he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the
hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson
who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as
they were running in _The St. Louis Mirror_, and put them forward in
_Poetry_ as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a
home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of _The St. Louis Mirror_, is
accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him
carry along the work of writing.
In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law
practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote _The Spoon River
Anthology_. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s
work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture
gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home.
Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.
The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets
for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia
and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was
willing to admit he was “sick abed.”
There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book.
He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds
him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other
ones.
Poetry and the Panama-Pacific
EUNICE TIETJENS
Has poetry, as an art, any meaning whatever for the American people, or
has all the recent ink which has been spilled in proclaiming a
renascence of American poetry gone only to water the roots of the
publishing business? These are questions which will be forced upon the
mind of every admirer of the lyric muse in contemplating the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. For in spite
of the millions of money and the acres of ground at the disposal of the
American sections there is nowhere, except in the commercial exhibits of
the publishers, any recognition of the existence of contemporary poetry.
When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the
departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature
of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is
a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund
Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no
commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the
St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening.
All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and
easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening,
together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented.
But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an
attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large
exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and
“Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical.
It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the
theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing,
are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be
eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these
arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately
suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that
commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and
not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine
art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and
a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors
of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly,
readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation
in proportion to the attention paid the other arts.
It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a
local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of
the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as
commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of
the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the
discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at
large.
For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the
American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present
world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe
that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more
adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a
living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater
length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through
commercialism to beauty.
The Mob-God
The seats creak expectantly. The white whirr of the movie machine takes
on a special significance. In the murky gloom of the theater you can
watch row on row of backs becoming suddenly enthusiastic, necks growing
suddenly alive, heads rising to a fresh angle. Turning around you can
see the stupid masks falling, vacant eyes lighting up, lips parting and
waiting the smile, mouths opening waiting to laugh. A miracle is
transpiring. A sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism, a smear
of dead nerves, dead skin, fiberless flesh is beginning to quiver with
an emotion. Laughter is about to be born. The lights dance on the screen
in front. Letters appear in two short words and a gasp sweeps from mouth
to mouth.
The name of a Mob-God flashes before the eyes. Suddenly the screen in
front vanishes. In its place appears a road stretching away to the sky
and lined with trees. The sky is clear. The scene is cool and healthy.
The leaves of the trees flutter familiarly. The road smiles like an old
friend. And far in the distance a speck appears and moves slowly and
jerkily. Wide open mouths and freshened eyes watch the speck grow
larger. It takes the form of a man, a little man with a thin cane. At
last his baggy trousers and his slovenly shoes are visible. His thick
curly hair under the battered derby becomes clear. He walks along
carelessly, quietly, with an infinite philosophy. He walks with an
indescribable step, kicking up one of his feet, shuffling along.
Laughter is born. The vapid faces respond magically to His presence.
Pure, childish delight sounds. The faces are bathed in a human light. A
noisy, wholesome din fills the theater. And the little man comes down
the road with his calm and solemn face, his sad eyes, his impossible
mustache, his ridiculous trousers, and his nervous, spasmodic gait amid
the roars and wild elation of idiots, prostitutes, crass, common churls,
and empty souls converted suddenly into a natural and mutual simplicity.
The stuffy, maddening “bathoes” that clings to the mob like a stink is
dispelled, wiped out of the air. Laughter, laughter, shrieks and peals,
chuckles and smiles, the broad permeating warmth of the simplest,
deepest joy is everywhere.
Charlie Chaplin is before them, Charles Chaplin with the wit of a vulgar
buffoon and the soul of a world artist. He walks, he stumbles, he
dances, he falls. His inimitable gyrations release torrents of mirth
clean as spring freshets. He is cruel. He is absurd; unmanly; tawdry;
cheap; artificial. And yet behind his crudities, his obscenities, his
inartistic and outrageous contortions, his “divinity” shines. He is the
Mob-God. He is a child and a clown. He is a gutter snipe and an artist.
He is the incarnation of the latent, imperfect, and childlike genius
that lies buried under the fiberless flesh of his worshippers. They have
created Him in their image. He is the Mob on two legs. They love him and
laugh.
“Fruits to Om.”
“Glory to Zeus.”
“Mercy, Jesus.”
“Praised be Allah.”
“Hats off to Charlie Chaplin.”
“THE SCAVANGER.”
The Theatre
“ROSMERSHOLM”
(_The Chicago Little Theatre_)
I don’t want to write about _Rosmersholm_ or about Ibsen now. I want to
write about Mme. Borgny Hammer, who is great in the manner of the great
Norwegians.
There is a lot of talk about the Russian soul just at present. I wish
the Norwegian soul might come in for its share of analysis and
appreciation. It is interesting not because of its dark shudderings but
because of its intense light and its clearness. It is like the sun; it
is like wild flowers—not the delicate but the hardy ones.
Mme. Hammer is this sort of person. She is an actress because she must
act or die. She is so intense that the air about her is always
“charged”; and she is so natural and simple that you know right away she
must be great. There wasn’t a particle of difference between her
presence on the stage as the Ibsen heroine and her manner when she meets
you on Michigan Avenue and stops to say that Ibsen is so wonderful it’s
impossible to cut a line of his dialogue. In both situations she is the
genius. Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West was a stunningly-worked-out idea; Mme.
Hammer’s was just—Rebecca West. Mrs. Fiske had a theory of the character
and presented it in a series of subtle and powerful designs. But what
did this wonderful woman do? She didn’t act Rebecca West at all: she
just gave you the impression that she is Rebecca every day of her life.
She made _Rosmersholm_ a natural scene in the life of some modern
family, instead of making it a “study”—an effect in a rather strained
psychology.
I wish I could describe Mme. Hammer’s stage conversations—especially the
parts where she listens. She is so busy feeling Rebecca West that she
has no time to waste in managing her eyes and voice and hands. They take
care of themselves just as they would in her own library. When our best
actresses “listen” they keep their eyes on the person who is talking
with the kind of look that says: “I know it would be bad art now to look
at the audience out of the tail of my eye. I must pay close attention to
what this actor is saying to me.” Mme. Hammer looks at Rosmer with the
same expression she would wear if he were about to say things she hadn’t
heard him rehearse every day for six weeks. If she should break out with
some dialogue of her own it couldn’t sound any more spontaneous than her
reading of the lines Ibsen gave to Rebecca. I know Rebecca’s lines, and
yet I forgot them and decided she must be making things up as she went
along. What richness of simplicity, and what a sturdy beauty!
I have never seen an actress who cares less about herself than Mme.
Hammer and cares so deeply for the character she is presenting. The
expressions of her face are marvelous.... She said to me once that she
disagreed with critics who thought Hedda Gabler had nothing to give.
“She had so much, so very much to give,” she said passionately. No
wonder she thinks so: she is a big woman who herself has an infinity of
things to give.
M. C. A.
“THE TROJAN WOMEN”
Of the production of _The Trojan Women_ of Euripides by The Little
Theatre Company, at the Blackstone Theatre, Sunday, April 11th, one
might waste many, many words and much good space. One might make merry
over the quaint little mannikins trying their hardest to look like
Spartan soldiers. Or again, a whole column might be devoted to the
insipid posturings of the saintly-pretty lady who played Helen. Much
sarcasm might be expended on the flops done, in the approved
French-tragedy style, by the lady who played Andromache. A whole thesis
might be written by an enterprising student at some correspondence
school on the use of the Vaudeville Spotlight in Classic Greek Tragedy.
And Hamlet’s advice to the players might be quoted with some profit to a
few of the company: pointed emphasis at the “do not _mouth_ your words”
part of the advice, to the lady who speaks the speech beginning:
Lo, yonder ships: I ne’er set foot on one,
But tales and pictures tell, when over them
Breaketh a storm not all too strong to stem,
Each man strives hard, the tiller gripped, the mast
Manned, the hull baled, to face it, till at last
Too strong breaks the o’erwhelming sea: lo, then
They cease, and yield them up as broken men
To fate and the wild waters.
And last of all one might say unkind things about the blending of the
voices in the chorus.
All the above points, however, I know are very debatable. There are two
that cannot be debated. Two that outbalance by far all the other defects
of the production.
If all the cast had voices like corncrakes, and used them after the
manner of country-town amateurs, the production would still be worth
seeing for the thrilling pictures of colour and line presented by
individuals and the ensemble. And rising, soaring away above all the
petty little defects is the wonderful, majestical verse of Euripides.
What could be more beautiful than the lyric:
Even as the sound of a song
Left by the way, but long
Remembered, a tune of tears
Falling where no man hears,
In the old house as rain,
For things loved of yore:
But the dead hath lost his pain
And weeps no more.
It is greatly to be regretted that it has been thought fit to cut that
lyric, Cassandra’s Hymn to Hymen, and many of the other beautiful parts
of the play.
The whole thing might have been better in a hundred ways—then again it
might have been worse in ten hundred ways. Let us be glad that we had an
opportunity of seeing the wonderful thing, even though the Carnegie
Peace Foundation is backing it up.
D.
Music
BUSONI
Busoni—prophet. Where Bauer is a priest, Hofmann a wonder-child, Bachaus
a poet, Ganz an efficient, Paderewski a magician, and Samaroff a
failure—Busoni is a prophet. His voice arrests the senses, throws a
silence over them. At first, the world is obscured; later the last trace
of it is gone. The song of the prophet vibrates through new spaces.
Listening ones follow without restraint, so great is the magnetic pull
of it; they follow, enchanted, through new spaces to new and miraculous
realms of life, where music is more real than ivory or pine.
With one paragraph’s deference to the clay-members, let them be informed
that Ferruccio Busoni is a composer and concert-pianist, almost fifty
years old, who began his study and piano-practice at a most tender age,
and who is now considered to be something of an artist—that is, when he
isn’t off pursuing some new notion about quarter-tones, or his one
hundred and thirteen new scales for the pianoforte. He has these
aberrations. But then, musicians are crazy anyway. At a recent concert
with the Chicago Symphony Mr. Busoni played one concerto by Saint-Saëns
and another one which he himself composed. Incidentally, Mr. Busoni’s
composition was based on North America. It is the least bit regrettable
that we are so busy and hurried that Mr. Busoni could introduce us,
through a work of art, to the country we hurry over. He played these
works on an inferior piano and did several questionable things in his
playing, such as let his wrist sag, etc. His personal friends insist
that he hates to play the piano. Let the clay-members join the blessed
minority in silent thanksgiving that he has hated it hard enough to have
scornfully brushed aside the limitations of wood and wire, that his
hatred is greater than a world of near-love.
On his recent appearance here, at the very start, Busoni passed above
the norm of virtuosity in piano-manipulation, and the tonal explorations
began. It was quite bewildering. The mob thought it was fine. The
authorities had to admit that it was good. Young ladies considered it
divine. Professional musicians—always self-appointed and astute
critics—were prevented from indulging in their customary snap-judgments
while the artist played, and were held, opinionless, to the music. The
listeners who possessed not only sensitive ears but also receptive minds
and fluent imaginations were swung clear of earth, were lifted into a
region where no dead wall separated them from the strong voice of the
prophet. He was saying tremendous things. He forced upon smaller minds
the rush, the splendor, the glittering plunge of tones, such as they had
never dreamed of before. He gave them the dream. And this was what the
yet smaller and the very smallest minds, down between the dead walls,
admired, but sanctioned grudgingly, as brilliant style. There were noisy
hands and exclamations, as at a cock-fight. But the blessed minority
heard and recognized the piano-playing of today, tomorrow, and the
future. The instrument had at last shaken off the curse of apartment
houses, and had come into its own.
Wilhelm Bachaus sings the fancies of a dreamy young poet; Paderewski
thrills his audience whether he smiles or sulks at the keyboard; Bauer
intones the affirmation of a lovely faith in tonal beauty; Godowsky
presents necklaces of perfectly carven gems to the subtly responsive
ones; these men and a few others justify their own uses of the
pianoforte. They are strongly individual, and are not to be balanced,
one against another. Ferruccio Busoni, however, would cast a shadow if
he traveled earthward from his altitudes. He is solitary and unique.
Others work up through human difficulties in order to perfect their
means of expressing tonal ideals. Busoni takes their goal as a fresh
starting-point, and tonal ideals become a further means, to voice the
surge of strength which he essentially is, to express the resistless,
flashing drive of the universe. His flying clusters of notes are the
tail of a comet, of some swift participator in cosmic rhythms. The swirl
of his music-fire is a glorious something for which the pianoforte must
providentially have been created—a genuine offering to the vigilant
keepers of Beauty.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
TWO CHICAGO PIANISTS
I have not heard all the young Chicago musicians play, but of those I
have heard there are two who stand out as musicians and pianists instead
of merely good players of the piano. They are Carol Robinson and James
Whittaker.
Miss Robinson is an Illinois girl who came to Chicago to be Fannie
Bloomfield Zeisler’s “artist pupil” (or something like that) and chief
assistant. A year ago she was playing the piano efficiently; this year
she is using that as a starting-point and proving that she has a real
right to the instrument. She has a technical foundation that cannot fail
her; it is already equal to practically all the tests she may need to
put it to, and she uses it as surely and unconsciously as one uses his
feet to walk with. Her playing at present has the clearness and
innocence of a brook; if she can get something of the sea into her
feeling she will be big. The music Carol Robinson gives is not so far
the expression of some incredible longing to make the piano serve as an
outlet. It is natural and beautiful—and absolutely untroubled. It is
articulate and yet it has not acquired a meaning. It is without a hint
of intensity. Carol Robinson has the most interesting part of the
struggle before her—the part for which her genius for hard work is
merely a preparation: what does she want to say through the piano?
James Whittaker’s music is very personal, very sensitive, very charming,
and very marked by good taste. It is by far the most musical playing I
have heard in Chicago. Mr. Whittaker went to Berlin to study and then to
Paris, where he finished and became an ardent exponent of the French
school. His technical equipment is not the perfect tool that Carol
Robinson’s is; by which I don’t mean that it is at all inadequate, but
somehow you feel that he is always conscious of the demands he puts upon
it and that it sometimes leaves him unsatisfied. His theory is that most
of the methods taught outside the French Conservatoire are “short cuts”;
but his work suggests that he succeeds in spite of his theory. For he
does succeed in the one great essential: in making music. His relation
to the piano is a dedication, and his music is vibrant with feeling. His
tone production is a pressure with a fine nervousness in it, and he has
the real “pearl” quality in his scales. His Chopin is perhaps, as he
himself says, a little “scientific.” His César Franck just misses being
deep _enough_. He is at his best in quite modern French music, or in a
thing like Grieg’s Cradle Song which he plays very, very beautifully.
Brahms he doesn’t want to play, I imagine; but the breadth that Brahms
requires and gives is the very quality that would make what James
Whittaker has to say (and is saying very charmingly) a bigger and deeper
thing.
M. C. A.
WITH KREISLER
_Four weeks in the Trenches, by Fritz Kreisler._ [_Houghton
Mifflin Company, Boston._]
I had a big day with Ruby Davis, our Chicago little violinist, out in
the country, roaming, climbing, racing, conversing, but not talking.
Talk we left behind us, in the city drawing-rooms. Between pranks and
escapades we found rest in sitting side by side and reading Kreisler’s
war impressions. I knew that Ruby worshipped Fritz, but his reflections
on the book of the violinist have shown me that in addition to
admiration he possesses critical perception. We delighted in the pages
written with spontaneous beauty, without pose, without the banal
superstructure of sentimental colors, but revealing a tense, vibrating,
virile artistic heart, reservedly sensitive to bloody horrors as well as
to imperceptible impressions of human emotions concealed beneath the
dehumanizing military uniform. Ruby called my attention to the fact that
only such an artist as Kreisler could have had a broad non-professional
outlook on men and things, an artist of unusual versatility, of a wide
education, of rich experiences in various fields of life. Yet, he added,
only the keen, delicate ear of a musician could have perceived the
symphonic sounds on the battle-field and in the trenches, as, for
instance, in this passage: