Plays, Acting and Music Part 4

They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their hearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one's mind in suspense.

Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family, and he interests us in every member of that family. He plays them like chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. They express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads.

They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keen sense of the game. They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in and out of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes and surprises them by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts, sometimes crudely, sometimes with a navete which seems laughable; and they act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come.

They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosing them; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, at every moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, and they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction. They seem to go their own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escaped almost literally out of their author's hands. The last scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within its own limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a solution. Mr. Barker can write: he writes in short, sharp sentences, which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from every corner of the stage. He brings his people on and off with an unconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique. The scene with the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions in the play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doing the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough to carry it against opposition. The opposition is the firm and narrow mind of the British playgoer. Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoy without crushing. The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders the world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces the world. Mr. Barker is young: he will come to think with more depth and less tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more mastery of means. But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and honest in the spectacle of this game, in which the p.a.w.ns seem to move themselves.

II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"

On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his stagecraft as one is inclined to a.s.sume, and whether there are not things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the performance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's plays: the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only, we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes seem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbs over the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?"

and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in the newspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its meaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is, but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if the Stranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upon a crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own and a considerable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the subconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of the drama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory.

III. "THE NEW IDOL"

It was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage Society to give a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole," one of those pieces by which M. Francois de Curel has reached that very actual section of the French public which is interested in ideas. "The New Idol" is a modern play of the most characteristically modern type; its subject-matter is largely medical, it deals with the treatment of cancer; we are shown a doctor's laboratory, with a horrible elongated diagram of the inside of the human body; a young girl's lungs are sounded in the doctor's drawing-room; nearly every, character talks science and very little but science. When they cease talking science, which they talk well, with earnestness and with knowledge, and try to talk love or intrigue, they talk badly, as if they were talking of things which they knew nothing about. Now, personally, this kind of talk does not interest me; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But I am ready to admit that it is justified if I find that the dramatic movement of the play requires it, that it is itself an essential part of the action. In "The New Idol" I think this is partly the case. The other medical play which has lately been disturbing Paris, "Les Avaries," does not seem to me to fulfil this condition at any moment: it is a pamphlet from beginning to end, it is not a satisfactory pamphlet, and it has no other excuse for existence. But M. de Curel has woven his problem into at least a semblance of action; the play is not a mere discussion of irresistible physical laws; the will enters into the problem, and will fights against will, and against not quite irresistible physical laws. The suggestion of love interests, which come to nothing, and have no real bearing on the main situation, seems to me a mistake; it complicates things, things which must appear to us so very real if we are to accept them at all, with rather a theatrical kind of complication. M. de Curel is more a thinker than a dramatist, as he has shown lately in the very original, interesting, impossible "Fille Sauvage." He grapples with serious matters seriously, and he argues well, with a closely woven structure of arguments; some of them bringing a kind of hard and naked poetry out of mere closeness of thinking and closeness of seeing. In "The New Idol" there is some dialogue, real dialogue, natural give-and-take, about the fear of death and the horror of indestructibility (a variation on one of the finest of Coventry Patmore's odes) which seemed to me admirable: it held the audience because it was direct speech, expressing a universal human feeling in the light of a vivid individual crisis. But such writing as this was rare; for the most part it was the problem itself which insisted on occupying our attention, or, distinct from this, the too theatrical characters.

IV. "MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION"

The Stage Society has shown the courage of its opinions by giving an unlicensed play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," one of the "unpleasant plays" of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, at the theatre of the New Lyric Club.

It was well acted, with the exception of two of the characters, and the part of Mrs. Warren was played by Miss f.a.n.n.y Brough, one of the cleverest actresses on the English stage, with remarkable ability. The action was a little cramped by the smallness of the stage, but, for all that, the play was seen under quite fair conditions, conditions under which it could be judged as an acting play and as a work of art. It is brilliantly clever, with a close, detective cleverness, all made up of merciless logic and unanswerable common sense. The princ.i.p.al characters are well drawn, the scenes are constructed with a great deal of theatrical skill, the dialogue is telling, the interest is held throughout. To say that the characters, without exception, are ugly in their vice and ugly in their virtue; that they all have, men and women, something of the cad in them; that their language is the language of vulgar persons, is, perhaps, only to say that Mr. Shaw has chosen, for artistic reasons, to represent such people just as they are. But there is something more to be said. "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is not a representation of life; it is a discussion about life. Now, discussion on the stage may be interesting. Why not? Discussion is the most interesting thing in the world, off the stage; it is the only thing that makes an hour pa.s.s vividly in society; but when discussion ends art has not begun. It is interesting to see a sculptor handling bits of clay, sticking them on here, sc.r.a.ping them off there; but that is only the interest of a process. When he has finished I will consider whether his figure is well or ill done; until he has finished I can have no opinion about it. It is the same thing with discussion on the stage. The subject of Mr. Shaw's discussion is what is called a "nasty" one. That is neither here nor there, though it may be pointed out that there is no essential difference between the problem that he discusses and the problem that is at the root of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray."

But Mr. Shaw, I believe, is never without his polemical intentions, and I should like, for a moment, to ask whether his discussion of his problem, taken on its own merits, is altogether the best way to discuss things. Mr. Shaw has an ideal of life: he asks that men and women should be perfectly reasonable, that they should clear their minds of cant, and speak out everything that is in their minds. He asks for cold and clear logic, and when he talks about right and wrong he is really talking about right and wrong logic. Now, logic is not the mainspring of every action, nor is justice only the inevitable working out of an equation.

Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must be regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion to its exact.i.tude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not move by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count of more exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. There is a great living writer who has brought to bear on human problems as consistent a logic as Mr. Shaw's, together with something which Mr. Shaw disdains. Mr. Shaw's logic is sterile, because it is without sense of touch, sense of sight, or sense of hearing; once set going it is warranted to go straight, and to go through every obstacle. Tolstoi's logic is fruitful, because it allows for human weakness, because it understands, and because to understand is, among other things, to pardon. In a word, the difference between the spirit of Tolstoi and the spirit of Mr. Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Euclid.

"MONNA, VANNA"

In his earlier plays Maeterlinck invented a world of his own, which was a sort of projection into s.p.a.ce of the world of nursery legends and of childish romances. It was at once very abstract and very local. There was a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a forest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns of gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of eternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and destiny the stage-manager. The people who came and went had the blind gestures of marionettes, and one pitied their helplessness. Pity and terror had indeed gone to the making of this drama, in a sense much more literal than Aristotle's.

In all these plays there were few words and many silences, and the words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque.

Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in an essay in "Le Tresor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said which mattered.

Gradually the words began to mean more in the scheme of the play. With "Aglavaine et Selysette" we got a drama of the inner life, in which there was little action, little effective dramatic speech, but in which people thought about action and talked about action, and discussed the morality of things and their meaning, very beautifully.

"Monna Vanna" is a development out of "Aglavaine et Selysette," and in it for the first time Maeterlinck has represented the conflicts of the inner life in an external form, making drama, while the people who undergo them discuss them frankly at the moment of their happening.

In a significant pa.s.sage of "La Sagesse et la Destinee," Maeterlinck says: "On nous affirme que toutes les grandes tragedies ne nous offrent pas d'autre spectacle que la lutte de l'homme contre la fatalite. Je crois, au contraire, qu'il n'existe pas une seule tragedie ou la fatalite regne reellement. J'ai beau les parcourir, je n'en trouve pas une ou le heros combatte le destin pur et simple. Au fond, ce n'est jamais le destin, c'est toujours la sagesse, qu'il attaque." And, on the preceding page, he says: "Observons que les poetes tragiques osent tres rarement permettre au sage de paraitre un moment sur la scene. Ils craignent une ame haute parce que les evenements la craignent." Now it is this conception of life and of drama that we find in "Monna Vanna."

We see the conflict of wisdom, personified in the old man Marco and in the instinctively wise Giovanna, with the tragic folly personified in the husband Guido, who rebels against truth and against life, and loses even that which he would sacrifice the world to keep. The play is full of lessons in life, and its deepest lesson is a warning against the too ready acceptance of this or that aspect of truth or of morality. Here is a play in which almost every character is n.o.ble, in which treachery becomes a virtue, a lie becomes more vital than truth, and only what we are accustomed to call virtue shows itself mean, petty, and even criminal. And it is most like life, as life really is, in this: that at any moment the whole course of the action might be changed, the position of every character altered, or even reversed, by a mere decision of the will, open to each, and that things happen as they do because it is impossible, in the nature of each, that the choice could be otherwise.

Character, in the deepest sense, makes the action, and there is something in the movement of the play which resembles the grave and reasonable march of a play of Sophocles, in which men and women deliberate wisely and not only pa.s.sionately, in which it is not only the cry of the heart and of the senses which takes the form of drama.

In Maeterlinck's earlier plays, in "Les Aveugles," "Interieur," and even "Pelleas et Melisande," he is dramatic after a new, experimental fashion of his own; "Monna Vanna" is dramatic in the obvious sense of the word.

The action moves, and moves always in an interesting, even in a telling, way. But at the same time I cannot but feel that something has been lost. The speeches, which were once so short as to be enigmatical, are now too long, too explanatory; they are sometimes rhetorical, and have more logic than life. The playwright has gained experience, the thinker has gained wisdom, but the curious artist has lost some of his magic. No doubt the wizard had drawn his circle too small, but now he has stepped outside his circle into a world which no longer obeys his formulas. In casting away his formulas, has he the big human mastery which alone could replace them? "Monna Vanna" is a remarkable and beautiful play, but it is not a masterpiece. "La Mort de Tintagiles" was a masterpiece of a tiny, too deliberate kind; but it did something which no one had ever done before. We must still, though we have seen "Monna Vanna,"

wait, feeling that Maeterlinck has not given us all that he is capable of giving us.

THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP.

The letter of protest which appeared in the _Times_ of June 30, 1903, signed by Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Meredith, and Mr. Hardy, the three highest names in contemporary English literature, will, I hope, have done something to save the literary reputation of England from such a fate as one eminent dramatic critic sees in store for it. "Once more," says the _Athenaeum_, "the caprice of our censure brings contempt upon us, and makes, or should make, us the laughing-stock of Europe." The _Morning Post_ is more lenient, and is "sincerely sorry for the unfortunate censor," because "he has immortalised himself by prohibiting the most beautiful play of his time, and must live to be the laughing-stock of all sensible people."

Now the question is: which is really made ridiculous by this ridiculous episode of the prohibition of Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," England or Mr. Redford? Mr. Redford is a gentleman of whom I only know that he is not himself a man of letters, and that he has not given any public indication of an intelligent interest in literature as literature. If, as a private person, before his appointment to the official post of censor of the drama, he had expressed in print an opinion on any literary or dramatic question, that opinion would have been taken on its own merits, and would have carried only the weight of its own contents.

The official appointment, which gives him absolute power over the public life or death of a play, gives to the public no guarantee of his fitness for the post. So far as the public can judge, he was chosen as the typical "man in the street," the "plain man who wants a plain answer,"

the type of the "golden mean," or mediocrity. We hear that he is honest and diligent, that he reads every word of every play sent for his inspection. These are the virtues of the capable clerk, not of the penetrating judge. Now the position, if it is to be taken seriously, must require delicate discernment as well as inflexible uprightness. Is Mr. Redford capable of discriminating between what is artistically fine and what is artistically ign.o.ble? If not, he is certainly incapable of discriminating between what is morally fine and what is morally ign.o.ble.

It is useless for him to say that he is not concerned with art, but with morals. They cannot be dissevered, because it is really the art which makes the morality. In other words, morality does not consist in the facts of a situation or in the words of a speech, but in the spirit which informs the whole work. Whatever may be the facts of "Monna Vanna"

(and I contend that they are entirely above reproach, even as facts), no one capable of discerning the spirit of a work could possibly fail to realise that the whole tendency of the play is n.o.ble and invigorating.

All this, all that is essential, evidently escapes Mr. Redford. He licenses what the _Times_ rightly calls "such a gross indecency as 'The Girl from Maxim's.'" But he refuses to license "Monna Vanna," and he refuses to state his reason for withholding the license. The fact is, that moral questions are discussed in it, not taken for granted, and the plain man, the man in the street, is alarmed whenever people begin to discuss moral questions. "The Girl from Maxim's" is merely indecent, it raises no problems. "Monna Vanna" raises problems. Therefore, says the censor, it must be suppressed. By his decision in regard to this play of Maeterlinck, Mr. Redford has of course conclusively proved his unfitness for his post. But that is only one part of the question. The question is: could any one man be found on whose opinion all England might safely rely for its dramatic instruction and entertainment? I do not think such a man could be found. With Mr. Redford, as the _Times_ puts it, "any tinge of literary merit seems at once to excite his worst suspicions." But with a censor whose sympathies were too purely literary, literary in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of some other kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student who cannot tolerate an innocent jesting with "serious" things, scruples of the moralist who must choose between Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio, between Tolstoi and Ibsen? I cannot so much as think of a man in all England who would be capable of justifying the existence of the censorship. Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made ridiculous by this ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all, England, which has given us the liberty of the press and withheld from us the liberty of the stage?

A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of good manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the game. When the p.a.w.ns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of p.a.w.ns, they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power to play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief, to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of work will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweet and Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience to burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled with delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with delight. If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so much pleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean very much to the public?

The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of Old Drury," I happened to be in the last row of the stalls. My seat was not altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was admirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attention to my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered with laughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled and quivered with delight. At every piece of clowning there was the same responsive gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that I should have thought a child would have seen through them, and resented them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloated over. I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when I remembered something that was said to me the other day by a young Swedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he had been to most of the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater part of the pieces which were played at the princ.i.p.al London theatres were such pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower cla.s.s theatres, and that n.o.body here seemed to mind. The English audience, he said, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set before them with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected to laugh, cried when they were expected to cry. But of criticism, preference, selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been told that London was the centre of civilisation. Well, in future I shall try to remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over some bad play, badly acted: it is all right, it is only the children.

THE TEST OF THE ACTOR

The interest of bad plays lies in the test which they afford of the capability of the actor. To what extent, however, can an actor really carry through a play which has not even the merits of its defects, such a play, for instance, as Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has produced in "The Princess's Nose"? Mr. Jones has sometimes been mistaken for a man of letters, as by a distinguished dramatic critic, who, writing a complimentary preface, has said: "The claim of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's more ambitious plays to rank as literature may have been in some cases grudgingly allowed, but has not been seriously contested." Mr. Jones himself has a.s.sured us that he has thought about life, and would like to give some representation of it in his plays. That is apparently what he means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the _Nineteenth Century_: "O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?" Does Mr. Jones, I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any "soft proclaim of silver flutes," or any of the other organ effects which he enumerates, in "The Princess's Nose"? Does anyone "seriously contest" its right not to "rank as Literature"? The audience, for once, was unanimous. Mr.

Jones was not encouraged to appear. And yet there had been applause, prolonged applause, at many points throughout this bewildering evening.

The applause was meant for the actors.

If Mr. Jones had shown as much tact in the construction of his play as in the selection of his cast, how admirable the play would have been! I have rarely seen a play in which each actor seemed to fit into his part with such exact.i.tude. But the play! Well, the play began as a comedy, continued as a tragedy, and ended as a farce. It came to a crisis every five minutes, it suggested splendid situations, and then caricatured them unintentionally, it went shilly-shallying about among the emotions and sensations which may be drama or melodrama, whichever the handling makes them. "You see there is a little poetical justice going about the world," says the Princess, when she hears that her rival, against whom she has fought in vain, has been upset by Providence in the form of a motor-car, and the bridge of her nose broken. The broken nose is Mr.

Jones's symbol for poetical justice; it indicates his intellectual att.i.tude. There are many parts of the play where he shows, as he has so often shown, a genuine skill in presenting and manipulating humorous minor characters. As usual, they have little to do with the play, but they are amusing for their moment. It is the serious characters who will not be serious. They are meant well, the action hovers about them with little tempting solicitations, continually offering them an opportunity to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be grasped. The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material is wasted; only the actress makes anything of it. We know how Sullivan will take a motive of mere farce, such words as the "O Captain Shaw!" of "Iolanthe," and will write a lovely melody to go with it, fitting his music to the feeling which the words do but caricature. That is how Miss Irene Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones's unshapen material. By the earnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and gaiety of her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr. Jones had not made.

Mr. Jones would set his character in some impossible situation, and Miss Vanbrugh would make us, for the moment, forget its impossibility. He would give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do, and she would do it with distinction. She had force in lightness, a vivid malice, a magnetic cheerfulness; and she could suffer silently, and be sincere in a tragedy which had been conceived without sincerity. If acting could save a play, "The Princess's Nose" would have been saved.