Chapter 9-

PART III Cultural Life

Shakespeare in Today's England

I HAVE given the title 'Cultural Life' to this section of my account, but I am far from being happy about it. It is likely to give rise to dissatisfaction on all sides. The things I am going to speak about are regarded by the English people as their amusements, and they may feel that I am spoiling their enjoyment by bringing in the pretentious notion of culture. On the other hand, most of my countrymen will miss in them that high purpose which alone can, in their view, justify anybody's describing them as cultural. Therefore, in order to avoid giving offence to any party, if not to succeed in pleasing both, I shall begin with a safe topic, which is amusement in England but culture in India.

It is Shakespeare. We in Bengal used to worship him, and I am one of the last surviving Bengalis who were brought up in that cult. So I found nothing unusual in the celebrations which I saw at Stratford-upon-Avon on the 391st anniversary of the poet's birthday. Their formal part: the speeches, the procession, un- furling of the flags, visit to the birth-place, laying of wreaths and posies on the tomball this w might have managed more or less in the same way if we had to pay homage to a national hero. St course, here too I noticed local touches. The speeches were in the form of toasts, and to ram them down we had the following Juncheon:

Мени

Melon Rafraichi

Consommé en gelée 

 Saumon froid, sauce mayonnaise Pointes d'asperges

он

Dindonneau et jambon froids Salade de saison Pommes nouvelles

Gâteau glacé Shakespeare

Fromages

Cafe

-and to wash them down we were given a two-page wine list, which for the honour of Stratford was qualified as the 'Abridged Wine List'. Also, the speeches were made by people who could be expected to know something about the poet and be cogent, and not by politicians or civil servants who thought that they were conferring an honour on Shakespeare or at the most recommend- ing his name for the Honours List.

But everything besides this function in Shakespeare's relations with contemporary England was novel to me. At the very outset I was surprised by the tribute to him that was implicit in the apparent prosperity of Stratford. Here was a little town doing quite well on Shakespeare, as the country town in which I was born did on litigation, which in its turn was kept going by t money brought in by jute. I was told elsewhere in England that Shakespeare was dreadfully commercialized at Stratford. It was, however, this very commercialization which gave me the greatest pleasure. As I wrote to my family:

'Stratford is a small town, smaller than Kishorganj of my boyhood. But it has all kinds of old and modern china, antiques, old and modern silver, furniture, and books. Of course, Stratford flourishes on Shakespeare, and even Englishmen say everything at Stratford is commercialized. But in order to make Shakes- peare commercially profitable you must have a sufficiently strong interest in him. In our country religion is still more commercialized but religion is there."

That, as I see it, is the kernel of the matter. If people and towns flourish on religion in India it is because religion is a living thing in the country. Nobody flourishes on Kalidasa, however heavy he might be as a brick to throw at Englishmen when they talk about Shakespeare.

What surprised and at the same time delighted me still more was his vogue on the stage. The world's greatest writers can be the world's greatest bores. It is only when a man tries to read Shakes- peare as he reads a modern novel that he feels how strangely distant and even absurd Shakespeare can be. But in contemporary England he seems to have become popular entertainment. Eng- lishmen had not degraded the old playwright, actor, and stage manager into a mere author.

I went to see As You Like It at the Old Vic on the day following that of my arrival, and when I took my seat the auditorium was already full. It was the seventeenth performance of the play in less than a month. It will be pointed out that the Old Vic is a repertory theatre whose business is to produce the classics. But mea are more obstinate than horses, they canne: be even taken to the water, far less made to drink. A subsidized national theatre can give perform- ances of the classics, but neither it nor anybody else can make people buy tickets unless they want to. Yet they were buying tickets.

I saw it being done in a very inpressive manner at Stratford. I had gone out for my walk before six in the morning, and when returning I was astonished to see a large crowd before the Memor- ial Theatre. What were they doing there? When I came nearer I was even more astonished to find that men and women were sleeping on the ground under blankets with rucksacks as pillows. They had spent the night there in the open and in the cold in order to queue up for tickets, in fact they were sleeping in a queue. People do such a thing only when they get their money's of trouble's worth of enjoyment, they do not do it out of a sense of duty to culture.

