PLAYSACTING AND MUSIC

A BOOK OF THEORY

BYARTHUR SYMONS

LONDON

1909

_To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and admiration_

PREFACE

When this book was first published it contained a large amount ofmaterial which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besidesmany corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has beenremodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first;what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to havebeen: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentionswhich I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events, the programme was carried out. 

This book, I said then, is intended to form part of a series, on which Ihave been engaged for many years. I am gradually working my way towardsthe concrete expression of a theory, or system of æsthetics, of all thearts. 

In my book on "The Symbolist Movement in Literature" I made a firstattempt to deal in this way with literature; other volumes, now inpreparation, are to follow. The present volume deals mainly with thestage, and, secondarily, with music; it is to be followed by a volumecalled "Studies in Seven Arts, " in which music will be dealt with ingreater detail, side by side with painting, sculpture, architecture, handicraft, dancing, and the various arts of the stage. And, as life toois a form of art, and the visible world the chief storehouse of beauty, I try to indulge my curiosity by the study of places and of people. Abook on "Cities" is now in the press, and a book of "imaginaryportraits" is to follow, under the title of "Spiritual Adventures. " Sideby side with these studies in the arts I have my own art, that of verse, which is, after all, my chief concern. 

In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as littleabstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as theyexist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, aliveand in effective action, in every achieved form of art. I do notunderstand the limitation by which so many writers on æsthetics chooseto confine themselves to the study of artistic principles as they areseen in this or that separate form of art. Each art has its own laws, its own capacities, its own limits; these it is the business of thecritic jealously to distinguish. Yet in the study of art as art, itshould be his endeavour to master the universal science of beauty. 

1903, 1907. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

An Apology for Puppets 3

PLAYS AND ACTING

Nietzsche on Tragedy 11

Sarah Bernhardt 17

Coquelin and Molière 29

Réjane 37

Yvette Guilbert 42

Sir Henry Irving 52

Duse in Some of Her Parts 60

Annotations 77

M. Capus in England 93

A Double Enigma 100

DRAMA

Professional and Unprofessional 109

Tolstoi and Others 115

Some Problem Plays 124

"Monna Vanna" 137

The Question of Censorship 143

A Play and the Public 148

The Test of the Actor 152

The Price of Realism 162

On Crossing Stage to Right 167

The Speaking of Verse 173

Great Acting in English 182

A Theory of the Stage 198

The Sicilian Actors 213

MUSIC

On Writing about Music 229

Technique and the Artist 232

Pachmann and the Piano 237

Paderewski 258

A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert 268

The Dramatisation of Song 277

The Meiningen Orchestra 284

Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten 290

Notes on Wagner at Bayreuth 297

Conclusion: A Paradox on Art 315

INTRODUCTION

AN APOLOGY FOR PUPPETS

After seeing a ballet, a farce, and the fragment of an opera performedby the marionettes at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome, I am inclined to askmyself why we require the intervention of any less perfect mediumbetween the meaning of a piece, as the author conceived it, and thatother meaning which it derives from our reception of it. The livingactor, even when he condescends to subordinate himself to therequirements of pantomime, has always what he is proud to call histemperament; in other words, so much personal caprice, which for themost part means wilful misunderstanding; and in seeing his acting youhave to consider this intrusive little personality of his as well as theauthor's. The marionette may be relied upon. He will respond to anindication without reserve or revolt; an error on his part (we are allhuman) will certainly be the fault of the author; he can be trained toperfection. As he is painted, so will he smile; as the wires lift orlower his hands, so will his gestures be; and he will dance when hislegs are set in motion. 

Seen at a distance, the puppets cease to be an amusing piece ofmechanism, imitating real people; there is no difference. I protest thatthe Knight who came in with his plumed hat, his shining sword, and flungback his long cloak with so fine a sweep of the arm, was exactly thesame to me as if he had been a living actor, dressed in the sameclothes, and imitating the gesture of a knight; and that the contrast ofwhat was real, as we say, under the fiction appears to me less ironicalin the former than in the latter. We have to allow, you will admit, atleast as much to the beneficent heightening of travesty, if we have everseen the living actor in the morning, not yet shaved, standing at thebar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in that abandonment tolaughter which has become from the necessity of his profession, anatural trick; oh, much more, I think, than if we merely come upon analways decorative, never an obtrusive, costumed figure, leaning againstthe wall, nonchalantly enough, in a corner of the coulisses. 

To sharpen our sense of what is illusive in the illusion of the puppets, let us sit not too far from the stage. Choosing our place carefully, weshall have the satisfaction of always seeing the wires at their work, while I think we shall lose nothing of what is most savoury in the feastof the illusion. There is not indeed the appeal to the senses of thefirst row of the stalls at a ballet of living dancers. But is not that atrifle too obvious sentiment for the true artist in artificial things?Why leave the ball-room? It is not nature that one looks for on thestage in this kind of spectacle, and our excitement in watching itshould remain purely intellectual. If you prefer that other kind ofillusion, go a little further away, and, I assure you, you will find itquite easy to fall in love with a marionette. I have seen the mostadorable heads, with real hair too, among the wooden dancers of atheatre of puppets; faces which might easily, with but a little of thatgood-will which goes to all falling in love, seem the answer to aparticular dream, making all other faces in the world but spoilt copiesof this inspired piece of painted wood. 

But the illusion, to a more scrupulous taste, will consist simply inthat complication of view which allows us to see wood and wire imitatingan imitation, and which delights us less when seen at what is called theproper distance, where the two are indistinguishable, than when seenfrom just the point where all that is crudely mechanical hides thecomedy of what is, absolutely, a deception. Losing, as we do, somethingof the particularity of these painted faces, we are able to enjoy allthe better what it is certainly important we should appreciate, if weare truly to appreciate our puppets. This is nothing less than afantastic, yet a direct, return to the masks of the Greeks: that learnedartifice by which tragedy and comedy were assisted in speaking to theworld with the universal voice, by this deliberate generalising ofemotion. It will be a lesson to some of our modern notions; and it maybe instructive for us to consider that we could not give a play ofIbsen's to marionettes, but that we could give them the "Agamemnon. "

Above all, for we need it above all, let the marionettes remind us thatthe art of the theatre should be beautiful first, and then indeed whatyou will afterwards. Gesture on the stage is the equivalent of rhythm inverse, and it can convey, as a perfect rhythm should, not a little ofthe inner meaning of words, a meaning perhaps more latent in things. Does not gesture indeed make emotion, more certainly and moreimmediately than emotion makes gesture? You may feel that you maysuppress emotion; but assume a smile, lifted eyebrows, a clenched fist, and it is impossible for you not to assume along with the gesture, ifbut for a moment, the emotion to which that gesture corresponds. In ourmarionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like allother forms of emotion, generalised. The appeal in what seems to youthese childish manoeuvres is to a finer, because to a more intimatelypoetic, sense of things than the merely rationalistic appeal of verymodern plays. If at times we laugh, it is with wonder at seeing humanityso gay, heroic, and untiring. There is the romantic suggestion of magicin this beauty. 

Maeterlinck wrote on the title-page of one of his volumes "Drames pourmarionettes, " no doubt to intimate his sense of the symbolic value, inthe interpretation of a profound inner meaning of that external nullitywhich the marionette by its very nature emphasises. And so I find mypuppets, where the extremes meet, ready to interpret not only the"Agamemnon, " but "La Mort de Tintagiles"; for the soul, which is tomake, we may suppose, the drama of the future, is content with as simplea mouthpiece as Fate and the great passions, which were the classicdrama. 

PLAYS AND ACTING

NIETZSCHE ON TRAGEDY

I have been reading Nietzsche on the Origin of Tragedy with the delightof one who discovers a new world, which he has seen already in a dream. I never take up Nietzsche without the surprise of finding somethingfamiliar. Sometimes it is the answer to a question which I have onlyasked; sometimes it seems to me that I have guessed at the answer. And, in his restless energy, his hallucinatory, vision, the agility of thisclimbing mind of the mountains, I find that invigoration which only a"tragic philosopher" can give. "A sort of mystic soul, " as he says ofhimself, "almost the soul of a Mænad, who, troubled, capricious, andhalf irresolute whether to cede or fly, stammers out something in aforeign tongue. "

The book is a study in the origin of tragedy among the Greeks, as itarose out of music through the medium of the chorus. We are apt to lookon the chorus in Greek plays as almost a negligible part of thestructure; as, in fact, hardly more than the comments of that "idealspectator" whom Schlegel called up out of the depths of the Germanconsciousness. We know, however, that the chorus was the originalnucleus of the play, that the action on which it seems only to commentis no more than a development of the chorus. Here is the problem towhich Nietzsche endeavours to find an answer. He finds it, unlike thelearned persons who study Greek texts, among the roots of things, in thevery making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflictof the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods, Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, whichwe see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we seein music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication;the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as itwere, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which aroseout of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry, " the vital ecstasy; thedrama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms. "We now see that the stage and the action areconceived only as vision: that the sole 'reality' is precisely thechorus, which itself produces the vision, and expresses it by the aid ofthe whole symbolism of dance, sound, and word. " In the admirable phraseof Schiller, the chorus is "a living rampart against reality, " againstthat false reality of daily life which is a mere drapery ofcivilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality ofnature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, thecasuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the truedecadent, an "instrument of decomposition, " the slayer of art, thefather of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutespathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentimentsfor the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy: that is to say, destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can beinterpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiacstates, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysiacintoxication. " There are many pages, scattered throughout his work, inwhich Pater has dealt with some of the Greek problems very much in thespirit of Nietzsche; with that problem, for instance, of the "blithenessand serenity" of the Greek spirit, and of the gulf of horror over whichit seems to rest, suspended as on the wings of the condor. That myth ofDionysus Zagreus, "a Bacchus who had been in hell, " which is thefoundation of the marvellous new myth of "Denys l'Auxerrois, " seemsalways to be in the mind of Nietzsche, though indeed he refers to it butonce, and passingly. Pater has shown, as Nietzsche shows in greaterdetail and with a more rigorous logic, that this "serenity" was but anaccepted illusion, and all Olympus itself but "intermediary, " an escape, through the æsthetics of religion, from the trouble at the heart ofthings; art, with its tragic illusions of life, being another form ofescape. To Nietzsche the world and existence justify themselves only asan æsthetic phenomenon, the work of a god wholly the artist; "and inthis sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince usthat even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an æstheticgame played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of itsjoy. " "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will, " the vital principle. "If itwere possible, " says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing figures ofspeech, "to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is manbut that?), in order to endure life, this dissonance would need someadmirable illusion to hide from itself its true nature, under a veil ofbeauty. " This is the aim of art, as it calls up pictures of the visibleworld and of the little temporary actions of men on its surface. Thehoofed satyr of Dionysus, as he leaps into the midst of these graciousappearances, drunk with the young wine of nature, surly with the oldwisdom of Silenus, brings the real, excessive, disturbing truth ofthings suddenly into the illusion; and is gone again, with a shrilllaugh, without forcing on us more of his presence than we can bear. 

I have but touched on a few points in an argument which has itself theecstatic quality of which it speaks. A good deal of the book isconcerned with the latest development of music, and especially withWagner. Nietzsche, after his change of sides, tells us not to take thispart too seriously: "what I fancied I heard in the Wagnerian music hasnothing to do with Wagner. " Few better things have been said about musicthan these pages; some of them might be quoted against the "programme"music which has been written since that time, and against the falsetheory on which musicians have attempted to harness music in the shaftsof literature. The whole book is awakening; in Nietzsche's own words, "aprodigious hope speaks in it. "

SARAH BERNHARDT

I am not sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the momentof what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone;what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which aloneone can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not theprinciple of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat ofthe blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, isprecisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art. To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of the skeleton is leftbare when age thins the flesh upon it, is to learn more easily all thatis to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature hashitherto concealed with its merciful covering. 

The art of Sarah Bernhardt has always been a very conscious art, but itspoke to us, once, with so electrical a shock, as if nerve touchednerve, or the mere "contour subtil" of the voice were laid tinglingly onone's spinal cord, that it was difficult to analyse it coldly. She wasPhèdre or Marguerite Gautier, she was Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fédora, LaTosca, the actual woman, and she was also that other actual woman, SarahBernhardt. Two magics met and united, in the artist and the woman, eachalone of its kind. There was an excitement in going to the theatre;one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen; there wasalmost a kind of obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when thelioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars. And theacting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown;it was as if the whole nervous force of the audience were sucked out ofit and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered thesingle, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the woman. And so, inits way, this very artificial acting seemed the mere instinctive, irresistible expression of a temperament; it mesmerised one, awakeningthe senses and sending the intelligence to sleep. 

After all, though Réjane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them upto you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supremefeast. In "La Dame aux Camélias, " still, she shows herself, as anactress, the greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting;there is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canailleattractiveness, as with Réjane; the thing is plastic, a modelling ofemotion before you, with every vein visible; she leaves nothing to theimagination, gives you every motion, all the physical signs of death, all the fierce abandonment to every mood, to grief, to delight, tolassitude. When she suffers, in the scene, for instance, where Armandinsults her, she is like a trapped wild beast which some one istorturing, and she wakes just that harrowing pity. One's whole fleshsuffers with her flesh; her voice caresses and excites like a touch; ithas a throbbing, monotonous music, which breaks deliciously, whichpauses suspended, and then resolves itself in a perfect chord. Hervoice is like a thing detachable from herself, a thing which she takesin her hands like a musical instrument, playing on the stops cunninglywith her fingers. Prose, when she speaks it, becomes a kind of verse, with all the rhythms, the vocal harmonies, of a kind of human poetry. Her whisper is heard across the whole theatre, every syllable distinct, and yet it is really a whisper. She comes on the stage like a miraculouspainted idol, all nerves; she runs through the gamut of the sex, andends a child, when the approach of death brings Marguerite back to thatdeep infantile part of woman. She plays the part now with the accustomedease of one who puts on and off an old shoe. It is almost a part of her;she knows it through all her senses. And she moved me as much last nightas she moved me when I first saw her play the part eleven or twelveyears ago. To me, sitting where I was not too near the stage, she mighthave been five-and-twenty. I saw none of the mechanism of the art, as Isaw it in "L'Aiglon"; here art still concealed art. Her vitality wasequal to the vitality of Réjane; it is differently expressed, that isall. With Réjane the vitality is direct; it is the appeal of Gavroche, the sharp, impudent urchin of the streets; Sarah Bernhardt's vitality iselectrical, and shoots its currents through all manner of winding ways. In form it belongs to an earlier period, just as the writing of Dumasfils belongs to an earlier period than the writing of Meilhac. It comesto us with the tradition to which it has given life; it does not springinto our midst, unruly as nature. 

But it is in "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are torealise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre, " Racineanticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If the part had been made for her by a poetof our own days, it could not have been brought more perfectly withinher limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits totheir utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama, and it is written with a sense of the stage not less sure than its senseof dramatic poetry. There was a time when Racine was looked upon asold-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays thathis verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his languageis as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the mostpassionate of poets. Of the character of Phèdre Racine tells us that itis "ce que j'ai peut-être mis de plus raisonnable sur le théâtre. " Theword strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phèdreis indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeksthemselves, could make it. The passion itself is an abnormal, an insanething, and that passion comes to us with all its force and all itsperversity; but the words in which it is expressed are neverextravagant, they are always clear, simple, temperate, perfectly preciseand explicit. The art is an art exquisitely balanced between theconventional and the realistic, and the art of Sarah Bernhardt, when sheplays the part, is balanced with just the same unerring skill. She seemsto abandon herself wholly, at times, to her "fureurs"; she tears thewords with her teeth, and spits them out of her mouth, like a wild beastravening upon prey; but there is always dignity, restraint, a certainremoteness of soul, and there is always the verse, and her miraculousrendering of the verse, to keep Racine in the right atmosphere. Of whatwe call acting there is little, little change in the expression of theface. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in "Phèdre" thatone can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty. Inher modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to use only a few ofthe instruments of the orchestra: an actress must, in such parts, beconversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room inmodern conversation? But here she has Racine's verse, along withRacine's psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer thevoice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words, her lines, witha kind of joyful satisfaction; all the artist in her delights in thetask. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence; but everythingis coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty. 

Well, and she seems still to be the same Phèdre that she was eleven ortwelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias. " Is it reality, is it illusion? Illusion, perhaps, but an illusion which makes itselfinto a very effectual kind of reality. She has played these pieces untilshe has got them, not only by heart, but by every nerve and by everyvein, and now the ghost of the real thing is so like the real thing thatthere is hardly any telling the one from the other. It is the living onof a mastery once absolutely achieved, without so much as the need of anew effort. The test of the artist, the test which decides how far theartist is still living, as more than a force of memory, lies in thepower to create a new part, to bring new material to life. Last year, in"L'Aiglon, " it seemed to me that Sarah Bernhardt showed how little shestill possessed that power, and this year I see the same failure in"Francesca da Rimini. "

The play, it must be admitted, is hopelessly poor, common, melodramatic, without atmosphere, without nobility, subtlety, orpassion; it degrades the story which we owe to Dante and not to history(for, in itself, the story is a quite ordinary story of adultery: Danteand the flames of his hell purged it), it degrades it almost out of allrecognition. These middle-aged people, who wrangle shrewishly behind thejust turned back of the husband and almost in the hearing of the child, are people in whom it is impossible to be interested, apart from anyfine meanings put into them in the acting. And yet, since M. De Max hasmade hardly less than a creation out of the part of Giovanni, fillingit, as he has, with his own nervous force and passionately restrainedart, might it not have been possible once for Sarah Bernhardt to havethrilled us even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford? I think so;she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to herown purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in badplays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodiousimage, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly, chantingly, or frantically, as the expression marks, to which she seemsto act, demand. The interest is in following her expression-marks. 

The first thing one notices in her acting, when one is free to watch itcoolly, is the way in which she subordinates effects to effect. She hasher crescendos, of course, and it is these which people are most apt toremember, but the extraordinary force of these crescendos comes from thesmooth and level manner in which the main part of the speaking is done. She is not anxious to make points at every moment, to put all thepossible emphasis into every separate phrase; I have heard her glideover really significant phrases which, taken by themselves, would seemto deserve more consideration, but which she has wisely subordinated toan overpowering effect of ensemble. Sarah Bernhardt's acting alwaysreminds me of a musical performance. Her voice is itself an instrumentof music, and she plays upon it as a conductor plays upon an orchestra. One seems to see the expression marks: piano, pianissimo, largamente, and just where the tempo rubato comes in. She never forgets that art isnot nature, and that when one is speaking verse one is not talkingprose. She speaks with a liquid articulation of every syllable, like onewho loves the savour of words on the tongue, giving them a beauty and anexpressiveness often not in them themselves. Her face changes less thanyou might expect; it is not over-possessed by detail, it gives alwaysthe synthesis. The smile of the artist, a wonderful smile which hasnever aged with her, pierces through the passion or languor of the part. It is often accompanied by a suave, voluptuous tossing of the head, andis like the smile of one who inhales some delicious perfume, withhalf-closed eyes. All through the level perfection of her acting thereare little sharp snaps of the nerves; and these are but one indicationof that perfect mechanism which her art really is. Her finger is alwaysupon the spring; it touches or releases it, and the effect followsinstantaneously. The movements of her body, her gestures, the expressionof her face, are all harmonious, are all parts of a single harmony. Itis not reality which she aims at giving us, it is reality transposedinto another atmosphere, as if seen in a mirror, in which all itsoutlines become more gracious. The pleasure which we get from seeing heras Francesca or as Marguerite Gautier is doubled by that other pleasure, never completely out of our minds, that she is also Sarah Bernhardt. Onesometimes forgets that Réjane is acting at all; it is the real woman ofthe part, Sapho, or Zaza, or Yanetta, who lives before us. Also onesometimes forgets that Duse is acting, that she is even pretending to beMagda or Silvia; it is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage. ButSarah Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when she isat her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness of the one doesnot disturb our possession by the other. When she is not at her best, wesee only the actress, the incomparable craftswoman openly labouring ather work. 

COQUELIN AND MOLIÈRE: SOME ASPECTS

To see Coquelin in Molière is to see the greatest of comic actors at hisbest, and to realise that here is not a temperament, or a student, oranything apart from the art of the actor. His art may be compared withthat of Sarah Bernhardt for its infinite care in the training of nature. They have an equal perfection, but it may be said that Coquelin, withhis ripe, mellow art, his passion of humour, his touching vehemence, makes himself seem less a divine machine, more a delightfully faultyperson. His voice is firm, sonorous, flexible, a human, expressive, amusing voice, not the elaborate musical instrument of Sarah, whichseems to go by itself, câline, cooing, lamenting, raging, or in thatwonderful swift chatter which she uses with such instant and deliberateeffect. And, unlike her, his face is the face of his part, always adisguise, never a revelation. 

I have been seeing the three Coquelins and their company at the GarrickTheatre. They did "Tartuffe, " "L'Avare, " "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, ""Les Précieuses Ridicules, " and a condensed version of "Le DépitAmoureux, " in which the four acts of the original were cut down intotwo. Of these five plays only two are in verse, "Tartuffe" and "Le DépitAmoureux, " and I could not help wishing that the fashion of Molière'sday had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Molière was not apoet, and he knew that he was not a poet. When he ventured to write themost Shakespearean of his comedies, "L'Avare, " in prose, "le mêmepréjugé, " Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin dePierre, ' parce qu'il était en prose, nuisit au succès de 'l'Avare. 'Cependant le public qui, à la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit pardonner à cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il mérite. On comprit alorsqu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comédies en prose. " How infinitelyfiner, as prose, is the prose of "L'Avare" than the verse of "Tartuffe"as verse! In "Tartuffe" all the art of the actor is required to carryyou over the artificial jangle of the alexandrines without allowing youto perceive too clearly that this man, who is certainly not speakingpoetry, is speaking in rhyme. Molière was a great prose writer, but I donot remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse. Thetemper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. Hisworldly wisdom, his active philosophy, the very mainspring of his plots, are found, characteristically, in his valets and his servant-maids. Hesatirises the miser, the hypocrite, the bas-bleu, but he chuckles overFrosine and Gros-René; he loves them for their freedom of speech andtheir elastic minds, ready in words or deeds. They are his chorus, ifthe chorus might be imagined as directing the action. 

But Molière has a weakness, too, for the bourgeois, and he has made M. Jourdain immortally delightful. There is not a really cruel touch in thewhole character; we laugh at him so freely because Molière lets uslaugh with such kindliness. M. Jourdain has a robust joy in life; hecarries off his absurdities by the simple good faith which he puts intothem. When I speak of M. Jourdain I hardly know whether I am speaking ofthe character of Molière or of the character of Coquelin. Probably thereis no difference. We get Molière's vast, succulent farce of theintellect rendered with an art like his own. If this, in every detail, is not what Molière meant, then so much the worse for Molière. 

Molière is kind to his bourgeois, envelops him softly in satire as incotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby; and Coquelin is withoutbitterness, stoops to make stupidity heroic, a distinguished stupidity. A study in comedy so profound, so convincing, so full of human natureand of the art-concealing art of the stage, has not been seen in ourtime. As Mascarille, in "Les Précieuses Ridicules, " Coquelin becomesdelicate and extravagant, a scented whirlwind; his parody is moresplendid than the thing itself which he parodies, more full of fineshow and nimble bravery. There is beauty in this broadly comic acting, the beauty of subtle detail. Words can do little to define a performancewhich is a constant series of little movements of the face, littleintonations of the voice, a way of lolling in the chair, a way ofspeaking, of singing, of preserving the gravity of burlesque. In"Tartuffe" we get a form of comedy which is almost tragic, the horriblyserious comedy of the hypocrite. Coquelin, who remakes his face, as by aprolonged effort of the muscles, for every part, makes, for this part, agreat fish's face, heavy, suppressed, with lowered eyelids and a secretmouth, out of which steals at times some stealthy avowal. He has themovements of a great slug, or of a snail, if you will, putting out itshead and drawing it back into its shell. The face waits and plots, witha sleepy immobility, covering a hard, indomitable will. It is like adrawing of Daumier, if you can imagine a drawing which renews itself atevery instant, in a series of poses to which it is hardly necessary toadd words. 

I am told that Coquelin, in the creation of a part, makes his wayslowly, surely, inwards, for the first few weeks of his performance, andthat then the thing is finished, to the least intonation or gesture, andcan be laid down and taken up at will, without a shade of difference inthe interpretation. The part of Maître Jacques in "L'Avare, " forinstance, which I have just seen him perform with such gusto and suchcertainty, had not been acted by him for twenty years, and it was done, without rehearsal, in the midst of a company that required prompting atevery moment. I suppose this method of moulding a part, as if in wetclay, and then allowing it to take hard, final form, is the methodnatural to the comedian, his right method. I can hardly think that thetragic actor should ever allow himself to become so much at home withhis material; that he dare ever allow his clay to become quite hard. Hehas to deal with the continually shifting stuff of the soul and of thepassions, with nature at its least generalised moments. The comic actordeals with nature for the most part generalised, with things palpablyabsurd, with characteristics that strike the intelligence, not withemotions that touch the heart or the senses. He comes to more definiteand to more definable results, on which he may rest, confident that whathas made an audience laugh once will make it laugh always, laughterbeing a physiological thing, wholly independent of mood. 

In thinking of some excellent comic actors of our own, I am struck bythe much greater effort which they seem to make in order to drive theirpoints home, and in order to get what they think variety. Sir CharlesWyndham is the only English actor I can think of at the moment who doesnot make unnecessary grimaces, who does not insist on acting when thedifficult thing is not to act. In "Tartuffe" Coquelin stands motionlessfor five minutes at a time, without change of expression, and yetnothing can be more expressive than his face at those moments. InChopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held for three bars, and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne, says Mr. Huneker in hisinstructive and delightful book on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, "bysome miraculous means, " so that "it swelled and diminished, and wentsinging into D, as if the instrument were an organ. " It is that power ofsustaining an expression, unchanged, and yet always full of livingsignificance, that I find in Coquelin. It is a part of his economy, theeconomy of the artist. The improviser disdains economy, as much as theartist cherishes it. Coquelin has some half-dozen complete variations ofthe face he has composed for Tartuffe; no more than that, with noinsignificances of expression thrown away; but each variation is a newpoint of view, from which we see the whole character. 

RÉJANE

The genius of Réjane is a kind of finesse: it is a flavour, and all theingredients of the dish may be named without defining it. The thing isParisian, but that is only to say that it unites nervous force with awicked ease and mastery of charm. It speaks to the senses through thebrain, as much as to the brain through the senses. It is the feminineequivalent of intellect. It "magnetises our poor vertebrae, " inVerlaine's phrase, because it is sex and yet not instinct. It is sexcivilised, under direction, playing a part, as we say of others thanthose on the stage. It calculates, and is unerring. It has none of thevulgar warmth of mere passion, none of its health or simplicity. Itleaves a little red sting where it has kissed. And it intoxicates us byits appeal to so many sides of our nature at once. We are thrilled, andwe admire, and are almost coldly appreciative, and yet aglow with theresponse of the blood. I have found myself applauding with tears in myeyes. The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand:neither counteracted the other: and I had to think twice, before I couldremember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill whichI had been almost cruelly enjoying. 

The art of Réjane accepts things as they are, without selection orcorrection; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shallbe nature. What one remembers are little homely details, in which theshadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what iscommon or ugly. She renders the despair of the woman whose lover isleaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose. To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy. Wherenature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whateverform emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of anuntrained and unconscious body. In "Sapho" she is the everyday "Venustoute entière à sa proie attachée, " and she has all the brutality andall the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but seriousvice, vice plus passion. Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, inwhich all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak theirown language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; thewhole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sinceritywhich cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis. She seems at everymoment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect;then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, youwill find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has donenothing with genius. 

Réjane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar: she has all the instincts ofthe human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quitecivilise. There is no doubt of it, nature lacks taste; and woman, who isso near to nature, lacks taste in the emotions. Réjane, in "Sapho" or in"Zaza" for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and sufferingwith all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly humanthing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you bythe throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. Morethan any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion;with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In "Sapho"or "Zaza" she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and her actingreminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how thesenses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love. It islike an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth, beforethe realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh. Scepticism is no longer possible: here, in "Sapho, " is a woman whoflagellates herself before her lover as the penitent flagellates himselfbefore God. In the scene where her lover repulses her last attempt towin him back, there is a convulsive movement of the body, as she letsherself sink to the ground at his feet, which is like the movement ofone who is going to be sick: it renders, with a ghastly truth tonature, the abject collapse of the body under overpowering emotion. Here, as elsewhere, she gives you merely the thing itself, without adisturbing atom of self-consciousness; she is grotesque, she is what youwill: it is no matter. The emotion she is acting possesses her like ablind force; she is Sapho, and Sapho could only move and speak and thinkin one way. Where Sarah Bernhardt would arrange the emotion for somethrilling effect of art, where Duse would purge the emotion of all itsattributes but some fundamental nobility, Réjane takes the big, foolish, dirty thing just as it is. And is not that, perhaps, the supreme meritof acting?

YVETTE GUILBERT

I

She is tall, thin, a little angular, most winningly and girlishlyawkward, as she wanders on to the stage with an air of vaguedistraction. Her shoulders droop, her arms hang limply. She doublesforward in an automatic bow in response to the thunders of applause, andthat curious smile breaks out along her lips and rises and dances in herbright light-blue eyes, wide open in a sort of child-like astonishment. Her hair, a bright auburn, rises in soft masses above a large, pureforehead. She wears a trailing dress, striped yellow and pink, withoutornament. Her arms are covered with long black gloves. The applausestops suddenly; there is a hush of suspense; she is beginning to sing. 

And with the first note you realise the difference between YvetteGuilbert and all the rest of the world. A sonnet by Mr. AndréRaffalovich states just that difference so subtly that I must quote itto help out my interpretation:

 If you want hearty laughter, country mirth-- Or frantic gestures of an acrobat, Heels over head--or floating lace skirts worth I know not what, a large eccentric hat And diamonds, the gift of some dull boy-- Then when you see her do not wrong Yvette, Because Yvette is not a clever toy, A tawdry doll in fairy limelight set . .. And should her song sound cynical and base At first, herself ungainly, or her smile Monotonous--wait, listen, watch her face: The sufferings of those the world calls vile She sings, and as you watch Yvette Guilbert, You too will shiver, seeing their despair. 

Now to me Yvette Guilbert was exquisite from the first moment. "Exquisite!" I said under my breath, as I first saw her come upon thestage. But it is not merely by her personal charm that she thrills you, though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable. 

It is not merely that she can do pure comedy, that she can be frankly, deliciously, gay. There is one of her songs in which she laughs, chuckles, and trills a rapid flurry of broken words and phrases, withthe sudden, spontaneous, irresponsible mirth of a bird. But where she ismost herself is in a manner of tragic comedy which has never been seenon the music-hall stage from the beginning. It is the profoundly sad andessentially serious comedy which one sees in Forain's drawings, thoserapid outlines which, with the turn of a pencil, give you the wholeexistence of those base sections of society which our art in England ismainly forced to ignore. People call the art of Forain immoral, theycall Yvette Guilbert's songs immoral. That is merely the conventionalmisuse of a conventional word. The art of Yvette Guilbert is certainlythe art of realism. She brings before you the real life-drama of thestreets, of the pot-house; she shows you the seamy side of life behindthe scenes; she calls things by their right names. But there is not atouch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated norcontaminating by what she sings; she is simply a great, impersonal, dramatic artist, who sings realism as others write it. 

Her gamut in the purely comic is wide; with an inflection of the voice, a bend of that curious long thin body which seems to be embodiedgesture, she can suggest, she can portray, the humour that is dry, ironical, coarse (I will admit), unctuous even. Her voice can be sweetor harsh; it can chirp, lilt, chuckle, stutter; it can moan or laugh, betipsy or distinguished. Nowhere is she conventional; nowhere does sheresemble any other French singer. Voice, face, gestures, pantomime, allare different, all are purely her own. She is a creature of contrasts, and suggests at once all that is innocent and all that is perverse. Shehas the pure blue eyes of a child, eyes that are cloudless, that gleamwith a wicked ingenuousness, that close in the utter abasement ofweariness, that open wide in all the expressionlessness of surprise. Hernaïveté is perfect, and perfect, too, is that strange, subtle smile ofcomprehension that closes the period. A great impersonal artist, depending as she does entirely on her expressive power, her dramaticcapabilities, her gift for being moved, for rendering the emotions ofthose in whom we do not look for just that kind of emotion, she affectsone all the time as being, after all, removed from what she sings of; anartist whose sympathy is an instinct, a divination. There is somethingautomatic in all fine histrionic genius, and I find some of the charm ofthe automaton in Yvette Guilbert. The real woman, one fancies, is theslim bright-haired girl who looks so pleased and so amused when youapplaud her, and whom it pleases to please you, just because it isamusing. She could not tell you how she happens to be a great artist;how she has found a voice for the tragic comedy of cities; how it isthat she makes you cry when she sings of sordid miseries. "That is hersecret, " we are accustomed to say; and I like to imagine that it is asecret which she herself has never fathomed. 

II

The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every one else on themusic-hall stage is precisely the difference between Sarah Bernhardtand every one else on the stage of legitimate drama. Elsewhere you mayfind many admirable qualities, many brilliant accomplishments, butnowhere else that revelation of an extraordinarily interestingpersonality through the medium of an extraordinarily finished art. Yvette Guilbert has something new to say, and she has discovered a newway of saying it. She has had precursors, but she has eclipsed them. Shesings, for instance, songs of Aristide Bruant, songs which he had sungbefore her, and sung admirably, in his brutal and elaborately carelessway. But she has found meanings in them which Bruant, who wrote them, never discovered, or, certainly, could never interpret; she hassurpassed him in his own quality, the _macabre_; she has transformed therough material, which had seemed adequately handled until she showed howmuch more could be done with it, into something artistically fine anddistinguished. And just as, in the brutal and _macabre_ style, she hasdone what Bruant was only trying to do, so, in the style, supposed to betraditionally French, of delicate insinuation, she has invented newshades of expression, she has discovered a whole new method ofsuggestion. And it is here, perhaps, that the new material which she hasknown, by some happy instinct, how to lay her hands on, has been of mostservice to her. She sings, a little cruelly, of the young girl; and theyoung girl of her songs (that _demoiselle de pensionnat_ who is theheroine of one of the most famous of them) is a very different beingfrom the fair abstraction, even rosier and vaguer to the French mindthan it is to the English, which stands for the ideal of girlhood. Itis, rather, the young girl as Goncourt has rendered her in "Chérie, " acreature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at worksomewhat abnormally in an anæmic frame, with an intelligence left tofeed mainly on itself. And Yvette herself, with her bright hair, thesleepy gold fire of her eyes, her slimness, her gracious awkwardness, her air of delusive innocence, is the very type of the young girl ofwhom she sings. There is a certain malice in it all, a maliciousinsistence on the other side of innocence. But there it is, a newfigure; and but one among the creations which we owe to this "comicsinger, " whose comedy is, for the most part, so serious and so tragic. 

For the art of Yvette Guilbert is of that essentially modern kind which, even in a subject supposed to be comic, a subject we are accustomed tosee dealt with, if dealt with at all, in burlesque, seeks mainly for thereality of things (and reality, if we get deep enough into it, is nevercomic), and endeavour to find a new, searching, and poignant expressionfor that. It is an art concerned, for the most part, with all that partof life which the conventions were intended to hide from us. We see aworld where people are very vicious and very unhappy; a sordid, miserable world which it is as well sometimes to consider. It is a sideof existence which exists; and to see it is not to be attracted towardsit. It is a grey and sordid land, under the sway of "Eros vanné"; it is, for the most part, weary of itself, without rest, and without escape. This is Yvette Guilbert's domain; she sings it, as no one has ever sungit before, with a tragic realism, touched with a sort of grotesqueirony, which is a new thing on any stage. The _rouleuse_ of the QuartierBréda, praying to the one saint in her calendar, "Sainte Galette"; the_soûlarde_, whom the urchins follow and throw stones at in the street;the whole life of the slums and the gutter: these are her subjects, andshe brings them, by some marvellous fineness of treatment, into thesphere of art. 

It is all a question of _métier_, no doubt, though how far her method isconscious and deliberate it is difficult to say. But she has certainquite obvious qualities, of reticence, of moderation, of suspendedemphasis, which can scarcely be other than conscious and deliberate. Sheuses but few gestures, and these brief, staccato, and for an immediatepurpose; her hands, in their long black gloves, are almost motionless, the arms hang limply; and yet every line of the face and body seemsalive, alive and repressed. Her voice can be harsh or sweet, as shewould have it, can laugh or cry, be menacing or caressing; it is neverused for its own sake, decoratively, but for a purpose, for an effect. And how every word tells! Every word comes to you clearly, carryingexactly its meaning; and, somehow, along with the words, an emotion, which you may resolve to ignore, but which will seize upon you, whichwill go through and through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, thepower to make you feel intensely; and that is precisely the final testof a great dramatic artist. 

SIR HENRY IRVING

As I watched, at the Lyceum, the sad and eager face of Duse, leaningforward out of a box, and gazing at the eager and gentle face of Irving, I could not help contrasting the two kinds of acting summed up in thosetwo faces. The play was "Olivia, " W. G. Wills' poor and stagey version of"The Vicar of Wakefield, " in which, however, not even the leanintelligence of a modern playwright could quite banish the homely andgracious and tender charm of Goldsmith. As Dr. Primrose, Irving wasalmost at his best; that is to say, not at his greatest, but at his mostequable level of good acting. All his distinction was there, hisnobility, his restraint, his fine convention. For Irving represents theold school of acting, just as Duse represents the new school. To Duse, acting is a thing almost wholly apart from action; she thinks on thestage, scarcely moves there; when she feels emotion, it is her chiefcare not to express it with emphasis, but to press it down into hersoul, until only the pained reflection of it glimmers out of her eyesand trembles in the hollows of her cheeks. To Irving, on the contrary, acting is all that the word literally means; it is an art of sharp, detached, yet always delicate movement; he crosses the stage withintention, as he intentionally adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highlyconventional elocution of his own; he is an actor, and he acts, keepingnature, or the too close resemblance of nature, carefully out of hiscomposition. 

With Miss Terry there is permanent charm of a very natural nature, whichhas become deliciously sophisticated. She is the eternal girl, and shecan never grow old; one might say, she can never grow up. She learns herpart, taking it quite artificially, as a part to be learnt; and then, ather frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into delight, thoughnot always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of apassing moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a sciencefounded on tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes himwhat he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch ofgenius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal, wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, buta craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an artwholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves toslow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-outword. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is expected, to ouraccustomed sense of the logic, not of life, but of life as we havealways seen it on the stage, by his way of taking snuff, of taking outhis pocket-handkerchief, of lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. Hehas observed life in order to make his own version of life, using thestage as his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limitationsof the stage. 

Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI. " His Louis XI. Is amasterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is thegrotesque art of the thing which saves it from becoming painful. Thisshrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked allthe flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and crackedcovering of yellow skin, would be unendurable in its irreverent copy ofage if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice thanthere is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figureis at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distractsone between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing; onewatches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism, still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation, make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetisesus, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement; the handsact almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. Thepassion of fear, the instinct of craft, the malady of suspicion, in afrail old man who has power over every one but himself: that is what SirHenry Irving represents, in a performance which is half precisephysiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing inart. 

See him in "The Merchant of Venice. " His Shylock is noble and sordid, pathetic and terrifying. It is one of his great parts, made up of pride, stealth, anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolicalsubtlety. Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle ofhis stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakeswith lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and thegreat actor. See him as Mephistopheles in "Faust. " The Lyceumperformance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figuredrifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devilMephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomesa kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy pride, holdinghimself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the oldacknowledgment that "the devil is an ass. " A head like the head ofDante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromolithographicbackgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on thecheap triumph of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay with agimlet out of an inn table: it is partly Goethe's fault, and partly thefault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick of the stage. Mephistopheles is not really among Irving's great parts, but it is amonghis picturesque parts. With his restless strut, a blithe and agedtripping of the feet to some not quite human measure, he is like somespectral marionette, playing a game only partly his own. In such a partno mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image with its solemn masklives in a kind of galvanic life of its own, seductively, with somemocking suggestion of his "cousin the snake. " Here and there some of theold power may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuatingremains. 

Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and"Coriolanus, " the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificentspectacle. It is a play made up principally of one character and acrowd, the crowd being a sort of moving background, treated inShakespeare's large and scornful way. A stage crowd at the Lyceum alwaysgives one a sense of exciting movement, and this Roman rabble did allthat was needed to show off the almost solitary splendour of Coriolanus. He is the proudest man in Shakespeare, and Sir Henry Irving is at hisbest when he embodies pride. His conception of the part was masterly; ithad imagination, nobility, quietude. With opportunity for ranting inevery second speech, he never ranted, but played what might well havebeen a roaring part with a kind of gentleness. With every opportunityfor extravagant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about him, like a rock against which the foam beats. Made up as a kind of RomanMoltke, the lean, thoughtful soldier, he spoke throughout with a slow, contemptuous enunciation, as of one only just not too lofty to sneer. Restrained in scorn, he kept throughout an attitude of disdainful pride, the face, the eyes, set, while only his mouth twitched, seeming to chewhis words, with the disgust of one swallowing a painful morsel. Whereother actors would have raved, he spoke with bitter humour, a humourthat seemed to hurt the speaker, the concise, active humour of thesoldier, putting his words rapidly into deeds. And his pride was anintellectual pride; the weakness of a character, but the angry dignityof a temperament. I have never seen Irving so restrained, so much anartist, so faithfully interpretative of a masterpiece. Something ofenergy, no doubt, was lacking; but everything was there, except theemphasis which I most often wish away in acting. 

DUSE IN SOME OF HER PARTS

I

The acting of Duse is a criticism; poor work dissolves away under it, asunder a solvent acid. Not one of the plays which she has brought withher is a play on the level of her intelligence and of her capacity forexpressing deep human emotion. Take "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. " It is avery able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a particularkind of character, but it is only able, and it is only a glimpse. Paula, as conceived by Mr. Pinero, is a thoroughly English type of woman, thenice, slightly morbid, somewhat unintelligently capricious woman who has"gone wrong, " and who finds it quite easy, though a little dull, to goright when the chance is offered to her. She is observed from theoutside, very keenly observed; her ways, her surface tricks of emotion, are caught; she is a person whom we know or remember. But what isskin-deep in Paula as conceived by Mr. Pinero becomes a real humanbeing, a human being with a soul, in the Paula conceived by Duse. Paulaas played by Duse is sad and sincere, where the Englishwoman is onlyirritable; she has the Italian simplicity and directness in place ofthat terrible English capacity for uncertainty in emotion and huffinessin manner. She brings profound tragedy, the tragedy of a soul which hassinned and suffered, and tries vainly to free itself from theconsequences of its deeds, into a study of circumstances in their ruinof material happiness. And, frankly, the play cannot stand it. When thiswoman bows down under her fate in so terrible a spiritual loneliness, realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only theinevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid wordswhich shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come. Thesituation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation. Here isDuse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remainsempty. It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that donot come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and inher voice, only not in the words that she says or in the details of theaction which she is condemned to follow. 

See Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, " and youwill see it played exactly according to Mr. Pinero'a intention, andplayed brilliantly enough to distract our notice from what is lacking inthe character. A fantastic and delightful contradiction, half gamine, half Burne-Jones, she confuses our judgment, as a Paula in real lifemight, and leaves us attracted and repelled, and, above all, interested. But Duse has no resources outside simple human nature. If she cannotconvince you by the thing in itself, she cannot disconcert you by aparadox about it. Well, this passionately sincere acting, this one realperson moving about among the dolls of the piece, shows up all that ismechanical, forced, and unnatural in the construction of a play nevermeant to withstand the searchlight of this woman's creativeintelligence. Whatever is theatrical and obvious starts out into sight. The good things are transfigured, the bad things merely discovered. Andso, by a kind of naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it mightbe, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perversesimplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial and insincerecharacter, Duse plays "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" in the grand manner, destroying the illusion of the play as she proves over again thesupremacy of her own genius. 

II

While I watch Duse's Magda, I can conceive, for the time, of no other. Realising the singer as being just such an artist as herself, she playsthe part with hardly a suggestion of the stage, except the naturalwoman's intermittent loathing for it. She has been a great artist; yes, but that is nothing to her. "I am I, " as she says, and she has lived. And we see before us, all through the play, a woman who has lived withall her capacity for joy and sorrow, who has thought with all hercapacity for seeing clearly what she is unable, perhaps, to help doing. She does not act, that is, explain herself to us, emphasise herself forus. She lets us overlook her, with a supreme unconsciousness, a supremeaffectation of unconsciousness, which is of course very conscious art, an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. I do not know ifshe plays with exactly the same gestures night after night, but I canquite imagine it. She has certain little caresses, the half awkwardcaresses of real people, not the elegant curves and convolutions of thestage, which always enchant me beyond any mimetic movements I have everseen. She has a way of letting her voice apparently get beyond her owncontrol, and of looking as if emotion has left her face expressionless, as it often leaves the faces of real people, thus carrying the illusionof reality almost further than it is possible to carry it, only neverquite. 

I was looking this afternoon at Whistler's portrait of Carlyle at theGuildhall, and I find in both the same final art: that art of perfectexpression, perfect suppression, perfect balance of every quality, sothat a kind of negative thing becomes a thing of the highestachievement. Name every fault to which the art of the actor is liable, and you will have named every fault which is lacking in Duse. And theart of the actor is in itself so much a compound of false emphasis andevery kind of wilful exaggeration, that to have any negative merit is tohave already a merit very positive. Having cleared away all that is notwanted, Duse begins to create. And she creates out of life itself an artwhich no one before her had ever imagined: not realism, not a copy, butthe thing itself, the evocation of thoughtful life, the creation of theworld over again, as actual and beautiful a thing as if the world hadnever existed. 

III

"La Gioconda" is the first play in which Duse has had beautiful words tospeak, and a poetical conception of character to render; and her actingin it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it tobe in "Magda, " or in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. " But the play is not agood play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at itsworst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "TitusAndronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda. " D'Annunziohas put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci:"Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte, " and the action of the play isintended as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art andof beauty. But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror, and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the words cannotredeem a conclusion so inartistic in its painfulness. But, all the same, the play is the work of a poet, it brings imagination upon the stage, and it gives Duse an opportunity of being her finest self. All the wordsshe speaks are sensitive words, she moves in the midst of beautifulthings, her whole life seems to flow into a more harmonious rhythm, forall the violence of its sorrow and suffering. Her acting at the end, allthrough the inexcusable brutality of the scene in which she appearsbefore us with her mutilated hands covered under long hanging sleeves, is, in the dignity, intensity, and humanity of its pathos, a thing ofbeauty, of a profound kind of beauty, made up of pain, endurance, andthe irony of pitiable things done in vain. Here she is no longertransforming a foreign conception of character into her own conceptionof what character should be; she is embodying the creation of anItalian, of an artist, and a creation made in her honour. D'Annunzio'stragedy is, in the final result, bad tragedy, but it is a failure of afar higher order than such successes as Mr. Pinero's. It is written witha consciousness of beauty, with a feverish energy which is still energy, with a sense of what is imaginative in the facts of actual life. It iswritten in Italian which is a continual delight to the ear, prose whichsounds as melodious as verse, prose to which, indeed, all dramaticprobability is sacrificed. And Duse seems to acquire a new subtlety, asshe speaks at last words in themselves worthy of her speaking. It is asif she at last spoke her own language. 

IV

Dumas fils has put his best work into the novel of "La Dame auxCamélias, " which is a kind of slighter, more superficial, moresentimental, more modern, but less universal "Manon Lescaut. " There is acertain artificial, genuinely artificial, kind of nature in it: if not"true to life, " it is true to certain lives. But the play lets go thishold, such as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention asit crosses the footlights; a convention which is touching, indeed, fartoo full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to bemistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fineliterature. And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, afactitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly withParis. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins andloves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice, done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardtimpersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate mannerwhich is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always, turnsher into quite another kind of woman; not the light woman, to whom lovehas come suddenly, as a new sentiment coming suddenly into her life, butthe simple, instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of thedemi-monde, only the natural woman in love. Throughout the play she hasmoments, whole scenes, of absolute greatness, as fine as anything shehas ever done: but there are other moments when she seems to carryrepression too far. Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end ofthe scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word "Armando"over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is ofthe finest order of pathos. She appeals to us by a kind of goodness, much deeper than the sentimental goodness intended by Dumas. It is loveitself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything butitself, uncontaminated, unspoilt. She is Mlle. De Lespinasse rather thanMarguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as breath, and devotion a part of ardour. Her physical suffering is scarcely to benoticed; it is the suffering of her soul that Duse gives us. And shegives us this as if nature itself came upon the boards, and spoke to uswithout even the ordinary disguise of human beings in their intercoursewith one another. Once more an artificial play becomes sincere; oncemore the personality of a great impersonal artist dominates the povertyof her part; we get one more revelation of a particular phase of Duse. And it would be unreasonable to complain that "La Dame aux Camélias" isreally something quite different, something much inferior; here we haveat least a great emotion, a desperate sincerity, with all thethoughtfulness which can possibly accompany passion. 

V

Dumas, in a preface better than his play, tells us that "La PrincesseGeorges" is "a Soul in conflict with Instincts. " But no, as he has drawnher, as he has placed her, she is only the theory of a woman in conflictwith the mechanical devices of a plot. All these characters talk asthey have been taught, and act according to the tradition of the stage. It is a double piece of mechanism, that is all; there is no creation ofcharacter, there is a kind of worldly wisdom throughout, but not aglimmer of imagination; argument drifts into sentiment, and sentimentreturns into argument, without conviction; the end is no conclusion, butan arbitrary break in an action which we see continuing, after thecurtain has fallen. And, as in "Fédora, " Duse comes into the playresolved to do what the author has not done. Does she deliberatelychoose the plays most obviously not written for her in order to extort atriumph out of her enemies? Once more she acts consciously, openly, making every moment of an unreal thing real, by concentrating herselfupon every moment as if it were the only one. The result is aperformance miraculous in detail, and, if detail were everything, itwould be a great part. With powdered hair, she is beautiful and a greatlady; as the domesticated princess, she has all the virtues, andhonesty itself, in her face and in her movements; she gives herself witha kind of really unreflecting thoughtfulness to every sentiment which ishalf her emotion. If such a woman could exist, and she could not, shewould be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid, or the valet who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodramaagain, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where are the threestages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in hispreface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reachesperfection? Shown us by Duse, from moment to moment, yes; but in thepiece, no, scarcely more than in "Fédora. " So fatal is it to write forour instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement. A work of artmust suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative worklike "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginativeand theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty, even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of allactresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beautywhich is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after allonly tantalise us, showing us little fragments of her soul under manydisguises, but never giving us her whole self through the revealingmedium of a masterpiece?

VI

"Fédora" is a play written for Sarah Bernhardt by the writer of playsfor Sarah Bernhardt, and it contains the usual ingredients of thatparticular kind of sorcery: a Russian tigress, an assassination, asuicide, exotic people with impulses in conflict with their intentions, good working evil and evil working good, not according to aphilosophical idea, but for the convenience of a melodramatic plot. Asartificial, as far from life on the one hand and poetry on the other, asa jig of marionettes at the end of a string, it has the absorbingmomentary interest of a problem in events. Character does not exist, only impulse and event. And Duse comes into this play with a desperateresolve to fill it with honest emotion, to be what a woman would reallyperhaps be if life turned melodramatic with her. Visibly, deliberately, she acts: "Fédora" is not to be transformed unawares into life. But heracting is like that finest kind of acting which we meet with in reallife, when we are able to watch some choice scene of the human comedybeing played before us. She becomes the impossible thing that Fédora is, and, in that tour de force, she does some almost impossible things bythe way. There is a scene in which the blood fades out of her cheeksuntil they seem to turn to dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. She makestriumphant point after triumphant point (her intelligence being free toact consciously on this unintelligent matter), and we notice, more thanin her finer parts, individual movements, gestures, tones: the attitudeof her open hand upon a door, certain blind caresses with her fingers asthey cling for the last time to her lover's cheeks, her face as shereads a letter, the art of her voice as she almost deliberately takes usin with these emotional artifices of Sardou. When it is all over, and wethink of the Silvia of "La Gioconda, " of the woman we divine under Magdaand under Paula Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of waste; for evenPaula can be made to seem something which Fédora can never be made toseem. In "Fédora" we have a sheer, undisguised piece of stagecraft, without even the amount of psychological intention of Mr. Pinero, muchless of Sudermann. It is a detective story with horrors, and it is fartoo positive and finished a thing to be transformed into something notitself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster; he chains his slaves. Withoutnobility or even coherence of conception, without inner life or even arecognisable semblance of exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork;you cannot make the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day intoagreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a greatintelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with contempt, as athing to exercise her technical skill upon. As a piece of technicalskill, Duse's acting in "Fédora" is as fine as anything she has done. Itcompletes our admiration of her genius, as it proves to us that she canact to perfection a part in which the soul is left out of the question, in which nothing happens according to nature, and in which life isfigured as a long attack of nerves, relieved by the occasional intervalof an uneasy sleep. 

ANNOTATIONS BY THE WAY

I. "PELLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE"

"Pelléas and Mélisande" is the most beautiful of Maeterlinck's plays, and to say this is to say that it is the most beautiful contemporaryplay. Maeterlinck's theatre of marionettes, who are at the same timechildren and spirits, at once more simple and more abstract than realpeople, is the reaction of the imagination against the wholly prosetheatre of Ibsen, into which life comes nakedly, cruelly, subtly, butwithout distinction, without poetry. Maeterlinck has invented playswhich are pictures, in which the crudity of action is subdued into mistyoutlines. People with strange names, living in impossible places, wherethere are only woods and fountains, and towers by the sea-shore, andancient castles, where there are no towns, and where the common crowd ofthe world is shut out of sight and hearing, move like quiet ghostsacross the stage, mysterious to us and not less mysterious to oneanother. They are all lamenting because they do not know, because theycannot understand, because their own souls are so strange to them, andeach other's souls like pitiful enemies, giving deadly woundsunwillingly. They are always in dread, because they know that nothing iscertain in the world or in their own hearts, and they know that lovemost often does the work of hate and that hate is sometimes tendererthan love. In "Pelléas and Mélisande" we have two innocent lovers, towhom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom;we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying whatthey desire most in the world. And out of this tragic tangle Maeterlinckhas made a play which is too full of beauty to be painful. We feel anexquisite sense of pity, so impersonal as to be almost healing, as ifour own sympathy had somehow set right the wrongs of the play. 

And this play, translated with delicate fidelity by Mr. Mackail, hasbeen acted again by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Martin Harvey, to theaccompaniment of M. Fauré's music, and in the midst of scenery whichgave a series of beautiful pictures, worthy of the play. Mrs. Campbell, in whose art there is so much that is pictorial, has never been sopictorial as in the character of Mélisande. At the beginning I thoughtshe was acting with more effort and less effect than in the originalperformance; but as the play went on she abandoned herself more and moresimply to the part she was acting, and in the death scene had a kind ofquiet, poignant, reticent perfection. A plaintive figure out oftapestry, a child out of a nursery tale, she made one feel at once theremoteness and the humanity of this waif of dreams, the little princesswho does know that it is wrong to love. In the great scene by thefountain in the park, Mrs. Campbell expressed the supremeunconsciousness of passion, both in face and voice, as no other Englishactress could have done; in the death scene she expressed the supremeunconsciousness of innocence with the same beauty and the sameintensity. Her palpitating voice, in which there is something like thethrobbing of a wounded bird, seemed to speak the simple and beautifulwords as if they had never been said before. And that beauty andstrangeness in her, which make her a work of art in herself, seemed tofind the one perfect opportunity for their expression. The only actresson our stage whom we go to see as we would go to see a work of art, sheacts Pinero and the rest as if under a disguise. Here, dressed inwonderful clothes of no period, speaking delicate, almost ghostly words, she is herself, her rarer self. And Mr. Martin Harvey, who can be sosimple, so passionate, so full of the warmth of charm, seemed untilalmost the end of the play to have lost the simple fervour which he hadonce shown in the part of Pelléas; he posed, spoke without sincerity, was conscious of little but his attitudes. But in the great love sceneby the fountain in the park he had recovered sincerity, he forgothimself, remembering Pelléas: and that great love scene was acted witha sense of the poetry and a sense of the human reality of the thing, asno one on the London stage but Mr. Harvey and Mrs. Campbell could haveacted it. No one else, except Mr. Arliss as the old servant, was good;the acting was not sufficiently monotonous, with that fine monotonywhich is part of the secret of Maeterlinck. These busy actors occupiedthemselves in making points, instead of submitting passively to thepassing through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of theseemotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling words. 

II. "EVERYMAN"

The Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of "Everyman" deserves aplace of its own among the stage performances of our time. "Everyman"took one into a kind of very human church, a church in the midst of themarket-place, like those churches in Italy, in which people seem so muchat home. The verse is quaint, homely, not so archaic when it is spokenas one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, butvery irregular in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke itso admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been trained toscan it as well as they articulated it. "Everyman" is a kind of"Pilgrim's Progress, " conceived with a daring and reverent imagination, so that God himself comes quite naturally upon the stage, and speaks outof a clothed and painted image. Death, lean and bare-boned, rattles hisdrum and trips fantastically across the stage of the earth, leading hisdance; Everyman is seen on his way to the grave, taking leave of Riches, Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods (each personified with his attributes), escorted a little way by Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and the FiveWits, and then abandoned by them, and then going down into the gravewith no other attendance than that of Knowledge and Good Deeds. Thepathos and sincerity of the little drama were shown finely andadequately by the simple cloths and bare boards of a Shakespeareanstage, and by the solemn chanting of the actors and their serious, unspoilt simplicity in acting. Miss Wynne-Matthison in the part ofEveryman acted with remarkable power and subtlety; she had the completecommand of her voice, as so few actors or actresses have, and she wasable to give vocal expression to every shade of meaning which she hadapprehended. 

III. "FAUST" AT THE LYCEUM

In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did hisbest to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately hewas less satisfied with Goethe's verse, though it happens that the verseis distinctly better than the construction. He kept the shell and threwaway the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which hegives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Herehe speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words arefollowed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone outof them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. TheWalpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study isemptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' Kitchen brews messes withoutmagic, lest the gallery should be bewildered. The part of Martha isextended, in order that his red livery may have its full "comic relief. "Mephistopheles throws away a good part of his cunning wit, in order thathe may shock no prejudices by seeming to be cynical with seriousness, and in order to get in some more than indifferent spectral effect. Margaret is to be seen full length; the little German soubrette does herbest to be the Helen Faust takes her for; and we are meant to beprofoundly interested in the love-story. "Most of all, " the programmeassures us, Wills "strove to tell the love-story in a manner that mightappeal to an English-speaking audience. "

Now if you take the philosophy and the poetry out of Goethe's "Faust, "and leave the rest, it does not seem to me that you leave the part whichis best worth having. In writing the First Part of "Faust" Goethe madefree use of the legend of Dr. Faustus, not always improving that legendwhere he departed from it. If we turn to Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" weshall see, embedded among chaotic fragments of mere rubbish and refuse, the outlines of a far finer, a far more poetic, conception of thelegend. Marlowe's imagination was more essentially a poetic imaginationthan Goethe's, and he was capable, at moments, of more satisfyingdramatic effects. When his Faustus says to Mephistopheles:

 One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee, To glut the longing of my heart's desire: That I may have unto my paramour That heavenly Helen which I saw of late;

and when, his prayer being granted, he cries:

 Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

he is a much more splendid and significant person than the Faust ofGoethe, who needs the help of the devil and of an old woman to seduce ayoung girl who has fallen in love with him at first sight. Goethe, it istrue, made what amends he could afterwards, in the Second Part, whenmuch of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world wasnot active enough to replace it. Helen has her share, among otherabstractions, but the breath has not returned into her body, she isglacial, a talking enigma, to whom Marlowe's Faustus would never havesaid with the old emphasis:

 And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

What remains, then, in Wills' version, is the Gretchen story, in all itsdetail, a spectacular representation of the not wholly sincerewitchcraft, and the impressive outer shell of Mephistopheles, with, inSir Henry Irving's pungent and acute rendering, something of the realsavour of the denying spirit. Mephistopheles is the modern devil, thedevil of culture and polite negation; the comrade, in part the master, of Heine, and perhaps the grandson and pupil of Voltaire. On the Lyceumstage he is the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; thoughso many of his best words have been taken from him, it is with a finesubtlety that he says the words that remain. And the figure, with itslightness, weary grace, alert and uneasy step, solemnity, grim laughter, remains with one, after one has come away and forgotten whether he toldus all that Goethe confided to him. 

IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS

When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaningof Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know thescarcely human oval which represents a woman's face, with the help of afew thin curves for eyelids and mouth. Well, that convention, as I hadalways supposed it to be, that geometrical symbol of a face, turns outto be precisely the face of the Japanese woman when she is made up. Sothe monstrous entanglements of men fighting, which one sees in thepictures, the circling of the two-handed sword, the violence of feet incombat, are seen to be after all the natural manner of Japanese warfare. This unrestrained energy of body comes out in the expression of everymotion. Men spit and sneeze and snuffle, without consciousness ofdignity or hardly of humanity, under the influence of fear, anger, orastonishment. When the merchant is awaiting Shylock's knife he tremblesconvulsively, continuously, from head to feet, unconscious of everythingbut death. When Shylock has been thwarted, he stands puckering his faceinto a thousand grimaces, like a child who has swallowed medicine. It isthe emotion of children, naked sensation, not yet clothed bycivilisation. Only the body speaks in it, the mind is absent; and thebody abandons itself completely to the animal force of its instincts. With a great artist like Sada Yacco in the death scene of "The Geishaand the Knight, " the effect is overwhelming; the whole woman dies beforeone's sight, life ebbs visibly out of cheeks and eyes and lips; it isdeath as not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death. There are moments, at other times and with other performers, when it is difficult not tolaugh at some cat-like or ape-like trick of these painted puppets whotalk a toneless language, breathing through their words as they whisperor chant them. They are swathed like barbaric idols, in splendid robeswithout grace; they dance with fans, with fingers, running, hopping, lifting their feet, if they lift them, with the heavy delicacy of theelephant; they sing in discords, striking or plucking a few hoarse noteson stringed instruments, and beating on untuned drums. Neither they northeir clothes have beauty, to the limited Western taste; they havestrangeness, the charm of something which seems to us capricious, almostoutside Nature. In our ignorance of their words, of what they mean toone another, of the very way in which they see one another, we shallbest appreciate their rarity by looking on them frankly as pictures, which we can see with all the imperfections of a Westernmisunderstanding. 

V. THE PARIS MUSIC-HALL

It is not always realised by Englishmen that England is really thecountry of the music-hall, the only country where it has taken firmroot and flowered elegantly. There is nothing in any part of Europe tocompare, in their own way, with the Empire and the Alhambra, either asplaces luxurious in themselves or as places where a brilliant spectacleis to be seen. It is true that, in England, the art of the ballet hasgone down; the prima ballerina assoluta is getting rare, the primo uomois extinct. The training of dancers as dancers leaves more and more tobe desired, but that is a defect which we share, at the present time, with most other countries; while the beauty of the spectacle, with us, is unique. Think of "Les Papillons" or of "Old China" at the Empire, andthen go and see a fantastic ballet at Paris, at Vienna, or at Berlin!

And it is not only in regard to the ballet, but in regard also to the"turns, " that we are ahead of all our competitors. I have no greatadmiration for most of our comic gentlemen and ladies in London, but Ifind it still more difficult to take any interest in the comic gentlemenand ladies of Paris. Take Marie Lloyd, for instance, and compare withher, say, Marguerite Deval at the Scala. Both aim at much the sameeffect, but, contrary to what might have been expected, it is theEnglishwoman who shows the greater finesse in the rendering of thatsmall range of sensations to which both give themselves up frankly. TakePolin, who is supposed to express vulgarities with unusual success. Those automatic gestures, flapping and flopping; that dribbling voice, without intonation; that flabby droop and twitch of the face; all thatsoapy rubbing-in of the expressive parts of the song: I could see noskill in it all, of a sort worth having. The women here sing mainly withtheir shoulders, for which they seem to have been chosen, and which areundoubtedly expressive. Often they do not even take the trouble toexpress anything with voice or face; the face remains blank, the voicetrots creakily. It is a doll who repeats its lesson, holding itself upto be seen. 

The French "revue, " as one sees it at the Folies-Bergère, done somewhatroughly and sketchily, strikes one most of all by its curious want ofconsecution, its entire reliance on the point of this or that scene, costume, or performer. It has no plan, no idea; some ideas are flunginto it in passing; but it remains as shapeless as an English pantomime, and not much more interesting. Both appeal to the same undevelopedinstincts, the English to a merely childish vulgarity, the French to avulgarity which is more frankly vicious. Really I hardly know which isto be preferred. In England we pretend that fancy dress is all in theinterests of morality; in France they make no such pretence, and, indispensing with shoulder-straps, do but make their intentions a littleclearer. Go to the Moulin-Rouge and you will see a still clearerobject-lesson. The goods in the music-halls are displayed so to speak, behind glass, in a shop window; at the Moulin-Rouge they are on the openbooths of a street market. 

M. CAPUS IN ENGLAND

An excellent Parisian company from the Variétés has been playing "LaVeine" of M. Alfred Capus, and this week it is playing "Les Deux Ecoles"of the same entertaining writer. The company is led by Mme. JeanneGranier, an actress who could not be better in her own way unless sheacquired a touch of genius, and she has no genius. She was thoroughlyand consistently good, she was lifelike, amusing, never out of key;only, while she reminded one at times of Réjane, she had none ofRéjane's magnetism, none of Réjane's exciting naturalness. 

The whole company is one of excellent quality, which goes together likethe different parts of a piece of machinery. There is Mme. MarieMagnier, so admirable as an old lady of that good, easy-going, intelligent, French type. There is Mlle. Lavallière, with her brillianteyes and her little canaille voice, vulgarly exquisite. There is M. Numès, M. Guy, M. Guitry. M. Guitry is the French equivalent of Mr. FredKerr, with all the difference that that change of nationality means. Hisslow manner, his delaying pantomine, his hard, persistent eyes, hisuninflected voice, made up a type which I have never seen morefaithfully presented on the stage. And there is M. Brasseur. He is akind of French Arthur Roberts, but without any of that extravagantenergy which carries the English comedian triumphantly through all hisabsurdities. M. Brasseur is preposterously natural, full of aplomb andimpertinence. He never flags, never hesitates; it is impossible to takehim seriously, as we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life. I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as to whether "LaVeine" is a fit play to be presented to the English public. "Max" hasdefended it in his own way in the _Saturday Review_, and I hasten to saythat I quite agree with his defence. Above all, I agree with him whenhe says: "Let our dramatic critics reserve their indignation for thoseother plays in which the characters are self-conscious, winkers andgigglers over their own misconduct, taking us into their confidence, andinviting us to wink and giggle with them. " There, certainly, is theoffence; there is a kind of vulgarity which seems native to the lowerEnglish mind and to the lower English stage. M. Capus is not a moralist, but it is not needful to be a moralist. He is a skilful writer for thestage, who takes an amiable, somewhat superficial, quietly humorous viewof things, and he takes people as he finds them in a particular sectionof the upper and lower middle classes in Paris, not going further thanthe notion which they have of themselves, and presenting that simply, without comment. We get a foolish young millionaire and a foolish youngperson in a flower shop, who take up a collage together in the mostcasual way possible, and they are presented as two very ordinary people, neither better nor worse than a great many other ordinary people, whodo or do not do much the same thing. They at least do not "wink orgiggle"; they take things with the utmost simplicity, and they call uponus to imitate their bland unconsciousness. 

"La Veine" is a study of luck, in the person of a very ordinary man, notmore intelligent or more selfish or more attractive than the average, but one who knows when to take the luck which comes his way. The few, quite average, incidents of the play are put together with neatness andprobability, and without sensational effects, or astonishing curtains;the people are very natural and probable, very amusing in their humours, and they often say humorous things, not in so many set words, but by aclever adjustment of natural and probable nothings. Throughout the playthere is an amiable and entertaining common sense which never becomesstage convention; these people talk like real people, only much moreà-propos. 

In "Les Deux Ecoles" the philosophy which could be discerned in "LaVeine, " that of taking things as they are and taking them comfortably, is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told thatthe whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naïve, sotactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her motherto see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peuttrès bien vivre sans être la plus heureuse des femmes": that is one ofthe morals of the piece; and, the more you think over questions ofconduct, the more you realise that you might just as well not havethought about them at all, might be another. The incidents by whichthese excellent morals are driven home are incidents of the same orderas those in "La Veine, " and not less entertaining. The mounting, simpleas it was, was admirably planned; the stage-pictures full of explicitdrollery. And, as before, the whole company worked with the effortlessunanimity of a perfect piece of machinery. 

A few days after seeing "La Veine" I went to Wyndham's Theatre to see arevival of Sir Francis Burnand's "Betsy. " "Betsy, " of course, is adaptedfrom the French, though, by an accepted practice which seems to medishonest, in spite of its acceptance, that fact is not mentioned on theplay-bill. But the form is undoubtedly English, very English. Whatvulgarity, what pointless joking, what pitiable attempts to serve up oldimpromptus réchauffés! I found it impossible to stay to the end. Someactors, capable of better things, worked hard; there was a terrible airof effort in these attempts to be sprightly in fetters, and in rustyfetters. Think of "La Veine" at its worst, and then think of "Betsy"! Imust not ask you to contrast the actors; it would be almost unfair. Wehave not a company of comedians in England who can be compared for amoment with Mme. Jeanne Granier's company. We have here and there a goodactor, a brilliant comic actor, in one kind or another of emphaticcomedy; but wherever two or three comedians meet on the English stage, they immediately begin to checkmate, or to outbid, or to shout down oneanother. No one is content, or no one is able, to take his place in anorchestra in which it is not allotted to every one to play a solo. 

A DOUBLE ENIGMA

When it was announced that Mrs. Tree was to give a translation of"L'Enigme" of M. Paul Hervieu at Wyndham's Theatre, the play wasannounced under the title "Which?" and as "Which?" it appeared on theplacards. Suddenly new placards appeared, with a new title, not at allappropriate to the piece, "Cæsar's Wife. " Rumours of a late decision, or indecision, of the censor were heard. The play had not beenprohibited, but it had been adapted to more polite ears. But how? Thatwas the question. I confess that to me the question seemed insoluble. Here is the situation as it exists in the play; nothing could besimpler, more direct, more difficult to tamper with. 

Two brothers, Raymond and Gérard de Gourgiran, are in their countryhouse, with their two wives, Giselle and Léonore, and two guests, theold Marquis de Neste and the young M. De Vivarce. The brothers surpriseVivarce on the stairs: was he coming from the room of Giselle or ofLéonore? The women are summoned; both deny everything; it is impossiblefor the audience, as for the husbands, to come to any conclusion. A shotis heard outside: Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save thereputation of the woman he loves. Then the self-command of Léonore givesway; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is someunnecessary moralising ("Là-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots decaptive!" and the like), but the play is over. 

Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, veryintellectually significant, but there it is, a striking dramaticsituation. Above all, it is frank; there are no evasions, no sentimentallies, no hypocrisies before facts. If adultery may not be referred to onthe English stage except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, thensuch a play becomes wholly impossible. Not at all: listen. We are toldto suppose that Vivarce and Léonore have had a possibly quite harmlessflirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Léonore'sroom, he has merely been walking with Léonore in the garden: at midnightremember, and after her husband has gone to bed. In order to lead up tothis, a preposterous speech has been put into the mouth of the Marquisde Neste, an idiotic rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forgetwhat else, which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce'ssentiments as he walks with Léonore in the garden at midnight. But allthese precautions are in vain; the audience is never deceived for aninstant. A form of words has been used, like the form of words by whichcertain lies become technically truthful. The whole point of the play:has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife's lover if hediscovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him? is obviously not aquestion of whether a husband may kill a gentleman who has walked withhis wife in the garden, even after midnight. The force of the originalsituation comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and theuncertainty of the person responsible for it. "Cæsar's Wife" may lendher name for a screen; the screen is no disguise; the play; remains whatit was in its moral bearing; a dramatic stupidity has been imported intoit, that is all. Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play is asecond, not so easily explained, enigma: the enigma of the censor, andof why he "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. " The play, I must confess, does not seem to me, as it seems to certain Frenchcritics, "une pièce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre . .. La tragédie desmâitres antiques et de Shakespeare. " To me it is rather an insubstantialkind of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle. As a tragic episode, the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force and simplicity, the admirable quality of directness. Occasionally the people are tooeager to express the last shade of the author's meaning, as in theconversation between Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides tocommit suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action isreally at an end. But I have never seen a piece which seemed to havebeen written so kindly and so consistently for the benefit of theactors. There are six characters of equal importance; and each in turnabsorbs the whole flood of the limelight. 

The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version of"Au Téléphone, " one of Antoine's recent successes at his theatre inParis. It was brutal and realistic, it made just the appeal of anaccident really seen, and, so far as success in horrifying one isconcerned, it was successful. A husband hearing the voice of his wifethrough the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians arebreaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and helpless to aid her, is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It isbrought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us asuncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation hasabsolutely no artistic value, because terror without beauty and withoutsignificance is not worth causing. When the husband, with his ear atthe telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing thewindow-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certainsympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerveswith the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "LaMort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the doorsoftly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death. In his actingMr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult tosay, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for whatextravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable? He had not, no doubt, what I see described as "le jeu simple et terrible" ofAntoine, a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror; he had the readyabandonment to emotion of the average emotional man. Mr. Warner has anirritating voice and manner, but he has emotional power, not fine norsubtle, but genuine; he feels and he makes you feel. He has the quality, in short, of the play itself, but a quality more tolerable in theactor, who is concerned only with the rendering of a given emotion, thanin the playwright, whose business it is to choose, heighten, and dignifythe emotion which he gives to him to render. 

DRAMA

PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL

Last week gave one an amusing opportunity of contrasting the merits andthe defects of the professional and the unprofessional kind of play. "The Gay Lord Quex" was revived at the Duke of York's Theatre, and Mr. Alexander produced at the St. James's Theatre a play called "The Findingof Nancy, " which had been chosen by the committee of the Playgoers' Clubout of a large number of plays sent in for competition. The writer, MissNetta Syrett, has published one or two novels or collections of stories;but this, as far as I am aware, is her first attempt at a play. Bothplays were unusually well acted, and therefore may be contrasted withoutthe necessity of making allowances for the way in which each wasinterpreted on the stage. 

Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye forwhat is telling, a cynical intelligence which is much more interestingthan the uncertain outlook of most of our playwrights. He has no breadthof view, but he has a clear view; he makes his choice out of humannature deliberately, and he deals in his own way with the materials thathe selects. Before saying to himself: what would this particular personsay or do in these circumstances? he says to himself: what would it beeffective on the stage for this particular person to do or say? Hesuggests nothing, he tells you all he knows; he cares to know nothingbut what immediately concerns the purpose of his play. The existence ofhis people begins and ends with their first and last speech on theboards; the rest is silence, because he can tell you nothing about it. Sophy Fullgarney is a remarkably effective character as astage-character, but when the play is over we know no more about herthan we should know about her if we had spied upon her, in her own way, from behind some bush or keyhole. We have seen a picturesque and amusingexterior, and that is all. Lord Quex does not, I suppose, profess to beeven so much of a character as that, and the other people are mere"humours, " quite amusing in their cleverly contrasted ways. When thesepeople talk, they talk with an effort to be natural and another effortto be witty; they are never sincere and without self-consciousness; theynever say inevitable things, only things that are effective to say. Andthey talk in poor English. Mr. Pinero has no sense of style, of thebeauty or expressiveness of words. His joking is forced and withoutideas; his serious writing is common. In "The Gay Lord Quex" he iscontinually trying to impress upon his audience that he is veryaudacious and distinctly improper. The improprieties are childish in theinnocence of their vulgarity, and the audacities are no more thantrifling lapses of taste. He shows you the interior of a Duchess'sbedroom, and he shows you the Duchess's garter, in a box of othercuriosities. He sets his gentlemen and ladies talking in the allusivestyle which you may overhear whenever you happen to be passing a groupof London cabmen. The Duchess has written in her diary, "Warmafternoon. " That means that she has spent an hour with her lover. Manypeople in the audience laugh. All the cabmen would have laughed. 

Now look for a moment at the play by the amateur and the woman. It isnot a satisfactory play as a whole, it is not very interesting in allits developments, some of the best opportunities are shirked, some ofthe characters (all the characters who are men) are poor. But, in thefirst place, it is well written. Those people speak a language which isnearer to the language of real life than that used by Mr. Pinero, andwhen they make jokes there is generally some humour in the joke and someintelligence in the humour. They have ideas and they have feelings. Theideas and the feelings are not always combined with faultless logic intoa perfectly clear and coherent presentment of character, it is true. Butfrom time to time we get some of the illusion of life. From time to timesomething is said or done which we know to be profoundly true. A womanhas put into words some delicate instinct of a woman's soul. Here andthere is a cry of the flesh, here and there a cry of the mind, which isgenuine, which is a part of life. Miss Syrett has much to learn if sheis to become a successful dramatist, and she has not as yet shown thatshe knows men as well as women; but at least she has begun at the rightend. She has begun with human nature and not with the artifices of thestage, she has thought of her characters as people before thinking ofthem as persons of the drama, she has something to say through them, they are not mere lines in a pattern. I am not at all sure that she hasthe makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it willbe better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your destinationby taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey. The onecertain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning, and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all. The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breathout of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best onlyplaying a clever game with us. He may amuse us, but he is only playingping-pong with the emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think, any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it isdoes not always come into the picture. 

TOLSTOI AND OTHERS

There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Thosenovels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed intodramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantlyunemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind ofpainter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, andit is meant to be monotonous. Tolstoi endeavours to give us somethingmore nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and indaily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in whichexternal action takes part. In the drama we can only properly realisethe soul's action through some corresponding or consequent action whichtakes place visibly before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work, many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can beardetachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and whichis to come out of it. Often the scene which most profoundly impressesone is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partlyto that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection, " Book II. , chapter xxviiii. , the scene in the theatre "during the second act of theeternal 'Dame aux Camélias, ' in which a foreign actress once again, andin a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption. " The General'swife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in thestreet, another woman, the other "half-world, " smiles at him, just inthe same way. That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is one of the greatcrises of his life. He has seen something, for the first time, in whathe now feels to be its true light, and he sees it "as clearly as he sawthe palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats and theStock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night there was norestful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming froman invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer therestful darkness, ignorance. " The chapter is profoundly impressive; itis one of those chapters which no one but Tolstoi has ever written. Imagine it transposed to the stage, if that were possible, and theinevitable disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!

In Tolstoi the story never exists for its own sake, but for the sake ofa very definite moral idea. Even in his later novels Tolstoi is not apreacher; he gives us an interpretation of life, not a theorising aboutlife. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is ofmore consequence) it gives a great part of its value to his "realism" ofprisons and brothels and police courts. In all forms of art, the pointof view is of more importance than the subject-matter. It is asessential for the novelist to get the right focus as it is for thepainter. In a page of Zola and in a page of Tolstoi you might find thesame gutter described with the same minuteness; and yet in reading theone you might see only the filth, while in reading the other you mightfeel only some fine human impulse. Tolstoi "sees life steadily" becausehe sees it under a divine light; he has a saintly patience with evil, and so becomes a casuist through sympathy, a psychologist out of thatpity which is understanding. And then, it is as a direct consequence ofthis point of view, in the mere process of unravelling things, that hisgreatest skill is shown as a novelist. He does not exactly write well;he is satisfied if his words express their meaning, and no more; hiswords have neither beauty nor subtlety in themselves. But, if you willonly give him time, for he needs time, he will creep closer and closerup to some doubtful and remote truth, not knowing itself for what it is:he will reveal the soul to itself, like "God's spy. "

If you want to know how, daily life goes on among people who know aslittle about themselves as you know about your neighbours in a street ordrawing-room, read Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will beperfectly satisfied. But if you want to know why these people are happyor unhappy, why the thing which they do deliberately is not the thingwhich they either want or ought to do, read Tolstoi; and I can hardlyadd that you will be satisfied. I never read Tolstoi without a certainsuspense, sometimes a certain terror. An accusing spirit seems to peerbetween every line; I can never tell what new disease of the soul thosepitying and unswerving eyes may not have discovered. 

