THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ONE.
Three Plays. By Anatoli Vasilievich Lunacharski. (Rout- ledge. 7s. .6d.)
Gas. By Georg Kaiser. (Chapman and Dodd. 3s. 6d.)
Four Short Plays. " British Drama League " Series. (Oxford : Blackwell. 3s. 6d. ) WHEN one whittles away the bark from the old drama, one finds a core of suffering. Some whittlers stop when they reach conflict, but without suffering there can be no real conflict ; the clashes of intellectual opinion or physical force have no bearing on human life unless they have dug them- selves a foothold in man himself, and that foothold is dug in the emotion of pain. The capacity for feeling pain (in which, of course, the capacity for feeling joy is implicit, I *se " suffering " for the whole gamut) is the bridge between man and physical circumstance, man and intellectual opinion. Dramatic conflict resolves itself into a conflict between different forms of suffering.
The romanticism of drama, its " elevating " quality, lies in its assertion of man's possession of this faculty of suffering :
a faculty-which, in our heart of hearts, we are always terrified of rasing—terrified that we may even now have lost. Why
do we " enjoy " the Traiades, the Prometheus Vinctus, the last speech from Faustus—any other tragedy you like to name ? Is it a delight in the circumstance of misery (with which we are already surrounded) ? Surely not : rather, it is because we are never tired of being told that we can suffer, can suffer more deeply than we had ever ourselves conceived to lie within the compass of man. We are in perpetual terror of becoming as logs of wood (a terror in itself woodlike, negative).
But this is a notion of drama which is losing ground. If one reads many of the plays of the day, one of the first things one is struck by is that the characters seem to have lost the power to hurt each other. They fight with swords of lathe, like men in a nightmare, strike without wounding. It is all external : one is shown two incompatible bundles of intellectual ideas which barge into each other blindly and then in the last act veer off, go their own ways. The most usual opposition for a play now, of course, is the opposition between parents and children, between the faith of the old and the inquiry of the young. Mr. Miles Malleson's new play, The Fanatics, is an excellent example of this, and it is a thousand pities that under the present censorship laws it is most un- likely to be allowed to find its way on to the public boards.
Here one is given two situations that one would have thought
would be fruitful of suffering. Frankie finds her fiancé, John, in the arms of a chorus girl ; and John's sister, Gwen, refuses to marry her lover until what she considers a decent interval of living in sin shall have elapsed. Both these thunderclaps burst on the astonished parents of John and Gwen. But what do the young people themselves do ? Frankie cries a bit, it is true ; but then she sits down with Gwen and another girl to an enthralling conversation on sex in general, in which John ultimately joins. It is part and parcel of the Young Idea to refuse to be hurt—at any rate, by any of the approved methods. It behaves like the comic man of the cinema, who, when shot at, catches the bullet in his hand, bites it to see what it is made of, and then throws it away with an expression of boredom. Well, then, one would have expected the Old Idea to be the real hero of the drama, to do the suffering.. But that play, it seems, is still waiting to be written : the dramatist is too much on the side of the young to allow the inevitable shifting of sympathy : if the young can't, the old shan't suffer. They bluster and fume —and then they, too (at any rate in plays), go their own ways unmoved. One has only to see how this conflict used to be treated—to read the Antigone, for instance—to see the difference.
Well, then, if the old human conflicts lose their adequacy, whither shall the drama turn for seriousness, for new, signifi- cant conflict ? It has turned with unanimity. Why is man ? Has life a purpose—and 'what purpose ? The new conflict is between man and his own intellectuality. It is the ultimate, unanswerable problem, the final surd, the philosophical square root of minus one, but a problem which the inquiries of the Young Idea are bound to face almost at the outset. It shows its head in The Fanatics, but is shelved with the very inadequate solution of one's duty to one's neighbour, which after all is a means, not an end, the means to make man---what ? Mr. Malleson's inquiring young people accept it quite as easily as their parents—the doctrine of holy monogamy. In Mr. Hermon Ould's play, The Dance of Life, it assumes the central position. Mr. Malleson is a highly naturalistic writer, with a complete knack of making his folk convincing. Mr. Ould is more experimental, and by a happy invention of alternate naturalistic and symbolistic! scenes has made it possible at least to tackle the problem.i Moreover, he has written a play which, besides being techni- cally interesting, seems to have every prospect of a rosy commercial future—may even rival the run of Outward Bound, and for some-what the same reasons. And, indeed, while Outward Bound is definitely disgraced by its last act, The Dance of Life is only mildly disappointing in its conclusions. Man's purpose in life is to dance, •says Mr. Ould (whatever the means by that). At any rate, the conclusion is less obviously unsatisfactory (because less definite) than Mr. Malleson's -or Mr. Vane's, and the play seems exactly what the managers are always crying for—something new but not too new Lunacharski is far the most considerable of the authors here under review : the Bolshevik State is certainly to be• congratulated on its choice of a Minister of Education lj These three plays, Faust and the City, The Magi, and Vasilisa the Wise, not only show that the brilliant fire of Russian literature has by no means flickered out, they have a definite place in European drama. They are far from perfect : the Faust begins in the very first rank of plays of any language, and ends among the " also rans " : The Magi isnn interesting adventure into gnosticism, but not as interesting as Faust : only Vasilisa, although never promising quite such-grand things as Faust, actually raises itself as the story unfolds, and in one scene (that in the Moon-country) touches a high climactic level of beauty that lends design to the whole. Lunacharski has the visual dramatic sense developed to a degree of almost incredible beauty : and succeeds in suggesting his settings by a very few words of stage direction. Nor is it only plastic setting he suggests : one cannot read at any rate Vasilisa without a musical setting suggesting itself too, and one is not surprised to learn that both that and The Magi are shortly to be staged as operas. May they soon be so staged in England! It is not easy to give any adequate idea of the manner of these plays in so short an article, where there is not even room for quotation : but perhaps Vasilisa can be best sug- gested by saying that it is something like The Immortal Hour, only better, at the same time more complex in contact and simpler in expression. Here, one might say, is escape from the Eternal Surd : Ivan Tsarevich never asks why he is alive, or the lovely and fey mute of the moon, Yalya-m, or even the wise Vasilisa herself. But rather than escape it is an indirect method of attack. And here I would say this, that though the direct method is an excellent method of teaching a child French, it is the indirect method which always proves paramount in art, and that Vasilisa is a far better posing of the problem than any of the direct question- ings of the natural young fanatics of the English writers.
So much for Vasilisa and The Magi. In Faust, the com- missar does attach more directly the problem of why is life, and why, in especial, is Society. The legend is based on a passage from Goethe, where Faust goes off to found a free city ; and the Faust one sees here is no master-slave of Mephistopheles, but an ideal Benevolent Despot, Duke of an Utopia of his own creation, where Mephistopheles is partly his servant, partly the enemy sowing tares. The Devil is the Apostle of the Ancient Dah, a Chronian, the enemy of Life, Life the disturber of the Primeval Nothing. So far, the play is on the grand scale, the universal struggle an impressive one. The scales are nicely balanced, between anarchy and organism, both in the practical and ethical planes. But then somehow the conception changes : the Devil dwindles from a vast Prince of the Nothing to a petty intriguer, driven to admit that Faust has better brains than he has. Then the struggle ceases to be philosophic, and becomes political. Faust is opposed by the ideal liberal, the perfect democrat ; and behind him are seen the sinister allegorical figure of