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 THE DRAMA AND 
 THE STAGE 
 
 BY 
 
 LUDWIG LEWISOHN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1982, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 MINTED IN THE U S. A. BV 
 
 THE OUINN BODEN COMPANY 
 RAH WAY. N. J.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 Prefatory Note L 
 
 THE brief essays and studies that compose this vol- 
 ume are desultory only in appearance. They were 
 written on, but not for a particular day, and seek to 
 illustrate, whatever the date or the material, a theory 
 of both the drama and the theatre that is coherent and 
 that is profoundly implicated with permanent quali- 
 ties of life and art. They all had their first appearance 
 in the Nation, to the editor of which, Mr. Oswald 
 Garrison Villard, I am indebted, among many other 
 things, for his permission to reprint them here. 
 
 L. L. 
 
 1052972
 
 CONTENTS 
 I. THE NEW DRAMATURGY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE DRAMA AND THE STAGE .... 3 
 
 THE THEATRE: MYTHICAL AND REAL . . 6 
 
 THE CRITIC AND THE THEATRE . . . . 12 
 
 A NOTE ON TRAGEDY 19 
 
 A NOTE ON COMEDY 24 
 
 ON SENTIMENTAL COMEDY AND MELODRAMA . 29 ? 
 
 A NOTE ON DRAMATIC DIALOGUE . . . . 35^ 
 
 A NOTE ON ACTING . . . ... 40 
 
 II. THE AMERICAN STAGE 
 
 MR. BELASCO EXPLAINS ... . . . 47 
 
 FOUR THEATRE GUILD PRODUCTIONS ... S3 
 
 GORKI AND ARTHUR HOPKINS .... 72 
 
 A MODERN CHRONICLE PLAY .... 78 
 
 THE TYRANNY OF LOVE 84 
 
 ACCORDING TO SARCEY . . . . "* 89 
 
 PITY AND TERROR .... . . . 94 
 
 SUSAN GLASPELL . ... . . . 102 
 
 AN EVENING AT THE MOVIES . . . . 1 1 1 
 
 THE ONE- ACT PLAY IN AMERICA . . . .116 
 
 THE LONELY CLASSICS . 121
 
 vi Contents 
 
 III. CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FRENCH THEATRE OF TO-DAY . . . 147 
 THE GERMAN THEATRE OF TO-DAY . . . 152 
 SHAW: HEIGHT AND DECLINE . . . .158 
 THE QUIET TRUTH . . . . .168 
 
 BARRIE, OR THE SILVER LINING . . . .174 
 
 ARCHER, OR LOADED DICE 179 
 
 SOMERSET MAUGHAM HIMSELF . . . .184 
 MAX REINHARDT 188 
 
 IV. ART, LIFE AND THE THEATRE 
 
 A CERTAIN PLAYWRIGHT 195 
 
 WITHIN OUR GATES 201 
 
 PLAY-MAKING .... ... . . 207 
 
 CONVERSATION . . . . .., . .212 
 
 MARIONETTES . . . . ... . .218 
 
 TOWARD A PEOPLE'S THEATRE .... . .223 
 
 THE STROLLING PLAYERS . . . . .228 
 
 INTERLUDE .... . ., . . 232 
 
 OASIS ......... 237 
 
 UNDERWORLD . . 241
 
 I 
 
 Toward a New Dramaturgy
 
 The Drama and the Stage 
 
 THE critical observer of our living theatre, to be 
 useful at all, must cultivate good humor, patience and 
 tolerance. To great humility of expectation and a 
 gratitude for small mercies he must add a steadfast 
 determination not to be taken in. For the theatre is 
 a place of many illusions, the home of over-eager 
 minds and of harsh ambitions, the scene of an alterna- 
 tion of blazing splendor and of bleak despair. No one 
 can understand the theatre who sees it too intently 
 from within; no one can serve it who does not, as it 
 is to-day, hold it a little cheap. Because the theatre of 
 to-day is being killed by the theatre. This mechan- 
 ism which, stripped to its essentials, is but a wooden 
 platform sheltered from the winds, this simple thing 
 placed now on a hill-side, now in an inn-yard, now in a 
 room, has become an end in itself. Revolving stages, 
 subtle lights, elaborate scenes are in their right orde* 
 beautiful and useful things. They become a menace 
 when they cause it to be forgotten that the platform is 
 the platform of the eternal poet struggling with the 
 mysteries of the earth. This is not fine language; it 
 is the plain and sober truth. But who will admit it? 
 David Belasco? Or the hundred mechanics of the 
 
 3
 
 4 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 theatre who will swear to you that John Galsworthy 
 may be a dramatist for the study but that he doesn't 
 understand the theatre? 
 
 As if, indeed, there were anything so intricate to 
 understand! But this trumped-up technical intricacy 
 of play-writing is the bread and butter as well as the 
 chief pride of its adepts adepts of a delusion which 
 they uphold to save their trade and their self-impor- 
 tance. Learned men have come to their aid, interpret- 
 ing the transformations of that ancient platform as the 
 history of the drama; poets have abetted them by inno- 
 cent fear and wonder. Yet that delusion crumbles at 
 the most obvious test. On the stage, as it is to-day, 
 we have seen the Medea of Euripides and the Book of 
 Job; we have seen Everyman; we have seen Shake- 
 speare; we have seen Ibsen and Hauptmann, Galswor- 
 thy and Shaw, and the fantasies of Maeterlinck and 
 Dunsany. Which of these understood that mysteri- 
 ous mechanism? Which of them had that esoteric 
 sense for what is "of the theatre"? 
 
 Let us have done, first of all then, with this verbiage. 
 
 A play is a dialogue which, when spoken by actors 
 from a platform, holds the minds of men through its 
 culmination toward some physical or spiritual end. 
 
 The power and depth of that sense of culmination is 
 the measure of the play's dramatic life. 
 
 Any dialogue that has dramatic life can be acted on 
 any stage.
 
 The Drama and the Stage 5 
 
 A born dramatist can write drama without ever hav- 
 ing seen a theatre. If an audience refuses to hear 
 him, it is because the soul of his work is alien from 
 that audience's collective soul. 
 
 The popular playwright is not he who understands 
 either the theatre or the drama best, but he who flat- 
 ters men most and disturbs them least. 
 
 It is in the intellectual character of the audience, 
 not in the mechanism of the theatre or the technique of 
 writing plays, that the causes for the condition of our 
 stage are to be sought. From a platform you cannot 
 speak to one man; you speak to many. And the group 
 is always less intelligent, less flexible, less merciful than 
 the individual. The hope of the theatre is in the fact 
 that there are groups and groups. A group has been 
 found to keep Jane Clegg in a New York play-house 
 for many consecutive weeks. But since the commer- 
 cial managers seek not the best group but the largest, 
 the staple of our stage is sodden melodrama and brain- 
 less farce. The serviceable critic will try to rally the 
 smaller groups and sustain their contact with the more 
 civilized enterprises of the theatre.
 
 The Theatre: Mythical and Real 1 
 
 IN the cities of the East and of the West Mr. Gordon 
 Craig would have theatres arise that are also temples. 
 They are to be majestic but not cold; in them are to 
 blend the precious glow and glint of gold and ivory 
 and jade. Within and without they are to be durable 
 and changeless in their massive beauty. Upon their 
 stages the scenery is to consist of wrought and carven 
 symbols. There is to be nothing perishable, nor any- 
 thing that too closely recalls the perishable. By mel- 
 low daylight actors from whom "all weaknesses of the 
 flesh have been eradicated," wearing masks, or since 
 even these actors are but a concession Uebermarion- 
 ettes are to perform a silent and universal drama. And 
 Mr. Craig has, no doubt, a vision of faithful multi- 
 tudes streaming upon appointed holy days to these 
 temples, hushed with awe and wonder before the splen- 
 dor of their mysteries. 
 
 Well, Mr. Craig is mistaken. No multitudes would 
 come to his temples, but only a few forlorn and feebly 
 irritable esthetes and reactionaries. It is not the dura- 
 bleness and lofty beauty of his theatres that will keep 
 the multitude away. For the barbarous multitude will 
 
 1 The Theatre Advancing. By Edward Gordon Craig. 
 
 6
 
 The Theatre: Mythical and Real 7 
 
 go as gladly to a temple as to a barn to see a play. 
 But it demands a play. And at this point Mr. Craig's 
 beautiful and imaginative vision suddenly exhibits a 
 staring gap. What is the play to be about? Granted 
 that it is to be a super-pantomime acted by austere 
 men or marionettes, it must express something; it must 
 tell something. The content of that play, so far as Mr. 
 Craig permits us dimly to gather and infer, is to sym- 
 bolize by universal gestures the inner mystery of what 
 is man and the world and God. But in order to sym- 
 bolize that mystery in art so clearly and universally 
 that men shall flock to his vast rituals, the dramatist 
 must first have solved it. And his solution must com- 
 mend itself to all. He must, in other words, first rees- 
 tablish an historic condition analogous to that of the 
 thirteenth century in which the eternal mysteries are 
 held to have been finally explained and in which sym- 
 bolical embodiments of this explanation are as welcome 
 in the market-place as in the sanctuary. 
 
 Of this necessity Mr. Craig is quite aware. He is 
 thoroughly consistent. He holds that "modern life is 
 damnable," that all our troubles have been brewed by 
 the Materialist Fool, that what we lack is "belief and 
 the power to worship." He thinks that a mob is an ugly 
 thing and a king a beautiful one; he is wholly innocent 
 of the desperate materialism of his own thought. "Hail 
 once more," he exclaims, "to that divine arrogance 
 which knew that the obedience of the many to the judg-
 
 8 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 ments of the one meant happiness to the mass of men." 
 He thinks that the ancient Hindus' "love of loveliness 
 and sanity sprang from their love of obedience to their 
 arrogant rulers," and that if we can but revive their 
 awe and wonder and humility on earth then "States 
 and religions will arise all fresh once more and Man- 
 kind will again be happy." It is the old and amiable 
 delusion of the romantic dreamer who dreams an 
 ordered and beautiful and hierarchical world with him- 
 self, of course, stationed near the top of the hierarchy, 
 building the majestic temples of his vision, and never 
 picturing himself as one of the obedient multitude 
 whom it pleases him to imagine hanging upon his lips 
 and enthralled by the authority of his soul. If he once 
 did that his gorgeous vision, pinnacles and all, would 
 fade like a puff of smoke. For he would at once dis- 
 cover in his own heart the eternal heretic and rebel 
 who has but to arise and to reflect to know that it is 
 the essence of his manhood to be free. Whatever, then, 
 may be Mr. Craig's gifts as a scenic artist and stage 
 craftsman and they are, doubtless, of the highest it 
 is clear that his theories of the theatre have been treated 
 far more gravely than they deserve. 
 
 What Mr. Craig, in fact, succeeds in doing is to 
 leave us with a feeling of unwonted tenderness and 
 charity toward that actual theatre at which, for the 
 best reasons possible, we may just have been jeering. 
 For that theatre, more in some countries than in oth-
 
 The Theatre: Mythical and Real 9 
 
 ers, but a little everywhere, tries to fulfil its true func- 
 tion and to serve mankind in its appointed way. It is 
 the way of all art which, sometimes aiming after the 
 illusion of the real, sometimes by a synthesis of the 
 elements of experience, clarifies and interprets our 
 world for us, shows forth its hidden meaningfulness 
 and beauty, and thus, by persuading the individual to 
 rise, through the contemplation of the concrete, to a 
 larger vision, takes from him the burden of the pain 
 and confusion of life. It does for him precisely what 
 the creative act does for the poet. The latter transfers 
 his experience to the objective world and gives it form 
 and meaning. He then sees it apart from himself under 
 some eternal aspect and is free of its tyrannies and 
 fears. We others, contemplating the poet's works in 
 the study or on the stage, are liberated by them and 
 raised above ourselves in just the measure in which they 
 hold and interpret human experiences that we too have 
 known and have endured. Hence to increase the dig- 
 nity and worth and appeal of any art, including the art 
 of the theatre, it is necessary (whether the technical 
 method be naturalistic or idealistic) to bring it ever 
 closer and closer to the concrete realities of man's strug- 
 gle with himself and with his world. Mr. Craig wants 
 to create first a new mythology and then a new ritual 
 in his durable theatres. What the sane friends of the 
 theatre desire is to strip it of those remnants of the old 
 mythologies and rituals that still so often make it a
 
 IO Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 tawdry and a shameful thing. Mr. Craig wants a 
 drama of faith. Let him go to see the melodramas. 
 There he will find fierce tribal faiths and age-long 
 delusions of hatred and terror still at their ancient 
 business of intolerance and persecution and self-right- 
 eousness and force. There he will learn that, if he were 
 to build his theatre-temples in his new order, and free 
 spirits were to build still other theatres, the kings and 
 sacerdotal managers of his dim shrines would soon be 
 at their old tricks of burning both the non-conformist 
 and his house. 
 
 The problem of improving or, if you will, reforming 
 the living theatre is, in truth, neither so intricate nor so 
 esoteric as Mr. Craig and a few other theorists would 
 have us believe. The theatre on the Continent of 
 Europe has been, for rather more than thirty years, in 
 a very tolerable condition. In no city of any consid- 
 erable size in France or Germany or Austria or Switz- 
 erland or Holland or Scandinavia has a season gone by 
 without many adequate representations of the works of 
 the modern masters or a few dignified and intelligent 
 revivals of the classics of all countries. For a variety 
 of reasons, some obscure enough, some clear to any 
 observer, the theatre of the English-speaking countries 
 lags behind. The immediate practical problem is obvi- 
 ous: to work towards a condition of our theatre and 
 its audiences in which Shakespeare and Sheridan, Gals- 
 worthy and Shaw will be as gladly and as widely heard
 
 The Theatre: Mythical and Real n 
 
 as Moliere and Goethe, Ibsen and Hauptmann, Her- 
 vieu and Schnitzler are heard in their respective coun- 
 tries. That problem, assuredly, will not be solved, it 
 will not even be touched, by an amiable and gifted 
 mystic who flies in the face of historic processes.
 
 The Critic and the Theatre 
 
 IF there is one person, we are often tempted to as- 
 sert, who should not be permitted to criticize the 
 drama, it is the dramatic critic. It is not because he 
 commonly fails of being sensitive, honest, and even 
 learned. It is because his profession puts him in a false 
 position. Consider for a moment the man's task. He 
 must be, on command, in a receptive mood toward the 
 most complex of all the arts. But his receptivity must 
 be controlled from the start by a conscientious inner 
 censorship of his impressions. He sees to report and 
 enjoys to dissect. The wise passiveness which is the 
 condition of fine artistic judgment is not for him. He 
 cannot, like the critic of literature, attack his document 
 again, reflect and reconsider, and correct his morning 
 mood by his midnight one. He must grasp his bright, 
 brief, transitory pageant at once, and he must grasp it, 
 ideally, with the imaginative innocence of a child, the 
 austere detachment of a philosopher, the rich sympa- 
 thies of a man. For the poorest play, feeble and fool- 
 ish though it be, is in its very nature plastic vision, 
 philosophy and life. It is vision, obviously, through 
 its mobile and colorful embodiment on the stage; it is 
 
 12
 
 The Critic and the Theatre 13 
 
 philosophy, since every dramatic action culminates in 
 an ending which betrays the playwright's attitude to 
 the totality of things; it is life by being an example of 
 an art of imitation. No wonder, then, that the dra- 
 matic critic, jaded by his round of enforced apprecia- 
 tion on the one hand, or unable, on the other, to keep 
 so many psychical balls in the air, either hides the 
 nobler part of him and deals in trenchant, critical de- 
 tail, the flash of wit, the exploitation of his personality, 
 or that, like an unskilful juggler, he drops the balls, 
 denies their existence, and flees for permanent refuge 
 to a theory that artificially simplifies the art he con- 
 templates and reduces his function to something more 
 agreeable with mortal powers. Thus we have brilliant 
 comment on this or that aspect of the theatre, but com- 
 ment that is, in any larger sense, quite sterile. Or else 
 we have learned and charming and urbane exercitations 
 upon all externals of theatrical and dramatic history 
 and practice, which leave the core of the matter quite 
 untouched. We have Hamlet with the critic substi- 
 tuting himself for the protagonist; we have Hamlet 
 with Hamlet left out. 
 
 There is Mr. George Jean Nathan. 1 That he some- 
 times makes the judicious wince and often makes the 
 fastidious shudder is a small matter. For he has some 
 of the qualifications of a dramatic critic in a higher 
 degree than any other American contemporary. He 
 
 1 Comedians All. By George Jean Nathan.
 
 14 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 has an unrivaled knowledge of the modern stage, a 
 thorough impatience with sham and cant, and flashes 
 as in his brief note on the artificial play of the most 
 searching insight. But because sentimentality and 
 sweetishness and foolish uplift have so often among us 
 masqueraded as serious art, he has huddled everything 
 /that seeks to touch the soul, the genuine as well as the 
 false, into one basket and flung that basket out of his 
 back window. What he wants is intelligent entertain- 
 ment, plays that will please a comfortable and discrim- 
 inating man of the world. He will not get what he 
 wants, and much of his fine energy will have been spent 
 quite in vain. No man can write a serious play, and 
 show men and women acting and suffering, except upon 
 spiritual and moral terms, except with attitudes, opin- 
 ions, and principles that reveal his inmost soul even 
 more than theirs and bind the playwright and his play 
 to stern and fundamental things. The drama is, quite 
 literally, what Aristotle called all poetry more philo- 
 sophical than history. Do (Edipus Rex and Hamlet 
 afford intelligent entertainment, or to come to Mr. 
 Nathan's special field An Enemy of the People or 
 The Weavers or The Lower Depths? The intelli- 
 gently entertaining play, which commonly assumes the 
 form of polite comedy, is the product of small, com- 
 pact, untroubled communities. Such the vast seethings 
 of the world's life tolerate less and less. Mr. Nathan, 
 in a word, has no patience with tinsel and paper flow-
 
 The Critic and the Theatre 15 
 
 ers. He finds them out with an unerring gaze and with 
 a cold exuberant enjoyment reduces them to pulp. But 
 the theatre cannot be helped by the mere exposure of 
 isolated instances of hollowness and fraud, even though 
 that exposure be full of energy and wit and good sense. 
 As the playwright inevitably reveals his special percep- 
 tion of ultimate values in his plays, so the dramatic 
 critic, speaking of those plays, betrays the road of the 
 mind upon which he travels. And Mr. Nathan's pil- 
 grimage, unless we mistake him grossly, is towards 
 orchids. He wants to sit quietly in his aloof and faun- 
 like elegance and glance at the exquisite form and glow 
 of the petals and forget annoying things, and, through 
 a succession of such experiences, build a house of art 
 in which he can be secure from the tyranny of the 
 Puritan and the contamination of the mob. But never 
 was the theatre less likely than to-day to become a gen- 
 tleman's Paradise. We must either acquiesce in its 
 present sentimentality and gaudiness and that a man 
 of Mr. Nathan's sophistication cannot do or else we 
 must cast in our lot with the world process and seek to 
 bring the gravest and most stirring of the arts nearer, 
 in its true character, to an ever-increasing number of 
 men and that Mr. Nathan will not do. Thus it comes 
 about that, with all its vehemence and strength and 
 veracity in detail, Mr. Nathan's critical structure is 
 built of fragile materials in a precarious and a lonely 
 place.
 
 1 6 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 Professor Brander Matthews, 1 through his teaching 
 and writing, through his unfailing vivacity and accom- 
 plished scholarship, has probably done more to touch 
 the minds of intelligent people with a vivid interest in 
 the theatre than any other living American. If he has 
 not helped the American theatre itself as powerfully 
 as, given his station 'and influence, he might have done, 
 it is because he has too often acquiesced in its con- 
 dition upon a somewhat rigid application of certain 
 historical analogies. These analogies he reiterates in 
 The Principles of Playmaking. Since Shakespeare and 
 Moliere were, first of all, successful playwrights, who 
 made an immediate appeal to the audiences of their 
 
 
 
 day, Professor Matthews makes such an appeal the 
 criterion of the dramatist of all ages. But Shakespeare 
 and Moliere wrote for very small and homogeneous 
 audiences. To which of the innumerable audiences of 
 a contemporary metropolis, it must be asked, shall the 
 young dramatist address himself? Whose applause 
 shall decide whether he makes an analogous appeal in 
 his own time and place that of the audiences of some 
 bed-room farce, or of the Theatre Guild? And how 
 long a run shall, for a given play, constitute its test of 
 that broad popularity which we rightly grant Shake- 
 speare and Moliere on the score of a few perform- 
 ances? Nor is it always true to-day that the "audience 
 is a crowd composed of all sorts and conditions of 
 
 1 Principles of Playmaking. By Brander Matthews.
 
 The Critic and the Theatre 17 
 
 men." A New York audience, for instance, is com- 
 posed of people who can achieve a certain standard of 
 dress, who can risk with galleries abolished and bal- 
 conies restricted two dollars on an evening's enter- 
 tainment or boredom, who belong neither to the great 
 religious communions that disapprove of the theatre, 
 nor to that very cultivated minority which, in its pres- 
 ent state, disdains it. Hence our playwright, far from 
 being obliged to "deal with subjects appealing to col- 
 lective human nature," must, for immediate success, 
 cater to the tastes and prejudices of a narrow, inflex- 
 ible, commonly over-fed bourgeoisie, desperately fright- 
 ened by ideas and unfamiliar modes of feeling. Thus 
 the phrase of Moliere, "to please the public," has little 
 left in common with its original meaning, and every 
 first-rate modern dramatist has had to help destroy the 
 contemporary theatre as he found it in order to be 
 heard at all. So soon as we grasp the true nature of 
 these conditions, the entire theory which differentiates 
 the secondary literary qualities of a play from its pri- 
 mary theatrical ones collapses. To the right audi- 
 ence, once it be found and gathered, a notable drama's 
 excellence in invention, structure and style will consti- 
 tute its theatrical effectiveness; its "veracity of char- 
 acter" will afford all needed "histrionic opportunities" 
 who would desire opportunities that do not grow out 
 of such veracity? and its truth to the human environ- 
 ment with which it deals will be picturesque enough.
 
 1 8 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 No, it is not acquiescence from which the most fruitful 
 criticism can arise. Our theatre is not, so far as it is 
 most prosperous, the theatre of the great dramatists 
 fallen upon evil days. It is the theatre of a class and 
 an economic condition from which we must free it for 
 the service of nobler and more human things.
 
 A Note on Tragedy 
 
 IT has been said many times, and always with an 
 air of authority, that there is no tragedy in the modern 
 drama. And since tragedy, in the minds of most edu- 
 cated people, is hazily but quite firmly connected with 
 the mishaps of noble and mythical personages, the 
 statement has been widely accepted as true. Thus very 
 tawdry Shakespearean revivals are received with a tra- 
 ditional reverence for the sternest and noblest of all 
 the art-forms that is consciously withheld from Ghosts 
 or Justice or The Weavers. Placid people in college 
 towns consider these plays painful. They hasten to 
 pay their respects to awkward chantings of Gilbert 
 Murray's Swinburnian verses and approve the pleasant 
 mildness of the pity and terror native to the Attic stage. 
 The very innocuousness of these entertainments as 
 well as the pain that Ibsen and Hauptmann inflict 
 should give them pause. Pity and terror are strong 
 words and stand for strong things. But our public 
 replies in the comfortable words of its most respectable 
 critics that tragedy has ceased to be written. 
 
 These critics reveal a noteworthy state of mind. 
 They are aware that tragedy cuts to the quick of life 
 and springs from the innermost depth of human 
 thinking because it must always seek to deal in some 
 
 19
 
 2O Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 intelligible way with the problem of evil. But since it 
 is most comfortable to believe that problem to have 
 been solved, they avert their faces from a reopening 
 of the eternal question and declare that the answer of 
 the Greeks and the Elizabethans is final. They are 
 also aware, though more dimly, that all tragedy in- 
 volves moral judgments. And since they are unaccus- 
 tomed to make such judgments, except by the light of 
 standards quite rigid and quite antecedent to experi- 
 ence, they are bewildered by a type of tragic drama 
 that transfers its crises from the deeds of men to the 
 very criteria of moral judgment, from guilt under a law 
 to the arraignment of the law itself. 
 
 Macbeth represents in art and life their favorite 
 tragic situation. They can understand a gross and 
 open crime meeting a violent punishment. When as 
 in King Lear, the case is not so plain, they dwell long 
 and emphatically on the old man's weaknesses in order 
 to find satisfaction in his doom. In the presence of 
 every tragic protagonist of the modern drama they are 
 tempted to play the part of Job's comforters. They 
 are eager to impute to him an absoluteness of guilt 
 which shall, by implication, justify their own moral 
 world and the doctrine of moral violence by which they 
 live. The identical instinct which in war causes men 
 to blacken the enemy's character in order to justify 
 their tribal rage and hate, persuades the conventional 
 critic to deny the character of tragedy to every action
 
 A Note on Tragedy 21 
 
 in which disaster does not follow upon crime. Yet, 
 rightly looked upon, man in every tragic situation is a 
 Job, incapable and unconscious of any degree of volun- 
 tary guilt that can justify a suffering as sharp and con- 
 stant as his own. 
 
 Thus modern tragedy does not deal with wrong and 
 just vengeance, which are both, if conceived absolutely, 
 pure fictions of our deep-rooted desire for superiority 
 and violence. It is inspired by compassion. But com- 
 passion without complacency is still, alas, a very rare 
 emotion. And it seeks to derive the tragic element in 
 human life from the mistakes and self-imposed com- 
 pulsions, not from the sins, of men. The central idea 
 of Ghosts, for instance, is not concerned with the sin 
 of the father that is visited upon the son. It is con- 
 cerned, as Ibsen sought to make abundantly clear, with 
 Mrs. Alving's fatal conformity to a social tradition that 
 did not represent the pureness of her will. Her tragic 
 mistake arises from her failure to break the law. The 
 ultimate and absolute guilt is in the blind, collective 
 lust of mankind for the formulation and indiscriminate 
 enforcement of external laws. 
 
 To such a conception of the moral world, tragedy 
 has but recently attained. That both the critical and 
 the public intelligence should lag far behind is inev- 
 itable. Every morning's paper proclaims a world whose 
 moral pattern is formed of terrible blacks and glaring 
 whites. How should people gladly endure the endless
 
 22 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 and pain-touched gray of modem tragedy? They un- 
 derstand the Greek conception of men who violated the 
 inscrutable will of gods; they understand the renais- 
 sance conception that a breach of the universal moral 
 law sanctioned and set forth by God, needed to be pun- 
 ished. They can even endure such situations as that 
 of Claudio and Isabella in the terrible third act of 
 Measure for Measure. For that unhappy brother and 
 sister never question the right of the arbitrary power 
 that caused so cruel a dilemma, nor doubt the absolute 
 validity of the virtue that is named. These two strike 
 at each other's hearts and never at the bars of the mon- 
 strous cage that holds them prisoner. Do they not, 
 therefore, rise almost to the dignity of symbols of that 
 moral world in which the majority of men still live? 
 
 But it is precisely with the bars of the cage that 
 modern tragedy is so largely and necessarily concerned. 
 It cannot deal with guilt in the older sense. For guilt 
 involves an absolute moral judgment. That, in its turn, 
 involves an absolute standard. And a literally abso- 
 lute standard is unthinkable without a super-human 
 sanction. Even such a sanction, however, would leave 
 the flexible and enlightened spirit in the lurch. For if " 
 it were not constantly self-interpretative by some 
 method of progressive and objectively embodied reve- 
 lation, its interpretation would again become a mere 
 matter of human opinion, and the absoluteness of moral 
 guilt would again be gravely jeopardized. Not only
 
 A Note on Tragedy 23 
 
 must God have spoken; He would need to speak anew 
 each day. The war has overwhelmingly illustrated how 
 infinitely alien such obvious reflections still are to the 
 temper of humanity. We must have guilt. Else how, 
 without utter shame, could we endure punitive prisons 
 and gibbets and battles? Is it surprising that audi- 
 ences are cold to Ibsen and Hauptmann and Galswor- 
 thy, and that good critics who are also righteous and 
 angry men deny their plays the character of tragedy? 
 But the bars of the absolutist cage are not so bright 
 and firm as they were once. The conception of unre- 
 lieved guilt and overwhelming vengeance has just 
 played on the stage of history a part so monstrous that 
 its very name will ring to future ages with immitigable 
 contrition and grief. And thus in the serener realm of 
 art the modern idea of tragedy is very sure to make its 
 gradual appeal to the hearts of men. Guilt and pun- 
 ishment will be definitely banished to melodrama, 
 where they belong. Tragedy will seek increasingly to 
 understand our failures and our sorrows. It will ex- 
 cite pity for our common fate; the terror it inspires 
 will be a terror lest we wrong our brother or violate his 
 will, not lest we share his guilt and incur his punish- 
 ment. It will seek its final note of reconciliation not 
 by delivering another victim to an outraged God or an 
 angry tribe, but through a profound sense of that com- 
 munity of human suffering which all force deepens and 
 all freedom assuages.
 
 A Note on Comedy 
 
 THE pleasure that men take in comedy arises from 
 their feeling of superiority to the persons involved in 
 the comic action. The Athenian who laughed with 
 Aristophanes over the predicament of the hungry gods, 
 the contemporary New Yorker who laughs over a come- 
 dian blundering into the wrong bedroom, are stirred by 
 an identical emotion. The difference in the intellec- 
 tual character of the two inheres in the nature of the 
 stimulus by which the emotion is in each case aroused. 
 In the former the pleasure was conditioned in a high 
 and arduous activity of the mind; in the latter it arises 
 from a momentary and accidental superiority of situ- 
 ation. High and low comedy are dependent in all ages 
 upon the temper of the auditor whose pleasurable emo- 
 tion of superiority must be awakened. He who has 
 brought a critical attitude of mind to bear upon the 
 institutions and the ways of men will cooperate with 
 the creative activity of a faculty which he himself pos- 
 sesses and has exercised; he to whom all criticism is 
 alien can evidently find no causes for superiority within 
 himself and must be flattered by the sight of physical 
 mishaps and confusions which, for the moment, are 
 not his own. Pure comedy, in brief, and that comedy 
 
 24
 
 A Note on Comedy 25 
 
 of physical intrigue which is commonly called farce, 
 cannot from the nature of things differ in the effect 
 they strive to produce. But they must adapt their 
 methods of attaining this common end to the character 
 of the spectator whose emotions they desire to touch. 
 It follows that pure comedy is rare. Historically we 
 find it flourishing in small, compact, and like-minded 
 groups: the free citizens of Athens, the fashionables 
 of Paris and London who applauded Moliere and Con- 
 greve. But in all three instances the reign of pure 
 comedy was brief, and in the latter two precarious and 
 artificial at best. With the loss of Athenian freedom, 
 intrigue took the place of social and moral criticism; 
 no later poet dared, as Aristophanes had done in The 
 Acharnians, to deride warlikeless in the midst of war. 
 In the New Comedy public affairs and moral criticism 
 disappeared from the Attic stage. In Rome there was 
 no audience for pure comedy. Its function was exer- 
 cised by the satirists alone, precisely as a larger and 
 nobler comic force lives in the satires of Dryden than 
 in the plays of Congreve. Nor should it be forgotten 
 that Moliere himself derives from a tradition of farce 
 which reaches, through its Italian origin, to Latin com- 
 edy and the New Comedy of Greece, and that the 
 greater number of his own pieces depends for effective- 
 ness on the accidents and complications of intrigue. 
 When he rose above this subject matter and sought 
 the true sources of comic power and appeal in L'Ecole
 
 26 Toward a New. Dramaturgy 
 
 des Femmes and Tartuffe, he aroused among the un- 
 critical a hatred which pursued him beyond the grave. 
 
 The modern theatre, which must address itself pri- 
 marily to that bulwark of things as they are, the con- 
 tented middle classes, is, necessarily, a bleak enough 
 place for the spirit of comedy. These audiences will 
 scarcely experience a pleasurable feeling of superiority 
 at the comic exposure of their favorite delusions. 
 Hence Shaw is not popular on the stage; a strong comic 
 talent, like Henri Lavedan's, begins by directing its 
 arrows at those grosser vices which its audience also 
 abhors and then sinks into melodrama; isolated excep- 
 tions, such as the success of Hauptmann's massive 
 satire of bureaucratic tyranny in The Beaver Coat, 
 scarcely mitigate the loneliness of comedy on the stage 
 of our time. The comic spirit which once sought refuge 
 in satire now seeks it in the novel that great, inclusive 
 form of art which can always find the single mind to 
 which its speech is articulate. 
 
 But since men still desire to laugh in the theatre, 
 there has arisen out of a long and complicated tradi- 
 tion the sentimental comedy. Here the basic action is 
 pseudo-realistic and emotional. Into it are brought, 
 however, odd and absurd characters whose function is 
 the same as that of Shakespeare's Fools in tragedy. 
 They break the tension and release the pleasurable 
 feeling of superiority. More often, however, they en- 
 croach largely on the sentimental action, and then we
 
 A Note on Comedy 27 
 
 have the most popular form of theatrical entertain- 
 ment among us a reckless mixture of melodrama and 
 farce. And this form caters, beyond all others, to its 
 huge audience's will to superiority. Men and women 
 laugh at the fools whom they despise, at the villains 
 whose discomfiture vindicates their peculiar sense of 
 social and moral values; they laugh with the heroes in 
 whom those values are embodied and unfailingly tri- 
 umphant. 
 
 From such facile methods pure comedy averts its 
 face. It, too, arouses laughter; it, too, releases the 
 pleasurable emotion of superiority. But it demands a 
 superiority that is hard won and possessed by few. It 
 is profoundly concerned with the intellect that has in 
 very truth risen above the common follies and group 
 delusions of mankind; it seeks its fellowship among 
 those who share its perceptions or are prepared to share 
 them. It demands not only moral and intellectual free- 
 dom in its audience; it demands a society in which 
 that freedom can be exercised. It cannot flourish, as 
 the central example of Attic comedy illustrates, except 
 in a polity where art and speech are free. And any one 
 who reflects on the shifting panorama of political insti- 
 tutions will realize at once how few have been the times 
 and places in history in which, even given a critically 
 minded audience, the comic dramatist could have 
 spoken to that audience in a public playhouse. 
 
 The immediate example in our own period is that
 
 28 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 of Bernard Shaw. Whatever the ultimate value of his 
 plays may be, he is to us the truest representative of 
 the comic spirit. Some of his plays have, on occasion, 
 quite frankly been removed from the stage by the 
 police power; none are truly popular except in the 
 study. The bourgeois audiences who at times witness 
 their performance have set up between themselves and 
 Shaw the protective fiction that he is a high-class clown. 
 Since they cannot, in self-defense, laugh with him, 
 they attempt to laugh at him, and thus save their 
 pleasure and their reputation for cleverness at once. 
 True comedy, in a word, is a test both of the inner 
 freedom of the mind and of the outer freedom of the 
 society in which men live. Its life has always been 
 brief and hazardous. Nor is it likely to flourish unless 
 the liberties of mankind are achieved in a new meas- 
 ure and with a new intensity. For the great comic 
 dramatist, if he would gain the most modest success, 
 must gather in a single theatre as many free minds in 
 a free state as Lucian or Swift or Heine seek out and 
 make their own in a whole generation.
 
 On Sentimental Comedy and Melodrama 
 
 IN sentimental comedy the purpose of clouds is to have 
 a silver lining. The silver lining is carefully "planted" 
 from the start and in the last act irradiates the visible 
 horizon. It is a perfectly open secret; the playwright 
 would fare ill who refused to play the game. The pub- 
 lic will endure physical but not moral suspense. It 
 likes to be puzzled to know how the crooked will be 
 set straight. Indeed the crooked must not be crooked 
 in its real being at all. The clouds must be delusions. 
 Straightness and radiance must be seen as the normal 
 order of the world. And this normal order must be 
 reestablished and rendered clear by a half-humorous, 
 half-sentimental character of native birth. This is the 
 hero of sentimental comedy a rough customer, pref- 
 erably, but with a heart of gold, clean, wholesome, 
 manly, chivalrous, the sworn foe of libertines, foreign- 
 ers, revolutionaries, grafters, scientists, idlers. . . . 
 
 Is there anything that unites all heroes of senti- 
 mental comedy? Perhaps it is their common convic- 
 tion that virtue is a definite and simple thing, that it 
 is not to be found among the wise and learned, that it 
 need but be discerned to transform life, and that it 
 pays. A curious blending of the spirit of the Gospel 
 
 29
 
 30 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 with that of the Enlightenment, of ancient sayings con- 
 cerning the wisdom of the foolish with those verses in 
 which Edward Young declared that 
 
 All vice is dull, 
 A knave's a fool, 
 And Virtue is the child of Sense. 
 
 It follows that in this art of the theatre, if in no 
 other, we cultivate prettiness and are afraid of beauty. 
 How entrancingly pretty our leading actresses are! 
 Miss Billie Burke has an exquisite childlikeness, Miss 
 Laurette Taylor a liquid pathos of expression, Miss 
 Elsie Janis a boyish freshness and grace. Beauty is 
 a thing almost from another world. It would not so 
 swiftly reveal itself to so many eyes. It arises from 
 deeper sources. It brings not only peace but also a 
 sword. Neither in life nor in art will prettiness burn 
 the topless towers of Ilion. Genius and beauty hold 
 a menace and a flame. Talent and prettiness delight 
 and soothe. One might almost achieve them oneself! 
 Such is, unconsciously enough, the reaction of our 
 wider audiences. The managers and stage directors 
 are equally at ease. Their ways are ways of pleasant- 
 ness. Miss Burke is not fretting to play Electra, Miss 
 Taylor is content not to appear as Lady Macbeth, Miss 
 Janis dances like an elf, but she does not insist on 
 dancing the tarantella of Nora Helmer.
 
 On Sentimental Comedy and Melodrama 31! 
 
 So, by a happy and tacit conspiracy, pretty plays 
 all sentimental comedies are found for these pretty 
 stars plays in which they can wear charming clothes 
 and have their lovely innocence of aspect safely as- 
 persed by dark doubts. No moral discomfort will arise 
 from such plotting. You know from the first that Miss 
 Burke and Miss Taylor are as harmless as they are 
 pretty. They are irremediably sweet. Beauty may 
 dwell with guilt and bitterness and wisdom, knowing 
 the earthly and the heavenly love. When Miss Burke 
 and Miss Taylor let down their hair, you think of the 
 nursery; beauty with the same gesture evokes a vision 
 of the ancient night lit by its burning stars. A whole 
 dramaturgy of the pretty could be derived from such 
 reflections, and it is more than a jest to point out that 
 on the screen actresses who approach beauty of person 
 or expression are cast for the parts of "vampires." 
 
 If prettiness and its innocence keep our dramas from 
 being serious, they may also be said to keep our farces 
 from being amusing. Throughout its history and it is 
 a very long one farce has aroused laughter by pre- 
 senting people in absurd and uncomfortable predica- 
 ments. Into these predicaments the characters of farce 
 fall by committing the follies and excesses to which 
 human nature is addicted. But since on our stage 
 human nature must be shown as not really addicted to 
 these at all, and since pretty is as pretty does, our 
 farces are anemic and clownish. Our actresses are
 
 32 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 pretty and must be innocent; the men may be silly, but 
 their conduct must be fundamentally correct. Thus 
 the eternal contents of the lower human comedy which 
 a Moliere did not disdain are reduced to a game of 
 hide-and-seek adorned by slightly provocative cos- 
 tumes. Our moral illusionism lies at the root of the 
 whole situation. We like to think of ourselves as a 
 nation of kindly, proper, good-looking, romantically 
 virile people. Between the mirror of the stage and 
 ourselves we hold up for reflection that comfortable 
 
 and sentimental dream. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Melodrama, it is commonly held, owes its character 
 to astute plotting and to moments of intensely height- 
 ened conflict. The briefest observation of our stage 
 destroys that theory at once. Our average melodrama 
 is structurally stupid. Its continuance depends on 
 some trick that a clever child could see through. At 
 some crucial moment a false reticence or nobility is 
 feigned and the action rattles ahead for want of three 
 words of explanation that only perversity coupled with 
 dullness could have withheld. There is no nimbleness 
 of invention in these plays. The plots are monotonous 
 and heavy; the final act is, as a rule, openly bankrupt 
 of ingenuity or resourcefulness. Of this fact the audi- 
 ences are not unaware. It is possible to overhear 
 jesting comments on it from people of no startling intel- 
 ligence. Yet these people will go again and again, and
 
 On Sentimental Comedy and Melodrama 33 
 
 melodramas are far beyond farce or sentimental com- 
 edy the safest investments of the commercial man- 
 agers. 
 
 The explanation is not far to seek. It lies in the 
 extreme psychical gregariousness of the average Amer- 
 ican. Spiritual isolation has no bracing quality for 
 him. To be in a minority makes him feel indecent to 
 the point of nakedness. His highest luxury is the mass 
 enjoyment of a tribal passion. War, hunting, and per- 
 secution are the constant diversions of the primitive 
 mind. And these that mind seeks in the gross mimicry 
 of melodrama. Violence, and especially moral violence, 
 is shown forth, and the audience joins vicariously in 
 the pursuits and triumphs of the action. Thus its hot 
 impulses are slaked. It sees itself righteous and erect, 
 and the object of its pursuit, the quarry, discomfited 
 or dead. For the great aim of melodrama is the kill- 
 ing of the villain. Whether he be tribal enemy or 
 moral or social dissenter, he is permitted small suc- 
 cesses, shadowy evasions, brief exultations. But these 
 are known to be momentary, and felt as rudely ironic. 
 The net tightens, its cords cut closer and closer into 
 the victim's flesh until the magnificent instant of the 
 clicking handcuff or the whirring bullet is ripe. 
 
 Stronger and deeper is the final instinct that adds 
 fierceness and joy to the mimic man-hunt of melo- 
 drama. The villain, whether tribal enemy, mere for- 
 eigner, or rebel against the dominant order, is always
 
 34 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 represented as an unscrupulous rake. He attacks the 
 honor of native women, and thus especially if his 
 skin is a tinge darker there is blended with the other 
 motives of pursuit the motive of a vicarious lynching 
 party of the orthodox kind. The melodrama of this 
 approved pattern brings into mimic play those forces 
 in human nature that produce mob violence in peace 
 and mass atrocities in war. Nations addicted to phys- 
 ical violence of a directer and simpler kind have cul- 
 tivated the arena and the bull-ring. Those, like our- 
 selves, who desire their impulses of cruelty to seem the 
 fruit of moral energy, substitute melodrama.
 
 A Note on Dramatic Dialogue 
 
 DRAMATIC dialogue is of two kinds. In the older and, 
 it has often been thought, nobler kind the dramatist 
 lends the characters his own energy and beauty of 
 speech and they are differentiated one from another 
 primarily by the sentiments they utter and only sec- 
 ondarily, if at all, by the manner of that utterance. 
 Stylistically the speech of Jason and Medea, Othello 
 and lago, Alceste and Philinte is one. Whether such 
 dialogue be written in verse or prose does not affect the 
 method involved. Bernard Shaw, despite an occasional 
 use, as in certain scenes of Major Barbara, of the 
 raciest vernacular, shares with his characters his own 
 wealth of energy and eloquence and wit. Among the 
 Neo-Romantics this stylistic unity is even more per- 
 vasive, and in Yeats and Hofmannsthal, kings and 
 poets, ghosts and clowns use the identical forms and 
 cadences of speech. 
 
 The second kind of dramatic dialogue, which may 
 be called the naturalistic, makes such a selection from 
 the actual speech of men as to produce an illusion of 
 reality. Here the language of the characters is ad- 
 justed to their class and occupation, their actual men- 
 tality and range of expression, and individual pecul- 
 
 35
 
 36 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 iarities of speech are studied and suggested. The occa- 
 sional use of naturalistic dialogue is old. It is found 
 in Horace's account of the bore he met on the via sacra, 
 in Swift's Genteel and Ingenious Conversations, in one 
 magnificent passage after another of Tom Jones. But 
 its conscious cultivation as a dramatic medium is re- 
 cent. That cultivation dates from Hauptmann's Before 
 Dawn (1889) and the early acts of Brieux's Blanch- 
 ette (1891). It is not found in either Augier or in 
 Ibsen, both of whom use a kind of dialogue no less 
 lifted into a unity of style because that style is sober 
 and pedestrian. 
 
 The dramatist who feels an original creative impulse 
 need not ask himself: Ought there to be a third kind of 
 dialogue? That question has no meaning in art. He 
 must ask himself: Can there, in the nature of things, 
 be a third kind? If a dramatist strives, as Mr. David 
 Liebovitz did in John Hawthorne the other day, to 
 make very simple people speak, he can either lend 
 them a heightened medium for all they would say if 
 they could, as Arthur Symons did so beautifully in 
 The Harvesters, or he can select all that is vivid, 
 strange, and passionate in their own actual speech, as 
 Hauptmann did so incomparably in Rose Bernd. But 
 when he takes their vernacular, as Hauptmann did, and 
 tries to use that vernacular as Symons used the medium 
 of The Harvesters, he creates a confusion of styles 
 which at once renders impossible that suspension of
 
 A Note on Dramatic Dialogue 37 
 
 disbelief which is dramatic, no less than poetic, faith. 
 To point out the veracity of this detail or that is futile. 
 He has used the true details of speech, but he has used 
 them in a manner that robs them of persuasiveness as 
 art. For art can produce nothing closer to reality than 
 an interpretative illusion of it. And the artist can fail 
 of this object with well-observed details almost as 
 easily as with those that have been observed ill. We 
 are convinced by every word that Beatrice Cenci utters; 
 we are equally convinced by the speech of Jones in 
 Galsworthy's The Silver Box. But Jones's vernacular 
 used in an attempt to produce the timeless human in- 
 tensity of Beatrice would issue in feebleness and dis- 
 cord. 
 
 The average American playwright uses a semi- 
 naturalistic dialogue romanticized by a bad tradition 
 drawn from both plays and books. The people of Mr. 
 James Forbes talk as shoe-dealers and insurance agents 
 think they talk just after they have read their favorite 
 magazines. Mr. Eugene Walter once had his moments 
 of veracity. But, as a rule, the dialogue of popular 
 plays is an imitation of the speech that people like to 
 assign to themselves in their day-dreams, full of false 
 gaiety and spurious nobleness. The serious dramatist 
 cannot, of course, use this method. His choice is 
 forced upon him. His manner must be akin to Shel- 
 ley's or to Galsworthy's. He will hesitate to use the 
 former for artistic as well as for practical reasons.
 
 38 Toward a 'New Dramaturgy 
 
 The stylicized drama, whether in prose or verse has, 
 as a matter of hard fact, not even the sympathy of our 
 better actors and our better audiences. The reason for 
 this is not pertinent here. The fact remains. Hence 
 our American dramatist is almost under the necessity 
 of observing and making a selection from the actual 
 speech of his contemporaries. 
 
 At this crucial point another difficulty confronts 
 him. Cultivated Americans talk more bookishly and 
 are more alienated from the vernacular than the cor- 
 responding class of Europeans. They use slang and 
 common turns of speech with an ironic under-tone. 
 The reason is that our common speech is not folk- 
 speech, but a corrupt newspaper English filled with the 
 ephemeral catch-words of sport and trade. An edu- 
 cated Irishman can talk like an Irish peasant and still 
 talk beautifully; an educated American cannot talk 
 like a clerk in a cigar-store without a grin. We have 
 islands of folk-speech in New England and the South. 
 But the sporting page of the newspapers, the Victrola 
 record of songs sung by Nora Bayes, and the slang of 
 the drummer are rapidly obliterating the dialects that 
 savor of the earth. The best, then, that the dramatist 
 can do is, probably, to follow the novelists who use the 
 corrupt speech of the populace naturalistically but with 
 a constant and communicated awareness of its true 
 character. That is what Sinclair Lewis did so admira- 
 bly in Main Street, and what Miss Zona Gale did
 
 A Note on Dramatic Dialogue 39 
 
 equally well in Miss Lulu Bett. That both the speech 
 in question and the author's awareness of its quality 
 can be transferred to the stage has been amply illus- 
 trated by the first act of the dramatized version of Miss 
 Gale's story. If the playwright, finally, desires to deal 
 with the minority of cultivated and sophisticated Amer- 
 icans, he has but to turn to modern literary English, 
 using it with what simplicity and colloquial ease he can 
 command. And here, again, the novelists from Edith 
 Wharton to Joseph Hergesheimer have set him excel- 
 lent examples. But whatever style he uses must be 
 used consistently and purely. Good dialogue, as Gals- 
 worthy has pointed out, must be like hand-made lace. 
 One thread of foreign material or inharmonious color 
 breaks the web and destroys the illusion.
 
 A Note on Acting 
 
 CRITICISM of acting alternates, as a rule, between un- 
 governed ecstasy and rough disdain. Whether Hazlitt 
 celebrates the praise of Mrs. Siddons or some contem- 
 porary that of John Barrymore, what we get is the 
 impression made by a commanding or romantic person- 
 ality rather than the record of an artistic achievement. 
 Lesser actors, on the other hand, are dismissed without 
 a word of interpretation or instruction. Nothing in 
 their work is clearly denned or accurately understood 
 by the criticism they receive, and little is left them but 
 to defy their censors and to blunder on. Yet actors 
 deserve helpfulness and close understanding. Their 
 artistic life is precarious and transitory. An approach 
 to perfection before middle age is their one hope. Only 
 so can they expect a few rich and untroubled years 
 before the lights go out upon them and their audiences. 
 
 Nor paint nor pencil can the actor save 
 Both art and artist have one common grave. 
 
 The matter, closely looked upon, is not forbiddingly 
 intricate. When toward the end of his life Johnson 
 was asked to sum up the virtues of Garrick, he said: 
 "A true conception of character, and a natural ex- 
 
 40
 
 A Note on Acting 41 
 
 pression of it, were his distinguished excellencies." We 
 speak more subtly to-day and deal in finer shadings; 
 the intimate nature of the modern drama, the with- 
 drawal of the stage-picture into its frame, and the con- 
 sequent abandoning of all declamation, have given the 
 words "natural expression" a far intenser meaning. 
 But to the substance of the old critics little need be 
 added. Actors are still, as Colley Gibber declared 
 them to be, "self-judges of nature, from whose various 
 lights they only take their true instruction." It is 
 when they are such that we hear, in the fine words of 
 Lessing, "that natural music which unfailingly opens 
 all hearts because we feel that it comes from within 
 and shows us that art has shared in it only in so far as 
 art and nature can become identical." 
 
 The actor's art, then, however difficult to practise is 
 not difficult to understand. His intelligence must 
 grasp the poet's intention and his imagination lend it 
 the concreteness of life. But his imaginative activity 
 must always be the servant of what he has observed in 
 himself and others. Nature must be his teacher and 
 his norm. He has never, to be sure, seen a Hamlet or 
 an lago, an Osvald or a Henschel. But he has seen 
 men in spiritual perplexity, sardonic mirth, bleak de- 
 spair, and dumb confusion. Having built up the con- 
 crete projection of a character from his imaginative 
 observation, he must, . with that personal plasticity 
 which alone justifies his calling, melt into the being
 
 42 Toward a New Dramaturgy 
 
 which the poet and he have combined to fashion, and 
 speak and act and live outward from within that being's 
 very soul. His faults may therefore be referred to a 
 failure in one of the three basic elements of his art 
 intelligence, imaginative observation, plastic expres- 
 sion. Or else he may, yielding to a frequent tempta- 
 tion of powerful or peculiar personalities, abandon the 
 art he is well fitted to practise and depend on a con- 
 tinuous display of his own self under this or that 
 borrowed name. 
 
 The commonest fault of our actors to-day is a failure 
 in the second element of their art. Their eyes are 
 turned upon the theatre, upon some vivid personality of 
 the stage, upon their careers and persons, upon any- 
 thing except nature and its spontaneous expression 
 amid the varying moods of life. They are not unskil- 
 ful in portraying sharp moments of passionate excite- 
 ment. There are few actresses who cannot weep con- 
 vincingly. They have all wept and, like many modern 
 people, involuntarily watched the adequate expression 
 of their grief. But in the level passages of a play, in 
 attempting to depict the life from which the passions 
 arise, these very actresses will be of an insufferable 
 and vulgar artificiality. They have never taken the 
 trouble to observe themselves or others at common 
 tasks or in quiet hours; they have no ear or eye for 
 the kind of speech and gesture by which the subdued 
 but important business of nine-tenths of life is carried
 
 A Note on Acting 43 
 
 on. They disdain nature and, rather than observe it, 
 transfer to their private behavior the metallic graces 
 of the stage, mouthing and languishing at home and 
 abroad. On the stage they are passable or even elo- 
 quent when the situation is tense. But they say "good 
 morning" or lay the cloth for breakfast with the air of 
 pinchbeck princesses in disguise. The men are more 
 aware of the texture of common existence. But in- 
 stead of observing nature, they substitute personal man- 
 nerisms that are realistic enough but wear thin by 
 constant and wearying repetition in play after play. 
 Mr. Sidney Toler has a quaint glance and Mr. Wallace 
 Eddinger an amusing aspect of hurt innocence. But 
 since neither one has observed life, his mannerism has 
 become a mere trick and his art an exhibition of that 
 single possession. The personal mannerisms of Mr. 
 Dudley Digges cannot be studied from the stalls. 
 When we see him we lose him and dwell solely with the 
 excellence and truth of what he has created. 
 
 The ambition of the average American actor is not 
 to interpret drama or create character, but to be John 
 Barrymore. In regard to Mr. Barrymore's artistic 
 intelligence and fascinating gifts there can be no ques- 
 tion. But as Fedya in Redemption, as Gianino in The 
 Jest, and as Richard III he played but variations upon 
 the theme of himself. There was the same morbidezza, 
 the same sense of inferiority becoming fierceness or 
 malign splendor, the same white profile, the same
 
 44 Toward a New- Dramaturgy 
 
 stricken grace. In each piece one became primarily 
 aware not of a creature of a given world and kind, but 
 of John Barrymore's somewhat hectic idealization of 
 himself. It was not, first of all, acting, but superb day- 
 dreaming upon the stage. Mr. Lionel Barrymore, de- 
 void of his brother's poignant charm, is a far more 
 scrupulous practitioner of his art. His Neri in The 
 Jest, was shaggy, boisterous, full of excess and gorgeous 
 wildness; his Mouzon in La Robe Rouge was polished, 
 quietly cynical, hard, and graceless in an inimitably 
 truthful modern way. The two creations had nothing 
 in common but his intelligence, his powers of observa- 
 tion, his ability to project what he had grasped and 
 seen. The contrast illustrates this brief argument and 
 sums it up. To emulate John Barrymore is both fool- 
 ish and impossible; to imitate his brother is to have a 
 just and fruitful notion of the actor's art.
 
 II 
 
 The American Stage

 
 Mr. Belasco Explains 
 
 FOR thirty-seven years Mr. David Belasco has devoted 
 himself to the art of the theatre. In remote cities 
 where no other American manager's name would be 
 recognized, his is known. If a girl is applauded in 
 amateur theatricals in Peoria or Denver she writes for 
 counsel and help to David Belasco. There is a Belasco 
 legend composed of anecdotes that commercial travel- 
 ers swap in smoking-cars; there is a Belasco biography 
 in two stout volumes by the late William Winter; there 
 is, finally, issued but the other day, the word of Mr. 
 Belasco himself. 1 The critics may jeer mildly; the 
 knowing ones among the public may show a correct 
 disdain. They are all impressed. A Belasco opening 
 the first of any given season above all still com- 
 mands its very special little alertness and thrill. 
 
 And why should not these people be impressed? Mr. 
 Belasco's dedication to his chosen art is as tireless as 
 it is complete. He has spared no toil and no expense 
 to produce what he considers beautiful things. He has 
 never been cynical about his success, but has taken it 
 to be the reward of his hard gained merits. He is 
 satisfied with himself and with his public. He has 
 
 1 The Theatre through its Stage Door. By David Belasco. 
 
 47
 
 48 The American Stage 
 
 made art pay. He still makes it pay. And who has 
 the right to deny the unfailing qualities of every Belasco 
 production the silken delicacy of its surface, the un- 
 obtrusive perfection of its visible details, the gentle 
 glow and harmony of its color schemes? Not those, 
 assuredly, who daily applaud the less perfect produc- 
 tions of quite similar plays on another street. Nor 
 those others who, in high places and humble ones, pro- 
 claim the theatrical theory of the drama the theory, 
 namely, that plays are "built" in the theatre, not written 
 in solitude; that they are constructed to be gladly heard 
 by any audience of the moment, not created to be over- 
 heard by the finer spirits of the age. 
 
 Of that theory Mr. Belasco's practice is the best of 
 all possible illustrations. A manuscript to him is not 
 something to be interpretatively bodied forth. It is a 
 little raw material and a convenient starting-point. 
 "Almost invariably," he tells us, "the exceptionally suc- 
 cessful play is not written but re-written." During the 
 crucial week of preliminary rehearsals, he continues, 
 "I rewrite, transpose, change, and cut until the manu- 
 script is so interlined that it is almost impossible to 
 read it. ... If it seems too heavy at a certain point, 
 it must be lightened; if too tearful, laughter must be 
 brought into it." It is no wonder that Mr. Belasco is 
 the author or co-author of many of the plays he has 
 produced, and that he has sedulously avoided the work 
 of any master. What could he do with the method of
 
 Mr. Betas co Explains 49 
 
 production so truly attributed to another manager in 
 another land, the method that strives to give to each 
 play "its individual style, its special atmosphere, its 
 peculiar inner music." 1 "Who am I?" asked Oscar 
 Wilde, only half in jest, when he was urged to make 
 changes in An Ideal Husband for the production of the 
 play, "Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?" Mr. 
 Belasco has not tampered with masterpieces. He has 
 left them alone. And that is what every producing 
 manager must do who desires as our professors coun- 
 sel and indeed command to build successful plays in 
 the theatre. 
 
 To Mr. Belasco, at all events, the play has been but 
 one of many things. "The all-important factor in a 
 dramatic production," he tells us, "is the lighting of the 
 scenes." And again: "The greatest part of my success 
 in the theatre I attribute to my feeling for colors trans- 
 lated into effects of light." He has ransacked the curio 
 shops of ancient cities for furniture and the fabled 
 East for silken draperies and has found in these "explo- 
 rations in search of stage equipment really the most 
 interesting part" of his work. And he has sought out 
 charming and promising young persons and chosen and 
 adjusted them as he would select and adjust folds of 
 rich velvet or the glow of a new tint of light into the 
 harmony of a production. He has "made" Frances 
 Starr and Jeanne Eagels and Lenore Ulric and Ina 
 
 i Max Reinhardt. By Siegfried Jacobsohn. Berlin. 1910.
 
 50 The American Stage 
 
 Claire. He has fitted them like brilliant bits of glass 
 into the shifting colors of his successive scenes. And 
 yet this prestidigitator of light and shadows, this clever 
 artificer, this glorified interior decorator, whose con- 
 sciousness has never been touched by either life or art, 
 holds himself to be a realist. "I am a realist," he pro- 
 claims proudly and sincerely. And he is a realist be- 
 cause on his stage he "will allow nothing to be built of 
 canvas stretched on frames. Everything must be real." 
 He is a realist because when he produced The Music 
 Master he "searched for people in the theatres of the 
 lower East Side"; because he employed real Japanese in 
 The Darling of the Gods and caused the Uhlans in 
 Marie-Odile to be represented by real Germans! In 
 such preoccupations he has spent a lifetime of labor and 
 has ended by impressing a nation. He has touched 
 nothing that he has not, in his own inimitable sense, 
 adorned. 
 
 What has he touched? He could never, as we have 
 seen, produce the work of a great dramatist. No great 
 dramatist would have endured the process. He has 
 given us one play by Pierre Wolff and one by Her- 
 mann Bahr. He saw the unfulfilled promise of Eugene 
 Walter and staged The Easiest Way. The rest is sen- 
 timent and drapery The Music Master and Du Barry, 
 The Auctioneer and The Darling of the Gods. . He ven- 
 tured on Tiger, Tiger, but accompanied it by the ultra- 
 saccharine Daddies; he re- wrote and re-built Dark
 
 Mr. Belasco Explains 51 
 
 Rosaleen until it was pretty and trivial enough; he 
 engaged Mr. Albert Bruning only to load him with 
 Chinese robes in a spectacle play by George Scarbor- 
 ough. He likes to have children on the stage as often 
 as possible and hence avoids plays in which there are 
 none. For such plays, in his opinion, "view life flip- 
 pantly and cynically, like the comedies of Bernard 
 Shaw"; he is blandly unconscious of the contemporary 
 practice of his profession elsewhere, except to fling a 
 querulous word at Max Reinhardt, a producing man- 
 ager who, during the first eight years of his career, pre- 
 sented one play each by Aristophanes, Euripides, Cal- 
 deron, Moliere, Goldoni, Lessing, Henri Becque, Tol- 
 stoi, Hauptmann, Donnay, Chekhov, Gorki, and J. M. 
 Synge, two by Hebbel, Kleist, Gogol, Strindberg and 
 Schnitzler, three by Grillparzer, Wilde, and Maeter- 
 linck; four by Schiller, Goethe, Wedekind, and Hof- 
 mannsthal; five by Ibsen; six by Shaw; and nine by 
 Shakespeare ! 
 
 The Gold Diggers by Avery Hopwood is a perfect 
 example of Mr. Belasco's art. There is a foolish little 
 story about a savage uncle who wishes to rescue his 
 nephew from a chorus girl and himself falls a prey to 
 the charms of another. There is a sunny little moral 
 about chorus girls duly emphasized by a gray-haired 
 mother. But neither the story nor the moral is very 
 obtrusive. These, as well as Mr. Hopwood's little local 
 jests, serve, after all, only to call attention to a burst
 
 5 2 The American Stage 
 
 of morning sunlight which Nature would do well to emu- 
 late more often, to Mr. Belasco's exquisite bits of color, 
 to the influence of his training upon the talent and per- 
 sonality of his latest creation, Miss Ina Claire. The 
 latter illustrates his most solid gift. He can train 
 actresses. Miss Claire's rendering of her lines in the 
 first act has the daintiest verisimilitude and the nicest 
 precision in its miniature way; her crucial scene in the 
 second act, in which she feigns intoxication so well and 
 yet never lets us lose a sense of spiritual delicacy, is a 
 little marvel of its kind. But the almost total waste 
 of talent and hard work exemplified in these bits sym- 
 bolizes once more and depressingly enough the char- 
 acter of Mr. Belasco's whole career. Miss Claire has 
 intelligence and flexibility; Miss Jobyna Rowland has 
 her unfailing vein of natural and robust humor; Mr. 
 Bruce McRae is a careful artist; quite minor members 
 of the cast do credit to Mr. Belasco's persuasive meth- 
 ods. Thus a highly agreeable entertainment is offered, 
 an entertainment that eludes criticism by never coming 
 within its proper range. But we dare neglect neither 
 the show nor the master of the show so long as any are 
 left among us who believe that either one sustains the 
 slightest relation to the drama or the drama's interpre- 
 tation on the stage of our time.
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 
 I. The Faithjul 
 
 THE Theatre Guild began its career with the presenta- 
 tion of a fantastic comedy, The Bonds of Interest, by 
 the Spanish playwright, Jacinto Benavente. The suc- 
 cess of that first venture was small. Next the Guild 
 undertook to give the public the wholesome bread of 
 realistic art, and the brilliant success of John Ferguson 
 serves, even after a discounting of its adventitious ele- 
 ments, almost to mark an epoch in the American the- 
 atre. It is, therefore, a little disheartening to the 
 friends of the Guild to see them, in their third produc- 
 tion, John Masefield's The Faithful, return to the ex- 
 ploitation of the merely fantastic strain in dramatic 
 literature. For it is a fact that the ventures of the 
 insurgent theatre and of the art theatre in this country 
 have constantly come to grief through their cultivation 
 of the over-refined, the exotic, and the fanciful. From 
 the play lists of our little theatres one would infer, if 
 one knew no better, that the staple of the modem 
 drama is the neo-romantic in its most tenuous and 
 cloudy moods. It was not by such methods that the 
 Theatre Libre and the Verein Freie Biihne revived and 
 re-created the European theatre. Each began by pre- 
 53
 
 54 The American Stage 
 
 senting those foreign plays which most searchingly 
 interpreted the human problems of its immediate pres- 
 ent, each saw and fulfilled its final mission by opening 
 the theatre to the young revolutionaries of the native 
 drama. These stages began with Ibsen and Tolstoi; 
 they ended with Curel, Brieux, and Hauptmann. 
 
 The success of those now historic undertakings was 
 no accidental one. It was not by mere accident that 
 the early audiences of The Faithful at the Garrick The- 
 atre felt a perceptible estrangement and chill. The 
 Greeks were right when they made the Muses the 
 daughters of Memory. It is from memory that the 
 creative imagination springs. The spiritual energy of 
 the poet may indeed transform and creatively interpret 
 the world. But it must be a world that he has orig- 
 inally seen and lived in. It must be founded on a soil 
 that has known the tread of his footsteps and the mois- 
 ture of his tears. He may project the elements of his 
 experience, as Shakespeare did in The Tempest and as 
 Goethe did in the second part of Faust, into a region 
 unseen by any mortal eye. But the elements of hk 
 own experience, the vision of his own mind, the pang 
 of his own heart must still be present there. What 
 does Mr. Masefield deeply know of the feudal life of 
 Old Japan? What experience of his own soul has he 
 bodied forth through that shadowy and alien world? 
 Pictures and translated legends caught his fancy, and 
 from these pictures and these far-off echoes in another
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 55 
 
 tongue he wove a pattern of ghostly lights and mimic 
 passions. But he has not shared these passions and 
 the tragedy has not been, in some ultimate sense, part 
 of the tragic life of his own heart. The old Horatian 
 tag with its sovereign common sense sums up the whole 
 matter: 
 
 Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
 Primum ipsi tibi: turn tua me infortunia laedent. 
 
 It is worth while to glance briefly at the fable of the 
 play. By guile and force the crafty and unscrupulous 
 daimio Kira takes possession of the narrow hills and 
 woodlands of the daimio Asano. An envoy from the 
 imperial court comes to that province. Partly through 
 fear and enmity, partly because Asano will not stoop 
 to bribery, Kira deliberately misleads him concerning 
 the nature of the ritual by which an imperial envoy 
 must be greeted. Asano thus becomes guilty of an in- 
 voluntary sacrilege and is forced to commit hari-kiri. 
 His exiled retainers, led by his counselor Kurano, 
 pledge themselves to avenge the death of their lord. 
 After devious wanderings and on the very point of 
 abandoning their purpose in despair, their opportunity 
 comes and they slay Kira at the moment of his highest 
 earthly power and triumph. The trouble with all this, 
 for a contemporary audience, arises from the fact that 
 the remoteness of the action is not redeemed by any 
 warmth or reality of motivation. Kurano is at no mo-
 
 56 The American Stage 
 
 merit conscious of any essential injustice in the coil 
 of circumstance in which he and his friend are in- 
 volved. To him the matter is a purely personal one. 
 Asano has been killed. Therefore Kira must be killed. 
 The same is true of the humbler retainers who aban- 
 don their wives and children, not in order to bring a 
 little more justice into their world, not to prevent such 
 things, not to protest against tyranny through Kira's 
 death, but simply to kill him to even the score. Nor 
 is it true, as may conceivably be urged, that this is 
 demanding a modern attitude of the ancient Japanese. 
 The peasant wars of medieval Europe illustrate the 
 dim but massive sense of general injustice that may fire 
 humble and unlettered men. 
 
 Granting, however, the purely personal and hence 
 remote nature of this conflict, and disregarding, for a 
 moment, the total absence of the poet's deeper and 
 more spontaneous energy from the execution of the 
 play, the vexing question still remains: in what man- 
 ner are these characters to behave? There is an im- 
 pression current in the West that the Japanese are and, 
 above all, historically were given to an extraordinary 
 measure of stoical self-repression and continually 
 sheathed their human impulses in the rigid forms of 
 some prescribed ceremony. Mr. Masefield's central 
 incident and the exciting cause of his whole action, be- 
 ing concerned with a breach of ritual, deepens that im- 
 pression. But so soon as we leave that incident, we are
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 57 
 
 plunged into a loud, turbulent, and yet futile violence 
 which accompanies us to the end. What is no doubt 
 true is that both elements, the self-repression and the 
 violence, exist in the history and character of the Jap- 
 anese people. But Mr. Masefield has not made the 
 necessary synthesis; he has not derived both from some 
 fundamental trait of that character. And he has not 
 done so for the simple reason that he does not know 
 enough. The play is not written from within the ethnic 
 consciousness with which it deals. Sound and con- 
 vincing art cannot arise from a contact so external. 
 
 The players struggle painfully with Mr. Masefield's 
 unsolved problems. Mr. Rollo Peters, as Asano, gives 
 an admirable performance. He is the impassive, sto- 
 ical, gentle-souled Japanese aristocrat a creature all 
 silk and steel. He answers our preconception which 
 is, however, quite untested by experience. Mr. Augus- 
 tin Duncan has been reproved for the boisterousness 
 of his performance as Kurano. It is true that he is 
 noisy and jerky. But he could make out a fair case 
 for himself by appealing to his author's text. Mr. 
 Henry Herbert is keen as a blade and subtle as a 
 poison in the part of Kira. But again it is our un- 
 tested preconception of an Oriental villain that wins 
 our applause. The worthlessness and indeed the dan- 
 ger of all such preconceptions are among the most ter- 
 rible facts of our time. Hence the poet here leads us 
 into uncertainties of judgment which are fatal to any
 
 58 The American Stage 
 
 pleasure or any suspension of disbelief. Mr. Lee 
 Simonson's scenery is of a delicate beauty. Form and 
 color are a more universal language than articulate 
 speech. Only a people's speech can lead us to its soul. 
 Both Mr. Masefield and ourselves stand on the thresh- 
 old of a gate to which we have no access. 
 
 II. Jane Clegg 
 
 Politics crumble and opinions and moralities fade. 
 Life, whose meaning must somehow be sought within 
 itself, goes on. The tongue of the propagandist turns 
 to dust, but the voice of nature remains. Merely to 
 capture and project some bit of reality is, therefore, 
 to practise not only the best art but the most philo- 
 sophical. Such art seems quiet enough amid the noisy 
 contentions of the day. But its quietude is that of a 
 tree amid rockets. The rockets glitter and go out; the 
 earth-rooted tree will shelter generations. 
 
 St. John Ervine's Jane Clegg is not a great play, 
 even though we measure in terms of depth and inten- 
 sity rather than of range. But it belongs to a great 
 kind. Isolated plays of this kind have had a way of 
 being written for the modern English theatre and of 
 having no successors by the same hand. There was 
 Elizabeth Baker's Chains and Githa Sowerby's Ruth- 
 erford and Son. Perhaps Mr. Ervine's success in the 
 theatre will fortify his talent, will render it more fruit- 
 ful and also more faithful to itself. And that is neces-
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 59 
 
 sary. For it is likely to be forgotten that he wrote 
 Jane Clegg in 1913 and John Ferguson two years later 
 and hence tended to lapse from the perfect sobriety, 
 the weighty reality, the strictly inherent irony of the 
 earlier play. In John Ferguson the people are real 
 enough, though James Caesar verges on the monstrous 
 and "Clutie" John on the unsoundly fantastic. But 
 these people are involved in a coil of circumstance 
 the mortgaged farm, the delayed remittance, the false 
 suspicion of murder which smacks strongly of the 
 melodramatic theatre. 
 
 In Jane Clegg the people are found in no predica- 
 ment except the inevitable one of their own natures, 
 and the dramatic process is identical with the exhaus- 
 tive exposition of their inmost selves. With the high- 
 est skill and courage Mr. Ervine carries out the purity 
 of his intention to the very close of the play. Henry 
 Clegg leaves his home. The climax of the story, how- 
 ever, is not in that action but in that last talk between 
 himself and his wife which gives our vision of him its 
 final clarity and expresses his blundering justification 
 of his own miserable self. Thus the logic of reality is 
 completed and his physical departure is not an action 
 by which a play is closed but the symbol of a life's 
 necessities. 
 
 That life in which the play, despite its title, really 
 centers is completely unrolled before us, although the 
 dialogue contains little or no technical exposition in
 
 60 The American Stage 
 
 the older sense. But we are made aware of the shab- 
 bily gay, irresponsible father; we see the garrulous, 
 foolishly indulgent mother. We know how Henry 
 Clegg, ignorant, awkward, rigidly respectable in his 
 sentiments, goaded forever by his hungry senses, has 
 sneaked and bragged his way through the years and 
 how he would have done so quite peacefully to the end 
 but for his wife's rectitude of mind and decision of 
 character. That is his catastrophe. Not the meanest 
 creature can exist in a state of being continually shown 
 up. It cannot live under so fierce a light. Some rag of 
 self-esteem, however falsely come by, must cover the 
 nakedness of every soul. 
 
 But Mr. Ervine has not missed the fact and at this 
 point he touches greatness that his cockney clerk with 
 a mind as stale and shabby as his very clothes and 
 speech is the absurd and tragi-comic battleground of 
 great forces. Henry Clegg does not know it, but his 
 civilization has made of him a man monstrously divided 
 against himself. Through generations it has bred into 
 his very bone an assent to certain moral principles and 
 sentiments. But it has left his nature and his in- 
 stincts unexplained and untouched. Hence the whole 
 man is but one gesture of furtiveness. Everything 
 about him is false. His soul is shoddy. Truth is to 
 him the highest indecency. Thus when he is about to 
 leave his wife and go off to Canada with his "fancy" 
 woman, he is deeply pained and shocked at his wife's
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 61 
 
 callous willingness to let her own husband to whom 
 God has joined her go without wails or recriminations 
 or the sense of the presence of sin. He has a brief mo- 
 ment that verges on a grotesque self-righteousness. He 
 is a wretched sinner but at least he has the grace to 
 know it. That is his religion. Jane may be pure and 
 honorable. But she has no sense of sin. It almost 
 frightens him. In Jane, on the other hand, there is 
 illustrated the slow and painful struggle by which a 
 few people here and there learn to sweep aside the 
 moral convention and lay hold upon the moral fact. 
 Since Henry's actions and her emotional reactions have 
 destroyed whatever peace or beauty their marriage 
 ever held, how empty to go on babbling about its sanc- 
 tity! It is a burden and a shame. Both she and the 
 children will be better off without him. She feels a 
 natural pang at the breach with her youth and her 
 heart's past. But the pang is not uncontrollable. She 
 turns out the gas and goes upstairs. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that the intellectual content of 
 the play is weighty enough. But it is never emphasized 
 nor abstracted from the stuff of life itself. It appears 
 through those traits and attitudes of the characters 
 which arise from the impact between the individual and 
 the processes of that civilization within which he has 
 been molded. But to grasp the simple reality, as Mr. 
 Ervine has here done, is enough. If the grasp be but 
 firm and close the universal values will appear more
 
 62 The American Stage 
 
 strongly than if the dramatist had reflected on them 
 first and watched life afterwards. 
 
 Mr. Reicher's production of the play for the Theatre 
 Guild is undoubtedly the most perfect thing on our 
 stage to-day. It has an exquisite discretion; it does 
 not impair the fullest sense of reality at any point; it 
 has found the beautifully right atmosphere and gesture 
 for every moment in the play's shifting moods. It 
 allows no sense of artificial transition from mood to 
 mood to awaken in us, and it preserves inviolable its 
 seamless illusion of both the continuity and the change 
 of life. Thus the spectator need never become aware 
 of it as of something consciously done, but can yield 
 himself to the power of the embodied play as to an 
 undivided artistic and spiritual experience. And that 
 is rare. We have other good productions. But they 
 are very consciously and proudly good, and often their 
 excellence throws only into starker relief the hollow- 
 ness of the play on which they are expended. Or else 
 a single unsubdued and "stagy" actor shatters the illu- 
 sion. The five players who are associated with Mr. 
 Reicher in Jane Clegg have blended their personalities 
 wholly with the inner life of the play. Its world has 
 become theirs. We do not remember them except in 
 these shapes which they have assumed. The identity 
 of art and life is for once complete, and thus the two 
 hours during which we watch them are a pure example 
 of that enlargement of our contracted selves through
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 63 
 
 a vicarious experience which is the very core of art 
 itself. 
 
 III. Jangled Lives 
 
 As its fourth subscription performance of the season 
 of 1920 the Guild presented Strindberg's The Dance of 
 Death. The production had the two notes of faithful- 
 ness to fact and density of moral atmosphere which 
 mark Mr. Reicher's work. The hexagonal tower-room 
 designed by Mr. Lee Simonson for the first part of the 
 play combined clearness and freedom with a somber 
 and menacing beauty. The players were sincere and 
 created occasional moments of unaffected eloquence; 
 it is doubtful whether they had quite penetrated to the 
 inner substance of the play. Mr. Albert Perry dis- 
 played an extraordinary virtuosity without an inner 
 assumption of the character he portrayed. Mr. Dudley 
 Digges, one of the best actors on our stage, is too home- 
 spun and forthright for Strindberg. Miss Helen West- 
 ley alone conveyed the sense of a vivid experience and 
 of having projected into the play not only skill but a 
 soul that can be troubled. Despite its comparative 
 inadequacy, the production brings to an honorable close 
 the second season of the only American theatre of which 
 we can be wholly proud. 
 
 What a play! Written in 1901 it leaps beyond its 
 year and ours and establishes the dramaturgy of the 
 future. Its method is as astonishing as it is simple.
 
 64 The American Stage 
 
 It deals with people, not with moral attributes. It 
 does not let an abstract quality overshadow a man. 
 Strindberg clove to the root of the ancient fallacy in 
 the Horatian council to "let Medea be fierce, Ino tear- 
 ful, Ixion perfidious, and Orestes sad." For the result 
 of such characterization is to give us Ferocity, Perfidy, 
 Sadness. What was Othello's occupation during the 
 period covered by the play when he was not jealous? 
 Did Alceste consider the question of social probity at 
 breakfast? The drama is full of "humors" and "rul- 
 ing passions." Rarely until very late does it present 
 men and women. The reply that a dramatic action 
 demands a concentration and an overemphatic treat- 
 ment of its motives only restates the old fallacy in 
 another form. The psychologist tells us for conven- 
 ience about abstract memory or imagination. In reality 
 there are no such things. There are indeed, in the 
 thumping Stevensonian phrase, "passionate crises of 
 existence." But they hardly arise when "duty and 
 inclination come nobly to the grapple." Who knows 
 his inclination? Will it be exactly the same if it rains 
 to-morrow? Suppose she wears her hair differently in 
 the morning, or there is a slump in the market, or one 
 wakes with an attack of influenza? These noble and 
 naked absolutes grimly face to face were all very well 
 when your heroes were kings or generals making gran- 
 diose and probably vicious decisions at the risk of some 
 one else's skin. And duty? Shall I do my duty the
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 65 
 
 thing prescribed from without by social compacts and 
 moral traditions, or shall I do my duty, a thing so 
 difficult and fragile and much to be desired? Can either 
 be disengaged clearly enough at a given moment to 
 justify the eruptive gesture of the dramaturgic tradi- 
 tion? 
 
 The Captain and his wife hi The Dance of Death 
 have seen each other so long and so closely that they 
 no longer see each other at all. They try, like all 
 people, to find moral tags in the name of which they 
 can justify their mutual hatred. It is a profoundly 
 true circumstance that Alice does this more continually 
 than her husband, who yields quite unreflectively to 
 his vindictive impulses. The woman is more passion- 
 ate, yet more desirous of justifying her hatred. Hence 
 she is eager to prove to him the qualities that explain 
 it. She has, no doubt, chances enough. Again and 
 again she convinces her friend and kinsman Curt. But 
 in the end all hatred breaks down because all isolation 
 of moral qualities becomes impossible. We know least 
 those whom we know best, because we see them no 
 longer analytically but concretely. We have no clues, 
 because every clue becomes coarse and misleading when 
 brought to the test of a reality so intricate and obscure. 
 This husband and this wife feign, at times with pas- 
 sion and terror, to despise and hate each other. Yet 
 they are unable to break their galling chains because, 
 having passed beyond the perception of mere evil quali-
 
 66 The American Stage 
 
 ties in each other and seeing each other as concrete 
 psychical organisms, they cannot hold either contempt 
 or hatred long enough. They shift and waver and 
 know too much to rise to the point of willing and they 
 die in the inextricable bonds in which they are caught. 
 
 "There are disharmonies in life," Strindberg lets 
 Gustav say in Creditors, "that cannot be resolved." 
 The tragic outcome is that there is no tragic outcome. 
 There is no liberating action and no appeasement of the 
 heart. The years drag on and the shadows lengthen 
 and then comes the dance of death. Children grow 
 up and fall into the same entanglements and almost at 
 once the familiar disharmonies begin to sound as 
 Alice hears them from Judith and Alan and the lieu- 
 tenant. But the will to live and continue the race gilds 
 all beginnings with romance, and the Captain and his 
 wife in the tower-room are neither an example nor a 
 warning. Nor is it only the young whom instinct robs 
 of vision. Alice has but to make the immemorial ges- 
 ture and Curt, the clear-minded and the disillusioned, 
 is in flames. 
 
 Yet from this very play there arises a hope beyond 
 the note of compassion with which, contrary to the cus- 
 tom of his more acrid years, Strindberg ends his action. 
 It is no accident that the Captain and Alice live on an 
 island. Most married couples do. They have the same 
 friends and see the same scenes. People and the very 
 trees and streets take on the blurred colors of that tense
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 67 
 
 and monotonous and islanded existence. They cling 
 to each other and restrict each other and seek to en- 
 force agreements and concessions and harmonies of 
 which the very nature must be the spontaneity of per- 
 fect freedom. They assume possession and practise 
 force, and the island becomes a prison. The Captain 
 and Alice stayed on the island as each other's keepers. 
 Thus each became at once a tyrant and a slave. If 
 only they had tried a little wandering and used their 
 island as a place of peace and refuge, and renounced 
 possession as the one hope of coming into their own 
 at last! No, the disharmonies cannot be resolved. But 
 they can be silenced. Where the hope of a rare and 
 difficult happiness ends, peace and freedom may begin. 
 
 IV. Liliom 
 
 Franz Molnar's Liliom the "Roughneck" pre- 
 sented by the Theatre Guild illustrates with extraordi- 
 nary force and freshness the plasticity of dramatic 
 form. Instead of a play in three acts or four we have 
 here a dramatic "legend in seven scenes and a pro- 
 logue." To emphasize this matter of form is to recall, 
 of course, the unteachableness of the human mind. 
 Despite the theatre of the Hindus, the Greeks, the medi- 
 evals, the Elizabethans, the moderns, your average 
 director, critic, playwright believes that the form of 
 the drama is now immutably fixed. He has substituted 
 a dead formula for a living reality and guards that
 
 68 The American Stage 
 
 formula with belligerent ardor. Therefore to us, at 
 this moment, the very form of LUiom has a special and 
 exhilarating charm. 
 
 That form was used in a tentative way by Haupt- 
 mann in Elga. It was deliberately cultivated by Frank 
 Wedekind, from whose works the Hungarian Molnar 
 undoubtedly derives it. It seeks to substitute an inner 
 for an outer continuity, successive crises for a single 
 one, and to blend chronicle with culmination. It takes 
 the crests of the waves of life as the objects of its 
 vision. The last wave merges into the indistinguish- 
 able sea. Film technique may be said to have influ- 
 enced this form or even the chronicle method of Shake- 
 speare. But it does not select its episodes to tell a 
 story. They must unfold the inner fate of souls. In 
 Wedekind and the expressionists the scenes are not 
 only symbolical from the point of view of the entire 
 action but also in their inner character, and little at- 
 tempt is made to preserve the homely colors of life. 
 What makes Lttiom so attractive is that Molnar has 
 avoided this extreme. He has used the expressionist 
 structure and rhythm; the content of his scenes is 
 beautifully faithful to the texture of reality. 
 
 Poor Liliom, barker for a merry-go-round in an 
 amusement park, what is he but once more the eternal 
 outcast, wanderer, unquiet one? He hasn't been taught 
 a trade; he can't settle down as a care-taker; he isn't 
 canny like the excellent Berkowitz. But he loves Julie.
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 69 
 
 She weeps over his worthlessness and he strikes her 
 strikes her out of misery, to flee from self-abasement, 
 to preserve some sort of superiority and so some liking 
 for himself. She is to have a child and something 
 cosmic and elemental tugs at the bully's heart. Are 
 love and fatherhood only for the canny ones, the tread- 
 ers in the mill, the hewers of wood? This is the con- 
 flict that destroys him. He is, viewed in another fash- 
 ion, Everyman, and the little play, which has its shoddy, 
 sentimental patches, is a sort of gay and rough and 
 pitiful Divine Comedy. Liliom did not ask to be born 
 with those imperious instincts into a tight, legalized, 
 moral world. Society demands so much of him and 
 gives him nothing wherewith to fulfil those demands. 
 The world process has not even given him brains enough 
 to think himself beyond demands and restrictions. He 
 struggles with his body and nerves. His mind is docile. 
 He believes that he is a sinner, he doesn't doubt that 
 there are police courts in heaven as there are on earth, 
 that there are cleansing, purgatorial fires, and a last 
 chance, maybe, to be good. But neither the fires of hell 
 nor his belief in them have power to change the essen- 
 tial character with which the implacable universe 
 brought him forth. His notion of an expiatory action 
 is to steal a star from the sky for his little daughter. 
 He is Liliom still, and the joke is on the order with 
 which man has sought to snare the wild cosmos. The 
 joke is on a man-made world and a man-made heaven,
 
 jo The American Stage 
 
 because both that world and that heaven have used 
 force. The joke is not on Julie. Julie has used love. 
 "There are blows that don't hurt; oh, yes, there are 
 blows that you don't feel." Love does not feel the 
 blows. Love does not demand nor coerce nor im- 
 prison. Paradise is in the heart of love. For the sake 
 of that ending you forgive Molnar the shoddy, senti- 
 mental little patches, for the sake of that moment 
 which is beautiful, which is indeed great. 
 
 Among the many admirable productions of the The- 
 atre Guild that of Lillom may unhesitatingly be classed 
 first. It is of a beautiful perfection. A scrupulous 
 respect for reality is combined in it with a strong and 
 sober imaginative sense. The first may be attributed 
 to the direction of Mr. Frank Reicher. He was brought 
 up in a school where veracity was understood and prac- 
 tised as in no other period of theatrical history. The 
 imaginative lift that the production has is largely due 
 to Mr. Lee Simonson. Better than any other scenic 
 artist among us he can convey the sense of out-of- 
 doors, of the free air, of gardens and horizons. His 
 spring really blooms, his autumn is russet and full of 
 melancholy. His railroad embankment in the fourth 
 scene is a triumph of the imaginative vision of reality, 
 his "courtroom in the beyond" of an airy, restrained, 
 compelling fancy. 
 
 The actors were assisted by the fact that the direc- 
 tors did not tamper with the play. Its folk-character
 
 Four Theatre Guild Productions 71 
 
 is preserved and so its people retain their fine, con- 
 crete humanity. Thus, for instance, Miss Eva Le Gal- 
 lienne, whose impersonations have hitherto been slight 
 and faint and bloodless, is here transformed into a 
 peasant girl, awkward and rude but full of the patience 
 of a deep passion and the tenacity of a noble endur- 
 ance. Mr. Joseph Schildkraut fulfilled all the expecta- 
 tions that were entertained of him. Once or twice he 
 forced the note of stubborn impudence, as in his en- 
 trance into the infernal flames. But predominantly his 
 Liliom is memorably racy, vivid, and exact. Miss 
 Helen Westley surpasses all her recent performances 
 in a part that demands not only harshness and verve 
 but a bitter pathos and a wise relenting; and Mr. Dud- 
 ley Digges, whose portrait of The Sparrow is a little 
 masterpiece of sly rascality, heightens our sense of his 
 flexibility and insight. And it would be ungrateful not 
 to mention the no less excellent accomplishment in 
 minor parts of Hortense Alden, Henry Travers, Edgar 
 Stehli, and Albert Perry.
 
 Gorki and Arthur Hopkins 
 
 WHENEVER the characters of tragedy dwell in their 
 traditional isolation, the inner logic of the play must 
 be sustained by ascribing their misfortunes wholly to 
 their erring wills. But once that isolation is broken, 
 once life comes streaming in, the cold ache of guilt 
 yields to a brotherly community in suffering. Such is 
 the secret of Gorki's technique and of his dramatic 
 reasoning in Night Lodging. The fierce, eternal little 
 tragedy of love and jealousy in which Michael Ivanov 
 and Vassilisa, Natasha, and Vaska are involved does 
 not flare in the void. Nor do the characters who sur- 
 round them serve either as background or as mere 
 choric witnesses. The coil of life is one. Gorki might 
 have written another play about the same people and 
 have shifted the main emphasis upon the richly indi- 
 cated tragic experiences of others among them. And 
 we are, indeed, made fully aware of the Actor's life 
 and doom and can build up imaginatively the entire 
 fabric of all these other lives. There are no subsidiary 
 characters in this drama, as there are none in reality. 
 Each soul is of supreme import to itself, and in that 
 dim night lodging as on a larger and less shadowy 
 scene these different selves struggle for some realiza- 
 
 fa
 
 Gorki and Arthur Hopkins 73 
 
 tion of their yearnings both in the world of things and 
 in the minds of their fellows. Nastia and the Baron 
 cry out in bitter pain against the unbelief that meets 
 their romantic stories. But it is not these stories in 
 themselves that they are concerned for; it is the com- 
 munication to others of the realities of their inner 
 lives. For only so can they mitigate the anguish of 
 their futility and their loneliness. It was his intimate 
 perception of such facts that led Gorki to break the tra- 
 ditional dramaturgic pattern. Each man is the pro- 
 tagonist of his own drama, and that drama, in such a 
 world as the present, is commonly a tragic one. There 
 is in life no such person as a "first citizen" or a "second 
 gentleman" whose function ends when he has listened 
 to a hero's speech. The men and women in Night 
 Lodging have and sustain an intimate vision of the 
 course of the central tragedy. But ever the cries of 
 their own hearts break forth and silence the voices of 
 the passions that contend around them. Individual 
 dramas detach themselves from the general rumor of 
 life and sink back into it. But that rumor is itself 
 made up of an hundred dramas and we need but listen 
 a little more steadily here and there to catch the tragic 
 accents of each one. Hence it is clear that the flowing 
 and wavering technique of this play is not due as we 
 have been and shall be glibly told to a neglect of right 
 craftsmanship or to unfamiliarity with the theatre, but 
 to a closer and a juster vision of human life.
 
 74 The American Stage 
 
 Together with the tradition of the psychical isolation 
 of a tragic action, Gorki also abandons that of its 
 pseudo-nobility. His people are the outcasts, the re- 
 jected and disinherited of the old Russian order. They 
 drink and brawl and jeer. But they also sing and 
 yearn. From all their follies and futilities, lifted above 
 their degradation and their woe, rises the voice of 
 their hope "for something better." Only the landlord 
 and policeman are content, though even their satisfac- 
 tion in a little power and brief authority is touched by 
 the ferocity that springs from fear. The others, out 
 of these lowest depths, are still striving and, like the 
 Actor, make their final exit only when all striving seems 
 quite vain. And they speak of the desirable not as a 
 state of power and possession but as a state of free- 
 dom, and of human life not as of something finished 
 and rigid but as of something that men may somehow 
 understand and master and guide. It is the old wan- 
 derer Luka who has come very near to solving that 
 mystery. He believes them all, because he sees beyond 
 the words to the passions of their speech. He under- 
 stands them, because his compassion has transcended 
 all the common categories of moral judgment. He re- 
 turns again and again to the wonder and strangeness, 
 the terror and the tragic beauty of the merely human. 
 "To be a human being do you know what that is?" 
 To know that fully is the deepest and the most healing 
 wisdom. Luka is the voice of that new spirit which
 
 Gorki and Arthur Hopkins J$ 
 
 Russia has brought into the modern world. We hear 
 it in Dostoevski as we hear it in Gorki. It can give 
 beauty and reality to words that would sound mawkish 
 on other lips. It has cast aside the moral values which 
 sustain the members of a merely economic or political 
 hierarchy in their self-esteem and their several sta- 
 tions and has sought man in his simple humanity, hav- 
 ing nothing but the glow of his passions, the pain of 
 his heart, the aspiration of his mind. And it is this 
 spirit that makes Night Lodging a play of such consol- 
 ing and, if rightly looked upon, of such cheering power. 
 Many spectators, including the best-known reviewer on 
 our daily press, have found it unbearably gloomy. 
 They see the shadows on the damp walls, the dusty 
 sunlight struggling through the dim window-panes, the 
 Tartar's broken arm, the vodka glasses, the poverty, 
 the sin. They miss prosperity and bright raiment and 
 easy falsehoods and fortunate love. They do not hear 
 the faint music of that more human world toward which 
 we are traveling, toward which even these outcasts had 
 set their still unseeing faces that world which shall 
 hold all men in freedom, in which there will be left no 
 spot to which any can be cast out. 
 
 We owe this production, as we owed that of Tolstoi's 
 Redemption, to Mr. Arthur Hopkins. The mere state- 
 ment constitutes, in the present condition of our com- 
 mercial stage, a measure of praise and gratitude to 
 which nothing need be added. Nor did Mr. Hopkins
 
 76 The American Stage 
 
 stop at selecting the play. He strove to understand it. 
 An unfamiliar dramatic rhythm had to be expressed. 
 ,The pulsing of many lives had to be indicated, the par- 
 allel but never coincident throb of many passions, the 
 rise and submergence uf the more vivid central action. 
 All that has been more than adequately achieved. Only 
 in the final act is one magnificent moment the out- 
 burst of Satin permitted to predominate a little too 
 emphatically, and one suspects a touch of weariness 
 on the manager's part, a slight impatience after the 
 disappearance of Vaska from the scene. But this is 
 a very minor blemish. The players, accustomed to the 
 false and the flashy, literally surpass themselves. Mr. 
 Alan Dinehart's performance is far from being the 
 most distinguished. But when one recalls him as the 
 singing waiter in an ephemeral farce and then sees him 
 here, pale, troubled, brooding, impassioned, rising to 
 true spiritual expressiveness, one is confirmed in an old 
 suspicion that it is not the actors who dictate the im- 
 possible selections of our stage. Miss Gilda Varesi as 
 Vassilisa is, as she should be, acrid and turbulent. But 
 she does not fail to sound the illuminating and elo- 
 quent note of helplessness in the face of her own strong 
 passion. Miss Pauline Lord, whose admirable art is 
 seen far too rarely, has the grace of a wild abandon as 
 Nastia. She beats against the invisible bars of her 
 cage and we share the ache of her wounded heart and 
 hands. Mr. Edward G. Robinson as Satin sulks and
 
 Gorki and Arthur Hopkins 77 
 
 smolders until the word of liberation comes to him 
 and then rises to his great moment with a fervor not 
 less convincing for its almost lyrical touch. The Actor 
 of Mr. Edwin Nicander is wan and subtle, broken, 
 strangely humorous and pathetic; the Luka of Mr. 
 W. H. Thompson is perfect in the grace of kindli- 
 ness, natural wisdom, and unborrowed dignity. Thus 
 sound art liberates the actor no less than the spectator, 
 and truth and humanity find and restore us to our 
 deeper selves.
 
 A Modern Chronicle Play 
 
 IT is the dramaturgic school of Scribe and Sarcey which 
 has persuaded both the wise and the foolish that a play 
 must be tight as a glove and orderly as a machine. But 
 all art belongs to the biological and spiritual order and 
 its forms are infinite in number and plasticity. There 
 are good plays and bad ones, but none that are not 
 plays because they fail to conform to a convention or 
 a pattern, even as there are comely faces and ugly 
 faces, but none that are not faces because they do not 
 coincide with some anterior conception of beauty. 
 Hence all technical objection to Mr. John Drinkwater's 
 Abraham Lincoln may be set aside at once. It "plays." 
 Therefore it is a play. It is a chronicle play, a "his- 
 tory"; it seeks to recreate the rhythm of life by meth- 
 ods as old as The Life and Death of King John and as 
 new as Hauptmann's Elga and A Ballad of Winter. 
 Most modern plays have returned, for the sake of veri- 
 similitude, to the pseudo-Aristotelian unities of time 
 and place. But most modern plays deal with single 
 culminations in the fates of men, and these are, by 
 their very nature, brief and strictly localized. Mr. 
 Drinkwater has chosen to show six culminating mo- 
 ments in Lincoln's life, and since each of the six scenes 
 
 78
 
 A Modern Chronicle Play 79 
 
 has its own unity of effect, its own dramatic life and 
 progression, and since each moves toward a point at 
 which historic and artistic culmination are identical, 
 the stodgiest technician has but an illusory reason for 
 his quarrel. 
 
 The strictures of the historian, who can justly charge 
 that the Lincoln of the play is little more than the 
 Lincoln of popular myth, are not to be dismissed so 
 easily. But they apply to the play only as a written 
 document. In the acted drama the intention of the 
 author is luminously clear. Each scene of Mr. Drink- 
 water's play is not only a crucial episode in the life of 
 Lincoln, but it is also a vision of the struggle of a great 
 people, through which the tragic character of all mass 
 conflict is symbolized for the living world. The inten- 
 tion of the interpretative third scene the keystone of 
 this whole structure should have escaped no one even 
 without the very just explanatory note which Mr. 
 Drinkwater has added to the bill of the play. He has 
 tried, as he truly points out, to lend "heightened sig- 
 nificance to a certain strain in Lincoln's character and 
 to certain movements and tendencies in the human 
 mind that he led and directed." What is that strain 
 and what are those tendencies? Both may be summed 
 up in a brief phrase: Mercy is justice. The Abraham 
 Lincoln of the play is an uncouth, kindly, humorous 
 man of the people, careless of all things save his spir- 
 itual vision, tolerant in all things that do not seek to
 
 8o The American Stage 
 
 break the essential rectitude of his mind. He knows 
 nothing of personal enmity, nothing of tribal hatred. 
 He rebukes the fierce shallowness that would humiliate 
 the enemy or crush him. He is stricken with horror 
 at the thought of war becoming a "blood-feud." His 
 ideal is to keep the vision inviolate without war. If 
 war does come, its aim shall be to defend the vision, 
 not to destroy the foe. He is firm when others are only 
 stubborn, steadfast when they are belligerent, mag- 
 nanimous when they are vengeful. And this symboli- 
 cal portrait of him has not only, as a whole, the "imag- 
 inative lucidity" which Mr. Drinkwater claims for it, 
 but also a high moral value for a world stricken by the 
 same diseases that men were suffering from in Lin- 
 coln's day. 
 
 The chief faults in Mr. Drinkwater's execution can 
 be easily and briefly marked. An Englishman, writing 
 a play of American folk-history, he was highly con- 
 scious of the daring and difficulty of his task. Some of 
 this arduous self-consciousness has been communicated 
 to his characters. In hours of moral conflict and de- 
 cisive action the heat and glow of life dim the future 
 wholly. But Lincoln is, especially in the earlier scenes, 
 too aware of his historic mission and character and of 
 the judgment of posterity. He seems at moments to 
 be subtly acting up to Mr. Drinkwater's retrospective 
 interpretation of him. The symbolical intention thus 
 tends, quite often, not to irradiate the density of life,
 
 A Modern Chronicle Play 8 1] 
 
 but to disperse it. Against the resultant thinness of 
 effect Mr. Drinkwater has sought to guard by the addi- 
 tion of folk-characters. But the invention of these has 
 not been happy. The Farmer and the Storekeeper are 
 not people, but devices of exposition; Mrs. Lincoln is 
 not a woman, but two contradictory qualities; the 
 maid in the Lincoln household is amusingly British. 
 The two council-chamber scenes and the scene at Appo- 
 mattox are the purest in quality of effect because they 
 are freest of the effort to supply imaginatively what 
 only first-hand experience can make authentic. A little 
 history is a dangerous thing; pure poetry is truer. 
 
 The production of this play stands or falls, of course, 
 with the ability of the actor who takes the central part. 
 It would have been impossible to receive the impres- 
 sions here recorded, had Mr. Frank McGlynn been less 
 than adequate. And his task was a staggering one. 
 It is difficult enough to interpret the protagonist of the 
 ordinary biographical play under the severe and jealous 
 eye of the historian and the specialist. But every 
 American is, in a sense, a specialist on Lincoln. He is 
 not only a folk-hero, but one with whom men still liv- 
 ing walked and spoke, and who is bound to the entire 
 present generation by an immediate and a verbal tra- 
 dition. Through a single obviously false note in his 
 performance Mr. McGlynn could have become, with 
 fatal ease, absurd and offensive. But his performance, 
 however incorrect historically in this detail or that, has
 
 82 itfie American Stage 
 
 a final tightness and harmony of effect. It may not 
 convince the conscience of the scholar and the eye- 
 witness. It cannot offend the heart and mind of the 
 most fastidious beholder. Mr. McGlynn has a simple, 
 a humble dignity; he has gleams of quiet humor and 
 moments of stern enough determination. But his de- 
 termination avoids the shadow of truculence; his humor 
 glints but on the edge of sadness; his kindliness never 
 sinks to the over-soft. He has the correct height and 
 narrowness of person. He is ungainly without being 
 ignoble, loose-limbed but knitted from within. If there 
 is a touch of the merely sentimental in his posture at 
 the end of the first scene, it is because the dramatist 
 has asked the impossible. A lank, bearded man in a 
 frock-coat, kneeling in prayer beside the "parlor" lamp, 
 recalls the conventicle and the evangelist, not the fol- 
 lower of Jesus and the friend of man. In the fifth 
 scene, on the other hand, Mr. McGlynn reaches the 
 highest point of his performance through silence. Lin- 
 coln spends the night propped up on chairs in Grant's 
 headquarters at Appomattox. To that weary figure, 
 grotesquely garbed, resting uneasily from so much sor- 
 rowful endurance, Mr. McGlynn has succeeded in giv- 
 ing sadness, loneliness, a grave beauty of the spirit, a 
 homely, magnanimity, a visionary touch of the tragic 
 end to come. This is Lincoln as the heart of man con- 
 ceives him. 
 
 We have here neither a great play nor a great per-
 
 A Modern Chronicle Play 83 
 
 formance. Both seek and gain omitting all faults and 
 inadequacies, of execution such adventitious aids to 
 interest and impressiveness as the highest and most 
 enduring art avoids. The historical hero is too much 
 enmeshed in the particular which is transitory and not 
 sufficiently enmeshed in those concrete things which 
 are not transitory because they have a touch of the 
 universal fate of man. In the realm of art Hamlet and 
 Faust are greater and truer than Napoleon or Lincoln. 
 But to our stage of to-day Abraham Lincoln is bread 
 and wine amid a glut of painted sweets and brackish 
 water.
 
 The Tyranny of Love 
 
 IT was on April 25, 1891, that a play called Amour- 
 euse had its first performance at the Odeon in Paris. 
 The author, Georges de Porto-Riche, who was even 
 then forty-two years old, had contributed a one-act 
 play, La Chance de Frangoise, to the repertory of the 
 Theatre Libre three years before, and had also written 
 a one-act play in verse. He had tried his hand at lyr- 
 ical poetry but without conspicuous success. Nor did 
 he cultivate or greatly extend the reputation which 
 came to him immediately upon the appearance of 
 Amour euse. Neither Le Passe (1897) nor Le Vieil 
 Homme (1911) shows any development of his mind or 
 art. He seems himself to have been aware of the early 
 exhaustion of his vein, for in 1898 he published his 
 four plays under the very appropriate title Theatre 
 d' Amour and made no further attempt at dramatic com- 
 position for fourteen years. His fame, which presents 
 every appearance of solidity and permanence, rests es- 
 sentially on the three-act drama of domestic life 
 Amour euse, which was produced for the first time in 
 English on February 28, 1921, at the Bijou Theatre 
 under the title The Tyranny of Love. 
 The unrivaled excellence of Amour euse in its own 
 
 84
 
 The Tyranny of Love 85 
 
 field is due to two facts: it exhausts its subject; its 
 progression and outcome are conditioned neither by 
 technical exigencies nor by the use of moral fictions, 
 but conform utterly to the native dictates of the human 
 heart. It is as fresh and pertinent to-day as it was on 
 its first appearance thirty years ago; to witness its 
 performance is to reaffirm and re-experience in one's 
 own mind the conviction that depth and exactness of 
 veracity constitutes the highest beauty in literature; 
 it touches one's memory even of Heartbreak House 
 with a tinge of the over-eager and falsely pointed and 
 sets into relief the over-consciousness and calculated 
 symmetry even of The Skin Game; it makes all lesser 
 plays seem like the trivial and childish fables they are. 
 Its scrupulous perfection shows up their easy vul- 
 garity. 
 
 speciosis condere rebus 
 carmina vulgatum est opus et componere simplex. 
 
 What distinguishes Porto-Riche is his insight into 
 the curiosities of love, into the difficulties of the heart. 
 The conflict between Dr. Etienne Feriaud and his wife 
 Germaine is the eternal one between the man of cre- 
 ative temper to whom love is excitement in youth and 
 repose in later years, and the woman to whom the sat- 
 isfactions of love in the broadest sense are coextensive 
 .with the content and meaning of life. "It is they whom 
 you jeer at," Dr. Feriaud exclaims, "it is the scientists.
 
 86 The American Stage 
 
 the artists, and the poets who have bettered this imper- 
 fect world and made it more endurable. Doubtless 
 they have been bad husbands, indifferent friends, rebel- 
 lious sons. Does it matter? Their labors and their 
 dreams have strewn happiness, justice, and beauty over 
 the earth. They have not been kind lovers, these ego- 
 ists, but they have created love for those who come 
 after them." Germaine, however, cannot make the 
 distinction between a service of self for its own sake 
 and the service of a self that is identified with a great 
 cause. She is jealous of her husband's work, of his 
 very thoughts; she desires to contract his interests to 
 the preoccupations of love and reduce his activities to 
 the feeding of her ever-famished heart. She has her 
 case, which Porto- Riche permits her to state with tell- 
 ing eloquence. She has not had adventure and ro- 
 mance. Her absorbing adventure and romance are here 
 and now. But she makes the grave error of thinking 
 that adventure and romance can be pervasive elements 
 of life not white days and their memories but years 
 and continuous presences. Her exactions first rasp and 
 then chill her husband. "I suffocate morally and phys- 
 ically," he cries out. "I must be free." She "rum- 
 mages in his brain as one rummages in drawers." She 
 diminishes the preciousness of love by her eagerness 
 and the haste of her consents. She thus drives him 
 into a mood of supreme rebellion and disgust. Yet 
 from that moment and its irreparable consequences
 
 The Tyranny of Love 87 
 
 springs for him that revenge of life itself which she 
 predicts. Though all seems over between them, he re- 
 turns. Nervous disquietude and jealousy have drawn 
 him back. It. is Germaine who utters a warning at 
 last: "But we shall not be happy." The cry does not 
 stir him. People are not happy. They are united by 
 the very wounds they have inflicted on each other. 
 Life is passion, conflict, resignation, and, at best, peace. 
 
 No brief account can do justice to the dialogue of 
 Porto-Riche, which combines an elegiac beauty of 
 rhythm with entire naturalness and an inexhaustible 
 wealth of psychological observation. Not every artist 
 has mastered all the intricacies of an emotional or 
 spiritual situation because he has known it well enough 
 for effective presentation. Porto-Riche knows his situ- 
 ation to the most fleeting of impulses, the faintest reac- 
 tion of the mind, the ultimate quiver of the nerves. He 
 knows it so well that he transcends the second stage of 
 insight at which the consciousness of complexity clogs 
 the processes of art. He sees not only completely but 
 with supreme clarity and order. To hear his dialogue 
 is a liberal education in the character of art and the 
 more difficult art of life. 
 
 We owe this production of The Tyranny of Love to 
 the good taste and admirable courage of Mr. Henry 
 Baron. He uses a translation of his own which is not 
 always elegant and idiomatic but which is faithful and 
 complete. It is a pity that he thought a superficial
 
 88 The American Stage 
 
 change of scene and nomenclature necessary. But the 
 very superficiality of the attempt keeps it from being 
 very annoying. The play is authentically before us. 
 And the acting is more than adequate. Mr. Flateau 
 is a bit sullen and heavy and Mr. Cyril Keightly not 
 quite free from mannerism. But both have grasped 
 their parts with great intelligence and sincerity. Miss 
 Estelle Winwood reveals herself as an emotional actress 
 of extraordinary genuineness, charm, and force. The 
 success or failure of this production will give us the 
 measure of the theatrical taste about us. For it con- 
 stitutes nothing less than a first-rate interpretation of 
 the best modern play of the entire season.
 
