THE PUPPETS
At the corner of a Bloomsbury square I found my path blocked by a little crowd of children who were watching a puppet show of an unusual kind. The usual kind, of course, isPunch and Judy, which has become a degenerate thing, with its puppets grasped in the operator’s hand; these puppets were wired, in the grand manner of the art, and had a horse and cart, no less, for their transport. The show, though lamentably poor in itself—the puppets merely danced solemnly round and round without any attempt at dramatic action—was rich in suggestion. Do we not all keep a warm corner of our hearts for the puppets, if only for their venerable antiquity and their choice literary associations? Why, in the grave pages of theLiterary Supplementlearned archæologists have lately been corresponding about the Elizabethan “motions,” and Sir William Ridgeway has traced the puppets back to the Syracuse of Xenophon’s day, and told us how that author in his “Symposium” makes a famous Syracusan puppet player say that he esteems fools above other men because they are those who go to see his puppets (νευρόσπαστα). My own recollectionsconnect Xenophon with parasangs rather than puppets, but I am glad to be made aware of this honourable pedigree, though I strongly resent the Syracusan’s remark about the amateurs of puppets. I share the taste of Partridge, who “loved a puppet show of all the pastimes upon earth,” and I sympathize with the showman in “Tom Jones” who could tolerate all religions save that of the Presbyterians, “because they were enemies to puppet shows.” And so I lingered with the children at the corner of the Bloomsbury square.
Puppets, someone has said, have this advantage over actors: they are made for what they do, their nature conforms exactly to their destiny. I have seen them in Italy performing romantic drama with a dash and apanachethat no English actor in my recollection (save, perhaps, the late Mr. Lewis Waller) could rival. Actors, being men as well as actors, and therefore condemned to effort in acting, if only the effort of keeping down their consciousness of their real, total self, cannot attain to this clear-cut definiteness and purity of performance. But the wire-puller must be a true artist, his finger-tips responsive to every emotional thrill of the character and everynuanceof the drama; indeed, the ideal wire-puller is the poet himself, expressing himself through the motions of his puppets and declaiming his own words for them.
It was with this thought in my mind that I ventured, when Mr. Hardy first publishedTheDynasts, to suggest that the perfect performance of that work would be as a puppet show, with Mr. Hardy reading out his own blank verse. I pointed out the suggestive reference to puppets in the text. One of the Spirits describes the human protagonists as “mere marionettes,” and elsewhere you read:—
Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gearAs puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.
Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gearAs puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.
Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gearAs puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.
Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear
As puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.
Further, at the very core of Mr. Hardy’s drama is the idea that these Napoleons and Pitts and Nelsons are puppets of the Immanent Will. If ever there was a case for raising a puppet show to the highest literary dignity, this was one.
But it was all in vain. Either Mr. Hardy was too modest to declaim his own verse in public, or else the actors pushed in, as they will wherever they can, and laid hands on as much of his work as they could manage. And so we had Mr. Granville Barker’s version early in the war and only the other day the performance at Oxford, and I have nothing to say against either, save that they were, and could only be, extracts, episodes, fragments, instead of the great epic-drama in its panoramic entirety. A puppet show could embrace the whole, and one voice declaiming the poem would to be sure not give the necessary unity of impression—that singleness must be first of all in the work itself—but would incidentally emphasize it.
The puppet presentation would, however, do much more than this. It would clarify, simplify,attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is, of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living, bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact, realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in their imagination. There is the notorious instance of Charles Lamb, with his objection to seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies acted. He complained that the gay and witty Richard III. was inevitably materialized and vulgarized by the actor. Lamb, as we all know, was capricious, and indeed made a virtue of caprice, but what do you say to so serious and weighty a critic as Professor Raleigh? Talking about the Shakespearean boy-actors of women, he commits himself to this:—“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare has not suffered more than he has gained by the genius of later-day actresses, who bring into the plays a realism and a robust emotion which sometimes obscure the sheer poetic value of the author’s conception. The boys were no doubt very highly trained, and amenable to instruction; so that the parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which served as a transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own talent and passions by those whoare its ministers. With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic drama died in England, and it has had no second life.”
A little “steep,” is it not? Logically it is an objection to all acting of poetic drama. Boy-players of girls are only a half-way house. The transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos would be still more transparent if it were merely the medium of the printed page. Now this much is certain. Shakespeare conceived his plays, whatever poetry or wit or pathos he put into them, in terms of men and women (not boy-women). The ideal performance of Shakespeare would be by the men and women who grew in Shakespeare’s imagination. But they, unfortunately, do not exist in flesh and blood, but only in that imagination, and, to bring them on the stage, you have to employ ready-made men and women, who at the very best can only be rough approximations to the imaginary figures. In this sense it is not a paradox but a simple commonplace to say that no one has ever seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage, or ever will see. And the greater the “genius” of the actor, the more potent his personality—though he will be the darling of the majority, thirsting for realism, the immediate sense of life—the more will he get between the poet and imaginative students like Lamb and Professor Raleigh, who want their poetry inviolate.
This seems like a digression, but is really to my purpose. Flesh-and-blood actors we shall alwayshave with us; they will take good care of that themselves. But for the imaginative souls who are for compromise, who are for half-way houses and look back fondly to the boy-players, I would say: Why not try the puppets? These also present a “transparent medium” for the author’s expression. And, further, the purely “lyrical” passages in which Shakespeare abounds and which seem so odd in the realism of the human actors (e.g., the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death) would gain immensely by being recited by the poet (or wire-puller). A puppet-showHamletmight be an exquisite experiment in that highest art whose secret is suggestion.