On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

(Academy, 23rd December 1876.)

‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’

The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared, displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of The Duchess of Malfi. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once, at least, before, the Independent Theatre—eschewing mere eccentricity and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the unseemly)—once before was it occupied with work of genius and high literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?

And now, after a régime more or less of the experimental and unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster—Webster, it is true, with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the modern taste. But still a classic—a giant in conception and writing—a strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr. Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’ Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that The Duchess of Malfi is ‘a masterpiece excelled only by King Lear.’ And, if I take down my volumes of Lamb’s Specimens, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’ And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’

But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time, along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor events—these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will, of his time, were—one need hardly say it, but that it affects his acceptability upon the modern stage—the permitted coarseness, the absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from scene to scene within the compass of a single act—a point in which no English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of construction of our own time.

Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be—‘rearranged for the modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it, that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors—the modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to them—as on account of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style. The similes of Webster—pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of the imagery of his contemporaries—are rather lost upon a public and upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately simplicity—born writer, rather than playwright—requires to be heard by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures so characteristic of the Italian temperament—a temperament never more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty—when these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess—when crazy folk yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one—an audience without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.

Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence—for such appears to be Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation—the forces of the Church in its bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure. And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon—a learned, helpful student of the time—had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the macabre. Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity; but the Independent Theatre—sometimes too little in touch with the main-stream of English life and thought—may well permit itself to give a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are unburdened with Literature?

(Academy, 29th October 1892.)

REMBRANDT

It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,—and the saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional—that if the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges, a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really, which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by which that vision is expressed.’