"O limèd soul that struggling to be free
Art more engaged!"
Charles Stephen Dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatist
and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the
twentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten is
by no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with a
charming indecision of touch. The general prejudice against the
granting of freeholds has spread to the desired lands of fame; and
where our profligate ancestors were willing to call a man great in
perpetuity, we, with more shrewdness, prefer to name him a genius for
seven years. We know that before that period may have expired fate
will have granted us a sea-serpent with yet more coils, with a
yet more bewildering arrangement of marine and sunset tints, and the
conclusion of previous leases will enable us to grant him undisputed
possession of Parnassus. If our ancestors were more generous they
were certainly less discriminate; and it cannot be doubted that many
of them went to their graves under the impression that it is possible
for there to be more than one great man at a time! We have altered
all that.
For two years Dale was a great man, or rather the great man, and it
is probable that if he had not died he would have held his position
for a longer period. When his death was announced, although the
notices of his life and work were of a flattering length, the
leaderwriters were not unnaturally aggrieved that he should have
resigned his post before the popular interest in his personality was
exhausted. The Censor might do his best by prohibiting the
performance of all the plays that the dead man had left behind him;
but, as the author neglected to express his views in their columns,
and the common sense of their readers forbade the publication of
interviews with him, the journals could draw but a poor
satisfaction from condemning or upholding the official action. Dale's
regrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clash
of personalities to an arid discussion on art. The consequence was
obvious. The end of the week saw the elevation of James Macintosh,
the great Scotch comedian, to the vacant post, and Dale was
completely forgotten. That this oblivion is merited in terms of his
work I am not prepared to admit; that it is merited in terms of his
personality I indignantly wish to deny. Whatever Dale may have been
as an artist, he was, perhaps in spite of himself, a man, and a man,
moreover, possessed of many striking and unusual traits of character.
It is to the man Dale that I offer this tribute.
Sprung from an old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yet
sufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies
in crediting him with the Celtic temperament. Nevertheless, he was
essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of
dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. To these two
central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that
rendered him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic
æstheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he
mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the
barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him
an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men
might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect
their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest
conviction should have its place in the formation of his character.
Conversely, he was nothing without a reason.
These may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of a
man's life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth
about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our
materials will be nearly complete. "Dale hates his
fellow-human- beings," wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even
expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. But he
hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to
say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of
individuals, and, _pace_ the critics, the love was no less sincere
than the hatred. He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker
German philosophers an image of the perfect man--an image differing
only in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the Imperialists as
"efficiency." He did not find--it was hardly likely that he would
find--that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, and
he therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession of
those weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of which
the sum is human nature.
I now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is in
itself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmost
importance in considering the life of Charles Stephen Dale I should
prefer not to mention it. I refer to his complete lack of a sense of
humour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detract
from his importance as an artist and a man. The difficulty which I
mentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clear
conception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yet
succeeded in defining it satisfactorily. Here I would venture to
suggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, a
sense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to the
finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to
the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. I am aware that
this definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may be
found to include the truth. Obviously, the natures of those who
possess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and it
is therefore against the limits imposed by this sense that
intellectual anarchists, among whom I would number Dale, and poets,
primarily rebel. But--and it is this rather than his undoubted
intellectual gifts or his dogmatic definitions of good and evil that
definitely separated Dale from the normal men--there can be no doubt
that he felt his lack of a sense of humour bitterly. In every word he
ever said, in every line he ever wrote, I detect a painful striving
after this mysterious sense, that enabled his neighbours, fools as he
undoubtedly thought them, to laugh and weep and follow the faith of
their hearts without conscious realisation of their own
existence and the problems it induced. By dint of study and strenuous
observation he achieved, as any man may achieve, a considerable
degree of wit, though to the last his ignorance of the audience whom
he served and despised, prevented him from judging the effect of his
sallies without experiment. But try as he might the finer jewel lay
far beyond his reach. Strong men fight themselves when they can find
no fitter adversary; but in all the history of literature there is no
stranger spectacle than this lifelong contest between Dale, the
intellectual anarch and pioneer of supermen, and Dale, the poor
lonely devil who wondered what made people happy.
I have said that the struggle was lifelong, but it must be added that
it was always unequal. The knowledge that in his secret heart he
desired this quality, the imperfection of imperfections, only served
to make Dale's attack on the complacency of his contemporaries more
bitter. He ridiculed their achievements, their ambitions, and their
love with a fury that awakened in them a mild curiosity, but by no
means affected their comfort. Moreover, the very vehemence with
which he demanded their contempt deprived him of much of his force as
a critic, for they justly wondered why a man should waste his
lifetime in attacking them if they were indeed so worthless.
Actually, they felt, Dale was a great deal more engaged with his
audience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected to
despise for their sycophancy. And, especially towards the end of his
life when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which he
used to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more and
more childishly artificial, less and less effective. He was like one
of those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of their
audience unless they are always doing something, though nothing is
more monotonous than mannered vivacity.
Dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at the
same time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his æesthetic sense.
He had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical and
remote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelled
ceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarily
accepted. The result in terms of art was chaos. Possessed of an
intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost
entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise
his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his
nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger,
and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He
lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his
conception. It is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels,
tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine gift
that enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. He
could only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing the
wayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. He never
attempted--and this is a hard saying--to produce any work beautiful
in itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that never
allowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on his
audience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed.
His work will appeal rather to the student of men than to the
student of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must be
held to constitute a remarkable human document.
It is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers Dale
was credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for the
examination of any of his plays impresses one with the number and
mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. A
noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the
weakness of the other man's speech, rather than the weakness of
the other man's argument. His prose was good, though at its best
so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally
well-written leading article. At its worst it was marred by
numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be
feared, intentional. His attitude on this point was typical of his
strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. He
committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate
his audience into a condition of mental alertness. As a matter of
fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he
did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a
poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. He
proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too
often beneath it. Revolting against the dignity, not infrequently
pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown
with more enthusiasm than skill. It is intellectual arrogance in a
clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success
merely because he wishes it.
There is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to Dale's
personal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more than
justice, the photographers rather less. In his younger days he
suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun;
towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that
made him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men,
he had good eyes.
Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published
accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that
last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account
of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed--cold,
epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And
once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.
In the third scene of the second act of "Henry V.," a play written
by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes
the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need
quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus
that every man dies.