THE PLAYS OF HERMAN HEIJERMANS.
To those content with convenient superficialities the plays of a dramatist such as Heijermans are easy of definition. He is dismissed as “a realistic writer,” “a playwright of the naturalistic school,” a follower of Ibsen, or Hauptmann, or Tolstoy, or Zola. Even then, perhaps, the definitions are not exhausted. They spring from the encyclopedia of commonplaces, and are as chaotic as the minds of their authors. There is the adjective “meticulous,” for example,—invaluable to critics. And “morbid,”—equally indispensable, in the form of “morbid psychology.” “Photographic” and “kinematographic” must not be forgotten; the latter an almost brand-new weapon of offence. For the rest, “grey,” “faithful,” “squalid” or “lifelike” will serve their turn, according to the critic’s point of view.
In phrases such as these we hear the echoes of a controversy now a generation old; a controversy dating back to the “free theatres” of the 1890 period in Paris, Berlin and London, the first performances [4]of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” and the early plays of Hauptmann and Strindberg. Then the issues between Realist and Philistine were sharply defined; the very terms were mutually exclusive. To be modern, to be “free,” was to be an Ibsenite, an apostle of moral indignation, an author or playgoer burning to lay bare social hypocrisies and shams; not merely pour épater le bourgeois, but in order to assert the Great Truths of Actual Life, so recently discovered by the stage. It mattered little that Ibsenites owed their existence to their misunderstanding of Ibsen. He had supplied them with an essential war cry. The old domination of insincere sentiment and false romance in the theatre was indefensible and insupportable. All the enthusiasm of dramatic reformers was perforce directed to the advance of the new realistic movement. Hence arose a battle of epithets between the two camps, with “antiquated,” “conventional,” “sentimental,” “romantic” on the one hand, and “vulgar,” “dreary,” “indecent,” “noisome” on the other.
In Anglo-Saxon countries, naturally enough, the issue was made one of morality rather than artistic method. Ibsen’s views on marriage were suspect, and the whole dramatic movement lay in quarantine. Indeed, realism in literature came to be regarded as an unsettling tendency, emanating from the Continent, and directed against all British institutions from property to religion. The division of opinion may be studied in historical documents such as the criticisms of the London Press on the first English performance of “Hedda Gabler,” and the early prefaces of Bernard Shaw; the one side tilting at realism, the other at romance;—both, alas, the most shifty of windmills where morality is concerned.
The provocative cry of “naturalism,” raised by [5]the newer dramatists and their supporters, was responsible for half the trouble. A naturalist, in good English usage, is taken to be a professor with a butterfly net or an inquirer into the lower forms of pond life; and there is a good deal to be said for the analogy as applied to the author of realistic literature. Pins and chloroform may be his implements of tragedy; his coldly scientific method gives point to the comparison. Undoubtedly the “naturalistic drama” suggested probable inhumanity and possible horror. In any case it clearly offered no hope of an enjoyable evening, and was condemned from the first to be unpopular.
So much for the misconception encouraged by a purely journalistic phrase. Useless to maintain that the older dramatists, from Robertson and Dumas fils to Sardou, held a monopoly of the milk of human kindness, while Ibsen, Hauptmann, Tolstoy and Strindberg wallowed in mere brutal, original sin. The alleged “naturalism” of the latter belied its name. It ranged from revolutionary Utopianism to the creation of most unnatural giants,—stage characters removed from the average of everyday life by their own distinction. Indeed, the differences between the old school and the new were as nothing compared with the intellectual gulf between, say, Strindberg and Tolstoy. Setting out from the common ground of external approximation to life, the dramatists of the period soon diverged upon individual paths. Hauptmann passed from the vivid and revolutionary “Weavers” to the mythology of “Hannele” and the “Sunken Bell,” and the simple domestic drama of “Fuhrmann Henschel” and “Rose Bernd.” Tolstoy became a preacher; Strindberg a Swedenborgian mystic. Of the early playwrights of the French Théâtre Libre, Courteline and [6]Ancey, practised the Comédie rosse, or brutal comedy, until Paris, tired of the uncouth novelty, turned to the more amiable and no less natural work of Capus and Donnay. Brieux devoted himself to the composition of dramatic tracts. Bernard Shaw, after protesting that he “could none other” than dramatize slum landlords and rent collectors in “Widowers’ Houses,” found readier targets for his wit in bishops, professors of Greek and millionaires. Nature, in fact, proved too strong for naturalism. No formula could embrace all the individual playwrights of that stormy time. The most catholic of “schools” could not hold them.
Formulas, however, die hard; and it is still necessary to free Heijermans from the “naturalistic” label so conveniently attached in 1890 to works like Tolstoy’s “Power of Darkness,” Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang and Zola’s “Therèse Raquin.” All that his plays have in common with theirs is a faithful observation of life, and more particularly of life among the common people. Moreover, he belongs to a newer generation. He had written several short pieces (notably Ahasuerus and ’n Jodenstreek?) in 1893 and 1894, but “The Ghetto” (1899) was his first important play. This three-act tragedy of the Jewish quarter in a Dutch city has been published in an English adaptation which woefully misrepresents the original, and I should rather refer readers to a German translation (Berlin, Fleische) revised by Heijermans himself. Like most early work, the play did not satisfy its author, and several versions exist.
The story is simple enough. Rafael, the son of an old Jewish merchant, has an intrigue with the Gentile maidservant, Rose. His father, Sachel, lives in an atmosphere of mistrust, hard dealing, thievery; a patriarch with all the immemorial wrongs of the [7]ghetto upon his shoulders, and all the racial instinct to preserve property, family and religion from contact with “strange people.” He is blind, but in the night he has heard the lovers’ footsteps in the house. Rose has lied to him; Rafael, as usual, is neglecting his business for Gentile companions. So the play opens. After some bargaining over the dowry, a marriage is arranged for Rafael with the daughter of another merchant. The authority of the Rabbi is called in, but Rafael refuses. He is a freethinker; in the ghetto, but not of it. “Oh, these little rooms of yours,—these hot, stifling chambers of despair, where no gust of wind penetrates, where the green of the leaves grows yellow, where the breath chokes and the soul withers! No, let me speak, Rabbi Haeser! Now I am the priest; I, who am no Jew and no Christian, who feel God in the sunlight, in the summer fragrance, in the gleam of the water and the flowers upon my mother’s grave … I have pity for you, for your mean existence, for your ghettos and your little false gods—for the true God is yet to come, the God of the new community; the commonwealth without gods, without baseness, without slaves!”
Sachel is blamed for allowing this open rupture to come about. It is better to pay the girl off quietly and have done with her, argue the other Jews. Every woman has her price—and especially every Gentile woman. A hundred gulden—perhaps two hundred if she is obstinate—will settle the matter. The money is offered, but Rose is not to be bought. She has promised to go away with Rafael as his wife. He has gone out, but he will return for her. The family tell her that the money is offered with his consent; that he is tired of her and has left home for good. But she is unmoved. She has learned to [8]mistrust the word of the Jews; she will only believe their sacred oath. At last old Sachel swears by the roll of the commandments that his son will not return. In despair, Rose throws herself into the canal and is drowned. Rafael comes too late to save her. The God of the Jews has taken his revenge.
The play is perhaps a little naïve and crudely imagined, but it has all the essential characteristics of Heijermans’ later work; the intense humanitarian feeling, the burning rhetoric, the frankly partisan denunciation of society. Indeed, it could not be otherwise. In dealing with such a case of bigotry and racial intolerance, it is idle for a playwright to hold the scales with abstract justice. At most he can only humanise the tragedy by humanising the villains of his piece, and showing them driven into cruelty by traditional forces beyond their control. That is the part of the “Ankläger,” the social prophet and Public Prosecutor; and it is the part which Heijermans, above all others, has filled in the newer dramatic movement.
In Het Pantser (“The Coat of Mail”) his subject is the life of a Dutch garrison town. “The Coat of Mail” is militarism; the creed of the governing caste. And the setting is peculiarly apt for the presentation of a social issue. In a small country such as Holland military patriotism may be strong, but it is tempered by the knowledge that the country only exists by the tolerance, or the diplomatic agreement, of more powerful neighbours, and that in case of war it could do no more than sacrifice an army to the invader. To the philosophic workman, then, well read in revolutionary literature from Marx to Kropotkin, the standing army presents itself simply as a capitalist tool, a bulwark of the employing class against trade unionism. The industrial struggle is [9]uncomplicated by sentimentality. Patriotic stampedes to the conservative side are unknown. Social Democracy is strong. Strikes are frequent, and the protection of “blackleg” labourers is in the hands of the garrison. That is the theme of this “romantic military play.”
Mari, a second lieutenant, refuses to serve on strike duty. He is a weak but sincere idealist; his head full of humanitarian enthusiasm, his rooms stocked with anti-militarist pamphlets. He will leave the army rather than order his men to fire on the factory workers. Around him stand the members of the military caste, linked together by tradition and family relationship. His father is a colonel in the same regiment; the father of his fiancée, Martha, is commanding officer. One friend he has: an army doctor named Berens, who has infected himself with cancer serum in attempting to discover a cure for the disease, and passes for a drunkard because he keeps the symptoms in check by alcohol. Here a parallel is drawn between military bravery and the civilian courage of the scientist.
Mari is put under arrest, but the affair is kept secret in order to avoid a scandal. He can only be reinstated by full withdrawal and apology. Martha comes to him and implores him to withdraw. The strike is thought to be over. He can plead the excitement of the moment in excuse, and the matter will be settled honorably. He gives way and apologises. A friendly discussion of the point with his superior officers is interrupted by a volley in the street outside. The troops have fired upon the mob, and the son of the shoemaker over the way has been shot.
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. [10]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, [11]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 [12]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”; [13]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 [14]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; [15]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.
Ashley Dukes. [16]
