One Half of Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780795352386
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della critica letteraria

A collection of speeches on literature, academia, and more by the " extremely entertaining novelist and public speaker" ( The Washington Post ). These public addresses by the acclaimed Canadian man of letters and New York Times -bestselling author Robertson Davies provides portraits of literary personalities, advice on writers and writing, and comments on academia and the modern world. Whether giving advice to schoolgirls, discussing the Age of Aquarius as seen by alchemists, exploring Jungian psychology in the theater and insanity in literature, or telling us how to design a haunted house, Davies brings to all his subjects the same intensity and marvelous craftsmanship that are the hallmarks of his fictional creations.

Five: Masks of Satan

The Devil’s Burning Throne

The four lectures that follow were the result of an invitation from Trinity College, Toronto, to give their Larkin-Stuart Lectures in November 1976. The problem of Evil in Literature had engaged me for some years, and I knew from personal experience that to make Evil palpable and acceptable in fiction was not simply a matter of inventing horrors and displaying them through the agency of characters who had been labelled as bad. Why bad? and who determines what badness is? I do not pretend that I met and defeated the problem, but I think I gave it a tussle, in terms of what public lectures may do.

It is not uncommon for the lecturer on such occasions as this to say that he approaches his task with a sense of his own inadequacy, and I ask your forgiveness for such a commonplace. However, in my case it is not meant as a ritual cringe, but as a statement of truth. If I had known what I was getting into when I accepted the invitation of your Provost to be this year’s lecturer in this distinguished series, I would have had the common sense to decline. But you know how persuasive the Provost is, and it was only after I had accepted and set about the task of preparing my lectures that I realized that I had bitten off more than I could ever hope to chew. As I recall our conversation he put it to me like this: ‘Won’t you come to Trinity in the autumn and talk about anything you like; the only condition is that whatever your subject may be, you should give it a mildly theological flavour.’ I agreed, and he said, ‘What do you suppose you might like to talk about?’ As I had, for about five years, been busy with some writing which made me think a good deal about what Evil is, and how it works, and even where it comes from, I said, ‘How would it be if I talked about ideas of Evil as they appear in literature?’ ‘Just the thing,’ said he, ‘and you’ll have no difficulty in popping in a little theology here and there.’ Light-heartedly I agreed to pop in any amount of theology, and we turned our conversation to other things.

Now the day of reckoning has arrived, and you cannot imagine what troubles I have had in the interval. I am not going to tell you about them; other people’s troubles are the dullest sort of topic. But I realized as soon as I set to work that I would have to set some limits to my subject, so I decided that I would confine it to the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I decided that I would say nothing about poetry. As for theology, I soon recognized with horror that I did not know enough about it.

Theology, like politics, is a subject on which every human creature, male and female, has some sort of opinion. Real theologians, however, are subtle fellows who very properly scorn amateur intruders into what they call the Queen of Sciences. I know that there are theologians among you, ready to explain the difference between a Principality and a Throne, and all the intricacies of Prevenient Grace. What I say will probably seem like baby-talk to them, but perhaps they will not be displeased that someone who is not professionally one of their number is nevertheless concerned about some of the problems that are their special concern.

Do I hear you say: If you don’t know anything about your subject, what are you wasting our time for? But you see, I do know something about the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I do know something about the way in which Evil has been depicted and defined in it by writers who, like myself, are not theologians but who are seriously concerned by the problem of Evil. They look at it from a point of view which is not that of the theologians, but of the recorders, the analysts, the synthesizers of human experience. Their concern is principally to describe life, to experience human problems and to feel deeply, though not always sympathetically, about them. They are fascinated by Evil, in the true sense of that much misused word ‘fascination’, and in the main they agree with Thomas Hardy that

If way to the better there be

It exacts a full look at the worst.

But the full look at the worst may not leave the looker able to define the principle behind what he has seen. What is Evil? Can it be conquered or avoided? Where does it come from? Why is it so often more attractive than Good? Some writers have tried to answer these questions, and it is the answers they have given that I want to discuss with you in these lectures. The answers may not satisfy theologians, because the answers are not usually expressed in terms of philosophical clarity, and they are in every case tainted, or infected, or whatever word you want to use to say that they are coloured by the intense personal feeling of the literary artist.

Nevertheless, these literary answers have satisfied, or partly satisfied, millions of people whom theology does not reach. Theology is a discipline and it must retain a scholarly calm. Literature is not a discipline, but an art, and when it is calm it is easily overlooked. It is the heated, sometimes rowdy approach of literature to the problem of Evil that is my theme.

How do I propose to approach it? In the first of these lectures I want to talk about Melodrama. That is tonight’s lecture, and its title is The Devil’s Burning Throne. A luridly melodramatic title, is it not, quite in the nineteenth-century melodramatic mode? It comes from that supreme melodramatist Shakespeare. It is in Measure for Measure that he makes the Duke say

—let the Devil

Be sometime honoured for his burning throne.

And in the drama of the century past the Devil was given his full meed of respect, as I hope to show in a few minutes.

My second lecture, tomorrow night, is called Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto; the phrase is from Carlyle, and it is also highly melodramatic, as was Carlyle’s approach to history.

Under that general heading I want to talk about the nineteenth-century novel, with a good deal of emphasis, but not exclusive emphasis, on the work of Charles Dickens.

My third lecture will be called Gleams and Glooms. Whose phrase is that? It comes from Henry James, that great master of the ghost story and the uncanny story, and it is about ghost stories and uncanny stories I shall speak then. I offer no excuse for doing so. Ghost stories, as a genre, are somewhat neglected by literary critics, partly because so many of them are bad, but partly also, I think, because they tempt critics into quagmires and morasses in which critics fear to tread. The ghost story is above all things a story of feeling, and critics, for reasons we need not examine, are not particularly happy with feeling on this level. Tragedy—ah, with tragedy they are perfectly content, because you can discuss tragedy without becoming personally involved. But the ghost story is not tragedy; its light is moonlight, and there is an old belief that too much moonlight may make you mad. Critics, who prize their reason above all else, are understandably shy of it.

My final lecture is called Thunder Without Rain; that is T. S. Eliot’s phrase. In it I shall talk about the novel of the twentieth century which seems to us so often to be rooted in the horror of life without any mitigation of whatever may be evoked of despair. Threat without blessing—that is, thunder without rain. Why are so many modern literary artists despairing? With some, of course, it is a fashionable pose. But what makes it fashionable? Why do so many readers hunger for this Dead Sea fruit? With our finest literary artists, however, it is far beyond any question of fashion; it is deep concern with the plight of man, to which there seems no solution. But I must confide to you that I am an optimist—not an idiot optimist, I hope, not a shallow-minded Pollyanna—and I think there is a solution, and in my final lecture I shall attempt to persuade you that it is an answer of a kind, though I dare not pretend that it is a complete answer.

There you are. That is what I am going to do, and I shall turn at once to the matter of Melodrama.

The word is often used now in a condescending manner, to suggest a bygone vulgar form of theatre art in which violent appeals to the emotions and sensational incidents were used to body forth a simple-minded morality. There are plenty of people—some of you may be of this class—to whom the word melodrama suggests a story about an innocent village maiden whose virtue is assailed by an evil squire, and who is rescued in the nick of time by her sailor-lover, whose nature is all courage, goodness, and devotion. Certainly there were melodramas of that sort, but they make up only a modest part of the whole melodramatic theatre. Similarly there are people who suppose that melodrama was always coarsely and vulgarly acted, and appealed only to humble and simple people. And there are many who cherish a few phrases from popular melodrama, such as ‘Once aboard the lugger, and the girl is mine!’ or ‘Rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake’; they suppose that all melodramatic writing was on that level. Consider this: melodrama was the most powerful and widespread dramatic mode of the nineteenth century, and it included all kinds of theatre except comedies and farces. Shakespeare, as the nineteenth century knew him, was a melodramatic writer. If you had gone to The Merchant of Venice a century ago, you would have seen a play about the thwarting of a bloody-minded villain seeking revenge on his tormentors, and everything in the play that diverted your attention from that theme—including the whole of the lyrically comic Fifth Act—would have been omitted. So also with Hamlet, in which virtually everything that makes the King, the Queen, and Laertes psychologically interesting was cut, to throw into prominence the character of Hamlet, who was represented as a poetical young man, too good for the surroundings in which he found himself.

Let us not be patronizing about this approach to Shakespeare. Nowadays we see productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which extraordinary pains are taken to show that all rulers and courtiers are rotten, that all people of humble station and limited education are good, and that fairies are malicious and sometimes dirty goblins.

We see The Merchant of Venice performed in a style which suggests that a principal theme is the struggle for Bassanio between Portia and his homosexual friend Antonio. We see The Merry Wives of Windsor with a corrupt aristocrat, Falstaff, at odds with some middle-class social climbers. Every age gets the Shakespeare it wants, and if the nineteenth century seemed to want it sweet and hot, our age seems to want it sour and cold. Melodrama dominated the stage of the nineteenth century, and brought everything to a pitch of passion that was sometimes irrational: our time, with its psychological and sociological bias, reduces whatever it can to psychology and sociology. We may say that, within certain limits, there is a correct and classical way to perform the music of Mozart or Beethoven, but we have not yet reached any agreement about a correct classical way in which to act Shakespeare and we put the stamp of our age upon him, however resistant his plays may be to that process.

The stamp of the nineteenth century was melodramatic. Emotion, the hottest and most violent that could be evoked, was what the public wanted. Why was it so?

In the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States, hundreds of thousands of people moved from farms and villages to big cities, and changed from rural work to industrial work. These multitudes of uprooted people became aware of social inequality in a way that had not affected them before. More than that: they became aware of human inequality of the sort which is not subject to remedy by legislation and taxation in quite a new way. They found that some people were cleverer than others, more inventive and industrious than others, more adaptable than others and—it must be said and it is relevant to our main theme—luckier than others. It was no longer a world in which

God bless the Squire and his relations

And keep us in our proper stations

was a possible prayer. It was a world of new opportunities, where a factory-hand might see a man born in the same village as himself rise to extraordinary wealth and influence, and send his sons to Eton; understandably the unsuccessful man wondered what had gone wrong with the scheme of things. His strong back and biddable nature, which were all the capital he had, brought him less in town than it had in the country, and in town he had no Squire, who might be an easy-going gentleman with a kindly wife, who would feel an obligation toward him and perhaps take pity on his misfortunes, when they came.

What about this man’s womenfolk? If they were lucky, they might escape factory work, and get into domestic service. And what was that? Very often it was slavery and wretchedness, psychological dwarfism and spiritual deformity. Frequently it was sexual exploitation. Maidservants in a badly conducted household were fair game for the footmen, who were great idle fellows with an inordinate opinion of themselves, of the kind made familiar to us in the writings of Thackeray. Sometimes also the girls were fair game for the sons of the household, or the master. And when a girl became pregnant, she lost her place, for who wants a pregnant housemaid, or her tedious bastard when it is born? So it was the street for her, and immediately the street became what Victorians called ‘the streets’. It is an extraordinary fact that there were vastly more prostitutes in the great cities of the world in the nineteenth century than there are today. What then? Prostitution is not a calling which suits all those who take it up. One girl in a hundred might make a marriage of some sort; one girl in a thousand might do well at her trade; most ended up as prematurely old thieves, or prostitutes of the lowest grade, descriptively known as ‘tuppenny uprights’—as distinguished, one assumes, from the ‘grand horizontals’.

The respectable female servant might marry a footman and keep a pub; that was success. Or she might shrivel in service, only one in hundreds having the luck to be settled in a good place with a kind mistress. In either case, sexual denial was obligatory.

What has this to do with melodrama? Much indeed, for the theatre was the popular entertainment of the time, filling the place now occupied by the films and television, and providing the most acceptable night out for people who might not be able to read, and to whom a supper at an oyster bar, followed by five or six hours in a popular theatre, was bliss, and spiritual refreshment, and a glimpse of the world as they wished It to be, and as perhaps they believed it really was, it only a few things could be set right.

What was it like, a night out in one of these nineteenth-century theatres that played so important a part in the inner life—and I must emphasize that it was the inner life that these robust entertainments nourished—of the city-dwellers of that time? We know from a great amount of evidence how popular they were, and how faithful a local audience might be to a neighbourhood theatre. Because we must not think of London, let us say, in 1827, as having a ‘theatrical district’ like the present West End. Officially the theatrical life of London was very much what it had been in 1660, when Charles II was restored to his throne, and very quickly licensed the building of two theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Until 1843 these two theatres were the only ‘legitimate’ playhouses in London; there were others, of course, but they laboured under certain legal disadvantages: they might not present the plays of Shakespeare or indeed any of the classical repertoire, and they were officially regarded as music-halls. To escape legal trouble, they had to provide some music at every performance, and the result was a series of productions of Shakespeare into which quite a lot of music was interpolated, making them for legal purposes, melodramas. For our purpose the most interesting development was that a new style of play, which combined music and drama, and was called ‘melodrama’, came into being. At first the melodramas were performed in mime, with musical accompaniment, but very soon this gave way to a type of play in which there were plenty of songs, and a considerable amount of musical accompaniment from an orchestra which supported and heightened the dramatic impact of the plot. Any of you who have seen silent films with a musical accompaniment know how effective such drama can be. Even today, considerable numbers of film-goers are almost unaware of the music that accompanies what they see, even though the musical scores are of a high degree of sophistication, and are sometimes music of a high order. Anybody who has seen Scott of the Antarctic (1948) with music by the late Vaughan Williams knows how splendidly the music enlarged the emotional quality of the film.

There were many melodrama theatres; in 1827 there were twelve of them, and by 1880 the number had grown to fifty-two. Actors who played at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were not above taking a profitable engagement at a melodrama house, several of which were across the Thames, on the Surrey side of the water. Edmund Kean often played on the Surrey side, and one of the theatres in which he did so is still in existence and some of you doubtless have visited it, for until very recently it was the home of the National Theatre. But in Kean’s day it was known as the Royal Coburg, and after the accession of Queen Victoria, in 1837, it became the Royal Victoria, and subsequently the Old Vic. When you are in that beautiful old auditorium you see, despite substantial changes, what the size and general appearance of an early-nineteenth-century theatre was.

What would you have seen if you had gone to the Coburg or one of the other melodrama theatres in, let us say, 1827? That would depend somewhat on your place in society; if you were poor, and sat in the Gallery, you would have been on hand not later than half past five in the evening, because the Gallery door opened between then and six o’clock. When the doors opened, you rushed in a pelting, shoving, eager mob up the stone stairs and snatched the best seats you could get in a cramped, steep gallery, equipped with hard, backless benches. The elderly and infirm were often crushed, squeezed, and pummelled unless they were so lucky as to go with young friends, who used them as battering-rams in the scramble up the very long stairs. But once you were in your place, there you stayed, because if you left it unguarded somebody would snatch it. However, you had providently brought a basket with you, and throughout the lo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Ham and Tongue
• ONE: GARLANDS AND NOSEGAYS
• TWO: GIVING ADVICE
• THREE: JEUX D’ESPRIT
• FOUR: THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITING
• FIVE: MASKS OF SATAN