Chapter X: Act II: is rather thin. In Act III, which recalls a Gilbertian farce, (1)

there are cockney brigands, a bandit corporation, limited, devoted to the robbing of automobiles that pass through Spain. The idea is not sufficiently novel to be funny. A lengthy parabasis, written in genuine Shavian, shows us hell, the Devil, Don Juan, and Anna of Mozartean fame. At least the talk here is as brilliant as is commonly supposed to prevail in the nether regions. _Inter alia,_ we read that marriage is the most licentious of human institutions--hence its popularity. Even the Devil is shocked. "The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error." "Beauty, purity, respectability, religion, art, patriotism, bravery, and the rest are nothing but words which I or any one else can turn inside out like a glove," continues this relentless rake and transformed preacher. Too true; but the seamy side as exhibited by Don Juan Shaw is not so convincing as in Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values. "They are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved."

Admitted, keen dissector of contemporary ills; but how about your play? In effect the author says: "To the devil with all art and plays, my play with the rest! What I wish to do is to tell you how to run the universe; and for this I will, if necessary, erect my pulpit in hell!"

After this what more can be said? The play peters out; there is talk, talk, talk. Ann calls the poetic temperament "the old maid's temperament"; the brigand chief sententiously remarks: "There are two tragedies in life: one is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it"--which sounds as if wrenched from a page of Chamfort or Rivarol; and Ann concludes with "Go on talking, Tanner, talking!" It is the epitaph of the piece, dear little misshapen, still-born comedy. Well may Mr. Shaw write "universal laughter" at the end. Yet I am willing to wager that some critics will be in tears at this exhibition of perverse waste and clever impotency.

The Revolutionists' Handbook and Pocket Companion, which tops this extraordinary contribution, sociology masking as comedy, is its chiefest attraction. There, petrified into glistening nuggets, may be found Shaw philosophy, Shaw humour. There are maxims, too. "Do _not_ unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." This smacks of the inverted wisdom of the late James Whistler. Marriage, crime, punishment, the beating of children, title, honours, property, servants, religion, virtues, vices--everything of vital import to thinking men and women is regarded with the charmingly malevolent eye of Shaw. He exclaims: "Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject." Come, come, Bernard Shaw! Proudhon said it, but the speech was not his own property. You, who know your social classics so well, should have remembered Brissot's Philosophical Examination of Property and Theft, only published in 1780! You also say, "Beware the man whose God is in the skies," and "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." Tut, tut! Why not add--all girls over fifty should be drowned? It is just as logical. But can one condense the cosmos in a formula?

The general impression of the book causes us to believe there is a rift in the writer's lute; not in his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scepticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith to Shaw. Ibsen asserts that after twenty years a truth that has outlived its usefulness is no longer _truth_, but the simulacrum of one. Shaw's truths may be decaying. We feel sure that if they be, he will be the first to detect the odour and warn away his public. Some years ago he printed a pamphlet against anarchy and anarchist, which was to be expected from a mild, frugivorous man. Now he seems to be wearying of the milk-white flag of socialism; and yet his revolutionary maxims are maxims for children in the time of teething. The world has moved since the Fabian society scowled at the British lion and tried to twist its tail with the dialectics of moderate socialism. To use Mr. Shaw's own pregnant remark, "Moderation is never applauded for its own sake"; and: "Hewho can, does. He who cannot, teaches." Fabianism taught, taught moderation! Yet to-day the real thing is not Elisée Reclus, but Michael Bakounin; not Peter Kropotkin, but Sergei Netschajew; not Richard Wagner, but his friend, Roeckel, who was sent by him across the cannon-shattered barricades at Dresden in 1849 to fetch an ice to the thirsty composer. Wagner rang the alarm bells on this opera bouffe and escaped to Switzerland, Bakounin and Roeckel remained and went to prison!

Shaw is still ringing alarm bells, but somehow or other their music is missing and carries no message to his listeners. Is it possible that he regrets the anarchy that he has never had the courage to embrace and avow? A born anarchist, individualist, revolutionist, he has always gone in for half-hearted measures of reform. Never, like Bakounin, has he applied the torch, thrown the bomb; never, like Netschajew, has he dared to pen a catechism of destruction, a manual of nihilism so terrific that advanced Russian thinkers shudder if you mention its title. It is even rumoured that the Irish dramatist serves his parish as a meek citizen should--he will be writing poetry or melodrama next. His pessimism is temperamental, not philosophical, like that of most pessimists, as James Sully has pointed out. And instead of closely observing humanity, after the manner of all great dramatists, he has only closely studied Bernard Shaw.

"Regarded as a play, Man and Superman is, I repeat, primitive in invention and second rate in execution. The most disheartening thing about it is that it contains not one of those scenes of really tense dramatic quality which redeemed the squalor of Mrs. Warren's Profession, and made of Candida something very like a masterpiece." Thus William Archer.

V

Most modestly Mr. Shaw entitles a farce of his, the celebrated drama in two tableaux and in blank verse,--The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Unrewarded. It is nothing else but the story of Cashel Byron's Profession put into blank verse, because, as Mr. Shaw says, blank verse is so much easier to write than good prose. It is printed at the end of the second edition of the prize-fighting novel. As there has been a dramatization made--unauthorized--for a well-known American pugilist-actor, Mr. Shaw thought that he had better protect his English interests. Hence the parody for copyright purposes which was produced in London the summer of 1903 by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre. It is funny. It gibes at Shakespeare, at the modern drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw himself, and almost everything else within reach. The stage setting was a mockery of the Elizabethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing the legend, "A Glade in Wiltstoken Park," etc. Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King carried off the honours. Aubrey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, especially at the close, when he informed his audience that the author had left the house. And so he had. He was standing at the corner when I accosted him. Our interview was brief. He warned me in grave accents and a twinkling Celtic eye never again to describe him as "benevolent." Half the beggars of London had winded the phrase and were pestering him at his back gate. Mr. Shaw still looks as if a half-raw beefsteak and a mug of Bass would do him a world of good. But who can tell? He might then lose some of his effervescence--that quality of humour so happily described by Edmund Gosse when he spoke of the _vegetable_ spirits of George Bernard Shaw.

The new play, John Bull's Other Island, was first played in London by the Stage Society last November. It is said--by Shaw's warmest enemies--to be witty, entertaining, and dramatically boneless. There is no alternative now for Mr. Shaw--he must visit America, lecture, and become rich. It is the logical conclusion of his impromptu career, for it was first in America that the Shaw books and plays were successful and appreciated; the plays largely because of the bold efforts of Arnold Daly and Winchell Smith, two young dramatic revolutionists. And Mr. Shaw may rediscover America for the Americans!

VII

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?