Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and
is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
begun to change into something else.
is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
begun to change into something else.
Yeats
Gordon Craig used scenery of this kind
at the Purcell Society performance the other day, and despite some
marring of his effects by the half-round shape of the theatre, it was
the first beautiful scenery our stage has seen. He created an ideal
country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse, or
speaking in music, or the expression of the whole of life in a dance,
and I would like to see Stratford-on-Avon decorate its Shakespeare with
like scenery. As we cannot, it seems, go back to the platform and the
curtain, and the argument for doing so is not without weight, we can
only get rid of the sense of unreality, which most of us feel when we
listen to the conventional speech of Shakespeare, by making scenery as
conventional. Time after time his people use at some moment of deep
emotion an elaborate or deliberate metaphor, or do some improbable
thing which breaks an emotion of reality we have imposed upon him by an
art that is not his, nor in the spirit of his. It also is an essential
part of his method to give slight or obscure motives of many actions
that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and we set
these cloudy actions among solid-looking houses, and what we hope are
solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end, slain by our desire
to increase it. In his art, as in all the older art of the world,
there was much make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember
the time when, as my nurse used to tell me, herons built their nests
in old men's beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in
_Richard III. _ where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but had
his scenery been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple back cloth that
made Dido and AEneas seem wandering on the edge of eternity, he would
have found nothing absurd in pitching the tents of Richard and Richmond
side by side. Goethe has said, 'Art is art, because it is not nature! '
It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from
nature, which is but their looking-glass.
III
In _La Peau de Chagrin_ Balzac spends many pages in describing a
coquette, who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an
improbable incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully
she can sing. Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing,
and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self.
He would have us understand that behind the momentary self, which acts
and lives in the world, and is subject to the judgment of the world,
there is that which cannot be called before any mortal Judgment seat,
even though a great poet, or novelist, or philosopher be sitting upon
it.
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and
is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
begun to change into something else. George Eliot had a fierceness one
hardly finds but in a woman turned argumentative, but the habit of mind
her fierceness gave its life to was characteristic of her century, and
is the habit of mind of the Shakespearian critics. They and she grew
up in a century of utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed
important except his utility to the State, and nothing so useful to
the State as the actions whose effect can be weighed by the reason.
The deeds of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II. had no obvious
use, were, indeed, no more than the expression of their personalities,
and so it was thought Shakespeare was accusing them, and telling us
to be careful lest we deserve the like accusations. It did not occur
to the critics that you cannot know a man from his actions because
you cannot watch him in every kind of circumstance, and that men are
made useless to the State as often by abundance as by emptiness, and
that a man's business may at times be revelation, and not reformation.
Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a better King than Hamlet would
have been, Aufidius was a more reasonable man than Coriolanus, Henry
V. was a better man-at-arms than Richard II. , but after all, were not
those others who changed nothing for the better and many things for
the worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake has said that 'the
roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too great for the
eye of man,' but Blake belonged by right to the ages of Faith, and
thought the State of less moment than the Divine Hierarchies. Because
reason can only discover completely the use of those obvious actions
which everybody admires, and because every character was to be judged
by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar
worshipper of Success. I have turned over many books in the library at
Stratford-on-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which
grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two
types, whose representatives were Richard II. , 'sentimental,' 'weak,'
'selfish,' 'insincere,' and Henry V. , 'Shakespeare's only hero. ' These
books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that school-boys do
in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and
a distaste for school games.
at the Purcell Society performance the other day, and despite some
marring of his effects by the half-round shape of the theatre, it was
the first beautiful scenery our stage has seen. He created an ideal
country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse, or
speaking in music, or the expression of the whole of life in a dance,
and I would like to see Stratford-on-Avon decorate its Shakespeare with
like scenery. As we cannot, it seems, go back to the platform and the
curtain, and the argument for doing so is not without weight, we can
only get rid of the sense of unreality, which most of us feel when we
listen to the conventional speech of Shakespeare, by making scenery as
conventional. Time after time his people use at some moment of deep
emotion an elaborate or deliberate metaphor, or do some improbable
thing which breaks an emotion of reality we have imposed upon him by an
art that is not his, nor in the spirit of his. It also is an essential
part of his method to give slight or obscure motives of many actions
that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and we set
these cloudy actions among solid-looking houses, and what we hope are
solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end, slain by our desire
to increase it. In his art, as in all the older art of the world,
there was much make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember
the time when, as my nurse used to tell me, herons built their nests
in old men's beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in
_Richard III. _ where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but had
his scenery been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple back cloth that
made Dido and AEneas seem wandering on the edge of eternity, he would
have found nothing absurd in pitching the tents of Richard and Richmond
side by side. Goethe has said, 'Art is art, because it is not nature! '
It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from
nature, which is but their looking-glass.
III
In _La Peau de Chagrin_ Balzac spends many pages in describing a
coquette, who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an
improbable incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully
she can sing. Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing,
and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self.
He would have us understand that behind the momentary self, which acts
and lives in the world, and is subject to the judgment of the world,
there is that which cannot be called before any mortal Judgment seat,
even though a great poet, or novelist, or philosopher be sitting upon
it.
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and
is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
begun to change into something else. George Eliot had a fierceness one
hardly finds but in a woman turned argumentative, but the habit of mind
her fierceness gave its life to was characteristic of her century, and
is the habit of mind of the Shakespearian critics. They and she grew
up in a century of utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed
important except his utility to the State, and nothing so useful to
the State as the actions whose effect can be weighed by the reason.
The deeds of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II. had no obvious
use, were, indeed, no more than the expression of their personalities,
and so it was thought Shakespeare was accusing them, and telling us
to be careful lest we deserve the like accusations. It did not occur
to the critics that you cannot know a man from his actions because
you cannot watch him in every kind of circumstance, and that men are
made useless to the State as often by abundance as by emptiness, and
that a man's business may at times be revelation, and not reformation.
Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a better King than Hamlet would
have been, Aufidius was a more reasonable man than Coriolanus, Henry
V. was a better man-at-arms than Richard II. , but after all, were not
those others who changed nothing for the better and many things for
the worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake has said that 'the
roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too great for the
eye of man,' but Blake belonged by right to the ages of Faith, and
thought the State of less moment than the Divine Hierarchies. Because
reason can only discover completely the use of those obvious actions
which everybody admires, and because every character was to be judged
by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar
worshipper of Success. I have turned over many books in the library at
Stratford-on-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which
grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two
types, whose representatives were Richard II. , 'sentimental,' 'weak,'
'selfish,' 'insincere,' and Henry V. , 'Shakespeare's only hero. ' These
books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that school-boys do
in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and
a distaste for school games.
