The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/London Letter
LONDON LETTER
June, 1923
IT is about a year, as far as I can remember, since any play by Shakespeare has been put on the stage for a "run" in any of the forty-odd theatres in the West End of London. It sometimes seems that the War has reduced England to barbarism: not only by the astonishing, rapid, and almost complete departure of all moral decency and tolerance during the fighting (that was perhaps less marked here than in most of the countries compromised) but by the withering of all public pretence of respect for Art. Before the War it was considered elevating, genteel, even chic, to patronize in moderation the serious theatre. The Middle Classes took their children to see Tree in Shakespeare, the Upper Classes made a vogue of the Russian Opera and Ballet. For a moment it looked as if an artistic revival incubated in snobbery might grow to flourish naturally upon an improved public taste. Then came War; the war was against Kultur; Culture herself, for all her togas, had alarming resemblances to her panoplied German cousin; look at Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, the Prince Consort himself; the Royal Family set an unfortunate but much followed example by changing its name; and everything modern was declared decadent. The young demanded amusements that drugged and did not stimulate the brain—it was a bad time for brains that worked properly—and their parents were able to be honest with themselves and prefer Revue to Shakespeare and Rimsky-Korsakov. So a new generation arose which did not believe in Victorian shams and voted art as well as faith and morals a convention and a bore. Meanwhile of course artists just pursued their way; but every form of art has become more difficult to understand and more apparently esoteric. The distance of the great mass of the semi-educated public (that is the class which goes, and sends its children, to the Universities) from all knowledge of the best art being produced is greater than it has probably ever been. Enjoyment of the arts has become specialized, and it sometimes seems that soon only writers will read books, only painters look at pictures, and only musicians listen to music.
Now this version I believe to be a more specious than complete explanation of the recent history of taste. It is true that while the most popular contemporary writers were in their lifetimes Dickens and Tennyson, they are now people like Miss Dell and Mrs Wilcox. And such a dégringolade is more than an accident. But Dickens and Tennyson were not pioneers: their works were largely emasculated varieties of their predecessors, especially and respectively of Smollett and Keats. The formal innovators, like Browning, Henry James, Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler, for years appealed only to a public as restricted as that which at present interests itself in new forms in art. For it is unreasonable to expect a rapid general understanding of formal novelty. The important and feasible thing is first to obtain some general knowledge of what is old: the creative genius may occasionally be ignorant of his predecessors, but if an audience for new things is to be found which is discriminating as well as appreciative, it will need some scholarship in the highest achievements of the past. No one, I venture to say, is so much to be distrusted as the admirer of Picasso who has not studied Giotto and Poussin, the advocate of Eliot and Joyce who has not studied Milton and Sterne, the enthusiast for the Expressionist Theatre who has not studied Webster and Dryden. And I suggest that there is no better rule for everyone to follow than that of reading, for every new book, at least one old one.
As far as the theatre in England is concerned, it is not certain that if good things were offered to the public, they would not be lapped up. But the public is not given a chance: we are on the cruel knees of the theatrical financiers. But despite the power of these remorseless deities, we have in London one institution which did not exist before the war, which grows yearly more robust, and which, I believe, has no counterpart in the States. That is the Phoenix, a Society which exists to produce performances of old English plays; in each of the three or four seasons since its beginning, it has given four plays of great interest and importance.
The very genius of Shakespeare has in some respects had calamitous results—for his successors and contemporaries have been disastrously eclipsed by it from the public view, and several of them were only not so great as he. I do not suppose that people are any more generally aware in America than they are here of the greatness of English dramatic literature. Do many of them know that there is a greater Webster than Noah, and a more important Ford than Henry? Here Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith are the only three old dramatists who have continually been played, and many of those readers who consider themselves well-educated have neglected the existence of any besides these, and perhaps Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Congreve. Several of the plays recently produced by the Phoenix have not been acted in England for over a century. Thus those who have a little knowledge of this tremendous literature have been given the exciting opportunity of seeing acted some of its masterpieces, and others—a remarkable number indeed—have made at these performances their first acquaintance with some of the greatest plays ever written by man. Last summer two plays by Dryden were given, All for Love and Amphitryon: the greatness of Dryden as dramatist, critic, and poet can hardly be exaggerated. During this season we have had The Jew of Malta, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and The Alchemist. (If there is any reader of The Dial who does not know these five plays, I beg him or her to put down this Letter without finishing it, and immediately read them.) To my infinite disappointment I missed the Marlowe, but in spite of serious inequalities in the acting and production Ford's tragedy and Jonson's comedy made two of the most impressive performances any one could see. As a warning to any American who may be inspired to produce such plays, I can state that a highly unsuitable taste for "cuts" seems to be taking hold of those responsible for these productions. If it is easy to exaggerate the damage that "cuts" do, it is grotesque to want them.
At Cambridge an amateur society of undergraduates, the Marlowe, has been formed for doing similar work, so that it should soon be possible to see acted all the masterpieces of sixteenth and seventeenth century drama, and also to discover which of the less obviously magnificent plays stand best the test of stage performance.
"I never go to the theatre except when I'm drunk," said one of the most intelligent and rightly eminent men in England the other day. "Drunk" is of course a façon de parler—but the fact remains that there is no theatre in England to interest educated people except the Phoenix and the Stage Society. "To instruct delightfully," says Dryden, "is the general end of all poetry." I suggest to the Citizens of the United States that in no way could they gain at once more instruction and delight than by forming a society like our Phoenix for the performance of the masterpieces of old dramatic art.
The most remarkable, and the most devastating, event in this winter's history of the Fine Arts in England has been the bequest to the Nation and the prompt exhibition in the National Gallery, of the nine portraits of the Wertheimer family by Mr Sargent. I am told that every public picture-gallery in the States wants to procure an example of Mr Sargent's painting. I know he is an American, but I should have thought there were limits even to patriotism; and it seems anyhow a mistake to buy at the top of the market. But perhaps this story like so many that reach us from abroad is untrue, and it 1s only here, in a country not his own, that this prophet has an honour that no other living painter, native or foreign, is given. Mr Roger Fry in an admirably balanced article has assized the exact aesthetic value of these portraits, but without attempting to describe their immeasurable vulgarity. Most men of aesthetically good will would agree that they are blasphemously out of place in the National Gallery, and that in allowing them to crowd real pictures off the walls and into the cellars, our officials have committed an extravagant and unpardonable error. But is it irretrievable? No one has, I think, yet suggested what seems to me the obvious solution of the difficulty. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Paris contains a number of rooms illustrating the styles of art at every period from early times right up to the present. Last before the room containing contemporary work is one of fascinating fearfulness. It is devoted to Art Nouveau. The most enthusiastic aberrations of late Victorian taste never attained such a height as this. But what a noble nucleus for an Edwardian room the Wertheimer portraits would make, and what a perpetual lesson in social and aesthetic history they would teach. It would have to be the carefullest reconstruction of a drawing- or dining-room of the period, the furniture either carved oak of the best Boer War period, or painstaking but "improved" imitations of the florider sorts of Boulle; the piano-cover or table-centre a choice piece of ribbon-work; about the room a little beaten metal from India; an octagonal table encrusted with mother-of-pearl from Morocco; a great many photographs in silver frames; and above a dado of lincrusta, upon the most expensive satin-finished wall-paper, the nine portraits from the National Gallery. They would rehearse unendingly the bankruptcy (the commercial metaphor is appropriate)—the catastrophic bankruptcy in taste of the age which hailed Kipling as its prophet, Puccini as its musician, Pinero as its playwright, and Sargent as its painter.
I want to take advantage for the second time in this Letter of the license given me by the epistolary form, change the subject abruptly, and point out that the almost simultaneous publication of two books on Tennyson provides a suitable occasion for everyone to make up his or her mind about that poet, remembering of course that no aesthetic decision about so recent an artist is likely to be other than temporary and incomplete. Like Victor Hugo, Tennyson is a poet to whom it is at present extraordinarily difficult to be just. He has ceased to be fashionable, but is not far enough away to be romantic. His work has not yet been given patina by the indulgent hand of the merciful faker, Time. Seventeenth and eighteenth century verses, for instance, often engage our amused affection by their characteristic absurdity, by the extravagance to which minor writers especially carried the fashions of their age. Similarly Early and even Middle Victorian decoration have their charms for us: they are already "period," but it is only the most delicate dilletanti who can yet extract much enjoyment from the quaintness and typical Victorianism of such poems as The Lord of Burleigh, The Princess, In the Children's Hospital, and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The moral ideas also are too near, if not to our own, at least to our parents', for us to be able to regard them with the tolerant interest and sympathy which those of the old writers in- spire. Tennyson has only been dead for thirty years.
Tennyson and his family contrived to cover his tracks with remarkable success, and neither Mr Nicolson (whose book is published by Constable) nor Mr Fausset (whose book is published by Selwyn and Blount) bring any new material worth mention. But they apply a new method to the old material, and the method is inevitably Mr Lytton Strachey's. It seems impossible to touch biography now without trying this instrument, but it is dangerous to use. No one has quite such delicate taste as Mr Strachey. Both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset consider that most of Tennyson's poetry is best forgotten, and I do not see how it is possible to disagree with them. The Old Guard of Tennysonians has come out with surprising energy to cry "Sacrilege" at these impudent young men, but its protests have relied more upon passion than upon argument.
Mr Nicolson's Tennyson is incomparably better than his Verlaine, which he ruined by what must have been an assumed conventionality. He judges Tennyson from the point of view of an aesthete and man of the world: Mr Fausset criticizes him from the moral and intellectual standpoint. Mr Nicolson writes urbanely, but sometimes flippantly: Mr Fausset earnestly, but with a sort of post-war bitterness. Mr Nicolson’s Tennyson is a sensitive, melancholic, almost neurotic poet driven by ironic circumstances most unsuitably to play the Bard of the Victorian Age: Mr Fausset on the other hand maintains that he was the victim of his too sheltered life, and seems to think that if once he had come into the open, he might have become a great poet of moral ideas. I doubt if either of these explanations is satisfactory. Certainly he was some sort of a poet manqué; but what sort?
Even in his most depressing poems, in Enoch Arden, in The Idylls, in Tiresias, he keeps surprising you by some technical effect of quite sublime ingenuity. On occasion he could attain real magnificence of image: "Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars" seems to me one of the great lines of English poetry. But it is rare for his felicities to rise to the height where they can be called inspirations. A few lyrics are perfect, but how few! Hardly more than fifty different poets have brought off, whom no one has ever thought of making equal with Tennyson. But his occasional verse is astonishingly good, and on this Mr Nicolson rightly lays great emphasis. Though hardly, I think, enough; for I suggest very tentatively that Tennyson should have been a greater Prior instead of a worse Wordsworth. Which means of course that I agree with both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset in thinking that he was the victim of his milieu, but that I doubt if he had the genius appropriate to either of the destinies they respectively suggest for him. Passion is wanting. A great lyric poet would indeed have piped because he must; a great moral poet would have thrown off the bonds of time and place and confining circumstance. But Horace might conceivably have mistaken himself for a Catullus or a Lucretius.