A Conversation on Drama

SENEX. I have just been to Ghosts at the Century and it has filled me with melancholy reflections.

IUVENIS. Yet one should n’t find Ghosts depressing: it is not intended to discourage us with life — merely to disgust us with false ideals. For of course Ibsen was n’t writing merely the tragedy of a young man who goes mad from syphilis, as stupid people seem to believe, but the tragedy of a family brought to ruin through Puritanism and respectability. What was the cause of Oswald’s disease? He inherited it from his father. And how had his father contracted it? From going with the girls of the town. And what had reduced him to doing that? The priggishness of Mrs. Alving and the dullness of the community. And what had made Mrs. Alving such a prig? The Puritanical ideals she had been taught, which made her take life as all ‘duty’ and no passion or joy — which not only made her marriage a failure but actually continued to prevent her escaping from her situation even after she realized it. It is a tragedy, in short, which has been brought about by an unworkable moral ideal.

SENEX. Mrs. Alving would have been sure to live happily, then, in a more liberal society?

IUVENIS. Of course; you remember what Oswald says about his mother’s moral ideas: ‘ In the great world, people won’t hear of such things. There, nobody really believes these doctrines any longer. There, you feel it a positive bliss and ecstasy merely to draw the breath of life.’

SENEX. But what about the tragedies of the ‘great world’? People come to grief there too, don’t they?

IUVENIS. False moralities and oppressive institutions make their effect felt everywhere.

SENEX. And it is the false moralities and oppressive institutions which cause all the tragedies?

IUVENIS. Yes, of course; and it is the purpose of the great writers, like Ibsen, to deliver mankind from their enslavement.

SENEX. But suppose Mrs. Alving had not been constrained by institutions and had held a noble ideal of duty instead of a narrow one — could she never have suffered a tragic fate?

IUVENIS. She might have held a noble ideal of duty and been persecuted by people who could not understand it. But that, in a sense, would not have been a tragedy, because the truth is indestructible, and, even if the prophet himself is destroyed, in declaring it he has triumphed. As a matter of fact, Ibsen has written a play on that subject — An Enemy of the People. Dr. Stockmann tries to act in obedience to a noble ideal of duty, and as a result his whole town turns against him. But Ibsen does not represent Dr. Stockmann as ruined, as Mrs. Alving has been. Mrs. Alving has lost everything, including her moral convictions; but Dr. Stockmann, who has lost only the favor of his neighbors, maintains the strength of his faith — in fact, he is the stronger for having lost public favor. As Ibsen makes him say at the end of the play: ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.’

SENEX. Well, I cannot agree with you that the only things which produce real tragedies are false moral ideals which can easily be explained away. What provoked the melancholy reflections I spoke of was, precisely, seeing Œdipus Tyrannus only a few days before Ghosts at the same theatre. Now there is a tragedy which strikes me as more profound than the majority of modern tragedies because it has nothing in it of the conflict you speak of between conventional and enlightened ideas. Œdipus was a good and conscientious man, so far as his capacity went; he was proud, perhaps, but there is no reason to believe that he abused his position of power. Yet by reason of crimes which he did not even know he had committed he was eventually undone.

IUVENIS. And on that very account I have never liked Sophocles or been able to see the point of Œdipus! Œdipus is the victim of a convention — the convention which forbids incest — and it is outrageous that he should be made to suffer for an offense which he has committed innocently. Yet there is not a word of condemnation on Sophocles’ part for the foolish prejudice which makes him blind himself and for the superstitious and stupid public opinion which drives him forth into banishment.

SENEX. No; as Mackail says, Sophocles accepts conventions because they are actual facts of life — they are among the motive forces of the world.

IUVENIS. But surely it is the mark of a second-rate mind to accept conventions in that fashion!

SENEX. But, after all, might n’t the tragedy have been the same, whether there were conventions involved in it or not? Is n’t it the point that Œdipus, who thought himself so securely established, so much what we should call nowadays a ‘success,’ was actually fated to be brought low by forces which he had himself unconsciously set in motion? And is n’t that a catastrophe which in one form or another is likely to happen to us all? Do we not even in some sense, like Œdipus, destroy our fathers as the price of our own lives? And do we not have to expiate it just the same?

IUVENIS. No: that is too cruel, too unjust! We should never be obliged to expiate it in an enlightened society.

SENEX. Yet Sophocles is really much less cruel than Ibsen, for, instead of stopping his story with a definitive disaster, as a modern writer of tragedy would do, he follows the agony of Œdipus Tyrannus with the tenderness of Œdipus at Colonus, in which Œdipus, realizing at last his own innocence and the wantonness of his self-mutilation, knowing that in the eyes of the gods he has expiated his guilt, finds peace and honor among strangers. That is what Arnold meant when he said that Sophocles saw life steadily and saw it —

IUVENIS. Yes, I know; but my feeling has always been that he saw it a little too steadily. If he had been a little more upset about it, I should feel more enthusiasm for him. In any case, you surely would n’t have the modern dramatists try to imitate Sophocles. When people attempt to reproduce classical tragedy, you only get the meaningless pessimism of the Greeks with none of their vividness — stuff like Corneille and Racine.

SENEX. Would that we did get something like Racine!

IUVENIS. But there you have the same unintelligent acceptance of conventions, and of conventions which were obsolete in the author’s time at that! After all, why should n’t Phèdre have fallen in love with her son-in-law? It was the most natural thing in the world. And why should Bérénice have been debarred from marrying Titus simply because she was a foreigner and a queen? Racine would have been better employed in attacking the ridiculous errors which made these tragedies possible!

SENEX. And if the prejudices had been removed, the tragedies would never have occurred ?

IUVENIS. Why, obviously.

SENEX. But might not the conflict between passion and duty or between passion and ambition have occurred in any case? Racine himself, as you say, does not take these particular prejudices any more seriously than you or I, but, like Sophocles, he accepts conventions as among the motive forces in men’s lives, and these prejudices represent the particular conventions of the societies he is writing about. The fact that human beings once considered them important is enough for Racine; he knows that if the emotions of his characters had not been balked by these obstacles they would have been balked by others of the same kind. If it had not been a taboo against falling in love with her son-in-law which interfered with Phèdre’s passion, it would have been the duty to her husband and her home, like that which prevented Mrs. Alving from running away with Pastor Manders. But, whereas Ibsen is interested in attacking the particular convention, Racine sees convention as universal and it is the universal that interests him. So with Shakespeare, it is not social problems which preoccupy him, — most of the societies he presents are imaginary, — but the universal fatality of moral character undone by some weakness involved in its very strength. It is not the breakdown of a particular system of morals and conventions that the great classical dramatists deal with, but the failure of man himself.

IUVENIS. None the less, it is plain that in Shakespeare we have already the modern rebel. His Othellos and his Lears do not interest me; they are the heroes of a glorified melodrama. But in Hamlet and in some passages of his other plays you have already the arraignment of authority. It is not his weak character which inhibits Hamlet from revenging his father’s death, but his realization of the uselessness and absurdity of the conventional code which demands it. He is superior to the society about him, not merely incompetent to play a part in it — as some people try to pretend. It is only his father’s ghost which drives him toward revenge — the voice of authority, of tradition, the voice of the dead past. And it is Hamlet’s struggle against this past which makes him heroic and admirable.

SENEX. But surely it is not Hamlet’s ideas in themselves which primarily interest Shakespeare: it is the moral curve which he follows. He is equally interested in Macbeth and Coriolanus, who have no ideas at all.

IUVENIS. Yes, perhaps; I suppose that on the whole I must agree with Shaw about Shakespeare — a man of impressive poetic genius but very meagre ideas!

SENEX. Ah, Shaw! There you have a clear example of the shortcomings of the modern point of view. Compare Shaw — the great modern comic dramatist, I grant you —with the great classic comic dramatist, Molière. When you read what Shaw has to say about Molière, you realize the great difference between them; because it is only what he takes for the revolutionist in Molière that Shaw really admires. He applauds Don Juan because it represents a rebel and Tartuffe because he thinks it an attack on an institution; but Le Misanthrope he regards as Molière’s ‘dullest and worst play’ because he cannot see that it solves any social problem. Yet is it not evident that Molière begins where Bernard Shaw leaves off? Shaw has been preoccupied all his life with a crusade against certain middle-class prejudices which did not exist for Molière; he has depended for almost his whole effect on shocking an audience which held them. And that is why he has never been successful with the French, the audience of Molière: they have inherited as a part of their very national culture the sort of realistic recognition of human conditions which Bernard Shaw has been struggling and protesting all his life to achieve. I see that he has recently been denouncing the conservatism of the French for their lack of appreciation of his plays: ‘I am too old,’ he says, ‘to educate Paris. It lags too far behind and I am too far ahead ‘ — or something of the sort. Actually, he has never caught up to it yet. For, like you, he has believed that if certain prejudices were destroyed, and society more efficiently organized, all would thereafter go well. For him, all problems are soluble; in his plays and his prefaces he has worked out the most hopeless of human complications with the elegance of geometrical demonstrations. But for Molière life is not so simple as that. For him the best man — or the best idea — does not invariably win. There is not merely a conflict between human values: there is very often an utter deadlock. It is not suggested, for example, that any reform could have relieved the painful situation of Alceste or of George Dandin — though Bernard Shaw would probably have blamed them both on a feudal society. These situations are as much the fatalities of moral character as the situations in Racine. The only difference is that Molière smiles, whereas Racine, like Antiochus in Bérénice, has no comment save ‘ Helas! ‘

IUVENIS. But it is not because we understand life less than our ancestors that our dramatists have become reformers: it is because we understand it better! We understand the causes of things so well that we have at last come to doubt the necessity of their taking place in the way they do. Would you really exchange Bernard Shaw and his world for Molière and Racine and their world, or for Sophocles and his? Molière and Racine are both courtiers in a fixed artificial society imposed by tyranny upon mankind — a system whose security they believed eternal, but which, as a matter of fact, was soon to blow up. How can you hold such an extravagant opinion of men who either did not realize the falsity of their situation or lacked the courage to declare it? And as for Sophocles, life was terrible for him precisely because he understood it so little; intellectually, he was still half a barbarian, still very close to the primitive mythology from which he and his fellows drew their themes. He saw that life was full of suffering and, not yet realizing that suffering was preventible, he blamed it on the gods or on Fate or on some other primitive hobgoblin. For the Greek dramatists, a neurotic derangement which we should nowadays refer to the doctor was a visitation by the Furies! I remember that once when I was at college I had to write something on Œdipus and that when I came to read the literature of the subject I found half a dozen contradictory accounts, all by equally illustrious critics, of Sophocles’ moral ideas — including one by John Addington Symonds which made him a pious Victorian Christian with a philosophy of moral retribution similar to that of George Eliot. The conclusion I finally came to was that Sophocles had no real moral ideas, but had merely taken over old legends and made harrowing tragedies out of them. But we to-day walk a different world, whose roads we have already charted and shall presently have made safe, and we stand under a sky which has been cleared of the punishments and thunders of the gods. We are the masters of our universe — or know that we are capable of becoming so. We can no longer see the necessity of resigning ourselves to a cruel Fate, like the Greeks, or of embracing suffering, like the Christians, in the hope that it may buy us salvation after death. We realize now that our sufferings are needless, that they are only the accidents of our ignorance, that by the exercise of a little economy and the stimulation of a little good-will we shall be able to purge life forever of privation and violence. And in the meantime we have no longer any use for the gospel of despair!

SENEX. Ah, I am afraid you take too short a view. That is precisely what I deplore in modern literature. Have we not all, since the eighteenth century, been inclined to take too short a view? The liberals of the eighteenth century thought a millennium was close at hand; they could not foresee industrialism and the effects of democratic enfranchisement, the afflictions which the stupidity and selfishness of men made of their science and republicanism. So the modern liberals of ten years ago did not really foresee the war, and when it came they expected more of the peace than anyone had a right to. Now even Shaw, I think, begins to realize that he has expected too much too soon. Before the war he seemed to have little doubt that Fabian socialism would settle everything and that its progress would be unimpeded. Now he writes in a somewhat different strain. In Heartbreak House one felt something like disillusion. In Back to Methuselah one found him contemplating a future which should see an end of socialism and a continuance of wars. And now in Saint Joan, for perhaps the first time in his life, he has written a play in which the representatives of authority are equally impressive and morally admirable with the rebel and the heretic, and in which the conclusion is not a hopeful one. I feel sometimes that all Shaw’s early iconoclasm merely served to inculcate in your generation a code of social morality as narrow as the religious one he was reacting against — a new kind of priggishness for the old. But Shakespeare and Sophocles and Molière would never have made prigs of their readers. They do not explain away all the irremediable evils and the irreconcilable conflicts of life, as Shaw, for example, does. They are that rare thing in our own day, men of the world who know the world thoroughly, yet continue to take it with intense seriousness. That is the great thing about a classical education: it enables us to know the worst early, yet encourages us to maintain our dignity in face of it. The classical writers allow us no illusions; yet they make it possible for us to do without them. Their doctrine is not the doctrine of despair, for despair means defeat by life, whereas the great poets have mastered life, — not by fixing their hopes on expectations which are certain to be disappointed, but by grasping the failures and disgraces of humanity at the mercy of external nature and its own, and imposing human beauty upon them, — so that, from being a horror which we cannot bear to look at, which we will flee to any rabbit-hole rather than face, life becomes something we can tolerate the thought of, which we can even in a sense love, because it has been shown us in our own image. This is, I believe, the only kind of victory of which we can be sure that humanity is capable: to leave behind, and to derive consolation from, its judgment of its fate.

IUVENIS. But we still have pessimists of the type you admire; one does not have to go to the ancients to find them. Thomas Hardy, for example.

SENEX. A few moderns have something of the steady and comprehensive point of view that one finds in the classical dramatists, but in general the level of civilization has sunk so that the poet to-day has to waste the greater part of his career climbing back to where his ancestors started. I read your writings and those of your contemporaries with considerable admiration, but I am dismayed by the disadvantages you are working under — as Shaw and Ibsen did before you. You are under the necessity of using up your whole energy, perhaps devoting your whole lives, to the destruction of Victorian bigotries and middle-class superstitions which you should never have had to cope with in the first place. You lose the best years of your youth battling for a place which should have been yours right from the beginning. You speak of Hardy, but there is a great difference between Hardy and the Greek dramatists to whom you would compare him. Almost as much as Shaw’s master, Samuel Butler, he has reacted against a narrow orthodoxy into a heresy equally narrow. His catastrophes are as naïve and ridiculous as the happy endings of the Victorians. His tragedies are unsatisfactory from the moral point of view because they make everything depend on external accident; with the possible exception of Jude the Obscure, character plays no real part in them. Hardy’s people are merely the victims of an evil spirit — really a satire on the benevolent Providence of the pious — who plays practical jokes upon them.

IUVENIS. But is that not precisely what the Greek Fate does?

SENEX. NO, because the Greek Fate was called Necessity and was inherent in the situation: it was set in motion by the characters themselves. The point of the tragedy of the Atreïdai — like that of the family of Œdipus — is that crime inevitably breeds crime and that it has its source in human perversity, whereas for Hardy there is only a melodrama, in which man, the amiable, the innocent, is continually foiled by the villain God. And that, as I am sure you will agree, is not a convincing account of life.

IUVENIS. NO, but I respect Hardy for his reaction against a blind belief in Providence.

SENEX. So do I; and I think that he and Butler present a far more edifying spectacle than the Victorian writers who allowed themselves to accept the comforting optimism of the time. Thackeray, for example, who seems always to be taken for an unusually attractive personality, affects me far more disagreeably, on the whole, than either Butler or Hardy, who are admittedly more or less unpalatable: for Butler and Hardy are courageous and straightforward, whereas Thackeray is timid and insincere. Half the time he is a real critic of life, with a profound feeling for its moral complexity, and half the time he is a correct family author, paying his tribute to the middle-class virtues. When Thackeray comes to deal with Helen Pendennis, he cannot make up his mind whether to tell the truth about her or to say what his audience would like to hear; the result is that one moment he will describe her as a saint, a model of piety and motherly devotion, and the next moment, as if with an outbreak of irritability, he will let you see how narrow, how ugly, and how foolish he really feels that she is. Butler, on the other hand, has become so much embittered by a long enslavement to Mrs. Pendennis’s virtues that when he comes to deal with a similar type in The Way of All Flesh he can produce only a caricature so repulsive as scarcely to be recognizable as the portrait of a human being. Ibsen, who had more strength and more genius than either, gave us neither the angel with part of the gilt rubbed off that we get in Helen Pendennis, nor the bugaboo of Christina Pontifex, but the tragic figure of Mrs. Alving. So I prefer Ibsen, not only to Thackeray, but also to Butler. But I prefer Shakespeare and Molière to any of them. For it is only when Mrs. Alving and what she represents have ceased to haunt literature— or, better still, when they have never begun — that the real masterpieces are created. And ever since the early nineteenth century — Byron and Stendhal felt her first shadow — Mrs. Alving has been at the back of all minds. She has had a place, even though an invisible one, at every intellectual table. And we have had always, in our conversation, either to defer to her or to defy her — whereas it would have been better if, as at Plato’s Symposium, she had not been among the guests at all.

IUVENIS. But you said a little while ago, in comparing Shaw to Molière, that the French were still civilized. Have n’t they been affected by middleclass ideas?

SENEX. Yes, of course; but not so much as we. Remy de Gourmont and Anatole France and the rest represent perhaps the highest civilization in Europe, but even with them one feels a hostile influence in the air that they are a little conscious of affronting: Remy de Gourmont has his M. Croquant, and France is really in full reaction against the narrow version of the Christian virtues characteristic of the nineteenth century. With the French, the revolution in society has brought, not so much sentimentality and hypocrisy, — as it has in the English-speaking countries, — but rather a kind of intensification into vices of the classic virtues of the French bourgeoisie, so that their thrift has been reduced to meanness and their prudence to timidity. As you know, the bourgeois was the bugbear of French writers throughout the whole nineteenth century. He clipped the wings of the Romantic movement, which had produced some bold and admirable poets. Flaubert and Baudelaire, for example, had both been launched by the impulse of the Romantics; yet Baudelaire, when he composes a Litany to Satan, has begun to turn from the free enjoyment of that impulse to the assault on a bourgeois society almost as much as Flaubert when he turns from the first version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine to L’Éducation sentimentale.

IUVENIS. Well, I think you exaggerate the difference between the present and the past in the matter of the criticism of society. After all, there have always been great writers who were not afraid to be reformers. After all, Sophocles may have been resigned, but Euripides was a revolutionist and made some of his most celebrated tragedies the vehicles of feminist and antimilitarist propaganda. Molière may have been willing to play safe, but Beaumarchais, not so very long afterward, had spirit enough to direct a comedy against the outrageous institutions of his time. He and the other French writers of the eighteenth century did not hesitate to put their talents at the service of the crusade against feudalism and the mediæval Church. Why then should we be ashamed to put ours at the service of the crusade against industrialism and against Puritan morality?

SENEX. I did not say that you ought to be ashamed: I approve of what you are doing. But you are worse off than Beaumarchais and Voltaire and the rest because they had the benefit of the aristocratic standards cultivated by the very institutions they were attacking, whereas your intellectual integrity and your taste are seriously impaired by industrialism and democracy. And your task is becoming more and more tremendous — cleaning the Augean stables is nothing to it! Think of the ablest contemporary American writers and then consider how much of what they have written has been merely an indictment of vulgar tastes and commercial ideals. H. L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Van Wyck Brooks — in one way or another they are all preoccupied with the struggle against middle-class standards. And the result is — as I said of Shaw — that, where they leave off, the real criticism of life begins. That is what I meant when I said that seeing Ghosts had started a depressing train of reflection. I foresee that any sort of genuinely high culture will very soon become impossible in the United States, and that when Europe becomes Americanized too, as it seems well on the way to becoming, the same thing will be true there. That will leave China— if she manages to stall off for a time the influence of the business man and the missionary — with what will, so far as I can see, be the only first-rate aristocratic culture in the world. So you are in a different and less favorable situation than the philosophers before the revolution: in their case, the system they were attacking was already in decay — feudalism had flourished and was ready to fall. But industrialism is still on the rise; it has, in fact, probably only just begun. And so long as we have a democratic society and the people are ignorant and uncultivated, as they will be for many centuries, we shall have such a lowering of standards, both in the world about us and therefore even within ourselves, as it seems extremely discouraging to oppose.

IUVENIS. Who knows? You speak as if industrialism and business were identified with the ambitions of the people. But as the régime which these things have imposed on us becomes more and more oppressive, as it becomes plainer and plainer that its conditions do not comport with human life, how do you know that the people will not rebel against it? How long will men go on working in factories and in offices? The servant class has nearly disappeared. What will happen when the employee begins to go, as he already shows signs of doing? When the people are a little better educated, how can they help getting bored with their work? And in the meantime our nerves have been stretched too tight. Even now they may be snapping!

SENEX. Perhaps; but do not hope too much, if that should occur. It will not solve the problem of culture. And I fear that life will still supply a good deal of material for Sophoclean tragedies.