1899-01-20 to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle

Printed letter signed, Daily Chronicle (25 January 1899, page 3), 2,126 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

[Friday] Jan. 20 [1899]

Sir,

In his criticism of my introduction to Mr. Martyn's plays, Mr. Archer writes that at the time of the production of Ghosts by the Independent Theatre, I was in the habit of saying every time I met him that Ibsen was a blockhead. So much is a matter of opinion in the controversy in which I am engaged with Mr. Archer, that it would be as well to be accurate about the matters of fact that are left to us.

I will therefore remind Mr. Archer that I wrote an article describing the extraordinary joy of art I had experienced at the first performance of Ghosts in Paris, and as the French performance of Ibsen’s play was antecedent to the English by, I should think, at least a couple of years, I could not at the time stated have told him, every time we met, that Ibsen was a blockhead. Not then nor at any other time did I say such a thing. My admiration for Ibsen began from the evening I heard Dr. Aveling read Ghosts, and he had not finished the opening scene when the joy of art began to kindle in me, and every new play of Ibsen’s has fanned its flame higher. It is true that I do not care for The Doll’s House, but this little eccentricity of taste need not be discussed here.

I will pass on to Mr. Archer's admiration of Mr. W. B. Yeats. "Within his limitations," he says, "Mr. Yeats is as authentic a poet as ever lived." But what a hollow way of expressing oneself! I wish that Mr. Archer had ventured to say the needful truth, that with the exception of Mr. Swinburne, Mr.Yeats is the one living poet; he would have won my entire approbation if, in addition to this, he had said that the monotonous chiming of the paragraphist about the verses of the poet of windlasses and colonial expansion, written in every kind of jargon, is beginning to caste a doubt in the minds of some few of us regarding the literary discernment of the newspapers. For it is as necessary to say this, as it is to say that the verses of The Countess Cathleen are equal to the verses of Homer, a remark of mine which Mr. Archer deprecates.

And then, in reply to my taunt that he had written no word about this divine play, the only play in the English language, always excepting Shakespeare’s, which is at once a stage play and a poetic play, Mr. Archer offers to show me in proof an article which he wrote six months ago in praise of Mr. Yeats’s tragedy. I am obliged to Mr. Archer, and shall be glad to see his article. I always read him with pleasure, and I shall be especially glad to hear why the publication of this article should have been postponed. Meanwhile I am surprised that my description of The Countess Cathleen should be cited as a reason against the representation of the play. I said that The Countess Cathleen being a creature of myth, and stripped of all circumstantial habit, is visible only to the eyes of the soul, and represents that which is most human and eternal in man. But this is also a description of Hamlet.

Hamlet is less visible to the outward eye than Don Quixote, less visible than Falstaff. As the soul waxes, the characteristic envelope declines; and the externalities that we meet in Maupassant’s stories stare us in the face, whilst the souls that Tourgueneff evokes are like the Countess Cathleen, visible only to the eyes of the soul. And it is such pure, disembodied souls as Hamlet’s and the Countess Cathleen that the stage requires for the actor and the actress to incarnate. The actor and actress can add nothing to such pure externalities as we find in Dickens and Maupassant.

Mr. Archer's second objection to the representation of Countess Cathleen is no more valid than the first. "To do the poem justice," he says, "the mounting ought to be unusually elaborate and rich.” Now I cannot find words to sufficiently repudiate this Philistine suggestion. It seems to me that of all the artistic futilities which have engaged the admiration of the nineteenth century, the most vain is stage scenery and stage costume. If the play is good you do not know what the scenery is like, if the play is bad the scenery is no recompense.

Recompense! None who is capable of appreciating an evening sky by Corot may find pleasure in a back cloth. Think of the mountain range, the cornfield, above all, of the orchard in blossom, which cost three thousand pounds! And think of the painted wings, the stems of trees, ferns and rocks, which we have to look upon when we go to the theatre.

In the so-called dark ages the multitude expressed its taste in stained glass. The multitude in our streets express theirs in back cloths and Mr. Alexander’s calves in flesh-colored stockings. I ask you, Sir, and the readers of your newspaper if I am wrong in saying that it is impossible to imagine more degrading spectacles than these? Then the actresses — the intolerable parade of their Parisian dresses, and the parade of their necks and arms! Are these things right? Such enticements should be confined to the ballroom; on the stage they are improper.

Only a rehearsal of a play is endurable in these days. At rehearsals we are spared both costume and scenery, necks and calves; I have been at pains to observe if the absence of these things affect the appreciation of the play. Not the least. Those who attend the rehearsals at Covent Garden enjoy the opera more than those who come in the evening. Without the authority of Wagner no one would venture to defend scenery and costume; and Wagner liked these things because he was blind to the beauties of painting and sculpture. Did he not say that in the art of the music-drama the scenery would take the place of the picture gallery, and the attitudes of the actors and the actresses of the sculpture gallery?

I have no wish to seem paradoxical. My desire always is to tell the truth, my truth, and I will ask you, Sir, who have seen it, if there exists on earth a more hideous spectacle than Klingsor's garden? Or maybe the most hideous scene in all the world is the first scene of the third act, that cottage, Sir, you remember it, covered with, red creeper, and behind it the back cloth representing the flowering meadow, that flowering meadow so beautiful in the music, so vile in the paint.

The setting of the first act of The Valkyrie is an interior, and is therefore inoffensive. It is not until we get to the last act that the scenery comes between us and the idea. Oh, that ride in the flies, to which Wagner attached as much importance as to the ride in the orchestra! And those terrible gas jets, flaring up in the midst of the most melodious music in the world!

To appreciate any scenery — in scenery, the best is the worst — I am quite sure that it is necessary to be blind to the beauty of Corot and of Turner; and I trust that Mr. Yeats shares these opinions, and will have his play performed without scenery and without costumes, confining these things to their proper place, the program.

Regarding Mr. Martyn's plays, Mr. Archer and I differ even more widely than we differ about Mr. Yeats's plays. He looks upon The Heather Field as one of a whole drawerful of meritorious plays which would do very well for the fifteenth or the twentieth production of the New Century Theatre, had the enterprise reached that stage of its existence, but which it would be absurd to throw into prominence as the third or fourth production."

Alas, that Mr. Archer should say such things! Has he forgotten — at times it is convenient to have a short memory — that little one-act play which preceded Admiral Guinea? Lest it should be thought that I exaggerate, I will ask Mr. Archer to have the little play published, so that the Press may have an opportunity of judging its merits.

But no, let this play be waived, let us consider instead The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a play which Mr. Archer looks upon as fondly as Mr. Clement Scott looks upon School. Let us compare it with The Heather Field, let us place them side by side.

Mr. Archer’s description of The Heather Field is not a very sympathetic one, but it will do: —

The Heather Field is a curious study in morbid psychology. An Irish landlord, born with that craving for an ideal, unattainable beauty which is the note of the Celtic spirit in its recent literary manifestations, is ill-advised enough to marry a worldly, shallow-souled woman, who neither loves nor understands him. As a refuge from his domestic unhappiness, he takes to reclaiming a heather moor on his estate, sinks fortunes of borrowed capital in the scheme, which becomes his monomania, "hears voices, magical voices, on the mountain side, and in his heart the sound of silver harpstring," and finally, when the heather breaks out again over the reclaimed land, goes raving mad in a symbolical "concatenation according."

The play could hardly be described more perfunctorily, yet it is even in Mr. Archer's words a distinctly interesting and literary subject for a play.

We will put The Second Mrs.Tanqueray to the same test.

A widower with a grown-up daughter decides to marry a woman who has had, and is known to have had, a number of lovers. He takes his wife to live with him in the country, but she is not well received by the neighbours, and complains of the boredom of life; and to relieve her boredom some of her old friends are asked to come to stay with them. But she is not interested in them — they bore her as much as the others. The episode that the play turns upon is that the young Englishman who wishes to marry her daughter-in-law is one of her own old lovers, and the shock is so great that she goes upstairs and cuts her throat.

I may be wrong; we live to be wrong; I have no wish to consider my opinion superior to Mr. Archer’s; but I cannot but think that the plot of Mr. Pinero's play is nonsense, and that it would be impossible to write a great play upon such a plot.

In the last paragraph of his article, Mr. Archer seems to me to step boldly into the shoes of Mr. Clement Scott. The only theatre, he says, which, with any show of reasonableness, might undertake the production of either The Countess Cathleen or The Heather Field would be an "experimental theatre," and he does not hesitate to say that if he were on the "Reading committee of an English Théâtre-Français or Burgtheater" he would "ruthlessly blackball all works of this class until they had proved, in the experimental theatre, their power of appealing to an intelligent public."

Mr. Archer must know that the public was, is, and always will be, a filthy cur, feeding upon offal, which the duty of every artist is to kick in the ribs every time the brute crosses his path. But it appears that “a richly-endowed theatre might set apart certain evenings or afternoons for experimental performances confessedly appealing to the aesthetic curiosity rather than to the robust dramatic sense of the main body of the public.”

Now, I do not understand Mr. Archer at all. For to do this is surely the aim of the ordinary commercial manager. What plays would Mr. Archer produce? Not Ibsen. Six performances always exhausted his public, and since he said that he was more interested in poetry than in reformations, he is altogether neglected.

Why endow a theatre which appeals to the robust dramatic sense of the public any more than endow a shoemaker? To endow a theatre that appeals only to the aesthetic curiosity is a comprehensible request; the taste of the public regarding the pictures that are bought for the National Gallery is not consulted; why, therefore, should the taste of the public be consulted regarding the plays to be produced by an endowed theatre? To endow a theatre that the public endows is surely superfluous.

I am, yours truly,

GEORGE MOORE