Various

“ Romance, indeed, remains to the last, and blends with satire into a most singular flashing web; but satire, after all, comes to rule. Now the principle of satire is reason, reason commenting mockingly upon absurd or base realities. Its natural medium is prose; but it invests itself, by right, in verse instead, whenever the gaiety of the mocker sings itself into a tune, and demands the cymbals, or when the wrath of the moralist demands a louder blast for accompaniment. Byron, as we know, used both prose and verse. ”

“ For the playwrights of three hundred years ago were practical men—they had to be. The chief component of the medium they worked in, the human actor, is still extant, and little changed by lapse of time. And by the process of trial and error the rest of the material, puzzling as it may seem in the careless record left of it, would often fit into place with surprising ease. Even the most expert of stage-managers, even the playwright himself, will find that his own play, coming into action, surprises him by its behaviour, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes the reverse. ”

“ Nothing has been said of the Byron who went to Greece, who upheld the freedom of little nations, and who exclaimed that “the peoples will conquer in the end.” Nor has anything been said of his sufferings or of their problematical causes. People will always make books about Byron, as they do about Hamlet; for it is the man that tells us most about himself, who remains the most mysterious. These are only stray notes on Byron’s art and genius; they are an effort to intimate what he still can say to us when all mere enthusiasm, and all mere revulsion, have cleared themselves away. ”

“ I have always felt that Byron’s future is safe, not only with critics, and not only with persons who care for poetry, but with persons who do not much care for it at all. This may sound a double-edged saying; but it is meant well. It implies, for one thing, that the man, apart from his writings, can never be forgotten, just as Swift, Johnson, and Carlyle can never be forgotten, whatever becomes, in the judgment of Time, of their formal works. ”

“ Chambers’ work (and if ever a book deserved the dignified term, this does) forms a magnificent museum of facts about the Elizabethan stage. Thousands of specimens are ranged through the chapters, each in its place, each, it would seem, correctly and adequately labelled. An achievement indeed, and a benefit to be conferred upon generations of scholars, who will need no other authority. But, accepting the facts, one may yet question here and there Dr. Chambers’ application of them. With the magnanimity of true learning, he gives one every chance to. ”

“ But the trouble is that no art lends itself wholly to scientific methods of criticism and research, and the art of the theatre least of any. For its ways are irrational, and the livelier parts of it are not to be ticketed and put in a museum. These lines upon lines of print that call themselves plays are but inadequate records of the full effect that author and actor conspired to produce. Dr. Chambers, as aforesaid, assembles his specimens, tests them, dissects them, compares them, does all that a right-minded man can be expected to do with them. ”

“ Oldcastle held a place in the history of his country’s civilisation which allowed the dramatist to hold up as an example one who was human, kindhearted, cheerful and trustworthy, charitable, self-controlled and devout, tender to his wife, for whose sake only his suffering weighs upon him, and above all a staunch adherent to principle as regards both his advanced religious creed and his loyalty to the King. ”

“ There is little for us to discover in the way of bare fact that was not known to some person or other before our day; much of our work must necessarily be rediscovery, but it is no less important on that account and no less worthy of the name of research. Much toil might indeed have been saved to us if our forefathers had thought fit to put on record a few of the familiar facts about their great contemporaries, their lives and their writings, which we now labour to infer from a hint or a jest. ”

“ Every stage-manager has had to arbitrate in this perennial dispute. It is not a mere trades union matter; it affects the dignity of a craft. No one, as a matter of fact, has ever been able to draw a line; but every one will tell you that he knows the difference. Scenery is something to look at; a property is a thing to use. But—! A property is movable; scenery stands. But—! Had Dr. Chambers assisted on a few such occasions, he would have needed no better introduction to the traditional mind of the theatre and its working. ”

“ Once more, I don’t believe the Elizabethan manager would have admitted that a problem existed. Every now and then a playwright’s imagination might get the better of his tactical discretion; for certainly tactics are involved. It is all a question of what actors with their make-believe can convince you of, or make you forget; and they must never be let seem to be trying to convince you. ”

“ To the founders of the Review it seems that research as they understand it is the life-blood of literary history; that without it, without the constant discovery of new facts and of new relations between the old, the study can be little more than the reiteration of stale arguments, coloured perhaps by temporary likes and dislikes, by fashion and by prejudice, but still essentially the same; a weary study and one without pleasure or profit either to the teacher or to the taught. ”

“ We certainly have had no Byron. In one sense, in the sense in which Flaubert said, “Tous les époques sont atroces,” every age is fodder for the satirist. In another sense, our own age seems especially vulnerable. But the paralysis of great literary art which has been caused by the world-convulsion, and which seems to have inhibited the largest kinds of poetry, has also left poetic satire comparatively mute. Moreover, if we look far back, do we find any English satire in rhyme that approaches Don Juan, if we reckon quality, variety, and mass all together? ”

“ It was the old, discursive, ironical Italian method. Beppo is his gay little first adventure of this kind. It is another anecdote: the husband, long thought to be lost, comes home in the guise of a Turk; introduces himself, with politeness and tact, to his wife and to his successor, and all goes smoothly. That is the whole; all the virtue is in the embroidery, in the arabesque; and these are perfect. Such, too, is the method of Don Juan, with its flow of wit, vulgarity—even flat boorishness—confession, observation, colour, and poetry. ”

“ Chambers might have done well by hiring an inn-yard and personally exploring its theatrical possibilities. Quite seriously, if some of the theorists, whose aimless suggestions his fine, stern habit of investigation must put to shame, could be set to acting a play or so upon a stage of their devising, if they could agree upon one (and I should dearly like to have the casting of the play) they would learn more in a week than they will persuade each other of in a generation. ”

“ It is not only that official prose was always either Latin or, like Britton’s Epitome of English Law, French. Englishmen habitually wrote their letters in French. If a body of tradesmen or craftsmen met together to draw up the rules of their guild, such rules would be in French rather than English. An official proclamation addressed even to humble people is always in French, if it is not in Latin; it seems to be assumed that, if a man can read or write at all, he can of course read French. ”

“ And a certain grandeur of conception in that poem it would be hard to deny. Byron himself, in the person of Cain, is reasoning passionately, with unfettered brain, on life and death and divine responsibility. If they are not original reasonings, but old familiar eighteenth-century ones, the poet, with a freedom and fierceness as of the sea-eagle, makes them his own. Still, there is very little realised grandeur of expression. It is just in Cain that his sins of diction and metre swarm most abundantly. Continually, the eagle comes to earth, and walks, or hops, and is absurd. ”

“ I will add, that if we are asking what Byron can give us to-day, and to what gap in contemporary poetry his performance points, one reply will be, that we have had no new Don Juan. We have no great satirist in verse; the art seems to be lost. We have nobody with a large, free, gay, unflinching knowledge of the world, and with the ability to express that knowledge in verse. Allowing for the vast and obvious differences, Byron, at the opening of the nineteenth century, occupies a position not wholly unlike that of Swift at the opening of the eighteenth. Have we a Swift? ”

“ The spirit, however, of gaiety and irony that pervades the whole work, though it might at first seem to make matters worse, is really the solvent and antidote. There is, once more, that curious fundamental coolness and freedom of mind, and that dominance of reason, which emerges from Byron’s torments, mysteries, posings, and more or less factitious confessions of wickedness and weakness. ”

“ Chambers has done so supremely is unnecessary. It is, of course, the only sure foundation upon which we may build a knowledge of what the Elizabethan theatre in being really was. But, the foundation laid, we must, I suggest, for the next stage in the business, cut loose from the scientific method and attune ourselves imaginatively to those most unscientific persons—the Elizabethan playwright and actor. At least, it is by leaving both their vagaries and their virtues out of account as it seems to me, that in these two chapters Dr. Chambers is led, and leads us, somewhat astray. ”

“ And a further, quite important factor in the matter is that backgrounds can be made effective indoors and by a constant artificial light; outdoors they are more trouble than they are worth. But all the conditions of indoor playing made for a less robust sort of drama. Such surroundings are favourable to prettiness of every sort. So then the movement took shape which resulted in the scenic theatre as we now know it. The conventions of locality hardened more and more, and the actor became, so to speak, a collaborator with the scenery—and not always the more prominent partner. ”

“ Had they done this we should have been many stages further on the endless road, but there would still have been need, as much and no more than there is to-day, for research. For bare facts are not all. Much of what we strive to find out was not and could not be known to those of the period which we study, for it was veiled from them by the life of everyday. They were like travellers in the forest who cannot see the greater conformation of the land for the undergrowth that presses round them too closely on every side. ”

“ Further, the Latin is translated from the English, not from the French. Now assuming the English to be the original, this is intelligible; for if the French translation came to be made decades after the English, it is easy to understand that the English might well have had such a start that the French, in spite of the popularity of that tongue, could not catch it up. But if the work is really a French work, it is difficult to see why, during this period when French prose was so fashionable and English prose so depressed, the English manuscripts should be so much more numerous than the French. ”

“ Sir Thomas Stukeley, too, is not of royal blood. But to select him for the leading figure of a play was to create a hero-type hitherto almost unknown in Elizabethan drama, a man who was not “a dramatic character” in the traditional sense at all. It is true that, before Oldcastle, dramatic art had occasionally celebrated men of note in civic affairs, but never before had so detailed a portrait been attempted of a man who had not earned any warlike laurels or made himself famous by daring adventures. ”

“ Miss Dymes gives an elaborate analysis of each case: in six passages there is nothing to decide either way; in one case there is, perhaps, a slight superiority in the French wording; in the eight other cases Miss Dymes finds reason to think the English reading the original. She shows that, on abstract grounds, the English makes rather better sense than the French, sometimes very much better sense; and she brings in, with devastating effect, a consideration which Mr. Macaulay had overlooked—the question as to which reading could more easily have grown out of the other. ”

“ Chambers himself, I think, would forswear his misguided allegiance to the Swan drawing if he were set to work for a little in a theatre built on its lines. It is all but inconceivable that any manager or dramatist, with a variety of plays to produce, and the conveniences of the inn-yards and the theatre for model, should deliberately handicap themselves by setting up those two foolish doors. ”

“ I only draw attention to the fact that the writer is by no means a man of very clear conception.
But he is very far, also, from possessing Shakespeare’s marvellous insight into the motives of human action. There can be little doubt that the effect of a speech like Sir Thomas More’s in this scene would in reality have been very different from that depicted by the dramatist. ”

“ Nor would anything an Elizabethan stage-manager could do help us to realise either the locality or the high hills. We may presume an inner stage (though Richard II. can be played without one) , and that, for this scene, its curtains would be better closed than open. Let so much be conceded. An inner stage did by use and wont suggest an interior of some sort, for it was the convenient place to set furniture in, or from which to bring it forth; and why distract the audience’s attention to the empty place uselessly? ”