“In 1870 or ’71 I found in the galeries of the Odéon a little plaquette—a few rough pages of verse. Nobody that knew had ever heard of the author, and it was years before I saw his name mentioned in the Press, or heard him talked of. But I had stored the name in my memory as that of a great poet. It was Verlaine… Perhaps Verlaine’s friends told him that his verse was doubtless pretty, but that he had better write plays for the Gymnase. Certainly they never made him rich, and it is a chance, a mere chance, that he did not die unknown. If he had, it wouldn’t have harmed him. He had touched his full salary the moment he wrote them. I don’t believe garlands ever fall on the poet’s head. They collect round the neck of his ghost which stands in front of him, or behind. And the ghost bows and smiles or struts, and it is all so indifferent and so far-off to the other fellow, who sits, like Verlaine, strumming rhythms on the table of a dirty little café.”
He believed in treating Shakespeare’s plays like opera, and paying the greatest importance to the bravura passages. He deplored Shakespeare being the victim of pedants and a national institution. He saw in Shakespeare the Renaissance poet and nothing else. He thought that any kind of realism was as out of place in Shakespeare as in the libretto of an opera; that dramatic poems were not plausible things, nor exhibitions of real people, and that bravura passages, however absurd their occurrence in a particular context, looked at from the point of view of reality, were not only legitimate, but came with authority if considered as lovely arias, duets, or concerted pieces.
This view of the production of Shakespeare is now widely held, though unfortunately it is seldom practised; managers and players still try to make Shakespeare realistic, and too often succeed in smothering his plays with scenery, business, and acting.
The most refreshing thing about Brewster was that he was altogether without that exaggerated reverence for culture in general and books in particular that sometimes hampers his countrymen (he was an American) when they have been transplanted early into Europe and brought up in France, Italy, or England, and saturated with art and literature. He liked books; he enjoyed plays, poetry, and certain kinds of music; but he didn’t think these things were a matter of life and death. He enjoyed them as factors in life, an adjunct, an accompaniment, an interlude, just as he enjoyed a fine day; but he was never solemn and never pompous, and he knew how much and how little things mattered. He liked people for what they were, and not for what they did, or for what they achieved. The important thing in his eyes was not the quantity of achievement, or the amount of effort, but the quality of the life lived. With such ideas he was as detached from the modern world as a Chinese poet or sage, not from the modern world, but rather from the world, for to the human beings who lived in it there never can have been a moment when the world was not modern, even in the Stone Age; and in the game of life he strove for no prize; the game itself was to him its own reward.
In The Prison he writes: “There is a greater reward than any which the teachers can warrant; they might teach you to lead a decorous life, help you to learn the rules of the game, show you how to succeed in it. But the profit of the game itself, that which makes it worth playing at all, even to those who succeed best, this they can neither grant nor refuse; you bear it in yourselves, inalienably, whether you succeed or fail.”
I imagine that a man like Dr. Johnson might have said severe things about him, and I once heard a critic (who admired and appreciated him) say it was a pity Brewster was such an idle and ignorant man. But his ignorance was more suggestive than the knowledge of others, for he ignored not what he was unable to learn, but what he had no wish to learn, and his idleness was a benefit to others as well as to himself: a fertile oasis in an arid country. His mind had the message of the flowers that need neither to toil nor to spin.
In February 1902 Pope Leo the Thirteenth celebrated his jubilee. I heard him officiate at Mass at the Sixtine Chapel, and I also went—although I forget if this was later or not—to High Mass at St. Peter’s, when the Pope was carried in on his chair and blessed the crowd. I had a place under the dome. At the elevation of the Host the Papal Guard went down on one knee, and their halberds struck the marble floor with one sharp, thunderous rap, and presently the silver trumpets rang out in the dome. At that moment I looked up and my eye caught the inscription, written in large letters all round it: “Tu es Petrus,” and I reflected the prophecy had certainly received a most substantial and concrete fulfilment. Not that at that time I felt any sympathy with the Catholic Church; indeed, it might not have existed for me at Rome at that time. I thought, too, that the English Catholic inhabitants of Rome were on the look out for converts, and were busy casting their nets. Of this, however, I saw no trace, although I met several of them at various times.
But that ceremony in St. Peter’s would have impressed anyone. And when the Pope was carried through St. Peter’s, with his cortège of fan-bearers, and rose from his chair and blessed the crowd with a sweeping, regal, all-embracing gesture, the solemnity and the majesty of the spectacle were indescribable, especially as the pallor of the Pope’s face seemed transparent, as if the veil of flesh between himself and the other world had been refined and attenuated to the utmost and to an almost unearthly limit.
During Holy Week I attended some of the ceremonies at St. Peter’s, and I think what impressed me most was the blessing of the oils on Maundy Thursday, and the washing of the altar, when that great church is full of fragrant sacrificial smells of wine and myrrh, and when the vastness of the crowd suddenly brings home to you the immense size of the building which the scale of the ornamentation dwarfs to the eye.