by S. T. Joshi
And so on and so on—pantheism in new words, Christian Science with a novel sauce, a ponderous begging of the question. More intelligible, and by far, is the Shakespearean answer that Shaw quotes a bit further on: “As flies to wan-ton boys, so we are to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”6 Shaw denounces this answer as “the most frightful blasphemy ever uttered”—certainly not a relevant objection to it, for the one true answer, if we ever get it, is bound to seem blasphemous to the believers in every other answer, and blasphemy, after all, is nothing to be alarmed about, for all religions have their roots in it. But fort unately enough, there is no need to forfeit public esteem by practising it. If the orthodox answers fail to satisfy, there is always the provisional answer of Mark Twain, and, for that matter, of Andreyev himself—the answer that no answer is possible, the theory that life is essentially meaningless. This answer seems to make a subtle appeal to those who approach the problem from the side of the artist. Shakespeare inclines to it more than once, and it is constantly bobbing up in Ibsen and the Russians. And, as I have more than once pointed out, it is the ground idea, as the Germans would say, of such novelists as Conrad and Dreiser. Their view of life is entirely phenomenal; they leave its hidden causes to better guessers.
But here I wander into the thorny fields of theology, probably making an ass of myself at every step—and my original purpose was merely to praise Andreyev for showing how the drama can be made to deal with great things as well as small, and that without losing any of its beauty and mystery. His play is interesting, it is imaginative and it is sound inform, and yet its central theme belongs to the highest levels of human speculation. The trouble with ninety-nine percent. of the current plays is that they are utterly trivial—that they deal with situations and “problems” that no adult and educated male would waste five minutes indiscussing. Even such renowned pieces as “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “Mrs. Dane’s Defense”7 are of no importance at bottom—as P. P. Howe shows very clearly in his new book of “Dramatic Portraits.” The alleged problems they set forth are problems which belong to gossip rather than to ethics. They are dramatizations of neighborhood scandals. Go back to the plays of the Robertson era and you will find a complete absence of any sense that the drama is capable of bolder flights. It was Ibsen, more than any other, who showed its capacity for getting nearer the heart of things. The Germans, aware of him early, hailed him as the “deepest-down-diving and most-mud-up-bringing” of dramatists. And where he led the way, such men as Galsworthy, Hankin, Hauptmann, Brieux, Shaw (in his serious moments), and above all, the Russians, have made more or less successful efforts to follow. But it will be years, of course, before they shoulder their way into our theaters—save, perhaps, as rare strangers, puzzling freaks. If you want to know what they are doing, you must read them in books.
“Savva,” which comes in the same volume with “The Life of Man,” is less serious in intent. Seeking a label for it, one may plausibly call it a sardonic comedy. It tells the story of a young Russian who plans to show his contempt for the national superstitions by blowing up a famous monastic church, to which the invalids of five provinces resort to be cured of their ills. The particular object of devotion in this church is a large ikon, or image of a saint, and so Savva decides to plant a bomb directly beneath it. But the shrewd monks, getting wind of his scheme, quietly remove the ikon before the bomb explodes. Immediately after the explosion they put it back—and there, unharmed amid the wreckage, it convinces all who have ever doubted, and the church is packed with pilgrims, and the healing trade grows ten times as prosperous as ever before; and as for Savva, he is kicked to death by a mob of irate believers. The humor of this curious piece belongs to the bitter brand of Dostoevsky; we have nothing quite like it in our Western literature. And running through it there is always the old questioning, the refrain of the eternal riddle.
This Andreyev volume is number nine of “The Modern Drama Series,” discreetly chosen and intelligently edited by Edwin Björkman. Mr. Bjorkman is introducing a number of European dramatists whose work is well worth knowing, among them the Italian, Giuseppe Giacosa, and the Irishman, Lord Dunsany. Giacosa, who died in 1906, is chiefly known to England and America as the author, with Luigi Illica, of the libretti of “Tosca,” “La Bohème” and “Madame Butterfly,” but as Mr. Björkman’s selection of plays shows, he was also a dramatist of excellent skill, and what is more important, of considerable dignity. His weakness was a tendency to account for his characters in terms of conventional morality. That is to say, he always kept pretty close to the habitual thin king of his audience, and particularly that part of it above the ground floor. But in compensation for this defect he showed a firm grip upon situation, a quite extraordinary sense of character, and at least in his later plays, a gratifying purpose to get away from the worn-out drama of adultery. The three pieces in the present volume are “Il Più Forte,” “Come le Foglie” and “Diritti dell’ Anima,” translated as “The Stronger,” “Like Falling Leaves” and “Sacred Ground” by Edith and Allan Updegraff, with an introduction by the translators. “Diritti dell’ Anima,” more accurately translated as “The Rights of the Soul,” was played in this country, but only for a few performances, by Mary Shaw, and “Come le Foglie” had an American production at the hands of Donald Robertson. The third play, “Il Più Forte,” has been done by the Drama Players in Chicago, and Olga Nethersole once took a hack at a fourth play, “Tristi Amori” (Sad Loves). But all these attempts led to nothing, and Giacosa has yet to be discovered by our alert managers.
A dramatist of far greater originality, if of less instinct for the theater, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany. Dunsany is an Irishman and is commonly counted among the adherents of the Neo-Celtic movement, but as a matter of fact his connection with it is of the slightest. His plays are not peasant comedies of modern Ireland like those of Synge, Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum et al., nor romances out of Irish legend like those of Yeats, but fantasies upon a plan he seems to have invented himself. Let “The Gods of the Mountain,” a piece in three short acts, serve as a specimen. The scene is vaguely “the East,” and the principal characters are seven roguish beggars. These beggars have fallon upon evil days: “there has been a comet come near to the earth of late and the earth has been parched and sultry, so that the gods are drowsy and all those things that are divine in man, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song, have faded and died.” What to do? One of the seven, Ulf by name, suggests a plan. Why not try a bold hoax? Why not get revenge upon the recreant gods by impersonating them and grabbing their revenues? More specifically, why not impersonate the seven green gods of the mountain, whom all the people worship blindly without ever having seen them?
The plan appeals to the other rascals, and they employ a thief to steal suitable costumes. Then, in godly array, they go into the city. But they are too shrewd, of course, to announce themselves in so many words, and thus challenge inquiry and suspicion. They know a far better plan than that. They go about the city apparently unconcerned, but all the while diligently talking god talk—referring casually to their sister, the moon; complaining of the ingratitude of humanity; hinting darkly about mysterious events to come. The people of the city do the rest. In an hour the rumor runs in all directions that the gods of the mountains are visiting their lieges incognito; by the end of the day the seven rogues are installed in magnificent quarters, and the pious are coming from near and far to worship them and flatter them and curry favor with them, and they are being stuffed with the lordliest victuals the vicinage affords. And so it goes for several blissful days, perhaps more. The god business is vastly more agreeable than the begging business.
But then comes the inevitable agnostic, the higher critic, the fellow with pointed and embarrassing inquiries. At the start he is disregarded and even denounced, but by and by his questions begin to get attention. Can it be true that those greedy and boisterous fellows are really the green gods of the mountain?
Suppose they are actually blasphemous irnpostors? Suppose it turns out, on investigation, that the gods of the mountain are still in the mountain? At once a couple of sharp fellows on dromedaries are sent out to look into it. They travel for days over the hot sands, into regions where few men have ever set foot. They come at last to the mountain. And then, full of news, they hasten back. The gods of the mountain are not in the mountain. Ergo, the seven rogues are genuine. (Ah, the logic of theology! The syllogism divine!) And so, triumphantly sustained, exculpated, acquitted, the seven face long lives of ease and honor. The faithful struggle to pay them tribute. They feast until their tummies are as tight as drumheads.
But in all this triumph there is still a touch of disquiet. No man can disbelieve utterly in the religion of his race and time; no man can shake himself wholly free from the ideas prevailing about him. And so the seven are pricked by conscience, that ancient handmaiden of the gods. “I have a fear,” says Ulf, “an old fear and a boding. We have done ill in the sight of the seven gods.” They withdraw into their sanctuary to talk it over. And then comes the final grotesquerie, the true Dunsanian touch. As they consult in whispers a heavy marching is heard outside, and presently there enters a file of seven green men. “They wear greenstone sandals; they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries; their right arms and forefingers point upward, right elbows resting on left hands.” Who are these mysterious strangers? They are the real gods of the mountain! And at once they inflict their terrible punishment and enjoy their terrible revenge. Each points his green forefinger at one of the shrinking impostors. The latter falls into the attitude of his accuser—and turns to green stone! Then the real gods vanish and the people come rushing in. They see the seven dead beggars—stiff, cold, petrified. They fall on their faces, contrite and panic-stricken. “We have doubted them! They have turned to stone because we have doubted them! They were the true gods!”
Maybe this will give you some notion of the peculiar quality of Dunsany’s plays—the outlandish color in them, the mordant humor, the exuberant fancy, the amazing strangeness. And every one of the five in the book is just as far from the usual. This Dunsany, indeed, seems to have invented a wholly new type of drama, part extravaganza, part allegory and part comedy. And if you turn to two of his other books, “Time and the Gods” and “The Book of Wonder,” you will find that he has also invented an entirely new type of story. To give you his formula in a few words is quite impossible. He mixes the fantastic and the commonplace in a way that, to me at least, is wholly new. His scenes, more than once, suggest the Arabian Nights, but in his themes, his situations and his dramatis personæ there is little to recall the Sultan Shahriyar and his garrulous bride. In one of the plays, for example, the only characters are two burglars—“both dead”! In one of the stories the action hinges on a golden dragon’s kid-napping of “Miss Cubbidge, daughter to Mr. Cubbidge, M.P., of 12a, Prince of Wales Square, London, S. W.” In another story young Thomas Shap, a clerk in the City, is crowned emperor of the Thuls, with a hundred and twenty archbishops, twenty angels and two archangels in his train. One is transported to strange countries—Zith, Zericon, Mluna, Moung, Averon, Bel-Narana. One meets men of strange names—Zarb, Argimenes, Darniak, Akmos, Illanaun, Oorander. Here in brief is something new under the sun, a world of fancy unheard of until Dunsany explored it. No wonder Frank Harris, emerging from the first performance of “King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior,” in London, said, “It was one of the nights of my life.”8
Of the other volumes so far issued in “The Modern Drama Series” the most important is that containing two plays by Hjalmar Bergström, a Dane of the generation following Ibsen and Björnson. The work of this generation is less familiar to English-speaking readers than it ought to be. Such men as Bergström, Gustav Wied and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark, and Gunnar Heiberg, Johan Bojer, Peter Egge, Knut Hamsun and Thomas Krag in Norway have been slowly building up a national literature which does anything but discredit to its two great leaders. Most of these men (and working with them, by the way, are several very talented women) are what may be called general practitioners. That is to say, they turn from the drama to the novel and back again, and now and then venture into poetry, or even into history and criticism. Bergström, for example, published three novels and a volume of short stories before he wrote his first play. But of late he has even been pretty faithful to the stage. His “Lynggard & Co.,” published in 1905, made him a celebrity overnight, and since then his “Karen Borneman” has given him the first position among living Scandinavian dramatists. Both plays are here presented, and both were decidedly worth translating. They are not thesis plays in any exact sense, but in each of them you will find that fundamental seriousness of aim, that determination to think the thing out, which is the best of all the legacies that Ibsen left to the drama of today.
And so, skipping over D. H. Lawrence’s “The Widowing of Mrs. Holyrod,” a poignant tragedy of the poor, introducing a new dramatist who is bound to be heard from later on; and Arthur Davison Ficke’s “Mr. Faust,” a somewhat clumsy effort to pour old wine into new bottles; and a volume of three plays by Henry Becque, long ago described and praised by James Huneker, and a new English version of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” made by R. Ellis Roberts—so skipping, we emerge from “The Modern Drama Series” and come straightway upon four of the brown volumes of “The Drama League Series of Plays.” They are “Her Husband’s Wife,” by A. E. Thomas; “The Sunken Bell,” by Gerhart Hauptmann; “The Great Galeoto,” by José Echegaray, and “Mary Goes First,” by Henry Arthur Jones. The Thomas and Jones pieces are agreeable comedies, both keeping safely to the surface, but both extremely amusing. To the former Clayton Hamilton contributes an introduction which points accurately to its very considerable technical merits, but without attempting to read any profundity into it. At this sort of light satire, indeed, Jones is an undoubted master. You must go far to find anything to surpass his best comedies, particularly “The Liars” and “Joseph Entangled.” Of the other two volumes, “The Great Galeoto” is the more important, for it is unquestionably the best play produced in Spain in modern times, and the only previous English version of it (setting aside Charles F. Nirdlinger’s adaptation, “The World and His Wife”), has been out of print for several years. But why reprint Hauptmann’s “The Sunken Bell,” particularly from the old plates and with the old introduction (circa 1899), and burdened with a long and vapid “critical analysis” by Frank Chouteau Brown, apparently one of the officers of the Drama League of America? Imagine a critic who starts off with the doctrine that “Hauptmann has probably never been entirely at his ease in the theater”! How can anyone subscribe to such nonsense—after “Fuhrmann Henschel”? Where is there a dramatist who is more at ease?
The Drama Leaguers might well have spared themselves the printing of “The Sunken Bell,” either with or without Mr. Brown’s amazing commentary, for the play is included in volume four of the admirable Lewisohn-Huebsch edition of “The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann”—an edition that will run, I think, to six volumes. In this volume, besides “The Sunken Bell,” one also finds “Henry of Auë,” hitherto untranslated, and “The Assumption of Hannele.” In volume three are “The Reconciliation” (Des Friedensfest), “Lonely Lives” (Einsame Menschen), “Colleague Crampton” and “Michael Kramer”—four social dramas of the very highest dignity and importance. What a man, indeed, is this Hauptmann! What a protean talent! How it has absorbed, digested and improved upon the ideas of other men—Zola, Arno Holz, Paul Heyse, Wilhelm Bölsche, Strindberg, Johannes Schlaf, Tolstoi, Ibsen, pioneers great and rebels small! There is nothing possible on the stage that he has not tried to do; there is no form of the drama that he has not attempted—and almost always with success. He has written beautiful verse and biting, acidulous prose. He has depicted great heroes and miserable wretches. He has done plays that will make you roar with mirth and plays that will make you blanch and shudder. No other dramatist of
today—nor, for that matter, of any other day—can show such astounding versatility and virtuosity. Hauptmann lacks, true enough, the ultimate attribute of greatness: he has not, of his own motion, plowed up new ground. But what a splendid crop he has sown and reaped upon the ground plowed up by others! With what surpassing skill he has labored within his limitations!
And so, by way of “The Post Office,” by Rabindranath Tagore, a pretty and pathetic little fancy, and “The Game of Chess” and “Barbara,” two highly artificial one-acters by Kenneth S. Goodman, we come at last to our loud and bold friend, George Bernard Shaw! Is it time to add “tiresome”? For one, I protest against it. The formula of Shaw has become transparent enough—a dozen other men now practice his trick of putting the obvious into terms of the scandalous—but he still works with surpassing humor and address. The long preface to “Misalliance”—it runs to 121 closely printed pages, perhaps 45,000 words, a good-sized book in itself—is one of the best things, indeed, that he has ever done. He calls it “Parents and Children,” but it really traverses the whole field of the domestic relations, with side trips into education, journalism, party politics, theology, criminology and sex hygiene. Reading it, you will be constantly chuckling, and glowing, and mummering “How true! How true!” This is the special function of Shaw, the steady business of his life: to say the things that everybody knows and nobody says, to expose the everyday hypocrisies, to rout platitudes with super-platitudes. And with what unfailing bounce and gusto he does it! What joy he gets out of the business!