Pot-Boilers Part 7

So wrote Trelawny in 1869 (he had recovered his style) to Claire Clairmont. His letters to her, now published for the first time, compose the largest and liveliest part of the volume. If he cared for one woman more than another, we believe that woman was Claire. She was not good, but she has been more than sufficiently reviled. For Trelawny that she was beautiful sufficed; let it satisfy the vindictiveness of virtue that she suffered horribly. What precisely was the degree of their intimacy is not clear; but, in view of Claire's reputation and certain pa.s.sages in these letters, it is perhaps not unfair to suppose that at any rate for a short time in the year 1822 she was his mistress. Be that as it may, after Sh.e.l.ley's death they parted, and doubtless it will be said she treated her lover ill. To us it appears that he gave as good as he got. She was mercenary, and he was inconstant. If we read Letter XX aright, when she did offer, after some months of prudent dalliance, to live with him at Florence, he replied that he had but 500 a year, which was not enough for two. An establishment on the confines of respectability was the last thing he desired. Neither ever loved truly; but Trelawny, for a time, felt violent physical pa.s.sion for the woman whose head and shoulders remind us of what dealers call a Giorgione.

Such is the story, so far as we can deduce it from these letters; each, if our conjecture serve, was partially satisfied, for in money matters Trelawny always treated his lady handsomely, though he could not or would not give her what most she wanted--material security.

He never lost his taste for Claire; and on the ruins of their bitter and agitated relations was built a kind of friendship, in which expansion and intimacy and malice were all possible, and which is aptly commemorated by these vivid and entertaining letters. As for Mary, her character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim ba.n.a.lity, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike to disprove it:

"Mary Sh.e.l.ley's jealousy must have sorely vexed Sh.e.l.ley--indeed she was not a suitable companion for the poet--his first wife Harriett must have been more suitable--Mary was the most conventional slave I ever met--she even affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning for society--she was devoid of imagination and Poetry--she felt compunction when she had lost him--she did not understand or appreciate him."

There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838 to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings harden with my bones--age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parna.s.sus he had been shot through the body and had pardoned one of his a.s.sailants; he had swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade and the Suss.e.x fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin--men have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "---- is as gross and fat as ---- and from the same cause--gluttony and sotting--it's all the fashion."

And here we would interpose a query--Was it really necessary to suppress the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading.

After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend to editors and biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's complaint--"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly British sense of give and take--"Never mind, have a shot at mine."

Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl from Sh.e.l.ley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose vanity, credulity, and superst.i.tion makes them believe in G.o.d--the devil--souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons, and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the great poet he loved:

"You say he [Sh.e.l.ley] was womanly in some things--so he was, and we men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling, sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best qualities of man he excelled."

Through these letters--through all Trelawny's writings--runs a wonderful sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam, taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for syntax--these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and Sh.e.l.ley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an oddity. He loathed superst.i.tion, cant and sn.o.bbery and said so in a way that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate--the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.)

SOPHOCLES IN LONDON

I

[Sidenote: _"OEdipus" at Covent Garden_]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]

There need be nothing anachronous or archaeological about a performance of _OEdipus_ at Covent Garden. There is no reason why the plays of Sophocles should move us less than they moved the Athenians twenty-three hundred years ago, and there is some for supposing that we, who live in the twentieth, are more likely to appreciate them than those who lived in any intervening century. For everywhere to-day is a cry for simplicity and significance, and art more simple and significant than the Attic drama does not exist. In less than ten thousand words Sophocles tells all that can be told about a terrible and complex tragedy. Zola or Meredith in ten times the s.p.a.ce would have added nothing. They would only have put flesh on bone and muscle; they would have given us trappings and ornament where Sophocles gives nothing but bare springs and forces.

Yet in this flat, lean, Attic drama all Latin realism and Celtic romance, all details and suggestions, are implicit. It states just those fundamental things of which all the rest are but manifestations or consequences. There is as much psychology in the scene between OEdipus and Jocasta, a matter of some seventy lines, as could be forced into seventy pages by a modern novelist. A change of feeling that it would take Mr. Henry James a chapter to elaborate is indicated by a statement, a question, and a reply. Sophocles could never be satisfied with anything short of the essential: that he stated; the rest he left out.

Though Prof. Gilbert Murray is, as every one knows, a charming and sensitive scholar, he is not the ideal translator of Sophocles. Perhaps the Zolas and Merediths--especially the Merediths--impress him too easily; perhaps he loves too well the literary tradition, the European tradition of five hundred years, to understand that the greatest poetry is rarely poetical:

A Voice, a Voice, that is borne on the Holy Way!

What art thou, O Heavenly One, O Word of the Houses of Gold?

Thebes is bright with thee, and my heart it leapeth; yet is it cold, And my spirit faints as I pray.

I--e! I--e!

What task, O Affrighter of Evil, what task shall thy people essay?

One new as our new-come affliction, Or an old toil returned with the years?

Unveil thee, thou dread benediction, Hope's daughter and Fear's.

This is very pretty, but is it Sophocles?--or Swinburne? Still, grace there is, and distinction, in all that Prof. Murray writes--qualities that are not accentuated by the mouthings of the protagonist, Mr. Martin Harvey, the uninspired drone of the chorus, or the intermittent shrieking and bawling of the crowd. In the translation of the Professor the simple profundities of the poet become delicate verse, which in the mouth of the histrion is turned into rhythmless rhetoric.

But, after all, in performances of this sort it is not the play, but the production, that is the thing--though that is less true of this than of any other Reinhardt entertainment we have yet seen. Still, deeds not words: it is by theatrical effects and stage decoration, if by any means, that the message of Sophocles is to be conveyed to the people of London. That both are remarkable cannot be denied. _OEdipus_ is a fine show. It is erudite, striking, and ingenious; but it is not a work of art. What is it, then? To borrow an expressive, though unnecessarily insulting term from our neighbours, it is "Le faux bon."

And what is "Le faux bon"? It is something exceedingly difficult to produce. We do not wish to belittle it; we wish to make plain its nature. If we succeed, we shall show also how choice and rare a thing this _OEdipus_ is. At any rate, it keeps good company. The plays of Mr.

Stephen Phillips are cla.s.sical examples of the "faux bon," and, to remove a suspicion of disparagement, we hasten to add that the plays of M. Rostand and FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar are examples too. The brilliant and entertaining pictures of Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Orpen serve our purpose even better, so closely do they resemble the first-rate. And now in this, the latest art, the new art of the theatre, come M. Bakst with his _Scheherazade_, and Prof. Reinhardt with _Sumurun_ and _The Miracle_, levying contribution on all the others, culling from them all those features that people of taste expect and recognize in a work of art.

For "le faux bon" is produced to meet the demands of a tasteful and cultivated society--a society that knows as much about art as can be taught. People who have been brought up on terms of familiarity with the arts learn to recognize all those features that a work of art ought to possess; they know the effects that it ought to produce; but, unless born with the power of reacting emotionally and directly to what they see and hear, they cannot understand what a work of art is. Such people are numerous in these days. Far too intelligent to be duped by imitations of particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what they require is imitation art. And that is what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's productions there are dramatic pauses and suspensions, effects of light and sound, combinations of movement and ma.s.s, line and colour, which recall, not particular works, but general ideas based on the study of hundreds of works, and provoke, in the right kind of spectator, precisely those trains of thought and feeling that are provoked by real works of art. True, they express no first-hand emotion, neither does the real thing to lovers of the "faux bon," but they cause physical reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage) subtle enough to do duty for aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are.

_OEdipus_ is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets; and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to _The Miracle_, because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer _OEdipus_ to the pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all seem to us about equal.

II

[Sidenote: _The "Trachiniae" at "The Court."_]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1911_]

The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek drama. The traditional opinion that the Athenians were a race of fools with a sense of form, who wrote tedious verse to perfection, has been ousted by a new doctrine, less false, but even more dangerous. A race of scholars arose who a.s.sumed, reasonably enough, that plays written by intelligent men for an intelligent public could not be quite so dull as tradition proclaimed; and though to rob the cla.s.sics of their terrors needed much audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas won ground by sheer force of plausibility. Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an intelligent public meant a public of modern scholars. He peopled the Attic theatre with an audience of cultivated liberals, and by "a good play" meant the sort of play such a public would relish. Whence it followed that the Athenian dramatists must have concerned themselves with those problems which have been so acutely discussed in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.

As a fact, Athenian tragedy is never, or hardly ever, concerned with intellectual matters of any sort; its business is to express emotion, and this it has done in the most perfect literary form ever devised by man. The great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance is that she plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the most insipid period of cla.s.sical sculpture, nor yet as though she were cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much "psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest subtleties has led her to misunderstand completely the pa.s.sage (580-95 in the acting edition) in which she supposes the queen to be justifying herself to a reluctant chorus, whereas, in fact, she is justifying herself to the Universe, and giving the audience a hint. The meek chorus is only too willing to agree.

Poor is the triumph of Fate over a timid woman. Heracles is a more splendid but not less helpless victim. Mr. G. Edwards understands the part well. Very fine was the pa.s.sionate indignation, surging up through physical agony, in the first great speech; and this mood is made to prevail until in the name "[Greek: Nessos]" the hero recognizes the finger of G.o.d. From that point, though violent and dictatorial still to his son and the respectful mortals about him, the tyrant submits sullenly to those he can neither vanquish nor appease.

Mr. Garrod, who played the part of Hyllus, spoke his lines exceedingly well. Perhaps the chorus was a little too cla.s.sical--that is to say, too stiff and lackadaisical; but the phrasing was always pretty and sometimes unexpected, and the lovely strophe beginning,

[Greek: hon aiola nux enarizomena;]

seemed to gain a new enchantment from the delicately concerted voices.

Scholars will have to bring strong arguments to justify what is an obvious literary blemish in the distribution of the concluding lines.

Somehow or other, between Hyllus and the chorus, the sombre intensity of the complaint was allowed to evaporate. The words,

[Greek: ta de nun hestot' oiktra men hemin, aischra]

and

[Greek: kouden touton o ti me Zeus]