International Exhibition of 1913 was organized, and it is very solidly
to the credit of our public that it did not regard the event in that
negative fashion--but as a positive thing, a revelation of the later
schools of European painting of which it had been kept in ignorance
by the will of the academies here and abroad. The “Armory Show,” as
it was called, drew forth a storm of ridicule, but it also attracted
such hundreds of thousands of visitors as no current exhibition had
ever gathered in this country before. The first contact of our public
with the arts that have succeeded Impressionism--with the painting
of Cézanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, the Cubists, and
others--was made at this epoch-marking show. With the jeers that it
received there were not a few hosannas, and even the vast majority of
visitors--doubtful as to the exact value of the various exhibits, knew
that qualities existed in the new schools that had never been seen
here and that were needed. Some three hundred works went from the walls
of the Armory to form a vanguard for the far more important purchases
of modern art that have since been building up our collections; so
that at the moment of this writing an exhibition can be opened at the
Metropolitan Museum which, while representing a mere fraction of the
wealth of such pictures in American possession, gives a superb idea of
the great schools of the later 19th century and the 20th century in
France. It is worthy of note that in its response to the great show of
1913 and to the smaller ones that followed, America was only giving,
in a stronger form, the measure of a power of appreciation it had
shown before. Earlier examples of this are to be found in the great
collections of Barbizon and Impressionist pictures here. A thing that
should weigh against many a discouraging feature of our art-conditions
is the fact that an American museum was the first in the world, and the
only one during the lifetime of Manet, to hang works by that master.
Returning now to our own painting, one man in this country resisted
with complete success the test of an exhibition with the greatest of
recent painters from abroad. It was Mr. Maurice B. Prendergast, who
for thirty years had been joyously labouring at an art which showed
its derivation from the best French painting of his day, its admirable
acceptances of the teaching of Cézanne (scarcely a name even in
Europe when Mr. Prendergast first studied him), and its humorous and
affectionate appreciation of the American scenes that the artist had
known from his youth. In original and logical design, in brilliant
colour that yet had the mellowness of a splendid wine, he expresses
the modern faith in the world we see and makes it lovable. At last
we welcome an art in accord with the finest of the ancient-modern
tradition, as European critics have since declared; yet it remains
American in provenance and in the air of unconscious honesty that has
always been a characteristic of the good work of this country.
The latest wave of influence to come over American art has almost
been the most far-reaching and invigorating. To go further than this
assertion, at least in the matter of individuals, would be to forego
the support of too large a part of that body of opinion that I know
to be behind my statements throughout this essay. Art-matters must,
in the final analysis, be stated dogmatically, but I am unwilling to
speak of the schools now developing save in a general way, especially
as the most interesting men in them have still to reach a definitive
point in their evolution. They are abreast or nearly abreast of the
ideas of Europe, and there is an admirable vigour in the work that some
individuals are producing with those ideas. But the changes brought
about by the International are still too recent for us to expect the
most important results from them for a number of years. The general
condition here has probably never been as good before.
I have, till now, spoken only of the more traditional aspects of
art--the kind one finds in museums--and that last word calls for at
least a mention of the great wealth of art-objects that are heaping up
in our public collections, and in the private galleries which so often
come to the aid of the museums.
There is, however, another phase of our subject that demands comment,
if only as a point of departure for the study that will one day be
given to the American art that is not yet recognized by its public or
its makers as one of our main expressions. The steel bridges, the steel
buildings, the newly designed machines, and utensils of all kinds we
are bringing forth show an adaptation to function that is recognized
as one of the great elements of art. Perhaps the process has not yet
gone far enough for us to look on these things as fully developed works
of art, perhaps we shall still need some influence from Europe to make
us see the possibilities we have here, or again, it may be in America
that the impetus to creation along such lines will be the stronger. At
all events we may feel sure that the study of the classics, ancient
and modern, which is spreading throughout the country has, in some
men, reached a point of saturation which permits the going on to new
discovery, and we may be confident of the ability of our artists to
make good use of their advantage.
WALTER PACH
THE THEATRE
Of the perceptible gradual improvement in the American popular taste so
far as the arts are concerned, the theatre as we currently engage it
offers, comparatively, the least evidence. The best-selling E. Phillips
Oppenheims, Robert W. Chamberses, and Eleanor H. Porters of yesterday
have given considerable ground to Wharton and Bennett, to Hergesheimer
and Wells. The audiences in support of Stokowski, the Flonzaley
Quartette, the Philharmonic, the great piano and violin virtuosos, and
the recognized singers, are yearly augmented. Fine painting and fine
sculpture find an increasing sober appreciation. The circulation of
_Munsey’s Magazine_ falls, and that of the _Atlantic Monthly_ rises.
