Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

In “Tancred” there is another, and an entirely charming, glimpse of French strolling players or strollers who played in French, the Baroni family—“Baroni; that is, the son of Aaron; the name of old clothesmen in London, and of Caliphs in Baghdad.” There is no more engaging incident in the romantic career of Sidonia than his encounter with this family in a little Flanders town. They played in a barn, to which Sidonia had taken care that all the little boys should be admitted free, and Mlle. Josephine advanced warmly cheered by the spectators, “who thought they were going to have some more tumbling.” It was Racine’s “Andromaque,” however, that she presented, and “it seemed to Sidonia that he had never listened to a voice more rich and passionate, to an elocution more complete; he gazed with admiration on her lightning glance and all the tumult of her noble brow.” Sidonia played fairy godmother to the whole family, and “Mlle. Josephine is at this moment [1849] the glory of the French stage; without any question the most admirable tragic actress since Clairon, and inferior not even to her.” If for Josephine we read Rachel, we shall not be far wrong.

Anyhow, it is evident that, when Disraeli thought Mrs. Kendal must have studied in the French school, he was paying her the highest compliment at his disposal. It is disappointing that we have no criticism from Disraeli of Sarah Bernhardt. Matthew Arnold said that Sarah left off where Rachel began. Disraeli says nothing, which is perhaps significant, for he did see Sarah. He was first asked to see her play at a party at Lord Dudley’s, but declined, as he “could not forgo country air.” A few weeks later, however, he was at the Wiltons’, where “the principal saloon, turned into a charming theatre, received the world to witness the heroine of the hour, Sarah Bernhardt.” And that is all. A playgoer of seventy-five is hardly disposed to take up with new favourites—which accounts, perhaps, for Disraeli’s verdict on Irving. “I liked the Corsican Brothers as a melodrama,” he writes to Lady Bradford (November, 1880), “and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving whom I saw for the first time, is third-rate, and never will improve, but good eno’ for the part he played, tho’ he continually reminded me of Lord Dudley....” Why “though”?

On another popular favourite he was even harder. Writing again to Lady Bradford, he says:—“Except at Wycombe Fair, in my youth, I have never seen anything so bad as Pinafore. It was not even a burlesque, a sort of provincial Black-eyed Susan. Princess Mary’s face spoke volumes of disgust and disappointment, but who cd. have told her to go there?” Staying later at Hatfield, however, he found all the Cecil youngsters singing the Pinafore music. A few years earlier he tells Lady Bradford a story he had just heard from a friend of a visit paid by a distinguished Opposition party to The Heir at Law at the old Haymarket. “Into one of the stalls came Ld. Granville; then in a little time, Gladstone; then, at last, Harty-Tarty! Gladstone laughed very much at the performance; H.-T. never even smiled. 3 conspirators....” Another remarkable trio figures in another story. Disraeli had been to the Aquarium to see a famous ape and the lady who used to be shot out of a cannon. “Chaffed” (if the word is not improper) about this by the Queen at the Royal dinner table, Disraeli said, “There were three sights, madam; Zazel, Pongo, and myself.”

It will be seen that there are few records of Disraeli’s playgoing or show-going in his old age. Gladstone, we know, was to the last a frequent playgoer—and, I believe, an enthusiastic admirer of Irving. Disraeli, I take it, had become rather the book-lover than the playgoer. The humblest of us may share that taste with the great man, and even take refuge in his illustrious example for the habit, denounced by the austere, of reading over solitary meals. Mr. Buckle tells us that “over his solitary and simple dinner he would read one of his favourite authors, mostly classics of either Latin, Italian Renaissance, or English eighteenth century literature, pausing for ten minutes between each course.” That passage will endear Disraeli to many of us, simple, home-keeping people, unacquainted with Courts and Parliaments, who feel, perhaps, a little bewildered amid the processional “drums and tramplings” and the gorgeous triumphs of his public career.

HENRY JAMES AND THE THEATRE

Are not the friends of Henry James inclined to be a little too solemn when they write about him, perhaps feeling that they must rise to the occasion and put on their best style, as though he had his eye on them and would be “down” on any lapses? An admirable reviewer of the Letters in the Literary Supplement seemed, indeed, so overcome by his subject as to have fallen into one of Henry James’s least amiable mannerisms—his introduction of elaborate “figures,” relentlessly worked out and at last lagging superfluous. And the editor of the Letters, admirably, too, as he has done his work, is just a little bleak, isn’t he?—wearing the grave face of the historian and mindful never to become familiar. “Thank Heaven!” one seems to hear these writers saying to themselves; “even he could never have called this vulgar.” Such is the posthumous influence of the fastidious “master”! I daresay I am captious. One is never quite satisfied with what one sees in print about people one loved. One always thinks—it is, at any rate, a pleasing illusion—that one has one’s own key to that particular cipher, and to see the thing not merely given away but authoritatively expounded in print is rather a nuisance. Look at the number of fair ladies to whom Henry James wrote letters rich in intimate charm (oh! and, as he would have said, of a decorum!)—perhaps each of them thought she had the best corner of his heart. The most immaculate of women, young and old, matrons and maidens, will sentimentalize their men friends in this way. How could Henry James have escaped? Well, if any one of these ladies had edited the Letters or reviewed them, wouldn’t each of the others have said: “No, that isn’t my Henry James—she never understood him, poor dear”? I apologize for this flippant way of putting it to the two refined writers I began by mentioning. But, as the lady says in The Spoils of Poynton, “I’m quite coarse, thank God!”

Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there, either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as with Guy Domville, or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,” as with his stage versions of The American and Covering End. But not everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success, and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes, success in the theatre. He talks in his letters as though he actually needed the money, but it was really not so. He looked round the world and found it teeming with “best sellers,” idols of the multitude, who by any standards of his simply couldn’t “write,” didn’t artistically “exist.” And the most pathetic thing in his letters is their evidence that he began, aye! and went on, with the illusion that he, such as he was, the absolute artist, might some day become a “best seller.” Even so late as the days of his Collected Edition it came as a shock to him that the great public wouldn’t buy.

It is evident that he had good hopes, beforehand, of Guy Domville. And yet he hated the actual process of production. The rehearsal, he says, is “as amazing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn’t meant for the Theatre.” And when dire failure came, it wasn’t, he says, from any defect of technique. “I have worked like a horse—far harder than any one will ever know—over the whole stiff mystery of ‘technique’—I have run it to earth, and I don’t in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket.” No, the fault must be in his choice of subject. “The question of realizing how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward the quality of things which might be a story in a book from his attitude toward the quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is another matter altogether. That difficulty is portentous, for any writer who doesn’t approach it naïvely, as only a very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to make oneself so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled.” “And yet,” he adds, pathetically enough (writing to his brother), “if you were to have seen my play!” He knew he had done good work, in his own way, and the plain fact that his way was a way which the gross theatre public would not understand or sympathize with was a terrible blow to him.

The process of turning himself into a simple-minded writer—that is, of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, was, of course, impossible. One doesn’t want to wallow in the obvious. But doesn’t it leap at the eyes that an artist who seeks to abandon his own temperament and point of view for another’s will forfeit all chance of that spontaneous joy without which there is no artistic creation? Fortunately, this theatrical malady of Henry James’s (though he had one or two recurrent twinges of it) never became chronic. The history of his real work is a history not of self-renunciation, but of self-development, of abounding, as the French say, in his own sense. As to the theatrical technique which he had put into his pocket he certainly kept it there. Like most laboriously acquired, alien techniques it was too technical, too “architectooralooral”—as any one can see who dips into his two forgotten volumes of “Theatricals.” His own proper technique was a very different thing, an entirely individual thing, and no reader of his books can have failed to notice how he gradually perfected it as he went along. It reached its highest point, to my thinking, in The Ambassadors, surely the greatest of his books (though over this question the fierce tribe of Jacobites will fight to their last gasp), when everything, absolutely everything, is shown as seen through the eyes of Strether. To see a thing so “done” as he would have said, an artistic difficulty so triumphantly mastered, is among the rarest and most exquisite pleasures of life. That was Henry James’s function, to give us rare and exquisite pleasures, of a quality never to be had in the modern theatre. He was no theatrical man, but he could, when he chose, be the most delicate of dramatic critics. Read what he says in these Letters about Rostand’s L’Aiglon (“the man really has talent like an attack of small-pox”), about Bernstein’s Le Secret as a “case,” about Ibsen, “bottomlessly bourgeois ... and yet of his art he’s a master—and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life.”