Chapter VIII: Act III: , after a climax that simply cuts into your nerves. Father and (3)

In Act II the bellman is upon abed of delirium. He has been found and brought down from the mountains by his friends, the priest and the villagers. His wife and children try to comfort him, but he is oblivious, for he sees in his excited trance the figure of a beautiful girl. Suddenly the dream becomes real. Rautendelein sits at his side and woos him back to health. Startling is the end of this scene. The nymph stands against the wall, her eyes fairly blazing at Heinrich, while his wife crouches at his feet, happy at his restoration to sanity. She does not see his glance fondly fastened on the nymph of the forest.

He then leaves his home and goes up to the heights, where, unhampered, he may exercise the full play of his artistic faculties. He will make a bell and tune it to the laughter of Rautendelein. It shall make silvery music across the hills and valleys, and summon the stray souls of earth to him. He exalts nature to the priest who follows him to reclaim his soul; this third act is really a glorified burst of Nietzscheism. Then he has bad dreams; he is haunted by visions of home, and, after all the splendour of imagery, of his defiance of the conventionalities of life, something mars his life with the perfect woman he has elected to follow.

Appear his two children carrying an urn. "What carry ye?" he demands. "Father, we carry an urn."--"What is in the urn?" "Father, something bitter."--"What is the something bitter?" "Father, our mother's tears."--"Where is your mother?" "Where the water-lilies grow."

Then booms down in the valley, where lies the lake, the sound of a bell; an unearthly tone it has, as if struck by no mortal hand; it is touched by the hand of his dead wife who killed herself to escape her misery. Remorse sets in. He is no longer Balder the god of Spring, but a wretched man, and, driving away with revilings the poor Rautendelein, he descends to the valley, but is driven away, and finally dies in front of the witch's hut; but not before Rautendelein finds him. His last words are an ecstatic appeal to the sun--the sun which is the symbol of his striving.

The charm, the witchery, the magical bitter-sweetness of this dramatic poem are formidable at the close. Heinrich dies of poison, self-administered, while through his filmy eyes there presses the vision of the beloved one. It is, indeed, Rautendelein, but her very shadow. Deserted, dreary, neither maid nor mortal nor nymph, she accepts the love of the hideous, frog-like Nickelman, and goes down to his slimy couch in the well. She emerges only to see her lover dying, and pathetically denies to him that she is Rautendelein. As the curtain falls on his corpse, we catch a glimpse of the girl sadly returning to the well and to her horrible mate in the mud.

Sorma gave a delicious, naïve, and plastic version of the nymph at the Irving Place Theatre in 1897. She possesses an exquisite sensibility. She painted with a light hand the caprice, elfish cunning, and wiles of Rautendelein, and at the close the tragic note was delicately sounded. It was a great, a notable achievement.

Sorma has been called the German Duse. She is really a Silesian by birth, and she is not a Duse. But she has unusual adroitness in the expression of the conventional dramatic symbolism, and an agility in technic and a variety of vocal and facial expression that enable her to assume a wide range of character. A certain briskness and imperious piquancy make her work unlike that of the German stage. She is more Gallic, in reality more Slavic than Gallic. Her person is finely fashioned, her features good, her eyes particularly expressive, and her mask mobile and expressive easily of a mob of elusive emotions. She reaches her climax by a rational crescendo, and never fails to thrill. Altogether a creature of real fire and with an air of distinction. Of the occasional sentimentality of the German stage she is never guilty.

Mr. Meltzer in the preface of his admirable translation tells us "to view the play from the standpoint of the reformer, and you may interpret it as the tale of a dreamer, who, hampered by inevitable conditions, strives to remodel human society. For my part I incline to regard Heinrich the bell-founder as a symbol of Humanity struggling painfully toward the realization of its dream of the ideal truth and joy and light and justice. Rautendelein in this reading stands for Nature, or rather for the freedom and sincerity of Nature, missing a reunion with which Humanity can never hope to reach the supreme truth, and the supreme bliss of which the Sun is the emblem."

The artist _sans_ moral obligations is bound to be a failure, no matter the height or depth of his genius. This has Tennyson sung; and Goethe, in his imperial manner, has set it forth. Symbolic and allegoric The Sunken Bell may signify the conflict of Pagan and Christian, Jew and Greek, Heinrich standing midway between the opposing forces as did Walter Pater's Denys in the mad days at Auxerrois. Miraculously has the poet fixed his wild people of wood and waves. They with their coarse, elemental gestures and foolery might have stepped out of a canvas by Arnold Böcklin. The blank verse is admirable, and while the Faust metre is largely used there are no such lyrics as we find strewn through Goethe's immortal pages. And yet--yet is not Hauptmann Germany's most distinguished dramatist since that master? The admirers of Robert Hamerling and Von Wildenbruch will not have it so--possibly because of the pessimism and the socialistic views of the new man. Nevertheless, Hauptmann has the ear of all Germany to-day.

In Rose Bernd, Hauptmann returns to his beloved Silesians of The Weavers, of Fuhrmann Henschel, of Before Sunrise. His new five-act piece is a drama of the open fields and rough peasant life. It is atmospheric throughout. Its moral fibre is incontestably strong, though the method of presentation may seem unpleasant. The dialect is difficult for the student, the play itself squalid and painful to a degree. Nor has it the inevitable quality of Die Weber or Wagoner Henschel. Rose recalls, though vaguely, something of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, of Hetty Sorrel, and of Gretchen. She is a worker in the harvest fields, and previous to the action of the play has been deceived by Christoph Flamm, the mayor of the district and a jolly landowner who has a paralyzed wife. He is a vital figure; his exuberance, unrepentance, selfishness, and genuine passion for Rose are all minutely indicated. His wife has been a second mother to Rose, who resides with her father, a poor old peasant, a strict pietist. Frau Flamm has lost her only child and lives on her memories. She is wheeled about her house in an invalid's chair. She, too, is alive, and her not unkindly probing of the unfortunate girl's secret brings about some stirring scenes.

Rose is engaged to a young man, a book-binder, who is pious, whose dream was to become a missionary. He is unassuming, ugly, and adores Rose. She might have surmounted her troubles if the disturbing element in the person of Streckmann, the dissipated engineer of the village threshing machine, had not crossed her fate. He has witnessed the interviews of Rose and Flamm, and he scares her by threatening to tell the story to her father and her betrothed. He attempts to capture her for himself, and at last succeeds, as the wretched girl relates in accusing him: "I came to you in terror and anguish. I got on my knees before you. You swore that you would keep my secret. You fell upon me like a bird of prey. I tried to escape ... you committed a crime."

Streckmann later, in drunken fury, tells the peasants of Rose's sins. Her father believes in her, but insists upon an explanation. The miserable creature confesses in a delirious accent that she has just strangled her new-born babe. Her father has her arrested, and her patient lover August, who has forgiven her, lifts the swooning girl and exclaims, "Hat das mädel gelitten!" (What the girl must have suffered!) The play was forbidden the boards in Austria by the Emperor--it was at once too moral and too truthful.

The interpretation at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, which I witnessed, October 2, 1904, was one the memory of which I shall long treasure. The distribution of the rôles was almost faultless; the individual execution of a high order. Rose was enacted by that great artist, Else Lehmann, who portrayed the trying soul states and mental agony of the unfortunate peasant girl with supreme skill. All the more difficult is the character because Hauptmann has resolutely avoided showing us what Rose really thinks. She is reacted upon by her friends and enemies, yet seldom speaks, except in mono-syllables. The illumination of her nature was a peculiar triumph of Lehmann's simple, sincere art.

Next to her artistically stood Hedwig Pauly as the invalid wife who knows the manner of man to whom she is united and divines through feminine intuition and sympathy the sufferings of Rose. The scene wherein the girl is interrogated was tear-compelling. Nor must the open-air incidents be forgotten. Herr Brahm's company played throughout with that fidelity to life, with that utter absence of "acting," which are the very essence of the histrionic art.

Rose Bernd, one is tempted to add, is Hauptmann's masterpiece, if we did not remember Die Weber. It is deeply human, and in its exposition of character a masterpiece.

It seems Hauptmann's fate to be hopelessly misinterpreted--he, the poet whose love for his fellow-beings is become a veritable passion. He began his artistic life as a poet-sculptor, and he has been modelling human souls ever since. Perhaps they may be as imperishable as if they had been carved in marble.

V

PAUL HERVIEU

When Ferdinand Brunetière praises a drama, novel, or poem, it may be inferred that the ethical element predominates. It is, therefore, something of a surprise to find him enthusiastic over Paul Hervieu's latest play, Le Dédale, which met with such a friendly reception at the Théâtre Français, December 19, 1903, the night of its production. It is a work of power, of art, while its moral is not flaunted as on a signboard. The implacably harsh and logical treatment of the woman with two husbands doubtless extorted from M. Brunetière the honour of a patient and lengthy review. Himself a Roman Catholic of the reactionary--one is tempted to employ the old-fashioned word "ultramontane"--type, the French critic could not fail to side with the playwright, though he has not hesitated, after the manner of critics, to read into this problem piece some meanings of his own.

With the advent of the Naquet divorce bill in France the countenance of problem plays underwent a radical change. A ministerial stroke of the pen invalidated Dumas _fils_ and his unhappy women as a theme for dramatic treatment. We have had plays dealing with the unpleasant subject since then, but these were either frankly frivolous like those of Alfred Capus, or wittily cynical with those of Maurice Donnay. The modern master builder of French drama, Henry Becque, wrote L'Enlèvement, in which he presented the question with his accustomed clearness and probity. Hervieu, in Le Dédale, shows the influence of at least one scene of Becque, though he has handled the incident so individually as to deflect its conclusions completely. Since L'Enlèvement there has been no such literary performance as Le Dédale, which proved a labyrinth indeed for its unhappy characters and a masterpiece in form.

The story is a simple one, direct as antique tragedy, and far from being improbable. Divorce in France is a much more complicated matter than in America. Society, notwithstanding its cynical attitude, is not too favourable to divorced men and women, particularly women. The church refuses to sanction separation if it is to be followed by remarriage. Whether forged in heaven or elsewhere, the fetters of wedlock are never to be loosed unless by death. Now Hervieu does not pretend to a sympathy with either society or the church. He does not attempt to win our suffrages for the woman or for the man. His is too judicial an intellect to show partisanship, and he is too superior an artist to turn his play into a moral tract. He dives deeper than the law or society; he dives straight into the human heart, and after setting forth his situations his summing up is irrefragable. From the clash of his warring souls comes his tragedy; the divorce is a mere pretext to set his people in action. The law of the species, that compelling and terrible law, is his weapon, a formidable one in his skilled hands. His thesis, baldly stated, is this: A man and a woman once married are married until death, if there be a child. Let the law supervene, let vagrant passion demolish the social structure, this stark, naked fact remains--the flesh of the child unites the parents in the bond of eternity.

In an earlier play, Les Tenailles, the same idea was present, but is a first attempt compared to this newer work. The story in Le Dédale runs thus: Marianne de Pogis has separated from her husband Max, a handsome, careless _viveur_, for very patent reasons; with her own eyes she witnessed his infidelity, further accentuated by the fact that her friend was an accomplice to his infidelity. The outraged woman takes her son and seeks the protection of her parents. These are called the Villard-Duvals, the father of the old school, tolerant of masculine transgressions; the mother a strict Roman Catholic, who abhors divorce. M. Hervieu has never been so happy in his painting of two such widely dissimilar portraits. Marianne is a proud woman with her father's will and temperament, proud and, unfortunately for her peace of mind, passionate. The inevitable man turns up. He is an admirable character, this Le Breuil--a gentleman, steadfast, honourable above all, patient. He loves Marianne and will not be refused. And she, tired of her claustral existence, tired of her mother's reproaches, at last listens to the pleadings of her suitor. Why not? She argues that her life has been made miserable through no fault of her own. Why not remarry and snatch some happiness from the devourer of all happiness--Time? Her mother refuses to hear of the project. Worse to her would be the remarriage of her daughter than sheer adultery. She has accused Marianne of an unforgiving disposition, and it is only too plain that she still considers her married to her divorced husband. But the father likes his presumptive son-in-law. The man's honesty and fearlessness appeal to him. Marianne, worn out by the continual bickering, marries Guillaume Le Breuil.

In the next act we find them happy. The little son is loved by his stepfather as if he were his own. But a cloud mounts in their sky. The former husband, Max de Pogis, comes with his mother to intercede for a sight of his boy. He is melancholy and depressingly repentant. He married the woman for whom he sold his matrimonial birthright, and is now a widower. In a vividly conceived and expressed scene his mother, a skilful, worldly dame, argues with Marianne that to the father the love of the son belongs. At last, after an exhausting interview in which the hearts of these three humans are shown as if in a blazing light, Marianne consents to her son visiting the château of his father and his grandmother.

And then begins the mischief. The boy is smitten by a dangerous illness. The third act discovers Marianne almost crazed by grief at the home of her former husband. She has nursed the child in company with his father. She only leaves the bedside when the doctor pronounces his patient out of danger. The woman collapses. Max finds her weak, her nerves shattered by the strain. He has touched her hand across the body of their dying child, but not her heart. He makes an impassioned appeal, but is repulsed. She loves her new husband, she says, and has written him at least once every day. The mother of Max also tells the harassed woman of the love she has aroused in her son--a love purified by deep sorrow. At last Marianne retires to the apartment in which she slept the night when Max de Pogis brought her to his château. Max enters. It is a scene that even when read touches the heart. The man is in earnest. He is humble. He tells of his love--a love compared to which the second husband's is nothing. He plays the old variations with a woman's heart--a maternal heart--as the instrument. This music proves dangerous. It sets reverberating familiar chords. The hour is midnight. The father of her son looks into her eyes and points to the mementos of their early love. He clasps her to his breast, and the curtain falls on the subjugation of the woman. The ghost of the past has made her forget the present.

Do not be in haste to condemn her weakness. The dramatist is pitiless enough in his judgment. She goes to her parents', not her husband's home, and half mad with remorse tells--without any attempt to sentimentally varnish her guilt--her mother everything. That lady is not surprised, shocked as she may be. Max, after all, is the husband of Marianne in the sight of God, let legislators decree what they may. It is the triumph of the mother, the triumph of the species Jules Gaultier would call it. The father is told, and he grieves mightily. And Le Breuil, the new husband, what of him! Shuddering, Marianne declares that henceforth for her he no longer exists. She has descended lower than the lowest, but there remains a still deeper gulf of vileness, and into it she will not fall. Le Breuil clamours for admittance. He must know why his wife has not gone to her house. She will not see him. He, the gentle Guillaume, becomes quarrelsome. Then she resolves to meet him. This interview is another masterpiece of observation and dramatic values. He begs for an explanation--he suspects that her nerves have been upset by her visit and by the illness of her son, though he is too tender and chivalric to cast this in her teeth. He is angelic in his behaviour, but to no avail. Some subtle chemistry has transformed the nature of Marianne. She respects, she pities her husband--live with him she cannot. Aroused by her obduracy, Guillaume rushes at her to kiss her. In a blinding flash she sees herself further dishonoured-- and to avoid the shame and desolation of it all she confesses. It is an awful revelation. The unhappy man cannot believe his ears. He is brutal, hysterical, wretched, and finally in a fury throws the woman from him and rushes out to kill the wrecker of his happiness.

Fifth acts are always dangerous. Ibsen's fifth acts are, as a rule, his weakest. The playwright who has the genius of the first act has seldom the genius of the fifth. M. Hervieu's first acts invariably puzzle or offend. No writer has to create a new public with each new play as has this one. The reason is because his themes and their bold, unconventional manipulation set on edge the nerves of his audience.

In his drama, Hervieu is the great serious artist. He never trifles, despite his gift of irony, with his characters; never mocks them--above all, never lets them escape his iron grasp. There is nothing of the _improvisatore_ in him; he has not the romantic passion of George Sand nor Ibsen's spirit of revolt; nor is he a vindicator of social wrongs like M. Brieux. He is a dramatist, perhaps, fathered by the unique Henry Becque, with a vision not unlike Stendhal's. The intensity of this vision, the sincerity of the man, and the utter absence in him of the theatrical wonder-worker have endeared him to M. Brunetière.

Every big play has at least one act that evokes violent discussion. Le Dédale is no exception. Its fifth act is a strain upon our credulity, though sober second thought compels one to accept the dénouement, violent as it is. A duel is inevitable between the two men; the death of either one would be banal; Marianne cannot without violating the proprieties be thrust into the arms of either man; besides, the woman, horrified by her error, an error seemingly thrust upon her by malignant fate, has now conceived an aversion to both Max and Guillaume. Max persecutes her, follows her to her country home, while Guillaume silently tracks him. She meets the latter in an arbour and refuses to live with him again. The injured man encounters Max as that seducer gayly proceeds through the garden. Their meeting is a stirring moment. After a few bitter words Guillaume drags Max over a cliff into a raging stream, where their bodies are swept irrecoverably away. Unconscious of this double tragedy, Marianne is heard calling: "Louis, Louis!" and as the little boy runs in the curtain falls on a mute, touching display of maternal love.

The reading of the play gives the impression of a melodramatic touch in this catastrophe. It seems at first as if the author in despair had solved his problem by a hasty theatrical stroke. As performed by the inimitable Bartet and Le Bargy and Paul Mounet there is only a faint suggestion of the theatric. Like the divorce theme, the tragedy at the close is but an aid to expand M. Hervieu's thesis. Not the inviolability of ecclesiastical marriage, not the dispute of two men for the possession of a woman, but his thesis is the exposition of the truth that a man and a woman are forever linked by that bond of flesh, their child. Otherwise the dramatist holds no brief for heredity or one against divorce. He selected his material like an artist. What would have been the result if Marianne had had a child by her second husband? Probably we should have had no play. We must accept the premises of Hervieu or else avoid challenging his conclusions. In the remotest analysis a drama may be an entity for the crucible of the metaphysician; yet if it be great it will defy the test of logic as does life itself. And there is not only logic in Paul Hervieu's Le Dédale, but life, a great section of throbbing, real life. It is certainly the most significant French play thus far of the new century.

I tested the validity of the foregoing criticism written after reading the play by attending a performance at the Français, Paris, October 20, 1904. Madame Bartet was superb, far exceeding my rather suspicious expectations. Her serenity and dignity in the earlier acts; the maternal anguish, the maternal--literally--passion that caused her defection; the remorse and almost hysterical confession, were all indicated by this mistress of fine nuances. Le Bargy has seldom been better cast, while Paul Mounet was excellent; and I was almost convinced by the finale, though I wish the playwright, taking a hint from Ibsen, had ended on an unresolved cadence. But M. Hervieu is too logical, too Gallic, to treat his audiences thus. He even re-wrote The Enigma so as to make the end clearer.

The Enigma, which London saw in March, 1902, at Wyndham's Theatre, was then called Cæsar's Wife, which is, as Osman Edwards justly remarks, a pompous title.

The English cast of L'Enigme was: Mrs. Tree as Léonore, Fay Davis as Giselle, Fred Kerr as Marquis de Neste, Leonard Boyne as Vivarce. The story is simple, the treatment rather classic: Act I is lengthy, barren of incident, and bitter in its polemical tone; Act II is old-fashioned in its development and climax, yet the last words spoken are distinctly novel and a tremendous indictment of the man who slays the woman on the plea of outraged honour. Here is Dumas's _Tué-là_ reversed with a vengeance. Yet one platitude supplants another. If the brute who kills his wife because she is unfaithful to him is to be succeeded by the lady who deceives her husband because he is unpleasant to her, where does the moral come in? It is a new convention driving out an old. As Hervieu is _féministe_, his sympathy leads him to espouse the cause of the woman. Without wishing to be ungallant, we may ask what is the difference between the woman with a half-dozen lovers and the man with a half-dozen mistresses? In the eyes of the law, in the eyes of religion, none; in the eyes of society a vast deal--if the woman is discovered. Not if the man is; but before a jury-box composed of twelve intelligent men the woman who--as popular parlance has it--"sins" has every chance of being pitied and pardoned. Here the elemental sympathy of the male for the female counts heavily against testimony and judge's charge.

Dumas knew this (if he had lived in America the fact would have been driven home every morning in the newspapers) when he wrote Francillon, especially when he wrote Femme de Claude. _Tué-là_! was his ferocious advice. So M. Hervieu set himself to preach the contrary. In Les Paroles Restent, his first dramatic essay, even in Les Tenailles, and La Loi de l'Homme, the wordiness becomes most monotonous. In The Enigma, we notice the same long-winded discussions à la Dumas as in Princesse Georges, with the _raisonneur_ in the centre of the stage, --in this case Marquis de Neste,--weighing the merits of the various speeches, spouting many himself, altogether turning the expository act into a debating society. In their revolt against the so-called "well-made play," the newer Parisian dramatists have gone to the other extreme.

However, the plot of The Enigma is distinctly worth the telling. Two brothers, noblemen, De Gourgiran by name, are married to two charming women, Léonore and Giselle. Here is a quartet instead of the eternal duo with the triangle hung over the door like a sinister horseshoe presaging ill luck. To this double family are added the elderly Marquis, who is a cousin to the brothers, and a young man, Vivarce by name. He is the unknown quantity of this well-mixed combination. At first the household seems like most happy ones--without anything worthy of chronicling. The brothers are mighty Nimrods, the wives have children to interest them, Vivarce to amuse them, the Marquis to lecture them. Everything goes on oiled wheels until the gamekeeper of the estate tells his masters that poachers are abroad. The fraternal pair resolve on stealing out before daybreak and surprising the rascals. The respective characters of the brothers do not show much diversity; both live to hunt, and incidentally they love their wives better, much better, than their dogs. About this there must be no mistake. Honest, upright, inflexible, hard-hearted, hard-headed persons, they are absolutely lacking in humour. They bore their wives, and if you would tell them this, they would shrug shoulders philosophically and remark that women, especially good wives, were intended to be bored by husbands.

But note their scowling features if that drawing-room animal, the professional lover, is mentioned! Both empty their choicest vials of objurgation and fury upon the luckless beast's head. In fact, a discussion is started about the treatment a man should accord an erring wife. The one rather would shoot such a wife through the heart, the other brother would slay the lover and keep the wife alive and near at hand so that she might be tortured. This cold-blooded proposition arouses the righteous indignation of Giselle, who protests in the name of her sex, in the name of humanity. She becomes so agitated that the Marquis, whose suspicions have been aroused for some time, suspects the lady of carrying on an intrigue with Vivarce. Earlier in the scene he has privately accused Vivarce of betraying one of his hosts' wives, but which one he cannot say.

Now here is where the puzzle comes in and the psychology evaporates. The Marquis, so he relates, while suffering from insomnia, gets up one fine night and sees Vivarce vanishing in the door of the château, which door was opened by a female hand. Whose? Evidently one of the married women. Which one? Ah, that is the enigma! Vivarce feebly admits his shameful behaviour, though he refuses to give the name of the fair sinner. The old nobleman is perplexed. He advises flight. He talks like an ancient uncle from the country, who does not wish to borrow money from his city relatives--that is, he talks sense, and as it dribbles in one ear and out the other of his moonstruck companion, he realizes the futility of his well-meant sermon. Young men will be fools and lunatics--and he might have added, when they are not, heaven help their wives in later years!

Unknown to the others the brothers resolve on lying in wait for the poachers. After some conjugal bantering they retire. Their wives sit up to talk matters over. The door has been barred; it is very close within; Giselle proposes that they open the house. She essays in vain to lift the heavy oaken bar. Leonore tries. She succeeds. The moonlight is mellow without, and the summer night sends pleasant air and odours into the living room. At last the two women prepare for bed. Novels are selected, and with lamps in hand they are leaving the room without thought of the open door. Giselle remembers it and returns. Leonore bids her not to bother--there are no thieves in the neighbourhood. The curtain falls.

Up to this moment there is no way of recognizing the "guilty" woman. Dishonours are about even. Giselle, to be sure, is passionate in her protestations of contempt for the brutality of husbands who take the law into their own hands. But Leonore unbars the door. Giselle recalls the fact that it should not be open, and Leonore tells her not to worry. Which one is it? And before you rush rashly to a conclusion remember that the dramatist knows more than his audience, and that he contrives pitfalls for the unwary. Both women seem guilty, both may be innocent. One of the brothers comes softly into the room; both have agreed not to worry their wives about the poachers. The door is found unbolted. The first comer surmises that his brother has preceded him, but the gamekeeper tells him the door was open. Then the other brother enters. Surprise! But there is no time for this sentiment, as a man steals through the dimly lighted room. After a brief, fierce struggle he is pinioned. A lantern reveals the features of Vivarce. How did he come there? Why did he come out of the women's apartments at this hour in the morning? Hate and destruction are in the air.

His answers are evasive. He is nervous--wanted a cigarette. The lie is cast back in his teeth. And then a woman, holding a candle, rushes in with pale face. It is Leonore. She has been awakened, so she avers, by the shock of voices. Her husband sternly inquires her whereabouts a few moments before. She has an excuse ready. She swears she is not guilty, and even kneels to Vivarce, beseeching him to clear her. It is too much. Her husband plucks her by the arm, and then, as his brother questions her too closely, the man wavers to the side of his wife. Perhaps, after all, it was Giselle. Yes, where is Giselle? The husband of the absent one is swift to defend her. He goes to her room and finds her fast asleep. Aha! says the other woman, and awakens her. Confused by the lights, the accusation, the clash of words, she is the very picture of a guilty woman as she enters in her white night robe, her hair unbound, her features suffused in tears. Besides, did she not make some very audacious speeches earlier in the evening defending the right to love of a woman wearied of her husband? Free love--ah, odious phrase! It damns her at once.

The trouble with a situation of this kind is that the spectator, carried away by his curiosity, forgets all about the play of character, the problem involved. It is The Lady or the Tiger over again, and not so cleverly handled as that little masterpiece, for, as we shall presently see, Hervieu solves the riddle in a very prosaic fashion. A big interrogation point at the end would be the only excuse for a recrudescence of a play of the Dumas sort. When Richard Strauss composed the enigmatic tonalities at the close of his Tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, he did so because he could not logically leave us on a full harmonic close. Since Hervieu did not develop his theme broadly and allowed it to degenerate into the theatric device of guessing the girl, he might have followed Frank Stockton and Richard Strauss--withheld the complete dénouement and sent us home wondering. But his artistic conscience began to operate at the close of Act II, and not daring in Act III, he despatches his young lover out to the dewy morn, there to shoot himself. This suicide cuts the tangle. The sister who quails at the news is the guilty one--a Solomon-like judgment, if ever there was one.

The gunshot rouses the women. Leonore it is who shudders and screams; Giselle is only shocked. The complacent face of her husband at this juncture is a study in selfishness. Leonore's husband throttles her and is pulled off just in time. He bids her live--he knows how to torture; and as the curtain falls the Marquis in the centre of the picture invokes the curse of heaven on a social system that tolerates such hideous cruelty.

It may be seen that the intellectual playwright takes advantage of a situation in Pagliacci or in Catulle Mendès's La Femme de Tabarin; when the lover is being killed or is killed, the grief of the "guilty" wife betrays her secret to the world. It is lacking in novelty, yet a sound situation psychologically. The torture motive is not new.

However, Paul Hervieu's reputation does not stand or fall on this drama any more than it does on his novels, Flirt and L'Armature. Les Paroles Restent has a theme cleverly invented, above all cleverly handled. A man sets in motion a lie about a young girl in society, though he believes it is the truth. Later he meets and loves her. His remorse is great when he discovers that she is innocent. To make reparation (oh, masculine vanity of vanities!) he resolves to confess both his love and his fault. He does so. The woman, Régine de Vesles, is outraged in her pride, in her love, to discover that her secret calumniator is the man she has adored. She parts from him. A duel is precipitated--lugged in by the hair, really--and De Nohan is dangerously wounded. Naturally Régine goes to his bedside and pardons him. They are sure to be happy. Alas! _les paroles restent_, and after De Nohan hears repeated his vile slander he dies. The situations are effective throughout, the character-drawing subtle.

This play is full of melodrama, and, as has been pointed out, contains "several weapons borrowed from the arsenal of the inexhaustible Scribe." Hervieu followed it with Les Tenailles, which was at once a challenge to his critic and a greater play. _Tenailles_ (nippers)--horrible word! Here the author gives us human nature in the raw. A woman is married to a man she does not love. He, it appears, makes no attempt to secure her love. She really loves a famous man, a traveller. She tells her husband so. She will not deceive him, as other feebler women would; she must leave at once. But the husband of Irene Fergan is cool-headed. He asks his wife how she proposes to escape the hateful marriage tie. She must give the law a reason, a motive. Collusion is the only remedy, and he will not enter into any such conspiracy. Then she declares she will run away. Not far, he calmly replies, for there is always the police. No matter what she does, he will not let her go. Bowing her head, the woman submits. The wife is the prisoner of the husband, the woman bond-slave of the man, despite all our gabbling about emancipation and equal rights in this enlightened century.

Ten years pass, when the curtain again rises. There is a child; the home is seemingly a placid one. The little son must be sent to school. Another crisis. There is a terrible duel of words and will. Enraged she cries, "The child is not yours," and then confesses--no, confesses is not the word, rather boasts, that she had a lover, the man she always loved, the traveller. The husband now no longer claims the other's son; he will even grant the divorce. The culmination comes when Irene refuses to be thrust out of doors,--the child has just passed through the room,--she has borne the agony of ten years. They must go hand in hand manacled to the end, let the nippers gall as they will. There is the child. Its future is at stake. "But," the man whimpers, "you are guilty and I am innocent."--"No," she says, "we are only two miserable people, and misery knows none but equals." The answer is like the harsh stroke of a savage alarm bell. It startled all Paris for many months. _Les paroles restent!_

The Law of Man is even more tense and disagreeable than its predecessor. Herein the problem posed is this (for with Hervieu the play is always a problem; like Ibsen he asks questions and seldom answers them, though it may be premised that while he has much of Ibsen's gloom and love for the unusual, he lacks the cold, concentrated logic of the Norwegian): A woman surprises her husband by means of letters, but does not leave him. Her daughter falls in love with the son of the woman who has caused the trouble. Poor wife, poor mother, she is confused at these crossroads of misery. Sacrifice her daughter and appease her vengeance, or--hold her silence for evermore? She prefers the former, and summoning the husband of her own husband's mistress, the father of the young man who seeks the hand of her innocent daughter, she tells the secret. After the first natural rage, this undeceived man, more merciful than the woman, insists on her silence. Two innocent young folk must not have their happiness slain because of their parents' sins. And as it is his right, the selfish and wretched woman must submit. A way is found to make the lovers happy, and the play ends, leaving all sorts of interrogation marks in the air. There are big things in this drama.

La Course du Flambeau played by Réjane with such striking effect is judged by some of Hervieu's admirers as his masterpiece. It is not, though an exceedingly interesting work replete with wisdom and several strong studies of character. Sabine Revel, who sacrifices her mother for the sake of her daughter and is in turn herself sacrificed, illustrates the not uncommon fate of a selfish daughter and a too fond mother. The Greek motto embodied in the title--the passing on of the illuminated torch, according to Lucretius, at the "lampadophories" festival in Athens--is employed by the dramatist as a symbol of the chain of life, the light passed on from one generation to another with the sacrificing of the old by the young which characterizes human existence.

