He believed in treating Shakespeare’s plays like opera, and paying the greatest importance to the _bravura_ passages. He deplored Shakespeare being the victim of pedants and a national institution. He saw in Shakespeare the Renaissance poet and nothing else. He thought that any kind of realism was as out of place in Shakespeare as in the libretto of an opera; that dramatic poems were not plausible things, nor exhibitions of real people, and that _bravura_ passages, however absurd their occurrence in a particular context, looked at from the point of view of reality, were not only legitimate, but came with _authority_ if considered as lovely arias, duets, or concerted pieces.
This view of the production of Shakespeare is now widely held, though unfortunately it is seldom practised; managers and players still try to make Shakespeare realistic, and too often succeed in smothering his plays with scenery, business, and acting.
The most refreshing thing about Brewster was that he was altogether without that exaggerated reverence for culture in general and books in particular that sometimes hampers his countrymen (he was an American) when they have been transplanted early into Europe and brought up in France, Italy, or England, and saturated with art and literature. He liked books; he enjoyed plays, poetry, and certain kinds of music; but he didn’t think these things were a matter of life and death. He enjoyed them as factors in life, an adjunct, an accompaniment, an interlude, just as he enjoyed a fine day; but he was never solemn and never pompous, and he knew how much and how little things mattered. He liked people for what they were, and not for what they did, or for what they achieved. The important thing in his eyes was not the quantity of achievement, or the amount of effort, but the quality of the life lived. With such ideas he was as detached from the modern world as a Chinese poet or sage, not from the modern world, but rather from the world, for to the human beings who lived in it there never can have been a moment when the world was not modern, even in the Stone Age; and in the game of life he strove for no prize; the game itself was to him its own reward.
In _The Prison_ he writes: “There is a greater reward than any which the teachers can warrant; they might teach you to lead a decorous life, help you to learn the rules of the game, show you how to succeed in it. But the profit of the game itself, that which makes it worth playing at all, even to those who succeed best, this they can neither grant nor refuse; you bear it in yourselves, inalienably, whether you succeed or fail.”