transfigured and glowing pink.
“I see,” said Moisse, withdrawing his hand with an involuntary shudder.
He was about to say something but he turned, again involuntarily, and
hurried away, breaking into a run when he found himself in the rain.
The little old man’s face drooped.
He walked slowly staring after him.
He stood bareheaded while the rain bombarded his drenched figure and he
looked at the young dramatist running.
While he stood gazing after him his face screwed up was suffused with a
strange tenderness and the tears dripped out of his eyes.
Editorials and Announcement
_Emma Goldman at the Fine Arts Theatre_
Beginning Sunday night, November 21, Emma Goldman is to deliver nine new
lectures in the most interesting playhouse in town—the Fine Arts
Theatre, Chicago home of the Irish Players and Miss Horniman’s company
and Miss Barnsdall’s Players’ Producing company, etc. The complete list
of lectures will be found on page 44.
The first, on “Preparedness”—well, if you heard the Powys-Browne debate
last Sunday night and agree with Margery Currey that Mr. Browne struck
the roots of the issue, then I _beg_ you to hear Emma Goldman. Mr.
Browne said something about the real issue being whether people would
rather kill or be killed. I could scarcely believe my ears.... If you
once listen to Emma Goldman talking of fundamentals you can never fall
for sentimentalizations again.
_Will Our Readers Help?_
There is a beautiful plan on foot to help THE LITTLE REVIEW live through
its third year. It is this:
If our readers will order their books through the Gotham Book Society we
will receive a certain percentage on all the sales. This arrangement has
been made with the publishers, so that any book you want, whether listed
in our pages or not, may be procured at the same price for which it is
on sale at your local bookseller’s—and sometimes even less than that.
You will find full particulars on page 50 of this issue.
Radical magazines do not become popular, and the problem of meeting the
cost of production every month is really a desperate one. If there is a
good response to this plan we ought to make the bulk of our publishing
cost out of it, and then we can devote our energies to the improvement
of the magazine’s quality. Will you please keep this in mind when
ordering your books? It will mean such a tremendous thing to us!
_The Russian Literature Class_
In reply to many inquiries about the group for the study of Russian
literature, we are glad to announce that the idea is in the process of
realization. Early in January the group will meet, and will proceed to
attend the regular lectures. The course will be offered by a Russian,
who is well known to the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW. Those willing to
join the adventure are asked to send their names and addresses to 834
Fine Arts Building.
John Cowper Powys on War
MARGERY CURREY
It was a quite, quite dreadful jolt that shook the John Cowper Powys
cult on the night of the debate between the master and Maurice Browne of
the Little Theatre. The great one, appearing robed in black, through his
Delphic, released, blinding vapor clouds of infallible utterance, was to
devastate the suggestion that war is evil, avoidable, and should not be
prepared for by military methods. Maurice Browne was to defend the
suggestion.
Scarce half a moon before had the first murmuring of discontent arisen
among the worshipers of the temple, when their idol, beautiful, mordant,
flaming, strode forth in flapping black garments and proclaimed that in
this great war of many nations “the gall and vitriol and wormwood and
uncleanness of mankind are burned, purged from the purified flesh of
humanity; that then humanity is transformed, until the passion of hate
is hardly distinguishable from the passion of love.”
The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the
stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky
heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the
crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an
iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little
iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating
clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed
wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing
there.
“War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist
struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who
think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if,
thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist
crusade.”
Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime
of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the
income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once
thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of
her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of
her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the
most humble.
Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the
end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt
Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on
Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde,
of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe
and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!
And the debate? There stood Maurice Browne in valiant opposition, really
“the idealist and fanatic” as his opponent called him, not adding “the
clear thinker,” the rejector of temptations to revel in obvious and
facile romanticisms on the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country,
with all the talk of defending one’s beloved from the hand of the
ravager. There were even those who understood Mr. Browne when his
bravery and his prophetic sight let him dare to say such things as “It
is better to be killed than to kill. To refrain from a combat of
violence when the victims might be your dearest ones is not to put a
finger in the cogs of God’s orderly universe. It is a question of
looking the God that is within you in the face.” As for the merits of
the debate, the matter of war and its avoidableness was not touched on
in its practical aspects, except by one who presided over the meeting
and in three intelligent moments discussed the economic and the proved
sides of war. THE LITTLE REVIEW is no tract, and we may pass that by as
understood.
And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they
overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly
Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not
evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and
some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! The
vote was on the merits of the question.
The Theatre
THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS
SAXE COMMINS
Were I a self-appointed apologist for the Washington Square Players I
might be able to say with gracious fairness that “their works are not
worth as much as their endeavors but their endeavors are heroic.” But I
am not inclined to pardon these enthusiasts whose enthusiasm has become
cautious, whose ideals are inoffensive, whose outlines are blurred by an
undiscerning dilettantism, who in the absence of a dominant individual
characteristic flounder helplessly through an unbalanced, inartistic
program, that is only relieved, fortunately, by Mr. Phil Moeller’s
delicious satire _Helena’s Husband_.
“It is not from what you emancipate yourself, it is for what.”—Let us
see whether the Washington Square Players have really liberated
themselves from the Broadway tradition of “getting it over,” from the
sacrifice of the artistic for the opportune, and from the fear of
offending the generous critics of the New York Press and incidentally a
gullible public. “What have they done that has an element of daring,
invigorating thought,” was asked of one of the members of the producing
staff. “_My Lady’s Honor_, one of last year’s plays,” was his answer. To
those who were unfortunate enough to have seen this pseudo-feminist
tract—George Broadhurst supplanting Ibsen in a free theatre—I need not
tell what resentment that remark aroused. Nor could those who saw
_Moondown_ on the same bill be more antagonized than I was when I heard
so fatuous a statement as “If we had more plays like _Moondown_ we would
establish the equivalent in America to the Celtic renaissance.” Is this
“for what” the Washington Square Players have emancipated themselves?
Even if _Moondown_ had any value in itself would they deserve any credit
for an aspiration that is only a conditional imitation? I take these
casual expressions of members of the organization critically because
there is a most noticeable absence of persistent, highly individualized
effort, because there is a majority rule, the odorlessness of an insipid
mixture prevalent in the atmosphere about the Band Box. They are
successful—unfortunately.
Consider the present bill. Has the play-reading committee shown any
distinction that differentiates it from those Broadway theatrical
agencies that supply syndicated thrills on demand? Have they not
arranged their programme without any regard for balance, to the
vaudeville formula in this manner: One curtain-raiser on a current
topic—of course the war; one play cut and measured for the star, a
misfit, to prepare you for the middle piece, in this instance an
amazingly clever satire by Phil Moeller; and then the end-up—(Yes, they
have outgrown Broadway; they don’t wave a big American flag as a grand
finale number)—in this spirit: “wouldn’t a fancifully pagan thing be
very nice to show that we have a conception of the beautiful?” Voilà—the
whole is the sum of its parts, mathematically accurate, yes; but “who
knows whether two and two don’t make five” in the science of Esthetics,
if there is such a thing.
Where, I cannot understand, is their proclaimed aspiration of finding
plays which fulfill the artistic merit that they would lead us to
believe the New York theatre-goer demands? If there is such a public, do
they think and choose for them secure in the belief that the patient
supporters of these sterile Little Theatre movements will abide such
exploitation? Is their complacency so complete that they can disregard
every requirement that a “New Theatre” movement imposes and yet get away
with it? When I use the term “New Theatre” I mean it in the
Strindbergian sense, a new and thoroughly iconoclastic theatre that
panders to no opinion, whose merit lies solely in an individual and
artistic distinction, a theatre that has something of the “continual
slight novelty.”
_Fire and Water_, the opening play of the bill by Hervey White, is a
sacrifice of art to the god of timeliness, an inane argument, an
undramatic episode, a virtuous plea against War that permits its author
to air some abstractions on brotherhood and equality with utter
disregard for the tenseness or the dramatic possibilities of the
situation. Broadway knows better. They, at least, are both opportune and
spectacular and do not pour forth so much of what Nietzsche calls
“moralic acid.”
_Night of Snow_, by Roberto Bracco, seems chosen ostensibly to allow Mr.
Ralph Roeder to cover as great an area of the stage as is possible in
forty-five minutes of monotonous gesture to the melodious obligato of a
voice ranting second-rate Hamlet self-lacerations. It tells the story of
a person half gentleman, half derelict, who likes to cry about it while
his mistress and mother indulge themselves to satiation with sickly
sweet sacrifice. “I am his Mo-ho-ther” etcetera. What a relief was
Moeller’s play—a play that could not even be contaminated by its
environment. I think Anatole France would be glad to have written it.
_Helena’s Husband_ is much more than an historical interpretation of a
phase of the Trojan wars. It is the truth! Moeller is more than clever.
He knows as well as France that “history is a pack of lies.”
_The Antick_, by Percy Mackaye, is a devitalized Pagan attempt which in
spite of charming Lupokova was extremely tedious. I heard little of it,
so poor was the enunciation of the actors, and for my concentrated
attention I was rewarded with an incoherent effort to transplant Pan to
barren, colorless New England. I wonder whether Mr. Mackaye ever read
Pater’s _Denys L’Auxerrois_?