Yet there is no hint of Ibsen in this symbol; Hervieu is a painter of manners, and a psychologist, not a poet. He confessed to me, while graciously submitting to be "interviewed," that Ibsen has had little part in his development. He is a true Frenchman and really derives from Dumas _fils_ in his love of the problem posed; while his cerebral temperament makes him more of a disciple of Stendhal and Becque than of the very emotional, modern Germans and Scandinavians. Yet he has an _emotive_ temperament--a glance at his sympathetic eyes will prove it. He is a man with too large a head for his frame. He feels too deeply to be happy. M. Alfred Binet, in his precise psychological study of the dramatist, describes his sober methods of travail, his slow composition, his philosopher's dislike of the hasty or the improvised, and his fondness for clearly articulated dialogue. He has the logical imagination, he disdains the Zola "human documents" in preparing his story, and while he is by nature an ironist, he is too serious in his outlook on life to play the part of a mystifier. "Irony is the speech of the timid man," he said to me, when we spoke of Becque and his too cynical disciples. An anxious sincerity is the key-note of M. Hervieu's character. He abhors the facile triumphs of the Parisian play-maker who dallies with ignoble themes. A finely attuned intellect, a plentiful sympathy with suffering, a special sensitiveness to the soul feminine, combined with real artistry,--though he despises mere technical dexterity,--all have made Paul Hervieu the present master-psychologist of the French stage.

VI

THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW

I

To my friend, George Bernard Shaw, the Celtic super-man,
critic, novelist, socialist, and preface writer, to whom
the present author--_circa_ 1890--played the part of a
critical finger-post for the everlasting benefit (he
sincerely hopes) of the great American public; and to
whom he now dedicates this particular essay in gratitude
for the rare and stimulating pleasure afforded him by the
Shaw masques, the Shavian philosophy, and also the vivid
remembrance of several personal encounters at London and
Bayreuth.

The announcement that Bernard Shaw, moralist, Fabianite, vegetarian, playwright, critic, Wagnerite, Ibsenite, jester to the cosmos, and the most serious man on the planet, had written a play on the subject of Don Juan did not surprise his admirers. As Nietzsche philosophized with a hammer, so G. B. S. hammers popular myths. If you have read his Cæsar and Cleopatra you will know what I mean. This witty, sarcastic piece is the most daring he has attempted. Some years ago I described the Shaw literary pedigree as--W. S. Gilbert out of Ibsen. His plays are full of modern odds and ends, and in form are anything from the Robertsonian comedy to the Gilbertian extravaganza. They may be called psychical farce, an intellectual _comédie rosse_--for his people are mostly a blackguard crew of lively marionettes all talking pure Shaw-ese. Mr. Shaw has invented a new individual in literature who for want of a better name could be called the _Super-Cad_; he is Nietzsche's Superman turned "bounder"--and sometimes the sex is feminine.

We wonder what sort of drama this remarkable Hibernian would have produced if he had been a flesh-eater. If he is so brilliant on bran, what could he not have accomplished on blood! One thing is certain--at the cosmical banquet where Shaw sits is the head of the table--for him.

When Bernard Shaw told a gaping world that he was only a natural-born mountebank with a cart and a trumpet, a sigh of relief was exhaled in artistic London. So many had been taking him seriously and swallowing his teachings, preachings, and _pronunciamentos_, that to hear the merryman was only shamming, came as a species of liberation from a cruel obsession. Without paying the customary critical toll, Shaw had slipped duty free into England all manners of damnable doctrines. What George Moore attempted in a serious manner George Shaw, a fellow-Irishman, succeeded in accomplishing without the _chorale_ of objurgation, groans, exclamations of horror, and blasts of puritanical cant. Thus Proudhon, Marx, Lassalle, Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, and a lot of free-thinkers in socialism, religion, philosophy, and art, walked unmolested through the pages of critical reviews, while Mr. Moore was almost pilloried for advocating naturalism, while Vizetelly was sent to prison for translating Zola.

After the Shaw criticisms came the novels, then the plays. The prefaces of the latter are literature, and will be remembered with joy when the plays are forgotten. In them the author has distilled the quintessence of Shaw. They will be classics some day, as the Dryden prefaces are classics. Nevertheless, in the plays we find the old Shaw masquerading, this time behind the footlights. He is still the preacher, Fabian debater, socialist, vegetarian, lycanthrope, and normally abnormal man of the early days--though he prides himself on his abnormal normality. Finding that the essay did not reach a wide enough audience, the wily Celt mounts the rostrum and blarneys his listeners something after this manner:--

"Here's my hustings; from here will I teach, preach, and curse the conventions of society. Come all ye who are tired of the property fallacy! There is but one Karl Marx, and I am his living prophet. Shakespeare must go--Ibsen is to rule. Wagner was a Fabianite; the Ring proves it. Come all ye who are heaven-laden with the moralities! I am the living witness for Nietzsche. I will teach children to renounce the love of parents; parents to despise their offspring; husbands to hate their wives; wives to loathe their husbands; and brothers and sisters will raise warring hands after my words have entered their souls. Whatever is is wrong--to alter Pope. The prostitute classes,--I do not balk at the ugly word,--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, journalists, are deceiving you. They speak in divers and lying tongues. I alone possess the prophylactic against the evils of life. Here it is: Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant; and Three Plays for Puritans."

But Shaw only removed another of his innumerable masks. Beware, says Nietzsche, of the autobiographies of great men. He was thinking of Richard Wagner. His warning applies to Bernard Shaw, who is a great comedian and a versatile. He has spoken through so many different masks that the real Shaw is yet to be seen. Perhaps on his death-bed some stray phrase will illuminate with its witty gleam his true soul's nature. He has played tag with this soul so long that some of it has been lost in the game. Irishman born, he is not genial after the Oliver Goldsmith type; he resembles much more closely Dean Swift, minus that man's devouring genius. When will the last mask be lifted--and, awful to relate, will it, when lifted, reveal the secret? A master hypnotist perhaps he may be, illuding the world with the mask idea. And what a comical thing it would be to find him smiling at the end and remarking, "I fooled you, Brethren, didn't I?" In his many rôles one trait has obstinately remained, the trait of irresistible waggery. Yet we sadly suspect it. What if this declaration of charlatanism were but a mask! What if Shaw were really sincere! What if he really meant to be sincere in his various lectures and comedies! What if his assumption of insincerity were sincere! His sincerity insincere! The thought confuses. In one of his plays--The Philanderer--a certain character has five or six natures. Shaw again, _toujours_ Shaw!

Joke of all jokes, I really imagine that Shaw is a sentimentalist in private; and that he has been so sentimental, romantic, in his youth, that an inversion has taken place in his feelings. Swift's hatred of mankind was a species of inverted lyricism; so was Flaubert's; so may be Shaw's. Fancy him secretly weeping over Jane Eyre, or holding a baby in his lap, or--richest of all fancies--occasionally eating sausage and drinking beer! I met him, once upon a time, in Bayreuth. He spoke then in unmeasured terms of its beer drinkers, and added, without the ghost of a smile, that breweries should be converted into insane asylums.

Whether we take him seriously or not, he is a delightful, an entertaining writer. His facile use, with the aid of the various mouthpieces he assumes at will, of the ideas of Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, and Strindberg, fairly dazzles. He despises wit at bottom, using its forms as a medium for the communication of his theories. Art for art's sake is a contradiction to this writer. He must have a sense of beauty, but he never boasts of it; rather does he seem to consider it something naked, almost shameful--something to be hidden away. So his men are always deriding art, though working at it like devils on high pay. This puritanical vein has grown with the years, as it has with Tolstoy. Only Shaw never wasted his youth in riotous living, as did Tolstoy.

He had no money, no opportunities, no taste. A fierce ascetic and a misogynist, he will have no regrets at threescore and ten; no sweet memories of headaches--he is a teetotaller; no heartaches--he is too busy with his books; and no bitter aftertaste for having wronged a fellow-being. Behold, Bernard Shaw is a good man, has led the life of a saint, worked like a hero against terrible odds, and is the kindest-hearted man in London. Now we have reached another mask--the mask of altruism. Nearly all his earnings went to the needy; his was, and is, a practical socialism. He never let his right hand know the extent of his charities, and mark this,--no one else knew of it. Yet good deeds, like murder, will out. His associates ceased deriding the queer clothes, the flannel shirt, and the absence of evening dress; his money was spent on others. So, too, his sawdust menu,--his carrots, cabbage, and brown bread,--it did not cost much, his eating, for his money was needed by poorer folk. So you see what a humbug is this dear old Diogenes, who growls cynically at the human race, abhors sentiment-mongers, and despises conventional government, art, religion, and philosophy. He is an arch-sentimentalist, underneath whose frown are concealed tears of pity. Another mask torn away--Bernard Shaw, philanthropist!

He tells us in the preface to Cashel Byron's Profession--which sounds like the title of a Charles Lever novel--that he had a narrow escape from being a novelist at the age of twenty-six. He still shudders over it. He wrote five novels, three of which we know, to wit: Cashel Byron's Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, Love Among the Artists--hideous and misleading title. Robert Louis Stevenson took a great fancy to Cashel Byron and its stunning eulogies of pugilism. It was even dramatized in this country. With Hazlitt and George Meredith (oh! unforgettable prize-fight in The Amazing Marriage) Mr. Shaw praised the noble art of _sluggerei_. The Unsocial Socialist contains at least one act of a glorious farce comedy. He is Early British in his comedic writing. It is none the less capital fun.

This book or tract--it is hardly a novel--contains among other extraordinary things a eulogy of photography that would delight the soul of a Steichen. Shaw places it far above painting because of its verisimilitude! It also introduces a lot of socialistic talk which is very unconvincing; the psycho-physiologist would really pronounce the author a perfect specimen in full flowering of the saintly anarch. There is a rôle played by a character--Shaw?--? which recalls Leonard Charteris in a later play, The Philanderer. All of his men are modelled off the same block. They are a curious combination of blackguard, philosopher, "bounder," artist, and comedian. His women! Recall Stevenson's dismayed exclamation at the Shaw women! They are creatures who have read Ibsen; are, one is sure, dowdy; but they interest. While you wonder at the strength of their souls, you do not miss the size of their feet. Mr. Shaw refuses to see woman as a heroine. She is sometimes a breeder of sinners, always a chronicler of the smallest kind of small beer, and for fear this sounds like an I ago estimate, he dowers her with an astounding intellectual equipment, and then lets the curious compound work out its own salvation.