Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗
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Descent into Hell
by Charles Williams
1937
THE MAGUS ZOROASTER
“It undoubtedly needs”, Peter Stanhope said, “a final pulling
together, but there’s hardly time for that before July, and if
you’re willing to take it as it is, why-” He made a gesture of
presentation and dropped his eyes, thus missing the hasty
reciprocal gesture of gratitude with which Mrs. Parry immediately
replied on behalf of the dramatic culture of Battle Hill. Behind
and beyond her the culture, some thirty faces, unessentially
exhibited to each other by the May sunlight, settled to
attention-naturally, efficiently, critically, solemnly,
reverently. The grounds of the Manor House expanded beyond them;
the universal sky sustained the whole. Peter Stanhope began to
read his play.
Battle Hill was one of the new estates which had been laid
out after the war. It lay about thirty miles north of London and
took its title from the more ancient name of the broad rise of
ground which it covered. It had a quiet ostentation of comfort
and culture. The poor, who had created it, had been as far as
possible excluded, nor (except as hired servants) were they
permitted to experience the bitterness of others’ stairs. The
civil wars which existed there, however bitter, were conducted
with all bourgeois propriety. Politics, religion, art, science,
grouped themselves, and courteously competed for numbers and
reputation. This summer, however, had seen a spectacular triumph
of drama, for it had become known that Peter Stanhope had
consented to allow the restless talent of the Hill to produce his
latest play.
He was undoubtedly the most famous inhabitant. He was a cadet of
that family which had owned the Manor House, and he had bought it
back from more recent occupiers, and himself settled in it before
the war. He had been able to do this because he was something
more than a cadet of good family, being also a poet in the direct
English line, and so much after the style of his greatest
predecessor that he made money out of poetry. His name was
admired by his contemporaries and respected by the young. He had
even imposed modern plays in verse on the London theatre, and two
of them tragedies at that, with a farce or two, and histories for
variation and pleasure. He was the kind of figure who might be
more profitable to his neighbourhood dead than alive; dead, he
would have given it a shrine; alive, he deprecated worshippers.
The young men at the estate office made a refined publicity out
of his privacy; the name of Peter Stanhope would be whispered
without comment. He endured the growing invasion with a great
deal of good humour, and was content to see the hill of his birth
become a suburb of the City, as in another sense it would always
be. There was, in that latest poetry, no contention between the
presences of life and of death; so little indeed that there had
been a contention in the Sunday Times whether Stanhope were a
pessimist or an optimist. He himself said, in reply to an
interviewer’s question, that he was an optimist and hated it.
Stanhope, though the most glorious, was not the only notorious
figure of the Hill. There was Mr. Lawrence Wentworth, who was
the most distinguished living authority on military history
(perhaps excepting Mr. Aston Moffatt). Mr. Wentworth was not in
the garden on that afternoon. Mrs. Catherine Parry was; it was
she who would produce the play, as in many places and at many
times she had produced others. She sat near Stanhope now, almost
as tall as he, and with more active though not brighter eyes.
They were part of that presence which was so necessary to her
profession. Capacity which, in her nature, had reached the
extreme Of active life, seemed in him to have entered the
contemplative, so much had his art become a thing of his soul.
Where, in their own separate private affairs, he interfered so
little as almost to seem inefficient, she was so efficient as
almost to seem interfering.
In the curve of women and men beyond her, other figures, less
generally famous, sat or lay as the depth of their chairs induced
them. There were rising young men, and a few risen and retired
old. There were ambitious young women and sullen young women and
loquacious young women. They were all attentive, though, as a
whole, a little disappointed. They had understood that Mr.
Stanhope had been writing a comedy, and had hoped for a modern
comedy. When he had been approached, however, he had been easy
but firm. He had been playing with a pastoral; if they would
like a pastoral, it was very much at their service. Hopes and
hints of modern comedies were unrealized: it was the pastoral or
nothing. They had to be content. He consented to read it to
them; he would not do more. He declined to make suggestions for
the cast; he declined to produce. He would like, for his own
enjoyment, to come to some of the rehearsals, but he made it
clear that he had otherwise no wish to interfere. Nothing-given
the necessity of a pastoral-could be better; the production would
have all the advantage of his delayed death without losing any
advantage of his prolonged life. As this became clear, the
company grew reconciled. They gazed and listened, while from the
long lean figure, outstretched in its deck-chair, there issued
the complex intonation of great verse. Never negligible,
Stanhope was often neglected; he was everyone’s second thought,
but no one’s first. The convenience of all had determined this
afternoon that he should be the first, and his neat mass of grey
hair, his vivid glance, that rose sometimes from the manuscript,
and floated down the rows, and sank again, his occasional
friendly gesture that seemed about to deprecate, but always
stopped short, received the concentration of his visitors, and of
Mrs. Parry, the chief of his visitors.
It became clear to Mrs. Parry as the afternoon and the voice
went on, that the poet had been quite right when he had said that
the play needed Pulling together. “It’s all higgledy-piggledy,”
she said to herself, using a word which a friend had once applied
to a production of the Tempest, and, in fact to the Tempest
itself. Mrs, Parry thought that this pastoral was in some Ways,
rather like the Tempest. Mr. Stanhope, of course, was not as
good as Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was the greatest English
poet, so that Stanhope wasn’t. But there was a something. To
begin with, it had no title beyond A Pastoral. That was
unsatisfactory. Then the Plot was incredibly loose. it was of no
particular time and no particular place, and to any cultured
listener it seemed to have little bits of everything and
everybody put in at odd moments. The verse was undoubtedly
Stanhope’s own, of his latest, most heightened, and most
epigrammatic style, but now and then all kinds of reminiscences
moved in it. Once, during the second act, the word Pastiche
floated through Mrs. Parry’s mind, but went away again on her
questioning whether a Pastiche would be worth the trouble of
Production. There was a Grand Duke in it who had a beautiful
daughter, and this daughter either escaped from the palace or was
abducted—anyhow, she came into the power of a number of
brigands; and then there was a woodcutter’s son who frequently
burned leaves, and he and the princess fell in love, and there
were two farmers who were at odds, and the Grand Duke turned up
in disguise, first in a village and then in the forest, through
which also wandered an escaped bear, who spoke the most Complex
verse, excepting the Chorus. The Chorus had no kind of other
name; at first Mrs. Parry thought they might be villagers, then,
since they were generally present in the forest, she thought they
might be trees, or perhaps (with a vague reminiscence of Comus)
spirits. Stanhope had not been very helpful; he had alluded to
them as an experiment. By the end of the reading, it was clear
to Mrs. Parry that it was very necessary to decide what exactly
this Chorus was to be.
She had discouraged discussion of the play during the intervals
between the four acts, and as soon as it was over tea was served.
If, however, the poet hoped to get away from discussion by means
of tea he was mistaken. There was a little hesitation over the
correct word; fantastic was dangerous, and poetic both unpopular
and supererogatory, though both served for variations on idyllic,
which was Mrs. Parry’s choice and won by lengths. As she took
her second cup of tea, however, she began to close. She said:
“Yes, idyllic, Mr. Stanhope, and so significant!”
“It’s very good of you,” Stanhope murmured. “But you see I was
right about revision—the plot must seem very loose.”
Mrs. Parry waved the plot up into benevolence. “But there are a
few points,” she went on. “The Chorus now. I don’t think I
follow the Chorus.”
“The Chorus could be omitted,” Stanhope said. “It’s not
absolutely necessary to a presentation.”
Before Mrs. Parry could answer, a young woman named Adela Hunt,
sitting close by, leant forward. She was the leader of the
younger artistic party, who were not altogether happy about Mrs.
Parry. Adela had some thoughts of taking up production herself
as her life-work, and it would have been a great advantage to
have started straight away with Peter Stanhope. But her
following was not yet strong enough to deal with Mrs. Parry’s
reputation. She was determined, however, if possible, to achieve
a kind of collaboration by means of correction. “O, we oughtn’t
to omit anything, ought we?” she protested. “A work of art can’t
spare anything that’s a part of it.”
“My dear,” Mrs. Parry said, “you must consider your audience.
What will the audience make of the Chorus?”
“It’s for them to make what they can of it,” Adela answered. “We
can only give them a symbol. Art’s always symbolic, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Parry pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t say symbolic exactly,”
she said slowly. “It has a significance, of course, and you’ve
got to convey that significance to the audience. We want to
present it—to interpret.”
As she paused, distracted by the presentation by the poet of two
kinds of sandwiches, Adela broke in again.
“But, Mrs. Parry, how can one interpret a symbol? One can only
mass it. It’s all of a piece, and it’s the total effect that
creates the symbolical force.”
“Significant, not symbolical,” said Mrs. Parry firmly. “You
mustn’t play down to your audience, but you mustn’t play away
from them either. You must”—she gesticulated “intertwine…
harmonize. So you must make it easy for them to get into
harmony. That’s what’s wrong with a deal of modern art; it
refuses—it doesn’t establish equilibrium with its audience or
what not. In a pastoral play you must have equilibrium.”
“But the equilibrium’s in the play,” Adela urged again, “a balance
of masses. Surely that’s what drama is-a symbolical contrast of
masses.”
“Well,” Mrs. Parry answered with infuriating tolerance, “I
suppose you might call it that. But it’s more effective to think
of it as significant equilibrium-especially for a pastoral.
However, don’t let’s be abstract. The question is,
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