“o limèd soul that struggling to be free
art more engaged!”
charles stephen dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatist and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the twentieth century. that he should be already completely forgotten is by no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with a charming indecision of touch. the general prejudice against the granting of freeholds has spread to the desired lands of fame; and where our profligate ancestors were willing to call a man great in perpetuity, we, with more shrewdness, prefer to name him a genius for seven years. we know that before that period may have expired fate will have granted us a sea-serpent with yet more coils, with a yet more bewildering arrangement of marine and sunset tints, and the conclusion of previous leases will enable us to grant him undisputed possession of parnassus. if our ancestors were more generous they were certainly less discriminate; and it cannot be doubted that many of them went to their graves under the impression that it is possible for there to be more than one great man at a time! we have altered all that.
for two years dale was a great man, or rather the great man, and it is probable that if he had not died he would have held his position for a longer period. when his death was announced, although the notices of his life and work were of a flattering length, the leaderwriters were not unnaturally aggrieved that he should have resigned his post before the popular interest in his personality was exhausted. the censor might do his best by prohibiting the performance of all the plays that the dead man had left behind him; but, as the author neglected to express his views in their columns, and the common sense of their readers forbade the publication of interviews with him, the journals could draw but a poor satisfaction from condemning or upholding the official action. dale’s regrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clash of personalities to an arid discussion on art. the consequence was obvious. the end of the week saw the elevation of james macintosh, the great scotch comedian, to the vacant post, and dale was completely forgotten. that this oblivion is merited in terms of his work i am not prepared to admit; that it is merited in terms of his personality i indignantly wish to deny. whatever dale may have been as an artist, he was, perhaps in spite of himself, a man, and a man, moreover, possessed of many striking and unusual traits of character. it is to the man dale that i offer this tribute.
sprung from an old yorkshire family, charles stephen dale was yet sufficient of a cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies in crediting him with the celtic temperament. nevertheless, he was essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. to these two central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that rendered him notorious and ultimately great. thus, while his celtic ?stheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike “the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks,” it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the house of lords. smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. conversely, he was nothing without a reason.
these may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of a man’s life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our materials will be nearly complete. “dale hates his fellow-human — beings,” wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. but he hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of individuals, and, pace the critics, the love was no less sincere than the hatred. he had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker german philosophers an image of the perfect man — an image differing only in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the imperialists as “efficiency.” he did not find — it was hardly likely that he would find — that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, and he therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession of those weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of which the sum is human nature.
i now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is in itself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmost importance in considering the life of charles stephen dale i should prefer not to mention it. i refer to his complete lack of a sense of humour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detract from his importance as an artist and a man. the difficulty which i mentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clear conception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yet succeeded in defining it satisfactorily. here i would venture to suggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, a sense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to the finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. i am aware that this definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may be found to include the truth. obviously, the natures of those who possess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and it is therefore against the limits imposed by this sense that intellectual anarchists, among whom i would number dale, and poets, primarily rebel. but — and it is this rather than his undoubted intellectual gifts or his dogmatic definitions of good and evil that definitely separated dale from the normal men — there can be no doubt that he felt his lack of a sense of humour bitterly. in every word he ever said, in every line he ever wrote, i detect a painful striving after this mysterious sense, that enabled his neighbours, fools as he undoubtedly thought them, to laugh and weep and follow the faith of their hearts without conscious realisation of their own existence and the problems it induced. by dint of study and strenuous observation he achieved, as any man may achieve, a considerable degree of wit, though to the last his ignorance of the audience whom he served and despised, prevented him from judging the effect of his sallies without experiment. but try as he might the finer jewel lay far beyond his reach. strong men fight themselves when they can find no fitter adversary; but in all the history of literature there is no stranger spectacle than this lifelong contest between dale, the intellectual anarch and pioneer of supermen, and dale, the poor lonely devil who wondered what made people happy.
i have said that the struggle was lifelong, but it must be added that it was always unequal. the knowledge that in his secret heart he desired this quality, the imperfection of imperfections, only served to make dale’s attack on the complacency of his contemporaries more bitter. he ridiculed their achievements, their ambitions, and their love with a fury that awakened in them a mild curiosity, but by no means affected their comfort. moreover, the very vehemence with which he demanded their contempt deprived him of much of his force as a critic, for they justly wondered why a man should waste his lifetime in attacking them if they were indeed so worthless. actually, they felt, dale was a great deal more engaged with his audience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected to despise for their sycophancy. and, especially towards the end of his life when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which he used to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more and more childishly artificial, less and less effective. he was like one of those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of their audience unless they are always doing something, though nothing is more monotonous than mannered vivacity.
dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at the same time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his ?esthetic sense. he had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical and remote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelled ceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarily accepted. the result in terms of art was chaos. possessed of an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. his light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. he lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his conception. it is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels, tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine gift that enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. he could only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing the wayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. he never attempted — and this is a hard saying — to produce any work beautiful in itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that never allowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on his audience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed. his work will appeal rather to the student of men than to the student of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must be held to constitute a remarkable human document.
it is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers dale was credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for the examination of any of his plays impresses one with the number and mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. a noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the weakness of the other man’s speech, rather than the weakness of the other man’s argument. his prose was good, though at its best so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally well-written leading article. at its worst it was marred by numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be feared, intentional. his attitude on this point was typical of his strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. he committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate his audience into a condition of mental alertness. as a matter of fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. he proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too often beneath it. revolting against the dignity, not infrequently pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown with more enthusiasm than skill. it is intellectual arrogance in a clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success merely because he wishes it.
there is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to dale’s personal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more than justice, the photographers rather less. in his younger days he suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun; towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that made him look like a duke or a market gardener. like most clever men, he had good eyes.
nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published accounts of his death. there is something strangely pitiful in that last desperate effort to achieve humour. we have all read the account of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed — cold, epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. and once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.
in the third scene of the second act of “henry v.,” a play written by an author whom dale pretended to despise, dame quickly describes the death of falstaff in words that are too well known to need quotation. it was thus and no otherwise that dale died. it is thus that every man dies.
