Raymond Mortimer

“ As far as the theatre in England is concerned, it is not certain that if good things were offered to the public, they would not be lapped up. But the public is not given a chance: we are on the cruel knees of the theatrical financiers. But despite the power of these remorseless deities, we have in London one institution which did not exist before the war, which grows yearly more robust, and which, I believe, has no counterpart in the States. That is the Phoenix, a Society which exists to produce performances of old English plays ”

“ At Cambridge an amateur society of undergraduates, the Marlowe, has been formed for doing similar work, so that it should soon be possible to see acted all the masterpieces of sixteenth and seventeenth century drama, and also to discover which of the less obviously magnificent plays stand best the test of stage performance.
"I never go to the theatre except when I'm drunk," said one of the most intelligent and rightly eminent men in England the other day. ”

“ Several of the plays recently produced by the Phoenix have not been acted in England for over a century. Thus those who have a little knowledge of this tremendous literature have been given the exciting opportunity of seeing acted some of its masterpieces, and others—a remarkable number indeed—have made at these performances their first acquaintance with some of the greatest plays ever written by man. Last summer two plays by Dryden were given, All for Love and Amphitryon: the greatness of Dryden as dramatist, critic, and poet can hardly be exaggerated. ”

“ The very genius of Shakespeare has in some respects had calamitous results—for his successors and contemporaries have been disastrously eclipsed by it from the public view, and several of them were only not so great as he. I do not suppose that people are any more generally aware in America than they are here of the greatness of English dramatic literature. ”

“ Most men of aesthetically good will would agree that they are blasphemously out of place in the National Gallery, and that in allowing them to crowd real pictures off the walls and into the cellars, our officials have committed an extravagant and unpardonable error. ”

“ As a warning to any American who may be inspired to produce such plays, I can state that a highly unsuitable taste for "cuts" seems to be taking hold of those responsible for these productions. If it is easy to exaggerate the damage that "cuts" do, it is grotesque to want them. ”

“ The important and feasible thing is first to obtain some general knowledge of what is old: the creative genius may occasionally be ignorant of his predecessors, but if an audience for new things is to be found which is discriminating as well as appreciative, it will need some scholarship in the highest achievements of the past. ”

“ The young demanded amusements that drugged and did not stimulate the brain—it was a bad time for brains that worked properly—and their parents were able to be honest with themselves and prefer Revue to Shakespeare and Rimsky-Korsakov. So a new generation arose which did not believe in Victorian shams and voted art as well as faith and morals a convention and a bore. Meanwhile of course artists just pursued their way; but every form of art has become more difficult to understand and more apparently esoteric. ”

“ Though hardly, I think, enough; for I suggest very tentatively that Tennyson should have been a greater Prior instead of a worse Wordsworth. Which means of course that I agree with both Mr Nicolson and Mr Fausset in thinking that he was the victim of his milieu, but that I doubt if he had the genius appropriate to either of the destinies they respectively suggest for him. Passion is wanting. A great lyric poet would indeed have piped because he must; a great moral poet would have thrown off the bonds of time and place and confining circumstance. ”

“ Hardly more than fifty different poets have brought off, whom no one has ever thought of making equal with Tennyson. But his occasional verse is astonishingly good, and on this Mr Nicolson rightly lays great emphasis. ”