Gordon Craig's new book is calledThe Theatre Advancing, but we rather hope that when it reaches his goal line we will be elsewhere. To our mind the theater is the place where Art should beam upon the multitude and cry loudly, "Find out what everybody will have and don't forget the boys in the back room." Mr. Craig's theater is much too special for our taste. It will do away with everything that is boisterous and vulgar and broadly human. Consider, for instance, Mr. Craig's short chapter entitled "A Note on Applause" set down in the form of a dialogue between the Reader and the Writer:
"In the Moscow Art Theatre applause plays a very minor role. In general no play can live without it. In Moscow no actor takes a call before the curtain; hence, there is no applause."
"Reader: Isn't that very dull?"
"Writer: You think so; Moscow doesn't. It is all a matter of the point of view. When the acting is poor, an enthusiastic, roaring and thundering audience is necessary to keep up the spirits: but when the acting is absorbing applause is not needed, and if the actor won't come and bow, or the curtain rise after it has once fallen—well, then, applause becomes futile."
"Reader: Whoever heard of such an idea?"
"Writer: My dear Reader, it is not an idea, it is an established fact. Remove the reason for applause and you prevent the applause itself, and in doing so, prevent a vulgarity."
"Reader: But it is the natural desire to want to applaud when you see something good."
"Writer: Rather it is an unnatural habit. You do not applaud a thing, only a man or a woman. Applause is the flattery of the strong by the weak.
"If the conductor and musicians of an orchestra were not seen we should never applaud music. We do not applaud architecture, painting, sculpture, or literature. We should not applaud hidden musicians."
Concerning the last statement we have reason to doubt the accuracy of Mr. Craig's surmise in so far as it refers to American audiences. Every movie fan has heard audiences at some time or another break into wild applause for the shadows on the screen, and we were even more forcibly reminded of the strength of the personal illusion, no matter how inanimate the symbol, during the world's series. The players on the Scoreboard which we watched were no more than wooden disks with "Collins," "Jackson," "Cicotte" and the other names written upon them. When the Dutch Ruether disk was suddenly moved from the plate around to third base to indicate a triple, there were wild cheers from the crowd and they began to howl fora change in pitchers. "Take him out!" they cried, appealing to a manager who did not even have so much as a disk to represent him. There was some more mad scurrying around the bases by the red disks, and then suddenly a large hand, symbolizing Fate or God or Kid Gleason, we don't know which, was thrust through a hole in the scoreboard and fastened upon the little round Cicotte to bear him away from his fling of reality back into his accustomed wooden private life.
We don't know how it went with the Cicotte who left the diamond in Cincinnati. Not very well, we suppose. But for the wooden disk in Times Square it was a moment of triumph. For a fleeting second he was a man and the direct object of popular scorn and hatred. The rooter behind me shook his fist at him. "You got what was coming to you, you big stiff!" he shouted.
Everybody looked around, and the man seemed a little shamefaced at his exhibition of hostility to a wooden disk. He felt that he owed the crowd an explanation and he came through handsomely. "He was shining up the ball with emery," he said.
"We do not applaud the Atlantic Ocean," continues Craig, "or the poems of the ocean, but, catching sight of the man who can swim furthest in that ocean, we utter birdlike and beastlike cries."
And yet we rather think that there have been timeswhen men cheered for the sea. After that first silent moment on the peak in Darien, Cortez and his men must have been a pretty dull lot if they did not give at least one "Rah, rah, rah—P-A-C-I-F-I-C—Pa-cific!"
Mr. Craig can't convince us that we applaud too much, for it is our impression that we don't get up to shout half often enough. We shout for Ty Cobb, to be sure, or for Eddie Casey if he gets loose, but as a rule we do no more than clap hands once or twice if Bernard Shaw bowls over all the interference and runs the whole length of the field without a tackler so much as throwing him off his stride. We shout when Jack Dempsey knocks Jess Willard down seven times in one round, but we don't do nearly as well for the writing man who gets after some big, hulking idea that has outlived its usefulness and is still poking around as the hope of the white race.
Somebody ought to issue a call for volunteer groups of serious shouters to go out and whoop it up for a skyscraper, or a sunset or a sonnet. None of us cuts much of a figure complaining about all the things in the world he doesn't like if he hasn't made a practice of yelling his head off for such few things as meet with his approval in the theater or out of it. More than that, Mr. Craig ought to remember that if there were no applause in the American theater there would be no curtain speeches by David Belasco.
Just when everything seems to be moving more or less smoothly somebody comes along and raises the entrance requirements for dramatic critics. Clayton Hamilton is the latest to suggest a new standard. His test for reviewers consists of three point-blank questions, as follows:
One—Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens?
Two—Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight?
Three—Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini?
Our grade on the test is thirty-three and one-third per cent, which is not generally regarded as a pass mark.
We have stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens. We felt more bareheaded than usual because a German aeroplane was dropping bombs somewhere about the town. And yet even in this part of the examination we can hardly claim a perfect average. Come to think of it, we didn't exactly stand there in the nave at Amiens. We had heard of the increased difficulty of hitting a moving target, and whenever a bomb went off we found ourselves shifting rapidly from one footto another. We were not minded that any German in the sky should look through the roof and mistake us for an ammunition dump.
As for the rest, our failure is complete. We know that the Acropolis is a building in Athens or thereabouts. We have never seen it in moonlight or sunlight. We are not even sure that we would climb up. Our resolve would be largely influenced by the number of steps. Clayton Hamilton does not mention that. His is essentially the critical rather than the reportorial mind. We, for instance, are less interested in the fact that Clayton Hamilton climbed up by moonlight than in the time as caught by an accurate stop watch and the resulting respiration. We think that the Frari Madonna of Bellini is a picture, and Venice is our guess as to its home. Venice or Florence is always the best guess for Madonnas.
The only solution we can think of is to ask the managers to shift our seats for the present from the fourth row of the orchestra to the second balcony. Of course, our fighting blood is up. We are determined to qualify as soon as possible. Some day we will climb that Acropolis roped together with Louis De Foe, Charles Darnton and Burns Mantle. There will be a little trepidation in the ascent, to be sure. One false step, one blunder, would be fatal, and we have known the other members of the party to make these blunders. But we will reach the top at last and stand wonderinglyin the moonlight, slowly recovering our breath. Mr. Darnton will undoubtedly be the first to speak. He will look at the ghostly architecture silvered in the moonlight, and then he will murmur "Big hit!"
Later we will see the Frari Madonna, but it seems a little dangerous to predict that all the members of the party will walk with whispers. Perhaps that is not vital. At any rate, when the journey is completed we purpose to go straight from the dock to the office of A. H. Woods. If he consents to see us we are going to address him in this fashion:
"Mr. Woods, we wish to make an apology to you. Some months ago we reviewed several of your shows, in spite of the fact that we had never climbed to the Acropolis in moonlight or walked with hushed whispers into the presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini. Now that has been remedied. We have come back with a new vision. We are prepared to review the performances of your productions all over again. Do you think you could fix us up for to-morrow night with a couple of good aisle seats forUp in Mabel's Room?"
A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or maybe it is a sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. Death seems certain. And if there is a heroine, something worse than death awaits her—that is, from the Indians. Sawmills draw no sex distinctions. At any rate, things look very black for hero and heroine, but curiously enough, even at the darkest moment, I have never been able to get a bet down on the outcome. Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just in time, on foot, or horseback, or even through the air. The worst of it is that everybody, except the hero and the heroine and the villain, knows that the unexpected is certain to happen. It is not a betting proposition and yet it remains one of the most thrilling of all theatrical plots. William Archer proves inThe Green Goddessthat he is what Broadway calls a showman, as well as being the most famous technician of his day. He has taken the oldest plot in the world and developed it into the most exciting melodrama of the season.
Curiously enough, Mr. Archer has said that when he first thought of the idea forThe Green Goddesshe wanted to induce Shaw to collaborate with him on the play. It would have been an interesting combination. Shaw might have fooled everybody by following theprobabilities and killing the heroine and hero coldly and completely.
Mr. Archer, however, as the author ofPlay Making, knows that it is wrong to fool an audience, and so he kills only one of the beleaguered party, which is hardly a misfortune, since it enables the heroine, after a decent period of mourning, to marry the man she loves. As the Scriptures have it, joy cometh in the mourning.
Archer probably did not set out to show just how much better he could do with a thriller than Theodore Kroner or Owen Davis. His scheme was broader than that. Satire was in his mind as well as melodrama. He began his play with much deft foolery at the expense of the imperially minded English, by making his villainous rajah far more wise in life and literature than his English captives. When the rajah asks the brave English captain which play of Shaw he prefers, the gallant officer replies acidly: "I never read a line of the fellow." At this point in the play Mr. Archer and Mr. Arliss between them have succeeded in making the rajah such an altogether attractive person that a majority of the people in the audience are eager to have him obtain his revenge and quite reconciled to the heroine's accepting his marked attentions and becoming the chief wife in the royal harem of Rukh.
But melodrama is stronger stuff than satire. In the beginning, the playwright was melodramatic with anamused sort of tolerance, but then the sheer excitement and rush of action seized him by the coattails and dragged him along helter-skelter. Satire was forgotten and the hero and heroine, confronted by death, began to speak with the round and eloquent mouth, as folk in danger always do in plays. The rajah became more villainous scene by scene and the little group of English captives braver and braver. They even developed a trace of intelligence.
None of this is cited as cause for grave complaint against William Archer. Greater men than he have tried to play with melodrama and have been bitten by it. Shakespeare beganHamletas a searching and serious study of the soul of man, but before he was done the characters were fighting duels all over the place and going mad and participating in all the varied experiences which come to men in melodrama. After all, George Arliss succeeds in holding the rajah up as an admirable and interesting person, despite all the circumstances of the plot, which are leagued against him, and the author has been kind enough to permit him a cynical and cutting line at the end, even though he is deprived of the privilege of slaying his captives.
But for the fact that the hero and heroine are rescued by aeroplanes rather than a troop of cavalry or a camel corps, it can hardly be said that there is any new twist or turn inThe Green Goddess. The surprising and undoubted success of the play reveals the factthat the so-called popular dramatists and the theorists are not so many miles apart as one might believe at first thought. When Mr. Archer brings in the relief party of aviators just at the crucial moment, as hero and heroine are about to be slain, he has peripety in mind. But Theodore Kremer, who very possibly never heard of peripety, would do exactly the same thing. In other words, the technician is the man who invents or preserves labels to be pasted on the intuitive practices of his art.
The Green Goddessis sound and shipshape in structure, for all the fact that it is hardly a searching study of any form of life save that found within the theater. It is doubly welcome, not only as a rousing melodrama but, also, as an apt and pertinent reply to the question so frequently voiced by actors and playwrights: "Why doesn't one of these critics that's always talking about how plays should be written sit down and do one himself?"
If Archer is a little overcautious in taking human life inThe Green Goddess, the law of averages still prevails, for Eugene O'Neill has made up the deficit inDiff'rentby rounding off his little play with a double hanging. This tragedy, described on the hoardings as "a daring study of a sex-starved woman," has much of O'Neill's characteristic skill in stage idiom, but it is much less convincing than the same author'sThe Emperor Jones. IndeedDiff'rentis essentially a reflectionof the other play, in which O'Neill states again in other terms his theory that man is invariably overthrown by the very factor in life which he seeks to escape. Emma ofDiff'rent, like the Emperor Jones, completes a great circle in her frantic efforts to escape and, after refusing a young man, because of a single fall from grace, comes thirty years after to be an eager and unhappy spinster who throws herself at the head of a young rascal. With the growth of realism in the drama, criticism has become increasingly difficult, since the playwright's apt answer to disbelief on the part of the critics is to give dates, names, addresses and telephone numbers. "Let the captious be sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she would act," says O'Neill menacingly to all who would question the profound truth of his "daring study of a sex-starved woman." Of course, the question is just how well does O'Neill know his Emmas, but this is to take dramatic criticism into a realm too personal for comfort.
Seemingly, O'Neill and the other daring students of sex-starvation are well informed. Into the mind of the woman of forty-five they enter as easily as if it were guarded by nothing more than swinging doors. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as a lodge room, for not all may enter, but only those who know the ritual. This is annoying to the uninitiated, but we can only bide our time and our protest until someone of the young men takes the next step and gives us a complete and inside story of the psychology of maternity.
It might be possible to make a stand against the assurance of some of the younger realists by saying that truth does not lie merely in the fact of being. Every day the most palpable falsehoods are seeking the dignity of truth by the simple expedient of occurring. Nature can be among the most fearsome of liars. Still the fundamental flaw of the younger realists does not lie here so much as in the fact that, as far as art goes, truth depends entirely on interpretation rather than existence. No man can set down a story fact for fact with the utmost fidelity and then step back and say: "This is a work of art because it is true." Art lies in the expression of his reaction to the facts. O'Neill's method inDiff'rentis quite the reverse of the artistic. He is, for the moment, merely a scientist. Pity, compassion and all kindred emotions are rigorously excluded. Rather, he says: "What is all this to me?" There is no spark of fire in neutrality. The artist must care. Though a creator, he is one of the smaller Gods to whom there is no sanction for a lofty gesture of finality with the last pat upon the clay. He cannot say, "Let there be light," and then take a Sabbath. His place is at the switchboard. In his world he is creator, property man and prompter, too. The show can go on only most imperfectly without him.
Every little while some critic or other begins to dance about with all the excitement of a lonely watcher on a peak in Darien and to shout, as he dances, that Charlie Chaplin is a great actor. The grass on that peak is now crushed under foot. Harvey O'Higgins has danced there and Mrs. Fiske and many another, but still the critics rush in. Of course, a critic is almost invariably gifted with the ability not to see or hear what any other commentator but himself writes about anything, but there is more than this to account for the fact that so many persons undertake to discover Chaplin. As in the case of all great artists, he is able to convey the impression, always, of doing a thing not only for the first time but of giving a special and private performance for each sensitive soul in the audience. It is possible to sit in the middle of a large and tumultuous crowd and still feel that Charlie is doing special little things for your own benefit which nobody else in the house can understand or enjoy.
Personally we never see him in a new picture without suddenly being struck with the thought, "How long has this been going on?" Each time we leave the theater we expect to see people dancing in the streets because of Chaplin and to meet delegations with olivewreaths hurrying toward Los Angeles. We don't. Unfortunately Americans have a perfect passion for flying into a great state of calm about things and, for all the organized cheering from the top of the peak in Darien, we take Chaplin much too calmly at all moments except when we are watching him. Phrases which are his by every right have been wasted on lesser people. Walter Pater, for instance, lived before his time and was obliged to spend that fine observation, "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the earth have come and the eyelids are a little weary" upon the Mona Lisa.
The same ends of the same earth have come upon the head of Charlie Chaplin. Still Mr. Pater, if he had lived, would have been obliged to amend his observation a little. The eyelids are not weary. Unlike the Mona Lisa, Chaplin is able to shake his head every now and then and break free from his burden. In these great moments he seems to stand clear of all things and to be alone in space with nothing but sky about him. To be sure the earth crashes down on him again, but he bears it without blinking. It is only his shoulders which sag a little.
Charlie seems to us to fulfil the demand made of the creative artist that he shall be both an individual and a symbol at the same time. He presents a definite personality and yet he is also Man who grins and whistles as he clings to his spinning earth because he is afraidto go home in the dark. To be much more explicit, there is one particular scene inThe Kidin which Chaplin having recently picked up a stray baby finds the greatest difficulty in getting rid of it. Balked at every turn, he sits down wearily upon a curbstone and suddenly notices that just in front of him there is an open manhole. First he peers down; then he looks at the child. He hesitates and turns a project over in his mind and reluctantly decides that it won't do. Every father in the world has sat at some time or other by that manhole. Moreover, in the half suggested shake of his head Chaplin touches the paternal feeling more closely than any play ever written around a third act in a nursery on Christmas Eve. We can all watch him and choke down half a sob at the thought that after all the Life Force is supreme and you can't throw 'em down the manholes.
Many a good performance on the stage is purely accidental. Actors are praised for some trick of gesture or a particular note in the voice of which they are quite unconscious. We raved once over the remarkable fidelity of accent in an actress cast to play the rôle of a shop girl in a certain melodrama and it was not until we saw her the next season, when she was cast as a duchess, that we realized that there was no art about it. Chaplin does not play by ear. His method is definite, and it could not seem so easy if it were not carefully calculated. He does more with a gesture thanalmost anybody else can do by falling downstairs. He can turn from one mood to another with all the agility of a polo pony. And in addition to being one of the greatest artists of our day he is more fun than all the rest put together.
There must be a specially warm corner in Hell reserved for those parents who won't let their children see Charlie Chaplin on the ground that he is too vulgar. Of course, he is vulgar. Everybody who amounts to anything has to touch earth now and again to be revitalized. Chaplin has the right attitude toward vulgarity. He can take it or let it alone. Children who don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed of much of their childhood. However, they can make it up in later years when the old Chaplin films will be on view in the museums and carefully studied under the direction of learned professors in university extension courses.
Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and went to Heaven. It is just as well. The strain had become a little wearing. We had Liberty Loan orators, too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came to be something like being a permanent member of a cheering section. All that is gone now. Pointing with pride has become rude. The interpretation of life has been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick up any new novel at random and the chances are that it will begin about as follows:
"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back of the town—called in derision by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing'—was almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, gaunt men, who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived."
On page four the reader will find that young Hugh has been apprenticed to work on the sewers and after that, as the writer warms to his task, things begin togrow less cheerful. This particular exhibit happens to be taken from Sherwood Anderson'sPoor White, but if we go north to Gopher Prairie, celebrated by Sinclair Lewis inMain Street, we shall find: "A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs—vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull—the delicacy of a mining camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farm wives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home."
Wander as you will through the novels of the year, I assure you that things will be found to be about the same. Of course, it is possible now and again to get away from the stale beer, but once a story enters prohibition time the study of starved souls and complexes begins. There are also books in which there isn't any mud, but these pay particular attention to the stifling dust.
It must be that all this sort of life has been going on for some time, but naturally during the war when the Hun was at the gate it would hardly have been patriotic to talk about it. Now that it's all among friends we can talk about our morals and habits and they seem to range from none to appalling. I can't testify completely to the state of affairs reported upon by thenovelists, because I have spent a good deal of time recently in the theater and it is only fair to say that there, at any rate, peach jam and country air still combine to reform city dwellers, and people get married and live happily ever after, and some of them dance and sing and make jokes, and, of course, sunlight and moonlight and pink dresses and green ones and gold and silver ones, too, abound. My aunt says that this is just as it should be. "There's so much unhappiness in the world," she says, "that why should we pay money to see shows and read books that help to remind us about it. The man worth while," she says, "is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong."
Practically all the shows in town seem to have been written to please my aunt, but I don't agree with her at all. As a matter of fact, she lives in Pelham and has never heard of Freud or Jung. I tried to convince her once that practically all of what we call the civilized world is inhibited, and she interrupted to say that the last Saturday night lecturer told them the same thing about Mars. Perhaps it will be just as well to leave my aunt out of the story at this point and go on to explain why the modern novel is more stimulating and encouraging to the ego than the modern play.
First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel or a play or any form of art is what we call an escape. To be sure, a good many plays of the year are not calculated to give anybody much of a start on the bloodhounds,but you understand what I mean. Take, for instance, the most humdrum person of your acquaintance and you will probably find that he is an inveterate patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in the moonlight and seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over gates. He himself will never be in the moonlight to any serious extent and he will jump no gates. The moving pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic cravings.
The man in the theater or the man who reads a book identifies himself with one of the characters, hero or villain as the case may be, and while the spell is on he lives the life of the fictional character. Next morning he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An interesting thesis might be written on the question of just what bearing the eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon the falling marriage rate in the United States, but that would require a great many statistics and a knowledge of cube root.
Assuming then that art,—and for the purposes of this argument moving pictures and crook plays will be included under that heading,—takes the place of life for a great many people, what do we find about the pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the community in general? Simply that the man who is addicted to seeing plays and reading books in which everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even goingto the trouble of doing so much as one good deed a day on his own account.
The man who went with me to seeDaddiesa couple of seasons ago glowed with as complete a spirit of self-sacrifice as I have ever seen during all three acts of the play. He projected himself into the story and felt that he was actually patting little children on the head and adopting orphans and surprising them with Christmas gifts. On the way uptown he let me pay the fares and buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly impulses had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very cross and gloomy for the rest of the week.
Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my friend, I failed to make any complete identification with anybody on the stage, but I was also somewhat depressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of "the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me reflect on the imperfections of life. It did not seem to me at the time as if any of the children who live in the flat next door ever really tinkle. A week later I sawHamletand the effect was diametrically opposite. Everything in the play tended to make life seem more cheerful. He was too, too solid in flesh, also, and in many other respects he seemed ever so much worse off than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. And, goody, goody! next week an Ibsen season begins!
It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is generallygloomy. Ibsen understood the psychology of his countrymen. He lived in a land of long cold winters and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Norwegians would have gone home to die or to wish to die. Instead he gave them folk like Oswald, and all the Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as much as from cold. After seeingGhoststhere is no place like home. I wish some of the Broadway dramatists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have plays in which nobody could raise the mortgage and the rent crisis in our own lives would seem less acute.
If the heroine were turned out into a driving snowstorm and stayed there, I might appreciate our janitor. And if the wild young men and the women who pay and pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of degradation, I know I could derive no little satisfaction from the knowledge that the elevator in our building runs until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights.
Theatergoers who have lived through two or more generations invariably complain that the stage isn't what it used to be. Mostly they mourn for a school of drama in which emotion flowered more luxuriantly than in the usual run of plays to-day about life in country stores and city flats. The one thought in which these playgoers of another day take comfort is that even if we had such drama now there would be no one who could act it. ButDeburauis such a play, and Lionel Atwill must be some such one as those who figure in the speeches of our older friends when they say: "Ah, but then you never saw—". Sacha Guitry, who wroteDeburau, is alive; yes, indeed, even more than that, for he lives in Paris, and Lionel Atwill is a young actor whose greatest previous success in New York was achieved in the realistic drama of Ibsen. Now, it is possible for us to turn upon the elders and to say to them: "It is not for want of ability that this age of ours doesn't do your old-style plays. We could if we would. Go and seeDeburauand Lionel Atwill."
Of course, even in this verse play of the tragic life of a French actor of the early nineteenth century there are modern touches. For all the fact that Atwill is ableto rise now and again to a carefully contrived situation and to develop it into a magnificent moment of ringing voice and sweeping gesture, he is also able to do the much greater and more exciting thing of making Deburau seem at times a man and not a great character in a play. He is able to make Deburau, actor, dead man, Frenchman, seem the common fellow of us all. And, still more wonderful, Lionel Atwill succeeds in doing this even in scenes during which the author is pitching rimed couplets around his neck as if he were no man at all, but nothing more than one of the posts in a game of quoits. I find it difficult to believe that anybody's heart is breaking when he expresses his emotion in carefully carpentered rhyme:
When people on the stage begin to speak in this fashion the persuasive air of reality is seldom present. It is with Atwill. He is careful not to accentuate the beat. Sometimes I am almost persuaded during his performance that it isn't poetry at all. When I watch him, verse is forgotten, but I have only to close my eyes to hear the deep and steady rumble of the beat which thumps beneath the play. Atwill is a man standingon top of a volcano. So great is his unconcern that you may accept it as extinct, but sooner or later you will know better, for by and by, with a terrifying roar, off goes the head of the mountain in an eruption of rhyme.
Atwill is not the only modern note in an old-fashioned play by a young man of to-day. Our forefathers may be speaking the truth when they tell us that in their day all the actors were nine or ten feet tall and spoke in voices slightly suggestive of Caruso at his best, but our forefathers never saw such a production as David Belasco has given toDeburau. No one knew in those days of the wonders which could be achieved with light. Nobody, then, could have shown us in the twinkling of an eye the front of Deburau's tiny theater, then the interior of the theater itself, and finally, with only a passing moment of darkness, carry the stage of the theater within a theater forward and set it down in front of the audience, greatly grown by its journey.
In Sacha Guitry's play about Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard Deburau we see this famous clown and pantomimist, who brought all Paris to his tiny theater some hundred years ago, in the midst of a performance. We hear the applause of his audience and then after a bit we see the man himself rid of his Pierrot garb and his white grease paint. He is introduced to us as an exceedingly modest young genius who deplores the fact that he has become hated by his fellow players because of the applauseheaped upon him by the critics. Nor is he any better pleased when fair ladies wait to see him after a performance to press their attentions upon him. For them he has invented a formula of repulse. After a moment or so he produces a miniature from his pocket and remarks: "Pretty, isn't it?" When the fair lady agrees he adds: "It's a picture of my wife. I should so like to have you meet her."
But one night Deburau meets a lady much fairer than any of the others, and this time he forgets to show her the miniature. In the second act we find that he is madly in love with her, while she, although she is touched by his devotion, has outgrown her fancy for the actor. It is Deburau who christens her "the lady with the camellias," for she is Marie Duplessis, better known to us as Camille. Returning home for the first time in a week, Deburau finds his wife has left him and, gathering up his bird, his dog, and his little son, he goes to the house of Marie, hoping there to find welcome and consolation. Instead he finds another lover, Armand Duval, who is to make Marie one of the great heroines of emotional drama.
Seven years pass before the next act begins, and now we find Deburau old, broken, and disheartened. He has left the theater and he lives tended only by his son, who has grown to be a lively youngster of seventeen. Somewhat to his chagrin, he finds that the boy is eager to become an actor, and this emotion changes to angerwhen he learns that his son has studied all his rôles and hopes to make a début in Paris simply as Deburau. He is not to be brushed aside in such cavalier fashion. There is only one Deburau, he declares, and there will be only one until he dies.
To the garret, then, comes Marie Duplessis, truant through all the seven years, but the joy of Deburau is short-lived. He finds that she has not come back because she loves him, but because she is sorry for him. She has come with her doctor. Still, after Marie has gone and Deburau has been left alone with the physician, he finds unexpected consolation for his weary spirit. The physician finds no physical ailment. The trouble, he declares, is a nervous one. For that he can do little. Some magic other than medicine is needed. He suggests books, painting, nature, but to each Deburau shakes a weary head. They don't interest him. The theater, the doctor continues, is perhaps the best hospital of all. There are one or two actors, he tells Deburau, who are greater than any doctors in their power to bring merriment and new life to tired men.
"Who?" asks the sick man, and the doctor tells him of Deburau and his great art. Yes, by all means Deburau is the man he should see.
