HROSWITHA
Writing about Hroswitha’sCallimachus, as performed by the Art Theatre, I touched upon the unintentionally comic aspect of a tenth-century miracle play to a twentieth-century audience. Naturally this is not an aspect of the matter which recommends itself to a lady who is about to publish a translation of Hroswitha’s plays with a preface by a cardinal, and in a published letter she protests that the fun which the Art Theatre got out ofCallimachuswas not justified by the text. Let me hasten to acquit the Art Theatre of the misdemeanour attributed to it by Miss Christopher St. John. There was nothing intentionally funny in its performance. The players acted their parts with all possible simplicity and sincerity. The smiling was all on our side of the footlights. But I said that the smile was “reverent,” because of the sacred nature of the subject-matter.
This opens up the question of the frame of mind in which we moderns ought to approach works of “early” art. The first effort of a critic—we must all be agreed about that—should be to put himself, imaginatively, in the artist’s place. He has to try to think himself back into the time, the place, thecircumstances of the work, and into the artist’s temperament, intentions, and means of execution. We look at the Madonna of Cimabue in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and our first impulse is to find her ungainly, uncouth, without spiritual significance. It is only by thinking ourselves back among the Florentines of the thirteenth century that we can understand and appreciate Cimabue’s appeal. But consider how difficult—or, rather, impossible—that thinking-back process is. Consider what we have to unlearn. We have to make ourselves as though we had never seen the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; much more than that, we have mentally to wipe out six centuries of human history. Manifestly it cannot be done; we can never see the Cimabue picture as Cimabue himself saw it or as his Florentine contemporaries saw it. We have to try; but what we shall at best succeed in attaining is a palimpsest, the superimposition of new artistic interpretation on the old. And when we say that classics are immortal, we only mean that they are capable of yielding a perpetual series of fresh palimpsests, of being perpetually “hatched again and hatched different.” We cannot see Dante’sCommediaas Dante or Dante’s first readers saw it. For us its politics are dead and its theology grotesque; it lives for us now by its spirituality, its majesty, and the beauty of its form. But with works that are not classics, works that are not susceptible of a perpetual rebirth, the case is evenharder. They are inscriptions that we can no longer decipher; we cannot think ourselves, for a moment, back in the mind of the author. They have become for us curios.
And that is what Hroswitha’sCallimachushas become: a curio. How can we put ourselves back in the mind of a nun in the Convent of Gandersheim in the age of Otho the Great? I say “we.” For nuns perhaps (having, I assume, a mentality nearer the tenth century than the rest of us) may take a fair shot at it. So, too, may cardinals, whose august mentality I do not presume to fathom. But it is certain that common worldly men, mere average playgoers, cannot do it.
But, it will be objected, are we not, or most of us, still Christians? Are we not still capable of understanding prayers, miracles, saintliness, raising from the dead, “conversion,” and all the other subject-matter ofCallimachus? To be sure we are; hence my “reverent” smile. If Christianity were dead (or, as in Swift’s ironical pamphlet, abolished by Act of Parliament)Callimachuswould be simply meaningless for us, a nothing, mere mummery. It is not the matter of the play that provokes our smile; but its form. The “fun,” says Miss St. John, is “not justified by the text.” She is thinking of the matter, abounding in piety and tending to edification; but in point of fact the language, the “text”—at any rate in theatrical representation (far be it from me to prejudice her forthcoming book)—hasits comic side. Callimachus’s abrupt declaration of his passion to Drusiana and the terms of her rejection of him are both, to a modern audience, irresistibly comic. They are not meaningless, but they are delightfully impossible: they are love-making as imagined by a nun, the very person whoex hypothesiknows nothing about it. You have, in fact, precisely the same delicious absurdity, proceeding from an imagination necessarily uninstructed by experience, as you get in Miss Daisy Ashford’s book. (Several critics have made this comparison. I am really chagrined not to have thought of it myself. But it should show Miss St. John that I am, at any rate, not the only one who foundCallimachuscomic.)
Further, and quite apart from the exquisite naïveties of its text, the form of the play is so childlike and bland as to be really funny. The players, when not engaged in the action, stand motionless in a semi-circle. Changes of scene are indicated by two performers crossing the stage in opposite directions—a genuine cricket “over.” Characters are understood to be stricken with death when they composedly lie down on their backs. Others trot in pairs round Drusiana’s prostrate form and you understand they are journeying to her tomb. All this, of course, is merely primitive “convention.” Could we put ourselves back into Hroswitha’s time, it would pass unnoticed. In our own time, with a different set of “conventions,” that make some attempt at imitation of reality, wenaturally laugh at these old conventions. We laugh, but we are interested; our curiosity is being catered for, we like to see what the old conventions were. The curio, in short, is amusing in the fullest sense of the term.
And it leaves us with a desire to know more about Hroswitha, the “white rose” of the tenth century (if that be really the meaning of her name). Perhaps the Cardinal’s preface will tell us more. One remark occurs. It seems a little significant that a nun should have written all her plays on the one theme of chastity. It must have been an obsession with her, this virtue to which, as Renan said, nature attaches so little importance. And, in hunting her theme, this nun does not scruple to pursue it to the strangest places. She even puts courtesans upon the stage and houses of ill-fame. How on earth did the good lady imagine these unconventual topics? The question suggests some puzzles about the psychology of nuns. But one only has to seeCallimachusto know that Hroswitha must have been as pure as snow, or as a white rose, as innocently ignorant, in fact, of what she was writing about as Miss Daisy Ashford when she described an elopement.