THE MODERN DRAMA An Essay in Interpretation BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN, A.M., Litt.D. Professor in the Ohio State University NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXV Copyright, 1915, by B. W. HUEBSCH Printed in U. S. A. TO MY WIFE 330394 Im Grunde bleibt kein realer Gegenstand unpoetisch, sobald der Dichter ihn gehorig zu gebrauchen weiss. GOETHE. PREFACE With a few honourable exceptions books about books are apt, at present in America, to be any- thing but critical. An account of the modern drama, therefore, that aims at historical orderliness and intellectual coherence need not, perhaps, offer an excuse for its existence. My study is not one of phases or aspects but of the whole subject which I have attempted to grasp and to interpret as a whole. If I have succeeded in any measure, this volume should prove of real usefulness to students, teachers and critics of the drama. I have omitted any discussion of the theatre of Italy and Spain. No criticism can be fruitful which is not based on an intimate acquaintance with the idiom which that literature employs. But this omission represents no absolute loss. Italy and Spain have followed and exemplified the tendencies and methods of the modern theatre. They have neither changed them nor originated others. With the exception of a few lines from The PREFACE Sunken Bell, the translations of all quotations, in verse and prose, are my own. This volume has been written amid the press- ing tasks of a busy teacher and editor. It owes the possibility of its existence largely to the friendly interest shown me by Mr. Julius Rosen- wald of Chicago. LUDWIG LEWISOHN. Columbus, O., February, 1915. CONTENTS PREFACE CHAPTER ONE THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE MODERN DRAMA PAGE I THE NEW CONCEPTION OF TRAGEDY . . i II THE SCANDINAVIAN THEATRE .... 7 a) Henrik Ibsen b) Bjornstjerne Bjornson c) August Strindberg III PLAYS OF THE FRENCH NOVELISTS . 33 a) The Goncourt Brothers b) mile Zola c) Daudet and de Maupassant IV HENRI BECQUE 39 V THE NEW STAGES 44 a) Theatre Libre b) Freie Biihne CHAPTER TWO THE REALISTIC DRAMA IN FRANCE I THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH THE- ATRE 47 CONTENTS PAGE II THE PSYCHOLOGISTS 52 a) Georges de Porto-Riche b) Francois de Curel III FRENCH COMEDY . 63 Henri Lavedan IV THE SOCIOLOGISTS 70 a) Eugene Brieux, b) Paul Hervieu V THE HUMANISTS 90 a) Jules Lemaitre b) Maurice Donnay VI THE FAILURE OF THE FRENCH THEATRE . 100 CHAPTER THREE THE NATURALISTIC DRAMA IN GERMANY I THE RISE OF NATURALISM 103 II GERHART HAUPTMANN no III THE DIL'MA OF COMPROMISE .... 128 Hermann Sudermann IV THE SCHOOL OF HAUPTMANN . . . . 134 a) Max Halbe b) Max Dreyer c) Georg Hirschfeld V REVOLUTIONISTS IN THE DRAMA .... 146 a) Otto Erich Hartleben b) Frank Wedekind CONTENTS PAGE VI NATURALISTIC HUMANISM 154 Arthur Schnitzler VII NATURALISM ONCE MORE 163 CHAPTER FOUR THE RENAISSANCE OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA I THE CONDITIONS OF THE ENGLISH THEATRE 166 II PLAYWRIGHTS OF THE TRANSITION . . . 174 a) Henry Arthur Jones b) Arthur Wing Pinero III ARTIFICIAL COMEDY 189 Oscar Wilde IV THE CULMINATION OF INTELLECTUAL COMEDY 192 George Bernard Shaw V THE ENGLISH NATURALISTS 202 a) Granville Barker b) John Galsworthy ^ VI THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH THEATRE . 218 CHAPTER FIVE THE NEO-ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN THE MODERN DRAMA I THE THEORY OF NEO-ROMANTICISM . . 220 II MAURICE MAETERLINCK 228 III EDMOND ROSTAND 236 CONTENTS PAGE IV THE GERMAN MOVEMENT 247 a) Gerhart Hauptmann b) Hugo von Hofmannsthal V THE IRISH MOVEMENT 265 a) William Butler Yeats b) Lady Gregory c) John Millington Synge. VI THE ACHIEVEMENT OF NEO-ROMANTICISM . 274 STUDY LISTS 279 CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE MODERN DRAMA .... 289 INDEX 327 THE MODERN DRAMA CHAPTER ONE THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE MODERN DRAMA THE dramatic literature of the last three dec- ades, which it is the purpose of these pages to de- scribe and to interpret, may be called the mod- ern drama in no loose or inaccurate sense. In all ages the drama, through its portrayal of the acting and suffering spirit of man, has been more closely allied than any other art to his deeper thoughts concerning his nature and his destiny. When, therefore, during the third quarter of the nine- teenth century, these thoughts underwent a pro- found and radical change, it was inevitable that this change should be communicated to the drama and should reshape its content, its technique and its aim. The result is that art of the theatre for i 2 THE MODERN DRAMA which modern is the briefest and most conven- ient term. Traditionally the serious drama deals with the transgression of an immutable moral law by a self-originating will. The tragic action began with or, more usually, rose toward the incurring of that tragic guilt, and ended with the protag- onist's expiation of his transgression. Thence re- sulted the triple effect of tragedy: The compas- sion aroused for human frailty, the warning , addressed to the equal frailty of our own wills, and the vindication of the moral order native to the spectator in that age and country in which the tragedy was produced. This account of the nature of the historic drama is, essentially, the Aristotelian one. It de- scribes, however, not only CEdipus the King or the conscious imitations of the Attic stage, but with equal exactness the great Shakespearean tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, and such later and inferior but still authentic examples of trag- edy as Schiller's Wallenstein. In each instance, in the words of the Sophoclean chorus: "All-seeing Time hath caught Guilt, and to justice brought;" * in each instance the poet is conscious of an abso- THE FOUNDATIONS 3 lute moral order affronted by the will of man; . in each instance the destruction of the protagonist reconciles the spectator to a universe in which* guilt is punished and justice is upheld. The free scientific and philosophical inquiry of the later nineteenth century, however, rendered the traditional principles of tragedy wholly ar- chaic. It became clear that the self-originating^ element in human action is small. The individ- ual acts in harmony with his character, which is largely the result of complex and uncontrollable^* causes. It became even clearer that among the totality of moral values an absolute validity can be assigned to a few only. Hence the basic con- ception of tragic guilt was undermined from within and from without. The transgression of an immutable moral law by a self -originating will was seen to be an essentially meaningless concep- tion, since neither an eternally changeless moral law nor an uncaused volition is to be founijd-ir the universe that we perceive. _... Thus the emphasis of the drama was shifted from what men do^to what they suffej^- A ques-f ' tioning attitude exercised itself upon nature and upon society. Tragedy was seen to arise not the frailty or rebellion of a corrupted will ying the changeless moral order, but from the \ ; v 4 THE MODERN DRAMA pressure upon the fluttering and striving will c outworn custom, of unjust law, of inherited ir ^ stinct, of malevolent circumstance. If the sym- bol of historic tragedy may be found in Othello's poignant cry of self-accusation: "I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee; no way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss," jwith its acquiescence in retributive justice as re- establishing the moral harmony of the world, so may the symbol of modern tragedy be found in those great words with which Beatrice Cenci goes to meet her fate : "My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall To see, in this ill world where none are true, My kindred false to their deserted selves, And with considering all the wretched life Which I have lived, and its now wretched end, And the small Justice shown by Heaven and Earth To me and mine; and what a tyrant thou art, And what slaves these ; and what a world we make, The oppressor and the opprest . . ." j; For modern tragedy consists in man's failure [*to achieve that peace with his universe which marks the close of GEdipus the King or of Othello. Such endings in the drama correspond to a state THE FOUNDATIONS 5 of religious or moral certitude in the playwright and the audience. The loss of that certitude, the crying out after a reconciliation with an uncom- prehended world this it is that constitutes trag- edy in the modern drama. The tragic idea in Ghosts, in La Course du Flambeau, in Rose Bernd, in Strife, is not based upon a fearful sense of human frailty or guilt and a final acquiescence in its punishment. It is based upon a vision of the apparently "small justice shown by heaven and earth" and of "what a world we make, the oppressor and the opprest." Thence result those endings in the modern drama which are still felt by the uninstructed to be inconclusive and discon- certing. But these endings are, in the truest sense, both artistic and philosophical. They in- terpret our incertitude, our aspiration and search for ultimate values. Historic tragedy deals with man's disloyalty to his moral universe and the re-establishment of harmony through retribution. Modern tragedy deals with his perception of a world in which such things can be and such things be endured and in which, nevertheless, he must strive, if he would live at all, to be at home. This conception of the nature of tragedy made for a thorough-going change in the technique of the modern drama. An ascending action that IK 6 THE MODERN DRAMA culminates in the incurring or revelation of guilt and a descending action that closes in its expia- tion could no longer be used in the dramatic in- terpretation of human life. The structure of the r drama becomes far simpler, following the nat- ural rhythm of that life itself, seeking to come upon reality and understand some fragment of it, hesitating to rearrange the data of experience in the light of an anterior ethical assumption. Thus, too, in the pursuit of its realities the modern drama has had to abandon any arbitrary division of the stuff of life into sections fit or unfit for artistic treatment. For by what cri- terion is such fitness or unfitness to be determined ? Wherever human beings strive and suffer there is drama! And so our playwrights have enor- mously extended the subject-matter of the thea- tre, and have vindicated the spiritual and artistic values that lurk in the common lives of men. Such are the primary characteristics of the modern drama which the reader will recognise again and again in these pages ; such are the ideas and methods which differentiate it from the drama j of the past a conception of tragedy as inhering in the nature of things j^ther than ^ I oFlnen, a large simplicity of technique, the con- THE FOUNDATIONS 7 quest of vast regions of life for the interpretation of, art. II The whole modern development in the art of the theatre is prophetically summed up in the career of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). It will be seen, I think, when the tumult of contemporary judgment merges into the quiet certitude of pos- terity, that a few of his successors in the modern drama have surpassed him in reality and mystery, in sweetness and in insight. But behind them and their fellows stands that cold, gigantic figure with all the visions of its age in its unshadowed eyes. Or all but one. For there is, characteris- tically, no hint in Ibsen of that sympathy with / the disinherited of the social order which has so"p* deeply influenced the modern stage. He began with plays in the romantic tradition communicated to Scandinavia by the Germanised Dane, CEhlenschlager. Through the medium of verse and a semi-romantic technique, he pro- ceeded to embody the central and controlling idea of all his work positively in Brand (1866), nega- tively in Peer Gynt (1867). With the one not- able exception of Emperor and Galilean (1873) 8 THE MODERN DRAMA he now turned his attention to the objective de- lineation of contemporary reality. With The Wild Duck (1884) however, a strong symbolic element begins to invade his observation of the actual, an element which grows steadily during the succeeding years until in his dramatic epi- logue, When We Dead Awaken (1899), it has become coextensive with his art. Romanticism, naturalism, symbolism these three stages mark the history of modern literature as they mark the work of Ibsen. And this development corre- sponds to the parallel development in modern thought from the post-Kantian idealists, through the scientific positivism of Comte and Spencer, to the neo-idealism of Bergson, James and Eucken. The modern drama, in its stricter sense, how- ever, does not arise until both romantic tech- nique and romantic philosophy have been more or less definitely discarded. Hence we may dis- regard the plays of Ibsen that precede 1869. and consider at once the body of dramatic work which began, in that year, with The League of Touth and ended with When We Dead Awaken. The initial impulse of Ibsen's mature work was an impulse of protest against the social and spirit- ual conditions in his native country. \It is fairly THE FOUNDATIONS 9 easy to reconstruct these conditions from The League of Touth, The Pillars of Society (1877) and from Bjornson's The New System (1879). There arises from these plays the picture of a L small and isolated society in a state of cruel in- ternal competition. Men s^niggk- meanly for mean, advantages; the minutest differences in wealth and station are emphasised with all the bitterness of insecurity; the whole social structure is based upon a rigid orthodoxy in morals and re- ligion which maintains itself with the stealthy ferocity that belongs to growing impotence and smouldering panic. Prosperous persons uphold a cast-iron respectability that is often at variance with their own past. [Nowhere a breath of large- ness or generous thought or free sincerity; so that even unashamed lawlessness would have cleared the spiritual atmosphere made heavy and murky by these parochial potentates and their time-serv- ers. Therefore does the ultra-idealist Brand cry out: "Even if as slave of lust thou serve, Then be that slave without reserve ! Not this to-day, to-morrow that, And something new with each year's flight : Be what thou art with all thy might, Not piecemeal!" 10 THE MODERN DRAMA And therefore Ibsen declared in a letter written in 1870: "The principal thing is that one re- main veracious and faithful in one's relation to oneself. The great thing is not to will one thing rather than another, but to will that which one is absolutely impelled to will, because one is one- self and cannot do otherwise. Anything else will drag us into deception." It was against such de- ception that Ibsen's cold and analytic wrath was turned to the end of his career deception that was fostered, in Bjornson's words "in small souls amid small circumstances who develop wretch- edly and monotonously like turnips in a bed." By 1870, then, Ibsen's impulse of protest against Norwegian society had crystallised into SL doctrine of extraordinary power and import: i "The great thing is not to will one thing rather than another." l In these simple words he shifts the whole basis of human conduct, denies the su- premacy of any ethical criterion, social or reli- gious, sweeps aside the conception of absolute guilt and hence undermines the foundations of the historic drama in its views of man. From this negative pronouncement he proceeds at once to the positive. The great thing is "to will that which one is absolutely impelled to will, because one is oneself and cannot do otherwise. Any- THE FOUNDATIONS 11 thing else will drag us into deception." It is to be observed that Ibsen, who began as a romantic writer, does not greatly stress, theoretically or cre- atively, the positivistic limitations of the human will. He desires that will to act in utter free- dom, guided by no law but that of its own na- ture, having no aim but complete sincerity in its effort after self-realisation. This doctrine which, embodied in play after play, stirred and cleansed the spiritual atmosphere of Europe, is not as anarchic as it may superfi- cially appear. For Ibsen desires the purest and most ideal volitions of the individual to prevail, His great and grave warning is not to let these volitions be smothered or turned awry by mate- rial aims, by base prudence, by sentimental altru- ism, or by social conventions external to the purely willing soul. For every such concession leads to untruth which is the death both of the individual and of society. It follows almost inevitably for Ibsen was nothing if not tenacious and single of purpose that his plays are a series of culminations, tragic culminations of the effects of untruth born of some impure or materialised or basely intimidated will. And it is almost equally inevitable that this perversion of the will is often illustrated 12 THE MODERN DRAMA through the relation of the sexes in which law and custom, prejudice and social pressure, have most tragically wrenched the impulses of the free in- dividual. Thus Ibsen, adhering with iron con- sistency to his central belief, inaugurates all the basic problems and moral protests of the mod- ern drama. His characteristic theory of life received its first mature embodiment in The Pillars of Soci- ety (1877). The worm-eaten structure of Ber- nick's life which crumbles as the action of the play proceeds, is built upon the two base refusals of his youth to accept, with all their consequences, the free impulses of his personality. He denies himself Lona, the woman of his true choice, and throws upon another the burden of his relations with Mrs. Dorf. Not the error of his passion, be it observed, contributes to his downfall, but his cowardice in face of the realities of his own soul. By various dramaturgic methods, to be noted presently, the brittle quality of his existence is brought home to him. His purification cul- minates in the vital saying: "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom these are the pillars of society." In A Doll's House (1879) Ibsen illustrated his theory of life through a subtle inversion of his THE FOUNDATIONS 13 method. The culmination here consists in Nora's awakening to the fact that, dazed by social con- ventions, by the traditions of the sheltered life and its ignorance, she has never been able to be a freely willing personality. Hence she discards a past woven of actions and acquiescences which are, in no deep or intimate sense, her own. But Ibsen returns to his more usual procedure in his tragic masterpiece Ghosts (1881). The more than Thyestian horrors of that brief and fateful action spring pitilessly from a concession to that external social morality which the blind world approves. This is the lesson which, through the silent years, has burned itself into Mrs. Alving's soul. She shrinks from nothing, now, that soci- ety abhors. But it is far too late. Duty and piety throttled her will in the crucial moments of the past. She can but watch the bursting of their dreadful fruit. In the polemic Enemy of the People (1882) the conspiracy of an entire soci- ety against an undaunted will is shown, and the play ends upon the magnificent and characteristic note: "He is the strongest man in the world who stands alone." The Wild Duck (1884) exhibits, not too clearly or powerfully, a variety of char- acters corrupted by insufficient sincerity of free self-hood. Rosmersholm (1886), on the other 14 THE MODERN DRAMA hand, is but slightly touched with Ibsen's finer qualities as a thinker and dramatic artist. It is, at bottom, a conventional tragedy of fate and crime and retribution, distinguished only by the subtler timbre of his workmanship. It is, perhaps, not without some special sig- nificance that after the disloyalty committed against his nobler and more enduring method in Rosmersholm, Ibsen should have given his cen- tral doctrine its purest and most exquisite expres- sion in his next play: The Lady from the Sea (1888). The play is, in truth, the key to his work by virtue of its clear and almost poetical expression of his dominant mood and doctrine. The fable is of the utmost simplicity; the sym- bolism is not only searching but clear. Never as in the more famous Master Builder (1892) is the meaning distorted by misleading and contradic- tory elements. The lure of the sea which Ellida Wangel feels is the call of freedom; the Stranger is the projection of her untrammelled will. She had not followed Wangel at the dictate of a na- tive impulse. Hence she is not acclimated to the life of her home, and all the unlived possibil- ities of a freer choosing tug at her heart. That psychical strain necessarily culminates in a situa- tion symbolised by the last coming of the THE FOUNDATIONS 15 Stranger. As Ibsen most truly points out: no soul can rob another of its freedom of choice, but can at most brutally prevent the translation of choice into action. A gleam of that truth comes to Wangel. Sincerely he offers Ellida her lib- erty at the final moment and, free at last to choose, she seeks the security of a familiar home, and the wild lure of the great sea-spaces can trouble her no more. No hint of his deeper purpose is to be found in the carefully elaborated portrait of that ignoble egotist Hedda Gabler (1890), and not more than broken hints in the curiously overrated Master Builder. The play has passages that promise momently to exhale a haunting power, a subtle truth. But they never do. The symbolism radi- ates a feeble and flickering light in several direc- tions which, in the last analysis, illuminates noth- ing. It is possible to whet one's cleverness on The Master Builder, not to impart to it a steadi- ness of aim and execution that is not there. In his last three plays Ibsen returns to his char- acteristic motives. The tragedy of Little Eyolf (1894) is ultimately rooted in the fact that All- mers drifted into his marriage with Rita and did not purely choose her from all the world: the quaint and sombre happenings in John Gabriel 16 THE MODERN DRAMA Borkman (1896) can all be traced to the days in which Borkman denied his profoundest impulse and sold Ella for the mean advantages of the world; the sick souls of Rubeck and Irene in When We Dead AWaken (1899) die because they had denied their real selves. "What is irrevocable we see only when we dead awaken." Maja and Ulfheim, on the other hand, find an abundant life even in the death of the body because they meet that death in a union of complete self-affirma- tion. They have "willed that which they were absolutely impelled to will, because they were themselves and could not do otherwise." The very literally epoch-making trenchancy of Ibsen's revolt against the accepted morality of social man is somewhat obscured by the quietness of his manner. His medium is strangely unem- phatic; his rebels strangely unimpassioned. The cry of Nora is the most ringing in all his plays and it is by no means the most convincing. Re- becca West and Rita Allmers are deeply shaken, but they are shaken by the desires of love, not by the love of their free desires. Nevertheless, the eminent Norseman's contribution to the guidance of modern life is unmistakable in its final clear- * ness. The denial of one's sincerest self, even though made in the service of what men call mor- THE FOUNDATIONS 17 ality and institute as law, is an unmixed evil. It corrupts the soul that is guilty of it and infects others. Society cannot be purified until it is a society of free, self-directing personalities. This theory of life is, of course, like every other, insufficient, and stresses some human qual- ities at the expense of others. The greater num- ber of human aims must necessarily be collective and requires a measurable restraint and a directing of the individual impulse. It is open to small doubt, on the other hand, that Ibsen's gospel of the free personality swept like a current of cleansing autumn storm into the prejudice and convention-ridden life of the great middle classes through the eighteen-hundred and seventies and, , eighties, and that he is still an awakener and a J herald of liberty and sincerity in the personal life. ' Nor is his influence likely to decrease. Democ- racy which began by liberating man politically has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion. These majorities pass restrictive laws which sap the moral fibre of society and seek to reduce it to the standards of " ' \ r****, its most worthless elements. They abhor the ^ free and self -originating soul the solitary thinker, fighter, reformer, saint and exalt the i8 THE MODERN DRAMA colourless product of the uniform herd. In a society face to face with such dangers the works of Ibsen have an inestimable service to perform. They will continue to shape free personalities and help such personalities to find themselves. In his character as a dramatic artist I am in- clined to question the perfection which modern criticism is wont to ascribe to Ibsen. His work- manship, in reality, is very unequal, ranging from the pure and proud austerity of Ghosts to the trivial intrigue in The Pillars of Society and John Gabriel Borkman, at both extremes of his career. In the former play the procession in hon- our of Bernick at the moment when he has awak- ened to the hollowness of his life, the song that announces the departure of the unseaworthy ship, the dreadful suspicion that Dina and John have embarked on it, the actual embarkation and im- mediate rescue of Olaf all these are structural tricks of the crassest kind and derived from the creaking mechanism of the theatre according to Sarcey. Hardly less factitious are the elements of dark intrigue that are finally disentangled in John Gabriel Borkman. And even in Little Eyolf Ibsen stoops to the devices of unexpectedly discovered documents holding a melodramatic revelation, and of a sudden psychical turn-about THE FOUNDATIONS 19 on the part of Rita for the sake of a satisfactory and quite unbelievable ending. Nor, finally, can it be forgotten that the feverish suspense during long passages of A Doll's House is sustained by the external and time-honoured device of a letter known to be on its fatal mission, and that the last three acts of Rosmersholm are structurally the gradual revelation of an antecedent crime. No, Ibsen was not an impeccable technician. Never, at any period of his career, did he long free himself from the mechanical structure, the fortuitous externalities of the older French stage. Nevertheless, he was in his own time the earliest and the greatest master of modern dramaturgy. And he produced at least one faultless master- piece in Ghosts. His very great and, for their time, quite new achievements as a dramatic artist consist in his structural economy, his rejection of formal ex- position, his creation of atmosphere, and his ad- herence to the rhythm of the drama. He gains intensity by concentration, not by noisy climaxes or rattling curtains. In The Pillars of Society ', Hedda Gabler and, practically, in Rosmersholm^ he preserves the unity of place; in A Doll's House, Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman, the unities of 'both time and place. That the mod- 20 THE MODERN DRAMA ern drama, seeking to produce the illusion of real- ity, should return to the pseudo-Aristotelian uni- ties was natural. And in this drama they assume a new function and a new importance which Ibsen was the first to exemplify. Equally notable is his rejection of the older method of formal ex- position. That convention permitted characters at the opening of a play or act to relate to each other, but for the benefit of the audience, facts of which, by the very assumptions of the action, they were thoroughly aware. The scenes between the Marquis de Presle and his friend in the first act of Augier's Le Gendre de M. Poirier furnish a classical example of this convention. It is in- structive, by contrast, to observe the method of exposition used in Ghosts. The facts which the audience must know in that play are the true char- acter of Alving, the nature of Oswald's malady and the origin of Regina. Now these facts are communicated to the audience by being tragically and inevitably revealed to characters necessarily ignorant of them. Thus in the first act Manders learns the story of Alving' s real life; in the sec- ond act Mrs. Alving is told the secret of Os- wald's heritage; in the third act Regina is en- lightened as to her parentage. There is no speech or gesture directed at the audience. The THE FOUNDATIONS 21 drama has withdrawn into its own intense reality and is no longer heard but overheard. | Ibsen is the creator or, at least, the first con- stant practitioner of the elaborate ^igp-rlirprrion, by which the modern dramatist seeks to fix the aspect and mood of the environment in which his people act and suffer. In his use of them, these directions do not yet attain that blending of largeness in purpose and exactness in detail given them by the later naturalists. Nor have his scenes their variety and warmth. Even the ocean, which glimmers so often in the background of his settings, has not the multitudinous energy and grandeur of a living sea. It is still and brackish, and there are no stars over it. But in the matter of stage-direction, as of economy in structure, organic exposition and a continuity of dramatic rhythm unbroken by "asides" or mono- logues or scene-divisions, Ibsen has the priority, and maintains his prophetic station in the history of the modern stage. According to a current and popular critical error which merges the dramatist into the superior stage-carpenter, dialogue is the least considerable element in the making of a play. A moment's unprejudiced reflection will at once reveal the fact 1 that it is the one permanent quality in dramatic \ ^ 22 THE MODERN DRAMA art. The fable and the structure of the drama both undergo inevitable changes from age to age with the change of manners, interests, and with successive transformations in the mechanism of theatrical production* In the dialogue are crys- tallised the_abidjng elements of the _drama the projection of character, and the terms upon which the spiritual struggle of the characters is enacted. It is by virtue of the expressiveness of their me- dium that Electra, Hamlet, Le Misanthrope, and even The Weavers are not only for an age but for all time. And it is by his failure in dialogue that Ibsen misses greatness as a dramatist. Not that dialogue need be beautiful or, in any con- ventional sense, eloquent. The piercing reality of dramatic speech found in a few of the modern naturalists, with its intense embodiment of human sorrow and human aspiration, has a grave and searching beauty of its own. Ibsen's dialogue has neither high poetry nor dense reality; he has neither poetically interpreted nor faithfully imi- tated the speech of men. His characters dis- course in curiously level tones, with their vision, apparently, always fixed upon some blankness in space and never passionately arrested by the busi- ness in hand. A play of Ibsen's acted in any language, seems at once to infect the actors with THE FOUNDATIONS 23 that insidious monotony. They speak like som- nambulists, without modulation or fervour. I have used the word unemphatic. It returns to the mind often in dealing with Ibsen. I can think of no writer of equal rank in the history of literature so lacking in energy, in passion and in charm. Yet there he stands in his cold sturdi- ness, dominating and foreshadowing the whole of the modern drama by his priority in untheatrical severity of craftsmanship, and by the magnificence of his moral protest to be surpassed, perhaps al- ready surpassed, by the men who were to come after him, but never to be neglected or set aside. Like his greater contemporary and country- man, Ibsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910), began as a romantic playwright. Again like Ibsen he felt the impact of realism that marked the mid-century and produced The Newly Married Couple in 1865. The poet and dreamer in him occasionally came to the foreground, as in The King ( 1877) ; but, upon the whole, Bjornson may be classed among the realists of the modern drama. His character as a man and artist is not diffi- cult to disengage. He lacked Ibsen's incisive in- telligence; he was the burly, boyish enthusiast of 24 THE MODERN DRAMA peace, progress, purity of all the fine, intoxicat- ing symbols of the social awakening of his day, rarely penetrating, I think, beyond the word and the obvious glow and dreams which it induced. He was generous, kindly, chivalric, patriotic far more eager, in Bishop Wilson's great saying, to live up to what light he had, and clamorously to make it prevail than to question whether that light was not, after all, darkness. The contem- porary praise and popularity of such a character, aided by a pleasing personality freely displayed, was inevitable. It is equally inevitable that a critical adjustment of his qualities and position should follow. Largely, and from the first, he was a propa- gandist through the medium of the stage. Yet for this special task his natural endowment was the most inadequate. His thinking is never close; his vision of life is never unblurred by his moral enthusiasm. It is easy to imagine how M. Paul Hervieu would shatter the amiable dra- matic assertions of Bjornson. A Gauntlet (1883) illustrates his qualities as a thinker and artist. The structure is effective without being unduly theatrical. The second act, it is interest- ing to observe, ends with a cry that is literally and dramaturgically identical with the cry that THE FOUNDATIONS 25 ends the second act of M. Brieux's Les A varies (Damaged Goods}. The characters in A Gaunt- let are not without reality or charm. But the theme of the play is the iniquity of the double standard of sexual morality. Now this is a ques- tion of quite enormous difficulty. For the double standard has not been established by an act of the human will; it is the result of vast and ancient forces, biological, moral and economic, which have been operative throughout human history and are operative to-day. Hence, to deal with the problem it is necessary to betray a conscious- ness, at least, of these forces, and to discuss their possible deflection. Bjornson does nothing of the kind. He has discovered a wrong, an ap- parent lack of equity in human life, and he pro- ceeds to demolish it outright. Alfred Christen- sen, despite the fact that he has had a mistress, declares that he loves Svava truly and faithfully. And Svava's mother asks: "Suppose a woman, under the same circumstances, had come and said the same thing who would believe her?" And Bjornson was quite oblivious of the fact that the problem had not even been touched until one had accounted for the immemorial instincts and tra- ditions, common to all mankind, which would dictate the answer to Mrs. Riis's question. Such 26 THE MODERN DRAMA doctrinaire dealing with life is really a remnant of the old romanticism on its side of social and ethical theorising. Bjornson was happier in the treatment of more solid and less debatable subjects. Thus A Bank- ruptcy (1874) is vigorous and convincing. It has some of the stuff of human life in it and has been the most successful of his plays. His mas- terpiece, on the other hand, is probably the first part of Beyond Our Strength (1883). Here he grasped a situation and a problem of high spirit- ual import. No solution was possible. But the statement is dramatic and poetic at once. Of es- pecial charm and truth is the discussion of the clergymen in the second act. Nowhere else does Bjornson feel and reason with such delicate just- ness. His religious perceptions had deeper roots than his sociological opinions. Hence this dra- matic apologue of the relations of Christianity to the miraculous is his least questionable contribu- tion to the modern drama. Bjornson' s dramatic craftsmanship is usually sound, if rarely remarkable. His best plays are solidly built; his dialogue is adequate if no more. But nowhere, except in Beyond our Strength, does one feel oneself in the presence of that high in- tensity which, whether in the reproduction or in- THE FOUNDATIONS 27 terpretation of life, is the mark of every great dramatic impulse or method. The circle of the moderns from romanticism through naturalism to symbolism was also de- scribed by August Strindberg ( 1 849- 1912). But the heart of his immense productivity lies, I take it, in his naturalistic period. His symbolism dislimns into mere phantasmagoria. But between 1887 and 1897 he wrote a group of plays which belong to the most memorable products of the naturalistic drama. One cannot span that tortured and potent spirit by a formula or a phrase. The secret of his uncanny power, however, lay clearly in his unequalled capacity for suffering. "Observa- tion," Balzac wrote to Mme. Hanska, "springs from suffering. Our memory registers only what gives us pain." Strindberg's memory clung with a cruel and self -tormenting tenacity to what had given him pain. The result is an observation of life from which we avert our eyes shamed by its merciless truth. No dream or delusion could corrupt that soul made remorseless by its own an- guish. He lays bare his characters nerve by nerve and in each nerve laid bare is also the quiver of Strindberg's agony. 28 THE MODERN DRAMA His art the art of The Father (1887), Com ' rades (1888), Miss Julia (1888), Creditors (1890), The Link (1897) is the most joyless in the world. There is no lifting of the soul to a larger vision from the bondage of immediate pain. That is his limitation. It may be urged, on the other hand, that the pain he describes is so keen and absorbing that it gives his characters no chance to fight their way to the breathing of an ampler air. And that, too, is life. For he has chosen to depict the crudest malady of the age the malady that has stolen into the ancient and honourable relations of the woman to the man. He began with the severest consequence of this malady, which Hauptmann has also treated. So soon as the woman loses her sense of the man as friend, protector and, in the last analysis, arbi- ter, she is in the individual case stronger than he. Not the wife of the navvy; but the wife of the thoughtful gentleman, inhibited by ages of chiv- alric forbearance and defenceless against a primi- tive craft and tenacity which he has long out- lived. Thus, in The Father^ the man's will, the highest expression of his selfhood, is gradually corroded as by slow acid. As the captain says to his wife Laura: "Yes, you have a diabolical THE FOUNDATIONS 29 power of making your will prevail; but such power always belongs to him who shrinks from no tactics." We are told that when Laura was a little girl she used to feign death to have her will. No doubt small boys are self-willed too. But as the male grows older he realises the compacts of society and the necessity for comradely human ac- tion. He fears injustice. The woman, trag- ically often, continues the tactics of the child and has the power of all unscrupulous and irrational forces. It is characteristic of the situation that the pivot of the struggle is the daughter of the captain and Laura. The captain desires to train Bertha for her own good; Laura to satisfy the girl's trivial desires and assert the ownership of her own motherhood. Miss Julia is inferior to The Father in power and interest largely because the case it states is highly exceptional. And this order of art tri- umphs by the representative power of its con- crete subject-matter. That power reasserts itself in Comrades^ the acutest study in the modern drama of the gross delusion that marriage is pos- sible on a basis of personal and professional sepa- rateness. For marriage, as Axel says in the play, must be founded upon common interests, not upon conflicting ones. And these common interests, in 30 THE MODERN DRAMA normal and healthy unions, must be the home, the child and the man's work upon which the home and the family and all the historic civilisa- tion of mankind are built. Here, on the con- trary, is comradeship. Yet Berta does not even play that miserable game fairly. What woman, with the traditions of the sex behind her, could? And so while Axel does hack-work to pay the butcher and baker, she works at her art. The man finally gathers strength to escape. The Maid: A young lady is waiting to see you, sir. Axel: Very well; I'm at her service. Berta: Is that a new comrade*? Axel: No, not a comrade, but a sweetheart! Berta: And your future wife? Axel: Perhaps! I like to meet a comrade at an inn; at home I want a wife. Excuse me ! Berta: Good-by, then. And so we are never to meet any more? Axel: Why not? But only at an inn. Good-by! Creditors is a variation on the same theme, even subtler and more searching in its analysis, though not so representative. Despite the passionate ex- aggeration of a soul that has suffered, Gustav succeeds in summing up the whole matter. "For, look you, the woman is the man's child. If she doesn't become his, he becomes hers and then we THE FOUNDATIONS 31 have a topsy-turvy world." And, finally, in a sadder and mellower mood Strindberg once more exposed the utter misery of a modern "free" mar- riage in that masterpiece of dramaturgy and psy- chology, The Link. "There are disharmonies in life," says Gustav in Creditors, "that cannot be resolved." Such dis- harmonies exist in modern marriage, and these Strindberg set himself the task of analysing. It is a shallow view that sees in him the mere misogynist. It is possible to have revered, be- yond all human types, the wise mother, the kind wife, the ancient priestess of the human hearth, and yet to have written Comrades and The Link. For that type has presented itself immemorially to the imagination and experience of men. The predatory suffragette is a thing of yesterday and may soon be "with yesterday's seven thousand years." Yet for our own time these plays of Strindberg's are of the last importance. Amid much loose thinking and looser talking he set down the bare, frank truth. It may be impos- sible to refound that home in which man, from of old, has found his joy and peace; it may be necessary to shatter and remould anew the whole fabric of society and totally to change the rela- tions of the sexes. That, however, is another 32 THE MODERN DRAMA matter. It is a valorous deed to have shown that marriage and feminism in its immediate and acrid sense are incompatible. This group of five plays has a further impor- tance in the history of the modem drama. For the magnificent economy of his structure Strind- berg had but the single example of Ghosts (1881) when he wrote The Father (1887). Ear- lier than any other playwright he grasped with full consciousness all the principles of modern dramaturgy exclusion of intrigue, seamless con- tinuity of structure, a dialogue that produces the illusion of real speech. He rightly asserts in the preface to Miss^ Julia (1888) that, as a natural- ist, he has wholly abandoned the creation of labelled types and has shown the human soul in its boundless and troubled complexity and that he has avoided the symmetrical give and take of French dialogue "in order to let the brains of men work unhindered." It is equally noteworthy that all these dramas observe the unities of both time and place. These technical qualities, united to Strindberg's power of psychological analysis, tend to make the five pieces discussed his most solid contribution to dramatic literature. In poetry, in imagination, in variety and charm of matter, he is surpassed by many playwrights. THE FOUNDATIONS 33 The sombre concentration with which he exposed the disharmonies which had hurt him most acutely that stands alone. Ill The protest in favour of a new dramatic spirit and method was most persistent and most direct in France. For it was here that there had arisen, largely through the work of the indefatigable Eugene Scribe (1791-1861) a mere mechanic art of the theatre wholly divorced from reality either in life or thought. This drama, which amused all Europe, did not even in its heyday pass with- out sharp and just criticism. But the criticism was faintly voiced and proceeded only from a few of the finer spirits of the time. Thus, in his Soiree perdue, Alfred de Musset, as early as 1840, wrote lines which may be freely rendered as follows: "Alone one night at the Frangais I sate ; The author's hit was less than moderate. 'Twas only Moliere who, 'tis known, at best That blunderer who one day wrote Alceste Had not the art of tickling mind and hide By serving a denouement cut and dried. Thank heaven, our playwrights take another road, And we prefer some drama a la mode. 34 THE MODERN DRAMA Where the intrigue inextricably bound Swings, like a toy, the same mechanic round." Into this comedy of mere intrigue two men, Emile Augier (1820-1889) and Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824-1895), sought to inject the ob- servation of manners and the power of moral rea- soning. The history of the French stage from 1850 to 1880 is the history of their works. Un- der the influence, however, of the naturalistic movement in the novel, which was rendered il- lustrious soon after the middle of the century by the work of Gustave Flaubert, it was felt with a growing keenness that the theatre of Augier and Dumas was really incapable of either rendering or interpreting life. Both playwrights adhered in the structure of their pieces to the mechanic formula of Scribe, and Dumas invalidated his art by the eagerness of his polemics. In this condi- tion of the theatre it was but natural that the novelists of the new school should have made the effort to transfer to it their methods and their ideals. Those restless and intelligent souls, the Gon- court brothers, were first in the field. In their journal that half-heroic, half -pathological rec- ord of the literary life they have set down the high hopes, the heartburnings and the bitter dis- THE FOUNDATIONS 35 illusion that attended the difficult production and noisy failure of their Henriette Marechal in 1865. They were thoroughly aware of the degraded con- dition of the French drama in which, as Edmond de Goncourt explained, "I do not know a single denouement which is not brought about by the sud- den overhearing of a conversation behind a cur- tain, or by the interception of a letter, or by some forced trick of that kind." Yet Henriette Marechal itself closes with a pistol shot that kills the wrong person, and begins with exposition by a series of monologues. Nor did Augier use grosser coincidences than that by which Paul de Breville, wounded in a quixotic duel for an un- known lady, is carried into that very lady's house to await his recovery. "But there is truth in our play," Edmond plead years later, "far more truth than people believe." He was not wholly wrong. The fable is ill-managed, the technique cumbersome. But Henriette is a delicate and charming figure whose nature has been well grasped and is well presented. And throughout the play one has a sense of brave effort to escape from the external and mechanical into a finer re- gion of dramatic art. A far robuster figure entered the fray for a naturalistic drama in the person of Emile Zola 36 THE MODERN DRAMA (1840-1903). Between 1873 and 1878 he .pro- duced three plays. But they were hissed from the stage, and his longest run was one of seven- teen nights. Yet theoretically and despite the stupefying narrowness of his positivism, Zola had the root of the matter in him. It must have been a strange reflection for him that his ideals for the theatre were ultimately realised in Germany and not in France at all. He began quite rightly by inveighing against the reigning "comedy of intrigue" which he declared to be "a mere game of patience, a bauble ... in which all solid ele- ments are considered boredom," and equally against the play with a purpose (piece a these). "Never," he Lnely and truly wrote, "have the great masters preached or desired to prove any- thing. They have lived and that has sufficed to make immortal lessons of their works." His posi- tive statements are even more important for the development of the modern drama. "What is needed to-day is a large and simple delineation of men and things, a drama which Moliere might have written." And of his own plays he said: "The action resides not in some plot but in the inner conflicts of the characters; the logic used is not one of facts but of sensations and senti- ments." His people, he finally declared, "do not THE FOUNDATIONS 37 play but live before the public." This was a re- markably early statement (1878) of the meth- ods of the best modern dramaturgy. Of the three actual plays of Zola, two may be dismissed at once. Les Heritiers Rabourdin (1874) i g a tiresome variation on a stock comedy theme; Le Bouton de Rose (1878), an unconvin- cing working over of a phantastic story from Bal- zac's Contes Drolatiques. There remains Ther- ese Raquin (1873) which may fairly be called the first tragedy of the naturalistic theatre. The story is of a crudely brutal tinge. Therese and Laurent on a boating expedition drown the former's husband. But they have not, in the end, the strength and the baseness to profit by their crime. On the very night of their marriage, goaded and maddened by remorse and supersti- tious fear, they take prussic acid and die. There is, however, no coil 'of intrigue. The play con- sists in the working out through character of the necessary consequences of a given action. And that action in itself is not fortuitous but had re- sulted, in its turn, from the contact of character with character. In a word, Zola succeeded meas- urably in using a logic "not of facts but of sensa- tions and sentiments." The play contains in ad- dition that close-packed portrayal of milieu and 3 8 THE MODERN DRAMA character which is characteristic of the best dra- matic work of its kind. As in his novels, to be sure, Zola could not wholly escape the lurid. The paralysis of Mme. Raquin, Sr., her late discovery of her daughter-in-law's guilt, the dreadful re- venge of the silenced woman these are the fruits of Zola's romantic appetite for the monstrous and merely horrible. Yet Therese Raquin, with its stringent evolution, its unity of place and its strong verisimilitude bears witness to the power and intelligence, if not to the fineness and genius of its author's mind. The lure of the theatre was also felt by Al- phonse Daudet (1840-1897) whose best-known play, UArlesienne, was produced in 1872. But even as a novelist, and despite the immense docu- mentation of which he was so proud, 1 Daudet hardly belonged to the inner circle of naturalism. The austere impersonality of the school was never truly his. The scene of UArlesienhe is laid in his beloved South; it suffers from an overdose of his characteristic sweetness, and cannot be said to have hastened or even foreshadowed the approach of the modern drama. An interesting technical point in the play is that the woman of Aries, whose i Vide his Trente ans de Paris. THE FOUNDATIONS 39 character is the exciting force of the action, never appears at all. The youngest of the great naturalistic masters in prose fiction also tried his fortune in the thea- tre. But the two plays of Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) appeared in the full tide of the modern movement. He is not at his best in them. Yet both Musotte ( 1891 ) and La Paix du Menage (1893) show traces of his incomparable power. Thus it is seen that the naturalistic novelists failed to conquer the stage for the methods of their school. Their work, however, had its in- fluence; later playwrights returned to it for guid- ance; it gradually accustomed at least a small section of the public to the ideals of the new art, and prepared the way for Henri Becque and for the men and works of the modern French theatre. IV I have already named the dramatist who defi- nitely founded the modern theatre in France. The talent of Henri Becque (1837-1891) was slow to mature and even in its maturity hard, dry, and far from copious. His work is not en- gaging. His mind had neither a touch of inge- nuity (the strong point of the older play- 40 THE MODERN DRAMA wrights), nor of that almost silent poetry wrung from life itself which distinguishes the later nat- uralists. His chief gift is that of a Molierian irony the irony that results from the uncon- scious self-revelation of base or corrupt charac- ters. "You have been surrounded by rascals, my dear, ever since your father's death," Teissier, the most brutal of these rascals, says to Marie at the end of Les Corbeaux (1882). "You wouldn't want a mistress who is not religious! That would be dreadful!" Clotilde (La Parisienne, 1885) exclaims to her lover. The ironic revela- tion of a confusion of all moral values could scarcely be more succinct and telling. Yet Becque makes no display of these passages; he does not emphasise them or set them off by the modelling of his dialogue. Their power and meaning are gradually revealed. His first play L'Enfant prodigue (1868) is a lively comedy of no great interest or originality. But very doggedly during these years Becque was feeling his way, quite careless of the contempo- rary fashions of the stage. He had not yet found that way in Michel Pauper (1870). The plot is violent and crude ; the dialogue stilted and sen- timental; and Paris laughed the play to scorn. The first period of his activity may be said to THE FOUNDATIONS 41 close with a one-act play La Navette (1878). Here, however, amid a conventional plot con- veyed through a conventional technique there are hints of the ironic manner of his best passages. In 1880 Becque produced a robust and keen- witted little comedy in one act: Les Honnetes Femmes. He had evidently now settled down to the close and sober study of character. Through Mme. Chevalier he seeks to reveal woman's genuine attitude to motherhood and marriage. There are almost Shavian hints in her self -revelation. But these are quite unconscious on Becque' s part. He had gained the imperson- ality of the naturalistic drama and, again, two years later, gave the public his masterpiece, Les Corbeaux. The play is a study in character and in social conditions. It is wholly free from polemic in- tention of any kind. A piece of human life un- folds itself. The technique has not yet the plain and bare nobility attained by Hauptmann or Hirschfeld or Galsworthy at their best. But there is neither trickery nor mechanical interfer- ence. The illusion of the rhythm of life is main- tained throughout. The second act trails off into a natural, desperate, human silence as one dun- ning letter after another is read. 42 THE MODERN DRAMA We are introduced to the family of a moder- ately wealthy bourgeois. M. Vigneron has a wife and three daughters, Judith, Marie and Blanche. The latter is betrothed to a young man of small means but of good family. Vig- neron is entirely self-made. He has suffered pri- vations in his youth and his plenteous table is now his chief pleasure. He overeats and overworks. The first act ends with his death from an apo- plectic stroke. There follow the consequences. The women are quite unskilled and ignbrant of affairs. Hence the vultures gather chief of them Teissier, the late Vigneron's partner, but also architects, furnishers, tradesmen of all sorts and the family solicitor. One kind of pressure after another is applied. Teissier and the solicitor talk of saving what little is left of the estate. Blanche's engagement is broken. Marie, the most clear-seeing of the three girls, is not unaware of the chicanery that surrounds them. But their ne- cessities are immediate. The women are timid, doubtful of their own suspicions, and finally agree to the solicitor's plans. Judith, who is a musi- cian, entertains the hope that she may be able to assume the burden of the family. But her talent is not sufficient for anything except to introduce THE FOUNDATIONS 43 her to a life of shame. What is left? Marie consents, quite bravely and humanly, to marry the sordid old Teissier who immediately proceeds to deal with the other vultures. The dialogue is not polished nor is it particu- larly racy. The structure is, at times, almost crude. Yet the simple facts of life and their meaning are stamped upon the memory by Becque's dramatic irony. The play, with all its imperfections, is a masterpiece, foreshadowing the long line of works that forms the chief dis- tinction of the modern drama. La Parisienne is more closely-knit structurally and far better written than Les Corbeaux. The unity of place is maintained and the movement is both swift and nimble. Here the dramatist's whole art is concentrated upon the ironic self- revelation of a single character. Clotilde is the woman who is respectably adulterous, sentimen- tally vicious. She amuses herself with her lovers and is concerned to better her husband's position. She is utterly unaware of her own corruption and makes speech after speech that is memorable for its incisive moral irony. About the whole career of Becque there is something poverty-stricken and frustrated. Ad- mirable as are his best plays, they seem wrung 44 THE MODERN DRAMA from a soul without passion or spiritual fervour. But their importance in the history of the drama is quite secure. By 1885 the "well-made" play of the French type was definitely discredited by all the acutest and freshest critical minds in Europe. In Ger- many and France the eager young leaders of the modern drama were gradually finding their way toward productivity. But the official and com- mercial theatres were closed to them. The great public knew little or nothing of the modem movement except as, faintly and distortedly enough, it was aware of the scandal and terror that had followed in the wake of A Doll's House and Ghosts. Nor was this all. The art of act- ing, developed for many years in harmony with external effectiveness and artificial eloquence, was in no condition to interpret the simple realities of the new drama. Censorships and police regu- jlations, moreover, made any public performance of modern plays difficult and dangerous. In this state of affairs M. Andre Antoine, a Parisian actor and manager, completely in sym- pathy with the naturalistic drama, established the epoch-making Theatre Libre in 1887. It was THE FOUNDATIONS 45 not, in the ordinary sense, a theatre at all. Pri- vate performances were given for subscribers only, and thus the problems of both censorship and of commercial profit were eliminated at once. Antoine himself acted and trained his associates in the quiet reproduction of the tones and ges- tures of life. The names of many of the play- wrights whom Antoine introduced to the world have already fallen into a semi-obscurity Jean Jullien, George Ancey, Camille Fabre. But he opened the careers of Brieux and Curel; he gave Paris Ghosts, Tolstoi's The Might of Darkness and, in later years, The Weavers of Gerhart Hauptmann. Furthermore, in the very year of its organisation, the company of M. Antoine played in Berlin and vitally helped the birth of the new drama in Germany. Two years later, in 1889, the Free Stage Soci- ety (Verein Freie Buhne) was established in Ber- lin. The brilliant journalist, Maximilian Har- den, the critics, Theodor Wolff and Paul Schlen- ther, the skilful stage-manager and defender of naturalism, Otto Brahm, all had their share in the founding of the society which shaped so re- markably the fortunes of the modern drama. The plan of the Freie Biihne was in all respects identical with that of Antoine. And like the 46 THE MODERN DRAMA Theatre Libre, it began with Ibsen, with Tolstoi, with Zola and Goncourt, and had the memorable fortune of opening the theatre to Hauptmann. Both stages had many successors and imita- tors. The modern drama was thus first presented to small and picked audiences from whom it gradually passed to a larger public. As Brahm admirably put it: "The success of the free stage societies meant their extinction." Both in France and in Germany the masters of the modern drama, one after another, conquered the official and commercial theatres. In England, where the Independent Theatre was opened with Ibsen and with Shaw in 1891, the function of a free stage cannot yet, in Brahm's sense, be said to have been completely exercised. In America its use is still to come. The place of these theatres in the his- tory of the modern stage, however, plainly dis- poses of the critical delusion, so frequently nursed in England and America, that a dramatic move- ment lacks greatness and force because it does not at once appeal to the populace. The origins of the modern drama on the Continent illustrate the fortunes of an art that, through the media- tion of liberal and intelligent audiences, was grad- ually communicated to the slow moving masses of men. CHAPTER TWO THE REALISTIC DRAMA IN FRANCE I A MODERATELY acute observer, frequenting the theatres of Paris in the years that followed the founding of the Theatre Libre, would have ex- perienced little difficulty in foretelling the exact character of the whole modern movement on the French stage. The attitude of such an observer to the plays he saw would have varied, of course, with his age and tastes and nationality. Con- cerning two facts, however, he could not long have remained in doubt: The structural charac- ter of the French drama had undergone a pro- found change; the old patterns had been defi- nitely remoulded. But the change was not, upon the whole, in the direction of that transference of naturalistic aims and methods to the art of the theatre for which Henri Becque had so long and so valiantly laboured. It is necessary to assume for my observer, no 47 48 THE MODERN DRAMA doubt, a taste for new talents and first nights. Given that taste he would have seen in 1890 Brieux's Menages d* Artistes at the Theatre Libre and Jules Lemaitre's Le Depute Leveau at the Vaudeville; in 1891 he would have returned from the Odeon knowing that he had witnessed a mas- terpiece of a new kind in Amour euse by Georges de Porto-Riche. But 1892 would have been his great year. For in that year he would have seen Brieux, still at the Theatre Libre, display his most solid and enduring gifts in the first two acts of Blanchette; he would have seen arise on the boards -of that same playhouse the sombre and mysterious glow of Frangois de CurePs genius. Nor is this all. At the Vaudeville, within the space of a few months, he might have been pres- ent at Henri Lavedan's first decisive success with Le Prince d'Aurec, and at Paul Hervieu's first display of moral and intellectual gymnastics in Les Paroles restent. Now if my hypothetical play-goer had been, as is not unlikely, over forty, fond of the bril- liant artifice traditional on the French stage, and a more or less devout reader of the critiques of Francisque Sarcey, the new methods and experi- ments he saw would have touched him with a THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 49 sense of pain and disillusion. The drama was, ; quite obviously, ceasing to be an art governed only by its own conventions, and absorbing only so much of the living reality as could be trans- muted into theatrical effectiveness. Intrigue, in the older sense, had been very nearly eliminated from the new plays; there was no action merely for its own sake. If the fable was based upon some decisive action, that action had usually taken place long before the unfolding of its moral and spiritual consequences upon the stage. More often ? however, the play_arose^f rom a character or a condition, rather than from~~ariy~ action. Equally disconcerting must have been the fact that some of these plays showed no progression, but left their characters very much where they found them. In other words, my observer would have discovered, to his delight or dismay, all the earmarks of the modern drama in the early work of the men who were to dominate the French stage of the succeeding quarter of a century. The technique of the new drama was, neces- sarily, not only simplified but far more flexible. The relentless pattern of Scribe and his successors was broken: Exposition, progression, resolution, illustrative or antithetical action both within the 50 THE MODERN DRAMA act and within the frame of the whole play, all might be lacking. 1 The plays, by all the tradi- tional rules of the game, should have been inef- fectual upon the stage. Yet they were not. Dialogue alone, though rarely epigrammatic or neatly dovetailed, had undergone no fundamental change. The dialogue of the French drama is still literary in the narrower sense. The Parisian play-goer of the early nineties, unlike his Ger- man contemporary, was not shocked by hearing the unmistakable accents of his own daily speech and voice float to him across the footlights. Nor, reduced to the printed page, did these new plays show that elaborate exactitude in the description of scene, character, gesture and mood which the great Scandinavian dramatists had introduced and the German naturalists had just perfected. In other words, the modern drama in France, subtle, flexible and trenchant in theme and tech- nique as it is, has not been, as I began by pointing out, steadily naturalistic at any time. Brieux alone achieves, rarely in more than a single act, passages of broad and robust objectivity. But always his over-eager intellect breaks in; and either shatters or slowly analyses away the world i For a discriminating but by no means hostile description of the traditional technique cf. Augustin Filon: De Dumas a Rostand, pp. 14-17. THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 51 he has created. Now \ naturalism is the product of a brooding and contemplative mindJ It is watchful of the vision of life, but very patient; not over-zealous to change this essentially change- less world, nor desirous of reducing its vast multi- formities to the trim confines of a moral or an inference. The modern drama of France, on the contrary, is restlessly intelligent and even argu- mentative. It is, like the whole of French litera- ture, vividly social, immensely preoccupied with moral ideas and careless of facts except as they illustrate the ideas which the playwright has at heart. Thus it comes about that the most illus- trious master of the contemporary stage in France, Paul Hervieu, as well as his lesser col- league, Eugene Brieux, is a preacher of doctrine rather than a creator of character. The activity of the French drama during the past twenty years has been quite literally enor- mous. Hence I must exclude from my interpre- tative survey those figures which do not add to an understanding of the character so diverse and yet so homogeneous of the modern drama. I omit, therefore, with little hesitation, the solidly observed work of Georges Courtelines, the ami- able comedies of Alfred Capus, the high-pitched emotional plays of Henri Bernstein. Nor, on the 52 THE MODERN DRAMA other hand, is it advisable to touch upon the in- creasing throng of talents that yet lack outline and perspective. We shall learn all that is nec- essary from the work of seven playwrights which by its scope, significance and level of accomplish- ment holds and illustrates the national stage. These playwrights are Georges de Porto-Riche, Francois de Curel, Henri Lavedan, Eugene Brieux, Paul Hervieu, Jules Lemaitre and Mau- rice Donnay. II M. Georges de Porto-Riche (b. 1849) has called his collected plays Theatre d* Amour. The title is just. For M. de Porto-Riche is quite ex- clusively the psychologist of love. Alone of the modern French dramatists he began his career by writing and publishing verses. Yet it would be vain to look in his plays for lyric ardour or ro- mantic passion. Beauty he sees in love, but a beauty that is touched with mournfulness. His insight into the maladies of love, into the diffi- culties of the human heart, is so complete, that it has silenced in him all protest or precept. He analyses with a quiet but unerring kindliness that nervous, passionate, sad battle which the mod- ern mind calls love love, now no longer the THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 53 blending of a sacred weakness into a larger and sustaining life, but the bitter strife between man and woman, fatally hostile to each other in their new separateness and incapable of any harmoni- ous union of some other, yet undiscovered kind. Of these conflicts the characters of Porto-Riche have no objective consciousness. They experi- ence them; they do not reflect upon them or an- alyse them. They know that to endure love at all takes whatever one has of delicacy, of self- abnegation, of the power to suffer. Yet they know, too, that love is the eternally beautiful and desirable. Hence they speak with voices slightly subdued, and their creator has lent them a subtle and well-cadenced eloquence, passionate yet temperate, elegant yet sincere. Porto-Riche made his first appearance as a play- wright toward the end of 1888 at the Theatre Libre with a one-act comedy, La Chance de Fran- foise. The piece is structurally imperfect. The awkward convention of the impossible "aside" is used and the characters are pulled about mechan- ically. But already the author understands the root of the matter. Franchise is the modern mid- dle-class woman, freed from nearly all physical burdens and material tasks, and making of love her calling and her occupation. Thence arise the 54 THE MODERN DRAMA enormous emotional demands which she makes upon her husband. The latter, however, is an artist and philanderer, and for this reason Porto- Riche's first statement of his favourite "case" lacks justness and representative power. Uncom- mon, too, are the perfect humility and sweetness of Franchise which make her condemn even her silent suffering as in the nature of a reproach. For such a temperament there is no hope except as the author clearly saw in the sadly joyous cry of Frangoise to her husband with which the play ends: "She has betrayed you, Lovelace; you are growing old !" The fine analytic and dramatic power so clearly present in La Chance de Frangoise came to ad- mirable maturity three years later in the three- act play, Amour euse. It is by virtue primarily of this play that Porto-Riche's name belongs defi- nitely to the history of the French theatre. It has never, from its first appearance to the present year, been long absent from the Parisian stage. For years it formed a solid addition to the reper- tory of Mme. Rejane, and in 1908 it enjoyed a new triumph at the Comedie-Frangaise. Amour euse is an extraordinarily complete and searching presentation of the problem of modern love. Dr. Etienne Feriaud is a distinguished THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 55 physician and investigator with a noble and virile faith in his mission and in his type. "It is they whom you jeer at," he says to his frivolous friend Pascal, "it is the scientists, the artists and the poets who have bettered this imperfect world and made it more endurable. . . . Doubtless they have been bad husbands, indifferent friends, re- bellious sons. Does it matter? Their labours and their dreams have sown happiness, justice and beauty over the earth. They have not been kind lovers, these egoists, but they have created love for those who came after them." Dr. Feriaud, always admired by women, has had his adven- tures, though the chief of these was eminently staid and sensible. At forty he has married, for love, to be sure, but quite definitely in order to pursue, in the suave peace of his own home, his intellectual aims. In making these reasonable plans he has reckoned without the psychology of the modern woman. Mme. Germaine Feriaud, as she tells him in a brilliant passage, has not been surfeited with passion and romance before mar- riage. In marriage she must find her passion and her romance. Unendurable as her exactions are, she esteems them nobler and braver than the sen- sible comforts of middle-aged matrimony. The result is that Feriaud can neither work nor think. 56 THE MODERN DRAMA "I have lost the right to be alone," he cries out, "she rummages in my brain as though it were a chest of drawers." He writes his letters in a restaurant to avoid Germaine's nerve-racking in- quisitiveness. Her feminine adornments are on his desk, his house is in disorder, dispute follows reconciliation, and reconciliation, dispute. He has accepted an invitation to represent the med- ical science of France at a congress in Florence. By her troubling and indirect appeals, by her half- hidden cajoleries, Germaine causes him appar- ently by his own will to withdraw at the elev- enth hour and stay with her. No sooner has he made his consent to stay irrevocable than the sub- tle rancour that is necessarily at the heart of such a situation breaks forth. He tells Germaine the brutal truth at last: He is suffocating spiritually and physically because she has the fatal power of putting him in a state of mind which is contrary to the good advice she gives him but in harmony with those intimate desires of her own which she dare not formulate. He must have freedom and, since she threatens him with an act of irreparable rebellion and vengeance, he offers her with cold sarcasm to Pascal. Infuriated by his cool analy- sis of their emotional situation, she takes him at his word. But Germaine has her own notions of THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 57 honour. She confesses her sin and turns to leave the house. At the door Etienne stops her. Love is deeper than wasted days, stronger than sin. "Why have restlessness and jealousy forced me to re-open this door?" he laments. "Alas, we have torn at each other like bitter foes, irrepar- able words have been spoken; I have misunder- stood you, you have betrayed me and yet I am here. It seems as though we were riveted to- gether by all the evil we have done each other, by all the shameful words we have spoken." "But we will not be happy," she cries. And all his answer is: "What does it matter?" I do not think that M. de Porto-Riche has equalled Amoureuse either in Le Passe (1897), despite the engaging and austere charm of Dom- inique Brienne, nor in the tragic, though painful, Le vieil homme. But this play served, in 1911, to recall to the entire Parisian press the fact that France possesses one dramatist who unites with magnificent economy of workmanship fewness of characters, unity of place and almost of time a marvellous knowledge of human passion which he has never consented to dilute by rapid production or to subordinate to a merely theatri- cal effectiveness. 58 THE MODERN DRAMA M. Frangois de Curel (b. 1854) has been called a psychologist. I am willing to grant him that title, although his psychology has a way of be- ing, at crucial points, altogether incredible. , In truth, he has a thousand shortcomings as a drama- tist and yet this remarkable virtue, that, in a coun- try of social talents and clear accomplishments, he is so rigorously, so mysteriously himself. It is difficult to imagine where he gained his intense and sombre vision of life. One fancies him, like his own Robert de Chantenelles, the son of an an- cient family fallen upon evil days, passing his boyhood and youth in the vast greenery of some forgotten and solitary park. Beyond the park are great stretches of barren country. Within it, here and there, are pools, deep and old and green. A few white swans float on these stagnant waters and fragments of old statuary crumble amid the shadows. Here the youth, dreaming and think- ing, built himself that vision of human life and character which no contact with the world has been able to obliterate or change. Here he must have conceived those wide-eyed, wandering souls with their strange nobility and strange passions who people his plays. But in whatever way one seeks to disengage the peculiar qualities of Curel's genius, the spirit of the man will scarcely admit THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 59 a very intimate approach. It remains in its ar- dent, troubled obscurity. He mastered at the very outset of his career the methods of modern dramaturgy which fell in with his native bent. His fables are of souls at conflict with themselves or with each other; of visible action there is little. Hence a few char- acters and a limited scene suffice him. The drama of complicated intrigue and rattling cur- tains would have silenced him effectually. Of dialogue he is a master and writes it, especially in his earlier pieces, with a haunting vibrancy of modulation which carries one through speeches that are not seldom inordinately long. M. de Curel's plays are few. And yet within their narrow range he seems to have exhausted the number of situations with which he can deal powerfully. His latest play Le Coup d'Aile (1906) is a tissue of sheer psychological violence, though even here one must admit that wild en- ergy like Charlotte Bronte's which, for mo- ments at least, silences protest and disbelief. But indeed all his fables are difficult and strange: A woman is abandoned by her betrothed. She tries to kill the young wife who has been preferred to her and retires to a convent. Eighteen years pass. The man dies and she returns to the world. 60 THE MODERN DRAMA She discovers that the wife has not kept, accord- ing to the promise that was made, the shameful secret. Thus the false saint renounced life in vain. She seeks now to rob her rival of an only daughter, but a message of memory and affection from the dead man only now transmitted softens the harsh waywardness of her soul and she returns to the cloister (L'Envers d'une Saint e, 1892). Another woman, discovering her husband's vulgar liaison leaves her home and her children in an access of proud fury and permits herself to be thought bad or mad for sixteen years. Then she returns having if one will be- lieve it stifled so long the agony of her mother- hood, and rescues her daughters from the corrupt- ing influences of her husband's life (JJInvitee^ 1893). And still another woman, brave, young, intelligent, permits herself, loving him in silence, to be married as a matter of mere form, for so- cial and business reasons, to an eminent politician who as it is denominated in the bond is to keep his mistress. The young wife conquers through her wisdom and her beauty and turns her shadow into a substance (La Figurante, 1896). It is needless to dwell on the incredibly self-torturing souls in L 'Amour brode (18513), or on that savage girl who, disillusioned with the Western civilisa- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 61 tion grafted upon her unconquerable primitive- ness, becomes a queen in some far island of the Southern seas (La Fille sauvage, 1902). Illog- ical and monstrous as these fables are, Curel's in- tensity and almost tragic conviction wrests from us an unwilling and temporary assent. His masterpiece is his second play: Les Fos- siles (1892). In a great, shadowy chateau live the Duke de Chantenelles, his wife and his chil- dren, Robert and Claire. Cut off by their lineage and traditions from the life of the Republic, they pass a morbid and silent existence. The duke hunts furiously to deaden his disappointment and his grief. For Robert is dying of consumption, and with him the house of Chantenelles is doomed. To console him in his last days Robert asks for the presence of Helene Vautrin, a poor school- fellow of Claire's who once passed many months as a guest of the Chantenelles. Robert con- fesses that she was his mistress and has borne him a child. The dying man's wish is granted, de- spite Claire's desperate opposition, and, since the child is a boy, a marriage is determined upon which will save the ancient house from destruc- tion. But Claire's struggle grows more embit- tered. She has sent Helene out into the world on account of the girl's shameful relations to the 62 THE MODERN DRAMA duke. The latter, however, silences his daughter by an appeal to the supreme law of their lives. She consents to the outrage for the sake of the continuance of her race. Helene comes. She had yielded to the duke, it appears, through ig- norance and confusion. But on his return home her real love was given to Robert. Now Robert is ordered South and his young wife pleads with him that, after his death, she be permitted to go with her child and live her own life. Claire hears her and, in terror lest all their monstrous consents and abnegations have been in vain, cries out to Robert the dreadful truth. The duke con- firms it with the cry : "The child is ours !" De- liberately Robert returns to the frost-bound cha- teau of the North to die swiftly. Beside his bier Claire reads his last directions: Helene may take the boy elsewhere and train him to a life of true nobility a nobility not less austere because it will not disdain to share the life of its age and country. And Claire must watch over these two, in utter forgetfulness of self, in order that these wrongs may be, in some wise, expiated. Are these not almost Thyestian horrors? But the play burns with the white heat of that unflinch- ing dedication to an ideal of secular greatness and endurance. To be sure, we do not believe in THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 63 Helene who speaks the unspeakable truth in vir- ginal accents. But that is Curel, whose sense of measure and probability are lost in his passionate absorption. His work is unequal, violent and tortured at its best. But it is not easily forgotten, not lightly put aside. The man| seems a changeling in his country of firm, sane and accomplished masters, of brilliant, well-tempered, intellectual achieve- ment. His public recognition must always be partial and hesitant, and I am glad to pay this tribute to the genius however turbid and how- ever often touched with futility of Frangois de Curel. Ill The drama, in its stricter meaning, attracted only gradually the brilliant and varied energies of M. Henri Lavedan (b. 1859) . He began with nov- els and then proceeded to write down, in number- less dialogues, which never attain the structural fulness and complexity of even one-act plays, the moral history of his age. These dialogues em- body characteristic moments in the life of mod- ern society moments held fast by an astonish- ingly acute and detailed power of observation and rendered in the easiest and most living speech to 64 THE MODERN DRAMA be found in French. They are prose idylls of the decadence of the neo-Latins; they embrace every social class and every shade of contem- porary psychology. Grouped in series of twenty or thirty under significant headings, they illus- trate the fact that M. Lavedan's observation has been very seriously directed. He is not unaware of the possibility that Les Jeunes, Le Lit, Les Marionettes, Leur Beau Physique, Leur Coeur, Leur Soeurs, Les P elites Visites, may teach the fu- ture more concerning the life and manners of the expiring nineteenth century than many noisier and more pretentious works. These studies in dia- logue do not, unhappily, belong to my subject and I must pass on to the eleven plays which M. Lavedan has given to the French stage, between 1890 and 1911. For reasons sufficiently dark to a foreigner his first play Une Famille (1890) was crowned by the Academy and played at the C o me die-Fran- faise. Virtue, to be sure, triumphs in the play, but the intrigue creaks obviously around a me- chanical device to a hollow ending. One can very well understand, on the other hand, the re- sounding success of Le Prince d'Aurec (1892) and its sequel, Les deux No blesses (1894), without granting either play a very high degree of dra- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 65 matic or literary value. In these two pieces M. Lavedan undertook to discuss the present status and moral outlook of the nobility of France. The young Prince d'Aurec, of illustrious descent and noble traditions, is a typical blageur of his par- ticular decade. He jeers at all the ideals which, by his birth and station, he should normally up- hold. A furious gambler, and on the point of complete ruin, he is quite willing to sell the an- cestral sword of the Connetable d'Aurec, and puts himself as does his wife on her own account hopelessly into the power of a Jewish banker. At the last moment the situation is saved and the Prince is recalled to a brief consciousness of his duties by his mother. The old duchess, however and here one at once surprises M. Lavedan's moral is not by birth an aristocrat at all. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, mar- ried for her money by the older d'Aurec even as Mile. Poirier in Augier's play of nearly fifty years before. It is the born bourgeoise^ in a word, who sustains the great traditions of the house of Aurec. And in Les deux Noblesses it is by a d'Aurec who, under the plebeian name of Roche has become a modern captain of industry, that the fortunes of the house are retrieved. Of the house? Scarcely. For Suzanne de Touringe, on 66 THE MODERN DRAMA marrying the oil king's son, determines to be sim- ply Mme. Roche. Thus the nobility of labour and the nobility of birth are not really blended into a new future for the aristocracy. The for- mer absorbs the latter and M. Lavedan's real is- sue is still to seek. Technically both plays are lumbering; the second has a violently melodra- matic plot; the dialogue is, in many places, de- clamatory and conventional. No, it is not in these pieces that I am able to recognise Lavedan's permanent contribution to the French drama, nor in the wordy and flamboyant plays of a later period (Le Marquis de Priola, 1902; Le Duel, 1905). I recognise that contri- bution in the three, I am sorry to say, scan- dalous comedies; Viveurs (1895), Le nouveau Jeu (1898), Le vieux Marcheur (1894), an< ^ i n the mellower tone and real charm of his most recent play, Le Gout du Vice (1911). This play throws light not only on the charac- ters who appear in it but upon the temperament and career of M. Lavedan himself. The taste for vice, in its literal sense, is as old as mankind. But here is a group of people who cultivate it be- cause it is the fashion of the hour, because they are ashamed of goodness and force themselves to alien immodesties. How does the taste for vice THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 67 express itself? In a morbid horror of the impu- tation of priggishness, "in skirting precipices, in brushing the wings of vice, in talking about im- possible things and asserting what one would never dare commit." It is from such motives that M. Lavedan's Lortay writes semi-obscene fic- tion, and that the altogether delightful Mirette of the play apes a corruption of which she is in- capable, talks Casanova, and reads Paul et Vir- ginie. When they have found each other, his oc- cupation is, quite naturally, gone. "What shall I write now 4 ?" he asks in dismay. "The Distaste for Vice!" Mirette flashes out. The whole is an experience which, with an acuter consciousness, of course, M. Lavedan has himself known. Viveurs, Le nouveau Jeu and Le vieux Marcheur owe their stronger and more vivid qualities to a taste for vice. For, despite an oc- casional undertone of irony, M. Lavedan is very calmly tolerant of these creatures whom he has so magnificently observed and so tellingly bodied forth. These plays of the people who have "de- sires, thirsts, hungers and no souls" are very hon- estly and solidly built, robustly real and sober. They alone, among Lavedan's plays, are without shabby concessions to the mere stage. The dia- logue in them, too, is subtle, flexible, unafraid of 68 THE MODERN DRAMA reality. The world they portray is a thick world; it is concrete and tangible and, in no way, a theatrical schematisation of the real. The Viveurs form the hot-eyed rout of the boulevards, reeling from one joyless pleasure to another in a restless fever of attempted forgetful- ness ; spurring the weary flesh by new vices sati- ated and yet tireless. We see these women at their tailor, the men and women at a night cafe and in the waiting room of a fashionable physi- cian who shares their vices and their disillusion. From this crowd there gradually emerges one al- most tragic figure. Mme. Blandin, stung to the soul at last, implores her husband for a different life. She is refused and hurls herself back, ut- terly desperate, into the murky stream. Le nou- veau Jeu is an abysmal pantomime of arid souls. Yet it never abandons the mood and gait of com- edy. It portrays the striving after what, in the more vulgar English phrase, is "up-to-date." The incidents of the play will not bear telling. But the characters stand forth tangibly in all their spiritual poverty, and the note of irony assumes a larger significance at the play's end. The courtesan explains to the judge of instruction the lust for mere opposition and empty paradox that animates this world. And the judge bows before THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 69 her with these words : "You have instructed me."" Le vieux Marcheur the title tells the story ranks in vividness and solidity somewhat below its two predecessors. Such are the products of M. Lavedan's taste for vice. Like his own Lortay and Mirette he has known the reaction and in the second mood has written Catherine (1896) and Sire (1909). But a reaction from the contemplation of vice is apt, in its merely negative character, to fall upon an unreal and impossible spotlessness. The peo- ple in Catherine are of a hollow perfection. Tap them and they will break like Christmas figurines angels and Santa Clauses of sugar and flour. Their sentiments are too correct; their wings too unruffled. At one point in the third act a truly human difficulty threatens to creep in. The Due de Coutras, having married his sister's music teacher, feels the irk of his wife's well-intentioned but unmannerly family whom wealth and ease are beginning to corrupt. He criticises even her, the blameless Catherine (a modern and French Clarissa) in the remark that the heart, too, has its nerves. But the excessive sweetness of the first two acts settles down upon the last, and the issues of the situation are all shirked. Sire is the study of a beautiful, unreal sentiment. A faint 70 THE MODERN DRAMA whiff of lavender exhales from it. But the piece is over-elaborate for so frail a theme and, again, over-sweet. No, I prefer the Lavedan of the boulevards. He knows these amusement-seek- ers and ultra-moderns and old rakes. In their society he is unconstrained, copious and exact. It is from their lives that he has wrung his best work. A powerful, but not a notably fine nature, M. Lavedan is at his best when he observes and records. This he has done in his dialogues and in his three comedies. When he ceases to be ob- jective he becomes violent and sentimental by turns. Only in Le Gout du Vice has he added style and the fine play of intelligence to his work. Having found the genre of his last comedy, he should either cultivate it or return to the impas- sive chronicles of his earlier years. IV Mr. Bernard Shaw has recently told us, with characteristic vehemence and assurance, that M. Eugene Brieux (b. 1858) is the greatest French dramatist since the seventeenth century and the worthy successor of Moliere. In the same lively >ssay Mr. Shaw informs us that the French Alex- andrine is surpassed in worthlessness as a literary medium only by English blank-verse. So it is THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 71 clear that Mr. Shaw claims the occasional privi- lege (a thing not unknown among men of genius) of talking quite at random. There are saner if quieter ways, surely, of honouring the arresting talent and vigorous productivity of M. Eugene Brieux. M. Brieux is the self-constituted censor of his age. Unlike the Roman poet, he does not scourge the manners of his contemporaries with laughter, however bitter, but with denunciation and harangue. In order to exercise his office in the theatre he has invented the formula of the didactic play. In act one the evil is exhibited through character and circumstance; in act two its consequences are set forth; in act three it is talked about. The three plays so widely read in America are but isolated specimens of the vast reformatory zeal of M. Brieux. In the course of the years he has denounced many abuses and instructed the public on many subjects; the pur- suit of mere art, popular education, parents-in- law, universal suffrage, heredity, charity, divorce, horse-racing, marriage, the administration of jus- tice, wet-nurses, venereal disease, eugenics, illicit love, the French character, religion. Is not this a prodigious list? I have not invented it, how- ever; it represents, literally and in chronological 72 THE MODERN DRAMA order the subject-matter and polemic purpose of M. Brieux's plays from 1892 to 1907 from Menages d? Artistes, presented humbly and after long struggles at the Theatre Libre to La Foi which saw the boards in London and Paris with all the pomp and circumstance of its author's international fame. I am not aware that the question has been asked: What, then, is M. Brieux' s equipment for his task? On what is based the magnificent assurance of his criticism of society? I find a partial answer, at least, to these questions in La Foi. For in this play M. Brieux discusses the supreme concern of man the meaning of his ex- istence and his relation to the universe. With marvellous theatrical virtuosity Brieux has for once transferred his scene into the past. We are carried to ancient Egypt where the mys- terious Nile, on the authority of Pharaohs and priests, demands its annual tribute of human sac- rifice. Now there arises a man called Satni who has discovered that there are no gods. He calls to him the poor and disinherited of the land and tells them that by the mummery of fabled gods, kings and priests have oppressed them. He bids them be free henceforth of both hope and fear. The women mourn the loss of that heavenly kind- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 73 ness in which they had believed; Satni's father dies cursing him because he has emptied the uni- verse of hope ; Satni himself, in a moment of com- passion for the poor, lends himself to the high- priest's trickery of false miracles. But he per- ceives the deeper bondage that will follow and dies with the declaration of the miracle's false- ness upon his lips. The fabric of the play is dazzling enough. Its purport is only too obvious. M. Brieux is of the opinion that, in the widest sense, there are no gods. He subscribes to the old-fashioned ration- alistic nonsense that religion was invented or, at least, fostered by priests and kings to keep the common folk in poverty and subjection. To slay the slain is as futile in the matter of argu- ment as of anything else. But it has never, ap- parently, occurred to M. Brieux that hunger and stripes are not needed to make us desire a divine rather than a dispeopled universe, and that his Pharaohs and high-priests, in moments of weari- ness and insight, felt that desire as profoundly as their most abject slaves. The unphilosoph- ical and unhistorical character of Satni and M. Brieux's attitude is as clear to us to-day as is the village free-thinker's of thirty years ago. It is in the hard and shallow glare of such THE MODERN DRAMA fundamental convictions that Brieux has called society to his judgment bar. His is a mind with- out a past. History, philosophy, literature, have taught him nothing. He relies on science and common-sense and reverses, in all his mental pro- cesses, the famous line of Verlaine : "Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance !" Now there are problems which science and com- mon-sense are sufficient to deal with. The evils of vicarious motherhood (Les Remplagantes\ and of excessive gambling (Resultat des Courses) may, no doubt, be gradually legislated out of existence and no very worthy protest will arise. When, however, M. Brieux attacks prob- lems of greater complexity or subtlety, he pro- duces either helpless platitudes or something worse. At the end of her acute and typical suf- ferings Blanchette, the girl educated above her station, is asked by her father: "And so people do wrong to give their children an education?'* "No," Blanchette replies, "only they must also give them some way of using it and not want to make public officials of them." M. Brieux's con- clusions in the matter of charity are equally novel and illuminating: "You must love whom you desire to comfort; you must enclose your alms in THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 75 a handshake." Compare with these lame plati- tudes John Galsworthy's treatment of the same problem in The Pigeon. In the answer, finally, which the physician in Les Avaries gives Georges Dupont to the question how the latter, some day, is to guide his son in this answer, carefully pruned and bowdlerised in the American repre- sentation of Damaged Goods M. Brieux sounds the depth of brutal and fatuous inadequacy. But his authority matches itself with even more delicate and difficult problems : The pursuit of art for its own sake is charlatanism and moral shabbiness; the average marriage of convenience is odious but better than spins terhood or deprav- ity; motherhood should be regulated; love should not be curbed by motives of prudence. To all these rules one may give a superficial assent. But I am always pursued by the suspicion that on every question as, so clearly, on that of faith a great deal is to be said of which Brieux is con- stitutionally unaware, and that the real prob- lem usually begins where his authoritative plati- tudes end. Many of the evils which he combats, more- over, are knit into the very texture of human character. Yet he appears to have a robust faith that it needs but his bustling exposures to make 76 THE MODERN DRAMA men cease from the evil which they do. Not so. A merely positivistic and hence, despite all pre- tence, utilitarian ethics has never influenced man- kind. An ethics without foundation in meta- physics or religion never will. We need a nobler mandate to secure our obedience. A voice cry- ing on the market-place or from the stage: ' 'There are no gods ! There is no divine sanction in the universe ! But curb your instincts and de- stroy abuses !" such a voice, without persuasive- ness or sweetness or power will only alienate wis- dom and darken counsel. I have dwelt at some length on the didacticism of M. Bneux for two reasons: He is in danger, under the guidance of Mr. Shaw, of being taken seriously as a social philosopher; and because the negligible passions of a secularist preacher have irretrievably impaired the noblest original, endow- ment for the art of the theatre that modern France has produced. M. Brieux began his career as a confirmed nat- uralist, fitted, beyond any other Frenchman to share and continue the triumphs of that order of art the visible evocation of moral and material environments and the creation of character. The formula of the didactic play which he has in- vented and practised requires, in each case, a first THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 77 act descriptive of the conditions concerning which, from about the middle of the second act on, M. Brieux desired to discourse. These first acts are in their sober objectivity a series of admirable tri- umphs. The symbolist charlatans in Menages d? Artistes, the peasants and their world in Elan- cliette, the moral turmoil of cheap politics in VEngrenage, the village folk in Les Rempla- gantes, the milliners in La petite Amie\ these are unsurpassable in reality, convincingness and power. Here are scenes and characters which any dramatist might envy. But as M. Brieux's career has progressed these studies in reality have become fewer and more superficial; the tide of mere words has risen, and at the very height of their dramatic passion his characters have begun to break out into polemic generalisations. Nor were the gifts of the naturalist his only ones. In Le Berceau (1898) he treated, five years before M. Hervieu, the precise theme of the tatter's Le Dedale. Without having recourse to the violent incidents that disfigure M. Hervieu's play, by sheer power of analysing the most delicate con- flicts, moral and nervous, he achieves a truth to which there is, for once, no possible answer. Only, Hervieu's play is a play throughout; Brieux talks for an act and a half about that which, as 78 THE MODERN DRAMA an artist, he has so brilliantly and completely set forth. A few times only in his long and busy career a spirit of artistic repose has stolen over M. Brieux's restless mind. In La Couvee (1893), La petite Amie (1902), and Les Hannetons (1906), he has respected the objectivity of the art of the drama and written entire plays. La Couvee is a domestic drama, quiet, delicate and moving. The Graindor children have been spoiled by their mother's selfish love; the father's authority has been thwarted by sentimentality and cajolery. Now the boy and girl have grown up. The boy has been ruined by indulgence; the girl is safely married, but Mme. Graindor is jealous of her son-in-law and kindly enough but relent- lessly rules the homeless dwelling of the young couple. The husband, with the co-operation of his father-in-law, however, asserts the independ- ence of his household. Auguste Graindor goes to Africa and the parents are left alone. 'The brood has grown up; the little ones fly from the nest." The sadness and the power of man's com- mon lot are in the play. La petite Amie is a tragedy. Two amiable souls, devoted to each other, are quite literally forced out of existence by the rancorous ambi- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 79 tion and impenetrable worldliness of the youth's father. One door of hope after another closes. The evil of fate is inherent in the characters and in the social structure. These characters, espe- cially M. and Mme. Logerais, are permanent ad- ditions to one's world of imaginative realities. I am almost tempted to call Les Hannetons Brieux's masterpiece. It is assuredly his most finished play. The situation, that of a man dominated through weakness, habit, nervousness, by a worthless woman, is pitiful and sordid enough. Nor does anything happen. Pierre thinks, for a space, that he has escaped the yoke ; then bows his head again in fatalistic submission. The bitter comedy full of a harsh but abun- dant comic power ends where it began. But the thing is done to the life; the inevitable details are etched as with acid upon the brain. It is a "slice of life" presented in the simple and aus- tere fashion of the great Germanic naturalists, tempered by the wit and ease and mobile energy of French art. The literary character and career of M. Brieux illustrate the chariness of nature. So vast an ex- penditure of power; such broken and fragmen- tary results! In a more reposeful and less in- quisitive age he would have fashioned, as an ar- 8o THE MODERN DRAMA tist should. Or else, gifted with a subtler and more flexible intelligence, he would have seen that art, even were one to grant it the mission of practical influence, must exercise that influence by implication, by creation alone. He was called to be the glory of the French stage; he has sold his birthright for a handful of ephemeral half-truths. That elegant and reserved artist M. Paul Her- vieu (b. 1857) is often mentioned side by side with Brieux. No two dramatists could, in real- ity, present sharper points of difference. M. Brieux is robust and prodigal; M. Hervieu, deli- cate and frugal. Their names have been coupled because they are both interested in ideas; but M. Brieux's ideas are limited to the sociological po- lemics of his time; Hervieu is interested in those moral conceptions which form the manners and dictate the laws of men. Around such ideas he has fashioned plays that are unparalleled in their spareness and concision. He has eliminated from them all elements that do not immediately further or illustrate his cen- tral and controlling thought. With the most conscious deliberation he denies himself many of the richest qualities of the modern playwright's work : moral and material density of milieu ; com- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 81 pletely embodied characters; action that eddies in the stream of reality. Milieu, character and ac- tion, on the contrary, appear only in so far as they serve to express the dominant idea which the play is to drive home. His people, in the throes of their particular crises, are exhibited as absorbed by these alone, and are suddenly de- prived unnaturally but, granting the method, logically of all other interests, appetites, pas- sions, hopes. There can be little doubt but that in M. Her- vieu's creative process, the moral idea always pre- cedes both fable and character. It is, in truth, the ideas that build the plays. Hence their structure is logical, almost abstract. Their rela- tion to the vast welter of reality is like that born by geometry to the concrete phenomena of space. M. Hervieu does not even spare us the quo d erat demonstrandum of Euclid. For each play ends with a final iteration of the moral truth so preg- nantly announced in the exact expressiveness of his titles. M. Hervieu's rigorous methods are illustrated in a very curious and interesting way by some of these endings. Les Paroles restent (1892) closes as follows: Mme. de Sabecourt: Ah, words, they flutter away. Ligeuil: Not so. Words remain. The Doctor: And they kill! 82 THE MODERN DRAMA Which is precisely the truth that the play was written to prove. Again: The last speech of La Course du Flambeau (1901) is the tragic cry of Sabine Revel : 'Tor my daughter's sake I have killed my mother." And that every woman, given a cruel conflict of interests would do so is the play's point. Connais-toi (1909) finally, which expresses, in so masterly a way, the dis- harmony between the emotional gestures forced on us by a romantic civilisation and our real feel- ings, ends thus: General Siberan: Yesterday I would have deemed my friend [who has forgiven his erring wife] abject and grotesque. Clarisse: And were you a better man yesterday? General Siberan: I knew myself less well. Clarisse: Ah, who knows himself*? M. Hervieu's technique, then, has the severe beauty of the abstract. He sacrifices, I fear, a higher and richer beauty. But it is not the critic's business to quarrel with an artist's chosen methods, only with the artist's disloyalty to them. \ Such disloyalty is rare in M. Hervieu's work. Only now and then may one detect as in the romantic accidents in the fourth act of La Course du Flambeau or the mechanism on which the ac- tion of Le Reveil hinges an unscrupulous eager- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 83 ness to point the moral sharply. Of adornment M. Hervieu is never eager. He is the ascetic servant of moral ideas. I hasten to dispose of the one adverse criticism which the workmanship of this sane and admir- able artist can never wholly escape. His dia- logue is often tortured and often extravagant. A rather sober young financier and manufacturer is made to say to the young woman who has just accepted him: "You make me mad for joy; I would like to fall on my knees and cry out my happiness" (La Course du Flambeau). "Make me to know," says a man to a woman in Le Reveil, "every shadow that may appear under your brow, in order that I may obliterate it gently with my kisses." In Connais-toi a suspected wife says to her husband : "You may bump my skull against the wall and you will make no further ex- planations spurt forth." A close thinker, a not- able artist in the structure of his work, M. Her- vieu seems to lack the narrower sense for style as a fine adaptation of verbal means to ends. It is but just to add that in his latest play Baga- telle (1912) the dialogue shows greater modera- tion and dignity. The chief plays of M. Hervieu may be divided into three groups: those in which he seeks to il- 84 THE MODERN DRAMA lustrate universal moral truths ; those in which he attacks a false moral idea embodied in an unjust law; those in which he dissects the romantic tra- ditions of our emotional life. To the first group belong Les Paroles restent, La Course du Flambeau, and Le Dedale. Les Paroles restent relates the story of a slander in- nocently set afloat. The lie corrupts and cor- rodes the social existence and spiritual peace of several lives and, in the end, quite literally slays. Le Dedale seeks to translate into an overwhelm- ingly compelling action an action which, un- happily, flares into melodrama in the fifth act the moral impossibility of divorce, if there be a child. But La Course du Flambeau is the most notable drama in this group. Sabine Revel, a widow of thirty-six, lives with her mother Mme. Fontanes upon whom she is economically depend- ent, and her daughter Marie-Jeanne. Early in the first act an old friend of the family announces the theme in speaking to Sabine: "You do not know all your worth as a mother. And you will never know, I trust, the slightness of your worth as a daughter. Such truths are not learned when life is quiet and harmonious, but amid violent trials and bitter cries." Then the illustrative ac- tion sets in. Sabine sends away beyond recall THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 85 the man she loves because she will not rob Marie of her entire love and care until the latter no longer needs them. Scarcely has Stangy gone than Marie announces her betrothal to Didier Maravon. Sabine has thrown away her future in vain. Four years of happy marriage pass for Marie when Didier finds himself ruined. His honour is unimpaired but he needs three hundred thousand francs to settle with his creditors and regain his financial stability. Sabine appeals to her mother. But the refusal of Mme. Fontanes is unconditional. She will neither impoverish her daughter, nor break the promise given to her dead husband not to alienate his hard-earned capital. Marie, in her despair, actually re- proaches Sabine for not having married Stangy, and forces her to write to him to America for help. Delay follows delay. Sabine attempts forgery but is unsuccessful. Marie's health breaks down. She is ordered to the Engadine, but the doctor warns Sabine that Mme. Fontanes, who has a lesion of the heart, must not risk that altitude. Mme. Fontanes, ignorant of her dan- ger and irritated at Sabine's maternal egotism, in- sists on either keeping Sabine with her or mak- ing the journey. Sabine, rather than see her place near her child taken by a nurse, consents to Mme. 86 THE MODERN DRAMA Fontanes going. In the Swiss hotel Stangy ap- pears, married alas, but wealthy and full of his old kindness. He offers Didier a position in America which the latter and Marie joyfully ac- cept. Greatly and passionately Sabine pleads with her daughter not to leave her. But Marie follows her husband. The tragic woman turns to her mother : "Mother, I have only you ; I have never had any one but you!" And Mme. Fon- tanes falls dead. The play is almost unbearably poignant. For the idea presented with so much power, if with some exaggeration, is one which cuts at the root of our pretensions and of our self- esteem. The moral idea which, crystallised in custom and law, M. Hervieu has most bitterly attacked, is that of the final dominance of the man in mar- riage. In Les Tenailles (1895) anc ^ La Loi de rhomme (1897) he shows two marriages, both ir- retrievably ruined: one by a lack of sympathy and affection; one by the husband's flagrant in- fidelity. Yet neither of these marriages could be dissolved according to the then law of France. That law, by giving the power of ultimate deci- sion to the man alone, imprisons Irene Fergan in Les Tenailles and condemns Laure de Raguais in La Loi de rhomme to an even more shameful THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 87 bondage by demanding for her husband's indis- putable misdeed a kind of proof impossible to obtain. Both marriages could, of course, have been dissolved had the two men been willing to lend their aid to the necessary steps. At this point, however, enters the characteristically French conception of marriage as primarily a so- cial institution and hardly at all as a union of free personalities. Fergan and Raguais, though calmly convinced that marriage has ceased to mean anything to them personally, refuse to en- visage the possibility of divorce. They are un- willing to incur the moral, material and social diminution of their power and status which di- vorce would entail. One can, at least, they agree, keep one's personal dignity and present an uncrumbled social facade to society. It is against this conception of marriage that, in the last analy- sis, M. Hervieu directs his weapons. And he is at no loss to show, with the full brilliancy of his execution, the evil and the sorrow that arise from the pressure of such meaningless bondage. It is to be remembered, on the other hand, that mar- riage, however high and free its original motives, has a habit, in this work-a-day world, of becom- ing an institution into which are inextricably knotted all the strands that bind men and women 88 THE MODERN DRAMA to their kind. Hence its dissolution may be, in the totality of consequences, more widely tragic than even a hunger of the heart. To views of this character M. Hervieu has come very close in Le Reveil (1905) and Con- nais-toi (1909). These two plays belong, of course, to the latest and, I suspect, the final period of his development the anti-romantic. It is not a false or pinchbeck romance that M. Hervieu deprecates, but two notions, both Christian and romantic, and both deeply rooted in the conscious- ness of Western society the beauty of romantic passion, the nobility of romantic honour. Rapt to their heights of passionate enchantment Therese Megee and Prince Jean in Le Reveil are made suddenly to feel the touch of our real destiny and of our real duties. And at that touch the enchantment vanishes. At once they see each other and their passion in the light of common day and it falls away from them like an outworn garment. In Connais~toi, by a quieter and more masterly course of dramatic reasoning, General Siberan is brought to see that beyond the tradi- tional notions of romantic honour and revenge there watches in the human heart a better and more patient vision. M. Hervieu's last play Bagatelle (1912) is larger in spirit and mellower THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 89 than any of these. Its theme is the vanity of all mere vanities; its warning that we curb the errors of our own inconstant hearts. Twice only has M. Hervieu turned aside from the exposition of moral ideas: once in his his- torical play Theroigne de Mericourt (1902), and once in that very skilful but somewhat factitious display of stage-craft UEnigme (1901). In the remaining eight plays the moral conception is su- preme. Nor need it surprise even the non-Latin student of the drama that six of these eight plays deal with adultery. For around the relations of the sexes in marriage are gathered many of those fundamental impulses which guide our opinions and our conduct. Nevertheless I cannot believe that the name of a great master will be perma- nently given to one whose intensity of moral in- sight is won at the cost of such vast exclusions. But that intensity of insight is his, and a power of reasoning in dramatic form analogous to Dry- den's power of reasoning in poetic form. To the French playwright, as to the English poet, were given energy and intellectual intensity; to neither, that larger vision that sees life not only steadily but sees it whole. 90 THE MODERN DRAMA M. Jules Lemaitre (b. 1853) is not a member of any school or movement; he pleads for no defi- nite ideas, for no special view of life. Even his technique recalls, at times, the older procedures of Augier and Dumas fils. He is not even afraid to close a play by means of the quite vicious trick of a sudden turn in the psychology of his char- acters, as witness the endings of Revoltee (1889) and of UAge difficile (1895). ^ n a word, his methods are eclectic. The great critic, the wise and exquisite master of Les Contemporains, stands above the literature which he has described so incomparably "the intelligent, restless, mad, sombre, unguided literature of the second half of the nineteenth century" * with an air of friendly but serene detachment. He understands all the artistic battles of his time too well to be induced to serve under any standard. The individual note, however, which M. Le- maitre has contributed to the drama of his period is that of a sane and liberal humanity. His is neither the contemptuous tolerance of Lavedan nor the noisy Puritanism of Brieux. A spirit that has dwelt imaginatively in all times and in all literatures is incapable of either extreme. Hence iLes Contemporains. Vol. I, p. 239. THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 91 the surface of his dramatic work is never hard and brittle but always suffused with the warm glow of life. His understanding charity em- braces the "fault" of Mme. de Voves in Revoltee and the almost attractive corruption of Yoyo significant syllables! in L'Age difficile, as well as the antics of the amusing players in Flipote (1893). Life having been in all ages a matter so incalculable and mysterious, our vices and our virtues being equally immemorial, M. Lemaitre does not feel that he can afford a vain severity. He understands his people ; that is enough. I do not wish to convey the impression that M. Le- maitre has not his moral preferences or fails to see that the practical business of the world needs definite moral adjustments. He has expressed himself unmistakably to that effect through the withering portrait of a political opportunist and self-seeker in Le Depute Leveau (1890). He has concentrated all the most charming qualities of his dramatic talent in Le Pardon (1895). The play has three full-sized acts, ob- serves the unity of place, and has only three char- acters the smallest number in any modern drama. It follows that, in a sense, the play is really all talk, but that talk was written by one of the major prose artists of French litera- 92 THE MODERN DRAMA ture and, furthermore, reveals M. Lemaitre as a psychologist equal in acuteness and delicacy to any of his period. The theme of the play is, I had almost said inevitably, that of marital infi- delity, around which, despite M. Brieux's denial in La Frangaise, the interest of French society and literature so largely turns. Suzanne, conven- tionally married off at eighteen, is left to herself too much in the enforced idleness of the modem woman. Her husband Georges, though exclu- sively devoted to her, is often absent in the pur- suit of his affairs. In her idleness and loneliness Suzanne slips into a loveless intrigue. Georges discovers it, drives her out, and leaves to take a position in the factory of a former playmate's hus- band. Therese, his old friend, now secretly sum- mons Suzanne to her home (where the action of the play is laid) and by a train of very fine psy- chological reasoning which reveals Georges' most intimate desires to himself, persuades him to par- don his wife. To pardon her! There lies the difficulty. She cannot teach him to forget. He torments Suzanne with questions, unworthy sus- picions and cruel innuendoes. The memory of the tremendous physical fact is like an inexpug- nable poison in his blood. His single consolation is in his walks with Therese, in whom he con- THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 93 fides, who consoles him, and who, alas, has al- ways loved him. The result is only too natural and Suzanne is clearly enough instructed when Georges, no longer upbraiding her or torturing himself, exclaims: "Let us not be dramatic and sensitive. That's the mistake!" She does not feel that she has the right to reproach him; but she turns bitterly upon Therese. Poor Therese, however, has discovered by this time that Georges does not really love her; that it was his wounded love for his wife that threw him into her arms. She expiates her wrong by this humiliating con- fession and leaves Georges and Suzanne alone. And now? Georges has searched his heart and discovered that the keenest sting of Suzanne's un- faithfulness was to his outraged male vanity. That sting is now blunted, that vanity is now as- suaged. They are both miserable sinners, and in the recognition of their common frailty may love each other again. The psychology is exquisite, the dialogue of an extreme and plangent beauty. The play rises beyond argument and analysis to a sad vision of the heart of man. We are not as- sured that Georges and Suzanne will be happy; we have only felt that they are human and sin- cere. M. Lemaitre's range of subject-matter has 94 THE MODERN DRAMA been wide and he has written plays of very vary- ing moods. Marriage blanc (1891) is a study in morbid psychology flooded with that dry, hard sunshine which invalids watch in the South of France; Flipote is a satiric comedy which one might almost call high-spirited; L'Age difficile is a satiric treatment of a sufficiently tragic subject the loneliness of age. But here, as elsewhere, the wise and tender humanity of M. Lemaitre sounds its clarifying and reconciling note. His activity as a dramatist has been circum- scribed rather narrowly, nor has it ever reached a very large public. Its qualities of ease and grace and philosophic temperateness make one regret that it is not the drama rather than politics that has robbed the world of several volumes by the greatest of the living critics of literature. 1 Beautifully written dialogue and a mellow hu- manity ally the dramas of M. Maurice Donnay (b. 1859) to those of M. Jules Lemaitre. To these qualities M. Donnay adds an almost lyric note of speech and in the majority of his plays the best structural technique on the French ' stage. M. Donnay has found it possible to dis- i Now, alas, no longer among the living. But these pages may stand as I wrote them. THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 95 pense wholly with plot, with artificial rearrange- ment of events, with mere cleverness of combina- tion. Like the Germanic playwrights, he simply lets life unfold itself. The situations in his plays, are states of soul and these merge into each other according to the succession of reality, not accord- ing to the pattern of the theatre. Even when pleading for an idea, his concern for it is a mar- vel of discretion. The play is over before his process of insensible persuasion becomes retro- spectively clear. His subject is love modern love. Of its troubles, its difficulties, its tragedies, he is as acutely aware as M. de Porto-Riche. But to him and in this he differs from the older dramatist its delights and memories appear the fairest "Part of our lives' unalterable good." Neither his attempts at Aristophanic satire nor his criticisms of a depraved society contribute so rare and individual a note to the modern French drama as does the haec olim meminisse juvat which vibrates in the passion of Amants (1895), L'Autre Danger (1905), and even, at its close, of Les Eclaireuses (1913). I am tempted to call Amants a modern Romeo and Juliet. It is easy to anticipate the answer : 96 THE MODERN DRAMA A very modern Romeo and Juliet indeed! No doubt. Yet one might easily indicate the theine of the two plays in the same words : Two human beings who love each other utterly are separated by social and moral barriers peculiar to their time and place and character. Shakespeare's young Italians die; M. Donnay's modern French lovers separate and each marries some one else. Yet I am convinced, paradoxical as it may seem, that Claudine Rozay and Vetheuil had a far deeper capacity for tragic grief than those young amor- ists of the Renaissance. They seem grey enough by comparison. No Shakespeare has lent them the divine energy of his verse ; they are intelligent members of a highly complex society which fur- nishes them with duties and restraints. A dagger and a tomb are fine properties with which to make a brave show on the stage of this world. But that brief and almost harsh farewell which Clau- dine and Vetheuil say to each other by the shores of the Mediterranean has the high and tragic beauty of all entire sincerity of suffering. That, after an interval of time, these lovers can meet again with a sad equanimity and that each can pursue his way does not cheapen them when rightly thought upon. The best that was in each was given to the other. Time could not rob them THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 97 of their past. And it is braver to live than to die : more difficult to be than not to be. A wise and noble resignation to the inevitable rather than a vain striving and crying is char- acteristic of M. Donnay's people. Consider the fate of Claire Jadain in L'Autre Danger. Her husband is an impossible person self-opinion- ated, tyrannical, meanly envious. For four years the love of Freydieres compensates her for all the sterile spaces of her past. Though their love must live a shadowy existence, since her maternal duties bind her to her home, it has come to mean to her the whole of life. Then comes, by imper- ceptible degrees that "other danger" which, de- spite the innumerable French studies of passion, is here pointed out for the first time. Claire's daughter Madeleine has become a woman in the four years, and Madeleine loves Freydieres. At her first ball the young girl hears an evil whisper coupling the names of Freydieres and her mother. It is like a death blow to her white soul. And it is evident to Claire that only by a complete an- nihilation of self can she give the lie to the ru- mour and in the truest sense save her child's life and the sacredness of her own motherhood. She addresses herself to the terrible task of re- vealing to Freydieres (what she has never yet 98 THE MODERN DRAMA dared to admit even to herself) that he, too, loves Madeleine. "I ought to have foreseen that some day Madeleine would be eighteen; but one never thinks of that other danger." Freydieres strug- gles against the spiritual monstrousness of the situation, but Claire sends Madeleine to him. Silence and resignation are her portion. The closest observation went to the making of the play, the unravelling of almost invisible psychical threads. A coarse hand would have made the fable revolting. It is beautiful and tragic here. M. Donnay's latest play, which served to in- augurate a new Parisian theatre La Comedie Marigny depicts the very advanced feminists of the French capital. These ladies (Les ficlair- euses} are extremely alive nor are they without many admirable traits. Indeed there is no limit to M. Donnay's generosity to them. The pro- tagonist of the play and chief practical supporter of Vecole feministe is Mme. Jeanne Dureille who gets a divorce from her husband simply because the social male cannot strip himself of those au- thoritative airs which society has so long accorded him. Jeanne now lives in complete devotion to the Cause. But gradually and by imperceptible degrees a curious shadow steals over her inner life. And, in the end, there flickers from that shadow THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 99 a light. She really left her husband because, in the obscure hiding-places of the heart, she loved Jacques Leholloy. She gives herself to him and finally, amid the inevitable annoyances of life, flees to the shelter of his home and love. This household will be a very modern one, no doubt; Jacques is a feminist himself. But M. Donnay at least permits one to suspect that many traditional elements will gently steal back into this modern menage. For Jacques admits that the crude radicalism of nineteen hundred is no longer his. It is now nineteen hundred and thir- teen. And Jeanne comes to him for the oldest and best reason of all seeking a friend, indeed, but also a husband and protector. It is the engaging sincerity of M. Donnay that makes him one of the most delightful of modern dramatists. His observation is honest and exact. Nor, granting its fundamental artifice, is it easy to praise too highly the eloquent modulations of his prose. His work is not that of a very great spirit but of a gifted and kindly gentleman who understands his fellow-creatures well enough to forgive them, invariably for what they are. loo THE MODERN DRAMA VI From this interpretative description of the chief playwrights of modern France and of their work, several significant facts, I trust, appear at once: This drama is based upon an observation that is often very exact within its limits but, ex- cept for occasional acts and scenes by M. Brieux, neither many-sided nor solid. The life it treats is, as a rule, the life of those who need neither toil nor spin. The common people, the middle classes, are left, once more except by M. Brieux, almost in silence. Yet even the life of these ad- mirable idlers is not touched at very many points, and one's final impression of them is that of crea- tures of but two dimensions. Love and passion do, no doubt, play a very large part in life, espe- cially in such lives. But these elegant and inter- esting persons must, after all, have had a hundred other concerns, a hundred other contacts with real- ity. This criticism is not made in the service of a cheap moral rigidness. The weakness of this drama is not in what it gives, but in what it fails to give. Life in it is reduced to a few terms and these terms are far too often the same. A great and full-bodied art is more inclusive. Emma Bovary had her affairs too, and these affairs were THE DRAMA IN FRANCE 101 decisive factors in her fate. But that fate and life was magnificently founded in time and place and those humble but enduring things and activi- ties that form the dense texture of human exist- ence. Nor is that tenuousness of representation inherent in the form of the drama. A series of notable playwrights, from Becque to Galsworthy, have proven the contrary. Nor, finally, am I willing to believe that per- sons so extraordinarily intelligent and fine-fibred as the characters of Porto-Riche and Hervieu, Le- maitre and Donnay, are so utterly incapable of rising, if but for a moment, above the immediate illusions of life, or are so helplessly driven by the cruel flux of the phenomenal world. Do they never cast off that illusion? Do they never feel some cool wind from the shores of a larger order? Is a worldly resignation their last resort? Do they never rise beyond social values, and are truths of a merely social observation, however exquisitely subtle, their only refuge? A man, let us assume, is smitten by some cruel grief or dis- honour Doncieres in Connais-toi, Georges in Le Passe. From the throbbing heat of his human habitation, from the faces worn with sorrow and shame, from the voices that sob or plead, he goes out into the open. The hills curve dark against 102 THE MODERN DRAMA the sky, the ancient stones of the earth are patient under the stars. And the man, freed from the immediate passion of the hour, remembers the generations of the dead who, too, have tasted this pang, this shame, and he remembers the vastness of the eternal order. He may hope that in that order a divine vigilance is awake, or he may de- spair of such a hope. But he has shaken off, for one hour, the insistent illusions of mortality, and that hour will vibrate in his life and speech. Such an incident is typical, I take it, of a thou- sand. It cannot appear on the stage. But we may hear its liberating echo in the words of men. They are freed