[MacCarthy compares the characters and plot of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House to The Three Sisters and reviews an early production of The Three Sisters.]

“What does Bernard Shaw know about ‘heartbreak’—gay, courageous, resilient, handy, pugnacious, indispensable man that he is?” I reflected as I walked slowly away from the Court Theatre, where the Art Theatre Company had been acting Tchekhov's play The Three Sisters. For I had been sitting three hours (or was it months?) in real “Heartbreak House”; not in a “Heartbreak House,” of which the roof, as in the case of one London music-hall, was sometimes rolled back, releasing all the stuffy used-up air, leaving the antics of humanity bare to the speculation of the stars; not in a house of which at least half the inmates were crackling and sparking with vitality like the most electric of cats, but in one where they were more like dying flies in a glue-pot. It was a queer notion Mr. Shaw had of his own work when he thought he was writing in the spirit of Tchekhov; though we need not regret that he found as usual his inspiration in himself and created something individual and new. Indeed, that public criticism did not recognize a sharp discernment of actualities everywhere present in the fantastic implausibility of his characters shows, I fear, that public criticism is in an exceedingly feeble condition. What is Mr. Shaw's conception of “heart-break”?—a sudden disillusionment, cleansing and cutting as a flash of lightning. “Major Barbara,” the poet in Candida, the girl in Heartbreak House endure a sharp wretchedness, but not the misery that maims; presently they are not merely themselves again but twice as strong as before. Mr. Shaw's conception of such suffering is a price (sometimes it may be a high one) paid for freedom, but paid down at once on the nail and done with. “My heart is broken,” cries one character. “Then,” replies another, “You have lost happiness and found peace.” Moral pain is only life educating one, Man's will is his Kingdom of Heaven, are two root beliefs in Mr. Shaw. He has a most penetrating eye for the odd substitutes for self-respect and happiness men and women will adopt; he rips them up—exposes them, laughing; but a victorious mockery produces a very different atmosphere from Tchekhov's. Nothing, indeed, can be further removed from it. Mr. Shaw's characters in Heartbreak House may be failures, but they carry off their failure, play their parts, with gusto; they remain amusing to themselves and others. They may, as a fact, be left high and dry with life rushing past them, but the spot where they stand is not sad, dim and slimy as the shores of Styx, where Tchekhov's characters, poor, inhibited, excitable creatures, their eyes fixed on a pearly streak of light on the horizon, wait and wait, wailing for waftage. Contrast the lines from Mr. Shaw's play about heart-break quoted above with Masha's speech when her surreptitious affair with Colonel Vershinin comes to a huddled ending: “Grabbing at one's happiness and eating it in little bits and then having it suddenly taken away from one, makes one hard and vulgar.” We have had our English Tchekhov; his name was George Gissing. The Three Sisters reminded me of Odd Women; Gissing's long novels remind me of Tchekhov's short stories, spiritually and sociologically. There is the same insistence on the deadly quarrel between sensitive refinement and poverty; both are impressed with the fact that often the best qualities in people make them helpless and unhappy; both have infinite pity for weak-winged aspiration; both believe that coarseness of fibre is the best outfit for life, refuse to be reconciled to that or to become cynical themselves, but lament it should be so; both seem to fix the blame in part on our civilisation, yet to both the trouble seems also to lie deeper than that, indeed in the texture of life itself; both always see peeping over the shoulder of the muse of tragedy the blank puffy face of the goddess, Anti-climax, with her idiotic, meaningless smile; to both the sweetest thing in life is that kindred spirits who feel and suffer from these things, should keep close to one another—yet chance is always tearing them apart; both understand the poignancy of the flatness of good-byes; in both hope is a torpid chrysalis, never quite dead—a touch and it stirs in its sluggish dream. … As I dived for my hat, when the curtain fell on The Three Sisters, an instantaneous memory-picture rose before me. It was of a crowded upper room of a public-house. The air was hot and misty; shiny coppery faces like new pennies at the bottom of a basin of soapy water, loomed through the smoke of pipes and cheap cigars; a subscription “sing-song” was going on, interrupted from time to time by the crash of a glass or the squeal of a cuddled hoyden. By the side of the jingling, rowdy piano a young girl stood and sang. She had a sallow, swatty face, round shoulders, and gentle protruding eyes. She sang of a love which she would never know: two more years of work and a diet of sweets and pickles, and she would become a sour-smelling, toothless, anœmic draggletail. Why did this scene recur to me that moment so vividly? Thank you, my helpers and servers! Was it not in picture the story of the soul according to the gospel of Tchekhov? One word more, do not think of the characters in the play as specifically Russian; I have met them all, although I have never been there.

The three daughters and the son of General Prosorov were left badly off. The girls were clever and refined, Olga, Masha, and Irina, and highly educated. Olga had the strongest nature; in so far as anyone so gentle could be, she was a determined character; at any rate, she was the most patient and practical one of the family. She took to earning a living as a schoolmistress almost at once. She did not like it; she was not strong and she got very tired, but she did her work well; besides, though it was an article in the family creed that Irina and Andrey were the really clever ones, she had to decide everything at home. Irina was the most beautiful and poetic-minded; a sweet, museful, day-dreaming creature, rather too wrapped up in herself, very fastidious, and far too easily discouraged. Masha was a slightly more vulgar nature; she valued her gifts more as social assets, and clumsy manners offended her, in comparison with other things, more than they should. The General had brought them all up to believe that intellectual accomplishments were the most important things in life, and Masha, in a fit of hero-worship for the dry, chirruping little man who taught her Latin, married him. His name was Kuligin. As she says about him in the first intimate conversation we overhear with the man who is going to be her lover: “I thought him the best and wisest of men; I think him good still, but not the wisest of men.” Kuligin is the one happy character in the play, and such is the effect of Tchekhov's touch in drawing him, that one would rather almost be anything than happy after Kuligin's fashion; the mean chirpy humility of his complete satisfaction with himself and his modest destiny, with his wife, however contemptuously she treats him, his reiterated “O, I love Masha, I'm very fond of Masha, O, Masha's splendid,” and his quavering caresses which can no more be discouraged than flies, are spirit-damping to witness. Mr. William Armstrong acted him admirably; tip-toeing jauntily about and squeaking out tags from the Latin grammar. Kuligin is a kind little man with a completely dead heart. In the last act, however, he achieves a moment of pathos. When Masha, sobbing and hysterical, is torn out of Vershinin's arms by Olga, Kuligin comes down the steps of the house and sees them. His idea of comforting her is to say, hurriedly, “Don't cry, dear Masha; I forgive you, Masha, I do; I overlook all that has happened, Olga here is witness,” and then when that does no good, to put on a beard he has taken that morning from a boy in school, and help her through the pain of parting by being funny. He succeeds only in amusing himself. As for Andrey, the most accomplished of them all, his ambition was to be a famous professor at Moscow University, but since his father's death he had taken to fiddling and making picture frames instead of working. Moscow, Moscow, is the wailing refrain of the family; to Olga, Moscow means intelligent society and wider interests, to Irina a splendid lover, admiration and experience to feed her inner dream, to Andrey, Moscow means glory and using his brain. And here they are, marooned in a dull, commercial town, where they have nothing in common with anyone—except with the officers of the temporary garrison—marooned because their father's house is the only solid piece of property left them. There is another inmate of the house (temporary), the regimental doctor Chebutikin (Mr. Cancellor was excellent), a man of sixty. He, too, is dead. Years ago he adored their mother, and he professes to be devoted to the girls, but he does not pay his rent or help in any way—even by sympathy; he drugs himself by incessantly reading newspapers; his one aim in life is to forget his shame by believing that nothing matters—“We don't exist, we don't exist,” he exclaims pettishly. Yet, when he is drunk, the truth comes snivelling out of him, and in a maundering soliloquy (Act III., 2 a.m.: in this scene the stage ought to have been almost dark, lit only by a bedroom candle and the fitful light from the fire which is raging in the street) he shows us that though his gestures of affection for the girls are purely mechanical, there is in him still a sort of gangrened sensibility.

In Act I. we hear the family talking to the officers from the garrison. It is Irina's birthday. Colonel Vershinin makes his first appearance; a tall, romantic man, who loves to philosophise, as he calls it, that is to say, to make lyric orations about the future. “We poor things cannot hope for happiness, but our children's children … some day they will look back, pity, love, and understand us.” His other theme is his own domestic troubles. Masha's imagination is caught—her heart is a vacuum—you foresee what will happen. Mr. Harcourt Williams failed in this part in so far as he seemed unable to believe that any man could enjoy tirading as much as the Colonel. This beautiful faith in the future is Vershinin's path of escape from the actual; it was what Moscow was to Andrey and Irina. There is present also a Russian baron with a German name; a more solid, but very unattractive, sort of man, who is in love with Irina, and a sulky egotist who fancies himself, like Lermontov, in love with her also. The family are incredulously distressed at Andrey's love for a vulgar young girl, Natasha. They do not trouble to disguise their contempt for her. She leaves the lunch table in tears, and Andrey rushes to comfort her. “My darling, don't get upset.” He takes her in his arms. “O youth, splendid, beautiful youth. … I love you as no one has ever loved.”

Natasha plays a very important part in the fate of the three sisters. At first, she is cowed, but when she becomes a mother she becomes a tyrant. They wilt under the pressure of her vulgarity and vitality. You remember how another Natasha, Natasha the mother-woman, presides over the gigantic epic of War and Peace; armies come and go, heroes die, Moscow is burnt, emperors fall, everything passes away, but one thing is left unchanged—a mother's passionate absorption in her child. A baby's stained flannel flies like a banner above the epic of war and peace, and Tolstoi is content. Not so Tchekhov; in his Natasha he stresses the animal egotism of motherhood, making it appear mechanical, ruthless, dull. Andrey sinks to a pram-pusher and to a humble post on the district council; Natasha, between her babies, has an affair with his chief; Irina makes up her mind to accept the unattractive baron; the surly egoist picks a quarrel with him and shoots him in a duel; the regiment leaves, and with them Vershinin, and the three sisters are left stranded. “We must live … we must live,” sobs Masha. “We must work … just work.” “It's autumn now, the winter will soon come and I shall be working, working,” says Irina. “Our life is not ended, dear sisters,” cries Olga. “Surely we shall some day know why we are living. … If we only knew, if we only knew”; and Chebutikin, humming over his paper, mutters testily, “What does it matter, what does it matter?”

The performance was far from perfect. It was a mistake to pose the three sisters like a group of Canova Graces at the end, and the lighting was often wrong; nevertheless we should be grateful to the Art Theatre Society.