The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  However this question may be answered, some of his drawings belong to the class of the unforgetable. It may be a perversity of prejudice, but even the little cut of the “Connoisseurs,” the group of gentlemen collected round a picture and criticising it in various attitudes of sapience and sufficiency, appears to me to have the strength that abides. The criminal in the dock, the flat-headed murderer, bending over to speak to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, professional, anxious head to caution and remind him. tells a large, terrible story and awakes a recurrent shudder. We see the gray court-room, we feel the personal suspense and the immensity of justice. The “Saltimbanques,” reproduced in L’Art for 1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a cruel series. M. Eugène Montrosier says of it that “The drawing is masterly, incomparably firm, the composition superb, the general impression quite of the first order.” It exhibits a pair of lean, hungry mountebanks, a clown and a harlequin beating the drum and trying a comic attitude to attract the crowd, at a fair, to a poor booth in front of which a painted canvas, offering to view a simpering fat woman, is suspended. But the crowd doesn’t come, and the battered tumblers, with their furrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in the void. The whole thing is symbolic and full of grim-ness, imagination and pity. It is the sense that we shall find in him, mixed with his homelier extravagances, an element prolific in indications of this order that draws us back to Daumier.

  AFTER THE PLAY

  The play was not over when the curtain fell, four months ago; it was continued in a supplementary act or epilogue which took place immediately afterwards. “Come home to tea,” Florentia said to certain friends who had stopped to speak to her in the lobby of the little theatre in Soho—they had been present at a day performance by the company of the Theatre Libre, transferred for a week from Paris; and three of these—Auberon and Dorriforth, accompanying Amicia—turned up so expeditiously that the change of scene had the effect of being neatly executed. The short afterpiece—it was in truth very slight—began with Amicia’s entrance and her declaration that she would never again go to an afternoon performance: it was such a horrid relapse into the real to find it staring at you through the ugly daylight on coming out of the blessed fictive world.

  Dorriforth. Ah, you touch there on one of the minor sorrows of life. That’s an illustration of the general change that comes to pass in us as we grow older, if we have ever loved the stage: the fading of the glamour and the mystery that surround it.

  Auberon. Do you call it a minor sorrow? It’s one of the greatest. And nothing can mitigate it.

  Amicia. Wouldn’t it be mitigated a little if the stage were a trifle better? You must remember how that has changed.

  Auberon. Never, never: it’s the same old stage. The change is in ourselves.

  Florentia. Well, I never would have given an evening to what we have just seen. If one could have put it in between luncheon and tea, well enough. But one’s evenings are too precious.

  Dorriforth. Note that—it’s very important.

  Florentia. I mean too precious for that sort of thing.

  Auberon. Then you didn’t sit spellbound by the little history of the Due d’Enghien?

  Florentia. I sat yawning. Heavens, what a piece!

  Amicia. Upon my word I liked it. The last act made me cry.

  Dorriforth. Wasn’t it a curious, interesting specimen of some of the things that are worth trying: an attempt to sail closer to the real?

  Auberon. How much closer? The fiftieth part of a point—it isn’t calculable.

  Florentia. It was just like any other play—I saw no difference. It had neither a plot, nor a subject, nor dialogue, nor situations, nor scenery, nor costumes, nor acting.

  Amicia. Then it was hardly, as you say, just like any other play.

  Auberon. Florentia should have said like any other bad‘one. The only way it differed seemed to be that it was bad in theory as well as in fact.

  Amicia. It’s a morceau de vie, as the French say.

  Auberon. Oh, don’t begin on the French!

  Amicia. It’s a French experiment—que voulez-vous?

  Auberon. English experiments will do.

  Dorriforth. No doubt they would—if there were any. But I don’t see them.

  Amicia. Fortunately: think what some of them might be! Though Florentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby “Due d’Enghien,” coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have to be so big on the i’s, with its barely audible note of originality. It appealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the way things happen in life.

  Auberon. In life they happen clumsily, stupidly, meanly. One goes to the theatre just for the refreshment of seeing them happen in another way—in symmetrical, satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect and just at the right moment.

  Dorriforth. It shows how the same cause may produce the most diverse consequences. In this truth lies the only hope of art.

  Auberon. Oh, art, art—don’t talk about art!

  Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!

  Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make bold to say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we read a novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; and according as we look for the particular thing we find it.

  Auberon. That’s a profound remark.

  Florentia. We go to find amusement: that, surely, is what we all go for.

  Amicia. There’s such a diversity in our idea of amusement.

  Auberon. Don’t you impute to people more ideas than they have?

  Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn’t talk about them. We go to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, to give ourselves up, in short, to a charm.

  Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary.

  Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what we know, what we feel.

  Dorriforth. See already how you differ.

  “SO!”

  What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense of life.

  Amicia. The first thing is to believe.

  Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to disbelieve.

  Auberon. Lord, listen to them!

  Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio—to care.

  Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget.

  Amicia. To forget what?

  Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautiful more exciting: into fable and romance.

  Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it’s about us, about you and me—or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we live their experience, for the time, and that’s hardly escaping from life.

  Florentia. I’m not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it an escape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate.

  Dorriforth. You couldn’t put it better. That’s the life that art, with Auberon’s permission, gives us; that’s the distinction it confers. This is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar fellow—the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand. Then what becomes of our escape?

  Florentia. It’s precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us into foul and dreary places—into flat and foolish deserts.

  Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things: that’s the only place into which the poet can lead us. It’s there that he finds “As You Like It,” it is there that he finds “Comus,” or “The Way of the World,” or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us, after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can’t keep from us that we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on the walls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us.

  Amicia. That’s what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. There was an artistic intention, and the little room wasn’t bare: there was sociable company
in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they were common—

  Auberon. Ah, when the French give their mind to that—!

  Amicia. Nevertheless they struck me as recruits to an interesting cause, which as yet (the house was so empty) could confer neither money nor glory. They had the air, poor things, of working for love.

  Auberon. For love of what?

  Amicia. Of the whole little enterprise—the idea of the Théâtre Libre.

  Florentia. Gracious, what you see in things! Don’t you suppose they were paid?

  Amicia. I know nothing about it. I liked their shabbiness—they had only what was indispensable in the way of dress and scenery. That often pleases me: the imagination, in certain cases, is more finely persuaded by the little than by the much.

  Dorriforth. I see what Amicia means.

  Florentia. I’ll warrant you do, and a great deal more besides.

  Dorriforth. When the appointments are meagre and sketchy the responsibility that rests upon the actors becomes a still more serious thing, and the spectator’s observation of the way they rise to it a pleasure more intense. The face and the voice are more to the purpose than acres of painted canvas, and a touching intonation, a vivid gesture or two, than an army of supernumeraries.

  Auberon. Why not have everything—the face, the voice, the touching intonations, the vivid gestures, the acres of painted canvas, and the army of supernumeraries? Why not use bravely and intelligently every resource of which the stage disposes? What else was Richard Wagner’s great theory, in producing his operas at Bayreuth?

  Dorriforth. Why not, indeed? That would be the ideal. To have the picture complete at the same time the figures do their part in producing the particular illusion required—what a perfection and what a joy! I know no answer to that save the aggressive, objectionable fact. Simply look at the stage of to-day and observe that these two branches of the matter never do happen to go together. There is evidently a corrosive principle in the large command of machinery and decorations—a germ of perversion and corruption. It gets the upperhand—it becomes the master. It is so much less easy to get good actors than good scenery and to represent a situation by the delicacy of personal art than by “building it in” and having everything real. Surely there is no reality worth a farthing, on the stage, but what the actor gives, and only when he has learned his business up to the hilt need he concern himself with his material accessories. He hasn’t a decent respect for his art unless he be ready to render his part as if the whole illusion depended on that alone and the accessories didn’t exist. The acting is everything or it’s nothing. It ceases to be everything as soon as something else becomes very important. This is the case, to-day, on the London stage: something else is very important. The public have been taught to consider it so: the clever machinery has ended by operating as a bribe and a blind. Their sense of the rest of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you may perceive when you hear a couple of occupants of the stalls talking, in a tone that excites your curiosity, about a performance that’s “splendid.”

  Amicia. Do you ever hear the occupants of the stalls talking? Never, in the entr’actes, have I detected, on their lips, a criticism or a comment.

  Dorriforth. Oh, they say “splendid”—distinctly! But a question or two reveals that their reference is vague: they don’t themselves know whether they mean the art of the actor or that of the stage-carpenter.

  Auberon. Isn’t that confusion a high result of taste? Isn’t it what’s called a feeling for the ensemble? The artistic effect, as a whole, is so welded together that you can’t pick out the parts.

  Dorriforth. Precisely; that’s what it is in the best cases, and some examples are wonderfully clever.

  Florentia. Then what fault do you find? Dorriforth. Simply this—that the whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic one. There is something indeed that you can’t pick out, for the very good reason that—in any serious sense of the word—it isn’t there.

  Florentia. The public has taste, then, if it recognizes and delights in a fine picture.

  Dorriforth. I never said it hadn’t, so far as that goes. The public likes to be amused, and small blame to it. It isn’t very particular about the means, but it has rather a preference for amusements that I believes to be “improving,” other things being equal. I don’t think it’s either very intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear old public it takes humbly enough what is given it and it doesn’t cry for the moon. It has an idea that fine scenery is an appeal to its nobler part, and that it shows a nice critical sense in preferring it to poor. That’s a real intellectual flight, for the public.

  Auberon. Very well, its preference is right, and why isn’t that a perfectly legitimate state of things?

  Dorriforth. Why isn’t it? It distinctly is! Good scenery and poor acting are better than poor scenery with the same sauce. Only it becomes then another matter: we are no longer talking about the drama.

  Auberon. Very likely that’s the future of the drama, in London—an immense elaboration of the picture.

  Dorriforth. My dear fellow, you take the words out of my mouth. An immense elaboration of the picture and an immense sacrifice of everything else: it would take very little more to persuade me that that will be the only formula for our children. It’s all right, when once we have buried our dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part of the art, remarkable as some of its achievements already appear to us, is only in its infancy, and that we are destined to see wonders done that we now but faintly conceive. The probable extension of the mechanical arts is infinite. “Built in,” forsooth! We shall see castles and cities and mountains and rivers built in. Everything points that way; especially the constitution of the contemporary multitude. It is huge and good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects; it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It’s in a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can’t portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre, inevitably accommodating itself, will be at last a landscape without figures. I mean, of course, without figures that count. There will be little illustrations of costume stuck about—dressed manikins; but they’ll have nothing to say: they won’t even go through the form of speech.

  Amicia. What a hideous prospect!

  Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: we shall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it’s cruel, because our old ideals are only dying, they are in extremis, they are virtually defunct, but they are above-ground—we trip and stumble on them. We shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because it’s a moment of transition, and we still miss the old superstition, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are conscious of a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn’t. But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we have accepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, and the real one as having nothing to do with it.

  Florentia. I don’t follow you. As I’m one of the squeezed, gaping public, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immense injustice to that body. They do care for character—care much for it. Aren’t they perpetually talking about the actor’s conception of it?

  Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of their ineptitude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only things they understand? The vanity of wasting time over that! Auberon. Over what? Dorriforth. The actor’s conception of a part. It’s the refuge of observers who are no observers and critics who are no critics. With what on earth have we to do save his execution?

  Florentia. I don’t in the least agree with you.

  A
micia. Are you very sure, my poor Dorriforth?

  Auberon. Give him rope and he’ll hang himself.

  Dorriforth. It doesn’t need any great license to ask who in the world holds in his bosom the sacred secret of the right conception. All the actor can do is to give us his. We must take that one for granted, we make him a present of it. He must impose his conception upon us—

  Auberon (interrupting). I thought you said we accepted it.

  Dorriforth. Impose it upon our attention. clever Auberon. It is because we accept his idea that he must repay us by making it vivid, by showing us how valuable it is. We give him a watch: he must show us what time it keeps. He winds it up, that is he executes the conception, and his execution is what we criticise, if we be so moved. Can anything be more absurd than to hear people discussing the conception of a part of which the execution doesn’t exist—the idea of a character which never arrives at form? Think what it is, that form, as an accomplished actor may give it to us, and admit that we have enough to do to hold him to this particular honor.