Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

IV

After this desultory ramble through the history of the drama in other centuries and in other countries, we are in better case to consider the first of the three questions suggested by Mrs. Wharton’s assertion that we Americans are deficient in the intellectual honesty which is a recognized characteristic of the French. Is it really true that we like tragedies with happy endings? If it is true, we are no worse off than the English in the time of Shakspere, the French in the time of Corneille and in the time of Hugo, the Greeks in the time of Euripides. But is it true?

It might be urged in our defence that we do not in the least object to the death of the hero and the heroine (or of both together) in the music-drama; and it must be admitted that in serious opera a tragic ending is not only acceptable but is actually expected. It might be pointed out that the final death of the heroine has never in any way interfered with the immense popularity of a host of star-plays, ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ the ‘Dame aux Camélias,’ ‘Froufrou,’ ‘Théodora’ and ‘La Tosca.’ It might be permissible to record that the death of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ (a fatal termination not inherent in the theme of that heroic comedy and in fact almost inconsistent,) did not dampen the pleasure of the American playgoer.

These things must be taken for what they are worth; and perhaps they are not really pertinent to our immediate inquiry, since opera is a very special form of the dramatic art, making an appeal of its own within arbitrary limits, and since a star-play is relished by the majority largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of the histrionic versatility of the star herself or himself, a last dying speech and confession affording the performer an excellent opportunity for the display of his or her virtuosity.

We must go behind Mrs. Wharton’s rather too sweeping accusation and center attention on a single point. American playgoers of to-day enjoy and hugely enjoy seeing on the stage stories which are harrowing, which deal liberally with life and death, and which after all end happily, sending us home consoled and reassured. So have the playgoers of other lands in other times; and the real question is whether we refuse to accept the tragic end when this is ordained by all that has gone before, when it is a fate not to be escaped. In other words, have we the intellectual honesty which shall compel us to accept George Eliot’s stern declaration that “consequences are unpitying”?

Thus put, the question is not easy to answer.

For myself I am inclined to think that when we are at liberty to choose between the happy and the unhappy ending, when one or the other is not imposed upon us by the action or by the atmosphere of the story set before us, we tend to prefer a conclusion which dismisses the hero and the heroine to a vague future felicity. But I am inclined also to believe that we do not shrink from the bitterest end if this has been foreordained from the beginning of time, if the author has been skilful enough and sincere enough to make us feel that his tragedy could not possibly have any other than a tragic termination.

In the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ the fatal ending is obligatory; it grows out of the nature of things; and the play has established itself. In ‘Mid-Channel’ there is no way out of the difficulty in which the heroine has entangled herself, except through the door of death. On the other hand, the plot of the ‘Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith’ cried aloud for a tragic ending, which the author refused to grant; and perhaps this is one reason why the piece has never taken hold on our playgoing public despite its indisputable qualities.

As it happens there have been seen on our stage in the first and second decades of the twentieth century four plays, unequal in sincerity and different in texture, but all of them variants of the same theme. Two are British, ‘Iris’ by Sir Arthur Pinero, and the ‘Fugitive’ by John Galsworthy; and two are American, the ‘Easiest Way’ by Eugene Walter and ‘Déclassée’ by Miss Zoe Akins. In each of them we are invited to follow the career of a young woman who loves luxury and who moves through life along the line of least resistance, until at last the ground gives way beneath her feet. ‘Iris’ was the first of the four; it is the most delicately artistic and the most veracious. The ‘Easiest Way’ is perhaps the most vigorous. The ‘Fugitive’ is pallid and futile. ‘Déclassée’ is the least important of them all, as it is the least original. The two last-named pieces are unsatisfactory when we bring them to the bar of our intellectual honesty; and yet they both end with the death of the heroine, an arbitrary exit out of the moral entanglements in which she has involved herself. The two earlier plays have a more truly tragic ending, since they leave the heroine alive yet bereft of all that makes life worth living. No one of the four sent the spectators home reassured and consoled.