The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama

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.

Everyone knows that Ibsen has his own way of constructing a drama, a way which differs sensibly from ours. Is it better or worse? That is a question with which I am not concerned. What should be noted, however, is that the English, who have proved such wretched pupils in our school, and who, after fifty years have been unable to master their Scribe, have grasped everything they could turn to their own account in Ibsen’s methods. To understand this, we must remember that the English have a horror of our realism, even when toned down and filtered through America. Their compatriot, George Moore, despite his incontestable talent, has been unable to get them to accept him. They read his works with curiosity but without pleasure. We have seen in the preceding chapters that of their three most prominent dramatists, two turn their backs resolutely against realism, one by instinct, the other of set purpose; whilst the third cannot acclimatise himself to it, his temperament carrying him off towards the realm of fancy and humour. On this point they are at one with the public. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is an exception. It is a compromise between the dramatic system of Francillon and that of Hedda Gabler– the second, I think, prevailing. Ibsen has brought to the English the form, the kind, and the degree of realism they can put up with. Not that they accept everything without demur, even in Ibsen’s realism. They draw the line at the brutality of certain details, and the almost childish minuteness of others. Thus it was that Madame Solness’s nine dolls produced some tittering in the stalls.¹⁴ In Little Eyolf, if Alfred Allmers be allowed to make the avowal in the midst of his despair at the tragic death of his little boy, that he had caught himself wondering what he was going to have for dinner, I should not be surprised if there were, at this point, a shudder of protest. But these moments in which the dramatist and his English spectators are out of sympathy are rare. Shakespeare taught them to be surprised in no way at seeing human nature sink to the lowest depths after rising to giddy heights. What they want is to pass quickly from facts to ideas, and from ideas to fancies, and then to return suddenly to facts. The exact reproduction of life will never seem to them, as at certain literary epochs it has seemed to us, the supreme and final end of Art. It satisfies them only when it leads towards the solution of some problem of conduct, towards the explanation of some enigma of destiny, or of the fascinating secrets of this psychical world in which we live without ever seeing it, – of what is in it, and beside it, and beyond it. It must not be forgotten that symbolism is not a mere pastime and amusement to the Northern races which are addicted to it, but a real need born of their peculiar nature, a need which is not to be replaced by that idolatry of forms and colours which prevails in the joyous and sensuous South. When it is not satisfied, this need is accentuated to the point of a longing, a craving. The fact translates and suggests, follows or precedes, the thought; without the thought, it were but an empty envelope, a dress without a wearer, a box containing nothing. It serves, so to speak, as handmaid to the idea, and I would venture to suggest this formula (which I believe truthful, though it seem strange): In England, realism will be symbolical or non-existent.

If Ibsen’s art, then, is to prove to be to English taste, it is because this art is subordinated to the expression of certain moral feelings, and secret tendencies of the inner life; and also because all the questions with which the dramatist is taken up, are precisely those by which the English race is absorbed and divided into opposing camps; because in fine, Ibsen’s message, to make use of the expression of Carlyle, is addressed to this race more than to any other.

With regard to its bearing upon philosophy, let us take for instance that theory of Atavism which is developed, first of all, in a lugubrious episode in The Dolls’ House, and which pervades Ghosts, and Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea; does it not find a fit and well-equipped audience in the readers of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer? From a social standpoint, the ulcers which Ibsen cauterises are the ulcers which eat also into the life of England. That tyranny of the majority, that conventional and machine-like morality which stifles all initiative, that cavilling, degrading charity which is not Christian, but sectarian, are all well known to England. In Pastor Rörland and Pastor Manders these things find expression, – in the former violent, impetuous, fanatical, in the latter sheeplike and pusillanimous; the one is the incarnation of intolerance, the other of human respect; and England is well aware that she has both her Rörlands and her Manders. When, too, she is shown a Consul Bernick upon the stage, who is full of fine sentiments, but whose fortune is founded upon lies, and who sends out gallant fellows on a ship destined to be wrecked, she must be reminded of her own philanthropic ship-owners, enriched by the insuring of coffin-ships. And just as she is capable of a Bernick, so she is not unequal to producing a Stockmann, nor, in consequence, to understanding and loving this genial bavard, this impassioned devotee of truth and virtue, this Don Quixote, this Pangloss who would go to the martyr’s stake, but prefers to stop on the road. His enemies have broken his windows: what does he do? Sends for a glazier! He picks up the stones that have been thrown at him, examines them and criticises them. “Why, these are mere pebbles. There is hardly a decent stone in the lot!” He has returned from a public meeting with his trousers torn, and he comments thus philosophically upon the misadventure: “When you propose to stand up for justice before men, you should be careful not to wear your best pair of breeches.” If these traits are not English, I don’t know what the English character is.

Were I to pass Ibsen’s types in review one by one, I should find it easy to show with what ease they adapt themselves to English life. Engstrand, the man of the people, always a sinner and always lamenting his sin, who makes a career and a livelihood out of his repentance; and Lövborg, that noble but feeble character whom drunkenness drags into debauchery, and in whom the temptations of one night nullify years of virtue and honest endeavour; – these would require no modification or commentary upon the London stage. But it is English women that Ibsen seems to have divined best of all. Nearly all those demands of the Anglo-Saxon woman which evoke so much talk to-day are contained in germ in the last scene of The Dolls’ House, which dates from 1879. The woman is tired of being a servant and a plaything to the man; she sees herself confronted with responsibilities and duties for which she has had no preparation; she wants to live her own life as a reasoning and thinking being. This note is being re-echoed daily in the Reviews and on the platforms open to women, and thus Norah’s cry is indefinitely prolonged.

It is more than fifteen years since Ibsen wrote: “In democracy will be found the only solution of the social question. But the new state of society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. I expect much in this direction from woman and from the working-man, and it will be to the bringing nearer of their hour that my whole life-work shall be devoted.” I do not know whether this double promise has been kept. It seems to me that the people have found in him but a wayward and intermittent champion, and women a friend too pitilessly clear-sighted.

Women, both the good and the bad, are given traits of character, in Ibsen’s dramas, which are common to the Northern races. That joie de vivre, which in Norah gushes forth into affectionate sympathy, but which in Regina (in Ghosts) takes the form of a cold and marble-like indifference, which can be touched by nothing save self-interest and self-love; the jealousy and pride of Hedda Gabler, who prefers to send a man to his death, rather than see him repentant, and brought to happiness through the agency of another woman, and who decides to die herself rather than submit to the yoke or endure the scorn of the world; the naïvely animal sensualism of Rita Allmers (in Little Eyolf), who puts her husband before her child, and plays the wanton to rekindle the fire which had gone from his heart – to secure the marital attentions which are her due: these are all characteristics which are to be met with beyond the fiftieth parallel and north of the Pas de Calais, no less than north of the Sound.

I shall not go so far as to say that Ibsen has taught the English dramatists to understand the women of their race, but, at least, he has brought out certain aspects of them which had remained unportrayed, whether because the requisite psychological knowledge, or that rare quality, pluck, had been lacking in those who had attempted to depict them. Not all these dramatists accept Ibsen as their master; Sydney Grundy, whilst disapproving most strongly of the insults with which a certain section of the critics attack Ibsen and his partisans, has declared outright that he himself is no disciple of the author of The Master Builder. We can easily believe it; even without the declaration, his work in itself would have told us as much. Mr. Pinero, also, does not seem to me to have accepted any of Ibsen’s ideas; but he must have reflected upon his methods, and to some purpose, for if the brain which conceived Hedda Gabler is a powerful brain, the hand which constructed its various parts, and wove them together, is a cunning hand.