SOURCE: Chandler, Frank Wadleigh. “Family Studies.” In Aspects of Modern Drama, pp. 210-22. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

[In the following essay, Chandler compares marital relationships in plays by Bjornson, Mirbeau and Barker to Becque's The Vultures (translated by Chandler as The Ravens).]

I. The family study an outgrowth of the domestic drama. The family in relation to commercialism, as exhibited by Björnson, Becque, Mirbeau, and Barker: Björnson's A Bankruptcy, a family which has forfeited the higher values of life growing regenerate through a business failure; Becque's The Ravens, a widow and her children becoming the prey of her husband's former business associates; Mirbeau's Business Is Business and Sowerby's Rutherford and Son, the blight of commercialism falling upon a family through the exclusive devotion to business of its head; Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, proposing a problem in practical ethics and answering it in the spirit of Ibsen and Shaw; Barker's The Madras House, a gallery of family portraits introduced in connection with a satire upon business and sex.

I

Marital relations are the principal subject of treatment in the domestic drama. But, with increasing frequency of late, this drama has utilized, also, relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and the connection of the family as a whole with business and money, love and marriage. Moreover, special problems affecting the family circle have been proposed for solution. In plays where this is the case, emphasis is likely to fall upon the dramatist's thesis, the theory of conduct which he would advocate under certain conditions. With most of the family studies, however, the aim is pictorial—the representation of persons closely allied by blood or by marriage, their idiosyncracies being thrown into prominence by some family crisis. For the most part, the crisis itself is less important than the characters it affects, and the family studies incline toward realism. They are realistic, not only in the minuteness of their observation of human nature, but also in their looseness of structure and matter-of-fact material.

The development of the dramatic family study is historically to be associated with the rise of naturalism. An early instance of such a study appears in what has been called the first naturalistic play—The Selicke Family (Die Familie Selicke), by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. This piece, with its portrayal of a group of relatives suffering from poverty and from the dissipation of the family-head, a drunken bookseller, suggested to Hauptmann his Before Sunrise, which in turn prepared the way for his other family dramas—The Festival of Peace, Lonely Lives, and Michael Kramer. The fashion, once set, has spread until family studies now abound in the theatre. Not the least of these is Milestones, by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch, a work which extends the scope of the genre by tracing a domestic history through three generations, with a view to displaying in each the operation of the same law of individual growth from radicalism to old-fogeyism.

Of all such plays, one distinct group exhibits the family as affected by commercialism. Representative in this group are Björnson's A Bankruptcy, Becque's The Ravens, Mirbeau's Business Is Business, and Barker's The Voysey Inheritance. In the first of these dramas, Björnson's A Bankruptcy (En Fallit), a family, which has forfeited all the higher values of life in scrambling for wealth, grows regenerate through a business failure. The seemingly prosperous Tjälde, whose devotion to commerce has led him to neglect wife and daughters, is steadily losing money. Yet he justifies his pretense of affluence as the only means for saving the sums confided to him by others. When his sharp practice excites suspicion, the bankers of Christiania send an agent to inspect his accounts. Tjälde endeavors to save himself by securing credit from a visiting magnate in whose honor he tenders a dinner. His efforts prove fruitless, and, being confronted by the agent, he declares that he will shoot the inquisitor or himself. But the agent is perfectly cool. He advises Tjälde to strip off the cloak of deceit which he has worn for so long, to confess himself a bankrupt, to begin life over. For years, his wife and daughters have struggled to keep up appearances; they will all be happier to start afresh in honest poverty.

The merchant yields to the agent's advice. Although his windows are stoned by irate workmen, his woes are lightened by the generosity of friends, and the members of his family are drawn together by their common affliction. The lieutenant, a pretender for the hand of Tjälde's younger daughter, takes French leave; but an awkward clerk, hitherto scorned by the elder daughter, rallies to the aid of the bankrupt and works wonders in assisting him to retrieve his fortunes. To cap the climax, the very agent who had forced the failure of Tjälde takes the place of the lieutenant as suitor of the younger daughter.

Obviously, this play is old-fashioned in its structure, characters, and perfunctory optimism. It is a dramatized Vicar of Wakefield. “Sweet are the uses of adversity” might be its motto. Like Björnson's Geography and Love and When the New Wine Blooms, it decries preoccupation with business and exalts the domestic virtues. With the misery of Tjälde and his family, when engaged in the race for wealth, is contrasted their happiness when returning to a life of simplicity.

Some years after the appearance of A Bankruptcy, Henri Becque produced his play of superior realism, The Ravens (Les Corbeaux). Here is presented still another aspect of the family in its relation to business,—the fate of a widow and her children who become the prey of her dead husband's unscrupulous associates. In the first act, the family of Vigneron, a well-to-do manufacturer, is celebrating the betrothal of his youngest daughter. Vigneron's crabbed old partner, his solicitor, his architect, and a music teacher unite in the festivities, which are suddenly interrupted by the death from apoplexy of Vigneron himself. The three acts that remain exhibit the collapse of the family fortunes and the descent upon Mme. Vigneron and her children of these very guests—the ‘ravens.’ The youth who was to marry Blanche deserts her. The music teacher, who has assured Judith of her talents, now admits that her proposal to support the family by going on the stage is absurd. Vigneron's partner advises the widow to sell what is left of her real estate at a sacrifice, intending to purchase it himself in secret; and the architect, finding that the widow has no funds for more buildings, duns her for the fees already due him. The solicitor, hoping to line his own pockets, warns the widow against her husband's partner; and the latter, although past sixty, looks with greedy eyes upon the third daughter of Mme. Vigneron. When Marie scorns Teissier's dishonorable proposal, the old man, admiring what he takes to be merely her shrewdness, offers her marriage.

Although Marie detests Teissier, she feels that to take him is her only chance for saving her family. The solicitor assures her that at Teissier's death she will inherit half of his property. “You should know,” says the man of the law, “that love does not exist. … There is nothing but business in the world, and marriage is a business transaction like any other. The opportunity which now presents itself to you, you will never find a second time.” To her mother, Marie confesses her shame in yielding, yet she is spared the sense of guilt she would feel were she to refuse.

Old Teissier is satisfied with his bargain, but to test Marie, he supervises her meeting with a rascally creditor. When the fellow grows insolent, Teissier steps forth and sends him flying. Then he turns to the girl, exclaiming, “You are surrounded with rogues, my child, since the death of your father!” To Teissier it never occurs that he is the greatest rogue of the lot.

Something of the same satirical spirit animates a third drama dealing with the family as affected by lust for money. This is Octave Mirbeau's later piece, in three acts, Business Is Business (Les Affaires sont les affaires). Here the author's effort has been chiefly expended upon one character, the members of whose family are sketched but lightly. Isidore Lechat, a self-made man of affairs, turns all that he touches into gold, but, in the process, exploits friends and enemies alike. Those who think to get the better of him he invariably overthrows. He oppresses the poor, scandalizes the rich, and, without a qualm, offers up his family on the altar of Mammon. Lechat's wife cannot call her soul her own. Lechat's son turns to sport, quarrels with his father regarding the payment of his racing debts, and then, through the wild driving of his motor car, snuffs out his life. Lechat's daughter, the sensitive Germaine, revolting at her father's vulgarity, disappoints his plan of allying her with the son of a marquis by walking out of the house with a poor young chemist.

For a little, Lechat is unsteadied by such reverses. But he pulls himself together to retaliate upon two of his partners, contemptible rogues, who have thought to take advantage of his unnerved condition. The man of business, being assailed with cunning, rallies to reply in kind and crush these rivals, and upon his barren triumph falls the final curtain.

Although Business Is Business be overmoralized, its protagonist is a vital creation, reminiscent of Molière's best characters. Lechat is both a spender and a getter of money, but his spending is only a means to fresh getting. Gold is his god, and efficiency his demi-god. He patronizes the nobility, forcing the marquis, who comes to ask a loan of him, to consent to allying their families and to supporting his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies. When the marquis complains that Lechat would buy him, that worthy replies: “I never buy; I merely exchange. Business is a matter of exchange. We exchange money, land, titles, votes, intelligence, social position, office, love, genius—whatever we have for whatever we lack. There is nothing more permissible, and, rest assured, nothing more honorable.” To the poor young man who captures the affections of his daughter, Lechat responds with a compliment on the youth's acumen. Of course, the fellow has merely conceived a scheme for extorting money. “Say it squarely, make your price!” cries Lechat; “I will pay!”

Still another study of family life in relation to business is Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Son, its protagonist a glassmaker in the north of England. This John Rutherford is a more tragic figure than Mirbeau's Lechat, an industrial fanatic who regards his work as his religion. By his Gradgrind theory and practice of life, he drives each of his three children from home, and is left at the end desolate, except for the daughter-in-law he has always despised and the grandchild that he hopes may succeed him. His daughter, who has sought relief from drudgery in an affair with her father's foreman, that father turns out of the house as disgraced, after having himself appropriated the foreman's invention and then cashiered him. One son he has early alienated, a youth who seeks refuge in the church. The other he ruins morally, for this weak but well-meaning fellow, defeated in his plan of profiting by the foreman's invention, breaks into his father's strong box, and becomes a fugitive from justice, the deserter of his wife and babe.

More subtle in its treatment of a family crisis induced by commercialism is Granville Barker's best play, The Voysey Inheritance. Here the attention centers upon Edward Voysey, who discovers that his father for long has maintained a crooked business which he, as the son, will inherit. What shall he do? Publish the truth, and ruin his father, the firm, and the creditors; or, keep silent, and struggle to pay back little by little the moneys that have been taken for secret speculation from the clients' accounts? This question, at first one of theory alone, becomes pressing and practical when Edward's father suddenly dies. The son, assembling his family, lays the case before them. By some, the truth has been known or guessed at; to others, it comes with a shock. But all are agreed in declining to use their own private means for righting the wrong. Edward, they argue, must continue the business in silence, sending the clients their interest, and striving to replace, as he can, the capital.

When Edward objects to cheating the firm back into credit, the woman he loves meets his scruples, and, inspired by her confidence, he accepts the ‘Voysey inheritance.’ Needless to say, his path is beset with dangers. He must refuse to a clerk the hush money paid him for years. He must face the wrath of his father's old friend, who comes to withdraw his account and learns that it exists for the most part on paper. When the secret leaks out and a general collapse seems imminent, Alice reassures her lover. The clients, she says, rather than suffer the losses of bankruptcy, will let him work out their salvation. If they put him in prison, she still will be proud of him since under this strain he has grown into manhood. “There was never any chance of my marrying you,” says Alice, “when you were only a well-principled prig. I didn't want you … and I don't believe you really wanted me. Now you do, and you must always take what you want.”

This statement echoes the doctrines of Ibsen and Shaw. Beware of mere formulas for conduct, says Barker. The rules of right and wrong must often be modified when applied in a concrete instance. Thus Edward Voysey, in accepting the burden imposed by his father's dishonesty is right pragmatically, although wrong ideally. On general principles, he ought to fling down that burden with pious aversion, proclaiming the crime of his father and accepting the consequences. Just that is what a moral idealist, like Ibsen's Gregers Werle, would do and then glory in the ruin he had wrought.

More important than the author's ethical theory, in The Voysey Inheritance, is his painting of character. For the parents of Edward, his brothers and sisters, and their connections by marriage compose an unforgettable family group. Most carefully drawn is the father, a deceiver of self as well as of others, half convinced of the truth of his own little fiction of having inherited the crooked business from his father, and now handing it on to Edward as a sacred trust. Yet, as Edward later discovers, the man who can talk so top-loftily has once got the affairs of the firm quite straight, only to return to swindling just for the zest of the game.

If the other members of the Voysey family are shown less completely, they are no less distinct. There is Edward's deaf, little mother, devoted to her husband, although aware of his trouble. There is Trenchard, her eldest son, keen, cold, cock-sure, estranged from his father, and noting in that father's fiction of inherited dishonesty a touch of the artist common to criminals. There are the other sons, booming Major Booth, who roars the family into subjection, and the gaily impractical Hugh. As for the daughters, Ethel is a spoiled darling, and Honor is ‘mother's right hand,’ a spinster resigned to her sad survival. Add to these folk Ethel's lover, and the wives of Hugh and the Major, with Colpus the vicar and the selfish old friend of the Voyseys, and you have a remarkable family group, described with a precision of detail unrivalled on the contemporary stage outside the theatre of Shaw.

It is the Shavian influence, more than any other, that permeates The Voysey Inheritance. Hugh and his wife and Alice and Voysey himself talk like the people of Shaw. Thus Voysey assumes that what he has selfishly done in his business has been all for the good of the clients—a pose dear to Shaw's heroes. Hugh, like the Shavian scoffers, sneers at the average Happy English Home and the tyranny of its ideals, above all “the middle-class ideal that you should respect your parents, live with them, think with them, grow like them.” Hugh's wife, like the Shavian free-thinking young women, grows tired of his crying for what he can't get and proposes to leave him. And Alice, the heroine, speaks the language of Shaw in warning her Edward that he should no more neglect his happiness than he would neglect to wash his face, and in saying, “You have a religious nature. … Therefore you're not fond of creeds and ceremonies.” Her guardian, whom she refers to as “a person of great character and no principles,” has instructed her in the Shavian philosophy on the occasion of her inheriting a fortune. “You've no right to your money. You've not earned it or deserved it in any way. Therefore, don't be surprised or annoyed if any enterprising person tries to get it from you. He has at least as much right to it as you have … if he can use it better, he has more right.”

It will be evident that Granville Barker, as a writer of intellectual drama, is not content with making mere family studies in the naturalistic fashion. Rather, he exhibits his family groups with a well defined purpose. And this purpose, in a play like The Madras House, becomes relatively more important than the individual portraiture. Yet that chaotic comedy does depict, in connection with its dominant satire upon sex and business, two branches of a curious family.

The Huxtables and the Madrases are products of the drapery trade, a commerce which depends upon tickling the vanity of women and the appetite of men. A philosophic promoter proposes to unite with others the drapery houses of old Mr. Huxtable and Constantine Madras—brothers-in-law and business rivals, who have not spoken to each other for years. What happens in the play is of no consequence, but the satire it affords upon trade conditions and family life is amusing. The Huxtable group is composed of father, mother, and six maiden daughters, introduced as horrible examples of what our artificial civilization leads to. In the normal course of events these daughters should have been married; but now, falsely restricted from the society of men, they are miserable. Laura, the eldest, turns for relief to housekeeping. Minnie and Clara seek solace in missions. The brusque and business-like Emma, who might have succeeded in a profession, is enforced to idleness since it is not proper for a woman in her position to work; and Jane, the youngest, has had to decline two proposals, not only because her parents objected to the men as insufficiently wealthy, but also because her sisters disapproved, fearing that if the youngest were to marry, their chances would be minimized. So all have gone unwed. Jane, according to her mother, has displayed a wanton mind in squeezing consolation from a man's collar sent home from the laundry by error.

As for the Madras branch of the family, it consists of Constantine Madras, his wife, his son, and his daughter-in-law. Constantine has retired from active management of the Madras House, in order to practice, in Arabia, his peculiar theories in regard to women. Philip, his son, carries on the business in London, and for it neglects his own pretty wife, until one day he awakens to his folly. Then he resolves to turn from the foppery of decking out the vain and the vicious to something really useful. He rejects the handsome position offered him by the American promoter, and determines instead to court poverty and abuse by entering politics. “Why do I give up designing dresses and running a fashion shop to go on the London County Council?” he asks. “To save my soul alive!”