But the best play of an American theatrical season, say a “Beyond the
Horizon,” has still to struggle for full breath, while across the
street the receipts of some “Ladies’ Night,” “Gold Diggers,” or “Bat,”
running on without end, mount to the half-million mark.
If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American theatre, one
speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical charity, for the New
York theatre--so far as there is any taste in the American theatre--is
the native theatre at its fullest flower. Persons insufficiently
acquainted with the theatre have a fondness for controverting this,
but the bookkeeping departments offer concrete testimony that, if good
drama is supported at all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre,
not in the so-called “road” theatre. The New York theatre supports
an American playwright like Booth Tarkington when he does his best
in “Clarence,” where the road theatre supports him only when he does
his worst, as in “Mister Antonio.” The New York theatre, these same
financial records prove, supports Shaw, O’Neill, Galsworthy, Bahr, and
others of their kind, at least in sufficient degree to permit them to
pay their way, where the theatre of Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland,
Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh spells failure for them.
Save it be played by an actor or actress of great popular favour, a
first-rate piece of dramatic writing has to-day hardly a chance for
success outside of New York. These other cities of America, though
they are gradually reading better books and patronizing better music
and finer musicians, are almost drama-deaf. “There is, in New York,”
the experienced Mr. William A. Brady has said to me, “an audience of
at least fifteen thousand for any really good play. That isn’t a large
audience; it won’t turn the play into a profitable theatrical venture;
but it is a damned sight larger audience than you’ll be able to find
in any other American city.” Let the native sons of the cities thus
cruelly maligned, before they emit their habitual bellows of protest,
consider, once they fared forth from New York, the fate of nine-tenths
of the first-rate plays produced in the American theatre without the
hocus-pocus of fancy box-office “stars” during the last ten years.
The theatrical taste of America at the present time, outside of the
metropolis, is demonstrated by the box-office returns to be one
that venerates the wall-motto _opera_ of Mr. William Hodge and the
spectacular imbecilities of Mr. Richard Walton Tully above the finest
work of the best of its native dramatists like O’Neill, and above the
finest work of the best of the modern Europeans. In the metropolis,
an O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon,” a Galsworthy’s “Justice,” a Shaw’s
“Androcles,” at least can live; sometimes, indeed, live and prosper.
But for one respectable piece of dramatic writing that succeeds outside
of New York, there are twenty that fail miserably. The theatrical
culture of the American countryside is in the main of a piece with
that of the French countryside, and to the nature of the latter the
statistics of the French provincial theatres offer a brilliant and
dismaying attestation. Save a good play first obtain the endorsement
of New York, it is to-day impossible to get a paying audience for
it in any American city of size after the first curiosity-provoking
performance. These audiences buy, not good drama, but notoriety. Were
all communication with the city of New York suddenly to be cut off for
six months, the only theatrical ventures that could earn their way
outside would be the Ziegfeld “Follies,” the Winter Garden shows, “Ben
Hur,” and the hack dramatizations of the trashier best-sellers like
“Pollyanna” and “Daddy Longlegs.” This is not postured for sensational
effect. It is literally true. So true, in fact, that there is to-day
not a single producer in the American theatre who can afford to, or
who will, risk the loss of a mere four weeks’ preliminary “road” trial
of a first-class play. If he cannot get a New York theatre for his
production, he places it in the storehouse temporarily until he can
obtain a metropolitan booking rather than hazard the financial loss
that, nine times in ten, is certain to come to him.
More and more, the better producing managers--men like Hopkins, William
Harris, Jr., Ames, _et al._--are coming to open their plays in New
York “cold,” that is, without the former experimental performances in
thitherward cities. And more and more, they are coming to realize to
their sorrow that, unless New York supports these plays of the better
sort, they can look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its
hospitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred
dollars on a drama by Eugene O’Neill in the same week that it spent
forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson’s Winter Garden show. Boston,
one of the first cities to rush frantically forward with proofs of
its old New England culture, has turned into a prompt and disastrous
failure every first-rate play presented in its theatres without a
widely advertised star actor during the last five years, and at the
same time has made a fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who,
gauging its culture accurately, has sent it “Up in Mabel’s Room,”
“Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow
farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in “The Blue Flame.” (It is no
secret among the theatrical managers that the only way to bring the
culture of Boston to the box-office window is through a campaign of raw
advertising: the rawer the better. Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper
advertisements of “Up in Mabel’s Room” were made to display a girl
lying on a bed, with the suggestive catch-lines, “10,000 Visitors
Weekly” and “Such a Funny Feeling.” Thus, the advertisements of another
exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the title of the
show, “Oh, Mommer,” printed across the ample buttocks. Thus, the
advertisements of a Winter Garden music show, alluding to the runway
used in these exhibitions, christened it “The Bridge of Thighs.”) No
play presented in Philadelphia since “The Girl with the Whooping Cough”
(subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities on the
ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent where it has
been found necessary to call out the police reserves to maintain order,
as was the case when the play in point was produced. Washington is a
cultural wilderness; I have personally attended the premières of ten
highly meritorious dramas in the national capital in the last six years
and can report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to
them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some fifteen years
or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,”
it essayed to boo it into permanent discard. Baltimore, Detroit (save
during the height of the war prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops,
and Greeks in the automobile works found themselves suddenly able to
buy theatre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco--the
story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, lewdness and
sentimentality spell riches.
In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural prairie
whereon these cities are situated, the city of New York, as I have
written, looms up an æsthetic Athens. In New York, too, there is
prosperity for bare knees, bed humours, and “Peg o’ My Heart” bathos,
but not alone for these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd
into the leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are
audiences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production of
such more estimable things as Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” O’Neill’s
“Emperor Jones,” the plays of St. John Ervine and Dunsany, of Tolstoy
and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente and Guitry. True enough, in
order to get to the theatres in which certain of these plays are
revealed, one is compelled to travel in a taxicab several miles from
Broadway--and at times has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot
him to far streets and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated
ken--but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and their
audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of the American
theatre--in so far as it exists--may be said, in fact, to be an
alleyway culture. Almost without exception in the last dozen years
and more have the best dramatists of Europe and of our own country
been driven up alleyways and side-streets for their first American
hearing. Up these dark alleys and in these remote malls alone have they
been able to find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu,
Shaw, Echegaray, Strindberg, Björnson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine,
Bergström, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O’Neill--these and many others
of eminence owe their New York introduction to the side-street American
who, in the majority of cases, is found upon analysis to be of fifty
per cent. foreign blood. And what thus holds true of New York holds
equally true in most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that
is, as have arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to
boast a little playhouse up an ulterior mews.
The more general American theatrical taste, reflected perhaps most
fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of the Drama
League and the various “white lists” of the different religious
organizations, is--for all the undeniable fact that it seems gradually
to be improving--still in the playing-blocks and tin choo-choo-car
stage. Satire, unless it be of the most obvious sort and approach
easily assimilable burlesque, spells failure for a producer. A point
of view that does not effect a compromise with sentimentality spells
failure for a dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a
seltzer-siphon, “Abendstern,” or the _Police Gazette_, spells failure
for both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not
the American managers and producers, as is commonly maintained, but
the American playwrights. During the seventeen years of my active
critical interest in the theatre, I have not encountered a single
honest piece of dramatic writing from an American hand that could not
get a hearing--and an intelligent hearing--from one or another of these
regularly abused managers and producers. And during these years I have,
by virtue of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor
of a sympathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of
the dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has confected.
This young America, loud in its inveighing against the managers and
producers, has in the space of time indicated produced very, very
little that was worth producing, and that little has promptly found
a market. A bad workman is always indignant. But I know of no good
American play that either has not already been produced, or has not
been bought for future production. Any good play by an American will
find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read “Beyond
the Horizon” bought it immediately he laid the manuscript down, and
this, recall, was its professionally unknown author’s first three-act
play. The American theatre has altered in this department; the last
fifteen years have wrought a tonic change.
No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but with the
playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere parrots, are cowards.
Young and old, new and experienced, talented and talentless alike, they
are in the mass so many _Saturday Evening Post_ souls, alone dreaming
of and intent upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute
the Ford into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Russian
sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physically upon water;
a theatrical public, for all its potential willingness, cannot be
developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide writing. In the American
theatre of the present time there are not more than two, or at most
three, playwrights out of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts
a determined and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O’Neill, and give
a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplishment is still
too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next to nothing left.
Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. Craven’s “Too Many Cooks”
and “The First Year” are observant, highly skilful depictions of the
American scene, but they are dramatic literature only in the degree
that “Main Street” and “This Side of Paradise” are literature. With
the extraordinary “Papa,” Miss Zoë Akins gave up and surrendered--at
least temporarily--to the box-office skull and cross-bones. Until
Tarkington proves that “Clarence” was not a happy accident in the
long and unbroken line of “Up from Nowhere,” “Mister Antonio,” “The
Country Cousin,” “The Alan from Home,” “Cameo Kirby,” “Your Humble
Servant,” “Springtime,” “Getting a Polish,” “The Gibson Upright,” and
“Poldekin,” we shall have to hold up our decision on him. George Ade,
the great promise of authentic American drama, is no more; he pulled
in his oars, alas, in mid-stream. Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest
dramatist, fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The
rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs from the
last generation, proficient technicians with empty heads, or youngsters
still dramatically wet behind the ears. The rest of the rest? Ticket
salesmen.
In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among playwrights
so little fervour for sound drama as in the United States. In England,
they at least try, in a measure, to write well; in Germany, to
experiment bravely in new forms; in France, to philosophize either
seriously or lightly upon life as they find it; in Russia, to treat
soberly of problems physical and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the
Spanish heart and conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect
the life and thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing
aspirations, of a people. And in the United States--what? In the
United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is at the
moment not a playwright who isn’t thinking of “success” above honest
work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, they all think the same. Gold,
silver, copper. And the result is an endless procession of revamped
crook plays, detective plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic
plays: fodder for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake’s eye
spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is thrown
overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the Golden Gate. The
unquestionable talent of an Avery Hopwood--a George M. Cohan--a George
Bronson-Howard--is deliberately self-corrupted.
The American professional theatre is to-day at once the richest theatre
in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it reaches to the stars;
culturally, with exception so small as to be negligible, it reaches to
the drains. For both of these reaches, the American newspaper stands
largely responsible. The American newspaper, in general, regards the
theatre with contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university,
were spent on the staff of one of them--the leading daily journal of
America, it was in those days--and I shall never forget its attitude
toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a play was produced by
a manager who advertised extensively in the paper, it was praised out
of all reason. If a play was produced by a manager who happened to
be _persona non grata_ in the office, it was dismissed with a brief
reportorial notice. If a play was produced by a new and enterprising
manager on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by
fashionable audiences--the Empire, say--the former play, however worthy
an effort it might be, was let down with a stick or two that there
might be room to print the names of the fashionables who were in the
Empire seats. The surface of things has changed somewhat since then,
but the situation at bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer
writes honestly of a tawdry play in the _Evening Sun_; the producer
of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young reviewer
is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer takes half-page
advertisements of his forthcoming _opus_ in the New York newspapers,
and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, is hailed as a master work.
Let a new drama by Gerhart Hauptmann be presented in the Park Theatre
to-night and let Mr. John Barrymore also appear at eight-thirty in a
play by some obscure hack at the Empire, and there will not be a single
newspaper in the whole of New York City that will not review the latter
flashy affair at the expense of the former.
It is not that the newspapers, in New York as elsewhere, are
dishonest--few of them are actually dishonest; it is that they are
suburban, shoddy, cheap. With only four exceptions that I can think of,
the American newspaper, wherever you find it, treats the theatre as if
it were of very much less importance than baseball and of but a shade
more importance than a rape in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Two columns are
given freely to the latest development in bootlegging in Harlem, and
a begrudged half-column to a play by John Galsworthy. A society woman
is accused by her husband of having been guilty of adultery with a
half-breed Indian, and the allotment is four columns. On the same day,
a Shakespearean production is mounted by the most artistic producer
in the American theatre, and the allotment of space is two-thirds of
a column. The reply of the newspapers is, “Well, we give the public
what it wants! And it is more greatly interested in scandal than in
Shakespeare.” Have not then the theatrical managers the right to reply
in the same terms? And when they do, some of them, disgustedly reply in
the same terms, what is the hypocritical appraisal of their offerings
that the selfsame newspapers vouchsafe to them? If the New York _Times_
devotes three columns to a dirty divorce case, I fail to see how it can
with justice or reason permit its theatrical reviewer indignantly to
denounce Mr. A. H. Woods in the same issue for devoting three hours to
a dirty farce.
The American drama, like the American audience, lacks repose. This is
ever logically true of a new civilization. Time must mellow the mind
and heart before drama may achieve depth and richness; time must mellow
the mind and heart before an audience may achieve the mood of calm
deliberation. Youth is a rare and precious attribute, but youth, for
all its fine courage and derring-do, is inclined to be superficial.
Its emotions and its reactions are respectively of and to the primary
colours; the pastels it is impatient of. The American theatre, drama,
and audience are the theatre, drama, and audience of the metaphysical
and emotional primary colours: substantial, vivid, but all too obvious
and glaring. I speak, of course, generally. For there are a few
notable exceptions to the rule, and these exceptions portend in the
American theatre the first signs of the coming dawn. A producer like
Arthur Hopkins, perhaps the first American man of the theatre gifted
with a genuine passion for fine and beautiful things and the talent
with which to do--or at least try to do--them; a dramatist like young
O’Neill, permitting no compromise or equivoke in the upward sweep of
his dynamic imagination; an actor like Arnold Daly and an actress like
Margaret Anglin to whom failure in the service of honest drama means
absolutely nothing--these are they who inspire our faith in the future.
Nor do they stand alone. Hume and Moeller, Jones, Peters, Simonson and
Bel-Geddes, Glaspell, Wellman and Pottle--such youngsters, too, are
dreaming their dreams, some of them, true enough, still silly dreams,
but yet dreams. And the dreaming spreads, spreads....