The Ghost Ship

by Richard Middleton

  The Biography Of A Superman

  "O limed soul that struggling to be free Art more engaged!"

  Charles Stephen Dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatistand, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of thetwentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten isby no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with acharming indecision of touch. The general prejudice against thegranting of freeholds has spread to the desired lands of fame; andwhere our profligate ancestors were willing to call a man great inperpetuity, we, with more shrewdness, prefer to name him a genius forseven years. We know that before that period may have expired fatewill have granted us a sea-serpent with yet more coils, with ayet more bewildering arrangement of marine and sunset tints, and theconclusion of previous leases will enable us to grant him undisputedpossession of Parnassus. If our ancestors were more generous theywere certainly less discriminate; and it cannot be doubted that manyof them went to their graves under the impression that it is possiblefor there to be more than one great man at a time! We have alteredall that.

  For two years Dale was a great man, or rather the great man, and itis probable that if he had not died he would have held his positionfor a longer period. When his death was announced, although thenotices of his life and work were of a flattering length, theleaderwriters were not unnaturally aggrieved that he should haveresigned his post before the popular interest in his personality wasexhausted. The Censor might do his best by prohibiting theperformance of all the plays that the dead man had left behind him;but, as the author neglected to express his views in their columns,and the common sense of their readers forbade the publication ofinterviews with him, the journals could draw but a poorsatisfaction from condemning or upholding the official action. Dale'sregrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clashof personalities to an arid discussion on art. The consequence wasobvious. The end of the week saw the elevation of James Macintosh,the great Scotch comedian, to the vacant post, and Dale wascompletely forgotten. That this oblivion is merited in terms of hiswork I am not prepared to admit; that it is merited in terms of hispersonality I indignantly wish to deny. Whatever Dale may have beenas an artist, he was, perhaps in spite of himself, a man, and a man,moreover, possessed of many striking and unusual traits of character.It is to the man Dale that I offer this tribute.

  Sprung from an old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yetsufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemiesin crediting him with the Celtic temperament. Nevertheless, he wasessentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings ofdead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. To these twocentral influences we may trace most of the peculiarities thatrendered him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celticaestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because hemistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and thebarbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made himan agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller menmight dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affecttheir conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightestconviction should have its place in the formation of his character.Conversely, he was nothing without a reason.

  These may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of aman's life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truthabout a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, ourmaterials will be nearly complete. "Dale hates hisfellow-human- beings," wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, evenexpressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. But hehated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer tosay that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred ofindividuals, and, _pace_ the critics, the love was no less sincerethan the hatred. He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darkerGerman philosophers an image of the perfect man--an image differingonly in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the Imperialists as"efficiency." He did not find--it was hardly likely that he wouldfind--that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, andhe therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession ofthose weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of whichthe sum is human nature.

  I now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is initself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmostimportance in considering the life of Charles Stephen Dale I shouldprefer not to mention it. I refer to his complete lack of a sense ofhumour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detractfrom his importance as an artist and a man. The difficulty which Imentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clearconception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yetsucceeded in defining it satisfactorily. Here I would venture tosuggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, asense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to thefinite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as tothe importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. I am aware thatthis definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may befound to include the truth. Obviously, the natures of those whopossess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and itis therefore against the limits imposed by this sense thatintellectual anarchists, among whom I would number Dale, and poets,primarily rebel. But--and it is this rather than his undoubtedintellectual gifts or his dogmatic definitions of good and evil thatdefinitely separated Dale from the normal men--there can be no doubtthat he felt his lack of a sense of humour bitterly. In every word heever said, in every line he ever wrote, I detect a painful strivingafter this mysterious sense, that enabled his neighbours, fools as heundoubtedly thought them, to laugh and weep and follow the faith oftheir hearts without conscious realisation of their ownexistence and the problems it induced. By dint of study and strenuousobservation he achieved, as any man may achieve, a considerabledegree of wit, though to the last his ignorance of the audience whomhe served and despised, prevented him from judging the effect of hissallies without experiment. But try as he might the finer jewel layfar beyond his reach. Strong men fight themselves when they can findno fitter adversary; but in all the history of literature there is nostranger spectacle than this lifelong contest between Dale, theintellectual anarch and pioneer of supermen, and Dale, the poorlonely devil who wondered what made people happy.

  I have said that the struggle was lifelong, but it must be added thatit was always unequal. The knowledge that in his secret heart hedesired this quality, the imperfection of imperfections, only servedto make Dale's attack on the complacency of his contemporaries morebitter. He ridiculed their achievements, their ambitions, and theirlove with a fury that awakened in them a mild curiosity, but by nomeans affected their comfort. Moreover, the very vehemence withwhich he demanded their contempt deprived him of much of his force asa critic, for they justly wondered why a man should waste hislifetime in attacking them if they were indeed so worthless.Actually, they felt, Dale was a great deal more engaged with hisaudience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected todespise for their sycophancy. And, especially towards the end of hislife when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which heused to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more andmore childishly artificial, less and less effective. He was like oneof those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of theiraudience unless they are always doing something, though nothing ismore monotonous than mannered vivacity.

  Dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at thesame time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his aeesthetic sense.He had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical andremote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelledceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarilyaccepted. The result in terms of art was chaos. Possessed of anintellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almostentirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raisehis work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of hisnature might have been reconciled. His light
moments of envy, anger,and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. Helacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above hisconception. It is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels,tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine giftthat enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. Hecould only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing thewayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. He neverattempted--and this is a hard saying--to produce any work beautifulin itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that neverallowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on hisaudience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed.His work will appeal rather to the student of men than to thestudent of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must beheld to constitute a remarkable human document.

  It is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers Dalewas credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for theexamination of any of his plays impresses one with the number andmutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. Anoted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking theweakness of the other man's speech, rather than the weakness ofthe other man's argument. His prose was good, though at its bestso impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionallywell-written leading article. At its worst it was marred bynumerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to befeared, intentional. His attitude on this point was typical of hisstrange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. Hecommitted these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritatehis audience into a condition of mental alertness. As a matter offact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and hedid not realise that even if he had been successful it was but apoor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. Heproclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only toooften beneath it. Revolting against the dignity, not infrequentlypompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clownwith more enthusiasm than skill. It is intellectual arrogance in aclever man to believe that he can play the fool with successmerely because he wishes it.

  There is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to Dale'spersonal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more thanjustice, the photographers rather less. In his younger days hesuggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun;towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness thatmade him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men,he had good eyes.

  Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the publishedaccounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in thatlast desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the accountof his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed--cold,epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. Andonce more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.

  In the third scene of the second act of "Henry V.," a play writtenby an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describesthe death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to needquotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thusthat every man dies.