and as his relations with Mary Shelley were necessarily emotional and
intimate, an ambiguous proposal and a handful of affectionate letters
will not persuade us that he ever cared more seriously for her than for
scores of others. Though some letters must have been written when he was
courting the sister of Odysseus or keeping a harem at Athens, and others
when his heart was disengaged, can any one decide which are sincere and
which are not? Or, rather, are they not all equally sincere? The
following extract may help us to a conclusion:
"I say! the poet [Shelley] was a thorough mormon--why did he not
declare himself and anticipate the sect? I would have joined him
and found him a settlement--it would not hold together without a
superstition--for man all over the world are [_sic_]
superstitious--it's the nature of the animal--your mother was a
simpleton to have never heard of a man being in love with two
women; when we are young we are in love with all women--the bible
would call it by its proper name, lust."
So wrote Trelawny in 1869 (he had recovered his style) to Claire
Clairmont. His letters to her, now published for the first time, compose
the largest and liveliest part of the volume. If he cared for one woman
more than another, we believe that woman was Claire. She was not good,
but she has been more than sufficiently reviled. For Trelawny that she
was beautiful sufficed; let it satisfy the vindictiveness of virtue that
she suffered horribly. What precisely was the degree of their intimacy
is not clear; but, in view of Claire's reputation and certain passages
in these letters, it is perhaps not unfair to suppose that at any rate
for a short time in the year 1822 she was his mistress. Be that as it
may, after Shelley's death they parted, and doubtless it will be said
she treated her lover ill. To us it appears that he gave as good as he
got. She was mercenary, and he was inconstant. If we read Letter XX
aright, when she did offer, after some months of prudent dalliance, to
live with him at Florence, he replied that he had but L500 a year, which
was not enough for two. An establishment on the confines of
respectability was the last thing he desired. Neither ever loved truly;
but Trelawny, for a time, felt violent physical passion for the woman
whose head and shoulders remind us of what dealers call a Giorgione.
Such is the story, so far as we can deduce it from these letters; each,
if our conjecture serve, was partially satisfied, for in money matters
Trelawny always treated his lady handsomely, though he could not or
would not give her what most she wanted--material security.
He never lost his taste for Claire; and on the ruins of their bitter and
agitated relations was built a kind of friendship, in which expansion
and intimacy and malice were all possible, and which is aptly
commemorated by these vivid and entertaining letters. As for Mary, her
character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her
corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour
cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but
long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun
to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous
backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was
seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike to
disprove it:
"Mary Shelley's jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley--indeed she
was not a suitable companion for the poet--his first wife Harriett
must have been more suitable--Mary was the most conventional slave
I ever met--she even affected the pious dodge, such was her
yearning for society--she was devoid of imagination and Poetry--she
felt compunction when she had lost him--she did not understand or
appreciate him."
There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838
to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we
find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings
harden with my bones--age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived
through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parnassus he had been
shot through the body and had pardoned one of his assailants; he had
swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South
Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran
and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade
and the Sussex fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe
that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his
letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin--men
have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "---- is as gross and fat
as ---- and from the same cause--gluttony and sotting--it's all the
fashion."
And here we would interpose a query--Was it really necessary to suppress
the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of
the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their
descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people
been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading.
After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on
their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think
at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted
that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think
much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say
that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything
about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort
public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be
impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for
the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend to editors and
biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's
complaint--"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly
British sense of give and take--"Never mind, have a shot at mine."
Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl
from Shelley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose
vanity, credulity, and superstition makes them believe in God--the
devil--souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs
away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra
was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but
you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible
cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow
you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He
tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest
lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by
any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons,
and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the
great poet he loved:
"You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things--so he was, and we
men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling,
sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best
qualities of man he excelled."
Through these letters--through all Trelawny's writings--runs a wonderful
sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a
sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no
task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam,
taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of
strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for
syntax--these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and
Shelley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he
liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life
he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in
literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life
he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an
oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way
that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting
sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for
its part, what they hate--the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man
of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of
cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief
Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.)
SOPHOCLES IN LONDON
I
[Sidenote: _"OEdipus" at Covent Garden_]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]
There need be nothing anachronous or archaeological about a performance
of _OEdipus_ at Covent Garden. There is no reason why the plays of
Sophocles should move us less than they moved the Athenians twenty-three
hundred years ago, and there is some for supposing that we, who live in
the twentieth, are more likely to appreciate them than those who lived
in any intervening century. For everywhere to-day is a cry for
simplicity and significance, and art more simple and significant than
the Attic drama does not exist. In less than ten thousand words
Sophocles tells all that can be told about a terrible and complex
tragedy. Zola or Meredith in ten times the space would have added
nothing. They would only have put flesh on bone and muscle; they would
have given us trappings and ornament where Sophocles gives nothing but
bare springs and forces.
Yet in this flat, lean, Attic drama all Latin realism and Celtic
romance, all details and suggestions, are implicit. It states just those
fundamental things of which all the rest are but manifestations or
consequences. There is as much psychology in the scene between OEdipus
and Jocasta, a matter of some seventy lines, as could be forced into
seventy pages by a modern novelist. A change of feeling that it would
take Mr. Henry James a chapter to elaborate is indicated by a statement,
a question, and a reply. Sophocles could never be satisfied with
anything short of the essential: that he stated; the rest he left out.
Though Prof. Gilbert Murray is, as every one knows, a charming and
sensitive scholar, he is not the ideal translator of Sophocles. Perhaps
the Zolas and Merediths--especially the Merediths--impress him too
easily; perhaps he loves too well the literary tradition, the European
tradition of five hundred years, to understand that the greatest poetry
is rarely poetical:
A Voice, a Voice, that is borne on the Holy Way!
What art thou, O Heavenly One, O Word of the Houses of Gold?
Thebes is bright with thee, and my heart it leapeth; yet is it cold,
And my spirit faints as I pray.
I--e! I--e!
What task, O Affrighter of Evil, what task shall thy people essay?
One new as our new-come affliction,
Or an old toil returned with the years?
Unveil thee, thou dread benediction,
Hope's daughter and Fear's.
This is very pretty, but is it Sophocles?--or Swinburne? Still, grace
there is, and distinction, in all that Prof. Murray writes--qualities
that are not accentuated by the mouthings of the protagonist, Mr. Martin
Harvey, the uninspired drone of the chorus, or the intermittent
shrieking and bawling of the crowd. In the translation of the Professor
the simple profundities of the poet become delicate verse, which in the
mouth of the histrion is turned into rhythmless rhetoric.
But, after all, in performances of this sort it is not the play, but the
production, that is the thing--though that is less true of this than of
any other Reinhardt entertainment we have yet seen. Still, deeds not
words: it is by theatrical effects and stage decoration, if by any
means, that the message of Sophocles is to be conveyed to the people of
London. That both are remarkable cannot be denied. _OEdipus_ is a fine
show. It is erudite, striking, and ingenious; but it is not a work of
art. What is it, then? To borrow an expressive, though unnecessarily
insulting term from our neighbours, it is "Le faux bon."
And what is "Le faux bon"? It is something exceedingly difficult to
produce. We do not wish to belittle it; we wish to make plain its
nature. If we succeed, we shall show also how choice and rare a thing
this _OEdipus_ is. At any rate, it keeps good company. The plays of Mr.
Stephen Phillips are classical examples of the "faux bon," and, to
remove a suspicion of disparagement, we hasten to add that the plays of
M. Rostand and FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar are examples too. The
brilliant and entertaining pictures of Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Orpen serve
our purpose even better, so closely do they resemble the first-rate. And
now in this, the latest art, the new art of the theatre, come M. Bakst
with his _Scheherazade_, and Prof. Reinhardt with _Sumurun_ and _The
Miracle_, levying contribution on all the others, culling from them all
those features that people of taste expect and recognize in a work of
art.
