The Collected Drama of H L Mencken

by S. T. Joshi

  But why does he corrupt this excellent American with Briticisms? Why does he spell “wagon” with two “g’s” and turn “jail” into “gaol”? Why, above all, does he transmute marks into shillings? Doesn’t every sane reader know that these plays are about Germans, and that Germans use marks and not shillings? Would he also transmute sauerk raut into soused cabbage—or chou vinaigrette? Or a kommers into a stag party? Or the Münchener Hofbräuhaus into the Munich Court Brewery House?

  Nevertheless, we may well pardon him for his occasional follies in consideration of his copious and benign perspiration over a flabbergasting job. Let it be hoped that he will carry it to completion, and that its fruit will be a better understanding of Hauptmann in this fair land. Nineteen years ago, when the dramatist came among us to help prepare an English performance of his “Hannele” in New York, in Charles Henry Meltzer’s fine translation, the moral spouters and theological hoodlums of the town appealed to the authorities to stop the play. And why? On the ground that it was blasphemous! The greatest of modern miracle plays denounced as blasphemous! What is worse, the politician who was then Mayor of New York lent a hospitable, if somewhat flapping ear to the clamor, and the first performance was actually delayed.3 But when the curtain finally went up, of course, it was quickly seen that the play was entirely reverent and extremely beautiful, and so the campaign of libel and balderdash went for naught. Since then “The Sunken Bell” and one or two other Hauptmann plays have been given in this country, but our osseocaputal managers are still blind to the merits of such pieces as “The Beaver Coat,” “Rosa Bernd,” “Teamster Hensche,” “Before Dawn” and “Michael Kramer.” Perhaps Mr. Lewisohn’s labors will open the way. At any rate, let us so frame our hopes.

  I have no space here to enter upon a discussion of Hauptmann’s dramatic method, more than to say that he clings to naturalism even in the company of heroes and archangels—that he is as hard set against the soliloquy as the Ibsen of the plays after “A Doll’s House,” that he is as exact in his stage directions as Shaw, that he is as innocent of dirty prudery as Wedekind or Brieux, and that there is not the slightest hint of conventional heroics or of the “well made” play in any of his work. In this last particular he differs much from Sudermann, who has borrowed willingly from Sardou, as in “Magda,” for instance. That is one reason, and perhaps the main one, why “Magda” has conquered every civilized stage, whereas the Hauptmann plays are still but little known outside of Germany. But if I here seem to join the decriers of Sudermann, let me hasten to add that “Magda,” for all its old-fashioned touches, is still a play that Hauptmann himself might be proud to own, and that Sudermann's novels are infinitely better than Hauptmann’s.

  As a novelist, indeed, Hauptmann has narrowly escaped complete failure. His “The Fool in Christ,” which I reviewed a few months ago,4 was big in plan but wobbly in execution; his “Atlantis,” just published, is bad in both departments. It is the story of a young German physician who throws up his career to follow a Swedish dancer to this country. The manner of his ensnaring is at odds with the intelligence Hauptmann ascribes to him, and the manner of his rescue is at odds with his ensnaring. In brief, the story is psychologically incredible, and were it not for some entertaining episodes aboard ship, culminating in a rather theatrical shipwreck, it would be almost unreadable. Put it beside Sudermann’s “The Song of Songs,” or, better still, beside any of the stories in the volume called “The Indian Lily,” and you will see how far apart the two men stand as writers of prose fiction, and how vast is Sudermann’s superiority. Hauptmann, I freely admit, is probably the better dramatist, but I must dissent hunkerously from the current German doctrine that he has left Sudermann far behind him as a literary artist.

  Another great Continental who begins to enjoy, like Hauptmann, the affecting honor of American recognition, is August Strindberg, the Swede. He was a famous man in Scandinavia so long ago as 1878, and the more serious German theaters have been presenting his dramas since the middle eighties, but he had to die to cross the Atiantic. Now we make up, characteristically enough, for lost time. No less than four American publishers announce Strindberg plays in considerable number and variety, and three very competent translators, Wärner Oland, Edwin Björkman and Velma Swanston Howard, labor diligently upon even further translations. Before long, perhaps, these busy missionaries will catch up to Ernst Schering,5 the German, whose edition of Strindberg already runs to thirty-seven volumes and seems to be still far from the end. It is likely that the dramatist left a ton or more of unpublished manuscript. Several striking one-acters, unknown to his biographers, have been printed in the German magazines since his death last May—and play writing by no means monopolized his time during his later years, for he also wrote an enormous number of essays, criticisms, political broadsides, social satires, theological tracts, short stories, poems, impressions of travel, chapters of reminiscence and new introductions to his earlier books. The man was incredibly industrious, even in his recreations: he found leisure, despite all his writing and stage managing, to master chemistry, to bounce around among three or four antagonistic religions, and to woo, win, marry and divorce three wives.

  The latest contributions to the English canon of his works are “Lucky Pehr” and “Easter,” both translated by Mrs. Howard. Of the two, the former is the more interesting, for it shows Strindberg in the period of transition which connected his early poetical manner with his later savagery. In plan and execution, as well as in the name of its hero, the piece leans heavily upon Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” which preceded it by about fifteen years.

  Young Pehr, like his namesake, is a yokel who runs away from home to see the world, and like Peer again, he tastes the bitterness of pleasure and the gall of power, and like Peer yet again, he comes back at last to the home and sweetheart of his youth. The two plays, indeed, run almost exactly parallel courses. Both alternate between an incisive realism and an extravagant fantasy, both are filled with ridicule of Scandinavian mooning and booming, and both close upon the note of elemental sentiment.

  It is curious to see Strindberg, the woman hater par excellence, growing mushy over young love, and putting it high above the Nietzschean virtues and glories of his subsequent adoration. But even so, there are signs of the change that was going on within him—a touch of acid satire here, a flash of cynicism there. When he began “Lucky Pehr,” he was still married happily to his first wife, Baroness Wrangel, but before it came to the stage they were at logger-heads; and once this idyllic comedy was safely behind him, he launched into his famous book of short stories, “Marriage” (1884), and into his more famous play, “The Father” (1887), two of the most appalling attacks upon women ever written in the world. “Easter,” which belongs to his period of dalliance with Swedenborgianism and other forms of mysticism, is much less interesting than “Lucky Pehr,” but Mrs. Howard has helped it out by adding to it a number of characteristic Strindbergian sketches and short stories, some of them no more than a few pages in length. Her translations, judging by Schering’s German versions, seem to be reasonably accurate, but now and then they are damaged by a stilted clumsiness of phrase.

  Thirty-five Printed Plays

  During the first six months of my pastorate in this place—videlicet, from November, 1908, to April, 1909, inclusive—the published plays that came to me for review numbered exactly two, and one of them was so trivial that I got my notice of it into eighteen words. So rare, in that dark age, was the drama between covers! So small was the public appetite for reading plays! But during the half-year next succeeding there came a sudden jump from two plays to six, and with them came five volumes of dramatic criticism of more or lees soundness; and ever since then there has been a steady increase in both departments, and as the number of books has multiplied their interest and value have augmented, until now it seems quite natural to look to the shelf of dramatics for the most significant literature of the day. At the moment, indeed, it fairly groans with good things, for on it, to
continue with figures, I find no less than nineteen books of the play, comprising thirty-five separate pieces, and fully half of them are of that quality which entitles them to the utmost consideration and respect.

  What is to become, alas, alas, of the dramatic critics? How is the estimable Nathan to keep body and soul together in his declining years, now so hard upon him? Between the bookstores and the moving picture parlors, the theaters are getting a squeeze that rids them of all their erstwhile juices. Those persons who formerly attended their sessions to weep, to be thrilled and to do obeisance to buxom and preposterous actors—such ingenuous persons now get their fill of inspiration at the movies, and for very much less money. And those who went to the theater in search of food for thought, or at least of food for conversation, are now accommodated, more cheaply and more comfortably, in their own libraries.

  What remains to the theater? Imprimis, the leg show, in one disguise or another. Zum zweiten, the circus sideshow, as dancing, tightrope walking, animal training, juggling, skull cracking, clowning, etc. And troisièmement, the Opera, properly and improperly so-called. But even here, take notice, the signs of change are visible. The movies gobble the clowns and the wild beasts already, and the wrigglers and hill horses will be conquered on some near tomorrow. And over in Europe Dr. Richard Strauss is experimenting with a new and purified form of opera—an opera purged of fat tenors, snuffling sopranos and cater-wauling contraltos—to wit, “The Legend of Joseph,” awaiting only the perfect synchronization of cinema and phonograph to desert the Metropolitan for the far-flung town halls.

  I myself, once the most diligent of theatergoers, have jammed my old bones into D 7 Right but twice in the past year, and both times it was to my regret. The first time, I was robbed of my two dollars at a performance of—but let it go: I am willing to forgive and forget. The truth is that complete satisfaction in the theater is little more than a dream, a will-o’-the-wisp, an ideal never realized. Its attainment depends upon a collocation of talents and opportunities so improbable as to be virtually impossible, save perhaps as a rare miracle. It is easy enough to find an actor or an actress who can make a fair showing in this part or that, but to find a company in which every member is of such capacity and in which the casting takes accurate account of each individual idiosyncrasy and limitation—to do this is to stumble upon an unexpected gift of the gods. Even the acknowledged stars are proverbially fond of tackling the roles that they play worst. Who will forget middle-aged Mansfield as sixteen-year-old Don Car-los1 —a spectacle to make the very ushers weep! And Alla Nazimova, the passionate Oriental, as Nora Helmer, the cold woman of the North! And Petruchio Sothern as the Dane! And Maude Adams as Chantecler—ah, woe! And Mrs. Fiske, the intellectual, as Hedda Tesman, the psychopathic! . . . And Tetrazzini as Violetta, dying dropsically of tuberculosis pulmonalis!!2

  But as I have argued in the past, and now argue again, such horrors need not be suffered by anyone who can read English print and has enough imagination to conjure up a boxed interior from a stage direction. This trick, moreover, is learned with surprising ease. The first time you read an unfamiliar play you may find it a bit difficult to visualize the scene, the properties and the movements of the characters, but after two or three trials you will know how to do it. The dramatists give increasing help by improving their directions. When Ibsen wrote “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts” he was content to put in an occasional [Laughing] or [Looking at him] or [Going to the fireplace], but by the time he got to “Little Eyolf” his text was so thickly strewn with such indications of stage business that scarcely a speech was without one. And George Bernard Shaw, as we all know, has carried the thing so far that his later pieces are almost as much stories as plays, for many of their interlarded observations are not stage directions at all but miniature essays (and not, indeed, always miniature!) upon the motives, emotions, morals, superstitions, vices, crimes and imbecilities of his characters. Where Ibsen and Shaw led, the other dramatists now follow. The play of today is its own stage manager. Try it and see.

  No need to point out that the reading of plays multiplies enormously the number that one may enjoy in a season. It takes a whole evening to see even the cheapest farce on the stage; in the same time, and at half the expense, one may go through two such masterpieces as Hauptmann’s “The Weavers” and Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World.” The vast majority of really good plays, in truth, are never played in our theaters at all. The odds against them are too great; they cannot run the gauntlet of managers, actors, Comstocks,3 newspapers, flappers and tired business men. A regular theatergoer for twelve years, I saw but one play of Brieux’s in all that time, and that one the worst. Pinero’s “A Wife Without a Smile,” perhaps the best of all his farces, was closed before I could get to it, and has never been revived. (I have read it four times, always with delight.) Of Ibsen’s thirteen great social dramas, I saw but five, and three of them were atrociously acted. The Irish doused “The Playboy” before the Dublin company reached my town. To see Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren” I had to go to Germany. Of Hervieu’s plays I have seen but one; of Sudermann’s but two, of Gorki’s, Andreyev’s, Barker’s, Masefield’s, Hankin’s, Strindberg’s, Wedekind’s and Lavedan’s, none. I know Schnitzler, Bahr4 and Echegaray (in the theater) only in adaptations—i.e., with wooden legs and false whiskers. I have never seen a single performance of a Restoration comedy, nor of any Elizabethan play save Shakespeare’s.

  Going through the nineteen play books before me, I quickly find that the most interesting plays they offer are precisely those which stand the least chance of being presented on our stage. For example, “The Gods of the Mountain,” by Lord Dunsany,5 a fantasy so remote from reality that our beefy actors would kill it instanter. Again, Shaw’s “Misalliance,” a farcical extravaganza in one long act—too long, alas, for our thirsty theater patrons. And above all, Andreyev’s “The Life of Man,” a fine example of the Russian effort (vide Gorki’s “Lodgings for the Night”) to break down the outworn conventions of the drama—but ruined for our theater in its very first scene, for a woman is having a child off stage, and the conversation of the old crones before us would bring up the smuthounds and boy scouts at a gallop. Andreyev is no stranger, even in English. His “Anathema,” translated by Herman Bernstein, was published by the Macmillans four years ago. His “To the Stars,” done into the vulgate by Dr. A. Goudiss, was to be had so long ago as 1907. But has he ever reached our stage? To be sure he has not.

  “The Life of Man” is printed with the same author’s “Savva,” and both are translated into fluent English by Thomas Seltzer. The former is scarcely a drama at all, at least in the actorial, A. B. Walkley sense, but a series of five loosely connected scenes, with but one character in common to the five of them. That character is simply A Man, or, as the translator makes it, Man—which is to say, any man, every man. In the first scene he is born; in the second he is a young husband, struggling for a foothold in the world; in the third he is successful and rich; in the fourth misfortune overtakes him, and in the fifth and last he is ruined, forsaken and dying. I said just now that Man himself is the only character who appears in all these scenes, but in truth there is another, to wit, Someone in Gray, and this Someone in Gray also appears in a short prologue which he has all to himself. Who is he? Is he Deity, Omnipotence, the Christian God, the Mohammedan Allah? Or impersonal and inscrutable Fate, Kismet, Destiny? Andreyev leaves the answer to the theology of the reader. For him this mysterious and unintelligible watcher is merely Someone in Gray—the Button Moulder of “Peer Gynt,” Man’s eternal and unfathomable companion, dragging him relentlessly from the black void behind birth to the black void beyond the grave, tempting him with hopes and visions, tormenting him with cruel punishments, unmoved by his anguish, untouched by his delight, deaf to his prayers.

  Why? Wherefore? To what end? What is the aim, the purpose, the inner meaning of this amazing and sordid farce? Andreyev, of course, has no answer to offer: he is a dramatist, not a the
ologian. But merely to ask the question, leaving it unanswered, is to voice a philosophy—to wit, the impregnable (if unsoothing) philosophy of the agnostic, the intellectual watchful waiting of the man who is not afraid to say “I don’t know.” The history of all religions is the history of bold and magnificent answers—not one of which answers. Here, indeed, the most civilized races have improved but little upon the childish guesses of the savage: there are just as many sound objections to the Judaic theory of a God of wrath and to the Christian theory of a God of love as to the West African theory of a Ju-Ju. It may be true, as the reverend expositors tell us, that life on this earth is no more than a preparation for the bliss to come, that Homer will get back his sight and “David his little lad,” that a divine law of compensation works out its immutable rewards and penalties. But why prepare a man for bliss by putting out his eyes and breaking his heart? Why ground a doctrine of eternal justice upon such copious and staggering evidence of temporal in justice?

  George Bernard Shaw, attempting to give dramatic form to the problem in “The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet,” managed only to outrage the piety of the English play censor. In a letter to Lady Gregory, printed in “Our Irish Theatre,” he proceeded to the folly of trying to answer it. Thus:

  When Lady——, in her most superior manner, told me, “He is the God of love,” I said, “He is also the God of cancer and epilepsy.” That does not present any difficulty to me. All this problem of the origin of evil, the mystery of pain and so forth does not puzzle me. My doctrine is that God proceeds by the method of “trial and error,” just like a workman perfecting an aeroplane. . . . He has tried lots of machines—the diphtheria bacillus, the tiger, the cockroach; and He cannot extirpate them, except by making something that can shoot them, or walk on them, or, cleverer still, devise vaccines and antitoxins to prey on them. To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hands, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose.