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Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Ecce Homo
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Munkacsy’s picture which has been exhibited in the principal cities of Europe, is now on view at the Royal Hibernian Academy. With the other two pictures ‘Christ before Pilate’ and ‘Christ on Calvary’ it forms almost a complete trilogy of the later portion of the Passion. Perhaps what strikes one most in the picture under consideration is the sense of life, the realistic illusion. One could well fancy that the men and women were of flesh and blood, struck into silent trance, by the warlock’s hand. Hence the picture is primarily dramatic, not an execution of faultless forms, or a canvas reproduction of psychology. By drama I understand the interplay of passions; drama is strife, evolution, movement, in whatever way unfolded. Drama exists as an independent thing, conditioned but not controlled by its scene. An idyllic portrait or an environment of haystacks do not constitute a pastoral drama, no more than rhodomontade and a monotonous trick of ‘tutoyer’ build up a tragedy. If there be only quiescence in one, or vulgarity in the second, as is generally the case, then in neither one nor the other is the note of true drama sounded for a moment. However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if a play, or a work of music, or a picture concerns itself with the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of humanity, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. Maeterlinck’s characters may be, when subjected to the searchlight of that estimable torch, common sense, unaccountable, drifting, fate-impelled creatures — in fact, as our civilization dubs them, uncanny. But in whatever dwarfed and marionette-like a manner, their passions are human, and so the exposition of them is drama. This is fairly obvious when applied to a stage subject but when the word drama is in an identical way, applied to Munkacsy, it may need perhaps an additional word of explanation.
In the statuary art the first step towards drama was the separation of the feet. Before that sculpture was a copy of the body, actuated by only a nascent impulse, and executed by routine. The infusion of life, or its semblance, at once brought soul into the work of the artist, vivified his forms and elucidated his theme. It follows naturally from the fact that the sculptor aims at producing a bronze or stone model of man, that his impulse should lead him to the portrayal of an instantaneous passion. Consequently although he has the advantage of the painter, in at the first glance deceiving the eye, his capability to be a dramatist is less broad than the painter’s. His power of moulding can be equalized by the painter’s backgrounds and skilful disposition of shades, and while in such a manner naturalism is produced on an areal canvas, the colours, which add another life, help his theme to its expression in a very much completer and clearer whole. Moreover, and this applies markedly in the present case, as the theme becomes loftier or more extended, it can manifestly obtain more adequate treatment in a large picture than in the crowding of colourless, perfectly- modelled statues in a tableau. Notably then does the difference hold in the instance of ‘Ecce Homo’ where some seventy figures are limned on one canvas. It is a mistake to limit drama to the stage; a drama can be painted as well as sung or acted, and ‘Ecce Homo’ is a drama.
In addition, it is much more deserving of the comment of a dramatic critic than the majority of the pieces which are directly under his notice in the theatre. To speak of the technical point of an artwork such as this is, to my thinking, somewhat superfluous. Of course the draping, and the upraised hands, and outstretched fingers reveal a technique and a skill, beyond criticism. The narrow yard is a scene of crowded figures, all drawn with a master’s faithfulness. The one blemish is the odd, strained position of the governor’s left hand. It gives one the impression of being maimed or crippled from the manner in which the cloak conceals it. The background is a corridor, opened on the spectator, with pillars upholding a verandah, on which the eastern shrubs show out against a sapphire sky. At the right hand and in the extreme corner, as you face the picture, a stairway of two flights, say some twenty steps in all leads to a platform which is thus almost at right angles to the line of the pillars. The garish sunlight falls directly over this platform leaving the rest of the court partly in the shade. The walls are decorated and at the back of the piazza is a narrow doorway crowded with Roman soldiery. The first half of the mob, that is, those next underneath the platform, is enclosed between the pillars and a swinging chain in the foreground, which is parallel to