The Seagull [And] the Cherry Orchard

Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924079586594 3 1924 079 586 594 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1997 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT OF T^VO FRIENDS OF Cornell University 1934 TWO PLAYS BY TGHEKHOF Tchekhoff, Anton. The Kiss and Other Stories. By Anton Tchekhoff. Crown Svo. 6s. vi , TWO PLAYS TGHEKHOFBY THE SEAGULL THE CHERRY ORCHARD TRANSLATED, WITH AI» INTRODUCTION AJfD ISfOTES, BY GEORGE CALDERON NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY^ MDCCCCXII CONTENTS PAGE TCHEKHOF ........ 7 THE SEAGULL ....... 23 THE CHERRY ORCHARD . ... 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....... 15i — TCHEKHOF I APOLOGETIC TcHEKHOF wrote five important plays Ivcinof, Uncle Vdnya, The Sea- gull, The Three Sisters, and Tlie Cheriy Orcltard. The rest are one-act farces. I have chosen The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard for this volume as representing him at two extremes. The Seagull is easy, entrainant, not much unlike a Western play ; The Cherry Orchard is difficult, rebarbatif and verj' Russian. While our new Drama is still in its plastic age, still capable of new impressions (for in spite of many obstacles a new Drama seems to be growing obscurely up in England), it is good for all who cherish it, playwrights, critics, and spectators, to keep the best foreign models before their eyes. It is of course to Life itself that playwrights, like all other artists, must go, both for their matter and for their form. But Life is a very complicated affair. To different nations, to different generations, tp j/ different individuals, different views of it seem important. We sit studying one aspect with all our might, till some day we discover that we liave been neglecting a hundred others ; and off we career to pitch our campstools under another tree, whereon learned arboriculturists then hasten to hang a neat label with its proper name. Romanticism, Realism, Post-Impressionism or the like. We peer and pry about, eager to know if anj'one has found a new clue to the elusive secret. We do not want to pinch his particular recipe, but we do want to know all possible methods, to see the lie of the whole countrj', like carrier-pigeons that fly round in circles before they choose their own way. With French and German one may do a great deal ; there is Hervieu, Donnay, Capus, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and a few translated Norsemen and Hollanders, all men with different philosophies of Art and Life, good to be inquired into. But the contribution of the Russians, though less accessible, is not less important. Andreyef, Gorkj', Tchi'rikof, Blok, Yushkevitch, Tchekhof, have studied aspects to which it is right that we should make ourselves sensitive. It is in fact my Preface, not my Translation, that calls for apologj'. For, on the face of it, it is the business of a work of art to explain its own intentions. Still, the perfect work of art requires the perfect spectator ; and it is in order to help the reader to become one, that I offer him the fruit of mv meditations on Tchekhof; I want to clear ' 8 TCHEKHOF his eyes, to make his vision "normal^" like the unassuming Irishman's. For we Britons, perhaps more than any other nation, come to the contemplation of exotic art with a certain want of ease, a certain doubt where to focus our attention, a bewilderment as to what is foreign- ness in the matter and what is originality in its presentation. And I do not think the queer performance of The Cherri/ Orchard (in another version) given before the Stage Society,' will have done anything to dispel that bewilderment or forestalled me in elucidating the secrets of Tchekhofs genius. II THE CENTRIFUGAL METHOD A competent professional critic would easily stick a label on Tchekhof and push him without more ado into his proper pigeon- hole ; but, as a fumbling amateur, I must ask for the reader's indulgence while I go the long way round, retail all the differentiae which I see in him as systematicallj' as I can, and leave it to some experter person to condense them afterwards into the appropriate but undiscoverable word. The most general idea under which I can sum up the essential characteristics of his plays is this : That the interest of them is, so to speak, "centrifugal" instead of self-centred; that they seek, not so much to draw our minds inwards to the consideration of the events they represent, as to cast them outwards to the larger process of the world which those events illuminate ; that the sentiments to be aroused by the doings and sufferings of the personages on his stage are not so much hope and fear for their individual fortunes as pity and amuse- ment at the importance which they set on them, and consolation for ! their particular tragedies in the spectacle of the general comedy of Life in which they are all merged ; that Tchekhof s dramatic philosophy resembles in fact that modem theory of Physics which, instead of seeking in Matter itself for the final explanation of its nature, regards its constituent atoms as so many gaps or spaces in the primary sub- stance, and turns the imagination outwards to contemplation of the Ether of which they break the majestic continuity. Ill GROUP EMOTIONS In real life there is nothing of which we are more urgently, though less e.xpressl_y, conscious, than the presence of other life "humming about us, than the fact that our experiences and our impulses are very ' May 28, 1911. TCHEKHOF 9 little private to ourselves, almost always shared with a group of other people. The private life of feelings and opinions is lived far down beneath the surface, in the innermost recesses of the soul. The chief springs of human conduct are group emotions^ ; and the groups with I which we his share those emotions vary in magnitude from a man and | companion to a nation, a continent, or a world. For many reasons this truth, however well ascertained, has hardly found its way as yet on to the stage. Tchekhof is a pioneer. He shows us his little group of personages (there are never many parts in his plays) all subjected to the same influence or generating the same impulse at the same time. In most plays the action is con- tinuous; there are episodes, or byways, but all lead into the same main road. In Tchekhofs plays many things are said and done which have no bearing on the action, but are directed only to creating the ^ atmospliereT) The players have to show, by difference of tone and gesture, when they are speaking to the action, which concerns them as individuals, and when they are speaking to the atmosphere, which concerns them as members of a group. The spectators have to dis- tinguish what is painted in low tones and what stands sharply out, in order to grasp the central design. Sometimes the alternation of action-lines and atmosphere-lines is very rapid, as in The Cherry OrcJiard, in which the author has carried his method so far, that the surface seems as rough as that of a French " vibrationist " picture seen close at hand, but, when looked at aright, falls into a simple unity, and fi-om that very roughness gets qualities of life and light not otherwise attainable. In The ^eagull action and atmosphere are broken into masses large enough to be easily distinguished. In the first two acts, for instance, the author shows, by material symbols, the general tranquillity from which the commotions of individual life emerge. We are in a garden at night ; before us, a mile away, lies the seagull- haunted lake, shining in the light of the moon ; about us hangs the enchantment of rustic quietude ; and in our midst, only half divined, a storm is gathering that ultimately shatters the poetry of two young lives. In the dim moonlight of this scene the personages lose their individuality ; they become shadows against the landscape, drinking in its beauty together, or setting off its grandeur by the banality of their conversation. When this was performed at Glasgow ' all the characters but Nina, Trigorin and Madame Arcadina were gathered in a leisurely semicircle up-stage, facing the lake, some standing, some lounging in garden chairs ; from time to time one sauntered across or stretched his arms, or lighted a cigarette. There was an air of idly trickling colloquy among them, and when Shamrayef told how the famous Silva once took the low C in the opera-house at Moscow, his ' 'Where Mr Wareing, the manager, bravely allowed me to do the producing. 10 TCHEKHOF discreet crescendo emerged only as a higlier ripple of the un- eraphatic irony in the background. In the second act, where a squall of nerves is brewing, the conversation and behaviour of the personages have nothing to do with the action of the piece, but are directed to convey the atmosphere of tedium and heat in which such squalls are possible. Here we had yawns and fannings and moppings of the brow. With the entrance of the boorish land agent the passive group-emotion becomes suddenly active. Everyone abandons his listless attitude, alert with the sense of impending perturbation. "There are no horses to be had." A gust of anger goes through all the company ; each breaks out in turn, according to the difference of his interest and disposition.

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