Introduction

HEARTBREAK HOUSE: A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

Where Heartbreak House Stands

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows
this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war.
When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the
professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby
is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian
playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic
studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard,
Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England.
Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it
in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not
waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was
delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless
cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have
now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed
to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the
ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the
pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of
opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly
and exercising them violently until they were broad awake.
Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming
people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up
and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple
in exploiting and even flattering their charm.

The Inhabitants

Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and
roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only
ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the
Stage Society. We stared and said, "How Russian!" They did not
strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays
exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in
Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country
houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art,
literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people,
the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them
could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who
had social opportunities of contact with our politicians,
administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of
sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from
that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish