the reproach of being nothing but violent, while they hold every good
element which violence in action can give them. To them are comparable
the best (and only the best) of Eddie Cantor’s scenes--when he applied
for the job of policeman and when he was examined for the army--where
there is a play of motive and a hidden logic. In their world everything
must be sensible, and the most sensible thing in the world is to
hit out. Behind them is a dual tradition--centuries of laughter and
centuries of refining the instruments by which simple laughter can be
produced. For it is opposed to their sense of fitness (as it is to
ours) that the clown should create an effect of subtlety.[26] The kind
of laughter they produce _must_ involve the whole body, but not the
mind. They have to be active all the time, so that you are dazzled and
cannot think; and they must shake the solid ground under your feet, so
that you may shake with laughter. What the critical observer discovers
as method must reach the actual average spectator only as effect.
All of this the Fratellini have accomplished--“these three brothers
who constitute one artist” are the complete and perfect exemplars of
their art. Seeing them sometimes twice a week, and nearly two dozen
times, I find their qualities inexhaustible. Even in the descriptions
of acts noted above it can be seen that they have a definite sense of
pace; their changes from fast to slow in the middle of an act, their
variations from violence to trickery, their complete mastery of climax,
their fertility of invention, are all elements of superiority. But they
are only elements in a composition based on something fundamentally
right--the knowledge that we have almost forgotten how to laugh in the
actual world, and that to make us laugh again they must create a world
of their own.
_The Great God Bogus_
THE GREAT GOD BOGUS
If there were an Academy I should nail upon its doors the following
beliefs:
That Al Jolson is more interesting to the intelligent mind than
John Barrymore and Fanny Brice than Ethel;
That Ring Lardner and Mr Dooley in their best work are more
entertaining and more important than James B. Cabell and Joseph
Hergesheimer in their best;
That the daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is
easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of
art produced in America to-day;
That Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than David Belasco;
That one film by Mack Sennett or Charlie Chaplin is worth the
entire _œuvre_ of Cecil de Mille;
That _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and _I Love a Piano_ are
musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than _Indian
Love Lyrics_ and _The Rosary_;
That the circus can be and often is more artistic than the
Metropolitan Opera House in New York;
That Irene Castle is worth all the pseudo-classic dancing ever
seen on the American stage; and
That the civic masque is not perceptibly superior to the Elks’
Parade in Atlantic City.
Only about half of these are heresies, and I am quite ready to stand by
them as I would stand by my opinion of Dean Swift or Picasso or Henry
James or James Joyce or Johann Sebastian Bach. But I recognize that
they are expressions of personal preference, and possibly valueless
unless related to some general principles. It appears that what I care
for in the catalogue above falls in the field of the lively arts;
and that the things to which I compare them (for emphasis, not for
measurement) are either second-rate instances of the major arts or
first-rate examples of the peculiarly disagreeable thing for which I
find no other name than the bogus. I shall arrive presently at the
general principles of the lively arts and their relation to the major.
The bogus is a lion in the path.
Bogus is counterfeit and counterfeit is bad money and bad money
is better--or at least more effective--than good money. This is
not a private paradox, but a plain statement of a law in economics
(Gresham’s, I think) that unless it is discovered, bad money will drive
out good. Another characteristic of counterfeit is that, once we have
accepted it, we try to pass it off on some one else; banks and critics
are the only institutions which don’t--or ought not to--continue the
circulation. In the arts counterfeit is known as _faux bon_--the
apparently good, essentially bad, which is the enemy of the good.
The existence of the bogus is not a serious threat against the great
arts, for they have an obstinate vitality and in the end--but only
in the end--they prevail. It is the lively arts which are continually
jeopardized by the bogus, and it is for their sake that I should like
to see the bogus go sullenly down into oblivion.
Namely: vocal concerts, pseudo-classic dancing, the serious
intellectual drama, the civic masque, the high-toned moving picture,
and grand opera.
The first thing about them is that a very small percentage of those
who make the bogus arts prosperous really enjoy them. I recall my own
complete stultification after hearing my first concert; and the casual
way in which I made it evident to all my companions that I had been to
a concert is my only clue to the mystery. For at bottom there is a vast
snobbery of the intellect which repays the deadly hours of boredom we
spend in the pursuit of art. We are the inheritors of a tradition that
what is worth while must be dull; and as often as not we invert the
maxim and pretend that what is dull is higher in quality, more serious,
“greater art” in short than whatever is light and easy and gay. We
suffer fools gladly if we can pretend they are mystics. And the fact
that audiences at concerts and opera, spectators at classic dances and
masques, are suffering, is the final damnation, for it means that these
arts are failures. I do not found my belief on any theory that all the
arts ought to be appreciated by all the people. I do mean that most
of those who read _Ulysses_ or _The Pickwick Papers_ do so because
they enjoy it, and they stop the moment they are bored. There is no
superiority in having read a book. The lively anticipation of delights
which one senses in those going to the _Follies_ or to a circus is
wholly absent in the lobby of the Metropolitan or at a performance of
_Jane Clegg_. And the art which communicates no ecstasy but that of
snobbism is irretrievably bogus.
There is something hopeless about opera as we know it in the United
States; and the fact that ten or fifteen operas are among the permanent
delights of civilized existence does not alter the fact. (Three of
them: _Chovanstchina_, _The Marriage of Figaro_, and _Don Giovanni_,
are not in the repertoire of the Metropolitan; nor are _Falstaff_
and _Otello_; nor does the ballet proceed beyond _Coq d’Or_; nor it
seems would the Metropolitan hold it within its dignity to produce
_The Mikado_, although Schumann-Heink was ready to sing Katisha.)
Here is an art-form hundreds of years old, prospered by an enormous
publicity, favoured by extraordinary windfalls--the voice of Caruso,
the “personality” of Farrar--able to set into motion nearly every
appeal to the senses in colour, tone, movement--it has song and action
and dance--and what exactly is the final accomplishment? The pale
maunderings of Puccini, the vulgarity of Massenet, and the overpowering
dulness of our domestic try-outs. Wagner? A philosopher drunk with
divine wisdom is reported (by Goethe) to have cried out that he could
discern shortcomings even in God; and the melancholy truth is that the
welding of three arts into one succeeded only in Wagner’s brain, for on
the boards we lose Wagner as we attend to the stage, and regain him as
we return to the music. This is not true of _Boris_ or of _Figaro_--so
much less pretentious, both; and the director may arise who will know
how to fuse Wagner into one harmonious and beautiful object. At the
moment, one takes the Metropolitan with its vast seating capacity,
its endless sources of appeal to the multitude, and one knows that it
isn’t a success. If it isn’t losing money it is paying its way through
social subventions. Eighty per cent of the music heard there is trivial
in comparison with either good jazz or good symphonic music; ninety
per cent of the acting is preposterous; and the settings, costumes,
and properties are so far below popular musical comedy standards
that in the end Urban and Norman-Bel Geddes have had to be called
in to save them, and haven’t been given scope or freedom enough to
succeed. The Metropolitan is, I am told, the finest opera house in
the world and loses money because it is still several leaps ahead of
its clientèle which insists on more Puccini and no _Coq d’Or_. Also
I have had the supreme pleasure of hearing Chaliapin there and I am
not ungrateful. The Metropolitan has difficulties happily unknown to
us and is unquestionably an eminent institution. It is opera as we
know it, that calls down the curse, opera which has to call itself
“grand” to distinguish itself from the popular, superior, kind. For
it is pretentious and it appeals not to our sensibilities but to our
snobbery. It neither excites nor exalts; it does not amuse. Over it and
under it and through it runs the element of fake; it is a substitute
for symphonic music and an easy expiatory offering for ragtime.
_Ecrasez l’infâme!_
Audiences at the opera have, however, been thrilled by a voice. What
is there to say for the uncommunicative, uninspired, serious-minded
intellectual drama which without wit, or intensity, “presents a
problem” or drearily holds the mirror up to nature? Those little
scenes from domestic life, those second-hand expositions of other
people’s philosophies, those unflinching grapplings with “the vital
facts of existence” which year by year are held to be great plays?
Let me be frank; let me face my vital facts. I have never found my
brain inadequate to grapple with their grapplings, for it is almost
in the nature of the case that if a man has anything profound to
express he will flee from the theatre where everything is dependent
upon actors usually unintelligent and is reduced to the lowest
common factor of human intelligence. Bernard Shaw writes his ideas
into his prefaces because they can’t be fully stated on the stage;
Henry James tried to be delicate and failed. It remains for Ferencz
Molnar and Augustus Thomas to succeed--with borrowed and diminished
ideas. Still speaking of modern serious plays (because the _Medea_
of Euripides and the tragedy of _Othello_ are not involved) what is
bogus in them is their spurious appeal to our sentimentality or our
snobbery. It is their pretence to be a great and serious art when they
are simply vulgarizations. I have no quarrel with any man for the
subject matter of his work of art, and I should allow every freedom
to the artist. The whole trouble with our modern serious drama is
that it is usually such bad drama; the tedium of three hours of _Jane
Clegg_ isn’t worthy sitting through because of the desperate effort
of the dramatist and the producer to create the illusion of reality
by reproducing the rhythm of reality. The essential distortion,
caricature, or transposition which you find in a serious work of art or
in a vaudeville sketch, is missing here. And the efforts to ram this
sort of play home by pretending that only morons do not like it is
exactly and precisely bunk. Most plays fail because they are bad plays;
and the greater part of the intellectual drama following this divine
LAW, fails. A good manipulator of the theatre like Molnar can put
over _Liliom_, which has no more of a great idea than _Seven Keys to
Baldpate_ and is almost as good drama, if he knows in what proportion
to mingle his approaches to our meaner and higher sensibilities. For we
are not altogether lost yet.
If the civic masque and classic dancing continue much longer we will be
lost entirely. These arty conglomerations of middle-high seriousness
and bourgeois beauty are not so much a peril as a nuisance. The former
is the “artistic” counterpart of the Elks Parade and since I cannot
speak with decent calm about its draperies and mummery, I recommend
Mr R. C. Benchley’s chapter on the same subject in _Of All Things!_
The civic masque is fake mediævalism, the sort of thing which, if
ridicule could kill, should have gone out after W. S. Gilbert’s
couplets appeared in _Patience_. Alas the instinct for trumpery art
persists and on it has been grafted the astounding idea of communal
artistic effort--a characteristic thing, too, for the communal efforts
of ancient Greece were war and Bacchanalia, and of the middle ages,
the crusades; the municipal celebrations after which the civic masque
is patterned were created in cities which were unself-conscious and
were doing something out of vanity and joy. I cannot imagine the six
million of New York or the six thousand of Vineland, Arkansas, growing
suddenly mad with joy over the fact that they live in no mean city. I
neither like the civic consciousness nor believe deeply in its honest
existence. And when it takes to expressing itself as the symbol of the
corn and such-like idiocy it isn’t as funny as the induction scene of
the Ziegfeld Follies (which the Forty-niners took off as “I am the
spirit of Public School Number 146”) and it isn’t any more moving or
intelligent. Certainly it has never been so beautiful. Faced with the
vast myths of the American pasts, our poets simply haven’t found the
medium for projecting them. The dime novel and the Wild West film
both failed for lack of imaginative power, and that treasure remains
undisturbed. It is sealed and guarded and the civic masque nibbles
at it, dislodges a fragment, and comes dancing awkwardly into the
foreground waving the shadow of an illusion like a scarf over its head.
For obviously classic dancing is the natural form of expression for
this pseudo-civism. I have never had the patience to discover the
beginnings of the fatuous craze for imitations of presumably ancient
dances. Certainly the first of the notable dancers I saw was not before
1907--in the person of Isadora Duncan. It would be absurd to recall
those renditions of the _Seventh Symphony_ and what not at this date.
If Miss Duncan is a great artist and a great personality now, so much
the better, for her early success had much to do with breaking down
the gates of our decent objection to fake and her imitators swept
over us like a flood. Bogus again, these things; they interpret in
dance things which had already been all too clear in music or drama.
They know, it seems, the science of eurhythmics, which ought to mean
good rhythm, and they employ it to produce in pantomime an obvious,
brutally flat version of the Fall of Troy. They haven’t as yet added
one single thing to our stock of interest and beauty--as the Russian
Ballet did, as the old five-position ballet dance did, as modern
ballroom and stage dancing does. The costuming is almost always silly;
the music chosen is almost always obvious; and the postures assumed are
lethally monotonous. The old ballet, based on five definite positions,
made each slight variation count, and Pavlowa with her stricken face
and tenderness of movement knew it by heart, or by instinct. The new
dancers have no internal discipline and no freedom; and only the
accident that the human body is at times not displeasing to look upon
makes them tolerable. One could forgive them much if the pretensions
were not so unutterably lofty and the swank so ignorant and the results
so ugly. Fat women leaping with chaplets in their hair, in garments
of grey gauze, are not the poetry of motion, and Irene Castle in a
black evening dress dancing Irving Berlin’s music is--just as surely
as Nijinsky was. What is more, these two dancers, whom I choose at the
extremes of the dance, both have reference to our contemporary life;
and the classic dancing of Helen Moeller and Marion Morgan and Mr
Chalif and the rest have absolutely nothing to say to us. We’ve lost
that “simplicity,” thank God, or haven’t found it yet. We are an alert
and lively people--and our dance must actually express that spirit as
no fake can do.
Our existence is hard, precise, high spirited. There is no nourishment
for us in the milk-and-water diet of the bogus arts, and all they
accomplish is a genteel corruption, a further thinning out of
the blood, a little extra refinement. They are, intellectually,
the exact equivalent of a high-toned lady, an elegant dinner or a
refined collation served in the saloon, and the contemporary form of
the vapours. Everything about them is supposed to be “good taste,”
including the kiss on the brow which miraculously “ruins” a perfect
virgin--and they are in the physical sense of the word utterly
tasteless. The great arts and the lively arts have their sources in
strength or in gaiety--and the difference between them is not the
degree of intensity, but the degree of intellect. But the bogus arts
spring from longing and weakness and depression.[27] A happy people
creates folk songs or whistles rag; it does not commit the vast
atrocity of a “community sing-song”; it goes to Olympic games or to a
race track, to _Iphigenia_ or to Charlie Chaplin--not to hear a “vocal
concert.”
The bogus arts are corrupting the lively ones--because an essential
defect of the bogus is that they pretend to be better than the popular
arts, yet they want desperately to be popular. They borrow and spoil
what is good; they persuade people by appealing to their snobbery
that they are the real thing. And as the audience watches these arts
in action the comforting illusion creeps over them that at last they
have achieved art. But they are really watching the manifestations
of the Great God Bogus--and what annoys me most is that they might
at that very moment be hailing Apollo or Dionysos, or be themselves
participating in some of the minor rites of the Great God Pan.
_An Open Letter to the
Movie Magnates_
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOVIE MAGNATES
IGNORANT AND UNHAPPY PEOPLE:
The Lord has brought you into a narrow place--what you would call a
tight corner--and you are beginning to feel the pressure. A voice is
heard in the land saying that your day is over. The name of the voice
is Radio, broadcasting nightly to announce that the unequal struggle
between the tired washerwoman and the captions written by or for Mr
Griffith is ended. It is easier to listen than to read. And it is long
since you have given us anything significant to see.
You may say that radio will ruin the movies no more than the movies
ruined the theatre. The difference is that your foundation is insecure:
you are monstrously over-capitalized and monstrously undereducated; the
one thing you cannot stand is a series of lean years. You have to keep
on going because you have from the beginning considered the pictures as
a business, not as an entertainment. Perhaps in your desperate straits
you will for the first time try to think about the movie, to see it
steadily and see it whole.
My suggestion to you is that you engage a number of men and women: an
archæologist to unearth the history of the moving picture; a mechanical
genius to explain the camera and the projector to you; a typical movie
fan, if you can find one; and above all a man of no practical capacity
whatever: a theorist. Let these people get to work for you; do what
they tell you to do. You will hardly lose more money than in any other
case.
If the historian tells you that the pictures you produced in 1910 were
better than those you now lose money on, he is worthless to you. But
if he fails to tell you that the pictures of 1910 pointed the way to
the real right thing and that you have since departed from that way,
discharge him as a fool. For that is exactly what has occurred. In
your beginnings you were on the right track; I believe that in those
days you still looked at the screen. Ten years later you were too busy
looking at, or after, your bank account. Remember that ten years ago
there wasn’t a great name in the movies. And then, thinking of your
present plight, recall that you deliberately introduced great names and
chose Sir Gilbert Parker, Rupert Hughes, and Mrs Elinor Glyn. If I may
quote an author you haven’t filmed, it shall not be forgiven you.
Your historian ought to tell you that the moving picture came into
being as the result of a series of mechanical developments; your
technician will add the details about the camera and projector. From
both you will learn that you are dealing with _movement governed by
light_. It will be news to you. You seem not to realize the simplest
thing about your business. Further, you will learn that everything
you need to do _must_ be by these two agencies: movement and light.
(Counting in movement everything of pace and in light everything which
light can make visible to the eye, even if it be an emotion: do you
recall the unnatural splash of white in a street scene in _Caligari_?)
It will occur to you that the cut-back, the alternating exposition of
two concurrent actions, the vision, the dream, are all good; and that
the close-up, dearest of all your finds, usually dissociates a face
or an object from its moving background and is the most dangerous of
expedients. You will learn much from the camera and from what was done
with it in the early days.
I warn you again they were not great pictures except for _The Avenging
Conscience_ and--one you didn’t make--_Cabiria_. To each of these a
poet contributed. (Peace, Mr Griffith; the poet in your case was E. A.
Poe; and the warrior poet of Fiume contributed the scenario for the
second.) Mr Griffith contrived in his picture to project both beauty
and terror by combining _Annabel Lee_ with _The Telltale Heart_. A
sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and of
lost love through an _action_ of mystery and terror. (I think he made
a happy ending somehow--by having the central portion of his story
appear as a dream. How little it mattered since the _real_ emotion came
through the story.) The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere;
it was _felt_. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays
of light. And if I may anticipate the end, let me compare it with a
picture of 1922, a picturization as you call it, of Annabel Lee. It
was all scenery and captions; it presented a detestable little boy and
a pretty little girl doing æsthetic dancing along cliffs by the sea;
one almost saw the Ocean View Hotel in the background. Mercilessly the
stanzas appeared on the screen; but nothing was allowed to _happen_
except a vulgar representation of calf love. I cannot bear to describe
the disagreeable picture of grief at the end; I do not dare to think
what you may now be preparing with a really great poem. The lesson is
not merely one of taste; it is a question of knowing the camera, of
realizing that you _must_ project emotion by movement and by picture
combined.
I am trying to trace for you the development of the serious moving
picture as a _bogus_ art, and I can’t do better than assure you that
it was best before it was an “art” at all. (Or I can indicate that
slap-stick comedy, which you despise, is not bogus, is a real, and
valuable, and delightful entertainment.) I believe that you went out
West because the perpetual sun of southern California made taking easy;
there you discovered the lost romance of America, its Wild West and its
pioneer days, its gold rush and its Indians. You had it in your hands,
then, to make that past of ours alive; a small written literature and
a remnant of oral tradition remained for you to work on. On the whole
you did make a good beginning. You missed fine things, but you caught
the simple ones; you presented the material directly, with appropriate
sentiment. You relied on melodrama, which was the rightest thing you
ever did. Combat and pursuit, the last-minute rescue, were the three
items of your best pictures; and your cutting department, carefully
alternating the fight between white men and red with the slow-starting,
distant, approaching, arriving, victorious troops from the garrison
appealed properly to our soundest instincts. You went into the bad-man
period; you began to make an individual soldier, Indian, bandit,
pioneer, renegade, the focus of your interest: still good because you
related him to an active, living background. Dear Heaven! before you
had filmed Bret Harte you had created legendary heroes of your own.