The Curtain Falls26
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray27 illustrates the play in which emphasis little by little brings out the meaning of the whole piece. Examine even the first act. It is full of the feeling: “It cannot nor it will not come to good.” Tanqueray himself says frankly, “My marriage is not even the conventional sort of marriage likely to satisfy society.” Drummle coming in declares that George Orreyed is “a thing of the past,” because he has married Mabel Hervey. The group of old friends show anxiety, and it is clear that to the mind of Cayley Drummle Tanqueray is but repeating the rash step of Orreyed. The whole act prepares for the finale of the play.
Hervieu’s The Trail of the Torch shows the emphasis which strikes one hard blow and leaves to the rest of the play illustration of what has been clearly stressed. About one third of the way through Act I, Maravon explains to Sabine the thesis which the entire play illustrates:
Sabine. (Pointing to the two who have just gone.) Ah, my dear Maravon, what an absurd friend I have there!
Maravon. Mme. Gribert, you mean?
Sabine. Haven’t you noticed that she is beginning to look like a governess? I suppose it’s because she has been doing a governess’ work for so long that she has ceased to have any personal existence. She no longer cares to possess anything of her own, everything belongs to her daughter, and her husband works his fingers to the bone to pay for Beatrice’s dresses, while Beatrice lords it over both of them in a way that is beginning to be just a trifle odious.
Maravon. I’m afraid I don’t agree with you, Madame. With naively natural beings, like these, I enjoy watching the family wheels function with such simplicity. People of this kind conform to the law which begins by demanding of the mother the flesh of her flesh, often her beauty, her health, and, if need be, her life, for the formation of the child. And then, for the profit of the newer generation, Nature exerts herself to despoil the old. She exacts without stint from the parents in the shape of labors, anxieties, expenses, gifts, and sacrifices, all of their vital forces to equip, arm, and decorate their sons and daughters who are descending into the plain of the future. Take my own case, for instance. There was the question of my son’s position in life. Didier was able to persuade me very quickly that my property would be better placed, for the future, in his hands. To show you that Mme. Gribert and her daughter are merely following out a tradition of the remotest antiquity, if you can endure the pedantry of an old college professor, I will give you an example from the classics.
Sabine. Oh! Please do.
Maravon. You have probably never heard of the “Lampadophories,” have you? Well, on certain solemn occasions the citizens of Athens placed themselves at regular intervals, forming a sort of chain through the city. The first one lighted a torch at an altar, ran to the second and passed to him the light, and he to a third who ran to the fourth and so on, from hand to hand. Each one of the chain ran onward without ever looking back and without any idea except to keep the flame alight and pass it on to the next man. Then, breathlessly stopping, each saw nothing but the progress of the flaming light, as each followed it with his eyes, his then useless anxiety, and superfluous vows. In that Trail of the Torch has been seen a symbol of all the generations of the earth, though it is not I, but my very ancient friend Plato, and the good poet Lucretius, who made the analogy.
Sabine. That is not at all my idea of family relations. From my point of view, receiving life entails as great an obligation as giving it. There is a certain sort of link which makes the obligations counter balance. Since Nature has not made it possible for children to bring themselves into the world, of their own accord, I say that it was her intention to impose upon them a debt to those who give them life.
Maravon. They absolve that debt by giving life in turn to their children.
Sabine. They absolve it by filial piety which has been the inspiration of many deeds of heroism as you seem to forget.28
A recent editor of Hauptmann’s Gabriel Schilling’s Flight writes of it: “His analysis is projected creatively in the characters of the two women—Evelyn Schilling and Hanna Elias. What is it, in these women, that—different as they are—menaces the man and the artist Schilling? It is a passion for possession, for absorption, a hunger of the nerves rather than of the heart. These modern women have abandoned the simple and sane preoccupations of their grandmothers; the enormous garnered nervous energy that is no longer expended in household tasks and in childbearing strikes itself, beak and clawlike, into man. But man has not changed. His occupations are not gone. He cannot endure the double burden. That is why Gabriel Schilling, rather than be destroyed spiritually by these tyrannies and exactions, seeks a last refuge in the great and cleansing purity of the sea.