The Mirror of Nature by Robertson Davies

Abstract

master) had paved the way for this new era in English studies by organiz­ ing research in language and literature and laying the groundwork for modern literary scholarship” (275). A large claim and praise indeed and yet I cannot help questioning whether Furnivall merits this resurrection, whether he deserves the monument of this formidable book. Despite Benzie’s own admirable and meticulous scholarship, a reader may feel at the end of it, depending on his degree of scepticism, either that he has discovered an engaging, if erratic, literary mover and shaker, or that he has just emerged from a long hard game of Trivial Pursuit. george w in g / University of Calgary Robertson Davies, The Mirror of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 129. $6.50 There is a television broadcaster in Toronto who hosts a weekly program on international soccer. His favourite phrase is “of course,” normally used in the least appropriate places. We may be told, for example, that “ Last Tuesday, Walter Higginbotham, Wigan Athletic’s reserve left back was, of course, transferred to Scunthorpe United,” as if Mr. Higginbotham’s pro­ fessional development were so well-known to the world that any reiteration of its salient features could be justified only by the apologetic “of course.” The phrase is, of course, commonly used by writers, lecturers, and broad­ casters who, for one reason or another, feel compelled to say the obvious, and at the same time indicate to their readers or listeners that they are sage enough to recognize that they are indeed saying the obvious. “Of course” is a literary and verbal self-defence mechanism. (Fowler offers some interesting related observations on the use of the phrase.) The connection between the mannerisms of a television sports broadcaster and Robertson Davies’s 1982 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto may appear a trifle tenuous, but I was reminded of the broad­ caster a number of times by the lectures. Not that Davies is, like my broad­ caster, enamoured of “of course.” Indeed, I recollect coming across the phrase hardly at all. What occurred to me, however, is that the phrase really ought to be in the lectures much more than it is. My broadcaster elects to use it when relating the arcane; Davies declines to use it when relating the commonplace. The Mirror of Nature is about the theatre, especially the English theatre, of the nineteenth century. Davies suggests that “although the nineteenth century has little of literary worth to offer in its theatre, it provides a 260 counterpoint to the greater literature of the century, and is in itself an absorbing study in the psychology of the era” (4). His lectures, he says, are not concerned with history or criticism, but they attempt “ to show the change in psychological bias that took place during the century” (5). He describes the lectures as “ an extended plea for imaginative sympathy toward the theatre of the nineteenth century, which was truly, for its time, and in the Shakespearean sense, a Mirror of Nature” (120). These are, certainly, valuable objectives. One wonders, though, if they are attainable in three public lectures. Given Davies’s knowledge of Jung, his promise of psychological exploration whets the appetite, but the appetite remains unsatisfied. This is largely his audience’s fault, or at least Davies’s perception of his audience. Which brings us back to commonplaces. Al­ though he acknowledges the large advances made in the study of nineteenthcentury theatre in the last two decades or so, Davies makes no assumption that his audience for the Alexander Lectures has shared in or benefited from those advances. Thus it is that a goodly portion of the lectures is old hat. Is it still necessary — perhaps it is — to stress that one “lesson to be learned” from the nineteenth-century theatre is that “plays of modest lite­ rary worth have sometimes been remarkably successful on the stage” (88)? Would anyone deny that? And would anyone disagree with Davies when he says that “we cannot think of this [the nineteenth-century] theatre with­ out according the actors their proper place” (88) ? Perhaps Davies’s listeners and readers need plot summaries of rarely performed (nowadays, that...