For "le faux bon" is produced to meet the demands of a tasteful and
cultivated society--a society that knows as much about art as can be
taught. People who have been brought up on terms of familiarity with the
arts learn to recognize all those features that a work of art ought to
possess; they know the effects that it ought to produce; but, unless
born with the power of reacting emotionally and directly to what they
see and hear, they cannot understand what a work of art is. Such people
are numerous in these days. Far too intelligent to be duped by
imitations of particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what they require
is imitation art. And that is what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's
productions there are dramatic pauses and suspensions, effects of light
and sound, combinations of movement and mass, line and colour, which
recall, not particular works, but general ideas based on the study of
hundreds of works, and provoke, in the right kind of spectator,
precisely those trains of thought and feeling that are provoked by real
works of art. True, they express no first-hand emotion, neither does the
real thing to lovers of the "faux bon," but they cause physical
reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage)
subtle enough to do duty for aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe
that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the
collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are.
_OEdipus_ is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize
that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets;
and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at
the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our
eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not
believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the
creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly
pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form
and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the
most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to _The Miracle_,
because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer _OEdipus_ to the
pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all
seem to us about equal.
II
[Sidenote: _The "Trachiniae" at "The Court."_]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1911_]
The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of
honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek
drama. The traditional opinion that the Athenians were a race of fools
with a sense of form, who wrote tedious verse to perfection, has been
ousted by a new doctrine, less false, but even more dangerous. A race of
scholars arose who assumed, reasonably enough, that plays written by
intelligent men for an intelligent public could not be quite so dull as
tradition proclaimed; and though to rob the classics of their terrors
needed much audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas won ground by
sheer force of plausibility. Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an
intelligent public meant a public of modern scholars. He peopled the
Attic theatre with an audience of cultivated liberals, and by "a good
play" meant the sort of play such a public would relish. Whence it
followed that the Athenian dramatists must have concerned themselves
with those problems which have been so acutely discussed in the plays of
Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.
As a fact, Athenian tragedy is never, or hardly ever, concerned with
intellectual matters of any sort; its business is to express emotion,
and this it has done in the most perfect literary form ever devised by
man. The great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance is that she
plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the
most insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were
cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of
modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much
"psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple
humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience
without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest
subtleties has led her to misunderstand completely the passage (580-95
in the acting edition) in which she supposes the queen to be justifying
herself to a reluctant chorus, whereas, in fact, she is justifying
herself to the Universe, and giving the audience a hint. The meek chorus
is only too willing to agree.
Poor is the triumph of Fate over a timid woman. Heracles is a more
splendid but not less helpless victim. Mr. G. Edwards understands the
part well. Very fine was the passionate indignation, surging up through
physical agony, in the first great speech; and this mood is made to
prevail until in the name "[Greek: Nessos]" the hero recognizes the
finger of God. From that point, though violent and dictatorial still to
his son and the respectful mortals about him, the tyrant submits
sullenly to those he can neither vanquish nor appease.
Mr. Garrod, who played the part of Hyllus, spoke his lines exceedingly
well. Perhaps the chorus was a little too classical--that is to say, too
stiff and lackadaisical; but the phrasing was always pretty and
sometimes unexpected, and the lovely strophe beginning,
[Greek: hon aiola nux enarizomena;]
seemed to gain a new enchantment from the delicately concerted voices.
Scholars will have to bring strong arguments to justify what is an
obvious literary blemish in the distribution of the concluding lines.
Somehow or other, between Hyllus and the chorus, the sombre intensity of
the complaint was allowed to evaporate. The words,
[Greek: ta de nun hestot' oiktra men hemin, aischra]
and
[Greek: kouden touton o ti me Zeus]
should come from the same lips, surely.
O Providence, I will not praise,
Neither for fear, nor joy of gain,
Your blundering and cruel ways.
* * * * *
And all men's miserable days,
And all the ugliness and pain,
O Providence, I will not praise.
THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON[14]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Oct. 1911_]
No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the
Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that
some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce
from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and
that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants,
practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name.
What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should
be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all
great art. "Rhythmic vitality," Prof. Giles calls it; Mr. Okakura, "the
Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things"; Mr. Binyon
suggests "the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of
living things."
"At any rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist
must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and
himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit
which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe
that he must seize the universal in the particular."
"The universal in the particular," that is perhaps what the greatest art
expresses. Perhaps it is a widespread consciousness of this that
produces all great movements; and perhaps the history of their decline
and fall is nothing more than a history of its gradual decay and
disappearance. Great movements seem to arise when men become aware
suddenly that the universe has a soul: the first artists of a movement
are the men who perceive most clearly this soul in every part of the
universe; they are called Primitives. They are men driven to art by the
intolerable necessity of expressing what they feel; they break silence
only because they have something to say; and their one object is to say
it as completely and intelligibly as possible. Primitives stand in a
class by themselves because they have perceived more clearly than others
the reality that lies beneath the superficial, and because, having no
other end in view, they have expressed it more completely.
Great movements are alike in their beginnings; whether they are
Buddhist or Byzantine, Greek or Egyptian, Assyrian or Mexican, their
primitives have two qualities in common, profundity and directness. And
in their histories, so far as we may judge from the scanty records of
ancient civilizations, all have a general resemblance. Always, as the
sense of reality decays, the artist labours to conceal under technical
proficiency the poverty of his emotional experience. For the inspired
artist technique was nothing but a means; for his hungry successors it
becomes an end. For the man who has little to say the manner of saying
it gains consequence, and in a manner which has been elaborated into an
intricate craft the greatest emotions cannot be expressed. The circle is
vicious. With the exaltation and elaboration of craftsmanship expression
first falls into neglect and then becomes impossible. Those who are not
content to marvel at cleverness, but still ask emotion of art, must be
satisfied with such as craftsmen can supply. If pictures no longer
express feeling they may at least provoke it. If painting is to be a
mere question of pattern-making, at least let the patterns be pretty.
Sensuous beauty and cunning delineation become rivals for the throne
whence expression has been ousted. So, with occasional irregularities,
the path winds down the hill. Skill itself declines, and the sense of
beauty runs thin. At the bottom, for what once was art--the expression
of man's most holy emotions--smart tradesmen offer, at fancy prices,
mechanical prettiness, cheap sentiment, and accurate representation.
Comparisons between the history of Asiatic and of European art are
admittedly possible; but as yet we believe the precise nature of the
similarity has not been stated. It lies in the fact that both conform to
the general laws of decay. The Asiatic movement with which we are
familiar is essentially Buddhist; it expresses that sense of the
universe that is expressed in another form by Buddhist doctrine and its
later developments along the lines of Taoist idealism. How far the
spread of Buddhism in China represents a spiritual reaction from the dry
materialism of Confucianism is no matter for brief and dogmatic
discussion. We need only say that the fourth-century painting in the
British Museum by Ku K'ai-chih, though the artist himself is said to
have been a Buddhist, belongs clearly to an earlier movement than that
of which the T'ang and just pre-T'ang masterpieces are the primitives.
By comparison with early Buddhist art this exquisite picture is
sufficiently lacking in emotional significance to tempt one to suppose
that it represents the ripe and highly cultivated decadence of a
movement that the growing religious spirit was soon to displace. Slight
as his acquaintance with this early art must be, an Englishman who
visited regularly the exhibition at Shepherd's Bush was able to gather
from eight or ten pictures, a couple of large wooden Bodhisattvas, and a
few small figures in bronze, some idea of the way in which Japanese
primitives could enter and express the world of reality. That same power
he will find in the Byzantine mosaics of the sixth century, which
express the earliest triumphs of another spiritual revolution over the
cultured materialism of a moribund civilization.