Part 9 (1/2)

In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and created the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literature. All audacity of thought and expression has been stamped out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has been said a thousand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain age; quite so, only certain ages are more interesting than others, and consequently produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Democratic movement, in other words, Respectability, in other words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts; it was admitted that in the more individual arts--painting and poetry--men would be always found to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem: but no man is, after all, so immeasurably superior to the age he lives in as to be able to resist it wholly; he must draw sustenance from some quarter, and the contemplation of the past will not suffice. Then the pressure on him from without is as water upon the diver; and sooner or later he grows fatigued and comes to the surface to breathe; he is as a flying-fish pursued by sharks below and cruel birds above; and he neither dives as deep nor flies as high as his freer and stronger ancestry. A daring spirit in the nineteenth century would have been but a timid nursery soul indeed in the sixteenth. We want tumult and war to give us forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace to enjoy a kiss in; but we are expected to be home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that might shock the neighbours.

Respectability has wound itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The power of the villa residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith--not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph.

To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery than a London theatre; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to a.s.sist them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coa.r.s.e and common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr Pett.i.t's plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as _In the Ranks_ and _Harbour Lights_. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled--the miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the old castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than the million events which go to make up the phenomena of human existence. Not at these things considered separately do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is made of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue.

Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the idea.

Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out of obscuring matter, and this can best be done by the symbol. The symbol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it was the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the idea; now we evoke nothing, for we give everything, the imagination of the spectator is no longer called into play. In Shakespeare's days to create wealth in a theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, ”A magnificent apartment in a palace.” This was no doubt primitive and not a little barbarous, but it was better by far than by dint of anxious archaeology to construct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some projecting bal.u.s.trade taken in conjunction with a moored gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese: by the magical and unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or aspect of a landscape, and not by the up-piling of extraneous detail, are all great poetic effects achieved.

”By the tideless dolorous inland sea, In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold.”

And, better example still,

”Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,”

that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote. Being a great poet Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art; and, as is characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I had painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in London. I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love-song--for _Romeo and Juliet_ is no more than a love song in dialogue--tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross pa.s.sion of an ignorant public. I hated all that with the hatred of a pa.s.sionate heart, and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indications, and the simple recitation of that story of the sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realise the poet's divine imagination: and the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for her part to be played by a youth as in old time: a youth cunningly disguised, would be a symbol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.

But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is the basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I will pa.s.s on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.

The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything. It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We have the villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but s.h.i.+lling and two-s.h.i.+lling novels were purchased. Out of such circ.u.mstances the circulating library was hatched.

The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty outside public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the _elite_ could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and a.s.saftida with which Byron, Fielding and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature.

English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened; poor human nature! when you pinch it in one place it bulges out in another, after the fas.h.i.+on of a lady's figure. Human nature has from the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words ”dirty stories” in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease if you will--an incurable disease--which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the most moral people on the face of the earth. It was confidently a.s.serted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we still continued to go to church, true it is that we turned our faces away when _Mdlle. de Maupin_ or the _a.s.sommoir_ was spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie might wish us; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, ”I have scorched the evil one out of the villa; the head of the serpent is crushed for evermore;” but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.

An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana.

I have written much against the circulating library, and I have read a feeble defence or two; but I have not seen the argument that might be legitimately put forward in its favour. It seems to me this: the circulating library is conservatism, art is always conservative; the circulating library lifts the writer out of the precariousness and noise of the wild street of popular fancy into a quiet place where pa.s.sion is more restrained and there is more reflection. The young and unknown writer is placed at once in a place of comparative security, and he is not forced to employ vile and degrading methods of attracting attention; the known writer, having a certain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd; but all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered _nil_ by the veracious censors.h.i.+p exercised by the librarian.

There is one thing in England that is free, that is spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent;--but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England--I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall--I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there--for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for the time a living house--the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other's presence; in a word, there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some one will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing a street; a man comes on--not, mind you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests one--and sings of how he came up to London, and was ”cleaned out” by thieves.

Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a _frica.s.see_ of _Faust_, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better than a drawing-room set at the St James's, with an exhibition of pa.s.sion by Mrs and Mr Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett--an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor trull in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing _a che la morte_, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity--but bright quips and cranks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the ”pub” where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare--see, here she comes with ”What cheer, Rea! Rea's on the job.” The sketch is slight, but is welcome and refres.h.i.+ng after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs Kendal's c.u.mbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not these the _aions_ and the attributes of art? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with living material; how trim and saucy he is! and how he evokes the soul, the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, ”Will you stand me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer?” The soul, the spirit, the ent.i.ty of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene the comedian's eyes--each look is full of suggestion; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.

Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpectedness and nave naturalness remind me of the comic pa.s.sages in Marlowe's _Faustus_, I waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to appear, and to hear an enthusiastic wors.h.i.+pper cry out in his agony:--

”Was this the face that launched a thousand s.h.i.+ps And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!

Come, Helen, come; give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.”

And then the astonis.h.i.+ng change of key:--

”I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked,” etc.

The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such things--she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the _ingenue_ to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs Kendal's marital tendernesses and the abortive plat.i.tudes of Messrs Pett.i.t and Sims; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the movement of the English comedy with its constant change of scene. The music-hall is a protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club, and for this the ”'all” is inexpressibly dear to me.

But in the interests of those illiterate inst.i.tutions called theatres it is not permissible for several characters to narrate events in which there is a sequel, by means of dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious restriction were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers others would gradually learn to cater for more intellectual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and disorder new dramatic forms, coloured and permeated by the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a dramatic literature.

XII

It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them.