The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

Drummle: “H’m, well, I heartily congratulate you on your kennel. The view from the terrace is superb.”

Paula: “Yes, I can see London.”

Drummle: “London! Not quite so far, surely?”

Paula: “I can. Also the Mediterranean on a fine day. I wonder what Algiers looks like this morning from the sea? (Impulsively) Oh, Cayley! do you remember those jolly times on board Peter Jarman’s yacht, when we lay off” – (Stopping suddenly, seeing Drummle staring at her).

Has she ceased to love her husband and to appreciate the sacrifice he has made for her? By no means. When he asks her tenderly what he can do for her, she tells him he can do nothing more. He has done all he could do. He has married her. She accuses herself. Fool that she was, why did she ever want to be married? Because the other women of her world were not. The title of married woman looked so fine, seen from afar. Instead of trying to make her way into a circle of people who would have nothing to say to her, why not have lived happily with Aubrey in her own sphere, in which she would have experienced neither the cold insolences of well-bred people nor the inexorable uniformity of well-to-do, respectable life?

But these are Paula’s least serious trials. There is another woman in the house – the daughter by the first marriage. She has shut herself up in a convent, but just when her father is marrying again she decides to resume her place in his household. This young girl inspires in Paula a double jealousy. Paula envies her the tenderness shown her by Tanqueray; she feels that this tenderness is very different from the love she herself inspires. Then she would fain win the love of this child, who, warned by some instinct, draws away from her and shrinks from her caresses. It is a shame, she cries, for after all the girl knows nothing – she ought to love her. Then, forgetting that love does not come to order, that advice cannot produce it, that it is begged for in vain, she exclaims to Tanqueray, that he should command Ellean to love her. This love would do her so much good. It would expel from her nature that mischievous feeling which carries her into deeds of rashness and folly.

A neighbour, a lady who has for long been a family friend of the Tanquerays, comes to call on her at last, but it is only to take her step-daughter to some extent from under her care. What is it intended to do? To find some distractions for Ellean and get her married if possible (it being obvious that Paula cannot take her into society), and thus to bring about a freer and quieter time for Paula and her husband. But Paula can see in all this nothing but a conspiracy formed behind her back, and in which her husband is mixed up. Then ensues a passionate scene in which bursts out all the terrible violence of this spoilt-child-like character, embittered by a false position. Now there remains nothing more for us to learn about her.

When we see Ellean again in the third act, a great change has come over her. On her travels she has come across a man whom she loves and who wants her to marry him. Paula is overwhelmed with delight. She sees an opportunity of playing the part of a mother. She will help on this love-affair, and Ellean will love her out of gratitude. Already the ice in which the young girl’s heart has been locked is beginning to melt. She is to be found acknowledging to Paula the feeling of repulsion she at first had entertained for her, and trying to explain away, and express her sorrow for, her conduct. But the man who has gained the love of the girl is one of the former lovers of the woman!

This is the situation which forms the subject of the last two acts, and which leads Paula in the end to suicide. The circumstance which brings her face to face with a man whom she had known before her marriage is likely enough; that which makes of him a suitor for the hand of Ellean is less natural, but not impossible, and it would be ungracious – after the author has so richly catered for our psychological curiosity by his rare gifts of analysis – to carp at the means he has employed of stirring our sensibility. He has made it clear to us from out the close of the second act that the domestication of the courtesan is an impossible dream; and the appearance of Captain Ardale, bringing things to a crisis, does but render the antagonism between Past and Present, visible, palpable, crushing. And the Future, what of it? We are to be shown it; for nothing has been overlooked by the stern logic which informs this play, underlying and disguising itself, but not altogether hidden, under the aspect of humour and emotion. Paula, her mind already full of those thoughts of death she had, as it were, flirted with in the first act, replies to her husband, who has suggested as a remedy their migration to some distant land: – She sees her beauty, she tells him, fading little by little, her beauty that was her one strength, her one unfailing excuse; she sees herself tête-à-tête with this cruel and insoluble problem, with the bitter memory of her misdeeds, with the consciousness of the harm she had suffered and had wrought… I shall never forget this scene. How her hoarse voice vibrated, and its accents of despair! How her every word went to the heart and sank in it! The actress had her share in this great triumph, and it was one of the strokes of luck attending this fortunate play that it was the means of revealing a great artist.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a woman of Society who was led by circumstances and an unusually strong vocation to embrace the stage. She is said to have Italian blood in her veins; hence, no doubt, that nervous delicacy of hers, that morbidezza which shades, veils, tempers, refines her talent no less than her beauty. She has neither the originality, nor the knowledge, nor the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, but she possesses that magnetic personality of which I have spoken with reference to Irving, and with which there is no such thing as a bad part. If this personality must be described, I would say that Mrs. Campbell’s province as an actress is more particularly that of dangerous love. That voice of hers, though it has but little sonorousness, power, or richness, produces in one a sense of disquiet and distress, straitens the heart with a kind of fascinating delicious fear that I would describe as the curiosité de souffrir. You feel that if you love her you are lost, but once you have seen her it is too late to attempt resistance. The generations which believed in the human will, which asked for simple tenderness, pert coquetry or imperious passion in a heroine, would never have understood her. She has come just in time to lull our dolorous philosophy, to show incarnate in woman the victim and the instrument of destiny.

