Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

At any rate they fail with us. Webster, no doubt, had his true “posterity” (was it perchance contemporary with Pepys?), but we are his post-posterity. In a sense every masterpiece is in advance of its time. “The reason,” says Marcel Proust (“A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”)—

“The reason why a work of genius is admired with difficulty at once is that the author is extraordinary, that few people resemble him. It is his work itself that in fertilizing the rare minds capable of comprehending it makes them grow and multiply. Beethoven’s quartets (XII., XIII., XIV., and XV.) have taken fifty years to give birth and growth to the Beethoven quartet public, thus realizing like every masterpiece a progress in the society of minds, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the masterpiece appeared, that is to say, of beings capable of loving it. What we call posterity is the posterity of the work itself. The work must create its own posterity.”

Assuredly we of to-day can see more in Hamlet than its first audience could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation selects from a classic what suits it. Few of the original colours are “fast”; some fade, others grow more vivid and then fade in their turn. The Jacobean playgoer was impressed by Webster’s heaped corpses, and we titter. He probably revelled in the mad scene of the “lycanthropic” Ferdinand, where we are bored. (The taste for mad scenes was long lived; it lasted from the Elizabethans, on through Betterton’s time—see Valentine in Love for Love—and Garrick’s time, as we know from Boswell’s anecdote about Irene, down to the moment when Tilburina went mad in white satin.) On the other hand, a scene which has possibly gained in piquancy for us of to-day, the proud contemporaries of Mr. Shaw, is that wherein the Duchess woos the coy Antonio and weds him out of hand. When we chance upon a thing like this in a classic we are apt, fatuously enough, to exclaim. “How modern!”

No one is likely to make that exclamation over another classic of momentary revival, Le Malade Imaginaire. There is not a vestige of “modernity” in Molière’s play. It is absolutely primitive. Or rather it seems, in all essentials, to stand outside time, to exhibit nothing of any consequence that “dates.” It has suffered no such mishap as has befallen Webster’s tragedy—a change of mental attitude in the audience which has turned the author’s desired effect upside down. At no point at which Molière made a bid for our laughter are we provoked, contrariwise, to frown. You cannot, by the way, say this about all Molière. Much, e.g., of the fun in George Dandin strikes a modern audience as merely cruel. Both in Alceste and Tartuffe there has been a certain alteration of “values” in the progress of the centuries. But Le Malade Imaginaire is untouched. We can enjoy it, I imagine, with precisely the same delight as its first audience felt. Some items of it, to be sure, were actual facts for them which are only history for us; the subservience of children to parents, for instance, and (though Mr. Shaw will not agree) the pedantic humbug of the faculty. But the point is, that the things laughed at, though they may have ceased to exist in fact, are as ridiculous as ever. And note that our laughter is not a whit affected by childish absurdities in the plot. Argan’s little girl shams dead and he immediately assumes she is dead. Argan shams dead and neither his wife nor his elder daughter for a moment questions the reality of his death. His own serving-wench puts on a doctor’s gown and he is at once deceived by the disguise. These little things do not matter in the least. We are willing to go all lengths in make-believe so long as we get our laughter.

Here, then, is a classic which seems to be outside the general rule. It has not had to make, in M. Proust’s phrase, its own posterity. It has escaped those vicissitudes of appreciation which classics are apt to suffer from changes in the general condition of the public mind.... But stay! If it has always been greeted with the same abundance of laughter, has the quality of that laughter been invariable? Clearly not, for Molière is at pains to apologize in his play for seeming to laugh at the faculty, whereas, he says, he has only in view “le ridicule de la médecine.” Between half-resentful, half-fearful laughter at a Purgon or Diafoirus who may be at your bedside next week and light-hearted laughter at figures that have become merely fantastic pantaloons there is considerable difference. And so we re-establish our general rule.

PERVERTED REPUTATIONS

Sir Henry Irving used to tell how he and Toole had gone together to Stratford, and fallen into talk with one of its inhabitants about his great townsman. After many cross-questions and crooked answers, they arrived at the fact that the man knew that Shakespeare had “written for summat.” “For what?” they enquired. “Well,” replied the man, “I do think he wrote for the Bible.”

This story illustrates a general law which one might, perhaps, if one were inclined to pseudo-scientific categories, call the law of perverted reputations. I am thinking more particularly of literary reputations, which are those I happen chiefly to care about. And literary reputations probably get perverted more frequently than others, for the simple reason that literature always has been and (despite the cheap manuals, Board schools, and the modern improvements) still is an unfathomable mystery to the outer busy world. But, to get perverted, the reputations must be big enough to have reached the ears of that outer world. What happens, thereafter, seems to be something like this. The man in the back street understands vaguely that so-and-so is esteemed a great man. Temperamentally and culturally incapable of appreciating the works of literary art, for which so-and-so is esteemed great, the back-streeter is driven to account for his greatness to himself on grounds suitable to his own comprehension, which grounds in the nature of the case have nothing to do with the fine art of literature. The general tendency is to place these grounds in the region of the marvellous. For the capacity for wonder is as universal as the capacity for literature is strictly limited.

Thus you have the notorious instance of Virgil figuring to the majority of men in the middle ages not as a poet but as a magician. Appreciation of his poetry was for the “happy few”; by the rest his reputation was too great to be ignored, so they gave it a twist to accommodate it to the nature of their own imaginations. In more recent times, indeed in our own day, there is the equally notorious instance of Shakespeare. The Stratford rustic knew nothing of Shakespeare’s plays, but did know (1) that there was a great man called Shakespeare, and (2) that there was a great book called the Bible. He concluded that Shakespeare must have written for the Bible. But I am thinking of a very different perversion of Shakespeare’s reputation. I am thinking of the strange people, exponents of the back-street mind, who, being incapable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry and dramatic genius—having in fact no taste for literature as such—have assigned his greatness to something compatible with their own prosaic pedestrian taste and turned him into a contriver of cryptograms. Again you see the old appetite for wonder reappearing. The imputed reputation, as in Virgil’s case, is for something abscons, as Rabelais would have said, something occult.