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147 THE ART OF THE THEATRE: CHARLES LAMB, ARTHUR SYMONS AND EDWARD GORDON CRAIG By Lawrence W. Markert (University of Baltimore, Charles at Mt. Royal) R. V. Johnson, in his essay, "Aesthetic Traits of Charles Lamb," has touched in general on some of the significant ways in which Lamb anticipates late nineteenth century aestheticism, particularly in terms of the inevitable separation of life and art that became so crucial during this period. Lamb's influence, however, is especially strongly felt within the context of dramatic literature and theory; for, as Lamb rightly saw, on the stage the conflict between real people and imaginary lives becomes paramount. To recast Marianne Moore's expression, we see real toads in imaginary gardens. Lamb alludes to this paradox when he says that "on stage there is a discordancy never to be gotten over between painted scenes and real people." In relation to the dominant dramatic mode of this time, the discordancy Lamb describes is quite significant. Realistic stage conventions disallow for an imaginative and aesthetic presentation which, as L.amb implicitly states, is necessary to adequately depict great drama, especially the works of Shakespeare. Arthur Symons, in turn, takes up Lamb's observations about the theatre and develops a theory of dramatic presentation which is clearly allied with the artistic ideals of aestheticism. Edward Gordon Craig, who met Symons in 1902, draws on Lamb, as well as on Symons, to develop an art of the theatre which carries the ideals of aestheticism into the twentieth century. Each is interested in the theatre as a unified experience. Percy Fitzgerald's comment on Lamb's artistic principle, in fact, applies equally well to Symons and Craig; Lamb touches all departments of the stage; acting, scenery, writing, in succession and though there is no strict method in his treatment, we find his system perfectly homogenous. The same principle is at the bottom of all his speculations - viz., that a literal transcript of what we have with us in life, is no gain, and offers no genuine interest.^ The influence of Lamb on Symons is, no doubt, due in part to Pater's prior appreciation of him. Symons, for example, at various times in his letters to James Dykes Campbell mentions looking for and obtaining Pater's essay on Lamb, which had originally appeared in the Fortnightly Review for October, I878. It is also at this time that~h~i mentions to Campbell that "next to Browning and Meredith, he [Pater] is perhaps the living English writer whom I most admire. . . ." He undoubtedly learned from Pater's essay to appreciate Lamb as an early elaborator of aestheticism: In the making of prose he realizes the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of vers,e. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention 148 of mere abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect, in a sort of boundless sympathy.-' In other words, Lamb is perfectly suited to the role of Pater's aesthetic critic. He discriminates the details of his own experience and incorporates a moral dimension by the cultivation of a "boundless sympathy." Symons continues this same line of thinking in his own appreciation of Lamb as an aesthetic critic. Throughout his essays on drama, acting and dramatic theory, he continually alludes to Lamb in order to focus his arguments, particularly in relation to his own concern with the creation of beauty. He abstracts from Lamb a number of traits appropriate to aestheticism. In "Sicilian Actors," for example, he refers to Lamb's famous essay, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation," in order to evolve a discussion of whether the beauty of a play, associated with the imaginative world its language is able to evoke, is not lost in the stage production. Lamb states that with some of Shakespeare 's plays this is the case: But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in...

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