At least the Washington Square Players presume to desire, even though it
be in a misdirected manner. Will they overcome the affable praise that
they get so generously from uncritical critics? Will they mature
sufficiently to recognize the mistakes of their infancy? There is still
hope that they can be saved from success. Where is the strong, perhaps
tyrannical, individual who can do it?
“Lithuania”
Whoever hasn’t seen the Little Theatre’s production of Rupert Brooke’s
_Lithuania_ has missed an excellent although unimportant dramatic treat.
It is the most “effective” thing of its kind I ever have seen executed
in Chicago. It is one prolonged and unrelieved shudder from start to
finish.
Rupert Brooke is the hero of the occasion. His play is the thing. The
theme is that of the guest who stops over in an outlying peasant hut and
is murdered in his chamber while he sleeps. Brooke added a flourish in
making the guest a returned son of the house who vanished when he was
thirteen. Taking this hackneyed idea Brooke moulded it with consummate
skill. And the result is a study in horror and pathology, vivid,
artistic and for its effect upon the audience to be compared only to the
witnessing of a child birth. Three of its actors rose to its demands.
Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter contributed practically all the human
atmosphere there was. Miriam Kiper abetted her. Allan MacDougall, in the
part of a half-witted son of a tavern keeper, added a few excellent
moments. The other men were, however, entirely unsuccessful in their
efforts. Maurice Browne, as the peasant father, failed with the rest of
them to give the impression the play demanded, sullen, grim, virile,
despondency. But it was there, despite them.
An Objection
Why is it people have such stupid reactions to the plays put on by the
Chicago Little Theatre? I do not know. It is easy to explain why they
talk in subdued tones while entering; why they almost walk on tip-toe;
why they ask for the programs almost with awe; and why, sometimes, they
stop their chatter as the lights are slowly dimmed. The causes of these
actions and their explanation are obvious. And yet—after the play! What
inane, half-witted remarks about the bill! This “notice” printed above
about the opening bill of their fourth season—what is it worth as a
piece of criticism, as a review, or even as an account of the
proceedings it so tritely and knowingly pretends to explain? “Mrs.
Browne as the lame daughter.... Miriam Kiper abetted her. MacDougall ...
added a few excellent moments.... Maurice Browne ... failed with the
rest of them.” What rot! In watching Brooke’s play you are not aware
that you are watching “Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter” or Miriam Kiper
as the mother, MacDougall as the son of an inn-keeper, or Mr. Browne as
the father. You do not find time to bother about that part of your
reaction. Your subjection to play and players is too strong and tense.
It is the usual thing to bother after the play, questioning members—who
played this role?—who played that role? And then, after hours or days of
weighing and shallow balancing, write a “review.” Again I question: Why
do people react so stupidly to the plays at this theatre? This is not
the adequate or honest way to view a play like Brooke’s or acting like
the Little Theatre company’s. In this play even as in _The Trojan Women_
they have closely approached that losing themselves in the “impersonal
ideal” or “one tradition” of which Mr. Powys spoke so white-heatedly in
a former article in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Except for MacDougall and for
Moseman, who are _always_ MacDougall and Moseman, we were watching a
play—and forgot to gather the ingredients and essentials of the
inevitable review.
Book Discussion
An Inspired Publisher
To paraphrase the biblical adage: Samson is upon ye, Philistines! That
quaint giant, Russian literature, is storming the Anglo-Saxon world; and
no longer in apothecary doses, in solitary books, but in avalanches. A
practical dreamer, Alfred A. Knopf, is determined to deluge this country
with the best and nearly best that has been written in Russia, and he is
doing it on a big scale, in torrents and showers. Such a dizzying list
of publications: Gogol, Goncharov, Lermontov, Gorky, Andreyev, Garshin,
Kropotkin; and he is going to give us Sologub, Kuzmin, Ropshin! And he
has given us Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_, the book about which I have
been drumming the ears of my American friends for years, the book that
has stirred me more than any other work of art,—I mean it literally. Mr.
Knopf has introduced another novel feature on the book-market: he
selects translators from among those who know three things—Russian,
English, and how to write,—so that the reader will be spared the torture
of wading through a badly-done translation from the French version of a
German translation from the Russian (examples? Recall _Sanine_!).
A literature is like a people; if you want to know it, you must learn
not only its Cromwells and Napoleons, but also its Asquiths and
Vivianis; not only its Shakespeares and Goethes, but its Wellses and
Sudermanns as well. Turgenyev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, do not exhaust
Russian literature of the nineteenth century, though they are the
greatest novelists of their epoch. There are many interesting sides of
Russian life which are not reflected on the canvasses of the great Trio,
but have been painted by perhaps minor artists, whom we cannot afford to
miss if we intend to gain a clear vista of that peculiar life and its
peculiar literature.
Hence Goncharov and his _Precipice_. In Russia he is ranked next to
Turgenyev. Without the latter’s delicate lyricism Goncharov presents the
objective artist, if this is possible, in depicting the life of the
gentry, the class that has been either ignored or caricatured by the
writers with a _Tendenz_. In _Precipice_ we face Rayski, Vyera, the
grandmother, the passing types of the romantic nobility, whose passions
and tragedies are as stirring and as human as those of the more
democratic elements of society.
Garshin is another writer heretofore unknown to the English world. His
_Signal and other Stories_ are achingly Russian. Garshin is a product of
the Eighties, the epoch of “petty deeds,” when the heavy boot of
Alexander III. drove into the underground all that was idealistic in his
country. The soil-less _Intelligentzia_ had the alternative of turning
retrogrades or going insane. Garshin’s lot was with the latter category.
His few stories ache with the black melancholy which finally hurled him
down a flight of stone steps,—his last flight. His war impressions are
gripping with the resigned Russian sadness; they are all-human,
universal; but _Attalea Princeps_, the symbolical tale of an exotic
plant chafing in a hot-house—who but a compatriot of mad Garshin will
fathom its profound tragicness!
The republication of Kropotkin’s _Ideals and Realities in Russian
Literature_ will be of service to the critical student of Russian
literature. I say critical, for although the book is rich in material
the personal views of the author and his valuations of the writers are
considerably obsolete and tainted with the liberalistic tendency of
“problem”-friends.
Below are more reviews of Mr. Knopf’s publications. The most important
one is Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_. It deserves a special article.
See the next issue!
Homo Monstrosus
_Taras Bulba, by Nicolai Gogol. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._
They burned him at the stake, bound to a great tree in iron chains. The
flames lapped at his feet, glowing into his old face that was scarred
and leathered with battle, brightening the silver of his fierce
mustache....
Out of the reddened shadows that fell over him like a mantle his lips
could be seen curling in a smile, contemptuous and arrogant, and he
turned his eyes toward the Dnyeper where the boats of his brothers were
pulling away under a rain of lead.
“Farewell, comrades,” he shouted to them; “remember me, and come hither
again next spring to make merry!”
And then he turned to the Lyakhs against whom he had waged war and who
knew him as the raven of the steppe.
The fire had risen above the faggots and the great tree was burning. Out
of the flames came the voice of the hero....
“A Tzar shall arise from the Russian soil and there shall not be a Power
in the world which shall not submit to him.”
Thus died Taras Bulba, kazak.
In this day when a man’s skin is his most greedily guarded possession
and the lisping of pale, pretty words his greatest glory, Taras Bulba
comes charging into America, a figure in need. On his black horse he
comes, his scalp lock flying in the wind, his sword waving in great
circles above his head, his body leaning over the shining neck of his
steed and his voice ringing with the battle whoop of the kazak.
He is the eternal warrior, the plundering hero, the lusty knight of
battle, a devil of a man with boiling blood in his veins and the savage
joy of life in his heart.
Taras and his two sons, Andrii and Ostap, go thundering up and down the
Russian steppe with the savage avalanche of the Zaporozhe. They fight
and carouse and their deeds are mighty—mightier than the deeds of which
Homer sang and the performances which Walter Scott sketched. Beside
Taras Ivanhoe pales into tin puppet, Ulysses into a lady’s man.
What a book!
If you know Gogol through his _Dead Souls_, the “humorous” classic of
Russia, you will read in amazement his _Taras Bulba_. It is Rabelais
with a sword. Through its pages ring the shouts of battle and Gargantuan
manhood—Homo Monstrosus....
Once or twice the pale face of a woman peeps out of them and Gogol kicks
it back into place with his kazak boot.
“Do you want fire, Ostap? Do you want mad blood in your heart? Come ride
with me over the steppe to the tents of the Zaporozhe....”
When I closed the book with its red shouts still ringing in my ears—with
old Taras still burning against the great tree and the magic steppe
stretching before me—I thought of the baby-ribbon bards and the
querulous quibblers of American letters—and smiled....
Come on, Bulba, there is still blood in America that has not dried,
there are still hearts that have not been transformed into pink doilies.
Welcome! You can’t shout too loud for me, you can’t swagger too much.
The soul of you that left your burning body laughed and roared its way
into heaven....
Gorky at His Best and Worst
_Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf_
Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He
is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom
man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his
dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over
the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to
the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.