Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

But this is only casuistry, the vain effort to seek consolation for the death of a friend. I am not speaking of a boon companion, but of something much better, of that ideal, disinterested friend which every actor is for us on the stage, giving us his mind and heart and temperament and physical being, immolating his very self for us, and at the end (I can see Henry Irving the elder standing before the curtain as he uttered the words) our “obliged, respectful, loving servant.” This is pure friendship, purer than any private intimacy, with its inevitable contacts and reserves of different egoisms. Why does my mind go back to the elder Irving? Because I am thinking of his son Harry, who was so like him (too like him, it was a perpetual handicap), and never more like him than in that pride which does not ape humility but feels it—the pride of the artist in his art and the humility of the devotee in the temple of art. Indeed, I think Harry Irving had an almost superstitious reverence for his profession. He had it perhaps not merely because he was his father’s son, but also because he was his father’s son with a difference, an academic difference; he was one of a little band of Oxford men whose adoption of the stage was, in those days, a breach with orthodox Oxford tradition. All that, I daresay, is altered now. In an Oxford which has widened Magdalen Bridge and built itself new Schools anything is possible. But in those days undergraduates were not habitually qualifying for the stage; indeed, the old “Vic” in term-time was out of bounds. The old “Vic” had only just disappeared when I went up to see young Irving as Decius Brutus in Julius Cæsar, and H. B. was still very much an undergraduate. Heavens! the pink and green sweets we ate at supper not far from Tom Tower after the show—the sweets that only undergraduates can eat! If I remember the sweets better than the Decius Brutus, it will be indulgent to infer that Harry Irving’s début was not of the most remarkable. But his reverence for the histrionic art was, even then. I teazed him (youthful critics have a crude appetite for controversy) by starting an assault, entirely theoretical and Pickwickian, on that reverential attitude; we beat over the ground from Plato to Bossuet; and I think it took him some time to forgive me.

In his earlier years on the stage he was a little stiff and formal—characteristics which were not at all to his disadvantage in the young prig of The Princess and the Butterfly and the solemn young man-about-town of Letty (though the smart Bond Street suit and patent leather shoes of the man-about-town were obviously a sore trial to a boy who, from his earliest years, dressed after his father). I imagine his Crichton (1902) was his first real success in London, and an admirable Crichton it was, standing out, as the play demanded, with that vigour and stamp of personal domination which he had inherited from his father. His Hamlet, though his most important, was hardly his best part. It was too cerebral. But is not Hamlet, some one will ask, the very prince of cerebrals? Yes, but Hamlet has grace as well as thought, sweetness as well as light. Harry Irving’s Hamlet (of 1905, he softened much in the later revival) was a little didactic, almost donnish. He hardened the hardness of Hamlet—particularly his hardness to women, Ophelia and Gertrude, which we need not be sickly sentimentalists to dislike seeing emphasized. In a word he was impressive rather than charming—was perhaps almost harsh after the conspicuously charming Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. Nevertheless, if Harry Irving’s Hamlet was second to Forbes-Robertson’s, it was a very good second.

He had his father’s rather Mephistophelean humour—but I am annoyed to find myself always harping on his father. It is a tiresome obsession. None suffered from it more than the son himself, at once hero and martyr of filial piety. He invited comparison, playing as many as possible of his father’s old parts, all ragged and threadbare as they had become. But he lacked the quality which originally saved them, the romantic flamboyant baroque quality of his father’s genius. Sir Henry impressed himself upon his time by sheer force of individuality and by what Byron calls “magnoperation.” He was a great manager as well as a great actor, doing everything on a gigantic scale and in the grand style. He was a splendid figure of romance, off as well as on the stage. It was hopeless to provoke comparison with such a being as this. Though the son showed the family likeness he was naturally a reasonable man, a scholar, a man of discursive analytic mind rather than of the instinctive perfervid histrionic temperament. It was always a pleasure to swop ideas with him, to talk to him about the principles of his art, the great criminals of history, or the latest murder trial he had been attending at the Old Bailey; but I suspect (I never tried) conversation with his father, in Boswell’s phrase, a “tremendous companion,” must have been a rather overwhelming experience.... And, after all, the wonderful thing is that the son stood the comparison so well, that he was not utterly crushed by it—that the successor of so exorbitant an artist could maintain any orbit of his own. That is a curious corner of our contemporary society the corner of the second generation, where the son mentions “my father” quickly, with a slight drop of the voice, out of a courteous disinclination to let filial respect become a bore to third parties. There is an academician of the second generation in Pailleron’s play who is always alluding to mon illustre père, and as the ill-natured say joue du cadavre. In our little English corner there is never any such lapse from good taste, Harry Irving was greatly loved there; and will be sadly missed.

THE PUPPETS

At the corner of a Bloomsbury square I found my path blocked by a little crowd of children who were watching a puppet show of an unusual kind. The usual kind, of course, is Punch and Judy, which has become a degenerate thing, with its puppets grasped in the operator’s hand; these puppets were wired, in the grand manner of the art, and had a horse and cart, no less, for their transport. The show, though lamentably poor in itself—the puppets merely danced solemnly round and round without any attempt at dramatic action—was rich in suggestion. Do we not all keep a warm corner of our hearts for the puppets, if only for their venerable antiquity and their choice literary associations? Why, in the grave pages of the Literary Supplement learned archæologists have lately been corresponding about the Elizabethan “motions,” and Sir William Ridgeway has traced the puppets back to the Syracuse of Xenophon’s day, and told us how that author in his “Symposium” makes a famous Syracusan puppet player say that he esteems fools above other men because they are those who go to see his puppets (νευρόσπαστα). My own recollections connect Xenophon with parasangs rather than puppets, but I am glad to be made aware of this honourable pedigree, though I strongly resent the Syracusan’s remark about the amateurs of puppets. I share the taste of Partridge, who “loved a puppet show of all the pastimes upon earth,” and I sympathize with the showman in “Tom Jones” who could tolerate all religions save that of the Presbyterians, “because they were enemies to puppet shows.” And so I lingered with the children at the corner of the Bloomsbury square.

Puppets, someone has said, have this advantage over actors: they are made for what they do, their nature conforms exactly to their destiny. I have seen them in Italy performing romantic drama with a dash and a panache that no English actor in my recollection (save, perhaps, the late Mr. Lewis Waller) could rival. Actors, being men as well as actors, and therefore condemned to effort in acting, if only the effort of keeping down their consciousness of their real, total self, cannot attain to this clear-cut definiteness and purity of performance. But the wire-puller must be a true artist, his finger-tips responsive to every emotional thrill of the character and every nuance of the drama; indeed, the ideal wire-puller is the poet himself, expressing himself through the motions of his puppets and declaiming his own words for them.

It was with this thought in my mind that I ventured, when Mr. Hardy first published The Dynasts, to suggest that the perfect performance of that work would be as a puppet show, with Mr. Hardy reading out his own blank verse. I pointed out the suggestive reference to puppets in the text. One of the Spirits describes the human protagonists as “mere marionettes,” and elsewhere you read:—

Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear

As puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.