Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse—The First Translations—Ibsen acted in London—The Performers and the Public—Encounters between the Critics—Mr. Archer once more—Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the English—Ibsen’s Realism suited to English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life—The Women in his Plays—Ibsen and Mr. Jones—Present and Future Influence of Ibsen—Objections and Obstacles.
“There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive. Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen’s is about to appear.”
It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to one’s youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.
Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen’s published works, his historical and historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent partiality towards The Comedy of Love, and justified it by ingenious translations into verse of his own. He condemned Emperor and Galilean as only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice to the sombre grandeur of Brand and the dazzling fancy of Peer Gynt. In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him somewhat grêle for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist, who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as “a vast and sinister genius”—“a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire.”
Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming the poet’s talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of social and psychological dramas. “The play upon which I am now at work, he wrote,”—it was The Pillars of Society,—“will give the spectator exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life running their course before his eyes.” The stage was to be merely a room, one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of Brand and Peer Gynt not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his destiny.
In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an English version of Emperor and Galilean; three years later the British Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated The Dolls’ House under the title of Norah, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman’s Rights. Women like to form some concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, “a delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,” small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly, and rarely gesticulates, and that his “self-command amounts to coldness, but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power.” In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of Ibsen’s plays, The Pillars of Society, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine literary sense. To this library Ondine was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877. Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as final in some respects.
It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen’s fame and influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon performances, or, as a last resource, as a fin de saison, when there was nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre, which is the Theâtre Libre of London, but which might be called even more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he “does not pay.” Now Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving’s which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success is most real when business is worst.
Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith, passion, and courage, ready to “confess” him, and to endure for him, and with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins, and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.
It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it, from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen’s philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a “Pocket Ibsen” in the pages of Punch; these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who lower the rate of their wages.
Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now into the world of the theatre.
If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague, it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as 1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in Brand, which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort. But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of translations, which are now in everybody’s hands; not only do they convey into English the intense realism of Ibsen’s dialogues, but young authors may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a step or two nearer to life.
Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers of the Star as “Spectator,” and to those of the Speaker by his initials, “A. B. W.” To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, whose articles in the Saturday Review have attracted much notice during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen’s honour.
The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr. Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept—even, at need, to initiate—reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before the Playgoers’ Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the most striking of M. Maeterlinck’s plays. In 1893 he produced a play of Ibsen’s at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was The Enemy of the People. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage, and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one with a piece of Björnson’s. Therein he has set a good example to a greater actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be, the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course, like Charley’s Aunt! One must not expect too much when one has only genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a single one of lucky Mr. Penley’s spectators.
Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what prejudices—religious, philosophical, æsthetic—has it been impeded? To what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist’s art, or to the ideas which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before bringing my study to an end.
I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography; I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer, two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of Carlyle’s last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the livre de raison, in which this soul of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders, it is the real Bible of his race.
Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediæval world of the Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could not long hold up against the force of the current. These archæologists, strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt, of the ancient Vikings,—as brave before the enigmas of thought as they had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.
Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschläger before him and Björnson in his own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen’s historical and semi-legendary dramas than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no nobility and no class distinctions—Norway has been since 1814 very much what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.
In his strange poem, Peer Gynt, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure. Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the rest—grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that of a death agony! Peer Gynt’s old mother is about to meet her end, and she is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart. Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter for admission,—he’s got to let Peer Gynt’s old mammy into Heaven! The old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic, cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the English mind—less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.
Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen’s methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America. Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the public. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is an exception. It is a compromise between the dramatic system of Francillon and that of Hedda Gabler—the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen’s realism. They draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness’s nine dolls produced some tittering in the stalls.[14] In Little Eyolf, if Alfred Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were, at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare. Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world in which we live without ever seeing it,—of what is in it, and beside it, and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing. It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange): In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.
If Ibsen’s art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine, Ibsen’s message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to this race more than to any other.
With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious episode in The Dolls’ House, and which pervades Ghosts, and Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea; does it not find a fit and well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rörland and Pastor Manders these things find expression,—in the former violent, impetuous, fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is well aware that she has both her Rörlands and her Manders. When, too, she is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments, but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial bavard, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote, this Pangloss who would go to the martyr’s stake, but prefers to stop on the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines them and criticises them. “Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a decent stone in the lot!” He has returned from a public meeting with his trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure: “When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be careful not to wear your best pair of breeches.” If these traits are not English, I don’t know what the English character is.
Were I to pass Ibsen’s types in review one by one, I should find it easy to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand, the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lövborg, that noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest endeavour;—these would require no modification or commentary upon the London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of The Dolls’ House, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah’s cry is indefinitely prolonged.
It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: “In democracy will be found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be devoted.” I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.
Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in Ibsen’s dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That joie de vivre, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which in Regina (in Ghosts) takes the form of a cold and marble-like indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naïvely animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in Little Eyolf), who puts her husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which had gone from his heart—to secure the marital attentions which are her due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of the Sound.
I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed, whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of The Master Builder. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration, his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen’s ideas; but he must have reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which conceived Hedda Gabler is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.
As for Mr. Jones, he indeed has followed both the artist and thinker in Ibsen. In speaking of his plays, I omitted designedly the adaptation which he made of A Dolls’ House, in collaboration with Mr. Herman, an Alsatian, resident in London since 1870, who died three years ago. In certain respects the English piece is better constructed than the original, in as much as it rids us of Dr. Rank, who is an excrescence, and of the love-affair of Krogstad and Madame Linden, which is really wanting in common sense. But Mr. Jones, ill advised, I fancy, by a collaborator of rather a timid and commonplace order of mind, shrank from that last scene which may be repellent to some people, but which is really the whole play. For that terrible door which shuts with so inexorable a clang, in the midst of the silence of the night, separating husband and wife perhaps for ever, and leaving Norah to seek her way in the dark and the cold,—symbols of a life of which nothing is known, save that hardships will be met in it,—the authors of Breaking a Butterfly substituted a general reconciliation. They justified the optimistic dénouement by making the husband rise to that act of heroic devotion, which, in the original, Norah declares she hoped for from him. Ibsen did not intend this, and he was right. It is necessary that Norah should look for this sacrifice, and that she should look in vain. Thus the man and the woman maintain their individual characters: the one remains faithful to his practical logic, the other to her romantic conception of life; and if everything does not turn out well, at least everything is true in this most disunited of ménages.
Mr. Jones has been much happier when inspired by Ibsen than when he has translated him. It is, above all, when he is depicting women that he seems to me to be haunted by the memory of the Norwegian’s heroines. It may be said, speaking generally, that a breath of Ibsen has passed through all his works during the last seven or eight years. But his dialogue is too lively, he yields too much to the temptation of turning his wit to account, he is of too gay a temperament, to be a veritable Ibsenite. It is in these respects, indeed, that the divergence begins between the author of Hedda Gabler and his admirers on the other side of the Channel. The English are ready to rail at life, but not to condemn it root and branch; despite an apparent sombreness they know how to enjoy themselves, and they consent to travel only as tourists in that world of Ibsen’s, in which for the few smiling and sunlit spaces, there frown such vast and mournful solitudes, where nothing sings and nothing flowers.
It has been said that Ibsen is the Winter of the North and Björnson its Spring. This Björnson is a strange personality. Intellect and temperament have made a battlefield of his life. Born to write idylls, he has thrown himself heart and soul into the warfare of journalism. He has come under, and even sought, a thousand influences, instead of trying to find himself. The friendly antagonism with Ibsen has done him more harm than good. This connection has made him known to readers in Western Europe, but it has drawn him into channels for which his faculties did not fit him, and have failed to support him. By his faith in the future, and by his confident and combative spirit, he seemed destined to please the English. Long before Ibsen’s name had been even mentioned in London, his Arne and Synnové Solbakken had been read there, two sketches of peasant life which will bear comparison with La Mare au Diable and La Petite Fadette; and the idealist novels he has published during the last ten years became popular with his countrymen only after they had first achieved success in England. But his plays up to the present have made but little show upon the English stage, and he shares only to an infinitesimal degree in the sympathies and antipathies of his illustrious rival.
When Ibsen attacks that class of puritans and hypocrites who turn away their faces when they pass the entrance to a theatre, there is no hesitation about applauding him and imitating him. But when he would shake the whole edifice of society, and when he calls in question all the ideas and customs upon which the edifice is based, the theatre hesitates to follow him, for it feels that a portion of its clientèle, and that the best,—that which has always been constant in its support,—will be startled and alarmed. The theatre is reactionary, and has good reason to be: it is to its commercial interest to range itself alongside privilege and tradition, against change and progress. It is on the side of those who have money in their pockets, and who wish to amuse themselves, for these are the people to whom it opens its doors. These people are indignant when, having come to weep or to laugh, they are made to think; when a man to whom they cannot but listen speaks to them of their rights and their duties, of life and of death, of their most secret thoughts, of what they would fain ignore or forget, and all this with a freedom, an air of authority, a depth the theatre had never known before, the pulpit knows no longer. Here is the key to the exclamations of surprise, the gusts of anger, the broadsides of satire and ridicule, which Ibsen and his devotees have had to face. But one gets used to everything, even to being insulted, and gets even to like it. It is one of the amusements of the decadent. Perhaps some day we shall see Ibsen’s adversaries, fascinated by his genius, follow his barque like the rats that followed the ratwife’s in Little Eyolf, and plunge into the deep waters to the music of his flute.[15]
CHAPTER XIII
G. R. Sims—R. C. Carton—Haddon Chambers—The Independent Theatre and Matinée Performances—The Drama of To-morrow—A “Report of Progress”—The Public and the Actors—Actor-Managers—The Forces that have given Birth to the Contemporary English Drama—Disappearance of the Obstacles to its becoming Modern and National—Conclusion.
I have given an account of the beginnings of the contemporary dramatic movement, have indicated the various influences from within and from without which have affected it, by which it has been stimulated or held back; have analysed what seem to me the most characteristic of those dramas which have already seen the light. There remains nothing then for me to do, except to ascend a tower, as it were, and to scan the horizon, and to foretell, if I can do so, what we may expect from the drama of to-morrow.
There is a group of writers who keep near the confines of drama and melodrama, torn between literary ambition and the very natural wish to earn money. What will they do? Will they be artists or artizans? Will they stoop to the conditions of the trade, or rise to the requirements of the art? There are many of their kind whom Sir Augustus Harris has made away with, and whom we shall never get back.
I can remember the hopes given rise to by Mr. Buchanan. But, as Oronte says in Molière’s Misanthrope—“Belle Philis, on désespère alors qu’on espère toujours.” The case of Mr. G. R. Sims is different. There has been no apostasy with him; he has remained what he always was, and has given what he was bound to give. Story-teller, journalist, or playwright, he is an improviser, who does not aim too high, but who combines with a gift of observation, a certain imaginative faculty and a kind of popular humour, together with a touch of Zolaism. Above all, he is a Cockney, and nothing that belongs to Cockneydom is unknown to him. The only play of the period in which you can really smell the East End, as the maître of Medan would say, is The Lights o’ London, and that perhaps is why all the London managers, one after the other, returned it to Mr. Sims, “with thanks.” The Lights o’ London got produced in the end, however, and had an immense success, but a success that was not to endure. It is not towards realism, as we have seen, that the English stage is making.
Who will take the lead amongst the younger school of dramatists? Who will write the Judahs, The Second Mrs. Tanquerays of to-morrow? Will it be Mr. Louis N. Parker, Mr. Malcolm Watson, or Mr. J. M. Barrie? Or will it be Mr. Carton, author of Liberty Hall (one of the successes of 1893) and of The Squire of Dames, an adaptation, or rather an abridged translation, of L’Ami des femmes, which has been attracting the public to the Criterion? Up to the present, Mr. Carton has shown that he possesses wit and talent, but neither observation nor the inventive faculty. But in the near future he may give proof of both.
Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of his works, The Fatal Card, having crossed the channel? Since then he has written a piece entitled John-a-Dreams, played at the Haymarket in 1894, in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn. Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold’s father, a country clergyman.
“You do not know me, sir,” she says to him (I quote from memory), “but I know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ——. I was with Mrs. Withers then.”
“Oh, indeed,—an excellent person,” he replies; “but it is strange that I did not make your acquaintance.”
