Is it well to imitate Shakespeare?--The Death of the Classical
Drama--Herman Merivale and the _White Pilgrim_--Wills and his Plays:
_Charles the First_, _Claudian_--Tennyson as a Dramatist; he comes too
soon and too late--Tennyson and the Critics--_The Falcon_, _The Promise of
May_, _The Cup_, _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, _Harold_.
Irving's personality has filled the preceding pages so completely that I
have been unable to find space in which to do justice to those men and
women who, near at hand, or from afar, have helped to uphold the Colossus
upon the stage. Ellen Terry, first of all, who has not only been an
incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare's heroines, but
who, even more perhaps than her illustrious colleague, has in her pure and
sweet elocution set the poet's dream to music. From America have come Mary
Anderson, whose statuesque attitudes are well remembered; and, more
recently, Ada Rehan, who gave us so modern and so alluring a Rosalind. It
was possible for a critic to declare,--speaking of the vogue towards which
everything seems to have worked,--that of all the dramatists of the day,
Shakespeare was the most successful; adding with truth, that, having been
brought into fashion in the theatre, Shakespeare in his turn had brought
the theatre into fashion.
But is the resuscitation of Shakespeare productive of nothing but good?
Has it not been accompanied by certain drawbacks which are still evident,
and by certain dangers all of which have not been successfully surmounted?
One has taken to doubting whether Shakespeare be really the best of guides
for a new generation of dramatic writers, especially when one has studied
closely what the imitation of Shakespeare involves in practice. To imitate
Shakespeare is to copy in the most superficial manner his locutions and
turns of phrase, his complicated plots, his successions of changing
scenes; to mingle prose and verse, and to indulge in puns and _coups de
theatre_; above all, to assume certain mannerisms that are held to bear
the stamp of the master. To come near him, on the other hand, it is not
merely prose and verse that must alternate, but the realism and the poetry
of which these are but the outward signs; it is not puns and _coups de
theatre_ that are essential, but the power to divert and to move, which is
quite another matter. Shakespeare's spirit is not to be assimilated; this
is impossible to a man of our time: one can but dress oneself up in the
cast-off garment which served as a covering to his genius. This garment
does not suit us,--it is either too long or too short, or both together.
One dresses up as Shakespeare for an hour, and resembles the great man
about as much as a lawyer's clerk, masquerading _en mousquetaire_,
resembles d'Artagnan, or as the Turk of carnival time resembles the
genuine Turk smoking his pipe outside his cafe in Stamboul. This
tremendous model, all whose aspects we cannot see because it goes beyond
the orbit of our perspective glass, oppresses and paralyses our
intelligence: did one understand it, one would not be much the better off.
It would be sheer folly to wish the modern English dramatist not to read
his Shakespeare, for it is in Shakespeare that he will find the English
character in all its length and breadth; let him absorb and steep himself
in Shakespeare by all means: but let him then forget Shakespeare and be of
his own time, let him not walk our streets of to-day in the doublet and
hose of 1600. The choice has to be made between Shakespeare and life, for
in literature, as in morals, it is not possible to serve two masters. It
is possible that Shakespeare has been, and is still, the great obstacle to
a free development of a national drama. Nor is there anything to be
astonished at in this. The Shakespeare whom we know could not have been
born when he was had there been another Shakespeare two and a half
centuries before.
These are _a priori_ considerations, but they are confirmed by the
experience of the last twenty years. These years have seen the apotheosis
of Shakespeare and the death of the classical drama. Amongst the last who
tried to galvanise it into life, I hardly know what others to mention
besides Wills and Herman Merivale. In the drama entitled _The White
Pilgrim_, Merivale achieved some really beautiful passages: in them may be
felt the first thrill of those sombre and impalpable reveries, come
towards us with the cool breath of the North, in which we find a balm for
our fever. As for Wills, for a moment he gave rise to hopes. There was
room for false expectations as to the future of his career. He was, says
Mr. Archer, "so strong and so weak, so manly and so puerile, so poetic and
so commonplace, so careful and so slovenly." His Bohemian life, his
impassioned character, his hasty methods of production, added to the
illusion, and gave him, in the distance, a look of genius. But it was a
misleading look. I have seen two of his pieces, _Charles the First_ and
_Claudian_. The first called up on the stage--for the last time
doubtless--that legend of the martyr king which the historical labours of
Gardiner have shivered into atoms. And here is the story of Claudian. A
man who has killed a monk falls for this crime under a curse which,
instead of attaching itself to him, attaches itself to all those who cross
his path. He does evil unwittingly, when he would fain do good; he brings
about the death of those he loves. In the end he is saved. So that this
horrible waste of human lives, this torrent of tears and blood, these
sufferings, agonies, despairs, all serve but to gain a seat for a
white-robed criminal at the banquet of Life Eternal. "In order that the
world may be Claudian's purgatory, it must first be the hell of an entire
generation." Thus it is with all the pieces of Wills; they are founded
upon conceptions which crumble away upon analysis, and the versification
is too poor to veil or redeem the weakness of the dramatic idea.
Despite the efforts of Henry Arthur Jones and some other living writers,
tragic verse, blank verse, the impression of which I have tried to
characterise, is dead. Were there still authors to work in it, there would
yet lack actors to speak it, and I do not know who would venture to chant
it after Ellen Terry.
One name, however, comes to mind, a great name which it would be most
unjust to overlook in this review of the contemporary drama,--the name of
Tennyson. Mr. Archer has remarked that Tennyson, so fortunate in his life
as a poet, was inopportune in his career as a dramatist. He wrote his
plays too late and too early: too early for the public, and too late for
his talent. As a matter of fact, he was sixty-six when he published _Queen
Mary_, the first in date of the six pieces which constitute his dramatic
output. That was twenty years ago, and the education of theatre-goers was
far from being as advanced as it is now. It was not their fault if they
brought to the poet a taste somewhat coarsened by the success of _Our
Boys_ and the _Pink Dominoes_, and a soul closed to the higher enjoyments
of the imagination.
The actors did their duty, and even more than their duty, to the Laureate;
it was the critics--and I am borne out in this by the most eminent of
their number,--it was the critics who decided the fate of Tennyson's
plays; if they did not exactly condemn him unheard, at least they listened
to him under the sway of prejudice. I shall borrow the sardonic expression
of Mr. Archer: the critics were prepared to be disappointed--it was for
this they came. What business had this old man to start on a new career,
and a career requiring all the powers of youth? What induced him to
believe that he had developed faculties at an age at which it is more
usual to repeat and re-read oneself? Had a man any right to be a success
in two trades at once? Was there not a law against this kind of pluralism,
tacitly agreed upon by critics, and applied by them with remorseless
rigour? For the beauty of these methods of reasoning, it was necessary
that Tennyson should fail upon the stage; therefore he failed.
But as this check was an unfair one, he recovered from it, and his
theatrical work, even when it is mediocre, even when it is bad, belongs to
the living drama.
I myself have fallen into the common error. I spoke of Tennyson in 1885 as
if the tomb had closed over him already. I may have been right in saying
that in the garden of the poet, upon which winter had fallen, certain
flowers would bloom no more. But what I did not perceive then, and what
to-day is manifest to me and to many others, is the fact that the latter
days of the poet not only preserved some of his early graces, but brought
out for us qualities which his youth had not known. He remained in touch
with the mind of the humble until the very end. Moreover, he revealed
himself a master in the art of giving expression in verse to the social
and religious discussions which carry one away. He has displayed in his
theatrical work an historical sense and a dramatic sense of the highest
order, and if these two gifts have clashed sometimes to the point of
cancelling each other, their combination at certain more fortunate moments
had issue in some precious fragments of masterpieces. The slightest of all
his pieces is _The Falcon_. The action takes place in some vague region in
an Italy of romance; neither the scene nor the century is defined. It is
like a tale by Boccaccio, but by a Boccaccio who is ingenuous and pure.
Federigo, an impoverished gentleman, is in love, at a distance and without
hope, with the rich and beautiful widow Monna Giovanna. His greatest
possession, his pride and his joy, his only means, too, of securing a
subsistence, is a wonderful falcon which he himself has trained for
hunting. One morning Monna Giovanna pays him an unexpected visit, and,
ignorant of the neediness of her neighbour, invites herself
unceremoniously to lunch. Federigo, whose larder is empty, kills his
favourite bird, that he may serve it up for the lady. It happens that it
was this very falcon that the lady had come to beg for, to fall in with
the fancy of a sick child. Federigo is obliged to acknowledge the
sacrifice to which hospitality and her love impelled him, and Monna
Giovanna is so keenly touched by it that she falls, and for ever, into his
arms.
When _The Falcon_ was put before the public in 1879 at the St. James's
Theatre, John Hare, who is a manager of cultured taste as well as an
excellent comedian, had mounted it with the utmost care, and had given it
a _mise en scene_ that was at once realistic and poetic. Federigo and
Monna Giovanna were impersonated by the Kendals, and those who saw Madge
Robertson's performance think of it as one thinks of some painter's
masterpiece seen in the picture galleries of Italy or Germany. In mere
outward form, her Giovanna was a pendant to her Galatea. But neither the
charm of the scenery, nor the perfection of the acting, nor the music of
the verse, could obtain a long life for the piece. It was not to be
expected that there would be more than a few hundreds of elect spectators
to delight in this delicate trifle, the joy of an hour, the enthusiasm of
an evening. From the morrow, Cockneydom was obliged to recapture the
house, and call out for its wonted entertainment. The critics made common
cause with Cockneydom, but from reasons less foreign to art.
They pointed out that if there is any subject at all in _The Falcon_, it
is apparently Federigo's sacrifices. Now this subject, such as it is, is
not dealt with. Two words in an aside to his servant, a whispered order,
that is all that leads up to and justifies the death-sentence on the bird.
Even more deceptive than the _dejeuner_ offered to Monna Giovanna, the
_menu_ presented by Lord Tennyson to his spectators was composed but of
delicate _hors d'oeeuvres_, and there was not enough in them for healthy
appetites.
* * * * *
_The Promise of May_ had a worse fate than _The Falcon_. It failed
outright. A certain section of the public pretended to believe that the
poet spoke through the mouth of his hero when he denounces, with so much
bitterness and so indiscriminately, the principles and prejudices upon
which society has its base. These spectators were sadly wanting both in
patience and in intelligence. Harold's theories are answered in the play.
When he has been declaiming upon the evil that religions have wrought upon
man, Dora does her best to show him the good influences they have wielded.
Whereas he prophesies the imminent and universal abolition of the bonds of
marriage, Dora sets forth with simplicity, yet not without grace and
feeling, her ideal of a perfect union of man and wife. "And yet I had once
a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only
differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand-in-hand
together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave
at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would
seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the
resurrection, and no more partings for ever and ever."
In the first part of the play, too, when Harold pulls down for Eve a
branch of an apple-tree in blossom, this farmer's daughter looks upon it
sadly. "Next year," she says, "it will bear no fruit,"--a moving piece of
symbolism; one likes to see a poet condemning in this way the morality of
the impulse which, in plucking the flower, forbids it to bring forth the
fruit, and destroys the very seeds of the future.
The comparative success of _The Cup_ at the Lyceum surprises me less than
it does Mr. Archer. I see no need to seek the secret of this success in
the grace of Ellen Terry, or in the splendid scenery of Diana's Temple.
_The Cup_ has certain qualities which were calculated to please the
general public. The subject is taken from Plutarch's _De Claris
Mulieribus_, and from a passage which had already suggested a tragedy to a
Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. It is possible that, without being
quite conscious of it, Tennyson adopted to a certain point the tone of the
original author and the manner of his predecessors. He was less English,
less Shakespearian, less himself, in this piece than in his other dramatic
works. The dialogue is rapid and effective; the characters do not give
themselves up to poetical fancies; instead of formulating theories, they
express sentiments that are in no way complex or strange. One of them,
Synorix, is interesting. Except for the Don Juanism which seems to impart
to him too modern a note, this double-faced type, half Roman, half
barbarian, whose intelligence has been sharpened but whose passions have
not been extinguished by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a sort
of monster, who is conscious of his intellectual superiority and his moral
decay; he unites these two qualities in a sadness that has about it
something that seems great.
The attractiveness of this character was what made a failure of Tennyson's
piece; the English poet avoids the subject which Plutarch puts before him,
and which Thomas Corneille and Montanelli had seized upon; the latter,
cleverly and with success, despite the inflation of his style. This
subject lies in the action of Camma, widow of the Tetrarch of Galatia,
whom Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, has killed and supplanted.
Synorix loves her, and is anxious to make her his wife. Camma, seeing no
escape from this odious marriage, pretends to assent to it. After the
sacred rites she has to put her lips to the same cup as Synorix before the
altar of Diana. She gives him death to drink from it, and drinks death
from it herself. That this _denouement_ should awaken no objections in our
mind, it would be essential that we should have been brought to hate
Synorix as Camma hates him. Now, Tennyson seems to have done everything in
his power to minimise the repulsiveness of the character. He has woven
round him the fascination of a noble sadness, the palliation of a great
love; has in some sort constrained him to kill his rival, by importing
into the action an element of justifiable self-defence. Not content with
this, he depicts Camma's husband as an unintelligent brute, who ill
deserves her regrets and her sacrifice.
