Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

“I look upon Robertson as a genius. Not that he wrote anything very profound, or anything very witty, but because, at a time when the English stage had sunk to even a lower ebb than it is usually credited with reaching; when the theatres stank of stale gas and orange-peel and the higher drama was represented mainly by adaptations from Scribe by Leicester Buckingham; he had the vision to see that a new public could be created, and an old and jaded one refreshed, by invoking for dramatic purposes the spirit, and using some part of the method, of Thackeray.”

This is admirable, and I only wish our dramatists would more often be tempted into the region of dramatic criticism. All the same I confess that (after going through all Robertson’s plays) it seems to me to overrate the Thackerayan influence. There is a little sentimental cynicism in Robertson and there is much in Thackeray. There is a tipsy old reprobate in Pendennis and there is another in Caste. Tom Stylus helped to found a newspaper and so did George Warrington. Esther D’Alroy tried vainly to buckle on her husband’s sword-belt when he was ordered on service, and Amelia Osborne hovered helplessly about her husband with his red sash on the eve of Waterloo. But such matters as these are common property, communia, and the artist’s business, which Horace said was so difficult, is proprie communia dicere, to give them an individual turn. Drunkenness apart I don’t think Eccles is a bit like Costigan. As to the Thackerayan spirit, would that Robertson had “invoked” it! His plays might then be classics still, as Thackeray is, instead of merely documents.

If we are to connect Robertson with some typical Victorian novelist, I would myself, with all deference to Sir Arthur, suggest Trollope. His young women, his Naomi Tighes and Bellas, his Polly and Esther Eccles, strike me as eminently Trollopean. There are traces of Mrs. Proudie in both Mrs. Sutcliffe and Lady Ptarmigant. But, probably, these also are only instances of communia. Probably the young ladies (and, for all I know, the old ones, too) were real types of the ’sixties, as we see them in Leech’s drawings. Bless their sweet baby-faces and their simple hearts and their pork-pie hats!

The Robertsonian way is often spoken of as a “return to nature.” It is, in fact, a common eulogy of most reactions in art. “Don Quixote” was a return to nature, compared with the romances of chivalry, and “Tom Jones” was a return to nature, compared with “Don Quixote.” The world gradually changes its point of view and sees the facts of life in a new light. Artists change with the rest of the world, and give expression to the new vision. They are hailed as reformers until the next reformation; they seem to have returned to nature, until the world’s view of “nature” again changes. I think, as I have said, that Robertson’s work is to be related to the general anti-romantic reaction that started in France in mid-nineteenth century. But all reactions keep something of what they react against, and Robertson’s reaction retains a good deal of romance. School is as romantic as the German Cinderella-story, on which it was founded. The central situation of Caste—the return home of the husband given up for dead—is essentially romantic, not a jot less romantic than in La joie fait peur. The scenes at the “Owl’s Roost” in Society, applauded for their daring realism, are realistic presentations of the last stronghold of the romantic Murger tradition, literary “Bohemia.” Robertson’s dialogue was often the high-flown lingo of the old romance. (In dialogue we have “returned to nature” several times over since his day.) But more often it was not. He astonished and delighted his contemporaries by making many of his people speak in the theatre as they spoke out of it. He invented sentimental situations that were charming then and would be charming now—love-passages in London squares and over milk-jugs in the moonlight. He had been an actor and a stage manager and knew how to make the very most of stage resources. Take the scene of George’s return in Caste. There is a cry of “milkaow” and a knock at the door. “Come in,” cries Polly to the milkman—and in walks with the milk-can one risen from the dead! This thrilling coup de théâtre is followed, however, by something much better, the pathetic scenes of Polly’s hysterical joy and her tender artifice in breaking the news to Esther. I confess that I cannot read these scenes without tears. There was a quality of freshness and delicate simplicity in Robertson’s work at its best that was a true “return to nature.” No need, is there? to speak of the luck his work had in finding such interpreters as the Bancrofts and their company or of the luck the actors had in finding the work to interpret—the Bancrofts themselves have already told that tale. But it all happened half a century ago and I suppose we are not to expect a future Robertson revival. The past is past. Life is perpetual change. The more reason for not neglecting occasions of pious commemoration. Let us, then, give a friendly thought to “Tom” Robertson to-morrow.

VERSATILITY

Now that the Literary Supplement costs 6d., one feels entitled to examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I well know what mine is, before examination. Even when it cost 3d., my relation to it was always one of weekly disconcertment. It revealed to me so many things I didn’t know and never should know, yet known presumably to some other reader. Now omniscience is derided as a “foible,” but why should one be ashamed to confess it as an ideal? Frankly, I envy the man who was so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s epitome. He must have got more fun out of life than your profound specialist. It is to give this various reader this variety of fun that (I surmise, but the editor will know for certain) the Supplement exists. But for me, imperfectly various, it means something bordering on despair. I suppose other readers are more sensible, and just take what suits them, leaving the rest. But I simply hate leaving anything. Take the ten columns modestly headed “New Books and Reprints.” What a world of unknown topics and alien ideas and unfathomable theories about everything this simple title covers! Is there any reader whose intellectual equipment includes at once the biography of Absalom Watkin, of Manchester, the Indian Trade Inquiry Reports on Hides and Skins, an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and the particular philosophy of mysticism entertained by Mr. Watkin (not Absalom, but another)? Mine doesn’t—and there’s the pang, for each and all these subjects, simply because they are there, staring me in the face, the face of an absolutely blank mind about them, excite my intellectual curiosity. I should like to know all about ergatocracy—merely on the strength of its alluring name—and the true story, from the Franciscan point of view, of the Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England, and Lord Grey’s reminiscences of intercourse with Mr. Roosevelt, and the history of the Assyrian “millet” in the great war, and what is meant by the “Free Catholic” tendency in the Nonconformist Churches. Yet it is fairly certain that I shall have to do without any knowledge of most, if not all, of these matters which presumably engage the enlightened interest of some other readers.

That is why I say the Supplement disconcerts me every week. It makes me feel ignorant and, what is worse, lonely, cut off from so many human sympathies, cold to enthusiasms that are agitating other breasts, isolated in a crowd who, for all I know, may be banding themselves against me with the secret password “ergatocracy,” an uninitiated stranger among the friends of Mr. Absalom Watkin of Manchester. Indeed, unlike “the master of this college,” I am so far from feeling that “what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” as to find it the one sort of knowledge I itch to possess and suppose myself to have lost a golden opportunity in missing. There are strong men about, I am aware, who say they don’t care. They profess themselves content with knowing a few things thoroughly, with their own little set of enthusiasms, and repeat proverbs about jacks of all trades. I respect these sturdy men, but all the time my heart goes out to the other kind, the men of versatility, the men whose aim is to understand everything, to sympathize with every human emotion, to leave no corner of experience unexplored. And some such aim as this is indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand. To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards.

That resumption of self is easy enough. The true difficulty is in surrendering it, even for a while. One finds the task particularly hard, I think, in lending oneself to tastes one has outgrown. Remember your schoolboy enthusiasm over Macaulay’s style. You have lost that long ago, and are now, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. Yet you must recapture it, if only for a moment; that is to say, you must try to reflect in yourself the joy that Macaulay felt in writing as he did, if you are sitting down to try to criticize him adequately. This is difficult, this momentary renunciation of your present taste in favour of the taste you have outgrown. Remember your schoolboy attitude to Scott; how you read feverishly for the story and nothing but the story, and simply skipped the long prefaces and introductions and copious historical notes? To-day your taste has matured, and you see the prefaces and notes as a welcome setting for the story, as completing for you the picture of the author’s mind in the act of composition. But you will have to go back to your discarded taste and think only of the story if you are recommending Scott to your youngsters.

This difficulty is perpetually confronting one in the theatre. I confess, I find the theatre almost as disconcerting as the Literary Supplement for an analogous, though not identical, reason. In that case you have the bewildering spectacle of things unknown; in this, of tastes outgrown. One afternoon I saw a little play translated from the French, limpid in expression, simplicity itself in form, spare almost to austerity in its use of theatrical means. Not a word, not a situation, was emphasized. This or that point was neatly, briefly indicated, offered just as a germ which might be safely left to your own intelligence to develop. The action was pure acted irony, but not an ironical word was uttered. This, of course, is the sort of play that refreshes the jaded critic, and he has to resist the temptation to over-praise it. The next evening I saw a play diligently crammed with everything that the other had carefully left out—emphasis, repetition, six words where one would have sufficed, “dramatic” situations and suspenses, the gentle humours of life concentrated into eccentricities of stage “character.” There is a numerous, and entirely respectable, public with a taste in this stage; it likes dots on its i’s, things thrust under its nose, so that it can see them, and repeated over and over again, so that it can understand them. That is a taste which the jaded critic cannot but have outgrown. Yet the play was good, sound work of its kind, and the critic’s first duty was to force himself back into his outgrown taste and see the play with the spirit with which the author wrote it and its proper public received it. I say his first duty; it was open to him afterwards to recover his own personality and make his distinctions. But this first duty was hard. It is an ever-recurring trial of critical conscience. “These are our troubles, Mr. Wesley,” as the peevish gentleman said when the footman put too much coal on the fire.