“No, it is not strange, really,—do you remember the kind of work she was engaged upon?”
“The redemption of unfortunates, was it not.”
“Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless—you helped her?”
“No,” Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. “No, it was she who helped me.” She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. “They came to my help,” she goes on, “but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later on.”
Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she had made herself an honest woman.
“Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?”
“Certainly, my child,” the old man answers.
“You would still be of the same opinion even though the man were of your own rank, ... were a friend of yours, ... were your son?”
Harold’s father gives a gesture of anguish and horror, of physical recoil and inexpressible confusion. Then he stammers, tries to recover himself, seeks to call to his aid the merciful doctrine of the sacred Book which he has all his life upon his lips, and which he thought he had within his heart. But Kate does not give him time. A gesture has decided her future; she holds herself bound by this instinctive display of a social prejudice which has become his second nature, his second conscience, even to the point of effacing the idea of pardon in him who should be its interpreter and messenger. The title of the play is not misleading, the action being pervaded and, as it were, impregnated by, steeped in, dreaminess. Mr. Haddon Chambers dares to dream in the theatre, and the public seem to me to be ready to keep him company. That anyone should go to the theatre to dream will seem incredible to many Parisians. But we must remember always that the English mind has literary needs, and to a certain point emotional propensities, that are different from ours. We should have in our minds, too, in the place of these theatres of ours so brightly lit, in which the spectacle lies often as much in the boxes and balcony as on the stage, those London theatres, plunged in a semi-obscurity which induces to forgetfulness of oneself and of the ordinary conditions of life. The stage appears like the fabric of a vision. The dull-looking, uninterested faces of the musicians are no longer interposed between us and the scenery. The jingling of a bracelet, a slight rustling of satin, the faint and delicate odour of a rose, the quick breathing of some neighbour who is moved, bring home to us only at moments the presence of other human beings. Perhaps it is the place of all others where one gets furthest away from the thought of reality, where one is readiest to wish for the unlifelike and to love the impossible.
After the writers whom I have named, there are others, and yet others still, whose names the public hardly knows, and at whose manuscripts the managers look askance. The Independent Theatre gave them an opening, but this theatre itself has ceased its existence, beset with difficulties, and there is nothing to suggest that it will come to life again. There remain for them only those matinées in the regular theatres which lend their stage, more or less disinterestedly, for these ephemeral performances in which young actors are to be found interpreting unknown authors to the strangest of publics. The house is full of friends—if it be not empty altogether. A certain number of long-suffering play-lovers attend these tentative representations, sustained by the hope of being the first to discover a talent in process of formation, or a new formula of art: they have come across little up to the present except the gaucherie which feels its way, and the deliberate exaggeration which aims at exciting wonder.
Those who have followed me in this long study of mine, and who have watched the evolution of the English drama through its successive stages, are in a position to see for themselves what advance it has made already during the last thirty years. There is the advance first of all in the taste of the public. The democracy has gone through its course of education; it has “settled,” so to speak, and the dregs have sunk to the bottom. Three classes of spectators have gradually been formed by a process of natural selection. The music halls provide for the feasting of the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.
In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. To the names already mentioned I would add those of some to whom I have not had occasion to refer in these pages, but whom I have often had the pleasure of applauding: Mr. Willard, Mr. Wilson Barrett, and Mr. Forbes Robertson; Mr. Charles Wyndham, whose confident and brilliant style would do honour to the best of our sociétaires of the Rue Richelieu; Mr. Robson, whose gift of humorous naturalness almost made a realistic play out of Liberty Hall; Lionel Brough, who for thirty years has set the stamp of his whimsical originality upon all his rôles; Miss Evelyn Millard, who recalls Mrs. Patrick Campbell without imitating her; and Miss Kate Rorke, who is, on the contrary, her exact opposite, and who incarnates the sweet freshness of pure affection, the innocence which weeps and smiles, just as Mrs. Campbell personifies the love that is disquieting and dangerous; Miss Winifred Emery, an actress of varied and supple talent, capable of depicting caprice no less than virtue and devotion. The list is far from being complete.
There have always been a number of good actors, but what was constantly lacking before the Bancrofts’ time was unison. To-day the ensembles are far better than they were, and they would be better still were it not for that perpetual va-et-vient in the theatrical world which is so injurious to the homogeneity of the various companies.
The art of mise-en-scène did not exist. To-day it not merely exists: it has reached a certain degree of perfection. I am not referring now to the scenic splendours and illusions of Drury Lane, though I have no wish to make light of these, but to that appropriate framing, that scrupulous accuracy in the matter of historical details, no less than in the matter of modern accessories, that living atmosphere, to use Irving’s formula, with which the intelligent stage-manager should clothe the action of the piece. I have already alluded to the Shakspearian revivals at the Lyceum. No one knows better than Mr. Tree, of the Haymarket, how to give us a glimpse of the real world of fashion, and how to bring home to us the poetry underlying the play which he is producing. Mr. Haddon Chambers must have been grateful to him for that yacht which sped so swiftly past the Needles, bathed in the pale radiance of the moon; and for the scenery in the last act which imparted a sense of austere and solemn grandeur to the conclusion of the play. In the same piece, when Harold, after a sleepless night, threw open his window, and we saw the fields lying under their covering of morning mist, and the fresh and joyous sunlight flooded the room, and there came to our ears the song of the awakening birds, the sensation was full of a rare charm, serving as andante to the loftiest feelings.
It would seem that the dramatists have not so much influence in the matter of mise-en-scène as they might wish. But may this not be that for one reason or another their competency, except in the case of some of them, is inferior to their pretensions? It is the custom to abuse the actor-managers, and to point to them as one of the obstacles to the complete development of the drama. It is a domestic quarrel, and there is no good in interfering between husband and wife. It is possible that some actor-managers succumb to the temptation of ordering their parts to measure, and call for even more docility than talent from the young authors whom they employ. It is possible also that the ill-feeling of a dramatist who has had his work refused, or of an actor who has been left in the background, may have done something to exaggerate the evil. Make a study of the author-manager who has to minister to his own personal vanity, to his own literary prepossessions, and to the needs of his own special circle of admirers and sympathisers; the commercially-minded manager for whom questions of art find their answer in the yearly balance-sheet; the worldly, pleasure-seeking manager, amateur de théâtre and to an even greater degree amateur de femmes: you will find that each has his faults, and that these faults are just as bad on the whole as the actor-manager’s.
Another obstacle is the Censorship. I have shown how absurd it is in principle; it is my duty to add that in practice it is not wholly unreasonable, though it relapses into prudishness every now and then. I have read lately a moving drama, from the pen of Mr. William Heinemann, the celebrated publisher whose enterprising spirit is well known in the world of literature, and who has it in him to make no less a mark in the world of the theatre. The Censorship would not sanction The First Step: this piece might have made it known to Londoners that there are couples in their great city whom the registrar has not united and whom the clergyman has not blessed, men of good position who get drunk and beat their mistresses, young girls who leave home in the morning and don’t return at night. The Censorship thought it better to spare them this revelation.
But such instances are rare. The Censorship is changing bit by bit, like the beefeaters of the Tower, who replaced their hose by breeches some years ago without warning. These breeches do not go, I am aware, with the hood, doublet, and halbert, but this is our poor way of imitating nature in her transformations. For the Censorship there is only one way of adapting itself to modern life, and that is to disappear. Disappear it will, but slowly and gradually, confining its action to essential cases; and thus it will drag out its existence yet a little while. When, finally, the time will come to give it its coup-de-grâce, it will be found to have already ceased to breathe.
Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of the national mind, one of the reasons of England’s existence? They are the natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. When they leave it free, their end or its end will be near at hand, and England’s end will be in sight.
We live, not because we choose but because we must. It is thus with the English drama as with everything else. The law that put the dramatic work of foreigners upon the same footing in regard to copyright as their own has made translation and adaptation almost impossible, by reason of the double expense involved. Thenceforward it was necessary for the English dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It was thus the English drama came to life.
The vote of Congress, which in 1890 secured copyright in America for English authors, put an end to the old system of keeping plays in manuscript. Once publication was no longer attended by risk, how could they hold aloof from this new form of success? Accordingly they began to print. But in order to be read, a play should be really written. The drama, then, had to become literary. As yet it is literary only in a moderate degree. I began with the question: Is there a living English drama at the present moment? To be living it is necessary that it should express the ideas and the passions of the time, and to be English it should be a faithful likeness, a complete synthesis of all the elements of the national character. The drama, from various causes, was behind the times. These causes, which I have pointed out and discussed, were:—
1. The timidity resulting from excessive severity of manners.
2. The dramatist’s lack of opportunity for the study of social life.
3. The Shakespeare cult, which paralysed the imagination by offering it a model that was too big for it, and forms that had become antiquated.
These causes have disappeared one after the other. The moral ideal has become enlarged and has given over a wider field to the dramatist. The dramatist himself has learned to know life outside the green-room and the tavern back-parlour. He has studied from nature instead of copying Goldsmith and Sheridan. Shakespeare has never been less imitated, perhaps because he has never been better acted or better understood.
But what prevented the drama from being “English”? It is we French who have prevented it—it is from our drama that the English playwrights have drawn for so long, at first with an indiscriminate eagerness for which there is no parallel, later more modestly and with discernment. At the risk of offending my compatriots, I must here express my absolute conviction that, except in regard to acting, this French influence has been harmful to the English stage. Our dramatists have enriched some London managers; but they have lain for thirty years on top of the English dramatists, and have stifled their originality—and without deriving much profit from this involuntary tyranny. If only they could have taught their pupils the secrets of their trade! But the English were maladroit disciples of Scribe and Sardou, whilst the philosophy of Dumas and Augier remained to them a closed book.
The French influence has come at last to be what it should be. The two theatres, placed upon the same footing, will lend each other from time to time,—now, the idea of a play which, treated differently on either side of the channel, will serve to measure the divergence or resemblance of the two forms of society; now, a complete play which, translated literally, will give to us a perfect representation of London life, or to the Londoners a perfect representation of ours. Meanwhile the English drama, freed from its leading strings, will find its own way for itself. It is capable of doing so unaided, but I think Ibsen’s plays will help it. In this reference to Ibsen my readers may think they see a contradiction in my reasoning. “What!” they will cry. “In order to bring back the English drama to itself again, you say it must be freed from foreign influence, and yet you send it to school to Norway!”
But I have answered this objection by anticipation. I have shown that Ibsen is not a foreigner to England. He seems to have written for Englishmen; he has given them the kind of drama, more or less, that Shakespeare, were he living now, would have given them. I write this sentence, confident that if I am in the world, or, not being in the world, am still read, a score of years hence, no one will be inclined to call me to account for it. To the Northern races, at all events, Ibsen means not a fashion but an era.
What the English drama is in search of, what it is about to create,—with or without Ibsen’s assistance,—is a new form in which to reproduce that dualism which has struck and disconcerted every observer, native or foreign, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Taine. For my part, I have sometimes endeavoured to trace this dualism to the marriage, tempestuous but fruitful, of Saxon and Celt, to the effort, ever vain but never ceasing, of these two refractory elements to fuse and unite. The drama of the sixteenth century came, in a moving and memorable hour, from one of those unions between the young and strong in which there enters something of violence and even of madness. The existing drama is the issue of parents well on in years in a time of gloom and trouble. It is delicate and calls for care. At the same time, it bears resemblances to those who gave it life. A race of heroes who are also buccaneers, a race of poets and shopkeepers, a race fearless of death and devoted to money, calculating but passionate, dreamers yet men of action, capable of the charges of Balaclava and the deal in the Suez shares, cannot possibly find its literary expression either in pure idealism or in realism undiluted. The “bleeding slice of life” awakes in it no appetite; “Art for Art’s sake” leaves it wonderfully indifferent; of moralising, it is tired for the time being: it is passing through a stage of sensuous torpor which is not without charm, and it waits open-eyed and, as it were, hesitatingly before the labour of creating society afresh, of building up a new civilisation. It does not wish, and is not able, to forget those problems—that terrible To-morrow—by which we are everywhere threatened. Hence its sensuousness is tempered, refined, saddened by philosophy. And in this mood, what it asks of the drama is not to be amused, or to be excited, but to be made to think.