Modern drama in Europe, by Storm Jameson

Front matter

CAPTAIN SWING

A Play by Francis Brett Young

Author of ' Marching on Tanga,' etc.;

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE v

A FOREWORD Xlii

Chapter I

The drama of the past fifty years has been a drama of realism. Other tendencies there have been, other ideals. The drama of southern Europe has little in common with the dominant drama of the north : that dominant drama itself has had enemies of its own household. But our dictum, critical truism though it be, holds good of the significant drama of modern Europe. The words dominant, significant, applied to the drama of which Ibsen and Strindberg are the points of highest achievement, require explanation. The history of the drama, as of other literary forms, is one of impulse and reaction, revolt and conservation. And a vital drama must be one which responds to the new needs and ideals of the age, and in responding, re-creates them, setting itself above their evanescence and decay. Only such a drama is significant, and only such is at the same time of to-day and of to-morrow.

For an attempt at the realisation of this dramatic ideal during the years of change in the later half of the last century, it is to northern Europe that we must look. It is the dramatists of France, England, Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia whose work sets itself to express and stride ahead of its time. How far each succeeded and how far failed is for later thought. Sufficient now that in them modern realism is most clearly stated, because in them we find the life and ideals of their age, with its doubt and its faith, its searching and its failure. Should this be all we

i find, then '.they have failed of the highest vision. Not to reflect only, but- to inspire and re-create is their work • ours to- demand at the door of the future whether this present of their making has been worthy its high argument. That they made the attempt is their claim to be held makers of the dominant drama, the drama which marks the period.

This realist art sprang from the needs and from the condition of the age. Its necessity was the eternal necessity for a new ideal to replace one worn-out and barren. It was in the first instance a protest against the most rigid of dramatic tyrannies, that exercised over the most feeble of slaves. The 'well-made' play of Scribe, and later of Sardou, with the pseudopsychology of Dumas fits, held the European stage in the early half of the nineteenth century. In England and Germany its rule approached an absolute monarchy. Tn both countries the Gallic spirit was transmuted into an incredible puerility, sometimes touching that sorriest depth of all, a Teutonic effort after the delicately immoral. Attracted by the mechanistic neatness of their models, the English and German playwrights lacked the skill to equal it. Sardou, a heavy, wearisome Sardou, appears most often. The moral and social discussion which Dumas fits added to Scribe's constructive neatness was for the most part beyond them. But the intricate inanities of Les Pattes de Mouche face us everywhere in the drama of both countries. The servants or friends of the family discuss the chief puppets while the audience listen at the keyhole. In Les Pattes de Mouche Prosper forces the story of his life upon Vanhove — 'Qu'est-ce que vous dites de 9a?' he demands. 'Rien!' Exactly. Wives and maids retreat into bedrooms for the sole purpose of being discovered there. The aside is rampant. Incident upon incident is manufactured to keep up a stupid intrigue amid the babble of the characters. It is neither life nor an illusion of life, neither thought nor its appearance. The strings are pulled, the figures move. In the work of the younger Dumas there is the same want of a vital principle. The machinery is too well-oiled to creak, but it whirs. Here is an appearance of psychological discussion added to the old tricks of aside and soliloquy. The framework is the same. In La Femtne de Claude there are the principal characters with lesser ones to discuss them, to tell them their life-history, to jerk the action towards the little tragedy at the end when one puppet shoots the other. There is some fine writing in this play, on the theme of war and progress, to form a background for the grand study of a woman who kills or dishonours between two smiles, 'une colere de Dieu.' We must needs accept the statement on the word of her friends and enemies: she, like them, moves on wires, and like them has no character save the one in which she is dressed.

Such was the drama which formed a model for the youthful playwright in the mid-nineteenth century. Order characterised it. Dumas ft Is had a passion for tidiness. No puppet was ever on the stage when he was not wanted : the discussion, the morality, the social ethics, were never allowed to border on a philosophy of life. Life requires more than the mere technical skill of a Scribe, more than the indignations of a Dumas fils to subdue it to dramatic form. They overcame the difficulty by excluding life from their plays.

England

Let us see how it fared with their imitators. It is ill work to gibbet the pitiful ghosts of Sir Arthur Pinero's past. A scientific impersonality must save us. In 1880, one year before Ghosts increased his countrymen's hatred of Ibsen, appeared a little play, The Money Spinner. It opens with the entrance of Jules Flaubert, who wanders round his victim's dining-room, soliloquising in a villainous manner, and disappears. From the asides muttered over his letters we learn that Harold Boycott has 'borrowed' his firm's money : when he leaves the room the conversation continues crab-wise : —

Flaubert, returned (aside) : To shave ! That means a razor. I hate razors. Three times in my life I have been frustrated by a razor. It is such a sudden temptation.

Millicent (aside) : What sort of a man is Harold's new friend, I wonder?

Flaubert (aside) : Something tells me I am being looked at. How curious women are.

When Millicent realises Harold's financial confusion she has a magnificent idea. Before her marriage she was a decoy at her father's gambling-house in Paris, and by a happy chance here are her father and Dolly, her sister, come to visit her in Rouen. With them is a rich Scotch lord, once in love with Millicent, now with Dolly. She will remember her sleight of hand and cheat her old lover out of ten thousand francs. She plays — ' Why, how your hand trembles ! ' ' It is so warm here.' Then she is found out, weeps, confesses. But happiness does not depend on virtue when one is so pretty as Millicent. There is a touching scene between the sisters. Dolly, jealous, has been listening at the door, but satisfied that there is honour among thieves rushes to embrace her worthy relative. Harold takes ten thousand francs from the man who had just publicly called his wife a cheat, and all is well. In construction the play is crude beyond belief, in its use of the aside, its banality of conception, and an utter absence of probability in the progress of the action. The morality it assumes is incredibly low. Humour is supplied by the drunken stupidity of the scoundrelly old father. Of the characterisation it is impossible to speak. There is none; unless we suppose the author to be supporting the view that women have no morals, but habits only. Apart from this interpretation, which we offer with some hesitation, the characters are so meaningless as to be monsters of stupidity. Of the spiritual worth of the play there is nothing to be said. It is with the technique and the drawing of character, below consideration.

The state of the English stage at the time is sufficiently realised when we remember that with Mr H. A. Jones, Mr Pinero was among the first of the younger playwrights. Turning to Mr Jones, we find a difference of spirit. In construction his early plays are equally crude. A Bed of Roses, written two years after the Money Spinner, relies on the same tricks. The valet babbles of the family and of a casual advertisement in the Agony Column. This he has recognised by the initials to concern Charles Vellacott, erring son, disowned three years before. Dora, the daughter, tells her friend, Amy, the rest of the story. It seems needless, since Amy has always lived with them and was in love with Charles. Further, the resident doctor, George Dalyson, has an occasional pain in his arm, an old wound dating from his rescue of a man in the African war. Ha ! Charles ! The suspense ends when Charles rushes to the arms of a repentant parent and tells of an army surgeon who saved his life. George has been dismissed for making love to Dora; he has resigned her because he cannot tear her from an irascible father, but Charles' arrival saves them both. In matters technical Mr Jones is no apter pupil of his French masters than Mr Pinero. But he is content to write of people he knows. Old

Velacott, tyrannising over his family, insulting his doctor; Dora, the sweet little fool of ancient comedy; Amy, her more robust-minded friend, walk and talk, though sometimes in jerks. There is a gentle humour, and patches of unforced dialogue. That much is all there is to be said in praise. In truth both playwrights are on a level incredibly low. It is the level of the English drama of the time, which stood as low as any in Europe. In construction it was so bad as to seem a feeble joke; it concerned itself solely with people who had neither intellectual nor spiritual worth. It was as far behind its age then as it is now. It can hardly be labelled drama, badly-made, dull, undramatic as it was, with little of observation, save in the work of Mr Jones, and with nothing to lift it above the level of the most commonplace of bad novels.

Germany

The English stage had probably sunk lower than that in the other countries of northern Europe. In Germany, Hebbel, Freytag, Anzengruber were writing when Knowles, Lytton, Taylor, and Robertson in England had dragged the drama into such inanity that the early work of Mr H. A. Jones is good by comparison. In the years after 1830 a group of German playwrights gathered round Laube and Gutzkow struggled after Victor Hugo : their efforts ended in exaggeration of character, together with a dependence on intrigue after the fashion of Scribe. After them came Hebbel, thinker and artist, whose studies of character will not yet pass from their high place in the German drama, and Anzengruber, whose work is of no importance save in his peasant dramas. Here he writes of a folk he knew, and achieves both force and a shadowed beauty. But Hebbel's depths of psychology are apt to be turgid, and tainted with the raisonneur spirit, and Anzengruber's drama is specialised. In spite of their existence the German stage stood little higher than the English. Their work was not popular; the German audience preferred the middle-class comedy which did not trouble it with high ethical argument, but assumed a morality of the middle-classes neither inspiring nor productive. As the century passed into the seventies, the influence of Sardou and Dumas fits dominated. The playwrights who held the stage were the writers of bourgeois comedy, Moser and Blumenthal, and slavish copyists of France after the manner of Lindau. Perhaps somewhat more promise showed in Germany than in England. Hebbel and Anzengruber existed, if their age did not recognise them : for some years after 1874 the Meiningers kept alive in Germany an ideal of the theatre which is coming to its own now in the work of Max Reinhardt and in various Art Theatres : in 1876 the first Bayreuth performance suggested a rhythmical unity still to be realised on the stage. But on the other hand, the German Gallophile has a heaviness the English playwright lacks, and in his attempts at immorality flounders even more painfully. Of the drama of northern Europe little more can be said. There was no goodness in it. The lack of master dramatists, and the spiritual depression which lay on it during the early and middle years of the century, gave France her supremacy. She could offer a model of wonderful ingenuity and neatness, and she forced it on the enfeebled drama of the rest of Europe. In the far north, in Norway, the master dramatist was already writing, but even in 1877, in the Pillars of Society, Ibsen was half beneath the spell of a French technique. There is one exception to be made before the drama of northern Europe is left in its obscurity. Russian drama has a characteristic m.d.e. 7 c which it shared with none at the time, a recognition of the interest and importance of life, and a philosophy of life. It must be treated with respect, and we remove it from the company of the Blumenthals, Lindaus, Pineros, and the rest.

Spain and Italy

So much for the drama of the North. The drama of the South, though decadent, is something more inspiriting. Dying national traditions struggled against external faction; the romantic fireworks of 1830 and the later glitter of Dumas and Sardou passed in turn across a stage round which was still the glamour of the past. In the two countries to which we look, the past stood for differing ideals : they share only the one characteristic, an acceptance of life itself which is as far removed from the Russian probing into its value, as from the Teutonic absorption in its conditions. So far as their external history goes, both dramas passed through somewhat the same ordeal. In Spain, with the banishment of most literary men during Ferdinand's reign, came the severest shock to the tradition of Calderon, already reduced to a cut-and-dry formula. Less than twenty years later the liberal success of 1832 provided the outlet for a feverish energy of literary life. Byron, Chateaubriand, and Sir Walter Scott inspired it; the literary clubs of Madrid excited it, and the Duque de Rivas' Don Alvaro swept it on to the stage. The vivid effect-seeking of the latter-day romantic style accorded with elements in the Spanish genius, but it brought the drama nothing. There was, in the first place, an attempt by Zorilla and the Court dramatists to revive the tradition of Calderon. It failed utterly. Then came a following of the French society drama. But in Spain there is nothing like the long period of imitated Sardou and Dumas fits through which the drama of northern Europe passed. The didactic preoccupation of the latter is foreign to her spirit; her nearest approach to him is in the work of Breton de los Herreros, whose comedies join discursive ethics to a well-bred society and an easy wit. Her tradition of realism in the picaresque novel leavened even her imitation of Sardou ; moreover, he could teach Spanish dramatists nothing in imaginative intrigue, and they were little inclined to learn a mechanical neatness.

Indeed, the Spanish drama of the time suffered more from inanition than from helpless submission to the French dominion. Cross currents of literary influence, and the instability of society, worked with the depression following Calderon's systematisation of Lope de Vega to make the Spanish stage a battleground for any influence. French romanticism, French drame sociale, remembered traditions, have all their place; and Spanish drama shared in the general feebleness of European drama without sharing in its monotony.

The Italian drama followed the lines of the Spanish with some points of difference. Her dramatic tradition was not the same. In Spain it was the tradition of a robust romanticism, deifying personal honour, holding fast a vision of life's thousand aspects seen through a glory of imaginative fantasy. In Italy her highest ideal is an ideal which tolerates the opiates of the romantic as little as the copyist's vision of reality. The tradition of her drama is a classic tradition; a character of nobility and of great spiritual worth developing in conflict with an action, nervous, restrained, momentous. It is, moreover, an art of dramatic moments. The concentration of the dramatic energy sweeps the action to them : the intrinsic beauty of the language heightens their force. A dangerous heritage if the heir should lack the conscious restraint of strength. In the hands of such an one, the ' moments ' are not born of the conflict at the point of its supreme intensity. They become theatrical sensations, and the music of the language a cloak round a lay figure. The true Reality, which is the artist's interpretation of life, is lost beneath that false ideal of reality in L'Assommoir or La Faustin. Restraint departs when the dramatist turns to sensation for its own sake. It becomes unnecessary, since there is nothing worth restraining. Hence the method of the latest heir, of D'Annunzio, is fatal to the spirit of his art, though he wrap the body in cloth of Paradise.

To this latest betrayal the Italian drama was passing while the drama of northern Europe modelled its little wooden dolls. As in Spain, its course during this time was conditioned by social confusion. There was no united national ideal; religion was dying in sterile formalism; the people were waking to passionate revolt against their misery. The high hopes, the Risorgimento of the Garibaldian liberation, of Mazzini's gospel of freedom, were dead. Every fresh hope brought an illusion of literary revival, and as the hope died, so died the illusion, until one of Italy's greatest modern critics could write — 'In all that makes literature my country has grown feeble and weary, and grows more so with every year.' Cossa lived until 1881, and after his historical plays and Cavallotti's mangled Grecian themes came the imitation of French models. The Italians are intolerant of the instruction play. They forgave Cossa his little dramatic worth for his sonority of words. In the same spirit, their following of France took the form of ' clotted nonsense ' after the style of a debased Hugo; or elaborated the intrigue interest of Sardou and Dumas, ignoring for the most part the latter's philosophical trifling. This they did, in common with Spain, not solely from incapacity, as did the dramatists of the north, but from disdain.

But in the drama of both north and south at the time there was no life, and in their weariness of spirit they turned to whatever master was bold enough to have a serviceable formula. In England and Germany the imitation of the French drama was in effect a feeble endeavour to write of English life in the style of the French society drama : on the southern stage, the Gallic spirit blended with the decay of national traditions in literature and in life, to form a dramatic art unworthy of the past and sterile for the future. In such humiliating paths the European drama moved during the first part of the later nineteenth century. So arose the need of revolt, and as ever with the need, came the movement.

It becomes important now to understand those conditions of the age which moulded the form of that movement. It was an age seeking after strange gods. Science became a deity to one half the world, a wanton destroyer to the other. By the mouths of those who ignorantly worshipped, a philosophy of materialism triumphed, in a form more blatant than ever before, the way made easy for it by the genius of Huxley in the polemics which occupied him after 1880. In its train came those who feared or hated it; blind graspers at mysticism, or pessimists who said the gods were dead, and despaired, or accepted the new role with a self-conscious knowledge of its impressiveness. Whatever the value and need of the new doctrine, its first effect on art was to debase it. It depreciated life itself, displaying it as primarily a struggle for existence; insisted on adaptive submission to artificial environment, and preached an optimism which was as unjustifiable as it was blatant and unsatisfying. The art of the drama is the first to be degraded by a depreciation of life. Accordingly we find the acting drama of the period stupid commonplace, or clamorous melodrama.

But before the triumph of science, a change had already begun. It manifested itself in crude individualism of the Manchester school, and more subtly in what may be called a socialisation of the religious belief in the equality of human souls. With the theological validity of the belief we are not concerned : its dramatic validity concerns us mightily. It is responsible for half the misvaluation of dramatic values that has flooded our theatres with third-rate plays of third-rate people. Dramatically speaking, souls are not equal. Great plays cannot be written of little souls. ' Sublimity,' said Longinus, the master, ' is the echo of a great soul. . . . For it is not possible that men with mean and servile ideas and aims prevailing throughout their lives should produce anything worthy of immortality.' Mr Galsworthy's Justice is not a great tragedy, for Falder is a feeble soul. Sudermann's Heimat is commonplace because Magda is a poseur. D'Annunzio's Sogno d'un tramonto d'Autumno is glorious melodrama because Pantea is just the usual type of beautiful harlot. The life and death of little folk do not make a drama which inspires by the realisation of a fuller life. They may make excellent comedy of the Barrie order, or provide pegs for M. Brieux. They do not fulfil the essential of great drama, that it should perfect life, making human existence an inspiration, and not a wail or a bad joke. The dramatist works in lives and souls. If the life he present be only a picture stolen from the world around him, with nothing of his own power to interpret, it follows that it is feeble, a copy of less value than the original. His drama must be instinct with the spirit of life or become a little less than the cinematograph. If the life in which he works be ugly, that is to say, if it revel in the degenerate, if it assume life to be valueless, if it be a copy of degraded conditions, then again it is a drama of weakness and must perish of inanition. If his people move in a society which has lost belief in the beauty or worth of life, and do not struggle against such degradation, they cannot produce anything but a lower order of drama. A mechanistic conception of life destroys the highest dramatic action; the doctrine of equality degrades dramatic characterisation. For individualism, when it steps down from its place as a philosophic conception, and becomes a social faith, is measured in terms of material power. It was before Huxley had done his work as populariser of Darwin that Arnold could say : ■ The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us.'

The scientific philosophy and the social philosophy of the day degraded life. They did worse. They destroyed faith. Human aspiration lost its value when the doctrine of the survival of the fittest was allied to a belief that evil tends to disappear, and that adaption to an artificial environment is the duty of a race. Under such conditions of life, the drama might develop on two lines. It might resolve to take life as it appeared to be, to accept its law of cause and effect as the limit of action, and to deal in 'the facts of life' without any attempt to correlate or to give them higher significance. This it might do in a spirit of despair — pessimistic drama; in a spirit of impersonal interest — the realist drama of which The Silver Box is the type; in reforming mood --after the fashion of Mr Shaw and M. Brieux; or with intent to exploit 'real life' for dramatic purposes. Under this head fall Sudermann and Mr Granville

Barker, and how many more. The second line of dramatic development would turn aside from a hard acceptance of these 'facts of life/ and seek to hide them, without attempting to deny their validity as 'truth.' Dramatists of the latter order would deal in romance, or find fictitious resignation in a mystical puppet-show.

Both these lines were followed. By far the greater number of dramatists followed the first, and even those who rebelled against it were compelled to take count of its view of life. Hence the romance becomes a matter of painted masks, or the dreams of a sick man; and the mysticism deals in the shadows of shadows. To know, to deal in facts — this was the dominant note of the dramatic change. Of necessity it was most loud in the north, where the scientific and social philosophies pressed deeper into the life of the people. Hence it is towards the south that we look for the revolt of the romantic; and in the rebels of the north that the pseudo-mystical element predominates. Modern 'mysticism' requires the less energy; any sense of the fullness of life would inconvenience it.

The determination to get at the facts, to show up life for the failure it was, came first in the dramatic revolt against the society drama. It was the stronger element, and more important than its fellow, though both were born of the same need and the same conditions. The desire tg know, as an artistic impulse, is productive : the desire to evade is not. Hence the strength of the dramatic impulse given by Zola, the de Goncourts and their group : and the unproductive nature of such work as Maeterlinck's, and as D'Annunzio's. Maeterlinck's work has given little to drama : the plays of D'Annunzio's followers exaggerate his love of violent passions and miss his superlative beauty of language. The Belgian has inspired nothing : the Italian has at least had the power to inspire melodrama.

This dominant drama of realism has had two more or less distinct phases. The first was realised in the group of Parisian playwrights who joined M. Andre Antoine in 1887. An insistence on the lower and more terrible sides of life characterised their artistic ideal; and of all those who followed it, Strindberg is the greatest. The second phase came later when Ibsen gave to realist drama a meaning so wide, and a technique so nearly perfect that he revolutionised its conception. Had there been any to equal or excel him, it might be said that he revolutionised its product. At least, he profoundly altered it.

The First Phase of Realism in the Drama.

As in every movement, so in this, there were charlatans, men who saw the commercial value of plays dealing with crime and misery, and exploited life in the name of dramatic art. But there is no denying that the work of the pioneers was work given as the highest service they could offer to the theatre. In genuine scorn of the society drama they tried to force a recognition of its futility. It seems a general failing that a revolt against t^e atmosphere of the salon, combined with a desire to know life, leads straight to the gutter or the doss-house. So it happened with many of these rebels or the first phase. The literary faith of Zola and his group was to be applied to drama. The theatre must be dragged into line with the life of the day. As in their fiction they approached the ideal of a scientific record Naturalists of facts, thoughts and emotions, so in the drama they would present life, the life of the streets, of the middle-class, of the underworld, without forcing

■ m m, it within the limits of a plot, or attempting pseudopsychological analysis. This is the. movement labelled Naturalism, because it dealt with presumably natural things in a way more or less natural. We need not labour the value of such an effort at such a time. Nothing could have dealt a more effective blow at the output of machine-made plays, than the ruthless contrast between their unreality and the bareness of the facts. Drama, with all literature, received a creative impulse which moved in every country of Europe, and the effect of which still remains. There was a vital principle in the movement. It dealt with a present reality, and so could inspire to artistic creation as a drama of puppets could not. That it dealt with life in a disordered and disunifying way was its weakness. This brought it at the last to incoherence and defeat; but not before its work was done, and the theatre, lagging behind the age, had been brought into touch with its aspirations and its ideals.

Zola himself could not do for drama what he had done for literature. Therese Raquin failed on the stage. It was left for Henri Becque to embody the new theories in two plays. Les Corbeaux was written as early as 1882. It is the story of a manufacturer's widow, surrounded after her husband's death by legal men who defraud her of her fortune. That is all; no witty dialogue, no intricate plot, no love-making. The play is a series of genre pictures, opening with a sketch of the family life of a provincial merchant, neither made a witty impossibility, nor turned to ridicule. The scenes between Mme Vigneron, kindly, incompetent wife of the merchant, and Mme de Saint-Genis, calculating, bonne citoyenne, are natural conversations without sparkle or psychological discussion or paradox. The aside and the monologue have almost disappeared, but there are occasional lapses into the stage trickery of Dumas fils : our first knowledge of the treachery against the widow hangs on M. Teissier's monologue. It is usual to suppose that Becque disdained all constructive art. That is a mistake. There is both dramatic incident and a subtle development of character. Thus, in the first act, the sense of quiet well-being in Vigneron's home is destroyed in a moment by the news of his death. Thereafter the darkness draws down. The loss of their money puts an end to plans for the marriage of one daughter; and broken under the dishonour she sees approaching, she goes mad. Another daughter finds that her dreams of artistic success were silly illusion; and Marie, the third daughter, must save them all by marrying the old banker who has helped to rob them. The artificial intrigue of the popular drama is quite gone. ~"Thffj5tory is tolcMn trie farst act : . the three remaining acts develop it along a_jj trending line. It has little dramatic value, though there is a grimness inThe unslackenmg pressnrp nf Hka^f er. It is not f re^Trom jKjTf aults of the old modej^jand its technique consists ln^tellmg^Ee__stoir^witrxout embellislunent or^^tifice: That The perfection of such a technique wouIdT5e the negation^!oE3r^jQiaas shown byjKi fact that the^tofy, though told plainly^is arrangedrtn such a ^iyTKat~ttle"^rsract gjyftsiis the key "to all the ^nicftfen^ to the subsequent