sportive, perhaps the reason is that they are impassioned theater-goers;
they could not well be both, at any rate without neglecting the
financial pursuits which are their chief real amusement and hobby. I
mention the theaters in connection with sports, rather than in
connection with the arts, because the American drama is more closely
related to sporting diversions than to dramatic art. If this seems a
hard saying, I will add that I am ready to apply it with similar force
to the English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost all modern drama
outside Germany. It was astonishing to me that America, unhampered by
English traditions, should take seriously, for instance, the fashionable
and utterly meretricious French dramatists, who receive nothing but a
chilly ridicule from people of genuine discrimination in Paris. Whatever
American dramatists have to learn, they will not learn it in Paris; and
I was charmed once to hear a popular New York playwright, one who
sincerely and frankly wrote for money alone, assert boldly that the
notoriously successful French plays were bad, and clumsily bad. It was a
proof of taste. As a rule, one finds the popular playwright taking off
his hat to contemporaries who at best are no better than his equals.
A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically negligible throughout
the world; but if there is a large hope for it in any special country,
that country is the United States. The extraordinary prevalence of big
theaters, the quickly increasing number of native dramatists, the
enormous profits of the successful ones--it is simply inconceivable in
the face of the phenomena, and of the educational process so rapidly
going on, that serious and first-class creative artists shall not arise
in America. Nothing is more likely to foster the production of
first-class artists than the existence of a vast machinery for winning
money and glory. When I reflect that there are nearly twice as many
first-class theaters in New York as in London, and that a very
successful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand dollars a week,
while in London ten thousand dollars a week is enormous, and that the
American public has a preference for its own dramatists, I have little
fear for the artistic importance of the drama of the future in America.
And from the discrepancy between my own observations and the
observations of a reliable European critic in New York only five years
ago, I should imagine that appreciable progress had already been made,
though I will not pretend that I was much impressed by the achievements
up to date, either of playwrights, actors, or audiences. A huge popular
institution, however, such as the American theatrical system, is always
interesting to the amateur of human nature.
The first thing noted by the curious stranger in American theaters is
that American theatrical architects have made a great discovery--namely,
that every member of the audience goes to the play with a desire to be
able to see and hear what passes on the stage. This happy American
discovery has not yet announced itself in Europe, where in almost every
theater seats are impudently sold, and idiotically bought, from which it
is impossible to see and hear what passes on the stage. (A remarkable
continent, Europe!) Apart from this most important point, American
theaters are not, either without or within, very attractive. The
auditoriums, to a European, have a somewhat dingy air. Which air is no
doubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in favor of evening
dress (never again shall I gird against the rule in Europe!), but it is
due also to the oddly inefficient illumination during the entr'actes,
and to the unsatisfactory schemes of decoration.
The interior of a theater ought to be magnificent, suggesting pleasure,
luxury, and richness; it ought to create an illusion of rather riotous
grandeur. The rare architects who have understood this seem to have lost
their heads about it, with such wild and capricious results as the new
opera-house in Philadelphia. I could not restrain my surprise that the
inhabitants of the Quaker City had not arisen with pickaxes and razed
this architectural extravaganza to the ground. But Philadelphia is a
city startlingly unlike its European reputation. Throughout my too-brief
sojourn in it I did not cease to marvel at its liveliness. I heard more
picturesque and pyrotechnic wit at one luncheon in Philadelphia than at
any two repasts outside it. The spacious gaiety and lavishness of its
marts enchanted me. It must have a pretty weakness for the most costly
old books and manuscripts. I never was nearer breaking the Sixth
Commandment than in one of its homes, where the Countess of Pembroke's
own copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--a unique and utterly
un-Quakerish treasure--was laid trustfully in my hands by the regretted
and charming Harry Widener.
To return. The Metropolitan Opera-House in New York is a much more
satisfactory example of a theatrical interior. Indeed, it is very fine,
especially when strung from end to end of its first tier with pearls, as
I saw it. Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor. And let me
urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the
contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by
the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors
should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the
great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the
entrances to opera-houses did not!
Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera season in an
American city is just as humiliating as it is in the other Anglo-Saxon
country. It was disconcerting to see Latin or German opera given
exactly--with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists and
conductors, same conventions, same tricks--in New York or Philadelphia
as in Europe. And though the wealthy audiences behaved better than
wealthy audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes are less
like inclosed pews than in London), it was mortifying to detect the
secret disdain for art which was expressed in the listless late
arrivings and the relieved early departures. The which disdain for art
was, however, I am content to think, as naught in comparison with the
withering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes revealed, by those Latin
and German artists for Anglo-Saxon Philistinism. I seem to be able to
read the sarcastic souls of these accomplished and sensitive aliens,
when they assure newspaper reporters that New York, Chicago, Boston,
Philadelphia, and London are really musical. The sole test of a musical
public is that it should be capable of self-support--I mean that it
should produce a school of creative and executive artists of its own,
whom it likes well enough to idolize and to enrich, and whom the rest of
the world will respect. This is a test which can be safely applied to
Germany, Russia, Italy, and France. And in certain other arts it is a
test which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom--but not in music. In
America and England music is still mainly a sportive habit.
When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New York, my mind at
once turns, in contrast, to the natural raciness of such modest
creations as those offered by Mr. George Cohan at his theater on
Broadway. Here, in an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of a
public demand producing the desired artist on the spot. Here is
something really and honestly and respectably American. And why it
should be derided by even the most lofty pillars of American taste, I
cannot imagine. (Or rather, I can imagine quite well.) For myself, I
spent a very agreeable evening in witnessing "The Little Millionaire." I
was perfectly conscious of the blatancy of the methods that achieved it.
I saw in it no mark of genius. But I did see in it a very various talent
and an all-round efficiency; and, beneath the blatancy, an admirable
direct simplicity and winning unpretentiousness. I liked the ingenuity
of the device by which, in the words of the programme, the action of Act
II was "not interrupted by musical numbers." The dramatic construction
of this act was so consistently clever and right and effective that more
ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Another
point--though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgar
otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacity
and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful musical
comedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value and
interest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that I was really
in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or London.
Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able to
generalize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, and
expected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the most
respected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered
that two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, put
two real clocks on the stage, and made one strike after the other; or
when a manager mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, a
life-sized telephone-exchange on the stage--then was I bound to hear of
"artistic realism" and "a fine production"! But such feats of
truthfulness do not consort well with chocolate sentimentalities and
wilful falsities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt whether
I was not in London.
The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating as
the commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play, though
they had a trifling advantage over the English in that their most
sentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously insincere
felicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination instead of
being acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of these plays
showed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt to
demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so very hard after all.
They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights on the American man's
private estimate of the American woman, and the incidence of the
applause was extremely instructive.
The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and Paid For," by George
Broadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also a
purveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale about
the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl. The first act
was maladroit, but the others made me think that "Bought and Paid For"
was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen
anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis at
which experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. The
fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and very
well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetent
clerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed
"Bought and Paid For," and it is on the faith of such plays, imperfect
and timid as they are, that I establish my prophecy of a more glorious
hereafter for the American drama.
VII
EDUCATION AND ART
I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of an
illustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog--in fact, his own
dog--so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood human
conversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal it was
necessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of pronouncing
it. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American infant
who, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by the same mean
adult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the room with the
protest: "There's too blank much education in this house for me!"
Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set herself to learn to spell;
whereupon her parents descended to even worse depths of baseness, and in
her presence would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merely
inquired, with grimness: "What's the good of being educated, anyway?
First you spell words, and when I can spell then you go and whisper!"
And received no adequate answer, naturally.
This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at frequent intervals
throughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw the whole
American race of children--their independence, their self-confidence,
their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What _is_ father?" she
asked one day. Now her father happened to be one of the foremost
humorists in the United States; she was baldly informed that he was a
humorist. "What _is_ a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learned
that a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make people
laugh. "Well," she said, "I don't honestly think he's very funny at
home." It was naught to her that humorists are not paid to be funny at
home, and that in truth they never under any circumstances are very
funny at home. She just hurled her father from his niche--and then went
forth and boasted of him as a unique peculiarity in fathers, as an
unrivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in the
vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accent
typified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process of
education, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing,
exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and
rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display a
similar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute and
disconcerting than elsewhere.
One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road of
a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons,
and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastric
experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, and
the "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, and
the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and
beautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men and
maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of
the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful
sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so
interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any
conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so
gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that
the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled
thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as
this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It
was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and
across the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I
immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educational
methods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know
and understand all about education in America in one moment--the
education that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I
failed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered,
but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and
from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind
full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best
schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I
should probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in New
York--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with a
cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But I
asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.
* * * * *
The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand children
and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone
from which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a
malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of the
atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I found
that the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues of
corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of which
children were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless
highly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger,
and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept on
growing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen
angels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly
crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the
subject of a lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs;
they were full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and
I asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon
I learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a
training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended
I never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven
more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, without
having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstance
was symbolic.
Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatus
munificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and,
having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing at
instruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normal
regions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States
(save perhaps the cloak-room department of the Metropolitan
Opera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization of
the organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. A
handsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as the
antechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her,
had divined that that mother's child was the most important among a
thousand children--indeed, the sole child of any real importance--had
arranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, and
had stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her child
was indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A pretty
sight--the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious engine
in motion will charm an engineer.
The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lingered at leisure, were
tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not young.
I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic
magic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in North
Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: "If
anybody has any questions to ask, let him stand up." And the whole class
leaped furiously to its feet, blotting out the entire picture with black
shadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The whole class might have
been famishing. In another room I saw the teaching of English
composition. Although when I went to school English composition was
never taught, I have gradually acquired a certain interest in the
subject, and I feel justified in asserting that the lesson was admirably
given. It was, in fact, the best example of actual pedagogy that I met
with in the United States. "Now can any one tell me--" began the
mistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up with excessive
violence, and, having shot up, they wiggled and waggled with ferocious
impatience in the air; it was a miracle that they remained attached to
their respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on the part
of the intrepid mistress to choose between them.
"How children have changed since my time!" I said to the principal
afterward. "We never used to fling up our hands like that. We just put
them up.... But perhaps it's because they're Americans--"
"It's probably because of the ventilation," said the principal, calmly
corrective. "We never have the windows open winter or summer, but the
ventilation is perfect."
I perceived that it indeed must be because of the ventilation.
More and more startled, as I went along, by the princely lavishness of
every arrangement, I ventured to surmise that it must all cost a great
deal.
"The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars in the Upper School."
"Yes, I expected they would be high," I said.
"Not at all. They are the lowest in New York. Smart private schools
will charge five or six hundred dollars a year."
Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone for
the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at the
pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped the
half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown to
me. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenile
education in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I knew the
secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child is not a
fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a
splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered upon
hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction,
when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways of
dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of a
magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally
lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and
glances down confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't?
* * * * *
It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace
Mann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit of
inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in
the Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived me
of its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compare
Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in
their towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison.
I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before
anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had
already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and
classes were over. I saw five or more universities while I was in
America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of
instruction. What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine,
the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.
And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling
promise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other
than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have
been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Building
after building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. And
to my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair. Universities
in Europe are so old. And there are universities in America which are
venerable. A graduate of the most venerable of them told me that
Columbia was not "really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal, though
not in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate in question told me that
a university could not be created by a stroke of the wand. And yet there
staring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merely
could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware of
Columbia's theoretic age and of her insistence on it.) The wand is a
modern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd.