Читать книгу The Scene is Changed - Ashley Dukes - Страница 8

Table of Contents

If Munich had been both Bavarian-national and provincial, Zurich was just a city on a lake in a country international at heart for all its William Tell romanticism. Russians, Poles, Netherlanders, Scandinavians, Italians, Frenchmen and even a few English were represented in this cluster, and swarmed on terms of complete understanding with the angular black-coated German-Swiss. Having common interests in learning or science, sport on the water or the mountains, the pursuit of health or the refuge from persecution, we went about our daily task in that freedom which small European communities in this last century (or shall we say until the present one) have been able to offer their guests. The general tolerance was accompanied by a rigid system of police registration, which was accepted as a needful precaution in a country where all were welcome.

The social atmosphere was as congenial as the simplicity and cleanliness—the only dirt in Switzerland is to be found on its glaciers—but living there, I felt from the first the sense of being outside Europe looking in at her life, her mind and heart, her strength and errors and confusions. As one had hitherto looked into a dramatist's mind through the proscenium of a theatre, observing his particular way of bringing order out of chaos, so one now looked out physically at the strange and gigantic spectacle of the Powers. It was the time of the Edwardian Entente Cordiale linking up with the Franco-Russian alliance, and of the other grouping that professedly joined Germany with Italy through Austria-Hungary as relic of the Holy Roman Empire. But the view one had of it was not political, though all of us knew in those years that Europe might be pregnant with disaster. The individual civilizations themselves were seen more clearly from this craggy international height. Their colours stood out more vividly, with their vast cultural creations; and the very narrowness of the Swiss horizon, mental as well as material, brought a consciousness of the fateful spaces that lay between the Atlantic seaboard and the steppes.

Twice, in those early autumn months in Switzerland, I had taken my student ticket for a journey to the highest point of the railroad before the entry into the tunnel, and walked over the passes into Italy, turning back each time from the first villages above the Lombard plain, and returning to Zurich. Walking the passes is an old Alpine diversion, well repaid in the case of the Saint Gothard or Saint Bernard by the sudden change from mists to sunshine, often in the space of a few yards, and the prospect of the great country below. It was made doubly exciting by a scramble up some not too difficult peak at the head of the pass, from which one might see as far as Milan. After a joyous winding descent into an upper Italian valley with its vineyards ripening to harvest, to turn back from the gate of this promised land was more than tantalizing. Already I carried in my knapsack the books of those who knew it well—the travels of Arthur Young, the letters of Horace Walpole and Stendhal, the memoirs of Casanova. And if these should appear in every sense a promiscuous bag, they yet reflected the moods of a young Englishman, truant from science, who was learning about Europe and art from men who had taken coach or horse over the same highway. The nearness of Italy, lying there in the sun beyond the snowy ranges seen from the Zurich foothills, made one sure of her in the end; and for the present she could wait as she had waited for centuries.

France, lying westward and unknown but for one week's visit to Paris when I was hardly out of school, seemed actually much closer because my approach to literature had been chiefly through the French. Stendhal (De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, Vie de Henri Brulard) was then my ruling passion, since I had discovered one of his books on a stall in Vienna; and if he remains a passion after thirty years, it is because his absorption in life, women, war, theatre and poetry falls into a sequence personal and familiar. I could imagine him, as he somewhere describes himself, seated in the 1930's on a bench by an Italian lake looking back on it all: tracing with his cane in the dust the initials of the mistresses who had brought him so much grief as well as joy: recalling proudly that in his writings he had never given one of them away: declaring the ultimate creed of a man born into the crucible of the French Revolution and destined to survive into the Victorian age. He had been among the most eager of Napoleon's soldiers, following him to the Danube and to Moscow; yet he stood unmoved by the Fall in 1814 because it had ceased to mark the overthrow of human aspiration. If he had forgotten the plots of a score of his unwritten comedies, he preserved the spirit of our civilized heritage. Stendhalism is like Byronism, it has its manifest extravagances. But is there any man of a century ago who stands closer to our own time?

My reading just then included works of genius of every nationality, in which the Pensées of Pascal, the comedies of Molière, the novels of Flaubert and even the contemporary histories of Anatole France were confoundedly mixed up with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky and Turgenev. Still more oddly, the first part of Goethe's Faust which I knew almost by heart was accompanied as chorus by the verse of Stefan Georg. Then, having begun to realize how far dramatic poetry differs from all other, I was in course of discovering the marvels of the dramatists before and after Shakespeare. When it came to other poetry, I liked Ronsard and Donne better than Keats or Shelley. If there was room in any reader's mind for The Anatomy of Melancholy beside Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I somehow contrived to find it. No wonder there was little place in this gallery for Thackeray or Dickens; or that George Meredith, a writer who had been in fashion with every young Englishman of the period, was as good as forgotten. Bergson brought some discipline of thought into all this luxuriant confusion, and Sorel's Réflexions sur la Violence suggested new and disturbing political concepts far removed from those of Wells or the Fabians. By no means lastly, but outstandingly, there was Nietzsche; and I confess that for a while Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Birth of Tragedy, both read in the lyrical German, were like an Old and New Testament.

Nothing could witness my abandonment of science better than this miscellaneous yielding to mental avidity, sensibility, defiance, eroticism and literary conceit. The drama of my own private stage ousted all actual theatre interest for a while; and it was certainly more exciting than anything I could hope to see in the town theatre of Zurich, whose notion of modernity was to play some Russian social drama by Tolstoy or Gorky four times a week. (The work of Chekhov was still unknown.) I learnt nothing new about the stage or contemporary drama during many months spent in the German-Swiss city; but on the strength of my published articles the university allowed me to give short extension lectures to evening students on English life and letters. The subjects ranged from Elizabethan tragedy to the woman suffrage movement; the language was German but Socratic conversations followed in French and English; and since I learnt as much as my listeners the hours were far from wasted. They helped me to gather up and formulate the results of much seeing, thinking and reading; and this was useful now that the time drew nearer for a return to England.

By the middle of a second summer I was back in London, wondering why the place had changed so little when I had changed so much, or thought so. A. R. Orage's weekly review The New Age, which I had read before and during my time abroad, was still appearing with shrewd notes of the week, articles by Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton, a weekly book article by Arnold Bennett under a pseudonym, and commentaries on the arts. After a short spell in a teaching post I became its dramatic critic, with freedom to train the batteries of Continental criticism on Somerset Maugham, three of whose comedies were running at one time, Galsworthy who had just produced a capital-and-labour play called Strife, and Barrie who had established himself with What Every Woman Knows. The Vedrenne-Barker management was no more, and no regular forward-looking theatre had yet taken its place. Acting, too, seemed to be undecided. Ellen Terry survived from the former great generation, and even appeared in Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion. "Mrs. Pat" was to be seen occasionally, and Marie Tempest and Irene Vanbrugh moulded their art sensitively to whatever slight changes English comedy might undergo with the passage of years. But there were no new Irvings or Hares or Wyndhams that the public could discover; and though nearly every actor of the Vedrenne-Barker school made a name for himself, it was generally in character work. Gordon Craig's productions and especially his writings were much discussed, but Granville Barker remained the only practising director of distinction. It was as though the stage had halted, sensing the approaching rivalry of the screen; and in fact at this time (1909) Charles Chaplin was touring England with Fred Karno's Mumming Birds, which I recall seeing on "the halls", as we called the vaudeville houses.

To a young European the round of new plays was dull enough. For a while Rupert Brooke, who wanted to learn about the stage, came with me to the openings; but the only luck we had together was with Don at the Haymarket, written by Rudolf Besier who was later to write The Barretts of Wimpole Street. After these excursions we would either go round to the Gray's Inn rooms of Edward Marsh (then Winston Churchill's secretary) or rail at the theatre together in the Café Royal. Brooke then went abroad; and presently Orage, who was always a good editor, suggested that instead of gnashing my teeth weekly over plays that his readers would never go to see, I should write about the Continental stage and its dramatists. This suited me perfectly, and the series began with the Scandinavians and went on with Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, Russians, Dutchmen and Italians, with Shaw, Barker and Galsworthy as the three Court Theatre playwrights planted in the midst of them. These essays were later published in England and America under the title Modern Dramatists, which was far too important for their content, but conveyed a journalistic idea well enough.

In the same months I wrote a comedy, Civil War, which was produced by the Stage Society at the Aldwych Theatre in the spring of 1910. My twenty-fifth birthday fell during the rehearsals, and the first performance took place under the shadow of public mourning for Edward VII. The plot concerned a land-owning baronet whose son had fallen in love with a daughter of an old international communist living in a colony near the baronet's estate. The drama of social and political oppositions was as simple-minded as this theme would suggest; but at twenty-five it is one thing to be critical and another to be genuinely creative. Considering how few first plays are ever performed, this one was lucky and perhaps pardonable. Thanks to the acting it had a respectable Press, and one or two repertory theatres revived it in the next two years, after which it died a natural and far from regrettable death.

The event of that year 1910 was the Frohman Repertory Season at the Duke of York's. Charles Frohman, the shrewdest of theatre men, had been impressed by the success of Shaw and the other dramatists of the Court Theatre, and decided to give them a real chance under Granville Barker's direction. The theatre chosen was in good standing with the public, but it had drawbacks for repertory which no one seemed to realize until after the opening. These might have been overcome if only one of the first three or four plays had drawn the town, and carried the rest of the bill by frequent performance. But neither Galsworthy's Justice nor Barker's The Madras House, still less Shaw's Misalliance, could do this; and Barrie's plays, which were more popular, formed a double bill. The success problem confronted the repertory management as grimly as any other, and after a few weeks Pinero's old play Trelawney of the Wells was brought in to save the situation. By the time the venture closed, it had lost Frohman a small fortune and the newer English dramatists a good deal of credit. The drama of intellectualism and argument had been routed, and on the whole deservedly. Shaw remained, as he had been in the Court Theatre days, the only one of these writers entitled to demand of the theatre that it should be his own mouthpiece; and this by right of being a wit and a dramatist born. The rest, with their social indignation or carping, were misusing the stage and frustrating the actor and boring the audience.

I remember many things about the year 1911, including my own retirement to a cottage to write comedies, a move that coincided with a heat wave, a railroad strike, and an international crisis which threatened to blow up the world just three years too soon. My cellar-book also links this year with the framework of later life, for it was an excellent year for burgundy. In our theatre the interest of the year began early and well, for on January 30th the Reinhardt Company opened at the London Coliseum. I was there that day, and would not have been absent for the world from such an occasion. Having seen the first performance in the afternoon I saw the second in the evening, and the third next afternoon, and so on while funds and opportunity lasted. The play, if one could call it such, was an Arabian Nights entertainment founded upon the story of Noureddin and the Fair Persian: the title was Sumurun, Victor Holländer wrote the music and there was no text other than the sequence of action (one could not call it a libretto) devised by Friedrich Freska. There were several acting or miming performances in the first rank: one, obviously supreme, was that of Ernst Matray in the part of the clown. Direction was evident in every movement in every scene; and this was the work of Reinhardt, whose theatrical flair, to put it at the lowest, had contrived to make a masterpiece of its kind out of an old highly-coloured tale and a good company of mimes and some near-Eastern music. By what strange accident or providence Sumurun reached the stage of a London family vaudeville theatre, nobody could explain. It was there for several weeks and months; and one could only rejoice in it. This wordless play had taken full revenge upon the too-wordy dramatists of the Frohman season; but most of all upon their assumption that the stage must be their personal pulpit.

Later in the same year came the inferior but even more successful production of The Miracle, a spectacle devised by Karl Vollmöller to the music of Humperdinck and given at Olympia under Reinhardt's direction. This was kolossal where the Coliseum show had been merely superb. Both productions, very likely, had been conceived with the idea of making as much money as possible out of the English public, so that it could be spent on further Reinhardt ventures in Berlin. In this they succeeded, and for years afterwards the Professor (as he had now become) had complete freedom to develop the work of his companies. To The Miracle also he owed the castle of Leopoldskron, near Salzburg, built by a prince-archbishop of the seventeenth century who had banished all actors from the diocese. We shall come later to the Leopoldskron evenings which gave brilliance to the Festival in the 1920's.

1911 was also the year of Chekhov's first performance in London, and as usual the dramatic pioneer was the Stage Society, which gave The Cherry Orchard in George Calderon's translation. An audience of would-be intellectuals tittered at intervals all through the play, and had to be told by some members, including myself, to mend their manners. Next day our leading critic, William Archer, admitted with his invariable honesty that he had found the dramatist completely incomprehensible. Shaw, characteristically, entered the discussion by explaining Chekhov in purely scientific and social terms; the man, he said, was merely showing how futile the life of the bourgeoisie could be. He even threatened to write a Chekhov play himself, and later did so, to his own satisfaction, in Heartbreak House. These perplexities and obscurations were due to the simple fact that The Cherry Orchard was a work of art. It had nothing to do with the drama in which Shaw and Archer had been mainly interested, the social drama of Ibsen and his followers. Chekhov was employing naturalism as an art form in the theatre, just as Flaubert and George Moore in successive generations had employed it in their novels. Those who had understood the post-impressionism (or art naturalism) of Manet or Renoir or Cézanne should have had no difficulty in knowing what Chekhov was about. In the following year or two The Seagull and Uncle Vanya were seen, and they made clearer the dramatist's individual line and the beauty of composition that he had brought into the lifelike theatre.

Next in 1911 came the Imperial Russian Ballet, which had already triumphed in Paris. Its first appearance at Covent Garden on June 21st, the day of the summer solstice, with Nijinsky and Karsavina, was of course the event of the century so far. Diaghilev was in command, but this was still his romantic period with Pavillon d'Armide, Spectre de la Rose, Cléopatra and Les Sylphides. I shall inevitably have more to say about ballet, without pretending to any knowledge of its technique; but the importance of this coming of the Russians lay in its great widening of the theatre horizon. Here, in complete harmony, were direction, scene and costume, music and the work of stage artists who in years of schooling and longer years of experience had perfected themselves. Each one of them spent more hours in daily practice than our players of the legitimate stage spent in acting. It was possible to speak of the art of the theatre, not only as a unity which Gordon Craig had sought to make his readers comprehend, but as an accomplished fact. And here, at the end of a memorable year, is the place to pause again and look around.