from the laws of the transitory and united to the universe in which they live. That echo, that note of liberation, is never heard in the drama of contemporary France. Hence from a body of work so brilliant, so alluring, so intelligent and, within its own limits, so true, I turn with something not unlike relief to the more sombre but profounder dramatic literature of Ger- many and England. CHAPTER THREE THE NATURALISTIC DRAMA IN GERMANY THE drama of modern Germany has broken more completely with the past than any other body of contemporary literature. To a recognition of the empty and meaningless artifice of the technique of Scribe, Sardou and even Dumas fits, the Ger- mans added a national antipathy to a form of art not only base but foreign, not only foreign but all-powerful. The society play of the older French school, transferred to German conditions by Paul Lindau, Oscar Blumenthal and others, monopolised the stage during the years that im- mediately followed the establishment of the em- pire. The sounding historical plays of Ernst von Wildenbruch brought a larger air into the weary disillusion that held the theatres. But here was, after all, no new art, no sense of liberation for the young revolutionists who crowded the Berlin- cafes and prophesied a dawn of which no actiake glimmer had yet appeared on the dull kve writ- 103 104 THE MODERN DRAMA They had all, or nearly all, a pathetic faith in modern science. Hence they were forced, once more, to turn to France where alone, in the pseudo-naturalism of Zola, science had apparently created a literature in its own spirit. But this literature was neither new in the eighties, nor was it in dramatic form. The Goncourts, Zola, Daudet, had never succeeded in conquering the theatre for naturalism. The Scandinavian theatre was not yet a living force in Europe, nor could the young Germans have learned anything new from the methods of Ibsen. Hence, for some years, the drama hovered between two worlds, "one dead, the other powerless to be born." But even to the distant observer of to-day there floats a sense of the stir, the hope, the passionate and prophetic strife of those obscure days in which the germs of the modern drama were ripening in the souls of unguided and still inglorious youths. Societies were formed and programmes writ- ten and periodicals founded. The cry that arose with such generous earnestness from all these movements was for an art that should mirror, and thus implicitly interpret, the contemporary -md the real this immediate world whose sting ->ang and savour and visible form are the ntents of our experience and of our lives. THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 105 This world was not to be shattered and rebuilt according to the conventions of the theatre. Art was to triumph over itself, to transcend itself; to become, in the fullest sense, a vicarious experi- ence through which we might learn to pity the fate of others and to endure our own. It is abundantly clear that such an art an art which was to create the complete illusion of reality needed methods that had never, con- sciouly, and purposefully at least, been prac- tised before. There are, no doubt, pages of human speech in Fielding to which the most con- sistent naturalist could add nothing. But that fact was quite unknown in Berlin in the winter of 1887, when Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf withdrew to the frozen fields of a suburb and founded a new art. German criticism has dealt out scant justice to the major if not the senior member of this lit- erary firm: Arno Holz. But German criticism is at times petulant and finds it hard to keep its eye on the object and away from the man, the theory or the clique. It takes no very deep in- sight to understand the shortcomings of Arno Holz. He is cocksure, he is truculent, he is al- most ignorant. His theoretical writings make one wonder how so clever a man could have writ- 106 THE MODERN DRAMA ten so foolishly. But there dwells in him a fresh dexterity of literary technique that amounts to genius. There is no species of writing that he has not touched; there is none that he has not adorned. No, adorned is too cheap a word rejuvenated, rather, and created anew! He snapped his fingers in the face of many pompous idols of the tribe and made possible the modern drama. The task he set himself was the representation of life through the authentic speech of men not speech rewritten and rearranged in its order, nor, above all, heard with the merely literary in- stinct, but the humble speech of our daily lives with its elisions, its hesitations and iterations, its half -articulate sounds and cries, but also with its sting and sob and clutch. The first experiments of Holz and Schlaf were sketches (published over the Norwegian pseudonym of Bjarne P. Holm- sen, in 1889) in which the new dialogue was sur- rounded by masses of rather thin narrative. Al- most immediately, however, they eliminated the narrative portions and produced the first con- sistently naturalistic play: Die Familie Selicke (1890). With the perspective of nearly a quarter of a century since the first performance of the play a THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 107 and a fair knowledge of what has since been written in dramatic form in France, in Germany and in England, I agree unhesitatingly with Arno Holz's assertion that here first and here only a new domain was won for the art of the theatre. There is no difference in kind, he rightly declared, between the dialogue of Schiller and the dialogue of Ibsen. Both are written literature, not speech overheard. I would not imply, as Holz did, the necessary superiority of the newer over the oldei\ art. But it was new. No speech so haunting in its utter reality had ever appeared except iri! accidental fragments on the stage or between; the covers of a book. And that speech bit itself; into mind after mind; it gave the creative im- pulse to a whole literature of uncommon beautfy and power and volume. But Holz and Schlaf did not limit themselves to an exact imitation of the elements of speech. They also observed the inevitableness of its psy- chological succession. Hence the reality of their dialogue banished from Die Familie Selicke all factitious action. The play is, in the fullest pos- sible sense, a piece of life observed with stringent closeness and set down with austere veracity. There is but one scene for the three acts, the liv- ing-room of poor people; the action takes place io8 THE MODERN DRAMA 5 within a few hours. The room is sharply etched in the stage directions; the people are completely visualised. If you met them on the stairs of a house in the north of Berlin, you would recog- nise them at once the father, the mother, the two boys, the daughter and her sweetheart. The little that happens is neither new nor striking. Life and death and love appear in their imme- morial guise. A good deal of sordidness, a gleam of goodness and self-denial, souls warped by the wrongs of the world: what more does one want? "Sunt lacrymae rerum et nos mortalia tangunt." There are no rejected inheritances or sudden for- tunes, as there are even in Hervieu; no lost let- ters as in Pinero and Lemaitre; no swift trans- formations in the hearts and fates of men. There is, as Fromentin said of Rubens, "no pomp, no ornament, no turbulence, nor grace, nor fine cloth- ing, nor one lovely and useless incident." There is life. "And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse." It has been said that such art is merely photo- graphic. But the criticism is superficial. A photograph has neither movement nor expression ; it renders the mood of neither the world nor the THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 109 soul ; there is no laughter in it, no sob, no prayer. It gives a single gesture transfixed by a mechan- ism. It has been said, too, that such art lacks interpretative power, f But the infinite, as Goethe saw, lurks in the finite, if we but pursue the finite far enough. | To observe man and his life relent- lessly, to set down the results of such observation with complete sincerity, is to be sure, at last, to come upon those ultimate mysteries which escape the snares of circumstance and are free of the arbitrament of mortality. To such an interpre-^ tation of the world the finest validity belongs. To draw a moral, to preach a doctrine, is like shouting at the north star. Life is a vast and awful business. * The great artist sets down his vision of it and is silent. There are neither so- cial panaceas nor short cuts to cheerful living in the Iliad or in Lear. Now it is the merit of the naturalistic drama of modern Germany *pf the drama of Hauptmann and Halbe, of Hirschfeld and Schnitzler- to have set down a vision of life that coincides remarkably with the humble truth. Nothing^that is human has been alien to its sight, to its compassion, to its power of representation. It has grappled with reality on closer terms than any pther literature of which we have knowledge. Therein resides its power and, I believe, its per- manent value. And of this art the theory and ilio THE MODERN DRAMA the first complete example are due to Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. Holz showed his sketches and his play in manuscript to Gerhart Haupt- mann before the Silesian dramatist had written Before Dawn^ and Hauptmann is the pre-emi- nent master of the modern German drama both in its naturalistic and in its neo-romantic phases. Hence, Die Familie Selicke was an artistic achievement of historic significance, and a de- scription of it the necessary prologue to the de- velopment in the art of the theatre with which this chapter deals II In one of his rare fragments of lyrical verse Gerhart Hauptmann (b. 1862) has described, with insight and exactness, his own character as a creative artist. "Let thy soul, O poet, be like an ^Eolian harp, stirred by the gentlest breath. Eternally must its strings vibrate under the breathing of the world's woe. For the world's woe is the root of our heavenward yearning. Thus will thy songs be rooted in the world's woe, but the heavenly light will shine upon their crown." In this view, it is clear, the artist is essentially passive. And so, in fact, the natural- istic artist must be. He must not break in upon THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 111 the vision of life; his imagination rounds out and completes; it does not change the reality which experience furnishes. But that reality so sensi- tively observed and so greatly rendered has al- ways inspired Hauptmann with a boundless com- passion. To him the world's life has been the world's woe; his very austerity and apparent harshness pay tribute to the sacredness of human sorrow. Such a temperament adopted the tech- nique of the naturalistic drama not only as an artistic but as an ethical act. It sought the tragic beauty that is in truth and almost instinc- tively rejected all the traditional devices of dramaturgic technique. From such a point of view artifice is not only futile, it is wrong. There could be, in the drama of Hauptmann^ no complicatior^fjplpt, no culmination of the re- sultant struggle in merely effective scenes, no su- perior articulateness on the part of the charac- ters. There could be no artistic beginning, for life comes shadowy from life; there could be no artistic ending, for the play of life ends only in eternity. This view of the drama's relation to life leads, naturally, to the exclusion of many devices. Thus Hauptmann, unlike the playwrights of France, but like Ibsen and Galsworthy, avoids 112 THE MODERN DRAMA the division of acts into scenes. The coming and \ going of characters has the unobtrusiveness but seldom violated in life; the inevitable artifice of entrance and exit is held within rigid bounds. In some of his earlier dramas he also observed the unities of time and place, and throughout his work practises close economy in these respects. It goes without saying that he rejects the mono- logue, the unnatural reading of letteFs, the raisoneur or commenting and providential char- acter, the lightly motivised confession all the devices in brief, by which even Hervieu and Lemaitre, Wilde and Pinero, blandly trans- port information across the footlights, or unravel the artificial knot which they have tied. In dialogue, the medium of the drama, Haupt- mann adds to the reality of Holz a complete ef- fortlessness. Hence beside the speech of his char- acters all other dramatic speech seems conscious and merely literary. Nor is that marvellous veracity in the handling of his medium a mere control of dialect. Johannes Vockerat and Michael Kramer, Dr. Scholz and Professor Crampton, speak with a human raciness and na- tive truth not surpassed by the weavers or peas- ants of Silesia. Hauptmann has heard the in- THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 113 flections of the human voice, the faltering and fugitive eloquence of the living word, not only with his ears but with his soul. External devices necessarily contribute to this effect. Thus Hauptmann renders all dialect with phonetic accuracy and correct differentia- tion. In Before Dawn (1889) Hoffmann, Loth,' Dr. Schimmelpfennig and Helen speak normal high German; all the other characters speak the Silesian except the imported footman Eduard who uses the Berlin dialect. In The Beaver Coat (1893) the various gradations of that dia- lect are scrupulously set down, from the impu- dent vulgarity of Leontine and Adelaide to the occasional consonantal slips of Wehrhahn. The egregious Mrs. Wolff, in the same play, cannot - deny her Silesian origin. Far finer shades of character are indicated by the amiable elisions of Mrs. Vockerat, Senior, in Lonely Lives (1891), the recurrent crassness of Mrs. Scholz in The Re- conciliation (1890) and the solemn reiterations of Michael Kramer (1900). Nor must it be thought that such characterisation has anything in common with the set phrases of Dickens. From the richness and variety of German col- loquial speech, from the deep brooding of the German soul upon the common things and the 114 THE MODERN DRAMA enduring emotions of life, Hauptmann has caught the authentic accents that change dramatic dia- logue into the speech of man. In the structure of his drama Hauptmann, *again following and surpassing the theory and practice of Holz, met and solved an even more difficult problem than in the character of his dia- logue. He rejects the whole tradition of struc- tural technique. ' And he is able to do so by rea- son of his intimate contact with the normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of will with will, the passionate crises of human existence, are but rarely concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient sit- uation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retro- spect of calmer years, are the rule. Hence in- stead of effective rearrangement Hauptmann con- tents himself with the austere simplicity of that succession of action which observation really af- \ fords. The intrusion of a new force into a given j setting, as in Lonely Lives, is as violent an inter- ference with the sober course of things as he ad- mits. From his noblest successes, The Weavers (1892), Drayman Hensckel (1898), Michael Kramer (1900), Rose Bernd (1903), the arti- fice of complication is wholly absent. THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 115 It follows that his fables are simple and de^J void of plot, that comedy and tragedy must in- 1 here in character, and that conflict must grow from the clash of character with environment or of character with character in its totality. In other words: Since the unwonted and adven- turous are rigidly excluded, dramatic complica- tion can but rarely, with Hauptmann, proceed from action. For the life of man is woven of "little, nameless, unremembered acts" which pos- sess no significance except as they illustrate char- acter and thus, link by link, forge that fate which is identical with character. |The constant and bitter conflict in the world does not arise from pointed and opposed notions of honour and duty held at some rare climacteric moment, but from . the far more tragic grinding of a hostile environ- I ment upon man or of the imprisonment of alien souls in the cage of some social bondage. These two motives, appearing sometimes sin- gly, sometimes blended, are fundamental to Hauptmann's work. In The Reconciliation an " unnatural marriage has brought discord and de- pravity upon earth ; in Lonely Lives a seeker after r ! truth is throttled by a murky world; in The Weavers the whole organisation of society drives men to tragic despair; in The Beaver Coat the ii6 THE MODERN DRAMA motive is ironically inverted and a base shrewd- ness triumphs over the social machine; in Rose Bernd traditional righteousness hounds a pure spirit out of life; and in Gabriel Schilling's Flight (written in 1906) Hauptmann returns to a favourite motive: Woman, strong through the ' \ narrowness and intensity of her elemental aims \ destroying man, the thinker and dreamer whose '.will, dissipated in an hundred ideal purposes, j^-'goes under in the unequal struggle. y The fable and structure of Michael Kramer well illustrate Hauptmann's typical themes and i ^ i jnethods. The whole of the first act is exposi- ,i** L tibn. It is not, however,, the exposition of ante- cedent actions or events. It is wholly of char- acter. The conditions of the play are entirely static. Kramer's greatness of soul broods over the whole act from which his person is absent. Mrs. Kramer, the narrow-minded, nagging wife, and Arnold, the homely, wretched boy with a spark of genius, quail under that spirit. Michal- ine, the brave, whole-hearted girl, stands among these, pitying and comprehending all. In the second act one of Arnold's sordid and piteous mis- takes comes to light. An innkeeper's daughter complains to Kramer of his son's grotesque and annoyingly expressed passion for her. Kramer THE DRAMA IN GERMANY 117 takes his son to task and, in one of the noblest scenes in the modern drama, wrestles with the boy's soul. In the third act the inn is shown. Its rowdy, semi-educated habitues deride Arnold with coarse gibes. He cannot tear himself away. Madly sensitive and conscious of his final su- periority over a world that crushes him by its merely brutal advantages, he is goaded to de- struction. In the last act, in the presence of his dead son, Michael Kramer cries out after some reconciliation with the silent universe. The play is done and nothing has happened. The only ac- tion is Arnold's suicide and that action has no. dramatic value. The significance of the play lies in the unequal marriage between Kramer and ~ his wife, in Arnold's character in the fact that "* such things are, and that in our outlook upon the / \TTr/^l