[121]really believed that this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple little gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should be inclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in the matter. When he crucifies himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-room, remarking in his slowest manner: "The bird flutters no longer; I must atone, I must atone!" one is, in every sense, alone with the actor. Mr. Tree has many arts, but he has not the art of sincerity. His conception of acting is, literally, to act, on every occasion. Even in the prison scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good, until she begins to shout and he to rant, "and then the care is over," Mr. Tree cannot be his part without acting it.
That prison scene is, on the whole, well done, and the first part of it, when the women shout and drink and quarrel, is acted with a satisfying sense of vulgarity which
[122]contrasts singularly with what is meant to be a suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene preceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is the first act. This act takes the place of those astounding chapters in the novel in which the seduction of Katusha is described with a truth, tact, frankness, and subtlety unparalleled in any novel I have ever read. I read them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an "adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some translators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention his name, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "
[123]Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censor always against him; some of his books he has never been able to print in full in Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre we have, in what is boldly called Tolstoi's "Resurrection," something which is not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated. Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M. Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been left well alone?
SOME PROBLEM PLAYS
I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"
It was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville Barker's that the Stage Society was founded, and it is doing good service to the drama in producing them. "The Marrying of Ann Leete" is the cleverest and most promising new play that I have seen for a long time; but it cannot be said to have succeeded even with the Stage Society audience, and no ordinary theatrical manager is very likely to produce it. The author, it is true, is an actor, but he is young; his play is immature, too crowded with people, too knotted up with motives, too inconclusive in effect. He knows the stage, and his knowledge has enabled him to use the stage for his own purposes, inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one or two things which have never, or never so deftly, been done before. But he is something besides all that; he can
[125]think, he can write, and he can suggest real men and women. The play opens in the dark, and remains for some time brilliantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-century people, talk with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point; they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. Some of the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, "a game for clever children, women, and fools"; it is a game demanding close attention. A courtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people walk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fills one with excitement, the excitement of following a trail. It is a trail of ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought. They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their hearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding one's mind in suspense.
Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family, and he interests