On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre;
and while I found the piece itself--as indeed I expected to find
it--far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said,
I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was
not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is
worth seeing, though--would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It
is but the second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality
among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L’Assommoir_
was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with
fulness of horror in Charles Reade’s version _Drink_. The version of
_Thérèse Raquin_--executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos,
but overlooked by Mr. George Moore--does not widely depart from the
original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage,
have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it
has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only
satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he
ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly
discarding the original at a certain point--when the bare but real
equivalent of that original has once been secured--of forgetting, from
that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself
solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still
beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_
is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements on the stage;
but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing--that
is--has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has remained its somewhat
mechanical interpreter.
_Thérèse Raquin_ occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In point
of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays
neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the
writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem
in itself less interesting than the problem of the _Page d’Amour_ is,
in _Thérèse Raquin_, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy
which gives the _Page d’Amour_ so much of its value. _Thérèse Raquin_
contains only one or two sentences--they are those in which the wicked
little _bourgeoise_ expresses her desire to live for ever in the
sunshine--which permit one to realise that its author is the author
of the passionate idyl _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_. But, on the other
hand, in _Thérèse Raquin_ we are not face to face with the superfluous
and unveracious hideousness of _La Terre_; and the view of humanity is
not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in _Nana_. No; in
these respects we may rank _Thérèse Raquin_ rather with _L’Assommoir_
itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the
skies. In both--as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola
writes--an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own
punishment.
If _Thérèse Raquin_ were simply the melodrama some of its opponents
have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the
two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the
interval between two acts--the first of which ends and the second of
which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour--but
in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle
of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or
Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we
are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one
act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were
perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes
possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which,
in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence
of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts--different
slightly from the interest of the later ones--is the interest of mental
analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, _The Ring and the Book_ is
a ‘shocker.’
The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see _Thérèse Raquin_,
comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition
of several bitter truths--an exposition made by M. Zola with power
and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a
purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is
one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important
writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is
not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s
master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse
employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’--this
avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection
are of the very essence of Art--commends itself, as I understand, to
a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found
voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the
capacity of its professors for critical preachment.
(_Academy_, 24th October 1891.)
‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING
I question if _Macbeth_ can ever, in the hands of _any_ tragedian,
make the same mark as _Hamlet_. _Hamlet_, as far as the opportunities
for the display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have
been written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing
prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy.
Most of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it
is a point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he
brings into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the
remains of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed
to him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own;
admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute than
his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking
of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the grooms;
his righteous satire--‘your spirits shine through you’--on the hired
murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and pitying
warning to Macduff--
‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already’--
all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in
him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities
that have given _Macbeth_ a name, are more conspicuous and abundant: at
all events are more upon the surface; and the art is great that knows
how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does
much to modify the popular conception.
It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in _Macbeth_
is to show the deterioration of character through one crime that brings
another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual
process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show something
of the higher nature with which the character began. I think I note
also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief
in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural over him.
The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a destiny. His
crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them from without, by a
something not himself, making for Evil.
And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural power,
this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for Evil, has
upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of the play,
from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these, indeed, are set
before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in
their profession; but as men rendered desperate: the one
‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world’:
the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,
‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune,
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend it or be rid on ’t.’
Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate--for the
play itself indicates it a hundred times--how much Macbeth is separated
from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding
of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on,
the gradual sinking to that level of theirs--the fact that the distance
that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would
ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said
“God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when
Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his
desperation, be no milder than--
‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’--
words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending
frenzy--and when his final and bloody resolution--
‘Yet I will try the last,’
is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’
own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point
a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting
pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages
from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished.
(_Academy_, 23rd December 1876.)
‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’
The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared,
displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of _The
Duchess of Malfi_. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or
another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done
something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once,
at least, before, the Independent Theatre--eschewing mere eccentricity
and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the
unseemly)--once before was it occupied with work of genius and high
literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here
and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change,
what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?
And now, after a _régime_ more or less of the experimental and
unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent
Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to
be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster--Webster, it is true,
with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with
a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously
shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the
modern taste. But still a classic--a giant in conception and writing--a
strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr.
Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’
Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that _The Duchess of Malfi_ is ‘a
masterpiece excelled only by _King Lear_.’ And, if I take down my
volumes of Lamb’s _Specimens_, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia
becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this
play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to
lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’
And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect
master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their
terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’
But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time,
along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among
the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The
relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor
events--these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself,
perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching
examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will,
of his time, were--one need hardly say it, but that it affects his
acceptability upon the modern stage--the permitted coarseness, the
absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and
define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from
scene to scene within the compass of a single act--a point in which no
English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly
right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of
construction of our own time.
Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of
additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with
judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece
is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be--‘rearranged for the
modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these
initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it,
that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors--the
modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to _them_--as on account
of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the
achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling
themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style.
The similes of Webster--pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of
the imagery of his contemporaries--are rather lost upon a public and
upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to
be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one
among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately
simplicity--born writer, rather than playwright--requires to be heard
by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to
be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of
lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures
so characteristic of the Italian temperament--a temperament never
more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty--when
these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess--when crazy folk
yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and
cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one--an audience
without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the
commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.
Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent
company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness
of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and
ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence--for such appears to be
Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation--the forces of the Church in its
bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon
the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled
a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich
voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity
of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure.
And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence
and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people
thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon--a learned, helpful
student of the time--had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it
had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the _macabre_.
Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity;
but the Independent Theatre--sometimes too little in touch with the
main-stream of English life and thought--may well permit itself to give
a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more
than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are
unburdened with Literature?
(_Academy_, 29th October 1892.)