No More Learning

Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love
the arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks
like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel,
which is always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end
by filling it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that
people are ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and
Ireland, and even from America, to live with their favourite art as
shut away from the world as though they were 'in retreat,' as Catholics
say. Nobody but an impressionist painter, who hides it in light and
mist, even pretends to love a street for its own sake; and could we
meet our friends and hear music and poetry in the country, none of us
that are not captive would ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear
something that we like some twice or thrice in a winter, and among
people who are thinking the while of a music-hall singer or of a member
of parliament, but there we would hear it and see it among people
who liked it well enough to have travelled some few hours to find it;
and because those who care for the arts have few near friendships
among those that do not, we would hear and see it among near friends.
We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and interests we
cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among people we
meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow serious
as the Ten Commandments.


II

I do not think there is anything I disliked in Stratford, beside
certain new houses, but the shape of the theatre; and as a larger
theatre must be built sooner or later, that would be no great matter if
one could put a wiser shape into somebody's head. I cannot think there
is any excuse for a half-round theatre, where land is not expensive,
or no very great audience to be seated within earshot of the stage; or
that it was adopted for a better reason than because it has come down
to us, though from a time when the art of the stage was a different
art. The Elizabethan theatre was a half-round, because the players were
content to speak their lines on a platform, as if they were speakers at
a public meeting, and we go on building in the same shape, although
our art of the stage is the art of making a succession of pictures.
Were our theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner's
theatre, where the audience sit on seats that rise towards the broad
end while the play is played at the narrow end, their pictures could
be composed for eyes at a small number of points of view, instead of
for eyes at many points of view, above and below and at the sides,
and what is no better than a trade might become an art. With the eyes
watching from the sides of a half-round, on the floor and in the boxes
and galleries, would go the solid-built houses and the flat trees that
shake with every breath of air; and we could make our pictures with
robes that contrasted with great masses of colour in the back cloth
and such severe or decorative forms of hills and trees and houses as
would not overwhelm, as our naturalistic scenery does, the idealistic
art of the poet, and all at a little price. Naturalistic scene-painting
is not an art, but a trade, because it is, at best, an attempt to copy
the more obvious effects of nature by the methods of the ordinary
landscape-painter, and by his methods made coarse and summary. It is
but flashy landscape-painting and lowers the taste it appeals to,
for the taste it appeals to has been formed by a more delicate art.
Decorative scene-painting would be, on the other hand, as inseparable
from the movements as from the robes of the players and from the
falling of the light; and being in itself a grave and quiet thing it
would mingle with the tones of the voices and with the sentiment of
the play, without overwhelming them under an alien interest. It would
be a new and legitimate art appealing to a taste formed by itself and
copying nothing but itself. Mr.
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.