Exception has been taken to
the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the ground that the
Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the Catherine
whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern
history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose
diplomacy, whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal
reform, whose correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to
cut such a magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply,
I can only confess that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do
not interest me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the
statesmen with whom she played this mischievous kind of political
chess had any notion of the real history of their own times, or of
the real forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution,
which made such short work of Catherine's Voltairean principles,
surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and
scandalized any provincial governess in the French chateaux.
The main difference between her and our modern Liberal
Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite
intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened
into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our Liberal
ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without knowing or
caring enough about its meaning even to talk and scribble about it,
and pass their flogging Bills, and institute their prosecutions for
sedition and blasphemy and so forth, without the faintest suspicion
that such proceedings need any apology from the Liberal point of
view.
It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the
condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up
for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of
European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only
world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the
rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy,
however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest,
nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be persuaded
to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a woman with
plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals, still
fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her
contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these
Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as
eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of
furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic
relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon
committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love
interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine
kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century, not
as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated German lady whose
household routine was not at all so unlike that of Queen Victoria
as might be expected from the difference in their notions of
propriety in sexual relations.
In short, if Byron leaves you with an impression that he said
very little about Catherine, and that little not what was best
worth saying, I beg to correct your impression by assuring you that
what Byron said was all there really is to say that is worth
saying. His Catherine is my Catherine and everybody's Catherine.
The young man who gains her favor is a Spanish nobleman in his
version. I have made him an English country gentleman, who gets out
of his rather dangerous scrape, by simplicity, sincerity, and the
courage of these qualities. By this I have given some offence to
the many Britons who see themselves as heroes: what they mean by
heroes being theatrical snobs of superhuman pretensions which,
though quite groundless, are admitted with awe by the rest of the
human race. They say I think an Englishman a fool. When I do, they
have themselves to thank.
I must not, however, pretend that historical portraiture was the
motive of a play that will leave the reader as ignorant of Russian
history as he may be now before he has turned the page. Nor is the
sketch of Catherine complete even idiosyncratically, leaving her
politics out of the question. For example, she wrote bushels of
plays. I confess I have not yet read any of them. The truth is,
this play grew out of the relations which inevitably exist in the
theatre between authors and actors. If the actors have sometimes to
use their skill as the author's puppets rather than in full
self-expression, the author has sometimes to use his skill as the
actors' tailor, fitting them with parts written to display the
virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve problems of life,
character, or history. Feats of this kind may tickle an author's
technical vanity; but he is bound on such occasions to admit that
the performer for whom he writes is "the onlie begetter" of his
work, which must be regarded critically as an addition to the debt
dramatic literature owes to the art of acting and its exponents.
Those who have seen Miss Gertrude Kingston play the part of
Catherine will have no difficulty in believing that it was her
talent rather than mine that brought the play into existence. I
once recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now
in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to
the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran
actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare
that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss
Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded,
was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my
advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen
capable of standing up to our joint talents.
In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only
by the range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends
the modesty of nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any
Russian, and my English people more insular than any Briton, I will
not plead, as I honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be
written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects; that the
apparently outrageous Patiomkin is but a timidly bowdlerized ghost
of the original; and that Captain Edstaston is no more than a
miniature that might hang appropriately on the walls of nineteen
out of twenty English country houses to this day. An artistic
presentment must not condescend to justify itself by a comparison
with crude nature; and I prefer to admit that in this kind my
dramatic personae are, as they should be, of the stage stagey,
challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them, if he can.
The more heroic the overcharging, the better for the
performance.
In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am
departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so
rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to
let slip a word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader
by reminding him of the boards and the footlights and the sky
borders and the rest of the theatrical scaffolding, for which
nevertheless I have to plan as carefully as if I were the head
carpenter as well as the author. But even at the risk of talking
shop, an honest playwright should take at least one opportunity of
acknowledging that his art is not only limited by the art of the
actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No sane and
skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the
actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he
asks them to do things that they have never done before and cannot
conceive as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy
have done, for example), it is always found that the difficulties
are not really insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected
possibilities both in the actor and in the audience, whose
will-to-make-believe can perform the quaintest miracles. Thus may
authors advance the arts of acting and of staging plays. But the
actor also may enlarge the scope of the drama by displaying powers
not previously discovered by the author. If the best available
actors are only Horatios, the authors will have to leave Hamlet
out, and be content with Horatios for heroes. Some of the
difference between Shakespeare's Orlandos and Bassanios and
Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not only
to his development as a dramatic poet, but to the development of
Burbage as an actor. Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when
their livelihood is at stake: if they did, they would write parts
for heroes with twenty arms like an Indian god. Indeed the actor
often influences the author too much; for I can remember a time(I
am not implying that it is yet wholly past) when the art of writing
a fashionable play had become very largely the art of writing it
"round" the personalities of a group of fashionable performers of
whom Burbage would certainly have said that their parts needed no
acting. Everything has its abuse as well as its use.
It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than
great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the
worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor,
instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him
with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and
takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century,
the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to
have produced a group of heroic plays comparable in intensity to
those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; but nothing of the
kind happened: these actors played the works of dead authors, or,
very occasionally, of live poets who were hardly regular
professional playwrights. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills,
and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high horses for
the great actors of their time; but the playwrights proper, who
really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre,
did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to
compete with a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and
who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the
actor-managers of not charging author's fees. The result was that
the playwrights and the great actors ceased to think of themselves
as having any concern with one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen,
Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar
system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was true of
their respective predecessors.
Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead
that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been
there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and
Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound's
Conversion would never have been effected. The Devil's Disciple,
with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a potboiler, would
have had a different sort of hero if Richard Mansfield had been a
different sort of actor, though the actual commission to write it
came from an English actor, William Terriss, who was assassinated
before he recovered from the dismay into which the result of his
rash proposal threw him. For it must be said that the actor or
actress who inspires or commissions a play as often as not regards
it as a Frankenstein's monster, and will have none of it. That does
not make him or her any the less parental in the fecundity of the
playwright.
To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen
and whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor's
genius overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor
himself. When I snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and
made him wear a frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps
the first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the least
that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent
as a genuine stage classic. Mrs Patrick Campbell was famous before
I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate cockney
flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to all these
impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who
first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most
delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought me
more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the Helen of
Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career as Catherine
of Russia.
It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the
plays will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we
take care of the plays the actors will take care of themselves.
There is both give and take in the business. I have seen plays
written for actors that made me exclaim, "How oft the sight of
means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill done!" But Burbage may have
flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet under Shakespeare's nose at
the tenth rehearsal and cried, "How oft the sight of means to do
great deeds makes playwrights great!" I say the tenth because I am
convinced that at the first he denounced his part as a rotten one;
thought the ghost's speech ridiculously long; and wanted to play
the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter it or not, the
boast would have been a valid one. The best conclusion is that
every actor should say, "If I create the hero in myself, God will
send an author to write his part." For in the long run the actors
will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.
Great Catherine was performed for the first time at the
Vaudeville Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913, with
Gertrude Kingston as Catherine, Miriam Lewes as Yarinka, Dorothy
Massingham as Claire, Norman McKinnell as Patiomkin, Edmond Breon
as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene
Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford as Naryshkin and the Sergeant.
