All Art Is Propaganda (22 page)

If there is really such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise. The production of
The Tempest
at the Old Vic has no doubt given him another nasty jolt, though one must admire the enterprise of the managers in putting it on at such a moment.

Why is it that Shakespeare is nearly always acted in a way that makes anyone who cares for him squirm? The real fault lies not with the actors but with the audiences. These plays have to be performed in front of people who for the most part have no acquaintance with Elizabethan English and are therefore incapable of following any but the simplest passages. The tragedies, which are better-known than the others and in any case are chock-full of murders, often succeed reasonably well, but the comedies and the best of the histories
(Henry IV
and
Henry V
), especially their prose interludes, are hopeless, because nine-tenths of the people watching don't know the text and can be counted on to miss the point of any joke that is not followed up by a kick on the buttocks. All that the actors can do is to gabble their lines at top speed and throw in as much horseplay as possible, well knowing that if the audience ever laughs it will be at a gag and not at anything that Shakespeare wrote.
The Tempest
at the Old Vic was no exception. All the Stephano and Trinculo scenes were ruined by the usual clowning and roaring on the stage, not to mention the noise and fidgeting which seem to be a cherished tradition with Old Vic audiences. As for Ariel and Caliban, they looked like something that had escaped from a circus. Admittedly these are difficult parts to cast, but there was no need to make them quite so grotesque as was done on this occasion. Caliban was got up definitely as a monkey, complete with tail and, apparently, with some disgusting disease of the face. This would have ruined the effect of his lines even if he had spoken them more musically. Ariel, although for some reason he was painted bright blue, was horribly whimsical and indulged in exaggeratedly homosexual mannerisms, a sort of Peter Pansy.

John Gielgud, as a middle-aged rather than elderly Prospero, with the minimum of abracadabra, gave a performance that was a long way ahead of the rest of the company. Miss Jessica Tandy, as Miranda, spoke her lines well, but was wrongly cast for the part. No Miranda ought to have blue eyes and fair hair, any more than Cordelia ought to have dark hair. The best feature of the evening was the incidental music, which fitted the romantic setting of the play a great deal better than did the scenery. All in all, a well-intentioned performance, but demonstrating once again that Shakespeare, except for about half a dozen well-known plays, will remain unactable until the general public takes to reading him.

An uncanny play possibly owing something to
Outward Bound.
Six travellers find themselves stranded by chance at a country inn which in fact does not exist, and a murder which happened there exactly a year earlier is re-enacted in front of them. As a result the various personal problems which brought them there are solved. The dialogue is convincing and the mysterious atmosphere is well worked up, but the play's weakness is that the problems of the six main personages are of such a nature that it is impossible to take them seriously. The clergyman has lost his faith because his brother died of pneumonia, the young society beauty finds her life hollow, etc., etc. Although cast in 1940, the play makes no reference to the war, direct or indirect; bourgeois peacetime life, with all interest centring round financial success, motor-cars, divorce, etc., is apparently looked upon as something eternal. Miss Louise Hampton gave a very fine performance as Joanna Spring, successful journalist and editor of the Women's Page ("Write to Auntie Madge about it"), and the acting as a whole was worthy of better material.

France, 1918, Charlie Chaplin, in field grey and German steel helmet, is pulling the string of Big Bertha, falling down every time she fires. A little later, losing his way in the smoke screen, he finds himself attacking in the middle of the American infantry. Later he is in flight with a wounded staff officer, in an aeroplane which flies upside down for such lengths of time that Charlie is puzzled to know why his watch persists in standing up on the end of its chain. Finally, falling out of the aeroplane into a mud-hole, he loses his memory and is shut up in a mental home for twenty years, completely ignorant of what is happening in the world outside.

At this point the film really begins. Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, who happens to be Charlie's double (Chaplin plays both parts) is directing an extra-special purge against the Jews at the moment when Charlie, his mind restored, escapes from the asylum and goes back to his little barber's shop in the Ghetto. There are some glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not less, perhaps actually
more
moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with the kind of humour that depends on mishaps with pails of whitewash and blows on the head with a frying-pan. But the best farcical interludes are those that take place in the Dictator's palace, especially in his scenes with his hated rival, Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. (Jack Oakie, in this part, has an even closer physical resemblance to Mussolini than Chaplin has to Hitler.) There is a lovely moment at the supper table when Hynkel is so intent on outwitting Napaloni that he does not notice that he is ladling mustard on to his strawberries by mistake for cream. The invasion of Osterlich (Austria) is about to take place, and Charlie, who has been incarcerated for resisting the Storm Troopers, escapes from the concentration camp in a stolen uniform just at the moment when Hynkel is due to cross the frontier. He is mistaken for the Dictator and carried into the capital of the conquered country amid cheering crowds. The little Jewish barber finds himself raised upon an enormous rostrum, with serried ranks of Nazi dignitaries behind him and thousands of troops below, all waiting to hear his triumphal speech.

And here occurs the big moment of the film. Instead of making the speech that is expected of him, Charlie makes a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency. It is really a tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln's Gettysburg address done into Hollywood English, one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time. It is, of course, understating the matter to say that it is out of tune with the rest of the film. It has no connection with it whatever, except the sort of connection that exists in a dream—the kind of dream, for instance, in which you are Emperor of China at one moment and a dormouse the next. So completely is the thread broken that after that the story can go no further, and the film simply fades out, leaving it uncertain whether the speech takes effect or whether the Nazis on the platform detect the impostor and shoot him dead on the spot.

How good a film is this, simply as a film? I should be falsifying my own opinion if I did not admit that it has very great faults. Although it is good at almost every level it exists at so many levels that
it has no more unity than one finds, for instance, in a pantomime. Some of the early scenes are simply the old Chaplin of the two-reelers of thirty years ago, bowler hat, shuffling walk and all. The Ghetto scenes are sentimental comedy with a tendency to break into farce, the scenes between Hynkel and Napaloni are the lowest kind of slapstick, and mixed up with all this is a quite serious political "message." Chaplin never seems to have profited by certain modern advances of technique, so that all his films have a kind of jerkiness, an impression of being tied together with bits of string. Yet this film gets away with it. The hard-boiled audience of the press show to which I went laughed almost continuously and were visibly moved by the great speech at the end. What is Chaplin's peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, supermen in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And yet everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from the Christian culture. The common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men. Any intellectual can make you out a splendid "case" for smashing the German Trade Unions and torturing the Jews. But the common man, who has no intellect, only instinct and tradition, knows that "it isn't right." Anyone who has not lost his moral sense—and an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense—knows that "it isn't right" to march into the houses of harmless little Jewish shopkeepers and set fire to their furniture. More than in any humorous trick, I believe, Chaplin's appeal lies in his power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that
vox populi is vox Dei
¹
and giants are vermin.

No wonder that Hitler, from the moment he came to power, has banned Chaplin's films in Germany! The resemblance between the two men (almost twins, it is interesting to remember) is ludicrous, especially in the wooden movements of their arms. And no wonder that pro-Fascist writers of the type of Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell have always pursued Chaplin with such a peculiar venomous hatred! From the point of view of anyone who believes in supermen, it is a most disastrous accident that the greatest of all the supermen should be almost the double of an absurd little Jewish foundling with a tendency to fall into pails of whitewash. It is the sort of fact that ought to be kept dark. However, luckily, it can't be kept dark, and the allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.

If our Government had a little more imagination they would subsidize
The Great Dictator
heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany—a thing that ought not to be beyond human ingenuity. At present it is opening at three West End picture houses whose seats the majority of people cannot afford. But though it will probably get a mixed reception from the critics, I think it is safe to prophesy for it the nationwide success it deserves. Apart from Chaplin himself, Jack Oakie, Henry Daniell (as Goebbels), Maurice Moscovitch and the exceptionally attractive Paulette Goddard supply the best of the acting.

"In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain.... What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians' before they were put to the test in Greece and Africa."

 

"The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out."

 

"In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort.... Yet our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive 'blow' through Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or 'crush Russia,' or 'pour' over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things—for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it and fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost."

 

These quotations are not taken from the
Cavalry Quarterly
but from a series of newspaper articles by Mr. H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled
Guide to the New World.
Since they were written, the German Army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the idea that the German Army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc. etc.

What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in Berlin"? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration,
¹
which is an attempted definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.

What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened" and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of the Fatherland," etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.