Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

The production on two successive nights of two plays so violently contrasted in method as Mr. Harwood’s Grain of Mustard Seed and Mr. Galsworthy’s Skin Game—the first a play mainly of talk, the second a play entirely of action—sets one thinking. According to the orthodox canons, the second is the right, nay, the only method. Drama, we are told, is a conflict of wills and all the interest is in the action, the external manifestation of the conflict. There should be just enough talk to carry that on and not an idle word should be spoken. Diderot, indeed, professed to think that words were almost superfluous, and went to the play with cotton-wool in his ears in order to judge its merits on the dumb show; yet he wrote the most wordy and tedious plays. And there is, or was, a certain school of theatrical criticism which forever quotes the old Astley maxim, “Cut the cackle and come to the ’osses”—which was no doubt a most appropriate maxim, for quadrupeds. Others have mistaken action for physical, preferably violent action—Maldonado sweeping the crockery off the chimney-piece or Lady Audley pushing her husband down the well—and have ignored the fact that talk also may be action, “and much the noblest,” as Dryden says. “Every alteration or crossing of a design, every new-sprung passion, and turn of it, is a part of the action, and much the noblest, except we perceive nothing to be action, till they come to blows; as if the painting of the hero’s mind were not more properly the poet’s work than the strength of his body.” How often we were told in the old days that Dumas fils and Ibsen were too “talky,” when their talk was mainly psychological action.

But this demand for action and nothing but action, so persistently uttered of late years, would deprive the world of much of its best entertainment. Apply it to Congreve, “cut the cackle” of his plays, and you come to the ’osses, spavined hacks, of plots childishly complicated and perfunctorily wound up. Would any one of taste suppress the “cackle” of Sheridan’s scandalous college? Is not, in short, much of the pleasure of comedy in resting from the action, in getting away from it, in the relief of good talk? Yes, and often enough the pleasure of tragedy, too. There is a bustling, melodramatic action in Hamlet. But with what relief Hamlet gets away from his revenge “mission” at every moment, puts it out of sight, forgets it! His interview with the players and advice to them on histrionics, his chat with the gravedigger, what else are these but the sheer delight of good talk? For him the joy of living is the joy of talking, and with the chance of these before him his revenge-mission may go hang!

Obviously we never get so near Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s natural temperament, as in these moments of talk for its own sake, talk unfettered by the exigencies of the plot. For that talk wells up spontaneously and is not turned on to order; the poet has something interesting in his mind which he is bursting to say, and if to say it will keep the plot waiting, why, so much the worse for the plot. And here is a reason, I think, in favour of plays of talk. We get nearer the author in them; in good talk the author is expressing a pleasure so strong as to override the objection of irrelevance, and in sharing that pleasure we get the best of him, the spontaneous element in him, the man himself. On the other hand, mere yarn-spinning, mere plot-weaving, may be an almost mechanical exercise. Not necessarily, of course. I should be sorry to call Mr. Galsworthy’s Skin Game a mechanical bit of work. The will-conflict there has an intense reality and is fought tooth and nail. Irrelevant talk in such a white-hot play would obviously be fatal. Everybody speaks briefly, plainly, and to the point. Artistic work of any kind gives pleasure, and it is possible to be as delighted with Mr. Galsworthy’s kind as with Mr. Harwood’s. I am not comparing two artists of two different kinds, which would be absurd. I am only pleading for a kind which is not what a vain people supposeth, and which is apt to be stupidly condemned.

Not that it would be fair, either, to call Mr. Harwood’s brilliant task irrelevant. It helps to paint character. Thus, parents expect their son to have returned from the war a compound of Sir Galahad and Mr. Bottomley, and instead of that he is only a good bridge-player, after four hours’ bridge a day for four years. These witticisms help to tell you something about the young man whose family reputation gives rise to them in the family circle. When the old Parliamentary hand compares government to ’bus-driving, seeking to get through the traffic with the minimum of accident, or remarks on the reputation Canute would have made had he only waited for high tide, he is telling us something about himself and his political principles. But primarily these things are enjoyable for their wit and not for their relevance. In a play of fierce will-conflict they would have been impossible. These plays of brilliant talk belong to the quiet genre, and quiet in the theatre, as in art generally, is perhaps an acquired taste. “Punch,” we are constantly being told by the natural unsophisticated man, is what is wanted—the word itself is the invention of an unquiet people. Well, give me wit, and let who will have the “punch.”

The occasional tendency in the theatre to revolt against the restraint of the action and to play lightly round it has its counterpart in criticism. What is it gives so peculiar a charm to the criticism of Dryden? Is it not his discursiveness, his little descriptive embellishments—as, for example, in the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” the river trip, the listening for the distant thunder of the Dutch guns “on that memorable day,” the moonlight on the water, the landing at Somerset Stairs among the crowd of French dancers? I have elsewhere said how Hazlitt’s theatrical criticisms lose in readableness by their strict attention to business, compared with his miscellaneous essays, where he permits himself to wander “all over the place.” George Henry Lewes’s theatrical criticisms can still be read with pleasure for the very reason that they were diversified with deliberate, almost frivolous irrelevancies. And then there was Jules Lemaître with his perpetual “moi,” which provoked the austere Brunetière to quote Pascal’s “le moi est haïssable.” Yet where will you find more enjoyable criticism than Lemaître’s? But I must keep off Lemaître and the charm of him, or I shall become, what he never was, tiresome. Even as it is, I may resemble the parson who said he had aimed at brevity in order to avoid tediousness, and was answered, “You were brief, and you were tedious.”

“THE BEGGAR’S OPERA”

One of Boswell’s projected works was a history of the controversy over The Beggar’s Opera. The best known of the works he actually did write contains several references to this controversy. Reynolds said it afforded a proof how strangely people will differ in opinion about a literary performance. Burke thought it had no merit. Johnson thought very much the opposite, but said characteristically, “There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality.” Gibbon suggested that it might refine the manners of highwaymen, “making them less ferocious, more polite—in short, more like gentlemen.” It is noteworthy that the work was half a century old when these observations were made about it. It had become a classic. And later generations treated it as a classic—that is to say, kept on refashioning it to the taste of their own time. The version, for instance, that Hazlitt was so fond of writing about (in the second decade of the last century) was a sad mangling of the original. Even so, it represented for Hazlitt the high-water mark of theatrical enjoyment, just as the original did for Boswell, who said, “No performance which the theatre exhibits delights me more.” You cannot take up a volume of Swift’s correspondence, or Horace Walpole’s or Arbuthnot’s, without mention of The Beggar’s Opera. It even got into Grimm. It was the H.M.S. Pinafore of the time.

And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistress, the thing seemed strangely modern, and not only modern, but Gilbertian. (I am speaking, of course, of the tone, not of the sentiment—Gilbert was a very Victorian of propriety.) Peachum is Gilbertian. “Do you think your mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together if ever we had been married? Baggage!” Mrs. Peachum is Gilbertian. “If you must be married, could you introduce nobody into our family but a highwayman? Why, thou foolish jade, thou wilt be as ill-used and as much neglected as if thou hadst married a lord!” Again, “If she had only an intrigue with the fellow, why the very best families have excus’d and huddled up a frailty of that sort. ’Tis marriage, husband, that makes it a blemish.” Once more. “Love him! Worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.” Polly herself is Gilbertian. “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! What volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! I see him at the tree! The whole circle are in tears! Even butchers weep!” Lucy is Gilbertian. When Macheath is at the “tree,” her comment is, “There is nothing moves one so much as a great man in distress.” And not only the tone, but the very principle of the play is Gilbertian. Gilbert took some typical figure of the social hierarchy—a Lord Chancellor, a First Lord of the Admiralty—and set the Chancellor capering and the First Lord singing about the handle of the big front door. He put a familiar figure in unfamiliar postures. Gay took a typical figure of his own time—the highwayman—and showed him, not at work on the highway, but enjoying an elegant leisure, behaving like a Chesterfield or one of Congreve’s fine gentlemen. It was the realism, the actuality of the subject, combined with the burlesque of the treatment, that delighted the London of 1728 as it delighted the London of a century and a half later. At each date it was a new experiment in opera libretto. Boswell specified the attraction of Gay’s realism—“the real pictures of London life.” Johnson singles out the “novelty” of the treatment.

But it is time that I said something about Mr. Nigel Playfair’s revival. This is a remarkable success, from every point of view. For the original attraction of realism is, of course, no longer there. We have to take it all historically. And the revival has been particularly careful of historical accuracy. Just as Gay’s dialogue prompts you to say “Gilbert,” so Mr. Lovat Fraser’s scenery and costumes prompt you to exclaim “Hogarth!” By the way, on one of Hazlitt’s visits he records the exclamation of an old gentleman in the pit, after the scuffle between Peachum and Lockit, “Hogarth, by G—d!” This was, no doubt, a tribute to the grim, ugly squalor of that particular scene. But the whole décor and atmosphere of the present affair are Hogarthian—the stiff, flattened hoops of the women, the tatterdemalion aspect of Macheath’s rabble, Peachum’s dressing-gown (which I suppose is “documentary”), Macheath’s scarlet coat and flowing wig. And the dresses are accurately simple. The women wear plain stuffs; Polly alone is allowed a little finery. Indeed, there is an almost austere simplicity about the whole affair. One scene, with just the alteration of a few accessories, serves for Peachum’s house, for a tavern, and for Newgate. There is an orchestra of five strings, a flute, an oboe, and a harpsichord. It seems to me that their playing has the delicate charm of chamber music rather than the power and colour of orchestral—but I must not stray out of my province.