For modern civilised beings, in incessant relations with the reflections of life through literature and art, it is difficult to receive any impressions which do not re-reflect what lies in the mirror of art. And here is an amusing side-issue. We are presented in plays and books, with numerous situations in which the ignorance of one of the parties is a necessary factor in the particular dramatic situation which it is sought to evolve. But as this person, ex hypothesi, belongs to the class of society which is familiar with this particular plot ad nauseam, is it possible that he or she should go on betraying the same ignorance on which the plot originally was based? Even Marguerite has seen "Faust" nowadays!
This suggests an objection to old plots quite apart from their oldness, for that which started by being probable becomes improbable by age. Even if it were ever possible for a man to be jealous of a woman because he saw her kissing a man whom, after long and weary years of superfluous separation, he discovered to be her brother, it should surely be impossible to-day. If I saw any man kissing my fiancee I should know at once it was my future brother-in-law-or at any rate I should inquire-which the old hero never seemed to do. And yet I will wager that in the course of this year at least a dozen novels and plays will be built up upon this theme. It is, by the way, a noticeable characteristic of people in plays never to have read nor to be interested in any but the petty dramatic matter which is interesting them-and let us hope the audience-at the moment. It may be replied that the economy of the stage demands that everything that is not strictly essential should be eliminated; but yet it ought to be possible, by a few words, to give the idea that the figures upon the boards are doing more than moving to the strings of the playwright. Just so the painter of the gulf should suggest the ocean beyond; the painter of the landscape, the infinity of space and atmosphere in which it is enisled. What the plein air school contended for in painting is no less requisite in literature.
This consideration seems to account for the uneasy sense of unreality which we feel in the modern machine-made Sardou play, in which the characters have the air of existing entirely to themselves, and for the sake of the particular play, and do not give that large sense of being part of the civilised humanity we know that reads and thinks. The men make love or profess hate, repudiate their wives, or cut off their sons with shillings, all with the air of its happening for the first time, and wholly devoid of that sense of the ridiculous which they could not help feeling if they had been accustomed themselves to read novels and sit in stalls.
It is, in fact, impossible for us moderns, educated in a long literary tradition, to live our lives as naturally and naively as the unlettered of to-day, or the people of the preliterary geological epoch. This is brought out "ostensively," as Bacon would say, in "Don Quixote," or in the Russian novel "A Simple Story"-apparently so called because it is so complex-in which Gontcharov's hero lives in what Alice might call "behind the looking-glass" of literature. He is a country boy who comes up to St. Petersburg, and after a course of Russian novels is transformed into a series of imitations of their heroes. He does nothing, feels nothing, thinks nothing except after the pattern of these creatures of the quill.
Well! we are all like that, more or less. Though we may not be as chivalrously inspired as the Knight of La Mancha, nor run to the extremes of the simple Russian, we are all to some extent remoulded in imitation of the Booklanders, and this is the truth in the "decadent" paradox that nature copies art. There is a drop of ink in the blood of the most natural of us; we are all hybrids, crossed with literature, and Shakespeare is as much the author of our being as either of our parents. The effect of the stage in regulating the poses and costumes of susceptible souls has not escaped notice; but the effect of novels and poetry is more insidious. Who ever shuddered with bitter alliterative kisses before Swinburne, and who has failed to do so since? What poor little cockney clerk in his first spasms of poetry but has felt, sitting by his girl in the music hall, that if she walked over the grave in which he was planted, his "dust would hear her and beat, had he lain for a century dead" (though how Maud could survive her lover for a century, Tennyson failed to explain)? Per contra, the ingenuous spinster taking her notions of love from Maupassant's "Bel-Ami," or Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Trionfo della Morte," becomes a man-hater. Yes, I fear that the artistic treatment of life has a good deal to answer for. People do not yet understand that the mirror of art does not reflect life unrefracted. The great eternal theme of art is love-making; but even artists have to give up some time to art-making.
But to wind up anent our murderer. He is still at large. The police have given up the chase in despair. But he has never left the village, and we villagers all wink at one another as we discuss his whereabouts; and when we meet him driving his cart or come across him cutting wood in the forest and he genially gives us Buon' giorno we salute him with answering politeness. Only in the village band there is a temporary trumpeter, for even the police might hear of him if he performed in public loudly enough. But Italian justice, though it does really savour of comic opera, is not so farcical as it appears on the surface. It is an unwritten law that the police shall not pigliare him till the sessions are nigh. He is on parole, so to speak, to come up when called upon; if he were really to take flight, he would be declared an outlaw, and the only reason the police cannot find him is that they know where he is. How sensible! Why board and lodge him gratis for weeks? He has outraged the community: shall the community reward him with free meals? Even when he is caught he will be treated with the same economy. Capital punishment there is none in Italy. Why waste a citizen and a tax-payer? Especially when one has already been destroyed! No, he will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment. But he will not serve it. He will escape, or it will be commuted. And while he is in gaol he will have a good time. He will smoke and play cards, or, leaning out of his dungeon casement, hold a levee of his friends. Recently the soldiers at Bergamo mutinied because they were supplied with worse bread than the denizens of the gaol. I trust the ringleaders were sent to prison so as to remedy this dietary injustice.