patient. A European, he has been for many years afflicted with something
like “sentimentalomania,” a peculiarly Continental ailment. Skilful
physicians had tried in vain to cure him; change of climate and
environment had been of no avail: even in Siberian tundras and in foggy
London his disposition remained unaltered. In despair he went to Berlin,
where, he was advised, the gravest case of sentimentality would be
annihilated; the reaction proved almost fatal, for the Spree and the
_Sieges Allee_ made such a nauseating impression upon the poor fellow
that his illness was complicated by a severe outbreak of Germanophobia.
As a last resort, the famous specialist, Herr Dr. Von Bierueberalles,
bade him taste the influence of the sanest atmosphere on earth, that of
the States. When even the harshest and most practical American treatment
had failed to knock out the unfortunate’s folly, he was pronounced
hopeless and offered a place among the incurables, which offer he
willingly accepted, and acquiesced. He has since become accustomed to
his disease and bears it rather with defiant joy.
At times, when I seek relief from practical values and sane standards, I
come to have a chat with my friend, the Incurable. Henceforth he will
have the floor.
* * * * *
With whom do I side in the War? Why, of course, with Germany! Perhaps my
attitude shows that I have not been completely cured from the
Prussophobia that I had contracted in Berlin; as it is, I sincerely wish
to see the German boot victorious on the whole continent and over the
mouldy Britons, a rude, dreamless, wingless Napoleon brooding over old
napping Europe. Picture the ruined cathedrals of Belgium and France
“restored” into comfortable barracks for the braves of the Fatherland;
picture the boulevards of Paris and Brusselles, the quays of the Neva
and the Thames, ornated with the statues of the most Christian Wilhelm
and of his illustrious ancestors down to the Great Elector of
Brandenburg; picture the excellent _Schutzman_ reigning supreme,
physically and spiritually, from Vladivostock to Glasgow,—think what an
abyss of hatred, of stirring electrifying hatred will arise among the
rotting nations, and out of hatred self consciousness, endeavors,
cravings, to be crystallized in torrents of new art creations! As for
Germany, I have no fear for the duration of her hegemony; she will
undoubtedly choke from indigestion. But oh, how I dread the reverse
outcome! The victory of the Allies will push Progress a century
backward; it will strengthen the tottering absolutism in Russia; it will
swell the piggish arrogance of the French bourgeois; it will augment the
insular hypocricity of the English Philistine; it will still more, if it
is possible, vulgarize international diplomacy and greed, arousing the
appetites of the so-called Democracies.
Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that
“Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it
came from the pen of the author of _Incense and Splendor_ and _To the
Innermost_. I confess this statement, especially when considering its
authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as
many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has
come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the
Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things
that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have
produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been
a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an
outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such
instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into
the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like
music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s
personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his
interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “_Oh, You
Beautiful Doll_”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my
emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga
Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to
perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and
tenderness into “_O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!_” that one forgot the
triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar
illustration—Gertrude Stein’s _Tender Buttons_.[1] It is an exquisite
little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying
the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me
rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most
obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored
to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard
conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms,
and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of
discovering the “_innerer Klang_.” Both iconoclasts have admirably
succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on
roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of
cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says
the Painter:[2]
The apt use of a word, repetition of this word, twice, three
times or even more frequently, will not only tend to intensify
the inner harmony but also to bring to light unsuspected
spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that,
frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original
external meaning.
Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain
everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful
manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition,
and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral
sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The
_Tender Buttons_ arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of
moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of
one peculiar motive:
(From _A Substance in a Cushion_.)
What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is
no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
(From _Red Roses_.)
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sole hole,
a little less hot.
Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider
stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
(From _Breakfast_.)
What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is
when tears many tears are necessary.
Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain.... Why is
there so much useless suffering. Why is there.
Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I
could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood,
most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase
an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to
the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an
indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—_Adieu_!
IBN GABIROL.
[1] _Tender Buttons_, by Gertrude Stein [Claire Marie, New York].
[2] _The Art of Spiritual Harmony_, by W. Kandinsky [Houghton
Mifflin, Boston].
London Letter
E. BUXTON SHANKS
_London, Sept. 11, 1914._
We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared.
The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down
their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours
in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which
will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to
write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before
you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors,
but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a
rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.
Meanwhile the literary result of the war is nothing but disastrous. All
our more or less “official” poets—Mr. Bridges, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Binyon,
Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, and so on—have come forward with amazing
arrays of abstract nouns. Mr. Bridges, who is almost the worst as well
as almost the best of living poets, printed a copy of verses in _The
Times_ which rhymed far less often than is proper in a ceremonial piece
and ended thus:
Up, careless, awake!
Ye peacemakers, fight!
