ABSTRACT
When I find players speaking with such skill and delicacy … and with remarkable subtlety and conviction of expression; and when I see these artists, simply because their wigs are not up to Mr. Clarkson’s English standard … denounced … by gentlemen who go into obedient raptures when M. Mounet Sully plasters his cheeks with white and his lips with vermilion, and positively howls his lines at them for a whole evening with a meaningless and discordant violence …—Well, what then?” Well, these remarks, which are culled from Shaw’s quite glorious “Dramatic Opinions,” are simply the whole truth concerning Turgenev. Everything that one can say is simply an expoundment and expansion of these remarks—and in answer to their enigmatical “What then?” I would dolorously reply that Turgenev has been dead for more than thirty years; that interest in him is a needle in a bundle of hay; that the present is probably the prognosis of the future; and from a public which pursues the cult of the cinema, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and other allied and abominable manifestations, there is naught better to expect. In about five hundred years, perhaps, it may appreciate a reincarnated Turgenev; in about five hundred years it may conceivably have compassed that terrific stride, or rather, that painful upward progression, since there are no artistic seven-leagued boots. I mention the possibility, but without emphasis—it is an improbable possibility. The wig of Turgenev is not up to Mr. Clarkson’s English standard, and thereby is he discountenanced.
