There have been grown men in England, wonderful men, men all strength and sympathy and love, with powers far surpassing the intelligence of other races: but mark how the English treat them. They set them on a pinnacle, give them the admiration they despised, take none of their sympathy, raise horrible statues to their memory, and, to protect themselves against their thought, the mighty force of truth in their souls, breed dwarfish imitations of them, whom they adore and love as men can only love those of their own moral race. No other country less deserves to have great men, and no other country has gotten greater. This astonishing phenomenon has produced that complacency which is the only check on the fury of England’s adolescent energy. Without it, without the Brummagem dignity in which such complacency takes form, she would long ago have rushed to her destruction. With it she has a political solidity to which graver and more intelligent nations can never aspire.
But I should not talk politics to a politician. Nothing, I think you will agree, can reconcile conceptions bred in the House of Commons with those begot outside it. It has never yet been accomplished, and I gather, from the few English journals I see, that the attempt to do so is all but abandoned.
I am writing to you to-day because I wished to do so in Verona, but was there too deep in an emotional flux to be able to write anything but bad poetry or a crude expression of sympathy, which, as it would have been gratuitous, must have been offensive. To-day, in Livorno (which our sailors have chewed with their tobacco into Leghorn), I found among my papers a letter written to you by Matilda nearly twelve years ago. It belongs to you and I send it.
Yesterday in Livorno I found a marionette show and that set me thinking of England and the theater and many other subjects which used to absorb me during the hectic years of my life when I dwelt in Gray’s Inn. And I wished to communicate with England and could find no one to whom I am so nearly attached as you. I was engaged to visit Elba, and was there this morning, but was so distressed with the thought of the extreme youthfulness of England’s treatment of the great Napoleon that I left my party and crossed over to Capraia, which you will find on the map, and here, under the hot sun, with a green umbrella over my bald head, I am writing. I can see Elba. With my mind’s eye I can see England, and, indeed, when soberly I turn the matter over, I conclude that her treatment of Napoleon has not been nearly so shameful as her treatment of Shelley or Shakespeare. Shelley wrote one play; it has never openly been acted. Shakespeare wrote many plays; they have been Butchered, reduced from the dramatic to the theatrical.
The marionettes stirred me greatly. The drama they played was familiar—husband, wife, and lover—the treatment conventional, though the dialogue had the freshness of improvisation. It was often bald as my head, and in the more passionate moments almost heartbreakingly inarticulate. It was a tragedy; the husband slew the lover, the wife stabbed herself, the husband went mad, and they lay together in a limp heap, while from the street outside—where, I felt sure, there were gay puppets carelessly strolling—came the most comic, derisive little tune played upon a reed. (It must have been a reed, for it was most certainly puppet and no human music, and, for that, only the more stirring.) The whole scene is as living to my mind as any experience of my own, and, indeed, my own adventures in this life have been illuminated by it. In the English theater I have never seen a performance that did not thicken and obscure my consciousness. I could not but contrast the two, and you find me sitting on an island striving to explain it.
In the first place the performance of these marionettes compelled my whole-hearted interest because the play was detached from life, was not palpably unreal under the artificial light, and therefore could begin to reflect and be a comment upon life in a degree of success dependent, of course, upon the mind behind it. It was a common but a simple mind, skilled in the uses of the tiny theater, versed in its tradition, and always nice in its perception of the degrees of emotion proper to be loosed for the building up of the dramatic scenes. It was not truly an imaginative mind, not a genuinely dramatic mind, but it was thoroughly loyal to the imagination which has created and developed the theater of the marionettes. Except that the showman had a marked preference for the doll who played the husband, the balance of the play was excellently maintained, and the marionettes did exactly as they were bid. Thus between the controlling mind of the theater, the mind in its tradition, and my own there was set up a continuous and unbroken communication, and my brain was kept most exaltingly busy drawing on those forces and passions, those powers of selection and criticism which make of man a reasoning and then a dramatic animal. You may be sure that I fed the drama on the stage with that other drama, through which you and I floundered so many years ago. I longed to cry out to the husband that he should think less of himself and what the neighbors would say and more of his wife, who, being between two men, enamored of one and dedicated to the other, was in a far worse plight than himself, who was torn only between his affection and his pride. But tradition and convention and his own brainless subservience to his passion were too strong for him, and he killed the lover; would have killed the woman, too, but she was too quick for him. I wept, I assure you. I was sorrowful. Judge, then, of my relief and delight when the curtain rose again and those same three puppets, with others, played the merriest burlesque, a starveling descendant, I fancy, of the commedia dell’ arte. Where before they had surrendered to their passions, now my three puppets played with them at nimble knucklebones. The passion was no less genuine, but this time they were its masters, not its slaves, they had it casked and bunged and could draw on it at will. My lady puppet coquetted with the two gentlemen, set them wrangling for her, wagering, dicing, singing, dancing, vying with each other in mischievous tricks upon the town, and at last, owing, I suspect, to the showman’s partiality, she sank into the husband puppet’s arms and the lover puppet was propelled by force of leg through the window. (Pray, my dear Panoukian, admire the euphemism to spare both our feelings.) And now I laughed as healthily and heartily as before I wept. . . . Now, said I to myself, in England I should have been tormented with a picture, cut up by the insincerity of the actors into “effective” scenes and episodes, of three eminently respectable persons shaking themselves to bits with a passion they had never had; or, for comedy, there would have been the ribaldry of equally respectable persons twisting themselves into knots in their attempts to frustrate the discovery of a mis-spent night. Now, thought I, this brings me near the heart of the mystery. There are few men and women born without the kernel of passion. There are forty millions of men and women in the British Isles; what do they do with their passion? What, indeed—let us be frank—had I done with my own?
Now do you perceive why I am writing to you?
First of all, let us agree that boyhood is the least zestful part of a man’s life. His existence is not then truly his own, he is a spectator; he is absorbed in gazing upon the great world which at a seemingly remote period he is to enter. Then he is apprenticed, initiated by the brutal test of a swift growth and physical change; easily he learns the ways, the manners, the pursuits of men; the conduct of the material world, the common life, is all arranged; he has but to slip into it. That is easy. But his own individual life, that is not so easy. He soon perceives, confusedly and mistily, that into that he can only enter through his passion, through its spontaneous and inevitable expression. He knows that; you know it. I know it. They are a miserable few who do not know it. But in England he can find none to share his knowledge. He is left alone with his dread, with so much sick hope thrust back in him, for want of a generous salute from those who have gone before, that it rots away in him and eats into his natural faith. He asks for a vision of manhood and is given a dull imitation of man, strong, silent, brutal, and indifferent. He must admire it, for on all sides it is admired. As a child he has been taught to babble of gentle Jesus; as a youth he finds that same Jesus turned—by the distorting English atmosphere—into a hard Pharisee, blessing the money changers. His passion racks his bones and blisters his soul. His inmost self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating love. He dare not so much as whisper his need, for none but shameful words are given him to express it. “All’s well with the world,” he is told. “All’s wrong with myself,” he begins to think. In other men, older men, he can find no trace of passion, only temper and lewdness, with a swagger to both. They bear both easily. His passion becomes hateful to him; he begins to chafe against it, to spurn it, to live gaily enough in the common life, to choke the vision of his own life. So it has been with you, with me, with all of us.
There are works of art, it is true. Grown men understand them; adolescents hate them, for works of art reveal always the fulfilment of passion; they begin to flower at the point to which passion has raised the soul; they are the record and the landmarks of its after-journeyings, its own free traveling. To the soul in bondage all that is but babble and foolish talk, just as, to the adolescent, the simplicity of the grown man is folly. That a man should believe in human nature—as he must if he believes in himself—is, in adolescent eyes, suspect. . . . Have you not heard intelligent Englishmen say contemptuously of a man that he is an idealist, as who should say idiot?