New York Letter
George Soule
Someyears ago a good woman, who would like to be foster-mother to all struggling heroes, was sitting at midnight in her down-town flat. Suddenly there was a noise at the front door, someone leapt up the staircases two steps at a time, and rushed into her room shouting “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” She turned around and saw the dark face of a young actor, shining with excitement. He immediately burst into a superb interpretation of a passage fromHamlet. He had been working over it for two weeks without being able to satisfy himself, but it had come to him that evening. He could not wait to let his good friend know, had jumped on an elevated train, and after being carried two stations too far in his elation, was there with his prize.
No, this is not the beginning of a magazine story, nor is it a passage from the biography of a deceased European celebrity. It is the simple truth about a young American dramatist who is known only to a few;—and he is of New England stock!
Later the young Hamlet, having completed his acting apprenticeship, began to write, and went into the real estate business to support himself. Nobody wanted his plays; they were too “highbrow.” So he began to build a theatre of his own. The managers’ trust put every difficulty in his way, and finally, when the building was nearly done and the company was engaged, succeeded in crushing him. The next attempt was a repertory company on the East side, but this wiped out what little was left of hisresources before it got fairly started. One play was produced on Broadway;—it ran two weeks. Last year another was rehearsed for nine weeks, but it was withdrawn on the day of the dress rehearsal, because the author refused to make a change insisted on by the manager. Now the writer has retired to his farm in the Connecticut hills, where he and a companion have with their own hands built a little theatre. In this, on Sunday afternoons during the summer, he reads from his fifteen manuscript plays to such few people as can get there to hear him. And as he reads, there is on his face much the same enthusiasm as on the night years ago when he got his passage fromHamlet.
I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr. Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses, unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery.
The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is, of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much gilded fresco.
This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly perfect theatre I have known.
And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama ofThe LureorThe Fight. There was another, of subtler treatment, calledDeferred Payment, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked for everything in a woman except companionship.Keeping Up Appearances—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the false ideals of the community.Justice, written before Galsworthy’s play of the same name, draws a parallel betweensociety’s persecution of a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr. Davenport’s best work is inThe Importance of Coming and Going, a satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight into the mysteries of birth.
Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr. Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?” has not elicited a reply.
This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began; he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.
And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—Goethe.
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—Goethe.
Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond is to the ocean.—George Brandes.
Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond is to the ocean.—George Brandes.