I
I have been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in _News from Nowhere_
might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into our noisy time.
One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and red-tiled houses
remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been made not to make
money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the market houses that set
the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it among hurrying cabs and
ringing pavements, but in a green garden by a river side. Inside I have to
be content for a while with a chair, for I am unexpected, and there is not
an empty seat but this; and yet there is no one who has come merely
because one must go somewhere after dinner. All day, too, one does not
hear or see an incongruous or noisy thing, but spends the hours reading
the plays, and the wise and foolish things men have said of them, in the
library of the theatre, with its oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of
tinted glass; or one rows by reedy banks and by old farmhouses, and by old
churches among great trees. It is certainly one's fault if one opens a
newspaper, for Mr. Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need
talk of nothing but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams
blackened by time and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them. I
have seen this week _King John_, _Richard II._, the second part of _Henry
IV._, _Henry V._, the second part of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III._
played in their right order, with all the links that bind play to play
unbroken; and partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because
of the way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never
done before. That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring
nobles, of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has
been to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly
energy. I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway
shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones,
as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a
little dust under one's feet. The people my mind's eye has seen have too
much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before
our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem more than
a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.
In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one's head,
for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting, some one
of those many subjects of thought that build up our social unity. But here
he gives back one's dream like a mirror. If we do not talk of the plays,
we talk of the theatre, and how more people may be got to come, and our
isolation from common things makes the future become grandiose and
important. One man tells how the theatre and the library were at their
foundation but part of a scheme the future is to fulfil. To them will be
added a school where speech, and gesture, and fencing, and all else that
an actor needs will be taught, and the council, which will have enlarged
its Festivals to some six weeks, will engage all the chief players of
Shakespeare, and perhaps of other great dramatists in this and other
countries. These chief players will need to bring but few of their
supporters, for the school will be able to fill all the lesser parts with
players who are slowly recovering the lost tradition of musical speech.
Another man is certain that the Festival, even without the school, which
would require a new endowment, will grow in importance year by year, and
that it may become with favouring chance the supreme dramatic event of the
world; and when I suggest that it may help to break the evil prestige of
London he becomes enthusiastic.
Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love the
arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks like a
beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel, which is
always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end by filling
it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that people are
ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and Ireland, and
even from America, to live with their favourite art as shut away from the
world as though they were 'in retreat,' as Catholics say. Nobody but an
impressionist painter, who hides it in light and mist, even pretends to
love a street for its own sake; and could we meet our friends and hear
music and poetry in the country, none of us that are not captive would
ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear something that we like some
twice or thrice in a winter, and among people who are thinking the while
of a music-hall singer or of a member of parliament, but there we would
hear it and see it among people who liked it well enough to have travelled
some few hours to find it; and because those who care for the arts have
few near friendships among those that do not, we would hear and see it
among near friends. We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and
interests we cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among
people we meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow
serious as the Ten Commandments.