Chapter 13
Chapter 13 of Problems of the Playwright by Clayton Hamilton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Problems of the Playwright by Clayton Hamilton, Section 13. Chapter 13. The Loveliness of Little Things.
For those who seek adventure among beautiful achievements, there is a special pleasure in contemplating the loveliness of little things. The tiny temple at Nîmes is not so great an edifice as the cathedral of Amiens, but it is much more perfect and more fine. The mind is overwrought by the tremendous seraphim of Tintoretto cutting through chaos with strong level flight, but the heart goes out with keener
fondness to the little angels of Fra Angelico that demurely set one tiny foot before the other on the pancid fields of paradise. The vastest work of Byron is Don Juan with its enormous incongruity of words, but his loveliest work is the simple-moved little lyric that begins, She walks in beauty. Could any colossus of sculpture be so dainty or so delicate as the little bronze Narcissus of Naples, whose uplifted finger is eternally accompanied by a melody of
unheard flutes? What is Shakespeare's finest and most perfect work? It is not Hamlet nor Macbeth, it is not even Othello, it is I think the tiny song beginning, Take, oh take those lips away. It is conceivable that any of his great plays might be improved by a hundred alterations in the lines, but to change a single syllable of that full-on and lovely lyric would be like scratching the face of a little child. It is one of the paradoxes of art that its very finest works
are nearly always minor works. The pursuit of perfectness is incompatible with the ambition for amplitude, and a vast creation can seldom be completely fine. A cameo is a more perfect thing than a cathedral, and lovers of all that is most delicate in versification must turn to minor poets like Catollus. The major poet can afford to be careless, but the minor poet is constrained to write perfectly if he is to write at all. With the major poet, near art is a secondary concern.
He may indeed be a great artist like Milton, or he may be a reckless and shoddy artist like Walt Whitman, but the minor poet loves art for the sake of art. He pursues perfection and can rest content with nothing less faultless and less fine. Amid the drums and trumpets of all the great Elizabethan tragedies, there is no passage quite so perfect in pathetic delicacy as Mr. Austin Dobson's little lyric and dialogue entitled, Good Night, Babette. Such exquisite minor works as this
and all the others we have mentioned must be regarded as the little children of art. They awaken an affection that can never be inspired by those gigantic presences before which we bow our heads in awe. It is a great thing to strew roses in the triumphal path of Caesar, but it is a sweeter thing to deck with daffodils the blown hair of some dancing little maid. In the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, we learn that the dearest heir of his invention was not the tall
and agile Perseus that now takes the reign in Florence, but the precious little salt cellar which now arrests the wanderer through many rooms in the vast museum of Vienna. In this minor work, the artist's medium was not bronze but gold. He was not making a monument for multitudes to gape art, but was perfecting a tiny and precious thing for the eyes of the enlightened few. In this regard, a minor work of art may be defined as a work of art designed for the minority.
In many modern languages, like French and German and Italian, the sweetest way of expressing endearment is through the use of a diminutive. Mutechen in German means not merely little mother, but dear little mother as well. And when the younger Lippi was nicknamed Filippino, the name meant not so much little Philip as the well-beloved Philip. There is a famous passage in Dante's Purgatory at the outset of the 28th canto, where the poet's keenness of affection
for the perfect world is expressed by his appreciation of the little birds that sing on little branches in treetops, soon lightly by a little breeze. And this succession of diminutive is like a reaching out of tiny fingers groping for the reader's hand. Whoever has looked upon the sweetest painting in the world must know the love of little things. When you enter the tiny chapel of the Frari Church in Venice, where the masterwork of Giovanni Bellini sits enshrined,
you begin instinctively to walk in whispers. Your first impression is that of an ineffable serenity, a quiet that you must not interrupt. But this serenity arises partly from the fact that the Madonna is such a little lady and that the winged musicians that stand listening beneath her throne are the youngest of the children of the angels. And her own child, despite his sturdiness of standing, seems such a little boy beside those dwarfed athletes that bulge their muscles in
Raphael's cartoons. And the strips of landscape beyond the venerable saints open such enticing, tiny vistas of the earth. Tintoretto may soup-roaring through immensity, but here is an artist whose heart was as a nest for all the sweet, winged wishes of the world. He reminds you of little children kneeling in the night and whispering, God bless, to all the things that are. Similarly, the devotees of the drama must always keep an open home within their hearts for the
reception of the little children of this most adult of all the arts. There are certain plays that one would like to mention always with an Italian diminutive, with some such nickname as Prunella, for example. There is no vastness and no grandeur in their structure, only an intimacy of little perfectnesses. One feels a bit afraid, lest they might be seen by someone incapable of tenderness for tiny things. To this category must be assigned that exquisite dramatic poem of Alfred
de Musset, A Qua Rève Les Genes Filles, and in this same context, the reader must also be invited to consider such a fantasy as Prunella by Mr. Lawrence Houseman and Mr. Granville Barker. Prunella is a young maiden who lives immured in a little house and garden with three forbidding aunts, prim, privacy and prude. Along comes a company of strolling players headed by Pierrot and Scaramel, who gain access to Prunella and awakening her a longing to flee away into the mysterious and
alluring world. Pierrot wins her love and, aided by Scaramel and the others, abducts her from her prison house at night. In the last act, after Pierrot has tired of her, she wanders home, friendless and disenchanted. But Pierrot had learned, and it is sweet to think he may have learned this little truth from Mr. Austin Dobson, that love comes back to his vacant dwelling. His loneliness has taught him the value and the need of the old, old love that he knew of yore.
Prunella once again becomes his Pierrette and they look forward toward a life whose love is real. This story is, in all essentials, the same story that was told in Sister Beatrice, but it lacks those overtones of eternity which Mederling has imparted to his narrative. It was apparently the purpose of the authors of Prunella to emulate the pretty witty art of such a piece as Le Romanesque of Mr. Edmond Rostin, but they lacked that brilliant exuberance of fancy,
which was demanded by the task. Every once in a while, the authors permit us to regret that the piece could not have been written for them by Theodore de Banville or Mr. Austin Dobson. Several of Mr. Houseman's lyric stanzas are delightful, but his handling of rhymed couplets is pedestrian, and the prose passages lack that illumination, as by a flock of fireflies that is desirable in a composition of this type.
