Act II is rather thin. In Act III, which recalls a Gilbertian farce,

Note: Images of the original pages are available through

Internet Archive. See

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ICONOCLASTS

A Book of Dramatists

Ibsen, Strindberg, Becque, Hauptmann,

Sudermann, Hervieu, Gorky, Duse and

D'Annunzio, Maeterlinck and Bernard Shaw

by

JAMES HUNEKER

My truth is the truth

MAX STIRNER

New York

Charles Scribner's Sons

1910

TO

JOHN FRANCIS HUNEKER

CONTENTS

I. HENRIK IBSEN

II. AUGUST STRINDBERG

III. HENRY BECQUE

IV. GERHART HAUPTMANN

V. PAUL HERVIEU

VI. THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW

VII. MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL

VIII. HERMANN SUDERMANN

IX. PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY

X. DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO

XI. VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM

XII. MAURICE MAETERLINCK

I

HENRIK IBSEN

I

THE INDIVIDUALIST

The Kingdom of God is within you

I

Ferdinand Brunetière has declared that "there can be no tragedy without

a struggle; nor can there be genuine emotion for the spectator unless

something other and greater than life is at stake." This so exactly

defines the dramas of Henrik Ibsen that it might have been specifically

written to describe their dramatic and ethical content. Whatever else

Ibsen's works may be, they are first soul dramas; the human soul is

not only their shadowy protagonist, but it is the stake for which his

characters breathlessly game throughout the vast halls of his poetic

and historic plays and within those modern middle-class apartments,

where the atmosphere seems rarefied by the intensity of the struggle.

"Greater than life" means for Ibsen the immortal soul--immortal not in

the theologic, but generic sense; the soul of the species, which never

had a beginning and never can have an end. With this precious entity

as pawn on Ibsen's dramatic chess-board, the Brunetière dictum is

perfectly fulfilled.

Let us apply to him and his plays a symbol; let us symbolize the

arch-symbolist. Ibsen is an open door. The door enacts an important

rôle with him. Nora Helmer, in A Doll's House, goes out of the door

to her new life, and in The Master Builder, Hilda Wangel, typifying

the younger generation, enters to Solness. An open door on the chamber

of the spirit is Ibsen. Through it we view the struggle of souls in

pain and doubt and wrath. He himself has said that the stage should

be considered as a room with the fourth wall knocked down so that the

spectators could see what is going on within the enclosure. A tragic

wall is this missing one, for between the listener and the actor there

is interposed the soul of the playwright, the soul of Ibsen, which,

prism-like, permits us to witness the refractions of his art. This open

door, this absent barrier, is it not a symbol?

What does Henrik Ibsen mean to his century? Is he dramatist,

symbolist, idealist, optimist, pessimist, poet, or realist? Or is he a

destructive, a corroding force? Has he constructive gifts--aside from

his technical genius? He has been called an anarchic preacher. He has

been described as a debaser of the moral coin. He has been ranged far

from the angels, and his very poetic gifts have been challenged. Yet

the surface pessimism of his plays conceals a mighty belief in the

ultimate goodness of mankind. Realist as he is, his dramas are shot

through with a highly imaginative symbolism. A Pegasus was killed early

under him, as Georg Brandes says; but there remains a rich remnant of

poesy. And may there not be deduced from his complete compositions

a constructive philosophy that makes for the ennoblement of his

fellow-beings?

Ibsen is a reflective poet, one to whom the idea presents itself

before the picture; with Shakespeare and Goethe the idea and form

were simultaneously born. His art is great and varied, yet it is

never exercised as a sheer play of form or colour or wit. A Romantic

originally, he pays the tax to Beauty by his vivid symbolism and his

rare formal perfections. And a Romantic is always a revolutionist.

Embittered in youth--proud, self-contained, reticent--he waged war with

life for over a half-century; fought for his artistic ideals as did

Richard Wagner; and, like Wagner, he has swept the younger generation

along with him. He, the greatest moral artist of his century, Tolstoy

not excepted, was reviled for what he had not said or done--so

difficult was it to apprehend his new, elusive method. A polemist

he is, as were Byron and Shelley, Tolstoy and Dickens, Turgenev and

Dostoïevsky. Born a Northman, he is melancholic, though not veritably

pessimistic of temperament; moral indignation in him must not be

confounded with the pessimism that sees no future hope for mankind.

The North breeds mystics. Shakespeare would have made his Hamlet a

Scandinavian even if the legendary Hamlet and the earlier play had

not existed. The brief, white nights, the chilly climate, the rugged,

awful scenery, react on sensitive natures like Ibsen's. And then the

various strains in his blood should not be forgotten,--Danish, German,

Norwegian, and Scotch. Thus we get a gamut of moods,--philosophic,

poetic, mystic, and analytic. And if he too frequently depicts

pathologic states, is it not the fault of his epoch? Few dramatists

have been more responsive to their century.

II

The drama is the domain of logic and will; Henry Becque called it "the

art of sacrifices." The Ibsen technic is rather tight in the social

dramas, but the larger rhythms are nowhere missing. The most artificial

of art forms, the drama, is in his hands a mirror of many reverberating

lights. The transubstantiation of realities is so smoothly accomplished

that one involuntarily remembers Whistler's remark as to art being only

great when all traces of the means used are vanished. Ibsen's technic

is a means to many ends. It is effortless in the later plays--it is

the speech of emotion, the portrayal of character. "Qui dit drame, dit

caractère," writes André Gide. Ibsen's content conditions his form.

His art is the result of constraint. He respects the unities of time,

place, action, not that he admires the pseudo-classic traditions of

Boileau, but because the rigorous excision of the superfluous suits his

scheme. Nor is he an extremist in this question of the unities. Like

Renan, the artist in him abhors "the horrible mania of certitude." The

time-unit in his best plays ranges from one to two days; the locality

is seldom shifted further than from room to garden. As he matured his

theatrical canvas shrank, the number of his characters diminished. Even

the action became less vivacious and various; the exteriorization of

emotional states was substituted for the bustling, vigorous life of the

earlier plays. Yet--always drama, dynamic not static.

His dialogue--a spoken, never a literary one--varies from extreme

naturalism to the half-uttered sentences, broken phrases, and

exclamations that disclose--as under a burning light--the sorrow and

pain of his men and women. One recalls in reading the later pieces

the saying of Maurice Barrès, "For an accomplished spirit there is

but one dialogue--that between our two egos--the momentary ego that

we are and the ideal one toward which we strive." The Ibsen plays are

character symphonies. His polyphonic mastery of character is unique

in the history of the drama; for, as we shall presently show, there

is a second--nay, a third--intention in his dialogue that give forth

endless repercussions of ideas and emotions.

The mental intensity of Ibsen is relentless. Once, Arthur Symons

showing Rodin some Blake drawings, told the French sculptor,

"Blake used literally to see these figures; they are not mere

inventions."--"Yes," replied Rodin, "he saw them once; he should have

seen them three or four times." Ibsen's art presents no such wavering

vision. He saw his characters not once but for many months continuously

before, Paracelsus-like, he allowed them an escape from his chemical

retort to the footlights. Some of them are so powerfully realized that

their souls shine like living torches.

Ibsen's symbolism is that of Baudelaire, "All nature is a temple filled

with living pillars, and the pillars have tongues and speak in confused

words, and man walks as through a forest of countless symbols." The

dramatist does not merely label our appetites and record our manners,

but he breaks down the barrier of flesh, shows the skeleton that

upholds it, and makes a sign by which we recognize, not alone the poet

in the dramatist, but also the god within us. The "crooked sequence of

life" has its speech wherewith truth may be imaged as beauty. Ibsen

loves truth more than beauty, though he does not ignore the latter.

With him a symbol is an image and not an abstraction. It is not the

pure idea, barren and unadorned, but the idea clothed by an image which

flashes a signal upon our consciousness. Technically we know that the

Norwegian dramatist employs his symbols as a means of illuminating the

devious acts and speech of his humans, binding by repetitions the

disparate sections and contrasted motives of his play. These symbols

are not always leading motives, though they are often so construed; his

leit-motiven are to be sought rather in the modulation of character

and the characteristic gestures which express it. With Rosmersholm the

"white horses" indicate by an image the dark forces of heredity which

operate in the catastrophe. The gold and green forest in Little Eyolf

is a symbol of what Rita Allmers brought her husband Alfred, and the

resultant misery of a marriage to which the man, through a mistaken

idealism, had sold himself. There are such symbols and catchwords in

every play. In Emperor and Galilean the conquering sun is a symbol for

Julian the Apostate, whose destiny, he believes, is conducted by the

joyous sun; while in Ghosts the same sun is for the agonized Oswald

Alving the symbol of all he has lost,--reason, hope, and happiness.

Thus the tower in The Master Builder, the open door in A Doll's

House, the ocean in The Lady from the Sea, give a homogeneity which

the otherwise loose structure of the drama demands. The Ibsen play is

always an organic whole.

It must not be forgotten that Henrik Ibsen, who was born in

1828,--surely under the sign of Saturn!--had passed through the flaming

revolutionary epoch of 1848, when the lyric pessimism of his youthful

poems was transformed into bitter denunciations of authority. He was

regarded as a dangerous man; and while he may not have indulged in any

marked act of rebellion, his tendencies were anarchic--a relic of his

devotion to the French Revolution. But then he was a transcendentalist

and an intellectual anarch. If he called the State the enemy of the

individual, it was because he foresaw the day when the State might

absorb the man. He advocated a bloodless revolution; it must be

spiritual to compass victory. Unless men _willed_ themselves free,

there could be no real freedom. "In those days there was no King in

Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Ibsen

confessed that the _becoming_ was better than the _being_--a touch

of Renan and his beloved _fieri_. He would have agreed with Emerson,

who indignantly exclaimed, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world

not to be a unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that

peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned

in the gross, in the hundred of thousand, of the party, the section to

which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North

or the South?" Lord Acton's definition that "Liberty is not a means to

a higher political end. It is in itself the highest political end,"

would have pleased Ibsen. "The minority is always in the right," he

asserts.

The Ibsen plays are a long litany praising the man who wills. The weak

man must be educated. Be strong, not as the "blond roaming beast" of

Nietzsche, but as captain of your own soul's citadel! Rémy de Gourmont

sees the idea of liberty as an emphatic deformation of the idea of

privilege. Good is an accident produced by man at the price of terrible

labour. Nature has no mercy. Is there really free will? Is it not one

of the most seductive forms of the universal fiction? True, answers in

effect Ibsen; heredity controls our temperaments, the dead rule our

actions, yet let us act as if we are truly free. Adjuring Brand "To

thyself be true," while Peer Gynt practices "To thyself be sufficient,"

Ibsen proves in the case of the latter that Will, if it frees, also

kills. Life is no longer an affair of the tent and tribe. The crook of

a man's finger may upset a host, so interrelated is the millet-seed

with the star. A poet of affirmations, he preaches in his thunder-harsh

voice as did Comte, "Submission is the base of perfection"; but this

submission must be voluntary. The universal solvent is Will. Work

is not the only panacea. Philosophically, Ibsen stands here between

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; he has belief in the Will, though not the

Frankfort philosopher's pessimism; and the Will to Power of Nietzsche

without that rhapsodist's lyric ecstasy. Nietzsche asked: "For what

is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." Ibsen

demonstrates that a great drama must always have a great philosophic

substratum. There may be no design in nature--let us believe there is.

Gesture is the arrest of the flux, rendering visible the phenomena of

life, for it moderates its velocity. In this hypothesis he would not

be at variance with De Gourmont, who has not hesitated to ask whether

intelligence itself is not an accident in the creative processes, and

if it really be the goal toward which mankind finally believes itself

drifting.

There is the mystic as well as the realistic chord in the Ibsen

drama. His Third Kingdom, not of the flesh (Pagan) nor of the spirit

(Christian), yet partaking of both, has a ring of Hegel and also of

that abbot of Flores called Joachim, who was a mediæval Franciscan.

The grandiloquent silhouettes of the Romantic drama, the mouthers of

rhetoric, the substitution of a bric-à-brac mirage for reality, have

no place in Ibsen's art. For this avoidance of the banal he has been

called a perverter of the heroic. His characters are in reality the

bankruptcy of stale heroisms; he replaces the old formula with a new,

vital one--Truth at all hazards He discerns a Fourth Dimension of the

spirit. He has said that if mankind had time to think, there would be a

new world. This opposer of current political and moral values declares

that reality is itself a creation of art--each individual creates his

picture of the world. An idealist he is in the best sense of the word,

though some critics, after reading into the plays Socialism--picture

Ibsen and "regimentation," as Huxley dubbed it!--claim the sturdy

individualist as a mere unmasker of conventionalism. How far all this

is from Ibsen's intention--who is much more than a satirist! and social

reformer--may be seen in his Brand, with its austere watchword, "All

or Nothing." A prophet and a seer he is, not a glib socialist exposing

municipal evils and offering ready-made prophylactics. The curve of

Ibsen's art comprises all these petty minor evils of life, it reaches

across the edge of the human soul; while, ardent pilgrim that he is,

he slowly mounts to the peaks from which he may see his Third Kingdom.

But, like a second Moses, he has never descended into that country of

ineffable visions or trod its broad and purifying landscapes.

Max Stirner's radical and defiant egoism, expressed in his pithy

axiom, "My truth is the truth," might be answered by Ibsen with the

contradictory "Le moi est haïssable" of Pascal. Indeed, an ironic

self-contradiction may be gleaned from a study of Ibsen; each play

seems to deny the conclusions of the previous one. But when the

entire field is surveyed in retrospect the smaller irregularities

and deflections from the level melt into a harmonious picture. Ibsen

is complex. Ibsen is confusing. In Ibsen there rage the thinker, the

artist, the critic. These sometimes fail to amalgamate, and so the

artistic precipitation is cloudy. He is a true Viking who always loves

stormy weather; and, as Brandes said, "God is in his heart, but the

devil is in his body." His is an emotional logic, if one may frame such

an expression; and it would be in vain to search in his works for the

_ataraxia_ of the tranquil Greek philosopher. A dynamic grumbler, like

Carlyle, he eventually contrives to orient himself; his dramas are only

an escape from the ugly labyrinth of existence. If his characters are

sick, so is latter-day life. The thinker often overrides the poet in

him; and at times the dramatist, the pure _Theatermensch_, gets the bit

between his teeth and nearly wrecks the psychologist. He acknowledges

the existence of evil in the world, knows the house of evil, but has

not tarried in it. Good must prevail in the end is the burden of his

message, else he would not urge upon his fellow-beings the necessity of

willing and doing.

The cold glamour of his moods is supplemented by the strong, sincere

purpose underlying them. He feels, with Kierkegaard, that the average

sensual man will ever "parry the ethical claim"; and if, in Flaubert's

eyes, "man is bad because he is stupid," in Ibsen's "he is stupid

because he is bad." "To will is to have to will," says his Maximus

in Emperor and Galilean. This phrase is the capstone of the Ibsen

structure. If he abhors the inflated phraseology of altruism, he is one

with Herbert Spencer, who spoke of a relapse into egotism as the only

thing which could make altruism enduring.

Felicity, then, with Ibsen is experience itself, not the result of

experience. Life is a huge misunderstanding, and the Ibsen dramas

hinge on misunderstandings--the conflict between the instinctive and

the acquired, between the forces of heredity and of environment. Herein

lies his preference for the drama of disordered wills. And touching on

this accusation of morbidity and sickness, may there not be gleaned

from Shakespeare and Goethe many mad, half-mad, and brain-sick men and

women? The English poet's plays are a perfect storehouse of examples

for the alienist. Hallucination that hardens into mania is delicately

recorded by Ibsen; he notes with a surgeon's skilled eye the first

slight decadence and the final entombment of the will. Furthermore,

the chiefest malady of our age is that of the will enfeebled by lack

of exercise, by inanition due to unsound education; and as he fingers

our spiritual muscles he cries aloud their flabbiness. In men the

pathologic symptoms are more marked than in women; hence the number of

women in his dramas who assume dominant rôles--not that Ibsen has any

particular sympathy with the New Woman, but because he has seen that

the modern woman marks time better with the _Zeitgeist_ than her male

complement.

Will, even though your will be disastrous in its outcome, but will,

he insists; and yet demonstrates that only through self-surrender can

come complete self-realization. To say "I am what I am," is the Ibsen

_credo_; but this "_I_" must be tested in the fire of self-abnegation.

To the average theologian all this rings suspiciously like the

old-fashioned doctrine of salvation by good works. The Scotch leaven is

strong in Ibsen. In his bones he is a moralist, in practice an artist.

His power is that of the artist doubled by the profound moralist, the

philosopher doubled by the dramatist; the crystallization in the plays

of these antagonistic qualities constitutes the triumph of his genius.

III

The stage is Ibsen's pulpit, but he is first the artist; his moral,

as in all great drama, is implicit. He is a doubter; he often answers

a question with another question; and if he builds high he also digs

deep. His plays may be broadly divided into three phases. First we

get the national-romantic; second, the historical; third, the social

dramas of revolt. In the first, under the influence of fable and

folk-song, Ibsen delved into the roots of Scandinavia's past; then

follow the stirring dramas, Fru Inger of Ostraat, The Vikings at

Helgeland, The Pretenders, and those two widely contrasted epics,

Brand and Peer Gynt. Beginning with The Young Men's League and ending

with the dramatic epilogue, When We Dead Awake, the third period is

covered. And what range, versatility, observation, poetic imagination,

intellectual power! Yet this dramatist has been called provincial!

Provincial--when his maiden tragedy, Catilina, begins B.C. and his

epilogue ends the nineteenth century; when his characters are types

as well as individuals that exist from South to North. True man of

the North, he sought in Italy for his scene of action, his first

hero. That his men and women are strongly Norwegian is no imputation

of provincialism--Christiania is a world capital, Scandinavia is not

a Bœotia. And is not human nature composed of the same soul-stuff

the world over? A similar accusation might be easily brought against

French, English, and German drama. Not for the sake of the phrase did

M. Faguet salute Ibsen as "the greatest psychological dramatist since

the time of Racine." And remember that Faguet is a Frenchman loyal to

the art traditions of his race,--logic, order, clarity of motive, and

avoidance of cloudy dramatic symbolism.

There are at least three factors to be noted in the Ibsen plays--the

play _quâ_ play, that is, the drama for the sake of its surface

intrigue, with its painting of manner and character; the more ulterior

meanings and symbolism; and lastly, the ideologic factor, really

the determining one. M. Jules Gaultier, a young French thinker, has

evolved from the novels of Gustave Flaubert--greatest master of

philosophic fiction--a metaphysic which is very engaging. _Bovaryisme_

he denominates the tendency in humanity to appear other than it is.

This trait has been dealt with by all world novelists and satirists;

_Bovaryisme_ has elevated it to the dignity of a Universal Fiction. We

pretend to be that which we are not. It is the law of being, the one

mode by which life is enabled to vary and escape the typic monotony of

the species. It is the self-dupery of the race. We are all snobs of the

Infinite, parvenus of the Eternal. We are doomed to dissemble, else

perish as a race.

Now, apply the laws of biology to the moral world and you have

the perfect flowering of the application in the Ibsen drama. The

basic clash of character is that between species and individual.

Each drama furnishes an illustration. In Rosmersholm we see Johann

Rosmer--the last of the Rosmers, himself personifying the law of

heredity--endeavouring to escape this iron law and perishing in

the attempt. He drags down with him Rebekka West, who because of

her tendency to variability, in an evolutionary sense, might have

developed; but the Rosmer ideals poisoned her fresher nature.

Halvard Solness, the Master Builder, suffers from his tyrannical

conscience--nearly all of Ibsen's characters have a morbid

conscience--and not even the spiritual lift of that exotic creature,

Hilda Wangel, can save him from his fate. He attempts to go beyond

the law and limits of his being, and his will fails. But is it not

better to fall from his giddy height than remain a builder of happy

homes and churches? From her birth neurotic Hedda Gabler is hopelessly

flawed in her moral nature. She succumbs to the first pressure of

adverse circumstance. She, too, is not ripe for spiritual re-birth.

Nora Helmer, like Hilda Wangel, like Mrs. Alving, frees herself by her

variation from what we, in our ignorance of our own possibilities,

call the normal. It is a cardinal doctrine of Ibsen that we alone can

free ourselves; help can never come from without. This he demonstrates

by his ironical flaying of the busybody reformer and idealist, Greger

Werle, in The Wild Duck. Ibsen also presents here the reverse of

the Ibsen medal. Ekdal, the photographer, who is utterly worthless,

a fantastic liar and masquerader, like Peer Gynt, is not saved by

the interference of Werle--quite the contrary; tragedy is summoned

through this same Werle's intrusion, and that most pathetic figure,

Hedwig Ekdal, might have striven to self-realization had not her

young existence been snuffed out by a virtuous lie. Hilda Wangel is

the incarnation of the new order, Rosmersholm of the old. And, _les

femmes, ces êtres médiocres et magiques_, as Jules Laforgue calls them,

the women of Ibsen usually manage to evade the consequences of the

life-lie better than the men. The secret is that, nearer nature, they

instinctively will to live with more intensity of purpose. Sir Oliver

Lodge thinks that the conflict between Free Will and Determinism is

because we "ignore the fact that there must be a subjective partition

in the universe separating the region of which we have some inkling

of knowledge from the region of which we have none." It must be that

reservoir of eternal certitudes for which Maurice Maeterlinck sighs.

The unknown, the subliminal forces _là-has,_ have their share in the

control of our will, though we may only judge of what we see on this

side of the "misty region" of metaphysic. Be this as it may, Ibsen is

content to set his puppets acting within the appreciable limits of free

will allowed us by our cognition.

If this evolutionary foundation of the Ibsen drama be too deep, there

is also the dialogue, externally simple, terse, natural, forcible,

and in the vernacular replete with sonority, colour, and rhythm.

Yet it is a stumbling-block; beneath the dramatist's sentences are

pools of uncertainty. This is the so-called "interior" or "secondary"

dialogue. The plays, read in the illuminating sense of their symbolism,

become other and more perplexing engines of power. They are spiritual

palimpsests, through which may be dimly deciphered the hieroglyphics

of another soul-continent. We peer into them like crystal-gazers and

see the faint outlines of ourselves, but so seemingly distorted as to

evoke a shudder. Or is our ill-suppressed horror in the presence of

these haunting shapes of humanity the result of ignorance? The unknown

is always disquieting. Hippolyte Taine may be right. "Our inborn

human imperfection is part of the order of things, like the constant

deformation of the petal in a plant." And perhaps to Ibsen, who is ever

the dramatist, the lover of dramatic effects, should be granted the

license of the character painter. To heighten the facts of life is a

prime office of the playwright.

But he has widened by his synthesis the domain of the theatre; he

has brought to it new material for assimilation; he, in a technical

sense, has accomplished miracles by transposing hopelessly undramatic

ideas to the boards, and by his indomitable tenacity has transmuted

them into viable dramatic events and characters. Every piece of Ibsen

can be played; even Peer Gynt and its forty scenic changes. It has

been played--with its epic fantasy, humour, irony, tenderness, and

philosophy; Peer Gynt, the very picture of the modern inconstant man,

his spiritual fount arid, his imagination riotous, his conscience

_nil_, rank his ideals, his dodging along the line of least moral

resistance, his compromising with every reality of life--this Peer Gynt

is the very symbol of our shallow, callous, and material civilization.

In all the conflicting undertow of his temperament and intellect, Ibsen

has maintained his equilibrium. He is his own Brand, a heaven-stormer;

his own Skule, the kingly self-mis-truster, and his own Solness,

the doubter of himself cowed by the thoughts of the new generation

--personified in August Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann. The old and

the new meet at a tumultuous apex of art at once grim, repellent,

morose, emotional, unsocial, masterful, and gripping. And what an art!

What an ant-hill of struggling, impotent humanity he has exposed!

What riches for the comedians--those ever admirable exponents of

_Bovaryisme!_ They pass us slowly by, this array of Ibsen men and

women, with anguish in their eyes, their features convulsed and

tortured into revealing their most secret shames by their cruel master.

They pass us slowly, this motley mob, with hypnotic beckoning gestures

and piteous pleading glances, for their souls will be presently

spilled by their implacable creator. Lady Inger, her son dead, her

daughter distraught; revengeful Hjördis and bewitched Sigurd; Duke

Skule, fearing Hakon's divine right to the throne; Svanhilda freeing

Falk as she goes to her martyr marriage with the unloved Gulsted;

Brand, a new Adam, sacrificing wife and child to his fetich, "All or

Nothing"; fascinating, inconstant Peer Gynt; Emperor Julian, that

magnificent failure; the grotesque Steensgard; the whited sepulchre,

Consul Bernick; Nora and her self-satisfied Helmer; Oswald Alving and

his agonized mother; the doughty Stockmann, who declares that the

exceptional man stands ever alone; Gina, the homely sensible, and

Ekdal, the self-illusionist; Rebekka West and Johann Rosmer; Ellida

Wangeland the Stranger; Hedda and Lövborg; Hilda and Solness; Asta

and Rita Allmers; John Gabriel Borkman, his gloomy brows furrowed by

thoughts of vengeance, accused by Ella Rentheim, whose soul he has

let slip from his keeping; Rubek and Irene, the tragedy of the artist

who sacrifices love for art; and the entire cohort of subsidiary

characters, each one personal and alive---is not this small world, this

pictured life, a most eloquent witness to the fecundity of the northern

Rembrandt! He proclaims that "The Kingdom of God is within you";

Tolstoy has preached the like. But between the depressing quietism

of the Russian and the crescent individualism of the Norwegian there

lies the gulf separating East and West. Tolstoy faces the past. Ibsen

confronts the future.

* * * * *

II

YOUTHFUL PLAYS AND POEMS

Students of Ibsen are deeply indebted to Mr. William Archer, not alone

for his translations--colourless though they often are--but also

for his illuminative critical articles on the Norwegian master. A

comparatively recent one describes Ibsen's apprenticeship and destroys

the notion that he owed anything to George Sand. He learned much of his

stagecraft from Eugène Scribe, who was the artistic parent of Sardou.

But as Mr. Archer wrote in an English periodical:--

If the French are determined to claim some share in the

making of Ibsen, they must shift their ground a little.

He did not get his ideas from George Sand, but he got a

good deal of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe and the

playwrights of his school. Ideas he could not possibly

get from Scribe, for the best of all reasons; but he

can be proved to have been familiar, at the outset

of his career, with the works of that great inventor

and manipulator of situations, from whom there can be

little doubt that he acquired the rudiments of dramatic

construction. He ultimately outgrew his teacher, even

in technical skill, and his later plays, from Ghosts

onward, show the influence of Scribe mainly in the careful

avoidance of his methods. Nevertheless it was in the

Scribe gymnasium, so to speak, that he trained himself for

his subsequent feats as a technician.

It is significant of Ibsen's frame of mind in his extreme youth, that

his first drama was called Catilina (1850) and devoted to the Roman

champion of individual rights, the hater of tyrants. He studied,

says his biographer Hans Jaeger, Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's

Orations against Catiline; and Vasenius is quoted to the effect that

the Catilina of Ibsen is "a true representation of the historic

personage"--an opinion in which Jaeger does not coincide. Two women,

Aurelia and Furia, who dispute for the possession of the hero, are the

two women natures that may be found in nearly all of the dramas. It

is not the purpose of this study to dwell long upon the plays not in

the regular repertory. Chiefly for the historic retrospect are they

mentioned; particularly in the case of Catilina, the first as it sounds

the key in which the master works of the poet are generally sounded,

the key of individuality, "the utmost clearness of vision and fulness

of power," to employ Ibsen's own words.

Twenty-six poems appeared in a slim volume. They are boyish, one dating

from the nineteenth year of the author. They are immature, as might be

expected, though charged with pessimism, a youthful Byronism. "He went

about Grimstad like an enigma secured with seven seals," said a lady

who knew him then.

The Warriors' Tomb; Norma, or a Politician's Love,--this latter a

musical tragedy; St. John's Night, need not occupy our time, for the

curious Jaeger and Georg Brandes tell all there is to be told. St.

John's Night, though unpublished, was produced at the Bergen Theatre,

January 2, 1853.

The writer confesses to deep admiration for Fru Inger of Ostraat

(1857) and The Pretenders (1864), both translated by Mr. Archer.

Dealing as they do with historical figures they must be of necessity

interesting to Norwegians. Considered purely as stage plays they

appeal, particularly Lady Inger, a Lady Macbeth in her power for evil.

Nils Lykke, too, is firmly drawn and is fascinating in his ambitions

and debaucheries. There is one big scene in which the pair meet, which

does not soon leave the memory. We seem to see in The Pretenders "the

Great King's thoughts" of Skule, the germ of Julian's character, so

magnificently exposed in Emperor and Galilean. The Pretenders is full

of barbaric colour and the shock of arms. Some episodes recall in

atmosphere those wonderful scenes in Wagner's Götterdämmerung with

their hoarse-throated and bloody-minded thanes.

I was lucky enough to be present at the revival of this epical

composition at Berlin in the Neues Theatre, October, 1904. Previous

to this the Meiningen organization had presented the piece in a

worthy manner, and once at the Schiller Theatre there had been a few

representations. I was amazed at the power and verisimilitude of

Ibsen's characters up to the death scene--rather a theatrical one--of

the wicked Bishop Nikolas. After that the action became, because of

the weak interpretation of Duke Skule by Franz Wüllner, uninteresting.

And then, too, the fatiguing lengths; nearly five hours were consumed

in this noteworthy performance. Director Max Reinhardt was a subtly

wicked ecclesiastic, Friedrich Kanzler the heroic King Hakon. Die

Kronprätendenten, like Wagner's Ring, should be given in sections. At

the Neues Theatre it was splendidly mounted, though it is doubtful if

it ever will be a popular drama in Germany.

The Feast at Solhaug (1857) was a success when it was played at Bergen.

Jaeger says that Olaf Lijekrans, his next but unprinted drama, is

more romantic than its predecessor. St. John's Night is redolent of

folk-song, and the lyric prevails in nearly all the earlier work; but

prose dominates in the three historical dramas, the third being The

Vikings at Helgeland, considered elsewhere.

When Henrik Ibsen celebrated his seventieth birthday, the Berlin Press

Society, as an introduction to the celebration, had an Ibsen première,

at which his early drama, The Warriors' Tomb, was recited. This piece

exhibits him not as the psychological but as the romantic poet, in

his twenty-second year. He wrote the work in 1850 while he was a poor

student in Christiania. It was written immediately after Catilina, and

was performed on the stage at Christiania on September 26 of the same

year. When Ibsen became stage manager of tin Bergen Theatre a revised

version of the play was given, January 2, 1854. A local newspaper

printed it as a feuilleton, but every copy of that paper has vanished,

and The Warriors' Tomb exists only in two prompter's copies, one in

Christiania, the other in Bergen. The latter is the one which he

regards as the authorized version.

The piece is in verse and has a good movement and swing in it. It may

be called a dramatized ballad, and treats of the last great struggle

between Heathendom and Christendom. Students of English history know

how the Saxons wiped out Christianity from the Roman provinces they

conquered, except in a petty mountainous district in Wales, and

how a second wave of invaders ruined the Celtic church of Ireland

and the Celtic church of Iona, and founded an empire in Russia. It

seemed indeed as if the men who went to death hoping to drink mead in

Valhalla, would drive back those who went to battle hoping to sing

hymns among the cherubim. It is with this period of the world's history

that Ibsen's juvenile play is occupied.

King Gandalf and his men sail to Sicily to avenge the death of his

father, who had fallen in a Viking raid. There the rough wielder of the

sword meets the Christian maiden Blanca, and is conquered by her. The

word "forgiveness" overcomes him. He has sworn to die or be revenged,

so now resolves to die. Then he recognizes in a Christian hermit the

father whom he had believed to be dead. He buries only his sword and

his Viking spirit in the tomb of warriors.

The language of the piece is decidedly juvenile, and the whole of no

dramatic importance, yet it exhibits traces of the dramatic Viking of

to-day. In an address delivered at the Press Society's meeting, Dr.

Julius Elias points out that it contains another Ibsen motive, "the

ethical mission of woman." In the Lady of Ostraat, Ibsen's character,

Nils Lykke, says, "A woman is the most powerful thing on earth; in

her hands it lies to lead the man where God would have him," and here

Gandalf referring to an old saga says:--

'Tis said that to Valfather's share belongs

Only one-half of the slain warrior;

The other half falls into Freia's lot.

This saying I could never understand,

But now I grasp it. A slain warrior

Am I myself--and the best half of me

Belongs to Freia.

And Blanca leads Gandalf where God would have him; by her the rude

sea-king has his moral feelings touched, the heathen becomes a

Christian, the sea-rover a spiritual champion. She tells him that the

Northland that set out over the ocean to conquer the world with fire

and sword is called to "deeds of the spirit on the sea of thought."

Dr. Wicksteed in his invaluable lectures on Henrik Ibsen gives his

readers some specimen translations in prose of the poem. They deal,

in the main, with those themes dear to Tolstoy and Zola,--The Miner,

Afraid of the Light, The Torpedo and the Ark, Burnt Ships, The

Eider Duck--in this famous lyric as bitter-sweet as Heine's, Ibsen

prefigured his own flight from his native land to the South. We are

told by some that Ibsen was a man aloof from his country, a hater of

its institutions. No man, not even Björnson, has been more patriotic.

He has loved his Norway so well that he has seen her faults and has

not hesitated to lay on the lash. He loves the people quite as much

as Tolstoy his peasants; but he would have them stand each man on his

feet. Like Brand he has essayed to lead them to the heights, and never

has gone down to their level.

Love's Comedy (1862) is of especial interest to the student of the

prose plays. In it are floating, amorphous perhaps, the motives

we know so well of the later Ibsen. The comedy is accessible to

English readers, for it has been translated by C. H. Herford, with

an introduction and notes. Falk and Svanhild part because they fear

themselves,--she to marry a rich merchant, he to go his poetic path and

attempt to fly against the wind. The cruel satire of the lines stirred

all Norway. The paradox of two young folk abandoning each other just

because they fear their love will end the way of most married love,

is at least a rare one. As much as we admire Svanhild's resolution

to remember her love as a beautiful ideal, unshattered by material

realization, we cannot help suspecting that sensible old Gulstad's

money bags have a charm for her practical bourgeois nature. It is

Ibsen and his problem that is more interesting; we see the parent idea

of a long line of children, that idea which may be embodied in one

phrase,--never surrender your personality. "Nothing abides but the

lost" might be a motto for the piece, as Dr. Herford says. Brandes and

Wicksteed argue most interestingly from the theme. The young Ibsen had

recognized the essential mockery of so-called romantic love, with its

silly idealizations, its perplexed awakenings, its future filled with

desperate unhappiness. He had the courage to say these things by way of

a satirical parable, and there arose upon the air a burden of disgust

and hatred: cynic, atheist, brutal, and shocking. Ibsen bore it as he

bore his life long the attacks of press and public--in silence. He

could wait, and wait he did.

When Lugné-Poë produced The Comedy of Love at his Théâtre de

l'Œuvre, the translation by Mlle. Colleville and F. de Zepelin,

Catulle Mendès, who had been quarrelling with M. Poë to the extent

of a duel, wrote the following criticism of Ibsen's early work. It

illustrates the real Gallic point of view in the Ibsen controversy:--

It seems that sensitive admirers of Henrik Ibsen do not

class The Comedy of Love among the masterpieces of the

great Norwegian. I am glad of it for the sake of those

masterpieces. The thing which is displeasing above

everything in this piece, where Ibsen's genius once

more halts, is that one is unable to get at the initial

intention of the author. What does he pretend to teach by

making to evolute and chatter in the garden of a country

house--what house I do not know, but for certain it is

a matrimonial one--a number of engaged couples, married

folks and parsons who are the fathers of a dozen children

each? Those who used to love love no more; those who

were romantic have become bourgeois; those who are still

romantic will become bourgeois. Then there is a poet,

whose lyrics we should classify in France--but we are in

Lugné-Poë's house I--as provincial, who treats like a

Philistine all these poor engaged persons, these engaged

lovers, of our everyday life. As for him, being a poet

(Heavens I how mediocre his verses must be!)--he pursues

the vague, the immaterial, the sublime. He would like very

well to carry with him in this pursuit a young person,

once upon a time "poetical," but all the same strongly

"practical," who, after inclining for an instant toward a

life of devotion and _dévouement_ with the poet, does not

hesitate to espouse a very rich merchant, who evidently

has read Emile Augier, badly translated.

It is with difficulty I discover the object of Henrik

Ibsen. This puzzle is, however, very excusable in a

French critic, since it is shared by critics of the

North. Madame Ahlberg (read Ernest Tissot's book) thinks

that Ibsen desires to show the contrast between love and

the caricature of it which we see in marriage. Georg

Brandes, the celebrated Danish critic, in The Comedy

of Love esteems it impossible to know where he would

carry the poet, and says, "the only certain thing is his

pessimistic, conception of love and marriage."

But Henry Jaeger, Norwegian critic, is not even sure of

this, and to his mind this piece indicates that there

are "sentiments of love, like those of religion; that

is to say, which lose in sincerity the moment they are

expressed." On which side should a Frenchman have an

opinion on points which so divide much nearer judges?

At the bottom I am not far from believing that Ibsen

premeditated making it understood that even in love all is

vanity upon this earth. Ecclesiastes was of this advice,

and banality, that gray sun, shines on all the world. Is

this to say that The Comedy of Love is a mediocre work?

Not at all. Denuded of all dramatic interest, puerile

because of its romantic philosophy, and often tedious to

the point of inspiring us with the fear of a never ending

yawn, this piece, all the same a dream of youth already

virile, agitates in its incoherence, ideas, forces,

revolts, ironies, and hopes, which a little later in more

sure works, obscure but sure, will be the sad challenges

of human personality. And moreover, in the lyrical

language of personages too emphatically lyrical, which

proceeds from that Suabianism which Heine vanquished,

among all the little birds, all the little flowers, all

the starlit nights, and other sillinesses of German

romance, towers, flashes, and radiates resplendent the

ardent soul of the true poet.

* * * * *

III

THE VIKINGS AT HELGELAND

(1858)

With Dr. P. H. Wicksteed's affirmation, "Ibsen is a poet," humming in

my ears, I went to the most beautiful theatre in London, the Imperial,

to hear, to see, above all to see, the Norwegian dramatist's Vikings,

a few days before it was withdrawn, in May, 1903. For one thing the

production was doomed at the start: it was wofully miscast. The most

daring imagination cannot picture Ellen Terry as the fierce warrior

wife of Gunnar Headman. Once a creature capriciously sweet, tender,

arch, and delightfully arrogant, Miss Terry is now long past her prime.

To play Hjördis was murdering Ibsen outright.

But the play had its compensations. Miss Terry's son, Edward Gordon

Craig, exercised full sway with the stage, lighting, costumes. He

is a young man with considerable imagination and a taste for the

poetic picturesque. He has endeavoured to escape the deadly monotony

of London stage lighting, and, unaided, has worked out several

interesting problems. Abolishing foot and border lights, sending shafts

of luminosity from above, Mr. Craig secures unexpected and bizarre

effects. It need be hardly added that these same effects are suitable

only for plays into which the element of romance and of the fantastic

largely enter. We see no "flies," no shaky unconvincing side scenes,

no foolish flocculent borders, no staring back-cloths. The impression

created is one of a real unreality. For example, when the curtains are

parted, a rocky slope, Nordish, rugged, forbidding, is viewed, the

sea, an inky pool, mist-hemmed, washing at its base. From above falls

a curious, sinister light which gives purplish tones to the stony

surfaces and masks the faces of the players with mysterious shadows.

The entire atmosphere is one of awe, of dread.

With his second tableau Mr. Craig is even more successful. It is the

feast room in Gunnar's house. It is a boxed-in set, though it gives

one the feeling of a spaciousness that on the very limited stage of

the Imperial is surprising. A circular platform with a high seat at

the back, and a long table with rough benches, railed in, make up

an interior far from promising. A fire burns in a peculiar hearth in

the centre, and there are raised places for the women. Outside it is

dark. The stage manager contrived to get an extraordinary atmosphere of

gloomy radiance in this barbaric apartment. He sent his light shivering

from on high, and Miss Terry's Valkyr dress was a gorgeous blue when

she stood in the hub of the room. All the light was tempered by a

painter's perception of lovely hues. This scene has been admired very

much. For many, however, the third act bore off the victory. A simple

space of hall, a large casement, a dais, the whole flooded by daylight.

Here the quality of light was of the purest, withal hard, as befitted a

northern latitude.

In the last scene of all Mr. Craig wrestled with the darkness and

obtained several effects, though none startling or novel.

The Vikings was first planned for verse--a Norse tragedy of fate in

the Greek style. But the theme demanded a drastic, laconic prose, with

nothing unessential, and, as Jaeger points out, without monologues, or

lyric outbursts; the dialogue glows with passion, but the glow never

becomes flame or gives out sparks; here are caustic wit and biting

repartee, but the fighting is not carried on with light rapiers; we

seem to be watching a battle for life and death with the short, heavy

swords which the old Vikings used--hatred and love, friendship and

vengeance, scorn and grief--all are as intense as the sagas themselves.

The dramatic poet has been reproached, as his biographer asserts, for

"degrading the demi-gods" of the Völsung Saga into mere Norwegian and

Icelandic Vikings of the age of Erik Blodöx--or Bloody Axe. Other

critics, again, have commended him for making Vikings out of the

Völsung Saga.

Be it as it may, the result is drama of an excellent sort; romantic

drama if you will, yet informed by a certain realistic quality. Here

again the woman is the wielder of the power, and not the man. Hjördis

is the very incarnation of violence, of the lust of conquest, of hate,

revenge. She would overthrow kingdoms to secure the man she loved, and

that man is only a tool for her passionate ambitions.

The Vikings at Helgeland, then, is not exactly a dramatic paraphrase

of the Völsung Saga. Ibsen absorbed the wisdom of the ancients of his

race and made of them an organic work full of the old spirit, heroic,

powerful, and informed with the harsh romance of the time. This play

is not among his greatest, but it is none the less interesting as a

connecting link of his youth and early manhood.

Let us follow the piece scene by scene, noting the easy grasp of

character, the pithy dialogue, the atmosphere of repressed passion and

ferocious cruelty. There are evidences of crude power from first to

last. Upon the purple spotted rocks near the home of Gunnar Headman

on the island of Helgeland--in the north of Norway--Sigurd comes up

from his two war-ships which lie down in the misty cove. In the person

of Oscar Asche--familiar to New York theatre-goers as the appalling

Hebraic millionaire in Pinero's Iris--this Sigurd is a formidable

warrior, with hair in two blond plaits, steel-spiked cap, and fighting

harness.

He resembled Van Dyck's Siegmund as to girth, and with his big

bare arms, his bracelets, sword, and heavy stride, he gave one the

impression of clanking grandeur, of implacable phlegm. At once a row

begins, for Oernulf of the Fjords, an Icelandic chieftain, bars the

passage of the Viking. The pair fight. Fast from ship and cavern pour

warriors, and Dagny, the wife of Sigurd. Then hostilities cease. In

the young woman Oernulf recognizes a daughter wed without his consent

by Sigurd; for this hero, after giving up Hjördis--the foster daughter

of Oernulf--to Gunnar, marries Oernulf's real child, Dagny. As already

indicated, this scene was managed with remarkable deftness at the

Imperial. That sterling actor, Holman Clark, no stranger in America,

as Oernulf, carried away the major honours in this stirring episode.

His very mannerisms lent themselves to an amiable complicity with the

lines and gestures. We soon learn from his words that he means to

extort his pound of flesh from Gunnar for carrying off Hjördis. Sigurd

placates him with presents, with assurances of esteem. Dagny pleads

for forgiveness, and wins it.

Then enters Kara, the peasant, pursued by the house-carles of Hjördis,

and her motive is sounded for the first time in this drama of thwarted

love and hate. The wretched peasant has killed a subject of the Queen.

She is revengeful. He pleads for his life and is promised protection.

Hjördis soon appears. She looks like the traditional Valkyr and is

armed with a lance. Her nature is expressed in the cold way she greets

her foster sister, Dagny, though her face brightens at the sight of

Sigurd.

Violently reproached by her foster father, Hjördis responds in kind.

Let Gunnar be weak; let him renew his pact of friendship with Sigurd.

_She_ owes nothing to Oernulf. He has slain her real father in unfair

fight--then she is called a wanton by the angry chieftain and her rage

flames up so that the dark rocks upon which they all stand seem to be

illumined. Kara, in the interim, has gone away muttering his vengeance;

Hjördis, dissimulating, invites all to a great feast in Gunnar's house

and departs. Sigurd would go. Dagny mistrusts. At last Sigurd tells his

too-long-kept secret. It was he that slew the white bear and won the

woman beloved of Gunnar. Dagny is amazed, and after being conjured by

her husband to keep precious this story she promises. But she wistfully

regards the ring upon her arm, the ring of Hjördis, plucked from her

wrist by Sigurd (the ring of the Nibelungs!). Sigurd bids her hide it,

for if Hjördis catches a glimpse of it the deception will be as plain

as the round shield of the sun blazing on high. And then--woe to all!

The curtains close.

Act II is devoted to the feast and the strange events which happened

thereat. Ibsen's magic now begins to work. His psychologic bent is felt

the moment after we see Dagny and Hjördis in conference. The mild wife

of Sigurd wonders audibly at the other's depression. Why should she

bemoan her fate with such a house, a fair and goodly abode? Hjördis

turns fiercely upon her and replies, "Cage an eagle and it will bite at

the wires, be they of iron or of gold." But has she not a little son,

Egil? Better no son at all for a mother who is a wanton, a leman! She

recalls with sullen wrath the words of Oernulf. In vain Dagny seeks to

pacify her. The older woman is of the race of Titans. She tells with

pride the story of the queen who took her son and sewed his kirtle fast

to his flesh. So would she treat her Egil!

"Hjördis, Hjördis!" cries the tender-hearted listener. For this she is

mocked. Hjördis further tortures her by asking if she has accompanied

her husband into battle, into the halls of the mighty. "Didst thou

not don harness and take up arms?" Dagny answers in the negative.

Gunnar is extolled for his deed, a mighty deed as yet not excelled by

Sigurd. The listener seems on the point of denying this Hjördis notes

her agitation and presses her, but Dagny is faithful to her word; she

keeps Sigurd's secret. Then in a burst, almost lyric, Hjördis confesses

her love for combat to the sisters of Hilda, the terrible Valkyrs who

fly in the sky, carrying dead warriors to Valhall. She loves, too,

witchcraft, and would be a witch-wife astride of a whale and skim the

storm waves. "Thou speakest shameful things," says the frightened

Dagny, and is scoffed at for her timidity.

Gradually the feast begins. The warriors assemble. I cannot say that

I admired their costumes, reminding me, as they did, of crazy-quilts.

Sigurd and Gunnar enter arm in arm. Egil, the hope of Gunnar's house,

has been sent away; his father feared the descent of Oernulf and his

men. He now regrets the absence of his boy. Oernulf is not present,

but is represented by his youngest son, Thorolf. After the drinking

has begun the trouble-breeding Hjördis weaves her spell of disaster.

She sets boasting the warriors, forces the hapless Gunnar to describe

how he slew the great white bear, and openly proclaims him a better

man than Sigurd. Even this breach of hospitality does not embitter the

friends. Thorolf, however, is hot, imprudent, and at a chance word from

Hjördis is set on fire. Miss Terry, it must be confessed, played this

entire scene with great dexterity. Her broken phrases,--for she has

not a prolonged note in her compass,--her scornful mien, her raucous

voice, and shrewish gestures were admirable agents for the expression

of ill-stifled hate. Taunted beyond his self-control, Thorolf tells

the woman that Egil has been kidnapped by Oernulf and his other sons.

Instantly she screams that Egil has been slain. Thorolf leaves,

swearing that he will be avenged; that, "Ere eventide shall Gunnar and

his wife be childless."

At this juncture Gunnar, who has hitherto seemed a lymphatic sort of

person, seizes his battle-axe, and, despite Sigurd's word of warning,

follows Thorolf and kills him. A moment later enter Oernulf, bearing in

his arms the child Egil, happy and unharmed. It is a striking climax.

To the father, already bereaved of his other sons, lost in the fight

with the treacherous peasant, Kara, for the possession of the child,

must be told the terrible news. Thorolf is the apple of his eye, the

last of his race. Broken-hearted Gunnar explains. Outraged at the deed

caused by Hjördis, the timid Dagny gives her the lie when Gunnar's feat

is again nauseatingly dwelt upon. "It is Sigurd who won the woman; look

at the ring on my arm!" Amazed, infuriated, Hjördis turns upon her

husband. Is it true? Gunnar confesses without shame. Sigurd presses his

hand and proclaims him a brave man, though he did not slay the bear.

The hall empties and after Dagny-woman-like--triumphantly exults and

cries, "Who is now the mightiest man at the board--my husband or

thine?" Hjördis is left to her miserable thoughts. She soon makes up

her mind, "Now have I but one thing left to do--but one deed to brood

upon; Sigurd or I must die."

These words recall the fatal Siegfrieds-Tod! of Götterdämmerung. Both

Wagner and Ibsen followed the main lines of the immortal epic.

If in this act the student, curious of those correspondences which

subtly knit together ages widely asunder, discovers a modern tone, he

will regain the larger air of the antique North in Act III. It belongs

essentially to Hjördis. In the free daylight we discover her weaving

a bowstring. Near her, on a table, lie a bow and some arrows. The one

soliloquy of the piece begins the act. It is short, pregnant--what is

to follow is incorporated in its _nuances_. She pulls at the bowstring.

It is tough, well weighted. "Befooled, befooled by him, by Sigurd--"

But ere many days have passed--!

Gunnar enters. He has had a bad night. He cannot sleep because of the

murdered Thorolf. Then for a few bars of this barbaric music Ibsen

relapses into pure Shakespeare. We see Lady Macbeth and her epileptic

husband merge into the figures of the fiercer Brynhild and the weaker

Gunther. The man is urged on to betray, to slay his friend.

Hjördis lies to Gunnar--as lied, when mad with jealousy, Brynhild to

Gunther and Hagen; but this same Hjördis has hardly the excuse of her

bigger-souled sister.

Gunnar weakens. He describes a dream that he has had of late.

"Methought I had done the deed thou cravest; Sigurd lay slain on the

earth; thou didst stand beside him and thy face was wondrous pale.

Then said I, 'Art thou glad, now that I have done thy will?' But thou

didst laugh and answer, 'Blither were I didst thou, Gunnar, lie there

in Sigurd's stead.'" Ill at ease, Hjördis flouts this dream and pushes

her cause to an issue. Sigurd must die. How? "Do the deed, Gunnar--and

the heavy days will be past." She promises cheap joys--love. He leaves

her clutched to the very heart by her baleful words. The next interview

is with Dagny. No trouble now in winging this emotional bird. Already

she repents of her cruelty the previous night and would make amends.

Hjördis recognizes the malleability of the woman and pierces her armour

by proving to her her own unfitness for the high position as wife of

Sigurd--now the sole hero. She plays all the music there is hidden

within this string, and it sounds its feeble, little, discouraged

tune without further ado. Dagny feels her worthlessness, has always

felt it; better let Sigurd go unattended, unhampered, and quite alone

upon that shining path of glory which surely awaits him. She leaves.

Treading upon her heels almost comes the redoubtable Sigurd to this

exposed cavern of the wicked. Too soon he falls into the toils, not

because, like Hercules with Omphale, he is merely a sensuous weakling,

but because he has loved Hjördis from the first. The plot curdles.

Explanations fall like leaves in the thick of autumn. If Sigurd has

loved, Hjördis has anticipated him. This eagle bends curved beak and

is of the lowly for the moment. She proves to Sigurd that the one

unpardonable sin is the repudiation of love.

For another and a nobler motive Sigurd gives place to his beloved

friend Gunnar, yet none the less is his a crime. It must be expiated,

as was John Gabriel Borkman's. Curious it is to note the persistency

through a half century of an idea. Like Flaubert, Ibsen did not really

add to his early acquired stock of images and ideas.

Tempted almost beyond his powers, Sigurd manages to save his

self-respect and remain faithful to his wife. He recognizes his

mistake; he has always loved the other woman, though he never knew

before that this affection was returned. Hjördis bids him renounce all

for her; together they will win the throne of Harfager--the ultimate

dream of Sigurd. Sadly he bends his back to her gibes, to her devilish

suggestions. One way is open to him. He can fight Gunnar in behalf

of Oernulf and thus avenge the death of Thorolf and put an end to an

existence become insupportable. Hjördis has other plans.

Act IV is short. We see the unhappy Oernulf lamenting his murdered son

before a black grave mound. He sings his Drapa over the dead body.

A storm arises. It is a night of terrors. Kara, the peasant, still

unappeased, burns the home of Gunnar. Hjördis meets Sigurd and, after

entreating vainly, shoots him with the bow and arrow she has made

expressly for the purpose. A strand of her hair is entwisted in the

bowstring. Sigurd, dying, tells her to her horror that he is not a

pagan, that even in death he will not meet her "over there," for he is

a Christian man; the white God is his; King Ethelstan of England taught

him to know the new religion. (The epoch of the play is A.D. 933.)

Despairingly, the strong-souled woman casts herself into a chasm and is

translated into Valhall by her immortal sisters, the Valkyrs. This last

scene is hopelessly undramatic and, as given at the Imperial, quite

meaningless. After Hjördis commits suicide the curtains shut out the

scene.

In the play, however, Oernulf, Dagny, Gunnar, and Egil are discovered

watching the storm. Gunnar claims the protection of the man whose son

he has slain. The body of Sigurd is found, and the arrow of Hjördis.

"So bitterly did she hate him," whispers Dagny to herself with true

Ibsenesque irony. Gunnar says aside, "She has slain him--the night

before the combat; then she loved me after all." These sly, pitiless

strokes would have proved too much to a British audience, sufficiently

outraged by several of Hjördis's very plain speeches. The little Egil

sees his mother on a black horse "home-faring" with the Valkyrs. The

storm passes; peacefully the moon casts its mild radiance upon this

field of strange conflict.

* * * * *

IV

THE THREE EPICS

BRAND (1866), PEER GYNT (1867), EMPEROR AND GALILEAN (1873)

In his three epical works,--for epics they are,--Brand, Peer Gynt, and

Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen reached poetic heights that he has never

since revisited. The spiritual fermentation attendant upon his first

visit to Italy in May, 1864, gave Norway, indeed all Scandinavia, its

first modern epic. And it is not strange that this Italian journey

should produce such monumental results. Goethe was at heart never

so German as in Italy; and Ibsen, one of the few names that will

be coupled with the poet of Faust when the intellectual history of

the past century is written, was never such a Northman as in Rome,

though he had left his native land full of bitterness, a self-imposed

exile, doomed to exist on the absurd stipend doled out to him with

niggardly hands by the Norwegian government. Yet, instead of turning to

antiquity, he penned Brand, one of the few great epics since Milton and

Goethe, and then as a satiric pendant let loose the demoniac powers of

his ironic fantasy in Peer Gynt. In this vast symphony, Brand is the

first sombre movement, Peer Gynt a brilliant Mephistophelian scherzo,

while Emperor and Galilean is the solemn and mystic last movement.

Brand places Ibsen among the great mystics beginning with Dante and

including the names of Da Vinci, Swedenborg, mad naked Blake, and

Goethe. Unlike the poet of the Divine Comedy he set his hell on the

heights, for the hell of the defeated is the story of that stern Brand

who left his church in the valley, summoned his flock to follow him

and found an Ice Church on the high hills. Only Hamlet and Faust are

recalled to the reader as they see this soul warped by its ideal of

"All or Nothing," and in the spiritual throes of doubt, even despair.

His God is the merciless Jahveh of the later Hebraic dispensation, not

the Eloihim of the earlier. Weakness of will is the one unpardonable

sin. Heroic as a Viking, he stands for all the Norwegian race was not

when Ibsen wrote his poem. Life broken into tiny fragments, waverers

and compromisers, he lashes his countrymen so that across these pages

you seem to hear the whistle of the knotted thongs. Conventional

religion comes in for its share of abuse from the tongue of this new

Elijah. The wife Agnes, one of the poet's most charming creations, is

at first attracted by the shallow, artistic Einar. When she meets

Brand her soul goes out to him. "Did you see him tower as he talked?"

she asks her companion. Bat as he sacrificed his mother to his ideal,

so he sacrifices his wife. Their child does not thrive in the gloomy

valley where this cure of souls abides. No matter. He remains. God's

will be done. The child dies. His clothes are sold to a gypsy because

Agnes has shed tears over them--a human weakness. She opens her window

in the evenings so that the lamplight will fall across the grave of

her child. That consolation, too, is denied her. Be hard! might be

the Nietzschean motto of her husband. And so she dies. His mother

died saying, "God is not so hard as my son," because he refused her

the sacraments. She had ill-gotten wealth. To make restitution was

his demand--All or Nothing. He would not make bargains, be a paltry

go-between for God and man. His nobility of character repels. People

feel his power but find him unapproachable. The _laissez-faire_ policy,

the easy-going philosophy of the official servants of God, raises

wrath in his bosom. He would drive these blasphemers from the sacred

precincts of the temple. It is his realization of the hopelessness of

reforming men by the old means that sends him to the mountains. He

has built a church, for the old church is too small. But the new, a

symbol of the soaring soul, is misunderstood. It is a gift from Brand

to his people, and so horrified is he with his failure to stir these

petty souls that he throws the church key in the river and summons the

multitude to follow him upward, up there in the clouds, where the true

God abides away from the vileness of mart and palace. Some follow, many

mock, and he is finally stoned and deserted. A crazy creature, Gerd,

who symbolizes wildness, an egotist who scorns human ties; she it is

who is appointed by the poet to open Brand's eyes. His spiritual pride

has been his downfall, for while thinking of others he has not "found

salvation for his own soul." The avalanche which she starts overwhelms

them both, but not before he hears a voice answer his prayer--does

mankind's will, then, count for nothing. "He is the God of Love," is

the reply.

Havelock Ellis thinks that "we have to look back to the scene in the

death of Lear" to attain a like imaginative height in literature.

Ibsen has set his character in a most life-like _milieu_. His people

are painted with a broad, firm hand. The mayor, the schoolmaster, the

doctor, the sexton, are living men, and their worldly natures are

clearly indicated. Prophet Brand is, though Ibsen told Georg Brandes

that he could have made him sculptor or politician, as well as priest.

Sören Kierkegaard and his revolt from orthodoxy may have supplied the

poet for his portrait. He, however, more than half hints that it was

Gustav Lammers who was the original of Brand, a fiery nonconformist man

who built his own church and seceded from the current evangelicism.

But, after all, Brand is Ibsen's own portrait, is a mask for Ibsen

himself. The beauty, grim as it is, and the picturesque variety of this

great poem almost match its ethical grandeur.

The Ice Church is too cold for humanity, Brand's ideal too inhuman.

Yet he has willed, he has not wholly failed. His error was in its

application--in not willing enough for himself. "Be what you are," he

exhorts the weak Einar, "whatever it is, but be it out and out" No

compromise with the powers of evil--yet Brand's doctrine led to his

destruction. Not to will is a crime, to will too much leads to madness.

What is the answer to this perplexing problem? Ibsen does not give it.

In his phraseology "to be oneself is to lose oneself." And Brand, who

was for "All or Nothing," severed his dearest ties and finally was

destroyed himself.

The complexity must not repel the student. Mr. C. H. Herford's

translation with the illuminating introduction is well worth the

reading. He thinks that the "Norwegian priest is tortured ... as

was Hamlet; Hamlet's power of resolve is depleted by the restless

discursiveness of his intellect; Brand's failure in sympathetic

insight hangs together with his peremptory self-assertion.... Unless

appearances wholly deceive, Shakespeare drew in Hamlet the triumph of

impulses which agitated without dominating his nature." Ibsen had

_lived_ Brand, he confesses it.

But as a stage play, and it has been played, it is not a success. It

lacks condensation. A battle-field of two tense souls--for Agnes's

almost matches Brand's at times--it is too long and too loosely

constructed in its joints for effective dramatic representation.

Dr. Wicksteed makes an acute point when he shows that Einar's smug

conversion--which fills Brand with loathing--is missed by the priest,

for "only a man whose heart is dead can live by that destroying phrase,

'All or Nothing.' The principle which slays the saintly Agnes, and

drives her heroic husband mad, fits the miserable Einar like a glove;

he is happy and at home with it."

Self-realization through self-surrender is the fundamental organ-tone

of the masterly, overarching epic. And note the symbolism of the

church, the church in the valley, and Gerd's Ice Church! This symbol

of architecture reappears in The Master Builder, just as the avalanche

motive reappears in When We Dead Awaken. The mountain-tops are the

abodes of Ibsen's heroes,--who are his thoughts,--and there he scourges

the human soul on this lofty Inferno.

In Brand, Ibsen girded against the weaklings, the men of half-hearted

measures, the conventional cowards of civilization. In Peer Gynt he

makes a hero of such a one, a lying, boastful fellow. The poem is one

of the most audacious and fantastic ever written. Yet with all its

shifting phantasmagoria, it so stands four-square rooted in the old,

brown earth. Peer is a rascal, but a lovable one; a liar from the first

page to the last. He "is himself" without a deviation from the crooked

paths of selfishness. Again Ibsen puzzles, for the very keystone of

his ethical arch is individuality. Peer is a compromiser at every

station of his variegated career. He, too, treats his mother cruelly,

though from different motives from Brand. He runs off with another

man's bride, because he has been too lazy to win her lawfully. He does

this in the face of a woman, Solveig, for whom he has entertained

the first unselfish desire of his shallow existence; he goes to the

trolls and lives in the swamps of sensuality--where Solveig follows

him, but is left; he goes to America after his mother's death,--a

most affecting page,--makes a fortune by selling Bibles, rum, and

slaves, buys a yacht, sets up for a cosmopolitan; "has got his luck

from America, his books from Germany, his waist-coat and manners from

France, his industry and keen eye for the main chance from England,

his patience from the Jews, and a touch of the _dolce far niente_ from

the Italians." He makes friends, for he is successful. They maroon him

on a savage shore, but blow up his yacht. He thanks God for the swift

retribution--as others have done in similar predicaments--though he

thinks the Lord is not very economical. Many adventures ensue, from

the episode with the dancing girl Anitra to the crowning in a madhouse

of Peer as Emperor of Himself.

At last, old, ruined, he returns to Norway. In the mountains, in the

identical hut, he finds the patient Solveig, who has always loved

him. He has met the Button-moulder, Death, who tells him that he is

doomed to the melting-pot, there to be re-minted. He has never been

himself, he the thrice-selfish Peer Gynt. His old thoughts come back

to him materialized as balls of wool. "We are thoughts," they cry,

"thou shouldst have thought us; hands and feet thou shouldst have lent

us." So this scamp, who "lived his life" seemingly to the utmost,

never lived it at all, blenches before the Boyg, the great, amorphous

mass that blocks his path, and listened to its whispered "Go round."

He always skirted difficulties, never faced them, a moral coward, a

time-server. Yet he may escape the Button-moulder, for Solveig has

believed in him. "Where have I been with God's stamp on my brow?" he

asks her, bewildered before the dawning perception of his worthlessness.

"In my faith, in my hope, in my love," she smilingly answers. The

Button-moulder calls without the house; "we meet at the last cross-way,

Peer, and then we shall see--I say no more." But Solveig guards him as

he sleeps.

The curse of Peer Gynt is his overmastering imagination coupled with

a weak will. It proves his downfall. "To be oneself, is to slay

oneself," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is the same as in

Brand,--self-realization through self-surrender. This parody of Don

Quixote and Faust was never the real Peer Gynt until the end.

The musical setting of Peer Gynt by Eduard Grieg gives no adequate

idea of the poem's dazzling humour, versatility, poetic power, malice,

swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the possible exception of the

episode of Peer's mother's death, has written in a sheer melodramatic

vein. Brand and Peer Gynt brought to Ibsen the fame he deserved, though

it was thus far confined to Norway.

The huge double drama, Emperor and Galilean, with the sub-title, a

World Historic Drama, is in a theatrical sense one of Ibsen's few

failures, though epical literature would sadly miss this vast and

hazardous undertaking devoted to Cæsar's apostasy and the Emperor

Julian, all in its ten acts. Naturally enough, even Ibsen's admirers

admit that the work lacks dramatic unity and that it is without

culminating interest. Yet dramatic it is, this narrative of Julian, the

so-called Apostate, who conceived the crazy notion of dragging from its

grave the forms of a dead and dusty paganism. He hates the Galilean

and finally becomes mad enough to crown himself a god. The vivid

pictures testify to Ibsen's powers of evocation, for it is said that

he was not deeply read in the classics. Dr. Emil Reich finds in Julian

something decadent, a prevision of the familiar Parisian type noted by

Huysmans. Rather have Huysmans and Ibsen gone to ancient Rome for their

figures--Julian has a touch of the Neronic cruelty and lust, just as he

has that monstrous artist's Cæsarean madness of dominion.

It is the scholar Julian listening to the teachings of the seer Maximus

who most attracts. Maximus predicts the advent of the Third Kingdom,

the kingdom which is neither that of the Galilean nor of the Emperor.

It is an empire that will harmonize both the empire of pagan sensuality

and the empire of the spirit and bring forth the empire of man. That

will be the Third Kingdom; "he is self-begotten the man who wills....

Emperor God--God Emperor. Emperor in the kingdom of the spirit,--and

God in that of the flesh." This mystic thought recalls that Joachim of

Flora, whose prophecies of the approaching Third Kingdom were approved

bythe Franciscans, by that section which was called the Spirituals.

There are some superb "purple patches" in Emperor and Galilean,

particularly in the second drama. Jealous of the Redeemer, for he would

be a world builder, he asks Maximus:--

"Where is he now? What if that at Golgotha, near Jerusalem, was but a

wayside matter, a thing done, so to speak, in passing, in a leisure

hour? What if he goes on and on, and suffers, and dies, and conquers,

again and again, from world to world? O that I could lay waste the

world! Maximus--is there no poison in consuming fire, that could lay

creation desolate, as it was on that day when the spirit moved alone on

the waters?" A second Alexander this, not groaning for more worlds to

conquer, but eager to slay the Son of Man.

Maximus has told him that, "You have tried to make the youth a child

again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the

spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final, any more than the

youth is.

"You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth--to hinder him from

becoming a man. O fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is

to be--against the third empire in which the twin-natured shall reign."

After bewailing that the Galilean will live in succeeding centuries to

tell the tale of the Emperor's defeat, Julian sees blood-red visions,

the hosts of the Galilean, the crimson garments of the martyrs, the

singing women, and all the multitudinous sent to overthrow him. In

the ensuing battle he dies with the historic exclamation upon his

lips,--"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!"

Wicksteed points out that Julian is a pedant, not a prophet. Again we

may see operating in another environment a Peer Gynt on the throne, a

Skule of the Pretenders. Julian doubted as did Skule his divine call;

he did not really believe in himself, and under he went on his way to

the Button-moulder. Emperor and Galilean has all the largeness of an

epic and much of that inner play of spiritual functions which may be

seen amplified in its two predecessors.

The double drama was performed for the first time in its original

language at the National Theatre, Christiania, March 20, 1903. It

was played in German in connection with the celebration of Ibsen's

seventieth birthday in Berlin in 1898, and earlier in 1896 at Leipsic.

* * * * *

V

THE YOUNG MEN'S LEAGUE

(1869)

The Young Men's League is actually the first of the prose social

dramas, though in Love's Comedy, published seven years earlier, we find

the poet preoccupied with love and marriage. Politics and politicians

fill the picture, an exceedingly animated one of the new play. Some

critics pretend to see in the figure of Steensgaard a burlesque of

Björnson, with whom about this time Ibsen had a quarrel. But this

has been denied. Steensgaard is the ideal politician,--that is, the

politician without ideals. He is carried away by the sound of his own

sonorous voice, by the rumbling of his own empty rhetoric. Brought

up in low environment, he snobbishly worships all this as base

and vulgar. So we find him capitulating to the enemy at the first

attack, a little flattery, a pleasant visit to an aristocratic house,

a peep at the daughter, and Steensgaard has changed his political

skin. He has so long misled himself that he misleads others. He is a

phrase-monger, a _parvenu_, a turn-coat. He is, in a word, a politician

all the world over. Thackeray would have delighted in the portrait

of this blathering, self-confident, self-deceived--a Peer Gynt in

politics, but without Peer's brilliant imagination. The characters

grouped about him are very vital,--the pompous aristocrat, Chamberlain

Bratsberg; the impressionable Selma; Monsen the swindler, Bastian and

Ragna his children; the shrewd Dr. Fjeldbo; Daniel Heire and Madame

Rundholmen--the latter one of those incomparably observed women of the

lower middle classes so grateful to Ibsen's powers of depiction.

When the comedy was produced, a scandal ensued. The dramatist had

spared neither high nor low. The piece was hissed and applauded

until the authorities interfered. It is more local than any of the

plays, though some of the characters are sufficiently universal to be

appreciated on any stage, Steensgaard the lying lawyer-politician in

particular.

* * * * *

VI

PILLARS OF SOCIETY

(1877)

Pillars of Society is the fifteenth play of Henrik Ibsen, several of

which, among them Norma and The Warriors' Tomb, have not yet been

published. Written in Munich, it appeared in the summer of 1877.

The ensuing autumn saw the play on the boards of nearly all the

Scandinavian theatres; Germany followed suit early the next year, and

the success of this satiric social comedy ran like wildfire throughout

the continent. It was not until December 15, at the Gaiety Theatre,

London, that it had an English hearing.

There is something of Swift in its bitter strokes of sarcasm at the

expense of the ruling commercial classes. The Northern Aristophanes,

who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in Pillars of Society

a varied row of whited sepulchres. His attitude is never that of

Thackeray: he never seems to sympathize with his snobs and hypocrites

as does the kindly English writer. There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his

breast has never harboured the milk of human kindness. This remote,

objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too

disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in

convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely human. We are all of

us so accustomed to the little encouraging pat on our moral hump that

in the presence of such a ruthless unmasking of our weaknesses we are

apt to cry aloud,--"Ibsen, himself, is an enemy of the people!"

It is an ugly, naked art, an art unadorned by poetic halos, lyric

interludes, comic reliefs, or the occasional relaxation by wit of

the dramatic tension. Love me, love my truth, the playwright says in

effect; and we are forced to make a wry face as we swallow the nauseous

and unsugared pill he forces down our sentimental gullets. His sinews

still taut from the extraordinary labours of Emperor and Galilean, that

colossal epic-drama of Julian the Apostate, the Scandinavian poet felt

the need of unbending, so he wrote Pillars of Society. It is the second

of that group of three dramas dealing with social and political themes

in the large, external style of which he is the unrivalled possessor.

Ibsen smelt corruption in all governments of the people by the people

and against the people. He foresaw that King Log was more dangerous

than King Stork. For him Demos has ever been the most exacting of

tyrants, the true foe to individuality.

The student of social pathology will find much that is amusing in

a grim sort of a way scattered throughout the scenes of Pillars of

Society. There is much action, much swift dialogue, much slashing wit,

and the general atmosphere is of a more breezy character than in the

plays which follow this one. Cheerful it is not. Surgery, whether of

the body or the soul, is not exactly pleasure-breeding. The story is

not an involved one, though Ibsen has woven a sufficiently complex

pattern to afford æsthetic interest in its disentanglement. If Consul

Bernick had not been in need of money, he would not have married

his meek wife, Betty, to whose elder half-sister he had previously

pledged his faith. As a pillar of society in a thriving community,

as the pillar of its church and commerce, Bernick could never afford

to be caught napping. Once it had nearly happened. He had carried on

an illicit love affair with a French actress. Her husband surprised

the pair. Bernick contrived an escape. So his brother-in-law, who had

slipped away to America, was blamed for the scandal, and you may easily

imagine the tongue-wagging and head-nodding in this philistine town.

It seems that Ibsen levelled his shafts at a species of social

hypocrisy peculiar to his native land. Here in America, where all

is fair and naught is foul, his satire falls short of its mark, for

our target is clean, and our sepulchres are unwhited! Probably this

optimistic sense of being different--and better than our neighbours

--fills us with satisfaction in the presence of an Ibsen play.

Strangely enough the people in this very drama entertain identical

opinions on the subject of their American brethren! Perhaps Pillars

of Society is not so provincial in its character-painting as some of

Ibsen's critics have imagined. Perhaps his shoe fits!

The return of the supposed fugitive Johan, Bernick's scapegoat

brother-in-law, finds the Consul beloved and respected by his

fellow-citizens. He has educated in his own household Dina Dorf, the

daughter of that French actress with whom years before he had seen

merry days--that is, if there is really any joy of life in those

dull, drab Norwegian communities. With Johan returns Lona Hessel, the

elderly sister-in-law. The Bernick household is dismayed at this rude

invasion of the "Americans," and the tragi-comedy begins in earnest.

Bernick has not improved with the years. He has become more grasping

for wealth and power. He even conceives the idea of sending to sea an

untrustworthy ship. Its rotten hulk almost carries off his young son,

while the father imagines that the unwelcome visitors, Johan and Lona,

are on board. To complicate matters, Dina, sick of the false odour

of sanctity in the home of Bernick, loves Johan, and to the infinite

scandal of every one she speaks out her mind. _She_ will go to America,

where people are not so good--alas! Ibsen didn't know that our national

goodness is becoming as a rank, threatening vegetation upon the body

politic.

Furthermore Bernick, so as to make himself pose as a self-sacrificing,

deeply injured man, has insinuated that Johan was an embezzler as

well as an immoral man. About the figure of the Consul there cluster

several admirable hypocrites: Rector Rörlund, who keeps Bernick upon

his pinnacle of self-righteousness; Hilmar Tönnessen, who goes about

sniffing out other people's soul maladies and carrying with peevish

pride the "banner of the ideal"; and several merchants, who are in with

the Consul whenever a "deal," public or private, is possible. The minor

characters, the women in particular, are individually outlined from the

shipbuilder Aune, with his sturdy adherence to the interests of the

Bernick house and his weak-kneed code of morals, to the veriest sketch

of a clerk--all are human, brimming over with selfish humanity.

The catastrophe is led up to with a masterly gradation of incident.

Confronted by Lona when in his darkest hour of despair and need,

Bernick has the lying garments in which he invests himself for his

family and friends torn away by the fearless words of Lona. She does

not accuse him of committing the one unforgivable, biblical sin which

Ella Rentheim throws at the desperate head of John Gabriel Borkman.

No, Lona does not say, "You slew the love that was in me;" she tears

up two incriminating letters, she declares that with Johan and Dina

she will return to America; but--but Bernick must escape from the cage

of lies in which, like a monstrous master-spider, he has been spinning

a network of falsehoods for the world. He groans out that it is too

late, that he must "sink along with the whole of the bungled social

system"--he is not the first, nor the last man, who has attempted to

shift upon society his individual sins. He calls himself the tool, not

the pillar, of society, and you seem to see, as he talks, the plaster

flaking off in great patches, and the ugly stains coming into view.

A grand demonstration by the town is made: torchlight, music, speeches,

a presentation, and all the rest of the cheap, vain humbug of which

we all disapprove so heartily in America--and indulge in it about

once every hour. Bernick tells the truth, confesses that he is the

real sinner, not Johan, and shocks his world immeasurably, especially

the priggish Rörlund. That worthy rector, who would marry Dina in a

pitying, pardoning way, is flouted by her. She leaves with Johan. Then,

it may be confessed, there is a flat, conventional conclusion, "docked

of its natural, tragic ending," as Allan Monkhouse truthfully declares.

Bernick is in reality re-whitewashed at the close of this powerful,

picturesque play.

One feels instinctively that more could be done with Lona and Bernick,

more utilized from the strong scenes between Aune and Bernick. But in

John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen later realized the wicked grandeur inherent

in the character of a tremendous financial scoundrel; like Balzac's

Mercadet, his Borkman is a figure hewn from the native rock. Bernick

is a man you may meet in Wall Street, and certainly on any Sunday in

any given church you enter. He is proud, pious, fat as to paunch, and

lean-souled; and he drives a hard bargain with God, man, and devil. In

a word, the average pillar of any society, one who believes in making

religion and patriotism pay; a good father, a good husband, a good

fellow, is the inscription chiselled on his marble mortuary shaft--and

then the worms stop to smile archly at their eternal banquet! Truth

is always at the bottom of a grave. And Ibsen is a terrible digger of

graves when he so wills it.

As a matter of record it would not be amiss to state that Pillars of

Society, written in 1877, was produced in America at the Irving Place

Theatre, December 26, 1889, with Ernest Possart as Bernick, Frau

Christien as Mrs. Bernick, and Frl. Leithner as Lona. In English it

was first heard at the Lyceum Theatre, March 6, 1891, with George W.

Fawcett as Bernick, Alice Fischer as Lona, and Dina Dorf played by

Bessie Tyree. There was a third performance at Hammerstein's Opera

House three days later. Wilton Lackaye and his company revived the

piece at the Lyric Theatre, New York, April 15, 1904.

* * * * *

VII

A DOLL'S HOUSE

(1879)

Ibsen has been persistently confounded with those mannish women

who, averse from marriage, furiously denounce it as a tyrannical

institution. Strindberg, who was half mad at the time, accused the

Norwegian poet of being a woman's rights advocate. Dr. Brandes has told

us the contrary. Ibsen was never a woman's man; he did not like women's

society, preferring men's. He did not admire John Stuart Mill's book on

the woman question, and entertained an antipathy for those writers who

declare, gallantly enough, that they owe much in their books to their

wives. A sheer sense of justice impelled him to view the institution of

matrimony as not always being made above. A woman is an individual. She

has, therefore, her rights, not alone because of her sex, but because

she is a human being. So he wrote A Doll's House to show a woman's soul

in travail beset by obstacles of her own and others' making.

Thoroughly he accomplished his task. Nora Helmer, a lark-like creature

in Act I, grows before our eyes from scene to scene until, at the fall

of the curtain, she is another woman. In few dramas has there been

such a continuous growth. The play seems a trifle outmoded to-day,

not because its main problem will ever grow stale, but because of the

many and conflicting meanings read into it by apostles of feminine

supremacy. Ibsen declared in one of his few public speeches that he had

no intention of representing the conventional, emancipated woman.

It is Nora as an individual cheated of her true rights that the

dramatist depicts, for her marriage, as she discovers in the crisis,

has been merely material and not that spiritual tie Ibsen insists

upon as the only happy one in this relation. So she goes away to find

herself, and her going was the signal for almost a social war in

Europe. His critics forgot that Ibsen was a skilled deviser of theatric

effects, and such an unconventional exit was not without its artistic

values. This does not mean that he was insincere--Nora's departure is

a logical necessity. Without it the play would be sheer sentimental,

and therefore banal, nonsense. Nevertheless, that slammed door

reverberated across the roof of the world, and not over the knocking at

the gate in Macbeth was there such critical controversy.

One finds Nora Helmer a fascinating type of womanhood to study. To be

sure, she is not new--neither is Mother Eve, but can we ponder the

apple story too often or unprofitably? This Scandinavian Frou-Frou,

bursting with joy of life, is confronted with a grave problem, and as

she has been brought up perfectly irresponsible and a doll, she solves

the problem in an irresponsible manner. She commits forgery, believing

that the end justified the means, and you perforce sympathize with her

as her act brought good, not evil--rather would not have brought evil

if it had not been for the evil mind of Krogstad.

After the awakening Nora resolves to go away--away from husband,

home, and children. That such a revulsion should occur in the nature

of a gadabout and featherbrain like this girl, is not unnatural. Now

Torvald is not a bad man. On the contrary, he is what the world calls

a good man, and he is an insufferably selfish, priggish bore into the

bargain. Nora knew that when she left him "the miracle of miracles"

would never occur--that the leopard does not change his spots. The end

of this human fugue, so full of passion and vitality, contains some

of the strongest lines Ibsen penned. Nora is such a volatile, gay,

frivolous, restless, perverse, affectionate, womanly, childish, loving,

and desperate creature, that we hardly marvel at both her husband and

her father petting her like a doll. The awakening was severe, and

Torvald suffered, and it served him quite right. Dr. Rank forms "a

cloudy background" to the happiness of the Helmer household. He is very

interesting, with his cynicism and tragic resolves and passion. But

he serves his purpose in indicating certain things to Nora. He first

suggests, unconsciously, to her the thought of suicide, for Krogstad

discovers this thought lurking in her mind at his second visit and just

after Dr. Rank has made his confession of love to her. As for Krogstad,

he is only a man of mixed impulses. He could have been a decent member

of society; indeed, he tried hard to be. The unfortunate entrance into

the Helmer family life of Mrs. Linden upset all of his calculations,

and he became a blackmailer in consequence.

The afternoon of February 15, 1894, Mrs. Fiske played Nora in A

Doll's House at the Empire Theatre. It was a benefit performance.

Her support was unusually strong; W. H. Thompson, the Krogstad, won

critical admiration for the manner in which he suggested the shades

of a character whose possibilities for good and evil are perplexingly

interwoven. Mrs. Fiske was, however, the surprise of the day. Shedding

her Frou-Frou skin, she sounded every note on the keyboard of Nora

Helmer's character. She was bird-like, evasive, frankly selfish,

boiling with material enthusiasms, a creature of air, fire, caprice,

gayety, and bitterness. Excepting Agnes Sorma no one has indicated

with such _finesse_ of modulation the awakened moral nature of the

woman. And it is to be doubted if Mrs. Fiske ever bettered that first

rapturous interpretation.

The ending is an unresolved cadence, though to the ear attuned to the

finer spiritual harmonies it is not difficult to discern that the

wife will suffer and grow--and be herself. But the children, cries the

world! Ibsen, who has proved his love for the little ones, answers the

question by another. Read Ghosts, and you will see what might have

become of the Helmer children if Nora had stayed at home and continued

in her life-lie.

As an acting rôle Nora has won the suffrages of such artists as Betty

Hennings, Agnes Sorma, Hélène Odilon, Gabrielle Réjane, Friederike

Gossmann, Lilly Petri, Modjeska, Mrs. Fiske, Irene Triesch, Hilda

Borgström (a great Hilda Wangel), Stella Hohenfels, and Eleonore Duse.

Henrik Ibsen once attended a dinner given in his honour by the Ladies'

Club of Christiania, and made a speech about himself in answer to a

toast. Miss Osina Krog, in proposing Ibsen's health, spoke of him as a

poet who had done much for woman through his works. Dr. Ibsen's reply

was this:--

All that I have composed has not proceeded from a

conscious tendency. I have been more the poet and less

the social philosopher than has been believed. I have

never regarded the women's cause as a question in itself,

but as a question of mankind, not of women. It is most

certainly desirable to solve the woman question among

others, but that was not the whole intention. My task

was the description of man. Is it to some extent true

that the reader weaves his own feelings and sentiments in

with what he reads and that they are attributed to the

poet? Not alone those who write, but also those who read,

compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than

the poet himself. I take the liberty to thank you for the

toast, with a modification, for I see that women have a

great task before them in the field for which this ladies'

association works. I drink the health of the club and wish

it happiness and success.

I have always regarded it as my task to raise the country

and to give the people a higher position. In this work

two factors assert themselves. It is for the mothers to

awake, by slow and intense work, a conscious feeling of

culture and discipline. This feeling must be awakened in

individuals before one can elevate a people. The women

will solve the question of mankind, but they must do so as

mothers. Herein lies the great task of women.

And this speech quite dissipates the notion that Ibsen had affiliations

with the Feminists.

* * * * *

VIII

GHOSTS

(1881)

Following the scandal created by the first performance of A Doll's

House, Ghosts seemed like a deliberate affront to his critics, a

gauntlet hurled into their faces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen.

Now, he said, in effect,--though he has never condescended to pulpit

polemics or café Æsthetics,--here is a wife who resolves to endure

who stays at home and bears that burden. Nora Helmer refused! Behold

Mrs. Alving, the womanly woman, good housewife--_malgré elle même_--and

good mother!

Ghosts, like much that is great in art, is a very painful play. So

is Macbeth, so is Lear, so is Œdipus Rex. There are some painful

pictures in the small gallery of the world's greatest art, and in

music analogous examples are not wanting. Probably the most poignant

emotional music thus far written is to be found in the last movement

of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony. It is cosmic in its hopeless woe.

Yet Ibsen gives the screw a tighter wrench, for he conceived the idea

of transposing all the horror of the antique drama to the canvas of

contemporary middle-class life.

He gives us an Orestes in a smoking jacket, the Furies within the walls

of his crumbling brain. Naturally the academic critics cry aloud at the

blasphemy. The ancients, Racine, Shakespeare, and the rest, softened

their tragic situations by great art. As in a vast mirror the souls of

the obsessed pass in solemn, processional attitudes; the contours are

blurred; the legend goes up to the heavens in exquisite empurpled haze.

"Very well," grumbles in answer the terrible old man from Norway, "I'll

give you a new _Æsthetik_. Art in old times is at two removes from

life. I'll place it at one. I'll banish its opiates, its comic reliefs,

all its conventions that mellow and anæstheticize."

Then he wrote Ghosts. It is terrible. The Orestean Furies are

localized. They are no longer poetic and pictorial abstractions, but a

disease. So you can accept the thesis or leave it. One thing you cannot

do: you cannot be indifferent; and therein lies one secret of Ibsen's

power. It is his aloofness that his audiences resent the most of all.

If, like another master showman, Thackeray, Ibsen would occasionally

put his tongue in his cheek, or wink his eye in an aside, or whisper

that the story was only make-believe--there, dear ones, don't run away

--why, the Ibsen play might not be avoided as if it were the pest. But

there are no concessions made, and the sense of reality is tremendous

and often nerve-shocking.

The blemishes in Ghosts are few, yet they are in full view. That fire

is our old friend, "the long arm of coincidence." And what pastor

of any congregation, anywhere, could have been such a doddering

old imbecile as Manders with his hatred of insurance? Possibly he

represents a type of evangelical and very parochial clergyman, but a

type, we hope, long since obsolete. It is not well, either, to pry

deeply into the sources of Oswald's insanity. Thus far it has not

been accurately diagnosed. Let us accept it with other unavoidable

conventions. The pity about Ghosts, which is in the repertory of every

continental theatre, is that the Ibsenites made of it a stalking horse

for all kinds of vagaries, from free love to eating turnips raw.

Ibsen holds no brief for free love, or for diseased mental states. You

may applaud Mrs. Alving, you may loathe her; either way it is a matter

of no import to this writer. To call Ghosts immoral is a silly and an

illogical proceeding, for it is, if it is anything at all within the

domain of morals, a dramatic setting of the biblical wisdom that the

sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. This may be pure

pathology; in Ibsen's hands it is a drama of terrible intensity.

Ghosts is a very simple but painful story. The dissolute Captain

Alving, the father of Oswald, dies of his debaucheries before the play

begins. His wife, the mother of Oswald, has believed it her bounden

duty to hide from the world the cancer which is eating up her family

life. She partially succeeds, and only when he brings shame to her very

door does she weaken and fly to Pastor Manders, whom she once loved,

and who presumably loves her. This worthy clergyman does only what his

ideals have taught him. He refuses her refuge and sends her back to her

husband, admonishing her that her duty is to accept the cross which God

has imposed upon her and to reclaim her husband. Frozen up in heart

and soul, Mrs. Alving begins a long fight with the beasts of appetite

which rule her husband's nature. She sends away her son Oswald, she

even adopts a bastard daughter of her husband's, and marries off the

mother--a servant in her employ--to a carpenter, Jacob Engstrand

by name. The girl grows up to womanhood; Oswald, her son, becomes a

painter and lives in Paris. Captain Alving dies a miserable death,

his vices a secret to all but a few, while his widow seeks a salve

for her conscience by erecting with his money an orphanage. Naturally

Pastor Manders takes much interest in this scheme, and when he meets

Oswald fresh from Paris, he is struck by the resemblance the morbid,

sickly-looking youth bears to his dead father.

But all has not been well with the young man. He has been told by a

famous alienist in Paris that his days of sanity are numbered, and he

is at a loss to conjecture why such a curse should be visited upon

him. He always heard of his father's greatness and goodness. I know of

few more touching scenes than the conversation between mother and son,

and the horrible confession which follows. It is like a blast from a

charnel house; but then, what power, what lucidity! The poor, tortured

mother unburthens her heart to her pastor, and of course receives scant

consolation. How could he, according to his lights, treat her otherwise

than he did? Manders is a type, and he always faces the past; Mrs.

Alving looks toward the west for the glimmer of the new light. Alas,

it comes not I She only hears her son crying aloud, "Give me wine,

mother!" It is the spiritual battle of the old and new. And the old

order is changing.

Worse follows. The boy falls in love with Regina, his half-sister,

as to whose identity he is in absolute darkness, for she has been

brought up as a maid in his mother's house. But with his mind weakening

he clutches at this straw to help him. "Isn't she splendid, mother?"

he says, admiring the girl's superb animal development, and we can

easily conjecture the agony of his mother. Weak she must appear in the

pastor's eyes, for she almost hesitates about revealing the birth of

Regina, and wavers on the question of Oswald marrying her. She has been

too indulgent to the boy, and Manders does not scruple to tell her so.

He is one of your iron-minded men who have a rigid sense of what is

right and wrong, and one who would have no sympathy with fluttering

souls like Amiel, Lamenais, Clough, or any of the spiritual band to

whom dogmas are as steel clamps. Mr. Manders is outraged at Mrs.

Alving, and proposes sending Regina away, but where? To her father,

Jacob Engstrand, a cunning, low, hypocritical rascal? No, he is not her

real father. At the end of the first act both overhear Oswald trying

to kiss Regina in the dining room, and another such scene, in which

Captain Alving and Regina's mother were the actors, flashes before her,

and she cries "Ghosts!" as the curtain falls.

Everything then goes wrong. The Alving orphanage burns down, and

there is no insurance because Pastor Mander believes that insuring a

consecrated building against fire would be questioning Providence.

But his human respect plays him into the hands of Jacob Engstrand,

whose cunning is more than a match for the worthy priest. The dialogue

between these two widely varying types is a masterpiece.

Mrs. Alving is at last goaded into telling Oswald and Regina of their

blood relationship, and the girl, who is a bad, selfish lot, goes

away--deserts the family at the most critical period. She upbraids

Mrs. Alving for not having told her of her true station in life, and

turns her back on the poor mumbling wretch Oswald. She then walks

off defiantly and to her putative father's home, a sailors' dance

house. Oswald's mind is completely unhinged by this dénouement, and he

confides to his mother in stuttering, stammering accents--the sure

forerunner of the crumbling brain within--that he has some poison to

kill himself with; that he had relied on Regina to do it when he would

be an absolute idiot; but, as Regina was at hand no longer, his mother

must play the executioner.

The end is as relentless as a Greek tragedy. The boy chases his mother

from room to room imploring and screaming at her to rid him of his

pain; as she brought him into life without his consent, so should

she send him forth from it when he bade her. It is all frightful,

but enthralling. When Oswald cries aloud for the sun, the end has

been reached. He is a hapless lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed

mother, remembering her promise to him, searches frantically in his

pocket for the morphine, and then a merciful curtain bars out from

further view the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too deep and

jars some hidden and diseased nerves, what shall we say? Rather can he

not turn upon us and cry, "I but hold the mirror up to nature; behold

yourselves in all your nakedness, in all your corruption!" Anatole

France once wrote, "If the will of those who are no more is to be

imposed on those who still are, it is the dead who live, and the live

men who become the dead ones." And this idea is the motive of Ghosts.

* * * * *

IX

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

(1882)

Ibsen was called such hard names when Ghosts was produced that

William Archer made a collection of all the epithets hurled at the

dramatist's head and published them in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ with

the title Ghosts and Gibberings. Of course the Norwegian was indignant

that his play should have been so grossly misunderstood, and in An

Enemy of the People he undertook to show that the reformer--the true

pioneer--is always abused and pilloried as a dangerous foe to society,

and that the majority is always in the wrong. It is merely a case of

Horace's _odi profanum vulgus_ over again. But how did the playwright

go about his task? Did he paint for us another Ajax defying the

social lightning? Did he give us a modern Coriolanus? With his usual

ideal-demolishing propensities this terrible old man makes his hero a

fussy doctor--a man of the middle classes; a man who forgets the names

of the servant girls; a man who loves to see his children feed on roast

beef; a man who is economical in little things; a thorough professional

gentleman, who explodes, fusses, fumes, fidgets, goes off continually

at half cock; a crack-brained enthusiast, a fanatic, and a teller of

disagreeable truths. But this doctrinaire with torn trousers is a

mighty fellow after all, and by the supreme genius of his creator has

quite as much right to live as any Homeric hero. Vitality is the most

masterful test of a dramatist's characters; their vitality is their

excuse for being. Every figure in An Enemy of the People is brimming

with vitality, from the drunken man to Dr. Stockmann. Of course you can

hardly be expected to take an overweening interest in the condition

of the water pipes in that little town on the south coast of Norway.

What are water pipes to Hecuba? Yet a world of principle is involved in

these same germ-breeding conduits, and the crafty dramatist has, while

apparently depicting local types, contrived to paint a large canvas.

Have we not our Burgomaster Stockmanns, our Editor Hovstads, our timid

meliorists like Aslaken, and our fire-eating Billings? Men, men all of

them.

What a daring thing it was to write a play without a love scene, a

play which is more like life than all the sensualistic caterwaulings,

philanderings, and bosh and glitter of the conventional stage, which we

fondly fancy holds the mirror up to nature! I have before dwelt on the

frugality of his phrases, of the delicacy and concise cleaving power

of his dialogues. He has broken with the convention of monologues,

of mechanical exits--indeed, of everything which savours of old-time

stage artifice. His acts terminate naturally, yet are pregnant with

possibilities. You impatiently wait for the next scene, and all because

a lot of nobodies in an out-of-the-way Norwegian health resort fight a

man who is crazy to tell the truth--and ruin the place. But they are

human beings even if they strut not in doublets and hose, and pour not

out perfumed passion to the damosel on the balcony.

One cannot sympathize much with Dr. Stockmann. He, while being "the

strongest man on earth," brought a calamity on his native place by his

awful propensity for blabbing out the truth. Besides, Ibsen leaves us

just a margin of doubt in the matter. Perhaps the worthy medical man

was not correct in his diagnosis of the waters, and if this were so

his conduct was inexcusable. But he fought for that most dangerous of

ideals,--the truth, even though he flaunts in the face of the mob the

fact that "a normally constituted truth lives, let me say as a rule,

seventeen or eighteen years: at the outside twenty; seldom longer."

One recalls Matthew Arnold's lecture on Numbers, in which that essayist

preached the evils of majority. Ibsen hits at democracy when he

can--for him the mass of the people is led by the few. An Enemy of the

People is an excellent repertory piece, though one feels the moral

stress too strongly in it.

* * * * *

X

THE WILD DUCK

(1884)

The Wild Duck followed An Enemy of the People and preceded Rosmersholm,

and is linked by similar inner motives, so these plays really can be

grouped as a trilogy. Stockmann, the energetic denouncer of public

dishonesty, is now Gregers Werle, just as earnest and sincere in

his claims for the ideal and in his strictures upon the erring. But

from what a different point of view, with what different results!

If Stockmann is a public-spirited reformer, Werle is a sneak and a

nuisance. Yet the two men's ideals coincide. Why this shifting of

position on the part of Ibsen?

A period of depression, consequent upon his uninterrupted labours and

their seeming futility, may have been one reason; the other is probably

because Ibsen, charged with the spirit of bitter mockery and in a

pessimistic humour, wished to show the obverse of his medal. From Brand

to Stockmann his idealists had been heaven-stormers. Well, here is a

heaven-stormer, an idealist, who is a dangerous man _because_ he tells

the truth. Is it well to blurt out the truth on all occasions? The

result of this thesis is one of the most entertaining, one of the most

tragic, plays of the series.

The Wild Duck has several drawbacks, the chief being the confusing

mixture of satire and tragedy; the satire almost oversteps the

limitations of satire, the tragic emphasis seems to be placed at the

wrong spot. The two qualities mingle indifferently. And the act ends

are not satisfying; they lack climax, especially after the catastrophe.

But the dialogue as in The League of Youth is an admirable transcript

from life. Each character speaks; nothing sounds as if written. The

glory of The Wild Duck is its characterization. Even the implacable

Dr. Nordau praises Gina Ekdal, calling her a female Sancho Panza. The

comparison is a happy one, for her husband, Hjalmar Ekdal, is a Don

Quixote of shreds and patches, a weak, vain, boastful, gluttonous,

shiftless fellow, and, of course, an idealist. He raves of the ideal,

and he is kept to an insane pitch of cloudy self-exaltation by Gregers

Werle, who, discovering that Gina was a former mistress of his father,

tells Ekdal with dire results. The little Hedwig, the most touching in

Ibsen's gallery of children, is also worked upon by the mischief maker,

so that she kills herself from a spirit of sacrifice--more of Werle's

idealism.

Ekdal talks grandiloquently about shattered honour to Gina, who bids

him eat bread, drink coffee--he has been out all night airing his woes

to the storm. The woman's homely wit, solid common sense, and big

heart are given with satisfying verisimilitude. Gregers' father, and

his housekeeper, Mrs. Sörby; the garret of the photographer Ekdal,

where his disgraced, old drunken father has rigged up a mock forest

in which he hunts the "wild duck" and other tame fowl; the character

of Relling, Ibsen again masked, whose sardonic humour, cruel on the

surface, is in reality prompted by a kind heart--he makes people

believe they are grander than they are and therefore makes them

happier; all these figures in this amazing Vanity Fair are handled

masterfully. The World-Lie is here in microcosmic proportions. Every

one, except the stolid, unimaginative Gina, swaggers about in the

sordid atmosphere of deception. Werle always makes matters worse, and

on a painful note of tragedy the curtain falls. The tyranny of the

ideal is clearly set forth.

* * * * *

XI

ROSMERSHOLM

(1886)

Rosmersholm was finished in 1886. It followed The Wild Duck, that

ghastly mockery of Ibsen's own ideals, and in its turn it was followed

by The Lady from the Sea. The astonishingly fecund imagination that

drew Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck did not show symptoms of fatigue in

the characterization of Rosmersholm. Its first representation occurred

on January 17, 1887. Bergen, Norway, and later Berlin, heard it

twenty-five times in one season. London had its taste of the strange

combination of evil and good on February 23, 1891; Paris, October 4,

1893, with Lugné-Poë's company. All Europe witnessed with astonishment

Rosmersholm, and New York had its first English performance March 28,

1904, at the Princess Theatre by the Century players.

Rosmersholm is not an agreeable drama. Why any one who prefers

amusement should sit it out is strange: stranger still the impulse to

abuse it because it does not give the same pleasure as the circus. Like

Hamlet Rosmersholm has a long foreground--Emerson said the same of Walt

Whitman. Hamlet comes before us after the mischief of his life has been

worked, his father has been slain, his mother has married the slayer

of her son's father, of her son's happiness. The first scene in Hamlet

is illuminating; the first two acts of Rosmersholm are most perplexing

to an audience unprepared for them by study. The technical error of

the modern play lies here: until Act III we are left in darkness as to

Rebekka's character and her ruling motives. Dr. Emil Reich proposed,

merely as a matter of experiment, a _schemata_ or a new _scenario_, in

which the first two acts would show Rebekka West freshly arrived at

Rosmersholm, her conduct with Beata Rosmer, the slow persecution of

that unfortunate lady, and her death by suicide at the mill-dam. This

idea has only one drawback--Ibsen did not follow it when he planned his

work.

The truth is that, notwithstanding its mastery of character,

Rosmersholm must not be viewed as a drama following any previous model.

Emile Faguet declines to consider any longer the northern dramatist as

a realist. In his early prose dramas, when he filled in his canvas with

jostling throngs, Ibsen was a painter of manners; but as he grew, as

his method became less that of his predecessors and more of his own,

the action became more intense. The modern psychologic drama was born,

the drama in which wills collide, but not the will for trivial things.

It is the eternal duel of the sexes, the duel of the old and the new.

In this sombre atmosphere, subjected to many pressures by the black and

alembicated art of the dramatic wizard, the circumstances that occur

externally are of little significance, the dialogue spoken not to be

accepted unless for its "secondary intention." Bald on its surface,

its cumulative effect discloses the souls of his people. Commonplace,

even provincial as are their gestures, their surroundings, we presently

see the envelope of humanity melt away, and soon exposed are the real

creatures, the real men and women, exposed as in a dream. It is a cruel

art this that unwraps leaf by leaf the coverings of the human soul.

With the average dramatist, clever though he may be, his inspiration

compared to Ibsen's is like fire in a sheaf of straw--the spark glows

for an instant and then there is a vivid crackling of shallow flame.

We witness the illuminated edge of an idea, and then it fades into the

blackness. Ibsen's flame is more murky than brilliant; but it makes

light the swamps he traverses on his irresistible progress to the

mountains beyond.

Isolated then as is the _milieu_ of Rosmersholm, its real territory is

spiritual and not Rosmer's gloomy manor-house. The real and the ideal

are indescribably blended. Only after much study does the character

of Rebekka Gamvik, called West, yield its secrets. She was born in

Finmark. Her mother, possibly of Lapp origin, had carried on an

intrigue with Dr. West. Rebekka was its fruit. This she did not know

until too late to avert a hideous catastrophe; it was not alone her

illegitimacy that so horrified her when Rector Kroll informed her of

it--there were depths which she did not care to explore farther, though

she made the offer to Rosmer. Dr. West at his death bequeathed a small

library to his adopted daughter, and this proved a Pandora box both

to her and to Rosmersholm. Books of a "liberal" character filled the

mind of the young woman with dangerous ideas; for like the disciple in

Paul Bourget's novel, she speedily translated these ideas into action.

As cunning as Becky Sharp, as amorous as Emma Bovary, as ambitious as

Lady Macbeth, Rebekka West is the most complete portrait of a designing

woman that we know of; she is more trouble-breeding than Hedda Gabler.

Vernon Lee speaks of "the certainty that something is going on, that

certain people are contriving to live, struggle, and suffer, such as

I am haunted with after reading Thackeray, Stendhal, or Tolstoy." She

quotes William James's phrase, "the warm, familiar acquiescence which

belongs to the sense of reality." All greatly imagined characters in

fiction and drama have this "organic, inevitable existence," which

persists in the memory after the book is closed, after the curtain has

fallen. Rebekka West is among these characters. She is more terrible

than one of Félicien Rop's etched "Cold Devils." She grows in the

mind like a poisonous vegetation in the tropics. More magnificent in

her power to will and execute evil than Hedda Gabler, she weakens at

the crucial hour; this same will is paralyzed by the old faiths she

had sneered away. Edmund Gosse considers the failure of Rosmer as an

instance of new wine fermenting in old bottles. Equally, in Rebekka's

case, the old wine spoils in the new bottles.

Taking her courage in both hands the comely young woman contrives to

enter the household of Rector Kroll, whose sister Beata is married

to Rosmer. Kroll is a sturdy schoolmaster, an orthodox Conservative,

settled in his conviction that the world was made for good church-men

with fat purses--by no means a ludicrous or a despicable character. As

drawn by Ibsen, his is a massive personality,--sane, worldly-wise, a

man who hates the things of the spirit just as he hates radicalism. But

he doesn't know this. And it is the irony of his fate that he utters

those smug phrases dedicated by usage to matters spiritual, while he

walks in the way of the flesh. A tower of strength, Kroll is more than

the match for such a dreamer as Johannes Rosmer. Brendel, besides being

a fantastic adumbration of Ibsen, has propulsive power. He changes, at

each of his two appearances, the current of Rosmer's destiny.

Rebekka intuitively discerns this little rift in the armour of Kroll,

and flatters the worthy teacher, flatters his wife until she smuggles

herself beneath the Kroll roof-tree. There she encounters Rosmer

and his wife Beata. The latter is attracted by the fresh, vivacious

stranger with the free manners. Life at Rosmersholm is dull; Johannes

is a student of heraldry and a poor companion. Again Rebekka moves. She

is soon mistress of Rosmersholm. Her quick brain makes her a delight

to the master, her hypocritical sympathy an actual necessity to his

wife. Then begins the systematic undermining of both. She lends Dr.

West's books to the clergyman, and she insinuates into the feeble

brain of Beata the deadly idea that because of her childlessness she

is no longer worthy to remain Madame Rosmer. Slowly this idea expands,

and its growth is accelerated when Beata sees Johannes falling away

from the faith of his fathers. Sick in body, sick in brain, the

deluded woman is led step by step to the fatal mill stream. Before the

confession that Rebekka is disgraced and must leave Rosmersholm at

once, Beata recoils, and quickly commits suicide. And now the curtain

rises on Act I.

While these facts are revealed by subtle indications in the dialogue,

a feeling of dissatisfaction is also aroused. Not until Act III do we

learn of them completely, then through Rebekka's defiant confession.

This confession is brought about by a simple result, the failure of

Rosmer to reach her ambitious expectations. He is an idealist, a hero

of dreams, one who longs to step into the noisy arena of life and

"ennoble" men. Little wonder his brother-in-law Kroll mocks him. A

Don Quixote without the Don's courage. Surely Ibsen was smiling in

his sleeve at this milk-and-water Superman, this would-be meddling

reformer to whom he adds as pendant the pure caricature of Ulric

Brendel. Full of the new and heady wisdom garnered from Dr. West's

library, Rosmer resolves to break away from his political party, his

early beliefs, his very social order. The insidious teachings of

Rebekka flush his feeble arteries. He defies Kroll, and the war begins.

It is not very heroic, principally consisting in mud-throwing by rival

newspapers. Ibsen's vindictive irony--for the episode was suggested

by the disordered politics of Norway in 1885--has ample opportunities

for expression in the character of Mortensgaard, the editor of the

opposition journal, a man who has succeeded in life because, as Brendel

truthfully says, he has managed to live without ideals. Mortensgaard

is very vital. He is a scoundrel, but an engaging one in his outspoken

cynicism. It is only in print that he hedges. As much as he desires the

support of Rosmer, easily the most prominent man on the country-side,

it is as Rosmer the priest and conservative and not Rosmer the radical.

There are too many of the latter tribe!

This shifting of standards puzzles the clergyman; but when he learns

that the editor has a letter written by Beata which might incriminate

both Rebekka and himself, then he begins to see his false position, and

also the peril of playing with such fire. Slowly he is undeceived as to

Rebekka's character. He catches her eavesdropping, and is stunned by

her confession of treachery and murder. In the last act the bewildered

man hears another upsetting disclosure. On the eve of her departure

for the north, and after Rosmer has made his peace with Kroll and his

party, she blurts forth the fatal truth. She has long loved Rosmer,

and that love, at first passionate, selfish, impelled her to crime;

with the months came a great peace, and then, like a palimpsest showing

through the corrupt training of her girlhood, her conscience asserted

itself. Rosmersholm and the Rosmer ideals had begun their work of

denudation and disintegration. If the Rosmer ideal ennobled, it also

killed happiness, which really means that, the sting of her wickedness

being extracted, the woman was powerless for good or for evil; she no

longer had the inclination to descend into the infernal gulf of crime,

nor had she the will power to live the higher life. The common notion

is that Rebekka is converted by pure love. It is a suspiciously sudden

conversion. Rather let us incline to the belief that the main-spring

of her will was broken, even before Rosmer offered her marriage. Of

a cerebral type, like the majority of Ibsen's heroines, the violence

of her passion once cooled, she had nothing to make her life worth

while. Her confession calmed her nerves; after it, like many notorious

criminals, she was indifferent to the outcome.

In Rosmer the old churchly leaven began to work. Horrified by Rebekka's

revelation, as disappointed in her as she was in him, he demanded

why she had confessed her love. To give you back your innocence, she

replied. Does he wish for another test?--then make one, she will not

fear it. Straightway the stern priest awakens in him; he has never cast

off, despite his blasphemies, the yoke of the Lord. This woman that he

loves was the murderess of his wife Beata. An eye for an eye! Expiation

must be by blood sacrifice! Does she dare go out on the bridge across

the stream and--? Rebekka, worn out, sick of the vileness of her soul,

weary of this life which can now promise nothing, eagerly assents. She

will go, and go alone. Soon the last tremor of manhood is felt in the

superstitious brain of Rosmer. No, she shall not go alone. Together as

man and wife, sealed by a kiss, they will go to eternity. And then the

male moral coward and the female companion of his destiny walk calmly

to their fate. The housekeeper watches them fall in the raging pool,

and she is not as much surprised as one would imagine.

"The dead wife has taken them," she exclaims, for, like every one at

Rosmersholm, she believes in the triumph of the dead.

Rebekka West recalls to Georg Brandes the traits of a Russian woman,

rather than a Scandinavian. This is true. She might have stepped out

of a Dostoïevsky novel. She is far more interesting because far more

complex than Hedda Gabler, while not so modish or so fascinating. She

is less of a moral monster than Hedda, and far braver. She, at least,

has tested life and found its taste bitter in the mouth. Her eroticism

we must take for granted; in the play she displays nothing of it;

all is retrospective and introspective. The woman never contemplated

suicide; but that way out of the muddle is as good as a wretched

existence in some Finnish village. Rosmer proposes the suicide, he

dares not face his own wrecked ideals; it takes a man who is master of

himself to master his fellows. Life is like running water in his hands;

the woman he loved is a failure; all things come too late to those who

wait. Of Rebekka's repentance Ibsen leaves us in no doubt; but that she

would have elected self-slaughter for her end one strongly discredits.

It is despair, not heroism, that exalts her. She committed crime for

love, and now that crime she will expiate by self-surrender to her

lover's wish.

Browning would have delighted in such a theme as this, and might have

developed it into a second Ring and the Book. But dramatically the

English poet could never have beaten and bruised the idea into shape.

Ibsen has surmounted perilous obstacles in his dramatic treatment of a

purely psychologic subject. We wish to witness a conflict of wills, and

not the hearsay of such a conflict. Thus nearly two acts seem wasted

before the real situation occurs at the close of Act II, when Rosmer

proposes marriage. But so little does the poet care for incident, for

detail, that Rosmersholm might be played in one scene; the main action

takes place before the curtain goes up. The drama is a curious blending

of several styles--there are two motives and two manners. Both Free

Will and Determinism--not such Hegelian opposites as we imagine--have

each a share; while a mingling of romance and realism is shown in the

narration and in the background. The White Horse of Rosmersholm is

a colourful bit of symbolism, recalling Walter Scott; the accessory

characters are the homeliest and most natural imaginable. Auguste

Ehrhard, Ibsen's French admirer, has pointed out that in his subsidiary

figures the dramatist is very lifelike and his chief characters are

usually the mouthpieces of his theories.

The protagonist of Rosmersholm is Beata. She is seldom long absent from

each of the four acts. She peers over the edges of the dialogue, and

in every pause one feels her unseen presence. An appalling figure this

drowned wife, with her staring, fish-like eyes! She revenges herself

on the living in the haunted brain of her wretched husband, and she

exasperates Rebekka, slowly wearing away her opposition until the

doleful catastrophe. There is something both Greek and Gothic in this

spectral fury, this disquieting Ligeia of the mill-dam.

We find the old hero and heroine obsessed by fate, replaced by this

neurasthenic pair. The antique convention is altered, ancient values

depreciated. A hero is no longer interesting or heroic; the heroine,

a criminal, is no longer sympathetic. Yet we are enthralled by this

spectacle; for if cultivated man disdains the crude dramatic pictures

of lust and cruelty admired of his ancestors, he, nevertheless, hankers

after tragedy. And it is for the modern that Ibsen has devised a

tragic, ironic drama of the soul. In doing this the dramatist is the

slave of his own epoch, for, to quote Goethe again, a genius is in

touch with his century only by virtue of his defects; he, too, must be

an accomplice of his times.

Brandes has quoted Kierkegaard in relation to Ibsen's position: "Let

others complain of this age as being wicked. I complain of it as being

contemptible, for it is devoid of passion. Men's thoughts are thin

and frail as lace, they themselves are the weakling lace-makers. The

thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful." Browning has

expressed the same sentiment in his poem, The Statue and the Bust;

Ibsen transformed it into drama. His men are dreamers, his women

devils; both stop short of the great renunciation or the great revolt.

It is the realization of his failure that drives Rosmer and Rebekka

with him to death. As her strength of will once dominated him, so his

weakness ultimately overmasters her. She is a woman after all, a woman

in whom instinct has cried so imperiously that it wrecks her soul. A

fiddle may be mended, says Peer Gynt, but a bell, never! A cracked bell

might be the symbol of this extraordinary drama.

Rosmersholm has a planetary moral, and not a theologic one. And the

moral law cannot be transcended, he teaches in his elliptical style. He

is in the uttermost analysis an optimist.

Those self-indulgent weaklings who seek in Ibsen's dramas for

confirmation of their mediocre ideals will be sadly mistaken. Ibsen,

if he teaches anything, teaches that the ego is a source of danger. It

is in the delicate relations of the sexes that he reveals himself the

sympathetic poet and healer. And what greater tragedy on earth is there

than an unhappy marriage? Ever the moral idea is the motive of his

plays, the one overarching idea of our universe: man's duty to himself,

man's duty to his neighbour! That has been the chief concern of all the

great dramatists, and to its problems this poet-psychologist has added

his burden of the discussion.

In Rosmersholm we see how the self-deceptions of the man and woman who

disregarded the natural law and worldly wisdom ruined their lives.

Dr. Wicksteed concludes that "the strength and weakness of Ibsen's

much-discussed treatment of marriage lie in the fact that he does not

deal with it as marriage at all, but as the most striking instance of

the ever recurrent problem of social life, the problem that we may

hide in other cases, but must face here, the problem of combining

freedom with permanence and loyalty, of combining self-surrender with

self-realization."

Faguet scores Brandes for denying that Ibsen alone among dramatists

has used the symbol in a peculiarly poetic manner, proving that if

Ibsen is a realist he is also a psychologist, who with his lantern

illuminates the recesses of the soul. "For example," writes M. Faguet,

"in Rosmersholm, northern nature in its entirety, with its savageness,

its immense expanse of space, its broad horizons, its lofty heavens, is

the symbol, to my mind, of the moral liberty to which aspire several

characters of the play, as, indeed, do half of Ibsen's characters."

Finally, the symbol is above all a means for the dramatic poet to

give full expression to the poetry in his soul ... in Ibsen it is

essentially a direct product of the author's poetic faculty.... "Up to

the present time Ibsen is the only dramatic poet to write symbolical

dramas, that is to say, dramas into which a symbol is introduced

occasionally by way of explanation or commentary, or as an element of

beauty." The symbol, then, is not a sign of a weakened imagination, as

some bigoted "psychiatrists" would have us believe.

And the interpretation of Rosmersholm! Not a half-dozen actresses on

the globe have grasped the complex skeins of Rebekka West's character,

and grasping them have been able to send across the footlights the

shivering music of her soul. Thus far Scandinavian women have best

interpreted her to the satisfaction of the poet. The Italians are

too tragic, the French too histrionically brilliant; it is a new

virtuosity, a new fingering of the dramatic keyboard, that is demanded.

* * * * *

XII

THE LADY FROM THE SEA

(1888)

Told with infinite technical skill, displayed on a canvas, the tints of

which modulate from dull copper to the vague mistiness of a summer sea,

this mermaid allegory of Ibsen had a charm that has almost vanished

in the translation and vanishes still more at a performance. Ellida

Wangel, The Lady from the Sea, is the second wife of Dr. Wangel, a

sensible, healthy bourgeois. She is jealous of his dead wife, she

is a neurotic creature given to reverie and easily impressed by the

strange, the far-away, the poetry of distance. In a mood of fantastic

excitement she once betrothed herself to a stranger, a sailor on an

American ship. He comes back to claim her, and so perfectly adjusted

are the atmospheric conditions of the drama, that we believe she should

leave her home and go away with this slightly supernatural and old-time

romantic figure.

In a stirring interview Ellida lets out the truths about her married

life to the perplexed Wangel--who is a sort of elder brother to

Helmer, though kinder of heart. "You bought me," she cries, her bosom

overcharged with the truth. It is the truth, but then, who cares co

face domestic truth? The worthy doctor is sadly taken aback. He had

married Ellida because his children needed a mother; he had--and "you

bought me all the same," is the cutting response. It is so. The man

sees the case from a different angle, and listens to her story of the

stranger. She will go when he returns, she says. He does return. He

does claim her; and in the garden scene at the end we see a situation

not unlike that last act of Candida. The stranger bids Ellida

prepare for departure. Wangel, who knows women better than it would

appear, tells her to go. "Now you can choose in freedom and your own

responsibility." The woman wavers and finally sends the sailor about

his business. The problem has been solved. Ellida can go to her husband

of her own free will.

Wicksteed's comment is refreshing. "The mere freedom of choice in which

Ellida Wangel and Nora Helmer lay such stress is but a condition, not

a principle of healthy life.... Without the spirit of self-surrender

free choice will never secure self-realization." This lady of the

light-house--Ellida was brought up in one--has two stepdaughters, the

eldest of whom contracts a loveless marriage, as does Svanhild in The

Comedy of Love, for the sake of a comfortable home. This parallelism

in the sub-plot is a favourite device of Ibsen--as though the children

mimicked the parents. The younger daughter later becomes the celebrated

Hilda Wangel who charms Master Builder Solness to his glory and ruin.

There is little in her here that gives evidence of such potentialities.

She is rather pert, wild, and self-conscious. The men of the play are

all excellently sketched. The Lady of the Sea, too, presents, in a

hazy symbol, the old lesson of individuality and free choice. But the

parable has never been so poetically uttered except in Brand.

It is pleasant to record the impressions of a performance of this play

at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, September 30, 1904. Director Otto Brahm

has long been a noted Ibsenite, his brochure familiar to all students

of the Scandinavian master. Ibsen, in German, plays decidedly smoother,

with more sonority and an abundance of the much-decried "atmosphere."

The stage settings, as is usual at this artistic playhouse, were

beautiful. Yet one felt the danger of transferring to the boards such

an imaginative idea. In the hands of Agnes Sorma the difficult rôle of

Ellida would not have suffered. Irene Triesch, despite her unequivocal

sincerity, is not temperamentally suited to the part. A mermaid who is

given to morbid reveries and a fierce buccaneer-like stranger hardly

convince us in this miracle-hating age. Each time the sailor appeared

with his big cloak and melodramatic hat I expected to hear the theme

of the Flying Dutchman intoned by an invisible orchestra. The human

half of the story is more credible. Boletta and Hilda are real flesh

and blood, while the tutor Arnholm, impersonated by that excellent

character-actor, Emmanuel Reicher, was as big a bore as Ibsen probably

intended him to be. The Lady from the Sea is an attempt to capture a

mood in which Maeterlinck might have been more successful.

* * * * *

XIII

HEDDA GABLER

(1890)

Hedda Gabler is a great play, great despite its unpleasant theme,

and also remarkable, inasmuch as its subject-matter is essentially

undramatic--"the picture not of an action but of a condition," as Henry

James puts it. The Norwegian poet usually begins to develop his drama

where other writers end theirs. Yet so wonderful is his art that we are

treated to no long explanations, no retrospective speeches; indeed, the

text of an Ibsen play is little more than a series of memoranda for the

players. Cuvier-like, the actor must reconstruct a living human from a

mere bone of a word. These words seem detached, seem meaningless, yet

in action their cohesiveness is unique; dialogue melts into dialogue,

action is dovetailed to action, and fleeting gestures reveal a state of

soul. Ibsen does not read as well as he acts. He is extremely difficult

to interpret for the reason that the old technic of the actor is

inadequate, as Bernard Shaw long ago declared.

One merit of the piece is its absence of literary flavour. It is a

slice of life. In his prose dramas, Ibsen throws overboard the entire

baggage of "literary" effects. He who had worked so successfully in the

field of the poetic legendary and historic drama; who had fashioned

that mighty trilogy Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, saw

that a newer rubric must be found for the delineation of modern men and

women, of modern problems. So style is absent in his later plays--style

in the rhetorical sense. Revolutionist as he is, he is nevertheless a

formalist of the old school in his adherence to the classic unities.

In Hedda Gabler the action is compressed within a space of about

thirty-six hours, in one room, and with a handful of persons. One is

tempted to say that the principal action occurs before the play or

"off" the stage during its progress. We may see that Hedda does little

throughout. Yet, through some magical impartment of the dramatist, we

seem to be in possession of the characteristic facts of her nature

before she arrives on the scene. Concision does not alone explain

this, it may be noticed in other plays of the Norwegian. It is the

dramaturgic gift raised to its highest power, though that power be

expended upon base metal. Why Ibsen preferred a Hedda to an Isolde is a

question that would lead us into devious paths.

In Hedda Gabler all lyricism is sternly suppressed. As if the master

had determined to punish himself for his championing of individualism

in his earlier plays, he draws the portrait of one who might easily

figure as a Nietzschean Super-Woman. Preaching that the state is the

foe of the individual, that only revolution--spiritual revolution--can

regenerate society, that the superior man and woman are lonely, that

individual liberty must be fought for at all hazards,--liberty of

thought, speech, action,--Ibsen then deliberately shows the free woman,

one emancipated from the beliefs of her family circle and her country.

She epitomizes the latter-day anti-social being and is rightfully

considered by psychologists as a flaming sign of the times, a brief for

the social democrats.

With remorseless logic and an implacable analysis Ibsen discovers

to our gaze this bare soul. We see Hedda at school, a discontented,

restless girl, envious of her companions, conscious of her own

superiority, mental and physical, cruel and overbearing. Little, timid

Thea Rysing, with the crown of white-gold hair, wavy, copious, excites

anger in the breast of the badly balanced Hedda. She pulls the hair and

would delight to see it burn. After all, is she not General Gabler's

daughter, an aristocrat, though a poor one! She goes into society and

has admirers. Few attract her. They are either too stupid or not rich

enough. In this dangerous predicament, jelly-like and drifting, she

encounters Eiljert Lövborg, a young man of genius--at least Ibsen

says he is; he has certainly the temperament of erratic genius, though

at no time does he betray the possession of higher gifts. Yet an

interesting man, a romancing idealist, a deceiver of himself as well as

of the women before whom he masquerades and poses in the rôle of the

misunderstood and persecuted. He is first cousin to Hjalmar Ekdal in

The Wild Duck, one of those egotists of the self-pitying, elegiac kind

who weeps when he regards in the mirror his own sentimental features.

Despite her hardness, vanity, selfishness, Hedda is taken in by this

clever fellow. Like Emma Bovary (though socially more elevated) she is

at heart an incorrigible romantic and very snobbish. Modish elegance

is her notion of the universe, and a saddle horse with a man in livery

discreetly following her as she dashes through the crowded park

represents to her the top notch of mundane happiness. Lövborg is a born

liar. He has personal address, is undoubtedly a man of brains, and

dissipated as he is manages to surround his loose living with the halo

of Byronism. His debauches, he believes, are the result of a finely

strung nature in conflict with a prosaic world. Hedda sympathizes

with this view. She does more. She becomes morbidly interested in his

doings and asks imprudent questions which the man rightfully construes

as evidences of desire for the life he describes. He makes his first

error. It is Hedda's opportunity and she avails herself of it.

Naturally theatric, she seizes her father's pistol--there is a brace

of old cavalry pistols which play an important rôle throughout--and

threatens Lövborg. He leaves her and pretends that he is going to the

dogs, but in reality quits the city and takes a position in a country

family, there to find a more credulous victim, Thea, now the wife of

Sheriff Elvsted.

Remember that these experiences are not shown on the stage. Deftly

conveyed by the dramatic stenography of Ibsen, the audience absorb

the facts almost unconsciously; and when the curtain falls on Act II,

we seem to have known the Gablers, Tesmans, Lövborg, and Thea for

years. And all the time Ibsen is not overstepping the traditional

territory of the drama; his Lövborg and Hedda, his Thea and George,

his Brack--are they not, in their relative position, stock figures for

any classic comedy? George Tesman is own brother to Georges Dandin

and twin to Charles Bovary. He belongs to that large army of husbands

called by Balzac "the predestined." His beard, eyes, nose,--above all

his nose,--speech, gait, clothes, are they not so many stigmata of

the man whose wife will deceive him? The beauty of the situation is

that Hedda does not betray George, and yet she seems more criminal

than the timid Thea, who boldly deserts her old husband to follow the

scapegrace Lövborg. Hedda is the woman on the brink, the adulteress

in thought, the eternal type of one whose will is weakened by egoism.

Her soul, its roots nurtured in rank soil, has expanded secretly into

a monstrous growth. Her whole life has been one of concealment. She

has lied, presumably, in her girlhood, as she lies in the married

state. She is never happy except when teasing a man. Laura Marholm

paints her portrait as the _détraquée_: "Her wanton curiosity, her

constant longing, inflame the decadent and appeal directly to his

sensuality; but her cowardice and disinclination to satisfaction drive

her forever from attack to flight, and no sooner has she retreated

than she stretches forth her antennas and gropes for him again. To see

man feverish--that is what she lives upon; if she cannot have this

atmosphere about her, she becomes sallow, hollow-cheeked, and hysteric."

Here is Hedda Gabler sketched in a few words. A cold heart, a cool

head, curious but not sensual, combined with a cowardly fear of

the conventions--a snobbish tribute to virtues in which she does

not believe--these sent Hedda Gabler to her destruction, to that

Button-moulder who fashions anew the souls of the useless in his cosmic

dust-heap. She went through her life with the chip of chastity on her

shoulder; yet dare a man approach her and she is in the throes of mock

virtue. She made Lövborg feel this. Brack, with the measuring eye of

a worldly man, was not deceived by her tantrums; he saw the essential

baseness of the creature.

Hedda stands for a certain order of her sex--not the "strong-minded"

or "advanced"--that is, happily, in the minority. In Ibsen's judgment

she is doomed to failure because she did not dare far enough. She

feared to sin, not because of scrupulosity, but because of the world's

opinion. If she ever allowed tender feelings to usurp the hard image of

herself enthroned in her soul, they were for Lövborg. He struck in her

a depraved chord of feeling. Both loved pleasure. Both took the seeming

for actuality. If there is one thing that discredits Lövborg's claim

as a man of genius, it is his worship of trivial things. The scholar,

the philosopher, the poet, seek pleasure, seek the gratification of the

senses; but Lövborg's attitude is too base. He is worthy of Hedda's

admiration, and Hedda's only.

With his incomparable irony Ibsen gives the victory to the weak, to

the stupid. We may foresee the future of George and Thea when the

shock of battle has passed. Both, dull persons, plodding, painstaking,

absolutely devoid of humour, settle down to a peaceful existence

over the "great" work of the dead Lövborg. It is all piteous, all

hopelessly banal--and it is also daily life to its central core.

To assert that Hedda's acts were alone the result of her condition

would be to place the drama within the category of the pathologic.

Rather is the point made that, _despite_ her approaching motherhood,

Hedda's manifest disgust at any reference to it is a sign of her

deep-seated depravity. She loathes children, especially a child of

Tesman. She is too selfish to enter, even imaginatively, into the joys

of maternity. Ibsen notes this when he puts into George's mouth the

silly speech about young wives and the burning of the manuscript. Hedda

is, on the contrary, less hysterical and more self-contained after

marriage than before. Nothing could be more damnably cold-blooded than

her deliberate manipulation of Lövborg's vain nature. Only at the grate

as she burns the manuscript and in the outburst of wild music preceding

her suicide are the demoniac forces of her nature unloosed.

The former act is, nevertheless, controlled by a slow, cautious hate,

and the latter occurs off the stage; the pistol shot is the final

punctuation mark to this destructive, restless existence. No, Ibsen

aimed at something more profound than exhibition of maternal hysteria.

The causes of Hedda's behaviour dated back to her girlhood. She was

perverse, how perverse we see in her shameless confession that she had

led George to an avowal simply because she wanted the comfortable

Falk villa for a residence. Her revolt against life was bounded by her

petty appetites, nothing more; and for this reason she is an invaluable

"human document."

Removed from her cramping environments Hedda would have developed along

more normal lines; and herein lies the beauty of Ibsen's problem, Ibsen

who always asks questions--like Rembrandt in his Night Watch with

its mystic daylight. Hedda might have become an actress or a circus

rider, anything less evil than her position as the trouble-breeding

wife of Tesman. By enclosing her within the Tesman walls, surrounding

her with stupid and dissipated people, she was driven in upon herself,

and passing from one mood of exasperation to another she finally

became shipwrecked. As Allan Monkhouse writes, "Hedda Gabler is a

personification of ennui, a daring effort of imagination, a great

piece of construction, a study of essentials with all accidental human

element omitted, a work indeed not of realism, though surrounded by

realistic details, but belonging rather to such ideal art as the

Melancholia of Albert Dürer." Mr. Monkhouse could have quoted La

Bruyère about "opposition truths that illuminate one another," Hedda

Gabler is one of those "opposition truths" that illuminate an entire

section of her sex.

Technically, Ibsen has not surpassed himself in this work. Never has

he woven his patterns so densely--the pattern of character and the

pattern of action. As in a dream we divine the past of the humans he

sets strutting before us, and we leave the theatre as if obsessed by

an ugly nightmare. Those who condemn the characters are compelled

perforce to admire the cunning workmanship, and no greater error

can be committed than supposing the two may be disentangled. Study

carefully the play, study carefully its performance, and then despair

at separating the characterization from the purely formal elements.

Here matter and manner are merged perfectly. We note a few symbolic

catchwords, such as "vine leaves," but they serve their spiritual

as well as their technical purpose. The pistols, too, are cunningly

prepared agents of ruin. We also wonder why George is such a blind

fool; why Thea so soon consoles herself, with Lövborg's body still

warm; why Lövborg, who despises Tesman, should be anxious to show him

his new work. But, to quote Mr. James again: "There are many things

in the world that are past finding out, and one of them is whether

the subject of a work had not better have been another subject. We

shall always do well to leave that matter to the author; he may have

some secret for solving the riddle, so terrible would his revenge

easily become if he were to accept a responsibility for his theme."

And further: "The 'use' of Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others,

and that even her most disagreeable qualities have the privilege,

thoroughly undeserved doubtless, but equally irresistible, of becoming

a part of the history of others. And then one isn't so sure that she is

wicked, and by no means sure that she is disagreeable. She is various

and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she

struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen different

interpretations, to the importunity of our suspense...."

This seems to be a final judgment--if judgments of Ibsen can be

final--upon a woman, who, all said, is human enough to suffer, suffer

principally because she feared to sin. She is not a caricature of the

"modern" woman. If she had become conscious of the claims of others, in

a word the modern, unselfish, emancipated woman, her life would have

been different--and the theatre deprived of a most fascinating and

enigmatic figure, with her pallid skin, her haunting gray eyes, her

sweet, studied languor, and her delicate air of one to whom life owes

its richest gifts.

Dr. Wicksteed, in his admirable lectures on Ibsen, remarks: "I am

convinced that it is in this typical significance of marriage, and not

in any special interest in the so-called woman question as such, that

we are to seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this theme.

Suppress individuality and you have no life; assert it, and you have

war and chaos.... Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was forced into

marriage, but she deliberately and shamelessly paid the flattered

and delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for opening to her

a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and entry into the best

career she could still think of as possible, and we see the result.

Without the spirit of self-surrender, free choice will never secure

self-realization."

Her death, sought because of cowardly reasons, is yet the one real fact

in Hedda's shallow, feverish existence. Death could alone solve the

discords of her life's cruel music.

* * * * *

XIV

THE MASTER BUILDER

(1892)

The doctor of the madhouse at Cairo, in which Peer Gynt crowns himself

Emperor of Himself, said of his "patients": "Each one shuts himself up

in the cask of self, plunges down deep in the ferment of self. He's

hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves

in the well of self. None has a tear for another's woes, none has a

sense for another's ideas. Ourselves--that's what we are in thought and

in speech; ourselves to the outmost plank of the springboard."

Such a sealed soul was that of Halvard Solness before Hilda Wangel

knocked at his door to demand of him the fulfilment of his promise. Ten

years earlier he had promised to make her a princess. She was then a

child and had excitedly waved a flag when she saw Solness in the pride

of his manhood, the greatest of the architects, climb to the top of

the scaffolding that surrounded the newly completed church and hang a

wreath on the weather-vane. Her enthusiasm had pleased the artist, and

a kiss was given with the promise. Her knock is as revolutionary as the

open door of Nora's house of dolls. As Hilda enters she brings with her

brilliant young womanhood, the fresh breeze of the new century. It was

needed in the unhappy Solness household.

Halvard lost his former home through a fire; it was the beginning of

his luck in life and also the date of his unhappiness. His children

died soon after the affair, and his wife's mind became morbid over the

loss.

"Is it not frightful," he tells Hilda, "that I must now go about and

reckon it up, pay for it?--not with money, but with human happiness.

And not merely my own; with that of others, too. Do you see _that_,

Hilda? That is what my artistic success has cost me--and others. And

every livelong day I must go about and see the price paid for me anew.

Again, and again, and still again."

Several fixed ideas haunt this man's brain. He has become moody, even

surly, because he suspects the younger generation of treason to him. As

he supplanted old Brovik, the broken-down architect in his employ, so

he fears that the son, Knut Brovik, will supplant him. He has, being a

man loved by women, won power over Knut's betrothed. He believes that

he has the rare gift of willing a thing, a telepathic power. He is not

mad but overwrought, and Hilda's visit is in the nature of a rescue.

_She_ is the fairy princess who is to rescue him from the evil Ego, in

which he is imprisoned as if in an ogre's cage.

Georg Brandes writes of The Master Builder: "It gives at one and the

same time a sense of enthralment and a sense of deliverance. This is

a play that echoes and reëchoes in our minds long after we have read

it.... Great is its art, profound and rich in its symbolic language....

Ibsen's intention has been to give us by means of real characters, but

in half-allegorical form, the tragedy of a great artist who has passed

the prime of life."

And as the Danish critic aptly remarks, in his--Ibsen's--case, "Realism

and symbolism have thriven very well together for more than a score of

years. The contrasts in his nature incline him at once to fidelity,

to fact, and to mysticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling

_naïveté_ of the dialogue, externally so simple that it delights

children. Symbolic figures are employed throughout, with repetitions of

motives as in a symphonic composition. These buttress up a structure

that might otherwise dissolve in fantastic smoke, so aerial is its

thesis.

The various acts are mainly composed of a duologue between Hilda and

Halvard. Gradually she obtains by her terrible intensity and child-like

belief in him complete control of his self-absorbed will. She drives

him to sign a letter of praise for the youthful architect, Knut, _his_

possible rival; she sends the other girl away; she is kind to Aline,

the unhappy wife. Hilda is, as Ibsen said, a _reversed_ Hedda Gabler.

She has much of Rebekka West in her, with added youth and a nature

buoyant enough to triumph over the Solness ideals, just as she would

have compelled Rosmersholm to go down into the world and ennoble men.

She discovers Solness's intention to build no more, to climb no more

to the top of high turrets. It pains her to think that her part, her

master builder, the incarnation of her maidenly dreams, dares no longer

mount in company with his ideals. He will build no more churches, only

houses for human beings. There may be a castle in the air where he will

find his happiness--with Hilda.

"I'm afraid you would turn dizzy before we got halfway up," she says.

"Not if I can mount in hand with you, Hilda," he replies.

"Then let me see you stand free and high up." But alone, he must mount

to the top of the new tower. She urges him after the manner of Peter

Skule in The Pretenders, as did Rebekka in Rosmersholm. She will not

stand between Aline and Halvard, for she now knows Aline. Otherwise

her moral life is as free as Nietzsche's. So Solness marches up the

scaffolding, up the ladder to the very pinnacle, forgetting that life

has but one pinnacle to scale, and never a second. Her ecstasy as she

watches him reach the top, be once more the old genius, his real self,

Halvard Solness, that she cheers him and--he falls. Unconscious that he

is dead, apparently not caring for the woe brought to this house, Hilda

calls out until the curtain hides her from view:--?

"_My--my_ master builder!" And he is really hers, for she has created

his soul anew. That is the meaning of this difficult and lovely

fable,--though he fell to his death, Solness once more stood alone on

the heights.

Maurice Maeterlinck has written most clearly on the theme of this play.

"Some time ago," he says in The Treasure of the Humble (translated

by Alfred Sutro), "when dealing with The Master Builder, which is

the one of Ibsen's dramas wherein the dialogue of the second degree

attains the deepest tragedy, I endeavoured, unskilfully enough, to

fit its secrets.... 'What is it,' I asked, 'what is it that, in The

Master Builder, the poet has added to life, thereby making it appear so

strange, so profound, so disquieting, beneath its trivial surface? The

discovery is not easy, and the old master hides from us more than one

secret. It would even seem as though what he has wished to say were but

little by the side of what he has been compelled to say. He has freed

certain powers of the soul that have never yet been free, and it may be

that these have held him in thrall.'

"'Look you, Hilda,' exclaims Solness, 'look you! There is sorcery in

you, too, as there is in me. It is this sorcery that imposes action on

the powers of the beyond. And we _have_ to yield to it. Whether we want

to or not, we _must_. There is sorcery in them as in us all.' Hilda

and Solness are, I believe, the first characters in drama who feel,

for an instant, that they are living in the atmosphere of the soul;

and the discovery of this essential life that exists in them, beyond

the life of every day, comes fraught with terror. Hilda and Solness

are two souls to whom a flash has revealed their situation in the true

life.... Their conversation resembles nothing that we have ever heard,

inasmuch as the poet has endeavoured to blend in one expression both

the inner and outer dialogue. A new, indescribable power dominates

this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and

reveals the sources of an unknown life."

A true interior drama then is The Master Builder, full of the

overtones, the harmonies, of mundane existence. Never has Ibsen's art

been so clairvoyant.

* * * * *

XV

LITTLE EYOLF

(1894)

Little Eyolf is a moving drama of resignation. It does not sparkle with

the gem-like brilliancy of Hedda Gabler, it is not so swiftly dramatic,

nor has it the sombre power of Ghosts, nor yet the intimacy of A Doll's

House; but it is profoundly pathetic, and the means employed by Ibsen

to produce his greatest effects are simple in the extreme.

The story is this: Alfred Allmers has married a girl with "gold and

green forests"; Rita is her name. They have one child, Eyolf, a sweet

little boy, but lame from a fall. The sister of Allmers is named Asta.

She has the true savour of the Ibsen woman. She visits the Allmers at

their country home. Alfred has just come back from an excursion of six

weeks in the mountains, a lonely, self-imposed tour. He is a delicate

young man of lofty ideals, not as yet realized in his work. There

is something incomplete about him. He reminds one a trifle of Hedda

Gabler's husband, but while he is about as talented he is not quite

so dense. He has a life work, a volume to be written, which he calls

Human Responsibility. But he is a dreamer and has done little with it.

He is wrapped up in his boy and dedicates his life to him. In Little

Eyolf shall happily blossom all the painful buds of his own impotent

ambitions Alfred Allmers has the vision, but not the voice. He is a

type.

But his wife, a full-blooded, impetuous woman, feels that she is being

denied her rights through this absorbing passion of the father for his

son. Her nature hungers for more than child love. She loves her husband

fiercely and fails to understand his coolness. Then what Ibsen calls

a Rat-Wife appears. The Rat-Wife is only a woman with a dog that goes

about catching and killing rats. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she

plays upon a little pipe and the rats follow her to the water and are

drowned. "Just because they want not to--because they're so deadly

afraid of the water--that's why they've got to plunge into it," says

this horrid old bel-dame of the naughty perverse rodents. She has

lured other game--human game--in her early days, and Little Eyolf is

transfixed by her glittering eye, as Coleridge hath it.

He follows her music as far as the water and is drowned. The act is

vital and searching in its analysis of character. With a few powerful

strokes we get Rita, Asta, Alfred, the Rat-Wife; and the poor lame

chap, with his hankering after a soldier's life, is very sad.

The contention between Alfred and Rita, husband and wife, in the next

act, goes to the very springs of their souls. We learn that Rita is

jealous of her little boy--the dead, drowned boy, whose open, upturned,

and staring eyes haunt her. Alfred upbraids her for her neglect of

the child, and declares that he would be alive if it were not for her

carelessness. Being lame he was not taught to swim like other lads,

and the lameness was caused by a fall from a table. Rita had left

him asleep on the table, safe as she thought, and then the accident

occurred. The husband protests in a low voice that he too forgot, "You,

you, you, lured me to you--I forgot the child--in your arms."

The two lay bare their very thoughts. Alfred has really never loved

Rita. Her gold and green forests and her beauty led him to marry her.

His craze for the boy further removed him from his wife, and his

intellectual life was not conducive to perfect sympathy. He wished his

lad to be a prodigy. He meant him to do in the world all the father

had not. The scene is a poignant one. The mother, very human woman of

considerable temperament, is almost broken-hearted at the double loss.

The child's death was a blow, but her husband's dislike drives her

frantic. The child, young as he was, had repelled her. She felt barred

from the wealth of love that flourished between father and child. She

resented it. She resented the child's love for Asta, for Asta proves to

be a very formidable factor in the play. She is jealous of everybody.

Alfred Allmers is just a bit of a prig, self-conscious like most people

with a self-imposed mission in life, and doubtless possessing in full

measure the scholar's peevishness. The sister Asta is a woman with an

awful secret. She can give her suitor Borgheim no hopes. She loves

her brother's child to distraction, and she knows of her mother's

dishonour. To Rita she is not altogether sympathetic. She takes from

her Eyolf's love, the love he should have bestowed on his mother, and

she is evidently held in high intellectual favour by her husband.

Naturally Rita, who has lifted up both the Allmers by her wealth, feels

all this. She confesses it, too, to her husband. He has become morbid,

unmanned, hysterical, since the accident. All his hopes are dashed to

earth and shattered. He conceives a horrible fear for his wife. The

interview is a prolonged one and intensely painful. It is written with

supreme art and conveys volumes in half-uttered sentences. There are no

really long speeches, the dialogue being crisp, and while the action

is not rapid, three lives' histories are told with consummate art and

unabated vigour.

Asta has then a scene with her brother. She tells him that she is not

his sister; her mother was not all she should have been to his father.

Brother and sister face each other, and their parting at the end of the

act is another of those strangely affecting climaxes Ibsen builds so

well. There is never shown a hint of warmer feelings between the two

than their supposed relationship warrants. Eyolf, Eyolf! it is always

the spirit of the child that directs the doings of this strange yet

ordinary group of human beings.

Allmers later suggests suicide to his wife, and the awful contingency

is discussed. The tone of Little Eyolf is distinctly optimistic. Hope

is preached on every page. Alfred and Rita clasp hands and take up

their life work as it lies before them in the squalid village that

belongs to them. Asta goes away with Borgheim, leaving a flavour of

the mystic behind her. She is a true Ibsen girl. Little Eyolf is the

lodestar of Allmers ever after. The play seems on its surface to be a

powerful preachment against dilettanteism. Writing a book about Human

Responsibility is all well enough, but out in the thick of the fight

is a man's place. Assume the responsibilities of common humanity. Do

not talk about them. The relations of parents to children are fully

exploited, and the lesson read is that parents owe much to each other,

quite as much as to their children.

Ibsen has girded at the conventionalities of the marriage relation in

other plays. This is his Kreutzer Sonata. He shows the selfishness

of a parent's love. Rita and Alfred confess that they never truly

understood Eyolf, for they never knew each other. It is a profound

character study. Ibsen was writing for another theatre--the theatre of

the twentieth century. He has, like Maeterlinck, abjured the drama of

poison, mystery, conflict, violence, aye, even the drama of heroism.

He is a sorcerer who reveals to us the commonplace of life in other

symbols. We are surrounded by mystery. Life at its lowest term is a

profound mystery. Science may tabu late, but the poet draws aside the

veil.

To dip below the surface of Ibsen's lines is never a grateful task,

especially if the dramatic idea is first taken into consideration.

Psychology must play the principal rôle in any estimate of Little Eyolf

as a play pure and simple. Language is symbolic, though with Ibsen the

single word is never as important as it is with Maeterlinck. So we find

little of that dripping repetition, that haunting reiteration which the

Belgian writer may have borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe. The ellipsis

in Ibsen is cunningly contrived, he subtly foreshadows coming events,

but never by the Word Beautiful. Little Eyolf depicts the tyranny of

passion.

* * * * *

XVI

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN

(1896)

There is in John Gabriel Borkman logical, well-knit construction. There

is an unflinching criticism of life--the attitude of a man who began

life as a poet and ends it as a realist; there is a strange power,

unpleasant power, a meagre intensity, yet unquestionable intensity,

and a genius for character-drawing and development of character that

is just short of the marvellous. That Ibsen has chosen his characters

from the world about him--a provincial, narrow, hard, cold world,--is

a commentary on his truthfulness, on his adherence to realistic

principles. The curious part of this is the resemblance his bourgeois

people bear to the bourgeois of nearly every civilized country.

John Gabriel Borkman is a play of great power, of a frugal,

constructive beauty, and in it from first to last there sounds faintly

but distinctly an antique note. There is also something of a Hamlet

situation in the position of the young man who might have won back his

father's kingdom, but quite like a modern Hamlet solved the knotty

problem by going away to Paris; any place, far away from the bleak

northern world where lived in a gloomy house his father, an ex-convict,

his mother, a soured fanatic, and his aunt, an old maid and an idealist.

John Gabriel Borkman, thirteen years previous to the opening of the

play, had been a gigantic speculator. All Norway, all the world, would

have been at his feet if he had not failed at the moment when success

seemed assured. By his downfall hundreds were enmeshed in ruin, and the

man went to prison for five years, leaving behind a heartbroken wife

and a young son. This boy, Erhart, was taken away and raised by a rich

aunt, but is now at home, where he has lived for eight years when the

curtain rises.

Mrs. Borkman is discovered in her old-fashioned drawing-room, in the

house saved out of the wreckage by her twin sister, Ella Rentheim. She

is longing for the return of her son Erhart, in whom she discerns the

saviour of the family. Her sister enters, and in his own remarkable,

sharp way Ibsen lets us witness the spiritual tragedy in the lives

of the pair. They both love Erhart, as formerly Ella had loved his

father, John Gabriel Borkman. The women hate each other, and their duel

is fought out in half-uttered sentences, pregnant pauses, and deadly

glances. It is the perfection of dialogue-writing and clear exposition.

You catch dim perspectives of the past, the treachery of the husband

of Mrs. Borkman, and of darker depths which are later explored. The

mother--oh, such a pitiful, harsh, sorrowful, repellent mother, nursing

her injuries until they become hissing vipers in her bosom--defies

her sister to win away the love of her son, that son she has dedicated

to the mission of rehabilitating the fortunes and good name of the

Borkmans. With cutting humility she acknowledges that she eats the

bread of her sister's charity, and then they hear footsteps. Is it

Erhart returning? No; it is some one up in the long gallery overhead!

It is the ex-convict, ex-banker, and swindler, John Gabriel Borkman,

who has never left the house since his release eight years before. Mrs.

Borkman cries:--

"It sometimes seems more than I can endure--always to hear him up

there walking, walking. From the first thing in the morning to the last

thing at night. And one hears every step so plainly! I have often felt

as if I had a sick wolf up there, prowling up and down in a cage.

Right over my head, too! Listen! there he goes. Up and down, up and

down, the wolf is prowling."

Then Erhart, a lively young man of about twenty-three, enters, welcomes

his aunt affectionately, his mother carelessly. With him is a Mrs.

Wilton, a beautiful young woman, whose husband has deserted her. The

pair are in love, although the mother does not quite see it. Mrs.

Wilton wishes Erhart to go with her to a neighbor's house, a Mr.

Hinkle's, but his duty is at home and she leaves him, the air being

promise-crammed with tantalizing hopes of pleasure and caprice. The

young man soon tires of the bickerings about him, and after declaring

that his aunt should be in bed after her long journey, leaves his

mother alone, and as the curtain falls she exclaims: "Erhart, Erhart,

be true to me! Oh, come home and help your mother! For I can bear this

life no longer."

Her mother's heart tells her that her boy is being drawn away from her,

drawn by some force she cannot analyze.

In Act II we get a picture of the "sick wolf up there," John Gabriel

Borkman himself. He is one of Ibsen's most veracious portraits. He

clings with unshaken obstinacy to the belief that he only sinned

against himself, that if he had been given time, that if he had

not been betrayed by a false friend, he would have pulled through.

All these facts are deftly brought out by conversation with the

half-pathetic, half-ludicrous figure of an humble bank clerk, the

only one of Borkman's friends who has clung to him in his reverses,

although Borkman has swept away his poor earnings. The contrast of the

pair--Borkman, almost satanic in his pride and his belief that he will

eventually regain his position in society, and the feeble aspirations

of the poor clerk, who is a poetaster--is wonderfully managed. There is

a quarrel, and Borkman is left to his gloomy thoughts, and then Ella

Rentheim comes in and one of the most powerful situations of the play

ensues.

It has developed that Borkman has always loved Ella, but gave her up

and married her sister because an influential man who could advance his

interests was also in love with Ella. This man, not being able to marry

her, betrayed Borkman and his schemes. His name is Hinkle, and at his

very house that night, near Christiania (the scene of the play), Erhart

Borkman is enjoying himself with Mrs. Wilton and not caring a rap for

his sick-souled father, mother, and aunt.

When Borkman finally acknowledges to Ella that in his lust for power he

has sacrificed his love of her, and has sacrificed it uselessly, she

turns on him and cries "Criminal!" She goes on:--

"You are a murderer and you have committed the one mortal sin.... You

have killed the love life in me. Do you understand what that means? The

Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness.

I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The

great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love life in a human soul....

You have done that. I have never rightfully understood until this

evening what has really happened to me. That you deserted me and turned

to Gunhild instead--I took that to be mere common fickleness on your

part, and the result of heartless scheming on hers. I almost think I

despise you a little in spite of everything. But now I see it! You

deserted the woman you loved! Me, me, me! What you held dearest in the

world you were ready to barter away for gain. That is the double murder

you have committed! The murder of your own soul and mine!"

And again, "You have cheated me of a mother's joy and happiness in

life--and a mother's sorrows and tears as well."

Then Ella tells Borkman that sorrow and disease have broken her down,

and she intends leaving her fortune to Erhart, the only one she loves;

her spiritual son, but he must give up the name of Borkman and take

that of Rentheim. Mrs. Borkman appears at this juncture, and there is

another clash as the curtain falls on three wretched people.

Act III treads closely on the heels of the preceding one, for the

action of the entire play takes place during one dull winter's

evening; and if there is unity of time, unity of place, there is

unity of character, for like some vast but closely knitted polyphonic

composition, the piece contains not a line, not a character, that is

wasted or undeveloped. It is as far as form simply magnificent; an

object lesson to young dramatists. But as to its theme; ah, I, too,

would be sorry to see our stage always filled with these crabbed, sour,

mean, loveless, and sad-visaged people! Little wonder that joyous

Erhart Borkman, the selfish son of a union barren of love, goes away in

Act III, after a climax that simply cuts into your nerves. Father and

mother--oh, the agony of that poor, old, weak, deserted woman--appeal

to him, but with Mrs. Wilton and a young girl, a daughter of the old

clerk, he goes out into the world to see life, to seek love, to enjoy,

to enjoy, to enjoy! It is the new laughing at the despair of the old,

and the curtain falls on a group that seems frozen with antique grief.

Of Act IV and Borkman's death--his soul had been dead since he went

to prison--I shall say but little. The end is silver-tipped with

symbolical hintings, but there is nothing dark or devious for even the

commonest comprehension.

The spiritual director of the Théâtre de l'œuvre, M. Lugné-Poë, once

wrote of Ibsen thus:--

"I do not know any one but M. August Ehrhard who has, with such

painstaking erudition, disengaged Ibsen's thought from his principal

works. And although the learned critic committed the great fault of

never attempting one single time to assimilate the rugged thought

of the great dramaturge, it must, nevertheless, be allowed his

conclusions were happy. I may cite this phrase from the letter to Ibsen

which terminates his volume, 'In truth you will renew the miracle of

Sophocles--at eighty years of age you will give us a new Œdipus.'

"To-day that which Ehrhard prophesied is already three-quarters

realized. Since Hedda Gabler, Ibsen has given us The Master Builder,

that heroic drama of pride, and John Gabriel Borkman, the secular

legend of the human chimera."

Even an indifferent performance which I saw at the Schiller Theatre,

Berlin, could not quite destroy the impression of a wounded Titan

struggling against fate. John Gabriel Borkman is a prodigious figure, a

second Mercadet, but fashioned by a Balzac of the theatre.

* * * * *

XVII

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKE

DRAMATIC EPILOGUE

(1899)

Mr. William Archer sees in this closing drama of the social series

little else than a resuscitation of the characters and motives that

have done duty in his earlier plays. It is true that there is much

familiar music, that the themes have been treated in the previous

works; nevertheless the variation is of enthralling interest. This

epilogue is closely related to The Master Builder. Solness the

architect is differentiated from Arnold Rubek, the sculptor in

character; but both men are successful artists; both men have failed

in the one achievement worth the while--love. As in Brand, Rubek goes

to the snow-covered heights with his only love--Brand's was an ideal;

Rubek's is a woman--and the avalanche sweeps both to eternity. The

_Deus caritatis_, whose voice thunders in the ears of the dying Brand,

is in the epilogue the voice of the sister of mercy who cries, _Pax

vobiscum_, as Rubek and Irene are whirled away.

Ibsen, always disdainful of stage settings, evidently experienced a

change of mind, for, following Richard Wagner's example, he makes some

exceedingly severe demands upon the ingenuity of the stage manager,

beginning with The Lady from the Sea and John Gabriel Borkman.

The story of When We Dead Awake is simplicity itself. Arnold Rubek is

a famous sculptor, in middle years married to Maja, a young woman full

of the joy of life. The union proves unhappy. She is frivolous; he is

failing as an artist. Years before he had designed his masterwork,

The Day of Resurrection, and his model was the most beautiful woman

in the world. The artist conquered the man and he allowed Irene to

leave him, though she adored him. With her departure his fount of

inspiration dried up. He made portrait busts and revenged himself on

the indifferent world by maliciously modelling resemblances to ignoble

animals in the countenances of his sitters--the pig, the goat, the

ape, the hawk, were faintly suggested. This very modern trait has been

paralleled in the case of a celebrated painter of our times. Henry

James, in his own faultless way, has told the story in The Liar.

As is the case with the Ibsen plays, this train of happenings leads

up to the first act at a northern watering-place. Rubek and Maja tell

each other the truth of their mutual boredom. Then Irene comes upon

the scene, a sinister apparition. She is half mad and is watched by a

sister of mercy. She encounters Rubek, and the story of her love, which

led to insanity, comes out. He sees that his art has blinded him to

his real happiness. Like Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Irene

accuses him savagely of murdering her love life through neglect. Maja

has gone off with Ulfheim, a savage brute of a hunter, and together

Rubek and Irene seek to attain the heights. But the inexorable law of

their being bars the way. Only once in a lifetime is it vouchsafed to

a man or a woman to touch the tall stars, and so they perish, but not

before Rubek has cast off his life lie.

Eduard Brandes, the brother of the better known Georg, himself a

critic and dramatist, has uttered eloquent words about this drama:--

Unquestionably, there will be many objections made against this

magnificent drama because the high-sounding prose at times may seem

vulnerable to the attack of logical analysis. And it is quite certain

that the objections will gather themselves into the pertinent question,

Why did Henrik Ibsen show Irene as insane and why does he let Rubek,

who is not insane, prefer the abnormal woman to the beautiful and

sensible Maja?

To this may be answered, If Ibsen with such violence desired to

emphasize that life in its entirety, even the most artistic, is to be

counted as death, and that only the life of love is real love, to both

Irene and Maja, then he was forced to employ the most drastic pictures

of the kind of death that life without love assuredly is. Insanity,

without a doubt, is both mental and physical death: though the insane

may exist, yet humanity does not consider such existence--life.

Had not Irene stood there, so heartbroken, so ill in mind and evil, so

desirous and yet so afraid, with the black shadow of cell and restraint

in her wake, the lesson of the play would not be too plain, Without

love--no life.

It is Irene, of course, who is the star character in the play. It is

far from being the undecisive Rubek who not until the hour of his death

understood the love which Irene offered him, which in Maja's case was

confined to the customs of conventional marriage.

That Henrik Ibsen stands untouched by his weight of years, this drama

will ere long announce to the entire world. It is quite true that the

structure of the play cannot be analyzed on the spur of the moment.

The construction embodies a stage setting which will enhance the worth

of the drama. Almost with the identical progress which Irene and Rubek

make toward the mountain top the acts unfold themselves lucidly and are

entirely comprehensible. The more the psychological problem is studied

the better will it be understood why Ibsen is called great.

When We Dead Awake is a master's work and a masterpiece. Like none

other is Ibsen--so grand, so mystical, and yet so entirely in agreement

with the organic make-up of humanity. From the peak of the mountain he

speaks to us, aged as to years, youthful in deed and daring. There is

but one ruler, says Henrik Ibsen: the great Eros, and the poet is his

prophet!

When We Dead Awake ends the cycle of the noble prose dramas of Henrik

Ibsen. Despite Mr. Archer's criticism the play shows little falling off

in intensity, even if the motives are thrice familiar. To will greatly

is the touchstone of life, to will when you know that you are hedged in

by overmastering destiny; to dare, though you know that free will is

one of life's darling illusions--that is success in life.

To thy own self be true,

said Shakespeare, and no one has said it with such tragic intensity

since him as has Henrik Ibsen.

"It has been a veritable misfortune for Æsthetics that the word 'drama'

has always been translated by 'action,'" wrote Nietzsche. "Wagner is

not the only one who errs here; all the world is still in error about

the matter; even the philologists ought to know better. The ancient

drama had grand _pathetic scenes_ in view; it first excluded action

(relegated it _previous_ to the commencement, or _behind_ the scene).

The word 'drama' is of Doric origin, and according to Dorian usage

signifies 'event,' 'history,' both words in a hieratic sense. The

oldest drama represented local legend, the 'sacred history,' on which

the establishment of the cult rested (consequently no doing but a

happening....)"

And elsewhere Nietzsche declares: "The affirmation of life, even in

its most unfamiliar and most severe problems, the will to _live_ life,

enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the _sacrifice_ of its highest

types--_that_ is what I call Dionysian, _that_ is what I divined as the

bridge to a psychology of the _tragic_ poet. Not in order to get rid of

terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement

discharge (it was thus that Aristotle understood it), but beyond terror

and pity, _to realize in fact_ the eternal delight of becoming--that

delight which even involves in itself the _joy of annihilation_."

He also pictures the great tragic artist offering a draught of sweetest

cruelty to heroic men. Readers interested should study Lessing in his

Hamburg Dramaturgy, Schopenhauer's essay on Tragedy, and Nietzsche's

valuable contribution to the discussion, his early work, The Birth

of Tragedy. The latter extols the Dionysian spirit of the drama--its

ecstasy and its triumphant affirmation of life the eternal. Walter

Pater should be consulted on the same lofty theme.

In form the perfected Ibsen tragedy follows Sophocles: anterior to the

rising of the curtain the various motives have developed and collided

in the dark chamber of the dramatist's brain. They are then incarnated

for the spectator as they near their catastrophe; thus the most

rigid economy of effects is practised, the three unities preached by

Boileau are set before us with unerring logic. It is all in a single

picture, this dénouement of his character's silent years. The method

has its drawbacks, yet there is no denying its intensity, which like

the fiery garment of Nessus envelops the dramatist's unhappy men and

women. Determinate as is the motivation of these dramas, there is

allowed the interval for action that might be described by the tick

of the pendulum,--diastole, systole, ebb, and flow. But within that

tiny mental territory man is monarch of his acts; moreover, as Ernest

Renan suggests, "What we call infinite time is, perhaps, a minute

between two miracles." Man dances on the rope of the present between

the past and the future, says Nietzsche; the spectacle, brief as it

is, has been recorded by Ibsen. Renan, who anticipated Nietzsche by

his proclamation that man should be virtuous for virtue's sake alone,

without regard for rewards attendant upon its performance, has also

written in his preface to Caliban (1878):--

"Man sees clearly at the hour which is striking that he will never know

anything of the supreme cause of the universe, or of his own destiny.

Nevertheless he wishes to be talked to about all that." And Ibsen has

talked to us much about all these things, following Goethe's axiom that

"no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the poet knows how to use

it." The theatre director in Faust remarks, "He who brings much, brings

something to every one."

Octave Uzanne wrote, "People the orchestra and galleries of a theatre

with a thousand Renans and a thousand Herbert Spencers, and the

combination of these two thousand brains of genius will not produce

aught but the soul of a _concierge_."

So much for the power of collectivity. This theme which Gustave Le Bon

has treated in The Mob and The Psychology of the Peoples--literally

a drag-net psychology--? may be found lucidly discussed in Mr. A. B.

Walkley's Dramatic Criticism. The modern audience, he says, is no

longer a great baby, like the mediæval one, but an intelligent adult.

"On this crowd depends our future hopes of the stage."

With all the authorities, apologists, and panegyrists, Ibsen remains

a difficult nut to crack. His perversities of execution, aberrations

in sentiment, contrarieties, and monumental obstinacy are too much for

the average commentator's nerves--why, then, should he be enjoyed by

the public when doctors of the drama disagree? His warmest admirers

deny him the gift of humour, but we believe that he is the greatest

humorist, as well as dramatist, of the nineteenth century. No man,

not even Browning, has kept such rigid features in the very face of

idiotic abuse and still more silly praise. Not a sense of humour!

After A Doll's House came Ghosts, totally contravening the thesis, or

supposed thesis, of that problem play; after Ghosts, An Enemy of the

People, which declared for the rights of the individual; after this

piece the maddening and angular ironies of The Wild Duck, in which he

mocks himself, his theories; and then as if to explode the whole Ibsen

mine, Rosmersholm appeared. Therein the reformer, whether idealist

or of the ordinary peddling political stripe, is mercilessly flayed,

and Rebekka West, his wonderful incarnation of passion, deceits,

femininity, and renunciation, sacrifices her life to a false ideal,

to "Rosmersholm ideals," and mocks herself as she joins in the double

suicide. No humour! What, then, of Hedda Gabler, the young woman of

to-day; shallow-cultured, her religious underpinning gone, vacillating,

cerebral, all nerves full of a Bashkirtseff-like charm, this Hedda

who is so modern, who peeps over moral precipices, shudders and peeps

again--what preconceived theories of Ibsen did Hedda _not_ upset?

Followed the fantastic Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel

Borkman, and When We Dead Awake, each mutually destructive of what we

supposed Ibsen stood for, destructive of the fumbling decadent that

spite depicts him. Not a humorist! Why, Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift,

Dumas _fils_, and Calvin (who was fond of roasting his religious foes)

rolled into one is about the happiest formula we can express for the

tense-lipped old humorist of Norway!

Like the John Henry Newman of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his chief concern

is with the soul. To call him hard names is to betray the inner

anxieties that assail us at some time of our existence. "What if this

man were telling the truth?" we shiveringly ask. Then we incontinently

proceed to stone him to death with scabrous adjectives!

Ibsen never condescended to newspaper polemics--usually the refuge

of second-rate men. And his scorn and cruelty are but a disguised

kindness; if he lays bare our rickety social systems, our buckram

politics, exposes the _falsetto_ of our ideals, the flabbiness of our

culture, the cowardice of our ethics, the sleek optimism of our public

counsellors, and the dry rot of loveless marriage, it is to blazon our

moral maladies that we may seek their cure.

Like John Knox with Mary Stuart, he rudely raps at the door of our

hearts, bidding us awaken and open them. He is a voice crying in

the wilderness of shams--shams social, the shams of sentiment, of

money-getting. And he sometimes fails to discriminate the sheep and

goats, tweaking the foolish, self-satisfied noses of the former so

sadly, that he has been accused of mixing his moral values. But like

Tennyson he knows that there is often honest faith in doubt. His words

and works may be compared to that serpent of brass erected by Moses

in the midst of his ailing nation, which was at once a symbol and a

prophylactic.

Ibsen, the cunning contriver of sinewy, vital dramas, swift in action,

with all extraneous flesh lopped away like the muscular figure of

a Greek athlete, this Ibsen of overarching poetic power, is a man

disdainful of our praise or our blame, knowing, with the subtle

prevision of genius, that one day the world will go to him for the

consolations of his austere art.

II

AUGUST STRINDBERG

To search for God and to find the Devil! that is what happened to

me.--STRINDBERG'S _Inferno_.

A critic is a man who expects miracles. So it has become the general

practice to ignore a poet in his totality and seek only for isolated

traits. And then the trouble we take to search for what a man is not:

the lack of humour in Shelley, the lack of spirituality in Byron, the

lack of sanity in Nietzsche, the lack of melody in Richard Strauss!

The case of Johann August Strindberg has also proved tempting to

critical head-hunters. Long before we read his books we knew of his

neurasthenia, and after his reputation as a many-sided man of genius

had been established in Europe his matrimonial affairs were employed as

an Exhibit A to divorce him from public and critical favour. And yet

this poet, romancer, and novelist, who has created such a profusion

of types as to be called "The Shakespeare of Sweden," this more than

countryman of Swedenborg in his powers of intense vision, this seer

and chemist, possesses such a robust, tangible personality that the

world is hardly to be censured for being curious about the man before

studying his works.

His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden. In the seventeenth

century his ancestors were living in the little village of Strinne.

Tremendous in physique and intermingled with clerical strains,

Strindberg inherits both his big frame and sensitive conscience

from his mixed forebears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that

of Renan, Anatole France, Barrès, Bernard Shaw, as René Schickele

has suggested. A simple pagan he is not; nor would his particular

case have been so complicated. His lyric pessimism and his gift of

distilling his bitter experiences into a tale or a play are to-day

merged in the broad currents of his historical dramas and socialistic

novels. Even his misogyny has become ameliorated,--those episodes in

which are crystallized the petty misery of a married couple,--unpaid

debts, unloved children, the bailiff knocking at the back door!--let

us believe that they, too, were but a phase of his development. Played

in Germany and France,--Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable,

and its author as a _confrère_,--popular in Russia, recognized though

not without many years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be said to

have achieved what he set out to do,--"to search for God and find the

devil," and once more to find his God.

Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German translator of Strindberg,

related to me this anecdote. On the writing-desk of Ibsen there

stands, or stood, a photograph of Strindberg the Swede, once Ibsen's

foe. To a visitor's surprise, Ibsen, after gazing in silence for some

time at the picture, said, "There is one who will be greater than I."

Whether this story be true or not Strindberg is a man of genius,

a crazy one at times, fascinating as a writer and interesting

as a psychiatric study. And he answers to the chief test of the

dramatist--he is a prime creator of character. Edmund Gosse pronounced

him to be "certainly the most remarkable creative talent started by the

philosophy of Nietzsche"; and in speaking of his novel, Inferno, he

says that it "is a record of wretchedness and superstition and squalor,

told by a maniac who is a positive Lucifer of the intellect.... in

France not only has he a large following, but he exercises a positive

influence." Yet this erratic man has planned technical revolutions

for the dramatic stage--on the mechanical as well as the spiritual

side--that are as startling as were Richard Wagner's in the music

drama. It is not necessary here to describe his scheme for presenting

his long historical dramas without a change of front scene.

Strindberg is a man with an abnormal emotional temperament which he has

often allowed to master his judgment. If he had been a composer, while

his symphonies would have undoubtedly provoked abuse, they would not

have scandalized moralists--such is the peculiar vagueness of that art

in the domain of articulate thought. Some day the tone-symbols of music

will become a part of our consciousness, and then we may confidently

expect arrests, prosecutions, transportations, perhaps executions.

Luckily for the bold and imaginative thinkers, music remains the only

art, the last sanctuary wherein originality may reveal itself in the

face of fools and not pierce their mental opacity.

August Strindberg is a name little known to the English stage or

reading public. Yet his dramatic work dates back to 1872, when Meister

Olaf was composed. In this youthful essay he anticipated by seven years

the Nora type presented by Ibsen. His first novel appeared in 1879,

and in 1884, when Giftas was published, the stories in this violent

book nearly sent him to the Stockholm jail. It was 1888 before Gräfin

Julie was put forth, and this play originally in three acts brought

Strindberg European fame. Gläubiger, in 1889, confirmed the first

critical impression that a writer and thinker of a high order was come.

Strindberg's career has been a disordered one. Poverty interrupted his

studies at the Upsala University, made him a "super" in a theatre, and

drove him to journalism, and to become a doctor's assistant. Always

unhappy in his relation with women, often quite mad, and usually living

on the treacherous borderland of hallucination, his existence has been

fevered and miserable, though his successes are brilliant. Sanity

has not been his cardinal quality--he has more than once gone to the

asylum, emerging in a few months cured, and, remarkable as it sounds,

remembering the details of his mania. _Détraqué_, sick and cracked,

he nevertheless plunged into the study of chemistry, searching for a

universal solvent--a mad dream that would interest Balzac. Ideas almost

consumed the brain of this _cérébral_.

But hard work calmed his nerves, as was the case with Dostoïevsky.

Strindberg's scientific investigations are full of the flashes of

divination that at times lend value to the theories of imaginative

men. He has written an Introduction à une Chimie unitaire, which was

favourably received. It was a conclusion foregone that his impulsive

and overwrought emotional nature would lead him into extravagances.

Inferno and the double drama, Nach Damaskus, reveal his eroticism,

his exasperated imagination, his harsh atheism. He has confessed in

one of his autobiographical outpourings--for he lays bare his soul

with the same naïveté as did Tolstoy and Rousseau--that in his youth

he was a believer, that the modulation to free-thinking and rank

atheism was an easy one. Then, after a period of turbulence, he became

the dispassionate ponderer; and finally socialism, with its remote

horizons, its heroisms, its substitution of humanity for the old gods,

caught his wandering soul.

He lives no longer in Paris, a whirlpool for a man of his nature,

and since his third marriage, to Harriet Bosse, the popular Swedish

actress, called by her admirers the "Scandinavian Duse," he has resided

in Stockholm. There his great historical plays have been heard and

praised and abused; there he shows in his later writings a mystic

strain; there last autumn after some years of exaltation he agreed to

separate from his wife, for the clash of two such opposing temperaments

"hindered their free development"--so says his faithful biographer.

The separation caused much commotion in artistic and dramatic circles.

It was, however, a perfectly amicable one; Harriet Bosse declared that

she needed more liberty, for she hopes to travel throughout Europe. A

laudable ambition. Strindberg, notwithstanding his unhappy unions, is a

staunch monogamist, and allowed the woman to go her way. He has already

drawn her portrait in the powerful historical play Christine. Therein

the soul of the actress is set before us as the counterfeit Queen of

Sweden; winning and masculine, flattering and harsh, a heartless demon

and a tender maiden begging for sympathy; anon a mocking tyrant, a wild

cat, a second Messalina. It would appear that the poet lost no time in

studying Fru Strindberg's characteristics. She, on her side, had made a

contract with her manager not to appear in any of her husband's plays,

though she has enjoyed triumphs in Fräulein Julie and Samum. Perhaps

this was the first little rift in the domestic lute.

Biologists believe that after forty a man of genius--who is in

Darwinian parlance a _sport_--returns to his tribe; resumes in himself

the traits of his parents. Perhaps Strindberg has reached the grand

climacteric and may give us less disturbing masterpieces. In 1902,

under the title of Elf Einakter, a German translation of eleven of

his one-act plays was published. This collection contains the ripest

offering thus far of his unquestionable genius. It begins with Gräfin

Julie, condensed by the dramatist into a one-act piece. "A tragedy of

naturalism," he calls it. It is an emotional bombshell. The social

world seems topsy-turvied after a first reading. After a second, while

the gripping power does not relax, one realizes the writer's deep,

almost abysmal knowledge of human nature. Imagine a Joseph Andrews

made love to by a Lady Booby, youthful, fascinating. But Fielding

aims light shafts of satire; Strindberg calls up ghosts with haunting

eyes. Passion there is, and a horrible atmosphere of reality. You

know the affair has happened; you see the valet, Jean, chucking his

cook-sweetheart under the chin as she feeds him with dainties in the

kitchen; you witness the appearance on the scene of Julie enamoured;

frantic, unhappy Julie; and you view the crumbling of her soul,

depicted as in one of those drawings of Giulio Romano from which you

avert your head. The finale makes Ghosts an entertainment for urchins.

Everything is brought about naturally, inevitably. Be it understood,

Strindberg is never pornographic, nor does he show a naked soul merely

to afford charming diversion, which is the practice of some French

dramatists.

What would our Ibsen-hating critics say after Gräfin Julie or

Gläubiger! That kitchen--fancy a kitchen as a battlefield of

souls!--with its good-hearted and pious cook, the impudent scoundrel of

a valet eager for revenge on his superiors, and the hallucinated girl

from above stairs--it is a tiny epic of hatred, of class against mass.

Julie is neurotic. She has coolly snapped the betrothal vows made with

a titled young man of the district It is St. John's Eve. The villa of

the Count, Julie's father, is empty save for the two servants, Jean and

Christina--the latter is the cook. Julie, bored by her colourless life

and fevered by a midsummer's madness, throws herself at the valet's

head. He is frightened. His servant nature has the upper hand until the

pair, forced to hide because of the intrusion of rough country folk,

reappear. Then the male brute is smirking, triumphant. Justin Huntly

McCarthy made a translation of the piece for an English magazine in

1892. Here is an excerpt:--

[JULIE _enters, sees the disorder in the kitchen, and clasps her hands.

Then she lakes a powder puff and powders her face._]

JEAN. [_Enters excited_] There, you see and you hear. Do you still

think it possible to remain here?

JULIE. No, I do not. But what shall we do?

JEAN. Fly; travel; fly away from here.

JULIE. Travel? Yes! But where?

JEAN. To Switzerland, to the Italian lakes. Have you ever been there?

JULIE. No. Is it beautiful?

JEAN. An eternal summer. Orange trees, laurels--ah!

JULIE. But what shall we do there afterwards?

JEAN. We will start a first-class hotel for first-class guests.

JULIE. A hotel!

JEAN. That is the life to live, believe me. Always new faces, new

languages, not a moment's leisure for worrying or dreaming, no seeking

after employment, for work comes of itself. Night and day the bell

rings, the trains whistle, the omnibuses come and go while the gold

pieces roll into the till. That is a life to live.

JULIE. That is a life to live. And what of me?

JEAN. You shall be the mistress of the house, the ornament of the

firm. With your appearance and your manners we are sure of a colossal

success. You sit like a queen in the office and set your slaves in

motion with one touch on the electric bell; the guests march past your

throne and lay their treasures humbly on the table. You cannot imagine

how people tremble when they get a bill. I will salt the accounts

and you will sugar them with your most bewitching smile. Yes, let us

travel far from here. _He takes a time-table from his pockety_ Good. By

the next train we are in Malmö at 6.30, in Hamburg at 8.40 to-morrow

morning, from Frankfort to Basle in one day, and we are in Como by the

St. Gothard route in, let me see, three days. Three days!

JULIE. That is ah very fine. But, Jean, you must give me courage. Say

that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.

JEAN. [_Hesitating_] I would like to, but I dare not. Not here in this

house. I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?

JULIE. YOU! Say "thou" to me. Between us there are no longer any

barriers. Say "thou."

JEAN. [_Troubled_] I cannot. There are still barriers between us so

long as we remain in this house. It recalls the past, it recalls the

Count. I have never met any man who compelled such respect from me.

I have only to see his glove lying on a table to feel quite small. I

have only to hear his bell and I start like a shying horse. And when

I look at his boots standing there so stiff and stately, it makes me

shiver. [_He pushes the boots away with his foot._] Superstition,

prejudice, which has been driven into us from childhood, but which we

can never get free of. If you will only come into another country, into

a republic, then people shall kneel down before my porter's livery,

people shall kneel down. But I shall not kneel down. I am not born to

kneel, for there is stuff in me; there is character in me; and if once

I reach the lowest branch, you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a

lackey, but next year I am a proprietor; in a few years I shall have

an income, and then I run off to Roumania, where I buy a decoration. I

can--mark well that I say can--die a count.

JULIE. Beautiful, beautiful!

JEAN. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then you will

be a countess, my countess.

JULIE. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you love

me, or else--ah, what am I else?

JEAN. I will say it a thousand times--later on. But not here. And above

all, no hysterics, or all is lost. We must manage the affair quietly,

like sensible people. [_He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and lights

it_.] Sit down there, and I will sit here, and then we can chat as if

nothing had happened.

JULIE. Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?

JEAN. I! why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can command

my feelings.

JULIE. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and now--

JEAN. [_Coldly_] Yes, before. But now we have something else to think

about.

The scamp sounds her as to the money she possesses. She has none. He

compels her to rob her father. He kills her bird. She curses him, for

her poor brain is going under from the strain put upon it. She throws

herself upon the mercy of the cook; but Christina, who is a good woman,

repels and rebukes the sinner. The Count returns. He rings. Jean again

becomes the servant, though not until he has given Julie his razor,

bidding her use it. She goes out and kills herself, unable to resist

the stronger will.

In this shocking drama is crystallized all the bitterness of

Strindberg, for he once married a Countess; he, too, has lived in

the _Inferno._ Again we say the ending revolts; in comparison, the

_coda_ of Ibsen's Ghosts is a mild exercise in emotional _arpeggios_.

Strindberg's heavy fist smashes out music, sinister and murderous, in

this ruthless play.

Julie is a close study of a girl whose blood is tainted before birth,

whose education has been false, whose life in society has inflamed her

passions. She falls easily when the cunning Jean tempts her at the

psychologic moment. I saw Julie at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin, last

autumn, Frau Eysoldt--Sorma suffering from a bruised arm--assuming the

title rôle, deciphering with skill the abnormal hieroglyphics of the

character.

In Gläubiger, a tragic comedy, Strindberg treats, with his accustomed

omniscience, a sweet little story about a man who follows his

runaway wife to a seaside resort and becomes acquainted with the new

husband--unknown to the lady, who is away for a week. Here we catch

a glimpse of another hell, the cruelty of a powerful intellect. The

weaker man is a painter, turned sculptor, and--subtle irony--he models

only his wife's figure. (This was published in 1889; Ibsen certainly

read it--witness When We Dead Awake.) The snaring of the poor emotional

wretch's soul is masterly. It is all over in an hour, the entire play,

and again we feel as if we had mutely assisted at the obsequies of

three human beings.

The first husband--who is discovered as such at the end of the

play--meets his former wife, and her infamous nature is exposed. The

artist hears the conversation, and his fate is not to be spoken of

lightly. We pass on.

Paria is after a tale of Ola Hansson. It need not detain us. Poe is

a child compared to Strindberg in the analysis of morbid states of

soul. Samum is a shuddering ode to revenge. Finally we arrive at Die

Stärkere, which met with such acclaim on the Continent. Its chief

device of having one silent figure and making the other do the talking

is sufficiently novel. But it is again the drama, always the drama

with Strindberg. His picture, executed by a kindred and sympathetic

interpreter, Edvard Munch, shows the face of one who, like Dante, has

seen the nethermost hell.

Played by two artistic actresses, this sardonic little sketch, replete

with irony, malice, hatred,--yet full of humanity,--would prove most

attractive. It has many sly strokes of humour. The scene of the

action is a café on Christmas Eve. Madame X talks to Mademoiselle Y,

who remains absolutely silent, yet by glances and gestures contrives

to send the other woman scudding along the road from idle, amenable

chatter to outrageous recrimination. The two women love the same man.

Madame X is his wife. Ferociously she exposes her secrets. Her husband

at first has forced her to imitate Mademoiselle Y. But she is now the

stronger. She has made him forget his early love, who sits in a dreary

café alone on Christmas Eve, while she, his legal wife, will go home to

the father and children! It is an ugly episode. In Das Band we reach

a play revealing the better characteristics of the poet. It consists

only of a court-room scene with jurymen, judge, and officers before

whom a husband and wife make their petition for divorce--according

to Scandinavian procedure. They are resolved to separate; but there

is a child, a son, beloved by both. With this elemental stuff as a

subject, Strindberg wrings the heart of you. At the end the parents

damn themselves by their own admission, the child is taken from their

custody, and they confront each other in the deserted, dim court room,

their hearts bursting, their future a foggy, abandoned field. They

recall the poet Aldrich's picture of No-man's land, where the soul sees

its double, a _doppelgänger._

"And who are you?" cried one agape,

Shuddering in the gloaming light;

"I know not," said the second shape,

"I only died last night."

These two souls in the play, once hooked by the steels of marriage

and parenthood, realize as they fall loathingly asunder that they are

dead, that their life has passed on into the soul of their miserable

boy. It is such a play as this that vindicates Strindberg's claim to

the mastery of the drama. Here he is at his human best, freed from the

bizarre, and his humour and wit illuminate the ghastly darkness with

friendly flashes. The jurymen are excellent, and more comical still are

the court officers. Many touches throughout would make the translation

and performance of Das Band profitable. And not once is the child on

the stage. Possibly, as America is a divorce-loving nation, it would

reject with indignation the sight of so many bleaching family bones!

Mit dem Feuer Spielen is a comedy of a drastic kind. It shows

Nietzsche's influence. The sister of Nietzsche, Frau Förster-Nietzsche,

once assured me in Weimar that her brother enjoyed reading Strindberg's

novels. And there are several references to Strindberg in the published

correspondence of Georg Brandes and Nietzsche.

Debit and Credit also proves that, consciously or unconsciously,

Strindberg is a Nietzschean. It is a rogue's comedy with original

variations. The chief character evokes laughter, for through the grim

and sordid rifts in the plot--it pictures a tawdry great man--we hear

bursts of natural fun. There is humour, kindly and mocking. Very

Shaw-like, except that it was written in 1892, is Mutterliebe. In

Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mr. Shaw expanded the same grewsome idea.

Elsewhere the Irish writer calls Strindberg "the only living genuine

Shakespearian dramatist." Strindberg in his fifteen pages traverses a

lifetime, and his ending is logical.

In the preface to Fräulein Julie, Strindberg makes a general

confession--for him as for Tolstoy a psychologic necessity. "Some

people," he says, "have accused my tragedy of being too sad as though

one desired a merry tragedy. People call authoritatively for the

Joy of Life, and theatrical managers call for farces, as though the

Joy of Life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people who

each and every one are suffering from St. Vitus's dance or idiocy. I

find the joy of life in the powerful, terrible struggle of life; and

the capability of experiencing something, of learning something, is a

pleasure to me. And therefore I have chosen an unusual but instructive

subject; in other words, an exception, but a great exception, that will

strengthen the rules which offend the apostles of the commonplace.

What will further create antipathy in some is the fact that my plan

of action is not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be

taken of it. An event in life--and this is rather a new discovery--is

usually accompanied by a series of more or less deep-seated motives;

but the spectator usually generally chooses that one which his power

of judgment finds simplest to grasp, or that his gift of judgment

considers the most honourable. For example, some one commits suicide:

'Bad business!' says the citizen; 'Unhappy love!' says the woman;

'Sickness!' the sick man; 'Disappointed hopes!' the bankrupt. But it

may be that none of these reasons is the real one, and that the dead

man hid the real one by pretending another that would throw the most

favourable light on his memory."

The Father (produced in 1887 and translated into English by N.

Erichsen) is in three short acts. It depicts the destruction of

a man's brain through the machinations of his malevolent wife.

Strindberg's misogyny is the keynote of his early work. He hates woman.

He accuses Ibsen of gynolatry. "My superior intelligence revolts," he

cries, "against the gynolatry which is the latest superstition of the

free-thinkers." His own married life was so unhappy that he revenges

himself by attacking the entire sex. Every book, every play, is a

confession. He is the most subjective dramatist and poet of his age. In

Comrades he synthesizes the situation:--

To wish to dethrone Man and replace him by Woman--going

back to a matriarchy--to dethrone the true master of

creation, he who has created civilization and given to the

vulgar the benefit of his culture; he who is the generator

of great thoughts, of the arts and crafts, of everything,

indeed; to dethrone him, I say, in order to elevate "les

sales bêtes" of women, who have never taken part in the

work of civilization (with a few futile exceptions), is to

my mind a provocation to my sex. And at the idea of seeing

"arrive" these anthropomorphs, these half apes, this horde

of half-developed animals, these women whose intellects

are of the age of bronze, the male in me revolts. I feel

myself stirred by an angry need of resisting this enemy,

inferior in intellect, but superior by her complete

absence of moral sense.

In this war to the death between the two sexes it would

appear that the less honest and more perverse would come

out conqueror, since the chance of man's gaining the

battle is very dubious, handicapped as he is by an inbred

respect for woman, without counting the advantages that he

gives her in supporting her and leaving her time free to

equip herself for the fight.

This sex-against-sex manifesto will not make him popular in America, a

land peopled with gynolatrists; but his plays and novels may be read

with profit; if nothing else, they illustrate the violent rebound of

the pendulum in Scandinavia, where the woman question absorbed all

others for a time. Besides, Strindberg is a good hater, and good haters

are rare and stimulating spectacles.

Inferno is the very quintessence of Strindberg. Written between two

attacks--his unstable nerves send him at intervals into retreat--it is

the most awful portrayal of mental suffering ever committed to paper.

Poe said in one of his Marginalia that the man who dared to write the

story of his heart would fire the paper upon which he wrote. This

Strindberg has dared to do with a freedom, a diabolical minuteness,

that make the naïve stutterings of Verlaine and the sophisticated

confessions of Huysmans mere literature. Because of their intensity

you are forced to believe Strindberg, though his is only too plainly

a pathologic case; the delusions of persecution, of grandeur, of

almost the entire lyre of psychiatric woes, are to be detected in

this unique book. An enemy, a Russian, haunts him in Paris and plays

on the piano poisonous music which warns the listener that he is

doomed. It is the history of Strindberg's quarrel with the Polish poet

mystic and dramatist, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who really tracked the

Swede because he was jealous of his own wife. Strindberg once wrote of

Maupassant's La Horla, "I recognize myself in that, and do not deny

that insanity has developed."

Margit is a five-act drama, with the sub-title La Femme du Chevalier

Bengt. It is a historical play of the times of the Reformation, and it

is modern in its glacial analysis of the feminine soul. The picture is

more various than is the case with the eternal monologue or dialogues

of his shorter pieces--and there is humour of a deadly kind. In Das

Geheimnis der Gilde (1879-80) the theme of Ibsen's The Master Builder

was anticipated. To enumerate the works of Strindberg would consume

columns; Herr Schering of Berlin has literally devoted his life to the

task of translating them. Already there are forty volumes of plays,

tales, novels, essays, monographs, poems, fables. Even in these times

of piping versatility, the many-sided activities of the Swede amaze.

His Nach Damaskus reveals a tendency to drift Rome-ward, to that

Roman church, the sanctuary for souls weary of the conflict. There

is no denying the fact that Strindberg's later productions show a

cooler head, steadier nerves, though the motives are usually madness

or blood guilt. The latest volume at the time of writing is devoted

to three plays,--Die Kronbraut, Schwanenweiss, Ein Traumspiel. Two of

these are powerful and painful. The playwright paints the peasantry

of his country with the sombre brush of Hauptmann. Ein Traumspiel is

that wonderful thing, a real dream put before us with all the wild

irrelevancies of a dream, yet with sober and convincing art. As a stage

piece it would be superbly fantastic. Strindberg has a faculty, which

he shares in common with E. T. W. Hoffmann and Edgar Poe, of catching

the ghosts of his brain at their wildest and pinning them down on

paper. In such moods he may be truly called a seer. Swedenborg alone

equals him in the veracity and intensity of his visions.

These later plays were admittedly composed during the few happy years

with his third wife, Fru Strindberg-Bosse. Edwin Bjorkman, who has

written with authority of his fellow-countryman, declares that "the

motives that move Strindberg are moral."

"One of his favourite doctrines," continues Mr. Bjorkman, "is that

social and individual purity is the only solid foundation for physical

and mental health, as well as an indispensable condition of true

achievement. He speaks somewhere of an artist 'who was yearning for the

summit of ambition without being willing to pay the price required of

those who are to reach it.'" And then he adds, "The only choice left us

by life is between the laurel and our pleasure."

Further he quotes the dramatist, "I let my self be carried away by

the heat of the battle [over the woman's emancipation movement, of

which he was at that time the only prominent literary antagonist in

the Scandinavian countries], and I went so far beyond the limits of

propriety that my countrymen feared I had become insane."

An alchemist, a dabbler in spiritualism, a wanderer among the lowly

long before Gorky was heard of, Strindberg once wrote to a friend when

lack of money kept him a practical prisoner on a small island outside

of Stockholm, although his writing-desk was housing the completed

manuscripts of six one-act plays and two larger dramas, "I am thinking

of becoming a photographer in order to save my talent as a writer."

A later novel is autobiographic. Einsam was published in 1903. It is

more reflective than his other books and betrays the loneliness of the

returned exile. It registers the poet's dissatisfaction with Lund,

to which he went after the tremendous experiences from 1894 to 1898.

A most startling play, one of my favourites, is Totentanz. It is a

double drama, the shabby hero of which would have pleased the creator

of Captain Costigan. His novel Die Gotischen Zimmer (1904) is of

socialistic character and contains many eloquent pages. As he was born

January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, it will be seen that this erratic man

is beginning to reach the cooling period of his genius.

The most vivid of his books, after Inferno, is The Confessions of a

Fool (Die Beichte eines Thoren). Strindberg's wife, to marry him, had

divorced herself from a baron. Yet the suspicious writer accused her of

all the crimes in the calendar. And he also admits that he abused her.

Strindberg was suffering from _paranoia simplex chronica_, according

to Dr. William Hirsch, whose valuable work, Genius and Degeneration,

contains a study of the Swede's case. What is of peculiar interest is

the symptom in his malady called "referential ideas." "The patients,"

says Dr. Hirsch, "refer all that goes on about to themselves. They

suspect that the world is leagued against them." For example: when

Strindberg first read Ibsen's Wild Duck, he immediately thought the

whole piece was intended for him and was only written on his account He

expressed himself as follows:--

It was a drama of the famous Norwegian spy, the inventor

of the equality madness. How the book fell into my

hands I could not say. But now everything was clear

and gave occasion to the worst suspicions concerning

the reputation of my wife. The plot of the drama was

as follows: A photographer (a nickname I had earned by

my novels drawn from real life) has married a person

of doubtful repute, who had been formerly the mistress

of a great proprietor. The woman supports the husband

from a secret fund which she derives from her former

partner. In addition, she carries on the business of her

husband, a good-for-nothing, who spends his time drinking

in the society of persons of no consequence. Now that

is a misrepresentation of the facts committed by the

reporters. They were informed that Maria [Strindberg's

wife] made translations, but they did not know that it

was I who particularly corrected them and paid over to

her the sums received for them. Matters become bad when

the poor photographer discovers that the adored daughter

is not his child, and that the wife warned him when she

induced him to marry her. To complete his disgrace, the

husband consents to accept a large sum as indemnity. By

this I understand Maria's loan upon the baron's security,

which I endorsed after my wedding.... I prepared a great

scene for the afternoon. I wished to catch Maria in

cross-examination, to which I wished to give the form of a

defence for us both. We had been equally attracted by the

scarecrow of the masculinists, who had been paid for the

pretty job.

To show how mad were his conclusions it is only necessary to add that

he does not resemble in the least the selfish idealist, Hjalmar Ekdal,

in The Wild Duck, who never works unless he has to, while Strindberg's

literary labours have been enormous. Nor is it conceivable that the

baroness, Madame Strindberg, furnished Ibsen with the documents for

the portrait of the delightful Gina Ekdal. That woman was drawn from

the people. Furthermore, to call Ibsen "the inventor of the equality

madness" is absolutely a misstatement of a fact, as Ibsen has been a

despiser of democracy and all forms of equality.

With an almost infinite capacity for suffering, let us hope that this

great, bruised soul has found surcease from its mental suffering,

found some gleams of consolation, in his calmer years--until his next

psychical hegira. In rebelling against his existence, in refusing to

accept the wisdom of the experienced, Strindberg has suffered intensely

because his is an intense temperament. But he is a "culture hero," he

has "proved all things," and even from his hell he has brought us the

history of experiences not to be forgotten. One is tempted to credit

the alleged utterance of Ibsen, "Here is one who will be greater than

I!"

III

HENRY BECQUE

Emile Zola once wrote in his sweeping dictatorial manner, "Le théâtre

sera naturaliste ou il ne sera pas"; but as Henry Becque said in his

mordant style, Zola always convinced one in his pronunciamentos; it

was only when he attempted to put his theories into action that they

completely broke down. Alas! realism in the theatre after all the

gong-sounding of café æstheticians, after the desperate campaigns of

the one clairvoyant manager in the movement, Antoine, is as dead as the

romanticism of Hernani. After the flamboyant, the drab--and now they

are both relegated to the limbo of the tried-and-found-wanting.

When Zola sat down to pen his famous call to arms, Naturalism on

the Stage, Antoine was still in the future, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou

ruled the Parisian theatre, Uncle Sarcey manufactured his diverting

_feuilletons_, and Augier was become a classic. The author of

L'Assommoir had like Alexander sighed for new worlds to subjugate. He

had won a victory, thanks to Flaubert and the De Goncourts, in fiction;

it remained for the theatre to provoke his ire. It still clung

obstinately to old-fashioned conventions and refused to be coerced

either by Henrietta Maréchal or by the furious onslaught of Zola and

his cohort of writing men.

In the essay referred to, Zola said that a piece of work will always

be a corner of nature seen through a temperament. He told the truth

when he declared that the "romantic movement was but a skirmish;

romanticism, which corresponds to nothing durable, was simply a

restless regret of the old world." Stendhal and Balzac had created

the modern novel. The stage did not move with the other arts, though

Diderot and Mercier "laid down squarely the basis of the naturalistic

theatre." Victor Hugo gave the romantic drama its death-blow. Scribe

was an ingenious cabinet-maker. Sardou "has no life--only movement."

Dumas the younger was spoiled by cleverness--"a man of genius is not

clever, and a man of genius is necessary to establish the naturalistic

formula in a masterly fashion." Besides, Dumas preaches, always

preaches. "Emile Augier is the real master of the French stage, the

most sincere"; but he did not know how to disengage himself from

conventions, from stereotyped ideas, from made-up ideas.

Who, then, was to be the saviour, according to Zola? And this writer

did not underrate the difficulties of the task. He knew that "the

dramatic author was enclosed in a rigid frame,... that the solitary

reader tolerates everything, goes where he is led, even when he is

disgusted; while the spectators taken _en masse_ are seized with

prudishness, with frights, with sensibilities of which the author

must take notice under pain of a certain fall. But everything marches

forward! If the theatre will submit to Sardou's juggling, to the

theories and witticisms of Dumas, to the sentimental characters

of Augier, the theatre will be left in the onward movement of

civilization"; and as Becque said in his Souvenirs of a Dramatic

Author, the theatre has reached its end many times, yet somehow it

continues to flourish despite the gloomy prophecies of the professors

and critical malcontents. Every season, avowed Becque, that same cry

rises to heaven,--"La fin du théâtre"; and the next season the curtain

rises in the same old houses, on the same old plays.

However, Zola trumpeted forth his opinions. According to him the

De Goncourt brothers were the first to put into motion realistic

ideas. Henriette Maréchal, with its dialogue copied from the spoken

conversation of contemporary life, with its various scenes copied

boldly from reality, was a path breaker. And Becque again interrupts;

Edmond de Goncourt posed for thirty years as a hissed author, "pour

cette panade d'Henriette Maréchal." Away with the mechanism of the

polished, dovetailed, machine-made play of Dumas. "I yearn for life

with its shiver, its breath, and its strength; I long for life as it

is," passionately declaimed the simple-minded bourgeois Zola, who

then, in default of other naturalistic dramatists, turned his Thérèse

Raquin into a play--and melodrama it was, not without its moments of

power, but romantic and old-fashioned to a degree.

And this was Zola's fate: be contumaciously usurped the throne of

realism, never realizing his life long that he was a romanticist of the

deepest dye, a follower of Hugo, that melodramatic taleteller. All the

while he fancied himself a lineal descendant of Balzac and Flaubert.

Searching ceaselessly with his Diogenese lantern for a dramatist, he

nevertheless overlooked not only a great one, but the true father of

the latter-day movement in French dramatic literature--Henry Becque.

What a paradox! Here was the unfortunate Becque walking the boulevards

night and day with plays under his arm, plays up his sleeve, plays

in his hat, plays at home--and always was he shown the door, only

to reappear at the managerial window. Calm in his superiority, his

temper untouched by his trials, Becque presented the picture of the

true Parisian man of genius,--witty, ironical on the subject of his

misfortunes, and absolutely undaunted by refusals. He persisted until

he forced his way into the Comédie Française, despite the intriguing,

the disappointments, the broken promises, and the open hostility of

Sarcey, then the reigning pontiff of French dramatic criticism. Jules

Clarétie pretended a sympathy that he did not feel, and it was only

when pressure was brought by Edouard Thierry that his masterpiece,

Les Corbeaux, was put on the stage after many disheartening delays;

after it had been refused at the Vaudeville, the Gymnase, the Odéon,

the Porte-Saint-Martin, the Gaîté, the Cluny, and the Ambigu. Such

perseverance is positively heroic.

I know of few more diverting books than Becque's Memoirs and the record

of his Literary Quarrels. If he was gay, careless, and unspoiled by his

failures in his daily existence, he must have saved his bile for his

books. They are vitriolic. The lashing he gives Sarcey and Clarétie is

deadly. He had evidently put his revengeful feelings carefully away

and only revived them when the time came, when his successes, his

disciples, his election as the master of a powerful school, warranted

his decanting the bitter vintage. How it sparkles, how it bites! He

pours upon the head of Sarcey his choicest irony. After snubbing the

young Becque, after pompously telling him that he had no talent, that

he should take Scribe for a model, Sarcey at the end, when he saw

Becque as a possible strong figure in the dramatic world, calmly wrote:

"Oh! Becque I have known a long time. He brought me, his first piece. He

owes it to me that his The Prodigal Son was played." To cap his attack,

Becque prints this statement at the end of the miserable history of

his efforts to secure a footing. It is almost too good to be true.

Diabolically clever also is his imitation of a Sarcey _critique_ on

Molière, for Sarcey was no friend of character dramas.

In his preface to The Ravens, Becque announces that he is not a

thinker, not a dreamer, not a psychologist, not a believer in heredity.

As Jean Jullien truly said, the Becque plays prove nothing, are not

photographic, are not deformations of life, but sincere life itself.

The author relates that in composing--he had a large apartment on the

rue de Matignon---he spent much time in front of a mirror searching for

the exact gesture, for the exact glance of the eye, for the precise

intonation. This fidelity to nature recalls a similar procedure of

Flaubert, who chanted at the top of his formidable voice his phrases to

hear if they would stand the test of breathing. Becque caught the just

colour of every speech, and it is this preoccupation with essentials

of his art that enabled him to set on their feet most solidly all his

characters. They live, they have the breath of life in them; when they

walk or talk, we believe in them. The peep he permits us to take into

his workshop is of much value to the student.

He admired Antoine, naturally, and his opinion of Zola I have recorded.

He rapped Brunetière sharply over the knuckles for assuming that

criticism conserves the tradition of literature. Vain words, cries

Becque; literature makes itself despite criticism, it is ever in

advance of the critics. Only a sterile art is the result of academies.

Curiously enough, Becque had a consuming admiration for Sardou. Him he

proclaimed the real master, the man of imagination, observation, the

masterly manipulator of the character of characters. This is rather

disconcerting to those who admire in the Becque plays just those

qualities in which Sardou is deficient. Perhaps the fact that Sardou

absolutely forced the production of Becque's L'Enfant Prodigue may

have accentuated his praise of that prestidigitator of Marly. Becque

entertained a qualified opinion of Ibsen and an overwhelming feeling

for Tolstoy as dramatist. The Russian's Powers of Darkness greatly

affected the Frenchman. (Becque was born in 1837, died in 1900.)

And what is this naturalistic formula of Becque's that escaped the

notice of the zealous Zola and set the pace for nearly all the younger

men? Is it not the absence of a formula of the tricks of construction

religiously handed down by the Scribe-Sardou school? As is generally

the case, the disciples have gone their master one better in their

disdain of solid workmanship. The taint of the artificial, of the

sawdust, is missing in Becque's masterpieces; yet with all their large

rhythms, unconventional act-ends, and freedom from the _cliché_, there

is no raggedness in detail; indeed, close study reveals the presence

of a delicate, intricate mechanism, so shielded by the art of the

dramatist as to illude us into believing that we are in the presence

of unreasoned reality. Setting aside his pessimism, his harsh handling

of character, his seeming want of sympathy,--a true objectivity, for

he never takes sides with his characters,--Becque is as much a man of

the theatre as Sardou. He saw the mad futility of the literary men

who invaded the theatre full of arrogant belief in their formulas,

in their newer conventions that would have supplanted older ones.

A practical playwright, our author had no patience with those who

attempted to dispense with the frame of the footlights, who would turn

the playhouse into a literary farm through which would gambol all sorts

of incompetents masquerading as original dramatic thinkers.

Becque's major quality is his gift of lifelike characterization.

Character with him is of prime importance. He did not tear down the

structure of the drama but merely removed much of the scaffolding which

time had allowed to disfigure its façade. While Zola and the rest

were devising methods for doing away with the formal drama, Becque

sat reading Molière. Molière is his real master--Molière and life,

as Augustin Filon truthfully says. In his endeavour to put before us

his people in a simple, direct way he did smash several conventions.

He usually lands his audience in the middle of the action, omitting

the old-fashioned exposition act, careful preparation, and sometimes

development, as we know it in the well-regulated drama. But search for

his reasons and they are not long concealed. Logical he is, though it

is not the cruel logic of Paul Hervieu, his most distinguished artistic

descendant. The logic of Becque's events must retire before the logic

of his characters, that is all. Humanity, then, is his chief concern.

He cares little for literary style. He is not a stylist, though he has

style--the stark, individual style of Henry Becque.

Complications, catastrophe, dénouement, all these are attenuated

in the Becque plays. Atmosphere supplies the exposition, character

painting, action. The impersonality of the dramatist is profound. If

he had projected himself or his views upon the scene, then we would

have been back with Dumas and his preachments. Are we returning to the

Molière comedy of character? Movement in the accepted sense there is

but little. Treatment and interpretation have been whittled away to a

mere profile, so that in the Antoine repertory the anecdote bluntly

expressed and dumped on the boards a slice of real life without comment

--without skill, one is tempted to add.

Becque was nearer classic form than Hervieu, Donnay, De Curel, Georges

Ancey, Leon Hennique, Emile Fabre, Maurice Donnay, Lemaitre, Henri

Lavedan, and the rest of the younger group that delighted in honouring

him with the title of supreme master. After all, Becque's was a

modified naturalism. He recognized the limitations of his material, and

subdued his hand to them. M. Filon has pointed out that Becque and

his followers tried to bring their work "into line with the philosophy

of Taine," as Dumas and Augier's ideas corresponded with those of

Victor Cousin, the eclectic philosopher. Positivism, rather than naked

realism, is Becque's note. The cold-blooded pessimism that pervades so

unpleasantly many of his comedies was the resultant of a temperament

sorely tried by experience, and one steeped in the material-ism of the

Second Empire.

So we get from him the psychology of the crowd, instead of the hero

ego of earlier dramatists. He contrives a dense atmosphere, into

which he plunges his puppets, and often his people appear cold,

heartless, cynical. He is a surgeon, more like Ibsen than he would

ever acknowledge, in his calm exposure of social maladies. And what

a storehouse have been his studies of character for the generation

succeeding him! Becque forged the formula, the others but developed it.

The Becque plays! The last edition is in three volumes published by

_La Plume_ of Paris. It begins with an opera--fancy an opera by this

antagonist of romance!--entitled Sardanapale, in three acts, "imitated"

from Lord Byron. Victorin Joncières, a composer of respectable

ability, furnished the music. The "machine" was represented for the

first time at the Théâtre Lyrique, February 8, 1867. It need not

detain us. L'Enfant Prodigue, a four-act vaudeville, saw the light,

November 6, 1868, at the Théâtre Vaudeville. It is Becque at his

wittiest, merriest best. In an unpremeditated manner it displays a

mastery of intrigue that is amazing. For a man who despised mere

technical display, this piece is a shining exemplar of virtuosity.

Let those who would throw stones at Becque's nihilism in the matter

of conventional craftsmanship read The Prodigal Son and marvel at

its swiftness of action, its stripping the vessel of all unnecessary

canvas, and scudding along under bare poles! The comedy is unfailing,

the characterization rich in those cunning touches which are like salt

applied to a smarting wound. The plot is slight, the adventures of

several provincials who visit Paris and there become entangled in the

toils of a shrewd adventuress. The underplot is woven skilfully into

the main texture. Hypocrisy is scourged. A father and a son discover

that they are trapped by the same woman. There is _genre_ painting that

is Dutch in its admirable minuteness and truth; a specimen is the scene

at the _concierge's_ dinner. Wicked in the quality called _l'esprit

gaulois_, this farce is inimitable--and also a trifle old-fashioned.

In Michel Pauper,--given at the Porte-Saint-Martin, June, 1870,--Becque

was feeling his way to simpler methods. The drama is in five acts

and seven tableaux; and while it contains in solution all of Becque,

it may be confessed that the outcome is rather an indigestible mess.

The brutality of the opening scenes is undeniable. Michel is a

clumsy fellow, who does not always retain our sympathy or respect.

His courtship has all the delicacy of a peasant at pasture. But he

is alive, his is a salient character. The suicide of De La Roseraye

has been faithfully copied by Donnay in La Douloureuse, and by many

others in Paris, London, and America. Hélène, poor girl, who is so

rudely treated by Comte de Rivailler, would call forth a smile on

the countenance of any one when she announces her misfortune in this

stilted phraseology, "He asked of his own will what he could not obtain

from mine." The ending has a suspicion of the "arranged," even of the

violent melodramatic. And how shocking is the fall of Hélène! She

is the first of the Becque cerebral female monsters, though she has

at least more blood than some of his later creations. She loves the

Count--the shadow of an excuse for her destruction of her noble-minded

husband. However, one does not read Michel Pauper for amusement.

It is in L'Enlèvement that we find Becque managing with consummate

address a genuine problem. It was produced at the Vaudeville, November

18, 1871. The three acts pass at a château in the provinces. Emma de

Sainte-Croix, rather than endure the neglect and infidelities of her

husband, lives in dignified retirement with her mother-in-law. She is

a _femme savante_, though not of the odious blue-stocking variety. She

has a daily visitor in the person of a cultivated man who resides

in the neighbourhood. At once we are submerged in a situation. De La

Rouvre loves Emma. He, too, has been wretchedly mismated. His wife

was a despicable voluptuary who cheated him with his domestics. He

begs Emma to secure a divorce from her pleasure-loving husband. She

refuses. She loathes the divorce courts. She loathes vulgar publicity.

He proposes an elopement and is sharply brought to his senses by the

woman. She loves the proprieties too much to indulge in romantic

adventures, and has she not suffered enough through this love illusion?

Her mother-in-law does not approve of the man's presence. Her son is

always her son, and she hopes for reconciliation. If only Emma would be

a little more lenient!

The prodigal husband returns. He is an admirable blackguard who

respects neither his own honour nor that of his family. He flirts with

his wife at his mother's instigation, but his heart is not in the game.

Descends upon him one of his lady loves. She invades the château and

is introduced to his wife as a supposedly casual passer-by. But she is

detected as the worthless spouse of De La Rouvre. There is a scene.

Later Raoul, the husband, forces his way into his wife's bedchamber and

the episode on reading recalls Paul Hervieu's Le Dédale. The outcome,

however, is different. Repulsed, the husband curses his wife, and she

departs for India, elopes with her lover. Terse in dialogue, compact

in construction, L'Enlèvement contains some of the best of Becque.

Ibsen and Dumas are writ large in the general plan and dénouement,

though the character drawing is wholly Becque's. Despite his economy

of action and speech, he seldom gives one the feeling of abruptness

in transitional passages. His scenes melt one into the other without

a jar, and only after you have read or watched one of his plays do

you realize the labour involved to produce such an illusion of life

while disguising the controlling mechanism. All the familiar _points

de repires,_ the little tricks so dear to the average play-maker, are

absent. Becque conceals his technical processes, and in that sense he

has great art, though often seeming quite artless. And L'Enlèvement is

more than a picture of manners; it is as definitely a problem play as

A Doll's House. Only after being driven to it does Emma revolt. She is

a _révoltée_ of the cerebral type. The crowning insult is the attempt

made upon her right to her person. Hervieu's heroine is passional, and

it accounts for her lapse. We feel for her acutely. Emma's departure is

logical.

With La Parisienne, Becque is once more on his own ground. Paris and

its cynical view of the relations of the sexes is embodied in this

diabolically adroit and disconcerting comedy--represented for the first

time at the Comédie-Française, September 14, 1882, and reviewed at the

Odéon, November 3, 1897. The play is full of a _blague_ now slightly

outmoded, but the types remain eternally true--those of the Parisian

triangle. Only this three-cornered, even four-cornered, arrangement

(for there are two "dear friends") is played with amazing variations.

Clotilde du Mesnil and Lafont are quarrelling over a letter when the

curtain rises. He adjures her to resist temptation. "Resist, Clotilde;

that is the only honourable course, and the only course worthy of

you." She must remain dignified, honourable, the pride of her husband.

Suddenly, in the midst of this ignoble squabble, she cries, "Prenez

garde, voilà, mon mari!" Up to this moment the audience fancies that

it has been witnessing a marital row. The shock is tremendous when the

truth is learned. Nor are your feelings spared when later you hear

Clotilde accuse Lafont of not being fond of _her_ husband. The two

wrangle over the accusation. In another speech she exclaims: "Vous êtes

un libre penseur! Je crois que vous vous entendriez très bien avec une

maîtresse qui n'aurait pas de religion, quelle horreur!" This extremely

naïve statement reveals to us the land on the other side of good and

evil in which dwell Becque's characters. Are they even cynical? Hardly,

for there is no mockery, no parade of immorality, no speeches with

equivocal meanings. The calm assumption of external decency is merely

a reversion to the baldest paganism. It is the modern over-cynicism.

These people are so bad that, paradoxical as it may sound, they are

good. Certainly they are more refreshing and infinitely more moral

than that wretched Camille, with her repentant whimperings and her

nauseating speeches about soiled doves and their redemption.

And Lafont, stupid, loving, honest according to his lights, Lafont

so marvellously presented by Antoine, is he not a being who lives!

Clotilde as incarnated by Réjane is the worldling, neither stupid nor

witty. She is simply a good-natured, vain woman, who deceives her

husband and lover as naturally as she breathes.

Clotilde takes on a new _amant_, who treats her as badly as she treated

Lafont. Deserted, she picks up the old thread and begins to live as

before. As Mrs. Craigie says of this play: "There are critics who

mistaking the situation for the philosophy have called this piece

immoral. One would as soon call Georges Dandin or Tom Jones immoral. A

true book, a true play, cannot be otherwise than moral. It is the false

picture--no matter how pretty--which makes for immorality."

Throughout, these lovers quarrel like married folk. The social balance

is upset, domestic virtues topsy-turvied. And yet the merciless

stripping of the conventional romance,--the deluded husband, unhappy

wife, and charming consoler of the afflicted,--these old properties of

Gallic comedy are cast into the dust-bin. It is safe to say that since

La Parisienne no French dramatic author has had the courage to revive

the sentimental triangle as it was before this comedy was written. If

he ventured to, he would be laughed off the stage. And for suppressing

the sentimental married harlot let us be thankful to the memory of

Becque.

Les Corbeaux is unique in modern comedy. Never played, to my knowledge,

in English, its ideas, its characterization, its ground-plan, have

been often ruthlessly appropriated. The verb "to steal" is never

conjugated in theatreland. Yet this play's simplicity is appealing. A

loving father of a family, a good-tempered bourgeois, dies suddenly.

His affairs turn Out badly. His widow and three daughters fall into

the hands of the ravens, the partner of their father, his lawyer,

his architect, and a motley crew of tradespeople. Ungrateful matter

this for dramatic purposes. Scene by scene Becque exposes the outer

and inner life of these defenceless women and their secret and malign

persecutors. Every character is an elaborate portrait. Naturally, the

family go to the dogs, and the wickedest villain of the lot catches in

marriage the flower of the unhappy flock. His final speech is sublime,

"My child, since your father's death you were hemmed in by a lot of

designing scoundrels." And by inference he pats himself on the back,

he, the worst scoundrel of all. If you tell me that the theme is not a

pleasant or suitable one for the drama, I shall recommend you to the

spirit of the late Henry Becque for answer. Les Corbeaux is the bible

of the dramatic realists.

Remain seven small pieces, principally in one act. La Navette is

wicked--and amusing. It aims at nothing else. Les Honnêtes Femmes might

have been written by Dumas. It is a sugar-coated sermon extemporized by

a young married woman for the benefit of a presumptive lover. She finds

him a bride, and the curtain falls. Le Départ is of sterner metal.

Here Becque beats Zola at his own game. The scene represents a working

girl's atelier in a Parisian store. The various women are clearly

outlined, so clearly that Huysmans in Sœurs Vatard is recalled. One

girl is honest. She is honourable enough to refuse an offer of marriage

made by the foolish young son of the proprietor, and for this wisdom

receives insults from the father and is finally discharged for being

too virtuous. She then incontinently goes to the devil. The devastating

irony of the dramatist illuminates this little piece with sinister

effect And the moral is never far to seek in Becque--perhaps a twisted

moral, yet not altogether a negligible one. In Veuve we find our old

friend Clotilde of La Parisienne, now a widow. Her behaviour to her

faithful admirer is a study of feminine malice, not only seen "through

a temperament," but the outcome of unerring observation. Madeleine is

a depressing sketch of a woman with a past who is educating her child

at a convent It has poignant moments. The other two little affairs, Le

Domino à Quart and Une Exécution, are exercises in pure humour of the

volatile Parisian sort.

Becque's touch is light in comedy, rather clumsy in set drama. He is,

as a rule, without charm, and he never indulges in mock pathos or cheap

poetic flights. He excelled in depicting manners, and his dramatic

method, as I have endeavoured to show, was direct and free from

antique rhetoric and romantic turgidities. He has been superseded by

a more comprehensive synthesis; France is become weary of the cynical

sinners--yet that does not invalidate the high ranking of this man

of genius. Whatever may be his deficiencies in the purely spiritual,

Henry Becque will ever remain a commanding figure in the battalion of

brilliant French dramatists.

IV

GERHART HAUPTMANN

Der Mensch, das ist ein Ding Das sich von ungefâhr bei uns verfing:

Von dieser Welt und doch auch nicht von ihr: Zur Hälfte--wo? wer

weiss?--zur Hälfte hier. Halb unser Bruder und aus uns Geboren Uns

feind und freund zur Hälfte und verloren.

_--Die Versunkene Glocke._

In the figure of Gerhart Hauptmann we encounter a man of genius,

a man of European significance, and more than the standard-bearer

of Young Germany. True, Hauptmann did graduate from the seminary

of the realists,--the heads of which were Arno Holz and Johannes

Schlaf,--writing, under the name of Bjarne P. Holmsen, that delectable,

ironic fantasy, Papa Hamlet But the dramatic poetic instincts of

the Silesian youth--he was born at Salzbrunn, 1862, the son of a

hotel-keeper--were not long to be penned behind the bars of a formula.

As in Goethe's Faust, two spirits travailed furiously within him.

Ultra-idealist in his boyhood, he suffered from the green-sickness of

Byronism, and wrote poems in imitation of Byron, Hebbel, Schiller. He

studied sculpture at Rome for a time and set up an atelier there. His

epic, Promethidenlos (1885), was as subjective as a restless, unhappy

young man of twenty-three could make it. Yet there is no mistaking the

chord set clanging by its immature music--the chord of sympathy with

human suffering, the true Hauptmann leit-motiv that may be equally

heard in his first drama, Before Sunrise, and in his latest, Rose Bernd.

The critical allotment of Hauptmann to the Ibsen domain is easy,

too easy; he has been greatly influenced by the "red star of the

north," though it has not been a baleful one. He owes as much to

Zola as to Ibsen, as Zola owes in his turn much to Victor Hugo and

Jean Jacques Rousseau. Young Germany itself, Karl Bleibtreu, Conrad

Alberti, Sudermann, Halbe, Conradi, Kretzer, and the rest were in the

fashioning of the _Freie Bühne_ heavily indebted to Antoine and his

revolutionary Théâtre Libre. Under the spell of the mystic and lyric

prose of Friedrich Nietzsche--surely among the most musical that

issued from German lips--individualism became an all-absorbing element

in the production of art works. It was the old leaven of Max Stirner

and his Der Einzige. John Henry Mackay, the Scotch-German, hymned in

almost delirious verse the rights of the Ego; even the cool-headed

East Prussian Sudermann felt the impact of this lyric anarchism when

he published his Three Heron Feathers. As to Hauptmann, whose lyre was

ever more sensitive to the mobility of the moral atmosphere, this wind

of individualism swept him along and he wrote Before Sunrise. It was

produced in 1889, and at once its author was recognized as a force.

Socialistic, this play is almost as rank as La Terre. Technically

it has many weak spots, but the basic idea is capital. The Krauses,

suddenly come into money, afforded the dramatist opportunities for his

still immature but profoundly true gifts of characterization. It is a

depressing crowd he sets before us, drunkenness being the least of its

defects. Helene Krause is betrothed to the lover of her step-mother,

and when Alfred Loth, a high-minded socialist, appears, she naturally

falls in love with him. Loth, warned by a doctor--an excellently

conceived character--that it were insane to marry into a tainted

family, leaves a letter for Helene and vanishes. She promptly kills

herself. The final curtain is harrowing. There is exaggerated realism

and also that curious tendency, which has developed instead of abating,

of dealing with depraved types. Friedensfest (1890), which followed,

begins to show Hauptmann more conscious of his own talents. The Scholz

family is accurately studied and presented. The dénouement baldly

stated--an unhappy father come home to die in a household from which

he has been banished by his conduct--smacks of German sentimentality.

Here the poet demonstrated that all lies in the individual handling

of the theme. The moral is "Peace on earth, good will to men," and

this unhappy pessimistic family is made to realize the strength of the

collectivist ideal. The same year Einsame Menschen appeared, in which

Ibsen's influence is paramount. It reads like a variant of Rosmersholm,

diluted though it be. If it proves anything, it is that the unpurified

is to be distrusted because it brings unhappiness in its train. The

Vockerat family is a fairly contented group until the appearance of

Anna Mahr, a young woman from Zurich University who has absorbed the

unsettling culture of the day. She speedily unseats the judgment of

John Vockerat, and in becoming his affinity she makes him neglect his

lovely wife. It is all so Ibsenian that we note with a sense of the

incongruous the scene of the action, the Müggelsee near Berlin. John

hates the religion of his parents, becomes estranged from these kindly

folk, throws himself on the mercy of Anna, who, after lecturing him

in the true-blue cerebral style of the emancipated woman, goes away.

Distracted, the young man drowns himself.

Notwithstanding technical and psychologic advances, this effort is

not so convincing as Before Sunrise. One feels the thesis prepared,

the task attacked, and not the spontaneous work of art. Charles

Henry Meltzer, Hauptmann's friend and English translator, declares

that Before Sunrise was written while the poet was still filled

with admiration of Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness, and after many

conversations with Arno Holz and Bruno Wille, the socialist. In one

respect it is very remarkable--the evocation of atmosphere. And some

critics see in Anna Mahr a forerunner to Hilda Wangel of The Master

Builder.

When, however, Die Weber was printed (1892), all Germany knew that

the master had appeared. It was not until February, 1893, that

the first performances took place on the _Freie Bühne_, Deutsches

Theatre, Berlin. The drama stands at the parting of the ways. Not

since Wagner's Die Meistersinger had such an attempt been made to

clear the German stage of its gingerbread rhetoric, its pasteboard

mock-antiques, its moonshine romantics. And while the Wagner comedy was

all grace, sweetness, and light and only epical in its vast machinery

of narration, The Weavers was a quivering transcript from life--and

such life! Germany took fire from the blaze of the dramatist's generous

wrath. Socialism or anarchy, what you will, were swallowed up in the

presentment of this veracious document of wretched lives. Yet, while

its _tendenz_ is unmistakably an arraignment of the wealthy classes,

of the _bourgeois_ master weavers, as is Zola's stern denunciation in

Germinal of unfeeling mine owners, Hauptmann, being the finer artist,

does not drive his lesson home with a moral sledge-hammer. He paints

the picture; his audience finds the indictment. Here is a new German

art at last.

And not altogether unprepared for this violent drama should have been

his admirers. His short _nouvelle_, Bahnwärter Thiel, is full of pity

for the downtrodden. This story sounds like a transposition of a Zola

melodrama to a finer key. The companion tale in the same volume, The

Apostle, might have been written by Dostoïevsky.

In Die Weber,--or De Waber, as it is called in the patois of

Silesia,--Hauptmann is for the first time Hauptmann. Zola and Ibsen are

no longer felt, for the resemblance to An Enemy of the People is of the

vaguest. Henceforth it is the masses, not the individual. Raised in the

weaving districts of Silesia, his grandfather a weaver and a witness

of a similar strike with its dire consequences,--Robert Hauptmann,

his father, also sat at the loom--the subject was one that could be

treated with epic breadth and eloquence by the poet. The mob is the

hero, for old Hilfe is only a representative of his class. Baumert

the soldier, Ansorge, the women, the blind wife, and the climax where

old Hilfe is dead and the little Mielchen tells with babyish joy the

story of the shooting--every character, every incident, rings true, and

rang so widely and so well that it set pealing the bells of the world.

If Hauptmann had died after writing Die Weber, he would have been

acclaimed a great dramatist.

It was Matthew Arnold who Englished Joubert's soul's cry, "You hurt

me!" In this moving and gloomy and largely planned tragedy of the

lowly, Hauptmann holds no brief for anarchy, plays upon no class

sentiment. He seems as objective as Flaubert, yet no play that I

ever witnessed is such a judgment of man and his cruelty to his

fellow-beings.

The ancients, who sounded the abysmal depths of despair, crime, and

terror, nevertheless contrived some relief; if no other, the artistic

form itself palliated the awful content of a tragedy of Æschylus. But

Hauptmann, with absolute indifference to our moral epidermis, strips

bare for us human nature, and we revolt naturally enough. The truth,

naked and unadorned, is always unpleasant. Pascal once wrote: "When I

see the blindness and the misery of man; when I survey the whole dumb

universe and man without light, left to himself and lost, as it were,

in this corner of the universe, not knowing who placed him here, what

he has come to do, what will become, of him when he dies, and incapable

of any knowledge whatever, I fall into terror, like that of a man who,

having been carried in his sleep to an island, desert and terrible,

should awake ignorant of his whereabouts and with no means of escape,

and therefore I wonder how those in so miserable a state do not fall

into despair." What would he not have written after witnessing this

play?

The Weavers is a parable. The Weavers is a symphony in five movements,

with one grim, leading motive--hunger. In every act you hear that

ominous, that sickening word "hunger." The necessity of such a play

is chilling to our pampered and capricious appetites. Hunger! What a

horrible theme for an art work! The northern novelist, Knut Hamsun, has

in a more personal style used the same theme. We love blithe art, art

imbued with deep serenity,--_heiterkeit,_ Winckelmann called it,--so

away with this grim phantom, evoked by a ruthless imagination! But what

if it be true? That is the affair of the Commissioner of Charities. We

pay our taxes. Go to, Herr Hauptmann, go to! We prefer illusionists,

not unmaskers of grim truths. Yet hunger!

"There is," wrote Thomas Hardy, "a size at which dignity begins;

farther on there is a size at which grandeur begins; farther on there

is a size at which solemnity begins; farther on a size at which

ghastliness begins."

The novelist was speaking of the interstellar universe. In Die Weber

there are depths where ghastliness begins. It is not a play, it is a

chorale of woe, malediction, and want. The people, hardly civilized,

are put before us, a marvellous vitascope of pain and disease. What

avails criticism before such a spectacle?

It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the grewsome story of this

play--how the weavers starved, how the weavers revolted, and that

wonderful ending, old age stiffened in death and childhood merrily

unconscious. It recalls Victor Hugo's precipice with its single

crannied rose in full bloom. And The Weavers was the first modern play

that deals with the life of the proletarians.

College Crampton (1892), Der Biberpelz (1893), Hannele (1893), Florian

Geyer (1896), Die Versunkene Glocke (1897), Fuhrmann Henschel(1898),

Schluck und Jau (1900), Michael Kramer (1900), Der rote Hahn (1901),

Der Arme Heinrich (1902), Rose Bernd (1903), complete the list thus

far of this fecund and remarkable man. He has felt his way through

naturalistic drama to comedy, and in the latter without much success;

and from comedy to historical drama, with no success at all; indeed,

Florian Geyer was a failure, though in its amended version as given

last October 22, in Berlin, at the Lessing Theatre, it won approval,

critical and popular. The poet has written a new five-act comedy for

the same theatre, which he calls The Merry Maiden of Bishopsberg.

The Beaver-Coat and The Red Cock--the symbol of fire--are folk-plays,

the comedy rather grim, the sense of actuality strong. The first is

a "thieves' comedy" and the fooling is heavy enough in both pieces;

the latter is a continuation. German officialism is parodied. Schluck

und Jau was also a failure. Written partially in prose and verse, it

recalls Calderon, Grillparzer, Shakespeare's prologue to The Taming of

the Shrew, and Hauptmann himself. Although Fuhrmann Henschel followed

Hannele and The Sunken Bell, we prefer to speak of it and several other

plays before those two masterpieces. Wagoner Henschel was a surprise

and a deep disappointment to many of Hauptmann's admirers. He seemed

to return to the most sordid of topics, yet it contains passages of

spiritual beauty; while as a whole the note it sounds is a supernatural

one, despite the vileness of its surroundings. The psychologic

depiction of Henschel's downfall is masterly. He is a stolid teamster

whose first wife in her death-bed makes him promise not to marry the

servant girl, Hanna Scholl. But he does, for some one must look after

his daughter. The moral _dégringolade_ begins. The woman is a vicious

slattern. She is unfaithful. Things go badly. Henschel comes to believe

that his first wife haunts him, and kills himself. It is very morbid,

but it fits in the Hauptmann scheme, as Professor J. F. Coar in his

Studies in German Literature shows: "Hannele contrasted spiritual

consciousness with moral consciousness. And Henry in The Sunken Bell

fails because he attempts what his creator, Hauptmann, attempted in

Hannele. How, then, shall a poet find his quest rewarded? Only by

seeking the spiritual mirrored in the moral. Hauptmann is far from

having such a vision in Teamster Henschel; still he is to be credited

with the effort to obtain it. Again, he could only see the misery of

life.... In constantly narrowing circles the thoughts of Henschel turn

about the one tense feeling of wrong committed when he married again

in violation of his promise. The infidelity of the second wife appears

to him like the judgment of God.... At night the figure of his dead

wife lies down with him.... There is no trace of dialectical reasoning

in this simple Silesian teamster. He stands facing existence without

the ability to apply his reason to anything but the humdrum affairs of

life. Once forced beyond the bounds of these, reason gives way, and he

is gradually led into a pessimistic fatalism from which there is no

escape. But to create by transforming spiritual life into moral action

is the law of individual existence, and men, as Hauptmann sees them,

are in the world for this purpose."

On the material side Fuhrmann Henschel might be called a drama of

insomnia. The majority of the Hauptmann plays record the struggle

of mankind to widen its spiritual horizon. College Crampton is an

exception. It is merely an entertaining piece shorn of tragic meanings.

Moreover, it contains some excellent comedy and characterization. The

hero--a sorry one--drinks. Michael Kramer ends with the suicide of a

foolish talented young fellow, who is jeered to the desperate deed by

a lot of idlers in a Silesian café. The types are local. Kramer, his

father, is an austere artist. The _milieu_ is the artistic, though as

drama we are never carried off our feet. Loosely joined episodes and

too much dialogue mar the piece. There are, however, many deft touches,

and the scene wherein Kramer views his dead son is full of reserve

power and suggestiveness. Nearly all these plays enumerated thus far

are irregular on the constructive side, withal effective and human.

Hauptmann has ever been careless in his technics. The well-made play is

never in his thoughts, for he works from within to external details.

Even in his imitative period he betrayed this creative impulse.

Der Arme Heinrich is not Hauptmann at his happiest, despite rare

flashes of beauty and power in this replica of a mediæval miracle play.

The theme is unpleasant, a leprous knight rescued by the unselfish pure

love of a maiden--an idea as old as The Flying Dutchman, though set

forth in different terms, framed by another environment. It is rather

to Hannele and Die Versunkene Glocke we must turn for the greater

Hauptmann.

In Hannele and in his other dramatic productions he has proved himself

to possess in a consummate degree the art of arousing certain emotions,

of presenting most vividly certain types which have excited his brain

into abnormal activity; above all he knows the art of contrasts. He

is an idealist, he is a realist, he is a religionist, he is a natural

philosopher. After carefully analyzing Hannele, on is tempted to

pronounce it the work of a transcendental realist.

The play is the history of a child's soul. It is a psychological study

of the brain of a wretched little outcast, who, just before her death,

experiences delirious trances, in which condition the events and

personages of her unhappy life become objective visions, and these

visions are seen by the audience. The story is so simply, so chastely

told that one marvels effects can be produced by a verbal machinery of

such simplicity. The disgust inspired by the quarrelling, fetid crew

of beggars in the almshouse gives way to feelings of the most profound

pity at the entrance of the poor little would-be suicide. Her first

words, "I'm afraid," inspire sensations of pity at her condition, and

horror of the brute who drove her to the commission of such a desperate

deed. Hauptmann's touch is so true, so tender, that he evokes with ease

the whole past of this wretched girl, whose existence has been one of

blows, curses, kicks, and starvation. Her undeveloped soul, cramped as

it had been by her neglected life, has awakened under the kindnesses of

her teacher Gottwald, and how natural that he should be invested by her

with almost supernatural attributes!

Hauptmann conveys all this and more through the half-scared utterances

of Hannele, who refuses to respond to the pertinacious questionings

of Magistrate Berger, and only speaks when Gottwald asks her to. She

appears to be a stubborn girl, but it is a stubbornness born of hard

beatings and harsh language. She has been the butt of the village

children, and the one ray of light which has entered her life is her

teacher, and through him some glimmerings of religion. Heaven to her

is a place all golden glory, whose Lord is overflowing with pity for

unhappy children, and where she can eat, drink, and be warm. She has

been half starved and turned out in the streets on biting cold winter

nights. It is most natural that she should long earnestly for this

heaven, and her appeals to be allowed to die, so that she could see

the Lord, are eloquent to a degree. She is only a beggar girl, this

Hannele, and Hauptmann gives her to us in all her rags and misery, and

free from mawkish sentimentality.

Pity is the dominating note of the play, especially in part first;

Hannele's bruised body, shrinking, sensitive soul, arouse the deepest

pity. The transition to an atmosphere where the elements of awe and

fear enter is quietly accomplished by the dramatist. Hannele's delirium

is the medium. When she first appears in the strong arms of her teacher

she is numbed by the icy waters of the pond, but the warmth of the hot

drink and the hot bricks soon revive her and she wanders a little in

her speech. She tells Gottwald that it was the Lord who beckoned to

her in the water, and when she is left alone with Sister Martha, she

screams with fear at the sight of old Daddy Pleschke's hat and coat,

which hang at the foot of her miserable bed. The child thinks she sees

her stepfather.

But mark the skill of Hauptmann. After she is left alone her dreams

begin to assume a more definite shape, and then we, sitting in

the darkened auditorium, see Mattern, the mason, her brute of a

stepfather, as a vile nightmare. He acts and speaks to the little form

on the bed as he would in real life, and it writhes in agony, and

finally Hannele, her brain on fire with the hideous vision, awakens to

his call, and jumps tremblingly out of bed, rushes into a corner for

shelter, and there faints.

The return of Sister Martha, the replacing of Hannele on her couch,

are followed by the further progress of the fever and delirium. Being

alone, a vision of her mother appears. It is the most striking of the

play. Her mother consoles her, speaks of heaven in tender and lofty

imagery, and hints at her suffering while alive, and just grazes the

subject of Hannele's birth. Her suspected father is the examining

magistrate Berger, but the idea is lightly dwelt upon--sufficiently,

however, to give us a glimmer of the truth and adding a deeper accent

to the gloom. Hannele's mother was hounded to her death as was this

child. Her body, as we know by the testimony of the wood-cutter,

Seidel, was a mass of bruises after death. The interview between mother

and daughter is solemn and yet piteously human. The poor child cries

aloud after the fading figure and later shows with joy to Sister Martha

the supposed flower, Golden Sesame, which her mother gave her. Then

this tiny waif of the gutter becomes light-headed and sings of flowers,

of her teacher, and of the angels she has seen. From this delirious

state she never recovers, and her dreams take on a darker tinge in the

second part of the play.

A great dark angel appears and remains dumb to the child's excited

questionings. Her visions become involved here, for the Deaconess is

also seen, and while she is habited as Sister Martha, her features

are those of Hannele's mother. The child notices this and remarks

upon it. And now a touch of Hoffmannish fantasy is given in the

appearance of the village tailor, who salutes her as the Princess

Hannele, and delights her by producing a shining robe and a pair of

small slippers. Although she knows she is preparing for her death-bed,

she is delighted. Her conversation with the Deaconess has taught her

that death is not to be avoided--that it is the gate to joys eternal.

There is something subtly sad in this child eagerly asking about death

and the hereafter, with the awful symbol of death sitting in grim

silence before her. Hauptmann has deeply probed the childish heart. The

fantastic tailor retires after deferentially saluting Death, and then

some children, headed by Gottwald, enter and beg Hannele's pardon for

calling her Princess Rag-tag. Gottwald is bidding her farewell when a

lot of the village people appear, and later the crystal coffin into

which Hannele is laid. There is nothing repulsive in all this, despite

its realism. Hauptmann's art is so far removed from the crude that

sequence follows sequence in the most natural fashion and just as in De

Quincey's Dream Fugue.

Then comes the most dramatic part of these visions. Mattern slouches

in and begins to curse Hannele, and to search for her in the dark

corners. The neighbours cluster about the coffin, hiding it from view.

The stranger enters and calls Mattern to account. There is a scene

between the two. Mattern denies having treated the child badly, and

thunder and lightning rebuke him for the lie. He perjures himself, and

the mystic flower glows with miraculous light on Hannele's breast. The

neighbours, who play the part of Greek chorus, fiercely cry, "Murderer!

murderer!" and as one pursued by the Furies the miserable wretch rushes

away to hang himself. The stranger assumes a supernatural appearance.

He becomes clothed in white, and his brow shines. He advances to the

crystal basket wherein lies Hannele, and bids her arise. She does so,

and the neighbours flee affrighted. Remember that all this occurs

within the darkened chambers of Hannele's sick brain. Its objectivity,

so far as we are concerned, is a device of the dramatist. Hannele

arises and goes to the stranger, who is a glorified image of her

teacher, Gottwald. Some lyrical passages, strongly tinged with Oriental

colouring, follow, and an apotheosis closes the scene.

After all this burst of colour and harmony, for there is much music of

harps and plucked strings, we are almost instantly transported to the

almshouse again, and see Hannele once more in her rags on her squalid

bed. The doctor gravely announces, "She is dead," and Sister Martha

ends the play by saying, "She is in heaven."

Now make of Hannele what you will. Consider it as a plea against

cruelty to children, as a strong pictorial proverb, anything. There is

symbolism lurking in its situations. The Christ-idea of pity, an idea

new to the pagan world, but not new to Buddhism, may be considered as

the key-note of Hannele. Religious it is not. Blasphemous, however, in

intention it is not, and one fails to see any similarity between it and

Jean Beraud's picture of a Christ attired in nineteenth-century garb

and with a modern Magdalen washing his feet.

Hauptmann may tread on remarkably delicate ground at times; but his

seriousness and artistic ingenuity have enabled him to produce a most

poetic analysis of a soul and give it dramatic rhythms. To have the

courage to give permanent shape to such a fantastic dream requires,

besides imagination, marked technical abilities.

To me Hannele seems like a huge chant to the glory of death. Death,

"whose truer name is Onward," as sang the poet, is the theme, and

Death is shown to be Lord and Master. Like Maeterlinck, Hauptmann

tries to give emotion in the mass. You remember in L'Intruse and Les

Aveugles, how everything is subordinated to the production of the one

thrill--that of fear. By dissimilar method Hauptmann gets a similar

result. He meets death with a grave sweetness. At first terrible as is

the figure of the great Dark Angel, with his dread sword all bathed in

greenish light, the Deaconess brings balm to the anxious, questioning

soul of the child, and she meets death with dignity and submission.

With some of the same gentle and elevated philosophy does Hauptmann

approach his theme. The beggar child and her sufferings and dreams

serve for him as something which he drapes about with wisdom and poetry.

It is a reversion to the old miracle play cunningly blended with

modern realism; it is this that makes its form seemingly amorphous,

and renders it both a challenge and stumbling-block to the critics.

From the old view-point such a play as this is not fit for the boards.

It lacks action, and deals with states of emotion rather than with

dramatic events. But a soul life can also be dramatic, and Hauptmann,

who knows Parsifal well, has retained an admixture of realism so as to

set off by violent contrast the exalted idealism of the later scenes.

Jules Lemaître, the French critic, in praising Hannele, spoke of the

persistency in us of early religious impressions, no matter how blurred

they become by contact with the world. Oddly enough, this mixture of

the real and the supernatural forestalled Gorky and his slum plays.

Gorky himself could not have conceived and executed anything more

poignant than the story of Hannele--"Petite sœur de la grande

Brunnhild endormie aux rochers déserts," as Gabriel Trarieux calls

her. A dream poem, a study in mysticism, Hannele evokes memories of

Maeterlinck, though it "lacks the unity of his atmosphere," as an

English critic has rightly said. But it is moving art, nevertheless.

Hauptmann wears all the earmarks of a genius. He is child of his

age to a dangerous degree, and his tremulous, vibrating sensibility

mirrored the hysterical agitation, the pessimism, the sad strivings,

the individualism, the fret-fire fomentings and unbelief of a dying

century. He knows Goethe, and after the last act of The Sunken Bell

one feels constrained to cry, "The third part of Faust!" But it is

not Faust, neither is it Tannhäuser, though there are analogies; it

is realism, it is idealism, it is pantheism, it is Wagnerism. Above

all Friedrich Nietzsche towers in the background, and there is poesy,

exquisite poesy.

The Sunken Bell is a compound of antagonistic elements. The unities

seem askew, yet the result is artistic and illusory. Hauptmann has a

clairvoyant quality; he imposes upon his audience his dream of his

own fantastic world, and you find yourself five minutes after the

rise of the curtain devoutly believing in this queer No-man's land

of mischievous water goblins, satyrs, wonderful white nymphs, and

sorrowful mortals. It is all a masque--a profound masque of the spirit

in labour. Viewed as a symbol, we see in Heinrich the bell-founder, the

type of the struggling, the aspiring artist, who, cast down by defeat,

is led to more remote and loftier heights by a new ideal, there to live

the life of the Uebermensch, the Super-man, of Nietzsche. The fall is

inevitable. Dare as dared Faust and Ibsen's Brand to desert the valleys

and scale the slopes of Parnassus, and man's fate is assured.

Hauptmann's hero is a bell-founder who, crazed by grief at the loss

of his bell in the lake, mounts the peak and lies dying at the door

of a witch. It is at a period so charmingly pictured by Heine. The

twilight of the gods has begun and the scared peasant caught flashes

of faun-like creatures flitting in woodland glade and grove, still saw

shining the breasts of the nymph in the brake, and piously crossed

himself when toad, snake, and worm crossed his path. Heinrich is found

by Rautendelein, an elfish being, an exquisite creation of fire, of

flame, something of Ariel, Miranda, Puck, naïve Gretchen, a new Undine,

a symbol of the freedom of nature, a creature touched with the vaguer

surmise of adolescence, the most poetically conceived since Goethe's,

and yet evocative of Hans Christian Andersen. She, like the mermaid

of Andersen, loves the unconscious mortal, and despite the jaundiced

warnings of an old spirit of the well, she follows the sick man back to

his abode. The first act is ably contrived. There is atmosphere, and

the well-nigh impossible parts of the faun and the frog man--the latter

indulges in the familiar _Brek-ke-ke-keks_ of Aristophanes--become

real for the moment. It is the Hauptmann spell that weighs upon our

senses. Andersen-like, too, is the discovery by this child fairy that

love means pain. She finds a tear in her eye and thinks it is dew. The

mystery of womanhood encompasses her.

In Act II the bellman is upon abed of delirium. He has been found

and brought down from the mountains by his friends, the priest and

the villagers. His wife and children try to comfort him, but he is

oblivious, for he sees in his excited trance the figure of a beautiful

girl. Suddenly the dream becomes real. Rautendelein sits at his side

and woos him back to health. Startling is the end of this scene. The

nymph stands against the wall, her eyes fairly blazing at Heinrich,

while his wife crouches at his feet, happy at his restoration to

sanity. She does not see his glance fondly fastened on the nymph of the

forest.

He then leaves his home and goes up to the heights, where, unhampered,

he may exercise the full play of his artistic faculties. He will make a

bell and tune it to the laughter of Rautendelein. It shall make silvery

music across the hills and valleys, and summon the stray souls of earth

to him. He exalts nature to the priest who follows him to reclaim his

soul; this third act is really a glorified burst of Nietzscheism. Then

he has bad dreams; he is haunted by visions of home, and, after all the

splendour of imagery, of his defiance of the conventionalities of life,

something mars his life with the perfect woman he has elected to follow.

Appear his two children carrying an urn. "What carry ye?" he demands.

"Father, we carry an urn."--"What is in the urn?" "Father, something

bitter."--"What is the something bitter?" "Father, our mother's

tears."--"Where is your mother?" "Where the water-lilies grow."

Then booms down in the valley, where lies the lake, the sound of a

bell; an unearthly tone it has, as if struck by no mortal hand; it is

touched by the hand of his dead wife who killed herself to escape her

misery. Remorse sets in. He is no longer Balder the god of Spring, but

a wretched man, and, driving away with revilings the poor Rautendelein,

he descends to the valley, but is driven away, and finally dies in

front of the witch's hut; but not before Rautendelein finds him. His

last words are an ecstatic appeal to the sun--the sun which is the

symbol of his striving.

The charm, the witchery, the magical bitter-sweetness of this

dramatic poem are formidable at the close. Heinrich dies of poison,

self-administered, while through his filmy eyes there presses the

vision of the beloved one. It is, indeed, Rautendelein, but her very

shadow. Deserted, dreary, neither maid nor mortal nor nymph, she

accepts the love of the hideous, frog-like Nickelman, and goes down to

his slimy couch in the well. She emerges only to see her lover dying,

and pathetically denies to him that she is Rautendelein. As the curtain

falls on his corpse, we catch a glimpse of the girl sadly returning to

the well and to her horrible mate in the mud.

Sorma gave a delicious, naïve, and plastic version of the nymph at the

Irving Place Theatre in 1897. She possesses an exquisite sensibility.

She painted with a light hand the caprice, elfish cunning, and wiles of

Rautendelein, and at the close the tragic note was delicately sounded.

It was a great, a notable achievement.

Sorma has been called the German Duse. She is really a Silesian by

birth, and she is not a Duse. But she has unusual adroitness in the

expression of the conventional dramatic symbolism, and an agility in

technic and a variety of vocal and facial expression that enable her

to assume a wide range of character. A certain briskness and imperious

piquancy make her work unlike that of the German stage. She is more

Gallic, in reality more Slavic than Gallic. Her person is finely

fashioned, her features good, her eyes particularly expressive, and her

mask mobile and expressive easily of a mob of elusive emotions. She

reaches her climax by a rational crescendo, and never fails to thrill.

Altogether a creature of real fire and with an air of distinction. Of

the occasional sentimentality of the German stage she is never guilty.

Mr. Meltzer in the preface of his admirable translation tells us

"to view the play from the standpoint of the reformer, and you may

interpret it as the tale of a dreamer, who, hampered by inevitable

conditions, strives to remodel human society. For my part I incline to

regard Heinrich the bell-founder as a symbol of Humanity struggling

painfully toward the realization of its dream of the ideal truth and

joy and light and justice. Rautendelein in this reading stands for

Nature, or rather for the freedom and sincerity of Nature, missing a

reunion with which Humanity can never hope to reach the supreme truth,

and the supreme bliss of which the Sun is the emblem."

The artist _sans_ moral obligations is bound to be a failure, no matter

the height or depth of his genius. This has Tennyson sung; and Goethe,

in his imperial manner, has set it forth. Symbolic and allegoric The

Sunken Bell may signify the conflict of Pagan and Christian, Jew and

Greek, Heinrich standing midway between the opposing forces as did

Walter Pater's Denys in the mad days at Auxerrois. Miraculously has the

poet fixed his wild people of wood and waves. They with their coarse,

elemental gestures and foolery might have stepped out of a canvas by

Arnold Böcklin. The blank verse is admirable, and while the Faust metre

is largely used there are no such lyrics as we find strewn through

Goethe's immortal pages. And yet--yet is not Hauptmann Germany's most

distinguished dramatist since that master? The admirers of Robert

Hamerling and Von Wildenbruch will not have it so--possibly because of

the pessimism and the socialistic views of the new man. Nevertheless,

Hauptmann has the ear of all Germany to-day.

In Rose Bernd, Hauptmann returns to his beloved Silesians of The

Weavers, of Fuhrmann Henschel, of Before Sunrise. His new five-act

piece is a drama of the open fields and rough peasant life. It is

atmospheric throughout. Its moral fibre is incontestably strong,

though the method of presentation may seem unpleasant. The dialect

is difficult for the student, the play itself squalid and painful to

a degree. Nor has it the inevitable quality of Die Weber or Wagoner

Henschel. Rose recalls, though vaguely, something of Tess of the

D'Urbervilles, of Hetty Sorrel, and of Gretchen. She is a worker

in the harvest fields, and previous to the action of the play has

been deceived by Christoph Flamm, the mayor of the district and a

jolly landowner who has a paralyzed wife. He is a vital figure; his

exuberance, unrepentance, selfishness, and genuine passion for Rose are

all minutely indicated. His wife has been a second mother to Rose, who

resides with her father, a poor old peasant, a strict pietist. Frau

Flamm has lost her only child and lives on her memories. She is wheeled

about her house in an invalid's chair. She, too, is alive, and her not

unkindly probing of the unfortunate girl's secret brings about some

stirring scenes.

Rose is engaged to a young man, a book-binder, who is pious, whose

dream was to become a missionary. He is unassuming, ugly, and adores

Rose. She might have surmounted her troubles if the disturbing element

in the person of Streckmann, the dissipated engineer of the village

threshing machine, had not crossed her fate. He has witnessed the

interviews of Rose and Flamm, and he scares her by threatening to tell

the story to her father and her betrothed. He attempts to capture her

for himself, and at last succeeds, as the wretched girl relates in

accusing him: "I came to you in terror and anguish. I got on my knees

before you. You swore that you would keep my secret. You fell upon me

like a bird of prey. I tried to escape ... you committed a crime."

Streckmann later, in drunken fury, tells the peasants of Rose's sins.

Her father believes in her, but insists upon an explanation. The

miserable creature confesses in a delirious accent that she has just

strangled her new-born babe. Her father has her arrested, and her

patient lover August, who has forgiven her, lifts the swooning girl and

exclaims, "Hat das mädel gelitten!" (What the girl must have suffered!)

The play was forbidden the boards in Austria by the Emperor--it was at

once too moral and too truthful.

The interpretation at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, which I witnessed,

October 2, 1904, was one the memory of which I shall long treasure.

The distribution of the rôles was almost faultless; the individual

execution of a high order. Rose was enacted by that great artist, Else

Lehmann, who portrayed the trying soul states and mental agony of the

unfortunate peasant girl with supreme skill. All the more difficult is

the character because Hauptmann has resolutely avoided showing us what

Rose really thinks. She is reacted upon by her friends and enemies, yet

seldom speaks, except in mono-syllables. The illumination of her nature

was a peculiar triumph of Lehmann's simple, sincere art.

Next to her artistically stood Hedwig Pauly as the invalid wife who

knows the manner of man to whom she is united and divines through

feminine intuition and sympathy the sufferings of Rose. The scene

wherein the girl is interrogated was tear-compelling. Nor must the

open-air incidents be forgotten. Herr Brahm's company played throughout

with that fidelity to life, with that utter absence of "acting," which

are the very essence of the histrionic art.

Rose Bernd, one is tempted to add, is Hauptmann's masterpiece, if we

did not remember Die Weber. It is deeply human, and in its exposition

of character a masterpiece.

It seems Hauptmann's fate to be hopelessly misinterpreted--he, the poet

whose love for his fellow-beings is become a veritable passion. He

began his artistic life as a poet-sculptor, and he has been modelling

human souls ever since. Perhaps they may be as imperishable as if they

had been carved in marble.

V

PAUL HERVIEU

When Ferdinand Brunetière praises a drama, novel, or poem, it may be

inferred that the ethical element predominates. It is, therefore,

something of a surprise to find him enthusiastic over Paul Hervieu's

latest play, Le Dédale, which met with such a friendly reception at

the Théâtre Français, December 19, 1903, the night of its production.

It is a work of power, of art, while its moral is not flaunted as

on a signboard. The implacably harsh and logical treatment of the

woman with two husbands doubtless extorted from M. Brunetière the

honour of a patient and lengthy review. Himself a Roman Catholic of

the reactionary--one is tempted to employ the old-fashioned word

"ultramontane"--type, the French critic could not fail to side with the

playwright, though he has not hesitated, after the manner of critics,

to read into this problem piece some meanings of his own.

With the advent of the Naquet divorce bill in France the countenance

of problem plays underwent a radical change. A ministerial stroke of

the pen invalidated Dumas _fils_ and his unhappy women as a theme for

dramatic treatment. We have had plays dealing with the unpleasant

subject since then, but these were either frankly frivolous like

those of Alfred Capus, or wittily cynical with those of Maurice

Donnay. The modern master builder of French drama, Henry Becque, wrote

L'Enlèvement, in which he presented the question with his accustomed

clearness and probity. Hervieu, in Le Dédale, shows the influence

of at least one scene of Becque, though he has handled the incident

so individually as to deflect its conclusions completely. Since

L'Enlèvement there has been no such literary performance as Le Dédale,

which proved a labyrinth indeed for its unhappy characters and a

masterpiece in form.

The story is a simple one, direct as antique tragedy, and far from

being improbable. Divorce in France is a much more complicated matter

than in America. Society, notwithstanding its cynical attitude, is

not too favourable to divorced men and women, particularly women.

The church refuses to sanction separation if it is to be followed by

remarriage. Whether forged in heaven or elsewhere, the fetters of

wedlock are never to be loosed unless by death. Now Hervieu does not

pretend to a sympathy with either society or the church. He does not

attempt to win our suffrages for the woman or for the man. His is too

judicial an intellect to show partisanship, and he is too superior an

artist to turn his play into a moral tract. He dives deeper than the

law or society; he dives straight into the human heart, and after

setting forth his situations his summing up is irrefragable. From the

clash of his warring souls comes his tragedy; the divorce is a mere

pretext to set his people in action. The law of the species, that

compelling and terrible law, is his weapon, a formidable one in his

skilled hands. His thesis, baldly stated, is this: A man and a woman

once married are married until death, if there be a child. Let the law

supervene, let vagrant passion demolish the social structure, this

stark, naked fact remains--the flesh of the child unites the parents

in the bond of eternity.

In an earlier play, Les Tenailles, the same idea was present, but is

a first attempt compared to this newer work. The story in Le Dédale

runs thus: Marianne de Pogis has separated from her husband Max, a

handsome, careless _viveur_, for very patent reasons; with her own eyes

she witnessed his infidelity, further accentuated by the fact that her

friend was an accomplice to his infidelity. The outraged woman takes

her son and seeks the protection of her parents. These are called the

Villard-Duvals, the father of the old school, tolerant of masculine

transgressions; the mother a strict Roman Catholic, who abhors divorce.

M. Hervieu has never been so happy in his painting of two such widely

dissimilar portraits. Marianne is a proud woman with her father's

will and temperament, proud and, unfortunately for her peace of mind,

passionate. The inevitable man turns up. He is an admirable character,

this Le Breuil--a gentleman, steadfast, honourable above all, patient.

He loves Marianne and will not be refused. And she, tired of her

claustral existence, tired of her mother's reproaches, at last listens

to the pleadings of her suitor. Why not? She argues that her life

has been made miserable through no fault of her own. Why not remarry

and snatch some happiness from the devourer of all happiness--Time?

Her mother refuses to hear of the project. Worse to her would be

the remarriage of her daughter than sheer adultery. She has accused

Marianne of an unforgiving disposition, and it is only too plain that

she still considers her married to her divorced husband. But the father

likes his presumptive son-in-law. The man's honesty and fearlessness

appeal to him. Marianne, worn out by the continual bickering, marries

Guillaume Le Breuil.

In the next act we find them happy. The little son is loved by his

stepfather as if he were his own. But a cloud mounts in their sky. The

former husband, Max de Pogis, comes with his mother to intercede for

a sight of his boy. He is melancholy and depressingly repentant. He

married the woman for whom he sold his matrimonial birthright, and is

now a widower. In a vividly conceived and expressed scene his mother, a

skilful, worldly dame, argues with Marianne that to the father the love

of the son belongs. At last, after an exhausting interview in which

the hearts of these three humans are shown as if in a blazing light,

Marianne consents to her son visiting the château of his father and his

grandmother.

And then begins the mischief. The boy is smitten by a dangerous

illness. The third act discovers Marianne almost crazed by grief at

the home of her former husband. She has nursed the child in company

with his father. She only leaves the bedside when the doctor pronounces

his patient out of danger. The woman collapses. Max finds her weak,

her nerves shattered by the strain. He has touched her hand across the

body of their dying child, but not her heart. He makes an impassioned

appeal, but is repulsed. She loves her new husband, she says, and has

written him at least once every day. The mother of Max also tells the

harassed woman of the love she has aroused in her son--a love purified

by deep sorrow. At last Marianne retires to the apartment in which

she slept the night when Max de Pogis brought her to his château. Max

enters. It is a scene that even when read touches the heart. The man

is in earnest. He is humble. He tells of his love--a love compared to

which the second husband's is nothing. He plays the old variations with

a woman's heart--a maternal heart--as the instrument. This music proves

dangerous. It sets reverberating familiar chords. The hour is midnight.

The father of her son looks into her eyes and points to the mementos

of their early love. He clasps her to his breast, and the curtain falls

on the subjugation of the woman. The ghost of the past has made her

forget the present.

Do not be in haste to condemn her weakness. The dramatist is pitiless

enough in his judgment. She goes to her parents', not her husband's

home, and half mad with remorse tells--without any attempt to

sentimentally varnish her guilt--her mother everything. That lady is

not surprised, shocked as she may be. Max, after all, is the husband of

Marianne in the sight of God, let legislators decree what they may. It

is the triumph of the mother, the triumph of the species Jules Gaultier

would call it. The father is told, and he grieves mightily. And Le

Breuil, the new husband, what of him! Shuddering, Marianne declares

that henceforth for her he no longer exists. She has descended lower

than the lowest, but there remains a still deeper gulf of vileness, and

into it she will not fall. Le Breuil clamours for admittance. He must

know why his wife has not gone to her house. She will not see him. He,

the gentle Guillaume, becomes quarrelsome. Then she resolves to meet

him. This interview is another masterpiece of observation and dramatic

values. He begs for an explanation--he suspects that her nerves have

been upset by her visit and by the illness of her son, though he is too

tender and chivalric to cast this in her teeth. He is angelic in his

behaviour, but to no avail. Some subtle chemistry has transformed the

nature of Marianne. She respects, she pities her husband--live with

him she cannot. Aroused by her obduracy, Guillaume rushes at her to

kiss her. In a blinding flash she sees herself further dishonoured--

and to avoid the shame and desolation of it all she confesses. It is

an awful revelation. The unhappy man cannot believe his ears. He is

brutal, hysterical, wretched, and finally in a fury throws the woman

from him and rushes out to kill the wrecker of his happiness.

Fifth acts are always dangerous. Ibsen's fifth acts are, as a rule,

his weakest. The playwright who has the genius of the first act has

seldom the genius of the fifth. M. Hervieu's first acts invariably

puzzle or offend. No writer has to create a new public with each new

play as has this one. The reason is because his themes and their bold,

unconventional manipulation set on edge the nerves of his audience.

In his drama, Hervieu is the great serious artist. He never trifles,

despite his gift of irony, with his characters; never mocks them--above

all, never lets them escape his iron grasp. There is nothing of the

_improvisatore_ in him; he has not the romantic passion of George Sand

nor Ibsen's spirit of revolt; nor is he a vindicator of social wrongs

like M. Brieux. He is a dramatist, perhaps, fathered by the unique

Henry Becque, with a vision not unlike Stendhal's. The intensity of

this vision, the sincerity of the man, and the utter absence in him of

the theatrical wonder-worker have endeared him to M. Brunetière.

Every big play has at least one act that evokes violent discussion. Le

Dédale is no exception. Its fifth act is a strain upon our credulity,

though sober second thought compels one to accept the dénouement,

violent as it is. A duel is inevitable between the two men; the death

of either one would be banal; Marianne cannot without violating the

proprieties be thrust into the arms of either man; besides, the woman,

horrified by her error, an error seemingly thrust upon her by malignant

fate, has now conceived an aversion to both Max and Guillaume. Max

persecutes her, follows her to her country home, while Guillaume

silently tracks him. She meets the latter in an arbour and refuses to

live with him again. The injured man encounters Max as that seducer

gayly proceeds through the garden. Their meeting is a stirring moment.

After a few bitter words Guillaume drags Max over a cliff into a raging

stream, where their bodies are swept irrecoverably away. Unconscious of

this double tragedy, Marianne is heard calling: "Louis, Louis!" and as

the little boy runs in the curtain falls on a mute, touching display of

maternal love.

The reading of the play gives the impression of a melodramatic touch

in this catastrophe. It seems at first as if the author in despair

had solved his problem by a hasty theatrical stroke. As performed by

the inimitable Bartet and Le Bargy and Paul Mounet there is only a

faint suggestion of the theatric. Like the divorce theme, the tragedy

at the close is but an aid to expand M. Hervieu's thesis. Not the

inviolability of ecclesiastical marriage, not the dispute of two men

for the possession of a woman, but his thesis is the exposition of

the truth that a man and a woman are forever linked by that bond of

flesh, their child. Otherwise the dramatist holds no brief for heredity

or one against divorce. He selected his material like an artist.

What would have been the result if Marianne had had a child by her

second husband? Probably we should have had no play. We must accept

the premises of Hervieu or else avoid challenging his conclusions. In

the remotest analysis a drama may be an entity for the crucible of

the metaphysician; yet if it be great it will defy the test of logic

as does life itself. And there is not only logic in Paul Hervieu's

Le Dédale, but life, a great section of throbbing, real life. It is

certainly the most significant French play thus far of the new century.

I tested the validity of the foregoing criticism written after

reading the play by attending a performance at the Français, Paris,

October 20, 1904. Madame Bartet was superb, far exceeding my rather

suspicious expectations. Her serenity and dignity in the earlier acts;

the maternal anguish, the maternal--literally--passion that caused

her defection; the remorse and almost hysterical confession, were

all indicated by this mistress of fine nuances. Le Bargy has seldom

been better cast, while Paul Mounet was excellent; and I was almost

convinced by the finale, though I wish the playwright, taking a hint

from Ibsen, had ended on an unresolved cadence. But M. Hervieu is too

logical, too Gallic, to treat his audiences thus. He even re-wrote The

Enigma so as to make the end clearer.

The Enigma, which London saw in March, 1902, at Wyndham's Theatre, was

then called Cæsar's Wife, which is, as Osman Edwards justly remarks, a

pompous title.

The English cast of L'Enigme was: Mrs. Tree as Léonore, Fay Davis as

Giselle, Fred Kerr as Marquis de Neste, Leonard Boyne as Vivarce. The

story is simple, the treatment rather classic: Act I is lengthy, barren

of incident, and bitter in its polemical tone; Act II is old-fashioned

in its development and climax, yet the last words spoken are distinctly

novel and a tremendous indictment of the man who slays the woman on

the plea of outraged honour. Here is Dumas's _Tué-là_ reversed with

a vengeance. Yet one platitude supplants another. If the brute who

kills his wife because she is unfaithful to him is to be succeeded by

the lady who deceives her husband because he is unpleasant to her,

where does the moral come in? It is a new convention driving out an

old. As Hervieu is _féministe_, his sympathy leads him to espouse the

cause of the woman. Without wishing to be ungallant, we may ask what

is the difference between the woman with a half-dozen lovers and the

man with a half-dozen mistresses? In the eyes of the law, in the eyes

of religion, none; in the eyes of society a vast deal--if the woman is

discovered. Not if the man is; but before a jury-box composed of twelve

intelligent men the woman who--as popular parlance has it--"sins" has

every chance of being pitied and pardoned. Here the elemental sympathy

of the male for the female counts heavily against testimony and judge's

charge.

Dumas knew this (if he had lived in America the fact would have been

driven home every morning in the newspapers) when he wrote Francillon,

especially when he wrote Femme de Claude. _Tué-là_! was his ferocious

advice. So M. Hervieu set himself to preach the contrary. In Les

Paroles Restent, his first dramatic essay, even in Les Tenailles,

and La Loi de l'Homme, the wordiness becomes most monotonous. In The

Enigma, we notice the same long-winded discussions à la Dumas as in

Princesse Georges, with the _raisonneur_ in the centre of the stage,

--in this case Marquis de Neste,--weighing the merits of the various

speeches, spouting many himself, altogether turning the expository

act into a debating society. In their revolt against the so-called

"well-made play," the newer Parisian dramatists have gone to the other

extreme.

However, the plot of The Enigma is distinctly worth the telling. Two

brothers, noblemen, De Gourgiran by name, are married to two charming

women, Léonore and Giselle. Here is a quartet instead of the eternal

duo with the triangle hung over the door like a sinister horseshoe

presaging ill luck. To this double family are added the elderly

Marquis, who is a cousin to the brothers, and a young man, Vivarce

by name. He is the unknown quantity of this well-mixed combination.

At first the household seems like most happy ones--without anything

worthy of chronicling. The brothers are mighty Nimrods, the wives

have children to interest them, Vivarce to amuse them, the Marquis to

lecture them. Everything goes on oiled wheels until the gamekeeper of

the estate tells his masters that poachers are abroad. The fraternal

pair resolve on stealing out before daybreak and surprising the

rascals. The respective characters of the brothers do not show much

diversity; both live to hunt, and incidentally they love their wives

better, much better, than their dogs. About this there must be no

mistake. Honest, upright, inflexible, hard-hearted, hard-headed

persons, they are absolutely lacking in humour. They bore their

wives, and if you would tell them this, they would shrug shoulders

philosophically and remark that women, especially good wives, were

intended to be bored by husbands.

But note their scowling features if that drawing-room animal, the

professional lover, is mentioned! Both empty their choicest vials

of objurgation and fury upon the luckless beast's head. In fact, a

discussion is started about the treatment a man should accord an erring

wife. The one rather would shoot such a wife through the heart, the

other brother would slay the lover and keep the wife alive and near

at hand so that she might be tortured. This cold-blooded proposition

arouses the righteous indignation of Giselle, who protests in the name

of her sex, in the name of humanity. She becomes so agitated that the

Marquis, whose suspicions have been aroused for some time, suspects the

lady of carrying on an intrigue with Vivarce. Earlier in the scene he

has privately accused Vivarce of betraying one of his hosts' wives, but

which one he cannot say.

Now here is where the puzzle comes in and the psychology evaporates.

The Marquis, so he relates, while suffering from insomnia, gets up one

fine night and sees Vivarce vanishing in the door of the château, which

door was opened by a female hand. Whose? Evidently one of the married

women. Which one? Ah, that is the enigma! Vivarce feebly admits his

shameful behaviour, though he refuses to give the name of the fair

sinner. The old nobleman is perplexed. He advises flight. He talks like

an ancient uncle from the country, who does not wish to borrow money

from his city relatives--that is, he talks sense, and as it dribbles

in one ear and out the other of his moonstruck companion, he realizes

the futility of his well-meant sermon. Young men will be fools and

lunatics--and he might have added, when they are not, heaven help their

wives in later years!

Unknown to the others the brothers resolve on lying in wait for the

poachers. After some conjugal bantering they retire. Their wives sit

up to talk matters over. The door has been barred; it is very close

within; Giselle proposes that they open the house. She essays in vain

to lift the heavy oaken bar. Leonore tries. She succeeds. The moonlight

is mellow without, and the summer night sends pleasant air and odours

into the living room. At last the two women prepare for bed. Novels

are selected, and with lamps in hand they are leaving the room without

thought of the open door. Giselle remembers it and returns. Leonore

bids her not to bother--there are no thieves in the neighbourhood. The

curtain falls.

Up to this moment there is no way of recognizing the "guilty" woman.

Dishonours are about even. Giselle, to be sure, is passionate in her

protestations of contempt for the brutality of husbands who take the

law into their own hands. But Leonore unbars the door. Giselle recalls

the fact that it should not be open, and Leonore tells her not to

worry. Which one is it? And before you rush rashly to a conclusion

remember that the dramatist knows more than his audience, and that he

contrives pitfalls for the unwary. Both women seem guilty, both may be

innocent. One of the brothers comes softly into the room; both have

agreed not to worry their wives about the poachers. The door is found

unbolted. The first comer surmises that his brother has preceded him,

but the gamekeeper tells him the door was open. Then the other brother

enters. Surprise! But there is no time for this sentiment, as a man

steals through the dimly lighted room. After a brief, fierce struggle

he is pinioned. A lantern reveals the features of Vivarce. How did he

come there? Why did he come out of the women's apartments at this hour

in the morning? Hate and destruction are in the air.

His answers are evasive. He is nervous--wanted a cigarette. The lie is

cast back in his teeth. And then a woman, holding a candle, rushes in

with pale face. It is Leonore. She has been awakened, so she avers,

by the shock of voices. Her husband sternly inquires her whereabouts

a few moments before. She has an excuse ready. She swears she is not

guilty, and even kneels to Vivarce, beseeching him to clear her. It is

too much. Her husband plucks her by the arm, and then, as his brother

questions her too closely, the man wavers to the side of his wife.

Perhaps, after all, it was Giselle. Yes, where is Giselle? The husband

of the absent one is swift to defend her. He goes to her room and

finds her fast asleep. Aha! says the other woman, and awakens her.

Confused by the lights, the accusation, the clash of words, she is the

very picture of a guilty woman as she enters in her white night robe,

her hair unbound, her features suffused in tears. Besides, did she not

make some very audacious speeches earlier in the evening defending the

right to love of a woman wearied of her husband? Free love--ah, odious

phrase! It damns her at once.

The trouble with a situation of this kind is that the spectator,

carried away by his curiosity, forgets all about the play of character,

the problem involved. It is The Lady or the Tiger over again, and

not so cleverly handled as that little masterpiece, for, as we shall

presently see, Hervieu solves the riddle in a very prosaic fashion.

A big interrogation point at the end would be the only excuse for

a recrudescence of a play of the Dumas sort. When Richard Strauss

composed the enigmatic tonalities at the close of his Tone poem, Also

Sprach Zarathustra, he did so because he could not logically leave

us on a full harmonic close. Since Hervieu did not develop his theme

broadly and allowed it to degenerate into the theatric device of

guessing the girl, he might have followed Frank Stockton and Richard

Strauss--withheld the complete dénouement and sent us home wondering.

But his artistic conscience began to operate at the close of Act II,

and not daring in Act III, he despatches his young lover out to the

dewy morn, there to shoot himself. This suicide cuts the tangle.

The sister who quails at the news is the guilty one--a Solomon-like

judgment, if ever there was one.

The gunshot rouses the women. Leonore it is who shudders and screams;

Giselle is only shocked. The complacent face of her husband at this

juncture is a study in selfishness. Leonore's husband throttles her and

is pulled off just in time. He bids her live--he knows how to torture;

and as the curtain falls the Marquis in the centre of the picture

invokes the curse of heaven on a social system that tolerates such

hideous cruelty.

It may be seen that the intellectual playwright takes advantage of a

situation in Pagliacci or in Catulle Mendès's La Femme de Tabarin; when

the lover is being killed or is killed, the grief of the "guilty" wife

betrays her secret to the world. It is lacking in novelty, yet a sound

situation psychologically. The torture motive is not new.

However, Paul Hervieu's reputation does not stand or fall on this drama

any more than it does on his novels, Flirt and L'Armature. Les Paroles

Restent has a theme cleverly invented, above all cleverly handled.

A man sets in motion a lie about a young girl in society, though he

believes it is the truth. Later he meets and loves her. His remorse is

great when he discovers that she is innocent. To make reparation (oh,

masculine vanity of vanities!) he resolves to confess both his love and

his fault. He does so. The woman, Régine de Vesles, is outraged in her

pride, in her love, to discover that her secret calumniator is the man

she has adored. She parts from him. A duel is precipitated--lugged in

by the hair, really--and De Nohan is dangerously wounded. Naturally

Régine goes to his bedside and pardons him. They are sure to be happy.

Alas! _les paroles restent_, and after De Nohan hears repeated his

vile slander he dies. The situations are effective throughout, the

character-drawing subtle.

This play is full of melodrama, and, as has been pointed out, contains

"several weapons borrowed from the arsenal of the inexhaustible

Scribe." Hervieu followed it with Les Tenailles, which was at

once a challenge to his critic and a greater play. _Tenailles_

(nippers)--horrible word! Here the author gives us human nature in the

raw. A woman is married to a man she does not love. He, it appears,

makes no attempt to secure her love. She really loves a famous man,

a traveller. She tells her husband so. She will not deceive him, as

other feebler women would; she must leave at once. But the husband

of Irene Fergan is cool-headed. He asks his wife how she proposes to

escape the hateful marriage tie. She must give the law a reason, a

motive. Collusion is the only remedy, and he will not enter into any

such conspiracy. Then she declares she will run away. Not far, he

calmly replies, for there is always the police. No matter what she

does, he will not let her go. Bowing her head, the woman submits. The

wife is the prisoner of the husband, the woman bond-slave of the man,

despite all our gabbling about emancipation and equal rights in this

enlightened century.

Ten years pass, when the curtain again rises. There is a child; the

home is seemingly a placid one. The little son must be sent to school.

Another crisis. There is a terrible duel of words and will. Enraged she

cries, "The child is not yours," and then confesses--no, confesses is

not the word, rather boasts, that she had a lover, the man she always

loved, the traveller. The husband now no longer claims the other's

son; he will even grant the divorce. The culmination comes when Irene

refuses to be thrust out of doors,--the child has just passed through

the room,--she has borne the agony of ten years. They must go hand in

hand manacled to the end, let the nippers gall as they will. There is

the child. Its future is at stake. "But," the man whimpers, "you are

guilty and I am innocent."--"No," she says, "we are only two miserable

people, and misery knows none but equals." The answer is like the harsh

stroke of a savage alarm bell. It startled all Paris for many months.

_Les paroles restent!_

The Law of Man is even more tense and disagreeable than its

predecessor. Herein the problem posed is this (for with Hervieu the

play is always a problem; like Ibsen he asks questions and seldom

answers them, though it may be premised that while he has much of

Ibsen's gloom and love for the unusual, he lacks the cold, concentrated

logic of the Norwegian): A woman surprises her husband by means of

letters, but does not leave him. Her daughter falls in love with the

son of the woman who has caused the trouble. Poor wife, poor mother,

she is confused at these crossroads of misery. Sacrifice her daughter

and appease her vengeance, or--hold her silence for evermore? She

prefers the former, and summoning the husband of her own husband's

mistress, the father of the young man who seeks the hand of her

innocent daughter, she tells the secret. After the first natural rage,

this undeceived man, more merciful than the woman, insists on her

silence. Two innocent young folk must not have their happiness slain

because of their parents' sins. And as it is his right, the selfish and

wretched woman must submit. A way is found to make the lovers happy,

and the play ends, leaving all sorts of interrogation marks in the air.

There are big things in this drama.

La Course du Flambeau played by Réjane with such striking effect is

judged by some of Hervieu's admirers as his masterpiece. It is not,

though an exceedingly interesting work replete with wisdom and several

strong studies of character. Sabine Revel, who sacrifices her mother

for the sake of her daughter and is in turn herself sacrificed,

illustrates the not uncommon fate of a selfish daughter and a too

fond mother. The Greek motto embodied in the title--the passing on of

the illuminated torch, according to Lucretius, at the "lampadophories"

festival in Athens--is employed by the dramatist as a symbol of the

chain of life, the light passed on from one generation to another with

the sacrificing of the old by the young which characterizes human

existence.

Yet there is no hint of Ibsen in this symbol; Hervieu is a painter of

manners, and a psychologist, not a poet. He confessed to me, while

graciously submitting to be "interviewed," that Ibsen has had little

part in his development. He is a true Frenchman and really derives

from Dumas _fils_ in his love of the problem posed; while his cerebral

temperament makes him more of a disciple of Stendhal and Becque than

of the very emotional, modern Germans and Scandinavians. Yet he has an

_emotive_ temperament--a glance at his sympathetic eyes will prove

it. He is a man with too large a head for his frame. He feels too

deeply to be happy. M. Alfred Binet, in his precise psychological study

of the dramatist, describes his sober methods of travail, his slow

composition, his philosopher's dislike of the hasty or the improvised,

and his fondness for clearly articulated dialogue. He has the logical

imagination, he disdains the Zola "human documents" in preparing his

story, and while he is by nature an ironist, he is too serious in his

outlook on life to play the part of a mystifier. "Irony is the speech

of the timid man," he said to me, when we spoke of Becque and his too

cynical disciples. An anxious sincerity is the key-note of M. Hervieu's

character. He abhors the facile triumphs of the Parisian play-maker who

dallies with ignoble themes. A finely attuned intellect, a plentiful

sympathy with suffering, a special sensitiveness to the soul feminine,

combined with real artistry,--though he despises mere technical

dexterity,--all have made Paul Hervieu the present master-psychologist

of the French stage.

VI

THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW

I

To my friend, George Bernard Shaw, the Celtic super-man,

critic, novelist, socialist, and preface writer, to whom

the present author--_circa_ 1890--played the part of a

critical finger-post for the everlasting benefit (he

sincerely hopes) of the great American public; and to

whom he now dedicates this particular essay in gratitude

for the rare and stimulating pleasure afforded him by the

Shaw masques, the Shavian philosophy, and also the vivid

remembrance of several personal encounters at London and

Bayreuth.

The announcement that Bernard Shaw, moralist, Fabianite, vegetarian,

playwright, critic, Wagnerite, Ibsenite, jester to the cosmos, and the

most serious man on the planet, had written a play on the subject of

Don Juan did not surprise his admirers. As Nietzsche philosophized with

a hammer, so G. B. S. hammers popular myths. If you have read his Cæsar

and Cleopatra you will know what I mean. This witty, sarcastic piece is

the most daring he has attempted. Some years ago I described the Shaw

literary pedigree as--W. S. Gilbert out of Ibsen. His plays are full of

modern odds and ends, and in form are anything from the Robertsonian

comedy to the Gilbertian extravaganza. They may be called psychical

farce, an intellectual _comédie rosse_--for his people are mostly a

blackguard crew of lively marionettes all talking pure Shaw-ese. Mr.

Shaw has invented a new individual in literature who for want of a

better name could be called the _Super-Cad_; he is Nietzsche's Superman

turned "bounder"--and sometimes the sex is feminine.

We wonder what sort of drama this remarkable Hibernian would have

produced if he had been a flesh-eater. If he is so brilliant on bran,

what could he not have accomplished on blood! One thing is certain--at

the cosmical banquet where Shaw sits is the head of the table--for him.

When Bernard Shaw told a gaping world that he was only a natural-born

mountebank with a cart and a trumpet, a sigh of relief was exhaled in

artistic London. So many had been taking him seriously and swallowing

his teachings, preachings, and _pronunciamentos_, that to hear the

merryman was only shamming, came as a species of liberation from a

cruel obsession. Without paying the customary critical toll, Shaw had

slipped duty free into England all manners of damnable doctrines.

What George Moore attempted in a serious manner George Shaw, a

fellow-Irishman, succeeded in accomplishing without the _chorale_ of

objurgation, groans, exclamations of horror, and blasts of puritanical

cant. Thus Proudhon, Marx, Lassalle, Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, and a

lot of free-thinkers in socialism, religion, philosophy, and art,

walked unmolested through the pages of critical reviews, while Mr.

Moore was almost pilloried for advocating naturalism, while Vizetelly

was sent to prison for translating Zola.

After the Shaw criticisms came the novels, then the plays. The prefaces

of the latter are literature, and will be remembered with joy when the

plays are forgotten. In them the author has distilled the quintessence

of Shaw. They will be classics some day, as the Dryden prefaces are

classics. Nevertheless, in the plays we find the old Shaw masquerading,

this time behind the footlights. He is still the preacher, Fabian

debater, socialist, vegetarian, lycanthrope, and normally abnormal man

of the early days--though he prides himself on his abnormal normality.

Finding that the essay did not reach a wide enough audience, the wily

Celt mounts the rostrum and blarneys his listeners something after this

manner:--

"Here's my hustings; from here will I teach, preach, and curse the

conventions of society. Come all ye who are tired of the property

fallacy! There is but one Karl Marx, and I am his living prophet.

Shakespeare must go--Ibsen is to rule. Wagner was a Fabianite; the Ring

proves it. Come all ye who are heaven-laden with the moralities! I am

the living witness for Nietzsche. I will teach children to renounce

the love of parents; parents to despise their offspring; husbands to

hate their wives; wives to loathe their husbands; and brothers and

sisters will raise warring hands after my words have entered their

souls. Whatever is is wrong--to alter Pope. The prostitute classes,--I

do not balk at the ugly word,--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, statesmen,

journalists, are deceiving you. They speak in divers and lying tongues.

I alone possess the prophylactic against the evils of life. Here it is:

Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant; and Three Plays for Puritans."

But Shaw only removed another of his innumerable masks. Beware, says

Nietzsche, of the autobiographies of great men. He was thinking of

Richard Wagner. His warning applies to Bernard Shaw, who is a great

comedian and a versatile. He has spoken through so many different

masks that the real Shaw is yet to be seen. Perhaps on his death-bed

some stray phrase will illuminate with its witty gleam his true soul's

nature. He has played tag with this soul so long that some of it has

been lost in the game. Irishman born, he is not genial after the Oliver

Goldsmith type; he resembles much more closely Dean Swift, minus that

man's devouring genius. When will the last mask be lifted--and, awful

to relate, will it, when lifted, reveal the secret? A master hypnotist

perhaps he may be, illuding the world with the mask idea. And what a

comical thing it would be to find him smiling at the end and remarking,

"I fooled you, Brethren, didn't I?" In his many rôles one trait

has obstinately remained, the trait of irresistible waggery. Yet we

sadly suspect it. What if this declaration of charlatanism were but a

mask! What if Shaw were really sincere! What if he really meant to be

sincere in his various lectures and comedies! What if his assumption

of insincerity were sincere! His sincerity insincere! The thought

confuses. In one of his plays--The Philanderer--a certain character has

five or six natures. Shaw again, _toujours_ Shaw!

Joke of all jokes, I really imagine that Shaw is a sentimentalist in

private; and that he has been so sentimental, romantic, in his youth,

that an inversion has taken place in his feelings. Swift's hatred of

mankind was a species of inverted lyricism; so was Flaubert's; so may

be Shaw's. Fancy him secretly weeping over Jane Eyre, or holding a baby

in his lap, or--richest of all fancies--occasionally eating sausage and

drinking beer! I met him, once upon a time, in Bayreuth. He spoke then

in unmeasured terms of its beer drinkers, and added, without the ghost

of a smile, that breweries should be converted into insane asylums.

Whether we take him seriously or not, he is a delightful, an

entertaining writer. His facile use, with the aid of the various

mouthpieces he assumes at will, of the ideas of Nietzsche, Wagner,

Ibsen, and Strindberg, fairly dazzles. He despises wit at bottom, using

its forms as a medium for the communication of his theories. Art for

art's sake is a contradiction to this writer. He must have a sense of

beauty, but he never boasts of it; rather does he seem to consider it

something naked, almost shameful--something to be hidden away. So his

men are always deriding art, though working at it like devils on high

pay. This puritanical vein has grown with the years, as it has with

Tolstoy. Only Shaw never wasted his youth in riotous living, as did

Tolstoy.

He had no money, no opportunities, no taste. A fierce ascetic and a

misogynist, he will have no regrets at threescore and ten; no sweet

memories of headaches--he is a teetotaller; no heartaches--he is too

busy with his books; and no bitter aftertaste for having wronged a

fellow-being. Behold, Bernard Shaw is a good man, has led the life

of a saint, worked like a hero against terrible odds, and is the

kindest-hearted man in London. Now we have reached another mask--the

mask of altruism. Nearly all his earnings went to the needy; his was,

and is, a practical socialism. He never let his right hand know the

extent of his charities, and mark this,--no one else knew of it. Yet

good deeds, like murder, will out. His associates ceased deriding the

queer clothes, the flannel shirt, and the absence of evening dress; his

money was spent on others. So, too, his sawdust menu,--his carrots,

cabbage, and brown bread,--it did not cost much, his eating, for his

money was needed by poorer folk. So you see what a humbug is this

dear old Diogenes, who growls cynically at the human race, abhors

sentiment-mongers, and despises conventional government, art, religion,

and philosophy. He is an arch-sentimentalist, underneath whose frown

are concealed tears of pity. Another mask torn away--Bernard Shaw,

philanthropist!

He tells us in the preface to Cashel Byron's Profession--which sounds

like the title of a Charles Lever novel--that he had a narrow escape

from being a novelist at the age of twenty-six. He still shudders

over it. He wrote five novels, three of which we know, to wit:

Cashel Byron's Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, Love Among the

Artists--hideous and misleading title. Robert Louis Stevenson took a

great fancy to Cashel Byron and its stunning eulogies of pugilism. It

was even dramatized in this country. With Hazlitt and George Meredith

(oh! unforgettable prize-fight in The Amazing Marriage) Mr. Shaw

praised the noble art of _sluggerei_. The Unsocial Socialist contains

at least one act of a glorious farce comedy. He is Early British in his

comedic writing. It is none the less capital fun.

This book or tract--it is hardly a novel--contains among other

extraordinary things a eulogy of photography that would delight the

soul of a Steichen. Shaw places it far above painting because of its

verisimilitude! It also introduces a lot of socialistic talk which is

very unconvincing; the psycho-physiologist would really pronounce the

author a perfect specimen in full flowering of the saintly anarch.

There is a rôle played by a character--Shaw?--? which recalls Leonard

Charteris in a later play, The Philanderer. All of his men are modelled

off the same block. They are a curious combination of blackguard,

philosopher, "bounder," artist, and comedian. His women! Recall

Stevenson's dismayed exclamation at the Shaw women! They are creatures

who have read Ibsen; are, one is sure, dowdy; but they interest. While

you wonder at the strength of their souls, you do not miss the size

of their feet. Mr. Shaw refuses to see woman as a heroine. She is

sometimes a breeder of sinners, always a chronicler of the smallest

kind of small beer, and for fear this sounds like an I ago estimate, he

dowers her with an astounding intellectual equipment, and then lets the

curious compound work out its own salvation.

He is much more successful with his servants; witness Bashville in

Cashel Byron's Profession, most original of lackeys, and the tenderly

funny old waiter in You Never Can Tell, a bitter farce well sprinkled

with the Attic salt of irony. Otherwise Mr. Shaw has spent his time

tilting at flagellation, at capital punishment, at the abuse of

punctuation, at the cannibalistic habit of eating the flesh of harmless

animals at Christmas, at Going to Church, extolling Czolgosz--heavens!

the list is a league long. His novels as a whole are disappointing,

though George Meredith has assured us in the first chapter of Diana

that brain stuff in fiction is not lean stuff. But there are some

concessions to be made to the Great God Beauty, and these Mr. Shaw has

not seen fit to make. Episodes of brilliancy, force, audacity, there

are; but episodes only. The psychology of a musician is admirably set

forth in Love Among the Artists, and the story, in addition, contains

one of the most lifelike portraits of a Polish _pianiste_ that has

ever been painted. John Sargent could have done no better in laying

bare a soul. Ugliness is rampant--ugliness and brutality. It is all as

invigorating as a bath of salt water when the skin is peeled off--it

burns; you howl; Shaw grins. He hates with all the vigour of his big

brain and his big heart to hear of the infliction of physical pain. He

does not always spare his readers. Three hundred years ago he would

have roasted heretics, for there is much of the grand inquisitor, the

John Calvin, the John Knox, in Shaw. He will rob himself of his last

copper to give you food, and he will belabour you with words that

assault the tympanum if you disagree with him on the subject of Ibsen,

Wagner, or--anything he likes.

Beefsteak, old Scotch ale, a pipe, and Montaigne--are what he needs

for one year. Then his inhumane criticism of poor, stumbling mankind's

foibles might be tempered. Shaw despises weakness. He follows to

the letter Nietzsche's injunction, Be hard! And there is something

in him of Ibsen's pitiless attitude toward the majority, which is

always in the wrong; yet is, all said and done, the majority. Facts,

reality, truth--no Gradgrind ever demanded them more imperiously than

Heervater Shaw, whose red beard and locks remind one of Conrad in Die

Meistersinger. Earth folk do everything to dodge the facts of life,

to them cold, harsh, and at the same time fantastic. Every form of

anodyne, ethical, intellectual, æsthetical, is resorted to to deaden

the pain of reality. We work to forget to live; our religions, art,

philosophy, patriotism, are so many buffers between the soul of man and

bitter truth.

Shaw wants the truth at all hazards; his habit of veracity is like that

of Gregers's Werle, is shocking. So he dips his subjects into a bath

of muriatic acid and seems surprised at their wrigglings and their

screams. "But I don't want to hear the truth!" yells the victim, who

then limps back to his comfortable lies. And the one grievous error

is that our gallant slayer of dragons, our Celtic Siegfried, does not

believe in the illusions of art. Its veils, consoling and beautiful,

he will not have, and thus it is that his dramas are amusing, witty,

brilliant, scarefying, but never poetic, never beautiful, and seldom

sound the deeper tones of humanity. With an artist's brain, he stifles

the artist's soul in him--as Ibsen never did. With all his liberalism

he cannot be liberal to liberalism, as Gilbert Chesterton so neatly

puts it.

The Perfect Wagnerite and The Quintessence of Ibsenism are two

supernally clever _jeux d'esprit_. As he reads Shaw and Fabianism

into the Ring of the Nibelungs, so his Ibsen is transformed into a

magnified image of Shaw dropping ideas from on high with Olympian

indifference. This pamphlet, among the first of its kind in English,

now seems a trifle old-fashioned in its interpretation of the Norwegian

dramatist--possibly because he is something so different from what Mr.

Shaw pictured him. We are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the

social reformer with an awful frown. He was a fighter for Ibsen, when

in London Ibsen was once regarded as a perverter of morals. Bravery is

Bernard's trump card. He never flinched yet, whether answering catcalls

from a first night's gallery or charging with pen lowered lance-fashion

upon some unfortunate clerical blockhead who endeavoured to prove that

hell is too good for sinners.

It is easy to praise Mozart to-day; not so easy to demonstrate the

genius of Richard Strauss. Wagner in 1888 was still a bogie-man, a

horrid hobgoblin threatening the peace of academic British music. Shaw

took up the fight, just as he fought for Degas and Manet when he was an

art critic. I still preserve with reverence his sweeping answer to Max

Nordau. It wiped Nordau off the field of discussion.

And the plays! They, too, are controversial. They all prove something,

and prove it so hard that presently the play is swallowed up by its

thesis--the horse patiently follows the cart It may not be art, but

it is magnificent Shaw. You can skip the plays, not the prefaces.

Widowers' Houses is the most unpleasant, ugly, damnably perverse of the

ten. The writer had read Ibsen's An Enemy of the People too closely.

Its drainpipes, and not its glorification of the individual, got into

his brain. It filtered forth bereft of its strength and meaning in this

piece, with its nasty people, its stupidities. How could Shaw be so

philistine, so much like a vestryman interested in pauper lodgings? In

the implacable grasp of Ibsen, this sordid theme would have been beaten

on a red-hot anvil until shaped to something of purpose and power.

Shaw was not blacksmith enough to swing the Ibsen hammer and handle

the Ibsen bellows. He has written me on this subject that if I were a

resident of London I would see my way clearer toward liking this play.

It is, he asserts, a transcript of the truth--which still leaves my

argument on its legs.

The Philanderer, with its irresponsible levity and unexpected

contortions, is a comedy of the true Shaw order. It is his Wild Duck,

for in it he pokes fun at an Ibsen club, at the New Woman, and the New

Sentiment, at almost everything he upholds in other plays and ways.

There is a dramatic critic slopping over with British sentiment and

other liquids. The women are absolutely incredible. The first act,

like most of the Shaw first acts, is the best; best because, in his

efforts to get his people going, the dramatist has little time to

sermonize. He usually gets the chance later, to the detriment of his

structure. The first act of The Philanderer would have made Henry

Becque smile. It has something of the Frenchman's mordant irony--and

then you never know what is going to happen. The behaviour of the two

women recalls a remark of Shaw's apropos of Strindberg; Strindberg,

who "shows that the female Yahoo, measured by romantic standards, is

viler than her male dupe and slave." Here the conditions are reversed;

there is no romance; the dupes are women, and also the Yahoos. The

exposure of Julia's soul, poor, mean, sentimental, suffering little

creature, withal heroic, would please Strindberg himself. The play has

an autobiographic ring.

As to Mrs. Warren's Profession. It was played January 12, 1902, in

London, by the Stage Society. Mr. Grein says that Mrs. Warren's

Profession is literature for the study. The mother is a bore,

wonderfully done in spots (the spots especially) and the daughter a

chilly, waspish prig. The men are better; Sir George Crofts and the

philandering young fellow could not be clearer expressed in terms of

ink. I imagine that in a performance they must be extremely vital.

And that weak old _roué_ of a clergyman--why is Shaw so severe

on clergymen? For the rest, Mrs. Warren's Profession creates a

disagreeable impression, as the author intended it should. I consider

it his biggest, and also his most impossible, _opus_.

You Can Never Tell, Arms and the Man, Candida, and The Devil's Disciple

are a quartet difficult to outpoint for prodigal humour and ingenious

fantasy. In London the first named was voted irresistibly funny. It is

funny, and in a new way, though the framework is old-fashioned British

farce newly veneered by the malicious, the roistering humour of Shaw.

Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple have been in Mr. Mansfield's

repertory for years; they need no comment further than saying that the

first has something of the Gilbertian Palace of Truth topsy-turvying

quality (Louka is a free paraphrase of Regina in Ghosts, though she

talks Shaw with great fluency), with a wholly original content and

characterization; and the second is perverse melodrama.

Candida is not for mixed audiences. Christian socialism is caviare to

the general. In characterization there is much variety; the heroine--if

there be such an anomaly as a Shaw heroine--is most engaging. Every

time I read Candida I feel myself on the trail of somebody; it is all

in the air. The Lady from the Sea comes back when in that last scene,

where the extraordinary young poet Marchbanks, a combination of the

spiritual qualities of Shelley, Shaw, Ibsen's Stranger, and Shelley

again, dares the fatuous James Morell to put his wife Candida to the

test. It is one of the oddest situations in dramatic literature, and it

is all "prepared" with infinite skill. The dénouement is another of Mr.

Shaw's shower baths; withal a perfectly proper and highly moral ending.

You grind your teeth over it, as Mr. Shaw peeps across the top of the

page, indulging in one of his irritating dental displays.

The Man of Destiny is a mystification in one act. Napoleon talks the

purest Balzac when he describes the English, and Mr. Shaw manipulates

the wires industriously. It's good sport of its genre.

Captain Brassbound's Conversion is pure farce. But the joy of Cæsar

and Cleopatra is abounding. You chortle over it as chortled Stevenson

over the footman. A very devil of a play, one to read after Froude,

Michelet, Shakespeare, or Voltaire for the real facts of the case.

Since Suetonius, it is the first attempt at true Cæsarean history. And

the stage directions out-Maeterlinck Maeterlinck with their elaborate

intercalations. The gorgeous humour of it all!

Arms and the Man has been translated into German and played in Germany.

What will the Germans say to Cæsar and Cleopatra? They take Shaw too

seriously now, which is almost as bad as not taking him seriously at

all. What will the doctors of history do when the amazing character of

Cleopatra is dissected? If Shaw had never written another line but this

bubbling study of antiquity, in which the spirit of the opera bouffe

has not entered, he would be entitled to a free pass to that pantheon

wherein our beloved Mark Twain sits enthroned. It is all truth-telling

on a miraculous plane of reality, a reality which modulates and merges

into fantasy. One almost forgets the prefaces and the notes after

reading Cæsar and Cleopatra.

Whether he will ever vouchsafe the world a masterpiece, who can say?

Why demand so much? Is not he in himself a masterpiece? It depends on

his relinquishment of a too puritanical attitude toward art, life, and

roast beef. He is too pious. Never mind his second-hand Nietzsche, his

Diabolonian ethics, and his modern version of Carlylean Baphometic

Baptisms. They are all in his eye--that absolutely normal eye with the

suppressed Celtic twinkle. He doesn't mean a word he utters. (Who does

when writing of Shaw?) I firmly believe he says his prayers every night

with the family before he goes to his Jaeger-flannel couch!

II

Candida is the very quintessence of her creator. Many prefer this

sprightly sermon disguised as a comedy to Mr. Bernard Shaw's more

serious works. Yet serious it is. No latter-day paradoxioneer--to coin

a monster word, for the Shaws, Chestertons, _et al_.--evokes laughter

so easily as the Irishman. His is a cold intellectual wit, a Swiftian

wit, minus the hearty and wholesome obscenity of the great Dublin dean.

But it is often misleading. We laugh when we should reflect. We laugh

when we might better hang our heads--this is meant for the average

married and bachelor man. Shaw strikes fire in almost every sentence he

puts into Candida's honest mouth. After reading his eloquent tribute to

Ibsen, the crooked places in Candida become plainer; her mission is not

alone to undeceive but to love; not only to bruise hearts but to heal

them.

In a singularly vivid passage on page 38 of The Quintessence of

Ibsenism, Mr. Shaw writes: "When Blake told men that through excess

they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay

through the Venusberg, and that the race would assuredly not perish

there as some individuals have, and as the Puritans fear we all shall

unless we find a way round. Also, he no doubt foresaw the time when our

children would be born on the other side of it, and so be spared the

fiery purgation."

This sentiment occurs in the chapter devoted to a consideration of

The Womanly Woman. Let us look at the phrases on the printed page of

Candida that might be construed as bearing upon the above, or, rather,

the result of the quoted passage.

Candida speaks to James, her husband, in Act II:--

Don't you understand? I mean, will he forgive me for not teaching

him myself? For abandoning him to the bad woman for the sake of my

goodness--my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you

understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity!

I would give them both to poor Eugene as willingly as I would give my

shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were nothing else to restrain

me. Put your trust in my love for you, James, for if that went I should

care very little for your sermons--mere phrases that you cheat yourself

and others with every day.

Here is one of the most audacious speeches in any modern play. It has

been passed over by most English critics who saw in Candida merely an

attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not realizing that the theme is

profound and far-reaching, the question put being no more and no less

than: Shall a married man expect his wife's love without working for

it, without deserving it? Secure in his conviction that he was a model

husband and a good Christian, the Rev. James Mavor Morell went his way

smiling and lecturing. He had the "gift of gab," yet he was no humbug;

indeed, a sincerer parson does not exist. He is quite as sincere as

Pastor Manders, much broader in his views, and consequently not half so

dull.

But he is, nevertheless, a bit of a bore, with his lack of humour

and his grim earnestness. No doubt Shaw took his fling at that queer

blending of Christianity and socialism, that Karl Marx in a parson's

collar which startled London twenty years ago in the person of the

Christian socialist clergyman. He saw, too, being a man with a sense

of character values and their use in violent contrast, that to the

rhapsodic and poetic Eugene Marchbanks, Morell would prove a splendid

foil. And so he does. Between this oddly opposed pair stands on her

solid, sensible underpinnings the figure of Candida. Realist as is Mr.

Shaw, he would scout the notion of his third act being accepted as a

transcript from life. For two acts we are in plain earthly atmosphere;

unusual things happen, though not impossible ones. In the last act

Shaw, droll dramatist and acute observer of his fellow-man's foibles,

disappears, only to return in the guise of Shaw the preacher.

And how he does throw a sermon at our heads! The play is arrested in

its mid-ocean, and the shock throws us almost off our feet. Do not

be deceived. That mock bidding for the hand of Candida, surely the

craziest farce ever invented, is but this author's cunning manner of

driving home his lesson. Are you worthy of your wife? Is the woman who

swore to love and honour you ("obey" is not in the Shaw vocabulary,

thanks to J. S. Mill) worthy of you? If your love is not mutual then

better go your ways--you profane it! Is this startling? Is this novel?

No and yes. The defence of love for love's sake, coming from the lips

of a Shaw character, has a surprising effect, for no man is less

concerned with sex questions, no man has more openly depreciated the

ascendancy of sex in art and literature. He would be the first to

applaud eagerly Edmund Clarence Stedman's question apropos of Walt

Whitman's Leaves of Grass: Is there no other light in which to view

the beloved one than as the future mother of our children? (I trust

to a treacherous memory; the meaning is expressed, though not in Mr.

Stedman's words.)

Therefore Candida is a large exposition of the doctrine that love

should be free,--which is by no means the same thing as free love; that

it should be a burden equally borne by both partners in the yoke; that

happiness, instead of misery, would result if more women resembled

Candida in candour. She cut James to the heart with the confounding

of her shawl and personal purity; it was an astounding idea for a

clergyman's ears. She proved to him later that she was right, that the

hundredth solitary sinner is of more consequence than the ninety-nine

reclaimed. Shaw, who is a Puritan by temperament, has, after his

master, Ibsen, cracked with his slingstone many nice little glass

houses wherein complacent men and women sit and sun their virtues in

the full gaze of the world. One of his sharp and disconcerting theories

is that woman, too, can go through the Venusberg and still reach the

heights--a fact always denied by the egotistical man, who wishes to be

the unique sinner so that he may receive the unique consolation. After

a gay life, a sober one; the reformed rake; Tannhäuser's return to an

Elizabeth, who awaits him patiently; dear, sweet, virtuous Penelope!

Shaw sees through this humbug of the masculine pose and turns the

tables by making his Candida ride the horse of the dilemma man-fashion.

Maeterlinck, in his Monna Vanna and Joyzelle, enforces the same

truth--that love to be love should be free.

And the paradoxical part of it all is that Candida is a womanly woman.

She is so domestic, so devoted, that the thin-skinned idealist Eugenie

moans over her kitchen propensities. Shaw has said that "the ideal wife

is one who does everything that the ideal husband likes, and nothing

else," which is a neat and sardonic definition of the womanly woman's

duty. Candida demands as her right her husband's trust in her love,

not heavenly rewards, not the consciousness of her own purity, not

bolts and bars will keep her from going from him if the hour strikes

the end of her affection. All of which is immensely disconcerting to

the orthodox of view, for it is the naked truth, set forth by a man

who despises not orthodoxy, but those who profess it only to practise

paganism. This Shaw is a terrible fellow; and the only way to get rid

of a terrible fellow is not to take him seriously but to call him

paradoxical, entertaining; to throw the sand of flattery in his eyes

and incidentally blind criticism at the same time. But Bernard Shaw has

always refused to be cajoled, and as to the sand or the mud of abuse

--well, he wears the very stout spectacles of common sense.

III

What does Mr. Shaw himself think of Candida? Perhaps if he could be

persuaded to tell the truth, the vapourish misconceptions concerning

her terrible "shawl" speech--about which I never deceived myself--might

be dissipated. It was not long forthcoming--his answer to my question,

an answer the publication of which was left to my discretion. It may

shock some of his admirers, disconcert others, but at the same time it

will clear the air of much cant; for there is the Candida cant as well

as the anti Shaw cant. He wrote me:--

Don't ask me conundrums about that very immoral female,

Candida. Observe the entry of W. Burgess: "You're the

lady as hused to typewrite for him." "No." "Naaaow: _she_

was younger." And therefore Candida sacked her. Prossy is

a very highly selected young person indeed, devoted to

Morell to the extent of helping in the kitchen but to him

the merest pet rabbit, unable to get the slightest hold

on him. Candida is as unscrupulous as Siegfried: Morell

himself sees that "no law will bind her." She seduces

Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to

seduce him. She is a woman without "character" in the

conventional sense. Without brains and strength of mind

she would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary. She is

straight for natural reasons, not for conventional ethical

ones. Nothing can be more cold-bloodedly reasonable

than her farewell to Eugene: "All very well, my lad;

but I don't quite see myself at fifty with a husband of

thirty-five." It is just this freedom from emotional slop,

this unerring wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her

so completely mistress of the situation.

Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him finally by

showing him his own strength--that David must do without

poor Uriah's wife. And then she pitches in her picture

of the home, the onions, and the tradesmen, and the

cossetting of big baby Morell. The New York _hausfrau_

thinks it a little paradise; but the poet rises up and

says, "Out then, into the night with me"--Tristan's

holynight. If this greasy fool's paradise is happiness,

then I give it to you with both hands, "life is nobler

than that." That is the "poet's secret." The young things

in front weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and

broken-hearted in the cold night to save the proprieties

of New England Puritanism; but he is really a god going

back to his heaven, proud, unspeakably contemptuous of

the "happiness" he envied in the days of his blindness,

clearly seeing that he has higher business on hand

than Candida. She has a little quaint intuition of the

completeness of his cure; she says, "he has learnt to do

without happiness."

So here is Shaw on Shaw, Shaw dissecting Candida, Shaw at last

letting in light on the mystery of the "poet's secret!" There may be

grumbling among the faithful at this very illuminating and sensible

exposition, I feel. So thinks Mr. Shaw, for he adds, "As I should

certainly be lynched by the infuriated Candidamaniacs if this view of

the case were made known, I confide it to your discretion"--which by

a liberal interpretation means, publish it and be hanged to you! But

"Candidamaniacs!" Oh, the wicked wit of this man who can thus mock his

flock! His _coda_ is a neat summing up: "I tell it to you because it

is an interesting sample of the way in which a scene, which should be

conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary notion of the

relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions

to a very high degree, all the more because the language of the poet,

to those who have not the clew to it, is mysterious and bewildering and

therefore worshipful. I divined it myself before I found out the whole

truth about it."

IV

Some day in the far future, let us hope, when the spirit of Bernard

Shaw shall have been gathered to the gods, his popular vogue may be

an established fact. Audiences may flock to sip wit, philosophy, and

humour before the footlights of the Shaw theatre; but unless the

assemblage be largely composed of Shaw _replicas,_ of overmen and

overwomen ("oversouls," not altogether in the Emersonian sense), it is

difficult to picture any other variety listening to Man and Superman.

For one thing, it is not a play to be played, though it may be read

with delight bordering on despair. A deeper reason exists for its

hopelessness--it is such a violent attack on what might be called the

Shaw super-structure, that his warmest enemies and chilliest admirers

will wonder what it is all about. Even William Archer, one of the

latter, confessed his disappointment.

Man and Superman--odious title--is Shaw's new attempt at a Wild Duck,

formerly one of Ibsen's most puzzling productions. Shaw mocks Shaw as

Ibsen sneered at Ibsen. This method of viewing the obverse of your

own medal--George Meredith would say the back of the human slate--is

certainly a revelation of mood-versatility, though a disquieting one to

the man in the street. It does not seem to be playing fair in the game.

Sometimes it is not. With Ibsen it was; he wished to have his fling at

the Ibsenite, and he had it. Shaw-like one is tempted to exclaim, Aha!

drums and trumpets again, even if the cart be re-painted. (_Vide_ his

earlier prefaces.)

The book is dedicated to Mr. Arthur Bingham Walkley, who once wrote of

his friend, "Mr. Bernard Shaw fails as a dramatist because he is always

trying to prove something." In the end it is Shaw the man who is more

interesting than his plays,--all the characters are so many,--Shaw's

winking at one through the printed dialogue.

In the pleasing and unpleasing plays, in the puritanical comedies, his

"forewords" were full of meat served up with a Hibernian sauce, which

produced upon the mental palate the flavours of Swift, of Nietzsche,

of Aristophanes, and of Shaw. This compound could not be slowly

degustated, because the stuff was too hot. Velocity is one of Shaw's

prime characteristics. Like a pianoforte _virtuoso_ whose fingers work

faster than his feelings, the Irishman is lost when he essays massive,

sonorous _cantilena_. He is as emotional as his own typewriter, and

this defect, which he parades as did the fox in the fable, has stood in

the way of his writing a great play. He despises love, and therefore

cannot appeal deeply to mankind.

In the present preface the old music is sounded, but brassier and

shriller; the wires are wearing. It is addressed to Arthur Bingham

Walkley, by all odds the most brilliant, erudite, and satisfying of

English dramatic critics. Now the cruel thing about this preface is

that in it the author tries to foist upon the critic of the London

_Times_ the penalty attached to writing such a play as Man and

Superman. We all cannot be Drydens and write prefaces as great as

poems; and Mr. Shaw might have left out either the play or the preface

and spared the nerves of his friends. He started out to make a play

on Don Juan, an old and ever youthful theme. He succeeded in turning

out an amorphous monster, part dream, part sermon, that will haunt its

creator as Frankenstein was haunted for the rest of his days. Man and

Superman is a nightmare.

To be impertinent is not necessarily an evidence of wisdom; nor does

the dazzling epigram supply the missing note of humanity. But our

author is above humanity. He would deal with the new man who is to

succeed the present used-up specimen. We must freeze up, if needs be

by artificial process, all the springs of natural instincts. Man must

realize that in the inevitable duel of the sexes he will be worsted

unless he recognizes that he is the pursued, not the pursuer. In the

animal kingdom it is the male that is gorgeously bedizened for the

purpose of attracting the feebler faculty of attention in the female.

But in the human order the man is the cynosure of the woman. Her

whole education and existence is an effort to win him--perhaps not

for himself, nevertheless to win and wear him. This is biologically

correct, though hardly gallant; and it is as old as Adam and Eve. Henry

James once defined the situation succinctly, "It was much more the

women ... who were after the men than the men who were after the women;

it was literally visible that the general attitude of one sex was that

of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and attenuating...."

(In the Cage.)

Mr. Shaw might have added that, unlike lightning, women strike twice in

the same spot. Frivolity, however, is not in Mr. Shaw's present scheme

of applied Unsociology.

As is the case with most reformers, he has harked back to the past for

his future types. His men and women, though they go down to the sea

in motor cars, converse about Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, affect

twentieth-century modes, are in reality as old as the hills and as

savage as hillmen. They are only a trifle more self-conscious. The

present play--let us call it one for the sake of the argument--deals

with a precious "baggage" named Ann Whitefield. She is, in the words

of Ibsen, "a mighty huntress of men." She is pert, very vulgar, quite

uncivilized, quite ignorant of everyday feminine delicacies; in a

word, the new woman, according to the gospel of Shaw. Her pursuit of

a man, unavowed, bold, is the story of the play. She is hot-footed

after a revolutionary socialist, John Tanner. Every word that springs

or saunters from his lips, every movement of his muscular person,

betrays the breed of Daredevil Dick, of all the revolutionaries in all

the Shaw plays--the true breed of which Saint Bernard is himself the

unique protagonist. Tanner is rich and believes himself an anarchist.

He is mistaken. He is only a Fabianite with cash, a Fabianite who has

lost the "shining face" of a neophyte and talks daggers and dynamite,

though he uses them not. Ann has been left an orphan. She is a new

Hedda Gabler, who knows what she wants, sees it, secures it; therefore

she burns no dramatic "children," sends no man to a drunkard's doom;

nor will she, one feels quite certain, deceive her husband. To secure

him she attempts all the deception before she marries him, and if she

seldom succeeds with her white lies she nevertheless bags her game.

To supply these two pleasing persons with characters upon whom they

may act and be reacted, Mr. Shaw has devised a middle-aged hypocrite,

a whited sepulchre and man of the world, named Roebuck Ramsden; a

sap-headed young man who dotes so much on Ann that he sacrifices his

own happiness that she may be happy--or humbugs himself into that

belief; a self-willed young lady, his sister Violet, who conceals her

marriage with evil results to her reputation; a comical low-comedy

chauffeur; several pale persons; a snobbish American youth of humble

Irish parentage gilded by American wealth; some brigands, a dream Don

Juan, and last, but not least, the Devil, who in this case is _not_ a

gentleman.

The first act is promising. Mr. Shaw's little paragraphs--they are

intended as a prompt-book in miniature--are more amusing than his

preface. We are deluded into the notion that a first-class comedy is at

hand. There are all the materials ready. Ramsden, an "advanced" thinker

of the antiquated Bradlaugh type, has been appointed co-executor,

co-guardian with Tanner, a thinker of the latter-day type; that is, a

man who has read Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, but not Max Stirner. The

fair Ann, her mother and sister are the stakes of the game. Octavius,

the sap-headed young man, is ready to sacrifice himself, and his sister

shocks all by not acknowledging the father of her unborn child. Here

is potential stuff for a tragic comedy. But Mr. Shaw will not mould his

material into viable shapes. He refuses to be an artist. He loathes

art. And so he is punished by fate--his inspiration vanishes almost at

the point of execution, and, except for a few fugitive flashes, never

burns serenely or continuously.

One telling bit is when Tanner congratulates Violet (what an

appropriate name!) on her delicate condition and is scorned by that

young person, scorned and snubbed. What--she a wicked woman! No, she

is but secretly wedded; in the fulness of time her husband will be

revealed. Tanner sneaks away, feeling that not to women must man look

for the emancipation of the sexes from conventional notions. There are

long harangues on prevailing economic evils, social diseases--all the

old Shaw grievances are paraded.

Act II is rather thin. In Act III, which recalls a Gilbertian farce,

there are cockney brigands, a bandit corporation, limited, devoted to

the robbing of automobiles that pass through Spain. The idea is not

sufficiently novel to be funny. A lengthy parabasis, written in genuine

Shavian, shows us hell, the Devil, Don Juan, and Anna of Mozartean

fame. At least the talk here is as brilliant as is commonly supposed to

prevail in the nether regions. _Inter alia,_ we read that marriage is

the most licentious of human institutions--hence its popularity. Even

the Devil is shocked. "The confusion of marriage with morality has done

more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single

error." "Beauty, purity, respectability, religion, art, patriotism,

bravery, and the rest are nothing but words which I or any one else

can turn inside out like a glove," continues this relentless rake and

transformed preacher. Too true; but the seamy side as exhibited by Don

Juan Shaw is not so convincing as in Nietzsche's transvaluation of

all values. "They are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into

adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be

robbed and enslaved."

Admitted, keen dissector of contemporary ills; but how about your play?

In effect the author says: "To the devil with all art and plays, my

play with the rest! What I wish to do is to tell you how to run the

universe; and for this I will, if necessary, erect my pulpit in hell!"

After this what more can be said? The play peters out; there is

talk, talk, talk. Ann calls the poetic temperament "the old maid's

temperament"; the brigand chief sententiously remarks: "There are two

tragedies in life: one is not to get your heart's desire; the other

is to get it"--which sounds as if wrenched from a page of Chamfort or

Rivarol; and Ann concludes with "Go on talking, Tanner, talking!" It

is the epitaph of the piece, dear little misshapen, still-born comedy.

Well may Mr. Shaw write "universal laughter" at the end. Yet I am

willing to wager that some critics will be in tears at this exhibition

of perverse waste and clever impotency.

The Revolutionists' Handbook and Pocket Companion, which tops this

extraordinary contribution, sociology masking as comedy, is its

chiefest attraction. There, petrified into glistening nuggets, may be

found Shaw philosophy, Shaw humour. There are maxims, too. "Do _not_

unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may

not be the same." This smacks of the inverted wisdom of the late James

Whistler. Marriage, crime, punishment, the beating of children, title,

honours, property, servants, religion, virtues, vices--everything of

vital import to thinking men and women is regarded with the charmingly

malevolent eye of Shaw. He exclaims: "Property, said Proudhon, is

theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the

subject." Come, come, Bernard Shaw! Proudhon said it, but the speech

was not his own property. You, who know your social classics so well,

should have remembered Brissot's Philosophical Examination of Property

and Theft, only published in 1780! You also say, "Beware the man whose

God is in the skies," and "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." Tut,

tut! Why not add--all girls over fifty should be drowned? It is just as

logical. But can one condense the cosmos in a formula?

The general impression of the book causes us to believe there is

a rift in the writer's lute; not in his mentality, but in his own

beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith to Shaw.

Ibsen asserts that after twenty years a truth that has outlived its

usefulness is no longer _truth_, but the simulacrum of one. Shaw's

truths may be decaying. We feel sure that if they be, he will be the

first to detect the odour and warn away his public. Some years ago

he printed a pamphlet against anarchy and anarchist, which was to be

expected from a mild, frugivorous man. Now he seems to be wearying of

the milk-white flag of socialism; and yet his revolutionary maxims are

maxims for children in the time of teething. The world has moved since

the Fabian society scowled at the British lion and tried to twist its

tail with the dialectics of moderate socialism. To use Mr. Shaw's own

pregnant remark, "Moderation is never applauded for its own sake";

and: "Hewho can, does. He who cannot, teaches." Fabianism taught,

taught moderation! Yet to-day the real thing is not Elisée Reclus,

but Michael Bakounin; not Peter Kropotkin, but Sergei Netschajew; not

Richard Wagner, but his friend, Roeckel, who was sent by him across

the cannon-shattered barricades at Dresden in 1849 to fetch an ice to

the thirsty composer. Wagner rang the alarm bells on this opera bouffe

and escaped to Switzerland, Bakounin and Roeckel remained and went to

prison!

Shaw is still ringing alarm bells, but somehow or other their music is

missing and carries no message to his listeners. Is it possible that he

regrets the anarchy that he has never had the courage to embrace and

avow? A born anarchist, individualist, revolutionist, he has always

gone in for half-hearted measures of reform. Never, like Bakounin,

has he applied the torch, thrown the bomb; never, like Netschajew,

has he dared to pen a catechism of destruction, a manual of nihilism

so terrific that advanced Russian thinkers shudder if you mention its

title. It is even rumoured that the Irish dramatist serves his parish

as a meek citizen should--he will be writing poetry or melodrama next.

His pessimism is temperamental, not philosophical, like that of most

pessimists, as James Sully has pointed out. And instead of closely

observing humanity, after the manner of all great dramatists, he has

only closely studied Bernard Shaw.

"Regarded as a play, Man and Superman is, I repeat, primitive in

invention and second rate in execution. The most disheartening thing

about it is that it contains not one of those scenes of really

tense dramatic quality which redeemed the squalor of Mrs. Warren's

Profession, and made of Candida something very like a masterpiece."

Thus William Archer.

V

Most modestly Mr. Shaw entitles a farce of his, the celebrated drama

in two tableaux and in blank verse,--The Admirable Bashville, or

Constancy Unrewarded. It is nothing else but the story of Cashel

Byron's Profession put into blank verse, because, as Mr. Shaw says,

blank verse is so much easier to write than good prose. It is printed

at the end of the second edition of the prize-fighting novel. As

there has been a dramatization made--unauthorized--for a well-known

American pugilist-actor, Mr. Shaw thought that he had better protect

his English interests. Hence the parody for copyright purposes which

was produced in London the summer of 1903 by the Stage Society at the

Imperial Theatre. It is funny. It gibes at Shakespeare, at the modern

drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw himself, and almost

everything else within reach. The stage setting was a mockery of the

Elizabethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who

hung up placards bearing the legend, "A Glade in Wiltstoken Park," etc.

Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King carried

off the honours. Aubrey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of

a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, especially at the close,

when he informed his audience that the author had left the house. And

so he had. He was standing at the corner when I accosted him. Our

interview was brief. He warned me in grave accents and a twinkling

Celtic eye never again to describe him as "benevolent." Half the

beggars of London had winded the phrase and were pestering him at his

back gate. Mr. Shaw still looks as if a half-raw beefsteak and a mug of

Bass would do him a world of good. But who can tell? He might then lose

some of his effervescence--that quality of humour so happily described

by Edmund Gosse when he spoke of the _vegetable_ spirits of George

Bernard Shaw.

The new play, John Bull's Other Island, was first played in London

by the Stage Society last November. It is said--by Shaw's warmest

enemies--to be witty, entertaining, and dramatically boneless. There is

no alternative now for Mr. Shaw--he must visit America, lecture, and

become rich. It is the logical conclusion of his impromptu career, for

it was first in America that the Shaw books and plays were successful

and appreciated; the plays largely because of the bold efforts of

Arnold Daly and Winchell Smith, two young dramatic revolutionists. And

Mr. Shaw may rediscover America for the Americans!

VII

MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL

_De profundis ad te clamavi!_

After witnessing a performance of Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl--The Night

Refuge is a fair equivalent in English--one realizes, not without a

shudder, that there are depths within depths, abysms beneath abysms,

still unexplored by the dramatic adventurer. The late Emile Zola posed

all his lifetime as the father of naturalism in literature; but he

might have gone to school to learn the alphabet of his art at the knees

of the young man from Nijni Novgorod, Maxim Gorky. That anarchist

of letters has taught us lessons of the bitterest import, Gorky the

Bitter One. We know now that Zola was only masquerading in the gorgeous

rags of romanticism with a vocabulary borrowed from Chateaubriand,

Victor Hugo, and Flaubert; we know, too, that despite the _argot_

of L'Assommoir, the book is as romantic as a Bouguereau canvas--the

formula is the same: highly glazed surfaces, smug sentiment, and pretty

colouring. The difference is that while Zola painted low life like a

born romantic, Bouguereau selected for his subjects the nymphs so dear

to the lover of classic anthologies. To the night of his unfortunate

death Zola believed himself a naturalist, though his books never escape

the taint of melodrama.

The naturalism of the Russians is in a different key. Gogol, the

inimitable Gogol, wrote Dead Souls, and Russia had conquered the

kingdom once ruled by Fielding. If Chateaubriand was the father of

modern French prose, as Goethe asserted, from Gogol stemmed all the

great modern Russians: Dostoïevsky, Turgenev, Stchendrin, Tolstoy,

Gorky; and the last seems nearer the first than either Turgenev or

Tolstoy. He is hardly ten years old artistically, yet his name is

known from Siberia to the Sandwich Islands. He is read more in a day

than Kipling is in a year, and, compared to Kipling, he is as flint to

chalk, a man carved from the hardest granite.

A revolutionary, inasmuch as he deliberately disowns, in his most

characteristic work, all the devices of literature, of rhetoric, of

literary architecture, he is at his worst in prolonged narrative,

such as Foma Gordyeeff. And when he philosophizes he is long-winded.

It is in the short tale with a simple setting that Gorky knows how to

stir us. A strip of sea beach, the sky a hot azure, the water green

as grass, two or three men and women, and we are given a tragedy in

miniature. Or the steppes, sullen and brown, stretch before us to the

setting sun; a few tramps talk at random, night falls. Misery huddles

close. We have felt the very pulse-beat of life--and such lives! A

wretched outcast, starved, wet as a dog in the rain--for he is but a

dog in the rain--meets a woman as miserable and as degraded as himself.

They manage to steal some mouldy bread, and sleep one night in a cask.

It is but the recital of one night. They drift apart in the morning,

never to meet again. Why should they care? Drab and monotonous, their

soiled lives need be viewed but for a moment to surmise their future.

Yet Gorky--for he is his own hero--contrives to sound undertones in

this dark music that appeal. Instinctively he lays bare the souls of

the men and women he dissects--souls as of muddy flame. A dreary sigh

escapes their lips as they drag their poor carcases from place to

place. Life has drugged them with sorrow. Why move at all? Why live at

all? Why were they born? Why do they die? Existence is reduced to a few

primary movements; eat, sleep; if vodka can be secured, then drink it

to oblivion, for the sole blessing in this vale of tears is oblivion.

It may be seen that, compared to Gorky's rank, unsavoury, but sincere

notation of facts, Thomas de Quincey's charming narrative of his

youthful woes in Oxford Street--that "stony-hearted mother"--and

his walks and talks with Anne, the noctambulist, is an idyll. Gorky

transfers to his pages the odours of a starving, sweating humanity,

its drunkenness, its explosions of rage, guttural cries of joy,

and its all too terrible animalism. We turn our heads the other way

when his women curse and rave. Walt Whitman, said Moncure Conway,

brought the slop pail into the drawing-room; but for Gorky there is no

drawing-room. Life is only a dung heap.

For years I have searched for the last word in dramatic naturalism,

and in Gorky's Nachtasyl I found it. I heard it first in Berlin at the

Kleines Theatre, and later in Vienna at the Deutsches Volkstheatre.

Gorky, himself a lycanthrope, pessimist, despiser of his fellow-men,

has assembled in this almost indescribable and unspeakable mélange--for

it is not a play--a set of men and women whose very lives smell to

heaven; the setting recalls one of his stories, Men with Pasts. (It is

in Orloff and his Wife.)

An utter absence of theatricalism and a naïveté in dramatic feeling

proclaim Gorky a man of genius and also one quite ignorant of the

fundamental rules of the theatre. His four acts might be compressed

into two, or, better still, into one. Only the fatigue and gloom

engendered would interfere with this scheme, for there is far too

much talk, far too little movement. Gorky, like many uneducated men

of power, loves to moralize, to discuss life and its meanings. He is

at times veritably sophomoric in this respect. Long speeches are put

into the mouths of his characters, who forthwith spout the most dreary

commonplaces about destiny, luck, birth, and death.

The strength of the play lies in its presentation of character.

Characterization, with a slender thread of narrative, no effective

"curtains," comprises the material of this vivid experiment.

Nevertheless, it burns the memory because of its shocking candour and

pity-breeding truths.

One is struck by a certain resemblance to Charles Dickens in all the

novels of the Russians, Dostoïevsky and Gorky in particular. There are

whole passages in Crime and Chastisement and Injury and Insult that

might have been suggested by the English master of fiction. Gorky,

like Gogol, loves to picture some poor wretch with a dominant passion,

and then to place him in surroundings that will move the machinery of

his being. And with all his hatred of life, of men, pity oozes from

his pages, sometimes contemptuous, sometimes passionate, pity. The

Night Refuge is a cellar with a kitchen, a few holes in the wall for

sleeping purposes. Its counterpart exists in every great city. Thieves,

prostitutes, men and women, the very dregs of life, pass their battered

days and nights in these foul caves. Gorky confesses to having lived

in such places while he wandered through some of the Russian towns.

Anarchists are not, as is popularly supposed, born or bred in these

pest alleys, whose inhabitants are too degraded, too worn out, to

harbour plans for the overthrow of governments. The vermin that burrow

in the mud and darkness are not dangerously brave or endowed with

destructive energies.

The keepers of the night asylum are a man and wife, a trifle better

off than their lodgers in physique, for they are not drunkards. The

husband is past fifty, an avaricious, snuffling, shuffling hypocrite,

jealous of his young wife and brutal to the people he harbours. His

wife is only twenty-six and hates her husband. She loves a young,

good-looking thief who lives in the cellar, an aristocrat among his

fellows, for he sleeps alone in a sort of cupboard, and only works at

his "profession" when he needs money. He gets the hottest tea and the

nicest morsels from the shrewish woman. Her voice, raucous and full

of fury, is softened when she addresses her Wasjka. His companions

know all about this affair, but are not jealous of him; they are too

indifferent to everything but their own wants to care for God or man,

devils or angels. They are over-tramps, beings for whom the moralities,

major and minor, no longer have any meaning. The thief is tired of the

woman, tired of his life amid stupid people, and has cast his eyes on

Natascha, the sister of his mistress. The elder woman realizes it and

trouble is brewing when the curtain goes up.

It is morning. A dull light filters from above on a mass of almost

shapeless figures. One by one they stir. Yawns, half-stifled oaths,

coughing, expectorations, noses noisily blown, whinings, cries of

pain, harsh laughter, and suppressed sobbing--the hideous symphony of

life at its lowest social ebb. Again you feel like averting your head,

for such is the force of suggestion that a noisome odour seems to

emanate from the stage and creep languidly through the auditorium.

The other _dramatis person_: a policeman, uncle to the sisters; a

locksmith with a dying wife--dying of consumption brought on by

the prolonged beatings at the hands of her semi-insane husband; a

street-walker--one who reads sentimental novels and speaks at intervals

of a romance she had when younger; a huck-stress, cynical, drunken,

loud-mouthed; a cap-maker who never works; an actor who has forgotten

his professional name, poisoned with alcohol; a man named Satin, a

good-natured, degenerate scoundrel; a decayed baron, neurasthenic, and

with a face that recalls one of Doré's sketches of a damned soul--lean,

always biting his nails, stuttering, his eyes blazing with the infernal

fires of vodka madness; an old man of venerable aspect, a pilgrim who

happens in; his name is Luka and he is some sixty years of age. Then

there is a young scapegrace shoemaker who plays the concertina and

always describes himself as a free man, a man without cares, a man who

would not accept wealth if offered him. A Tartar and several porters

and members of the barefoot brigade make up this unattractive company.

How to weave a play from such unpromising material must have puzzled

Gorky. Evidently he did not try, preferring the easier way of letting

his people tell their own stories and reducing technical construction

to a mere dropping of the curtain from time to time. In fact, there is

far more dramatic intrigue in Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness, of which

this piece is really a pendant. Gorky does not fear the naked truth as

do many literary artists who have social position and reputations to

maintain.

The collision of character which is essential to the production of

drama is brought about somehow or other, the chief means employed

being Luka the pilgrim. This old man, who is as loquacious as Polonius

and almost as platitudinous, changes the ideas of every one he meets.

He finds the thief hard and impenitent; he points out to him that in

Siberia, over yonder, is a wide, free land, where every man may hew a

way for himself. The good-looking scamp tells him that thief he was

born, thief he must remain; that his father saw the inside of prisons;

that if he goes to Siberia it will be as a convict, and not of his

own volition. Yet the words of the stranger have sunk a shaft into

his consciousness, and despite his mockery of the old man's belief he

pauses and reflects--why not? Why not become a decent man, marry, beget

children, and chuck the old life of crime and police espionage? He

loves Natascha. He hates her sister, and in the best scene of the play

he lays his case clumsily but manfully before the girl. The crossroads

of his life are arrived at--her decision will settle which turn he is

to take.

Natascha is that mixture of good, bad, and indifferent in all of us,

and is therefore a puzzle to audiences who like patterns made out of

the whole cloth, without any dubious mixture of light and shade. She

realizes that Wasjka has been her sister's lover; she has been beaten

so that her face and shoulders are often black and blue by her jealous

sister; she knows that her present life is a hell--yet she hesitates;

Luka urges her. Wasjka pleads. Unluckily, the sister returns home

earlier than expected and from a window overlooking the cellar up one

short flight of stairs she overhears the entire conversation. Here is

coincidence childishly introduced to unravel the simplest of dramatic

knots. Yet it seems inevitable. The sister is an envious, prying woman,

always spying upon her boarders. She may have hastened her devotions at

church--like her husband, she is bigoted and hypocritical--and quietly

sneaked in to see what mischief her disreputable crew of lodgers were

making. Pictorially the scene is striking. It recalls any one of the

numerous kitchen pieces of Teniers or Ostade, in which a stout wench is

courted, while from some aperture above a jealous wife threateningly

peers. At the crucial moment in the play the angry creature breaks out

into a volley of abuse. A pretty state of affairs! Such goings-on in

a respectable establishment if her back is turned for a half hour! A

body can't go to church to pray for the sins of her neighbours without

meddle-some old men entering unbidden a decent house and setting every

one by the ears!

After she empties one vial of wrath upon Luka's head she uncorks

another for her unfortunate sister's benefit. A lazy good-for-nothing,

living on the bread of her relatives--a fine marriage she will make

with a thief: a honey-moon in jail, perhaps! The husband puts in

nasty remarks, and Wasjka loses his temper. There is a short, sharp

interchange of blows, but the men are torn asunder. Hush! the police

are always lurking near by, and not even the uncle, himself a member

of the force, a bribe-taker, gambler, and drunkard, could intervene

where blood had been shed. But Wasjka's chance had passed. It does not

return. Natascha, cowed, humbly goes upstairs to the kitchen, there to

clean the samovar, and the aged Luka groans, for he knows what life is,

with its queer eddies and whirlpools of chance.

He has comforted the dying wife of the locksmith, Anna by name,

and, with all the ribaldry, drunkenness, and profanity around them,

whispers in her ears consoling words. She has known naught but misery,

starvation, cold, and blows her life long. Her brutal husband is

presented as the type of the workman who is always preaching of the

dignity of labour. _He_ is a workman, he proudly asserts to the thief,

and files away at his locks while his wife lies gasping. We catch a

strain of Tolstoy in the retort of the thief, who tells him that work

alone doesn't make a man. Thick of apprehension, the huge dolt sits

and files. When his wife begs for more air, he tells her to go to the

yard--the place is already too cold. Then he moves over to her and

offers her some bread. He even asks if she suffers. Finally, with the

others, he departs for the tavern. As she listens to Luka's words,

Wasjka enters and laughs them to scorn. Is there a God? The company,

which has returned, discusses violently this question. Talk, talk,

talk--the Russian tramp will talk all day if you give him a theme and a

drink. If one believes in a God, interposes Luka, then God exists; if

one does not, then there is no God. It is a neat metaphysical evasion,

but the others are momentarily silenced. Wasjka has boasted that he

fears neither life nor death. Anna quietly dies while the rest are

gabbling, and instantly a hush pervades the sordid scene. Dead! What

does that mean? A moment ago querulously begging for quiet--now quiet

forever! The young criminal edges his way upstairs, his bragging spirit

clean gone. Dead! Some one must run to the tavern and tell the husband.

The police must be informed; the sooner the better for the man's sake.

He might be suspected! The curtain falls on a moving spectacle.

Another case in which Luka interferes is that of the old actor. We

gather from this abject wreck's disconnected speeches that he has been

a dramatic artist in his time; but, as he repeats, parrot-fashion, he

"has poisoned his organism with alcohol." He picked up the phrase from

the doctor at the poorhouse infirmary. This caricature of humanity,

this wraith with a brilliant past, has drifted into the back waters

of the night refuge and there awaits death. One gleam of light he is

made to see before the end. Luka tells him of a city which contains a

hospital for the cure of drunkenness. There must the actor go and there

begin a new life. A new life! The words ravish his ears stunned by

debauchery and wake a momentary vista of hope. Where is this city? Luka

cannot tell. He has forgotten, but he will surely remember. The actor

later relates to the cynical street-walker the good news. His brain

stimulated by the intrusion of a new idea stirs to life. He quotes,

misquotes, Shakespeare; recalls bits of Lear, and breaks down in

recitation. The word, the word--what is it? Exalted he waves his arms

wildly and rushes out to the haven of rest, the tavern. When the dead

woman is surrounded by the speechless crowd, the old actor comes in,

mounts a table, and declaims his speech. He has remembered. The effect

is ghastly.

Luka has conversations with the baron. This odd bundle of bones lives

on the young woman already mentioned. If he can't get vodka, he will

drink drugs; these failing he will sit and gnaw his nails as a mouse

gnaws the wires of its cage, or he will sit cross-legged for hours on

the top of the Russian stove and listen to story-telling. His catchword

is "talk on"; anything for an anecdote. He mocks continually the woman

who supports him. She is an inveterate sentimentalist, and every day

tells a story about a student of noble birth who once threatened to

shoot himself for love of her. But, as the baron sarcastically points

out, the name of this imaginary hero is Gaston one day, another it is

Raoul. He taunts the poor devil into despair and drunkenness. Luka

expostulates. He touches the spring that sets working the young man's

recollections of a happy and honourable past. He was the son of a

wealthy, noble family. He had his coffee in bed in the morning--yes, it

is true! He had servants, horses, a wife. Why was he born? No idea! Why

did he marry? No idea! Why is he still living? No idea! Why will he die?

Then the woman has her revenge. It is her chance, and she takes it. She

sneers at the baron's lies. He take his coffee in bed! Not he. Liar

he is when he boasts of his birth. Vagabond! The episode is as ugly

as if it happened under our eyes. His secret weakness exposed, the

baron breaks into hysterical weeping, which presently modulates into

fierce anger. Seizing a glass, he attempts to hurl it at her head. But

the storm subsides, and soon they are all drinking and shouting. You

feel as if you had been viewing the scene from a hidden window, so

realistic is the performance by the troupe of the Kleines Theatre.

The climax is attained in the third act. A row is precipitated during

which the lodging-house keeper is killed. Who struck the blow? Loudly

his widow denounces Wasjka. He is the murderer of her husband, he

the thief who threatened so often the life of her good man. In the

confusion the police rush in, Wasjka is manacled; but so is the

woman, for Natascha bears witness that she overheard her sister

plotting the death of her husband with her lover, Wasjka. The moment

is as theatrically thrilling as you please; hate has the upper hand

in Natascha's heart and her evidence sends the pair to prison. She

disappears.

About this time you begin to suspect that the well-meaning Luka is a

trouble-breeder. Every pie in which he has put his finger so far is

spoiled. He, too, vanishes as noiselessly as he appeared. In Act IV

what is left of the gang sits at the same old dingy table drinking

and discussing, interminably discussing, the events of the past, and

also Luka. He is branded as a liar, a bore, a kill-joy, a busybody,

and one who causes trouble. What if he lies or tells the truth? What's

the difference, anyhow? His truth caused murder, his lies did no one

good, and so they sneer, sneer at the world, sneer at themselves,

occasionally, Pilate-like, asking, what is truth? The Tartar prays

in a corner and reads his Koran, the rest yell out a drunken song,

the shoemaker plays his concertina. The old actor, worse sot than

ever, asks the Tartar to pray for him, goes out to the yard, and

hangs himself. The baron discovers the swinging body and announces

the fact to his comrades. One answers wrathfully, "So he must spoil

our singing--the fool!" And with that the curtain drops, leaving you

puzzled, disgusted, shocked, yet touched. Gorky has caught something

of "the strange, irregular rhythm of life" in this piece, and you feel

the vibration of truth in every line of the extremely plastic dialogue.

That the stage has, or has not, any business with such spectacles never

occurs to the spectator until out upon Berlin's broad avenue of trees

pulsing with life.

The amateur of sensations, exquisite, morbid, or brutal, must feel

after Nachtasyl that the bottomless pit has been almost plumbed. What

further exploitation of woe, of crime, of humanity stripped of its

adventitious social trappings, can be made? And this question is put

by every generation without in the least stopping the fresh shaking

up of the dramatic kaleidoscope. The Gorky play, even if it disgusts

at times, at least arouses pity and terror, and thus, according to

the classical formula, purges the minds of its spectators. Compared

to the drama of lubricity manufactured in Paris and annually exported

to America, this little study of a group of outcast men and women

is a powerful moral lesson. That it is a play I do not assert, nor

could it be put on the boards in America without a storm of critical

and public censure. Americans go to the theatre to be amused and not

to have their nerves assaulted. Thackeray, in a memorable passage of

Vanity Fair, refused to stir those depths of humanity where lurk all

manners of evil monsters. Perhaps this refusal was for the great writer

an artistic renunciation; perhaps he knew the British public. In our

own happy, sun-smitten land, where poverty and vice abound not, where

the tramp is only a creation of the comic journals--in America, if

such a truth-teller as Gorky arose, we should fall upon him, neck and

crop, gag him, and without bothering over the formality of a writ _de

lunatico inquirendo_, clap the fellow behind the bars of a madhouse

cell. It would serve him right. The ugly cancers of the social system

should never be exposed, especially by a candid hand! In art, to tell

truths of this kind does not alone shame the devil, but outrages the

community. No wonder Emperor William does not grace such performances

by his presence. No wonder Gorky is a suspect in Russia. He tells the

truth, which in the twentieth century is more dangerous than hammering

dynamite!

One detail I have forgotten. Old Luka the Pilgrim is asked by Wasjka

Pepel where he purposes travelling after he leaves their haunt. To

Little Russia, he says, adding that he has heard of a new faith being

preached out there, and he will see if there is anything in it. There

might be--men search and search for better things.... If God will but

give them patience, all will be well! Perhaps this new preacher has

found the light! It is a touch unmistakably of Russia, where even the

irreligious are not without faith. Gorky, with all his moral anarchy,

is as superstitious as a _moujik._ He shakes his fists at the eternal

stars and then makes the sign of the cross. It may be for that reason

he wrote The Night Refuge.

_De profundis ad te clamavi!_

VIII

HERMANN SUDERMANN

The unfailing brilliancy of expression and abundant technical power

of Hermann Sudermann have so seldom failed him in the lengthy list of

his plays and novels that his admirers are too often oblivious to his

main defect as an artist and thinker--a dualism of style and ideas. The

Prussian playwright wishes to wear three heron feathers in his cap.

Cosmopolitan as he is, he would fill his dramas with the incomparable

psychologic content of Ibsen; he would be a painter of manners; he

would emulate Sardou in his constructive genius. To have failed,

and failed more than once, in his effort to precipitate these three

qualities in his surprisingly bold and delicate wit, is not strange.

And to have grazed so often the edge of triumphs, not popular but

genuinely artistic, warrants one in placing Sudermann high in the ranks

of German dramaturgists.

In a very favourable review written by Mr. W. S. Lilly of The Joy of

Life, he ranks Sudermann among the great painters of manners, and,

after reading Dame Care and The Cat's Bridge, we are tempted to agree

with the enthusiasm of the English critic. He thus sets down the

qualities of a painter of manners: "Sense and sensibility, sagacity

and suppleness, openness of mind and originality of thought, depth

of feeling and delicacy of touch." Does Sudermann's art include all

these things? We think not. Rather is he as a dramatist--the expert

_Techniker_, the man of the theatre, impregnated by the dominant

intellectual ideas of the hour, than a poet who from a haunting

necessity gazes into his heart and then writes: Sudermann is too

photographic; he too often wills his characters into a mould of his

own, not of their own, making; he wills his atmosphere to blend with

his theses, the reverse of Hauptmann's method. He is more cerebral than

emotional, more of a philosopher than a dramatic psychologist. Above

all, he is literary; he has the literary touch, the formal sense, the

up-gushing gift of verbal expression. Add to this order of talent a

real feeling for dramatic _nuance,_ and Sudermann's enigmatic warring

opposites of temperament and action seem remarkable.

In 1889, miraculous year of modern artistic Germany, Sudermann's

dramatic début in Honour was more of a nine days' wonder than

Hauptmann's Before Sunrise. The surety of touch, the easy mastery of

theatric effects, the violent contrasts, and the sparkling dialogue

transformed Sudermann's cometary career into a fixed star of the first

magnitude. To-day this first play appears banal enough. Time has

permitted us to see it in completer historic perspective. Ibsen's

influence in the posing of the moral conflict is speedily recognized,

just as Count Von Trast may be traced to those _raisonneurs_ so dear to

the younger Dumas, those human machines spouting logic and arranging

the dénouement like the god behind the cloud. One inevitably recalls

the relation of Björnsen to Ibsen in the present position of Sudermann

and Hauptmann.

Yet it is easy to admire Honour. It contains, notably in the two

acts of the "hinter haus," real strokes of observation and profound

knowledge of human nature. The elder Heinecke, rapacious rascal, is

a father lost to all sense of shame, for he closes his eyes to his

daughter's behaviour. This same old scamp is both true and amusing.

Nor is his wife depicted with less unwavering fidelity. The motive

of Honour is not alone the ironic contrast of real and conventional

ideals of honour--it shoots a bolt toward Nietzsche's land where good

and evil blend in one hazy hue. Sudermann, here and in nearly all

his later pieces, challenges the moral law--Ibsen's loftiest heron

feather--and if any appreciable theory of conduct is to be deduced from

his works, it is that the moral law must submit to the variations of

time and place, even though its infraction spells sin, even though the

individual in his thirst for self-seeking smashes the slate of morality

and perishes in the attempt.

This battle of good and evil Sudermann dwells upon, often to the

confusion of moral values, often to the tarnishing of his art. And

in his endeavour to hold the dramatic scales in strict equipoise,

to intrude no personal judgments, he leaves his audiences in blank

bewilderment. Better the rankest affirmations than the blandest

negatives. Yes counts far more than No in the theatre, and Sudermann

is happier when he is violently partisan. His contemporary, Hauptmann,

shows us the shipwreck of souls in whom the spiritual stress

preponderates. Sudermann, except in rare instances, sticks closer to

the social scale and its problems; and when he does he is at his best,

for it cannot be said that The Three Heron Feathers, written under

the spur of The Sunken Bell, betrays a mastery or even a familiarity

with those shadowy recesses wherein action is a _becoming_, where the

soul blossoms from a shapeless mass into volitional consciousness.

Sudermann's art is more external; it concerns itself with the How

rather than with the Why, and one feels that storm and fury were

deliberate engraftments, not the power which works from within to the

outer world.

There is character drawing of an unexceptional kind in Honour. Robert

Heinecke returns from foreign lands to find his family degraded, his

sister trading on her beauty, his father and mother accepting bounty

from the mansion house, the employers of the honourable son. The

maze in which he is caught is constructed with infinite skill; the

expository act is the best. There is not much mystery--we seem here

to be in the clear atmosphere of the French dramaturgists, Augier and

Dumas; while the finale is rather flat, we look for a suicide or a

scandal of some sort. The author keeps himself steady in the saddle

of realism. This ending is lifelike, inasmuch as the hero goes away

with Graf Trast, who literally reasons him out of his dangerous mood.

We feel that all the rest do not count, not the ignoble Kurt and his

snobbish friends, his philistine parents; not the Heineckes with their

vulgar avarice, their Zola-istic squalor. The romance is conventional.

In fact, so cleverly did Sudermann mingle the new and old in the

opposing currents of dramatic art that his play was instantly a success.

Accused of this ambition to drive two horses, the dramatist threw

down as a gauge to criticism, Sodom (1891). It was not a great play,

because it lacked logic, balance, truthfulness. A distorted picture of

artistic degeneracy, its satire on certain circles in Berlin caused a

furore; but the piece had not the elements of sincerity. Technically

it revealed the mastery of almost hopeless material, and while one's

æsthetic sense and the fitness of things are hopelessly upset, the

cunning hand of the prestidigitator is everywhere present. There are

some episodes that stir, notably the scenes between father and son; but

the grimness and sordidness are too much for the nerves.

Magda (1893) struck a new note. Many believe it to be Sudermann at

his best. Thus far he has not surpassed it in unity of atmosphere and

dissection of motives. That the _morale_ may be all wrong is not to

the point. Again we see Ibsen's mighty shadow in the revolt of the new

against the old; daughter and father posed antagonistically with the

figure of the pastor, one of the German author's better creations, as a

mediating principle.

One of many reasons that the Magda of Sudermann is a remarkable play

is the critical controversy over its interpretation. Each one of

us reveals his temperamental bias in the upholding of Bernhardt's

or Duse's or Modjeska's respective readings. And which one of the

three artists has exhausted the possibilities of Magda's many-sided

character? On this point Herr Sudermann is distressingly discreet,

although he has a preference for Duse, as is well known to a few of

his intimates. The reason is simple. Duse presents more phases of the

character, exhibits more facets of this curious dramatic gem, and by

her excellences, and not her limitations, we must judge her performance.

We have seen a dozen Magdas: English, French, German, Italian,

Belgian, Jewish, and Scandinavian. Fanatical admirers of Bernhardt

claim preeminence for her in the part, certain sides of which are

child's play for her accomplished virtuosity. But the critic who

knows Sudermann's Magda also knows that the very brilliancy of the

glorious French actress throws the picture into too high relief; there

are no middle tints in Sarah's embodiment. It recalls the playing

of an overmasteringly brilliant pianist, one who rolls over the

keyboard like a destructive avalanche. The human note, the sobbing,

undulating quality of a violoncello whose tone flashes fire, is

missing. Little doubt that Bernhardt gives us certain moods of Magda

in a transcendental manner. She is the supreme artist of all in the

exposition of tragic _bravura._ Yet she is not Sudermann's Magda. This

is so well known as to be a critical commonplace.

Mrs. Campbell's Magda is above the ordinary. Modjeska's powers were on

the wane when she appeared in the play; but we cannot forget the native

sweetness and true Polish _zal_ with which she suffused the character.

Supple, poetic, charming, she was, and despite all, lacked much of

Magda's complexity. Does Duse entirely fulfil all the requirements of

the rôle?

We do not know. We only feel that in mood-versatility she outstrips

all others we have seen, and if she has not seen farthest into the

soul of the opera singer, she has viewed it from more sides than her

contemporaries. Hence her interpretation is more various and, it being

Duse, is more wonderful in the technical sense in the revelation of an

effortless art.

She is natural, never photographic. Photography arrests motion; Duse

is ever in modulation. Rather, if you will have pictorial analogues,

might her Magda be compared to a Richard Earlom or a Valentine Green

mezzotint, wherein the luminous shadows and faint spiritual overtones

are acidly mellow. And who shall forget the manner of her throat

as it trilled with rage when to her Von Keller makes his perfectly

honourable and perfectly abominable offer! We have dwelt so much upon

the admirable reticences of this artist, upon her "tact of omission,"

we really forget that she never stops acting or living her part for a

moment. She continually evokes musical imagery, for the exquisite and

harmonious interrelations of every movement, every word, unroll before

us like great, solemn music.

Magda will probably outlive The Joy of Life, as it has already outlived

the dramatist's Honour. The theme of the first is based on more

fundamental facts than the others--the clash of will and affection. If

all human families were loving, if father never opposed daughter or

son flouted mother, then such a play as Magda never would have been

written. But, alas! the newspapers prove that family life is not always

celestial, indeed, that it is often bestial. But the Parson Tickletexts

never acknowledge this.

There is no lesson in Magda; the ending is not a sermon--unless you

wish it to prove that contradicting apoplectic fathers is a fatal

proceeding. Magda is an individualist. She is selfish. This trait

she shares with the mass of mankind. Her "I am I" is neither a

proclamation nor a challenge to the world. It is the simple confession

of a woman who knows herself, her weaknesses, her errors, who has

battled and wrested from life a little, passing triumph, the stability

of which she doubts.

"We must sin if we wish to grow. To become greater than our sins is

worth more than all the purity you preach." Is this immoral? We hasten

to quote a sentence from John Milton's Areopagitica, the magnificent

music of which fascinated the ear of Robert Louis Stevenson, quite

apart from its significant wisdom.

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and

unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but

slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for,

not without dust or heat." Poor Magda's virtue was certainly not

cloistered. She ran for fame's garland in all the dust and heat of

the artistic arena. She won, she lost. The bigot discerns in Magda an

abandoned creature; the men and women who see life from all sides and

know the fallibility of the flesh are apt to forgive her shortcomings.

"The ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us." She must have had a

detestable disposition. Fancy what a spoilt opera singer with sore

tonsils can be on a rainy day, especially when she reads the name of

her dearest foe "substituting" on the bill. Then drop her in the sleepy

old town of her nativity, where a harsh, opinionated father would worm

from her every detail of her dubious past Sudermann has done this with

the result--a lifelike play, in which nothing is demonstrated except

the unalterable stupidity of things in general and the naked fact that

"I am I" is the only motto, whether secret or published, of every

human crawling 'twixt earth and sky. In the pastor Sudermann attempts

to paint the altruist in action. It is hardly a convincing piece of

portraiture. Your true altruist is bounded by Tolstoy on the north, by

Howells on the west, by Francis of Assisi on the south, and on the east

by Buddha. Outside of book covers the person exists not.

The Battle of the Butterflies (1894) was seen in New York at

Conried's Irving Place Theatre. It is comedy of a skin-deep variety,

entertaining! And here's an end to it. Happiness in a Corner is deeper

in sentiment. It has the Ibsen touch with a pathos foreign to the

Norwegian. Inspector Orb is of Ibsen, so is Pastor Weidemann, and

the others--Bettina, Räcknitz, Elizabeth, and Helena--are alive and

suffer and joy. There is vitality in this work. Also is there force

and consummate cleverness in the three one-act plays grouped under the

title Morituri (1896). Avowedly devoted to the theme of death they are

all three illustrative of the dramatist's feeling for the right phrase,

the only right situation. Teja, Fritzchen, and The Eternal Masculine

show us in three widely differing modes how, as in life, we miss the

happiness near at hand while longing for the ideal--a theme dealt

with more broadly in The Three Heron Feathers.

John the Baptist (1898), like Paul Heyse's Mary Magdalen, was the

occasion of a scandal in Berlin, because the censor forbade its

performance on religious grounds, though Otto Ludwig's Maccabees and

Hebbel's Judith are stock pieces. As a drama it is weak, for the

vacillating hero wearies us to distraction, notwithstanding the poetic

charm of the prologue. If the Christ had been boldly dramatized, as

was evidently the playwright's purpose, the outcome, no matter how

shattering to pious nerves, would have been better artistically. But

this vague dreamer, pessimistic, halting, irresolute, what can we

make of him across the footlights, and for once Sudermann's technical

ability failed him.

The Three Heron Feathers (1899) is an attempt to meet Hauptmann on

equal terms. It lacks coherence, despite the occasional lift of

its verse--Sudermann fancied that he had forsworn the prose of the

realistic drama forever--while the lofty moral ideal, unduly insisted

upon, soon becomes a thorn in the flesh. No one is alive but the trusty

Lorbuss, the Prince being a theory set in action. The next play, St.

John's Fire (1900), we confess to having read with more pleasure than

seeing it enacted. It goes up in the air soon after the curtain rises

on Act III, though the story is a capital one for dramatic purposes. It

would seem that Sudermann was again attacked by his doubting mania. He

has contrived the atmosphere of romance, the pagan fire of St. John,

the mystery of night, the passion of Georg and Marikke; but either his

courage failed him, or else beset by some idea of resignation he spoilt

his development and conclusion, and we leave the theatre dissatisfied,

not with that spiritual dissatisfaction which Ibsen plants, a

rankling sore in one's heart, but the kind that grows into resentment

against the dramatist, for Marikke is a girl of whom Thomas Hardy

would have been proud. And then there is a muddle of symbolism and

heredity,--Sudermann endeavouring to scoop up in his too comprehensive

net the floating ideas of the hour. Georg von Hartwig's sudden lapse

into a selfish citizen we can never forgive.

Of the criticism of masterpieces there is no end. Take Sudermann's The

Joy of Life as an example. (Why such an Ibsen-like title for Es Lebe

das Leben?) Obsessed by subject and subject-matter only, many of us

turn a blind side to the real qualities that make up an excellent play.

Now this harping on the theme of a drama--whether pleasant, unpleasant,

dull, brilliant, or truthful--is eminently amateurish. It is rather

the function of the manager; it affects his box-office, and, as he is

not in business for art, he cherishes that brave little place above

all else. But a critic is supposed to wear an open mind, to accept a

subject without looking the gift poet in the mouth, and also to judge

how near the dramatist reaches the goal of his own ideal--not the

critic's. That we do not do so is to be pitied. It is because of this

that so many wonderful plays never see the light, or else are botched

at their birth.

This persistent avoidance of the dramatist's view-point, this

refusal to enter into sympathetic complicity with him, leads to sad

conclusions. If you decide violently that a play has no right to exist

because it exhibits a situation or character abhorrent to your notions,

in what a predicament is the dramatist! It recalls the story told by

George Saintsbury about the man who was shown Flameng's beautiful

etching of Herrera's Child with the Guitar. "But I don't like babies,"

said the man, unconsciously illustrating uncatholicity in criticism.

The subject did not appeal to him, therefore its truthful art could go

hang.

Too great an artist to preach a moral, Sudermann nevertheless bestows

the justice demanded by destiny upon the luckless Beata, Countess of

Michael von Kellinghausen. The Joy of Life is next to Magda technically

one of Sudermann's biggest achievements.

To present such a trite theme with new harmonies is a triumph.

The tragic quality of the piece in an atmosphere bordering on the

aristocratic commonplace is not the least of its excellences. We know

that life is daily, that great art is rare, that the average sensual

man prefers a variety show to a problem play; yet we are not abashed

or downcast. The cant that clusters about cults, theatric or artistic,

should not close our ears to the psychologic power and the message--if

you will have the word--of this Sudermann play. If his Beata,--Ibsen

has a Beata in Rosmersholm and D'Annunzio one in his La Gioconda--was

a sorely beset woman, if she felt too much, thought too much,--one

suspects her of poring over Nietzsche and hearing much Wagner; witness

that allusion to Hans Sachs's quotation from Tristan,--yet is she not

a fascinating soul? Are there to be no semi-tones in character? Must

women be paragons and men perfect for inclusion in a play? If this be

so, then all the art of the Elizabethans is false, their magnificent

freedom and their wit a beacon of warning to pure-minded playwriters.

And, pray, out of what material shall the dramatist weave his pattern

of good and evil?

But had Sudermann transposed his Beata to the fourteenth century,

had he dowered her with mediæval speech and the name of Beatrice,

had he surrounded her with lovers in tin-plate armour, our shrinking

natures might not have hied to cover. The pathos of distance would

have softened the ugly truths of the modern drawing-room. The Joy of

Life is a capital play. There is much conventionality displayed in the

minor characters; only Beata and Richard are really original. And the

use of the divorce debate as a symbol reveals the real weakness of

the play, though structurally it has some striking virtues. The small

part of Meixner, the theological student turned social-democrat, had

_vraisemblance_. It suggests the character of Krogstad in A Doll's

House. That tiresome exhorter, Count Trast, in Sudermann's Honour,

is luckily not duplicated. And we doubt not that the absence of

explicatory comment by the author is disheartening to a public which

likes all the questions raised answered at the close, after the manner

of a Mother Goose morality. Neither D'Annunzio nor Sudermann is a

preacher. As in the ghastly illumination of a lightning flash, souls

hallucinated by love, terror, pity, despair, are seen struggling in

the black gulf of night. And then all becomes abysmal darkness. There

are the eternal verities, the inevitable compensations in this play.

The application of the moral is left to the listener, who is given

the choice of echoing or not echoing the immortal exclamation of Mr.

Saintsbury's unknown, "But I don't like babies!"

In Storm-Brother Socrates, Sudermann places his scene in a small East

Prussian town, possibly Matizken, where he was born in 1857. The

schoolmaster, the grocer, the Jewish rabbi, the tax-collector, and

the dentist are the chief characters of this satiric comedy. A lot of

old cronies, men who went through the stirring times of '48, form a

revolutionary guild, calling themselves "The Brotherhood of the Storm."

Harmless enough, they still declaim against Bismarck--the time of

action is twenty years ago--and talk of their warlike exploits. As the

dramatist is preeminently a painter of manners, many of his portraits

are masterly. The dentist, Hartmayer, is a hater of tyranny and an

idealist. He has assumed the name of Socrates, his companions selecting

such stirring pseudonyms as Catiline, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and

Poniatowski. This dentist's son' Fritz has adopted the same profession;

and being called to attend a reigning prince's dog for toothache, he is

denounced by his anti-imperialist of a father. But Fritz is a socialist

and has no prejudices on the subject of canine gums. Another brother,

an impudent lad, is a conservative. When the archives of the Bund fall

into the hands of the local magistrate, the old man is thoroughly

miserable. His associates fly and he, expecting arrest, is decorated

for the services of his son in saving an aristocratic dog's teeth! He

accepts, and the curtain falls on a rather discursive, ill-natured

comedy. However, Sudermann's virtuosity has plenty of opportunity for

display.

The minor characters are well sketched. The waitress, Ida, is an

exceedingly vital figure, as is the innkeeper. The dialogue is

Sudermann almost at his best,--witty, sarcastic, ironical, tersely

vigorous, and true to life. Like Daudet and Flaubert, Sudermann loves

to prick the bloated German bourgeois. There is a little Hebrew,

named, from sheer cruelty, Siegfried Markuse. His description of his

freshman visits to a _Corps-Kneipe_ at the Königsberg University is a

fair example of the playwright's powers of unerring observation.

"Just as soon as I gave my name," relates Siegfried, "the man across

the table began to crack jokes on Jews. I play the naïve and keep the

game going. Then you should have heard them snicker. I see plainly

enough that they are laughing at me, but I clench my teeth and say

to myself, 'You are going to _compel_ me to respect your superior

intellect....' I talked about everything,--old idealism and modern

gaiters; Germany's inalienable national rights and the swellest way of

training poodles; the unimportance of Hegel's conception of divinity

and the importance of a good pug dog. I quoted Plato, Schopenhauer,

and the latest sharper. Everybody looked at me with mouth agape, and I

thought I had them just where I wanted them when my friend Hartmayer

came and whispered that he was commissioned to give me a hint that

this was no place for my colossal jaw, and that it would be better if

I stayed away next time. Outside I shook my fist and swore: 'If you

_won't_ have us as friends, you _will_ have us as enemies! Then we

shall see who comes out on top.'"

Mr. Lilly sees in Sudermann an affinity with Euripides, which may mean

that he is a painter of a society in its decadence. His affinities as

pointed out seem to be Parisian; at least he is Parisian in his gift

of observation and style, German as is his power of reasoning. He is

unmoral, following the _tendenz_ of his time, but not so completely

as D'Annunzio, who is satisfied with sheer shapes of beauty. With

Sudermann it is, first, technical prowess, secondly, social satire, and

he is always brilliant if not always satisfying.

IX

PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY

_A. S. A. I. Madame la princesse Mathilde_,

_sonnet improvisé_

_sur des rimes données sur un sujet choisi_

LA VERANDAH

Sous cette verandah, peinte en vert d'espérance, On arrive et l'on part

avec un souvenir Si doux, qu'on y voudrait aussitôt revenir Sous les

fleurs des tropiques et les plantes de France.

Une main de déesse y guérit la souffrance, Au mérite modeste elle ouvre

l'avenir. Elle sait couronner comme elle sait punir. Pour le génie elle

est pleine de déférence.

Devant elle enhardi, l'esprit prime-sautier, Ainsi qu'Euphorion dansant

sur la prairie, Peut, entre terre et ciel, se montrer tout entier.

Pour que son œil pétille et que sa lèvre rie Et que de toute humeur

sa lèvre soit guérie, Il suffit d'un bon mot de son bouffon Gautier.

--THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

The late Princess Mathilde Bonaparte meant many things to many people.

Her ancestry, her marriage to Prince Demidoff, her political power at

the Tuileries, her sympathetic patronage of artistic folk, her personal

beauty, love affairs, and feminine caprices--all these serve the

world as pleasing material for anecdotes. The Princess was fond of the

theatre, and fonder still of a _première_ when the play was written by

one of her intimate circle. She was surrounded by a distinguished group

of poets, painters, dramatists, novelists, and diplomats. De Morny

called her "the man of the family." She was good to gaze upon, and she

had intellect. After the death of Sainte-Beuve, the publication of her

correspondence with that celebrated critic gave us a portrait of his

friend. It occurs in Lettres de la Princesse:--

"The Princess has a high, noble forehead, and her light golden hair,

leaving uncovered on each side broad, pure temples, is bound in wavy

masses on the full, finely shaped neck. Her eyes, which are well set,

are expressive rather than large, gleam with the affection of the

thought of the moment, and are not of those which can either feign

or conceal. The whole face indicates nobleness and dignity, and, as

soon as it lights up, grace united to power, frankness, and goodness;

sometimes, also, it expresses fire and ardour. The head, so finely

poised and carried with such dignity, rises from a dazzling and

magnificent bust, and is joined to shoulders of statuesque smoothness

and perfection."

That description should cover a multitude of indiscretions, such as the

publication of the letters. She had already given Taine his _congé_

for his criticism of Napoleon in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, She was

the daughter of Jerome and Caroline of Wurttemberg and was as proud as

Napoleon. She never forgave an offence, and Taine's conception of the

First Consul as a superior bandit closed her doors upon him.

She stood with forced equanimity the first two of his masterly studies;

at the third she exclaimed with true feminine _finesse_ of cruelty:--

"Ah, I know what I shall do! I owe Mme. Taine a call. I shall leave my

card with P.P.C., which will mean that I take leave of him forever. I

cannot allow a friend to attack violently the head of my family, the

man without whom I should perhaps be nothing but a little orange-vender

on the bridge at Ajaccio." She put her threat into execution. Taine,

shocked by the rupture, called on Renan. After hearing the tale without

any comment but a sweet, ironical smile, Renan answered:--

"_ Cher ami_, I have quarrelled with a much greater lady than the

Princess Mathilde."

"With whom, then?"

"The Church," answered Renan, dryly.

Mathilde did not respect rank more than genius. She set her face

against the free and easy democratic manners, and because of this

disliked the American invasion--few of our countrymen crossed her

doors. One night Edmond About was invited to her house, and during

the trying moments before dinner he amused her with his wit. Suddenly

the Count Nieuwerkerke appeared. "Go away," cried the novelist, "and

let us be alone, you jealous fellow." The Princess arose, rang, and

instructed the servant: "Conduct M. About to his carriage. He is not

dining here to-night." And the man of the Broken Ear went away, his

temper much ruffled.

In 1847 the Princess settled in Paris permanently. She had been

divorced from the handsome, profligate Demidoff, and her allowance, a

big one, had been given her by a decree from the Czar. Over Napoleon

III she wielded great influence. Of him the De Goncourts said, "The

Emperor would be an excellent somnambulist if only he had intervals of

lucidity;" while Flaubert declared him to be clever because, knowing

his ignorance, he had the wisdom to hold his tongue. The Empress

Eugénie was always jealous of Mathilde's power with her imperial

cousin. That she was at the latter's funeral is an illustration of

life's topsy-turvy tricks. Eugénie was jealous also of the Castiglione,

and the De Goncourts do not fail to register Constance's spiritual

_mot_ about the Emperor.

"If I had only resisted, to-day I should have been an Empress!"

This recalls the delightful answer made by Alfred de Musset to a famous

actress of the Théâtre Français--is it necessary to give the name? Once

the lady had said:--

"Monsieur de Musset, I hear you have boasted of being my lover." "I beg

your pardon," answered the friend of Rachel and George Sand; "I have

always boasted to the contrary."

The rupture of Mathilde Bonaparte and Sainte-Beuve took place in 1869.

The brothers De Goncourt heard its details from the Princess. They

found her still trembling from the stormy interview. "I shall never

see him again--never again! I, who fell out with the Empress on his

account!... He has gone over to the _Temps_, our personal enemies! Ah!

I said to him, 'Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, listen! I am sorry you did not

die last year, for I should then have mourned a friend.'"

She must have been difficult at times. She had a good opinion of

her birth, wealth, position, and beauty. "Yes, I had a peculiar and

most extraordinary complexion. I remember in Switzerland, when I was

fourteen, they put a Bengal rose leaf on my cheek, and were unable to

distinguish between the two."

On one occasion, when Edmond de Goncourt was openly rude to her at

her Château Saint-Gratien, she, with her guests, sat stupefied.

Later he apologized, tears in his eyes--he was a gallant, handsome

gentleman--and he relates most ingenuously, "Suddenly she put her arms

around me and kissed me on each cheek, saying, 'Of course I forgive

you--you know how truly attached I am to you; I also, of late, have

felt quite nervous and upset.'"

It was this passage that caused Henry James to shiver; not because

of the fact, but the lack of tact. The De Goncourts were taken up

by the Princess in 1862. Jules, the younger brother, died in 1870,

literally killed by his devotion to literary art. The chiselling of

the De Goncourt phrases was deadly to brain and body. It is little

wonder that their novels, one after the other, until Germinie Lacerteux

appeared, should have been indifferently received. As Alphonse Daudet,

ever receptive and tender in his judgments of original work, wrote:

"Novels such as had never been seen before; novels that were neither

moulded upon Balzac nor diluted from George Sand, but novels made up

of pictures,... with plot scarcely indicated, and great blanks between

the chapters; real break-neck ditches for the bourgeois reader. To

this add an entirely new style, full of surprises--a style from which

all conventionality is banished, and which, by a studied originality

of phrase and image, forbids any commonplace in the thought; and then

the bewildering boldness, the perpetual uncoupling of words accustomed

to march together like oxen dragging a plough, the earnest care in

selection, the horror of saying all and anything; considering this,

how can one be astonished that the De Goncourts were not immediately

greeted by the applause of the common herd?"

The mystery of it is, Why should the De Goncourts have cared for the

applause of that same bourgeois public they so despised, reviled,

and held up to mockery in their books? Gautier, Zola, Daudet, had to

work like galley slaves for a living; the two brothers and Flaubert

were rich, as riches go with literary men; why, then, did they care

whether they were popular or not? Was it because they were human,

notwithstanding their theories of impassibility, perfection, and art

for art's sake?

The Château Saint-Gratien was the Princess Mathilde's country home

until her death. There she entertained, as entertained George Sand

at Nohant, all her friends. Until his death, in 1896, Edmond de

Goncourt was her privileged visitor. The work of the two brothers in

eighteenth-century chronicles amused and interested her, especially

their minute histories of such actresses as Du Barry, Sophie Arnold;

and, earlier, great women like Mme. de Pompadour, the Duchess of

Châteauroux; great painters, Watteau, Boucher, Latour, Greuze, Lancret,

Fragonard; and stage favourites such as Mesdames Saint Huberty,

Clairon, and La Guimard.

The brothers introduced Japanese art into France. They were amateurs

of the exquisite. Their house at Auteuil was truly "la maison d'un

artiste au XIX siècle." And consider the labour, acute, agonizing,

and enormous, involved in the writing and production of their novels:

Germinie, Madame Gervaisais, Renée Mauperin, Manette Salomon (which

was the first novel of studio life, excepting Fromentin's Domenique,

in France, and one that influenced Zola greatly in his L'œuvre and

De Maupassant in his Strong as Death), Charles Demailly--a wonderful

study of journalism in Paris, a true continuation of Balzac's Lucien

Rubempré; Sœur Philomène; and, written by Edmond after the death

of Jules, La Fille Elisa, Les Frères Zemganno, La Faustin, and

Chérie. In addition, there are the nine volumes of the journal, a

study of Gavarni, the master caricaturist; vaudevilles, pantomimes,

letters, portraits, several plays, histories, études, an early novel

En 18--, and miscellany amounting in all to over forty volumes. Yet

this fraternal pair, because of their wealth and birth, are still

contemptuously alluded to as "amateurs." Yes, amateurs, indeed, in

the fullest sense of a misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful

sensations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal hopeless of

attainment, amateurs who might well be patterned after in this age of

hasty production, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the cheap and

obvious. Aristocrats were the De Goncourts, yet their white fingers

never faltered when they held the burin and engraved in indelible

letters that first great naturalistic novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the

tale of an unhappy servant.

Even their friend De Monselet pronounced it "sculptured slime,"

and, to the curiously inclined, interesting are the _critiques_ of

Brunetière; of Barbey D'Aurevilly?--who hacked away at everybody on

general principles; of Renée Doumic, who always follows the lead

of Brunetière; of Maurice Spronck, who declared that the brothers

were victims of a malady known to psycho-physiologists as _Audition

colorée_. But there were fairer critics. The studies of Zola, Daudet,

Henri Ceard, Paul Bourget, Henry James, Emile Hennequin, the friendly

words of Turgenev, that gentle Russian giant, the valuable suggestions

of Flaubert--these were balm to the sensitive nature of Edmond de

Goncourt. He lived to head a school--hitherto rather sterile, it must

be confessed--and before his death he dowered an academy. (Ah, if all

French literary men had but a moiety of Daudet's humour in the matter

of academies!)

But the contribution of the De Goncourts to the novel will be lasting.

They have one celebrated disciple, Karl Joris Huysmans, who began

under their influence and has traced for himself over the "great

highway so deeply dug out by Zola ... a parallel path in the air by

which we may reach the Beyond and Afterward, to achieve thus, in one

word, a spiritualistic naturalism." In the last analysis Huysmans is

an artistic stepson of the epileptic Dostoïevsky, greatest of all

psychologists; and while he may have forgotten it, his first artistic

springboard was the De Goncourts.

What Henrietta Maréchal accomplished despite its failure, was in the

dialogue--modern, picturesque, and of the best style for the stage,

because it set forth the particular turn of mind of each talker; and

it was also the first attack on that stronghold of French dramatic

tradition, the monotonous semi-chanting of the conservatoire-taught

actor. Here was an elastic, natural dialogue, charged with turns of

phrases taken up from the sidewalk, neologisms, slang--in a word,

lifelike talk as opposed to the old stilted verbiage.

The play was a failure, of course, as we shall see, for extraneous

reasons. The director of the Théâtre Français, M. Edouard Thierry, put

it on, and after the sixth performance, during all of which the actors

never heard their own voices because of the organized popular tumult,

the play was withdrawn. On its publication in book form it sold better

than its author's novels--a fact Zola notes with his accustomed scent

for the perversity of mankind.

Yet, as Daudet declared, Henrietta Maréchal was throughout "a fine,

bold, and novel production. And a short time after, the same people who

had hooted it frantically applauded Heloise Paranquet and the Supplice

d'une Femme, plays of rapid action going straight to their issue, like

a train at full speed, and of which ... Henrietta Maréchal was the

inspiration. And was not the first act, taking place in the opera ball,

with its crowd, its abusive chaff, its masks joking and howling in

pursuit of each other, that close approach to life and reality, ironic

and real as a Gavarni sketch--was it not 'naturalism' on the stage

fifteen years before the word 'naturalism' was invented?"

Daudet, with characteristic delicacy and fidelity to the theme,

elsewhere describes a reading at Edmond de Goncourt's house of his Les

Frères Zemganno--those fraternal heroes of the sawdust.

When the play was read to the members of the Comédie Française,

Minister Rouher--who afterward distinguished himself so terribly in

the Franco-Prussian War!--suggested to the trembling authors that

the valiant girl, who assumes her mother's guilt and is shot dead by

her enraged father, be wounded only, and marry her mother's lover!

Charming, is it not? The suggestion was frowned down by Marshal

Vaillant, an old soldier, who did not fear the smell of stage powder.

Written in 1863, Henrietta Maréchal was not produced until December 5,

1865, at the Comédie Française, and after its speedy withdrawal it was

not revived until March 3, 1885, at the Odéon. In the preface to the

De Goncourts' Théâtre, Edmond wrote of the painful struggles the pair

endured to obtain a hearing. They composed a vaudeville, Sans Titre,

which was not heard, and followed this by other attempts, during which

they slowly attained some knowledge of dramatic construction, and in

1867 followed Henrietta Maréchal with a five-act prose drama called

La Patrie en Danger. This was also read at the Française, in 1868,

admired, and dropped. Edmond declared it superior to its predecessor.

It deals with the epoch of the French Revolution, and need not concern

us now.

Of interest is his declaration that in the novel he is a realist (he

is really a modified romantic, with a romantic vocabulary, selecting

for subjects modern themes); but in the drama he totally disagrees

with Zola and his naturalistic formulas as applied to the theatre.

They have dug up a letter he sent over a decade ago to M. Lothar, who

made the German translation of La Faustin. It all is to be found in

this preface of 1879. De Goncourt, who naturally ranks the drama below

the novel as literature, upholds the conventions of the former. The

drama is by its nature romantic and limited in scope. The monologues,

asides, dénouements, sympathetic characters, and the rest must always

endure. He does think, however, that reality may be brought nearer, and

that literary language should give place to a style which will reveal

the irregularity and abruptness of vital conversation. In this latter

particular he has been a benefactor. Unnatural theatrical dialogue he

slew with his supple, free, naturally coloured speech in Henrietta

Maréchal. Stage talk should be, De Goncourt asserted, flowing and

idiomatic--never bookish. The ball scene in Henrietta proves that the

brothers could practise as well as preach.

It is a mistake, too, to think that their novels and plays are immoral

or hinge always on the eternal triangle. Various passions are treated

by them in their air-tight receiver; their methods of psychological

evisceration recall the laboratory of an analytical chemist. In

Germinie it is the degradation of a woman through weakness; in Madame

Gervaisais--that Odyssey of a woman's soul--it is the mystic passion

for religion; in Manette Salomon, art and woman and their dangers to

the impressionable artistic temperament; Charles Demailly pictures

the gulfs of despair into which the literary, the poetic soul may be

plunged; Sœur Philomène shows the combat between religious vows

and nature; and so on through a wide gamut. And these two nervous

artists have been mockingly called maniacs, their work has been derided

as inutile--that work which practically reconstructed the artistic

life of the eighteenth century and discovered to itself the artistic

soul of the nineteenth. If they had remained normal units of their

class, they would have gambled, shot pigeons, sported mistresses, and

dabbled in racing, drinking, and the other sterilities of fashionable

life. They preferred art, and they were rewarded in the usual

fashion. The singular thing is that they expected, ingenuous souls,

encouragement from their world. Fame came only when Jules was dead

and Edmond too old and embittered to appreciate it. The survivor saw

his ideas appropriated by Zola and the younger crowd, and cheapened

and coarsened beyond all likeness to the original. What, then, must

have been the dismay and perplexity of the brothers when they heard

the hissing, catcalls, groans, and yells of an organized clique sworn

to kill Henriette Maréchal? The body of the house was not hostile;

but politics, the Republican opposition to the patronage of the

Bonapartes, aroused students on the other side of the Seine, and a

scandalous scene, only equalled by the Parisian productions of Hernani

and Tannhäuser, occurred. Strangely enough, Théophile Gautier, who had

figured in the Hernani fracas, had written the prologue to Henrietta

Maréchal, and spoke it without opposition from the malcontents, though

he was the librarian of Princess Mathilde. Not a word could be heard

in any of the scenes, and when Got, the comedian who played in the

cast,--the rest were Delaunay, the Lafontaines, Arnould-Plessis,

Bressant, and other distinguished artists,--appeared to announce, as

was the custom, the authors' names, he stood for ten minutes unable to

make himself heard in the terrific hubbub. The Journal of the brothers

contains a minute account of the affair, and of their terror as they

stood, pale, breathless, peeping out upon a disordered sea of human

faces. After all, it is a joy, despite its frequent injustice, to see

a community take its drama seriously and not merely as a first aid to

digestion.

The De Goncourts had the satisfaction a few weeks later to hear

Molière's Précieuses Ridicules hissed by the same mob believing that it

was Henrietta Maréchal.

Reading this play to-day one can see that its novelties must have

provoked hostility, though such critics as Jules Janin, Gautier,

Sarcey, Uhlbach, Nestor Roqueplan, Paul de Saint-Victor, and others

wrote impartial and enthusiastic criticisms. The middle-aged woman who

loves a young man was not pleasing upon the boards, and her daughter's

death at the pistol of her father caused a shudder; for it was the rank

side of adultery exhibited without that pleasing gloze of sentiment so

dear to the average Gallic playwright and public. Naturally politics

caused the row, for Princess Mathilde had steered the play into the

notice of M. Thierry. The speeches are too long and the action moves

languidly. Perhaps, after he had surveyed the situation in a calmer

mood, Edmond de Goncourt was impelled to write his preface espousing

the methods of Meilhac and Halévy. He said, among other acute things,

that the avarice in Molière's play, L'Avare, was "l'avarice bouffe"

when compared with the powerful and compelling study made by Balzac of

Père Grandet.

He also records the cynical remark of a well-known actress who, after

listening to the æsthetic _blague_ in a well-known literary group,

broke forth with this apostrophe, "Vous êtes jeunes, vous autres, mais

le théâtre au fond, mes enfants, c'est l'absinthe du mauvais lieu," and

to his dying day Edmond de Goncourt called the theatre a place for the

exercises of educated dogs or an exhibition of marionettes spouting

their tirades. Between these extremes he thought there was a place

where artistic spirit might be displayed in a dignified and beautiful

style. But he never found that place, despite his poignant finale, when

Henrietta declares that her mother's lover is her own.

Contrast this effective, if too heroic, dénouement with the cold

cynicism of Maurice Donnay in L'Autre Danger, where a pure girl is

forced by cruel circumstances to hear her mother's shame published, to

learn the awful news that the man she loves is the lover of her mother,

and, to cap this assault upon our nerves, the lover is made to marry

the wretched girl so as to divert suspicion from the inhuman mother.

In the grip of his dark pessimism Edmond de Goncourt predicted that in

fifty years the book would kill the theatre. It was about nine years

later that Ernest Renan, according to Octave Uzanne, said one evening

in conversation among friends, "Fifty years hence no one will open a

book." Both prophecies are likely to come to naught. Bad books, bad

plays, we shall always have with us. Life seems too brief for the

larger cultivation of beautiful art.

X

DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO

I

ELEONORA DUSE!

When this extraordinary woman first came to New York in January,

1893, she attracted a small band of admirable lunatics who saw her

uncritically as a symbol rather than as an actress. Some of us went

to fantastic lengths in our devotion. She was Our Lady of Evil, one

of Baudelaire's enigmatic women; Mater Malorium, a figure out of De

Quincey's opium-stained dreams; she was not only superior to Sarah of

the Sardou régime, but the true successor to Rachel. This semi-absurd

jumbling of Poe, Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans--what

a tremendous Duchess of Malfi we fancied Duse would make!--was not

altogether the fabric of fantasy. Nor was personality the strongest

asset in her art. She had suffered academic training; she had practised

when young all the scales of thumb-rule theatricalism; she had played

Cosette when a child and knew Electra. The apprenticeship then had been

exhausting, the thirty-six situations she had by heart, a long race

of play actors determined her vocation, and yet she rose superior to

all these things, to experiences that would have either crushed or made

mechanical the average artist. Life with its disillusionments was the

sculptor that finally wrought the something precious and strange we

recognize in Eleonora Duse.

Without especial comeliness, without the golden ductile voice of

Bernhardt, Duse so drilled her bodily organs that her gestures,

angular if executed by another, become potent instruments; her voice,

once rather thin, siccant, now gives a soft, surprised speech; and

her face is the mirror of her soul. Across it flit the agonies, the

joys, of the modern anæmic, overwrought woman. She excels in the

delineation of listless, nervous, hysterical, and half-mad souls. She

passes easily from the passionate creatures of Dumas and Sardou to

the chillier-blooded women of Ibsen and Sudermann, unbalanced and out

of tune with their surroundings. Shall we ever forget her reading of

Vladimir's letter in Fédora? And yet her assumption of the Russian

was a tour-de-force of technic; temperamentally the rôle belongs to

the hotter-tongued Bernhardt. With Santuzza, a primitive nature,

she accomplished wonders. That miserable, deserted girl, in a lowly

Sicilian village, with her qualms of conscience, her nausea, her hunted

looks--here was Verga's heroine stripped of all Mascagni's rustling

music, the soul showing clear and naked against the sordid background

of Cavalleria Rusticana.

The slinking ferocity of Cesarine's entrance into her husband's

atelier; the scene with Antonine; the interview of Camille with

Armand's father; the gracious gayety of Goldoni's La Locandiera; that

hideous battle of an exasperated man and woman before the closed

doors in Fernande; Magda's wonderful blush as she meets Kellar, the

cold-hearted prig, who ruined her--all these stale situations and

well-worn types, Magda being an honourable exception, Duse literally

re-created. In them we felt the power of her intellect, the magic of

the woman. And she stared tradition in the face by refusing to "make

up," unconcealing her own hair and doing nothing to restrict the

plasticity of her figure. Now she wears wigs, uses rouge discreetly,

for her hair is gray and her face more matured. But her art is broader,

though losing none of its former subtlety. There is more weight, more

brilliancy, in her action and gesture, and that doubtless prompted some

critics to compare her to Sarah Bernhardt. But she is still Eleonora

Duse, the woman with the imagination, the glance, and the beautiful

hands.

The wisdom of her choice in selecting only D'Annunzio's dramas is not

altogether apparent. She will listen to no advice; perhaps she is on

a mission; perhaps she wishes to make known everywhere the genius of

her young countryman, and to go back with the means to raise upon the

border of Lake Albano a great independent theatre, the poet's dream

of a dramatic Bayreuth. The D'Annunzio plays are not of the kind that

appeal to the larger public. For the student of contemporary drama they

are of surpassing interest in their freedom from conventional stage

trickery and characterization; La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, are really

lyric masterpieces in little, though many will wince at the themes,

at their bold development and treatment. When floated on the wings of

Richard Wagner's mighty music in Die Walküre, the incestuous loves of

Siegmund and Sieglinde are applauded; prose, be it as polished and

as sonorous as D'Annunzio's, has not the same privilege as music. So

the motto of Catulle Mendès for a playhouse has a point, "Abandon all

reality ye who would enter here." And D'Annunzio never falters before

harsh reality, as those who have read his romances well know. In each

of his plays we assist at the toilette of a woman's soul.

Duse's art, however, covers a multitude of D'Annunzio's

morbidities--everything that does not derive from bread and butter,

children in arms, politics, dog-shows and gowns, is adjudged morbid

by a world that feeds on divorce scandals, crimes of the day, and the

diversions of multi-millionnaires. D'Annunzio, who does not pretend to

be a mere painter of manners, is given over entirely to the portraying

of the primary passions. This Swinburne of Italy became famous in

his sixteenth year (he was born in 1864, and his real name is said to

be Gaetano Rapagnetto). Since then he has succeeded the poet Carducci

in the affections of a certain public, though his poetic ancestry may

be easily traced to Shelley, Baudelaire, Carducci, and Stecchetti.

From verse he passed to prose, writing in a highly coloured, fluid

style a group of novels called The Romances of the Rose, Lily, and

Pomegranate. The Triumph of Death is the best known to English and

American readers, though Fuoco--The Flame of Life--set wagging

the tongues of the curious by its carefully exposed portraits of a

celebrated Italian actress and D'Annunzio himself. In that astonishing

performance, the taste of which can be hardly gauged by any but Latin

standards, one of the D'Annunzio plays--The Dead City--is set forth

in detail. Whether the betrayal of a woman's soul--for D'Annunzio is

a true soul-hunter--was made with the concurrence of the subject, no

one seems to know. Of the psychologic value of the study there can be

but one opinion. It is unique, it is painful, it is appallingly true.

D'Annunzio now enjoys a European reputation. His art, despite its

exquisite workmanship, is still a gallery of echoes. He has absorbed

all contemporary culture, and so chiselled is his prose that he has

been called "the Italian Flaubert." A profound student of the classics,

he is rich in his scholarly allusions. The late Pope is said to have

delighted in the melodious thunder-pool of his style. From Balzac,

Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maeterlinck, Tolstoy, and Dostoïevsky

he has absorbed much; while he evidently knows the English classics.

Some of his dramatic figures seem to have stepped out of John Webster

or John Ford's pages. In his short tales, Novelle della Pescara, he

has utilized a number of De Maupassant's themes, in an individual

manner; but the assimilation is complete. Compare La Ficelle and

Foire de Candea--the transposition of character and place are most

deftly accomplished, as a writer in the _Mercure de France_ has shown.

That D'Annunzio has chosen to depict decadent men and women, and all

bristling with vitality, is his personal idiosyncrasy. His chief defect

is an absolute lack of humour, and this, coupled with the tropical

quality of his art, causes a certain monotony--we breathe a dense,

languorous atmosphere. Human interest in the daily sense of the phrase

is often absent. He loves nature. He describes her lovingly. His formal

sense is exquisite; yet too much literature often kills the humanity of

his characters. And he is always more lyric than dramatic.

"Gabriele d'Annunzio," writes M. Huret, "is of medium height, slender,

not to say frail, with short, reddish hair which is growing thin on the

top of his finely shaped head, and this he brushes straight back at the

temples; his back already somewhat bent, he has the air of one of those

aristocratic beings who have begun life too soon. His ruddy mustache

is trimmed close to the lip, and the points are turned up sharply at

the corners, while the chin ends in a little pointed beard. The nose is

regular and shows strength; the division between the nostrils extends

below in a prominent lobe. His eyes, of pale blue, like a faded violet,

are half veiled by his heavy lids. Beneath these eyes the network of

fine lines tells the story of precocious weariness. The finely shaped

mouth opens widely in a smile over carefully tended teeth. And one

may search in vain in that face for any trace of the overwhelming,

almost savage, sensuality which his privileged hero manifests in all

his novels. The appearance of his physiognomy as a whole is rather

self-contained and cold. He is a thinker, assuredly quite master of

himself, much more given to enthusiasm over a beautiful verse than

capable of a real emotion over another's grief. Besides, has he not

written, 'One must keep one's liberty complete at any cost, even in

intoxication'?"

D'Annunzio has ever been a spoiled darling of the Muses. At the age

of sixteen, after he had published that turbulently erotic book of

verse, Primo Vere, Marc Monnier, the critic, wrote of him in the _Revue

Suisse_, "If I were one of his masters I should give him a medal and

the stick."

It is to be hoped that with increasing age and experience he will

pierce beneath the vesture of things and seek for the message

spiritual. He is now the poet of the fleshly, albeit an interpreter of

its beauties. The poet in him celebrates the joy of living, the joys

of love, of death,--oh, he can pipe you many sweet lays of Death the

Triumpher!--of wine, of art. He has just begun to write for the stage,

and is unduly preoccupied with the sumptuousness of externals, with the

bravery of words, with the torturing complexities of character.

II

Gabriele d'Annunzio's La Gioconda is a four-act tragedy of power,

beauty, and horror. Despite the reputation of the poet-dramatist

and his undeniable qualities of copious invention, skilful

characterization, and prime literary ability, this piece was not warmly

received in Italy. Its unrelieved analysis, its slowly accumulating

burden of misery, and the cruelty of the climax do not allure the

average listener. And the poet in D'Annunzio shows at every line--there

are many gorgeous ones spoken in La Gioconda.

Duse possesses the subtle hands of that painter's Lisa Gioconda, and

as the motive of D'Annunzio's play springs from a pair of hands--its

original title was The Tragedy of the Beautiful Hands--Signora Duse

makes of her fingers ten eloquent signals.

The opportunity for theatric climax is rare in La Gioconda; but

when it does come the effect is strong. A wife, whose love and

devotion are slighted, dares to face her rival in the studio of the

sculptor-husband. He has endeavoured desperately to wean himself from

his passion for the model who posed as his masterpiece, a Sphinx.

Attempted suicide before the action of the play proved how deeply sunk

in his imagination is this crazy infatuation. His wife meets the woman,

who is young, beautiful, strange, and absolutely enamoured of the

sculptor. Of her sincerity there is no doubt. Then the dramatist throws

wire-drawn analysis to the winds and in a scene of peculiar brutality

the women duel for the possession of the gifted, worthless man.

Here Duse's imagination and technic are revealed. She must remain the

refined woman, though her brain is afire, her soul up in arms. In acrid

terms of reproach and irony she defies the temptress of her husband,

knowing full well that he is lost to her; in the very flush of defeat

she would pluck victory by the sleeve. Startled by the ready assurance,

enraged by the seemingly triumphant wife, Gioconda, the model, rushes

into the atelier, bent upon destroying her counterfeit in clay,--that

figure she so lovingly guarded during the sculptor's illness.

She had watched the work of his soul, while his wife nursed only his

sick body. With this she taunts the other. In despair before the

looming catastrophe, Duse, the wife, cries that she has lied, that her

husband still loves his model. But it is too late. The struggle of the

women is heard. A crash and a scream announce that the statue has been

overthrown. Then an ugly Sardou motive is obtruded.

With the shadow of eternal regret in her eyes, her hands wrapped in the

wet cloths that bound the clay, Duse staggers from behind the draperies

of the atelier. She has saved her husband's statue, but her beautiful

hands are hopelessly maimed. This scene is hideously cruel. And to top

the _crescendo_ of woe, the vacillating man runs in. "You, you, you!"

sobs his wife; "it is saved," and the curtain blots the agonizing

situation from our eye, not from our memory.

The play might be truthfully called The Triumph of Art, for, if it

poses any problem at all, it is this: What will an artist, a sensuous,

weak decadent, do when confronted by the choice of relinquishing his

wife or his mistress? The latter is surpassingly beautiful, and, as he

tells his friend, the painter, in Act I, she is his sole inspiration,

the guiding pillar of flame for his art. "She has a thousand statues

in her," in that marvellous body that "is like a look." He loves his

wife, too, but she does not reveal to him his entire creative self. She

is a staff to lean upon, not an electric impulse in his life. To the

everyday observer all this seems a variation of an old story. Lucio is

tired of Silvia, his wife, and dazzles himself with the sophistries of

art--base sensuality being the real reason for his behaviour.

But this supposition is only a half-truth. Lucio has a species of

accursed temperament that needs must feed upon the exquisite surfaces

of beautiful things. He is a true artist of mediæval times, loving

colour and form for their own sake; art for art is his motto, as it was

Benvenuto Cellini's, as it was George Eliot's Tito Melemo. Lucio's most

eloquent speech describes the appeal Gioconda makes to his artistic

nature, the creative ardour she arouses. This speech is of much

significance.

Despicable as is the man,--and we never doubt his ultimate desertion

of his wife,--there is no denying the grim truth with which he is

depicted. That he is not sympathetic is hardly our affair. It is bad

art to preach, and that D'Annunzio never does. He simply sets before

us, with consummate address, a few episodes in the life of an unhappy

family, leaving us to draw our own inferences. His men and women are

genuinely alive, and, given their various temperaments, they act as

they inevitably would in the world of the living.

The character of the wife, Silvia, is beautiful despite the dissonance

of the fatal untruth she utters. Without mawkish sentimentality, she

divines the eternal child that is the basis of every artist, and so she

forgives her husband. As portrayed by Duse, one feels that lurking in

the sanctuary of her innermost being there is the sad, bitter suspicion

that her sacrifice will be in vain.

But she stops not to count the cost, and, at the end of Act I, when the

emotional, weak-spined fellow, touched by her sacrifice, casts himself

sobbing at her knees, her great heart surrenders, and she pets and

pities him. The exquisite tenderness, soft credulity, and suppressed

sweetness of Duse here sound like a strain of marvellous music. The

chords of human sympathy sing melodiously. And her every movement has

the actuality of life.

After the third act any dramatist would have cried quits. Not so

D'Annunzio. He wishes to tell us that Silvia is deserted forever.

Pathos, poetic in its quality, contrasts with the horror of the

preceding scene. We are shown Silvia at the seaside, her crushed hands

concealed. To her comes La Sirenetta, an elfin creature of the sea,

a tiny, fantastic fisher maid, who sings the delightful ballad of

the Seven Sisters and consoles the sorrowful wife and mother. Yes,

Silvia has a daughter, Beata, who is kept in ignorance of her mother's

misfortune.

It is now that the spectator feels the remorseless grip of the poet.

La Sirenetta offers a star-fish to Silvia and wonders why she does not

accept it. She is the solitary shaft of sunshine in the play. Beata

runs in with flowers for her mother. It is a poignant touch. The chilly

indifference of the dramatist to the suffering of his characters, his

complete detachment, is art of a rarefied sort, though not the art

that will endear him to all. "Beata!" exclaims the poor mother, making

a futile gesture with her mutilated arms. "You are crying! You are

crying!" sobs the child, throwing herself upon her mother's breast. The

flowers slip to earth.

A trait of Duse is the stifling of her tears when her sister

visits her. She involuntarily lifts her arms, and then, checking

herself with an indescribable movement, she rests her face upon her

sister's shoulder. There the tears fall. There she dries them. It is

characteristic Duse. Her entire assumption is on the plane of exalted

realism. We know that Silvia has a beautiful, strong soul, that she

succumbs to the awful pressure of temptation; and the lie she tells

is henceforth a memory never lifted from her life. In a measure she

accepts with resignation physical torture and loss of her husband.

D'Annunzio has not before created such a noble woman. Lucio is only

a variant of his typical man: George Aurispa, Andrea Sperelli, and

the rest of his amateurs in corruption and artistic hunters of morbid

sensation. Silvia is unique. Silvia is adorable as Duse presents her.

Throughout this most human among actresses is in constant modulation;

her very silence is pregnant with suggestion. She is the exponent of an

art that is baffling in its coincidence with nature. From nature what

secret accents has this Italian woman not overheard?--secrets that she

embodies in her art.

There are many beauties in the play, beauties of style, though the

dialogue in the early acts is in excess of the movement This is quite

in consonance with continental ideas of playwriting. In Europe the

art of elocution is not a lost one, as it is on the English stage.

The Italians and the French often speak for the sheer beauty of their

expressive tongues. So the action halts and there are some amateurish

strokes betrayed in the bringing on of his characters by D'Annunzio.

But the burning rhetoric of the young poet lends fascination to several

scenes--notably the interview of painter and sculptor in Act II. His

brother-poet, Arthur Symons, has Englished D'Annunzio's prose and has

accomplished his task with rare distinction.

III

D'Annunzio's Francesca da Rimini is glorified melodrama. It is

unnecessary to revert to the plays, poems, books, pictures, symphonies,

that have been made with the unhappy loves of Francesca and Paolo as

a theme. From the day when the great Florentine exile sang in Canto V

of his Hell, "In its leaves that day we read no more," Dante inspired

painters, poets, sculptors,--Rodin not among the least,--musicians,

and playwrights. Leigh Hunt wrote The Story of Rimini; there is George

Boker's commonplace play, in which Lawrence Barrett, Louis James, Otis

Skinner, and others have appeared; there is an old play by Silvio

Pellico, and the two new settings of the story by Stephen Phillips and

Marion Crawford--the latter's version prepared for Sarah Bernhardt--are

of yesterday's doings. Both Liszt and Tschaïkowsky have composed

symphonic poems on the subject.

And now D'Annunzio, as if he wished to demonstrate his fitness in

the handling of any dramatic form, conceived and executed a species

of poetic melodrama in which the life of a feudal period is unrolled

before us in five glowing tableaux. Prodigality of colour, bloody war,

horrid lusts, are mingled artistically with the processional attitudes

of tirewomen, sweet singing, and interludes of lyric passion. As in

a mirrored dream of Burne-Jones, Francesca moves slowly from rapt

maidenhood to forced marriage; from unhappy marriage to deception and

death. Not content to follow the bare lines of the ancient chronicle,

the playwright weaves into his symphony of adulterous passion historic

episodes and pictures of manners. It is one epoch of strange, repellent

contrasts. Souls are danced to the tune of graceful madrigals, and

roses often dyed a deeper hue by blood. In the sphere of action the

play mostly lives, though there are some halting moments of poetic

delicacy and introspection set over against operatic episodes. We

first assist at a scene of jester and damsels which recalls Bandello

or Boccaccio. It is gay and humorous, with the coarse, unseemly humour

of the time. Alberich, teased by the three mermaids in Rheingold, is

recalled. Two brothers of Francesca indulge in fierce recriminations

during which a veiled accusation of attempted parricide is made, with

the result that murder is barely escaped.

Francesca is deliberately betrayed by her brother, Ostasio Polenta,

into the arms of the "Lamester" Giovanni Malatesta. She believes that

she is wedding his brother Paolo, called the handsome one, skilled in

the fine arts, of goodly presence, a warrior and a lover of sport. By

a device near the close of Act I he is made to pass and be seen by

Francesca. She goes to her doom willingly. She loves, but does not know

that Paolo is a married man.

In the second act, a year later, Francesca, in a Saracenic headdress,

seems to have aged ten years. On the battlement of her husband's

fortress, amid the enginery of war, Greek fire boiling in the caldron,

darts flaming, missiles, catapults, ballista, and outlandish weapons

that crowd the summit of the tower, she stands. There is a terrific

din; crossbows twang, shoutings and tocsins are heard. Francesca,

displaying true mediæval immobility at all these sights and sounds,

hovers about the platform, questioning, curious.

She insists on tampering with a torch of the deadly Greek fire, and

it evokes from the poet a flock of his flaming images that Swinburne

alone might parallel. As Paolo enters, eager for the fight, Francesca's

attitude shifts. At once we see her aroused interest. She loved him,

loves him. Their interview contains some striking speeches. "And then I

saw your face, silent between the spears of the horsemen," she tells

him, and adds that then she longed for death. He replies in a like

exalted strain. He exposes himself at the open portcullis, and she

trembles but is brave.

Her Pater Noster is an outlet for her overcharged feelings. It was

delivered by Duse with shivering eloquence. The intensity of the scene

is heightened by the entrance of her husband, surnamed Gianciotto. He

limps, but is a mighty warrior in the land. The characters of the two

brothers are exposed in a few lines. Still another brother appears,

Malatestino. He is the youngest. His eye has just been destroyed during

this battle. Malevolent, cruel, he too loves Francesca. In a later act

he plays the part of Iago to his elder brother.