PROFESSOR JOWETT ON THE DRAMA.
pROFESSOR JOWETT'S remark, made after Mr. Irving's Oxford lecture last Saturday, that the drama is " the only form of literature which is not dead, but alive, and is always being brought to life again and again by the genius of the actor," is hardly, we think, one which will be borne out by reflection. We should say that there are many forms of litera- ture which are much more alive than the drama, even if we restrict what we mean by the drama to the drama of those great dramatists whose works are most frequently revived and reproduced upon the stage. There is hardly any great poem of Shelley's which is so. little "alive " in the present day as his Cenci, in spite of the recent unfortunate attempt to put it on the stage. Which of Byron's great poems are so little alive as his plays? Which of Tennyson's ever came so near being still-born as his plays, even though Mr. Irving him- self did exert himself with no little success to give Queen Mary a resurrection P Oliver Goldsmith lives twice as vividly in his " Vicar of Wakefield,"—even with those who have never seen it dramatised,—and perhaps in his " Deserted Village," and the lines on the " Venison Pasty," as he does in that most amusing play, She Stoops to Conquer. And going back even to the far past, we doubt extremely whether any, except the greatest of Shakespeare's dramas, are half as much alive in the imagination of the present day as some of Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales." A few of Sheridan's plays, The Rivals certainly, and The School for Scandal, are rendered popular by their lively wit ; but would it be true to say that even they are half as mach alive in the mind of the present day as two or three of Fielding's, and at least one of Richardson's novels P Swift by his " Gulliver's Travels," Addison by his sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even Johnson by his " Vanity of Human Wishes " and his " London," have left a far more vivid mark on the present day than all the dramas of Dryden and Ben Jonson. And Miss Austen's portraitures live for no far more genuinely than even the leading characters of Goethe's and Schiller's plays. If we come to the most recent times, who would dream of comparing the literary livingness of even the best and most popular of Mr. Robertson's comedies, Caste, School, and the rest, with the best of Tennyson's, Browning's, or Matthew Arnold's poems P It seems to us a very grave and curious blander to say, as the Vice Chancellor of Oxford appears to have said, that the drama is living because great actors are continually creating for it a resurrection in the imagination of the public,
tvhlelither forms Of literature which have (because they need) no on& special class of interpreters, are, comparatively speaking, bad. Indeed, we question whether such a remark would have appeared even plausible, had it not been that the greatest genius 'the world ever knew happened to concentrate almost all his power on dramatic works. Were it not for Shakespeare, it would not even seem like the truth to say that dramatic forms of literature are living, while all other forms are dead. If we could exclude that wonderful genius wholly from our view, it would, we suspect, be much nearer the truth to say, at least at the present day, that the drama is the least living of all the forms of literature, and that all the efforts of the most accomplished actors hardly succeed in giving it a hold on the popular imagina- tion. Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" will live when his Remorse and Fall of Robespierre are quite obsolete, and even when his fine translation of Schiller's Wallemdein is half forgotten.
No one, we suppose, would venture to deny that considerable actors do from time to time greatly revive the interest, both general and special, taken in the dramas of the past, do draw public attention to them and their noblest passages, and do therefore immensely stimulate the •popular imagination in rela- tion to them. That is undeniable. But we should certainly be disposed rather to treat this histrionic revival of interest in the grander dramas of the past, as a make-weight against the unmerited neglect into which all dramatic literature is, in our 'undramatic age, too apt to fall, than as an influence which keeps the drama alive while all other forms of literature can be treated as comparatively dead. Mr. Irving recalled to his audi- ence Coleridge's saying of Edmund Kean, that to see him in the Shakespearian drama "was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." No doubt flashes of lightning might be thrown on Shakespeare by actors of really great genius,—but they are so rare, that the present writer can remember only one English actor capable of such a feat, and he did not meddle with Shakespeare; we mean the late Mr. Robson. In general, even good actors who do not spoil Shakespeare, but interpret him fairly well, do not succeed in heightening the moral and intellectual magic of Shakespeare, even when they are suffi- ciently masters of their art not to diminish it. The present writer has seen Maoready, Fechter, and Irving in Shake- speare's most considerable plays, and has never but once, and then only for a moment, been conscious of reading Shakespeare by a flash of lightning ; that was in Mr. Irving's rendering of the passage in which Macbeth says that " Macbeth has mur- dered sleep," which certainly gave new depth to Shakespeare's wonderful -expression of despair; though for the rest, we did not think Macbeth even Mr. Irving's best part. On the whole, we should prefer Fechter of the three actors, place Irving next, and Macready, except in such slightly artificial characters as Cardinal Wolsey, lowest of the three. But of none of them should we say that they enabled us to read Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, Indeed, Macready's efforts in that direction were very stagey indeed. And of all three actors, we should say that, even at their beat, they only succeeded in not lowering the ideal magic of Shakespeare, and hardly ever in giving us a new glimpse of his highest flights. What good actors can and do effect, is not to increase the charm and open the higher meanings of Shakespeare, but to restore to the drama that realism of common life which the mere reader of Shakespeare is too apt to forget,—in other words, to give greater vividness and significance to the circumstance and detail in which the imagination of Shakespeare was framed and em- bodied, and to prevent the fancy from running away into an ideal region from the control and contact of common life. This is what the stage does for us when it deals with the higher forms of drama. It does not, in our belief, as a rule stimulate the imagination half so much as the study of a great drama in one's own room ; but it makes one realise the common sur- roundings and petty accidents of the higher passions and emo- tions as one never realises them without the help of one's eyes and ears. Far from giving life to literature, the stage does more, we think, to give life to that which is the necessary accompani- ment of literature, the framework of literature, often the earthly clog on literature, than it does to give life to literature itself. The poetry of A lificlaummer Night's Dream, for instance, or the poetry of Antony and 'Cleopatra, or of Romeo and Juliet, is far more delightful and fascinating in a quiet room than it is as it is given on the stage. We should be even disposed to say that A Midsummer Night's Dream is spoiled by the stage, since it belongs to a region altogether too fanciful to borrow anything but injury from the physical embodiment of the actors' art. What we want from the actor, and what in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand we get from him, is not a "flash of lightning" on Shakespeare's meaning, but a lesson in the human feasibility of the situation, the play of petty motives, the pity of the earthly conditions, the embarrass- ments of the passions, the littleness which limits great minds ;—for instance, a lesson in the effect of rank and station on manners, in the punctiliousness produced by official life, in the incommensurability of formal ceremony with.the thrill of preternatural or supernatural awe. All
such effects as these we realise twice as well with real actors before ns. But the higher flights of imagination we realise, we will say, twice as well in solitude as we do on the stage. The utmost a good actor usually does for us in this respect is to make us feel that the imaginative passion is really there, in spite of the inertia or ponderousness of earthly circumstance ; but he does not, and cannot, in the ordinary course of things, make us feel the depth and intensity of that imaginative passion anything like as deeply as we should feel it in perfect solitude. The wings of poetry move more freely in solitude than in the world of business and pleasure. What the actor makes no see is not
the vibrations of the wings, bat the weight of the earthly body which these vibrations are capable of lifting into the air. For example, no man who has not seen Hamlet well acted remembers that Hamlet was a Prince with a strong sense of caste in him, as Fechter made us recognise him to be ; no man who has not seen Macbeth well acted remembers how his wife's malignant influence over him had alienated him from her, so that he took the news of her death with something like indifference, as Mr.
Irving has shown us ; no man who has not seen Iago well acted, realises how externally frank and gruff and soldier-like was the ordinary bearing of the man who could plot so deeply, and pierce the heart he wished to wound with so great a thrill of delight But all these touches of 'reality, though they add greatly to the vividness with which the circumstances of the drama are realised, do not add anything appreciable to the
higher imaginative flights of the poet. We realise what Hamlet meant when he was puzzling over the result of his own irresolution, and trying to persuade himself that it was not
irresolution at all, but justifiable doubt which held his hand, far better as we read than as we hear. We realise better when look- ing at the play how Lady Macbeth's scorn stung Macbeth into the execution of his murderous intent; but the soliloquy in which
he presents to himself how— "Pity, like s naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall •drown the wind,"— impresses us far more deeply in the reading than when heard upon the stage. We understand all the excruciating detail of Iago's slanders against Desdemona, far better with the actors in view ; but Othello's passion of eloquence in denouncing the wickedness of such slanders, if slanders they were, comes home far more powerfully in reading than in hearing the play:— "If thou dad slander her, and torture me, Never pray more : abandon all remorse; On horror's head, horrors accumulate : Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amazed,
For nothing oanst thou to damnation add Greater than that."
We defy an actor, however great, to give that by any feat of declamation the power that it will have for the reader in silence and solitude. The drama, in short, as produced in a theatre, is realist, not idealist. It adds immensely to the realism of the situation, but rather detracts from, than adds to, the depth of any true poetic fire. The actor succeeds in clothing the idealism
of the poet in actual flesh and blood, in making us think that the drama depicted really took place. But he does not often, even at his best, give life to the truest poetry of the play ; he only inspires us with the belief that such poetry is not wholly irreconcileable with the conditions of " such beings as we are, in
such a world as the present"
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