The Collected Drama of H L Mencken

by S. T. Joshi

  C. E. Montague is the other critic. He serves the Manchester Guardian, an esteemed public gazette of the English hinterland; and for two or three years past his weekly articles, aided by discriminating editorial shears, have been making their way in the world. Now a few score of them have been recast into sixteen chapters and published as “Dramatic Values,” a slim green book. Here we have a man who has given hard thought to the theater and its problems and has arrived at a number of original and intelligible ideas. His chapter on Shaw, for example, is the most sensible discussion of that wild Irishman that I have ever seen—an estimate which hits the bull’s-eye exactly in the center—a little masterpiece of friendly but straightforward criticism. And his chapters upon Ibsen, Synge, Masefield, Wilde and other dramatists are almost as good. Altogether this Mr. Montague is a critic whose work rises far above the customary newspaper drivel—a student of the current drama whose very first book makes him a respectable competitor of Walkley and Archer. Like Pollard, he is far from solemn, but like Pollard again he has something to say.

  Brieux and Others

  Imagine George Bernard Shaw as a modest man! As well imagine Colonel Roosevelt as a silent man, or the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst1 as an Elk, or Gabriele D’Annunzio as a member of the Society of Christian Endeavor! And yet here is Shaw having his try at that unaccustomed and incredible role, for in the very first sentence of his preface to “Three Plays by Brieux” he says quite distinctly that Eugene Brieux, a Frenchman, is “the most important dramatist west of Russia,” and then he keeps on saying it for nearly fifty sparkling and sapient pages, and before he has ceased you are pretty well convinced that he is right about it, and, what is more surprising, that he is sincere about it.

  Shaw, as everyone must suspect by this time, is acutely aware of his own heft and bulk as a dramatist. He knows perfectly well that he is in the front rank of his trade among us, that he has gone far ahead of Jones and Pinero and the other masters of yesteryear, and that the younger Englishmen who press him hard for tomorrow’s bays do so only because they follow so closely and so carefully in his footsteps. Knowing all this, he openly discusses it and glories in it and gloats over it, and sets himself up as a master of all the arts on the strength of it, and so deafens the world with his pontifical bawling; but when he comes to Brieux a sudden hush falls upon him, and it is in a chastened, self-effacing, and, in consequence, very engaging and persuasive manner that he discourses upon that better man. Here, indeed, is praise from Sir Hubert—three-ply praise that is triply worth having, for it comes, in the first place, from a rival not given to abnegation and mock-modesty, in the second place, from a dramatic technician who knows every secret trick and pitfall of the art, and in the third place, from one of the most acute dramatic critics of our time.

  But why does Shaw think so well of Brieux? Simply because Brieux is the one man in Europe who has dared to carry on to the bitter end, and without the slightest regard for tradition or public prejudice, that revolt against the dramatic conventions which was begun in 1852 by Dumas fils with “La Dame aux Camélias,” and brought to a pitched battle in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen with “A Doll’s House.” What those conventions were you all know, for they are still afflicting our orthodox drama—the “happy” ending, the “love interest,” the knotted hand-kerchief plot, raveled only to be unraveled, the “effective” curtain, the overworking of coincidence, and many another esteemed invention, always more or less artificial, always more or less childish. Upon them all Ibsen pronounced his high curse, battling valiantly for a new drama in actual contact with life: a drama free and fluent, with no set program to hobble and obfuscate it; a drama cut loose at last from the fixed types and situations of the Punch and Judy show. Such was the revolt that enlisted William Archer and his mighty pen and paved the way for Shaw and Galsworthy in England, Hauptmann and Sudermann in Germany, and their followers after them. Such was Ibsenism—not the Ibsenism of the woman’s clubs, of symbolism and balderdash, but the real, the essential Ibsenism.

  But, as Shaw shows, old Ibsen himself, like his German disciples, never quite achieved the thing he set out to do. Always there was a compromise, and the practitioner vetoed the reformer. You will find in every one of the great Norwegian’s plays, from the beginning of the third act of “A Doll’s House” onward, a palpable effort to shake off the old shackles—but you will also hear those old shackles rattling. In “Hedda Gabler” Sardoodledom actually triumphs, and the end is old-fashioned fifth act gunplay. In “The Master Builder” and “Ghosts” logic and even common sense are sacrificed to idle tricks of the theater; in “The Wild Duck” and “Rosmersholm,” as in “Hedda Gabler,” there are melodramatic and somewhat incredible suicides; and in “John Gabriel Borkman,” as Shaw wittily puts it, the hero dies of “acute stage tragedy without discoverable lesions.” The trouble with the conventional catastrophes in these plays is not that they strain the imagination, for Ibsen was too skilful a craftsman to overlook any aid to plausibility, however slight, but that they strain the facts. They are not impossible, nor even improbable, but merely untypical. In real life, unfortunately for the orthodox drama, problems are seldom solved with the bare bodkin, else few of us would survive the scandals of our third decade. The tragedy of the Oswald Alvings and Hedda Gablers and Halvard Solnesses we actually see about us is not that they die, but that they live. Instead of ending neatly and picturesquely, with a pistol shot, a dull thud and a sigh of relief, real tragedy staggers on. And it is precisely because Brieux is courageous enough to show it thus staggering on that Shaw places him in the highest place among contemporary dramatists, most of whom think that they have been very devilish when they have gone as far as Ibsen who, as we have seen, always made a discreet surrender to the traditions—save perhaps, in “Little Eyolf”—before his audience began tearing up the chairs.

  That this new drama is more closely in contact with life than the old drama it combats, and in consequence of greater interest and value as a criticism of life, no reflective man will deny, for if the old drama be examined in its most exaggerated form it will be found to be out of touch with life altogether. In such a play as “The Fatal Wedding,”2 for example, the characters are not human beings at all, but merely coiled springs which go off with an impressive jump whenever the dramatist looses them. That sort of thing, unluckily, is just what the average theatergoer, at least in America, wants. He asks of the play manufacturers who serve him not a true picture of life nor a sound interpretation of life, but only a succession of shocks, a constant staccato, a bold and bald harrowing of his simpler emotions. The only sort of interest he can imagine a stage play awakening is that which arises out of conflict—between dastardly villain and pure heroine, honest State’s attorney and rascally trust magnate, Eliza and the blood hounds. A play, to him, is a kind of puzzle or game. He esteems it in proportion to what he calls its “strength,” i.e., in proportion to the complexity of its knots and the violence of its surprises. It is not causes but effects that he seeks, and if only those effects are exciting enough, he is perfectly willing to accept them without any causes at all.

  Luckily for Brieux, and for those who are headed his way, there has arisen of late another and quite different type of theatergoer—one who seeks in the stage play that higher interest he has discovered and learned to esteem in the latter day novel. This new theatergoer—or rather play reader, for the plays he likes best are seldom performed in our theaters—is less interested in the overt act than in the motive behind it, less in the hide-and-seek of hero and villain than in the play of mind upon mind, less in the exhibition of a box of stale tricks than in the gradual revelation and evolution of personality. Just as he prefers “Evelyn Innes”3 to the latest detective story, so he prefers any play by Ibsen to any play by Sardou. It is to this man that Brieux addresses his plays. The chief merit of those plays, as I have said, lies in the fact that they come measurably nearer Ibsen’s goal than the plays written by Ibsen himself, or the plays written by any of his early followers�
�that they are measurably less contaminated by the ancient trickery of the theater—that they exhibit life as Brieux sees it, honestly and vividly and without any interposition of the customary rosy gauze. Brieux may be wrong, but he is at least not consciously wrong. He has tried to tell the truth—not the formal stage truth, but the real truth.

  I am not going to describe the three plays of the present volume in detail, first, because the subjects of two of them would scarcely bear much discussion in a public journal of this our so virtuous republic, and secondly, because one cannot well summarize a plot when there is no plot to summarize. “Maternity,” in a sense, is complementary to Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” as “Ghosts” itself was complementary to “A Doll’s House.” But for Lucie Brignac there is no easy escape, as there is for Nora Helmer, and no obliterating discharge of the lightnings, as there is for Mrs. Alving. Her revolt against the debasing motherhood which confronts her is essentially vain. The tragedy comes to no affecting climax; there is no final tableau with pretty speeches; the problem is not solved when the curtain falls, not because it is inherently insoluble, but simply because we men of earth, busy with lesser things, have not yet paused to solve it. In “The Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont” there is the same absence of a ready formula, a god in the machine, a smug summing-up at the close. The three daughters seek happiness by three paths. One sacrifices all to love—and lives to discover how little love is worth. Another makes a worldly marriage—and pays the bitter penalty. The third vanishes into the dark mists of an enforced spinsterhood. As the curtain falls we see the three of them, each in her separate hell, and each, human-like, yearning for the hells of her sisters.

  Depressing stuff! So it is, but certainly the man who sets out to write tragedies is not to be denounced for making them truly tragic. That is what Brieux accomplishes in these strange and moving plays. Their tragedy is not the tinsel thing of the theater beloved of William Winter, with its tin swords, its bowling on the heath, its black cloaks and wall eyes—all intensely unreal and all as pain-less as a haircut—but the poignant tragedy of every day, the tragedy that every man sees about him in the world, the tragedy he must play out himself. In “Damaged Goods,” the third play, horror is piled upon horror; one must simply run from such scenes if suppers are to be eaten after the performance. And yet—isn’t it all true? And what is more, isn’t it truly important? Who among us, indeed, has not seen “Damaged Goods” played in real life, not once but a score of times? It is, in fact, one of the eternal tragedies of civilization, and if, being weak of stomach, we agree to say nothing about it, then all the more honor to Brieux for forcing it upon us. A dramatist, of course, is not a preacher. It is his business to show the picture, not to point its moral. But there are pictures and pictures—and the greatest are those which, being seen, point their morals themselves.

  An Englishman who, following Shaw, thus follows Brieux, too, is Arnold Bennett, whose sudden fame as a novelist has somewhat obscured his claim to consideration as a dramatist. But perhaps you remember his “Cupid and Commonsense,” printed a year or so ago—a searching, merciless study of the hard-headed, money grubbing Briton—a play with scarcely a trace of the conventional machinery, and yet one which stood before you with the vividness almost of real experience. Now comes another such play, “What the Public Wants,” in which the central (and only important) character is an English publisher of the grosshändler type, a fellow who publishes religious papers and sporting papers, papers for the sheep and papers for the goats, papers yellow and papers lily white—Sir Charles Worgan by name. The whole science of ethics is reduced by Sir Charles to one proposition: give the public whatever it wants. Beyond that he has no morals and can understand no morals. No puling infant, wallowing naked in its nurse’s lap, was ever more innocent of the decencies. In the conventional drama, of course, the fate of that shameless ja-sager4 would be affecting and inevitable. Looking into the leading lady’s violet eyes, he would see there the Better Things of life—and straightway he would become a New Man with all the austere principles of a Methodist bishop. But not in Bennett’s play. When Sir Charles, in its third act, is confronted with the fact that one of his papers is about to print a scandalous article about the family of his mother’s oldest friend, and his fiancée, the widowed Emily Vernon, tries to show him the nastiness of that fact, he can’t, for the life of him, see it. Finally, true enough, he does yield to Emily, but that is only when she abandons argumentation and employs frankly the wheedling of a woman desired. Victorious, she turns from her victory in disgust—and Charles wonders what has come over her and the world. When the curtain blots him out at last he is precisely the same Charles it put before us at the start—brisk, efficient, frank and industrious, but as deficient in ideals as a Zulu or a union musician. The play, in execution as well as in plan, deserves to rank with the best of Shaw, Galsworthy and Barker. The interest is kept up without resort to the old tricks of the theater; the dialogue is lively and natural, and the characters, great and small, show a constant plausibility.

  Of a different kidney is “As a Man Thinks,” by Augustus Thomas, which threw Broadway into ecstasies of admiration when it was presented at the Thirty-ninth Street Theater last year. Here we have a well made parlor melodrama fitted out with platitudes—and Broadway stands speechless, as before a marvel. The hero and chief word spouter is a Jewish physician named Samuel Seelig, apparently Mr. Thomas’s notion of the intelligent Jew, perhaps his attempt to flatter the Jews of Broadway. Let us inspect a sample of the wisdom ladled out by this sage:

  All over this great land thousauds of trains run every day, starting and arriving in punctual agreement, because this is a woman’s world. The great steamships, dependable almost as the sun—a million factories in civilization—the countless looms and lathes of industry—the legions of labor that weave the riches of the world—all—all move by the mainspring of man’s faith in woman—man’s faith!

  I ask you, in all sincerity, could any more vapid balderdash be put into words? And yet that sort of stuff delights the jeweled occupants of the plush chairs and gets columns of praise in the newspapers! And I have not quoted the worst. Seelig, it appears, is very “advanced,” a passionate New Thoughter. He has seen “sick people get well merely through two or three hearty good wishers rooting for them.” He is an accomplished theologian, an interpreter of the divine mysteries. He believes that “most diseases are not physical so much as they are mental or spiritual.” And he is ready with some such profound discovery, some such abysmal banality, at every drop of the hat. The last act, in fact, becomes one long aria for his capacious bagpipes. He fills the stage with his sweet music.

  Let Mr. Thomas have done with such piffle, with such libels upon a race that has made many a genuine contribution to the thought of the world. The drama of ideas is not for him—chiefly, I am forced to conclude, because he has no ideas to put into it. The occult rubbish he dishes up is good enough, of course, to deceive the folk of Broadway, to whom an idea is as strange as an ideal, but when it is subjected to the acid test of reading its puerility at once grows assertive. Mr. Thomas’s true métier is the popular melodrama, a form in which he has won considerable distinction and by reason of very sound workmanship. His “Arizona,” of its elemental sort, was an excellent play. His “Alabama” had merit, too. And people have laughed, while waiting for bedtime, over his farces. But when he essays to be profound the game is one that he doesn’t know how to play, and the spectacle of his inept posturings cannot fail to make the judicious grieve.

  The Terrible Swede

  Run your eye down the stenographic autobiography of Johan August Strindberg, the great Swedish dramatist, in “Wer Ist’s,” the German “Who’s Who,” and you will encounter this:

  Verh: I, 76, m.d. Schauspiel. Siri v. Essen gesch. Wrangel, gesch; II, 93, m.d. Schriftst. Frida Uhl aus Wien, gesch.; III, 01, m.d. Schauspiel. Harriet Bosse aus Stockholm, gesch.

  Which, being clawed into the vulgate, gives news that Strindberg m
arried Siri von Essen, an actress and the divorced wife of one Herr Wangel, in 1876; that he divorced Siri and married Frida Uhl, a lady author “out of Vienna,” in 1893; that he divorced Frida and married Harriet Bosse, of the Stockholm theaters, in 1901; and that he has since divorced Harriet. And which, being revolved a bit in mind, and weighed, as it were, in the psychological scales, points to the origin, perhaps, of the two most salient characteristics of the man, as dramatist and as novelist; the one being his strong tendency to empty his personal experience, without effort at disguise, into his every fable, and the other being his liking for depicting the conjugal relation as a form of combat—not as a combat genial and romantic, of pretty love taps all compact, but as a combat savage and to the death, like that between two bull walruses or a pair of half-starved hyenas. Strindberg, indeed, has lived more stories than even Strindberg could invent, and they have been stories to bulge the eyeball and lift the lanugo on the baldest head.

  The son of a Stockholm barmaid, he has tasted almost every sort of adversity known to man. He failed, in his youth, as teacher, as physician, as actor and as journalist. Coming into the world to the wagging of tongues (for his father, a small shopkeeper, did not marry his mother until a few months before his birth) he moved, until well into middle age, in a fetid atmosphere of scandal. At twenty-six he was hero and villain of a peculiarly nasty divorce case; at thirty-five he faced a term in prison for a gross offense against Swedish prudery. And then came another divorce case, and then another, and then yet another. And in the intervals he more than once went hungry and half-clad, and more than once fled his country to escape his woes, and more than once meditated suicide as the one escape from despair. No wonder his own life bulks so large in his books and plays! And no wonder the dominant tone of those books and plays is a cynicism so appalling that it turns the virtuous liver to water!