Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama
The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, by Emma Goldman. [Richard G. Badger, Boston.]
[The points in which we disagree with the reviewer will be discussed in a coming issue.—The Editor.]
There is an element of the keenest adventure in one’s first meeting with a great personality, whether that encounter be in body or through the medium of the written word. In the case of Emma Goldman I should judge the latter to be the severer test, for on the printed page she must stand and fall by the content of her message, unaided by the glamor of personal magnetism and eloquence of the lecture platform. For my own part, I should have preferred to have met her as the fiery orator than as the purveyor of academic wares. And yet in this present performance she comes forward not in the guise of the accustomed critic—on the contrary she is very often quite uncritical—but rather as the social interpreter. In other words, Emma Goldman is here what she has always been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.
And she has a mighty text! Because “any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator,” she has chosen the drama as the fittest medium “to arouse the intellectuals of this country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the social unrest permeating the atmosphere.” The great iconoclasts of our time who have spoken through the drama—Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof, Gorki—she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us that their message is her message:—Change not Compromise.
As she puts it in her foreword:
They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up, and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the future.
Again and again she returns to her theme. In summarizing Ibsen’s stand:
Already in Brand, Henrick Ibsen demanded all or nothing,—no weak-kneed moderation, no compromise of any sort in the struggle for the ideal.
In praise of the author of Damaged Goods:
Brieux is among the very few modern dramatists who go to the bottom of this question by insisting on a complete social and economic change, which alone can free us from the scourge of syphilis and other social plagues.
In connection with Yeats’s Where There is Nothing:
It embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and Laughter.
Those who are a bit dubious of the “Life and Laughter” that will follow the wholesale destruction of the past will have no difficulty in discovering the shortcomings of Miss Goldman’s method. They are the obvious ones which of necessity befall the single-minded propagandist:—the intrusion of dogma and platitude into the discussion, the wearying insistence upon “the moral” of each play, the uncritical attitude of too-ready acquiescence in the veracity of each dramatic picture of life, etc. Such critics might point out that the artist, in spite of Strindberg’s dictum, cannot be a mere “lay preacher popularizing the pressing questions of his time”; that insofar as he approaches art, he does not preach; that it is by virtue of this power that Hervieux, for example, is a greater artist than his better-known contemporary, Brieux. (By the way, why did Miss Goldman omit the greatest of the French social dramatists?) These critics might even throw in a word for the institutions of the past which Miss Goldman believes can be as easily shed as an outworn cloak.
But one must not be an orthodox Anarchist to recognize the superficiality of these shortcomings which are the inevitable luggage of the preacher. For Miss Goldman is a preacher. Any interpreter works in accordance with his creed. Having taken to heart the fate of Lot’s wife, Miss Goldman has turned her back fiercely upon the past. Grant her this hypothesis and she is always logical and coherent and never irrelevant. And why shouldn’t we encourage her to forge boldly ahead, disdainful of the old bondage? We need her courage, her single-mindedness, and the aim to which she has vowed them. She is not alone, for many who know her not chant the same litany. As for the danger to society that lurks in her philosophy, we must not forget that the great conservative mass is leavened slowly. And in the end it is time alone who can give the verdict—whether we shall patch up the old fabric, or destroy and begin our weaving anew.
Marguerite Swawite.
The Whining of a Rejected One
Oscar Wilde and Myself, by Lord Alfred Douglas. [Duffield and Company, New York.]
Emma Goldman gave this laconic epithet to this latest pearl of scandal-literature. Mylord is very much in earnest, hence his pitiful failure to see the humorous side of his pathetic self-spanking. The modest title of the book obviously suggests the two-fold purpose of the titular harlequin—his own aggrandizement and the dethronement of the Prince of Paradoxes. He excellently succeeds in obtaining the reverse result of his first endeavor; not even his pugilistic father, the Marquis of Queensbury, could have given him a more thorough boxing than the one he so earnestly performs over his own ears. As to his other ambition, that of vying with the laurels of Herostrates in his attempt to belittle the dead lion, we must admit his success in one point, in proving the morbid vanity of Wilde. What but the passion for titular acquaintances could have induced the author of Salome to chum with Bosie Douglas, this burlesque snob, so utterly shallow, petty, so hopelessly stupid and arrogant?
I don’t know what to admire more: the “ethics” of the publisher or the sense of humor of the author.
K.