In Anglo-Saxon countries, naturally enough, the issue was made one of morality rather than artistic method. Ibsen’s views on marriage were suspect, and the whole dramatic movement lay in quarantine. Indeed, realism in literature came to be regarded as an unsettling tendency, emanating from the Continent, and directed against all British institutions from property to religion. The division of opinion may be studied in historical documents such as the criticisms of the London Press on the first English performance of “Hedda Gabler,” and the early prefaces of Bernard Shaw; the one side tilting at realism, the other at romance;—both, alas, the most shifty of windmills where morality is concerned.
The provocative cry of “naturalism,” raised by the newer dramatists and their supporters, was responsible for half the trouble. A naturalist, in good English usage, is taken to be a professor with a butterfly net or an inquirer into the lower forms of pond life; and there is a good deal to be said for the analogy as applied to the author of realistic literature. Pins and chloroform may be his implements of tragedy; his coldly scientific method gives point to the comparison. Undoubtedly the “naturalistic drama” suggested probable inhumanity and possible horror. In any case it clearly offered no hope of an enjoyable evening, and was condemned from the first to be unpopular.
So much for the misconception encouraged by a purely journalistic phrase. Useless to maintain that the older dramatists, from Robertson and Dumas fils to Sardou, held a monopoly of the milk of human kindness, while Ibsen, Hauptmann, Tolstoy and Strindberg wallowed in mere brutal, original sin. The alleged “naturalism” of the latter belied its name. It ranged from revolutionary Utopianism to the creation of most unnatural giants,—stage characters removed from the average of everyday life by their own distinction. Indeed, the differences between the old school and the new were as nothing compared with the intellectual gulf between, say, Strindberg and Tolstoy. Setting out from the common ground of external approximation to life, the dramatists of the period soon diverged upon individual paths. Hauptmann passed from the vivid and revolutionary “Weavers” to the mythology of “Hannele” and the “Sunken Bell,” and the simple domestic drama of “Fuhrmann Henschel” and “Rose Bernd.” Tolstoy became a preacher; Strindberg a Swedenborgian mystic. Of the early playwrights of the French Théâtre Libre, Courteline and Ancey, practised the Comédie rosse, or brutal comedy, until Paris, tired of the uncouth novelty, turned to the more amiable and no less natural work of Capus and Donnay. Brieux devoted himself to the composition of dramatic tracts. Bernard Shaw, after protesting that he “could none other” than dramatize slum landlords and rent collectors in “Widowers’ Houses,” found readier targets for his wit in bishops, professors of Greek and millionaires. Nature, in fact, proved too strong for naturalism. No formula could embrace all the individual playwrights of that stormy time. The most catholic of “schools” could not hold them.
Formulas, however, die hard; and it is still necessary to free Heijermans from the “naturalistic” label so conveniently attached in 1890 to works like Tolstoy’s “Power of Darkness,” Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang and Zola’s “Therèse Raquin.” All that his plays have in common with theirs is a faithful observation of life, and more particularly of life among the common people. Moreover, he belongs to a newer generation. He had written several short pieces (notably Ahasuerus and ’n Jodenstreek?) in 1893 and 1894, but “The Ghetto” (1899) was his first important play. This three-act tragedy of the Jewish quarter in a Dutch city has been published in an English adaptation which woefully misrepresents the original, and I should rather refer readers to a German translation (Berlin, Fleische) revised by Heijermans himself. Like most early work, the play did not satisfy its author, and several versions exist.
The story is simple enough. Rafael, the son of an old Jewish merchant, has an intrigue with the Gentile maidservant, Rose. His father, Sachel, lives in an atmosphere of mistrust, hard dealing, thievery; a patriarch with all the immemorial wrongs of the ghetto upon his shoulders, and all the racial instinct to preserve property, family and religion from contact with “strange people.” He is blind, but in the night he has heard the lovers’ footsteps in the house. Rose has lied to him; Rafael, as usual, is neglecting his business for Gentile companions. So the play opens. After some bargaining over the dowry, a marriage is arranged for Rafael with the daughter of another merchant. The authority of the Rabbi is called in, but Rafael refuses. He is a freethinker; in the ghetto, but not of it. “Oh, these little rooms of yours,—these hot, stifling chambers of despair, where no gust of wind penetrates, where the green of the leaves grows yellow, where the breath chokes and the soul withers! No, let me speak, Rabbi Haeser! Now I am the priest; I, who am no Jew and no Christian, who feel God in the sunlight, in the summer fragrance, in the gleam of the water and the flowers upon my mother’s grave … I have pity for you, for your mean existence, for your ghettos and your little false gods—for the true God is yet to come, the God of the new community; the commonwealth without gods, without baseness, without slaves!”
Sachel is blamed for allowing this open rupture to come about. It is better to pay the girl off quietly and have done with her, argue the other Jews. Every woman has her price—and especially every Gentile woman. A hundred gulden—perhaps two hundred if she is obstinate—will settle the matter. The money is offered, but Rose is not to be bought. She has promised to go away with Rafael as his wife. He has gone out, but he will return for her. The family tell her that the money is offered with his consent; that he is tired of her and has left home for good. But she is unmoved. She has learned to mistrust the word of the Jews; she will only believe their sacred oath. At last old Sachel swears by the roll of the commandments that his son will not return. In despair, Rose throws herself into the canal and is drowned. Rafael comes too late to save her. The God of the Jews has taken his revenge.
The play is perhaps a little naïve and crudely imagined, but it has all the essential characteristics of Heijermans’ later work; the intense humanitarian feeling, the burning rhetoric, the frankly partisan denunciation of society. Indeed, it could not be otherwise. In dealing with such a case of bigotry and racial intolerance, it is idle for a playwright to hold the scales with abstract justice. At most he can only humanise the tragedy by humanising the villains of his piece, and showing them driven into cruelty by traditional forces beyond their control. That is the part of the “Ankläger,” the social prophet and Public Prosecutor; and it is the part which Heijermans, above all others, has filled in the newer dramatic movement.
In Het Pantser (“The Coat of Mail”) his subject is the life of a Dutch garrison town. “The Coat of Mail” is militarism; the creed of the governing caste. And the setting is peculiarly apt for the presentation of a social issue. In a small country such as Holland military patriotism may be strong, but it is tempered by the knowledge that the country only exists by the tolerance, or the diplomatic agreement, of more powerful neighbours, and that in case of war it could do no more than sacrifice an army to the invader. To the philosophic workman, then, well read in revolutionary literature from Marx to Kropotkin, the standing army presents itself simply as a capitalist tool, a bulwark of the employing class against trade unionism. The industrial struggle is uncomplicated by sentimentality. Patriotic stampedes to the conservative side are unknown. Social Democracy is strong. Strikes are frequent, and the protection of “blackleg” labourers is in the hands of the garrison. That is the theme of this “romantic military play.”
Mari, a second lieutenant, refuses to serve on strike duty. He is a weak but sincere idealist; his head full of humanitarian enthusiasm, his rooms stocked with anti-militarist pamphlets. He will leave the army rather than order his men to fire on the factory workers. Around him stand the members of the military caste, linked together by tradition and family relationship. His father is a colonel in the same regiment; the father of his fiancée, Martha, is commanding officer. One friend he has: an army doctor named Berens, who has infected himself with cancer serum in attempting to discover a cure for the disease, and passes for a drunkard because he keeps the symptoms in check by alcohol. Here a parallel is drawn between military bravery and the civilian courage of the scientist.
Mari is put under arrest, but the affair is kept secret in order to avoid a scandal. He can only be reinstated by full withdrawal and apology. Martha comes to him and implores him to withdraw. The strike is thought to be over. He can plead the excitement of the moment in excuse, and the matter will be settled honorably. He gives way and apologises. A friendly discussion of the point with his superior officers is interrupted by a volley in the street outside. The troops have fired upon the mob, and the son of the shoemaker over the way has been shot.