ON NOT TAKING PAINS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 920, 29 March 1957, Page 12

ON NOT TAKING PAINS

BEERBOHM TREE; His Life and Laughter, = Hesketh Pearson; Methuen and Co., nglish price 25/-.

(Reviewed by

Bruce

Mason

HE most unfortunate apophthegm in the English language is for me at this moment, Carlyle’s celebrated dictum: "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains." What a dull, pettifogging universe is opened up by it! Or this, to which it is a corollary: "Consider the ways of the ant, thou sluggard, and be wise." Men of genius have rarely acted by them. Proust, perhaps, James Joyce, more certainly. But Shakespeare, Mozart, Dickens, Dostoevsky? Not a

bit of it. And so to Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a man given to epigram, who wrote in his diary: "Genius is an_ infinite capacity for not taking pains." It is clear, from Hesketh Pearson’s lively biogtaphy, that Tree’s life was built upon this maxim, and that if pains were taken, they were not by him. One of the great actor-managers, the greatest after Irving, he built the most sumptuous

theatre in London, Her (or His, according to the Royal incumbent), Majesty’s, and there presented Shakespeare with an opulence unrivalled on the stage before or since. Yet his productions were never mere display pieces, and his Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, brought Shakespeare to a wider audience than ever before, richly mounted, and splendidly performed. As an actor, he lacked the hypnotic quality which made Irving, seemingly,’ irresistible to his contemporaries, Mr. Pearson compares the two at some length. Tree produced sixteen Shakespeare plays, Irving twelve. Neither was expert in the delivery of

verse, in the manner of Forbes Robertson, who had undergone the rigorous training necessary to achieve vocal climax through lengthy rhetorical crescendo. Irving and Tree therefore developed their own personalities, both to hide their technical defects, and enhance their merits. Irving’s immense single-mindedness resulted in a stage personality so electrifying at its best, that audiences capitulated to its sheer mag2s

netic power. Tree, incapable of such devotion, won an audience more by charm and power. Where one enthralled, the other entertained. Irving was undoubtedly the finer artist, but Tree had a captivating quality which endeared him to audiences. As a man he was lovable and wilful, and extremely wayward with women, to whose flattery he was notoriously prone. As Lady Tree, after a good deal of suffering, ruefully commented: "With Herbert, a compliment always ended in a confinement." Shaw wrote Pygmalion for him and Mrs Patrick Campbell, and the chapter describing this production is the most entertaining in the book. A more unholy alliance could scarcely be imagined. They fought throughout rehearsals, snarling and bickering, and the play was an immense success. Tree was incapable of malice, and he spread round him a radiance to which all his con" temporaries, in some measure, succumbed. It is a tribute to Hesketh Pearson to say that this radiance is everywhere seizable in his book. A man of great richness of spirit, and ripeness of character, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was much mourned.