them. A decrepit street cur, the only animal in the picture, is crouching by it. On the platform in front of the soldiers, stand two figures. One has his hands bound in front and is standing facing the rabble, his fingers just touching the balustrade. A red mantle is so placed about the shoulders as to cover the entire back and a little of the foreshoulders and arms. The whole front of the figure is thus exposed to the waist. A crown of irregular, yellowish thorns is on the temples and head and a light, long reed barely supported between the clasped hands. It is Christ. The other figure is somewhat nearer the populace and leans a little towards them over the balustrade. The figure is pointing at Christ, the right arm in the most natural position of demonstration, and the left arm extended in the peculiar, crippled way I have already noticed. It is Pilate. Right underneath these two main figures, on the paved yard, is the tossing, tumbling Jewish rabble. The expressions conveyed in the varying faces, gestures, hands and opened mouths are marvellous. There is the palsied, shattered frame of a lewd wretch; his face is bruted animalism, feebly stirred to a grin. There is the broad back and brawny arm and tight clenched fist, but the face of the muscular ‘protestant’ is hidden. At his feet, in the angle where the stairway bends a woman is kneeling. Her face is dragged in an unwholesome pallor but quivering with emotion. Her beautifully rounded arms are displayed as a contrast of writhing pity against the brutality of the throng. Some stray locks of her copious hair are blown over them and cling to them as tendrils. Her expression is reverential, her eyes are straining up through her tears. She is the emblem of the contrite, she is the new figure of lamentation as against the severe, familiar types, she is of those, the sorrowstricken, who weep and mourn but yet are comforted. Presumably, from her shrinking pose, she is a magdalen. Near her is the street dog, and near him a street urchin. His back is turned but both arms are flung up high and apart in youthful exultation, the fingers pointing outwards, stiff and separate.
In the heart of the crowd is the figure of a man, furious at being jostled by a well clad Jew. The eyes are squinting with rage, and an execration foams on his lips. The object of his rage is a rich man, with that horrible cast of countenance, so common among the sweaters of modern Israël. I mean, the face whose line runs out over the full forehead to the crest of the nose and then recedes in a similar curve back to the chin, which, in this instance, is covered with a wispish, tapering beard. The upper lip is raised out of position, disclosing two long, white teeth, while the whole lower lip is trapped. This is the creature snarl of malice. An arm is stretched forth in derision, the fine, snowy linen falling back upon the forearm. Immediately behind is a huge face, with features sprawled upon it, the jaws torn asunder with a coarse howl. Then there is the half profile and figure of the triumphant fanatic. The long gaberdine falls to the naked feet, the head is erect, the arms perpendicular, raised in conquest. In the extreme end is the bleared face of a silly beggar. Everywhere is a new face. In the dark hoods, under the conical headdresses, here hatred, there the mouth gaping open at its fullest stretch, the head thrown back on the nape. Here an old woman is hastening away, horrorstruck, and there is a woman of comely appearance but evidently a proletarian. She has fine, languid eyes, full features and figure, but marred with cross stupidity and perfect, if less revolting bestiality. Her child is clambering about her knees, her infant hoisted on her shoulder. Not even these are free from the all pervading aversion and in their small beady eyes twinkles the fire of rejection, the bitter unwisdom of their race. Close by are the two figures of John and Mary. Mary has fainted. Her face is of a grey hue, like a sunless dawn, her features rigid but not drawn. Her hair is jet black, her hood white. She is almost dead, but her force of anguish keeps her alive. John’s arms are wound about her, holding her up, his face is half feminine in its drawing, but set in purpose. His rust coloured hair falls over his shoulders, his features express solicitude and pity. On the stairs is a rabbi, enthralled with amazement, incredulous yet attracted by the extraordinary central figure. Round about are the soldiers. Their mien is self-possessed contempt. They look on Christ as an exhibition and the rabble as a pack of unkennelled animals. Pilate is saved from the dignity his post would have given him, by the evidence that he is not Roman enough to spurn them. His face is round, his skull compact, the hair cropped short on it. He is shifting, uncertain of his next move, his eyes wide open in mental fever. He wears the white and red Roman toga.
It will be clear from all this that the whole forms a wonderful picture, intensely, silently dramatic, waiting but the touch of the wizard wand to break out into reality, life and conflict. As such too much tribute cannot be paid to it, for it is a frightfully real presentment of all the baser passions of humanity, in both sexes, in every gradation, raised and lashed into a demoniac carnival. So far praise must be given, but it is plain through all this, that the aspect of the artist is human, intensely, powerfully human. To paint such a crowd one must probe humanity with no scrupulous knife. Pilate is self-seeking, Mary is maternal, the weeping woman is penitent, John is a strong man, rent inside with great grief, the soldiers bear the impress of the stubborn unideality of conquest; their pride is uncompromising for are they not the overcomers? It would have been easy to have made Mary a Madonna and John an evangelist but the artist has chosen to make Mary a mother and John a man. I believe this treatment to be the finer and the subtler. In a moment such as when Pilate said to the Jews, Behold the man, it would be a pious error but indubitably, an error to show Mary as the ancestress of the devout rapt madonnas of our churches. The depicting of these two figures in such a way in a sacred picture, is in itself a token of the highest genius. If there is to be anything superhuman in the picture, anything above and beyond the heart of man, it will appear in Christ. But no matter how you view Christ, there is no trace of that in his aspect. There is nothing divine in his look, there is nothing superhuman. This is no defect of hand on the part of the artist, his skill would have accomplished anything. It was his voluntary position. Van Ruith painted a picture some years ago of Christ and the traders in the temple. His intention was to produce elevated reprimand and divine chastisement, his hand failed him and the result was a weak flogger and a mixture of lovingkindness and repose, wholly incompatible with the incident. Munkacsy on the contrary would never be under the power of his brush, but his view of the event is humanistic. Consequently his work is drama. Had he chosen to paint Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, redeeming his creatures of his own admirable will, through insult and hate, it would not have been drama, it would have been Divine Law, for drama deals with man. As it is from the artist’s conception, it is powerful drama, the drama of the thrice told revolt of humanity against a great teacher.
The face of Christ is a superb study of endurance, passion, I use the word in its proper sense, and dauntless will. It is plain that no thought of the crowd obtrudes itself on his mind. He seems to have nothing in common with them, save his features which are racial. The mouth is concealed by a brown moustache, the chin and up to the ears overgrown with an untrimmed but moderate beard of the same colour. The forehead is low and projects somewhat on the eyebrows. The nose is slightly Jewish but almost aquiline, the nostrils thin and sensitive, the eyes are of a pale blue colour, if of any, and as the face is turned to the light, they are lifted half under the brows, the only true position for intense agony. They are keen, but not large, and seem to pierce the air, half in inspiration, half in suffering. The whole face is of an ascetic, inspired, wholesouled, wonderfully passionate man. It is Christ, as the Man of Sorrows, his raiment red as of them that tread in the winepress. It is literally Behold the Man.
It is this treatment of the theme that has led me to appraise it as a drama. It is grand, noble, tragic but it makes the founder of Christianity, no more than a great social and religious reformer, a personality, of mingled majesty and power, a protagonist of a world-drama. No objections will be lodged against it on that score by the public, whose general attitude when they advert to the subject at all, is that of the painter, only less grand and less interested.
Munkacsy’s conception is as much greater than theirs, as an average artist is greater than an average greengrocer, but it is of the same kind, it is to pervert Wagner, the attitude of the town. Belief in the divinity of Christ is not a salient feature of secular Christendom. But occasional sympathy with the eternal conflict of truth and error, of right and wrong, as exemplified in the drama at Golgotha is not beyond its approval.
J.A.J. Sept. 1899
1900
Although the relations between drama and life are, and must be, of the most vital character, in the history of drama itself these do not seem to have been at all times, consistently in view. The earliest and best known drama, this side of the Caucasus, is that of Greece. I do not propose to attempt anything in the nature of a historical survey but cannot pass it by. Greek drama arose out of the cult of Dionysos, who, god of fruitage, joyfulness and earliest art, offered in his life-story a practical groundplan for the erection of a tragic and a comic theatre. In speaking of Greek drama it must be borne in mind that its risp dominated its form. The conditions of the Attic stage suggested a syllabus of greenroom proprieties and cautions to authors, which in after ages were foolishly set up as the canons of dramatic art, in all lands. Thus the Greeks handed down a code of laws which their descendants with purblind wisdom forthwith advanced to the dignity of inspired pronouncements. Beyond this, I say nothing. It may be a vulgarism, but it is literal truth to say that Greek drama is played out. For good or for bad it has done its work, which, if wrought in gold, was not upon lasting pillars. Its revival is not of dramatic but of pedagogic significance. Even in its own camp it has been superseded. When it had thriven over long in hieratic custody and in ceremonial form, it began to pall on the Aryan genius. A reaction ensued, as was inevitable; and as the classical drama had been born of religion, its follower arose out of a movement in literature. In this reaction England played an important part, for it was the power of the Shakespearean clique that dealt the deathblow to the already dying drama. Shakespeare was before all else a literary artist; humour, eloquence, a gift of seraphic music, theatrical instincts — he had a rich dower of these. The work, to which he gave such splendid impulse, was of a higher nature than that which it followed. It was far from mere drama, it was literature in dialogue. Here I must draw a line of demarcation between literature and drama.
Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours — a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them. Drama has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out. When so much is recognized an advance has been made to a more rational and true appreciation of dramatic art. Unless some such distinction be made the result is chaos. Lyricism parades as poetic drama, psychological conversation as literary drama, and traditional farce moves over the boards with the label of comedy affixed to it.
Both of these dramas having done their work as prologues to the swelling act, they may be relegated to the department of literary curios. It is futile to say that there is no new drama or to contend that its proclamation is a huge boom. Space is valuable and I cannot combat these assertions. However it is to me day- clear that dramatic drama must outlive its elders, whose life is only eked by the most dexterous management and the carefullest husbanding. Over this New School some hard hits have been given and taken. The public is slow to seize truth, and its leaders quick to miscall it. Many, whose palates have grown accustomed to the old food, cry out peevishly against a change of diet. To these use and want is the seventh heaven. Loud are their praises of the bland blatancy of Corneille, the starchglaze of Trapassi’s godliness, the Pumblechookian woodenness of Calderon. Their infantile plot juggling sets them agape, so superfine it is. Such critics are not to be taken seriously but they are droll figures! It is of course patently true that the ‘new’ school masters them on their own ground. Compare the skill of Haddon Chambers and Douglas Jerrold, of Sudermann and Lessing. The ‘new’ school in this branch of its art is superior. This superiority is only natural, as it accompanies work of immeasurably higher calibre. Even the least part of Wagner - — - his music — - is beyond Bellini. Spite of the outcry of these lovers of the past, the masons are building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home, where there shall be light for gloom, and wide porches for drawbridge and keep.
Let me explain a little as to this great visitant. By drama I understand the interplay of passions to portray truth; drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists, before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene. It might be said fantastically that as soon as men and women began life in the world there was above them and about them, a spirit, of which they were dimly conscious, which they would have had sojourn in their midst in deeper intimacy and for whose truth they became seekers in after times, longing to lay hands upon it. For this spirit is as the roaming air, little susceptible of change, and never left their vision, shall never leave it, till the firmament is as a scroll rolled away. At times it would seem that the spirit had taken up his abode in this or that form — but on a sudden he is misused, he is gone and the abode is left idle. He is, one might guess, somewhat of an elfish nature, a nixie, a very Ariel. So we must distinguish him and his house. An idyllic portrait, or an environment of haystacks does not constitute a pastoral play, no more than rhodomontade and sermonizing build up a tragedy. Neither quiescence nor vulgarity shadow forth drama. However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if a play or a work of music or a picture presents the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of us, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. I shall not speak here of its many forms. In every form that was not fit for it, it made an outburst, as when the first sculptor separated the feet. Morality, mystery, ballet, pantomine, opera, all these it speedily ran through and discarded. Its proper form ‘the drama’ is yet intact. ‘There are many candles on the high altar, though one fall.
Whatever form it takes must not be superimposed or conventional. In literature we allow conventions, for literature is a comparatively low form of art. Literature is kept alive by tonics, it flourishes through conventions in all human relations, in all actuality. Drama will be for the future at war with convention, if it is to realize itself truly. If you have a clear thought of the body of drama, it will be manifest what raiment befits it. Drama of so wholehearted and admirable a nature cannot but draw all hearts from the spectacular and the theatrical, its note being truth and freedom in every aspect of it. It may be asked what are we to do, in the words of Tolstoi. First, clear our minds of cant and alter the falsehoods to which we have lent our support. Let us criticize in the manner of free people, as a free race, recking little of ferula and formula. The Folk is, I believe, able to do so much. Securus judicat orbis terrarum, is not too high a motto for all human artwork. Let us not overbear the weak, let us treat with a tolerant smile the stale pronouncements of those matchless serio-comics — the ‘litterateurs’. If a sanity rules the mind of the dramatic world there will be accepted what is now the faith of the few, there will be past dispute written up the respective grades of Macbeth and The Master Builder. The sententious critic of the thirtieth century may well say of them — Between him and these there is a great gulf fixed.
There are some weighty truths which we cannot overpass, in the relations between drama and the artist. Drama is essentially a communal art and of widespread domain. The drama — its fittest vehicle almost presupposes an audience, drawn from all classes. In an artloving and art-producing society the drama would naturally take up its position at the head of all artistic institutions. Drama is moreover of so unswayed, so unchallengeable a nature that in its highest forms it all but transcends criticism. It is hardly possible to criticize The Wild Duck, for instance; one can only brood upon it as upon a personal woe. Indeed in the case of all Ibsen’s later work dramatic criticism, properly so called, verges on impertinence. In every other art personality, mannerism of touch, local sense, are held as adornments, as additional charms. But here the artist forgoes his very self and stands a mediator in awful truth before the veiled face of God.
If you ask me what occasions drama or what is the necessity for it at all, I answer Necessity. It is mere animal instinct applied to the mind. Apart from his world-old desire to get beyond the flaming ramparts, man has a further longing to become a maker and a moulder. That is the necessity of all art. Drama is again the least dependent of all arts on its material. If the supply of mould- able earth or stone gives out, sculpture becomes a memory, if the yield of vegetable pigments ceases, the pictorial art ceases. But whether there be marble or paints, there is always the artstuff for drama. I believe further that drama arises spontaneously out of life and is coeval with it. Every race has made its own myths and it is in these that early drama often finds an outlet. The author of Parsifal has recognized this and hence his work is solid as a rock. When the mythus passes over the borderline and invades the temple of worship, the possibilities of its drama have lessened considerably. Even then it struggles back to its rightful place, much to the discomfort of the stodgy congregation.
As men differ as to the rise, so do they as to the aims of drama. It is in most cases claimed by the votaries of the antique school that the drama should have special ethical claims, to use their stock phrase, that it should instruct, elevate, and amuse. Here is yet another gyve that the jailers have bestowed. I do not say that drama may not fulfil any or all of these functions, but I deny that it is essential that it should fulfil them. Art, elevated into the overhigh sphere of religion, generally loses its true soul in stagnant quietism. As to the lower form of this dogma it is surely funny. This polite request to the dramatist to please point a moral, to rival Cyrano, in iterating through each act ‘A la fin de l’envoi je touche’ is amazing. Bred as it is of an amiable-parochial disposition we can but waive it. Mr Beoerly sacked with strychnine, or M. Coupeau in the horrors are nothing short of piteous in a surplice and dalmatic apiece. However this absurdity is eating itself fast, like the tiger of story, tail first.
A yet more insidious claim is the claim for beauty. As conceived by the claimants beauty is as often anaemic spirituality as hardy animalism. Then, chiefly because beauty is to men an arbitrary quality and often lies no deeper than form, to pin drama to dealing with it, would be hazardous. Beauty is the swerga’ of the aesthete; but truth has a more ascertainable and more real dominion. Art is true to itself when it deals with truth. Should such an untoward event as a universal reformation take place on earth, truth would be the very threshold of the house beautiful.
I have just one other claim to discuss, even at the risk of exhausting your patience. I quote from Mr Beerbohm Tree. ‘In these days when faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, I believe it is the function of art to give us light rather than darkness. It should not point to our relationship with monkeys but rather remind us of our affinity with the angels.’ In this statement there is a fair element of truth which however requires qualification. Mr Tree contends that men and women will always look to art as the glass wherein they may see themselves idealized. Rather I should think that men and women seldom think gravely on their own impulses towards art. The fetters of convention bind them too strongly. But after all art cannot be governed by the insincerity of the compact majority but rather by those eternal conditions, says Mr Tree, which have governed it from the first. I admit this as irrefutable truth. But it were well we had in mind that those eternal conditions are not the conditions of modern communities. Art is marred by such mistaken insistence on its religious, its moral, its beautiful, its idealizing tendencies. A single Rembrandt is worth a gallery full of Van Dycks. And it is this doctrine of idealism in art which has in notable instances disfigured manful endeavour, and has also fostered a babyish instinct to dive under blankets at the mention of the bogey of realism. Hence the public disowns Tragedy, unless she rattles her dagger and goblet, abhors Romance which is not amenable to the laws of prosody, and deems it a had effect in art if, from the outpoured blood of hapless heroism, there does not at once spring up a growth of sorrowful blossoms. As in the very madness and frenzy of this attitude, people want the drama to befool them, Purveyor supplies plutocrat with a parody of life which the latter digests medicinally in a darkened theatre, the stage literally battening on the mental offal of its patrons.
Now if these views are effete what will serve the purpose? Shall we put life — real life — on the stage? No, says the Philistine chorus, for it will not draw. What a blend of thwarted sight and smug commercialism. Parnassus and the city Bank divide the souls of the pedlars. Life indeed nowadays is often a sad bore. Many feel like the Frenchman that they have been born too late in a world too old, and their wanhope and nerveless unheroism point on ever sternly to a last nothing, a vast futility and meanwhile — a bearing of fardels. Epic savagery is rendered impossible by vigilant policing, chivalry has been killed by the fashion oracles of the boulevards. There is no clank of mail, no halo about gallantry, no hat-sweeping, no roystering! The traditions of romance are upheld only in Bohemia. Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama. It is a sinful foolishness to sigh back for the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones they afford. Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery. The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, to-day as yesterday and as in years gone. The forms of things, as the earth’s crust, are changed. The timbers of the ships of Tarshish are falling asunder or eaten by the wanton sea; time has broken into the fastnesses of the mighty; the gardens of Armida are become as treeless wilds. But the deathless passions, the human verities which so found expression then, are indeed deathless, in the heroic cycle, or in the scientific age, Lohengrin, the drama of which unfolds itself in a scene of seclusion, amid half- lights, is not an Antwerp legend but a world drama. Ghosts, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import — a deepset branch on the tree, Igdrasil, whose roots are struck in earth, but through whose higher leafage the stars of heaven are glowing and astir. It may be that many have nothing to do with such fable, or think that their wonted fare is all that is of need to them. But as we stand on the mountains today, looking before and after, pining for what is not, scarcely discerning afar the patches of open sky; when the spurs threaten, and the track is grown with briers, what does it avail that into our hands we have given us a clouded cane for an alpenstock, or that we have dainty silks to shield us against the eager, upland wind? The sooner we understand our true position, the better; and the sooner then will we be up and doing on our way. In the meantime, art, and chiefly drama, may help us to make our resting places with a greater insight and a greater foresight, that the stones of them may be bravely builded, and the windows goodly and fair. \ . . what will you do in our Society, Miss Hessel?’ asked Rôrlund—’I will let in fresh air, Pastor.’ — answered Lona.