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G. S.FRASER
Brustein's other subjects, was a great classical humane writer, who com–
bined human sensitiveness with an incisive but forgiving intelligence,
in
the tradition, let us say, of Moliere's
Le Misanthrope.
I cannot see
that
The Seagull
and
The Cherry Orchard
are dramas of revolt (they are
obviously dramas of criticism). Eugene O'Neill's two greatest plays,
The Iceman Cometh
and
A Long Day's Journey Into Night,
express,
as Mr. Brustein himself demonstrates, not revolt, but the tortured
and
torturing yet never wholly unloving or ignoble human condition. Piran–
dello seems like Fellini or Antonioni, in technical revolt, but in his basic
attitude to life, a mixture of cynical or pessimistic clear-sightedness
and
harsh compassion, very traditionally Italian. Jean Genet is, in one sense, a
dramatist of revolt. But he is
in
that French tradition of agonizingly
sharp dualism-let us have heaven or hell, and heaven through hell
if
possible, but no flaccid humanistic middle state--that runs through
Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Leon Bloy. He seems to me very like
Bloy in his excremental fury, his obsession with the perverse and abomin–
able, his passion for sanctity. I dare say he might end up in the bosom
of the Church.
The first chapter, as I say, is flashy. We get freshman-class history
of ideas done in the historic present, like the first chapter of
A Tale of
Two Cities :
Naturalism is replacing supernaturalism, the experiment is super–
seding the apparition. The statistic is being substituted for the
insight, prose is supplanting poetry ... ,
and so, antithetically, on. Bang, bang, bang! Enter Marx, John Stuart
Mill, and Darwin, carrying horse-pistols and wearing black masks! But
in fact Mr. Brustein's detailed analyses show that most of his dramatists
worked not from popularized science or sociology but from symbolic
ideas, like the contrast between Nietzschean hardness and Christian
compassion. Shaw was more pervious to popularizations than the others
(so, in his early days, was Eugene O'Neill). Chekhov was unique
in
his
combination of an extraordinary social intelligence with a splendid,
and
unselfconscious, imperviousness to the grossness of ideologies.
But I should speak about the merits of this book. It contains the
best short sympathetic appreciation I have read of Strindberg, as
man
and dramatist. Mr. Brustein leads us with wonderfully detailed insight
through Strindberg's various phases. His development is a strange pilgrim–
age: from Oedipal fixation through false masculine protest, hysterical
obsession with purity, hatred of women, assumption of Nietzschean
hardness, to a growingly Christian (but never dogmatically or satisfiedly
