were grace of gesture and music of voice. Indeed, to gain these virtues
their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics
and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a
quality of art, but a condition of its production. Whether or not our
English actors hold the same view may be doubted; but Mr. Vezin certainly
has always recognised the importance of a physical as well as of an
intellectual training for the stage, and his performance of King Priam
was distinguished by stately dignity and most musical enunciation. With
Mr. Vezin, grace of gesture is an unconscious result--not a conscious
effort. It has become nature, because it was once art. Mr. Beerbohm
Tree also is deserving of very high praise for his Paris. Ease and
elegance characterised every movement he made, and his voice was
extremely effective. Mr. Tree is the perfect Proteus of actors. He can
wear the dress of any century and the appearance of any age, and has a
marvellous capacity of absorbing his personality into the character he is
creating. To have method without mannerism is given only to a few, but
among the few is Mr. Tree. Miss Alma Murray does not possess the
physique requisite for our conception of Helen, but the beauty of her
movements and the extremely sympathetic quality of her voice gave an
indefinable charm to her performance. Mrs. Jopling looked like a poem
from the Pantheon, and indeed the personae mutae were not the least
effective figures in the play. Hecuba was hardly a success. In acting,
the impression of sincerity is conveyed by tone, not by mere volume of
voice, and whatever influence emotion has on utterance it is certainly
not in the direction of false emphasis. Mrs. Beerbohm Tree's OEnone was
much better, and had some fine moments of passion; but the harsh
realistic shriek with which the nymph flung herself from the battlements,
however effective it might have been in a comedy of Sardou, or in one of
Mr. Burnand's farces, was quite out of place in the representation of a
Greek tragedy. The classical drama is an imaginative, poetic art, which
requires the grand style for its interpretation, and produces its effects
by the most ideal means. It is in the operas of Wagner, not in popular
melodrama, that any approximation to the Greek method can be found.
Better to wear mask and buskin than to mar by any modernity of expression
the calm majesty of Melpomene.
As an artistic whole, however, the performance was undoubtedly a great
success. It has been much praised for its archaeology, but Mr. Godwin is
something more than a mere antiquarian. He takes the facts of
archaeology, but he converts them into artistic and dramatic effects, and
the historical accuracy that underlies the visible shapes of beauty that
he presents to us, is not by any means the distinguishing quality of the
complete work of art. This quality is the absolute unity and harmony of
the entire presentation, the presence of one mind controlling the most
minute details, and revealing itself only in that true perfection which
hides personality. On more than one occasion it seemed to me that the
stage was kept a little too dark, and that a purely picturesque effect of
light and shade was substituted for the plastic clearness of outline that
the Greeks so desired; some objection, too, might be made to the late
character of the statue of Aphrodite, which was decidedly post-Periclean;
these, however, are unimportant points. The performance was not intended
to be an absolute reproduction of the Greek stage in the fifth century
before Christ: it was simply the presentation in Greek form of a poem
conceived in the Greek spirit; and the secret of its beauty was the
perfect correspondence of form and matter, the delicate equilibrium of
spirit and sense.
As for the play, it had, of course, to throw away many sweet superfluous
graces of expression before it could adapt itself to the conditions of
theatrical presentation, but much that is good was retained; and the
choruses, which really possess some pure notes of lyric loveliness, were
sung in their entirety. Here and there, it is true, occur such lines as--
What wilt thou do? What can the handful still left?--
lines that owe their blank verse character more to the courtesy of the
printer than to the genius of the poet, for without rhythm and melody
there is no verse at all; and the attempt to fit Greek forms of
construction to our English language often gives the work the air of an
awkward translation; however, there is a great deal that is pleasing in
Helena in Troas and, on the whole, the play was worthy of its pageant and
the poem deserved the peplums.
It is much to be regretted that Mr. Godwin's beautiful theatre cannot be
made a permanent institution. Even looked at from the low standpoint of
educational value, such a performance as that given last Monday might be
of the greatest service to modern culture; and who knows but a series of
these productions might civilise South Kensington and give tone to
Brompton?
Still it is something to have shown our artists 'a dream of form in days
of thought,' and to have allowed the Philistines to peer into Paradise.
And this is what Mr. Godwin has done.
PLEASING AND PRATTLING
(Pall Mall Gazette, August 4, 1880.)
Sixty years ago, when Sir Walter Scott was inaugurating an era of
historical romance, The Wolfe of Badenoch was a very popular book. To us
its interest is more archaeological than artistic, and its characters
seem merely puppets parading in fourteenth-century costume. It is true
our grandfathers thought differently. They liked novels in which the
heroine exclaims, 'Peace with thine impudence, sir knave. Dost thou dare
to speak thus in presence of the Lady Eleanore de Selby? . . . A
greybeard's ire shall never--,' while the hero remarks that 'the welkin
reddenes i' the west.' In fact, they considered that language like this
is exceedingly picturesque and gives the necessary historical
perspective. Nowadays, however, few people have the time to read a novel
that requires a glossary to explain it, and we fear that without a
glossary the general reader will hardly appreciate the value of such
expressions as 'gnoffe,' 'bowke,' 'herborow,' 'papelarde,' 'couepe,'
'rethes,' 'pankers,' 'agroted lorrel,' and 'horrow tallow-catch,' all of
which occur in the first few pages of The Wolfe of Badenoch. In a novel
we want life, not learning; and, unfortunately, Sir Thomas Lauder lays
himself open to the criticism Jonson made on Spenser, that 'in affecting
the ancients he writ no language.' Still, there is a healthy spirit of
adventure in the book, and no doubt many people will be interested to see
the kind of novel the public liked in 1825.
Keep My Secret, by Miss G. M. Robins, is very different. It is quite
modern both in manner and in matter. The heroine, Miss Olga Damien, when
she is a little girl tries to murder Mr. Victor Burnside. Mr. Burnside,
who is tall, blue-eyed and amber-haired, makes her promise never to
mention the subject to any one; this, in fact, is the secret that gives
the title to the book. The result is that Miss Damien is blackmailed by
a fascinating and unscrupulous uncle and is nearly burnt to death in the
secret chamber of an old castle. The novel at the end gets too
melodramatic in character and the plot becomes a chaos of incoherent
incidents, but the writing is clever and bright. It is just the book, in
fact, for a summer holiday, as it is never dull and yet makes no demands
at all upon the intellect.
Mrs. Chetwynd gives us a new type of widow. As a rule, in fiction widows
are delightful, designing and deceitful; but Mrs. Dorriman is not by any
means a Cleopatra in crape. She is a weak, retiring woman, very feeble
and very feminine, and with the simplicity that is characteristic of such
sweet and shallow natures she allows her brother to defraud her of all
her property. The widow is rather a bore and the brother is quite a
bear, but Margaret Rivers who, to save her sister from poverty, marries a
man she does not love, is a cleverly conceived character, and Lady Lyons
is an admirable old dowager. The book can be read without any trouble
and was probably written without any trouble also. The style is
prattling and pleasing.
The plot of Delamere is not very new. On the death of her husband, Mrs.
De Ruthven discovers that the estates belong by right not to her son
Raymond but to her niece Fleurette. As she keeps her knowledge to
herself, a series of complications follows, but the cousins are
ultimately united in marriage and the story ends happily. Mr. Curzon
writes in a clever style, and though its construction is rather clumsy
the novel is a thoroughly interesting one.
A Daughter of Fife tells us of the love of a young artist for a Scotch
fisher-girl. The character sketches are exceptionally good, especially
that of David Promoter, a fisherman who leaves his nets to preach the
gospel, and the heroine is quite charming till she becomes civilised. The
book is a most artistic combination of romantic feeling with realistic
form, and it is pleasant to read descriptions of Scotch scenery that do
not represent the land of mist and mountain as a sort of chromolithograph
from the Brompton Road.
In Mr. Speight's novel, A Barren Title, we have an impoverished earl who
receives an allowance from his relations on condition of his remaining
single, being all the time secretly married and the father of a grown-up
son. The story is improbable and amusing.
On the whole, there is a great deal to be said for our ordinary English
novelists. They have all some story to tell, and most of them tell it in
an interesting manner. Where they fail is in concentration of style.
Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters.
What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric. We are
most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid
formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they
would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of
verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a
very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one
should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation
of the intellectually unemployed.
(1) The Wolfe of Badenoch: A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth
Century. By Sir Thomas Lauder. (Hamilton, Adams and Co.)
(2) Keep My Secret. By G. M. Robins. (Bentley and Son.)
(3) Mrs. Dorriman. By the Hon. Mrs. Henry Chetwynd. (Chapman and Hall.)
(4) Delamere. By G. Curzon. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
(5) A Daughter of Fife. By Amelia Barr. (James Clarke and Co.)
(6) A Barren Title. By T. W. Speight. (Chatto and Windus.)
BALZAC IN ENGLISH
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)
Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles Dickens
complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although
since then the public has become more familiar with the great
masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the
Comedie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of
novel readers. It is really the greatest monument that literature has
produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says
that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of
documents on human nature. Balzac's aim, in fact, was to do for humanity
what Buffon had done for the animal creation. As the naturalist studied
lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women. Yet he was no
mere reporter. Photography and proces-verbal were not the essentials of
his method. Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius
converted facts into truths, and truths into truth. He was, in a word, a
marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific
spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was
entirely his own. The distinction between such a book as M. Zola's
L'Assommoir and such a book as Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the
distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 'All
Balzac's characters,' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour
of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured
as dreams. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The
very scullions have genius.' He was, of course, accused of being
immoral. Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge. His
answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive. 'Whoever
contributes his stone to the edifice of ideas,' he wrote, 'whoever
proclaims an abuse, whoever sets his mark upon an evil to be abolished,
always passes for immoral. If you are true in your portraits, if, by
dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult
language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face.' The
morals of the personages of the Comedie Humaine are simply the morals of
the world around us. They are part of the artist's subject-matter; they
are not part of his method. If there be any need of censure it is to
life, not to literature, that it should be given. Balzac, besides, is
essentially universal. He sees life from every point of view. He has no
preferences and no prejudices. He does not try to prove anything. He
feels that the spectacle of life contains its own secret. 'II cree un
monde et se tait.'
And what a world it is! What a panorama of passions! What a pell-mell
of men and women! It was said of Trollope that he increased the number
of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the
Comedie Humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the
people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempre, le Pere Goriot,
Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le
Cousin Pons, De Marsay--all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion
of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is
fervent and fiery-coloured; we not merely feel for them but we see
them--they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism. A steady course of
Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to
the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to
meet Tomkins, the friend of one's boyhood, when one can sit at home with
Lucien de Rubempre? It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac's
society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in May fair.
In spite of this, there are many people who have declared the Comedie
Humaine to be indigestible. Perhaps it is: but then what about truffles?
Balzac's publisher refused to be disturbed by any such criticism as that.
'Indigestible, is it?' he exclaimed with what, for a publisher, was rare
good sense. 'Well, I should hope so; who ever thinks of a dinner that
isn't?' And our English publisher, Mr. Routledge, clearly agrees with M.
Poulet-Malassis, as he is occupied in producing a complete translation of
the Comedie Humaine. The two volumes that at present lie before us
contain Cesar Birotteau, that terrible tragedy of finance, and L'lllustre
Gaudissart, the apotheosis of the commercial traveller, the Duchesse de
Langeais, most marvellous of modern love stories, Le Chef d'OEuvre
Inconnu, from which Mr. Henry James took his Madonna of the Future, and
that extraordinary romance Une Passion dans le Desert. The choice of
stories is quite excellent, but the translations are very unequal, and
some of them are positively bad. L'lllustre Gaudissart, for instance, is
full of the most grotesque mistakes, mistakes that would disgrace a
schoolboy. 'Bon conseil vaut un oeil dans la main' is translated 'Good
advice is an egg in the hand'! 'Ecus rebelles' is rendered 'rebellious
lucre,' and such common expressions as 'faire la barbe,' 'attendre la
vente,' 'n'entendre rien,' palir sur une affaire,' are all mistranslated.
'Des bois de quoi se faire un cure-dent' is not 'a few trees to slice
into toothpicks,' but 'as much timber as would make a toothpick'; 'son
horloge enfermee dans une grande armoire oblongue' is not 'a clock which
he kept shut up in a large oblong closet' but simply a clock in a tall
clock-case; 'journal viager' is not 'an annuity,' 'garce' is not the same
as 'farce,' and 'dessins des Indes' are not 'drawings of the Indies.' On
the whole, nothing can be worse than this translation, and if Mr.
Routledge wishes the public to read his version of the Comedie Humaine,
he should engage translators who have some slight knowledge of French.
Cesar Birotteau is better, though it is not by any means free from
mistakes. 'To suffer under the Maximum' is an absurd rendering of 'subir
le maximum'; 'perse' is 'chintz,' not 'Persian chintz'; 'rendre le pain
benit' is not 'to take the wafer'; 'riviere' is hardly a 'fillet of
diamonds'; and to translate 'son coeur avait un calus a l'endroit du
loyer' by 'his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease' is an
insult to two languages. On the whole, the best version is that of the
Duchesse de Langeais, though even this leaves much to be desired. Such a
sentence as 'to imitate the rough logician who marched before the
Pyrrhonians while denying his own movement' entirely misses the point of
Balzac's 'imiter le rude logicien qui marchait devant les pyrrhoniens,
qui niaient le mouvement.'
We fear Mr. Routledge's edition will not do. It is well printed and
nicely bound; but his translators do not understand French. It is a
great pity, for La Comedie Humaine is one of the masterpieces of the age.
Balzac's Novels in English. The Duchesse de Langeais and Other Stories;
Cesar Birotteau. (Routledge and Sons.)
TWO NEW NOVELS
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 16, 1880.)
Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their
culture, and Mr. G. Manville Fenn's last venture is no exception to the
general rule. The Master of the Ceremonies is turbid, terrifying and
thrilling. It contains, besides many 'moving accidents by flood and
field,' an elopement, an abduction, a bigamous marriage, an attempted
assassination, a duel, a suicide, and a murder. The murder, we must
acknowledge, is a masterpiece. It would do credit to Gaboriau, and
should make Miss Braddon jealous. The Newgate Calendar itself contains
nothing more fascinating, and what higher praise than this can be given
to a sensational novel? Not that Lady Teigne, the hapless victim, is
killed in any very new or subtle manner. She is merely strangled in bed,
like Desdemona; but the circumstances of the murder are so peculiar that
Claire Denville, in common with the reader, suspects her own father of
being guilty, while the father is convinced that the real criminal is his
eldest son. Stuart Denville himself, the Master of the Ceremonies, is
most powerfully drawn. He is a penniless, padded dandy who, by a careful
study of the 'grand style' in deportment, has succeeded in making himself
the Brummel of the promenade and the autocrat of the Assembly Rooms. A
light comedian by profession, he is suddenly compelled to play the
principal part in a tragedy. His shallow, trivial nature is forced into
the loftiest heroism, the noblest self-sacrifice. He becomes a hero
against his will. The butterfly goes to martyrdom, the fop has to become
fine. Round this character centres, or rather should centre, the
psychological interest of the book, but unfortunately Mr. Fenn has
insisted on crowding his story with unnecessary incident. He might have
made of his novel 'A Soul's Tragedy,' but he has produced merely a
melodrama in three volumes. The Master of the Ceremonies is a melancholy
example of the fatal influence of Drury Lane on literature. Still, it
should be read, for though Mr. Fenn has offered up his genius as a
holocaust to Mr. Harris, he is never dull, and his style is on the whole
very good. We wish, however, that he would not try to give articulate
form to inarticulate exclamations. Such a passage as this is quite
dreadful and fails, besides, in producing the effect it aims at:
'He--he--he, hi--hi--hi, hec--hec--hec, ha--ha--ha! ho--ho! Bless
my--hey--ha! hey--ha! hugh--hugh--hugh! Oh dear me! Oh--why don't
you--heck--heck--heck--heck--heck! shut
the--ho--ho--ho--ho--hugh--hugh--window before I--ho--ho--ho--ho!'
This horrible jargon is supposed to convey the impression of a lady
coughing. It is, of course, a mere meaningless monstrosity on a par with
spelling a sneeze. We hope that Mr. Fenn will not again try these
theatrical tricks with language, for he possesses a rare art--the art of
telling a story well.
A Statesman's Love, the author tells us in a rather mystical preface, was
written 'to show that the alchemist-like transfiguration supposed to be
wrought in our whole nature by that passion has no existence in fact,'
but it cannot be said to prove this remarkable doctrine.
It is an exaggerated psychological study of a modern woman, a sort of
picture by limelight, full of coarse colours and violent contrasts, not
by any means devoid of cleverness but essentially false and
over-emphasised. The heroine, Helen Rohan by name, tells her own story
and, as she takes three volumes to do it in, we weary of the one point of
view. Life to be intelligible should be approached from many sides, and
valuable though the permanent ego may be in philosophy, the permanent ego
in fiction soon becomes a bore. There are, however, some interesting
scenes in the novel, and a good portrait of the Young Pretender, for
though the heroine is absolutely a creation of the nineteenth century,
the background of the story is historical and deals with the Rebellion of
'45. As for the style, it is often original and picturesque; here and
there are strong individual touches and brilliant passages; but there is
also a good deal of pretence and a good deal of carelessness.
What can be said, for instance, about such expressions as these, taken at
random from the second volume,--'evanishing,' 'solitary loneness,' 'in my
_then_ mood,' 'the bees _might advantage_ by to-day,' 'I would not listen
reverently as _did the other some_ who went,' 'entangling myself in the
net of this retiari,' and why should Bassanio's beautiful speech in the
trial scene be deliberately attributed to Shylock? On the whole, A
Statesman's Love cannot be said to be an artistic success; but still it
shows promise and, some day, the author who, to judge by the style, is
probably a woman, may do good work. This, however, will require pruning,
prudence and patience. We shall see.
(1) The Master of the Ceremonies. By G. Manville Fenn. (Ward and
Downey.)
(2) A Statesman's Love. By Emile Bauche. (Blackwood and Co.)
BEN JONSON
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1886.)
In selecting Mr. John Addington Symonds to write the life of Ben Jonson
for his series of 'English Worthies,' Mr. Lang, no doubt, exercised a
wise judgment. Mr. Symonds, like the author of Volpone, is a scholar and
a man of letters; his book on Shakspeare's Predecessors showed a
marvellous knowledge of the Elizabethan period, and he is a recognised
authority on the Italian Renaissance. The last is not the least of his
qualifications. Without a full appreciation of the meaning of the
Humanistic movement it is impossible to understand the great struggle
between the Classical form and the Romantic spirit which is the chief
critical characteristic of the golden age of the English drama, an age
when Shakespeare found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries,
but in Seneca, and when Jonson armed himself with Aristotle to win the
suffrages of a London audience. Mr. Symonds' book, consequently, will be
opened with interest. It does not, of course, contain much that is new
about Jonson's life. But the facts of Jonson's life are already well
known, and in books of this kind what is true is of more importance than
what is new, appreciation more valuable than discovery. Scotchmen,
however, will, no doubt, be interested to find that Mr. Symonds has
succeeded in identifying Jonson's crest with that of the Johnstones of
Annandale, and the story of the way the literary Titan escaped from
hanging, by proving that he could read, is graphically told.
On the whole, we have a vivid picture of the man as he lived. Where
picturesqueness is required, Mr. Symonds is always good. The usual
comparison with Dr. Johnson is, of course, brought out. Few of 'Rare
Ben's' biographers spare us that, and the point is possibly a natural one
to make. But when Mr. Symonds calls upon us to notice that both men made
a journey to Scotland, and that 'each found in a Scotchman his
biographer,' the parallel loses all value. There is an M in Monmouth and
an M in Macedon, and Drummond of Hawthornden and Boswell of Auchinleck
were both born the other side of the Tweed; but from such analogies
nothing is to be learned. There is no surer way of destroying a
similarity than to strain it.