It may be added, that of the real drama--the conflict of emotion in
Camma's soul--we know nothing until the last scene. A _coup de theatre_
does not make a play, and Mr. Archer is doubtless right in placing the
work of Montanelli above that of Tennyson; but these defects
notwithstanding, I think _The Cup_ would be accorded the same favourable
reception from the public again now that it enjoyed in 1881. It bears a
distinct resemblance to our French tragedies, in its dignity, its
propriety, in the seriousness, the freedom from any comic element, by
which it is marked, by the consistency in the characters, its continuity
of tone and unity of action,--qualities which undoubtedly give more
pleasure, whatever may be said to the contrary, than the most faithful
imitation of the contrasts and inconsistencies of life.
Had he written nothing but _The Falcon_, _The Cup_, and _The Promise of
May_, Tennyson would hold but a very low place among play-writers. If he
is to live as a dramatist, it must be by his three historical plays,
_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_.
These dramas, it has been declared, were bound to be inferior, even before
they ever saw the light, to the historical dramas of the age of Elizabeth,
whose aspect and character they recalled so completely; for whereas the
histories of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hewn out of the old
Chronicles which, almost equally with reminiscences, preserve the vivacity
of personal impressions, and something, as it were, of the warmth of life,
Tennyson's dramas are taken from "History," properly so called, and
"History" is a serious scientific person who studies life by dissecting
it, who is addicted to discussion rather than to the telling of tales, and
who substitutes modern judgments for ancient passions. The objection is
more plausible than real. First of all, this definition of History, though
true enough of a Guizot, a Hallam, or a Lecky, is quite inapplicable to a
Carlyle, a Michelet, or a Taine.
In reading Freeman and Froude, was Tennyson less in touch with the soul of
the past than Shakespeare was in making his way through the cold and often
tedious pages of Holinshed? Moreover, even had Froude been as sententious
and frigid as he was in reality picturesque and impassioned, Tennyson's
own faculties would have made good these defects.
It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and
quite exceptional strength of Tennyson's sense of history. I must explain
clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical
faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living
over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It
was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc;
Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings;
Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at
the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted
upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger.
This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the
actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.
This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine
acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As
evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,--that is to
say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories,
illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history;
for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of
the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in _Queen Mary_, and in
_Becket_ the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map,
the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.
A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles,
and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose,
but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson,
to set before us _un etat d'ame_, and plunge us into the depth of the life
of olden days?
I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that
it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is
there a dramatic idea underlying _Becket_, _Queen Mary_, and _Harold_? I
shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the
first question; Yes, to the second and third.
It is true that _Becket_ achieved a startling success in the summer of
1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have
been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he
is--hieratical, pontifical. Mediaeval asceticism is one of the forms of
life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into
most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented
Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth
one's while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present
at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop
and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue
in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and
his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton,
when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and
then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which
follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been
carried through by dumb show without words at all.
Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow,
and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in
gusts from the church above--mingled with the cries of the people beating
against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great
edifice to its foundation--experienced one of the strongest emotions any
spectacle ever gave.
And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation
which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the
king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely
a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the
courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the
poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical
drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen
Terry's tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The
complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman
savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious
details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a
piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I
may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful
function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from
protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging
Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king's mistress to
care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so
much hardihood.
I have not the same objections to make against _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_.
In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged
in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the
character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road,
strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined
with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a
protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to
agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice
bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left
it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a
Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding,
she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not
sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated
stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before
her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust
in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered
human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched
out, if he did not quite complete it, in _Queen Mary_.
The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is
the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the
feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the
great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at
the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect
of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the
episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold's young brother, describes to him the
slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner,
deprived of all that he loves best,--of the sight of the green fields, of
the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of
memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away
by the loathsome vermin of the earth.
When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a
spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated
oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes,
and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in
it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to
which we are too often treated in the theatre.
Edith gives up the hero to Aldwyth while he lives; dead, she reclaims him,
with a nobility and pride of tone that thrill one.
These two dramas--I dare not say two masterpieces--set in a framework of
history, which in itself is infinitely precious, form the legacy left by
the great lyrist to the theatre of his country.
A pious hand, to extricate these two dramas from the rest, and so let in
air and light upon their essential lines; a great actor, to understand
and incarnate Harold; a great actress, to throw herself into the character
of Mary,--and Tennyson would take his proper place amongst the dramatists.
NOTE.--I have decided to make no reference here to the dramas of
Browning or Mr. Swinburne. These belong rather to the history of
poetry than that of the theatre.