THEATRICAL AMORISM
“The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life, it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren; sometimes like a fury.” It is one of the few things the general reader is able to quote from Bacon, who goes on to make some pointed remarks about love in life, but drops all reference to love on the stage, which he would hardly have done had he been Shakespeare.
But the converse question, how far love is “beholding” to the stage—what treatment it has received there, what justice the stage has done to it—is certainly not without interest. Life is not long enough to deal with the whole question, ranging through the ages, but it may be worth while to consider for a moment what our contemporary English stage is doing with the theme. Are our playwrights addressing themselves to it with sincerity, with veracity, with real insight? Or are they just “muddling through” with it, repeating familiar commonplaces about it, not troubling themselves “to see the thing as it really is”? These questionshave occurred to me in thinking over Mr. Arnold Bennett’sSacred and Profane Love. Thinking it over! interrupts the ingenuous reader; but have you not already reviewed it? So it may be well to explain that one “notices” a play and then thinks it over. True, one’s “notice”—the virtually instantaneous record of one’s first impressions—sometimes wears a specious appearance of thought. But that is one of the wicked deceptions of journalism, mainly designed to appease eager people of the sort who rush up to you the moment the curtain is down on the First Act to ask: “Well, what do you think of it?” In reality, as the wily reader knows, it is at best only thought in the making, a casting about for thought. Not until you have read it yourself next morning can you begin (if you ever do begin) to think. So, as I say, I have been thinking over Mr. Bennett’sSacred and Profane Love.
It is not what used to be called a “well-made” play. Its main interest is not cumulative, but is suspended for a whole act and, at its most critical point, relegated to an inter-act. In Act I. the young Carlotta gives herself to Diaz. In Act II. (seven years later) Diaz has dropped clean out. Carlotta, now a famous novelist, is in love with somebody else and shows herself strong enough to renounce her love. Act III. resumes the Carlotta-Diaz story. He has become an abject morphinomaniac; she heroically devotes herself, body and soul, to the terrible task of reclaiming him.BetweenActs III. and IV.(fourteen months) this terrible task is accomplished. We have to take it on trust, a rather “large order.” Act IV. ends the Carlotta-Diaz story in marriage. Obviously it is not a well-told story. It has a long digression, and the spectator’s attention is misled; it assumes a miracle behind the scenes, and the spectator’s credulity is over-taxed. Act II. is a play within a play; how Carlotta nearly ran away with her publisher. In Act IV. you cannot accept the alleged recovery of the morphinomaniac, you expect him to “break out” again at any moment. Of course, the story being what it is, there was no help for it. Years of rising to fame as a novelist, months of struggling with a drug victim, cannot be shown on the stage. Only, writers of well-made plays do not choose such stories.
But is this treating the play fairly? Is it just a story, the story of Carlotta and Diaz? Suppose we look at it in another way, suppose we consider it as a study of modern love, or, more particularly, of the modern woman in love. Then the play at once looks much more shipshape. It is theéducation sentimentaleof Carlotta. The second act ceases to be episodical; it is one of the stages in Carlotta’s “love-life” (as Ibsen’s Ella Rentheim calls it). The miracle of Diaz’s reclamation between the acts ceases to worry us; it only prepares another stage in Carlotta’s love-life. And, from this point of view, I think Mr. Bennett has achieved something much better than the construction of a well-made play.He has given us, in his downright matter-of-fact way, a close study of modern love in the case of a woman made for love, living for it, able to dominate it and to turn it to heroic purpose. She starts her career of love by “giving herself” to a man who is almost a stranger. I suppose this is considered a “bold” scene. But it is, evidently, there from no cheap purpose of “audacity,” it is no calculated fling at the proprieties. Mr. Bennett—it is his way—indifferently depicts human nature as he sees it, and the girl’s “fall” is natural enough. In amilieuof prosaic provincialism (if one may venture so to qualify the Five Towns) she is thrown into contact with a romantic figure from the great world, a famous pianist who has just enraptured her with his music, the embodiment of all her artistic ideals. She is of an amorous temperament (and since Mr. Bennett is undertaking a study of love, it would be no use choosing an ascetic heroine). The inevitable happens. When next seen, she has not seen or heard of the man for years since their one meeting. They have been years of strenuous labour, and she is a successful novelist. But she has not parted with her temperament, and she falls in love with, so to speak, the nearest man. He seems a poor creature for so superior a woman to choose—but such a choice is one of the commonplaces of life. When she realizes the misery she is causing to the man’s wife she promptly renounces him. (The wife has a little past love-history of her own—Mr. Bennett neglectsno facet of his subject.) Then Carlotta hears of Diaz and his morphinomania, conceives forthwith her heroic project of rescuing him, takes up her lot with him again, and pulls him through. When he is himself again, he reveals the egoism of the absolute artist. Carlotta must not accompany him to the concert, because she would make him nervous. She obeys, and is left in an agony of suspense at home. When the concert has ended in triumph, he must be off (without his wife) to an influential patron’s party. She acquiesces again, not without tears. The men she loves are not worthy of her; but she must love them, she was made for love. There is talk of marriage at the end. It seems an anti-climax.
I find that I have been discussing Mr. Bennett’s play instead of the general question into which I proposed to inquire—the treatment of love by our dramatists of to-day. It looks, I fear, like the familiar device of a reviewer for running away from his subject—“unfortunately, our space will not permit, &c.”—always very useful when the subject is getting ticklish. But the fact that I have had to dwell on Mr. Bennett’s case rather shows how rare that case is with us. The general treatment of love on our stage is, it seems to me, inadequate. Either it is a mereficelle, an expedient for a plot, or it is apt to be conventional, second-hand, unobserved. We want fresh, patient, and fearless studies of it on our stage. I am not asking for calculated “audacity” orsalacity (there has never been any dearth of that), but for veracity. Though the subject is the oldest in the world, it is always becoming new. There are subtleties, fine shades, in our modern love that cannot have been known to the Victorians; yet most of our stage-love to-day remains placidly Victorian. Was it Rochefoucauld or Chamfort who spoke of the many people who would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard it talked about? But think how we of to-day have all heard it talked about, what books we have read about it! The old passion has put on a new consciousness, and calls for a new stage-treatment. Where is our Donnay or our Porto-Riche? They, perhaps, pursue their inquiries a little farther than would suit our British delicacy; but our playwrights might at least take a leaf out of their book in the matter of veracity, instead of mechanically repeating the old commonplaces.