Writing about Hroswitha’s _Callimachus_, as performed by the Art Theatre,
I touched upon the unintentionally comic aspect of a tenth-century
miracle play to a twentieth-century audience. Naturally this is not an
aspect of the matter which recommends itself to a lady who is about to
publish a translation of Hroswitha’s plays with a preface by a cardinal,
and in a published letter she protests that the fun which the Art Theatre
got out of _Callimachus_ was not justified by the text. Let me hasten
to acquit the Art Theatre of the misdemeanour attributed to it by Miss
Christopher St. John. There was nothing intentionally funny in its
performance. The players acted their parts with all possible simplicity
and sincerity. The smiling was all on our side of the footlights. But I
said that the smile was “reverent,” because of the sacred nature of the
subject-matter.
This opens up the question of the frame of mind in which we moderns ought
to approach works of “early” art. The first effort of a critic—we must
all be agreed about that—should be to put himself, imaginatively, in the
artist’s place. He has to try to think himself back into the time, the
place, the circumstances of the work, and into the artist’s temperament,
intentions, and means of execution. We look at the Madonna of Cimabue
in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and our first impulse is to find
her ungainly, uncouth, without spiritual significance. It is only by
thinking ourselves back among the Florentines of the thirteenth century
that we can understand and appreciate Cimabue’s appeal. But consider how
difficult—or, rather, impossible—that thinking-back process is. Consider
what we have to unlearn. We have to make ourselves as though we had
never seen the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; much more than that, we have
mentally to wipe out six centuries of human history. Manifestly it cannot
be done; we can never see the Cimabue picture as Cimabue himself saw it
or as his Florentine contemporaries saw it. We have to try; but what we
shall at best succeed in attaining is a palimpsest, the superimposition
of new artistic interpretation on the old. And when we say that classics
are immortal, we only mean that they are capable of yielding a perpetual
series of fresh palimpsests, of being perpetually “hatched again and
hatched different.” We cannot see Dante’s _Commedia_ as Dante or Dante’s
first readers saw it. For us its politics are dead and its theology
grotesque; it lives for us now by its spirituality, its majesty, and the
beauty of its form. But with works that are not classics, works that
are not susceptible of a perpetual rebirth, the case is even harder.
They are inscriptions that we can no longer decipher; we cannot think
ourselves, for a moment, back in the mind of the author. They have become
for us curios.
And that is what Hroswitha’s _Callimachus_ has become: a curio. How can
we put ourselves back in the mind of a nun in the Convent of Gandersheim
in the age of Otho the Great? I say “we.” For nuns perhaps (having, I
assume, a mentality nearer the tenth century than the rest of us) may
take a fair shot at it. So, too, may cardinals, whose august mentality I
do not presume to fathom. But it is certain that common worldly men, mere
average playgoers, cannot do it.
But, it will be objected, are we not, or most of us, still Christians?
Are we not still capable of understanding prayers, miracles, saintliness,
raising from the dead, “conversion,” and all the other subject-matter
of _Callimachus_? To be sure we are; hence my “reverent” smile. If
Christianity were dead (or, as in Swift’s ironical pamphlet, abolished by
Act of Parliament) _Callimachus_ would be simply meaningless for us, a
nothing, mere mummery. It is not the matter of the play that provokes our
smile; but its form. The “fun,” says Miss St. John, is “not justified by
the text.” She is thinking of the matter, abounding in piety and tending
to edification; but in point of fact the language, the “text”—at any
rate in theatrical representation (far be it from me to prejudice her
forthcoming book)—has its comic side. Callimachus’s abrupt declaration
of his passion to Drusiana and the terms of her rejection of him are
both, to a modern audience, irresistibly comic. They are not meaningless,
but they are delightfully impossible: they are love-making as imagined
by a nun, the very person who _ex hypothesi_ knows nothing about it. You
have, in fact, precisely the same delicious absurdity, proceeding from
an imagination necessarily uninstructed by experience, as you get in
Miss Daisy Ashford’s book. (Several critics have made this comparison.
I am really chagrined not to have thought of it myself. But it should
show Miss St. John that I am, at any rate, not the only one who found
_Callimachus_ comic.)
Further, and quite apart from the exquisite naïveties of its text,
the form of the play is so childlike and bland as to be really funny.
The players, when not engaged in the action, stand motionless in a
semi-circle. Changes of scene are indicated by two performers crossing
the stage in opposite directions—a genuine cricket “over.” Characters
are understood to be stricken with death when they composedly lie
down on their backs. Others trot in pairs round Drusiana’s prostrate
form and you understand they are journeying to her tomb. All this, of
course, is merely primitive “convention.” Could we put ourselves back
into Hroswitha’s time, it would pass unnoticed. In our own time, with a
different set of “conventions,” that make some attempt at imitation of
reality, we naturally laugh at these old conventions. We laugh, but we
are interested; our curiosity is being catered for, we like to see what
the old conventions were. The curio, in short, is amusing in the fullest
sense of the term.
And it leaves us with a desire to know more about Hroswitha, the “white
rose” of the tenth century (if that be really the meaning of her name).
Perhaps the Cardinal’s preface will tell us more. One remark occurs.
It seems a little significant that a nun should have written all her
plays on the one theme of chastity. It must have been an obsession with
her, this virtue to which, as Renan said, nature attaches so little
importance. And, in hunting her theme, this nun does not scruple to
pursue it to the strangest places. She even puts courtesans upon the
stage and houses of ill-fame. How on earth did the good lady imagine
these unconventual topics? The question suggests some puzzles about
the psychology of nuns. But one only has to see _Callimachus_ to know
that Hroswitha must have been as pure as snow, or as a white rose, as
innocently ignorant, in fact, of what she was writing about as Miss Daisy
Ashford when she described an elopement.