156
DAVID
FERR.Y
a more complex pleasure and satisfaction. From the description of
Poussin's "Death of Adonis":
The mourning for Adonis is expressed in the prevalence of
horizontals in sky and earth echoing the dead youth's prostration
(as does the very shape of the canvas ) , and by the fact that
trees that might be vertical are slanting as if bent with grief.
Venus herself is bending lovingly over her dead lover, pouring
nectar upon him from a nearly horizontal urn. Hers is a guile–
less, Giorgionesque loveliness, and her nudity is not provocative.
More important here is the exquisite blend of the dramatic and
the peaceful, the restraint in the coloring (except, perhaps,
for the excessive greenness of the corpse), and the sadness
controlled by a faint, gentle hope emanating from the beauty
of the naked goddess and the charming cupids trying to revive
the dead boy. Though the picture is profoundly gracious, it is
not QrnamentaI: decoration has yielded to decorum.
From an account of John Clements's performance of Macbeth:
Clements scooted and rattled through the part as though the
whole thing were an after-dinner speech to a group of Veterans
of World War One, but just a few times, to murther their
sleep, springing a howl and scowl on them. In the "Tomorrow
and tomorrow" sflliloquy he did, however, reach certain heights
-albeit comic ones. Thus he bellowed his indignation at his
dead lady: "She should have died
hereafter!"
("Damn her!"
we almost heard) , and roared again, as an afterthought:
"Tomorrow!" which, it seems, would have been the ideal time
for her demise.
Things have been looked at, have been listened to, with remarkable
care; scrupulous mental and moral attention has been paid; and the
experiences are rendered carefully and scrupulously, not merely to "give
an impression" but to substantiate judgments which are themselves
coextensive with the rendering, the acts of description. That is to
say, the critical acts, the acts of judgment, are abstracted as little
as possible, with as little blurring as possible of the experience judged.
This is true of him at his best.
One must complain about his lapses, which are not infrequent.
Mr. Simon is often rude. Sometimes, of course, it is justified, and one's
only complaint then is that gracelessness is uneconomical. When
it
seems
unjustified, one's confidence in the critical voice is impaired. A more
frequent, subtler, and more serious fault may be illustrated from his
apostrophe to Zero Mostel:
