“And yet I could have forgiven you everything—your wantonness and your defiance—if you had taken the consequences and had a child! If you had had ten illegitimate children—better that than none at all! But you have arrogantly defied the very commandments of nature, which are nothing but the commandments of God!”
Perhaps this matter was included for the sake of Karen’s reply:
“Do you think I am a perfect monster of a woman, who has never felt the longing for a baby? Not me does your anger hit, but that society which will not regard it as an inevitable duty to recognize the right of every human being to have children—as a right, mark you, and not as a privilege reserved for the richest and the poorest. There are thousands of us to whom the right is denied—thousands of men as well as women. But we, too, are human beings, with love longings and love instincts, and we will not let us be cheated out of the best thing that life holds!”
Technically the play is not so perfect a thing as Mr. Björkman’s unbounded encomiums would make us believe. It opens, for instance, in the good old fashion scorned by Ibsen—with the gossip of servants, who are here engaged in laying the table instead of in the time-honored task of dusting. The whole action is cast within some eight hours, thus causing a use of coincidence to the straining point. The most commendable feature of technique is the admirably sustained suspense: the story of Gertrude overshadows the entire piece from the opening scene to Mrs. Borneman’s avowal in the last act. The powerful use of the story as contrast to Karen’s career is also unusual.
And yet in spite of its faults—perhaps because of them—we have found Karen Borneman the most stimulating play of the year. We hope one of our two organizations dedicated to the drama will put it on in the near future.
When the ape lost his wits he became man.—Viacheslav Ivanov.
Galsworthy’s Little Human Comedy
No magazine that comes to this office is looked for more excitedly than Harper’s Weekly. Poetry and Drama is a quarterly event that keeps us in a dignified intensity of expectation; and there are others. But Harper’s is a weekly adventure in the interest of which we haunt the postman. At present it is featuring a series of sketches by Galsworthy—satirical characterizations of those human beings who pride themselves on being “different.” Here is a man who knows himself for a philosopher; here is an “artist”; here is one of those rare individualities so enlightened, so superior, so removed, that there is only one label for him: “The Superlative.”
But it is in The Philosopher that Galsworthy excels himself. It is probably the most consummate satire that has appeared in the last decade: