by S. T. Joshi
Blank verse again. To wit, in “Sherwood,” by Alfred Noyes, the English poet, a suave and workmanlike rendering of the familiar story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, with the addition of a fairy element. Suave and workmanlike—but not glowing, not gorgeous, seldom inspired. Save, indeed, in his lyrics and in occasional passages of exhortation and soliloquy, Mr. Noyes shows little of that prodigality of language, that luscious word music, that arresting unexpectedness which we associate, bearing the Elizabethans in mind, with dramatic blank verse. Too often it is mere prose that he writes—prose deft and graceful, but still mere prose. That charge cannot lie against Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, author of “Alcestis,” for here a constant novelty and ingenuity of epithet are visible. Mrs. Wagstaff, in truth, sometimes goes to the opposite extreme and her adjectives run riot. But her little play, it must be confessed, has a considerable dignity nevertheless. That same quality is uppermost in “The Wife of Marobius,” by Max Ehrmann, a metrical fragment showing faint suggestions of “Hedda Gabler,” for its protagonist is a wife oppressed by the laws of physiology and its end is melodrama. Mr. Ehrmann has an acute ear; his verse is full of those subtle rhythms which lie deeper than the cæsuras of the pedants. Finally comes Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, with a group of seventeen one-act plays in irregular and rhymeless verse. Their collective title is “Daily Bread,” and they present grim pictures of the lives of the poor. Not much poetry here, nor even, in the conventional sense, much drama; but all the same the dusk of tragedy is in them, and the reader who reads one will probably read all—and then be a long time forgetting them.
So goes space—and five plays remain. Or rather, two plays and three books of plays. One of the first is Paul Wilstach’s effective stage version of Anatole France’s “Thaïs,” lately a rival to Massenet’s opera in popular favor. The other is the late Leo Tolstoi’s posthumous tragedy, “The Living Corpse,” a piece somewhat old-fashioned in structure but still touched with fire. Feodor Yasilyevich Protasov, at odds with his wife, resolves to set her free, and so he goes through the mummery of a pretended suicide. The wife thereupon marries an old lover, and Feodor departs with a gipsy woman. Later on the deception is discovered, the police take to the trail of all concerned, and Feodor, to make an end of the scandal, commits suicide in earnest. The three collections of plays are “Plays of Protest,” by Upton Sinclair; “Three Farces,” by Arnold Bennett, and “Embers,” by George Middleton. Mr. Middleton’s pieces are one-acters—somber little things without much action, but showing serious purpose and a considerable technical facility. Mr. Bennett’s are drawing room extravagances in the Gilbert manner. Mr. Sinclair’s are longer—and far less diverting.
Synge and Others
The curse of popularity lingers like a pall over Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski and John Millington Synge, ready to swoop down at any minute, like the Pharaonic chicken (Neophron percnopterus) of Holy Writ, and bear them off to the department stores and the quartered oak bookcases. A metaphor perhaps of lamen-table heterogeneity, but none the less you gather the idea behind it, and, let me hope, perceive the danger.
It would never do for Conrad, for one, to reach and inflame the vulgar, for the reason that the vulgar would at once translate his True Romance into shoddy romance, just as they translated Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” into a suffragist tract and “Huckleberry Finn” into bad Oliver Optic.1 Imagine “Lord Jim” illustrated by the Cruikshanks of the best sellers, with Jim stretching seven feet three inches into the blue, and wearing patent leather slippers in the midst of the Bornese jungle! Imagine “Heart of Darkness” done into a drama of fustian by some literary demi-mondain—and Kurtz carried upon the stage by four supers in burnt cork and black undershirts! Imagine the elocutionists of the Chautauquas—may the Fire be hot for them Beyond!—giving readings from “The Nigger of the Narcissus” and “Typhoon”! And yet such scandals impend, for the publishers, awaking from their lewd dreams of new Oppenheims and undiscovered McCutcheons,2 announce extensive second editions of various Conrad tales—and by the same token, Synge appears in an elegant library edition, suitable for the built-in bookcase beside the open fireplace of any Ladies’ Home Journal bungalow in the land.
Four or five years ago, while Synge still lived, the people of his own country tore up their theater seats and threw them at him, and the people of America dismissed him suspiciously, as but one more of the recondite devils praised by James Huneker, that agent of the incomprehensible and immoral. Only in such savage places as Vienna, Munich and Copenhagen was he hailed as artist. But now, as I have said, he appears suddenly in all the panoply of “The Works of—”—four stately and highly respectable volumes, bound in buckram and with uncut leaves—and before long, perhaps, we shall hear that the Ancient Order of Hibernians has forgiven him, and that he has been elevated to the national valhalla, along with Charles Lever and Mr. Dooley.3 Wherefore, and as in duty bound, I pronounce a curse upon the publishers who thus make him so seductive to the newly intellectual, and at the same time offer them my congratulations for doing it so well. They have put into these four volumes not only “The Playboy of the Western World,” “Riders to the Sea” and the other plays of Synge, but also his sketch books of Kerry, Wicklow and the Aran Islands, his scattered poems and some of his translations from the French and Italian, not to mention four fine portraits of him, all in photogravure. In the volume on the Aran Islands the drawings by Jack B. Yeats are reproduced, but Mr. Yeats’s equally excellent illustrations for the Kerry and Wicklow sketches are omitted. Other defects are the absence of an adequate introduction reciting the circumstances of Synge’s strange life and showing his precise relation to the other Neo-Celts, and the lack of a bibliography. But allowing for all this, it is a very satisfactory edition, done soberly and in good taste, and so it should get a welcome, despite its invitation to the Goths and Huns.
Synge made his flash so unexpectedly and so recently, and it was so blinding when it came, that it is difficult, this near to it, to achieve a sound estimate of it and him. Down to 1903 or thereabout he was an obscure intellectual waster, living idly in Paris on four dollars a week or doing hack work for second rate periodicals. No one save a few Irish editors and poets had ever heard of him, and only W. B. Yeats believed that there was anything in him. Even the production of “In the Shadow of the Glen” and “Riders to the Sea” in Dublin (at the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1904, respectively) brought him the notice of only a few specialists in the drama. But when these one-acters were published in a modest shilling pamphlet, in 1905, whispers about him began to go abroad, and when “The Playboy” followed two years later, to the tune of Celtic yelps and cat calls, Synge began to come into his own. That was rather less than six years ago. Today this fantastic and eerie fellow, whose whole published work fills less space than “Vanity Fair” and little more than “Peer Gynt,” is accepted as a genuine genius by all the critics of Christendom, and more than one of them, forgetting Sheridan and Goldsmith and disdaining all lesser men, has called him the greatest dramatist working in English since the age of Elizabeth. Staggering praise, and, to me at least, praise considerably overladen, but nevertheless its very exuberance shows that it has some basis in fact. Synge, in truth, was an artist of extraordinary talents, a dramatist who apparently accomplished with ease what others failed to accomplish by the severest painstaking, a sharp and relentless observer of human character, a contributor of new music to the English tongue—and if he had lived ten years longer, there is no doubt whatever that he would have justified the enthusiasm of some of his least compromising admirers, and taken his secure place beside Marlowe, Scott, Congreve, Coleridge and the other sublime sccond-raters, who are no less venerable because they are not of the true blood royal.
I have spoken of Synge’s apparent ease of manner, but I do not mean thereby that he struck the perfect note by intuition and without effort. As a matter of fact, he was an extremely conscious and conscientious craftsman, and if we had his notebooks we should probably find, a
s we have from Ibsen’s, that much careful toil intervened between his first grappling with an idea and its ultimate incomparable expression. In “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” indeed, there is proof of this, for Synge died before the play got its final touches, and so its dialogue, instead of showing an advance upon that of “Riders to the Sea,” shows an actual retrogression. It lacks the perfect music; one trips, now and then, upon a harsh progression, an awkward cadence. But where Synge exceeded all other dramatists of his time was in his capacity for attaining to that perfect music when he bent his whole endeavor to the task. He was not the inventor of his medium, by any means. You will find the same haunting Irish-English, with its queer enallages and hyperbata, its daring use of ancillary clauses, its homely vocabulary, its richness in idiom, in the plays and fairy tales of Lady Augusta Gregory—and particularly in her Kilkartan Molière—and in the plays, too, of a number of other Neo-Celts, including Lennox Robinson and Seumas O’Kelly. But it was Synge, and Synge alone, who lifted it to consummate beauty, who penetrated to its farthest possibilities, who made it sing like the angels. No man, in truth, ever brought to the writing of English a more sensitive ear, a more certain feeling for color and rhythm. Read “Riders to the Sea” or “The Well of the Saints” or one of the translations from Villon, and you will go drunk with the sheer music of the words, as you go drunk over the Queen Mab speech in “Romeo and Juliet,” or Faustus’s apostrophe to Helen, or the One Hundred and Third Psalm. Here any merely intellectual analysis must needs fail. The appeal is not to the intelligence at all, but to the midriff and the pulses. One feels such stuff more than one ever understands it.
But Synge, it should be said, is not all manner; there is matter in him, too. Translate it into ordinary English and “The Playboy” would still be a well built and effective comedy, with real Irishmen in it and irresistible humor. “Riders to the Sea,” structurally, is an almost perfect piece of craftsmanship. Even “Deirdre,” the least of the plays, is immeasurably better made than Lady Gregory’s “Grania,” or, to come still nearer home, the “Deirdre” of Mr. Yeats. As P. P. Howe points out, in “J. M. Synge: A Critical Study,” the dramatist’s acute sense of form, his instinct for balance, proportions, rhythm, is visible in the way his plots are managed as well as in the way his dialogue burbles and flows. But here it is easy to overestimate him, and Mr. Howe succumbs to the temptation. As dramatic contrivances and even as studies of character his plays have been more than matched by the inventions of other dramatists. Nothing that Synge ever wrote, not “The Playboy” nor “Riders to the Sea,” shows the superb design of Galsworthy’s “Strife,” Strindberg’s “The Father” and Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” and in the delineation of Irish peasant types, for all his wanderings over the countryside, he has nothing to teach to Lady Gregory. It is only as stylist that he leaves all rivals behind him, but here his lead is so great that he really has no rivals at all. He got into words the surge and splendor, the ground bass and overtones, of mighty music. He made prose that had more of Aurora’s light in it than nine-tenths of English poetry.
Gerhart Hauptmann
Obviously, this is Hauptmann’s year. Not only does he enjoy the vast prestige which goes with the award of the Nobel prize—and the princely emolument thereto appertaining—but he has also slowly attained, in a far more seemly and genuine sense, to the position of undisputed first favorite of the German people.
Fifteen years ago, or ten years, or even five years, he had still to share that preëminence with a rival, Hermann Sudermann. All civilized Germans were agreed that Hauptmann and Sudermann were the greatest living dramatists of their country, and the majority of them were willing to substitute “men of letters” for “dramatists,” but further than that there was no amicable lying down together. Sudermann had his partisans and Hauptmann had his partisans, and the more they raged and pleaded and adduced evidence the more they seemed to drift apart. But of late, as I have said, the fortunes of that war have been increasingly with Hauptmann. Such hostile critics as Karl Heinemann, Heinrich Bu lthaupt and our own Dr. Otto Heller1 have been borne down by the sheer weight of growing numbers, and so the dominant note in the German criticism of the moment is that sounded by Friedrich Kummer,2 who sees Hauptmann as “the sturdiest and most fully developed talent” of his generation, and ranks him as the equal, in the protean sweep and virility of his genius, of Ibsen and Strindberg. In brief, these triumphant German enthusiasts, practically unanimous at last, seem determined to beatify and even to canonize their hero, and no doubt they will not rest content until they have bracketed him with Shakespeare and Goethe, just as the advocates of Brahms have bracketed that honest music master with Bach and Beethoven.
At this distance, we may well hold aloof from such excesses of admiration, and particularly from that decrying of Sudermann which accompanies them, but meanwhile we may admit safely that Hauptmann is a master dramatist of a very high order, and perhaps the greatest now living in the world. If he had no out-standing merit save his astonishing versatility, it alone would be sufficient to make him notable, for it has not only led him to make experiments in various widely separated fields, always with considerable success, but it has also inspired him to explore and mark off pastures of his own.
His very first play, “Before Sunrise,” was something new in the world—the first true drama of naturalism, the thing that Zola had tried to write and failed—and it made a splash whose waves are still plainly visible, particularly in the plays of Wedekind, Gorki and Brieux. That was in 1889. Four years later, in 1893, he wrote “The Beaver Coat,” another striking novelty—the first full length drama of un morality. The old drama had inculcated the time-worn platitudes, and the new drama of Ibsen and company had roared against them. But here was a play dealing wholly with morals which yet had no visible moral—the first authentic “slice of life” ever seen on the stage—innocent, artless and meaningless morally, but enormously human and entertaining. And then, having thus proved his capacity for inventing new forms, Hauptmann turned to various older forms, and performed prodigies in nearly all of them.
He wrote a poetical play, “The Sunken Bell,” that set a new standard for German dramatic verse. He wrote a symbolical play, “And Pippa Dances,” that made the murkiest of Ibsen seem crystal clear. He wrote “The Assumption of Hannele,” perhaps the best miracle play ever written. He attempted a stately historical pageant in “Florian Geyer,” and failed by no more than an inch. He challenged Strindberg as a vivisectionist of tottering personality in “Michael Kramer.” He reduced that same enterprise to delicious absurdity in “Colleague Crampton.” He gave dramatic form to an ancient German legend in “Poor Heinrich.” He wrote bitter and unforgettable tragedies of the poor: “The Weavers” and “Rosa Bernd.” He experimented with rollicking Elizabethan farce in “Schluck and Jau,” and added the acid of satire. He returned to the mood of stark naturalism in “Teamster Henschel” and to that of cynical unmorality in “The Red Cock.” He wrote variations upon themes from Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” in “Lonely Lives.” He sneered at the family in “The Festival of Peace,” as Ibsen had sneered at it in “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts.” And finally, as if to pile up proofs of his versatility beyond all cavil, he wrote three or four novels and half a dozen short stories. You must go back to Goethe, in sober truth, before you will find a scrivener with more hands.
And now at last, in the year of his triumph at home, this assiduous and unfailingly interesting Silesian makes his bow in an adequate English translation. Heretofore it has been difficult for the reader with no German to get any understanding of him, for but eight of his plays have been available in English, and of these but four have been in general circulation. I doubt that any American public library, saving perhaps the Library of Congress, could have shown all eight a year ago.
What is more, even the reader familiar with German has been baffled by the dialects of the peasant plays—dialects so outlandish that, in the case of “The Weavers,” Hauptmann had to publish a tr
anslation into High German for his own countrymen. But the difficulties thus apparent in the task of translation have been very bravely tackled and, in large part, successfully overcome, by Ludwig Lewisohn, an almost ideal man for the enterprise, for he was born in Germany and came to manhood in the United States, and has spent a good part of his maturity teaching the German language. In his first volume of “The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann” he gives us four plays—“Before Dawn,” “The Weavers,” “The Beaver Coat” and “The Conflagration” (The Red Cock)—and all of them are in dialect. In the case of “The Weavers,” Mr. Lewisohn has borrowed the familiar translation of Mary Morison, but his versions of the other plays are his own, and it must be said for them that they show unflagging patience and ingenuity.
Not, of course, that they are wholly satisfying. As a matter of fact, the work of turning German dialects into equivalent English dialects not only bristles with difficulties, but even with actual impossibilities. Here and there, indeed, the translator must boldly throw exactness to the winds and descend from translation to paraphrase. Mr. Lewisohn, in such places, has made excellent use of that loose and picturesque English which is in common use throughout the United States, and which is fast developing into a separate American language. Its chief marks are its reduction of the tenses to three and its changes in the inflection of verbs and pronouns, so that “I should have seen,” for example, becomes “I ought to saw,” and “she and I,” in the nominative case, becomes “me and her.” Mr. Lewisohn is not quite as familiar with this American dialect as he might be, but that fault is not wholly his own, for it yet lacks a grammarian, though its grammar, as I hope to show some day, is already rigid, scientific and easily deducible. So far as he goes, however, he goes in the right direction.