J. Comyns Carr

“ I saw Desclée, and greatly admired her; and I remember, long afterwards, when I witnessed Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of Frou-frou, how much I thought it suffered in comparison with the original in those lighter and earlier scenes of the play in which the qualities of the heroine’s temperament have to be exhibited; and yet, when Madame Bernhardt came to the great scene in the third act, the recollection of Desclée, by a single stroke of genius, was almost effaced, and I can only think of Frou-frou as it is recalled to me by that superb exhibition of passion in her encounter with Louise. ”

“ Of the countless thousands who can enjoy Molière’s incomparable humour, how many are there who would pause before Leonardo’s Monna Lisa in the Louvre? How many again in our own country, of those who are familiar with the tragedies of Shakespeare, ever find their way into the British Museum or the National Gallery?
And yet the prejudice against the public support of the theatre endures, and can only, I think, be broken down by the demands of the democracy. If a national theatre is to be established in England, it must realise that it has a national mission. ”

“ To those who do not instinctively feel it, my reference may mean nothing, but to me, to whom the whole achievement of the Victorian Era, in art as in literature, stands high, it means everything. It is not my purpose in these pages of personal recollections to dwell upon my intimate association with men who are still living, but in Mr. Meredith I feel I may make an exception. And Browning has reminded me of him because there is in both a kindred quality—the quality of a superb reverence for life, an undying faith in its ultimate beauty. ”

“ It was in this way that I first encountered that handsomest and gayest of young actors, H. J. Montague, whose charm exercised a widespread fascination upon the play-goers of his day, and who was further, and quite independently of such histrionic gifts as he could boast, a companion of the most sympathetic spirit. If not endowed with absolute wit, he could so infect the recital of the most ordinary adventures that he had encountered during the day with something of the rollicking sense of boyishness that was his own, as to keep his hearers in a mood of unflagging merriment and enjoyment. ”

“ Perhaps the secret of Toole’s charm lay in an entire absence of pretence either social or intellectual. Something deeply human in his nature left him always at his ease in whatever society he might find himself; and, in a sense of humour which appreciated and detected without resentment the foibles of all whom he encountered, I think there are few men of his generation who could claim to be his equal. He laid no claim to any largeness of education, and I suppose there were few men who had read less, but in that knowledge that could be won without the aid of literature he was a genuine scholar. ”

“ Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in the Atalanta, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. ”

“ I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what wondrous feats of skill can be performed—in books. How to cast in the teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you—there are exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do not always serve you by the water-side. ”

“ As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters ”

“ It may, as I have said, have been true then—though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti—that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation. ”

“ To those who knew and loved Sullivan, and I think he was loved by all who knew him, the extraordinary charm of his personality will be unreservedly acknowledged.
There have been few men in our time in any walk of life who have possessed an equal measure of social fascination. His manner, always sympathetic and sincere, suffered no change in whatever company he found himself, and there was added to this finer quality of sympathy a quick and delicate sense of humour that made closer comradeship with him inspiring and delightful. ”

“ He had the sense of the theatre, a genuine instinct for those moments in the conflict of character to which the proper resources of the theatre can grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by comparison is an art of coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its limitations, of presenting the more intimate realities of character, or the more{214} delicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has its own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. ”

“ They formed a just and sometimes a flattering picture of the English social life of the time, betraying, in the rendering of form and in charm of bearing, the artist’s devotion to that type of English beauty—fitting models for which Du Maurier could always find without wandering beyond the limits of his own home.
One or two of his most highly finished drawings I was enabled to publish in the English Illustrated Magazine, and there is one in particular called “A Nocturne” which shows with what a fine sense of reality he could render on occasion the most delicate effects in landscape. ”

“ There is one element of Millais’s painting which, I think, has never received a full measure of appreciation. Apart from his superb gifts as a painter, he possessed a distinctive mastery in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that has left him without a rival among the living or the dead. His fine powers as a draughtsman enabled him to press into a single face a quality of sentiment that, by reason of its exquisite delicacy of expression, was saved from the reproach of any sentimentalism. ”

“ Not long ago I encountered in a seriously written review the astounding announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an isolated instance of an endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread to make the pitiable disaster of poor Wilde’s career the occasion of the most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as a writer. ”

“ I suppose no man ever held with such unswerving fidelity to the ideal with which he set out upon his career, an ideal as plainly manifest in those earlier contributions to the old Water-Colour Society as in his last great picture of “Arthur in Avalon.” In him the sense of design was all in all, but mere abstract design that missed the impulse of some legend of passion or romance never quite contented his genius.
It was his delight, as it was the delight of Botticelli, to be always exercising his invention upon some theme of legendary beauty ”

“ The moment when the artist has missed the spirit which links his work with the wider emotional movement of his generation, is always the moment when he most zealously and most loudly acclaims the detachment and independence of his calling. ”

“ The choice of the one or of the other must be determined by the temperament of the actor, and in an equal measure by the response he receives from the temper of his audience. Speaking only for myself, I may frankly say that the greatest impressions I have received in the theatre have been made upon me by performers who never left me for a moment to imagine they were not themselves; but who, without greatly striving to realise the external attributes of the characters they were presenting, have succeeded in the power of constantly identifying themselves with the culminating passions of life. ”

“ And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” ”

“ It must have been that Irving was taken by surprise, and although his habit was always to speak from preparation, and often indeed to read what he had prepared, he proved himself, on this occasion, a master of good-humoured impromptu, twitting Lord Houghton, in a spirit of genial banter, with being a slave to the old-fashioned idea that Shylock was a comic villain, and promising on some future occasion to try and more amply satisfy his lordship’s ideal by representing Shylock as a Houndsditch Jew with three hats upon his head and a bag of lemons in his hands. ”

“ But a knowledge of the man himself very speedily enabled me to take a juster view of his place as a painter. There are artists in every line, in literature as well as in painting, whose personality does not willingly associate itself with their work. This was certainly true of Browning, who would seem in social intercourse to be almost perversely desirous of enabling you to forget that he was a poet, and it was true no less of Millais, who rather sought by preference in his leisure hours the companionship of men who were not concerned with the art he professed. ”

“ It may seem foolish to suppose that any one could derive amusement from a day so idly spent, but those who risk this assumption labour under the misfortune of not having known Toole. His gaiety, when he was in the right mood, was infectious and irresistible, and yet, like all men of such exuberant high spirits, he was subject at times to moods of the deepest depression, moods which grew upon him in those sadder and later days of his life when he was deprived of the constant companionship of his comrades, which meant to him all in all. ”

“ It is, I think, impossible for any one who has been closely associated with the modern theatre not to be impressed with the need of some worthier support of the drama than is afforded by the fickle and shifting taste of the public; and the career of Irving, both as an actor and a manager, only goes to emphasise a truth that had been repeatedly enforced by the fortunes of his predecessors. We pride ourselves in this country upon what is achieved by individual enterprise, but we do not always remember at what a cost such achievements are won. ”

“ As literature has fallen since under the conduct of later hands, I find that it seems in some sense shattered in subdivision. There are, on the one hand, writers who seek to be artists and no more, men who pet and polish their rhythmic phrases till they may be said to have reached perfection, and on the other hand there are pamphleteers, eager and sincere, but still pamphleteers, who are content if they can coerce their readers into the belief that their chosen gospel for the regeneration of humanity is a fair equivalent for the larger vision of life itself. ”

“ Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. ”

“ Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material out of which it is moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music. Painting and sculpture have their own manifest laws and limitations, which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril which awaits their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse, must of necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive instinct of the artist can preserve it. ”

“ Author and composer, the master carpenter, the property master, and the electrician are linked together in a spirit of equal comradeship, and there is not one of them all who has it not in his power to make or mar the work of his fellows.
It is one of the inscrutable laws of the theatre that nothing is ever quite ready until the last moment. Costumes are delayed, properties are incomplete, or it may be some scene that did not quite fit its purpose is undergoing structural amendment, and has yet to receive the final touches at the hands of the scene-painter. ”

“ I do not think any one has a higher appreciation of your genius as an actor than I have, and if I could have found the occasion to praise this particular performance I would gladly have seized it, but I thought it, rightly or wrongly, a bad performance, and, out of a spirit of loyalty to my larger admiration of your talent, I refrained from saying so. ”