What struck me even more powerfully was the behaviour of the audience during the performances. Here was a set of playgoers who need not have been playgoers at all but only film-viewers, but who were not only at a Shakespeare play but taking him in directly and naturally. I kept my eyes and ears partly open for the audience. It seemed to be composed of ordinary middle-class people, who in no way answered my preconceived notion of what a Shakespeare scholar or enthusiast should look like. Nevertheless they were unmistakably showing their appreciation of the play, of the gorgeous Elizabethan rhetoric by close attention though they did not carry tablets, and of the vivacious Elizabethan jokes, some of them decidedly bawdy, by loud laughter. Critics have always been somewhat embarrassed by these jokes, and they have tried to explain them away by saying that Shakespeare was compelled to put them in to please his boisterous and coarse clientele. Even the robust Dr Johnson said that 'Shakespeare sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose'. Yet a modern audience, which could be expected to be squeamish by Elizabethan or even eighteenth-century standards, was finding the jokes quite acceptable. There was, however, to be another sur- prise. At the end of the play Rosalind came forward and spoke the epilogue:

'I am not furnished like a beggar,' [she said, pointing to her beautiful robes], 'therefore to beg will not become me: my way is to conjure you; and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women-as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as marry of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell."

The question arose in my mind what had made a contem- porary producer keep that bit of typical stage trick of the Eliza- bethan age? Rosalind was now a woman, and no longer a boy. But there was applause, and I heard some simpering myself. So the question was quickly disposed of. The same thing happened at Stratford. At the end of the performance of Twelfth Night the clown, Feste, sang the epilogue:

When that I was and a little tiny boy. With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.

Again the audience applauded. This performance was not received very enthusiastically by the dramatic critics, although John Gielgud was the producer and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were in the cast. Some of them found fault, with the inter- pretation, and one critic said that the very beauty of the décor had distracted attention from the psychological situations. I had not seen any performance on a public stage before going to England, and I was enchanted not only with Twelfth Night, but with every play I saw. It was a delight to feast one's eyes on the lovely spectacles, and to hear English spoken. I had no idea that the language sounded so beautiful. I can still hear Rosalind saying. 

'And I for no woman'. That scene was done like a vocal quartet in an opera.

So, when some days later I had a talk with a very cultured Frenchman in London about this performance, I mentioned the criticism to him. He promptly replied, "What could it be besides a spectacle? The book was so fantastic or even absurd.' I was inclined to share this view. Whatever might be the stage history of the play and more especially of Malvolio's part, I did not think that there was much scope for psychological profundity in acting Twelfth Night. Even now I do not think that Shakespeare is profound in the modern sense of being accessible only with effort. He was perfectly intelligible to his contemporaries in the light of what they already had in their head and heart, as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were to the Athenians. In any case, the producers and actors at Stratford had tried to please, and pleased the modern audience was.

Still, the main question remains unanswered. Why does Shakes- peare appeal to a modern audience? No Englishman, and I have asked many, has been able to give me a satisfactory answer. Usually they say that at the Old Vic and at Stratford you have the best representation of Shakespeare by the best actors and pro- ducers. But that does not explain why the best producers and actors concern themselves with him. The immediate explanation I gave to myself was that the English people remain basically Elizabethan and have always been so. Afterwards I discovered that there is also something more in it.

The question raised by Shakespeare in England faced me ma much more extreme and intractable form in France. As I was walking along the Quai Malaquais, my eyes were suddenly arrested by a placard on a kiosk, which showed that Raçine's Athalie was on at the Salle Richelieu of the Comédie-Française. I rushed back to the hotel and got a scat booked. When I entered the theatre in the evening I found the attendance to be even greater than at the Old Vic and the Memorial Theatre. Even Frenchmen were surprised when I told them about it. To non-French hearers Athalie sounds like continuous ranting, without any concession to love, humour, or any other human emotion. It remains through- out on the plane of Hebrew religious exultation, as embodied in classical French rhetoric.

The producer had made no secret of it. As I read in the pro- gramme notes After reading the most dazzling psychological and philosophic acrobatics of the grammarians, polemicists, com- mentators, ecclesiastics, authors, and artists on the fabulous personages of this sumptuous epic, I have come back to the Bible and Racine. Athalie is one of the most beautiful paraphrases of the Old Testament. We are in a world in which man meets the Eternal. It is, to my thinking, a tragedy of the Hebrew character.")

All this and more from Mme Vera Korène, who produced the play and in addition acted the part of Athalic, which Sarah Bernhardt used to take, with the utmost distinction. For this play, obsolete by the standards of all Indian readers of Western litera- ture, new stage sets and costumes had been designed and made at enormous expense, and new music written. It was the $30th performance of the play at the Comédie-Française.

It was beautifully presented. I had seen some very fine décor and costumes in England and elsewhere in France, but for beauty and nobility combined this Racine play surpassed all the rest. For the sake of the spectacle in red and gold, white and gold, blue and gold, and in the case of one character in green, I would have gladly missed rows and rows of legs in any ballet. And of course, the acting and clocution were superb. The whole play remains before my mind's eye, but one scene comes back most readily. It is the scene in which the chorus sings:

O promesse! 6 menace! & ténébreux mystère! Que de maux, que de biens sont prédits tour à tour! Comment peut-on avec tant de colère Accorder tant d'amour? 

'What was the relation between a modern civilized people and their classics?' I asked myself. Frenchmen could not answer the question any more to my satisfaction than Englishmen. But as in the one case, so in the other, I succeeded in finding the answer by myself. 

Culture Begins at Home

ANOTHER amusement of the English people which must be given its place in their contemporary cultural life is the growing habit of visiting the country houses. Ever greater numbers of them are showing this new interest, though it is not always easy to satisfy it. There is a fairly high admission fee, 2s. 6d., with another shilling for the garden in some cases, to which has to be added the cost of transport, meals, guidebooks, and souvenirs. As the English friend who took me to Albury Park said, 'Mr Chaudhuri, we cannot see these places as often as we wish to, because for a man with a family one visit means the greater part of a pound. Nevertheless, in actual fact, immense numbers do visit them. When seeing Knole I was told that on Easter Monday more than a thousand people had come, and the guides were quite exhausted taking them round.

Here, too, I will not condemn the commercialization. Perhaps a few owners, or at all events their agents, practise the art of adver- tisement to a point which is perilously near angling. But so far as I could see none of the places were spoilt by being thrown open to visitors, and those which were in the hands of the National Trust were being protected from museun.ization. As for the owners they too had not come to any harm, and if some of them just disclosed a streak of simony, they could put forward a strong plea. When those who have not got such houses impoverish those who have, play up class prejudice from below, try to disassociate the Throne from them, gloat over their downfall, and at the same time rush to their houses to gape at their possessions and way of living, the owners are bound to exact their toll. But it is not really necessary to be so cynical about either of the parties. People went to see the country houses before the custom of charging a fee was introduced, and the new practice has not made much difference to the spirit of showing or seeing.

But why do people come to see them? Even though not as remote from contemporary interests as Shakespeare is, they ar still things apart. One motivation of a practical order must be ruled out altogether, and that is the wish to get ideas about build- ing, furnishing, and living in such places. Even historical interest in them or the families did not seem to be very strong, because many of thy visitors had to be supplied with such information. Those who went to see them appeared to derive some immediate and direct satisfaction from the mere sight of the houses and their contents. I could plainly see that they were interested in the house as a building, in the park and the gardens, in the collection of furniture, pictures, and objets d'art. Among all this it was possible to make many interesting discoveries. I made a very unexpected one and wrote the following letter about it to the Editor of The Times, who printed it in his issue of 10 May DIWAN-I-AM PANELS Sir, I am sure a link that I observed between the Diwan-i-Am in Delhi and Penshurst Place will interest your readers. Every visitor to the Red Fort in Delhi must have noticed the pietra dura panels behind the throne platform in the Diwan-i-Am, among which there is one representing Orpheus with the beasts. It has been generally believed that these are of Italian and probably Florentine origin, though some have regarded them- as Indian for no apparent reason.

While visiting Penshurst Place, in the Tapestry Room, I saw a cabinet with seventeen pietra dura panels of exactly the same design and in the same materials, namely, black marble and coloured stone, depicting as in Delhi, birds and flowers. I also saw in Warwick Castle a box with four such panels. I was told that the Penshurst Place cabinet is of Florentine origin and work manship dating around 1640. I think that settles the question of the provenance of the Diwan-i-Am panels once and for all. Yours, etc.

I was so excited when I saw them that I cried out, "Why, we have exactly the same sort of panels in the Diwan-i-Am of Delhi!" It was probably the first time that so un-English a word had been uttered in the home of the Sidneys. So an English lady, who was among the visitors, came up to me and observed, "You bring the breath of the wide world into this place!' I immediately wrote to my son to send me the colour transparencies of the Delhi panels and when I got them, sent one to Penshurst Place for comparison. My letter was not published until I had left London for Paris, and most interesting letter from a lady in London was forwarded to me there, in which she informed me that her family too possessed a similar cabinet. I am sorry to say that I did not reply to her even after returning to India. East of Suez we disregard the command- ment about replying to letters, but I hope that if the lady who wrote the letter sees these lines she will accept my apologies.

But however interesting such minor discoveries may be, the houses do not survive to provide these alone. I made a much more important one connected with English politics. I had always wondered how and from where Burke had got the idea for the famous passage: "We have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars, I found the answer in the country houses. I am not sur- prised either that Burke, dogged by poverty, debts, and anxieties all through life, built a country house for himself. Here is a picture of the making of politics in a country house at the end of the last century: 

*After dinner we went into what I do think was the most fascinating room I ever saw in a house- great or small - one of the libraries, lined with well-bound books on white enam- elled shelves, with a few, but not too many knick-knacks lying about, and all illuminated with the soft radiance of many clusters of wax candles. A picture to remember: Spencer with his noble carriage and fine red beard; Mr G. seated on a low stool, discoursing as usual, playful, keen, versatile; Rosebery saying little, but now and then launching a pleasant mot; Harcourt cheery, expansive, witty."

And again on the next day:

'We met in the famous room where all the sovereign treas- ures of the bibliomaniacs are the Caxtons, the Mazarin Bible, the Mainz Psalter; prizes acquired by an ancestor from funds procured by sale of land from Wimbledon to Hyde Park Comer.... Rosebery took up a book and turned it sedulously over, only interjecting a dry word now and then. Harcourt not diffuse.' Politics against the background of incunabula, to be followed the next morning by politics against the Pink: 'Spencer came into my room betimes in his pink, to return letters and say good-bye. He was off for a fourteen-mile drive to the meet, and the rain pouring."

That explains to me why Ramsay MacDonald, even after country-house politics was wholly dead, pursued its glamour in a nationalized country house. Since English politics ceased to be. made in the country houses it has wholly changed its character, for in politics the successor to the aristocrat is not the so-called common man of democracy, but the bureaucrat.

For those who have a feeling for history these houses are what haunted houses are for those who love ghosts. The friend who took me to Knole and Penshurst Place wrote the following letter to me after a visit to Kenwood House a year later: 

'I had been thinking of you a day or two earlier when I happened to visit Kenwood House in brilliant sunshine after a light fall of snow, when it stood out in the distance looking like the last eighteenth-century villa on the face of the moon. I wish I could show it to you in that peculiar super-charged daylight.

'As it happened, I had just been reading the new edition of Margaret Jourdain's and her friend's account of their vision seen in Paris in the early 1900's, when these two serious Oxford ladies accidentally walked into the wrong dimension, and in broad daylight but uncanny silence saw a number of people, buildings, rocks, and trees, which hadn't actually been visible there for more than a century.

"Thinking of this I was wondering whether Kenwood doesn't in fact have all the original people and surroundings visible, perhaps on a certain day in every year or century, if only one knows how to get into the right frame of mind.

'Just then a hansom cab passed slowly across the façade, from one end of the terrace to the other. At that distance it was just distinguishable. Moving gently forward, so as not to break the spell, and keeping my eyes on the terrace (which looked dead and deserted instead of being crowded with people as it usually is on a fine Saturday morning), I saw two stout white horses come padding along, in the wake of the hansom, drawing a little vehicle of a kind I had only seen in old engravings: two seats facing forward, completely boxed in with glass windows, old cabbage-faced coachman in front, and inside a figure, a permage, someone of the calibre of Palmerston or the Duke of Wellington, sitting bolt upright in a heavy travelling coat-a Prime Minister profile with a great, heavy, nineteenth-century nose- and on the back of the chariot, phacton, curricle (what was its name?), stains where the rain had melted a thick coating of dust and caused it to run down and then dry up again in the snowy sunlight. This suggested a journey about long enough to have lasted from Whitehall to Kenwood. 

'Drawing nearer and looking around I saw that there were people about certainly twenty couples in the lawn-like field running down to the lake. All the men were in top hats with heavy overcoats; the ladies were elderly, with travelling bonnets and cloaks dike the pictures of Mrs Gladstone or earlier still. Behind the trees two heavy top-hatted figures with immense breadth of shoulders and military cloaks stamped up and down as if waiting for the protagonists in a duel, while a lady in a long close-fitting dress down to the ground clasped and unclasped her hands as if waiting, too, with a more poignant interest than either of the men.

'A voice loud and clear as that of the Archangel Gabriel said, "We are going to shoot, so would that gentleman please stand back, right back?" But nobody fired a shot. Instead, yet another strange vehicle appeared-a Rolls car with a film camera fixed on with steel scaffolding, and five 1900 faces looking out of the top."

Yet the romance of history is only an incidental interest in the country houses. My friend, whose letter I have quoted, used to have his falling asleep delayed in childhood by the discussion of food and wine between his father and George Saintsbury, which came wafting in from the dining-room. He remains capable of hallucinations which do not visit the general run of Englishmen. For them, I think, the houses suggest moods which belong to our times, however long they might have been brooded on in the past, moods which are incredibly homely and yet infinitely gracious. If an Englishman or Englishwoman wants today to be lifted out of the ordinariness of his or her daily life, and to carry back to it some douceur de vivre captured in the spirit, they can do no better than see these houses. After I had felt this myself! came upon a passage in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography which said exactly the same thing. Here it is:

'From 1814 to 1817 Mr Bentham lived during half of each year at Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations. The middle-age architecture, the baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English middle-class life, gave the senti- ment of a larger and freer existence, and were to rae a sort of poetic cultivation....

I would only add:

If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Builder's holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What flats have made of Man?

But in any case the English people are trying to bring into their flats sensations of more spacious habitations.

The passage from Mill shows that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and perhaps much earlier than that, the country houses as a class had already come to stand for a definite quality in living. But there also seems to have been an earlier age of quarrels and rivalries among then., when the palazzo was being imported into the English countryside. The opening lines of Ben. Jonson's poem on Penshurst Place illustrate this very clearly:

Thou art not, PENSHURST, built to envious show, Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polish'd pillars, or a roofe of gold: Thou hast no lantherne, whereof tales are told; Or stayre, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile, And these grudg'd at, art reverenc'd the while. 

The dig seems to be at Hatfield House. The date of the poem agrees with the date of the completion of that house. "Touch or marble' appears to refer to the black and white marble of the Marble Hall; the pillars may be the pilasters on the sides of the arches of the Armoury, which once were open, or they may be the six columns of the central section of the south front illustrating the Orders; the staircase and the lantern are, of course, both famous and obvious; but the other details are something of a problem. In any case, it seems probable that not much love was lost between the Sidney: and the Cecils, and a protégé of the former would represent the new family as upstarts. Ben Jonson makes two other points about the superior claims of Penshurst Place. First, he says that though built of the stone of the country its walls are reared with no man's ruin, no man's grone'. Then comes a really striking tribute:

These, PENSHURST, are thy praise, and yet not all. Thy lady's noble, fruitfull, chaste withall. His children thy great lord may call his owne: A fortune, in this age, but rarely knowne.

When I saw the charming picture of Lady Sidney with her six children in the Solar and stood before it full of admiration, I had not read the poem, and therefore I did not know what, in the estimation of the poet, was the special distinction of Barbara, née Gamage, and the lovely cherubs. Even the copious references to horns in Elizabethan literature had not led me to think that the joke was as well-founded in fact as Ben Jonson gravely suggests.

But these quarrels have now passed into history, and all the country houses stand today for about the same expression of the art of living. That is to say, Ben Jonson's final tribute to Penshurst is now applicable to all:

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells. 

The antithesis is no longer valid, because in all of them their lords dwell.

I cannot understand why Sarah Higgins, the country girl whom the Earl of Exeter married and brought to Burghley House near Stamford in Lincolnshire, died of the magnificence of her new home. Even I, a Hindu who had lived all his life in the most primitive of surroundings, felt that I should be perfectly at home if I had to live even in the most grandiose of them, because they have acquired on the one hand an ineffable simplicity, and on the other a curious power to raise everyone who comes to them to their own level without effort and without self-consciousness. They still remain grand, but they are also humble. To me it seemed that in them the distinction between Paolo Veronese and Carlo Crivelli had been obliterated.

I felt this most strongly in the dining-rooms, of which I saw a few very well-laid ones. I thought that in such rooms it would be an intrusion even to be a gourmet. After dining on the most recherché menus and drinking the choicest vintages at these tables one could rise from them only in forgetfulness of all that had preceded and say with a glad and grateful heart: The Lord be thanked for having given us this day our daily bread.

I would say that the large numbers of English people whom I saw in these houses felt in the same way, though perhaps they did not bring to bear on their experience the detached analysis which was natural in me because I had been brought up in the traditions of a wholly different civilization.