Various

“ It is, indeed, the virtue peculiar to the artist, as interpreter of form, that he instinctively comprehends the real elemental character of complex forms, whilst the majority of people (on the showing of their own drawings) entertain but confused or no ideas of them. It is because a good drawing reduces the chaos of ideas supplied by the raw material of nature, to one intelligible manner of seeing it, that all lovers of nature welcome it with joy. It is this process of discovery and interpretation that marks the essential difference between art and mechanical drawing or reproduction. ”

“ Making war upon the frigid artificiality of classical tragedy, he banished verse from the new species. The effect of these plays was intended to spring from their truth to nature—a truth such as no spectator could mistake, and which should bring home its moral teachings to the business as well as the bosoms of all. The theatre was to become a real and realistic school of the principles of society and of the conduct of life—it was, in other words, to usurp functions with which it has no concern, and to essay the direct reformation of mankind. ”

“ Now since drawing cannot suggest colour, local or atmospherical, any attempt to effect an illusion by a monochrome is at once defeated. If the end of drawing were to approach imitation or illusion as nearly as possible, how is it that a mere “sketch” by a master draughtsman can be for itself as valuable as his highly finished drawing? And surely a masterly outline drawing of a figure or landscape does not pretend to be an illusion. If then the draughtsman does not, and cannot hope to imitate nature, he is compelled to state only his ideas of it, ideas of three-dimensional form. ”

“ The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. ”

“ There had been a slight stirring of originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the Prince of Wales’s theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft (q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson’s death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his talent, and sank into a mere adapter. ”

“ But it would seem that some people mean by style nothing more than the mere superficial appearance of the work. They would have a draughtsman draw “in the style of Holbein,” but not “in the style” of Rembrandt. This kind of preference, as remarked above, is superficial, for it overlooks the main issue and purpose of drawing, viz. the representation, by any means whatever, of the artist’s ideas of form. It is as though one should prefer a letter from Holbein to one from Rembrandt, though both were equally expressive, simply because Holbein’s handwriting was prettier than Rembrandt’s. ”

“ The only difference between a good draughtsman and a bad one is the degree of subtlety of his apprehension. Unless the draughtsman has seen some such clear forms in his original, his labour to produce a work of art will be grievous and fruitless. All good drawing is stamped with this kind of structural insight. The more the artist adheres to nature, and the more finished his drawing, the more will the lines and forms that he makes be, so to speak, in excess of those of nature, or dull imitation or photography. ”

“ Contour being in nature an ideal line between one form and another, it is illogical to treat it or criticize it in a drawing as an actual and specific thing, apart from the forms that make it and are made by it. If an artist drew a dragon with deliberate disregard for animal construction, his drawing would be silly, and only by a profound knowledge of the forms of nature could it be made to have beautiful lines. Truth to nature is always originality, and it is the only originality worth the name. ”

“ Why is it that a rigorously accurate and finished drawing by a student or artist with no such ideas or conception is not good drawing, containing as it must do all that can be seen in the original, missing only its complete illusion? Why, in a word, is not a photograph a work of art? ”

“ And in the masterpieces of R. B. Sheridan some of the happiest features of the comedy of Congreve were revived, together with its too uniform brilliancy of dialogue, but without its indecency of tone. The varnish of the age is indeed upon the style, and the hollowness of its morality in much of the sentiment (even where that sentiment is meant for the audience) of The Rivals and The School for Scandal; but in tact of construction, in distinctness of characters, and in pungency of social satire, they are to be ranked among the glories 531 of English comedy. ”

“ While the criticism to which French tragedy in this age at last began to be subjected has left unimpaired the real titles to immortality of its great masters, the French theatre itself has all but buried in respectful oblivion the dramatic works bearing the name of Voltaire—a name persistently belittled, but second to none in the history of modern progress and of modern civilization. ”

“ Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into “the new, the romantic land.” New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. ”

“ I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it. My conversation is slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.” He was really as well as ostentatiously a playwright; the age demanded comedies, and he endeavoured to supply the kind of comedy that the age demanded. ”

“ A word or two are necessary upon “style,” which unfortunate word has made much mystery in criticism. The great draughtsmen of every time and country are known by their own words, as well as their works, to have been infinitely respectful to the form of every detail in nature. Their drawings always recall to our minds reality as we ourselves have seen it (provided we have studied from nature and not from pictures) . The drawing of a hand, for instance, by Hokusai, Ingres or Dürer, revives in us our own impressions of the forms and aspects of real hands. ”

“ The playwrights of the present generation have accordingly a motive for giving literary form and polish to their work which was quite inoperative with their predecessors, whose productions were either kept jealously in manuscript or printed only in miserable and totally unreadable stage editions. It is no small stimulus to ambition to know that even if a play prove to be in advance of the standards of taste or thought among the public to which it is originally presented, it will not perish utterly, but will, if it have any inherent vitality, continue to live as literature. ”

“ To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation? In the domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously: the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced “well-made,” exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more original, thoughtful and able than their predecessors. It is not at all to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. ”

“ A Molière can only be judged in his relations to the history of comedy at large. He was indeed the inheritor of many forms and styles—remaining a stranger to those of Old Attic comedy only, rooted as it was in the political life of a free imperial city; though even the rich extravagances of Aristophanes’ burlesque was not left wholly unreproduced by him. Molière is both a satirist and a humorist; he displays at times the sentiments of a loyal courtier, at others that gay spirit of opposition which is all but indispensable to a popular French wit. ”

“ His comedies offer elaborate and subtle—even tender—pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun. ”

“ If then an artist of clean vision sees in an object of reality such clear characteristic lines, he draws them not for their abstract beauty, but merely because by them alone can he express his idea of the form before him. ”

“ In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist’s labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. ”

“ Comus has been judged and condemned as a drama—unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask. ”

“ Among other subjects, the social position of women had an all-powerful attraction for his mind, and many of his later plays were written with the object of placing in strong relief the remarkable inequality of the sexes, both as regards freedom of action and responsibility, in modern marriage. Like all the dramatists of his time, he adhered to Scribe’s mode of play-writing—a mixture of the drame bourgeois, as initiated by Diderot, and the comedy of character and manners, long in vogue—from the days of Molière, Regnard, Destouches and Marivaux, down to the beginning of the 19th century. ”

“ It is one of those exceptional works which, by circumstance as well as by merit, have become the property of the world’s literature at large. Thus, both in Italian and in other literatures, the pastoral drama became a distinct species, characterized, like the great body of modern pastoral poetry in general, by a tendency either towards the artificial or towards the burlesque. Its artificiality affected the entire growth of Italian comedy, including the commedia dell’ arte, and impressed itself in an intensified form upon the opera. ”

“ The senses gradually become hazy, a soft humming seems to fill the pauses of the conversation, and modify the tones of the speaker, a filmy haze obscures the vision, the head seems lighter than usual, the equilibrium unstable. By-and-by objects appear double, or flit confusedly before the eyes; judgment is abolished, secretiveness annihilated, and the drunkard pours forth all that is within him with unrestrained communicativeness; he becomes boisterous, ridiculous, and sinks at length into a mere animal. ”

“ But no dramaturgic achievement in the century could compare in grandeur either of conception or of execution with Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth performances, where, for the first time in the history of the modern stage, the artistic instinct ruled supreme in all the conditions of the work and its presentment. Though the Ring of the Nibelungs and its successors belong to opera rather than drama proper, the importance of their production (1876) should be overlooked by no student of the dramatic art. ”

“ Is it not for the same reason that one man will divide up a row of eight marbles into groups of four, and another into five and three? The subjectivity of experience governs the different conceptions that good draughtsmen will form of the same object. Accordingly as a draughtsman feels form so will he draw it, and it is only because our sense apparatuses are more or less similarly constituted that we can understand and appreciate one another’s conceptions. ”

“ Thus the comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the interregnum of the Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes assumed with later growths of English comedy. ”

“ To regard a man’s works of art, or indeed any of his manifestations, from this point of view, is, after all, nothing but a kind of inquisitive cheiromancy. Those who pretend to like the drawings of Watteau or Michelangelo “because they show more individuality” than the incompetent work of a beginner or poor artist cannot be skilled in their own business, because the lady who tells your character by your handwriting finds as much individuality in bad writing as in good,—sometimes even more. ”

“ No great artist has ever more generously estimated the labours of a predecessor than Talma judged those of Le Kain; but it was Talma himself whose genius was pre-eminently fitted to reproduce the great figures of antiquity in the mimic world, which, like the world outside, both required and possessed its Caesar. He, like Rachel after him, reconciled French classical tragedy with nature; and it is upon the art of great original actors such as these that the theatrical future of this form of the drama in France depends. ”

“ Yet we often hear drawing judged by criteria which are founded upon no such concrete base but upon certain vague abstractions; or, again, upon a literary or moral base which could be applicable only to symbolic art.
It is said that this or that draughtsman excels in “beauty of line.” Now in spite of the labours of many painters and theorists, it cannot reasonably be held that one purely abstract line or curve is more beautiful than another, for the simple reason that people have no common ground upon which to establish the nature of abstract beauty. ”

“ As at home the popularity of the stage increased, the functions of playwright and actor, whether combined or not, began to hold out a reasonable promise of personal gain. Nor, above all, was that higher impulse which leads men of talent and genius to attempt forms of art in harmony with the tastes and tendencies of their times wanting to the group of writers who can be remembered by no nobler name than that of Shakespeare’s predecessors. ”