[In the following review, originally published in 1918, MacCarthy enthusiastically discusses the published version of Exiles.]

Exiles is a remarkable play. I am more sure of this than of having understood it. I could never undertake to produce it unless the author were at my elbow; and when a critic feels like that about a play which has excited him it means he has not quite understood it. What I can do is to give an account of the play and show where I was puzzled. But first I must come to terms with a misgiving. It is a treat to be puzzled by a play, so perhaps I overrate this one because it has puzzled me? I do not think that is the case, but that possibility is the grain of salt with which what follows must be taken.

To be made to wonder and to think about characters in a play is a rare experience—outside the drama of Ibsen. It is a pleasure far excelling the simple pleasure of delighted recognition which is all that the character-drawing in the ordinary respect-worthy play provides. On the stage temptations to superficiality and exaggeration are so many, and the drama is a form which requires so much condensation of subject-matter and imposes so many limitations that, within those limits, all except duffers and men of genius are, alas, more or less on a level! Once a certain knack is learnt the happy proficient in play-writing finds he can produce a play with an expenditure of a fifth of the intellectual energy and emotion necessary to produce a novel of the same calibre. If he has more to give, it does not show; if not, it does not matter, for what he may still be able to produce may be on a par with the work of a better intellect. Hence there is so much truth in sayings like: ‘In the art of play-writing construction is everything’; ‘The idea of a good play should be capable of being written on half a sheet of note-paper’, & c. They are certainly true of the common run of respect-worthy plays, but they are only true of them.

Exiles excited me for the same reason that the plays of Ibsen excite me—the people in it were so interesting. Ibsen's characters have roots which tempt one to pull at them again and again. And they are so deeply embedded in the stuff of experience that tugging at them brings up incidentally every sort of moral, social and psychological question, upon which those who would understand themselves and others can go on meditating, while feeling that they have still more to learn. The relations of Ibsen's characters to each other are presented with a sureness and brevity which gives the impression of masterly definition, and yet the complexity and obscurity of intimate relations between living people at intense moments are there too. If one lays a finger on a spinning rainbow top one discovers that the effect has been produced by a few discs of different coloured paper (red, green, yellow, and blue) superimposed upon each other; but while it was spinning that changing iridescence had too many hues to be identified. The rainbow top will pass as an emblem of the manner in which the plays of Ibsen satisfy at once the two prime contemplative pleasures—the exercise of the analytical faculty and delight in watching the movement of life.

I do not take Ibsen's name in vain in connection with the work of Mr Joyce. It is not (I beg you to believe) that habit so common in critics of chattering about anything but the subject in hand which persuades me to approach Exiles through the art of Ibsen. It is extraordinary, but the greatest of modern dramatists has as yet only had a destructive effect on the drama of this country. The plays of Ibsen have destroyed a certain amount of nonsense. Of late years his influence has been countered by the suggestion that he is a writer of problem plays, and ‘problems’, it is explained, have nothing to do with art. Ibsen is supposed to be out of date! Of all the verdicts which are now passed on the writers of the last century, this is the one which maddens me most. That great contemplative mind! … But the point I wish to make is that constructively Ibsen has had little influence. Few dramatists have learnt from his example. I hail Mr Joyce as one of the few who have grasped the value of two principles in dramatic art of which Ibsen is the master exponent.

The first is that on the stage, as in the novel, character (the individual) is the most interesting thing, the ultimate thing; for nothing happens at all unless it happens to a particular person, and action is dependent on character. The dramatist therefore must choose characters who illustrate his theme better and better the more he goes into them. Then, the deeper he digs the clearer will sound in our ears the running water of his theme. He cannot dig too deep, if he has chosen them well. But by what sign is he to recognise those characters? I do not know. His theme, intellectually stated, is certainly not the right clue. He usually finds them in himself—at least, a shaft which goes down any depth is nearly always, I think, opened from within, though afterwards sympathy and observation may continue the excavation and even control its direction; but that ground is not broken to any depth except by an author who has an inner life of his own to explore, is certain. Now what happens with most dramatists who are blessed with an idea is that they allow their theme to control their interest in character. In other words, either they have chosen characters which only illustrate superficially what they wish to show, or they only attempt to understand them in so far as they illustrate it. If they get really interested in human beings their theme becomes instead of clearer more obscure. I know no better test of a dramatist's imagination than observing if this happens.

One of the qualities which delighted me in Exiles was that evidently nothing would induce Mr Joyce to make his characters less complex and interesting than he saw them to be. He would rather obscure his theme than do that, and though a fault, it is a fault on the right side—on the interesting side. The second respect in which he has learnt from the master is his practice of intensifying our interest in the present by dialogue which implies a past. What a little scrap of people's lives a dramatist can show us—just an hour or two! In life it is usually what has gone before that makes talk between two people significant. If we did not add the days and months and years together our relations would be as empty as those of children, without being as delightful. The deduction is obvious: make people talk on the stage as though much had already passed between them. Dramatists are too afraid of mystifying their audience to use that obvious method of enriching their subject; for that there are not many people as quick and clever as themselves is a common delusion among them. Sometimes it may be no delusion; still, I am sure it is not necessary to temper their intelligence to the extent they commonly do. Besides, it is a writer's first point of honour not to write for people stupider than himself: let birds of a feather write for each other.

The merits of this play make it hard to tell its story. Summarised, that story would not distinguish it from many a play in which the love relations of two men and a woman wove the plot. Its distinction lies in the relations of the three points in that familiar triangle being complex and intense. Art is usually so superficial, life so profound. I admire Mr Joyce for having tried to deepen our conventional simplification of such relations and bring them nearer to nature. Now and then I lost my way in his characters as in a wood, but that did not make me think they were not true; rather the contrary. When I put my finger on his spinning rainbow top, I do not see the coloured rings which produced that iridescence so definitely as in the case of Ibsen. The theme of Exiles is not so clear to me. I conjecture that I get nearest to it in saying that the play is a study in the emotional life of an artist. (I am sure, at any rate, that I am giving the reader a useful tip in bidding him keep one eye always upon Richard Rowan, whatever else may be interesting him besides.) And when I say that the play is a study in an artist's life, I mean that its theme is the complication which that endowment adds to emotional crises which are common to all men. It makes sincerity more difficult and at the same time more vitally important. Imagination opens the door to a hundred new subtleties and possibilities of action; it brings a man so near the feelings of others that he has never the excuse of blindness, and keeps him at a distance, so that at moments he can hardly believe he cares for anything but his own mind.

When he acts spontaneously, he knows he is acting spontaneously—if not at the moment, the moment after—much as some people, thought modest, have hardly a right to be considered so, because they invariably know when they are. Exiles is a play in which two men are struggling to preserve each his own essential integrity in a confusing situation where rules of thumb seem clumsy guides; and between them is a bewildered, passionate woman—generous, angry, tender, and lonely. To understand Bertha one need only remember that she has lived nine years with Richard Rowan in that intimacy of mind and feeling which admits of no disguises, merciful or treacherous; that she has known all the satisfactions and disappointments of such an intimacy. Her nature cries out for things to be simple as they once were for her; but she, too, has eaten of the tree of knowledge and knows that they are not.

If you ask how Richard Rowan and Robert Hand stood towards each other, the answer is they were friends. There was a touch of the disciple in Robert. Richard was the intenser, more creative, and also the more difficult nature. He was an exile in this world; Robert was at home in it. But the essence of their relation was that they were friends, and friends who from youth had made life's voyage of discovery together. One was a journalist, the other an artist; but in experience they were equals. Both had lived intensely enough, and had been intimate enough to reach together that pitch of mutual understanding at which consciousness that each is still at bottom solitary is, in a strange way, the tenderest bond between them. Am I over-subtle? I think what I mean is recognisable. After all, it is in friendships of the second order (Heaven forfend that they should be held cheap!) that men are least troubled about the value of what they give. It is between these two friends that competition for the same woman rises, bringing with it jealousy, suspicion, and making candour—the air in which alone such a friendship as theirs can live—almost impossible. Well, very hard. Both make a mighty effort to preserve it; Richard succeeds best; how far Robert Hand failed is not quite clear to me. At first Richard thought his friend a common vulgar thief; against such a one he would protect Bertha tooth and nail. But he has misgivings which in different ways torture him more than natural jealousy. Perhaps Robert can give her something he cannot (O, he knows how unsatisfying and yet how much that has been!); something no human being has a right to prevent another having. This is the first thing he must find out.

The scene in Act II between the two men is wonderful in its gradually deepening sincerity. Hand is a coward at first, but he gets over that. Then Richard is tormented by misgivings about himself. Is not there something in him (for ties, however precious, are also chains) which is attracted by the idea that Bertha might now owe most to another—now, at any rate, that their own first love is over? How far is he sincere in leaving her her liberty? Is it his own that he is really thinking of? Bertha taunts him with that. And Bertha's relation to Robert—what is that? I think it is the attraction of peace. To be adored, to be loved in a simpler, more romantic, coarser way, what a rest! Besides, Robert is the sort of man a woman can easily make happy; Richard certainly is not. Yet, just as she decided between them years ago, in the end it is her strange, elusive lover who comes so close and is so far away whom she chooses. But was she Robert's mistress? The dramatist leaves that ambiguous. He does not mean us to bother much one way or another about that. Richard says at the end he will never know what they were to each other; but I do not think he is thinking of Divorce Court facts. He means how completely Bertha still belongs to him. Bertha tells Robert to tell Richard everything; but does he? She also tells him to think of what has passed between them as something like ‘a dream’. That, I think, is the line on which one must fix one's attention to get the focus. Robert is happy; quite content with that. Perhaps because less hot for certainties in life than Richard, he thinks he has enjoyed a solid reality. I do not know.

I have left out much it would be a pleasure to mark. Richard's relation to Beatrice Justice (the other woman in the play)—I could write an article on that; but what I have written will be perhaps enough to persuade you that this is a remarkable play.