The Defendant

or How Adam 'Ad 'em.' For who would trouble to bring to perfection a
work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write
'Othello' if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, 'Mr. Shakespeare
is fit for something better than writing tragedies'?

The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is
especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art,
glorified by Aristophanes and Moliere, have sunk into such contempt may
be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the
astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which
marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to
the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those
who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they
will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary
art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the
phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it
must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its
lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have
all the comedy emotions of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or 'Northanger
Abbey,' but if their actual conversation were reported, it would
possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by
his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or Pere Goriot, but
if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the
fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must
consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these
emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern
insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the
dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense.
If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in
life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the
morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the
youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and
men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it
is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with
every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of
joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the
black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the
literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and
artistic ambition is the form called 'farce'--or its wilder shape in
pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house,
there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the
possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder
whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or
sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the
candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a
potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this
nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of
pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said
(with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may
be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly
symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and
architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole
affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow
apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect
would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the
harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are
in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an
actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing
different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into
the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement
of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck
into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase
of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical
art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their
houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an
aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the
doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the
staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all
the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a
trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to
regulate one's life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.

The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but
we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of
transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men
of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it
under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic
literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little
knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although
two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the 'Frogs'
as on the wisdom of the 'Republic.' It is all a mean shame of joy. When
we come out from a performance of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' we feel
as near to the stars as when we come out from 'King Lear.' For the joy
of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than
wisdom, their love is stronger than death.

The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what
abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved
for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not
even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to
exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the
bells!


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A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY