[126]us in every member of that family. He plays them like chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. They express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads. They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keen sense of the game. They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in and out of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes and surprises them by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts, sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naïveté which seems laughable; and they act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come. They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosing them; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, at every moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, and they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction. They seem to go their own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escaped almost literally out of their author's hands. The last
[127]scene is an admirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within its own limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a solution. Mr. Barker can write: he writes in short, sharp sentences, which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from every corner of the stage. He brings his people on and off with an unconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre, and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique. The scene with the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit, and it has the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions in the play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doing the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough to carry it against opposition. The opposition is the firm and narrow mind of the British playgoer. Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoy without crushing. The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders the world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces the world. Mr. Barker is young: he will
[128]come to think with more depth and less tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more mastery of means. But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and honest in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to move themselves.
II. "THE LADY FROM THE SEA"
On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the performance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase, a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's
[129]plays: the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only, we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes seem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbs over the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?" and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in the newspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its meaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is, but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if the Stranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upon a crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own
[130]and a considerable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the subconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of the drama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory.