The Stage Society has shown the courage of its opinions by giving an
unlicensed play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," one of the "unpleasant
plays" of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, at the theatre of the New Lyric Club.
It was well acted, with the exception of two of the characters, and the
part of Mrs. Warren was played by Miss Fanny Brough, one of the
cleverest actresses on the English stage, with remarkable ability. The
action was a little cramped by the smallness of the stage, but, for all
that, the play was seen under quite fair conditions, conditions under
which it could be judged as an acting play and as a work of art. It is
brilliantly clever, with a close, detective cleverness, all made up of
merciless logic and unanswerable common sense. The principal characters
are well drawn, the scenes are constructed with a great deal of
theatrical skill, the dialogue is telling, the interest is held
throughout. To say that the characters, without exception, are ugly in
their vice and ugly in their virtue; that they all have, men and women,
something of the cad in them; that their language is the language of
vulgar persons, is, perhaps, only to say that Mr. Shaw has chosen, for
artistic reasons, to represent such people just as they are. But there
is something more to be said. "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is not a
representation of life; it is a discussion about life. Now, discussion
on the stage may be interesting. Why not? Discussion is the most
interesting thing in the world, off the stage; it is the only thing that
makes an hour pass vividly in society; but when discussion ends art has
not begun. It is interesting to see a sculptor handling bits of clay,
sticking them on here, scraping them off there; but that is only the
interest of a process. When he has finished I will consider whether his
figure is well or ill done; until he has finished I can have no opinion
about it. It is the same thing with discussion on the stage. The subject
of Mr. Shaw's discussion is what is called a "nasty" one. That is
neither here nor there, though it may be pointed out that there is no
essential difference between the problem that he discusses and the
problem that is at the root of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray."
But Mr. Shaw, I believe, is never without his polemical intentions, and
I should like, for a moment, to ask whether his discussion of his
problem, taken on its own merits, is altogether the best way to discuss
things. Mr. Shaw has an ideal of life: he asks that men and women should
be perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their minds of cant, and
speak out everything that is in their minds. He asks for cold and clear
logic, and when he talks about right and wrong he is really talking
about right and wrong logic. Now, logic is not the mainspring of every
action, nor is justice only the inevitable working out of an equation.
Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must be
regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion to
its exactitude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not
move by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count of
more exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. There
is a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems as
consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shaw
disdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense of
touch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it is
warranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's
logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because it
understands, and because to understand is, among other things, to
pardon. In a word, the difference between the spirit of Tolstoi and the
spirit of Mr. Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and
the spirit of Euclid.
"MONNA, VANNA"
In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which was
a sort of projection into space of the world of nursery legends and of
childish romances. It was at once very abstract and very local. There
was a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a
forest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns of
gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of
eternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and
destiny the stage-manager. The people who came and went had the blind
gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness. Pity and
terror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more
literal than Aristotle's.
In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the words
were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants
or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even
significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and
significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.
Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in
an essay in "Le Trésor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama,
as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said which
mattered.
Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With
"Aglavaine et Sélysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which
there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which
people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the
morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.
"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Sélysette," and in
it for the first time Maeterlinck has represented the conflicts of the
inner life in an external form, making drama, while the people who
undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of their happening.
In a significant passage of "La Sagesse et la Destinée," Maeterlinck
says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragédies ne nous offrent
pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalité. Je
crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragédie où la
fatalité règne réellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas
une où le héros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est
jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the
preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poètes tragiques osent très
rarement permettre au sage de paraître un moment sur la scène. Ils
craignent une âme haute parce que les événements la craignent." Now it
is this conception of life and of drama that we find in "Monna Vanna."
We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the old man Marco and in
the instinctively wise Giovanna, with the tragic folly personified in
the husband Guido, who rebels against truth and against life, and loses
even that which he would sacrifice the world to keep. The play is full
of lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against the too
ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here is
a play in which almost every character is noble, in which treachery
becomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what we
are accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even
criminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that at
any moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the position
of every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere decision of the
will, open to each, and that things happen as they do because it is
impossible, in the nature of each, that the choice could be otherwise.
Character, in the deepest sense, makes the action, and there is
something in the movement of the play which resembles the grave and
reasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and women
deliberate wisely and not only passionately, in which it is not only the
cry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama.
In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Intérieur," and even
"Pelléas et Mélisande," he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion
of his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word.
The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling,
way. But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has been
lost. The speeches, which were once so short as to be enigmatical, are
now too long, too explanatory; they are sometimes rhetorical, and have
more logic than life. The playwright has gained experience, the thinker
has gained wisdom, but the curious artist has lost some of his magic. No
doubt the wizard had drawn his circle too small, but now he has stepped
outside his circle into a world which no longer obeys his formulas. In
casting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery which alone
could replace them? "Monna Vanna" is a remarkable and beautiful play,
but it is not a masterpiece. "La Mort de Tintagiles" was a masterpiece
of a tiny, too deliberate kind; but it did something which no one had
ever done before. We must still, though we have seen "Monna Vanna,"
wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not given us all that he is capable
of giving us.