JOHN WEBSTER CHAPTER I THE THEATRE ANYONE who has read, with any alertness, more than a little of the mass of critical and editorial comments, whether of the last three or of the last three hundred years, upon Elizabethan plays, must often have felt a helpless and bewildered irritation at the absence of any standard or uniform grounds of judgment; both in the critics, and, on inspection, in himself. This is not the place to attempt to lay a deep æsthetic foundation; but, I think, it will be useful to try to fix the meanings of certain words and phrases, and to give a provisional answer to some of the more important questions. "What is Art?" is a question which most writers on subjects connected with literature, painting, plays, music, society, or life, are ready with an equal cheerfulness to ask or to answer. They may be right; but to me they seem to make a gigantic, unconscious, and probably unjustifiable assumption: It is quite doubtful, and it is nowadays continually more doubted, whether the word "Art" has properly any meaning at all. But it has so obsessed men's minds, that they start with an inevitable tendency to believe that it has a meaning. In the same way, those who believe in Art are generally inclined to believe in a single object at which all Art, that is to say all the arts, aim: Beauty. It may turn out to be true that both Art and Beauty are real and useful names; but the attitude of mind that assumes that they are is deplorable. The most honest and most hopeful course to pursue, is to say that there are certain kinds of human activity which seem to hang together in classes, such as reading books, hearing music, seeing pictures; and to examine our states of mind while we follow these pursuits, to see how far they are of one kind in each “art,” and in all, and whether all successful works of art do seem to us to have some quality in common which can be called Beauty. The situation seems to me as if men had agreed to say "The emotions caused in human beings by pins, walking-sticks, feathers, and crowbars, acting through the tactile sense, are all of one unique kind. It is called Grumph. Pins, etc., are called the grumphs. Grumph is one of the holiest things in this melancholy world," and so forth. And soon they'd say, "But, philosophically, what is Grumph?" Then they'd argue. They would come to some conclusion which, as you cannot tickle with a crowbar, would preclude tickling with feathers; and they would excommunicate all those who used feathers for tickling with the formula, "That is not Grumph!" They would write Treatises on any one grumph, on the "Pin-grumph," say, carefully keeping in mind all the time that what they said would have to be more or less true of the other grumphs too. Some would lay great importance on the fact that, as you were tickled with feathers, you were, in a way, also tickled by being beaten with a walking-stick. Others would discover the ferule of the pin, and the quill, shaft, and two vanes of barbs of the crowbar. An Oxford don would arise to declare that all grumph continually approximated to the condition of pins. . . I have put the affair, as I see it, in a figure, and with other names, in order to show its unreason more clearly, and far more shortly, than is possible if the prejudice-clad and elusive word "Art" is used. In either case, the sensible reply to it all is, "We have sticks and pins, plays and |