Of Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_, revived by the Phœnix Society, I said
that it was a live classic no longer, but a museum-classic, a curio
for connoisseurs. Its multiplication of violent deaths in the last act
(four men stabbed and one courtesan poisoned) could no longer be taken
seriously, and, in fact, provoked a titter in the audience. This sudden
change of tragic into comic effect was fatal to that unity of impression
without which not merely a tragedy but any work of art ceases to be an
organic whole. The change was less the fault of Webster than of the Time
Spirit. Apparently the early Jacobeans could accept a piled heap of
corpses at the end of a play without a smile, as “all werry capital.”
Violent death was not so exceptional a thing in their own experience as
it is in ours. They had more simplicity of mind than we have, a more
childlike docility in swallowing whole what the playwright offered them.
But Webster was not without fault. One assassination treads so hastily
upon the heels of the other, the slaughter is so wholesale. _Hamlet_
closes with several violent deaths, yet Shakespeare managed to avoid this
pell-mell wholesale effect.
But there is another element in Webster’s workmanship which, I think, has
helped to deprive the play of life. I mean his obtrusive ingenuity. I am
not referring to the ingenuity of the tortures practised upon the unhappy
Duchess—the severed hand thrust into hers, the wax figure purporting to
be her slain husband, and so forth. This fiendish ingenuity is proper
to the character of the tyrant Ferdinand, and its exercise does add a
grisly horror to the play. I mean the ingenuity of Webster himself, a
perverted, wasted ingenuity, in his play-construction. He seems to have
ransacked his fancy in devising scenic experiments. There is the “echo”
scene. It is theatrically ineffective. It gives you no tragic emotion,
but only a sense of amused interest in the author’s ingenuity, and you
say, “How quaint!” Then there is the little device for giving a touch
of irony to the Cardinal’s murder. He has warned the courtiers, for
purposes of his own, that if they hear him cry for help in the night
they are to take no notice; he will be only pretending. And so, when he
cries for help in real earnest, he is hoist with his own petard, and the
courtiers only cry, “Fie upon his counterfeiting.” Again the theatrical
effect is small; you are merely distracted from the tragic business in
hand by the author’s curious ingenuity. For any one interested in the
theatrical _cuisine_ these experiments, of course, have their piquancy.
Webster seems to have been perpetually seeking for “new thrills”—like the
Grand Guignol people in our own day. He had some lucky finds. The masque
of madmen, for instance, is a tremendous thrill, one of the biggest,
I daresay, in the history of tragedy. But there were experiments that
didn’t come off.
At any rate they fail with us. Webster, no doubt, had his true
“posterity” (was it perchance contemporary with Pepys?), but we are
his post-posterity. In a sense every masterpiece is in advance of its
time. “The reason,” says Marcel Proust (“A l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleurs”)—
“The reason why a work of genius is admired with difficulty at once is
that the author is extraordinary, that few people resemble him. It is his
work itself that in fertilizing the rare minds capable of comprehending
it makes them grow and multiply. Beethoven’s quartets (XII., XIII., XIV.,
and XV.) have taken fifty years to give birth and growth to the Beethoven
quartet public, thus realizing like every masterpiece a progress in the
society of minds, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found
when the masterpiece appeared, that is to say, of beings capable of
loving it. What we call posterity is the posterity of the work itself.
The work must create its own posterity.”
Assuredly we of to-day can see more in _Hamlet_ than its first audience
could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation
selects from a classic what suits it. Few of the original colours are
“fast”; some fade, others grow more vivid and then fade in their turn.
The Jacobean playgoer was impressed by Webster’s heaped corpses, and
we titter. He probably revelled in the mad scene of the “lycanthropic”
Ferdinand, where we are bored. (The taste for mad scenes was long
lived; it lasted from the Elizabethans, on through Betterton’s time—see
Valentine in _Love for Love_—and Garrick’s time, as we know from
Boswell’s anecdote about _Irene_, down to the moment when Tilburina went
mad in white satin.) On the other hand, a scene which has possibly gained
in piquancy for us of to-day, the proud contemporaries of Mr. Shaw, is
that wherein the Duchess woos the coy Antonio and weds him out of hand.
When we chance upon a thing like this in a classic we are apt, fatuously
enough, to exclaim. “How modern!”
No one is likely to make that exclamation over another classic of
momentary revival, _Le Malade Imaginaire_. There is not a vestige of
“modernity” in Molière’s play. It is absolutely primitive. Or rather
it seems, in all essentials, to stand outside time, to exhibit nothing
of any consequence that “dates.” It has suffered no such mishap as has
befallen Webster’s tragedy—a change of mental attitude in the audience
which has turned the author’s desired effect upside down. At no point at
which Molière made a bid for our laughter are we provoked, contrariwise,
to frown. You cannot, by the way, say this about all Molière. Much,
_e.g._, of the fun in _George Dandin_ strikes a modern audience as merely
cruel. Both in Alceste and Tartuffe there has been a certain alteration
of “values” in the progress of the centuries. But _Le Malade Imaginaire_
is untouched. We can enjoy it, I imagine, with precisely the same
delight as its first audience felt. Some items of it, to be sure, were
actual facts for them which are only history for us; the subservience
of children to parents, for instance, and (though Mr. Shaw will not
agree) the pedantic humbug of the faculty. But the point is, that the
things laughed at, though they may have ceased to exist in fact, are as
ridiculous as ever. And note that our laughter is not a whit affected by
childish absurdities in the plot. Argan’s little girl shams dead and he
immediately assumes she is dead. Argan shams dead and neither his wife
nor his elder daughter for a moment questions the reality of his death.
His own serving-wench puts on a doctor’s gown and he is at once deceived
by the disguise. These little things do not matter in the least. We are
willing to go all lengths in make-believe so long as we get our laughter.
Here, then, is a classic which seems to be outside the general rule.
It has not had to make, in M. Proust’s phrase, its own posterity. It
has escaped those vicissitudes of appreciation which classics are apt
to suffer from changes in the general condition of the public mind....
But stay! If it has always been greeted with the same abundance of
laughter, has the quality of that laughter been invariable? Clearly not,
for Molière is at pains to apologize in his play for seeming to laugh
at the faculty, whereas, he says, he has only in view “le ridicule de
la médecine.” Between half-resentful, half-fearful laughter at a Purgon
or Diafoirus who may be at your bedside next week and light-hearted
laughter at figures that have become merely fantastic pantaloons there is
considerable difference. And so we re-establish our general rule.