ZOLA'S 'TH^RESE RAQUIN ' 117

of the very essence of Art commends itself, as I
understand, to a little school of criticism, or of
dogmatism, which has now found voice among us ;
and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of
the capacity of its professors for critical preach-
ment.

(Academy, 24th October 1891.)



'MACBETH' AND IRVING

I QUESTION if Macbeth can ever, in the hands of
any tragedian, make the same mark as Hamlet.
Hamlet, as far as the opportunities for the display of
the one actor are concerned, might almost have
been written by an actor's playwright of our day,
bent on securing prominence for the ' star.' Macbeth
claims little of our sympathy. Most of us wonder
more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it
is a point in Henry Irving's art, as displayed in this
play, that he brings into such high relief all that
Macbeth had of noble, or of the remains of noble :
reverence and awe ; indignation at crimes that
seemed to him baser, because they were done for
pettier ends, than his own ; admiration of courage
in another, and of character more resolute than his ;
hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in
the taking of innocent blood. Macbeth's attitude
before the prayer of the grooms ; his righteous satire
' your spirits shine through you ' on the hired

118



'MACBETH' AND IRVING 119

murderers ; his invocation to his wife ; his almost
tender and pitying warning to Macduff

' But get thee back : my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already'

all these things show one or other of the qualities
that are good in him. But other things, of course,
showing the quite other qualities that have given
Macbeth a name, are more conspicuous and abun-
dant : at all events are more upon the surface ; and
the art is great that knows how to dwell on the
sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does
much to modify the popular conception.

It may be true, of course, that the main thought
of Irving in Macbeth is to show the deterioration of
character through one crime that brings another ;
but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual
process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to
show something of the higher nature with which the
character began. I think I note also, in Irving's
Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief
in the supernatural, but in the power of the super-
natural over him. The prophecy of the weird
voices is more than ever a destiny. His crimes are
done under a spell. He is moved to them from
without, by a something not himself, making for
Evil.



120 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

And the hold that this force from without, this
supernatural power, this sense of destiny, this some-
thing not himself, making for Evil, has upon him,
divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of
the play, from such as his own hired murderers.
Not that these, indeed, are set before us, by Shake-
speare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in
their profession ; but as men rendered desperate :
the one

' Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world ' :

the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,

' So weary with disasters, tugg'd with fortune,
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend it or be rid on 't.

Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail
to indicate for the play itself indicates it a hundred
times how much Macbeth is separated from these,
originally ; but it does need some such a deep under-
standing of the character as seems to be Irving's,
to indicate, as time goes on, the gradual sinking to
that level of theirs the fact that the distance that
divided the one from the others at the time that the
one would ponder regretfully that he ' could not say
"Amen"' when the grooms 'said "God bless us,'"



'MACBETH' AND IRVING 121

had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when
Macbeth's first greeting to an arriving messenger
must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than

' The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon '

words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated
angers of impending frenzy and when his final and
bloody resolution

' Yet I will try the last,'

is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin
to the murderers' own. And it is at least a sugges-
tive and worthy, if not at every point a complete,
stage performance that can display the half-repent-
ing pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last,
and the passages from crime to crime by which the
transition is accomplished.

(Academy, 2jrd December 1876.)



'THE DUCHESS OF MALFT

THE Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and,
it is to be feared, displeased many, by its production
of Mr. Poel's version of The Duchess of Malfi. But
it is the ill-advised whom on one account or another
it has now vexed ; it is the wisest whom it has at
last done something to satisfy. I said 'at last'
That was ungrateful. For, once, at least, before, the
Independent Theatre eschewing mere eccentricity
and the 'experimental' drama (a pretty word, very,
for the dull or the unseemly) once before was it
occupied with work of genius and high literary art,
or with work at all events by a writer whose genius,
here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not
give us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid
realism of M. Zola?

And now, after a regime more or less of the
experimental and unnecessary, we have again a
great man's work. The Independent Theatre has

once more realised that to be revolutionary is not
122



'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI' 123

to be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster
Webster, it is true, with the lime-light turned
on at the appropriate moment ; Webster with a
skirt-dance ; Webster with a measure of scenic
effect, dexterously shocking, or dexterously enter-
taining, as the case may be, to the modern taste.
But still a classic a giant in conception and writ-
ing a strong tower in comparison with a puny
earth-work. Excellently has Mr. Swinburne said
of him, 'There is no poet morally nobler than
Webster.' Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that
The Duchess of Malfi is ' a masterpiece excelled only
by King Lear' And, if I take down my volumes of
Lamb's Specimens^ I find that, in a little footnote,
Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive
when he descants upon this play. ' To move a
horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay
upon fear as much as it can bear . . . this only a
Webster can do.' And again, contrasting inferior
writers with this potent if imperfect master, ' They
know not how a soul is capable of being moved ;
their terrors want dignity ; their affrightments are
without decorum.'

But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults
that were of his time, along indeed with faults, or
deficiencies, that were his own. Among the latter



124 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

I would note some absence of clearness in exposi-
tion. The relation of character to character, the
how and wherefore of the minor events these
things are not invariably made plain : Webster
himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed credit-
ably through a searching examination in them.
And among the faults, or accidents, if you will,
of his time, were one need hardly say it, but
that it affects his acceptability upon the modern
stage the permitted coarseness, the absence of re-
ticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify
and define ; and, in mechanical arrangement, the
frequent shifting from scene to scene within the com-
pass of a single act a point in which no English
dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me,
went wholly right, until the trick had been learned
from the French masters of construction of our own
time.

Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the
absence of additions, has dealt with the deficiencies
of Webster's epoch with judgment and tenderness.
As far as it is possible to be so, the piece is now
what on the playbill it is asserted to be 're-
arranged for the modern stage.' And if the modern
stage should turn out, after these initial perform-
ances of the new version, not quite willing to have



'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI' 125

it, that will be not so much on account of the
irrepressible horrors the modern stage has no deep-
seated aversion to them as on account of the limited
measure of interest which that stage displays in the
achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with
almost baffling themes, in the vigour and affluence
of literary imagination and style. The similes of
Webster pregnant, and less far-fetched than much
of the imagery of his contemporaries are rather lost
upon a public and upon players who account infla-
tion to be poetry and familiarity to be wit. ' Cover
her face ; mine eyes dazzle ; she died young,' is one
among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer
of stately simplicity born writer, rather than play-
wright requires to be heard by those to whom
the suggestive is sufficient : requires, in a word,
to be met half-way along his road. Then, again,
though there are hints of lightness, there is no
touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures so
characteristic of the Italian temperament a tem-
perament never more inventive than when spurred
on by the motive of cruelty when these are tried
upon the long - suffering Duchess when crazy
folk yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand
that seems to her dead and cold is proffered
to her where she expected a live one an audi-



126 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

ence without imagination, without historical know-
ledge, versed only in the commonplace and
the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes in-
different.

Much of Mr. Poel's best work went into the
training of an intelligent company. His rehearsing
ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness
of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore him-
self with dignity and ease as the Cardinal, through
whose influence for such appears to be Mr. Poel's
reading of the situation the forces of the Church
in its bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition,
are brought to bear upon the ill-fated Duchess.
Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled a
great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified
presence, a rich voice completely at her service, and
an unusual sense of the simplicity of pathos, was,
as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory
figure. And Miss Hall Caine filled out to com-
pleteness, by her intelligence and sunny, sympathetic
style, the small part of Cariola. Some people
thought the ' Dance of Death,' as Mr. Arthur Dillon
a learned, helpful student of the time had cleverly
devised it, was too horrible : it had to me the fas-
cination at once of the beautiful and the macabre.
Horrors there were in the performance, and in the



'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI' 127

piece, of necessity ; but the Independent Theatre
sometimes too little in touch with the main-stream
of English life and thought may well permit itself
to give a piece in which Literature is burdened with
horrors. Has it not more than once indulged its
supporters with things in which horrors are un-
burdened with Literature ?

(Academy, 2Qth October 1892.)



REMBRANDT

IT is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true
one, and the saying is welcome to surprise the
academic and conventional that if the painted
work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his
drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings
that he wrought during some forty years of labour
would assert for him, amongst all capable judges,
a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now
admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this
I would underrate for a moment the skill of the
pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who
plays with subtle hue, the master of the material
which is applied to prepared canvas ; but that if one
asks oneself, ' What are the qualities, really, which in
any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it
his particular and permanent station ? ' one finds
shortly that one's answer has to be the following,
or something like it : ' The qualities are an alert
freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an indi-
.vidual vision of the world, and the knowledge how

128



REMBRANDT 129

best to wield the instrument by which that vision
is expressed.'

In the case of a writer, language is the instrument,
and Sterne's or Moliere's perception and sensitive-
ness are made evident in words. In the case of a
pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or
water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil
or the instrument may be that which was Rem-
brandt's more than any other's : it may be the needle
of the etcher.

I hope that, in my enumeration of the qualities
of intellect and craftsmanship that make for excel-
lence in creative Literature and in pictorial Design,
I have cut the ground from under the feet of those
who advocate the work of craftsmen merely those
who consider that in technique lies the end as well
as the beginning of success. Even to the most
casual of the students of the Arts to the most
superficial observer of the means whereby the
several performers may produce their effects, in
story, drawing, print it can scarcely be necessary
to say that a command of technique must be de-
manded by the severe and accurate judge. But
the genius of a man of the first order a Goethe,
Coleridge, Balzac, Rembrandt, Turner is, as it
seems to me, misunderstood altogether, if the flexi-

I



130 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

bility and freshness of spirit and the originality of
vision are not remembered and praised when we
praise too the excellent command of technical
means. And in the case of Rembrandt, the char-
acter and charm of whose three hundred etchings
are the theme of my discourse, the first thing to
take account of is that we have to deal not only
with a conjurer of the brush and a magician of the
needle, but with a deep soul. An time d'ttite that
is the true phrase for it : a being not above human
faults, but above average human excellence ; a
reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye
for the large lines of simple landscape ; an artist
who, with masculine perception of the import of
material things, was alive, constantly and keenly,
also to the concerns of the spirit ; a judge of char-
acter, who understood and who dissected all that
he portrayed ; a man of feeling, who rendered to
the full the pathos of age, of suffering, and
of Death who somehow rendered also, as in the
wistful portrait of the Prince of Orange, the incom-
municable pathos of Youth.

Over all Rembrandt's work, from the beginning
to the end of it, as much on canvas as in drawing,
as much in drawing as in etching, there reigns an
absolute sincerity. It was himself that he expressed.



REMBRANDT 131

Warped by no prejudice, modified by no fashion,
his art, during the generation and a half in which
he did his joyful labour in the midst of personal
triumph, in the midst, too, of personal disaster
recorded his own unaffected perception of the out-
ward world and his own profound vision of the
souls and the experiences of men. To study his
work, therefore, is, if we have the wit, to have the
opportunity to glean from it that which it is open
to us to glean always from the greatest Classics
the richer harvest of a familiarity not alone with
technical achievement, but with the great, deep way
of apprehending Life and the world.

From youth to age, with art delightful and
supreme, Rembrandt expressed himself in Etching.
One of his first prints the subject known to many
by Wilson's title of it, ' Head of a Woman lightly
etched ' is the earliest of his known portraits of
his mother ; and that shows already mastery of
character and mastery of line, as the lady, with the
pardonable vanity of the handsome, the pardonable
self-appreciation of one who was scarcely less a
woman of the world because she was bourgeoise by
station, smiles her sagacious, kindly, genial smile,
and lives with Whistler's ' Portrait of his Mother,'
with Holbein's ' Erasmus,' with Latour's pastels that



132 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

glow sober yet vivid on the walls of the Museum
of Saint-Quentin. It is a sketch, and consummate.
His very last print so it is generally accepted
is that ' Woman with the Arrow ' which, unless the
place be given to the print often called ' Negresse
couchte,' is the most tolerable of his nudities. It is
not faultless in draughtsmanship ; or, if it is fault-
less in draughtsmanship, then how deficient was the
model in perfection of form ! But, in a fine impres-
sion and in Etching, if the impression be not fine,
the work does not exist how alive is the figure !
The flesh, how supple ! The pose the grace of the
faulty. The light, how glowing, and the shade, how
velvety! You forgive it may be rather that you
scarcely notice the inexplicable mixture of realism
with the classic. The side of a bed, the young
thing sitting on it : Degas might have 'conceived
the figure thus. But it is not pure realism, for she
holds an arrow suggests some light allegory, as
much, save for her imperfections, as some nudity of
Titian's or Tintoret's just that touch of the Classic,
that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt's tribute
to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more
elegant, than any that it was the privilege, generally,
of the art of Amsterdam to show.

Between that early etching, the first of his mother's



REMBRANDT 133

portraits, and this final one, his last record of the
body, to which he has imparted a slimmer charm
than the charm that belonged unquestionably to
Hendrickje Stoffels, the young and sympathetic
companion of his later years recorded, opulent and
somewhat sensuous, in the great Edinburgh picture,
the range of Rembrandt, in about three hundred
prints, is almost inconceivably great. Several of
his plates, and these not really the least attractive,
are, like the rare sheet of studies, with the portrait
of Rembrandt himself (No. 82 in the catalogue of
Mr. Middleton-Wake), so to put it, thumb-nail
sketches as he passed upon his way and was struck
and interested by this or that countenance, this or
that gesture. Many deal with Sacred Subjects,
and invariably with a directness, a homeliness, one
might say almost, that is his alone. It would have
been impossible so to have conceived the incidents
of Bible Story if Rembrandt had not so profoundly
believed in them. The conventional and perfunctory
are altogether banished. And though, for reasons
that the present place would not perhaps be quite
the fittest for dwelling on, the Sacred Subjects of
this great Dutch master do not attract or charm as
the portraits and the landscapes do, there is yet in
them a world of material for serious study : in them



134 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

invention and imagination enrich a treatment
fortified already by closeness of observation. His
mind is stored ; his spirit is devout. In the ' Death
of the Virgin ' he takes advantage of tradition
gives us therefore not only St. Joseph moved at his
loss, St. Luke with hand on wrist as feeling the pulse
of the dying, but (as Mr. Middleton-Wake reminds
us) a company of Apostles, brought miraculously,
legend says, from distant missions ; and, above, are
angels and cherubim. A religious composition
better known to the public, is the ' Christ healing the
Sick,' or, as it is called often, ' The Hundred-Guilder
Print.' It got that latter name because, during
that portion of his life in which Rembrandt was
popular, the then substantial sum of a hundred
guilders was wont to be obtained for it, when, out
of Rembrandt's studio, an impression of it was sold.
Its intense reality and homely pathos the qualities
in it which have influenced, so greatly, later and
now living etchers, like Legros and William Strang
gave it immediate value. And since those days
a fine impression has always had its price, though
it should be said here that the difference in money
value, established more particularly in our own
generation, between a fine impression of the most
rare ' First State ' of this plate and the less rare but



REMBRANDT 135

often as desirable ' Second,' is a fantastic difference,
dependent only upon relative difficulty of acquisi-
tion. Thank goodness, even now a twenty-pound
note will buy sometimes a most desirable Rem-
brandt etching. A couple of hundred guineas is
required to buy a fine impression of the Second
State of the 'Hundred Guilder'; and of a First
State, could it come into the market, there is every
reason for knowing that two thousand pounds would
be about the ransom.

In various branches of his practice, Rembrandt's
fame is about equally dependent on picture, draw-
ing, and original print ; but I take leave to ask the
reader to impress upon his mind that in one branch,
the branch of Landscape, that is not so at all. Lord
Lansdowne's ' Mill,' a famous landscape at Cassel,
and a few other landscapes scattered about collec-
tions private and public, could not, however un-
deniable their art and however complete their charm,
secure for Rembrandt that exalted place amongst
the makers of Landscape which the drawings give,
and which is given yet more by the etchings. It
may be asked, naturally enough, 'Why were Rem-
brandt's painted landscapes so few his mastery
being so great? ' The answer is, that like our own
Gainsborough's, a century later, they were painted,



136 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

most of them, for his own personal delight. The
painted landscape of Rembrandt could not have
been warmly appreciated by a generation that made
difficult the life of Hobbema, and that extended
welcome less to Wynants and De Koninck than to
the Dutchmen who had become Italianised in theme
and treatment. How, then, about the drawings and
the etchings ? Well, the truth is, with these it
mattered little. The drawings were generally
masterly brief studies. In the case of the etchings
even, hours, not weeks, for the most part a day
and not a month had been bestowed on the per-
formance. For Rembrandt, with at least some other
sources of income, it was enough to have had the
delight of execution ; and then, here and there a friend
the Burgomaster Six perhaps, or Uytenbogaert, the
Receiver-General to the States of Holland would
want an impression or so. There was the little
sketch ' Six's Bridge ' a decisive, plain-sailing, by
no means particularly picturesque record of the
wooden way whose name is associated with Rem-
brandt's lifelong friend. There is the ' Goldweigher's
Field ' his estate, rather : the estate of Uyten-
bogaert, lying a few miles from Amsterdam ; its
pavilion and ornamental water, the surrounding
lands, the modest, heathy uplands, the trees and



REMBRANDT 137

towers, a bird's-eye view, a very panorama of slightly
undulating plain that stretches to the Zuyder Zee.
Of Rembrandt's etched landscapes which are rare
generally this is one of the rarer, one of the more
important. Art like that does not captivate at just
the first glance at it ; but, with knowledge, comes a
deep appreciation of the vision and the chronicle.

Two other landscapes I should wish to name as
at least the equals of this one, and both of them,
it may be, are easier to receive, easier for the little-
trained eye to enjoy promptly. One is the ' Large
Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn ' ;
the other is the ' Landscape with a Ruined Tower.'
The first is a record of sunshine ; the second, of the
more dramatic weather that threatens storm. The
first is the more intricate. Little in keeping with
the fashions of our moment, in the art of landscape,
is it to present within the limits of a single composi-
tion a view so varied and so elaborately wrought.
But Rembrandt, even more than Turner, could
achieve without any loss of unity of impression the
presentation or suggestion of every fact of the
scene ; and the piece remains ' modern,' though a
Classic. The ' Landscape with a Ruined Tower '
broad, decisive, concentrated is, in a sense, an
anticipation of the method of Constable : the interest



138 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

lying less in formal elegance of line or placid
light than in the strong realisation of the forces of
Nature a vivid broad illumination and an ominous
shadow, and the expression of these exalting some-
how the features of an everyday land, as emotion
transfigures a face. The ' tower,' the close observer
may inform me thinking of the title is not
' ruined ' ; for here is its domed roof. Yes, but the
domed roof is in the First State only, and that is so
rare that it is doubtful if it had ever been examined
by the cataloguer who bestowed upon the etching