No sooner has the doctor left than Deburau calls for his hat and his stick. He will no longer sit idle while inferior men play his parts. He is going back to the theater. There we find him in the last act in themiddle of a performance in one of his most famous rôles, but his old grace and agility are gone. When the audience should weep it laughs and there are tears instead of smiles for his decrepit attempts at comedy. Finally, he is hissed and booed and, after he has made a dumb speech of farewell, the curtain is rung down. The manager is in a panic. Somebody else must be put forward. It is quite evident that Deburau is done. In the crisis the old actor begs a favor. His son, he tells the manager, knows all his rôles. Why not let the audience have a new Deburau, a young Deburau? Then, as the company gathers about to listen, the old man makes up the boy for his part, and as he does so he tells him in a few simple words the secrets and the fundamentals of the art of acting. Presently the drum of the barker is heard outside the theater and the audience hears him announce that Deburau the great will give way to a greater Deburau, a Deburau more agile, more comic, more tragic. Then the terrified boy is pushed out upon the stage and the play begins.
By an ingenious device of David Belasco all our attention is focused upon the old man, who is listening and watching the performance of his successor, which we see only dimly through gauze curtains, but we hear the laughter and the shouts and the cheers. The new Deburau is a success, a triumph. The noise comes more faintly to our ears and we see only the old Deburau standing listening as from the house which hasjust hissed him there comes a wild acclaiming shout for his successor of "Deburau! Deburau!"
The old man does not know whether he should laugh or cry, and so he cries.
There is an amazing simplicity about great events. Creation week was clear, calm and quiet. Hardly a ripple was on the Rubicon the afternoon that Cæsar crossed. Even Babylon fell softly and bounced only once. In the same spirit Pierre V. R. Key startedJohn McCormack: His Own Life Story.
"It was a summer's day, with the sun shining," writes Mr. Key, "when we began. McCormack sat on the veranda of Rocklea, his Noroton, Connecticut, villa, gazing out upon the waters of Long Island Sound. He had sat that way for some minutes, in a suit of tennis flannels, his stalwart body relaxed in an armchair. I waited for his opening words. 'What a debt a man owes to his mother and father,' he said."
Mr. Key's admiration for McCormack we found later on rests on unassailable grounds. "He began to sing," Key writes, "he sings to-day—and will go on singing until he dies—for just one reason alone: God meant that he should sing."
We trust it will not be considered an impiety if we express a curiosity as to whether the nasal quality was included in God's intention.
We have forgotten what Aristotle or Clayton Hamilton or any of the others have set down as the first rule for playwrights, but it seems to us that it ought to be: Get O. P. Heggie. It makes no difference what the part may be, court dandy, early Christian or conjuror, Heggie is your man. The only disturbing factor is that into every rôle this actor brings a sort of spiritual animation. If you chance to call upon him to fall down stairs he will do it splendidly, missing not a single bump, and the audience will laugh its bellyful, but it will also have the feeling that in some curious way the thing has become exalted, that after all it may be the heart instead of the gizzard which is breaking under the emotion of the moment. Giving sawdust to this man is dangerous business, for the first thing you know he has changed it into blood.
Heggie was by all odds the outstanding figure in Ian Hay's pleasant farce-comedy,Happy-Go-Lucky. He was cast as Samuel Stillbottle, a bailiff's man, made up like Fields, the tramp juggler, and called upon to perform all the antics dear to low comedy. He did them with gusto, but there was something more. Heggie is almost the only actor we know who can trip over a door sill and keep his performance in two dimensions. The playwright may spread him into as broad a character as you please, but he cannot flatten him. Depth remains. When Heggie sets all the dishes to crashing or guzzles stage whisky till he chokes welaugh first and then pause to wonder whether or not the soul of man is immortal.
All this should be a part of the best clowning. The great clown is for us all the symbol of man's defiance to the great spaces and the wide darkness. Perhaps we die to-morrow, but to-day we are fellows of infinite jest. No matter what happens, we have laughed. To see O. P. Heggie is to be reminded of all the clowns that have ever been and are to come in the eternal succession of the brave and brazen.
Nothing in the world dies quite as completely as an actor and the greater the actor the more terrifying becomes the sudden transition from radiance to darkness. One day he is there with all his moods and complexities and curious glints of this and that, and the next day there is nothing left but a few wigs and costumes; perhaps a volume of memoirs, and a scrapbook of clippings in which we learn that the dead player was "majestic in presence" that "the poise of his head was stag-like" that he had "a great voice which boomed like a bell," that he was "regal, subtle, pathetic," and that "every one who was ever associated with him loved and respected him."
Ask some veteran theatergoer "What was Booth like as Hamlet?" and he will say "Oh, he was wonderful." Perhaps the face of the old theatergoer will grow animated and Booth may live again for a moment in hismind, but we who have never seen Booth will never know anything about him. Nobody can recreate and explain the art of a dead actor to the next generation. Even men who do tricks and true magic with words are not adept enough to set down any lasting portrait of an actor on the wing.
A good deal of whitewash has flowed past the fence, but Tom Sawyer's trick still holds good. Even to-day it is possible to get hard work done by making people think of it as a privilege. In looking over an autumn catalogue, we came across a series of books for young persons in which we were struck by the titles,When Mother Lets Us HelpandWhen Mother Lets Us Cook. We trust that the series will be extended along these lines. If so, we intend to use as birthday gifts for H. 3rd,When Father Lets Me Stoke the Furnace,When Father Lets Me Shine His Shoes, andWhen Father Lets Me Lend Him Money.
A great number of persons for whose opinions we have the highest respect have assured us thatWoman, by Magdeleine Marx, is an absorbing and well-written novel. We have done our best but we can't go through. At the last attempt, under whip and spur, we reached page 46 and there we found, "A gentle pearl-gray breeze was stirring the curtains." We can go no further.There is nothing for us to do but lie down and wait for the St. Bernards.
We rushed in blithely the other day to talk to a woman's club up New York State on how to bring up children. Quoting from W. H. Hudson, we said firmly that they should never be spanked or even chided very much. "Let them run about and shift for themselves," we said airily. "The instinct of the child is often more sound than that of the grown-up. He is closer to old race instincts and memories than his parent." Then we finished up with our mule story and asked for questions.
We expected that somebody would ask whether Ethel Barrymore was a good actress, and did we like the novels of H.G. Wells, or one or two other easy questions like that, to which a lecturer need say nothing more than "yes" or "no" or "assuredly." Instead of that somebody said, "How many children have you brought up?"
We could only answer that there was one, and that he wasn't very far up yet, nor had we been trusted with complete charge of him. At that point objections and questions became general and exceedingly difficult. Probably we gave some ground. There was, as we remember it, the admission that there were times in which a spanking might seem a very tempting solution of a difficult problem, although we did qualify it byurging that no moral interpretation be introduced into the punishment. We once knew a mother who used to say, "Gladys, you have been a bad girl, and so to-morrow at half-past eleven I'm going to spank you." That pose of cool and calm deliberation, of even-handed justice, of godlike inflexibility, has always seemed to us unbecoming in a parent. If he spanks a child he ought to be frank enough to say that he does it because he is angry and can't think up anything better.
However, it is probable that we were too much flustered to develop our position at any great length. We felt uncomfortably as if we had agreed to talk to a G. A. R. Post on the Battle of Gettysburg. One mother told us that she had raised four children with frequent spankings and that one was now a college professor while the other three were exceedingly successful in the wholesale hardware business. She said she had never regretted it. All four had grown up God-fearing and dutiful.
A still more devastating revelation of experience in child raising was yet to plague our confidence and complacency. "I'm an old woman," said one hearer, as we started to retire in none too good order, "and I can talk to you frankly. I have a daughter now who is old enough to have children of her own. I brought her up on that go-as-you-please system you have been talking about, and do you know what has become of her?"
We blanched a little and wondered just how frank she was going to be before we said "No."
"She calls herself a Socialist," said the old lady, and our lines broke away into full retreat at all points.
Some of the political friends insist dolefully, a few gleefully, that if certain candidates, laws, economic schemes, or what not, fail of speedy adoption we shall have a revolution. We are even told that the scenes of the French Revolution will be enacted here. We don't believe it for a moment. At any rate, not if Dickens painted a true picture inA Tale of Two Citiesbecause none of the radical ladies of our acquaintance could possibly perform the required knitting.
"For no man can be free," writes the author ofThe Book of Marjorie, "unless he despises pain and heat and cold and fatigue, unless those things mean no more to him than the patter of rain outside his room, unless he does succeed in keeping them so outside himself that they never enter at all into the calculations of the thinking part of him. If we can bring up our child like this he will have nothing to fear, because he will know that no real hurt can be done to him except by himself." And in another portion of the book we read, "I should hate for my son to be afraid, because thereare so many things that hinder him and check him that he must take into consideration."
But we are not at all sure that fear is to be set aside as one of the destructive emotions of mankind. All our fearless ancestors were eaten by ichthyosauri and other ferocious and primitive monsters. Indeed, there would be more ichthyosauri than men in the world to-day if certain of our progenitors had not learned that it is an exceedingly healthful thing at times to run for dear life. Of course, we admit that some fears are ignoble. We shall make no attempt, for instance, to justify our abiding distrust of cows, but the fact remains that a little decent fear is part of the proper portion of man.
Man is a weak and pitiful dweller in a violent world and nothing has done so much to sharpen his wits as fear. Probably he found fire because he feared the dark. Surely he instituted law through distrust of his fellows. And fear must have been the first prompting toward religion. Then, too, it seems more than likely that there would never have been a literature but for fear. Primitive peoples liked to hear the stories of great heroes who did mighty deeds because such things served to cheer and inspirit them.
Fear of his own frailties made man seek wisdom. To wish a child to grow up without fear is almost to wish him to be devoid of imagination. And more than that, if there was no such thing as fear courage would be without meaning and significance.
And yet we could wish that H. 3rd was not so frankly terrified at the sight of Ajax, who is not more than three months old or a foot long. Of course, Ajax attempts to bay, but it doesn't sound like much in a soprano. When the thin and piping voice of the dog sounds in agonized protest at being shut in the kitchen H. 3rd will throw both hands over his face and hide his head, as if he were Uncle Tom with a whole pack of bloodhounds on his trail. Moreover, he showed such abject fear when taken out to have his hair cut that we had to desist and let him keep his curls. Still a little such trepidation on the part of Samson might have been set down as a virtue.
Not the least interesting part of William Byron Forbush's seven volumes inThe Literary Digest Parents' League Seriesis the section devoted to questions and answers.
"I have a child," writes Esther P., "who already seems to be cut out for a business man. He refuses to play with dolls, balls, or even soldiers. This seems to restrict the range of toys for him. What can I provide?"
And Mr. Forbush answers: "There is an inexpensive 'toytown bank.' Also an outfit of tickets and uniform with which to play ticket-agent. Encourage him to print paper money and checks and buy him some toy money...."
If he is to be a real business man he'll not have anything to do with tickets bought directly at the box office. It would be better we think to get him a bright vest and a derby hat and let him pretend to be a sidewalk speculator. He might be encouraged to demand one pin a day from each of his parents for admission to the nursery and two pins, of course, on Saturdays and holidays. Also, arrangements could be made with some reliable brokerage house to have him supplied with the ticker tape each day.
We like John Galsworthy a great deal better than we ever did before after reading hisAddresses in America, 1919, for it seems to us that this man of lofty wisdom shows in this book a certain human tendency to fall into poppycock occasionally, like all the rest of us. In urging a closer comradeship between the English-speaking nations Mr. Galsworthy writes: "For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit—Good-by to Civilization! It will vanish like dew off the grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind, is and must be our object."
We suppose the dewdrops in each particular meadow get together occasionally and tell each other that when they are gone there will be no more dew. But then there comes another morning. We are not anxious to see Anglo-English civilization pass away, but after allthere are other civilizations in the world, and there have been others, and others will come. Some, we suppose, may be worse, but there is at least a possibility that others may be better. Nor are we fond of hearing the English-speaking peoples talking about "the betterment of all mankind." It has at least a savor of a German heresy which put the world into a four years' war. Next to maltreating foreign nations, almost the worst thing that any powerful country can do is to set out to better them.
Germany, in all truth, has enough to answer for without also being made responsible for the charges implied in humorous anecdotes. Margaret Deland, in rounding off her case against the Hun inSmall Things, writes, "And I recall here the revealing remark of a German, a member of a commission which, before the war, was traveling in America: 'Yes,' he said, 'we found your railroad cars very comfortable—except the sleeping cars. Our wives don't like to climb into the upper berths.'"
It may be remembered that one of the attacks made against England during the war by a famous German propagandist was contained in the story of the English woman who went to the hospital with a badly wounded face and upon being asked whether she had been bitten by a dog, replied, "No, another lady."
Then, of course, the honor of the United States iscalled into question by the yarn about the man from Chicago who took his wife to a big New York restaurant and ordered two broiled lobsters. The waiter returned to report that only one remained. "Only one lobster!" exclaimed the man from Chicago, "but what's my wife going to eat!"
Still again a number of persons in America cannot bring themselves to sympathize with the Sinn Fein movement because of the well-known meeting between two Irishmen at which one inquired, "Who was that lady I seen you walking down the street with?" to which the other replied, "That was no lady, you chump; that was my wife."
The Irishman's offense was not alone one of taste but of brutality as well, for we all know that as he said "You chump," he hit his friend violently over the head with a dull, blunt instrument. All this, in addition to the Ulster problem, makes the solution of the difficulties of Ireland seem insurmountable to many students of international affairs.
Moreover, the success of the proposed league of nations is questioned by many persons on account of the revelation contained in the story about the Jugo-Slav who said, "Yes, but ain't we going to give any to dear old mother?" We have forgotten the exact details of the story, but as we remember, it was equally damning to the national aspirations of the Slovenes.
The Russian writer Dmitry Mereshkovsky has called Roshpin'sThe Pale Horse"the most Russian book of the period," according to the introduction in the new edition. We are not disposed to dispute that statement after reading the first chapter, in which we found: "The hotel bores me to weariness. I know so well its hall porter in his blue tunic, its gilt mirrors, its carpets. There is a shabby sofa in my room and dusty curtains. I have placed three kilograms of dynamite under the table. I have brought it from abroad. The dynamite smells of a chemist's shop. I have headaches at night."
He should have tried the dynamite. We understand that it is an excellent cure for headaches when used internally.
In his introduction toMadeleine: An Autobiography, Judge Ben B. Lindsey writes of the book, "It ought to be read and pondered over. It is true." For our part, we doubt whether the book will prove of any vital aid in solving what newspapers are fond of referring to as "white slavery"; for, although much of the book is convincing and seemingly veracious, it is hard to grasp its intent. Indeed, there is such a mass of informative detail in this life story of a woman of the underworld that it almost seemed to us as if it were intended to be a companion book to such works asHow To Be a Boy ScoutorGolf in Fifty Lessons. It is true that theauthor of the book takes great pains to dwell frequently on the way in which her whole physical and spiritual nature revolted against the life which she was leading, but at other times there is a very evident intimation of her satisfaction in having been at any rate a leading member of her profession. Certainly, she writes with a good deal of gusto of the manner in which she and her friend Olga succeeded in selling the same bottle of champagne seven times to a befuddled gentleman, and undeniable pride in her accounts of how well she succeeded professionally in an executive capacity.
And yet, though we are not very much concerned with seeking for morals in books, there is one telling sermon in the volume, and all the more telling because it does not seem to have been within the plan of the writer. "Madeleine" ought to do something to clear away the mist in minds which confuse prudery and virtue. Even in her most degraded and sinful moments, Madeleine remains a proper person. In telling of her conversation with an associate in the life of shame Madeleine writes, "I felt sure that human degradation could go no further; when she took a box of cigarettes from under her pillow and offered me one I was speechless with indignation." A year or so later, while Madeleine still has both feet set in the primrose path, she violently upbraids a girl who wants her to use rouge. "I would not have my face painted, and that settled it! Not only for that day but for all of the succeedingdays in which I remained in the business. I had to draw a line somewhere." Again she rails at present-day fashions, and observes, "If a girl had come into Lizzie Allen's parlors wearing some of the present-day street styles she would have been told to go upstairs and put on her clothes."
But we were even more impressed by the chapter in which Madeleine goes to Butte to open a brothel and takes a dislike to the town because of its loose observance of the Sabbath. "Clothing stores, groceries, saloons, small drygoods shops, cigar stands, dance halls and variety shows elbowing one another and wide open for business, gave a shock to my sense of the fitness of things."
There are persons to whom a preposition is as inspiring as a trumpet call. Dangle an "on" before a dying essayist and he will get up and dash you off something entitled "On an Old Penwiper," or "On the Delights of Washing Before Breakfast." It is essential that an essayist be an enthusiast about more things than prepositions. They are merely his springboards. He ought to be a man who wears his Corona on his sleeve, for there is no moment of the day or night in which he is safe from the onrush of ideas. I once knew a man who was a complete essayist at heart but a city editor by profession. He came into the office one Julyafternoon and called me over. "As I was walking downtown," he began, "I saw a little piece of ice in the middle of Broadway. Write me a funny story about it."
The assignment floored me completely. I idled over it for an hour and then reported back that I couldn't see a story in the suggestion. "What suggestion?" said the city editor. The thing had gone from his mind. He was of the mold from which great men are made. Having said of anything "Let it be done" he at once felt not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done it himself. The matter never came to his mind again. At the moment I spoke to him he was already deeply engrossed in a scheme for a story computing the value of all the lobster salad sold in the City of New York, exclusive of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, in a single evening.
I have noticed that most essayists are like that. Their enthusiasms are intense, but not of long duration. It is just as well. After all, there probably is no great field for expression in the subject of penwipers. The essayist does it once in a fine spirit of frenzy and then goes on to something else. If he were faithful to the one theme there's no telling when he might exhaust his market.
Sometimes I am inclined to distrust the enthusiasm of the essayist. Being a man much moved to write, he comes to be so sensitive that even a puff of wind willpropel him into an essay. And then sometimes on dead calm days he will begin to write under the pretense that a breath from some far corner of the world has touched him. Perhaps it has. But then again it may be that he, too, is among the fakers.
"It is time, I think," writes Alpha of thePlough, in Windfalls, "that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts."
But why is it time? Fabre has said some hundreds of thousands of good words about wasps, but even if he hadn't, whence comes the cry of "justice for the wasp"? The wasps themselves haven't complained. Nor is there much persuasion in what Alpha sets down.
"Now the point about the wasp," he writes, "is that he doesn't want to sting you." Of still less moment to the world than the wrongs of the wasp are his motives and intentions. Any wasp who stings me will be wasting his time if he lingers around after the deed to explain, "I didn't want to do it."
Still, the whole trick of the essayist is to pick side-alley subjects. Selecting at random fromWindfalls, there areOn a Hansom Cab,Two Glasses of Milk,On Matches and Things. Few of them, it seems to me; are better than pretty good. That is hardly good enough. The essay is a stunt. Either the writer can balance his theme on the end of his nose or he can't.
What with the various new jobs which are being created, some enterprising university should found a School of Censorship. It might, most fittingly, be a Sumner school, and the college yell without question will be "Carnal I yell! I yell carnal!"
At first we were inclined to look at prohibition with tolerance, because it meant a release from all the books which described what would happen to a guinea pig if he were inoculated with Bronx cocktails. The relief was temporary, for we find that it takes just as much time to read the heartrending accounts of the effect of one drop of nicotine placed on the tongue of a dog.
InHabits That Handicap, by Charles B. Towns, we find the following ailments attributed directly or indirectly to the use of tobacco: Bright's disease, apoplexy, chronic catarrh, headache, heart disease, lassitude, dizziness, low scholarship, small lung capacity, predisposition to alcoholic excesses, hardening of the arteries, paralysis of the optic nerve, blindness, acid dyspepsia, insomnia, epilepsy, muscular paralysis, cancer, lack of appetite, insanity and loss of moral tone. Mumps, measles and beri-beri are slighted in the present edition.
"There is nothing to be said in its favor," writes Mr. Towns, "save that it gives pleasure."
"It seems," he adds in another portion of the book, "to give one companionship when one has none—somethingto do when one is bored—keeps one from feeling hungry when one is hungry and blunts the edge of hardship and worry."
Suppose, then, that every ailment which Mr. Towns has traced to tobacco actually lies at its door—even then is the case for the prohibition of smoking persuasive? Of course, low scholarship is a fearful and humiliating thing, but we wonder whether it is more devastating than loneliness. It is better, we think, to have a little lassitude now and then, or even a touch of acid dyspepsia, than to be without the weed which gives "one companionship when one has none." And consider the tremendous testimonial in favor of tobacco which Mr. Towns has written when he says that it gives "something to do when one is bored." Although we haven't the statistics for last year yet, we venture the guess that about 63 per cent of all the people who die in any one year cease living because they are bored. Boredom is the cause of 85 per cent of all actions for divorce. It fills our jails. Nations make war because of it. Social unrest, bedroom farces, tardiness, rudeness, blasphemy, crime, lies and yawning in the presence of company all rise because of it.
And so we are disposed to sit defiantly shoulder to shoulder with other smokers and to cry out against the foe who creeps ever closer through the haze, "Bring on your 'lack of appetite.'"
It may be true, as Mr. Towns says, that smoking causes a loss of moral tone, but if the smoker will save his coupons religiously at the end of a few months he will be able to exchange them for a book on character building.
It seems to us that Booth Tarkington belongs at the top or thereabouts in American letters. We will be surprised and disappointed if Penrod does not persist for a century or so. And yet much of Tarkington's work is flawed by a curious failing. Almost invariably the novels are carefully thought out to a certain point, and then they weaken. This point occurs, as a rule, within a chapter or so of the end. The story "hangs," as the racetrack reporters express it, in the last few strides. InRamsey Milholland, for instance, it seemed to us that Tarkington, after a minute development of a theme, cut it off abruptly. He was, according to our impression, a little tired and anxious to have it over with before he had actually reached the finishing mark. To-day we received a story which may provide an explanation. "Booth Tarkington," says a publisher's note, "probably uses more lead pencils than any other writer in America. Always he has disdained a typewriter.
"He works at an artist's drawing table, and," the story continues, "with a little stock of paper before him he then sets about the actual business of compositionvery slowly, very carefully. Every phrase—almost every word—is pondered, balanced, scrutinized before it is permitted to pass. As often as not a dozen phrases have been rejected before the final one, which seems to readers to come so trippingly, has been arrived at. Individual words are scored out again and again."
All this makes the slackening of vigor toward the end of a long novel comprehensible. Though a man begin with a dozen well sharpened pencils catastrophes are sure to occur in the course of fifty or sixty thousand words. Finally, the author finds himself with an aching wrist and only one pencil, which has grown a little dull. If he is to add another chapter he must pause to find a safety razor blade and sharpen up. And so instead he rounds off the tale while lead remains.
On the other hand, we feel certain that Harold Bell Wright composes on a typewriter, pausing only once every twenty-four hours to oil the machine with a little treacle.
Robert W. Chambers uses an adding machine and Theodore Dreiser favors an ax.
"Man is a machine," writes Dr. David Orr Edson inGetting What We Want, "with the directions for use written on his physiognomy—which society in general neglects to read. Through this omission much of theunrest in the world has developed, and psychologists have been forced to recognize and attempt to cope with the protests of the psychophysical against unendurable conditions of life."
To us these seem true words. It isn't only that society neglects to read, but also that it reads awry. Again and again our legible physiognomy has been taken to mean, "Shake well before using," when anybody with half an eye ought to know that it says, "Lay on its side in a cool, dry place."
We were discussing the education of H. 3rd the other day, and when we were asked where he was to go, of course we said, "The Rand School."
"No," said the friend who put the question, "I don't believe it. By the time H. is ready to go to school you'll be saying that the Rand School is a reactionary institution and full of snobs."
Perhaps, since he is to be a book reviewer, H. should go to a Montessori school. They teach the children to skip.
Gerald Cumberland'sSet Down in Malicereveals the interesting fact that Mrs. Shaw calls him "George." Moreover, she is quoted as saying "Don't be absurd, George."
There are limits to the success of the most adroit literary advertiser the modern world has known, as we learned from a trip to the British front two years ago. Our conducting officer had been Shaw's guide a few months before, and we were anxious to learn how he had impressed the army.
"Oh, he was no end of nuisance," replied the young officer. "When I got him out to our mess I found out that he was a vegetarian, and I had to hop around and get him eggs and all sorts of truck."
If Gerald Cumberland is thirty-one or less,Tales of a Cruel Countryis an exceedingly promising collection of short stories. If, on the other hand, he has gone beyond that age we see only a doddering literary future for him. There are twenty-two stories inTales of a Cruel Countryand three of them are excellent. One, in fact, seems to us a superb short story, but many of the other nineteen are rot. Now, they are the sort of rot which a young man may turn out by the bushel and still go on to great things. "Her eyes are pits of darkness," "a beautiful animal," "whiter than the paper on which this little history is written," "he pulled his body together sensually," "his teeth bit more deeply into his lower lip," "brutally I tore her arms away and flung her from me as a man would fling away a snake that had coiled around him in his sleep"—that is the sort of rot we mean.
It has its place in the work of every young writer. In fact, if he writes honestly there is no skipping this period, which must be passed before he is ready to do more important work. Fortunately, there are several easy tests by which one may determine whether a writer is still in his salad days, in which he does as the romaines, or whether he is ready to go on and deal with hardier grasses. Ask him what the word "mirror" suggests to him and note whether he replies "a man shaving" or "a slender woman disrobing." Try him with "model" and see whether he replies "artist's" or "tenement," and finally, if he can meet your "bed" immediately with "eight hours' sleep" you may put him down as among those who have finished their literary stint of "half insane gleam of desire," "her eyes swooped into his," and "vermouth on purple trays."
We are particularly interested in the publication of Clarence Buddington Kelland'sThe Little Moment of Happiness, because we made a dramatization of the novel last year which failed of production partly because of the deplorable lapse in morals which Mr. Kelland allows to his hero. The story concerns a Puritanical young American officer who is stationed in Paris during the war and falls in love with a beautiful French girl named Andrée. Now, Andrée is not like the girls whom Kendall, our hero, has been accustomed to meet in America. "A young man love a young girl,"says Andrée, "and a young girl love a young man.... They marry, maybe. That is well. But maybe they do not marry. It is expensive to marry. Then they see each other very often, and he gives her money so she can live.... That is well, because they are fidèle."
Naturally, we were as much shocked by this doctrine as Kendall, the hero; but, since Mr. Kelland's story was largely concerned with the young man's eventual decision to make shift without benefit of clergy, we could see no way open for us to act about the reformation of Andrée's character. As a matter of fact, owing to the exigencies of dramatic action, we were compelled to make the affair much more precipitate than in the book. We gave the hero an order to return to the front. We had off-stage bands of soldiers wandering up and down singing "Madelon," in the most heartrending way, and, finally, we introduced an air raid to shut off the Metro so that the heroine should have no available means of transportation to go home even if she desired to leave the apartment of the hero.
It was not enough. A manager read the play and at first seemed favorably inclined. Then he began to think it over and finally he summoned us to a conference.
"Suppose you had been an American officer in France during the war," he said.
We accepted the supposition.
"And then suppose after you came home you took your wife, or your mother, or your fiancée, to see this play."