It was with the same ally that Mr. Pinero risked his next battle, in January 1895, at the Garrick. I shall not analyse The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. I acknowledge that the piece is full of charming traits, and that the melodramatic element has been carefully eliminated from it. But I am obliged also to say that the author has seized one of the serious questions of the time, the emancipation of woman, and her revolt, justified in some respects, against marriage, and that this great subject has been allowed to slip through his fingers. Agnes Ebbsmith is on the point of seeking consolation in free love for the troubles and humiliations of her married life. She has rejected a copy of the Bible which a friend has offered as a last resource. She has thrown it into the fire, then in a sudden reaction she rushes to the fireplace, plunges her arm into the flame, rescues the sacred book, and falls upon her knees. The scene is a very fine one, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell never failed in it to bring down the house. But the conversion of Agnes is a dénouement, – not a solution, unless Mr. Pinero would have us believe that the modern woman will find in the Bible a response to all her anxieties, a remedy to all her ills. It is a delicate thesis, and not wishing to discuss it I shall remain silent. I prefer to bring my account of his talent to a stop, provisionally, with this admirable Mrs. Tanqueray, which submits and solves a moral problem at the same time that it sets forth and brings to its natural close a drama of domestic life.

CHAPTER XII

Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse – The First Translations – Ibsen acted in London – The Performers and the Public – Encounters between the Critics – Mr. Archer once more – Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the English – Ibsen’s Realism suited to English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life – The Women in his Plays – Ibsen and Mr. Jones – Present and Future Influence of Ibsen – Objections and Obstacles.

“There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive. Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen’s is about to appear.”

It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to one’s youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.

Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen’s published works, his historical and historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent partiality towards The Comedy of Love, and justified it by ingenious translations into verse of his own. He condemned Emperor and Galilean as only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice to the sombre grandeur of Brand and the dazzling fancy of Peer Gynt. In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him somewhat grêle for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist, who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as “a vast and sinister genius” – “a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire.”

Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming the poet’s talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of social and psychological dramas. “The play upon which I am now at work, he wrote,” – it was The Pillars of Society, – “will give the spectator exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life running their course before his eyes.” The stage was to be merely a room, one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of Brand and Peer Gynt not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his destiny.

In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an English version of Emperor and Galilean; three years later the British Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated The Dolls’ House under the title of Norah, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman’s Rights. Women like to form some concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, “a delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,” small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly, and rarely gesticulates, and that his “self-command amounts to coldness, but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power.” In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of Ibsen’s plays, The Pillars of Society, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine literary sense. To this library Ondine was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877. Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as final in some respects.

It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen’s fame and influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon performances, or, as a last resource, as a fin de saison, when there was nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre, which is the Theâtre Libre of London, but which might be called even more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he “does not pay.” Now Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving’s which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success is most real when business is worst.

Little by little a group of actors and actresses was got together who gave themselves up to the work, and interpreted their author with faith, passion, and courage, ready to “confess” him, and to endure for him, and with him, not death but hisses: I may mention Mr. Waring and Miss Robins, and above all Miss Achurch. An Ibsenite public was coming into existence at the same time, having for its nucleus a small group of those who had been devotees from the first. In addition, there was a great number of hostile critics come to condemn, but behaving themselves on the whole very respectably. Again, there were some who were merely curious, genuinely curious, who brought to these moving representations minds entirely open and unprejudiced. These returned in thoughtful mood and exchanged opinions upon the remarkable productions they had witnessed.

It was in the press that the great battles were waged. Many of the critics lost their temper and their manners, and passed, without realising it, from ridicule to mere rudeness. I do not confound these excesses either with the serious discussion to which men of talent submitted Ibsen’s philosophy in lectures and in the Reviews, or with merry skits such as those of Mr. Anstey, who gave us a “Pocket Ibsen” in the pages of Punch; these parodies suggest, to my mind, a lack neither of comprehension nor of respect. I refer to the furious and savage attacks which seemed to have for object the driving back of Ibsen to Norway, much as the East-End tailors would like to drive back to Hamburg those German immigrants who lower the rate of their wages.

Mr. Archer was the target for the fiercest volleys of these battles, in which he commanded the courageous little phalanx of Ibsenites; but he returned shot for shot, and with usury, for his fire was infinitely more destructive than that of his foes. Just as Mr. Gosse had revealed Ibsen to the literary world fifteen years before, Mr. Archer introduced him now into the world of the theatre.

If he entered into the Ibsen controversy so much later than his colleague, it must not be concluded on this account that he was less well equipped as regards preliminary study, or that he was upholding convictions that were newly born. To him, also, Ibsen was an early love. So far back as 1873 he knew by heart, in the original, those admirable scenes in Brand, which touch the soul to its depths. Before the performance of each new play he would try to explain the Monster, and to get the public into the way of looking it straight in the face; he would translate the symbolism into the most intelligible terms, speaking as one speaks to children, with an authoritative gentleness, a clearness of expression, and wealth of exposition, to which his quick intelligence does not often have resort. But the greatest service he has rendered to the cause, is his series of translations, which are now in everybody’s hands; not only do they convey into English the intense realism of Ibsen’s dialogues, but young authors may learn from them, also, new flexions of familiar speech, and thus get a step or two nearer to life.

Mr. Archer has been followed, and perhaps outrun, in his apostolate by other writers full of ardour and talent. Amongst these vanguard critics it is impossible not to mention Mr. Arthur B. Walkley, known to the readers of the Star as “Spectator,” and to those of the Speaker by his initials, “A. B. W.” To his name must be added that of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, whose articles in the Saturday Review have attracted much notice during the year 1895, and have constituted a veritable campaign in Ibsen’s honour.

The theatrical managers, as you may suppose, gave Ibsen a wide berth. Mr. Tree was the first of them who ventured to tackle him; this actor possesses an inquiring mind, and a spirit ever ready to accept – even, at need, to initiate – reforms. As long ago as 1891, in a lecture read before the Playgoers’ Club, he had given a very clever analysis of one of the most striking of M. Maeterlinck’s plays. In 1893 he produced a play of Ibsen’s at the Haymarket. The drama which he chose was The Enemy of the People. He had supposed, not unreasonably, that the geniality, courage, and invincible optimism of Stockmann would win the public. I imagine he did not regret the experiment, for since then he has made a similar one with a piece of Björnson’s. Therein he has set a good example to a greater actor, and in this connection I would venture to ask a question. Is Irving to quit the stage without attempting an Ibsen part? However that may be, the time is approaching when the Norwegian drama will pay. Not, of course, like Charley’s Aunt! One must not expect too much when one has only genius. Ibsen can and should keep alive without robbing or coveting a single one of lucky Mr. Penley’s spectators.

Now that Ibsen is known in England, what influence does he exert, or will he continue to exert in the future, upon English dramatic literature? By what racial affinities was the way for this influence prepared? By what prejudices – religious, philosophical, æsthetic – has it been impeded? To what does it owe its strength? To the dramatist’s art, or to the ideas which inform his work? This is the last big question I have to face before bringing my study to an end.

I do not wish to carry this question on to the moving bog of ethnography; I should lose my life. I shall say only that the English turn towards the Scandinavian world, much as we turn towards the Greco-Latin, with a vague feeling of tenderness and of filial curiosity. If the Teuton is their cousin, the Scandinavian is their brother; if not the eldest of the family, at least the one who has best kept up his tradition. Thus it is to him they have recourse when they would renew or seek inspiration in these traditions. Is it not a significant fact that Mr. Gosse and Mr. Archer, two of the most brilliant minds of their generation, should be familiar at the age of twenty-five with the literary idiom of Denmark and Norway? Is it not curious that the Sagas should have been the common source of Carlyle’s last work, and of the most important poem of William Morris? The Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the livre de raison, in which this soul of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders, it is the real Bible of his race.

Just because the Norseman was the incarnation in the mediæval world of the Teutonic genius in all its purity, a certain number of enthusiasts will not allow his descendants to exist in the present, and play their part in modern life. To make of this little country a museum of Runic relics, to make a mere caretaker of this vigorous little race, is worse than pedantry; it is cruelty. Will it be believed that it was from such a standpoint that objection was first raised against the acceptance of Ibsen? The idea was so curiously retrograde and artificial, that it could not long hold up against the force of the current. These archæologists, strayed into the field of criticism, made two mistakes: they misunderstood the law which imposes movement and progress upon all living organisms; and they were unable to recognise in Ibsen, beneath his modern aspect and present-day doubts, that valiant temperament, at once fearless and blunt, of the ancient Vikings, – as brave before the enigmas of thought as they had been of yore before the perils of battle and the tempest.

Thus it was that Ibsen, like Oehlenschläger before him and Björnson in his own day, made the Sagas his starting-point. It is in the Sagas that the Norse genius had its root, as in deep and tranquil waters, its stem rising towards the light and flowering above the surface. Even to-day, Norway and Denmark take more pleasure in Ibsen’s historical and semi-legendary dramas than in his more recent works; but whatever they themselves and the devotees of Runic tradition may think, their national character has undergone change since the twelfth century. Many races have contributed to the formation of their character, just as they have to that of the English, and it is worthy of remark that in both cases the elements are almost identical. The vigorous and energetic Finn, the weak and mystical Laplander, the blue-eyed, fair-haired Norseman, silent and profound, could all find their equivalents, if not their like, amongst the ancestors of the British people. Their history has been different, and yet has had points in common. Like England, Norway has had religious and political individualism for school or rather for model. Absolute independence under a nominal monarchy; freedom of the press and religious intolerance; no nobility and no class distinctions – Norway has been since 1814 very much what England would have been, had the semi-republican establishment of Cromwell and Puritan Democracy endured.

In his strange poem, Peer Gynt, Ibsen intended to depict the Norwegian type; and he has done so after a fashion which is the more intelligible to a foreigner in that he has in some cases exaggerated the principal features of this model to the point of caricature. The Norwegian mind is full of wild dreams, which seem to him as real as actual facts. Leading a hard and lonely existence amidst natural surroundings that seem to dwarf and threaten them, the people learn to live in themselves and for themselves. They have much pride and much ambition, and plenty of political wisdom. It is their imagination that sends them into maritime commerce, this being one of the ways left open to the spirit of adventure. Peer Gynt sells idols to the Chinese and Bibles to the missionaries; this second transaction redeeming the first. Twice he makes his fortune and twice he loses it; but he is a spirited gambler, and a few oaths suffice to comfort him for his most serious mischances. When, at the moment of his death, he is enabled to rest his head upon the bosom of the woman he has vilely betrayed, he accepts this final stroke of luck like all the rest – grateful but unastonished. The most ludicrous scene of all is that of a death agony! Peer Gynt’s old mother is about to meet her end, and she is seized with violent tremors. Her son, however, reminds her how, when he was a boy, the two of them used to play together at horse and cart. Supposing they had a game now? Where shall we drive to, mother? And off they go to where God lives! They come to the gates and call upon St. Peter for admission, – he’s got to let Peer Gynt’s old mammy into Heaven! The old woman breaks out into a guffaw, and in the midst of all this frolic, cheered now and brightened up, she achieves the dread crossing. To French readers this scene may seem a ghoulish farce: English humour accepts it from Norwegian humour without demur. In copying from Peer Gynt the portrait of one race, I had it in my mind to paint the portrait of a second. The picture has two models. That is why Ibsen comes so easy to the English mind – less difficult to understand than was Carlyle in his earlier works. The Norwegian cosmopolitan is more intelligible than the Scottish peasant, Germanized by a too long intimacy with Goethe and Jean Paul.