“When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves;” and “the doers of the law shall be justified.”
DISTORTIONS OF THE ENGLISH STAGE AS INSTANCED IN “MACBETH.”
Art is art because it is not nature, is the motto of the Idealisti; Art is but the imitation of nature, say the Naturalisti. The truth lies between the two. Art is neither nature alone, nor can it do without nature. No imitation, however accurate, for imitation’s sake makes a good work of art in any other than a mechanical sense. And every work of art in which the objects represented are inaccurately or imperfectly imitated is in so far deficient. But art works by suggestion as well as by imitation. Whatever is untrue to the imagination fails to produce its proper effect, however true it be to the fact. The most absolute realism will not answer the higher demand of the imagination for ideal truth. Art is not simply the reproduction of nature, but nature as modified and colored by the spirit of the artist. It is a crystallization out of nature of all elements and facts related by affinity to the idea intended to be embodied. These solely it should eliminate and draw to itself, leaving the rest as unessential. A literal adherence to all the accidents of nature is not only not necessary in art, but may even be fatal. The enumeration of all the leaves in a tree does not reproduce a tree to the imagination, while a whole landscape may be compressed into a single verse.
Between the ideal and the natural school there is a perpetual struggle. Under the purely ideal treatment art becomes vague and insipid; under the purely natural treatment it becomes literal and prosaic. The Pre-Raphaelites, in protesting against weak sentimentalism and vague generalization, and demanding an honest study of nature, have fallen into the error of exaggerating the importance of minute detail, and, by insisting too strongly on literal truth, have sometimes lost sight of that ideal truth which is of higher worth. But their work was needed, and it has been bravely done. They have roused the age out of that dull conventionalism in which it had fallen asleep. They have stimulated thought, revivified sentiment, and reasserted with word and deed the necessity of nature as a true basis of art.
As in the arts of painting and sculpture, so in the drama and on the stage a strong reaction is taking place against the stilted conventionalism and elaborate artifice of the last generation. Such plays as the “Nina Sforza” of Mr. Troughton, the “Legend of Florence” of Mr. Leigh Hunt, and the “Blot in the ‘Scutcheon” and “Colombe’s Birthday” of Mr. Browning, are vigorous protests against the feeble pretensions and artificial tragedies of the previous century. The poems and plays of Mr. Browning breathe a new life; and if as yet they have only found “fit audience though few,” they are stimulating the best thought of this age, and slowly infusing a new life and spirit into it.
But the traditions of the stage are very strong in England, and are not easily to be rooted out. The English public has become accustomed to certain traditional and conventional modes of acting, which interfere with the freedom of the actor, and cramp his genius within artificial forms. There is almost no attempt on the English stage to represent life as it really is. Tradition and convention stand in the stead of nature. From the moment an actor puts his foot on the stage he is taught to mouth and declaim. He studies rather to make telling points than to give a consistent whole to the character he represents. His utterance and action are false and “stagey.” In quiet scenes he is pompous and stilted; in tragic scenes, ranting and violent. He never forgets his audience, but, standing before the footlights, constantly addresses himself to them as if they were personages in the play. Habit at last becomes a second nature; his taste becomes corrupted, and he ceases to strive to be simple and natural. There is, in a word, no defect against which Hamlet warns the actor which is not a characteristic feature of English acting. It never “holds the mirror up to nature,” but is always “overdone,” without “temperance,” full of mouthing, strutting, bellowing, and noise. It “tears a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.” And “there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, having neither the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor Turk, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably;” and this needs to be reformed altogether.
These words of Shakespeare show that even in his time the inflated, pompous, and artificial style still in vogue on the English stage was a national characteristic. We have scarcely improved, since old traditions cling and hold the stage in mortmain. Reform moves slowly everywhere in England; but the two institutions which oppose to it the most obstinate resistance are the church and the theatre. In both of these tradition stands for nearly as much as revelation. Each adheres to its old forms, as if they contained its true essence; each believes that those forms once broken, the whole spirit would be lost; just as if they were phials which contained a precious liquid, and must be therefore preserved at all costs. The idea that the liquid can be quite as well, and perhaps better, kept in different phials has never occurred to them. They will die for the phial.
Still it is plain that a strong reaction against this bigoted admiration of traditional and conventional forms is now perceptible. The facilities of travel and intercourse with other nations have engendered new notions and modified old ones. It is impossible to compare the French and Italian stage with the English, and not perceive the vast inferiority of the latter. In the one we see nature, simplicity, and life; in the other, the galvanism of artificial convention. It cannot be denied that the recent acting of Hamlet by Fechter was to the English mind a daring and doubtful innovation. It was something so utterly different in spirit and style from that to which we have been accustomed that it created a sensation; and while it found many ardent admirers, it found quite as many vehement opposers. The public ranged themselves in two parties; the one insisting that the traditional and artificial school, as represented by Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke, was the only safe guide for the tragic actor; and the other arguing that as the true function of the stage was to hold up the mirror to nature, acting should be as much like life and as little like acting as possible. The former, at the head of which were the friends of Mr. Charles Kean, made a public demonstration in his behalf, and scouted these newfangled French notions of acting. Was it to be supposed that any school of acting could be superior to that created and established in England by the genius of such actors as Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke? Should foreigners presume to teach us how to interpret and represent plays which had been the study of the English people for centuries? To this it was opposed that, however mortifying to us, it was a fact that the Germans had led the way to a profounder and more metaphysical study of Shakespeare, and had taught us in many ways how to understand his plays, and that therefore there was no reason why foreigners might not teach us how to act them. The very fact that their eyes were not blinded, nor their tongues tied by traditional conventions, enabled them to study Shakespeare with more freedom and directness. There was no deep rut of ancient usage out of which they were forced to wrench themselves. And, besides, it was affirmed, and with truth, that the English stage is the jeer of the world, and needs thorough reform.