Such, then, is a novel of Tolstoi; such, more than almost any of hisnovels, is "Resurrection, " the masterpiece of his old age, into which hehas put an art but little less consummate than that of "Anna Karenina, "together with the finer spirit of his later gospel. Out of this novel aplay in French was put together by M. Henry Bataille and produced at theOdéon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and originaldramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. HenryBataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at HisMajesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play wascalled, Tolstoi's "Resurrection. " What Mr. Morton has done with M. Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'onest heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraimentpure, " in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite thewords one would use about the play in English?

They are not quite the words I would use about the play in English. Itis a melodrama with one good scene, the scene in the prison; and this isgood only to a certain point. There is another scene which is amusing, the scene of the jury, but the humour is little more than clowning, andthe tragic note, which should strike through it, is only there in aparody of itself. Indeed the word parody is the only word which can beused about the greater part of the play, and it seems to me a pity thatthe name of Tolstoi should be brought into such dangerous companionshipwith the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heardpeople around me confessing that they had not read the book. Howterrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they hadever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed thatthis demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle ofdrawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincingdisbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simplelittle gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should beinclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in thematter. When he crucifies himself, so to speak, symbolically, across thedoor of the jury-room, remarking in his slowest manner: "The birdflutters no longer; I must atone, I must atone!" one is, in every sense, alone with the actor. Mr. Tree has many arts, but he has not the art ofsincerity. His conception of acting is, literally, to act, on everyoccasion. Even in the prison scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good, until she begins to shout and he to rant, "and then the care is over, "Mr. Tree cannot be his part without acting it. 

That prison scene is, on the whole, well done, and the first part of it, when the women shout and drink and quarrel, is acted with a satisfyingsense of vulgarity which contrasts singularly with what is meant to bea suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scenepreceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is the firstact. This act takes the place of those astounding chapters in the novelin which the seduction of Katusha is described with a truth, tact, frankness, and subtlety unparalleled in any novel I have ever read. Iread them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to thetheatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, afoolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more thana sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, inshort, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity atwhich one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an"adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by sometranslators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention hisname, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censoralways against him; some of his books he has never been able to print infull in Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre we have, in what is boldly called Tolstoi's "Resurrection, " something which isnot Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and adramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated. Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M. Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have beenleft well alone?

SOME PROBLEM PLAYS

I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"

It was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville Barker's thatthe Stage Society was founded, and it is doing good service to the dramain producing them. "The Marrying of Ann Leete" is the cleverest and mostpromising new play that I have seen for a long time; but it cannot besaid to have succeeded even with the Stage Society audience, and noordinary theatrical manager is very likely to produce it. The author, itis true, is an actor, but he is young; his play is immature, too crowdedwith people, too knotted up with motives, too inconclusive in effect. Heknows the stage, and his knowledge has enabled him to use the stage forhis own purposes, inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one ortwo things which have never, or never so deftly, been done before. Buthe is something besides all that; he can think, he can write, and hecan suggest real men and women. The play opens in the dark, and remainsfor some time brilliantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-centurypeople, talk with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point;they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. Someof the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, "a game for cleverchildren, women, and fools"; it is a game demanding close attention. Acourtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; peoplewalk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fillsone with excitement, the excitement of following a trail. It is a trailof ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought. They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, theirhearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; butthese people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holdingone's mind in suspense. 

Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family, and he interests us in every member of that family. He plays them likechessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. Theyexpress ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme ofthings, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads. They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keensense of the game. They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in andout of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes andsurprises them by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts, sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naïveté which seems laughable; andthey act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come. They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosingthem; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, atevery moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, andthey have to stop, consider, choose a new direction. They seem to gotheir own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escapedalmost literally out of their author's hands. The last scene is anadmirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within itsown limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less asolution. Mr. Barker can write: he writes in short, sharp sentences, which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from everycorner of the stage. He brings his people on and off with anunconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique. The scenewith the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions inthe play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doingthe right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough tocarry it against opposition. The opposition is the firm and narrow mindof the British playgoer. Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoywithout crushing. The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewildersthe world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces theworld. Mr. Barker is young: he will come to think with more depth andless tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more masteryof means. But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd andhonest in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to movethemselves. 

II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"

On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from theSea, " I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring inhis stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are notthings in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier tobelieve in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, forinstance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of thefootlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw theperformance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's plays:the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only, we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea callsto the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and thesea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimitedfreedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who hastalked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyesseem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirablesymbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbsover the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?"and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in thenewspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of itsmeaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is, but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if theStranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upona crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own and aconsiderable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or thesubconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of thedrama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitableway of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory. 

III. "THE NEW IDOL"

It was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage Society togive a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole, " one of those pieces by whichM. François de Curel has reached that very actual section of the Frenchpublic which is interested in ideas. "The New Idol" is a modern play ofthe most characteristically modern type; its subject-matter is largelymedical, it deals with the treatment of cancer; we are shown a doctor'slaboratory, with a horrible elongated diagram of the inside of the humanbody; a young girl's lungs are sounded in the doctor's drawing-room;nearly every, character talks science and very little but science. Whenthey cease talking science, which they talk well, with earnestness andwith knowledge, and try to talk love or intrigue, they talk badly, as ifthey were talking of things which they knew nothing about. Now, personally, this kind of talk does not interest me; it makes me feeluncomfortable. But I am ready to admit that it is justified if I findthat the dramatic movement of the play requires it, that it is itself anessential part of the action. In "The New Idol" I think this is partlythe case. The other medical play which has lately been disturbing Paris, "Les Avariés, " does not seem to me to fulfil this condition at anymoment: it is a pamphlet from beginning to end, it is not a satisfactorypamphlet, and it has no other excuse for existence. But M. De Curel haswoven his problem into at least a semblance of action; the play is not amere discussion of irresistible physical laws; the will enters into theproblem, and will fights against will, and against not quiteirresistible physical laws. The suggestion of love interests, which cometo nothing, and have no real bearing on the main situation, seems to mea mistake; it complicates things, things which must appear to us so veryreal if we are to accept them at all, with rather a theatrical kind ofcomplication. M. De Curel is more a thinker than a dramatist, as he hasshown lately in the very original, interesting, impossible "FilleSauvage. " He grapples with serious matters seriously, and he argueswell, with a closely woven structure of arguments; some of them bringinga kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of thinking andcloseness of seeing. In "The New Idol" there is some dialogue, realdialogue, natural give-and-take, about the fear of death and the horrorof indestructibility (a variation on one of the finest of CoventryPatmore's odes) which seemed to me admirable: it held the audiencebecause it was direct speech, expressing a universal human feeling inthe light of a vivid individual crisis. But such writing as this wasrare; for the most part it was the problem itself which insisted onoccupying our attention, or, distinct from this, the too theatricalcharacters. 

IV. "MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION"

The Stage Society has shown the courage of its opinions by giving anunlicensed play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession, " one of the "unpleasantplays" of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, at the theatre of the New Lyric Club. It was well acted, with the exception of two of the characters, and thepart of Mrs. Warren was played by Miss Fanny Brough, one of thecleverest actresses on the English stage, with remarkable ability. Theaction was a little cramped by the smallness of the stage, but, for allthat, the play was seen under quite fair conditions, conditions underwhich it could be judged as an acting play and as a work of art. It isbrilliantly clever, with a close, detective cleverness, all made up ofmerciless logic and unanswerable common sense. The principal charactersare well drawn, the scenes are constructed with a great deal oftheatrical skill, the dialogue is telling, the interest is heldthroughout. To say that the characters, without exception, are ugly intheir vice and ugly in their virtue; that they all have, men and women, something of the cad in them; that their language is the language ofvulgar persons, is, perhaps, only to say that Mr. Shaw has chosen, forartistic reasons, to represent such people just as they are. But thereis something more to be said. "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is not arepresentation of life; it is a discussion about life. Now, discussionon the stage may be interesting. Why not? Discussion is the mostinteresting thing in the world, off the stage; it is the only thing thatmakes an hour pass vividly in society; but when discussion ends art hasnot begun. It is interesting to see a sculptor handling bits of clay, sticking them on here, scraping them off there; but that is only theinterest of a process. When he has finished I will consider whether hisfigure is well or ill done; until he has finished I can have no opinionabout it. It is the same thing with discussion on the stage. The subjectof Mr. Shaw's discussion is what is called a "nasty" one. That isneither here nor there, though it may be pointed out that there is noessential difference between the problem that he discusses and theproblem that is at the root of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. "

But Mr. Shaw, I believe, is never without his polemical intentions, andI should like, for a moment, to ask whether his discussion of hisproblem, taken on its own merits, is altogether the best way to discussthings. Mr. Shaw has an ideal of life: he asks that men and women shouldbe perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their minds of cant, andspeak out everything that is in their minds. He asks for cold and clearlogic, and when he talks about right and wrong he is really talkingabout right and wrong logic. Now, logic is not the mainspring of everyaction, nor is justice only the inevitable working out of an equation. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must beregulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion toits exactitude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does notmove by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count ofmore exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. Thereis a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems asconsistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shawdisdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense oftouch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it iswarranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi'slogic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because itunderstands, and because to understand is, among other things, topardon. In a word, the difference between the spirit of Tolstoi and thespirit of Mr. Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ andthe spirit of Euclid. 

"MONNA, VANNA"

In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which wasa sort of projection into space of the world of nursery legends and ofchildish romances. It was at once very abstract and very local. Therewas a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end, " a pool in aforest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns ofgold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness ofeternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, anddestiny the stage-manager. The people who came and went had the blindgestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness. Pity andterror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much moreliteral than Aristotle's. 

In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the wordswere ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasantsor children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely evensignificant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty andsignificance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and inan essay in "Le Trésor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said whichmattered. 

Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With"Aglavaine et Sélysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in whichthere was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in whichpeople thought about action and talked about action, and discussed themorality of things and their meaning, very beautifully. 

"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Sélysette, " and init for the first time Maeterlinck has represented the conflicts of theinner life in an external form, making drama, while the people whoundergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of their happening. 

In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destinée, " Maeterlincksays: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragédies ne nous offrentpas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalité. Jecrois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragédie où lafatalité règne réellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pasune où le héros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'estjamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque. " And, on thepreceding page, he says: "Observons que les poètes tragiques osent trèsrarement permettre au sage de paraître un moment sur la scène. Ilscraignent une âme haute parce que les événements la craignent. " Now itis this conception of life and of drama that we find in "Monna Vanna. "We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the old man Marco and inthe instinctively wise Giovanna, with the tragic folly personified inthe husband Guido, who rebels against truth and against life, and loseseven that which he would sacrifice the world to keep. The play is fullof lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against the tooready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here isa play in which almost every character is noble, in which treacherybecomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what weare accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and evencriminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that atany moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the positionof every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere decision of thewill, open to each, and that things happen as they do because it isimpossible, in the nature of each, that the choice could be otherwise. Character, in the deepest sense, makes the action, and there issomething in the movement of the play which resembles the grave andreasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and womendeliberate wisely and not only passionately, in which it is not only thecry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama. 

In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles, " "Intérieur, " and even"Pelléas et Mélisande, " he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashionof his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word. The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling, way. But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has beenlost. The speeches, which were once so short as to be enigmatical, arenow too long, too explanatory; they are sometimes rhetorical, and havemore logic than life. The playwright has gained experience, the thinkerhas gained wisdom, but the curious artist has lost some of his magic. Nodoubt the wizard had drawn his circle too small, but now he has steppedoutside his circle into a world which no longer obeys his formulas. Incasting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery which alonecould replace them? "Monna Vanna" is a remarkable and beautiful play, but it is not a masterpiece. "La Mort de Tintagiles" was a masterpieceof a tiny, too deliberate kind; but it did something which no one hadever done before. We must still, though we have seen "Monna Vanna, "wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not given us all that he is capableof giving us. 

THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP. 

The letter of protest which appeared in the _Times_ of June 30, 1903, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith, and Mr. Hardy, the three highestnames in contemporary English literature, will, I hope, have donesomething to save the literary reputation of England from such a fate asone eminent dramatic critic sees in store for it. "Once more, " says the_Athenæum_, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, andmakes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe. " The _MorningPost_ is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunatecensor, " because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting the mostbeautiful play of his time, and must live to be the laughing-stock ofall sensible people. "

Now the question is: which is really made ridiculous by this ridiculousepisode of the prohibition of Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna, " England orMr. Redford? Mr. Redford is a gentleman of whom I only know that he isnot himself a man of letters, and that he has not given any publicindication of an intelligent interest in literature as literature. If, as a private person, before his appointment to the official post ofcensor of the drama, he had expressed in print an opinion on anyliterary or dramatic question, that opinion would have been taken on itsown merits, and would have carried only the weight of its own contents. The official appointment, which gives him absolute power over the publiclife or death of a play, gives to the public no guarantee of his fitnessfor the post. So far as the public can judge, he was chosen as thetypical "man in the street, " the "plain man who wants a plain answer, "the type of the "golden mean, " or mediocrity. We hear that he is honestand diligent, that he reads every word of every play sent for hisinspection. These are the virtues of the capable clerk, not of thepenetrating judge. Now the position, if it is to be taken seriously, must require delicate discernment as well as inflexible uprightness. IsMr. Redford capable of discriminating between what is artistically fineand what is artistically ignoble? If not, he is certainly incapable ofdiscriminating between what is morally fine and what is morally ignoble. It is useless for him to say that he is not concerned with art, but withmorals. They cannot be dissevered, because it is really the art whichmakes the morality. In other words, morality does not consist in thefacts of a situation or in the words of a speech, but in the spiritwhich informs the whole work. Whatever may be the facts of "Monna Vanna"(and I contend that they are entirely above reproach, even as facts), noone capable of discerning the spirit of a work could possibly fail torealise that the whole tendency of the play is noble and invigorating. All this, all that is essential, evidently escapes Mr. Redford. Helicenses what the _Times_ rightly calls "such a gross indecency as 'TheGirl from Maxim's. '" But he refuses to license "Monna Vanna, " and herefuses to state his reason for withholding the license. The fact is, that moral questions are discussed in it, not taken for granted, andthe plain man, the man in the street, is alarmed whenever people beginto discuss moral questions. "The Girl from Maxim's" is merely indecent, it raises no problems. "Monna Vanna" raises problems. Therefore, saysthe censor, it must be suppressed. By his decision in regard to thisplay of Maeterlinck, Mr. Redford has of course conclusively proved hisunfitness for his post. But that is only one part of the question. Thequestion is: could any one man be found on whose opinion all Englandmight safely rely for its dramatic instruction and entertainment? I donot think such a man could be found. With Mr. Redford, as the _Times_puts it, "any tinge of literary merit seems at once to excite his worstsuspicions. " But with a censor whose sympathies were too purelyliterary, literary in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of someother kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student whocannot tolerate an innocent jesting with "serious" things, scruples ofthe moralist who must choose between Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio, between Tolstoi and Ibsen? I cannot so much as think of a man in allEngland who would be capable of justifying the existence of thecensorship. Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made ridiculous bythis ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all, England, which hasgiven us the liberty of the press and withheld from us the liberty ofthe stage?

A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop'sMove, " which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers forthe stage have done without thinking about art at all. 

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom insteadof vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society insteadof an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is acomedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control ofgood manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of thegame. When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns, they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power toplay the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with piecesmade scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie'sskill, in this play, seems to me to consist. 

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief, to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seentreating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of theplay as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of workwill appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweetand Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audienceto burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled withdelight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling withdelight. If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so muchpleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever meanvery much to the public?

The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonderand curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope tounderstand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell ofOld Drury, " I happened to be in the last row of the stalls. My seat wasnot altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it wasadmirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attentionto my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered withlaughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled andquivered with delight. At every piece of clowning there was the sameresponsive gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that Ishould have thought a child would have seen through them, and resentedthem as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloatedover. I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when Iremembered something that was said to me the other day by a youngSwedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he had been to mostof the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater partof the pieces which were played at the principal London theatres weresuch pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower classtheatres, and that nobody here seemed to mind. The English audience, hesaid, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set beforethem with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected tolaugh, cried when they were expected to cry. But of criticism, preference, selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been toldthat London was the centre of civilisation. Well, in future I shall tryto remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over somebad play, badly acted: it is all right, it is only the children. 

THE TEST OF THE ACTOR

The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of thecapability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor reallycarry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, sucha play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "ThePrincess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man ofletters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing acomplimentary preface, has said: "The claim of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones'smore ambitious plays to rank as literature may have been in some casesgrudgingly allowed, but has not been seriously contested. " Mr. Joneshimself has assured us that he has thought about life, and would like togive some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what hemeans by this peroration, which once closed an article in the_Nineteenth Century_: "O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, sorich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim ofsilver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us cangovern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance ofharmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?" Does Mr. Jones, I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim ofsilver flutes, " or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right notto "rank as Literature"? The audience, for once, was unanimous. Mr. Jones was not encouraged to appear. And yet there had been applause, prolonged applause, at many points throughout this bewildering evening. The applause was meant for the actors. 

If Mr. Jones had shown as much tact in the construction of his play asin the selection of his cast, how admirable the play would have been! Ihave rarely seen a play in which each actor seemed to fit into his partwith such exactitude. But the play! Well, the play began as a comedy, continued as a tragedy, and ended as a farce. It came to a crisis everyfive minutes, it suggested splendid situations, and then caricaturedthem unintentionally, it went shilly-shallying about among the emotionsand sensations which may be drama or melodrama, whichever the handlingmakes them. "You see there is a little poetical justice going about theworld, " says the Princess, when she hears that her rival, against whomshe has fought in vain, has been upset by Providence in the form of amotor-car, and the bridge of her nose broken. The broken nose is Mr. Jones's symbol for poetical justice; it indicates his intellectualattitude. There are many parts of the play where he shows, as he has sooften shown, a genuine skill in presenting and manipulating humorousminor characters. As usual, they have little to do with the play, butthey are amusing for their moment. It is the serious characters who willnot be serious. They are meant well, the action hovers about them withlittle tempting solicitations, continually offering them an opportunityto be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can begrasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the materialis wasted; only the actress makes anything of it. We know how Sullivanwill take a motive of mere farce, such words as the "O Captain Shaw!" of"Iolanthe, " and will write a lovely melody to go with it, fitting hismusic to the feeling which the words do but caricature. That is how MissIrene Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones's unshapen material. By theearnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and gaietyof her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr. Jones had not made. Mr. Jones would set his character in some impossible situation, and MissVanbrugh would make us, for the moment, forget its impossibility. Hewould give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do, andshe would do it with distinction. She had force in lightness, a vividmalice, a magnetic cheerfulness; and she could suffer silently, and besincere in a tragedy which had been conceived without sincerity. Ifacting could save a play, "The Princess's Nose" would have been saved. It was not saved. 

And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play whichinsists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, as we may realise any daywhen Sarah Bernhardt acts before us, there is a certain kind of franklymelodramatic play which can be lifted into at all events a region ofexcited and gratified nerves. I have lately been to see a melodramacalled "The Heel of Achilles, " which Miss Julia Neilson has been givingat the Globe Theatre. The play was meant to tear at one'ssusceptibilities, much as "La Tosca" tears at them. "La Tosca" is not afine play in itself, though it is a much better play than "The Heel ofAchilles. " But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardtwhich gives one all the shudders. "The Heel of Achilles" did not give mea single shudder, not because it was not packed with the raw material ofsensation, but because Miss Julia Neilson went through so many tryingexperiences with nerves of marble. 

I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-knowledge in actors. Here is a play, which depends for a great deal of its effect on a scenein which Lady Leslie, a young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marrya Russian prince whom she hates, in order to save her betrothed loverfrom being sent to Siberia. The lover is shut in between two doors, unable to get out; he is the bearer of a State secret, and everythingdepends on his being able to catch the eleven P. M. Train for Berlin. TheRussian prince stands before the young Englishwoman, offering her thekey of the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in marriage. Now, she has to express by her face and her movements all the feelingsof astonishment, horror, suspense, love, hatred, distraction, which sucha situation would call up in her. If she does not express them the scenegoes for nothing. The actress stakes all on this scene. Now, is itpossible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capableof rendering this scene as it should be rendered? It is a scene thatrequires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the moreintellectual merits of acting. It requires simply a great passivity tofeeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and thebody like drenching waves. The actress need not know how she does it;she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by anelaborate calculation. But to do it at all she must be the actress inevery fibre of her body; she must be able to vibrate freely. If theemotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us throughher, it will all go for nothing. Well, Miss Neilson sat, and walked, andstarted, and became rigid, and glanced at the clock, and knelt, and fellagainst the wall, and cast her eyes about, and threw her arms out, andmade her voice husky; and it all went for nothing. Never for an instantdid she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after the firstmoment of disappointment the mind was left calmly free to watch herattempt as if it were speculating round a problem. 

How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of dealingadequately with such a scene as that? I take it, not because it is agood scene, but because it affords so rudimentary a test of the capacityfor acting. The test of the capacity for acting begins where words end;it is independent of words; you may take poor words as well as finewords; it is all the same. The embodying power, the power to throw openone's whole nature to an overcoming sensation, the power to render thissensation in so inevitable a way that others shall feel it: that is theone thing needful. It is not art, it is not even the beginning of art;but it is the foundation on which alone art can be built. 

The other day, in "Ulysses, " there was only one piece of acting that wasquite convincing: the acting of Mr. Brough as the Swineherd. It is asmall part and an easy part, but it was perfectly done. Almost anyother part would have been more striking and surprising if it had beendone as perfectly, but no other part was done as perfectly. Mr. Broughhas developed a stage-personality of his own, with only a limited rangeof emotion, but he has developed it until it has become a second naturewith him. He has only to speak, and he may say what he likes; we accepthim after the first word, and he remains what that first word has shownhim to be. Mr. Tree, with his many gifts, his effective talents, all histaste, ambition, versatility, never produces just that effect: heremains interestingly aside from what he is doing; you see his brainworking upon it, you enjoy his by-play; his gait, his studied gestures, absorb you; "How well this is done!" you say, and "How well that isdone!" and, indeed, you get a complete picture out of his representationof that part: a picture, not a man. 

I am not sure that melodrama is not the hardest test of the actor: itis, at least, the surest. All the human emotions throng noisilytogether in the making of melodrama: they are left there, in their nakedmuddle, and they come to no good end; but there they are. To representany primary emotion, and to be ineffective, is to fail in thefundamental thing. All actors should be sent to school in melodrama, asall dramatic authors should learn their trade there. 

THE PRICE OF REALISM

Modern staging, which has been carried in England to its highest pointof excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and is, indeed, oftenbeautiful in detail. But its real aim is not at the creation ofbeautiful pictures, in subordination to the words and actions of theplay, but at supplementing words and actions by an exact imitation ofreal surroundings. Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in itsattempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to thesubstitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indicationsof them. "Real water" we have all heard of, and we know its place in thetheatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artisticendeavour to be real. Sir Henry Irving will use, for a piece ofdecoration meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitationflowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where twoor three brushes of paint would have supplied its place moreeffectively. When d'Annunzio's "Francesca da Rimini" was put on thestage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in orderthat it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francescaand Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published inone of the English papers, d'Annunzio declared that he had all his stagedecorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he haddone this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of thethings themselves. The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to hislips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than thatof the actor who uses a gilded "property. "

If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an amateur. The trueactor walks in a world as real in its unreality as that which surroundsthe poet or the enthusiast. The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in themidst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows tohim, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, asall the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumberthe stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguishbetween the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characterswho surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who arespeaking for them. 

This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice of themodern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be said that it isreally even what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation ofthe real thing? I said once, to clinch an argument against it, by givingit its full possible credit, that the modern staging can give you thehour of the day and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. Butcan it? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught the miraculouslunar trick to the life? Has the real hedgerow ever brought a breath ofthe country upon the stage? I do not think so, and meanwhile, we havebeen trying our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead ofabandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of theplay itself. 

What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkenedbackground for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on thestage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of animitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lightingfrom above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I maycall it, by which he uses his characters as masses and patterns, teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye iscarried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and theimagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks andpainted gables. 

I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on theEnglish stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patternsof light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had anew quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I wouldhave given all d'Annunzio's golden cups and Mr. Tree's boats on realThames water. 

Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, asmaterial for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitationof real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the samespirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine playis not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. Apoetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stagein such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of itsessence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poeticalplays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have thesecret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. Hewill make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after themanner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities ofnature. 

ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT

If you look into the actors' prompt-books, the most frequent directionwhich you will find is this: "Cross stage to right. " It is not a meredirection, it is a formula; it is not a formula only, but a universalremedy. Whenever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to becomeweak or wordy, you must "cross stage to right"; no matter what is wrongwith the play, this will set it right. We have heard so much of the"action" of a play, that the stage-manager in England seems to imaginethat dramatic action is literally a movement of people across the stage, even if for no other reason than for movement's sake. Is the play weak?He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for itshealth. 

If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as animprovisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements isthat it should make pictures. That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and whenone comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than theimpression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of theactors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has notbeen regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazardknown as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with thatsense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. Buthere, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which doesnot aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinckshould be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admitthat you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way. 

The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier's company came over here to giveus some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in "La Veine, " whichwas one of the telling scenes of the play: Guitry and Brasseur standingface to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and thenwaiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which thewhole temperament of each is summed up. One is inclined to say: NoEnglish actor could have done it. Perhaps; but then, no Englishstage-manager would have let them do it. They would have been told tomove, to find "business, " to indulge in gesture which would not comenaturally to them. Again, in "Tartuffe, " when, at the end, the hypocriteis exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on theaudience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then, at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearerside of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of aconvulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood. It would havetaken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would havewalked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on oneface, so to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective, thatis to say, so real?

A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when andhow not to do things. Their blood helps them, for there is movement intheir blood, and they have something to restrain. But they have realisedthe art there is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as peopledo when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words theyare saying and not on their antics while saying them. The other day, inthe first act of "The Bishop's Move" at the Garrick, there is a Duchesstalking to a young novice in the refectory of a French abbey. Afterstanding talking to him for a few minutes, with only such movements aswould be quite natural under the circumstances, she takes his arm, notonce only but twice, and walks him up and down in front of thefootlights, for no reason in the world except to "cross stage to right. "The stage trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of anypretence to reality. 

The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference betweenwhat is dramatic and what is merely theatrical. Drama is made to beacted, and the finest "literary" play in the world, if it wholly failsto interest people on the stage, will have wholly failed in its firstand most essential aim. But the finer part of drama is implicit in thewords and in the development of the play, and not in its separate smalldetails of literal "action. " Two people should be able to sit quietly ina room, without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attentionbreathless for as long as the playwright likes. Given a good play, French actors are able to do that. Given a good play, English actors arenot allowed to do it. 

Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the Englishcharacter which prevents our actors from ever sitting or standing stillon the stage? We are a nation of travellers, of sailors, of businesspeople; and all these have to keep for ever moving. Our dances are themost vigorous and athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage, with all kinds of leaping and kicking movements. Our music-hallperformers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to this country, inwhich kicking and leaping are also a part of the business. Ourmelodramas are constructed on more movable planes, with more formidablecollapses and collisions, than those of any other country. Is not, then, the persistent English habit of "crossing stage to right" a nationalcharacteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a matter of training? Itis this reflection which hinders me from hoping, with much confidence, that a reform in stage-management will lead to a really quieter andsimpler way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried? Might notsome stage-manager come forward and say: "For heaven's sake stand still, my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest youraudience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?"

THE SPEAKING OF VERSE

Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speakingverse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, ithas often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling invain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how farthey were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruseswere written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment todances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative akind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and notapparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stagetraditions, probably developed from the practice of some particularactor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there isnot even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, inthe speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishlycontorted species of prose. 

An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practicalassistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or inventan art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr. Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farrhas herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a mannerbetween speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr. Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and theexperiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray'stranslation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the onlydefinite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speechof actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is moreimportant, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by theclearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play ofShakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, fromany other melodrama. "I see no reason, " says Lamb, in the profoundestessay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think thatif the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer asBanks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omittingall the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, hisstupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough ofpassionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss tofurnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon anaudience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeareto us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo. " It isprecisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed tohear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, ifhe were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained todo it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here, in the rendering of words, is the actor's first duty to his author, ifhe is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of theactor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little ofthe "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note hadnot been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra. When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part ofeven the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of thatpoetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?

The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger ofover-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising thesound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I hearda lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comédie Francaise, onthe art of speaking on the stage. 

The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor, is Professor ofDeclamation at the Conservatoire) is the method of the elocutionist, butof the elocutionist at his best. He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which he has perfect command. "M. Silvain, " says M. CatulleMendès, "est de ceux, bien rares au Théâtre Français, qu'on entend mêmelorsqu'ils par lent bas. " He has trained his voice to do everything thathe wants it to do; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitivenessto the emotion of every word; his gestures seem to be at oncespontaneous and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as abrilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt forprose, as an inferior form. In all his renderings of verse, he neverforgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression ofcharacter, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence. He gave La Fontaine in one way, Molière in another, Victor Hugo inanother, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was thesame attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade fromCorneille's "Cinna, " he followed the angry reasoning of the lines bycounting on his fingers: one, two, three, as if he were underlining theimportant words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it isapt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is thedanger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain's methodbrings out the worst faults of that conception. 

Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knowsthat verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which heis at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody whichdemands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set to music, " butwhen it is said aloud. Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads itwith certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a"sing-song" way, quite different from the way in which he would readprose. Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and theatmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at emphasisingindividual meanings. They give, in the musician's sense, a "reading" ofthe poem, an interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeatsthinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, thepitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of asimple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one ofMr. Yeats' lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way in which Mr. Yeatshimself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain noteswhich she had written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch'spsaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling forthe beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most people wouldhave said them, but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as toproduce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he repeats thoselines? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in which the fixingof the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad, impossible. 

I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorablethat there is much to be said for a purely mechanical method, even if itshould turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many actorstreat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aimin saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it is notprose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression, and when they come to a passage of purely lyric quality they give it asif it were a quotation, having nothing to do with the rest of thespeech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats' methodwould almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible todo much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taughthow to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to expresswhat he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel something ofwhat verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr. Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teachhim to unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let himforget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make verse live onthe stage. 

GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH

Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man ofindividual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantictemperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivatedlike a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, athing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress nowliving, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering geniuscomes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchantsus, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We haveactresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds ofuseful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable ofgiving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital aninterpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form ofpoetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who cameto us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe andEdward Sothern?

The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor, is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as theconductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does notbring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like theconductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does notsubordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition, the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individualtalents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddleinsisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozenbars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which wouldslightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if herearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his ownorchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on thehorn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectlyaccomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he alteredthe time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which hewould himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor ofan orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? Themusical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic criticsand the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yetthis, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatrewhenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, ispresented with any sort of public appeal. 

In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of theactor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a seriousplay, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small, unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with anysort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws andconditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personalvanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselvesto account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare withshow, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers alack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering ofimaginative work on the stage?

It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management, of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet, " "Romeo and Juliet, "and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown thewhole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we mostneeded. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we havelost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. Andfirst of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which theygive to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. Ihave always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, shouldgive one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "asolemn music. " The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentallydifferent from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite, "Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whateverqualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythmfrom beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the musicwas unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrificeto the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presentedfor its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; forShakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's. 

And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespearethere come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performanceof "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as wellas the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to beacted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes therhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, orthat every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this isbecause no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with sobeautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and anecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet. The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the_ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragicchild, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to usoutside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has anexquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. ButMiss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. Iwould not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for thereare still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germansyet. " Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poetand a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently heinterprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of theuniverse! In "Hamlet, " too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seenin the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite saneHamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there wasnothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteousrepresentation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment ofa German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and notless to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune'sfool. " But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw himliving, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamentalsincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life. And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved beforeone's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from theacting and management of these two actors a result which no one inEngland has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I havesaid, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the bestchance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys thatintention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and neveruncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost aslamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now hereare two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point. There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse asthese two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, thispower of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can giveus, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautifuland subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give itsonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, butno one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts hisloveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he givesthe soliloquy "To be or not to be, " which we are accustomed to hearspoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr. Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitivereflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortablebefore setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear histhoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, andjust so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, anunderstanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producingby the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of thosewords and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completelymastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting inEnglish, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern. 

What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we getwhen we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we getfrom real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speakingmerely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character inthe round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look, for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaboratetravesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli. He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face ismotionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompousgestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio'stroubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done withrare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in theimmense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and ahappiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery ofit deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has beenallowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination. 

So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementaryprinciples of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted;only in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work ofthe actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal. Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spokenof her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at herOphelia. It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, andmerely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image ofsome beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be rememberedamong all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simplepoetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes intoit from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not meredecoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-lesswoman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you, the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence. She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a crediblething. 

In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanitybroken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the womanlet loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her artis tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespassesinto jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modernsentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name ofromance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to whicheverything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos intoa matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate andrestrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies everyrequirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art. 

Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modernmake-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc, " is a recent American melodrama, written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subjectwas made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it islamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment andtheatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the littlepeasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also thepeasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play ofshreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it itswhole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace andlove, who makes war angelically. 

Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all, to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better thanShakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood wasin Flower. " Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage. Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production, which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool'sfabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steadypractitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense ofparody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on thenonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. Shewas a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity withwhich she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public. 

An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preferenceto a single kind of _rôle_ is not properly an artist at all. It is thecurse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public inany single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, torepeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, heis, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist tobe ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When Ihave seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I amcontent to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showedme that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a partthat she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of ararer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta ofCatulle Mendès and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the namesof half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing themall, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardlyvarying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a naturalgenius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtlytrained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius atall; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits andstarts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness ofexcess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seemsto us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first reallyshows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seemcolourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. ButGiorgione will always be the greater. 

I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the wordsof Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, aboutthe "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, inpained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I hadnot, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless"person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easilybe made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs. Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba agreater operatic singer than Mme. Calvé. What Miss Marlowe has is agreat innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, anda childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wildbeast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of thedomestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes toher perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewherestealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable, unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit forcloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Réjane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy oflife, the plenitude of sap in the tree. 

The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is verydifferent. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almostresentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and inhis own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not theactor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience ofthat attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, andengaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, towhich the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, shefills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom sheis representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind andthe senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace, alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualitiesthat I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is theparticular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all whoare at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stagein the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on thesame level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results. Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe andEdward Sothern will have come to England in vain. 

A THEORY OF THE STAGE

Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as youwill, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. Butlet there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry, and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has beenscornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatestplays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh whichclothes that skeleton. 

The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can berepresented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can berepresented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to workon any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence ofa drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of itsappeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied. Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent, and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham, " the play whichShakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when hisright hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that greatlittle play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as thepuppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after threecenturies. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and isinarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come, there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in versecan we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothingbut beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with theballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which dramabegins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tellits secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, canlet out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past hasbeen mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, andto get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outsideof nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference toverse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who hasseemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries hispsychology far with it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, alimiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than thedrama of the poets. Only one modern writer has brought something whichis almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "ThePowers of Darkness. " The play is horrible and uncouth, but it isilluminated by a great inner light. There is not a beautiful word in it, but it is filled with beauty. And that is because Tolstoi has the visionwhich may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet. It is oftensaid that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of thefuture must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whomthe gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will beno more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but notessence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry whichshall take in wider regions of the mind. 

Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play ofShakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is notmore essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama. Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their bestopportunities. Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary tothe drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances anddisabilities to the writer of a book. Where can we find more spiltwealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speechbuilds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, withoutbeginning or ending? It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrificehis drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet" has been quoted against him. But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed merelingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought whichmakes or waits on action. If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem todelay action, it does but deepen it. The poetry is the life blood, orruns through it. Only bad actors and managers think that by strippingthe flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body. Theoutlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible melodrama, stillirresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though itcomes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as agrowth out of melodrama. 

The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist, however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from hisneglect of one or another of these two primary and essentialrequirements. There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movementin Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann, as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets, like Hauptmann. I do not know them well enough to bring them into myargument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, theendeavour is in the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we findeven so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there?Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles. At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is amarvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all theplaywrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase, "vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one of the clichés of theminor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing himto a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he couldno longer direct. 

Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "formarionettes, " and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired oflimiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic. "Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a manwhose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His laterspeech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in theconventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has broughtback mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained inexile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the futurewill have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwrightof our time. He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness, which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences. 

In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which allis atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vitalpassions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in"Francesca, " and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of theglorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon. Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; thespeech always a lovely veil, never a human outline. 

We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim tobe named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art. Mr. Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul. He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, notonly for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capersin their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a greattalker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplantedthe art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, ouronly modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by hisastonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with aspirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding thestage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty. Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous ofneglected altars. But those who amuse the world, no matter by whatmeans, have their place in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is aclock striking the hour. 

With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing butprose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with amore instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, notso long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards becameto Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fondadventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Camélias. " The other playsare already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of "Tue-là!" wasthe special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which specialpleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life, " is the dramaticmotive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with thecoming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La Femme deClaude, " but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, isto be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts ofinteresting temporary things, excellently made to entertain theattentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, inEngland, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights, apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr. Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less tobe associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, andMr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are manymore names, if I could remember them; but where is the seriousplaywright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or ournovelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a youngergeneration, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given usone or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's, besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had andtaken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attemptto write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish LiteraryTheatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers, each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose. Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhapsthe limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there forus to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based onthe great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?

The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist, affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest ofthe playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingeniousplausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at hisbest, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their dailyoccupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruelexpense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no visionbeyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to needa better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers. They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed theentries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak inthat play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play inprose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with acertain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our morecivilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they areaware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man inTolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies whofumble at their lips for sea-magic. 

And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which isas noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a likeradiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern asthis if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for hisart. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agonyhas ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of thepast were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeatedin our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little ofwhat has come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting andadequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render themmore as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, asprose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a partof what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who, in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with anadequate answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech ofsomething deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answerwhich would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips. 

THE SICILIAN ACTORS

I

I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here fromParis, where, I read, "la passion paraît décidement, " to a dramaticcritic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients, " especially on the stage. Weare supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded anacting which is more primitively passionate than anything we areaccustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian, some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of theaudience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet somarvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant theirgestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompanimentto so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a newintoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show. 

It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often verycrude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce livingthing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like thevolcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors atall, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality. 

Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes;her art is more nearly the art of Réjane. While both of these are greatartists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animalenergies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress, like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia, " the whole animal, snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotionsof fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she canbe piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with herdelicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to thesoured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out, turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts herbrutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover. Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels amongmiserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standingout from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motionwith a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after theSantuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana, " is to realise thedifference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul. And if one thinks of Réjane's "Sapho, " the difference is hardly less, though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part ofSantuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and patheticgesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve ofher lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in agreat thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of MimiAguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There isno love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonablehate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestlewith her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him whichsends an unanticipated knife into his heart. 

Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she hasmoments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro diRoio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that, I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself uprightagainst a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, andas one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some ofthe tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves. Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about toutter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowlydownwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees withboth arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes, while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer andnearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repelstime after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hoppingas if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in itsscarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would haveit to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copyof reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely hasthe whole being passed into its possession. 

And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a noblercatastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "Lafiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meantno more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Outof his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of asupreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, hehas denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that shouldhave been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the woodenfetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the darkveil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towardsher martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the onewho knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now thewoman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure ananguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains inthe irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of thoseclutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death, and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings itslast triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feelingthe flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!"and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, andobliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world. 

II

Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, consideredwith reference to their fitness for stage representation, " there hasbeen a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words, especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether awell-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show orwith words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. Theacting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio, " seemed to me todo something towards the solution of part at least of this problem. 

The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beautywhich d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the otherhand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasantsof the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story onwhich it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even inreading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted withthe speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of thelanguage and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; andthis primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunninglycontrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as weread it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. Thebeauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did notunderstand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwrightand his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put outthe calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point ofview of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved itsaim. 

And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to theplaywright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that inthis play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, thanin their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a betterwriter than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia. " But is it great poetry or greatdrama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actorslike these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order tobring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him thathe has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridgesaid, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--notthought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"

That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps Ihave already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, ofa performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that"it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumedno distinct shape, " but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to ourcost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised andbrought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. " If thatis true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is itfrom the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio. What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought orpassion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?

And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found theirfinest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out ofwhich they have made their art. "Malia, " a Sicilian play of Capuana, isan exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified againstall accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it, admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and tosuffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in thesesinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as ifnaked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, andunashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder beforethem, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it isourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set insymbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for thisspontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, thesource of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature, absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we seestruggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in thiswoman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that thepoets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, withoutpassion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for oncejustified itself by being mere nature. 

And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only theoccasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso andthe others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. Whatstage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at ourbig theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd asthe dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? Butthe play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Réjane hasdone greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greaterartist. But not even Réjane has given us the whole animal, in itsself-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge andcommand of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctivemotions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco andthe Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Agugliain the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, itwould have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thingmeaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contestbetween will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watchhelplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off andswallows it. "I feel as if I had died, " said the friend who was with mein the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died withthe woman, she meant, or in the woman's place. 

Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French criticwhom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by ahesitating consciousness that "la passion paraît decidement avoirpartout ses inconvenients. " But the critic who sets himself against amagnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast himgently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetismthrough which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible, authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets. And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal. 

MUSIC

ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC

The reason why music is so much more difficult to write about than anyother art, is because music is the one absolutely disembodied art, whenit is heard, and no more than a proposition of Euclid, when it iswritten. It is wholly useless, to the student no less than to thegeneral reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes forwhich we pay sixpence at the concerts. "Repeated by flute and oboe, withaccompaniment for clarionet (in triplets) and strings _pizzicato_, andthen worked up by the full orchestra, this melody is eventually allottedto the 'cellos, its accompaniment now taking the form of chromaticpassages, " and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a rhapsodywhich has nothing to do with the notes, and to present this as aninterpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yetwhat method is there besides these two methods? None, indeed, that canever be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise. 

In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which makes itpoetry must always evade expression, there yet remain the whole definitemeaning of the words, and the whole easily explicable technique of theverse, which can be made clear to every reader. In painting, you havethe subject of the picture, and you have the colour, handling, and thelike, which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But musichas no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its meaning asmusic; and, to understand anything of what is meant by its technique, acertain definite technical knowledge is necessary in the reader. Whatsubterfuges are required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion ofwhat a piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all, beyond generalisations, which would apply equally to half a dozendifferent pieces! The composer himself, if you ask him, will tell youthat you may be quite correct in what you say, but that he has noopinion in the matter. 

Music has indeed a language, but it is a language in which birds andother angels may talk, but out of which we cannot translate theirmeaning. Emotion itself, how changed becomes even emotion when wetransport it into a new world, in which only sound has feeling! But I amspeaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was bornin its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours. 

TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST

Technique and the artist: that is a question, of interest to the studentof every art, which was brought home to me with unusual emphasis theother afternoon, as I sat in the Queen's Hall, and listened to Ysaye andBusoni. Are we always quite certain what we mean when we speak of anartist? Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent to whichtechnique must go to the making of an artist, and the point at whichsomething else must be superadded? That is a matter which I often doubt, and the old doubt came back to my mind the other afternoon, as Ilistened to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over thenewspapers. 

I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the violinist andthe pianist are "a perfectly matched pair"; the applause, at theconcert, was even more enthusiastic for Busoni than for Ysaye. I hearboth spoken of as artists, as great artists; and yet, if words have anymeaning, it seems to me that only one of the two is an artist at all, and the other, with all his ability, only an executant. Admit, for amoment, that the technique of the two is equal, though it is not quitepossible to admit even that, in the strictest sense. So far, we havemade only a beginning. Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one isworth consideration in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must beperfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his artbegins when his technique is already perfect. Artists who deal inmaterials less fragile than human life should have no less undeviating asense of responsibility to themselves and to art. But the performancecomes afterwards, and it is the performance with which we are concerned. Of two acrobats, each equally skilful, one will be individual and anartist, the other will remain consummately skilful and uninteresting;the one having begun where the other leaves off. Now Busoni can do, onthe pianoforte, whatever he can conceive; the question is, what can heconceive? As he sat at the piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, ofthe Bechstein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other extraneousthings, never of Chopin. I saw the pianist with the Christ-like head, the carefully negligent elegance of his appearance, and I heardwonderful sounds coming out of the Bechstein piano; but, try as hard asI liked, I could not feel the contact of soul and instrument, I couldnot feel that a human being was expressing himself in sound. A task wasmagnificently accomplished, but a new beauty had not come into theworld. Then the Kreutzer Sonata began, and I looked at Ysaye, as hestood, an almost shapeless mass of flesh, holding the violin between hisfat fingers, and looking vaguely into the air. He put the violin to hisshoulder. The face had been like a mass of clay, waiting the sculptor'sthumb. As the music came, an invisible touch seemed to pass over it; theheavy mouth and chin remained firm, pressed down on the violin; but theeyelids and the eyebrows began to move, as if the eyes saw the sound, and were drawing it in luxuriously, with a kind of sleepy ecstasy, asone draws in perfume out of a flower. Then, in that instant, a beautywhich had never been in the world came into the world; a new thing wascreated, lived, died, having revealed itself to all those who werecapable of receiving it. That thing was neither Beethoven nor Ysaye, itwas made out of their meeting; it was music, not abstract, but embodiedin sound; and just that miracle could never occur again, though otherslike it might be repeated for ever. When the sound stopped, the facereturned to its blind and deaf waiting; the interval, like all the restof life probably, not counting in the existence of that particular soul, which came and went with the music. 

And Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not because he isfaultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at thepoint where faultless technique leaves off. With him, every faculty isin harmony; he has not even too much of any good thing. There are timeswhen Busoni astonishes one; Ysaye never astonishes one, it seems naturalthat he should do everything that he does, just as he does it. Art, asAristotle has said finally, should always have "a continual slightnovelty"; it should never astonish, for we are astonished only by someexcess or default, never by a thing being what it ought to be. It is afashion of the moment to prize extravagance and to be timid ofperfection. That is why we give the name of artist to those who canstartle us most. We have come to value technique for the violence whichit gives into the hands of those who possess it, in their assault uponour nerves. We have come to look upon technique as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. We have but one word of praise, and weuse that one word lavishly. An Ysaye and a Busoni are the same to us, and it is to our credit if we are even aware that Ysaye is the equal ofBusoni. 

PACHMANN AND THE PIANO

I

It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano asit ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can playonly certain things, but I contend that he is the greatest livingpianist because he can play those things better than any other pianistcan play anything. Pachmann is the Verlaine of pianists, and when I hearhim I think of Verlaine reading his own verse, in a faint, reluctantvoice, which you overheard. Other players have mastered the piano, Pachmann absorbs its soul, and it is only when he touches it that itreally speaks its own voice. 

The art of the pianist, after all, lies mainly in one thing, touch. Itis by the skill, precision, and beauty of his touch that he makes musicat all; it is by the quality of his touch that he evokes a more or lessmiraculous vision of sound for us. Touch gives him his only means ofexpression; it is to him what relief is to the sculptor or what valuesare to the painter. To "understand, " as it is called, a piece of music, is not so much as the beginning of good playing; if you do notunderstand it with your fingers, what shall your brain profit you? Inthe interpretation of music all action of the brain which does nottranslate itself perfectly in touch is useless. You may as well notthink at all as not think in terms of your instrument, and the pianoresponds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all otherpianists, has this magic. When he plays it, the piano ceases to be acompromise. He makes it as living and penetrating as the violin, asresponsive and elusive as the clavichord. 

Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrumentthan any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infalliblesense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. He seems to touch thenotes with a kind of agony of delight; his face twitches with the actualmuscular contraction of the fingers as they suspend themselves in thevery act of touch. I am told that Pachmann plays Chopin in a morbidway. Well, Chopin was morbid; there are fevers and cold sweats in hismusic; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be interpreted in arobust way. It must be played, as Pachmann plays it, somnambulistically, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing onwhose nerves one were operating, and as if every touch might mean lifeor death. 

I have heard pianists who played Chopin in what they called a healthyway. The notes swung, spun, and clattered, with a heroic repercussion ofsound, a hurrying reiteration of fury, signifying nothing. The pianostormed through the applause; the pianist sat imperturbably, hammering. Well, I do not think any music should be played like that, not Liszteven. Liszt connives at the suicide, but with Chopin it is a murder. When Pachmann plays Chopin the music sings itself, as if without theintervention of an executant, of one who stands between the music andour hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it;then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic, as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And thisbeauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is asea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or ittransports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven, where he hangs listening. He listens at all his senses. The dew, as wellas the raindrop, has a sound for him. 

In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments, the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or adiamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, andrightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household catwith our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us, has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks alanguage which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination, chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaksdown for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us thegulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is alullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle. Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul, but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing hefinds a kind of humour. 

In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost everyexecutant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success orfailure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which, to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathestranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached throughsome not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physicaldisquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him toventure outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is asimple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has lessdifficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter. With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from theirvulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mysterywhich is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detachedfrom mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in ourignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teachit to express human emotions, not its own. 

Pachmann gives you pure music, not states of soul or of temperament, notinterpretations, but echoes. He gives you the notes in their ownatmosphere, where they live for him an individual life, which hasnothing to do with emotions or ideas. Thus he does not need to translateout of two languages: first, from sound to emotion, temperament, whatyou will; then from that back again to sound. The notes exist; it isenough that they exist. They mean for him just the sound and nothingelse. You see his fingers feeling after it, his face calling to it, hiswhole body imploring it. Sometimes it comes upon him in such a burst oflight that he has to cry aloud, in order that he may endure the ecstasy. You see him speaking to the music; he lifts his finger, that you maylisten for it not less attentively. But it is always the thing itselfthat he evokes for you, as it rises flower-like out of silence, andcomes to exist in the world. Every note lives, with the whole vitalityof its existence. To Swinburne every word lives, just in the same way;when he says "light, " he sees the sunrise; when he says "fire, " he iswarmed through all his blood. And so Pachmann calls up, with thisghostly magic of his, the innermost life of music. I do not think he hasever put an intention into Chopin. Chopin had no intentions. He was aman, and he suffered; and he was a musician, and he wrote music; andvery likely George Sand, and Majorca, and his disease, and Scotland, andthe woman who sang to him when he died, are all in the music; but thatis not the question. The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife, caress you like the fur of a cat; and are beautiful sound, the mostbeautiful sound that has been called out of the piano. Pachmann calls itout for you, disinterestedly, easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you donot realise that he has had difficulties to conquer, that music is athing for acrobats and athletes. He smiles to you, that you may realisehow beautiful the notes are, when they trickle out of his fingers likesinging water; he adores them and his own playing, as you do, and as ifhe had nothing to do with them but to pour them out of his hands. Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; hishands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficultbusiness. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All thatviolence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His artbegins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimowithout hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play arun as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish, a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a runyou realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life. With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and thatis why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music likeMendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz:he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at theroot of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say initself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in whicheverything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is ofsuch moments that Pachmann is the poet. 

And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, revealsBach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that inthe playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous, alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy ofshading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, andclarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the mostabsolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto isthe greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on toplay Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound risesoftly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and therewas the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowinglight and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not lessappropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, theromantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, alittle luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopinfollowed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopinhad returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverishmusic, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to thecentre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a wingedenergy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is inthe Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. TheBarcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and notVenice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op. 50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in itssecret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone, gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that theEtudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential inChopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in theplaying of the Etudes. 

Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he islike one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it, lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which iscoming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act ofcreation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, towhich he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yetcontrolling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the musicbefore him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strainwhich comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for aprecisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration andart are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, oftenwrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by theconscious act of thought while listening for the music. 

"There is no exquisite beauty, " said Bacon in a subtle definition, "which has not some strangeness in its proportions. " The playing ofPachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is withoutstrangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fieryice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, athing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secretof the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why aline like:

 Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane, can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experiencednerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly ofsuggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the artof Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the twomethods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never astatement? Many of the great forces of the present day have setthemselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in whicheverything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr. Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art ofRichard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is somesmall, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, likeWhistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, andnothing else. 

II

 The sounds torture me: I see them in my brain; They spin a flickering web of living threads, Like butterflies upon the garden beds, Nets of bright sound. I follow them: in vain. I must not brush the least dust from their wings: They die of a touch; but I must capture them, Or they will turn to a caressing flame, And lick my soul up with their flutterings. 

 The sounds torture me: I count them with my eyes, I feel them like a thirst between my lips; Is it my body or my soul that cries With little coloured mouths of sound, and drips In these bright drops that turn to butterflies Dying delicately at my finger tips?

III

Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, andit is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument, which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torturehim, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes themdance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in theswell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoeswhich set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound, listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught awayfrom us visibly into that unholy company. 

Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannotinterpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more variedthan he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in privatea show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty, requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone hecares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and heplayed it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded. On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of ourtime has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked, and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which onlythe harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of otherplayers. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays withthe most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that daintyweb of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out ofmoonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is inBeethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, inthe depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann allthis is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it, wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about thefaint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and asmusic turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What heseeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound:the music, in fact. 

It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual, that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpretbetween the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as noone has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it, becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but avoice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of humanintelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its ownregion, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we canapprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mockingthe human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. WhenPachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious ofsaying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowskyplays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening andquickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann'smiraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like anatmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of abeauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that areawful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it throughPachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Isit technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have neverdreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us hisown magic?

He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience thanothers, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch whichis really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tellyou little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and flyand poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed, listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little hehad told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets aboveall other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which heplays. 

When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out apattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch uponthem, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errandthey are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey'send. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from thestraight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey, having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing hislearned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganinivariations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and assoulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that thenotes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as ifthey were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry forthem, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays thePreludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out themagic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G MinorRhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms hasset strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shapein the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to youexactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline ofform becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than formthat to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of theoutline. 

Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the onemost likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, Ithink, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of thegreatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in anintense measure, might have been thought less likely to be doneperfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings outof paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of thoseMazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, morewild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols ofunchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and thetrickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of itsdecoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of thewhole tossing and eager sea of sound. 

Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of thatpeculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things intheir fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, anyessential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in whatis certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? Thesharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this veryparing away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strikedeeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine isthe existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well assharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vastluminous music of the "Rheingold, " flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shadesnot less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyricinto drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfectlyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama. 

Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was oncethought to be no "serious artist. " Both have triumphed, not because thetaste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew havewhispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like asecret. 

PADEREWSKI

I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of theJubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy, noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, toa rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous househospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes andplayed the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his ownhome. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I hadbeen in hell, " so profound was the emotion she had experienced from theplaying. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed tobe nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, andthen the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the earlymorning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopledstreets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night anddawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way ofpopular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there hadbeen, for a few people, this divine escape. 

No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen'sHall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the torturedBurne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair stillpoised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberantgrowth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised, more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of thevirtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something, not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously, but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into asurprised awakening. 

The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and themost distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli. People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. Theword conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate. But there is much in common between two forms of an art in whichphysical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision towhich error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you getfrom Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewskiwhen he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people dothe same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-balldelicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with ascornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone sinceLiszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, andLiszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined withthis particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense aninspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but asif it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even histhunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake asa single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, thepiano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brothermet brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging itto battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which hegets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from theinstrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens underhis fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, andunder his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. Themusic leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caughttogether and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes arenever picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes topassage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where othersgive you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard throughclouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfullyover certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and begone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers aresecondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity. 

In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, therewas nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the duebrilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written formodern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, itsperfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of thelittle sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of abird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were afaithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, orthat it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata wasthere, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had knownthat it existed. 

Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on anoriginal theme, " in which Paderewski played his own music, really as ifhe were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feelingis altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for thefirst time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its largecontrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound wasevoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, anddie out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all weredelicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemedto watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity. 

When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in whichthe sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewskiwere still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece forthe piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the greatpianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as withBeethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in acreation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravuradisconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousnessin contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, hetossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what wasluscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worthby the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A moreastonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force couldhardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be morespectacularly magnificent?

Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could doanything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result isnot so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with asmaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin neverdazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice tohis own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people areonly now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine inhis work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shamelesstransfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, forinstance, in "Parsifal, " is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Lisztin which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of themysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for thepiano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknownperson, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which thereare no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is thetest rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, itwas so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played theBeethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should haveplayed the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between thoselimits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, andPaderewski has attained both limits. 

After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midstof an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert. What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with thesame intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, oris it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music inAmerica, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphaelof the piano, " which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors, "mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching thenotes?

Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that"magnetises our poor vertebras, " in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mereskill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and tocompel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of anart. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates hispersonal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like aperfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given tothe creator of beautiful sounds?

A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT

The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those raremagicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While musichas been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, andBerlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strangeman of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered forhimself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a frescopeeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknownmanuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations andfound out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has firstfound out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which hadbecome silent curiosities in museums. 

It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that theclavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that theexquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautifulmusic of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but theharpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than thesewriters, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, whichhas never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played onit. To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, orclavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequateinstrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, theinfinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wiresand jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed soentirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touchedit, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music, like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relisheven for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but themusic of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instrumentsthat Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us; and he plays to us also on the lute, thetheorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and I know not how manyvarieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to mostof us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angelswith crossed legs hold them to their chins. 

Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-musicand play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which wasonce as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain. And, havingmade with his own hands the materials of the music which he hasrecovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught othersto play this music on these instruments and to sing it to theiraccompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of ahouse, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon ahouse of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house ofpeace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it tookfever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and broughtthe clamour of the world into its seclusion. 

Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at theQueen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much passionate asfeverish. The rushing of his violins, like the rushing of an army oflarge winged birds; the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra;the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in theircountry dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweetsolid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of awoman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat; all this is like a verymaterial kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget thesoul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontentedcrying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressinglyinto this after all pathetic music? All modern music is pathetic;discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. AndTschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch ofunmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art. There is avehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side ofwhich the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He isunconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; hesees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the momentas a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toycan realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy. 

In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The onlyhealing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never getfar enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent. Allthose wild, broken rhythms, rushing this way and that, are letting outhis secret all the time: "I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy;I want, but I know not what I want. " In the most passionate and the mostquestioning music of Wagner there is always air; Tschaikowsky issuffocating. It is himself that he pities so much, and not himselfbecause he shares in the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan andIsolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in theirlove; they know only the absolute. Even suffering does not bringnobility to Tschaikowsky. 

To pass from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from "Parsifal" to the PatheticSymphony, is like passing from a church in which priests are offeringmass to a hut in which peasants are quarrelling, dancing, and makinglove. Tschaikowsky has both force and sincerity, but it is the force andsincerity of a ferocious child. He takes the orchestra in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a fragment of itthere, masters it like an enemy; he makes it do what he wants. But heuses his fist where Wagner touches with the tips of his fingers; heshows ill-breeding after the manners of the supreme gentleman. Wagnercan use the whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise: henever ends on a bang. But Tschaikowsky loves noise for its own sake; helikes to pound the drum, and to hear the violins running up and downscales like acrobats. Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in"Tristan, " from fire, as in parts of the "Ring, " from light, as in"Parsifal. " But Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with thecaprices of half-civilised impulses. He puts the frog-like dancing ofthe Russian peasant into his tunes; he cries and roars like a child in arage. He gives himself to you just as he is; he is immensely consciousof himself and of his need to take you into his confidence. In yourdelight at finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome himwithout reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarilya great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not asatisfactory man of genius. 

I contrast him with Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, aloneamong quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nervesmore forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality bywhich emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To themusicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an artwhich had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence ofemotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; butthe music is something much more than a means for the expression ofemotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to a law, itis music made for music's sake, with what might be called a moreexclusive devotion to art than that of our modern musician. This musicaims at the creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful soundas a thing which cannot exist outside order and measure; it has not yetcome to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty. It doesnot even desire liberty, but is content with loving obedience. It canexpress emotion, but it will never express an emotion carried to thatexcess at which the modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all itssuggestions of pain, grief, melancholy, it will remain, for us at least, happy music, voices of a house of peace. Is there, in the future ofmusic, after it has expressed for us all our emotions, and we are tiredof our emotions, and weary enough to be content with a little rest, anylikelihood of a return to this happy music, into which beauty shall comewithout the selfishness of desire?

THE DRAMATISATION OF SONG

All art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregonemust be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptorforegoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poetforegoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician thatprecise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind ofnecessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-made for him. But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter whatfixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarmé, of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselvesa compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weightwithout trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this tooautocratic command. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the artof the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same noteis produced in the same way; the expression given to that note, thesyllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song doesnot in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of itscapacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more inneed of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal ofsinging would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbedinto itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sanginarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There isnothing which such an instrument could not express, nothing which existsas pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice, with the least possible compromise. 

The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come intothe song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not thevoice lose something also, in its directness of appeal? Add acting tovoice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in whichother arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have ussee the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more andmore, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, inorder to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings arewritten partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For thesake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, wehave lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice inthe gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem hasbeen found. 

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by asinger who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but whowants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the sametime, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreterbetween poetry and the world. 

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twistedblonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, orpassionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquentmouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figurevaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When Iheard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite toher; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herselfto the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of thatimage of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it washerself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which shewas evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice isstrong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer;her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is thetemperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, andsets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes adrama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in herrendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as muchwith her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes themelody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in allits lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it?tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, whotakes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all hersenses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs ofMaeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As onelooked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than ofthe music or of the music than of the words. One took themsimultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of aflower. I understood why Mallarmé had seemed to see in her therealisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a newmixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarmé itwas the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad generalappeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things. 

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, lesscompletely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with itsrigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in theirtremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best oftheir vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because itis the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration. What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at onceinstinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her naturalinstinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, tobe so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, alwaysrecognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned towhat the song is saying through her because of that uninterruptedcommunion with herself. 

THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA

Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; theMeiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself. When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, aswith most orchestras, every particularly significant note. Brahms issometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him;Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him. What they do isprecisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition inwhich it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a muchmore difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the properappreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, andobviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretationhas its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value towhat is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create outof nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty workwith meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at hismoments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as henever could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectrestands from life. When I heard the "Don Juan, " which I had heard twicebefore, and liked less the second time than the first, I realisedfinally the whole strain, pretence, and emptiness of the thing. Playedwith this earnest attention to the meaning of every note, it was like atrivial drama when Duse acts it; it went to pieces through being takenat its own word. It was as if a threadbare piece of stuff were held upto the full sunlight; you saw every stitch that was wanting. 

The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from"Rosamunde, " and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, butrather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifullyplayed. I could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann. The faint, delicate music just came into existence, breathed a little, and wasgone. Here for once was an orchestra which could literally be overheard. The overture to the "Meistersinger" followed, and here, for the firsttime, I got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressionswhich that piece presents to one simultaneously. I heard the unimpededmarch forward, and I distinguished at the same time every delicateimpediment thronging the way. Some renderings give you a sense ofsolidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate andvarious life which informs this so solid structure. Here one got thecomplete thing, completely rendered. 

I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture to "Tristan. "Here the notes, all that was so to speak merely musical in the music, were given their just expression; but the something more, the vast heaveand throb of the music, was not there. It was "classical" rendering ofwhat is certainly not "classical" music. Hear that overture as Richtergives it, and you will realise just where the Meiningen orchestra islacking. It has the kind of energy which is required to renderBeethoven's multitudinous energy, or the energy which can be heavy andcloudy in Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagnerhimself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overtureto the "Meistersinger. " But that wholly new, and somewhat feverish, overwhelming quality which we find in the music of "Tristan" meets withsomething less than the due response. It is a quality which people usedto say was not musical at all, a quality which does not appeal certainlyto the musical sense alone: for the rendering of that we must go toRichter. 

Otherwise, in that third concert it would he difficult to say whetherSchumann, Brahms, Mozart, or Beethoven was the better rendered. Perhapsone might choose Mozart for pure pleasure. It was the "Serenade" forwind instruments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the mostdelightful music in the world. The music of Mozart is, no doubt, themost beautiful music in the world. When I heard the serenade I thoughtof Coventry Patmore's epithet, actually used, I think, about Mozart:"glittering peace. " Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven all seemedfor the moment to lose a little of their light under this pure andtranquil and unwavering "glitter. " I hope I shall never hear the"Serenade" again, for I shall never hear it played as these particularplayers played it. 

The Meiningen orchestra is famous for its wind, and when, at the firstconcert, I heard Beethoven's Rondino for wind instruments, it seemed tome that I was hearing brass for the first time as I had imagined brassought to sound. Here was, not so much a new thing which one had neverthought possible, as that precise thing which one's ears had expected, and waited for, and never heard. One quite miraculous thing these windplayers certainly did, in common, however, with the whole orchestra. Andthat was to give an effect of distance, as if the sound came actuallyfrom beyond the walls. I noticed it first in the overture to "Leonore, "the first piece which they played; an unparalleled effect and one ofsurprising beauty. 

Another matter for which the Meiningen orchestra is famous is itsinterpretation of the works of Brahms. At each concert some fine musicof Brahms was given finely, but it was not until the fourth concert thatI realised, on hearing the third Symphony, everything of which Brahmswas capable. It may be that a more profound acquaintance with his musicwould lead me to add other things to this thing as the finest musicwhich he ever wrote; but the third Symphony certainly revealed to me, not altogether a new, but a complete Brahms. It had all his intellectand something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind ofpassion. 

MOZART IN THE MIRABELL-GARTEN

They are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at the Hof-Theater, to follow the Wagner operas at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre; and I stayed, on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberflöte. " It was perfectlygiven, with a small, choice orchestra under Herr Zumpe, and with everypart except the tenor's admirably sung and acted. Herr Julius Zarest, from Hanover, was particularly good as Papageno; the Eva of "DieMeistersinger" made an equally good Pamina. And it was staged under Herrvon Possart's direction, as suitably and as successfully, in itsdifferent way, as the Wagner opera had been. The sombre Egyptian scenesof this odd story, with its menagerie and its pantomime transformation, were turned into a thrilling spectacle, and by means of nothing but alittle canvas and paint and limelight. It could have cost very little, compared with an English Shakespeare revival, let us say; but howinfinitely more spectacular, in the good sense, it was! Every effect wassignificant, perfectly in its place, doing just what it had to do, andwithout thrusting itself forward for separate admiration. German art ofto-day is all decorative, and it is at its best when it is applied tothe scenery of the stage. Its fault, in serious painting, is that it istoo theatrical, it is too anxious to be full of too many qualitiesbesides the qualities of good painting. It is too emphatic, it is meantfor artificial light. If Franz Stuck would paint for the stage, insteadof using his vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction andnightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would do, perhapsrather better, just what these scene-painters do, with so much skill andtaste. They have the sense of effective decoration; and German art, atpresent, is almost wholly limited to that sense. 

I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music, whichplayed round the story like light transfiguring a masquerade; and now, by a lucky chance, I can brood over it here in Salzburg, where Mozartwas born, where he lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera isto be seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and set downwhere it should always have been, high up among the pinewoods of theCapuzinerberg. I find myself wondering how much Mozart took to himself, how much went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow ofgreat hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has the air of alittle toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square in a clean, trim, perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat roofs, packed closetogether on each side of a long, winding river, which trails across thewhole breadth of the plain. From the midst of the town you look upeverywhere at heights; rocks covered with pine-trees, beyond them hillshooded with white clouds, great soft walls of darkness, on which themist is like the bloom of a plum; and, right above you, the castle, onits steep rock swathed in trees, with its grey walls and turrets, likethe castle which one has imagined for all the knights of all theromances. All this, no doubt, entered into the soul of Mozart, and hadits meaning for him; but where I seem actually to see him, where I canfancy him walking most often, and hearing more sounds than elsewherecome to him through his eyes and his senses, in the Mirabell-Garten, which lies behind the palace built by an Archbishop of Salzburg in theseventeenth century, and which is laid out in the conventional Frenchfashion, with a harmony that I find in few other gardens. I have neverwalked in a garden which seemed to keep itself so reticently within itsown severe and gracious limits. The trees themselves seem to grownaturally into the pattern of this garden, with its formal alleys, inwhich the birds fly in and out of the trellised roofs, its square-cutbushes, its low stone balustrades, its tall urns out of which drooptrails of pink and green, its round flower-beds, each of a singlecolour, set at regular intervals on the grass, its tiny fountaindripping faintly into a green and brown pool; the long, sad lines ofthe Archbishop's Palace, off which the brown paint is peeling; the wholesad charm, dainty melancholy, formal beauty, and autumnal air of it. Itwas in the Mirabell-Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart. 

The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberflöte, " is musicwithout desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has thefirm outlines of Dürer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint withina fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom andsplendour of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; inhearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ. " Mozart haswhat Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore thatquality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, inits kind, supreme. It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no needto look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself. Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but hecares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and, through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys tous all that he cares to convey: awe, for instance, in those solemnscenes of the priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with hismagic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling withPapagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth-Night. " "Die Zauberflöte" isreally a very fine kind of pantomime, to which music lends itself in thespirit of the thing, yet without condescending to be grotesque. The duetof Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as lovely as aduet of two birds, of less flaming feather. As the lovers ascend throughfires and floods, only the piping of the magic flute is heard in theorchestra: imagine Wagner threading it into the web of a greatorchestral pattern! For Mozart it was enough, and for his art, it wasenough. He gives you harmony which does not need to mean anythingoutside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful; and he gives youbeauty with a certain exquisite formality, not caring to go beyond thelines which contain that reticent, sufficient charm of theMirabell-Garten. 

NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH

I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH

Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as themusic-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumphnot less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Rememberthat every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and thatonly Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home, receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at manydoors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist mustalways be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at itsmercy, even after he has conquered its attention. The crowd never reallyloves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity;and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number ofintelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon theresisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it issupposed to be unintelligent not to adopt. Bayreuth exists becauseWagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcinghis ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than anyother artist of our time. Wagner always got what he wanted, not alwayswhen he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side, the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had thenecessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and atlast he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his owntriumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied. He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there were hisworks, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called. 

And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuthitself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner wished it to beseen and heard. The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatreat Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactlythe same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisibleorchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there areeven the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual andirrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As atBayreuth, the solemnity of the whole thing makes one almost nervous, forthe first few minutes of each act; but, after that, how near one is, inthis perfectly darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the musicsurges up out of the "mystic gulf, " and the picture exists in all theecstasy of a picture on the other side of it, beyond reality, how nearone is to being alone, in the passive state in which the flesh is ableto endure the great burdening and uplifting of vision. There are thusnow two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at. 

II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL

The performance of "Parsifal, " as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me themost really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and Ihave often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it wasthat one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoreticalideas, of Wagner. The music itself has the abstract quality of CoventryPatmore's odes. I cannot think of it except in terms of sight. Lightsurges up out of it, as out of unformed depths; light descends from it, as from the sky; it breaks into flashes and sparkles of light, itbroadens out into a vast sea of light. It is almost metaphysical music;pure ideas take visible form, humanise themselves in a new kind ofecstasy. The ecstasy has still a certain fever in it; these shafts oflight sometimes pierce the soul like a sword; it is not peace, the peaceof Bach, to whom music can give all he wants; it is the unsatisfieddesire of a kind of flesh of the spirit, and music is but a voice. "Parsifal" is religious music, but it is the music of a religion whichhad never before found expression. I have found in a motet of Vittoriaone of the motives of "Parsifal, " almost note for note, and there is nodoubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even thesombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. Theoutcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, thedespair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it. 

What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, torender mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed outthat that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysteriousintensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latestpictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-outof a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music. 

In "Parsifal, " more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagnerrealised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could begained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas. All that music ofthe closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases, and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or threephrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendida tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what barenessalmost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzschesays, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnoticprocess, a cunning absorption of the will of another. 

"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music, soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, andbe reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more thananything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, thesea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even themusic, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to thevisible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one, the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of itsconvention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythmis everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. No actor makesa gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of thatunintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move likemusic, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of paintingto arrest. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but besettled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on thestage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were thetime of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also, every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, itsreticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all, action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. Theaim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most peoplein real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they arenot making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying tomake us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not whatrestlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were oncerealised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture thanthese staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of itsframe, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, atleast, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shownus that it can be. 

Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for anew, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner'srepresentation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back thisworld of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousandtricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from theproscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of theGraal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole ofwhich Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitaryfigure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he isthe centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, whichit was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into areflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!

The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of coursethe beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what anenchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when achange is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded onnatural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in everywrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality iselaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may beformed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out. And "Parsifal, " which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it, in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort ofsupreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautifuldrama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter ofleaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the oldhermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universaltenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, insome vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is besidethe question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technicallyreligious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and howfar Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's mind was the mind to which alllegend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence;but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could neverhave been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in"Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, ordid not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries. His music, hisacting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and theacting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of thesolemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are inthemselves a kind of religious ceremonial. 

III. THE ART OF WAGNER

In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, itshould be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in thecontinuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation, " evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo andnightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of everycomposer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his musicmoves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which hedoes but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but aworld, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the dramalive their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all theirpassion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and naturalsights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or lesswell, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to therealism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had notsucceeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is theTurner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fierysplendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehendedwith all the clairvoyance of emotion. 

Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with allits voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries usonward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the briefhuman tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. Afew steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darknessawaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly orignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it wereto be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with anabandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we knowis futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because itmust compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, beforewhich there is only a great darkness, and only a great darknessafterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no lessconscious of its passing hour. 

And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers ofdrama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those longnarratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part ofWagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. InWagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense withthe instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least aspowerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listeningto the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is forthis that the "motives, " which are after all only the materialising ofmemory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true actionof the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of itspreponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music, their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualisingeffect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought, materialising both. 

Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped byhis system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody whichcircumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing asa statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swayingpoise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to woodand wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of thenature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the wholeexpression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than anyperson of the drama has ever found in his own soul. 

It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, anddistinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose onlytoo probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desksand their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger, " all Wagner'spersonages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimationsof humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hihumanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, withoutdisturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhumanpassion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this ofthe bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinitedevices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song, for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actualspeech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to whichrealism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of aspiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off. 

And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirabledexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly withalmost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulkpainfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it isthrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats arewithout the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, andwithout intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of"Parsifal, " there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, allobey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is animmense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in agreat embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried standssilent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always, with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out ofthe depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight. Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde giveshim to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and tohim: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given andreturned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (asif love and the thought of death came always together, the thought ofthe only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of themusic as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughtsand the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slowrhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwardsfrom its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the openingnotes of the "Ring, " seems to broaden outwards like ripples on aninfinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner. 

And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all humanthings is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to allother operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (thinkof Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered toa little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and loweringhis supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voiceremains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only inWagner does God speak to men in his own language. 

CONCLUSION

A PARADOX ON ART

Is it not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art, alittle narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic spirit, or, at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of the values of theseveral arts, a little unnecessarily? Literature, painting, sculpture, music, these we admit as art, and the persons who work in them asartists; but dancing, for instance, in which the performer is at oncecreator and interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, such asthe playing of musical instruments, or the conducting of an orchestra, or acting, have we scrupulously considered the degree to which thesealso are art, and their executants, in a strict sense, artists?

If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentiallyindependent of its material, however dependent upon its own materialeach art may be, in a secondary sense, it will scarcely be logical tocontend that the motionless and permanent creation of the sculptor inmarble is, as art, more perfect than the same sculptor's modelling insnow, which, motionless one moment, melts the next, or than the dancer'sharmonious succession of movements which we have not even time torealise individually before one is succeeded by another, and the wholehas vanished from before our eyes. Art is the creation of beauty inform, visible or audible, and the artist is the creator of beauty invisible or audible form. But beauty is infinitely various, and as trulybeauty in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt or the silence of Duse as in aface painted by Leonardo or a poem written by Blake. A dance, performedfaultlessly and by a dancer of temperament, is as beautiful, in its ownway, as a performance on the violin by Ysaye or the effect of anorchestra conducted by Richter. In each case the beauty is different, but, once we have really attained beauty, there can be no question ofsuperiority. Beauty is always equally beautiful; the degrees exist onlywhen we have not yet attained beauty. 

And thus the old prejudice against the artist to whom interpretation inhis own special form of creation is really based upon amisunderstanding. Take the art of music. Bach writes a composition forthe violin: that composition exists, in the abstract, the moment it iswritten down upon paper, but, even to those trained musicians who areable to read it at sight, it exists in a state at best but half alive;to all the rest of the world it is silent. Ysaye plays it on his violin, and the thing begins to breathe, has found a voice perhaps moreexquisite than the sound which Bach heard in his brain when he wrotedown the notes. Take the instrument out of Ysaye's hands, and put itinto the hands of the first violin in the orchestra behind him; everynote will be the same, the same general scheme of expression may befollowed, but the thing that we shall hear will be another thing, justas much Bach, perhaps, but, because Ysaye is wanting, not the work ofart, the creation, to which we have just listened. 

That such art should be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory whichcan never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that abeautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the samefate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of theliving, with a supremely prodigal magnanimity. Old people tell us thatthey have seen Desclée, Taglioni; soon no one will be old enough toremember those great artists. Then, if their renown becomes a matter ofcharity, of credulity, if you will, it will be but equal with the renownof all those poets and painters who are only names to us, or whosemasterpieces have perished. 

Beauty is infinitely various, always equally beautiful, and can never berepeated. Gautier, in a famous poem, has wisely praised the artist whoworks in durable material:

 Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus gelle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail. 

No, not more beautiful; only more lasting. 

 Tout passe. L'art robuste Seul à l'éternité. Le buste Survit à la cité. 

Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, acertain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate oneself or thework of one's hands; as the most austere saints have found selfishnessat the root of the soul's too conscious, or too exclusive, longing aftereternal life? To have created beauty for an instant is to have achievedan equal result in art with one who has created beauty which will lastmany thousands of years. Art is concerned only with accomplishment, notwith duration. The rest is a question partly of vanity, partly ofbusiness. An artist to whom posterity means anything very definite, andto whom the admiration of those who will live after him can seem topromise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to waste his time, as it seems to him, over temporary successes. Or he may shrink from thecontinuing ardour of one to whom art has to be made over again with thesame energy, the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage ordraws music out of his instrument. One may indeed be listless enough toprefer to have finished one's work, and to be able to point to it, as itstands on its pedestal, or comes to meet all the world, with thedemocratic freedom of the book. All that is a natural feeling in theartist, but it has nothing to do with art. Art has to do only with thecreation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, oroutline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no moretruly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composesrhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composesrhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to theother, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or themusician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed torecognise as of equal value. 

BY THE SAME WRITER

Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902. 

An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906. 

Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905. 

The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908. 

Cities, 1903. 

Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904. 

A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905. 

Spiritual Adventures, 1905. 

The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906. 

Studies in Seven Arts, 1906. 

William Blake, 1907. 

Cities of Italy, 1907.