"THE MIRACLE."
rTo THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOE."1
SIR,—The Spectator must have sympathy with all spectators, and may have room for a letter on the incomparable visions of "The Miracle." It is worth a hundred pageants—those rather stockish performances with Mrs. So-and-so as Boadicea, and the Mayor, designed by Nature to look exactly like Henry VIII.: worth a hundred sentimental mystery-plays like "Eager Heart." They come too late: we Londoners demand for our souls not past events, nor abstractions, but the tragedy of present flesh and blood. To-day, with snow on the ground,
and the wind howling round the house, back comes the scene of a -woman, fallen in the snow, with her dead baby in her arms, and the line of her dead lovers going past her, and then the devil dragging her up and after them. In the ordinary theatre the scene would have been too near, too small, too stagy : it is just the vastness of Olympia which makes it so terrible : such a waste of snow, such loneliness, such distances
her dead lovers come from so far oft but they will pass close to her : and they have so far to go, but she must follow them all the way. Size, the mere size of things, does, and ought, and will to the last syllable of recorded time, help us to understand what our lives are for. That is the deliberate intention of Provi- dence the universe is the size that it is, not by chance, but Oil purpose : the Matterhorn was made big, not for fun, but from design : we are intended to find it impressive, and he would be a fool who did not. Man's works, likewise, many of them, are the better for being as large as he can possibly make them : as Byron says of St. Peter's :— "Enter : its grandeur overwhelms thee not. And why P It is not lessened, but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal."
Given a stupendous theme, and all London to tell it to, and only a few weeks to do it in, we must needs have a huge are n. Away with the old familiar arrangement of the flat stage-front, and half-hoops of audience, and the story told to them across a row of footlights, a prompter's box, and a little handful of perspiring fiddlers in white shirt-fronts. Fling your action down into the very middle of the spectators; let them be all round it, circle beyond circle. That is the place of martyr- dom: and those of us who have stood in the Coliseum, or any like arena in France or Italy, know well the feel of an audi- ence not in front of events, but round them.
Besides, it is only the arena that can give to any audience the proper sense of things overhead. Somewhere up in the sky of Olympia, bells, of solemn tone, called us to attend: and, at some peril of their lives, men, slung in swinging cradles from the dim roof, were at work : searchlights wove their white and gold and crimson and purple over the terror and the beauty of the legend : and, at the last, rose-leaves were falling, falling, in a cloud of light, till you might think that Heaven would have none left.
This use of cathedral bells, organ, orchestra, light and darkness, snow and rose-leaves, is beautiful past telling : yet it was no more than the setting of the action. So grave was the story, so plain and strong the gestures, so powerful the multitude of the actors, that one hardly felt the machinery working. At most, if one looked up, there was a conflict of shafts of blinding light, of all colours, crossing and piercing each other on their way down to earth.
It would be hard to choose what is best, where all is good. To many of us, one of the finest passages in the tragedy is that where the image of the Virgin comes to life. It happens in the" Winter's Tale," but there the image was never an image: and it happens in "Pygmalion and Galatea," but that is a Greek
myth made, poor thing, into an English comedy : and Galatea did nothing worth doing with her life. But here is .111-ater Doi herself come to life, in the heart of our affairs; and no spectator can think lightly of the moment when the image stirred, and stood, and laid aside her mantle ; and, standing there, still crowned, and white from head to foot, looked like an old French ivory-carving. But a, dozen other visions were no less memorable. That scene of the woman dancing in the ring of thieves, dancing for her life, and the ring
slowly closing round her, like the tide coming in: and that scene of the Inquisition, the place crammed with men and women full of noisy hatred against her. From scene to scene, she dances her honour away, down to the very edge of ruin: and the devil pipes to her, every inch of the road. This devil, this Spielmann, was terrible: he bad taken all the colour out of all devils ever acted, sung, or painted: and the horror of him grew, from point to point of the working-out of the plot, till he seemed infective, tainting the whole air : he was the sting of every death, and the victory of every grave: indeed, he was so dreadful, that we could not understand how the woman, even by a miracle, could be saved from him. Some fatuous critics have advised that the tragedy should be presented not as a reality but as a dream. This idiotic suggestion is capable of wider use. Let us have Xing Lear played as a dream, and Faust, and Oedipus Rex ; all of them played as dreams. It would be so nice, and nobody would be shocked, and we could take all the children. Deere, don't be frightened : of course nothing is really happening: wait a bit, and you will see her wake up.
Is that the way to talk to London P Is it the dream of a dream that we are wanting P Not we : what London most urgently needs to-day is not less reality, but more, But what of the miracle P Well, strange things do seem to happen, now and again, to us, in the course of our downward dance, to atop us: and the image come to life, and the rose-leaves falling from the sky, are not bad symbols.
In fine, here is a sight such as London has never seen till now, nor thought to see, Into the arena, for thousands of spectators, one of the finest of all Christian legends has been flung, like a challenge to dull play-goers. For the proper telling of the story, those devices alone are used which will help us to tell the story to ourselves. Except in the scene of the destruction of the revellers by fire, which is the one bit of sensationalism, all devices are as pure as the Elgin. marbles. Light and. darkness, music and silence, multitude and solitude, are the scenery of "The Miracle"; our imaginations work hard, and receive the full reward of their work : the mere change of the lighting, the mere opening of the great doors of the Cathedral, are enough to give us the sense of another scene. The great doors are flung wide, and the children come in, and bring the country with them : and, by some strange trick of the eyesight, they seem to come from half-a-mile off, and look larger as they come toward the middle of the arena. Multitude or solitude, which is the more able, in this colossal drama, to play on our hearts P Perhaps it is solitude : perhaps the memory of the surging, shouting crowds, and the endless processions, is less vivid than the memory of that one figure, alone, slowly stirring with life, slowly disrobing and discrovrning herself for the work of helping another woman.—I am, Sir, Bre., X.
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