Picture and Text

Auberon. Never, never: it’s the same old stage. The change is in ourselves.

Florentia. Well, I never would have given an evening to what we have just seen. If one could have put it in between luncheon and tea, well enough. But one’s evenings are too precious.

Dorriforth. Note that—it’s very important.

Florentia. I mean too precious for that sort of thing.

Auberon. Then you didn’t sit spellbound by the little history of the Due d’Enghien?

Florentia. I sat yawning. Heavens, what a piece!

Amicia. Upon my word I liked it. The last act made me cry.

Dorriforth. Wasn’t it a curious, interesting specimen of some of the things that are worth trying: an attempt to sail closer to the real?

Auberon. How much closer? The fiftieth part of a point—it isn’t calculable.

Florentia. It was just like any other play—I saw no difference. It had neither a plot, nor a subject, nor dialogue, nor situations, nor scenery, nor costumes, nor acting.

Amicia. Then it was hardly, as you say, just like any other play.

Auberon. Florentia should have said like any other bad’one. The only way it differed seemed to be that it was bad in theory as well as in fact.

Amicia. It’s a morceau de vie, as the French say.

Auberon. Oh, don’t begin on the French!

Amicia. It’s a French experiment—que voulez-vous?

Auberon. English experiments will do.

Dorriforth. No doubt they would—if there were any. But I don’t see them.

Amicia. Fortunately: think what some of them might be! Though Florentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby “Due d’Enghien,” coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have to be so big on the i’s, with its barely audible note of originality. It appealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the way things happen in life.

Auberon. In life they happen clumsily, stupidly, meanly. One goes to the theatre just for the refreshment of seeing them happen in another way—in symmetrical, satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect and just at the right moment.

Dorriforth. It shows how the same cause may produce the most diverse consequences. In this truth lies the only hope of art.

Auberon. Oh, art, art—don’t talk about art!

Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!

Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make bold to say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we read a novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; and according as we look for the particular thing we find it.

Auberon. That’s a profound remark.

Florentia. We go to find amusement: that, surely, is what we all go for.

Amicia. There’s such a diversity in our idea of amusement.

Auberon. Don’t you impute to people more ideas than they have?

Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn’t talk about them. We go to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, to give ourselves up, in short, to a charm.

Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary.

Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what we know, what we feel.

Dorriforth. See already how you differ.

“SO!”

What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense of life.

Amicia. The first thing is to believe.

Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to disbelieve.

Auberon. Lord, listen to them!

Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio—to care.

Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget.

Amicia. To forget what?

Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautiful more exciting: into fable and romance.

Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it’s about us, about you and me—or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we live their experience, for the time, and that’s hardly escaping from life.

Florentia. I’m not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it an escape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate.

Dorriforth. You couldn’t put it better. That’s the life that art, with Auberon’s permission, gives us; that’s the distinction it confers. This is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar fellow—the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand. Then what becomes of our escape?

Florentia. It’s precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us into foul and dreary places—into flat and foolish deserts.

Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things: that’s the only place into which the poet can lead us. It’s there that he finds “As You Like It,” it is there that he finds “Comus,” or “The Way of the World,” or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us, after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can’t keep from us that we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on the walls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us.

Amicia. That’s what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. There was an artistic intention, and the little room wasn’t bare: there was sociable company in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they were common—

Auberon. Ah, when the French give their mind to that—!

Amicia. Nevertheless they struck me as recruits to an interesting cause, which as yet (the house was so empty) could confer neither money nor glory. They had the air, poor things, of working for love.

Auberon. For love of what?

Amicia. Of the whole little enterprise—the idea of the Théâtre Libre.