kingdom, you shall have all the song-birds in the world for your very own." He remembers his promise at last, and "You shall have your birds, my dear," says he, "if they cost me a hundred million." And so began the corner in birds and wild flowers. Mr O'Duffy is a more zealous imitator of Rabelais than of Swift. He lays his scene in no imagined fairyland. He takes us to the London and Dublin which we know, and shows how these haunts of life strike the heroes of his fancy. Cuchulain, son of Dechtere and of Lugh of the Long Hand, and Cuchulain's son, Cuanduine, are the Gargantua and the Pantagruel of his story, and the hope of them both is to free poor mankind from the effects of civilisation, and to rescue the birds from the cages of King Goshawk. The age which he depicts-it is some generations ahead of ours-is an age of paternal government. "You must understand," he says, "that in those days every action, word, and thought of which man is capable was most thoroughly regulated by law. Like every other product of human endeavour, the process of legislation had been so perfected and accelerated by the marvellous progress of science during the previous quarter of a century, that the output of laws baffles computation. Indeed, there were so many that it had been found necessary to double the number of judges; yet even so it would have been impossible to administer all the new crimes without rather neglecting the old ones." And from this followed the decision made by the governments all the world over "to abolish temptation, it being generally conceded by philanthropists, social reformers, and statisticians, that man's character was now so weak that at the mere appearance of temptation he would instantly succumb." So no wine, beer, or spirits, and no tobacco was allowed to be manufactured. Indeed, the vine and tobacco plant were extinct, and the substitutes for the banned commodities were one and all either poisonous or ineffective. A vigilant eye had been cast upon works of art. Thousands of pictures had been destroyed, and twofifths of the world's literature had been wholly and utterly suppressed. And here is Cuchulain's verdict upon the earth, which he thought he had visited for its good. "I am wearied of this earth of yours," he told the Philosopher. "I came here as to a world of war and wickedness, where a hero would find wrongs to right and wrongdoers to overcome. I find instead a dunghill of meanness and silliness, with a cock in its summit that I must not oust this way, or must not oust that way, or would cause complications by ousting the other way, but must wait and watch for opportunity, and do nothing hasty for fear of shocking the tame capons that pay him tribute for tain as friendly relations as if maggots. Cuanduine fares no better in the world than his heroic father. When he urges the electors, who spend their force upon nothing, to win back their wild flowers, he is assailed as a crank or a madman. "If we had our flowers back," says one man, 'he'd be wanting the birds next. There's no satisfying some people. Give them an inch and they take an ell." And then a wild-eyed girl turns upon him, saying, "You are a born materialist to pursue such sordid practical aims instead of sacrificing yourself for ideals and principles." For ideals and idealists, indeed, Mr O'Duffy reserves his fiercest contempt. He regards as the most dangerous of all those who rush in to "do good," and who have a simple faith that they are always right. It is in these terms that he contrasts the English and the Irish. "Now, as every Irishman knows," he says, "the people of England are in every way inferior to the people of Ireland, being materialists, whereas we are idealists. This they show more particularly in their politics; for their principles are in nature mundane and trivial, and held with such luke-warm conviction, that men of opposite parties do not regard each other as traitors, cowards, or tyrants, but even salute each other in the street, and, with characteristic hypocrisy, main SO VOL. CCXX.-NO. MCCCXXXIII. there were nothing to divide them, all which they justify with a mean and time-serving proverb to the effect that opinions differ.' . . . Ever unready to sacrifice anything at the altar of principle, they would no more think of burning an opponent's house than they would of shooting him in the street. An Englishman will not even defame the character of a man he disagrees with, nor does he hold any ideal high enough to impel him to rob a bank. By this timidity and love of compromise the English are deprived of that ennobling inspiration which we draw from our martyrs, and they lose also what we have aptly named the suffrage of the dead. The reincarnation of thousands of deceased patriots to outride the living would be impossible in an English election. The English, in fact, have scant reverence for the dead, which they express in another and cowardly proverb: 'A live ass is better than a dead lion'-a final proof of their inferiority to us ourselves, who believe that there is nothing so fine and noble as a dead ass." From this excellent and characteristic passage you may see that irony and wit are in the very texture of Mr O'Duffy's satire. And there are very few cranks or crazes which do not feel the weight of his lash. Bitter words he has to say of Freud and Birth Control, of 20 the multi-millionaires and the Barons of the Press. There are few of the sins of to-day which he leaves unpunished by his mordant pen. And the failure which overtakes Cuanduine in his mission to London is perhaps the measure of his own hopelessness. "Oh, I am Oh, I am a man of no account," said Cuanduine. "I have failed in all the tasks I set myself. I have no friend for the song-birds nor the wild flowers; I have not taught men the wisdom of charity. I have not taught them the folly of fighting." "You may yet teach them how to fight decently," said the philosopher. It is with great regret that we record the death of A. B. Walkley, for many years dramatic critic of The Times.' He was not only the most acute and most elegant critic of the theatre in his day and generation, he may be said to have represented alone, since the death of William Archer, the theatrical criticism of an older fashion. And it need not be pointed out here how wide a chasm yawned between the two men. The gifts which he brought to his task were many and various. He was a scholar of deep, if not wide, reading. He had a close acquaintance with some modern literatures. There was a time when he could rarely refrain, in a single article, from quoting Aristotle, which the journals were not slow to note and to turn, as well as they could, into ridicule. It was an amiable jest, and easily made. Nor is it likely ever to have ruffled Walkley's urbanity. After all, the 'Poetics' is the best foundation for a critic, and its wisdom is of universal application. If Aristotle were his breviary, the modern writers of France Jules Lemaître and Anatole France-stood nearest in his regard. He had studied their method, and he was familiar with their works. Especially he profited by the theatrical criticism of Jules Lemaître, who had a quicker intelligence than any of his rivals, and who had no difficulty in enrolling Walkley among the impressionists. At the same time, he saved him from the baleful influence of Brunetière, and other hard judges, cast in iron. If Walkley had read like a scholar, he had learnt also to write like a scholar. He seldom wrote an article which was not composed with taste and touched with wit. His taste and wit were unerring, and yet to read the wisest piece of criticism that ever he wrote was to wonder why on earth he had written it. What was it, in brief, that made Walkley a dramatic critic? That a man of letters should thus limit his industry cannot but surprise us, and we cannot hide from ourselves the paradox of Walkley's career. He was not a born man of the theatre. It is not too much to say that but for some acci dent, of which we know noth- is hoped for. He was not a ing, he might have never looked harsh critic. He was merely across the footlights at all. one who failed to sympathise He seemed always somewhat with the conventions and prealoof from the theatre. He ferences of the modern stage. might, you would have thought, He liked the finer shades; his have devoted a cloistered life nerves were shocked as easily to the revision of texts; and by bloodthirsty melodrama as there he was in his stall upon by knock-about farce, and at first nights, ready to tell the the theatre he seemed like a public what it should think traveller in a barbarous counabout a new play, and in what try, looking vainly for what spirit it should see it performed. he might admire. But if the The worst of the theatrical play at which he assisted were critic's profession is that the bad, the article which it sugcritic cannot pick and choose. gested to Walkley was always The theatre is a place of entertaining, for luckily he had pleasures taken in common, a the happy gift of putting a place in which the taste of the sharp edge upon dulness, and majority is likely to be supreme, of casting the light of irony except in the rare cases in upon stupidity itself. The truth which genius or a rare talent is that, if he were often out of demands attention. And the place in the modern theatre, critic, perforce, bows to the he was not wholly at home in general taste. He need not the modern world. He would praise what the general taste have been happy if only he had decrees. He is forced by the lived when he might see Mrs exigence of his craft to listen Bracegirdle playing in a comedy to it. Walkley, indeed, must of Congreve's. As it was, he was have spent many an evening rarely given a delight remotely in hopeless bewilderment. comparable with this, and yet, Asked to appraise what could we think, for a reason inexat the best mean little or noth- plicable, he did not suffer. ing to him, he faced a job for which neither his taste nor his intelligence fitted him. He knew not how to distinguish between two or more specimens of puerility. The consequence was that he was damned by many an offended actor or playwright, a damning not to be wondered at in the world of the theatre, where publicity is necessary and where flattery Outside the theatre, he knew well-none knew better-how to turn an essay, and his taste in literature, if limited, was sure. Like Hazlitt, he was a man of few books, but those which he knew gave up all their secrets to him. Jane Austen was rarely far from his mind nor from his pen. He had an unexpected familiarity with Dr Johnson. In one of the last essays which he wrote. he attempted to weigh Lamb the fineness and humour of against Hazlitt in the balance, and having praised Lamb for a column's length, let Lamb kick the beam. His admiration for Proust was something of a puzzle. Most assuredly he did not merely submit to fashion, and found something in that author's over - elaborate subtlety which was consonant with his temper. But, in spite of himself, it is as a dramatic critic that he will live, and it is only with the best of his fellow-craftsmen that he will be compared. To think of him now is to recall also Lamb and Hazlitt. He was in no sense their equal. He lacked Lamb. He had not the force which enabled Hazlitt to interpret to the world that great man, Edmund Kean, or to find phrases adequate for Kean's many triumphs. But a critic is bounded by his opportunities, and it was not given to Walkley to confront such actors as Munden or Palmer or the great Kean. But he was the critic of our days-happily we can recall two ready and able to carry on his work-and when the stage history of the past twenty-five years comes to be written, the articles of Arthur Bingham Walkley will be the historians' best material. Printed in Great Britain by WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS LTD. |