CHAPTER XX

BLIND-ALLEY THEMES—­AND OTHERS

A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no exit.  It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable.  The playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a no-thoroughfare.  Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic, happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us—­our sense of truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or, at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human nature, and the vanity of human aspirations.  But a play which satisfies neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable alternatives—­such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess, is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.

There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley theme—­two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our moral judgment.  The first of these is Measure for Measure.  If ever there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us.  Isabella is forced to choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils.  If she resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or take pleasure in her action.  If, on the other hand, she determines at all costs to save her brother’s life, her sacrifice is a thing from which we want only to avert the mind:  it belongs to the region of what Aristotle calls to miaron, the odious and intolerable.  Shakespeare, indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it unsolved—­evading it by means of a mediaeval trick.  But where, then, was the use of presenting it?  What is the artistic profit of letting the imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?  Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca kill Scarpia.  This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.  Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to be writing a comedy.  The result is that, though the play contains some wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never taken any real hold upon popular esteem.