Of all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world's
attention, the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except
where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one's
soul with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one mortal ailment.
It cannot become impassioned, that is to say, vital, without making
somebody gushing and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people do not
wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and they have no artistic and
charming language except light persiflage and no powerful language at
all, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the
fireplace. Again and again I have watched some play of this sort with
growing curiosity through the opening scene. The minor people argue,
chaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just as
we do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have been
wondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the burden of
fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then the great
scene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or
self-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to
the fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.
Ibsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little
provincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and
made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and
harps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments
of excitement, and if the play needed more than that, they could always
do something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do at
the end of _Little Eyolf_. One only understands that this manner,
deliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled
it with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a man
of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of
play to be slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing
anything but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or
now and then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a
man holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim
light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of
the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a
thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,
almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a
permanent form because having the power of psychological description it
can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.