DOI Heft:
Nr. 159 (May 1910)
DOI Artikel:Wood, T. Martin: Some recent work of Mr. Cayley Robinson
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19866#0280
Recent IVork by Mr. Cayley Robinson
and certainly as his craft increases in perfection,
the unseen element which gives to it its peculiar
meaning is the more clearly to be felt.
When Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" was brought
to England the question immediately arose as to
how this delicate, whimsical, mystical fairy-tale, in
which the fairies are the spirits of every-day things,
was to be carried across the footlights among the
stage carpentry and the artifice of the stage atmo-
sphere without losing its own peculiar fragrant
atmosphere. The play was wholly atmosphere, like
all the rest of Maeterlinck's works, outer things
only counting as symbols, as the expression of the
inner forces with which the author is concerned.
Maeterlinck's world to me is not Mr. Cayley
Robinson's world, and yet, perhaps, among English
artists Mr. Cayley Robinson has, with a medium
more difficult than writing, drawn to the very
threshold of the regions of the sub-conscious where
Reason has to confess herself at sea. Things can
only be hinted at in the plastic arts which can be
boldly expressed in words, for words are colourless,
taking the colour of their purpose, of the scheme
to which they are applied. But in painting there
has to be the compromise at every step between
its own very definite and material symbol and the
indefinite feelings to which these are to give us
the key. Its outer symbols can only come into
relation with a given mood when the artist creates
in that mood. Then tables and chairs and cotton
dresses, all of this world, all objective, become of
another world, personal, immaterial and subjective.
And no one knows how, certainly not the artist.
And no one knows that this wonderful transmuta-
tion has happened if their own feelings do not
give them the key. Or they may be aware that
DESIGN FOR THE FOREST SCENE IN "THE BLUE-BIRD" (ACT III., SCENE i)
206
BY CAYLEY ROBINSON
and certainly as his craft increases in perfection,
the unseen element which gives to it its peculiar
meaning is the more clearly to be felt.
When Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" was brought
to England the question immediately arose as to
how this delicate, whimsical, mystical fairy-tale, in
which the fairies are the spirits of every-day things,
was to be carried across the footlights among the
stage carpentry and the artifice of the stage atmo-
sphere without losing its own peculiar fragrant
atmosphere. The play was wholly atmosphere, like
all the rest of Maeterlinck's works, outer things
only counting as symbols, as the expression of the
inner forces with which the author is concerned.
Maeterlinck's world to me is not Mr. Cayley
Robinson's world, and yet, perhaps, among English
artists Mr. Cayley Robinson has, with a medium
more difficult than writing, drawn to the very
threshold of the regions of the sub-conscious where
Reason has to confess herself at sea. Things can
only be hinted at in the plastic arts which can be
boldly expressed in words, for words are colourless,
taking the colour of their purpose, of the scheme
to which they are applied. But in painting there
has to be the compromise at every step between
its own very definite and material symbol and the
indefinite feelings to which these are to give us
the key. Its outer symbols can only come into
relation with a given mood when the artist creates
in that mood. Then tables and chairs and cotton
dresses, all of this world, all objective, become of
another world, personal, immaterial and subjective.
And no one knows how, certainly not the artist.
And no one knows that this wonderful transmuta-
tion has happened if their own feelings do not
give them the key. Or they may be aware that
DESIGN FOR THE FOREST SCENE IN "THE BLUE-BIRD" (ACT III., SCENE i)
206
BY CAYLEY ROBINSON