Rebble, with his wife Envy,the unkillable spirit of revolution. The liberals demand that Faust shall surrender two-thirds of his authority to the People's Tribunes : he refuses, he surrenders it all, and retires to his tower. Meanwhile his son, Faustinus, the worst type of aristocrat, endeavours to regain his " rights " by force of arms ; and his daughter, Faustula, escaping the pedantic lover Faust provides for her, runs away with the young liberal leader. After a fearful battle Faustinus is conquered and killed, and democracy rstablished. But it is wearisome to describe it further : suffice it to say that we are given examples of all constitutional difficulties on an ideal scale; and finally that Faust dies in the market-place in an odour of civic sanctity in the arms of his sorrowing people, and a really first-rate play has foundered on the fatal rock of an Utopia. For the conception of the first half is magnificent indeed ; and in spite of the author's description of it as a " play for reading " would be far better worth staging than many better-turned articles from the playwright's workshop. Even as it stands, as a political essay it is more broad-minded than any other recent attempt of its kind : it is edifying to us English to find so undoctrinaire a production from an official of what we are inclined to regard as the most fanatical of governments. But as a play it is far the most ambitious attempt at the grand scale of recent years. M. Lunacharski is still in his forties ; he writes at enormous speed, generally by night after a day's official work (Vasilisa was so composed in a fortnight) ; he has already written a sequel to Vas visa (unpublished) and meditates the third member of a trilogy. One might really call him, with Pirandello, one of the most promising of living writers anywhere in the world. And in parenthesis one must say a word about the Broadway Translations. They hat:e a happy knack of avoiding the hackneyed as well as the merely curious, and as far as the general reader is concerned, contain more valuable " discoveries " than any other series I -know.
Another play, both more typical of Continental expressionist drama and the direct approach to the social aspect of the Surd, is Georg Kaiser's Gas, which has recently been per- formed in Vienna. (A translation has been produced at Birmingham, too.) It is a type of play much in fashion; and therefore difficult to judge on its merits, but at least one must admit its tremendous economy of words. It is the great fault of the facile Lunacharski that he flings his words on the page by the pailful, and says in ten minutes what might well be said in one ; but Kaiser condenses and condenses, and writes with an intellectual as well as a verbal compression that are admirable. Moreover, as it is an artist's business to formulate problems, not to solve them, to follow Pilate's part and " not stay for an answer " where there can be no answer, Kaiser attempts no solution of the great problems of industry he here formulates. Like Lunacharski, he reflects his drama against a benevolent despot, the billionaire's son, who is reduced to impotence by the machine he has created, but he is far more purely intellectual than Lunacharski, and has generalized his problems almost to the point of emaciation. In fact, one's only grouse against him is that Gas is too typical : too typical of a manner of writing in its form, too typical of a nexus of abstract problems in its matter. For it is heresy to believe that the universal can only be achieved by the sacrifice of the particular : and it is a heresy which Kaiser gives every sign of maintaining.
But social problems offer no real respite. What is the mean- ing of life ? What is being and not-being? Pirandello asks again and again with bewildering acumen. Is it a real creation of the imagination, The Six Characters suggests, or a delusion ? Is there any difference between error and truth, or are they figments, not creations, of the imagination? he asks in Cos*, se vi pare ! Can one distinguish madness from sanity? he asks in Henry IV. Pirandello is, philosophically, the most annihilating of modern minds, and yet one of the most creative. What a welcome relief is his clear brain after the self-deceptive turgidities of the Croeeans ! He alone realizes that the root of minus one is an irrational quantity.
And so, after crawling around the inside of metaphysics for hours like a goldfish in a bowl, nosing in vain at the glass, man at last sinks imperceptibly into mere swimming. In the only one of the Four Short Plays of any account, St. Simeon Stylites, by F. Sladen Smith, St. Simeon is visited on his pillar by a number of different people who all tempt him to come down, all ascribe different motives to his staying up. " It is pride, not piety," says the Devil. " No it isn't," said the Saint, "it's habit! " That is why most of us remain uncomfortably perched on the pillar of existence. But then : what is Habit ?
RICHARD HUGHES.
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