make-up. Even now it is difficult to produce such a
play as the _Comedy of Errors_; and to the picturesque accident of Miss
Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing
_Twelfth Night_ adequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of
Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be
done, requires the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a
costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of
the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an
artist to direct personally the whole production. For he is most careful
to tell us the dress and appearance of each character. ‘Racine abhorre
la réalité,’ says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas
s’occuper de son costume. Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications du
poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille d’une épée.’ But
with Shakespeare it is very different. He gives us directions about the
costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in _Macbeth_, and
the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_, several elaborate descriptions of
his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which
Petruchio is to be married. Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to
carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her
face brown so as to look sunburnt. The children who play at fairies in
Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green—a compliment, by the
way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were—and in white,
with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to
Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished
from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his
boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her
husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of
the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are
all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know the
patterns on the Dauphin’s armour and the Pucelle’s sword, the crest on
Warwick’s helmet and the colour of Bardolph’s nose. Portia has golden
hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek’s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won’t curl at all.
Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some
hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their faces.
Lear has a white beard, Hamlet’s father a grizzled, and Benedick is to
shave his in the course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of stage
beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many different
colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own
are properly tied on. There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and
of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of
Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver
in an ass’s head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the
Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband
and his wife’s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he
makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the
ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions of the
_mundus muliebris_, from the long of Autolycus in the _Winter’s Tale_
down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in _Much Ado About
Nothing_, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth
while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to
be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar—a passage which has the advantage of
brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
metaphysics of _Sartor Resartus_. But I think that from what I have
already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested
in costume. I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been
concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the
Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that
costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the
audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his
disposal. Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much
value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the
silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he has
as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth
of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
The difficulty Ducis felt about translating _Othello_ in consequence of
the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his
attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le bandeau!
le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference between _la
tragédie philosophique_ and the drama of real life; and the introduction
for the first time of the word _mouchoir_ at the Théâtre Français was an
era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and
M. Zola the _enfant terrible_, just as the classicism of the earlier part
of the century was emphasised by Talma’s refusal to play Greek heroes any
longer in a powdered periwig—one of the many instances, by the way, of
that desire for archæological accuracy in dress which has distinguished
the great actors of our age.
In criticising the importance given to money in _La Comédie Humaine_,
Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero
in fiction, _le héros métallique_. Of Shakespeare it may be said he was
the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may
depend on a crinoline.
The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way, to the results
of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s
stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;
but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a
London theatre in Shakespeare’s time, there are mentioned particular
costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars, and fools;
green coats for Robin Hood’s men, and a green gown for Maid Marian; a
white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks;
besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of
cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats,
frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits,
grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe ‘for to goo invisibell,’ which
seems inexpensive at £3, 10s., and four incomparable fardingales—all of
which show a desire to give every character an appropriate dress. There
are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets,
lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of
costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and
goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archæological
research on the part of the manager of the theatre. It is true that
there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the _donnée_ of the
play was after the Fall.