BOOKS
451
Christian) reverence for the Madonna-type, and a pious submission to
fate or God. (This is a hard thing for a psychotic, a schizophrenic para–
noiac, as Strindberg seems to have become in his years of isolation and
non-production, to achieve. In
A Dream Play,
we see an extraordinary
working out, deep and harsh and yet compassionate, of auto-psycho–
analysis through free fantasy-projection.) The account makes me revere
Strindberg: the poor miserable splendid old thing died of cancer in
1912, clutching a Bible and muttering: "Everything is atoned for!"
It was a terrible life, and yet one agrees with Mr. Brustein that "it is
the glory of his art that, despite his perpetual dissatisfaction with himself,
few could wish him to be anything other than he was."
I must be briefer about the other studies. Covering Ibsen's whole
development, Mr. Brustein defines three stages. Ibsen started as a poetic
dramatist, an essentially Romantic one, of the extreme and erring but
therefore noble and interesting, and outsize and symbolically representa–
tive, human case. Brand, Peer and Julian belong to this period. He went
on, without ever losing his predilection for aristocratic solitude and inner
struggle, to write the penetrating dramas of family and communal life
("houses for people") which still hold the stage. But from
The Master
Builder
onwards he is lamenting that he has chosen ignoble themes and
also, in
When We Dead Awaken,
that in a cold devotion to art he has
missed the chance of vivid, pulsating life when
it
was offered to him. Mr.
Brustein seems to agree with Ibsen's own judgment made in old age but,
like most people, I still prefer the compromise with community, the middle
range. On Chekhov, Mr. Brustein is interesting on the technique of
submerged melodrama and interspersed farce. (The "dramatic" scenes
happen between the acts, and the villains, with the exception of the beastly
little lower-middle-class girl in
The Three Sisters,
are not villains, while
the "nice people" ask for their own misfortunes.) He is less interesting
on Shaw and Pirandello than on the others, because they are less inter–
esting, perhaps. I wish he had dealt with
John BuZZ's Other Island,
Shaw's only "intimate" play, and one which comes out of bitter divisions
in the self. He thinks Genet's ritual enactments of horrors
might
send
us all out into the street, purged of aggression. I am not sure: "Aretine's
pictures have made few chaste." Brecht needs a more tricky approach.
But this is a book by a man immersed in the living theatre.
G. S.
Fraser
