Now this version I believe to be a more specious than complete explanation of the recent history of taste. It is true that while the most popular contemporary writers were in their lifetimes Dickens and Tennyson, they are now people like Miss Dell and Mrs Wilcox. And such a dégringolade is more than an accident. But Dickens and Tennyson were not pioneers: their works were largely emasculated varieties of their predecessors, especially and respectively of Smollett and Keats. The formal innovators, like Browning, Henry James, Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler, for years appealed only to a public as restricted as that which at present interests itself in new forms in art. For it is unreasonable to expect a rapid general understanding of formal novelty. The important and feasible thing is first to obtain some general knowledge of what is old: the creative genius may occasionally be ignorant of his predecessors, but if an audience for new things is to be found which is discriminating as well as appreciative, it will need some scholarship in the highest achievements of the past. No one, I venture to say, is so much to be distrusted as the admirer of Picasso who has not studied Giotto and Poussin, the advocate of Eliot and Joyce who has not studied Milton and Sterne, the enthusiast for the Expressionist Theatre who has not studied Webster and Dryden. And I suggest that there is no better rule for everyone to follow than that of reading, for every new book, at least one old one.
As far as the theatre in England is concerned, it is not certain that if good things were offered to the public, they would not be lapped up. But the public is not given a chance: we are on the cruel knees of the theatrical financiers. But despite the power of these remorseless deities, we have in London one institution which did not exist before the war, which grows yearly more robust, and which, I believe, has no counterpart in the States. That is the Phoenix, a Society which exists to produce performances of old English plays; in each of the three or four seasons since its beginning, it has given four plays of great interest and importance.
The very genius of Shakespeare has in some respects had calamitous results—for his successors and contemporaries have been disastrously eclipsed by it from the public view, and several of them were only not so great as he. I do not suppose that people are any more generally aware in America than they are here of the greatness of English dramatic literature. Do many of them know that there is a greater Webster than Noah, and a more important Ford than
