Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and went to Heaven. It is
just as well. The strain had become a little wearing. We had Liberty
Loan orators, too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came to be
something like being a permanent member of a cheering section. All that
is gone now. Pointing with pride has become rude. The interpretation of
life has been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick up any new
novel at random and the chances are that it will begin about as follows:
"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on
the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It
was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a
narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back
of the town--called in derision by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing'--was almost
entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and
stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, gaunt men, who
seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived."
On page four the reader will find that young Hugh has been apprenticed
to work on the sewers and after that, as the writer warms to his task,
things begin to grow less cheerful. This particular exhibit happens to
be taken from Sherwood Anderson's _Poor White_, but if we go north to
Gopher Prairie, celebrated by Sinclair Lewis in _Main Street_, we shall
find: "A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign
across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of
stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out
dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy
of a mining camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farm wives
sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become
drunk and ready to start home."
Wander as you will through the novels of the year, I assure you that
things will be found to be about the same. Of course, it is possible now
and again to get away from the stale beer, but once a story enters
prohibition time the study of starved souls and complexes begins. There
are also books in which there isn't any mud, but these pay particular
attention to the stifling dust.
It must be that all this sort of life has been going on for some time,
but naturally during the war when the Hun was at the gate it would
hardly have been patriotic to talk about it. Now that it's all among
friends we can talk about our morals and habits and they seem to range
from none to appalling. I can't testify completely to the state of
affairs reported upon by the novelists, because I have spent a good
deal of time recently in the theater and it is only fair to say that
there, at any rate, peach jam and country air still combine to reform
city dwellers, and people get married and live happily ever after, and
some of them dance and sing and make jokes, and, of course, sunlight and
moonlight and pink dresses and green ones and gold and silver ones, too,
abound. My aunt says that this is just as it should be. "There's so much
unhappiness in the world," she says, "that why should we pay money to
see shows and read books that help to remind us about it. The man worth
while," she says, "is the man who can smile when everything goes dead
wrong."
Practically all the shows in town seem to have been written to please my
aunt, but I don't agree with her at all. As a matter of fact, she lives
in Pelham and has never heard of Freud or Jung. I tried to convince her
once that practically all of what we call the civilized world is
inhibited, and she interrupted to say that the last Saturday night
lecturer told them the same thing about Mars. Perhaps it will be just as
well to leave my aunt out of the story at this point and go on to
explain why the modern novel is more stimulating and encouraging to the
ego than the modern play.
First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel or a play or
any form of art is what we call an escape. To be sure, a good many plays
of the year are not calculated to give anybody much of a start on the
bloodhounds, but you understand what I mean. Take, for instance, the
most humdrum person of your acquaintance and you will probably find that
he is an inveterate patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in
real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in the moonlight and
seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over gates. He himself will never be in
the moonlight to any serious extent and he will jump no gates. The
moving pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic cravings.
The man in the theater or the man who reads a book identifies himself
with one of the characters, hero or villain as the case may be, and
while the spell is on he lives the life of the fictional character. Next
morning he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An interesting
thesis might be written on the question of just what bearing the
eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon the falling marriage rate in the
United States, but that would require a great many statistics and a
knowledge of cube root.
Assuming then that art,--and for the purposes of this argument moving
pictures and crook plays will be included under that heading,--takes the
place of life for a great many people, what do we find about the
pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the community in
general? Simply that the man who is addicted to seeing plays and reading
books in which everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even going
to the trouble of doing so much as one good deed a day on his own
account.
The man who went with me to see _Daddies_ a couple of seasons ago glowed
with as complete a spirit of self-sacrifice as I have ever seen during
all three acts of the play. He projected himself into the story and felt
that he was actually patting little children on the head and adopting
orphans and surprising them with Christmas gifts. On the way uptown he
let me pay the fares and buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly
impulses had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very cross and
gloomy for the rest of the week.
Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my friend, I failed to
make any complete identification with anybody on the stage, but I was
also somewhat depressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of
"the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me reflect on the
imperfections of life. It did not seem to me at the time as if any of
the children who live in the flat next door ever really tinkle. A week
later I saw _Hamlet_ and the effect was diametrically opposite.
Everything in the play tended to make life seem more cheerful. He was
too, too solid in flesh, also, and in many other respects he seemed ever
so much worse off than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs
in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. And, goody, goody!
next week an Ibsen season begins!
It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is generally gloomy.
Ibsen understood the psychology of his countrymen. He lived in a land of
long cold winters and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and
lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Norwegians would have
gone home to die or to wish to die. Instead he gave them folk like
Oswald, and all the Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the
moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as much as from
cold. After seeing _Ghosts_ there is no place like home. I wish some of
the Broadway dramatists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have
plays in which nobody could raise the mortgage and the rent crisis in
our own lives would seem less acute.
If the heroine were turned out into a driving snowstorm and stayed
there, I might appreciate our janitor. And if the wild young men and the
women who pay and pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act
and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of degradation, I
know I could derive no little satisfaction from the knowledge that the
elevator in our building runs until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights.