these same actors might not have managed to acquit themselves with better credit, if their natural efforts to act had not been paralyzed by the apparent tyranny of an inhibitory stage-director. There is, of course, a time-tested formula of practice which assures us that all eyes will be focussed on the "star" of a performance if no other actor is allowed to move a muscle while the "star" is active on the stage; but John Barrymore is already an artist of such excellence that he does not need at all to resort to this mechanical method of focussing attention on himself. I have always known him, personally, to be a very modest man; and I cannot believe that he has consciously resorted to this silly subterfuge for apparently exalting himself above his fellow-actors. I am inclined, therefore, to assign the blame for the faulty stage-direction of this play to Arthur Hopkins, who has been willing to assume, upon the printed program, his due share of responsibility for an undertaking that is emphatically inartistic. Mr. Hopkins has long nurtured a theory that stagedirection should be "simple." It is easy enough to simplify" the art of acting, if all save one of the performers are forbidden to move their legs or arms. But the sort of "simplicity" which denies a natural expression of the spontaneous impulsions of life itself is not a thing to be desired. 66 But, though the stage-direction of Richard III is manifestly bad, the collaborative contribution of the art-director, Robert Edmond Jones, is worthy of unstinted praise. In true Elizabethan fashion, he has erected a single and permanent set, which may be al tered in a few seconds to suit the momentary exigencies of the ever-changing narrative. His successive designs are simple in conception, effective in composition, and harmonic in color; and he has handled in a masterly manner the contributory element of stage-illumination. VII THE PERMANENCE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP Henry Bernstein Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well: and this is the only answer that is necessary to critics who question the importance of technical accomplishment in art. In that decadent period which suddenly ceased to be in August, 1914, a hare-brained handful of young anarchs in all the nations that had gone to seed asserted, very noisily, that art was merely a matter of impulse and was not dependent upon craftsmanship. The first duty of the painter,— we were told, was not to learn to paint; the first duty of the writer was not to learn to write; the first duty of the musical composer was not to learn the laws of harmony and counterpoint. The cubists, the futurists, the imagists, the vorticists, one can't remember any longer the interminable list of "ists "-proclaimed that crudity was a proof of genius and that the aim of art was to be emphatically inartistic. This disease attacked the drama; and the heresy was held that the one thing that a playwright should avoid was any effort or ambition to produce a well-made play. The very phrase -" a well-made play "— was bandied about by anarchistic critics as if it were a badge of scorn. We were 66 - asked to admire The Madras House of Mr. Granville Barker the most appallingly unpopular play that has been produced in London within the memory of living men for the reason that it was inchoate and helter-skelter, like a London suburb, instead of planned and patterned, like that Lantern of the World, the high Acropolis. Even Mr. Bernard Shaw, who had made great plays and made them well- consider Candida, for instance- caught the fever, and allowed himself — in Getting Married and in Misalliance — to make two plays as badly as he could, in order to prove himself a "genius." The criticism of that now-forgotten period was marked by a jaunty impudence toward any craftsman who had ever taken pains to learn his craft. Stevenson was sneered at, because of his picked and polished prose; Raphael was ridiculed, because he knew how to draw; Tennyson was insulted, because of his unfaltering and faultless eloquence; Pinero was patted scornfully upon the head because he happened to be the ablest living master of his craft. It was assumed that, if a man had taken time and pains to learn to say things well, he could not possibly have anything to say. A respect for the traditions of the past was airily dismissed as "mid-Victorian." It was considered merely "scholarly" and "dull" for any person to remember the almost religious reverence of such a master-craftsman as Velasquez for the very tools of his trade. Poor Velasquez! he had never learned to paint carelessly and badly:- he was, therefore, not a "genius,” after all! That anarchistic period is past. The world is done with mental drunkenness and with the lassitude that comes of over-leisure. The change came when the earth was rocked with war, and nothing any more was heard except the clarion that called to battle "the army of unalterable law." Rheims was bombarded: Venice was endangered: and men who loved both Rheims and Venice learned to die for those ideals that erring little creatures used to laugh at, a little — such a little while ago. The rasping and discordant Ezra Pounds have ceased from troubling; for the Rupert Brookes and Alan Seegers have gone smilingly to Keats, and sit with him serenely in that region where Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, and there is never any question of the axiom. Thoughts fade and die; ideas are transitory; opinions pass like little ripples on the surface of an utterly immeasurable sea. Even the seeming certainties of science crumble and decay, like rocks beneath the beating of repeated rain. What survives? . . . Let Mr. Austin Dobson answer, with these lines: All passes. Art alone Enduring stays to us. The Bust out-lasts the Throne,— Only, the bust must be beautiful, and the coin must be cunningly designed; for, in the league-long history of art, there is "no antidote against the opium of time" except that Workmanship which is won only by good and faithful servants. |