Naturalism has passed away. The shallow materialism, the false simplicity of presentation, with which it sought to kill romantic methods of dramaturgy, proved fatal. They were found to be as unreal as the old-fashioned conventions of the stage. But there were other qualities in the movement which have not died, but profoundly influenced the character-drawing and scenic development of the modern drama. Hauptmann, Hervieu, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Gorky, Tchekhov have transmuted and individualised the permanent elements of the early realism. As an exponent of naturalism Strindberg's personality towered high above the first noisy purveyors of what M. Jullien named "slices of life"—some distressingly indigestible. It is true that the fabric of his drama was woven out of the ever-recurring theme of sexual antagonism. He described it with the undertone of personal suffering—the suffering of experience and of pity—with which Tolstoy made his peasants articulate in Powers of Darkness, or Henry Becque the ill-used women in Les Corbeaux.
But Strindberg's plays are highly "unpleasant," says some defender of the morality of the stage. True, but they are honestly unpleasant. They differ from the popular play of amorous escapades and half-uttered indecencies, as the mountain torrent differs from the garden fountain. They are written by the impelling force of an idea, whilst the conventional immorality play exists in the interests of frivolous entertainment. However much we may disagree with the leitmotif in Strindberg's naturalistic plays, and realise the limitations of his theses, we cannot ignore them. And do they not, after all, treat of "love," the obsessing object of dramatic interest from the plaintive demi-monde of Dumas fils to the man-hunting Ann of Bernard Shaw? From Sudermann and Pinero to Schnitzler and Capus, through sentimentalism, conventionalism, and cynicism, the theme persists in absorbing dramatic imagination. Compared with Schnitzler, the prince of amorists, Strindberg's milieu is sombre with fateful retribution. Like Strindberg, Schnitzler dramatises the illusion and disillusionment of love; his lovers and mistresses are also on the road to knowledge. The ten couples who pass over the stage in Reigen might be sparks from Strindberg's anvil. But on closer inspection we find that there has been no fire. Schnitzler's world is the play-room of the passions, Strindberg's their inferno.
In Lady Julie and Creditors, both one-act plays and each with only three speaking parts, he created a new dramatic form. He now assailed the old theatre with the same vigour with which he had attacked old social institutions. In the preface to Lady Julie he contemptuously writes:
"The theatre has long appeared to me, as art in general, to be a Biblia Pauperum, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read writing or print, and the playwright as a lay preacher who disseminates the thoughts of the period in popular form, so popular that the middle classes, which chiefly fill the theatres, can understand what it is all about without much mental exertion. The theatre has therefore always been a board-school for young people, the half-educated, and women who still possess the primitive capacity for deceiving themselves, and allowing themselves to be deceived, i.e. to accept illusion, receive suggestion from the author."
The influence of Edmond de Goncourt, who called the theatre an exhibition of spouting marionettes and a place for the exercise of educated dogs, can be traced in this passage. Rudimentary, incomplete processes of thought, dependent on imagination, are, concluded Strindberg, necessary to theatrical enjoyment. With the development of reflection, investigation, and the higher mental attributes, decay of pleasure in theatrical performances would follow as the shell drops from the ripe fruit. In the theatrical crisis which raged in Europe at this time (1888), and in the moribund state of drama in England and Germany he saw evidence of an approaching extinction of the theatre.
It would, however, be a mistake to invest these views with a greater seriousness than they contained. As Henry Becque pointed out in his "Souvenirs," la fin du théâtre has repeatedly been proclaimed by dissatisfied critics, without causing the slightest impediment in the ceaseless flow of dramatic production. In the preface to Le Fils Naturel, Dumas had compared the moralising functions of the stage to those of the Church. Strindberg replied, twenty years later, by predicting the downfall of both as vehicles of human progress. Hot-headed attacks on the theatre precede the evolution of new dramatic forms; they are the outcome of the modernity which is ever at war with methods which have become classic. "To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague," is the sweeping verdict of Eleonora Duse,[2] but there is no disparagement in the reflection that the melancholy prophecies are often uttered by dramatists who are misunderstood and rejected. In Anton Tchekhov's The Seagull, published in 1900, the familiar protest is heard: "To me the theatre of to-day," says the poet Constantine, through whom the author speaks, "is no more than an antiquated prejudice, a dull routine." He protests against the trivialities, the commonplace morality, the repeated dishing up of the same story in a thousand varieties. He wants to flee, as Maupassant fled from the Eiffel Tower. Each malcontent finds solution in his own new method of drama. Rousseau's letter to d'Alembert contains the genuine criticism of the theatre, with which no born dramatist can sympathise. From the effect of fostering artificial emotions, of indulging in sham joys and sorrows, there is no escape through improvement of dramatic form. Whether for good or ill it remains with us. But there is happily little danger of the rationality, in which Strindberg saw the doom of the theatre.
The choice of naturalistic subjects was to be a contributing factor in the process of rationalism. Of the painful impression created by Lady Julie Strindberg writes:
"When I chose this subject from life, just as it was told to me some years ago when it stirred me deeply, I found it suitable for a tragedy, for it still makes a painful impression to see a happily placed individual go to the wall, and still more to see a family die out. But the time may come when we shall be sufficiently evolved and enlightened to contemplate with indifference the coarse, cynical, and heartless drama which life offers, when we have laid aside the inferior and unreliable registration-machines which we call feelings, and which will be superfluous and injurious when our organs of judgment are fully developed....
"The fact that my tragedy makes a sad impression on many is the fault of the many. When we become strong, as were the first French revolutionaries, it will make an exclusively pleasant and cheerful impression to see the royal parks cleared of rotting, superannuated trees which have too long stood in the way of others with equal right to vegetate their full life-time; it will make a good impression in the same sense as does the sight of the death of an incurable.
"The reproach was levelled against my tragedy, The Father, that it was so sad, as though one wanted merry tragedies. People clamour for the joy of life, and theatrical managers order farces, as though the joy of life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people as if they were each and all afflicted with St. Vitus's Dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in the powerful, cruel struggle of life, and my enjoyment in discovering something, in learning something. Therefore I have chosen an unusual, though instructive, case, in other words, an exception, but a great exception which confirms the rule, and which is sure to offend the lovers of the banal. The simple brain will further be shocked by the fact that my motives behind the action are not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of it. An event in life—and this is a comparatively new discovery—is generally produced by a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives, but the spectator chooses for the most part the one which is easiest for him to grasp, or the one most advantageous to the reputation of his judgment. Take a case of suicide as an example. 'Bad business,' says the bourgeois. 'Unhappy love!' say the women. 'Sickness!' says the disease-ridden man. 'Shattered hopes!' the bankrupt. But it is possible that the motives lay in all of these causes, or in none, and that the dead man hid the real one by putting forward another which has thrown a more favourable light on his memory."