Secondly, reformers and demolishers of this tradition do not exist either, for they have nothing to reform or demolish. In Russia it was never necessary for naturalistic schools to rise with a great flourish of trumpets, and to proclaim that they were about to destroy the conventions and artificiality of the stage, and to give to the public, instead of childish sentimentalities and impossible Chinese puzzles of intrigue, slices of real life. Had anybody behaved thus in Russia he would simply have been beating his hands against a door which was wide open. For the Russian drama, like the Russian novel, has, without making any fuss about it, never done but one thing—to depict life as clearly as it saw it, and as simply as it could.
That is why there has never been a naturalist school in Russia. The Russians are born realists; they do not have to label themselves realists, because realism is the very air which they breathe, and the very blood in their veins. What was labelled realism and naturalism in other countries simply appeared to them to be a straining after effect. Even Ibsen, whose great glory was that, having learnt all the tricks of the stagecraft of Scribe and his followers, he demolished the whole system, and made Comedies and Tragedies just as skilfully out of the tremendous issues of real life—even Ibsen had no great influence in Russia, because what interests Russian dramatists is not so much the crashing catastrophes of life as life itself, ordinary everyday life, just as we all see it. “I go to the theatre,” a Russian once said, “to see what I see every day.” And here we have the fundamental difference between the drama of Russia and that of any other country.
Dramatists of other countries, be they English, or French, or German, or Norwegian, whether they belong to the school of Ibsen, or to that which found its temple in the Théâtre Antoine at Paris, had one thing in common; they were either reacting or fighting against something—as in the case of the Norwegian dramatists—or bent on proving a thesis—as in the case of Alexandre Dumas fils, the Théâtre Antoine school, or Mr. Shaw—; that is to say, they were all actuated by some definite purpose; the stage was to them a kind of pulpit.
On the English stage this was especially noticeable, and what the English public has specially delighted in during the last fifteen years has been a sermon on the stage, with a dash of impropriety in it. Now the Russian stage has never gone in for sermons or theses: like the Russian novel, it has been a looking-glass for the use of the public, and not a pulpit for the use of the playwright. This fact is never more strikingly illustrated than when the translation of a foreign play is performed in Russia. For instance, when Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, was performed in December, 1907, at the Imperial State-paid Theatre at St. Petersburg, the attitude of the public and of the critics was interesting in the extreme. In the first place, that the play should be produced at the Imperial State-paid Theatre is an interesting illustration of the difference of the attitude of the two countries towards the stage. In England, public performance of this play is forbidden; in America it was hounded off the stage by an outraged and indignant populace; in St. Petersburg it is produced at what, in Russia, is considered the temple of respectability, the home of tradition, the citadel of conservatism. In the audience were a quantity of young, unmarried girls. The play was beautifully acted, and well received,[25] but it never occurred to any one that it was either daring or dangerous or startling; it was merely judged as a story of English life, a picture of English manners. Some people thought it was interesting, others that it was uninteresting, but almost all were agreed in considering it to be too stagey for the Russian taste; and as for considering it an epoch-making work, that is to say, in the region of thought and ideas, the very idea was scoffed at.
These opinions were reflected in the press. In one of the newspapers, the leading Liberal organ, edited by Professor Milioukov, the theatrical critic said that Mr. Bernard Shaw was the typical middle-class Englishman, and satirised the faults and follies of his class, but that he himself belonged to the class that he satirised, and shared its limitations. “The play,” they said, “is a typical middle-class English play, and it suffers from the faults inherent to this class of English work: false sentiment and melodrama.”
Another newspaper, the Russ, wrote as follows: “Bernard Shaw is thought to be an enfant terrible in England. In Russia we take him as a writer, and as a writer only, who is not absolutely devoid of advanced ideas. In our opinion, his play belongs neither to the extreme right nor to the extreme left of dramatic literature; it is an expression of the ideas of moderation which belong to the centre, and the proof of this is the production of it at our State-paid Theatre, which in our eyes is the home and shelter of what is retrograde and respectable.”[26]
Such was the opinion of the newspaper critic on Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play. It represented more or less the opinion of the man in the street. For nearly all European dramatic art, with the exception of certain German and Norwegian work, strikes the Russian public as stagey and artificial. If a Russian had written Mrs. Warren’s Profession, he would never have introduced the scene between Crofts and Vivy which occurs at the end of Act III., because such a scene, to a Russian, savours of melodrama. On the other hand, he would have had no hesitation in putting on the stage (at the Imperial State-paid Theatre) the interior, with all its details, of one of the continental hotels from which Mrs. Warren derived her income. But, as I have already said, what interests the Russian dramatist most keenly is not the huge catastrophes that stand out in lurid pre-eminence, but the incidents, sometimes important, sometimes trivial, and sometimes ludicrous, which happen to every human being every day of his life. And nowhere is this so clearly visible as in the work of Tchekov; for although the plays of Tchekov—which have not yet been discovered in England, and which will soon be old-fashioned in Russia—are not a reflection of the actual state of mind of the Russian people, yet as far as their artistic aim is concerned, they are more intensely typical, and more successful in the achievement of their aim than the work of any other Russian dramatist.[27]
Tchekov has written in all eleven plays, out of which six are farces in one act, and five are serious dramas. The farces, though sometimes very funny, are not important; it is in his serious dramatic work that Tchekov really found himself, and gave to the world something new and entirely original. The originality of Tchekov’s plays is not that they are realistic. Other dramatists—many Frenchmen, for instance—have written interesting and dramatic plays dealing with poignant situations, happening to real people in real life. Tchekov’s discovery is this, that real life, as we see it every day, can be made just as interesting on the stage as the catastrophes or the difficulties which are more or less exceptional, but which are chosen by dramatists as their material because they are dramatic. Tchekov discovered that it is not necessary for real life to be dramatic in order to be interesting. Or rather that ordinary everyday life is as dramatic on the stage, if by dramatic one means interesting, as extraordinary life. He perceived that things which happen to us every day, which interest us, and affect us keenly, but which we would never dream of thinking or of calling dramatic when they occur, may be made as interesting on the stage as the most far-fetched situations, or the most terrific crises. For instance, it may affect us keenly to leave for ever a house where we have lived for many years. It may touch us to the quick to see certain friends off at a railway station. But we do not call these things dramatic. They are not dramatic, but they are human.
Tchekov has realised this, and has put them on the stage. He has managed to send over the footlights certain feelings, moods, and sensations, which we experience constantly, and out of which our life is built. He has managed to make the departure of certain people from a certain place, and the staying on of certain others in the same place, as interesting behind the footlights as the tragic histories of Œdipus or Othello, and a great deal more interesting than the complicated struggles and problems in which the characters of a certain school of modern dramatists are enmeshed. Life as a whole never presents itself to us as a definite mathematical problem, which needs immediate solution, but is rather composed of a thousand nothings, which together make something vitally important. Tchekov has understood this, and given us glimpses of these nothings, and made whole plays out of these nothings.
At first sight one is tempted to say that there is no action in the plays of Tchekov. But on closer study one realises that the action is there, but it is not the kind usually sought after and employed by men who write for the stage. Tchekov is, of course, not the first dramatic writer who has realised that the action which consisted in violent things happening to violent people is not a whit more interesting, perhaps a great deal less interesting, than the changes and the vicissitudes which happen spiritually in the soul of man. Molière knew this, for Le Misanthrope is a play in which nothing in the ordinary sense happens. Rostand’s L’Aiglon is a play where nothing in the ordinary sense happens.[28] But in these plays in the extraordinary sense everything happens. A violent drama occurs in the soul of the Misanthrope, and likewise in that of the Duke of Reichstadt. So it is in Tchekov’s plays. He shows us the changes, the revolutions, the vicissitudes, the tragedies, the comedies, the struggles, the conflicts, the catastrophes, that happen in the souls of men, but he goes a step further than other dramatists in the way in which he shows us these things. He shows us these things as we ourselves perceive or guess them in real life, without the help of poetic soliloquies or monologues, without the help of a Greek chorus or a worldly raisonneur, and without the aid of startling events which strip people of their masks. He shows us bits of the everyday life of human beings as we see it, and his pictures of ordinary human beings, rooted in certain circumstances, and engaged in certain avocations, reveal to us further glimpses of the life that is going on inside these people. The older dramatists, even when they deal exclusively with the inner life of man, without the aid of any outside action, allow their creations to take off their masks and lay bare their very inmost souls to us.