MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL
De profundis ad te clamavi!
After witnessing a performance of Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl—The Night Refuge is a fair equivalent in English—one realizes, not without a shudder, that there are depths within depths, abysms beneath abysms, still unexplored by the dramatic adventurer. The late Emile Zola posed all his lifetime as the father of naturalism in literature; but he might have gone to school to learn the alphabet of his art at the knees of the young man from Nijni Novgorod, Maxim Gorky. That anarchist of letters has taught us lessons of the bitterest import, Gorky the Bitter One. We know now that Zola was only masquerading in the gorgeous rags of romanticism with a vocabulary borrowed from Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Flaubert; we know, too, that despite the argot of L'Assommoir, the book is as romantic as a Bouguereau canvas—the formula is the same: highly glazed surfaces, smug sentiment, and pretty colouring. The difference is that while Zola painted low life like a born romantic, Bouguereau selected for his subjects the nymphs so dear to the lover of classic anthologies. To the night of his unfortunate death Zola believed himself a naturalist, though his books never escape the taint of melodrama.
The naturalism of the Russians is in a different key. Gogol, the inimitable Gogol, wrote Dead Souls, and Russia had conquered the kingdom once ruled by Fielding. If Chateaubriand was the father of modern French prose, as Goethe asserted, from Gogol stemmed all the great modern Russians: Dostoïevsky, Turgenev, Stchendrin, Tolstoy, Gorky; and the last seems nearer the first than either Turgenev or Tolstoy. He is hardly ten years old artistically, yet his name is known from Siberia to the Sandwich Islands. He is read more in a day than Kipling is in a year, and, compared to Kipling, he is as flint to chalk, a man carved from the hardest granite.
A revolutionary, inasmuch as he deliberately disowns, in his most characteristic work, all the devices of literature, of rhetoric, of literary architecture, he is at his worst in prolonged narrative, such as Foma Gordyeeff. And when he philosophizes he is long-winded. It is in the short tale with a simple setting that Gorky knows how to stir us. A strip of sea beach, the sky a hot azure, the water green as grass, two or three men and women, and we are given a tragedy in miniature. Or the steppes, sullen and brown, stretch before us to the setting sun; a few tramps talk at random, night falls. Misery huddles close. We have felt the very pulse-beat of life—and such lives! A wretched outcast, starved, wet as a dog in the rain—for he is but a dog in the rain—meets a woman as miserable and as degraded as himself. They manage to steal some mouldy bread, and sleep one night in a cask. It is but the recital of one night. They drift apart in the morning, never to meet again. Why should they care? Drab and monotonous, their soiled lives need be viewed but for a moment to surmise their future. Yet Gorky—for he is his own hero—contrives to sound undertones in this dark music that appeal. Instinctively he lays bare the souls of the men and women he dissects—souls as of muddy flame. A dreary sigh escapes their lips as they drag their poor carcases from place to place. Life has drugged them with sorrow. Why move at all? Why live at all? Why were they born? Why do they die? Existence is reduced to a few primary movements; eat, sleep; if vodka can be secured, then drink it to oblivion, for the sole blessing in this vale of tears is oblivion.
It may be seen that, compared to Gorky's rank, unsavoury, but sincere notation of facts, Thomas de Quincey's charming narrative of his youthful woes in Oxford Street—that "stony-hearted mother"—and his walks and talks with Anne, the noctambulist, is an idyll. Gorky transfers to his pages the odours of a starving, sweating humanity, its drunkenness, its explosions of rage, guttural cries of joy, and its all too terrible animalism. We turn our heads the other way when his women curse and rave. Walt Whitman, said Moncure Conway, brought the slop pail into the drawing-room; but for Gorky there is no drawing-room. Life is only a dung heap.
For years I have searched for the last word in dramatic naturalism, and in Gorky's Nachtasyl I found it. I heard it first in Berlin at the Kleines Theatre, and later in Vienna at the Deutsches Volkstheatre. Gorky, himself a lycanthrope, pessimist, despiser of his fellow-men, has assembled in this almost indescribable and unspeakable mélange—for it is not a play—a set of men and women whose very lives smell to heaven; the setting recalls one of his stories, Men with Pasts. (It is in Orloff and his Wife.)
An utter absence of theatricalism and a naïveté in dramatic feeling proclaim Gorky a man of genius and also one quite ignorant of the fundamental rules of the theatre. His four acts might be compressed into two, or, better still, into one. Only the fatigue and gloom engendered would interfere with this scheme, for there is far too much talk, far too little movement. Gorky, like many uneducated men of power, loves to moralize, to discuss life and its meanings. He is at times veritably sophomoric in this respect. Long speeches are put into the mouths of his characters, who forthwith spout the most dreary commonplaces about destiny, luck, birth, and death.
The strength of the play lies in its presentation of character. Characterization, with a slender thread of narrative, no effective "curtains," comprises the material of this vivid experiment. Nevertheless, it burns the memory because of its shocking candour and pity-breeding truths.
One is struck by a certain resemblance to Charles Dickens in all the novels of the Russians, Dostoïevsky and Gorky in particular. There are whole passages in Crime and Chastisement and Injury and Insult that might have been suggested by the English master of fiction. Gorky, like Gogol, loves to picture some poor wretch with a dominant passion, and then to place him in surroundings that will move the machinery of his being. And with all his hatred of life, of men, pity oozes from his pages, sometimes contemptuous, sometimes passionate, pity. The Night Refuge is a cellar with a kitchen, a few holes in the wall for sleeping purposes. Its counterpart exists in every great city. Thieves, prostitutes, men and women, the very dregs of life, pass their battered days and nights in these foul caves. Gorky confesses to having lived in such places while he wandered through some of the Russian towns. Anarchists are not, as is popularly supposed, born or bred in these pest alleys, whose inhabitants are too degraded, too worn out, to harbour plans for the overthrow of governments. The vermin that burrow in the mud and darkness are not dangerously brave or endowed with destructive energies.
The keepers of the night asylum are a man and wife, a trifle better off than their lodgers in physique, for they are not drunkards. The husband is past fifty, an avaricious, snuffling, shuffling hypocrite, jealous of his young wife and brutal to the people he harbours. His wife is only twenty-six and hates her husband. She loves a young, good-looking thief who lives in the cellar, an aristocrat among his fellows, for he sleeps alone in a sort of cupboard, and only works at his "profession" when he needs money. He gets the hottest tea and the nicest morsels from the shrewish woman. Her voice, raucous and full of fury, is softened when she addresses her Wasjka. His companions know all about this affair, but are not jealous of him; they are too indifferent to everything but their own wants to care for God or man, devils or angels. They are over-tramps, beings for whom the moralities, major and minor, no longer have any meaning. The thief is tired of the woman, tired of his life amid stupid people, and has cast his eyes on Natascha, the sister of his mistress. The elder woman realizes it and trouble is brewing when the curtain goes up.
It is morning. A dull light filters from above on a mass of almost shapeless figures. One by one they stir. Yawns, half-stifled oaths, coughing, expectorations, noses noisily blown, whinings, cries of pain, harsh laughter, and suppressed sobbing—the hideous symphony of life at its lowest social ebb. Again you feel like averting your head, for such is the force of suggestion that a noisome odour seems to emanate from the stage and creep languidly through the auditorium.
The other dramatis person: a policeman, uncle to the sisters; a locksmith with a dying wife—dying of consumption brought on by the prolonged beatings at the hands of her semi-insane husband; a street-walker—one who reads sentimental novels and speaks at intervals of a romance she had when younger; a huck-stress, cynical, drunken, loud-mouthed; a cap-maker who never works; an actor who has forgotten his professional name, poisoned with alcohol; a man named Satin, a good-natured, degenerate scoundrel; a decayed baron, neurasthenic, and with a face that recalls one of Doré's sketches of a damned soul—lean, always biting his nails, stuttering, his eyes blazing with the infernal fires of vodka madness; an old man of venerable aspect, a pilgrim who happens in; his name is Luka and he is some sixty years of age. Then there is a young scapegrace shoemaker who plays the concertina and always describes himself as a free man, a man without cares, a man who would not accept wealth if offered him. A Tartar and several porters and members of the barefoot brigade make up this unattractive company.
How to weave a play from such unpromising material must have puzzled Gorky. Evidently he did not try, preferring the easier way of letting his people tell their own stories and reducing technical construction to a mere dropping of the curtain from time to time. In fact, there is far more dramatic intrigue in Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness, of which this piece is really a pendant. Gorky does not fear the naked truth as do many literary artists who have social position and reputations to maintain.
The collision of character which is essential to the production of drama is brought about somehow or other, the chief means employed being Luka the pilgrim. This old man, who is as loquacious as Polonius and almost as platitudinous, changes the ideas of every one he meets. He finds the thief hard and impenitent; he points out to him that in Siberia, over yonder, is a wide, free land, where every man may hew a way for himself. The good-looking scamp tells him that thief he was born, thief he must remain; that his father saw the inside of prisons; that if he goes to Siberia it will be as a convict, and not of his own volition. Yet the words of the stranger have sunk a shaft into his consciousness, and despite his mockery of the old man's belief he pauses and reflects—why not? Why not become a decent man, marry, beget children, and chuck the old life of crime and police espionage? He loves Natascha. He hates her sister, and in the best scene of the play he lays his case clumsily but manfully before the girl. The crossroads of his life are arrived at—her decision will settle which turn he is to take.
Natascha is that mixture of good, bad, and indifferent in all of us, and is therefore a puzzle to audiences who like patterns made out of the whole cloth, without any dubious mixture of light and shade. She realizes that Wasjka has been her sister's lover; she has been beaten so that her face and shoulders are often black and blue by her jealous sister; she knows that her present life is a hell—yet she hesitates; Luka urges her. Wasjka pleads. Unluckily, the sister returns home earlier than expected and from a window overlooking the cellar up one short flight of stairs she overhears the entire conversation. Here is coincidence childishly introduced to unravel the simplest of dramatic knots. Yet it seems inevitable. The sister is an envious, prying woman, always spying upon her boarders. She may have hastened her devotions at church—like her husband, she is bigoted and hypocritical—and quietly sneaked in to see what mischief her disreputable crew of lodgers were making. Pictorially the scene is striking. It recalls any one of the numerous kitchen pieces of Teniers or Ostade, in which a stout wench is courted, while from some aperture above a jealous wife threateningly peers. At the crucial moment in the play the angry creature breaks out into a volley of abuse. A pretty state of affairs! Such goings-on in a respectable establishment if her back is turned for a half hour! A body can't go to church to pray for the sins of her neighbours without meddle-some old men entering unbidden a decent house and setting every one by the ears!
After she empties one vial of wrath upon Luka's head she uncorks another for her unfortunate sister's benefit. A lazy good-for-nothing, living on the bread of her relatives—a fine marriage she will make with a thief: a honey-moon in jail, perhaps! The husband puts in nasty remarks, and Wasjka loses his temper. There is a short, sharp interchange of blows, but the men are torn asunder. Hush! the police are always lurking near by, and not even the uncle, himself a member of the force, a bribe-taker, gambler, and drunkard, could intervene where blood had been shed. But Wasjka's chance had passed. It does not return. Natascha, cowed, humbly goes upstairs to the kitchen, there to clean the samovar, and the aged Luka groans, for he knows what life is, with its queer eddies and whirlpools of chance.
He has comforted the dying wife of the locksmith, Anna by name, and, with all the ribaldry, drunkenness, and profanity around them, whispers in her ears consoling words. She has known naught but misery, starvation, cold, and blows her life long. Her brutal husband is presented as the type of the workman who is always preaching of the dignity of labour. He is a workman, he proudly asserts to the thief, and files away at his locks while his wife lies gasping. We catch a strain of Tolstoy in the retort of the thief, who tells him that work alone doesn't make a man. Thick of apprehension, the huge dolt sits and files. When his wife begs for more air, he tells her to go to the yard—the place is already too cold. Then he moves over to her and offers her some bread. He even asks if she suffers. Finally, with the others, he departs for the tavern. As she listens to Luka's words, Wasjka enters and laughs them to scorn. Is there a God? The company, which has returned, discusses violently this question. Talk, talk, talk—the Russian tramp will talk all day if you give him a theme and a drink. If one believes in a God, interposes Luka, then God exists; if one does not, then there is no God. It is a neat metaphysical evasion, but the others are momentarily silenced. Wasjka has boasted that he fears neither life nor death. Anna quietly dies while the rest are gabbling, and instantly a hush pervades the sordid scene. Dead! What does that mean? A moment ago querulously begging for quiet—now quiet forever! The young criminal edges his way upstairs, his bragging spirit clean gone. Dead! Some one must run to the tavern and tell the husband. The police must be informed; the sooner the better for the man's sake. He might be suspected! The curtain falls on a moving spectacle.
Another case in which Luka interferes is that of the old actor. We gather from this abject wreck's disconnected speeches that he has been a dramatic artist in his time; but, as he repeats, parrot-fashion, he "has poisoned his organism with alcohol." He picked up the phrase from the doctor at the poorhouse infirmary. This caricature of humanity, this wraith with a brilliant past, has drifted into the back waters of the night refuge and there awaits death. One gleam of light he is made to see before the end. Luka tells him of a city which contains a hospital for the cure of drunkenness. There must the actor go and there begin a new life. A new life! The words ravish his ears stunned by debauchery and wake a momentary vista of hope. Where is this city? Luka cannot tell. He has forgotten, but he will surely remember. The actor later relates to the cynical street-walker the good news. His brain stimulated by the intrusion of a new idea stirs to life. He quotes, misquotes, Shakespeare; recalls bits of Lear, and breaks down in recitation. The word, the word—what is it? Exalted he waves his arms wildly and rushes out to the haven of rest, the tavern. When the dead woman is surrounded by the speechless crowd, the old actor comes in, mounts a table, and declaims his speech. He has remembered. The effect is ghastly.
Luka has conversations with the baron. This odd bundle of bones lives on the young woman already mentioned. If he can't get vodka, he will drink drugs; these failing he will sit and gnaw his nails as a mouse gnaws the wires of its cage, or he will sit cross-legged for hours on the top of the Russian stove and listen to story-telling. His catchword is "talk on"; anything for an anecdote. He mocks continually the woman who supports him. She is an inveterate sentimentalist, and every day tells a story about a student of noble birth who once threatened to shoot himself for love of her. But, as the baron sarcastically points out, the name of this imaginary hero is Gaston one day, another it is Raoul. He taunts the poor devil into despair and drunkenness. Luka expostulates. He touches the spring that sets working the young man's recollections of a happy and honourable past. He was the son of a wealthy, noble family. He had his coffee in bed in the morning—yes, it is true! He had servants, horses, a wife. Why was he born? No idea! Why did he marry? No idea! Why is he still living? No idea! Why will he die?
Then the woman has her revenge. It is her chance, and she takes it. She sneers at the baron's lies. He take his coffee in bed! Not he. Liar he is when he boasts of his birth. Vagabond! The episode is as ugly as if it happened under our eyes. His secret weakness exposed, the baron breaks into hysterical weeping, which presently modulates into fierce anger. Seizing a glass, he attempts to hurl it at her head. But the storm subsides, and soon they are all drinking and shouting. You feel as if you had been viewing the scene from a hidden window, so realistic is the performance by the troupe of the Kleines Theatre.
The climax is attained in the third act. A row is precipitated during which the lodging-house keeper is killed. Who struck the blow? Loudly his widow denounces Wasjka. He is the murderer of her husband, he the thief who threatened so often the life of her good man. In the confusion the police rush in, Wasjka is manacled; but so is the woman, for Natascha bears witness that she overheard her sister plotting the death of her husband with her lover, Wasjka. The moment is as theatrically thrilling as you please; hate has the upper hand in Natascha's heart and her evidence sends the pair to prison. She disappears.
About this time you begin to suspect that the well-meaning Luka is a trouble-breeder. Every pie in which he has put his finger so far is spoiled. He, too, vanishes as noiselessly as he appeared. In Act IV what is left of the gang sits at the same old dingy table drinking and discussing, interminably discussing, the events of the past, and also Luka. He is branded as a liar, a bore, a kill-joy, a busybody, and one who causes trouble. What if he lies or tells the truth? What's the difference, anyhow? His truth caused murder, his lies did no one good, and so they sneer, sneer at the world, sneer at themselves, occasionally, Pilate-like, asking, what is truth? The Tartar prays in a corner and reads his Koran, the rest yell out a drunken song, the shoemaker plays his concertina. The old actor, worse sot than ever, asks the Tartar to pray for him, goes out to the yard, and hangs himself. The baron discovers the swinging body and announces the fact to his comrades. One answers wrathfully, "So he must spoil our singing—the fool!" And with that the curtain drops, leaving you puzzled, disgusted, shocked, yet touched. Gorky has caught something of "the strange, irregular rhythm of life" in this piece, and you feel the vibration of truth in every line of the extremely plastic dialogue. That the stage has, or has not, any business with such spectacles never occurs to the spectator until out upon Berlin's broad avenue of trees pulsing with life.
The amateur of sensations, exquisite, morbid, or brutal, must feel after Nachtasyl that the bottomless pit has been almost plumbed. What further exploitation of woe, of crime, of humanity stripped of its adventitious social trappings, can be made? And this question is put by every generation without in the least stopping the fresh shaking up of the dramatic kaleidoscope. The Gorky play, even if it disgusts at times, at least arouses pity and terror, and thus, according to the classical formula, purges the minds of its spectators. Compared to the drama of lubricity manufactured in Paris and annually exported to America, this little study of a group of outcast men and women is a powerful moral lesson. That it is a play I do not assert, nor could it be put on the boards in America without a storm of critical and public censure. Americans go to the theatre to be amused and not to have their nerves assaulted. Thackeray, in a memorable passage of Vanity Fair, refused to stir those depths of humanity where lurk all manners of evil monsters. Perhaps this refusal was for the great writer an artistic renunciation; perhaps he knew the British public. In our own happy, sun-smitten land, where poverty and vice abound not, where the tramp is only a creation of the comic journals—in America, if such a truth-teller as Gorky arose, we should fall upon him, neck and crop, gag him, and without bothering over the formality of a writ de lunatico inquirendo, clap the fellow behind the bars of a madhouse cell. It would serve him right. The ugly cancers of the social system should never be exposed, especially by a candid hand! In art, to tell truths of this kind does not alone shame the devil, but outrages the community. No wonder Emperor William does not grace such performances by his presence. No wonder Gorky is a suspect in Russia. He tells the truth, which in the twentieth century is more dangerous than hammering dynamite!
One detail I have forgotten. Old Luka the Pilgrim is asked by Wasjka Pepel where he purposes travelling after he leaves their haunt. To Little Russia, he says, adding that he has heard of a new faith being preached out there, and he will see if there is anything in it. There might be—men search and search for better things.... If God will but give them patience, all will be well! Perhaps this new preacher has found the light! It is a touch unmistakably of Russia, where even the irreligious are not without faith. Gorky, with all his moral anarchy, is as superstitious as a moujik. He shakes his fists at the eternal stars and then makes the sign of the cross. It may be for that reason he wrote The Night Refuge.
De profundis ad te clamavi!
VIII
HERMANN SUDERMANN
The unfailing brilliancy of expression and abundant technical power of Hermann Sudermann have so seldom failed him in the lengthy list of his plays and novels that his admirers are too often oblivious to his main defect as an artist and thinker—a dualism of style and ideas. The Prussian playwright wishes to wear three heron feathers in his cap. Cosmopolitan as he is, he would fill his dramas with the incomparable psychologic content of Ibsen; he would be a painter of manners; he would emulate Sardou in his constructive genius. To have failed, and failed more than once, in his effort to precipitate these three qualities in his surprisingly bold and delicate wit, is not strange. And to have grazed so often the edge of triumphs, not popular but genuinely artistic, warrants one in placing Sudermann high in the ranks of German dramaturgists.
In a very favourable review written by Mr. W. S. Lilly of The Joy of Life, he ranks Sudermann among the great painters of manners, and, after reading Dame Care and The Cat's Bridge, we are tempted to agree with the enthusiasm of the English critic. He thus sets down the qualities of a painter of manners: "Sense and sensibility, sagacity and suppleness, openness of mind and originality of thought, depth of feeling and delicacy of touch." Does Sudermann's art include all these things? We think not. Rather is he as a dramatist—the expert Techniker, the man of the theatre, impregnated by the dominant intellectual ideas of the hour, than a poet who from a haunting necessity gazes into his heart and then writes: Sudermann is too photographic; he too often wills his characters into a mould of his own, not of their own, making; he wills his atmosphere to blend with his theses, the reverse of Hauptmann's method. He is more cerebral than emotional, more of a philosopher than a dramatic psychologist. Above all, he is literary; he has the literary touch, the formal sense, the up-gushing gift of verbal expression. Add to this order of talent a real feeling for dramatic nuance, and Sudermann's enigmatic warring opposites of temperament and action seem remarkable.
In 1889, miraculous year of modern artistic Germany, Sudermann's dramatic début in Honour was more of a nine days' wonder than Hauptmann's Before Sunrise. The surety of touch, the easy mastery of theatric effects, the violent contrasts, and the sparkling dialogue transformed Sudermann's cometary career into a fixed star of the first magnitude. To-day this first play appears banal enough. Time has permitted us to see it in completer historic perspective. Ibsen's influence in the posing of the moral conflict is speedily recognized, just as Count Von Trast may be traced to those raisonneurs so dear to the younger Dumas, those human machines spouting logic and arranging the dénouement like the god behind the cloud. One inevitably recalls the relation of Björnsen to Ibsen in the present position of Sudermann and Hauptmann.
Yet it is easy to admire Honour. It contains, notably in the two acts of the "hinter haus," real strokes of observation and profound knowledge of human nature. The elder Heinecke, rapacious rascal, is a father lost to all sense of shame, for he closes his eyes to his daughter's behaviour. This same old scamp is both true and amusing. Nor is his wife depicted with less unwavering fidelity. The motive of Honour is not alone the ironic contrast of real and conventional ideals of honour—it shoots a bolt toward Nietzsche's land where good and evil blend in one hazy hue. Sudermann, here and in nearly all his later pieces, challenges the moral law—Ibsen's loftiest heron feather—and if any appreciable theory of conduct is to be deduced from his works, it is that the moral law must submit to the variations of time and place, even though its infraction spells sin, even though the individual in his thirst for self-seeking smashes the slate of morality and perishes in the attempt.
This battle of good and evil Sudermann dwells upon, often to the confusion of moral values, often to the tarnishing of his art. And in his endeavour to hold the dramatic scales in strict equipoise, to intrude no personal judgments, he leaves his audiences in blank bewilderment. Better the rankest affirmations than the blandest negatives. Yes counts far more than No in the theatre, and Sudermann is happier when he is violently partisan. His contemporary, Hauptmann, shows us the shipwreck of souls in whom the spiritual stress preponderates. Sudermann, except in rare instances, sticks closer to the social scale and its problems; and when he does he is at his best, for it cannot be said that The Three Heron Feathers, written under the spur of The Sunken Bell, betrays a mastery or even a familiarity with those shadowy recesses wherein action is a becoming, where the soul blossoms from a shapeless mass into volitional consciousness. Sudermann's art is more external; it concerns itself with the How rather than with the Why, and one feels that storm and fury were deliberate engraftments, not the power which works from within to the outer world.
There is character drawing of an unexceptional kind in Honour. Robert Heinecke returns from foreign lands to find his family degraded, his sister trading on her beauty, his father and mother accepting bounty from the mansion house, the employers of the honourable son. The maze in which he is caught is constructed with infinite skill; the expository act is the best. There is not much mystery—we seem here to be in the clear atmosphere of the French dramaturgists, Augier and Dumas; while the finale is rather flat, we look for a suicide or a scandal of some sort. The author keeps himself steady in the saddle of realism. This ending is lifelike, inasmuch as the hero goes away with Graf Trast, who literally reasons him out of his dangerous mood. We feel that all the rest do not count, not the ignoble Kurt and his snobbish friends, his philistine parents; not the Heineckes with their vulgar avarice, their Zola-istic squalor. The romance is conventional. In fact, so cleverly did Sudermann mingle the new and old in the opposing currents of dramatic art that his play was instantly a success.
Accused of this ambition to drive two horses, the dramatist threw down as a gauge to criticism, Sodom (1891). It was not a great play, because it lacked logic, balance, truthfulness. A distorted picture of artistic degeneracy, its satire on certain circles in Berlin caused a furore; but the piece had not the elements of sincerity. Technically it revealed the mastery of almost hopeless material, and while one's æsthetic sense and the fitness of things are hopelessly upset, the cunning hand of the prestidigitator is everywhere present. There are some episodes that stir, notably the scenes between father and son; but the grimness and sordidness are too much for the nerves.
Magda (1893) struck a new note. Many believe it to be Sudermann at his best. Thus far he has not surpassed it in unity of atmosphere and dissection of motives. That the morale may be all wrong is not to the point. Again we see Ibsen's mighty shadow in the revolt of the new against the old; daughter and father posed antagonistically with the figure of the pastor, one of the German author's better creations, as a mediating principle.
One of many reasons that the Magda of Sudermann is a remarkable play is the critical controversy over its interpretation. Each one of us reveals his temperamental bias in the upholding of Bernhardt's or Duse's or Modjeska's respective readings. And which one of the three artists has exhausted the possibilities of Magda's many-sided character? On this point Herr Sudermann is distressingly discreet, although he has a preference for Duse, as is well known to a few of his intimates. The reason is simple. Duse presents more phases of the character, exhibits more facets of this curious dramatic gem, and by her excellences, and not her limitations, we must judge her performance.
We have seen a dozen Magdas: English, French, German, Italian, Belgian, Jewish, and Scandinavian. Fanatical admirers of Bernhardt claim preeminence for her in the part, certain sides of which are child's play for her accomplished virtuosity. But the critic who knows Sudermann's Magda also knows that the very brilliancy of the glorious French actress throws the picture into too high relief; there are no middle tints in Sarah's embodiment. It recalls the playing of an overmasteringly brilliant pianist, one who rolls over the keyboard like a destructive avalanche. The human note, the sobbing, undulating quality of a violoncello whose tone flashes fire, is missing. Little doubt that Bernhardt gives us certain moods of Magda in a transcendental manner. She is the supreme artist of all in the exposition of tragic bravura. Yet she is not Sudermann's Magda. This is so well known as to be a critical commonplace.
Mrs. Campbell's Magda is above the ordinary. Modjeska's powers were on the wane when she appeared in the play; but we cannot forget the native sweetness and true Polish zal with which she suffused the character. Supple, poetic, charming, she was, and despite all, lacked much of Magda's complexity. Does Duse entirely fulfil all the requirements of the rôle?
We do not know. We only feel that in mood-versatility she outstrips all others we have seen, and if she has not seen farthest into the soul of the opera singer, she has viewed it from more sides than her contemporaries. Hence her interpretation is more various and, it being Duse, is more wonderful in the technical sense in the revelation of an effortless art.
She is natural, never photographic. Photography arrests motion; Duse is ever in modulation. Rather, if you will have pictorial analogues, might her Magda be compared to a Richard Earlom or a Valentine Green mezzotint, wherein the luminous shadows and faint spiritual overtones are acidly mellow. And who shall forget the manner of her throat as it trilled with rage when to her Von Keller makes his perfectly honourable and perfectly abominable offer! We have dwelt so much upon the admirable reticences of this artist, upon her "tact of omission," we really forget that she never stops acting or living her part for a moment. She continually evokes musical imagery, for the exquisite and harmonious interrelations of every movement, every word, unroll before us like great, solemn music.
Magda will probably outlive The Joy of Life, as it has already outlived the dramatist's Honour. The theme of the first is based on more fundamental facts than the others—the clash of will and affection. If all human families were loving, if father never opposed daughter or son flouted mother, then such a play as Magda never would have been written. But, alas! the newspapers prove that family life is not always celestial, indeed, that it is often bestial. But the Parson Tickletexts never acknowledge this.
There is no lesson in Magda; the ending is not a sermon—unless you wish it to prove that contradicting apoplectic fathers is a fatal proceeding. Magda is an individualist. She is selfish. This trait she shares with the mass of mankind. Her "I am I" is neither a proclamation nor a challenge to the world. It is the simple confession of a woman who knows herself, her weaknesses, her errors, who has battled and wrested from life a little, passing triumph, the stability of which she doubts.
"We must sin if we wish to grow. To become greater than our sins is worth more than all the purity you preach." Is this immoral? We hasten to quote a sentence from John Milton's Areopagitica, the magnificent music of which fascinated the ear of Robert Louis Stevenson, quite apart from its significant wisdom.
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust or heat." Poor Magda's virtue was certainly not cloistered. She ran for fame's garland in all the dust and heat of the artistic arena. She won, she lost. The bigot discerns in Magda an abandoned creature; the men and women who see life from all sides and know the fallibility of the flesh are apt to forgive her shortcomings.
"The ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us." She must have had a detestable disposition. Fancy what a spoilt opera singer with sore tonsils can be on a rainy day, especially when she reads the name of her dearest foe "substituting" on the bill. Then drop her in the sleepy old town of her nativity, where a harsh, opinionated father would worm from her every detail of her dubious past Sudermann has done this with the result—a lifelike play, in which nothing is demonstrated except the unalterable stupidity of things in general and the naked fact that "I am I" is the only motto, whether secret or published, of every human crawling 'twixt earth and sky. In the pastor Sudermann attempts to paint the altruist in action. It is hardly a convincing piece of portraiture. Your true altruist is bounded by Tolstoy on the north, by Howells on the west, by Francis of Assisi on the south, and on the east by Buddha. Outside of book covers the person exists not.
The Battle of the Butterflies (1894) was seen in New York at Conried's Irving Place Theatre. It is comedy of a skin-deep variety, entertaining! And here's an end to it. Happiness in a Corner is deeper in sentiment. It has the Ibsen touch with a pathos foreign to the Norwegian. Inspector Orb is of Ibsen, so is Pastor Weidemann, and the others—Bettina, Räcknitz, Elizabeth, and Helena—are alive and suffer and joy. There is vitality in this work. Also is there force and consummate cleverness in the three one-act plays grouped under the title Morituri (1896). Avowedly devoted to the theme of death they are all three illustrative of the dramatist's feeling for the right phrase, the only right situation. Teja, Fritzchen, and The Eternal Masculine show us in three widely differing modes how, as in life, we miss the happiness near at hand while longing for the ideal—a theme dealt with more broadly in The Three Heron Feathers.
John the Baptist (1898), like Paul Heyse's Mary Magdalen, was the occasion of a scandal in Berlin, because the censor forbade its performance on religious grounds, though Otto Ludwig's Maccabees and Hebbel's Judith are stock pieces. As a drama it is weak, for the vacillating hero wearies us to distraction, notwithstanding the poetic charm of the prologue. If the Christ had been boldly dramatized, as was evidently the playwright's purpose, the outcome, no matter how shattering to pious nerves, would have been better artistically. But this vague dreamer, pessimistic, halting, irresolute, what can we make of him across the footlights, and for once Sudermann's technical ability failed him.
The Three Heron Feathers (1899) is an attempt to meet Hauptmann on equal terms. It lacks coherence, despite the occasional lift of its verse—Sudermann fancied that he had forsworn the prose of the realistic drama forever—while the lofty moral ideal, unduly insisted upon, soon becomes a thorn in the flesh. No one is alive but the trusty Lorbuss, the Prince being a theory set in action. The next play, St. John's Fire (1900), we confess to having read with more pleasure than seeing it enacted. It goes up in the air soon after the curtain rises on Act III, though the story is a capital one for dramatic purposes. It would seem that Sudermann was again attacked by his doubting mania. He has contrived the atmosphere of romance, the pagan fire of St. John, the mystery of night, the passion of Georg and Marikke; but either his courage failed him, or else beset by some idea of resignation he spoilt his development and conclusion, and we leave the theatre dissatisfied, not with that spiritual dissatisfaction which Ibsen plants, a rankling sore in one's heart, but the kind that grows into resentment against the dramatist, for Marikke is a girl of whom Thomas Hardy would have been proud. And then there is a muddle of symbolism and heredity,—Sudermann endeavouring to scoop up in his too comprehensive net the floating ideas of the hour. Georg von Hartwig's sudden lapse into a selfish citizen we can never forgive.
Of the criticism of masterpieces there is no end. Take Sudermann's The Joy of Life as an example. (Why such an Ibsen-like title for Es Lebe das Leben?) Obsessed by subject and subject-matter only, many of us turn a blind side to the real qualities that make up an excellent play. Now this harping on the theme of a drama—whether pleasant, unpleasant, dull, brilliant, or truthful—is eminently amateurish. It is rather the function of the manager; it affects his box-office, and, as he is not in business for art, he cherishes that brave little place above all else. But a critic is supposed to wear an open mind, to accept a subject without looking the gift poet in the mouth, and also to judge how near the dramatist reaches the goal of his own ideal—not the critic's. That we do not do so is to be pitied. It is because of this that so many wonderful plays never see the light, or else are botched at their birth.
This persistent avoidance of the dramatist's view-point, this refusal to enter into sympathetic complicity with him, leads to sad conclusions. If you decide violently that a play has no right to exist because it exhibits a situation or character abhorrent to your notions, in what a predicament is the dramatist! It recalls the story told by George Saintsbury about the man who was shown Flameng's beautiful etching of Herrera's Child with the Guitar. "But I don't like babies," said the man, unconsciously illustrating uncatholicity in criticism. The subject did not appeal to him, therefore its truthful art could go hang.
Too great an artist to preach a moral, Sudermann nevertheless bestows the justice demanded by destiny upon the luckless Beata, Countess of Michael von Kellinghausen. The Joy of Life is next to Magda technically one of Sudermann's biggest achievements.
To present such a trite theme with new harmonies is a triumph. The tragic quality of the piece in an atmosphere bordering on the aristocratic commonplace is not the least of its excellences. We know that life is daily, that great art is rare, that the average sensual man prefers a variety show to a problem play; yet we are not abashed or downcast. The cant that clusters about cults, theatric or artistic, should not close our ears to the psychologic power and the message—if you will have the word—of this Sudermann play. If his Beata,—Ibsen has a Beata in Rosmersholm and D'Annunzio one in his La Gioconda—was a sorely beset woman, if she felt too much, thought too much,—one suspects her of poring over Nietzsche and hearing much Wagner; witness that allusion to Hans Sachs's quotation from Tristan,—yet is she not a fascinating soul? Are there to be no semi-tones in character? Must women be paragons and men perfect for inclusion in a play? If this be so, then all the art of the Elizabethans is false, their magnificent freedom and their wit a beacon of warning to pure-minded playwriters. And, pray, out of what material shall the dramatist weave his pattern of good and evil?
But had Sudermann transposed his Beata to the fourteenth century, had he dowered her with mediæval speech and the name of Beatrice, had he surrounded her with lovers in tin-plate armour, our shrinking natures might not have hied to cover. The pathos of distance would have softened the ugly truths of the modern drawing-room. The Joy of Life is a capital play. There is much conventionality displayed in the minor characters; only Beata and Richard are really original. And the use of the divorce debate as a symbol reveals the real weakness of the play, though structurally it has some striking virtues. The small part of Meixner, the theological student turned social-democrat, had vraisemblance. It suggests the character of Krogstad in A Doll's House. That tiresome exhorter, Count Trast, in Sudermann's Honour, is luckily not duplicated. And we doubt not that the absence of explicatory comment by the author is disheartening to a public which likes all the questions raised answered at the close, after the manner of a Mother Goose morality. Neither D'Annunzio nor Sudermann is a preacher. As in the ghastly illumination of a lightning flash, souls hallucinated by love, terror, pity, despair, are seen struggling in the black gulf of night. And then all becomes abysmal darkness. There are the eternal verities, the inevitable compensations in this play. The application of the moral is left to the listener, who is given the choice of echoing or not echoing the immortal exclamation of Mr. Saintsbury's unknown, "But I don't like babies!"
In Storm-Brother Socrates, Sudermann places his scene in a small East Prussian town, possibly Matizken, where he was born in 1857. The schoolmaster, the grocer, the Jewish rabbi, the tax-collector, and the dentist are the chief characters of this satiric comedy. A lot of old cronies, men who went through the stirring times of '48, form a revolutionary guild, calling themselves "The Brotherhood of the Storm." Harmless enough, they still declaim against Bismarck—the time of action is twenty years ago—and talk of their warlike exploits. As the dramatist is preeminently a painter of manners, many of his portraits are masterly. The dentist, Hartmayer, is a hater of tyranny and an idealist. He has assumed the name of Socrates, his companions selecting such stirring pseudonyms as Catiline, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Poniatowski. This dentist's son' Fritz has adopted the same profession; and being called to attend a reigning prince's dog for toothache, he is denounced by his anti-imperialist of a father. But Fritz is a socialist and has no prejudices on the subject of canine gums. Another brother, an impudent lad, is a conservative. When the archives of the Bund fall into the hands of the local magistrate, the old man is thoroughly miserable. His associates fly and he, expecting arrest, is decorated for the services of his son in saving an aristocratic dog's teeth! He accepts, and the curtain falls on a rather discursive, ill-natured comedy. However, Sudermann's virtuosity has plenty of opportunity for display.
The minor characters are well sketched. The waitress, Ida, is an exceedingly vital figure, as is the innkeeper. The dialogue is Sudermann almost at his best,—witty, sarcastic, ironical, tersely vigorous, and true to life. Like Daudet and Flaubert, Sudermann loves to prick the bloated German bourgeois. There is a little Hebrew, named, from sheer cruelty, Siegfried Markuse. His description of his freshman visits to a Corps-Kneipe at the Königsberg University is a fair example of the playwright's powers of unerring observation.
"Just as soon as I gave my name," relates Siegfried, "the man across the table began to crack jokes on Jews. I play the naïve and keep the game going. Then you should have heard them snicker. I see plainly enough that they are laughing at me, but I clench my teeth and say to myself, 'You are going to compel me to respect your superior intellect....' I talked about everything,—old idealism and modern gaiters; Germany's inalienable national rights and the swellest way of training poodles; the unimportance of Hegel's conception of divinity and the importance of a good pug dog. I quoted Plato, Schopenhauer, and the latest sharper. Everybody looked at me with mouth agape, and I thought I had them just where I wanted them when my friend Hartmayer came and whispered that he was commissioned to give me a hint that this was no place for my colossal jaw, and that it would be better if I stayed away next time. Outside I shook my fist and swore: 'If you won't have us as friends, you will have us as enemies! Then we shall see who comes out on top.'"
Mr. Lilly sees in Sudermann an affinity with Euripides, which may mean that he is a painter of a society in its decadence. His affinities as pointed out seem to be Parisian; at least he is Parisian in his gift of observation and style, German as is his power of reasoning. He is unmoral, following the tendenz of his time, but not so completely as D'Annunzio, who is satisfied with sheer shapes of beauty. With Sudermann it is, first, technical prowess, secondly, social satire, and he is always brilliant if not always satisfying.
IX
PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY
A. S. A. I. Madame la princesse Mathilde,
sonnet improvisé
sur des rimes données sur un sujet choisi
LA VERANDAH
Sous cette verandah, peinte en vert d'espérance, On arrive et l'on part avec un souvenir Si doux, qu'on y voudrait aussitôt revenir Sous les fleurs des tropiques et les plantes de France.
Une main de déesse y guérit la souffrance, Au mérite modeste elle ouvre l'avenir. Elle sait couronner comme elle sait punir. Pour le génie elle est pleine de déférence.
Devant elle enhardi, l'esprit prime-sautier, Ainsi qu'Euphorion dansant sur la prairie, Peut, entre terre et ciel, se montrer tout entier.
Pour que son œil pétille et que sa lèvre rie Et que de toute humeur sa lèvre soit guérie, Il suffit d'un bon mot de son bouffon Gautier.
—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
The late Princess Mathilde Bonaparte meant many things to many people. Her ancestry, her marriage to Prince Demidoff, her political power at the Tuileries, her sympathetic patronage of artistic folk, her personal beauty, love affairs, and feminine caprices—all these serve the world as pleasing material for anecdotes. The Princess was fond of the theatre, and fonder still of a première when the play was written by one of her intimate circle. She was surrounded by a distinguished group of poets, painters, dramatists, novelists, and diplomats. De Morny called her "the man of the family." She was good to gaze upon, and she had intellect. After the death of Sainte-Beuve, the publication of her correspondence with that celebrated critic gave us a portrait of his friend. It occurs in Lettres de la Princesse:—
"The Princess has a high, noble forehead, and her light golden hair, leaving uncovered on each side broad, pure temples, is bound in wavy masses on the full, finely shaped neck. Her eyes, which are well set, are expressive rather than large, gleam with the affection of the thought of the moment, and are not of those which can either feign or conceal. The whole face indicates nobleness and dignity, and, as soon as it lights up, grace united to power, frankness, and goodness; sometimes, also, it expresses fire and ardour. The head, so finely poised and carried with such dignity, rises from a dazzling and magnificent bust, and is joined to shoulders of statuesque smoothness and perfection."
That description should cover a multitude of indiscretions, such as the publication of the letters. She had already given Taine his congé for his criticism of Napoleon in the Revue des Deux Mondes, She was the daughter of Jerome and Caroline of Wurttemberg and was as proud as Napoleon. She never forgave an offence, and Taine's conception of the First Consul as a superior bandit closed her doors upon him.
She stood with forced equanimity the first two of his masterly studies; at the third she exclaimed with true feminine finesse of cruelty:—
"Ah, I know what I shall do! I owe Mme. Taine a call. I shall leave my card with P.P.C., which will mean that I take leave of him forever. I cannot allow a friend to attack violently the head of my family, the man without whom I should perhaps be nothing but a little orange-vender on the bridge at Ajaccio." She put her threat into execution. Taine, shocked by the rupture, called on Renan. After hearing the tale without any comment but a sweet, ironical smile, Renan answered:—
" Cher ami, I have quarrelled with a much greater lady than the Princess Mathilde."
"With whom, then?"
"The Church," answered Renan, dryly.
Mathilde did not respect rank more than genius. She set her face against the free and easy democratic manners, and because of this disliked the American invasion—few of our countrymen crossed her doors. One night Edmond About was invited to her house, and during the trying moments before dinner he amused her with his wit. Suddenly the Count Nieuwerkerke appeared. "Go away," cried the novelist, "and let us be alone, you jealous fellow." The Princess arose, rang, and instructed the servant: "Conduct M. About to his carriage. He is not dining here to-night." And the man of the Broken Ear went away, his temper much ruffled.
In 1847 the Princess settled in Paris permanently. She had been divorced from the handsome, profligate Demidoff, and her allowance, a big one, had been given her by a decree from the Czar. Over Napoleon III she wielded great influence. Of him the De Goncourts said, "The Emperor would be an excellent somnambulist if only he had intervals of lucidity;" while Flaubert declared him to be clever because, knowing his ignorance, he had the wisdom to hold his tongue. The Empress Eugénie was always jealous of Mathilde's power with her imperial cousin. That she was at the latter's funeral is an illustration of life's topsy-turvy tricks. Eugénie was jealous also of the Castiglione, and the De Goncourts do not fail to register Constance's spiritual mot about the Emperor.
"If I had only resisted, to-day I should have been an Empress!"
This recalls the delightful answer made by Alfred de Musset to a famous actress of the Théâtre Français—is it necessary to give the name? Once the lady had said:—
"Monsieur de Musset, I hear you have boasted of being my lover." "I beg your pardon," answered the friend of Rachel and George Sand; "I have always boasted to the contrary."
The rupture of Mathilde Bonaparte and Sainte-Beuve took place in 1869. The brothers De Goncourt heard its details from the Princess. They found her still trembling from the stormy interview. "I shall never see him again—never again! I, who fell out with the Empress on his account!... He has gone over to the Temps, our personal enemies! Ah! I said to him, 'Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, listen! I am sorry you did not die last year, for I should then have mourned a friend.'"
She must have been difficult at times. She had a good opinion of her birth, wealth, position, and beauty. "Yes, I had a peculiar and most extraordinary complexion. I remember in Switzerland, when I was fourteen, they put a Bengal rose leaf on my cheek, and were unable to distinguish between the two."
On one occasion, when Edmond de Goncourt was openly rude to her at her Château Saint-Gratien, she, with her guests, sat stupefied. Later he apologized, tears in his eyes—he was a gallant, handsome gentleman—and he relates most ingenuously, "Suddenly she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek, saying, 'Of course I forgive you—you know how truly attached I am to you; I also, of late, have felt quite nervous and upset.'"
It was this passage that caused Henry James to shiver; not because of the fact, but the lack of tact. The De Goncourts were taken up by the Princess in 1862. Jules, the younger brother, died in 1870, literally killed by his devotion to literary art. The chiselling of the De Goncourt phrases was deadly to brain and body. It is little wonder that their novels, one after the other, until Germinie Lacerteux appeared, should have been indifferently received. As Alphonse Daudet, ever receptive and tender in his judgments of original work, wrote: "Novels such as had never been seen before; novels that were neither moulded upon Balzac nor diluted from George Sand, but novels made up of pictures,... with plot scarcely indicated, and great blanks between the chapters; real break-neck ditches for the bourgeois reader. To this add an entirely new style, full of surprises—a style from which all conventionality is banished, and which, by a studied originality of phrase and image, forbids any commonplace in the thought; and then the bewildering boldness, the perpetual uncoupling of words accustomed to march together like oxen dragging a plough, the earnest care in selection, the horror of saying all and anything; considering this, how can one be astonished that the De Goncourts were not immediately greeted by the applause of the common herd?"
The mystery of it is, Why should the De Goncourts have cared for the applause of that same bourgeois public they so despised, reviled, and held up to mockery in their books? Gautier, Zola, Daudet, had to work like galley slaves for a living; the two brothers and Flaubert were rich, as riches go with literary men; why, then, did they care whether they were popular or not? Was it because they were human, notwithstanding their theories of impassibility, perfection, and art for art's sake?
The Château Saint-Gratien was the Princess Mathilde's country home until her death. There she entertained, as entertained George Sand at Nohant, all her friends. Until his death, in 1896, Edmond de Goncourt was her privileged visitor. The work of the two brothers in eighteenth-century chronicles amused and interested her, especially their minute histories of such actresses as Du Barry, Sophie Arnold; and, earlier, great women like Mme. de Pompadour, the Duchess of Châteauroux; great painters, Watteau, Boucher, Latour, Greuze, Lancret, Fragonard; and stage favourites such as Mesdames Saint Huberty, Clairon, and La Guimard.
The brothers introduced Japanese art into France. They were amateurs of the exquisite. Their house at Auteuil was truly "la maison d'un artiste au XIX siècle." And consider the labour, acute, agonizing, and enormous, involved in the writing and production of their novels: Germinie, Madame Gervaisais, Renée Mauperin, Manette Salomon (which was the first novel of studio life, excepting Fromentin's Domenique, in France, and one that influenced Zola greatly in his L'œuvre and De Maupassant in his Strong as Death), Charles Demailly—a wonderful study of journalism in Paris, a true continuation of Balzac's Lucien Rubempré; Sœur Philomène; and, written by Edmond after the death of Jules, La Fille Elisa, Les Frères Zemganno, La Faustin, and Chérie. In addition, there are the nine volumes of the journal, a study of Gavarni, the master caricaturist; vaudevilles, pantomimes, letters, portraits, several plays, histories, études, an early novel En 18—, and miscellany amounting in all to over forty volumes. Yet this fraternal pair, because of their wealth and birth, are still contemptuously alluded to as "amateurs." Yes, amateurs, indeed, in the fullest sense of a misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful sensations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal hopeless of attainment, amateurs who might well be patterned after in this age of hasty production, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the cheap and obvious. Aristocrats were the De Goncourts, yet their white fingers never faltered when they held the burin and engraved in indelible letters that first great naturalistic novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the tale of an unhappy servant.
Even their friend De Monselet pronounced it "sculptured slime," and, to the curiously inclined, interesting are the critiques of Brunetière; of Barbey D'Aurevilly?—who hacked away at everybody on general principles; of Renée Doumic, who always follows the lead of Brunetière; of Maurice Spronck, who declared that the brothers were victims of a malady known to psycho-physiologists as Audition colorée. But there were fairer critics. The studies of Zola, Daudet, Henri Ceard, Paul Bourget, Henry James, Emile Hennequin, the friendly words of Turgenev, that gentle Russian giant, the valuable suggestions of Flaubert—these were balm to the sensitive nature of Edmond de Goncourt. He lived to head a school—hitherto rather sterile, it must be confessed—and before his death he dowered an academy. (Ah, if all French literary men had but a moiety of Daudet's humour in the matter of academies!)
But the contribution of the De Goncourts to the novel will be lasting. They have one celebrated disciple, Karl Joris Huysmans, who began under their influence and has traced for himself over the "great highway so deeply dug out by Zola ... a parallel path in the air by which we may reach the Beyond and Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism." In the last analysis Huysmans is an artistic stepson of the epileptic Dostoïevsky, greatest of all psychologists; and while he may have forgotten it, his first artistic springboard was the De Goncourts.
What Henrietta Maréchal accomplished despite its failure, was in the dialogue—modern, picturesque, and of the best style for the stage, because it set forth the particular turn of mind of each talker; and it was also the first attack on that stronghold of French dramatic tradition, the monotonous semi-chanting of the conservatoire-taught actor. Here was an elastic, natural dialogue, charged with turns of phrases taken up from the sidewalk, neologisms, slang—in a word, lifelike talk as opposed to the old stilted verbiage.
The play was a failure, of course, as we shall see, for extraneous reasons. The director of the Théâtre Français, M. Edouard Thierry, put it on, and after the sixth performance, during all of which the actors never heard their own voices because of the organized popular tumult, the play was withdrawn. On its publication in book form it sold better than its author's novels—a fact Zola notes with his accustomed scent for the perversity of mankind.
Yet, as Daudet declared, Henrietta Maréchal was throughout "a fine, bold, and novel production. And a short time after, the same people who had hooted it frantically applauded Heloise Paranquet and the Supplice d'une Femme, plays of rapid action going straight to their issue, like a train at full speed, and of which ... Henrietta Maréchal was the inspiration. And was not the first act, taking place in the opera ball, with its crowd, its abusive chaff, its masks joking and howling in pursuit of each other, that close approach to life and reality, ironic and real as a Gavarni sketch—was it not 'naturalism' on the stage fifteen years before the word 'naturalism' was invented?"
Daudet, with characteristic delicacy and fidelity to the theme, elsewhere describes a reading at Edmond de Goncourt's house of his Les Frères Zemganno—those fraternal heroes of the sawdust.
When the play was read to the members of the Comédie Française, Minister Rouher—who afterward distinguished himself so terribly in the Franco-Prussian War!—suggested to the trembling authors that the valiant girl, who assumes her mother's guilt and is shot dead by her enraged father, be wounded only, and marry her mother's lover! Charming, is it not? The suggestion was frowned down by Marshal Vaillant, an old soldier, who did not fear the smell of stage powder.
Written in 1863, Henrietta Maréchal was not produced until December 5, 1865, at the Comédie Française, and after its speedy withdrawal it was not revived until March 3, 1885, at the Odéon. In the preface to the De Goncourts' Théâtre, Edmond wrote of the painful struggles the pair endured to obtain a hearing. They composed a vaudeville, Sans Titre, which was not heard, and followed this by other attempts, during which they slowly attained some knowledge of dramatic construction, and in 1867 followed Henrietta Maréchal with a five-act prose drama called La Patrie en Danger. This was also read at the Française, in 1868, admired, and dropped. Edmond declared it superior to its predecessor. It deals with the epoch of the French Revolution, and need not concern us now.
Of interest is his declaration that in the novel he is a realist (he is really a modified romantic, with a romantic vocabulary, selecting for subjects modern themes); but in the drama he totally disagrees with Zola and his naturalistic formulas as applied to the theatre. They have dug up a letter he sent over a decade ago to M. Lothar, who made the German translation of La Faustin. It all is to be found in this preface of 1879. De Goncourt, who naturally ranks the drama below the novel as literature, upholds the conventions of the former. The drama is by its nature romantic and limited in scope. The monologues, asides, dénouements, sympathetic characters, and the rest must always endure. He does think, however, that reality may be brought nearer, and that literary language should give place to a style which will reveal the irregularity and abruptness of vital conversation. In this latter particular he has been a benefactor. Unnatural theatrical dialogue he slew with his supple, free, naturally coloured speech in Henrietta Maréchal. Stage talk should be, De Goncourt asserted, flowing and idiomatic—never bookish. The ball scene in Henrietta proves that the brothers could practise as well as preach.
It is a mistake, too, to think that their novels and plays are immoral or hinge always on the eternal triangle. Various passions are treated by them in their air-tight receiver; their methods of psychological evisceration recall the laboratory of an analytical chemist. In Germinie it is the degradation of a woman through weakness; in Madame Gervaisais—that Odyssey of a woman's soul—it is the mystic passion for religion; in Manette Salomon, art and woman and their dangers to the impressionable artistic temperament; Charles Demailly pictures the gulfs of despair into which the literary, the poetic soul may be plunged; Sœur Philomène shows the combat between religious vows and nature; and so on through a wide gamut. And these two nervous artists have been mockingly called maniacs, their work has been derided as inutile—that work which practically reconstructed the artistic life of the eighteenth century and discovered to itself the artistic soul of the nineteenth. If they had remained normal units of their class, they would have gambled, shot pigeons, sported mistresses, and dabbled in racing, drinking, and the other sterilities of fashionable life. They preferred art, and they were rewarded in the usual fashion. The singular thing is that they expected, ingenuous souls, encouragement from their world. Fame came only when Jules was dead and Edmond too old and embittered to appreciate it. The survivor saw his ideas appropriated by Zola and the younger crowd, and cheapened and coarsened beyond all likeness to the original. What, then, must have been the dismay and perplexity of the brothers when they heard the hissing, catcalls, groans, and yells of an organized clique sworn to kill Henriette Maréchal? The body of the house was not hostile; but politics, the Republican opposition to the patronage of the Bonapartes, aroused students on the other side of the Seine, and a scandalous scene, only equalled by the Parisian productions of Hernani and Tannhäuser, occurred. Strangely enough, Théophile Gautier, who had figured in the Hernani fracas, had written the prologue to Henrietta Maréchal, and spoke it without opposition from the malcontents, though he was the librarian of Princess Mathilde. Not a word could be heard in any of the scenes, and when Got, the comedian who played in the cast,—the rest were Delaunay, the Lafontaines, Arnould-Plessis, Bressant, and other distinguished artists,—appeared to announce, as was the custom, the authors' names, he stood for ten minutes unable to make himself heard in the terrific hubbub. The Journal of the brothers contains a minute account of the affair, and of their terror as they stood, pale, breathless, peeping out upon a disordered sea of human faces. After all, it is a joy, despite its frequent injustice, to see a community take its drama seriously and not merely as a first aid to digestion.
The De Goncourts had the satisfaction a few weeks later to hear Molière's Précieuses Ridicules hissed by the same mob believing that it was Henrietta Maréchal.
Reading this play to-day one can see that its novelties must have provoked hostility, though such critics as Jules Janin, Gautier, Sarcey, Uhlbach, Nestor Roqueplan, Paul de Saint-Victor, and others wrote impartial and enthusiastic criticisms. The middle-aged woman who loves a young man was not pleasing upon the boards, and her daughter's death at the pistol of her father caused a shudder; for it was the rank side of adultery exhibited without that pleasing gloze of sentiment so dear to the average Gallic playwright and public. Naturally politics caused the row, for Princess Mathilde had steered the play into the notice of M. Thierry. The speeches are too long and the action moves languidly. Perhaps, after he had surveyed the situation in a calmer mood, Edmond de Goncourt was impelled to write his preface espousing the methods of Meilhac and Halévy. He said, among other acute things, that the avarice in Molière's play, L'Avare, was "l'avarice bouffe" when compared with the powerful and compelling study made by Balzac of Père Grandet.
He also records the cynical remark of a well-known actress who, after listening to the æsthetic blague in a well-known literary group, broke forth with this apostrophe, "Vous êtes jeunes, vous autres, mais le théâtre au fond, mes enfants, c'est l'absinthe du mauvais lieu," and to his dying day Edmond de Goncourt called the theatre a place for the exercises of educated dogs or an exhibition of marionettes spouting their tirades. Between these extremes he thought there was a place where artistic spirit might be displayed in a dignified and beautiful style. But he never found that place, despite his poignant finale, when Henrietta declares that her mother's lover is her own.
Contrast this effective, if too heroic, dénouement with the cold cynicism of Maurice Donnay in L'Autre Danger, where a pure girl is forced by cruel circumstances to hear her mother's shame published, to learn the awful news that the man she loves is the lover of her mother, and, to cap this assault upon our nerves, the lover is made to marry the wretched girl so as to divert suspicion from the inhuman mother.
In the grip of his dark pessimism Edmond de Goncourt predicted that in fifty years the book would kill the theatre. It was about nine years later that Ernest Renan, according to Octave Uzanne, said one evening in conversation among friends, "Fifty years hence no one will open a book." Both prophecies are likely to come to naught. Bad books, bad plays, we shall always have with us. Life seems too brief for the larger cultivation of beautiful art.
X
DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO
I
ELEONORA DUSE!
When this extraordinary woman first came to New York in January, 1893, she attracted a small band of admirable lunatics who saw her uncritically as a symbol rather than as an actress. Some of us went to fantastic lengths in our devotion. She was Our Lady of Evil, one of Baudelaire's enigmatic women; Mater Malorium, a figure out of De Quincey's opium-stained dreams; she was not only superior to Sarah of the Sardou régime, but the true successor to Rachel. This semi-absurd jumbling of Poe, Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans—what a tremendous Duchess of Malfi we fancied Duse would make!—was not altogether the fabric of fantasy. Nor was personality the strongest asset in her art. She had suffered academic training; she had practised when young all the scales of thumb-rule theatricalism; she had played Cosette when a child and knew Electra. The apprenticeship then had been exhausting, the thirty-six situations she had by heart, a long race of play actors determined her vocation, and yet she rose superior to all these things, to experiences that would have either crushed or made mechanical the average artist. Life with its disillusionments was the sculptor that finally wrought the something precious and strange we recognize in Eleonora Duse.
Without especial comeliness, without the golden ductile voice of Bernhardt, Duse so drilled her bodily organs that her gestures, angular if executed by another, become potent instruments; her voice, once rather thin, siccant, now gives a soft, surprised speech; and her face is the mirror of her soul. Across it flit the agonies, the joys, of the modern anæmic, overwrought woman. She excels in the delineation of listless, nervous, hysterical, and half-mad souls. She passes easily from the passionate creatures of Dumas and Sardou to the chillier-blooded women of Ibsen and Sudermann, unbalanced and out of tune with their surroundings. Shall we ever forget her reading of Vladimir's letter in Fédora? And yet her assumption of the Russian was a tour-de-force of technic; temperamentally the rôle belongs to the hotter-tongued Bernhardt. With Santuzza, a primitive nature, she accomplished wonders. That miserable, deserted girl, in a lowly Sicilian village, with her qualms of conscience, her nausea, her hunted looks—here was Verga's heroine stripped of all Mascagni's rustling music, the soul showing clear and naked against the sordid background of Cavalleria Rusticana.
The slinking ferocity of Cesarine's entrance into her husband's atelier; the scene with Antonine; the interview of Camille with Armand's father; the gracious gayety of Goldoni's La Locandiera; that hideous battle of an exasperated man and woman before the closed doors in Fernande; Magda's wonderful blush as she meets Kellar, the cold-hearted prig, who ruined her—all these stale situations and well-worn types, Magda being an honourable exception, Duse literally re-created. In them we felt the power of her intellect, the magic of the woman. And she stared tradition in the face by refusing to "make up," unconcealing her own hair and doing nothing to restrict the plasticity of her figure. Now she wears wigs, uses rouge discreetly, for her hair is gray and her face more matured. But her art is broader, though losing none of its former subtlety. There is more weight, more brilliancy, in her action and gesture, and that doubtless prompted some critics to compare her to Sarah Bernhardt. But she is still Eleonora Duse, the woman with the imagination, the glance, and the beautiful hands.
The wisdom of her choice in selecting only D'Annunzio's dramas is not altogether apparent. She will listen to no advice; perhaps she is on a mission; perhaps she wishes to make known everywhere the genius of her young countryman, and to go back with the means to raise upon the border of Lake Albano a great independent theatre, the poet's dream of a dramatic Bayreuth. The D'Annunzio plays are not of the kind that appeal to the larger public. For the student of contemporary drama they are of surpassing interest in their freedom from conventional stage trickery and characterization; La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, are really lyric masterpieces in little, though many will wince at the themes, at their bold development and treatment. When floated on the wings of Richard Wagner's mighty music in Die Walküre, the incestuous loves of Siegmund and Sieglinde are applauded; prose, be it as polished and as sonorous as D'Annunzio's, has not the same privilege as music. So the motto of Catulle Mendès for a playhouse has a point, "Abandon all reality ye who would enter here." And D'Annunzio never falters before harsh reality, as those who have read his romances well know. In each of his plays we assist at the toilette of a woman's soul.
Duse's art, however, covers a multitude of D'Annunzio's morbidities—everything that does not derive from bread and butter, children in arms, politics, dog-shows and gowns, is adjudged morbid by a world that feeds on divorce scandals, crimes of the day, and the diversions of multi-millionnaires. D'Annunzio, who does not pretend to be a mere painter of manners, is given over entirely to the portraying of the primary passions. This Swinburne of Italy became famous in his sixteenth year (he was born in 1864, and his real name is said to be Gaetano Rapagnetto). Since then he has succeeded the poet Carducci in the affections of a certain public, though his poetic ancestry may be easily traced to Shelley, Baudelaire, Carducci, and Stecchetti. From verse he passed to prose, writing in a highly coloured, fluid style a group of novels called The Romances of the Rose, Lily, and Pomegranate. The Triumph of Death is the best known to English and American readers, though Fuoco—The Flame of Life—set wagging the tongues of the curious by its carefully exposed portraits of a celebrated Italian actress and D'Annunzio himself. In that astonishing performance, the taste of which can be hardly gauged by any but Latin standards, one of the D'Annunzio plays—The Dead City—is set forth in detail. Whether the betrayal of a woman's soul—for D'Annunzio is a true soul-hunter—was made with the concurrence of the subject, no one seems to know. Of the psychologic value of the study there can be but one opinion. It is unique, it is painful, it is appallingly true. D'Annunzio now enjoys a European reputation. His art, despite its exquisite workmanship, is still a gallery of echoes. He has absorbed all contemporary culture, and so chiselled is his prose that he has been called "the Italian Flaubert." A profound student of the classics, he is rich in his scholarly allusions. The late Pope is said to have delighted in the melodious thunder-pool of his style. From Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maeterlinck, Tolstoy, and Dostoïevsky he has absorbed much; while he evidently knows the English classics. Some of his dramatic figures seem to have stepped out of John Webster or John Ford's pages. In his short tales, Novelle della Pescara, he has utilized a number of De Maupassant's themes, in an individual manner; but the assimilation is complete. Compare La Ficelle and Foire de Candea—the transposition of character and place are most deftly accomplished, as a writer in the Mercure de France has shown. That D'Annunzio has chosen to depict decadent men and women, and all bristling with vitality, is his personal idiosyncrasy. His chief defect is an absolute lack of humour, and this, coupled with the tropical quality of his art, causes a certain monotony—we breathe a dense, languorous atmosphere. Human interest in the daily sense of the phrase is often absent. He loves nature. He describes her lovingly. His formal sense is exquisite; yet too much literature often kills the humanity of his characters. And he is always more lyric than dramatic.