Mari sends in his papers; but a newspaper has published the facts of the case, and he is met with the disgrace of immediate dismissal from the army. This does not suit Martha. She must marry a soldier; civilian life with a dismissed lieutenant was not in the bond. So Mari suffers another disillusionment, and the end of the play sees him setting out from home, while the old shoemaker is left to lament for his son.
And the sum total of it all? A warm heart, a weakness for rhetoric, and—a study in vacillation.
In Ora et Labora Heijermans is less rhetorical; rather, one suspects, for lack of a mouthpiece. His peasants bear their fate, if not in silence, with almost inarticulate resignation. They are too hungry to waste words. Moreover, there is no visible enemy to denounce, no Coat of Mail, no racial prejudice, no insatiate capitalism. Winter is the villain of the piece. This is indeed naturalism, in the literal sense; humanity devoured by Nature. Everything is frost-bound: the canal, the soil, the very cattle. The barges are idle. There is no work and no warmth. When the last cow upon the farm dies of disease, its throat is cut so that it can be sold to the butcher. All hopes are centred in the father of the family, who is to sell the carcase in the town; but he spends the money and returns home drunk. As a last resort, his son Eelke enlists in the army for six years’ colonial service, leaving Sytske, the girl he was about to marry. His advance pay buys fuel and food, but the lovers part with a hopeless quarrel, and the old peasants are left wrangling over the money he has brought.
Allerzielen (1906) is a later work. A village pastor finds a woman in a state of collapse upon his threshold. He takes her in, and she gives birth to a child. She is a stranger in the district, Rita by name. The child is sent into the village to be nursed, while the pastor gives up his own room to the mother. She recovers slowly, and meanwhile the peasants set their tongues to work upon the scandal. The child is discovered to be illegitimate. A good village housewife is suckling a bastard. The pastor is housing an outcast, and shows no sign of sending her about her business. The neighbouring clergy are perturbed. Dimly and distantly the Bishop is said to be considering the facts …. Amid alarums and excursions the affair pursues its course. The village passes from astonishment to ribaldry, from ribaldry to stone-throwing. The pastor speaks gently of Christian charity and souls to be saved, but fails to appease his parishioners. They are hot upon the scent in a heresy-hunt. If they could see within the parsonage walls, they would yelp still louder. For Rita proves to be an unblushing hedonist. No prayers for her, when the birth-pangs are once over; no tears, no repentance. She sings gaily in her room while the pastors argue about duty and morals. She feels “heavenly.” She invades the study to enjoy a view of sunlight, clouds and sea. She finds the waves more musical than the wheezing of the church organ. If only the child were with her, her happiness would be complete.
But the child is neglected by its foster mother. It sickens and dies. The pastor is driven from his church by the Bishop, and leaves the broken windows of the parsonage to his successor. Rita and he are both homeless now. And then the child’s father comes,—another hedonist. The child is dead, but Life remains. Its body lies in unconsecrated ground, but the vows of love are renewed at the graveside. The Church can only crush its own slaves. All roads are open to the spirits of the free. The pastor can only offer a hopeless “Farewell” as the two set out upon their way. But Rita calls after, “No,—no! You will come over to us.”
It matters nothing that this gospel of Life has often been preached. Heijermans has caught the spirit of it as well as the letter. His characters say and do nothing particularly original; nothing that would even pass for originality by reason of its manner. He works in vivid contrasts, without a shade of paradox. He figures the opposed forces of Reaction and Revolution in religion, in statecraft, in economics, in all human relationships, with a simplicity of mind which would draw a smile from the forever up-to-date “intellectual.” Reaction is a devilish superstition; Revolution a prophetic angel pointing the way to the promised land. The one is false, the other true. There is no disputing the point, since truth and falsehood are absolute terms. Perhaps the secret is that Heijermans never tires of his own philosophy. He is content to see it firmly planted on the ground; he does not demand that it should walk the tight-rope or turn somersaults as an intellectual exercise. He has accepted a view of life which some call materialistic, and others positivist, or scientific, or humanitarian; but for him it is simply humane,—founded upon social justice and human need.
A philosophy, however, does not make a dramatist. In the plays I have already described Heijermans shows his power of translating the world-struggle of thought into the dramatic clash of will, but it is upon “The Good Hope” (Op Hoop van Zegen) that his reputation chiefly depends. He chooses a great subject; not merely the conflict of shipowners and fishermen in the struggle for existence, but the sea-faring life and the ocean itself. Truly “a sea-piece”; tempestuous, powerful. One can hear the breaking of the waves. From the opening scene, with the old men’s tale of sharks, to the night of the storm in the third act, when the women and children huddle in Kneirtje’s cottage for shelter, the story is always the same. The sea is the symbol of Fate. It takes a father here, a brother there. It seizes Geert and Barend alike; the one going aboard carelessly, the other screaming resistance. Sometimes it plays with its victims on shore, making no sign, leaving months of hope to end in despair. In a more merciful mood it sends children running through the village to cry “’n Ball op! ’n Ball op!” as an overdue ship is signalled from the coastguard tower. And there an echo of the sea-ballad now and again; when raps are heard upon the door at the height of the storm, or a flapping curtain blows out the lamp, or a pallid face is seen at the window ….
In sheer force of theatrical construction “The Good Hope” is still more striking. There are great moments, finely conceived. The play is full of natural rather than violent coincidence. Barend has always feared death by drowning, and he makes his first and last voyage in a leaky trawler. His father sank in a wreck, and it is his mother, unable to maintain the household, who persuades him to go. She fears the disgrace of his refusal after the papers are signed, but he is dragged aboard by the harbour police. His brother Geert sets out proudly enough, singing the Marseillaise and preaching rebellion; but he sinks far away, impotent, unheard, and leaves his sweetheart to bear a fatherless child. Old Cobus can only reflect, “We take the fishes, and God takes us.” That is perhaps the most dramatic thread of all,—the parallel of fate. The struggle for existence on land drives men to the fishing-boats and the Dogger Bank. From the minnows to leviathan, there is no escape. “We take the fishes, and God takes us.” A gale of wind and rain whistles through the play, sweeping the decks of life, tossing men out into the unknown.
Let us turn to the social standpoint. The ship-owner, Bos, is frankly a villain. He knows “The Good Hope” is unseaworthy, but he allows her to sail. True, the warning comes from a drunken ship’s carpenter, but he understands the risks. Business is business. The ship is well insured ….
It is implied, then, that shipowners are unscrupulous scoundrels, and fishermen their unhappy victims. Here is a bias which makes the actual tragedy no more impressive. Good ships, as well as bad, may perish in a storm. Nature is cruel enough without the help of man. The problem of the big fish and the little fish is one of size, not of morality. Even sharks may possibly rejoice in an amiable temperament. It can only be said that Heijermans has here chosen the right motive for his own particular type of drama. His sympathy is with the fishermen. He knows that, humanly speaking, in every conflict between employers and employed, the men are right and the masters wrong. Impossible to redress the balance by individual virtue or kindliness. The masters stand for the exploiting system; for capital, for insurance, for power, for law and order and possession. Their risks are less and their temptations greater. Even from the standpoint of abstract justice, a dishonest employer may fairly be set against a drunken labourer or a gaol-bird fisherman. The one is no less natural than the other. But Heijermans goes beyond all finicking considerations of this sort. He seeks to destroy and rebuild, not to repair or adjust. He avoids mere naturalism; the “conscientious transcription of all the visible and repetition of all the audible” is not for him. And here he is undoubtedly justified, not only by his own experience, but by that of other dramatists. There was no inspiration in the movement towards mere actuality on the stage. It sickened of its own surfeit of “life.” Its accumulated squalor became intolerable. It was choked by its own irrelevance, circumscribed by its own narrowness. For naturalism is like a prison courtyard; it offers only two ways of escape. One is the poet’s upward flight, the other the revolutionist’s battering-ram. Heijermans has chosen his own weapon, and used it well. He has given us “The Good Hope,” not as a mere pitiful study in disillusionment, but as a tragic symbol of human effort in the conquest of despair.