The Common Reader
through five acts or thirty-two chapters must somehow be based on Smith,
have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it
pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose that a man
because his name is Smith and he lives at Liverpool is therefore “real”.
We know indeed that this reality is a chameleon, quality, the fantastic
becoming as we grow used to it often the closest to the truth, the sober
the furthest from it, and nothing proving a writer’s greatness more than
his capacity to consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he
touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of gossamer. Our
contention merely is that there is a station, somewhere in mid-air,
whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the
great artist is the man who knows where to place himself above the
shifting scenery; that while he never loses sight of Liverpool he never
sees it in the wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then,
because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to
fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise
above life they soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible
for long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry, and a cloud
landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans
bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to
work.
Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is of a
different quality altogether from the boredom which a nineteenth-century
play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The riot of images,
the violent volubility of language, all that cloys and satiates in the
Elizabethans yet appears to be drawn up with a roar as a feeble fire is
sucked up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an intermittent
bawling vigour which gives us the sense in our quiet arm-chairs of
ostlers and orange-girls catching up the lines, flinging them back,
hissing or stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the Victorian
age is evidently written in a study. It has for audience ticking clocks
and rows of classics bound in half morocco. There is no stamping, no
applause. It does not, as, with all its faults, the Elizabethan audience
did, leaven the mass with fire. Rhetorical and bombastic, the lines are
flung and hurried into existence and reach the same impromptu
felicities, have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness,
which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom in our day the deliberate,
solitary pen. Indeed half the work of the dramatists one feels was done
in the Elizabethan age by the public.
Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the
public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay the
greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us—the plot; the
incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions which
presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public
actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with
the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen; undoubtedly a
play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we have a right to
demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly possible) that
what happens shall have an end in view. It shall agitate great emotions;
bring into existence memorable scenes; stir the actors to say what could
not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can fail to remember the plot
of the _Antigone_, because what happens is so closely bound up with the
emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one
and the same time. But who can tell us what happens in the _White
Devil_, or the _Maid’s Tragedy_, except by remembering the story apart
from the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans,
like Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and
the violence which those plots demand so terrific, that the actors
themselves are obliterated and emotions which, according to our
convention at least, deserve the most careful investigation, the most
delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is
inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no
characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences whom we know so little
that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine
in those early plays—Bellimperia in the _Spanish Tragedy_ will serve as
well as another—and can we honestly say that we care a jot for the
unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill
herself in the end? No more than for an animated broomstick, we must
reply, and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of
broomsticks is a drawback. But the Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude
forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the
formidable framework which greater dramatists could modify, but had to
use. Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert;
Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. “This man”, says Mr.
Havelock Ellis, “writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but
as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy
the fibres of their hearts.”
The play—_’Tis pity she’s a Whore_—upon which this judgement is
chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella spun from pole to
pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First, her brother tells
her that he loves her; next she confesses her love for him; next finds
herself with child by him; next forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is
discovered; next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and
brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings which such crises
and calamities might be expected to breed in a woman of ordinary
sensibility might have filled volumes. A dramatist of course has no
volumes to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can illumine; he
can reveal enough for us to guess the rest. But what is it that we know
without using microscopes and splitting hairs about the character of
Annabella? Gropingly we make out that she is a spirited girl, with her
defiance of her husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian
song, her ready wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we
understand the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches
her conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her.
She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach.
Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood,
nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the
English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she
is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this
we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the
play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been
accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we have not
expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with prose, and the
play, after all, is poetry.
The play is poetry we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to
obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so
far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as
we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences emerge;
the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play; the
emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and
gradually massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion concentrated,
generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what
phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!
O, my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.
or
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.
With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say
“You have oft, for these two lips
Neglected cassia”.
Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her
reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect
marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his swiftness
to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground not on the sky: suggest by
description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing
Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true,
he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the
undertakers’ men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can we
compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the
little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual
and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the
separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna
Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the
. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,
. . . driven, I know not whither.
So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our
Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we close
_War and Peace_? Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting the
superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the novelist’s art. Rather
we are made more than ever aware of the inexhaustible richness of human
sensibility. Here, in the play, we recognise the general; here, in the
novel, the particular. Here we gather all our energies into a bunch and
spring. Here we extend and expand and let come slowly in from all
quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so
saturated with sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience,
that far from ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its
inferiority to others we complain that they are still unable to keep
pace with the wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of
what may yet be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the
unexpressed.
Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion we still
read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring in the
land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories of
Liverpool fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any likeness
between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia at Muswell
Hill and the Armenian Duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the
owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to a still-born babe
’mongst women howling. To join those territories and recognise the same
man in different disguises we have to adjust and revise. But make the
necessary alterations in perspective, draw in those filaments of
sensibility which the moderns have so marvellously developed, use
instead the ear and the eye which the moderns have so basely starved,
hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as they are printed in
black letters on the page, see before your eyes the changing faces and
living bodies of men and women, put yourself, in short, into a
different, but not more elementary stage of your reading development and
then the true merits of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The
power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining
genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
Theirs is that broad humour based upon the nakedness of the body, which,
however arduously the public spirited may try, is impossible, since the
body is draped. Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some
sort of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence
of the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any