"He has talent to waste, and much of it is really wasted because he lacks opportunity for cultivation and frequently has not the required concentration and application. Perhaps it is better so; for if all Jewish talent was brought out in the various formsof greatness, what would—what would the anti-Semites not say? They would say that the Jews have stolen their talents. For anti-Semitism is the cry of despair of defeated mediocrity, or it is the plaint of the blinded Christian maddened by jealousy because he has been beaten by the wandering Jew in his own game of trade, commerce, politics, or art. But the Jew is kind, his kindness is unsurpassed, and the Hebrew line in which his people are called 'merciful sons of the merciful' is literally true. He pities the anti-Semite as he pities all who suffer and who are in want of the good things and the good qualities of life.
"The Jew is a great possibility. Sensitive of and susceptible to all things, to the very color of the atmosphere around him, with a soul sharpened by sorrow and a mind of keenest understanding, he can become anything and everything, assimilate himself with any and all conditions, and illustrate life with a new meaning or adorn it with a worthy work. He is like unto an Æolian harp on which various breezes play various tunes.
"His beautiful, consecrated, peaceful, religious, home life, the life wherein the home is a synagogue and the synagogue is a home, this on the one hand and the strange world with its hard realities, with its stumbling-blocks and stunning blockheads, on the other, have created in the Jew a striking two-sidedness, a kind of duality and, if I may so call it, a sort of conciliation between the ideal and the real. Thisforms another trait by which you may tell him. Thus he is very practical, and still dreams, hopes for the restoration of Palestine, and loves his home and his country wherever he abides. He is an ardent Zionist and a good citizen at the same time.
"Murder, or any other kind of talent, will out. Say rather that talent will out even if it must come in the shape of murder, so to speak. People capable of the highest good and noblest greatness are often cast down into the abyss of degradation by their loving neighbors, or other circumstances. People must live, you know, and therefore they often live a living death. Not permitted to live rightly and happily, they still must live somehow. The instinct of self-preservation preserves much evil, but life is life. Those who have talent and are not permitted to use it for the good of all, use it for their own temporal good, regardless of the consequences. The thought that I wish to leave here as we part with the Jew is: That they who walk in darkness find the ways that are dark. Over-praise is damning, and I want to be careful. The Jew has on the whole been far, far better than he has been permitted to be—and this, too, is one of the charges against him. He is a graduate of the school of sorrow, with the highest honors.
"What is that story about the man who in his long quest after the ideal, at last found her in the woman who has suffered?
"Well, here is the Jew, a being who has suffered."
"Sometimes," said Keidansky, "it is grossly immoral to live up to your highest principle." And in reply to my half-uttered protest, he quickly continued: "No, no; I am not jesting. It's a sad business, this jesting about the human tragedy. For what is it but mocking each other's wounds, laughing at one another's infirmities in this great lazaretto, where we are all pitiful patients? What is it but scoffing at our sores, grinning at our gashes, deriding our diseases, laughing at our own weaknesses? No, I am not jesting," and the speaker eyed me strangely as he looked up from his manuscript on the little table in Machtell's café.
"Beneath the levity is lead," he said slowly. "Behind all the fun is crushing failure. Behind all the satire is sorrowful shortcoming. Behind the smile is a searing smart. Grief lurks in the grin. Through all the drollery despair peers forth, and there is nothing more lugubrious than laughter. Comedy is made up of error, failure, confusion, misunderstanding, misfortune, misdirected efforts and wasted energy. Whenever error ends fatally it is called tragic, but that is not the worst. The real tragedy is not the play that ends with the death of the leading characters, but the one in which they are condemned to struggle and live on and laugh and be laughed at. Each oneof us is his own caricature. There is so little to do, yet we all overdo it. We all reduce our lives to absurdities. Our efforts exaggerate their importance and betray our barbarities.
"We overdraw our characters and all our lifetime suffer in our own estimation. The more serious we are the more extravagant is the farce. As we creep along the roads, the shadows we cast mock and menace us.
"We are poor debtors, all. With infinite intentions in a world of infinitesimal possibilities, our efforts constantly caricature and cartoon our aims. All our works are filled with comic illustrations galore. We make them ourselves, and they overshadow our works. Did you ever see any one fall on the street and a lot of lookers-on laugh? Well, that is in a measure the history and interpretation of humor.
"We seek and do not find; we fight and do not conquer; we play and do not win; we attempt, but do not achieve; we aspire and do not attain; we desire and are not gratified; we long for light yet grope on in darkness; we struggle and are defeated; we strive for salvation and discover it to be a mere sham; our labor is lost, our love is not returned, our devotion is not understood, our wings are broken at the point of flying, all our yearnings are in vain; and then, the newspaper humorist writes half a column of pointed jottings out of these things; or else the literary comedian will prepare a series of funny papers. Do you understand now what an appalling, grim andgruesome spectacle there is behind all these little jests? And how tragic it is for the humorist who sees it all? They say that a Scotchman laughs on the third day after he hears a joke. It does not take so long to find that there is nothing to laugh at. It is all so sad. Think what a tremendous tragedy the funny paragrapher sums up in a few lines and sells to 'Puck' for $2.98. Come, take up a column of comicalities in any publication and see what is at the bottom of every jest. What is it about? Is it about a man and a woman linked together by law, with a Chinese wall of misunderstanding between them, 'so strangely unlike and so strongly attached to each other' that it is hell for both of them? Or, is it about a woman who wears her life away in the farce of 'Vanitas Vanitatum?' Is it about the greedy mercenary who loses his soul to gain the world? Or is it about one who gives up the world to gain nothing?
"Is it about an enthusiastic youth who, to escape the materialism of his surroundings, jumps from the frying-pan into Bohemia; or is it about a philosopher who, gazing at the stars, falls into a mud puddle? Is it about the poet starving in a garret, or is it about the artist lost in the quest of the unattainable? Is it about the moral principle trampled under foot because of the material advantage, or is it about the low life of him who longs for the highest? What is it about? Is it about a man who bleeds and a woman who laughs, or is it about beings who sell themselves for life with promises to love, honor, cherish andprotect? Is it about some one groping in darkness, grappling with the impossible, or is it about a great republic gone mad over the visit of an effete representative of monarchy? Perhaps it is about a bright American girl in quest of a titled idiot, or else about a being so degraded that he is in mortal fear of work and has a horror for soap! It may be about mediocrity dreaming of talent, of failures chasing the phantoms of success, of fading beauty, waning love, of the stumbling of the blind, or of any and all the confusions of error and the thousands of misunderstandings of the home and of people who are near and fail to be dear to each other. The list is too long. It can never be exhausted. But at the bottom of any one of the jests, old or new, you will find an excruciating little tragedy. It is all so sad, sorrowful and depressing. The humor of the situation? Say rather the tragedy of the case.
"And to look behind, to peer through the panorama, to see all this, to have a sense of humor and to have it bad, is not such a cheerful thing as it is thought to be, for it is also a sense of our hopelessness. It is a sad business, this jesting about the human tragedy—or the human farce. In other words, it is to see the futility of all our efforts, the failure of all our fighting, the uselessness of our aspirations, the emptiness of our aims, the vanity of our strivings, the nothingness of it all. Life, with all its faults and foibles and failures, with all its incongruities, irreconcilables, clashes and unfitnesses, stretches outbefore you as just so much material for sardonic satire. Scrambling, squabbling, scurrying, seething, squally squads and crowds of humanity, how gruesomely grotesque it all is and how ludicrous! With all its heroics, brave deeds and still greater bravadoes, with all its gloried wonders and wonderful achievements, with all its glorious boasts, lofty hopes and superb masteries, with all our arts and philosophies, humanity and the whole world seems to me like a swarming mole-hill, and at times moves me to nothing but to laughter. It is so ridiculous, all the mimicry of the whole microcosm. Tell me, have you ever been seized by a sense of the utter absurdity of it all, so that you laughed and laughed until there were tears of blood, almost, in your eyes?
"I wonder if you know what it is to have a mocking demon within you to laugh and leer at everything you do, at every step you take, at your best deeds, finest words, greatest strides, noblest endeavors. Imagine a voice that at every turn of the road—especially when you act your grandest, talk your loudest, achieve your highest—that at every turn of the road exclaims: 'How absurd, how silly of you!' Imagine a state of mind when all is farce around you and your own caricature is your constant companion. Such things happen to some people, and to them everything is so unreal, so absurd, so stupid; the greatest events, the sublimest utterances, are ever so laughable. The more seriously the people play their parts the more ridiculous the performance seems.The greater the tragedy the more laughter. What is so funny as Hamlet's soliloquy? What are so laughable as the ravings of Job? And so it sometimes feels with the other sublimely sad things that have been written. The moving finger writes, and the mocking voice within laughs—laughs at everything and you can take nothing seriously. You take up the best, the most pathetic things you have written yourself, and even these make you smile. Such things have been said before and they were absurd and out of place—in the first place. Whatever you do you hear the mocking voice from within say: 'Silly creature, those things have been done before, and they have only led fools to their dusty death.' You whisper the sweetest things, prompted by love to your lady fair, and the voice from within: 'Silly fool, these things have been said before and the course of true love never did run long.' You have a feeling that it is all histrionic, all acting, all farce, and that we are all overdoing our parts tremendously. Strutting, swaggering, blustering, bombastic swashbucklers all. It is not life. It is an historical novel. It will sink into nothingness. 'O, Thor, du Thor, du prahlender Thor!' Do you remember Bret Harte's parody on Hugo's 'Les Misérables'? So easily is the sublime tipped over and made ridiculous. 'Tis but a slight step from pathos to bathos. But wait until I address this letter to the New York 'Abend Blatt.' Abe Cahan came over here and spoke for the Socialists this afternoon, so I wrote the thing up. He is in the other room withthat blatant crowd of Jewish actors. They are taking him to task for one of his reviews in the 'Arbeiter Zeitung' of a recent performance of theirs. They never know exactly what a critic means except when he does not criticise. They are to give here Gordin's 'Jewish King Lear' to-morrow night. You don't know Cahan? He is one of the brightest, biggest men in our movement. I come in here," Keidansky explained, "because these actors are so ignorant of the conventions, simple and natural, and I like them for it.
"There is a story by J. L. Peretz," Keidansky continued, after he had folded up and addressed his communication, "that I want to tell you apropos of what I have been saying. Peretz is one of the literary masters of to-day, but he writes in Yiddish, so the world misses his greatness. The story is about a reformer, a revolutionary, an idealist. He addresses a meeting in behalf of his cause, speaks fervently, passionately, 'spits fire,' waves a sharp sword at his audience and makes a ringing appeal for the truth. In the room where he speaks there is a mirror. Accidentally he looks into it. He sees himself. His enthusiasm leaves him at once, his fervor vanishes, he loses his power of speech, becomes calm, indifferent, and finishes his oration in disgust. He no longer feels the saint and hero he felt. While speaking so excitedly he looked like a murderer in the mirror. After this he has an unearthly dream about the part of hell that is allotted to reformers. When hewakes up he receives a postal card asking him to come to another meeting of the revolutionists. He immediately burns the card. This is giving but the faintest outlines of the story, but you see Peretz, like Heine, also has the sense of humor developed to a tragic extent—to the extent of seeing the absurdity, futility and irony of it all—even our grandest efforts.
"Yes, so it seems to some eyes, and so it is at least to those who see it so. After all, what is it? A cry and a struggle and a sigh, a flash of light and a streak of dawn and darkness, and then we stand by the grave and weep for the dead that the living may see our tears. Ah, the helplessness and hopelessness of it all; the desolation and despondency, the thoughts that paralyze the mind and stifle the soul; all things out of joint, out of proportion, and Fate cries out to you in the slang phrase 'you don't fit!' Ah, the humor of the entire procession and the deep tragic background behind it. Seek and you will find, and when you find you shall not want it. Wealth makes us weary of it. Fame brings her wreath and finds her poet dead. Faith consoles, but we have the consciousness all along that we are sick and are taking medicine. 'Love grows hate for love's sake and life takes death for guide.' Love? Have ever two souls come near each other? Those whom we love most understand us least. Happiness? The art of finding happiness is one of the lost arts. No one is ever consciously happy. Knowledge is almost positive proofthat we cannot know. With it we are more puzzled than we were without it. The last word of science is 'wait.' What do we know? Moses went up to heaven, but God refused to be interviewed. The people, like the modern editor, insisted upon a story and so we have the Bible. But science and the higher criticism has interrupted our reading and spoiled the pleasure of it. What do we know? Even Professor Daniel De Leon does not know everything. Man asks questions, investigates, 'und ein Narr wartet auf Antwort.' Life contains more emptiness than anything else. Life is a long wait for that which does not come. Is life worth living? 'Tis not worthwhile asking the question."
"If that is so, or seems so," I hazarded the question, "then why be here?"
"Why, to see it all, to enjoy the tragedy," Keidansky answered with swift enthusiasm. "I would not advise my best friend to commit suicide. Such an exciting farce. What would life be, what would art be without the tragic elements in it? It's great! But I began to tell you why it is sometimes grossly immoral to live up to your highest principles, when my train of thought was wrecked. Some other time. Come, let's go into the other room and I'll introduce you to the players and to Comrade Cahan—if he is still alive."
"Yes, I have promised to tell you why it is sometimes grossly immoral to live up to your highest principles. It was a rash promise, yet I shall try to make it good. And though it was several weeks ago, I am more than ever inclined to think the same way."
Thus spake Keidansky when I reproachfully reminded him of a former utterance.
"There are the missionaries," he said, "who go forth among peaceful, law-avoiding savages to force upon them a religion that has outlived its usefulness, a religion that has not prevented them from doing such an immoral, impolite thing. They go forth to promulgate the truth of which they are not sure. They invidiously invade the premises of goodly primitive people, and ruthlessly trample upon their traditions, beliefs, superstitions and feelings. We shut people out of our country, and we send missionaries to offer them free admission or standing-room in our heaven. Heedless that their bodies are starving, we come and ask to let us save their souls. We forget that they have a right to their religion, to their way of non-thinking, to take the medicine they like; that their method of salvation is best for them,
'That human hopes and human creedsHave their roots in human needs.'
'That human hopes and human creedsHave their roots in human needs.'
'That human hopes and human creedsHave their roots in human needs.'
'That human hopes and human creeds
Have their roots in human needs.'
We forget that they have just as much a right to wear their mental corsets as we have to wear ours, or, if you wish, that their beliefs are as true to them as ours are to us. We forget that they speak to God in their own language. We go forth among them and mock at all that is holy and dear to their hearts.
"Of course, missionaries, like all agitators, are devoted people, living up to their very highest principles, and we all mean well; but this sort of business, this invasion and utter disregard for others, is to me grossly immoral. And to court and minister to the needs of cannibals and brigands is too much altruism on our part, and that excessive phase of it is wicked and hurtful."
"But," I protested, "is not the legitimate advocacy of ideas justifiable?"
"Yes," said Keidansky, "the legitimate advocacy of ideas. There are those who on one day of the week would turn our cities into cemeteries, who would stifle our spirits and starve our souls, who on that day deny us music and mirth and song—think it a sin to smile, wicked to be happy, and a crime to make merry. If they could reach the sun, they would stop it from working overtime and shining on the Lord's day; yet if the sun should ever reach them, their piety would not cast such a pall over the community. Yes, I know; but listen. Have patience. Patience is a Christian virtue, which Christians have forced upon Jewish money-lenders. Iknow that there are many people to-day who have quite a high opinion of the Almighty, believing that He loves light and sunshine, laughter and joy, and glories in the happiness of every living thing, down to the humblest worm. But I am speaking of the others—those who deny the pleasure of everything except self-denial; for whom the only laws of life are the blue laws.
"Just now our city is being held up by the police, and at the point of a club told to be good and pious and religious. We are told not to breathe, or sigh, or sneeze, or smile, or show any signs of life on Sunday. Orders to stop the circulation of our blood on that day have not yet been issued, but everything comes to those who wait—every evil comes to those who have over-zealous pietists among them. To heaven, or be damned. It is a case of your adherence, or your life. You must be killed, or cured. Now in this disregard of disbelievers, the narrowness of vision and hurtful overzeal, I discern something immoral.
"Yet it is a matter of principle to spread whatever gospel one has been captured by. Personally, I have never been so tortured by any as by those people who wished to save me, and out of justice to them, I must say that they tortured me according to their highest principles. It must be admitted that there is an amount of good and pleasure for the agitator, involved in agitation, yet his work cannot, generally, be called moral on the ground that it conduces tohappiness, because he is only one, and those whom he is molesting to save are many.
"And so many of those who sacrifice and abnegate and deny themselves, who neglect nature, ignore the laws of their being, emaciate their bodies and starve their souls, is it not immoral of them to weaken their constitutions, minds and spirits, and diminish their power for positive good in the world? In the end, are not many of them miserably misled by their highest principles?
"If he loseth the world, what shall it profit a man that he gaineth his soul? Of what earthly use is a soul, without a wicked world to use it in? To what good is a soul without all the opportunities of losing it?
"Alone in the mountains, far from the madding crowd, it is easy to be sane and soulful and saintly; but to me, every effort to separate the soul from the world is immoral, though it is in accord with some lofty principles. The soul outside of the world is a tramp who shirks work. To remain in the world, to do, to work, to wage war against weakness, to live strongly and have no fear—that is the soul doing its duty, and sowing happiness for all.
"And speaking of happiness for others, in the first place, it is not right to force it upon others against their consent, and in the second place, it is wrong to do it at the expense of your own welfare. Do all that you can for yourself first, or you are not justified in trying to manage other lives on a betterbasis. I believe in perfection, but I believe that as much of it as is possible should begin with the perfectionists. I believe that nothing is worth doing, unless there is a sound reason for it. I believe in egoism. Altruism may have done much good, but I pity the Altruists, who have enervated, weakened and impoverished themselves by their mostly futile attempts to help others.
"Largely, altruism is an attempt to do for others what you cannot do for yourself.
"There are principles which have led people to lose all that was good in them. The roads to unattainable ideals and impossible perfections are strewn with countless corpses of lost victims. People lose their health, peace, welfare and all, trying to do for others what, in so many cases, cannot be done at all. All this is wrong. It is wrong to add to the store of the world's misery, though you are attempting to alleviate it. No, no one should work for philanthropy unless he gets a good salary for it. As to asceticism, it has never been a profitable business. Contrary to other religions, Judaism rather stood for the joy of life than the arrest of it.
"I have seen much of the problem of immoral principles among our radicals of the Ghetto, many of whom have ruined and wrecked their lives because of the ideas they advocated. If the dream of social justice would be realized to-morrow, many of them would not have the strength to enjoy it. Others are so weak that they would not be able to stand theshock. There were those who had others dependent upon them, and who neglected everything and everybody, particularly themselves, for the sake of 'the cause,' and who finally became utterly useless. They added to the poverty of the East Side in their efforts to abolish it, while if they had taken good care of themselves they would, in the long run, have done vastly more for their ideals. Among my plots for stories that I have never written, is the case of a man who became a tramp, because he was too anxious to abolish the system that produces tramps. One of the finest poets of the East Side is now a mental and physical wreck, because he lived up to his highest principles—and neglected himself.
"Enthusiasts very often lose the sense of justice, become oblivious to everything—except the invisible. I know too well the nobility of the motives; I know that there are more of them on the East Side than any other place in America; I know, also, that a cause requires such sacrifices, yet, what are the results? Very often, failure. It has been observed that a man, who in the midst of a savage or barbarous community, in defiance of current social or religious customs, should attempt to live the ideal life of a perfect civilization, would doubtless be quickly eliminated from such a society by violent and tragical means, and thus effectively be stopped from influencing those around him to better ways of living. A great deal of our enforced civilization of savageraces has been fatal in its effects upon the health and happiness of the vast majority, while it has failed to elevate the average morals of the survivors. Authorities say that this is likely to be the result, whenever conventional education is forced upon a people in advance of their functional development. The Hawaiian Islanders are pointed out as an impressive example, and the missionaries, as well as the radicals of the Ghetto, trying to convert their orthodox brethren, ought to remember these things.
"The way out of it? Some one says: 'That course of conduct must be adopted which will promote the greatest possible development of life-giving energies, both in the individuals immediately affected, and in society at large, including the life of posterity.' That's science, if I have the quotation right. Principles should be founded on fact, and be conducive to the largest happiness, including even the happiness of the one who holds the principles. In size, they should be more than 8 by 12 inches. They should be a yard wide—wide enough and true enough for all. Yet they should be such principles as to allow others to hold other principles. The right principles, in accord with the best laws of life, and not theology, will come up to all requirements, and they will be moral.
"Yes, individualism by all means," he added; "be yourself, but don't be a savage."
I met Keidansky at the performance of a Yiddish play, and our talk turned to matters dramatic.
"I notice by the papers," I remarked, "that Sarah Bernhardt has just produced a play written for her by F. Marion Crawford, the American novelist. So we are going to supply the theatres of other countries with plays. Are you interested?"
"Very much," said Keidansky; "this is not the only case of an American writing for the foreign stage, and it suggests to me a fine possibility. About Crawford I know but little; but he is one of our popular men. He has, according to his own confession, written to please; he has never offended any living beings by putting them into his works; he has never attempted to picture life, uninteresting as it is, and he is, on the whole, not one of those that we should want to send away to write plays for the people of other lands. And I am rather glad his 'Francesca da Rimini' has failed in London.
"But if there are any among us who are terribly in earnest, with tremendous intentions to elevate the stage, to write plays that will instruct, stimulate, uplift, to take all the struggles of humanity and put them into dramas—why let them learn some one of the foreign languages and go abroad and write playsfor the serious people of Europe. Yes, if they persist in these things, and want to make us think, and all that sort of thing, which is short of pleasure, if they cannot amuse us with something funny or entertain us with something nice and romantic, why let them go abroad. It's the only way we can get rid of them, and we shall not mourn the loss of those who would have us do nothing else but mourn.
"We Americans do not want any plays that require intellect, for we need all that we have in our business enterprises; we do not want to think in the theatre, because it takes all our thoughts to advertise and sell our goods, nor do we want our emotions stirred, for that is a nervous strain, clouds the mind, and makes people unfit for speculation, scheming or anything on the next day. Then, these plays that arrest the brain and touch our very soul, they make us sentimental, soft-hearted, kind-natured, and draw us out on long conversations with our wives, children and friends. Meanwhile the wheels of trade are turning, and in the race for success we are left behind.
"We are a healthy people, and we don't want any morbid, lurid, ghastly productions over here, and in a large sense all very serious works are morbid, lugubrious and gloomy. At bottom of them there is always a problem, an evil, a crying wrong, a morbid state of something. A happy home is not dramatic; people at peace with themselves and the world are not good subjects for tragedy. According to the conception of these earnest writers there is no plotfor a play without a peck of trouble. We don't want any such dramatic dishes served. We don't want people to play upon our feelings, and yet pay them for it. Occasionally, we are willing to have something a little bit sad, but we want it to end happily. But the earnest ones tell us that in real life few sad stories end happily, that their pictures are true to life. Hang it, we ourselves know they are true to life. There's plenty of trouble at home,—that's why we go to the theatre—to forget it. Gorky pictures a man—fat and forty, successful and comfortable as a government official—a man, who after reading 'a book of one of these modern much-praised writers,' comes to the conclusion that he is 'an insignificant nonentity, a superfluous being, of no use to any one.'
"This is just what one of the modern plays does for you. See, it seems to say, see, you crown of creation, what a crawling creature you are. Your past is what it ought not to have been. Your present is what it ought not to be. 'The future is but the past again, entered through another gate.' Yesterday you were a fool—to-morrow you will be a still greater one. Your best resolutions shall become bitter regrets. You are weak, and you make laws and build governments and create creeds, and they make you weaker yet. All the adornments of your civilization are relics of barbarism. Evolution is too slow for anything, and you cannot get ahead of yourself. You have talked all your life and not uttered an original thought. There have been a few original beings, butmost of you are poor imitations—you must follow others. You must have a master, either in heaven, or on earth; you are a slave of society. You strike for freedom and anti-conventionality only when it becomes a fad. You don't understand. Your children cannot teach you anything. You are too old to learn. When you were young you had only your parents to instruct you. Your home rests upon false assumptions. It is a field of battle—or there are no strong individuals in it and all is peace. The theory of heredity is not true—your children are stupid; your wife is a doll, which you have chosen for her pretty cheeks, and, though she is fading, claims the rights of a free-born human being, and does not understand—but what's the use? Of what earthly good can such plays be? Why should we in this free, independent and prosperous country listen to such things? Besides, family quarrels, filial relations, disagreements between relatives are not fit materials for the dramatist. It is none of his business to meddle in such private matters. If there is trouble in the home, if a man and a woman find that one and one is two, if the interests of certain persons, or classes, are against those of others, if people find their religion too small for them and their laws not big enough, why there are courts that they can go to, and legislatures and clergymen and lawyers and Christian Scientists and so many other sources of help and salvation. For a writer it is extremely bad taste to deal with such matters. His mission is to amuse us,and he has no right to abdicate the sovereignty of his exalted office.
"At least that is what we Americans—the majority of our people—think, and if there are writers among us so abnormally serious as to see things otherwise, there is but one thing to do with them—we should send them away to other countries where people like that kind of dreary drama.
"Let them, like Marion Crawford, write for the French stage. The French are not even shocked when they see a real resemblance between life and the drama. In fact they put everything into their plays, all their faults, and I wonder how they can look at these plays. So many things happen in France, and it is all in their books and plays, besides a lot of things that never happen. You cannot in their country escape life and all its troubles by going to the theatre or reading one of their novels. All life's tribulations, turmoil and travail are in them. Not that the people are over-earnest, but that they like something strong, love to be stirred and moved, and are recklessly unafraid of the vertigoes of thought. They have great artists and wonderfully fine writers, but their dramatic works are terribly upsetting. A good performance of 'Camille' breaks a person up for several days. They are a dangerous lot, all the French writers.
"No, we over here do not want such productions. There are plenty of pretty incidents and fables out of our romantic history that we can use on our stage.
Every veteran of our wars tells enough of his own heroic deeds to make a dozen of plays. Then there are so many historical novels, guaranteed to have nothing to do with life, that have not as yet been dramatized. Such plays would help us to understand our grand history.
"But there is lots of room in Europe for our would-be realists, and our government would do well by making an appropriation for their instruction in foreign languages and their deportation to the lands of burdensome intentions, revolutionary movements and problem plays. This would mean peace in our own country.
"There are the Germans, who love Schopenhauer and beer and usually drink the two together. They feel intensely, revel in realism and have the keenest enjoyment of tragedy. Nothing is too sad, sombre, or too stirring for their stage. All the unanswered questions that have vainly troubled the ages are raised in their dramatic and literary works. What an uncomfortable prospect that is! They always have men who writes plays that will never die. They have no shame, these Germans. They feel strongly and openly show it. Altogether they have a passion for the thoughtful, and give the modern playwright with tendencies a splendid opportunity. But what is to be said of a country that can produce such play as Hauptmann's 'Die Weber'—a country that can send fifty Socialist members to the Reichstag? Yes, we can safely send them to Germany, or else toRussia. It would be hard for an American to learn that language, but Russia is the land where they say the most daring, the boldest things in the most candid manner, or without any manner at all. I don't know why it is unless it is because free speech is forbidden in that country. There the play, or the novel, palpitates with life and vibrates with heart-throbs. All the evil and oppression and ruin of the country cries out through its literature and drama, and the people worship such art. Life itself is seen on the Russian stage. This is where we should send our earnest writers. True, there is a censorship in Russia, but the radical utterances of an American author will easily pass the Russian censor.
"There is Norway, where a man like Ibsen, who has made that country the scene of action of all the tragedies of the world, is allowed at large after an exile of many years. Ibsen has held up the Land of the Midnight Sun as a dominion of darkness, yet they like him and are also proud of him in his country. Belgium is another good market for the serious and revolutionary drama. In Spain, Echegaray is doing nearly what Ibsen is doing in Norway, and he has a number of literary companions with similar sombre intentions. Even in England they are beginning to write such plays, and an American can easily learn the English language. It's a good thing that Henry James prefers to live in England, only we ought to put a tariff on his psychological stories. We need not fear. Any and all thesecountries will serve us as places of exile for our earnest authors.
"But hold on, I've nearly forgotten. Perhaps the expenses of sending these people to Europe can be saved. Let them learn to write in Yiddish, for in the Jewish theatres of the New York Ghetto all sorts of serious, sombre, life-like, problematic and powerful plays are produced."
"It's quite a problem," said Keidansky, suddenly, after a pensive pause, as he watched the glimmering lights of the Cambridge bridge across the gloomy Charles.
"What is?" I asked.
"How to abolish the social reformers," he answered in a tone of determination.
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when we left the little café where we spent part of the evening, and he said it was too early to go home, which in any case was the last resort. It was so roasting hot up in his attic, that no matter what time he climbed up there, he would be "well done" by the time he rose in the morning. But the place he told me of had this advantage: it was delightfully cool in the winter. Keidansky was physically exhausted and mentally lazy, and would say but little at first. He had spent the day in preparing an article for one of the Jewish papers, and during the evening gave two lessons in English, visiting his pupils at their homes; for it was thus, he once informed me, that he learned what English he knew—by teaching it to others. Incidentally these lessons he gave and his journalistic efforts helped to pay for the necessities of life, such as rent, laundry, lunches, symphony concerts ("on the rush"), admissions to picture exhibitions, books, gallery tickets to the bestplays that came to town, etc. He had worked very hard that day, he said, which was a direct violation of his principle. He did what he could to keep his ideas out of his article, and he hoped it would be published. He felt tired, did not want to go home, and proposed that we walk over to the Charlesbank Park where, on a night like this, we could at least in imagination conjure up a breeze.
"Your whim is law," I said, and we set off for the park. I had been speaking of a Yiddish melodrama which had been produced in Boston a few days before. Keidansky had not seen the play, but he intended to write a review of it for one of the New York papers. He knew all about it and the species to which it belonged. When capital punishment was abolished, sitting through one of these plays would be an all-sufficient penalty for murder, he said. Then this subject gave out and there was a pause, after which Keidansky made the startling remark concerning social reformers.
"Abolish them? Do you really mean it?" I asked.
"Yes, though I do say it," he replied.
"What for?" I, being puzzled, queried again, and he answered:
"For the welfare of society, and perhaps also the sure approach of the millennium." He continued: "The social reformers, as a rule, are a most unsocial job lot of people. As I have known them, their business has been to frighten, to scowl, to scare, and to make a mountain of evil out of a mole-hill that did not exist.They are often the most blinded zealots, the narrowest-minded, one-sided partisans, with tremendous, almost Dante-like propensities to conjure up hair-raising horribles, but with the genius and the poetry of a Dante left out. Their method is to cut life up piecemeal, pepper it good and heavy, and send you to bed with a few bitter morsels. After a night of the most excruciating nightmares, you wake up with a nauseous taste in your mouth, and a pronounced case of reformania. It is not so much what they say, as how they emphasize it; the very dictionary groans beneath the weight of their abuse of adjectives, and after a time they convince you that you don't know your own address, that you have not, as you imagined, been living on the planet earth, but in the most devilish, hellish purgatory.
"In order to convert this earth into a heaven, they must needs make it appear to be the blackest hell. In order to abolish evil, they must prove that nothing else exists. To convince you of the infinite possibilities in the development of men, they must prove to you that they have ever been divided between parasitic capitalists and starving slaves. Evolution, as they concoct it for you, has been a process of going from bad to worse, from a mild form of slavery to a more abject one.
"You see, they are in for effect, and with the aid of the most bombastic language and turgid phraseology they are bound to make it, no matter how many people they dishearten, discourage and dismay. Todamn humanity, they think, is but a trifle when their supreme end is to save the world. Hope is not in heaven, earth sees no gentler star; earth is hell and hell bows down before the social reformer. The reformer that I mean is a man ever wandering about with a pail of black paint in one hand, a brush in the other, and with an expression of heartrending sorrow in his face because he cannot find a ladder high enough to enable him to put a few coats of his paint on the skies. The world must be saved at any cost, say these reformers, and if the world is the cost, why it is dead cheap at that, when they can become saviors of society and possibly sainted martyrs. And so they proceed to exaggerate the evils that exist in the most brazen-faced manner and to magnify the evils they imagine to the utmost extent. They generously enlarge every iniquity that is and fully describe those that have never been; they complicate every simple problem in order to puzzle mankind and to be misunderstood and to appear great. The world has become so civilized, the reformers reason, or rather think, that it is hard to find its monstrous wrongs and social reform are being forgotten, and so out with our telescopes, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks. The capitalists must be dethroned, the down-trodden wage-slave must be enthroned, and then our saviors riot and revel in their never-ending disquisitions. Yes, when there are many reformers in the world, the world is in sore need of reform.
"These people are pitifully short-sighted and canbarely see one side of life at a time; they dissect life and remove it from reality. Their solutions are so fine that they have nothing to do with the real problems. They detach humanity from the world. They abolish the concrete (for convenience) and get lost in their abstractions like the detective who disguised himself so much that he could not discover his own identity. They conceive more evil than exists because they rarely know the difference between right and wrong. They are visionaries without breadth of visions; theorists, not knowing the uselessness of all theories; people who would save the world because they do not know it; builders without a foundation; saviors without the saving graces of truth and beauty. They embitter humanity, they darken the world, painting it blacker than it ever was in the barbaric past and—they make me weary, the more so because they constantly remind me how foolish I once was myself.
"I tell you, the world is better to-day than it ever was before, and it would become still better if we could abolish these disparaging, discouraging, slanderous social reformers. The true reformers are those who make us see how good and great the old world is. As you said the other day, the greatest explorers were those who discovered heaven on earth. And after we have abolished the reformers we could gradually also abolish the other evils which afflict our civilization and mar existence. They would no longer impede our progress and we could little by littlewipe out the wrongs that oppress us and institute more just conditions for all members of society. These things could be done gradually, reasonably, with good cheer, and with the best results. For another trouble with the vaudeville social reformers that I did not mention is their overweening, overwhelming conceit, which makes them so ludicrously unreasonable and prevents them from seeing that the world is just a trifle bigger than one of their numbers."
It was nearing dawn, and I asked him how he was going to do away with the reformers.
"Well, there's the rub," he said. "I do not know exactly, but I've been thinking that perhaps the only and best way of abolishing the social reformers would be by finding the true solution of the social problem and abolishing all the wrongs and iniquities of our civilization. Let us destroy, annihilate the evils of unjust laws, governments and monopolies, and institute a just system of society and the social reformers will disappear.
"Let us have a society wherein all will share equally in all the joys and sorrows of life, wherein none shall be starved and none shall be pampered to death, wherein none shall have too much of the goods of the world and all shall have enough, wherein no hungry babes will wallow in the gutters to become candidates for the prisons and insane asylums, and no children shall be ruined by riches; a world wherein there will be no temperance movements to drivemen to drink, no trust to destroy men's souls, and no churches to harbor infidels; a world without the constant clouds of harrowing, sad thoughts, without the rains of tears, and with more and more of sunshine. Let us do that and we will abolish the obnoxious reformers. Let us abolish the monstrous crime of poverty, which has not the shadow of a reason for existence in a world that is overwhelmed with wealth, and the occupation of the reformers will be gone, and they will vanish. Really, we ought to be willing and ready to do anything for their abolition."
"I am going to buy a book on Salem street," said my friend, when we suddenly encountered on Tremont Row. "Do you wish to come along?"
I was bent on any adventure, and so we started for the quarter, down through Hanover street. It was but a short distance, and before we had done much chatting in the way of exchanging ideas, we were at the head of the street, facing the pawnshop of No. 1, with the welcome legend of "Money to Loan."
We passed safely the bedecked and bedraggled second-hand clothing stores, though the pullers-in were out in full force. As my companion explained, it is only the seeming strangers who are approached and asked to buy, or sell, but familiar figures and persons in their company are never molested. One of these attendants, a dark, sad-eyed, kind-faced young man, was leaning against the door-post of a store and intently reading a Jewish magazine. We were across the street and we stopped to look. This fellow, who was engaged in the most sordid business, was reading the "Zukunft," the magazine of dreams, ideals and Utopias, published by the New York radicals. An elderly, bearded and stout man came down the street. Without looking up from his booklet the youth mechanically asked: "Any clothing to-day?"
"No," the man shouted, "no clothing to-day, and you'll never sell anything if this is the way you'll attend to your business." It was the proprietor of the store. For a moment the puller-in seemed dazed. Then he shoved his "Zukunft" into his coat pocket. He began to cast his eyes about for customers. He looked a model of sorrow. I was told that it was his idealism, his striving for the impossible, beautiful, that reduced him to the ugly position he was in. We moved on. There were other men reading, if only in snatches, but they apparently owned their stores and had their assistants. One of the pullers pointed out to me is one of the most enthusiastic Zionists in this city. Children were playing on sidewalks and doorsteps, sedately but happily. A school-teacher from one of the neighboring institutions passed through the street. Several little girls recognized and flocked about her. One took the teacher's umbrella, the other asked for the privilege of carrying the young lady's Boston bag. They took hold of her arms and went along dancing and smiling as she talked to them. Above the rumbling of wagons were heard the pleasing notes of a piano and the singing of a sweet-voiced daughter of the tenements.
Farther up the street was more crowded. It was Thursday afternoon. The stores were all activity and bustle, and the pedlers with their wagons and pushcarts were crying their foods and wares for "the Holy Sabbath" in quaint and singing Yiddish phrases. I was reminded by my friend that AbrahamGoldfoden, the father of the Jewish stage, in one of his operettas uses a swarming, eve-of-Sabbath market-scene like this very effectively, and makes his hucksters sing beautifully of the things they have to sell. Said my guide: "Of course, in the operetta of 'The Witch' the pedlers are not so ragged and besmeared, and you cannot hear the smell of the meat and the fish, but neither can you buy and eat these things. After all, if art is beautiful, real life is quite useful.
"To our people," said Keidansky, casting his eyes about, "everything here is a matter of course, and there is nothing unusual about it all. The strangest things are the strangers, who come to stare, study and wonder. In fact, the self-concentration of the Jew, probably the secret of his survival, makes this the only place in the world, the temporary Palestine, the centre of the universe. There are other places in this city, but they are only the outskirts, the suburbs of the Ghetto. There are other peoples and religions, but we are the people and ours is the faith. The flattery that children receive from their parents afterwards helps them to bear the brunt of the battle. The consciousness of his being chosen helped Israel to find his way through the dark labyrinth of the centuries. Everything here is as it should be, only a little more on the exclusive and pious European plan. This is more of the old fashioned view, but it is still extant, inasmuch as the Ghetto remains."
Now we were near Bersowsky's book-store whichwas on the other side of the street and we stopped, facing it. A street-organ was playing in front of the strange emporium and a band of children were dancing gayly to its music. We could see the books and periodicals, phylacteries and newspapers, holy fringe-garments and sheets of Jewish music in the windows from the other side of the street. And as we came nearer we could see the very aged woman, bewigged and kerchiefed, wan, wrinkled and wry—the most familiar figure in the Ghetto—we could see her sitting on her high stool, drinking a glass of tea and selling newspapers. There were several simple prints and chromos in the window, reproductions from pictures of Jewish life. Parents blessing their children on the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Passover, high priests lighting the candles in the temple—these were their subjects. In the windows were also brass candlesticks, such as are being lighted and blessed on the eve of each Sabbath. We stood outside and mused.
"This," Keidansky explained, "is the leading Jewish book-store in Boston, and it is in a sense also the spiritual centre of this Ghetto. If any one were to ask me what is to-day the moral condition of the Jews, their spiritual state, what are their intellectual status and religious aspirations, if any one should ask me—I would take them into this store and let them see what it contains. Religion, history, literature—it is all in here—at least in all its physical manifestations. Pentateuchs, Bibles, prayer-books, all books ofreligious instruction, books of piety and penance, volumes of the Talmud and of Mishna, phylacteries and holy scrolls, covers for the scrolls and curtains for the Holy Ark, ram's horns to sound on New Year's, knives wherewith to kill cattle according to a merciful ritual, candle-sticks and show-threads which the Jews were commanded to wear at the bottom of their garments (and some of them now wear under their garments)—in a word, all that stands to preserve the old faith is here. All the symbolism of our old faith is here incarnated. And yet side by side with these are the things which tend towards the transformation or dissolution of the ancient religion—the publications of the radicals, the destroying utterances of the revolutionists. Here come the orthodox for prayer-books and the anti-religious for free-thought pamphlets. Here you find the organs of the patriots and Zionists, who wish to preserve and regenerate the Jewish people, and also the organs of the Socialists and Anarchists who are fighting against all national ideas and for an assimilated humanity. Come in and I'll show you. There is the 'Zukunft' (Future), the best literary and scientific monthly we ever had, which is published by the Socialists. It was formerly edited by Abe Cahan, now Dr. Caspe has charge of it. And look! 'Die Freie Arbeiter Stimme,' the Anarchist weekly, ably edited by S. Yanofsky, one of the cleverest Yiddish writers.
"And," my friend whispered, "this old lady, who stands for all that is pious and ancient, handingout the 'Freie Arbeiter Stimme' and the Socialist 'Vorwärts,' is to me as strongly dramatic and as profoundly symbolic a picture as any thing in life and literature. Mr. Bersowsky, who started this store, now sells books, it is hoped, in a better world. Look at this young old woman—his widow—and see if hearts ever break around here. The aged lady is his mother, and she would not be in any other place in the world, except where her husband, and afterwards her son spent their last days. So she stays here all the time the store is open, and sells papers and books in spite of protests.
"The Jew is so practical that he always looks ahead; he is chronically optimistic, and his imagination creates everything that the world denies him. Dreamer he has been ever since the prophets, and even before their time. It must have been superb idealism and beautiful faith which enabled him to loan money to his neighbors during the Middle Ages. It still requires fine imagination to do it to-day.
"Between the sordid and the sublime stands the Jew, who is either one or the other, or both, as circumstances shape his destiny. You can see this in all his literature, from the stories of Motke Chabad to the plays of Jacob Gordin.
"Is it not strange how quickly we adapt ourselves, and how soon we come up to date and ahead of date? But yesterday we had no literature except our religious guides, our only beacon lights in the old-world Ghettos; and now we have splendid modernworks, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, all breathing the modern spirit. Many standard works from all European tongues have been translated for us; but we have a number of great masters of our own. It is such a short time ago that we had no fiction to speak of us (except the sermons of our preachers); and now there is Abromowitz and Peretz, Spector and Rubenowitz, and so many others. There is a whole group of modern poets, who have also grown up in no time. And the struggle between the old and the new, which this literature represents, the striving for the modern, and the longing for the ancient—that is what makes it so painful and pleasant—so stirring, and therefore such good art. All grades of feeling and believing, thinking and non-thinking, are in the books and periodicals that you find in this store. And the men and women who come here, living in the same Ghetto, are often millions of miles apart in their ideas."
My guide asked for his book, a Hebrew story, by L. M. Lillenblum. The elderly man, who is a relative of the family and a partner in the business, knew all about it, found it after a long search, and made my friend happy. The story, I was told, was written about twenty years ago by a native of Keidan. At that time there was a general literary awakening, and many talented men wrote profane and useful books in the holy language, and shocked the orthodox Jews of Russia. In Keidan, they wanted to excommunicate the author of "The Follies ofMy Youth"; but the rabbi of Kovno telegraphed, saying that the infidel was a great man, and should be left alone—with his book. An old man came in, and after much bargaining, bought a silk praying-shawl. Several persons came in for papers. A young man bought the "Zukunft" and "The Merchant of Venice" translated in blank verse, by Joseph Bovshover.
He wore glasses, long hair, carried an umbrella and a green bag; in fact, one might have met him in a vegetarian restaurant. He was pointed out to me as a noted radical, a dreamer, who writes for the "Vorwärts," works as a tailor in a sweat-shop, and is said to be writing a book. A comely young maiden, with a madonna-like face, came near the store. She had a few mayflowers in her hand—and gave them to a ragged little child standing there. She came in and bought a paper. She did not read Yiddish; but it was for her father. She was a college student, I was told, of advanced ideas, but deeply in love with the people of the Ghetto and their beliefs—was planning to devote her life to settlements and social reform work—one of the many dreamers who came into this store.
"Once," said my guide, "I told her that I would put her into a book. 'Thank you,' she answered. 'I don't want to sink into oblivion so soon.' But she is an idyl of the Ghetto just the same. Look; here are the poems of David Edelstaat. He sleeps now in a lonely grave in the Jewish cemetery atDenver, Colorado, by the side of the fence, for he was a delinquent in Israel. He went there by way of the corroding sweat-shop and a damp cellar in New York, where he edited a little communist weekly. Many of our idealists go to Denver this way. It is the only time they travel and take a vacation. The hospitals there are crowded. But Edelstaat's poems, they are a sacred treasure among the Jewish working people."
The smoke was so thick and the din so heavy, that I did not see him when I came in and barely heard his shouted greeting. Such was the crowded condition of the regular resort on Saturday night; yet I found Keidansky tucked up in a corner of the café, "oblivious to the obvious," around him, with a pile of newspapers in his hands. "The group" had not as yet assembled, so my friend was reading.
"This has been a great week," he said with gladsome emphasis, after we had exchanged courtesies. I at once suspected what he meant.
"A great week," I said, "because you have been able to see humanity piteously dissected, human beings mercilessly analyzed, souls stript of their raiment, wounded and bleeding, our fellow-men on exhibition, crippled by custom and walking on the crutches of convention, our best arrangements of life held up to ridicule and scorn. A great week," I said, "because you have fed on tragedy like a fiend?"
"Yes, there is something sad about tragedy," answered Keidansky, ignoring my bitterness, "but the man who sees things clearly, who looks a long distance behind the scenes, the man who sees the worst and does not die, but lives to cast his observationsinto a perfect work, and to lift you up to the mountain-top with him, is not this man great and gladdening? Is there not cause for exultation in a really big tragedy? And this is saying but little about the æsthetic pleasure of a story told in heart-breaking and soul-stirring manner," he added. "Some one must do this work, and it makes one feel real good when the right man comes along.
"The saddest stories are yet to be told, before there can be much more happiness in the world. We can never reach the heights until we realize the depths. As for myself, I give all the world to the man who can make it better than it is. And such works are making the longed-for improvement, by performing the miracle of making men and women think, doing this, not by any pedantic preachments, but by the power of suggestiveness and the large vision of the newer and truer art. Art with a purpose? But all art has this purpose. And the less the purpose is consciously inculcated into art, the better is that purpose carried out. They call them problem plays, but was there ever a great play without some sort of problem in it? Without some burning question of life, and love, and death? What's that? Immoral? Was there ever a masterly and mastering work that was not immoral, according to the popular judgments? Was there ever a work with a big purpose that conformed to the critics and to current lack of opinions? Could there be much of a purpose to anything that did not shock the world's conspiracy ofcowardice they call morality?Gott ist mit dir!You must go abroad and take some cure. You have been reading the American dramatic critics. It was a great week, I say, with Ibsen and Björnson, Sudermann and Pinero, and two wonderful artists to interpret them, but the pleasure was very much spoiled for me by some of these critics. Ah, these poor critics. Here are the papers, and I can still hear them choking and croaking and cackling, and my heart goes out to them and turns sick. What a wonderful lot of fellows they are. What endless platitudes and empty phrases—full of nonsense—they have delivered themselves of this week, yet I don't think they are any the wiser for it. I know one of the fraternity (there is sufficient disagreement between themselves to be called a fraternity) who is a perfect genius. With one stroke of his mighty pen he once annihilated Ibsen, Echegaray, Astrowsky, Paul Hervieue and Edward Martyn. It was all 'morbid trash,' he said of a series of their plays, and it is strange that these men are still heard of occasionally. That was after the John Blair experiment, and I walked into this critic's office and made a few extemporaneous remarks. He said I ought to have more respect for a man who can get as much advertising for his paper as he can. Of course, this was indisputable. It would take so little courage to do it, yet they dare not think their own thoughts, the dear, dear critics. No, there is not any use in trying to reason with them, but I sometimes would like to getthem all together in one room and give them all a sound horsewhipping.
"One of the critics, who writes in silk gloves, swears in the most perfect, correct English, and compares every play he sees to something of Shakespeare, objects to 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' as an immoral play. The dissection of this woman's heart and mind, he protests, is not the proper business of the dramatist, nor is the inspection of his dissecting table after the job has been done a proper amusement for theatrical spectators. 'A process of repentance and purification' and that sort of thing, on the part of this unfortunate, must be indicated, if art is to approach this kind of life. The entire scheme of ethics is bad. Yet the critic admits that the performance was terrible and touching, and that Mrs. Campbell—Heaven bless her for coming to see us—won a remarkable and complete victory in the part; altogether he praises her very generously.
"Now, what I say is this. If we can be moved and stirred by an immoral play, there is either something the matter with our morality, or there is something radically wrong with our hearts. I must recall to you the lines of Stephen Crane. 'Behold the grave of a wicked man, and near is a stern spirit. There came a drooping maid with violets, but the spirit grasped her arm. "No flowers for him," he said. The maid wept: "Oh, I loved him." But the spirit grim and frowning: "No flowers for him."
"Now, this is it. 'If the spirit was just, why did themaid weep?' If our standard of morality is right, why do our hearts go out for Paula Tanqueray, for Nora Helmer, for Mad Agnes? Is it because we have become so humane as to be far ahead of our morality? What does it mean, anyway? We are told that the contents of the plays seen here last week, are not fit subjects for the drama. Well, art might as well go out of business, if it is not going to look life squarely in the face, if it is not going to sound the very depths of things, and mirror conditions as they are to-day, for modern humanity. The play in particular, it is clear, must deal with the intense efforts, the dramatic essences of life; the play in particular will have nothing to do unless it takes up the crucial conditions, the large realities, the stirring struggles, the sterling aspirations of the clashing life of to-day under the new and as yet unadjusted surroundings. The drama must take up shame and crime, error and suffering, or there is no plot for a great play anywhere. The few pretty, romantic, silly stories have been told over and over again. Now we have grown. There is a larger life before us, and we want something stronger. We must have plays to educate our critics,—if that is possible.
"'He who is without sin among ye, let him cast the first stone.' If Christ had said nothing else, would not this have made him a great man? Yet after eighteen hundred years it is necessary for another Jew, a Portuguese Jew named Pinero, to say the same thing through the medium of a play, because theChristians say that Christ's teachings are immoral. And then the stones of the critics are thrown at Pinero."
Here I said something about the relation between art and morality, but Keidansky protested.
"Art has nothing to do with morality," he said, "and therefore it teaches such great moral lessons. It re-creates and reproduces Nature and life in forms of beauty and power. And because it approaches elementary conditions without bias and preconceived notions, and illumines its material with the touch of human genius, it shows us life in its largeness, right in its relativeness, and raises us above our established moralities. Because art is the spontaneous expression of the humane, the true, the good and the beautiful in our souls, it helps us to see the larger rights, the greater justice, and helps us to make, change and advance our morality. Art touches the commonplace and makes it divine. It makes a saint out of a sinner by showing causes, and casting a kindly light over human weakness.
"In real life 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' is a shameful scandal, to be exploited by sensational newspapers, and we avoid the parties concerned and run away from them; but art raises the story to the height of the tragic and the epic, and we suffer and grieve with Paula, and even the cold critic, who tries so hard not to be humane, is moved. In life we are even afraid to mention the names of such people; but art makes us weep for Camille, sympathize withSapho, be sad, or gay, with the vagabond François Villon, sigh for Denise, grieve with Don José, and follow Manon Lescaut through the desert of North America. Art helps us to realize that there is no sin but error, no degradation but dulness of the mind, no vice but lack of vision.
"I don't want to speak to you because you did not go to see Björnson's 'Beyond Human Power' and Mrs. Campbell's acting in that piece. Yet since you did not go you ought to be enlightened. You have read the story? Did you see how the critics dodged the issues of the play, beating about the bush and puzzling each other? A case of faith and reason, you know, and you mustn't talk about these things. A blind leader of the blind, a man who 'lacks the sense of reality' and sees only what he wishes to see; a woman of intellect who wastes her love on him; unbelieving children of a miracle worker; the clash between the new and the old; the decrepitude of orthodoxy; the contrast between the master and his disciples and who can never realize the impossible, unnatural ideals; the faith that kills. The play has all the tragedy of a dying religion, and the last act is as powerful as anything I have ever seen anywhere. What does it mean? To me it indicates the dying of the old Christianity, and I believe that Björnson, unlike Ibsen, is a Christian. The quiet, subdued, subtle work of Mrs. Campbell was worthy of the play.
"And there was Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House.'I shall never forget the performance of it. What a simple story, how concise and terse, not a superfluous word in the whole of it, yet how strong and stirring! It is primarily a picture, a powerful dramatic picture without a shadow of preachiness in it. You say there is a problem in it? Yes, but it's in the picture, the picture is the problem. Here is a perfect work of a great master, if there ever was one. There are whole cities made up of such dolls' houses, with women as playthings, toys, means of amusement, slaves of conventionality and of slavish men, yet the critics are croaking and raising the cry of 'immorality.' Save on the New York East Side Ghetto, Ibsen is comparatively unknown in America, but it is not true that the American people are not interested in his plays whenever they are given and that they would not go to see them if more of them were performed. In saying so the critics say what is not true, as was manifest from the enthusiastic audiences at the last week's performances. There is a Yiddish translation of the play by the poet Morris Winchewsky, and it was performed by Mr. and Mrs. Jacob P. Adler, but I have never seen it. Mrs. Fiske's 'Nora' is positively great. Her delicacy, her mastery of light and shade, her manner of speech and poise, and on the whole her perfect conception of the character is a stroke of genius. Why did you not see it? Do you want to go? You can pay for my lunch. Ibsen and Björnson have impoverished me this week."
"So you don't think much of the American critics?" I asked at this point.
"On the contrary," he said, "with the exception of some, I think they are all good advertising agents."