and am in no mood to withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can
see him in no other _milieu_ because he lacks the gift--not needed
in vaudeville, though useful there--of holding the audience in his
hand. He is liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles,
smiles, and laughter; seldom with guffaws. This is not necessarily
to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it
extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville
is made. As Ethel Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be,
so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right. Yet to give the
quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.
He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is
a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles
Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far
beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe
Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not
the “dippy” kind so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is
structural. Mr Cook’s is probably the longest single act in vaudeville,
and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that
follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.
His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning
with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the
player of instruments to--but no one has ever discovered where it does
go to. For after the card tricks--the ace of spades is asked for and,
as he remarks after five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back,
the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment’s notice the
ace of spades is produced; and it never is--Mr Cook finds it necessary
to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of
nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing
the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with
Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical
clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savour his humours.
In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than
radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets
because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and
his precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile
gravity: How are you? How are _you_? Fine, how’s yourself? Good. And
you? Splendid. How’s your uncle? I haven’t got an uncle. Fine, how is
he? He’s fine. How are _you_? He is amazingly inventive, creating new
stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His
little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and
the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by
their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have
ever seen: George M. Cohan.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
JOE COOK
]
Had I had any doubts about vaudeville as we practice it in the United
States they would have been dispelled in the past two years by one
great success and one notable failure: the _Chauve-Souris_ of Balieff
and the show of the Forty-niners. Balieff seemed for a moment to be
destroying B. F. Keith; here was something certainly vaudeville, with
turns and numbers, appealing to every grade of intelligence; here were
good music, exciting scenery, and good fun; here were voices caressing
the ear and dancers dazzling the eye; here was a gay burlesque and a
sophisticated _conférencier_. Now if our native product were only like
that ... (the implication was, Wouldn’t we just go every day to the
nearest vaudeville house!). Then, to be sure, a reaction. Put Ed Wynn
and Leon Errol and ... I omit the list--Wynn was almost unanimously
chosen as _conférencier_--and we could give the Russians at least a
good run for the money--and it _was_ money, loads of it, much to
their surprise. And then, without Ed Wynn and the list, the attempt;
for the Forty-niners were cheerfully setting out to be a company of
Americans stranded in Russia, giving the Russians to understand what
the folk and popular arts of America were. Months earlier the thing had
been perfectly done, as a game, in the _No-Siree_, a wholly amateur
single performance which was without doubt the gayest evening of the
year in New York. (The tribute is not exactly wrung from me, for
friends of mine were concerned in it; it was the high moment of the
Algonquin Circle and they should have disbanded the following morning.
Since I was not an adherent of the group, my advice was not asked; I
do not know whether it still exists, has passed to further triumphs,
or has repeated the Forty-niners.) Put on professionally, high class
vaudeville showed all the weaknesses of the commercial kind, and had
a dulness of its own. The Dance of the Small-town Mayors was exactly
right, but most of the parodies were outdated, the burlesques were
too _voulus_, the strain too great. There was lacking that technical
proficiency which is essential to vaudeville, and the adjustment of
means to material was sloppy. One fell back on Balieff and discovered,
as the exoticism wore off, that he too had his weak points. Sentimental
songs in however beautiful voices, the choreographics of figures come
to life from Copenhagen plate however accurately the footfall coincided
with Anitra’s Dance, and a number of other things suggested that in
Russia, too, refinement could corrupt and stultify. There remained
elements we could not match: we hadn’t encouraged our legitimate
stage sufficiently to be justified in expecting cubist settings in
vaudeville; nor when we heard American folk music (and its contemporary
form in ragtime) did we so earnestly applaud as to keep them fresh in
variety shows. Balieff never was “variety,” and we asked of variety
that it be like him; we missed the meaning of Balieff as surely as we
appreciated the fun. For he was a lesson not to vaudeville, but to us,
to those of us who left vaudeville in the hands of the least cultivated
audiences. We have asked nothing of vaudeville simply because we
haven’t suspected what it had to give. Yet week after week at the
Palace Theatre in New York there have been bills equal in entertainment
to the average Balieff programme; there has been evident an expertness
in technique, a skill in construction, a naturalness of execution,
a soundness of sense and judgement, which ought to have appealed to
all who had taste and discrimination. The people who do go there have
something, at least; and lack snobbism generally. If the audiences of
the Theatre Guild and the Neighborhood Playhouse were to add themselves
to their number, were to accept what is given and be receptive to
something more, it could not hurt vaudeville. Because like everything
else variety must grow, and there is no reason why it should shut
itself off from the direction of civilized life. It can exist very well
without the Theatre Guild audience; I wonder whether that audience can
exist as well without variety.
_They Call It Dancing_
THEY CALL IT DANCING
One of the most tiresome of contemporary intellectual sentimentalities
is the cult of “the dance”--a cult which has almost nothing in the
world to do with dancing. “The dance” is “art”; dancing is a form of
popular entertainment, one of the very few which can be practised by
its admirers. It is also one of the arts which can be “polite” without
danger of atrophy, the danger in this case being that the technical
refinement may eventually make dancing a trick, a rather graceful sort
of juggling.
In any case, we shall not have in America anything corresponding to
folk dances; the ritual dance, the dance as religion, simply isn’t our
type, and none of the tentatives in favour of that kind of dancing
has made me regret our natural bent toward ballroom and stunt dancing
as a mode of expression. In the rue Lappe in Paris nearly every other
house is a _Bal Musette_ and in all but one of these dance halls the
floor is taken by men and women of that quarter, working men and
women who come in and dance and pay a few _sous_ for each dance. They
do this every night and enjoy it; they enjoy the sometimes wheezing
accordeon and the bells which, on the right ankle of the player,
accentuate the beat. They dance waltzes and polkas and, since the Java
is forbidden, the mazurka. Once I saw two couples rise and dance the
_bourrée_, presumably as it was danced in their native province of
Auvergne; it is possible to see other provincial dances of France,
as they are remembered, in the Bal Musette of this district and
elsewhere--occasionally and not by pre-arrangement. The ancient dances
of America haven’t such roots, nor such vitality; and we may have to
become much more simple, or much more sophisticated, before we will
proceed naturally to buck-and-wing and cakewalk and the ordinary
breakdown on the floor of the Palais Royal. There are Kentucky mountain
and cowboy dances which the moving picture inadequately reconstructs,
and I am afraid that even negro levee dancing has lost much of its
own character in the process of influencing the steps of the ordinary
American dance. Undoubtedly those who can should preserve these
provincial and rooted dances; but it is idle to pretend that dancing
itself can be a subject for archæology. It is essentially for action,
not for speculation.
I do not belittle dancing when I attempt to deprive it of the cachet
of “Art.” Nothing so precise, so graceful, so implicated with music,
can escape being artistic; in the hands of its masters it becomes an
intuitive creative process, but this happens most frequently when
the dancer gives himself to the music and seldom when he tries to
interpret the music. From the waltz to the tango, from the tango to the
current fox-trot or one-step, polite dancing has held more of what is
essentially artistic than the art-dance, and it has had no pretensions.
The old tango and the maxixe were the only ones which could not easily
be danced by those who applauded them on the stage; classic dancing,
on the contrary, has always been an art of professionals--almost a
contradiction in terms in this case, for it is the essence of the
dance that it can be danced. It is not the essence of the dance that
it can be staged, or made into a pantomime. The Russian Ballet has no
reference to the subject for it is essentially the work of mimes and
the dancing is either folk dance or choreography.
[Illustration:
IRENE CASTLE
]
The reason politeness is not fatal to the dance is that there is only
one standard of vulgarity in dancing, which is ugliness. Vulgarity
means actively disagreeable postures and steps not exceptionally
adapted to the music. The relation of the dancers to one another is the
basis of their relation to the music, and that is why the shimmy has
little to do with dancing, whereas the cheek-to-cheek position--the
_bête-noire_ of chaperons a few weeks, or is it years, ago?--is
fundamentally not objectionable, since it brings two dancers to as near
a unit, with the same centre of gravity, as the dance requires. One
doesn’t dance the fox-trot as one danced the Virginia reel, and the
question of morals has little to do with the case. The “indecencies” of
the turkey-trot, as we used to phrase it, disappeared not because we
are better men and women, but because we are dancing more beautifully.
Two influences have worked to accomplish this. One is that our music
has become more interesting and is written specifically to be danced,
as the waltz-song always was and as our older ragtime was not. The
other is the effect of the stage (through which we have, recently,
learned a vast amount from negro dancing, an active influence for
the last fifteen years at least, touching the dance at every point
in music, and tending always to prevent the American dance from
becoming cold and formal.) Dancing masters go to the stage to perform
the dances they have elaborated in their studios; from the stage the
dance is adapted to the floor. This is what makes it so unnerving
to go through a year seeing nothing but men jumping over their own
ankles, or to witness Carl Randall dancing himself into his evening
clothes. One doesn’t know how soon one will be called upon to do the
same sort of thing in the semi-privacy of the night club. Acrobatic
dancing is interesting as all acrobatics are--brutally for the stunt
and æsthetically for the picture formed while doing the trick. The
dancing of choruses has something of the same interest. The Tiller or
Palace Girls do very little that would merit attention if done by one
of them; done by sixteen, it is entertaining; so are the ranks of heads
appearing over the top step of the Hippodrome or at the New Amsterdam,
and the ranks of knees rhythmically bending as row follows row down the
stairs. But none of these affect actual dancing appreciably.
Acrobatic or stunt dancing has a tendency to corrupt good exhibition
dancing--the desire to do something obviously difficult displaces
the more estimable desire to do something beautiful. Yet some of
our best stunt dancers can and do combine all the elements and to
watch them is to experience a double delight. George M. Cohan always
danced interestingly; he has sardonic legs and he is, I suppose, the
repository of all the knowledge we have of the 1890–1910 dance. Frisco
took up the same work near the place where Cohan dropped it; he is
(but where I do not know) a character dancer with a specific sense of
jazz, and was, for a moment, the symbolic figure of what was coming.
His eccentricities were premature, his comparative disappearance
unmerited. Eccentric also, and not chiefly dancers, are Leon Errol and
Jimmy Barton. Eccentric and essentially a dancer is the fine comic
Johnny Dooley. The difference is that almost all of Dooley’s comedy
is _in_ his dancing, whereas the others are great comedians and their
dances are also funny. It seems to be Dooley’s natural mode to walk on
the side of his feet and to catch a broken, wholly American rhythm in
every movement--to create dances, therefore, which are untouched by the
Russian Ballet and other trepaks and hazzazzas. The foreign influence
has touched Carl Randall, a gain in expertness, a loss in freshness.
There seems to be nothing he cannot do, nothing he doesn’t do well,
nothing he does superbly.
The dancing team which ought to have been the best of our time and
wasn’t is that of Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian.[21] The suppleness
of Miss Sanderson’s body, the breathless sway of the torso on the hips,
the suggestion of languor in the most rapid of her movements, are
not to be equalled; and Brian was always smart, decisive, accurate.
It is difficult to define the defect which was always in their work;
probably a reserve, a not giving themselves away to the music, a shade
too much of the stiffness which dancing requires. Miss Sanderson gets
along quite well without the lyric knees (as they were--one doesn’t see
them now) of Ann Pennington; nor has she the exceptional height which
makes the grace of Jessica Brown so surprising and her curve of beauty
so exceptional. Miss Brown, I take it, is one of the best dancers of
the stage, and, unlike Charlotte Greenwood, has nothing to do with
grotesque. Miss Greenwood makes a virtue of her defect--the longest
limbs in the world. Miss Brown is unconscious of hers as defects at
all; like most people’s, her legs are long enough to reach the ground.
It is marvellous to see what she can do when she lifts them off the
ground.
I choose these names as examples, fully aware that I may be omitting
others equally famous. But what remains is deliberate: two groups of
dancers who were at the very top, I think, of their profession, of
their art. Of Doyle and Dixon only Harland Dixon is now visible; the
team is broken, but Dixon continues to be a wonderful dancer, in the
tradition rather of Fred Stone, and with recent leanings toward acting.
It was 1915 or so when I saw them dance Irving Berlin’s _Ragtime
Melodrama_, and although I have never seen that equalled, I have never
seen the team or Dixon alone dance anything unworthy of that piece. It
was a beautiful duo, perfectly cadenced, creating long grateful lines
around the stage; it was full of tricks and fun and character. And
gradually the duo resolved itself into feats of individual prowess,
in which Dixon slowly surpassed his partner and became a miracle of
acrobatics in rhythm. He is agile, never jerky, with a nice sense of
syncopation; he requires Berlin rather than Kern for his full value.
Kern gives all (and more) that Maurice can require, and whether with
Florence Walton or Leonora Hughes the dancing of Maurice is always
icily regular, and nearly null. His type of mechanism is exactly wrong
and he sets off in bold relief the accuracy, the inspired rightness
of Irene and Vernon Castle. That these two, years ago, determined
the course dancing should take is incontestable. They were decisive
characters, like Boileau in French poetry and Berlin in ragtime; for
they understood, absorbed, and transformed everything known of dancing
up to that time and out of it made something beautiful and new. Vernon
Castle, it is possible, was the better dancer of the two; in addition
to the beauty of his dancing he had inventiveness, he anticipated
things of 1923 with his rigid body and his evolutions on his heel; but
if he were the greater, his finest creation was Irene.
No one else has ever given exactly that sense of being freely perfect,
of moving without effort and without will, in more than accord, in
absolute identity with music. There was always something unimpassioned,
cool not cold, in her abandon; it was certainly the least sensual
dancing in the world; the whole appeal was visual. It was as if the eye
following her graceful motion across a stage was gratified by its own
orbit, and found a sensuous pleasure in the ease of her line, in the
disembodied lightness of her footfall, in the careless slope of her
lovely shoulders. It was not--it seemed not to be--intelligent dancing;
however trained, it was still intuitive. She danced from her shoulders
down, the straight scapular supports of her head were at the same time
the balances on which her exquisitely poised body depended. There were
no steps, no tricks, no stunts. There was only dancing, and it was all
that one ever dreamed of flight, with wings poised, and swooping gently
down to rest. I put it in the past, I hardly know why; unless because
it is too good to last.
_St Simeon Stylites_
ST SIMEON STYLITES
The most sophisticated of the minor arts in America is that of
the colyumist. It is, except for occasional lapses into the usual
journalistic disrespect for privacy, a decent art, and if it never
rises to the polish and wit of such an outstanding colyumist as
La-Fourchardière of _l’Œuvre_, it never sinks to the pretentious
pseudo-intelligent vulgarity of the English counterpart. The colyumist
is, to begin with, a newspaper humorist, and there are times, when
questions of art and letters are discussed, when one wishes he had
remained one. Phillips, who is now with the _Sun and Globe_ in New
York, sticks to his game manfully; he tells nothing about himself,
discusses no plays, and his colyum, which he illustrates with grotesque
little drawings, is self-contained. You do not have to be in the secret
to read him. His usual manner is to take a notable or obscure item of
news and play with it, in the manner of Mark Twain. When Ambassador
Harvey made a speech on the topic, “Have Women Souls”? Phillips
reported the proceedings and the aftermath:
“Latest bulletins from Europe and Asia on the conduct of other American
diplomats follow:
“Warren G. Harding,
President, United States:
Excellency:--
American ambassador here has brought about grave crisis by
speech, “Are Bananas a Fruit or a Flower?” and “Can Fresh
Roasted Peanuts Think?” Understand he has stated publicly his
opinion that John McCormack is greater singer than Caruso.
People are near uprising. Will you recall him or shall we give
him the bum’s rush?
KING OF ITALY.
and so on.
It is horseplay; but when he is in form it achieves a wild carelessness
and gaiety which the intellectual colyumist entirely forswears. He
has for compeer Arthur “Bugs” Baer, by all odds the funniest of the
colyumists and a too-much-neglected creator of American humour. There
is, also, a considerable number of colyumists of the Phillips type in
other cities. I make no apology for not knowing them, for a colyum
correctly conceived is written for the readers of its paper. It ought
to be partly private, and wholly provincial. Even Mencken when he ran
the colyum of the Baltimore _Sun_, and gathered much material for _The
American Language_, and told of each new consignment of German beer
after the blockade began in 1915, even he was not all things to all men.
The last man who kept his colyum balanced between the high and low
comic touch was Bert Leston Taylor. He was a very wise and humane
person, wise and humane enough to appreciate and to publish fun of a
sort differing by much from the humour he created. There was something
unnervingly oblique in his vision of the world, perfectly illustrated
by the captions he wrote for clippings from rustic journals. He
would take an item, “Our popular telegraphist Frank Dane had a son
presented to him last week. Frank says he is going to stay home nights
hereafter,” and write over it, “How the Days Are Drawing In.” There was
nothing incongruous in the appearance side by side of his own expert
parodies and the horseplay humour of some of his contributors. Taylor’s
touch made everything light, everything right. In his house there were
indeed many mansions. After him--before his death even--the colyumists
divided and went separate ways. The Chicago _Tribune_ continues the
Field-Taylor tradition indifferently well. Riq of the Chicago _Evening
Post_ comes near the golden mean, but his own character as a colyumist
is jeopardized by his contributors; when he gets a good theme--such as
the necessity for keeping the seam of a stocking straight, he can be
counted on. Calverley indicated his difficulty--or almost: Themes are
so scarce in this world of ours.
The colyumists are sophisticated, or _faux-naïfs_, or actually _naïf_.
Of the first, F. P. A. of the New York _World_ is the most notable
and Baird Leonard of the _Morning Telegraph_ the best. F. P. A. has
all the virtues of the colyumist in the highest degree; unfortunately
he has almost all the faults, in nearly the same measure. He is a
defeated Calverley, writing the best light verse in America, and the
best parodies in verse. His Persicos Odi, one of several (published
in the quarterly “1910”), seems to me better than Field’s--which had
the lines, “And as for roses, Holy Moses, they can’t be got at living
prices.” Adams’, as I recall it, ran:
The pomp of the Persian I hold in aversion;
I hate all their gingerbread tricks;
Their garlicky wreathings and lindeny tree-things
Nix.
Boy, us for plain myrtle while under this fertile
Old grapevine myself I protrude
For your old bibacious Quintus Horatius
Stewed.
and his treatment of the same poem according to Service is perfect
parody. Algernon St. John Brenon used to quarrel magisterially with
Adams about Latin quantities, but he could never undermine Adams’
feeling for the ease and urbanity of Horace--and Adams isn’t in the
business of preserving the tradition of dignity.