doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When
that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He
postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if
the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some
impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation
of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
mutual dislike.
Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In
other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
puts upon it.
It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes,
and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
easier said than done.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]
[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
_Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
to the higher instincts of the public.]
[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was
certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]
_CHAPTER XXI_
THE FULL CLOSE
In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
very end.
The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his
life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
anticlimax.
It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God
to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
help him to an effective "curtain."
As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for
years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience."
Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was
almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Björnson, in a very
moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though
indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be
his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.
The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.
Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented
on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious
British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
and