ENGLAND STANDS FOR HONOUR:
GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT.
Mr. William Watson has been prodigal of poetry and has reached his
highest level in a poem which contains the following singular lines:—
We bit them in the Bight,
The Bight of Heligoland.
It is a very sad business. These gentlemen have retired to their
studies, determined to feel what is proper, and they come out having
done their best; but they will be heartily ashamed of it—I hope—in a few
months. Unfortunately, Mr. John Lane has collected their verses in a
volume and is selling their shame for charity. Three good poems have
come out of the welter, one by Mr. G. K. Chesterton—_The Wife of
Flanders_, a very fine composition—and two by Mr. De La Mare.
The trouble is that a poet does not feel war fever very acutely in a
general sense. Patriotic poetry is nearly always bad. If there is a
worthy reference to the Armada in Elizabethan poetry, it has escaped me;
and the English resistance to Napoleon has never been a very happy
subject for English writers. The good poetry that is provoked by war is
of a different character: it is personal, visual, and concrete. It never
expresses any general aspect of war, but only such subjects as have been
personally observed and felt by the poet. I would give as instances
Rudyard Kipling and the German poet Liliencron, both of whom have
written well about soldiers and fighting, but foolishly about War and
Patriotism.
Yet any poet going about the streets today must see and feel a quantity
of poetical things. A week or so ago, I saw an endless baggage-train
belonging to the artillery, as it passed through Barnet. It had come
from Worcester, commandeering horses and wagons on the way; it was going
to Brentwood and thence—God knows! It was very long and uneven—the carts
had bakers’ and butchers’ names on them—the horses were ridden with
halters and sacks for saddles—the men were tired and dishevelled. I
spoke to one of them who was watering his horse at a trough, offered to
bring him beer from a public-house close by; but someone had given him
tea farther back on the road and he would rot. He thanked me and rode
away, drooping very much over his horse’s neck. It was all a poem in
itself or it gave me the emotions of a poem, because it had none of the
conventional glitter of war. It was poetical because it was
business-like, just as our khaki service uniforms are more beautiful
than the bright clothes the troops wear in peace.
If the war-poets would confine themselves to real and tangible things
like this, they might well express the experience through which we are
now passing. But they seem unhappily obsessed with the idea of
expressing an obstreperous valour and self-confidence and bluster which
the nation is very far from feeling. The nation, so far as I can gauge
it, is showing an obstinate, workmanlike silence and does not either
make light of, or grumble at, the hardships it has to suffer: the
baggage-train of which I have spoken was a very adequate symbol of this.
But no one is ever so greatly out of touch with the people as a popular
poet.
At the beginning of the war, the musical in London were shocked by an
announcement that no German or Austrian music would be played at the
famous Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts. We were naturally a little
upset, as we depend on these performances for solid and regular
entertainment: and it seemed hard and unnecessary to renounce Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and even Schönberg. Luckily good sense and
humour killed the absurd idea, but not before a French and Russian
programme had been substituted for the first Wagner night. Now, much as
I shrink from the thought of having to hear Tschaikowsky instead of
Wagner, I do believe that we have a cause for national resentment
against the second of these composers. His ridiculous and windy
prose-works have been among the writings which have provoked the war.
With Nietzsche, and with the renegade Englishman, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, he has encouraged the notion that there is a special
Teutonic culture which is superior to any other and which deserves to be
spread at any cost. Such an idea has never appealed to the true Germans
(e. g., Goethe, who knew what he owed to France and England), but it has
been useful to the Prussian soldiers, who have debased and vulgarized
true German culture. Perhaps I am exceeding the duties of a London
letter-writer and becoming an advocate; but I think I am giving you an
accurate account of the feelings of those here who admire German poetry
and music. I am not a Chauvinist in art—few people are. I read Goethe
impenitently in the public trains and trams, to the disgust of my
neighbours, and I continue to sing German songs, a little out of tune:
unless my Territorial uniform is served out to me very soon, I shall
probably be arrested as a spy.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
Some years ago a good woman, who would like to be foster-mother to all
struggling heroes, was sitting at midnight in her down-town flat.
Suddenly there was a noise at the front door, someone leapt up the
staircases two steps at a time, and rushed into her room shouting “I’ve
got it! I’ve got it!” She turned around and saw the dark face of a young
actor, shining with excitement. He immediately burst into a superb
interpretation of a passage from _Hamlet_. He had been working over it
for two weeks without being able to satisfy himself, but it had come to
him that evening. He could not wait to let his good friend know, had
jumped on an elevated train, and after being carried two stations too
far in his elation, was there with his prize.
No, this is not the beginning of a magazine story, nor is it a passage
from the biography of a deceased European celebrity. It is the simple
truth about a young American dramatist who is known only to a few;—and
he is of New England stock!
Later the young Hamlet, having completed his acting apprenticeship,
began to write, and went into the real estate business to support
himself. Nobody wanted his plays; they were too “highbrow.” So he began
to build a theatre of his own. The managers’ trust put every difficulty
in his way, and finally, when the building was nearly done and the
company was engaged, succeeded in crushing him. The next attempt was a
repertory company on the East side, but this wiped out what little was
left of his resources before it got fairly started. One play was
produced on Broadway;—it ran two weeks. Last year another was rehearsed
for nine weeks, but it was withdrawn on the day of the dress rehearsal,
because the author refused to make a change insisted on by the manager.
Now the writer has retired to his farm in the Connecticut hills, where
he and a companion have with their own hands built a little theatre. In
this, on Sunday afternoons during the summer, he reads from his fifteen
manuscript plays to such few people as can get there to hear him. And as
he reads, there is on his face much the same enthusiasm as on the night
years ago when he got his passage from _Hamlet_.
I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main
house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola
rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its
left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr.
Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no
old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an
old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a
hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the
intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by
a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses,
unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the
other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the
wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of
wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery.
The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old
farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is,
of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and
there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of
sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors
and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much
gilded fresco.
This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an
apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to
shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly
perfect theatre I have known.
And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of
unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but
in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of _The Lure_ or _The
Fight_. There was another, of subtler treatment, called _Deferred
Payment_, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked
for everything in a woman except companionship. _Keeping Up
Appearances_—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family
engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the
false ideals of the community. _Justice_, written before Galsworthy’s
play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of
a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and
society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr.
Davenport’s best work is in _The Importance of Coming and Going_, a
satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay
on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never
should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep
copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry
any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight
into the mysteries of birth.
Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with
Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have
succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is
master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a
popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager
has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were
only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his
plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr.
Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?”
has not elicited a reply.
This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began;
he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new
plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have
found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are
deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.
And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the
publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a
fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of
society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit
must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in
the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive
aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._
Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be
outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be
acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond
is to the ocean.—_George Brandes._
The Theatre
Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet
(_Blackstone Theatre_)
One of the noblest things I have ever seen on the stage—or ever expect
to see—is the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. The poet, the scholar, the
philosopher, the great gentleman, the lover, the brilliant talker, the
anguished boy—they are all there in the tall man in black with the
graven face and the wonderful hands and the voice of surpassing
richnesses—the tall, graceful, impetuous, humorous, agonized man in
black who reads Shakespeare as if he were improvising and makes a true
and charming human being out of a character that has had the misfortune
to become a problem. “And please observe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “that
this is not a cold Hamlet. He is none of your logicians who reason their
way through the world because they cannot feel their way through it; his
intellect is the organ of his passion; his eternal self-criticism is as
alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.” His moment of expiation,
alone at the back of the stage, with his arms raised to the vaulted
heavens; and his gallant last moment on the throne with its single
silver sentence, “The rest is silence”—these things are too moving to be
articulate about. Richard Le Gallienne has expressed it all as well as
it can be done: “All my life I seem to have been asking my friends,
those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the
greatest, and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me
and see Forbes-Robertson die in _Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that
strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something,
whatever it meant—death, life, immortality, what you will—of a
surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment
of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural
that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend
the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for
Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne
of Denmark.”
M. C. A.
“The Yellow Ticket”
(_Powers’ Theatre_)
A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of
reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured
animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you
witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented
in Michael Morton’s play, _The Yellow Ticket_. To me such a realistic
play in such a realistic presentation has as little to do with dramatic
art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside
my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a
piece of Russian life at Powers’. And I saw it indeed—real, nude,
appalling.
Some of my acquaintances have asked me whether the tragedy could be
true, whether a Jewish girl has no right to live in St. Petersburg,
unless she has bought her protection from the police by selling her
reputation—that is by procuring a yellow ticket, the trade-licence of a
prostitute. Yes, it is true. A Jew is forbidden to abide outside the
Pale of Settlement, with the exception of certain merchants and persons
of a university education, and prostitutes. The latter form the most
desirable element in the eyes of government officials, since their
occupation does not generally presuppose any predilections for
revolutionary ideas or free thought. I have known instances where women
involved in the Revolution, gentiles as well as Jewesses, obtained
yellow tickets which served them the rôle of a _carte blanche_ from the
molestations of the police. There are many anecdotic facts in Russian
life that seem incredible to the outsider, and Mr. Morton has produced
in his play a mass of such facts with photographic verisimilitude. It
must be said to the credit of the actors that they have escaped the
slippery path of melodramatic overdoing.
K.
“Jael”
(_The Little Theatre_)