Arthur Bingham Walkley

“ We have to suppose ourselves the Academy of Medicine. To help us to this illusion one or two actors are scattered about the house, who interrupt, argue with Pasteur, and are personally answered by him. We find ourselves, in fact, at once listening to a debate, as real audience, and, in the thick of it, taking part in it, as supposed audience. [120] There is a French proverb which says you cannot both join in a procession and look out of the window; but this experience upsets it. The result is a curious blend of sensations; you feel yourself both spectator and actor, at a play and in a play. ”

“ Brunetière was an incorrigible generalizer, first because he was a Frenchman, and next because he was a born critic. Criticism without general ideas, without a substructure of principle and theory to build upon, is an idle thing, the mere expression of likes and dislikes, or else sheer verbiage. This French critic was always throwing theories at the drama, and some of them have stuck. Perhaps the soundest of them and the most lasting was his theory of the drama as the spectacle of the struggle of will against obstacles. ”

“ Henry James, unfortunately for his theatrical ambitions, never was. You must not only be coarse in grain, but tough in hide, for success in the theatre. Everybody knows that Henry James achieved only failure there, either crushing failure amid hootings and yells, as with Guy Domville, or that very significant failure which is called a success of “esteem,” as with his stage versions of The American and Covering End. But not everybody knows how he positively yearned for the big popular success, and for that biggest, loudest, most brazen-trumpeted of successes, success in the theatre. ”

“ And yet, I suggest, it is the peculiarity of the actor’s medium that has often withheld from him, at any rate with unthinking people, his title to rank as an artist. He is his own medium, his own paint and canvas, his own brick and marble. The works of other artists, the picture, the poem, the sonata, have an independent life, they survive their authors; the actor’s works are inseparable from his actual presence, and die with him. ”

“ I was, perhaps rather naïvely, surprised the other day to hear an actor asking for Hazlitt’s “View of the English Stage.” Actors in general, whether correctly or incorrectly I cannot say, are reputed to be not enthusiastically given to reading. On the face of it, the thing seems likely enough. Their business is to be men of action and talk and the busy world—not sedentary contemplative, cloistered students. Your bookworm is as a rule a shy, retiring solitary; the very opposite of your actor who must not only boldly show himself but take a pride in being stared at. ”

“ It seems to me—that may be my stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.” ”

“ There is, for instance, an Oxford professor to whom the world is indebted for the most delicate, the most sympathetic, as well as the most scholarly appreciation of Shakespeare in existence. Yet this professor is so affronted by the flesh-and-blood domination of the actresses who play Shakespeare’s heroines, the dangerous competition of their personal charm with the glamour of the text, that he has committed himself to the startling proposition that poetic drama perished with Shakespeare’s boy actors! ”

“ All is dark and an excellent orchestra is playing a Beethoven symphony. The attendant flashes you to your seat with her torch, you tumble over a subaltern, and murmur to yourself, with Musset’s Fantasio, “Quelles solitudes que tous ces corps humains!” For that is the first odd thing that strikes you about the movies; the psychology of the audience is not collective, but individual. You are not aware of your neighbour, who is shrouded from your gaze, and you take your pleasure alone. ”

“ Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism, as every baby in Utopia Limited had its own ickle prospectus. This makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based on temperaments alien from his own. ”

“ Disraeli, or another, said that the secret history of the world, which never got into the history books, was the only true history. Let us hope that secret criticism is not the only true sort, but it is certainly the most live. It is free from the literary bias, the cant of criticism, the smell of the lamp. And it is the most potent of persuasives. Published criticism is powerless against it. The fate of a play is not decided by newspaper criticisms (thank goodness! I should be miserable if it were) , but by what the general playgoers say to one another and pass on to their friends. ”

“ And that is where clowns may enjoy a secret, malign pleasure; they proudly confront a universe which delights in them but cannot describe them. A critic may say to an acrobat, for instance:—“I cannot swing on your trapeze, but I can understand you, while you cannot understand me.” But Grock seems to understand everything (he could do no less, with that noble forehead) , probably even critics, while they, poor souls, can only struggle helplessly with their inadequate adjectives, and give him up. But if he condescended to criticism, be sure he would not struggle helplessly. ”

“ For it is to be remembered that the producer of a “film” is relatively more important than the producer of a “spoken drama.” He is always part, and sometimes whole, author of the play. He has to conceive the successive phases of the action in detail, and to conceive them in terms of photography. Even with some one else’s play as a datum he has, I take it, to invent a good deal. For while the “spoken drama” can only show selected, critical moments of life, the “silent stage” aims at continuity and gives you the intervening moments. ”

“ Perhaps the easiest of all kinds is the theatrical “imitation,” because all that is to be imitated is voice, tone, gesture—an actor’s words not being his own—yet I have never seen one that got beyond parody. The sense of an audience is not fine enough to appreciate exact imitation; it demands exaggeration, caricature.
[2]
Parody, indeed, is the pitfall of all pastiche. Even Mr. Max Beerbohm, extraordinarily susceptible and responsive to style as he is, did not escape it in that delightful little book of his wherein, some years ago, he imitated many of our contemporary authors. ”

“ For are we not all agreed about the first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of the artist criticized, to [96] adopt his point of view, to recreate his work within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas, and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors. And they have in common the literary temperament. ”

“ And some such aim as this is indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand. To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards. ”

“ And there you have the contrast with the film. In the “spoken drama,” poor, decrepit old thing, they appeal to that silly faculty, the human imagination; whereas the film has only to turn some wheels quicker or slower and it is all done for you, under your nose, without any imagination at all. Elephants are scuttling about like antelopes and divers plunging into the water at a snail’s pace. ”

“ Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting ricami di fantasia for strict analysis—he may be all the more stimulating to the reader. ”

“ But I am thinking of a very different perversion of Shakespeare’s reputation. I am thinking of the strange people, exponents of the back-street mind, who, being incapable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry and dramatic genius—having in fact no taste for literature as such—have assigned his greatness [186] to something compatible with their own prosaic pedestrian taste and turned him into a contriver of cryptograms. Again you see the old appetite for wonder reappearing. The imputed reputation, as in Virgil’s case, is for something abscons, as Rabelais would have said, something occult. ”

“ We enjoy the murders of Julius Cæsar or of Duncan because they are remote; they gratify the primeval passion for blood in us without a sense of risk. But we could not tolerate a play or a picture of yesterday’s murder next door, because we think it might happen to ourselves. ”

“ The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling? And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir for evidence that she had a love affair? ”

“ Here let me say that this profuse exhibition on the screen of all the correspondence in the case, letters, telegrams, copies of verses, last wills and testaments, the whole dossier, strikes me as a mistake. It under-values the intelligence of the audience, which is quite capable of guessing what people are likely to write in the given circumstances without being put to the indelicacy of reading it. As it is, you no sooner see some one handling a scrap of paper than you know you are going to have the wretched scrawl thrust under your nose. ”

“ Would any one of taste suppress the “cackle” of Sheridan’s scandalous college? Is not, in short, much of the pleasure of comedy in resting from the action, in getting away from it, in the relief of good talk? Yes, and often enough the pleasure of tragedy, too. There is a bustling, melodramatic action in Hamlet. But with what relief Hamlet gets away from his revenge “mission” at every moment, puts it out of sight, forgets it! His interview with the players and advice to them on histrionics, his chat with the gravedigger, what else are these but the sheer delight of good talk? ”

“ But a play of emotion or a play dependent on fine shades of acting is bound to suffer by the gradual waning of the first impression. And my own experience is that in writing about a play of which one has lost the first hot impression, and which one has to recall by an effort of memory, the proportions get altered, so that the criticism is thrown out of gear. Some point, a mere minor point, perhaps, that attracted one’s attention, remains in the mind and assumes an undue importance in relation to other details that have faded. ”

“ The art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. ”