First Scene. It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen). In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted façade. The doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit. The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his face. They are the two Maxes—Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:
"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach. In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard on recognising them:
"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended. I'm giving my annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides," he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying." Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.
Second Scene. On the stage of the theatre there are two long tables. The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down. Some men walk about conversing—some calmly, some feverishly. Several are sitting. The lighting is feeble. However, may be discerned familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking to Charles Baudelaire—who shivers (un nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner roaring at Sainte-Beuve—the old row over Salammbô is on again. Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat-tails of Richard Wagner, without attracting his attention. The Master, in company with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the back drop. "Listen for the Parsifal chimes," he says, delight playing over his rugged features. "Ape of the ideal," booms a deep voice hard by. It is that of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in Polish cavalier style.
"Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of Parsifal I'm going away." The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his newest Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his left hand he holds a spade. "To table, gentlemen!" It is the jolly voice of the Irish Ibsen, G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard the brumming of the audience, an orchestra softly plays motives from Pelléas et Mélisande. Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice Maeterlinck crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly strikes his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar and immediately jots down musical notation. "The correspondences of nuances," he sings to his neighbour, who happens to be Whistler. "The correspondence of fudge," retorts James. "D'ye think I'm interested in wall-paper music? Oh, Lil'libulero!" All are now seated. With his accustomed lingual dexterity Mr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon the papier-mâché fowls and the pink stage-tea, from what he describes as a gaseous invertebrate god—he has read Haeckel—and winds up with a few brilliant heartless remarks:
"I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honour me. Without me, and my books and plays, you would, all of you, be dead in earnest—dead literature as well as dead bones. As for the living, I'll have a shy at you some day. I'm not fond of Maeterlinck. ["Hear, hear!" comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss—well, I've never tried orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you——"
"Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef sandwich? In Russia I daren't eat meat on account of my disciples there and in England—" It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an indignant look, he, the prince of vegetarians: "Give him some salt, he needs salting." In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the confessions of Huysmans. The band, on the other side of the curtain, swings into the Kaisermarch. "Stop them! Stop it!" screams Wagner. "I'm a Social-Democrat now. I wrote that march when I was a Monarchist." This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up his tall, lanky figure, he began: "You mean, Herr Geyer—to give you your real name—you wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer, that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish cloth. You mean, the Wagner you never were, that you wrote your various operas—which you call music-dramas—to flatter your various patrons. Parsifal for the decadent King Ludwig——"
"Pardieu! this is too much." Manet's blond beard wagged with rage. "Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or are we met to do honour to the only man in England, and an Irishman at that, who, in his plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a modest man. I'm a painter." "Hein! You a painter!" Sitting alone, Gérôme discloses spiteful intonations in his voice. "Yes, a painter," hotly replies Manet. "And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe—" "All the worse for the Louvre," sneers Gérôme. The two men would have been at each other's throats if some one from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen.
"Children," he remarks, in a strong Norwegian brogue, "please to remember my dignity if not your own. Long before Max Stirner—" Nietzsche interrupted: "There never was such a person." Ibsen calmly continued, "I wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And when I see such so-called great men acting like children, I regret having left my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists, our confrères? Ask the master of the revels." Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops in his head at a practicable door.
"Who calls?"