That view of English life so freezes me that I lie back under my umbrella and thank God for the Italian sun.
Has it always been so in England? I think not. Garrick was a self-respecting, if a conceited, individual. He believed in his work and he had some dramatic sense. The theater had no credit then; even his genius could not raise it to the level of English institutions. But his genius made him independent, and still the theater was parasitic upon the Court. Subsequently the English Court, which, never since Charles II, had taken any genuine interest in it, repudiated the theater which then had healthily to struggle for its existence. I fancy that in Copas—(Matilda’s uncle)—I found the last genuine survivor of the race of mummers of which Henry Irving was the last triumphant example. They strangled the theater with their own personalities, for only by the strength of their personalities could they force themselves upon the attention of an England huddled away in dark houses, grimly, tragically, in secrecy, play-acting. With every house a playhouse, how can the theater be taken seriously? With so much engrossing pretence in their homes, men have no need of professional mummers; with a fully developed Nonconformist conscience, an Englishman can be his own playwright, mummer, and audience. He grudges the money paid to professional actors, despises any contrivance they can show him, spurns the whole affair as a light thing, wantonness, a dangerous toy that may upset the valuations by which he arrives at his own theatrical effect.
There was a time when the Englishman’s home was his theater. My own home was like that: year in, year out there was a tremendous groveling before God, and a sweaty wrestling with the Devil, and a barometrical record of prowess in both was kept. Human relations sneaked in when no one was looking, took the stage when the curtain was down; I was lucky, and on the whole had a good time in spite of the show, which, I am bound to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. My father was a very fine man at the groveling and the wrestling (and knew it), but in his human relations he was awkward, heavy, and blundering in the very genuine tenderness which he could not always escape;—and I think he knew that, too, poor wretch.
There must be fewer such homes now, but still an enormous number. God and Devil are not so potent, but the habit of posturing remains, has been handed down and carried over into human relations—(at least God and Devil did protect us from that!)—so that there is not one, not the most intimate and sacred, but is made subtly the occasion of self-indulgence, easy, complacent, and devastating; the epidemic disease consequent on the airless years from the Reform Bill to the South African War—(you will remember the histrionics before, during and after that tragedy of two nations). The old English home—theatrical and oleographic—has been destroyed by it, and I rejoice as I rejoice to hear that the Chinese women are abandoning the folly of stunting their feet. We used to stunt the soul, the affections, human passions. Unbind the China woman’s feet and she suffers agonies, so that she cannot walk. Thus it has been with us; we have suffered mortal agonies; we have been saved from madness by the inherited theatrical habit, by which we have shuffled through the human relationships enforced by our natural necessities and the inconsiderate insistence upon being born of the next generation. We have shuffled through them, I say, and we have made them charming, but we have not yet—shall we ever?—made them beautiful. There has been no true song in our hearts, only songs without words à la Mendelssohn, nor yet a full music in our blood. We have imitated these things, from bad models, drawn crude sketches of them. I, for instance, play-acted myself into marriage; when it came to getting out of it, play-acting was of no avail, though even for that emergency, as you know, the English game has its rules. . . . I could not conform to them, and in that I believe I shared in the general experience of the race. I was pitchforked out of the old theatricality into the new and found it ineffective. That must be happening every day, in thousands, perhaps in millions, of cases. . . . I feel hopeful, and yet unhappy, too, for my experience came to me too late. I have been able to discard; but, for the new life—vita nuova—I have not wherewith to grasp, to take into myself, to make my own. Even here on this island, in this country of light, I do not seem to myself to be fully alive, but am an outsider, a spectator, even as I was when a small boy, and I shall go down into this warm earth hardly riper than I was when I was born, nurtured only by one genuine experience and that negative. But for that I am thankful. It has made it possible for me to ruminate, if not to act, to rejoice in the possession of my uncomely and unwieldy body, to be content with that small fragment of my soul which I have mastered.
(It is really delightful to be writing to you again. It brings you before me, as a boy, a little piping boy; as a posturing and conceited youth—do you remember the cruel snub inflicted on you by Tallien, the French master? I had sent you to him with a message, and he said: “Tell Mr. Beenham I will take no message from his conceited puppy.” You! A prefect!—as a heated and quite too Stendhalian young man. It is charming.)
But I am rueful when I reflect that I solved my difficulty, which, after all, was a portion of the English difficulty, by leaving England. I should have stayed; fought it out; wrestled through with it until the three of us were properly and in all eyes established in that new relation to which inevitably we should have come. I was too old. I was too much under the habit of thinking of consequences; too English, too theatrical to believe that life does not deal in neat and finished endings. I could see nothing before me but the ugly conventional way of throwing mud at the woman and bringing you to an unjust and undeserved ruin, or the way most pleasing to my sentimentality, of withdrawing from the scene and leaving you to make the best of it; as, no doubt, you have done, since you are both successful personages and well in the limelight, and able to go triumphantly from honeymoon to honeymoon.
Are there children? I hope there are children!
And there begins my real difficulty. Not that I care about legitimacy. No reasonable child will ask more than to be conceived in a healthy body, born in a clean atmosphere, and bred in a decently ordered home. But if there are children you should not be separated. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps I have been long enough absent for your world to forget my existence. But I have my doubts. I too much dread the English atmosphere not to feel that it must have been too strong for you, and you will have accepted your parts in the play.
But, if there are children, there should be no play-acting in their immediate surroundings, in the love that brought them into being.
How I wish you could have seen my marionettes! We should then have an emotional meeting point. As it is, I seem to be dancing round and round you almost as agilely as though I were with you in England, in the thick of polite London. That surely is what you need, on your thickly populated island, a point at which the lower streams of thought can converge, so that your existence may more resemble a noble estuary than a swampy delta.