 According to Sarcey 
 
 IT was during the two decades from 1870 to 1890 that 
 Francisque Sarcey, with an amazing vigor and re- 
 sourcefulness of mind, established the theory of the 
 theatre as a mechanism, a puzzle, and a game. He ab- 
 stracted his theory from the practice of Scribe and 
 Sardou, stiffened and tightened it beyond the use of 
 his models, and applied it to Sophocles and Shake- 
 speare, Moliere and Ibsen. This thing, he declared, 
 was "of the theatre"; that was not. He insisted on the 
 rigor of the game he had invented and reduced the cre- 
 ative art of the drama to a base, mechanic exercise. 
 Since his theory deals exclusively with the effectiveness 
 of one narrow variety of form and since his interest in 
 substance and its development from within was prac- 
 tically nil, he kept the theatre both barren and static 
 and richly deserved as his epitaph the severe judgment 
 of Lanson: "Au lieu d'aider la foule a s'affranchir, il 
 la flattait dans la mediocrite de ses gouts." 
 
 Why talk about "Papa" Sarcey to-day? Because he 
 is with us. He is our neighbor at the playhouse, our 
 vis-a-vis at dinner, the critic in our class-rooms and on 
 our hearth. When Mr. Clayton Hamilton extols the 
 technique of Pinero he talks pure Sarcey; when learned 
 
 89
 
 90 The American Stage 
 
 professors lecture of the scene a faire and refuse to 
 singe their well-kept plumage on the fires of Haupt- 
 mann or Shaw, they are promulgating the same faith; 
 when, some years ago, the National Institute of Arts 
 and Letters elected Mr. Augustus Thomas as its pres- 
 ident and presented to him a gold medal for "his life 
 work in the drama" there was old Sarcey enthroned 
 and declared an immortal. And the tradition persists. 
 Listen to the chatter of the playwrights on Forty- 
 second Street. They do not create their plays in secret. 
 They "make" them in collaboration during week-end 
 trips to Atlantic City; their highest ambition is to bring 
 back an article that is "well-made." 
 
 It is not difficult to account for the persistence and 
 popularity of the theory of the "well-made" play. 
 There are ninety-nine men who can mend a machine to 
 one who can write a lyric; there are nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine who can superintend the manufacture of 
 sulphuric acid to one who can gain a new insight into 
 the problem of matter. Ingenuity is plentiful, creative 
 vision is rare. The theory of the "well-made" play in- 
 stalled the ingenious as lords of the theatre and dis- 
 credited the creative energy of the great masters at 
 the expense of their supposed craftsmanship. It 
 opened the doors of dramatic art to the type of mind 
 that likes to solve conundrums and disentangle puzzles 
 and invent a new can-opener and treat the business of 
 both literature and life with astuteness, deftness, and
 
 According to Sarcey 91 
 
 decorum. Successful playwrights needed now no 
 longer to be born. Cheerful mediocrity could learn all 
 the tricks of a smooth "facture"; the superficially ob- 
 served stuff of life furnished merely the pawns for the 
 game, the threads for the pattern, the rigid little blocks 
 for the skilful structure. Thus arose the school of 
 dra'matic writing that marched toward its big scenes 
 by the road of lost letters and sudden encounters and 
 stolen weapons and overheard conversations and hidden 
 wills and exotic inheritances, which refurbished the 
 ancient trick of indistinguishable twins, borrowed the 
 latest sleight-of-hand of the medium and the clairvoy- 
 ant, and made Mr. Augustus Thomas the dean of 
 American dramatists. 
 
 Mr. Thomas's new play, Nemesis, is the logical suc- 
 cessor of The Witching Hour and Palmy Days. The 
 modern drama, on both its naturalistic and neo-roman- 
 tic sides, has not left him wholly untouched. He has 
 felt a change in the times and been stirred by a gentle 
 ambition to change with them. During two acts of 
 Nemesis, even though the elderly silk-merchant and 
 his young wife and the French sculptor are but vague 
 and well-worn types, one is almost persuaded that Mr. 
 Thomas is interested in some fundamental facts of hu- 
 man nature. But when, toward the end of the second 
 act, the silk-merchant slyly, but in careful view of the 
 audience, pilfers and secretes- a bit of clay bearing the 
 sculptor's finger-prints, we know that the great game
 
 92 The American Stage 
 
 is on. Character and fate and vision are dropped. 
 Now comes the triumph of ingenuity. What will the 
 merchant do with the sculptor's finger-prints? Well, 
 he has them transferred to rubber stamps and forces 
 his wife to summon the sculptor to their house. There- 
 upon this gentleman of spotless life, addicted as we are 
 told, to the North American Review and the American 
 Journal of Economics, stabs the lady to death with the 
 calm precision of a stock-yard butcher, wipes the dag- 
 ger, the table, the door-knobs with a kerchief, and care- 
 fully imprints on all these objects the finger-prints of 
 the sculptor. There follows a trial scene in the Court 
 of General Sessions, written and produced with con- 
 summate imitative skill in all the external details of 
 reality, and a final moment outside of the Sing Sing 
 gates. There is no happy ending. And for that one 
 might be grateful, were it not that Mr. Thomas uses 
 a raw shock to the sensibilities merely to enforce his 
 belief that the one kind of circumstantial evidence com- 
 monly held to be incontrovertible may land an innocent 
 man in the electric chair. This preoccupation of his, 
 creditable no doubt to the man and the citizen, is 
 artistically of an incurable externality. But from the 
 point of view of Sarcey and the "well-made" play, it 
 provides his ingenuity with a bundle of new and effec- 
 tive devices. For to this school of dramaturgy things 
 and their accidental collisions take the place of pas- 
 sions and their fatalities.
 
 "According to Sarcey 93 
 
 The reason for paying even so much attention to a 
 negligible melodrama is the same for which we recalled 
 the theory of Sarcey. The full hope of the American 
 drama will not be realized until that theory and the 
 resultant practice are far more thoroughly discredited 
 among intelligent people than they are to-day; until 
 it is vitally understood, despite noisy reputations both 
 critical and theatric, that no creative mind is an ingeni- 
 ious mind, that no noble play is either "built" or 
 "made" but grows in the still chambers of the watch- 
 ful soul, that the school of Sarcey continues still to 
 produce plays in which, as Musset justly remarked long 
 ago, 
 
 1'intrigue, enlacee et roulee en feston, 
 Tourne comme un rebus autour d'un mirliton.
 
 Pity and Terror 
 I 
 
 THE night of Monday, October 10, 1921, was a mem- 
 orable one in the history both of the American stage 
 and of the American drama. It brought us Clemence 
 Dane's A Bill of Divorcement, Karl Schonherr's Chil- 
 dren's Tragedy, and Arthur Richman's Ambush. The 
 morning and afternoon of October n were far less 
 happy moments in the progress of American dramatic 
 criticism. The most distinguished of our evening pa- 
 pers observed that Schonherr's Kmdertragodie was 
 "not pleasant to contemplate" and that Ambush has 
 a "miserable end." Another contemporary wondered, 
 in regard to Ambush, whether it was necessary for the 
 American drama "to go through the drab and dispirit- 
 ing Manchester stage"; a third declared of the pro- 
 tagonist of that play that "nobody loves a weakling." 
 It is clear that American criticism cannot lead or guide 
 our creative life when it is necessary to remind its 
 busiest and most vocal practitioners of so elementary 
 a thing as Aristotle's remark that "we contemplate 
 with pleasure, and with the more pleasure the more 
 exactly they are imitated, such objects as, if real, we 
 could not see without pain." The reviewers made a 
 
 94
 
 Pity and Terror 95 
 
 great deal of the imperfect acting in Mr. Arnold Daly's 
 production of The Children's Tragedy. It was indeed 
 faulty enough. They made nothing of that magnificent 
 integrity and courage of his which returns again and 
 again to an attack upon our dramatic "forts of folly" 
 and now brought us the pure, severe, unfaltering beauty, 
 the dread and depth of Schonherr's little masterpiece. 
 But the American drama is closer to us and more impor- 
 tant. And we have an American tragedy at last. We 
 have Arthur Richman's Ambush. 
 
 The character of tragic fatality shifts from age to 
 age with the shifting views that men hold concerning 
 the nature of the universe and their destiny in it. The 
 arbitrariness of the gods yields to the will and law of 
 God, and that, in its turn, yields to the immanent laws 
 of heredity and the cruelties of the social order. But 
 there is a third and, closely considered, an even pro- 
 founder because less debatable source of tragic fatality. 
 It is that which arises from the sheer and unfathom- 
 able diversities of human character as given. Here 
 there is no place for theoretic subtlety and the dramatic 
 idea cannot be invalidated by discoveries in medicine or 
 revolutions in society. The appeal is purely to human 
 experience. And if that appeal is broad and deep 
 enough the dramatic idea is safe amid whatever change 
 of doctrines or institutions may come to pass. Such is 
 the appeal which Mr. Richman has made. And he has 
 made it with a power and poignancy, an honesty of
 
 96 The American Stage 
 
 mind, a richness of spiritual circumstance and a fru- 
 gality in the use of external device that are plainly 
 unique and plainly epoch-making in the history of the 
 American drama. 
 
 I not only see Walter Nichols, the clerk who lives in 
 Jersey City; I see his story, as Mr. Richman would 
 have us see it, through Nichols's eyes. The man is not 
 extraordinarily intelligent and not at all articulate. He 
 thinks he is old-fashioned, and that word helps him 
 out in a blundering way. But he is old-fashioned only 
 as all depth and fineness and integrity seems to raw- 
 ness and shallowness, and as the tempered and circum- 
 spect will must always seem to those who wreak their 
 desires unreflectingly upon the world. Walter Nithols 
 is in truth, as that reviewer remarked, weak. He is 
 weak because the gods themselves, in Schiller's old 
 saying, fight in vain against vulgarity of the soul. He 
 is not only weak. He is purblind. He has lived with 
 his wife Harriet for nearly twenty years and has not 
 known her. He is, in the deeper sense, not capable of 
 knowing her. Even at the end of the withering revela- 
 tions which the action chronicles, even in the lowest 
 depth of that abasement and despair into which she 
 has thrust him, he does not know her from within. 
 He is weak. The ideal kills. The mind that considers 
 all things and weighs the issues of life delicately and 
 distrusts brutal conclusions and fears to act because it 
 fears that action may be an affront or a wound that
 
 Pity and Terror 97 
 
 mind is weak in battling with the children of the world 
 and is unpractical and unsuccessful and is a fool's mind 
 according to the judgment of streets and market-places. 
 Often, as in the case of Walter Nichols, it hesitates to 
 resist evil because it does not recognize that evil and 
 is overcome. But it is overcome only outwardly. In 
 his extreme misery and shame Walter Nichols remains 
 himself, bearing an inner witness to all he is forced to 
 abandon. 
 
 The ruthless will that ensnares and drags him down 
 is fitly embodied in two women, his wife and daughter. 
 For it is true, however commonplace, that in woman 
 volition is directer and more elementary in every direc- 
 tion than in man. The will of woman suffers more re- 
 signedly but also acts more relentlessly. To Harriet 
 Nichols and to Margaret, the daughter, life has nar- 
 rowed itself to the mere absence of ease and pleasure 
 and of mean success. They repeat quite glibly and 
 honestly the formulas of their moral order. And they 
 try to observe the older woman more than the 
 younger a certain prudence and to stay, as Mr. Rich- 
 man points out with terrible irony, on this side of such 
 degradation as may involve suffering and want. But 
 the world is mere food for the voracity of their desires. 
 Only because, until the last possible moment, they 
 shield those desires behind the conventional forms of 
 life, are they able to deceive and scheme and conquer. 
 Had they been frank they would have been at once
 
 98 The American Stage 
 
 less ignoble and less destructive. They lie in the am- 
 bush of respectability and conventionality. The ideal 
 threatens to balk their desires. They leap forth and 
 destroy. Thus the dramatic idea is here identical with 
 the very forces that make life. A play in which that 
 identity is established is tragedy. 
 
 II 
 
 We are not moved by the remediable; we are not 
 moved by the accidental; we are not moved by unre- 
 lieved moral ugliness. It may be urged that nothing 
 is remediable. Absolutely speaking, that is true. At 
 the end of every discussion of the character of a tragic 
 action we meet the problem of choice. Though nothing 
 is easier than to dispose of the will as a separable entity, 
 we must still reckon with the unalterable subjective 
 conviction which the spectator projects into the people 
 on the stage that within some limits, however narrow, 
 a freedom of choice exists. The perfect tragic action 
 convinces us of the gradual obliteration of that margin 
 of choice. In such a play as Henri Bernstein's La 
 Griff e (The Claw), for instance, as in many plays of 
 that particular French school, we are constantly irked 
 by the conviction that the tragic protagonist could 
 have arrested his ruin; that, on the playwright's own 
 showing, there were forces present and alive within 
 the man which we would, in his place, have summoned. 
 That process of identification is inevitable. On it is
 
 Pity and Terror 99 
 
 based the convincingness or the reverse of every imag- 
 inative representation of life. If, when we have granted 
 a character every inner difficulty, every natural weak- 
 ness, every malevolence of fate, we still feel that given 
 his situation we could have rescued ourselves, the level 
 of the action in which he is involved falls below that 
 of tragedy. So soon as we instinctively interpose be- 
 tween the hero and his downfall a certain remedy pity 
 and terror flee and fatality turns into mere disaster. 
 What is true of the remediable is true in a far higher 
 degree of the accidental. In the world, which is a 
 world of causality, there is obviously nothing that cor- 
 responds to what people loosely call accident. In the 
 world of the representative and interpretative imagina- 
 tion all reasonableness and all convincingness is derived 
 from the artist's perfect control over the various strands 
 of moral and physical causality that weave the tragic 
 web. To resort to accident, that is, to the frankly ob- 
 scure and unexplained, is to sacrifice the intellectual 
 seriousness of your action at once. That is why Clem- 
 ence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement does not, despite its 
 earnestness and power, impress me as being of a tragic 
 character. It may be that after fifteen years of hope- 
 less insanity a man can suddenly regain his reason. 
 But the proof of an action or event must be, as David 
 Hume pointed out long ago, strong in direct proportion 
 to its improbability. Miss Dane has not troubled to 
 supply that proof. That, finally, the suddenly recov-
 
 loo The American Stage 
 
 ered man should wander into his old home on the very 
 Christmas day on which his wife has at last determined 
 to end her long solitariness, is to precipitate a tragic 
 crisis not from within its natural elements but from an 
 alien and extraneous source. Some allowance must in- 
 deed be made for the conventionalization of time and 
 space which the drama demands. But it is the unwise 
 playwright who accentuates this unavoidable artifice 
 by the use of festivals and anniversaries and coinci- 
 dences so perfect as to challenge belief at once. 
 
 The question of moral ugliness is a more subtle and 
 debatable one. It has little to do with any rude classi- 
 fication of human actions; it has little to do with the 
 external at all. Neither Macbeth who murders his 
 king repels us nor Rose Bernd who murders her child. 
 In each instance the dramatist has shown us the divine 
 humanity that transcends error and crime. When an 
 unrelieved moral ugliness is shown, it seems necessary 
 to the effects of tragedy that the author communicate 
 his sense of its quality to us. That is what Bernstein 
 so signally fails to do. We see his protagonist writhe 
 in the degradation of his exorbitant passions and never 
 glimpse a world beyond the fevered delusions in which 
 the man is caught. Thus the action is stained with a 
 spiritual sordidness which does not reside, as superficial 
 critics think, in poverty or dirt or meanness of occupa- 
 tion and station or in anything material and tangible, 
 but solely in the absence of those creative overtones by
 
 Pity and Terror r ioi 
 
 which the artist persuades us of the integrity and tran- 
 scendence of his own vision of things. 
 
 I have thought it more useful to offer briefly these 
 fundamental considerations than to criticize either A 
 Bill of Divorcement or The Claw in minuter detail, 
 or to explain by a concrete appeal the genuinely tragic 
 character of The Children's Tragedy, and of Mr. Arthur 
 Richman's Ambush. What Dryden called "the grounds 
 of criticism in tragedy" are apt to meet with no inquiry 
 among us. The fear of setting up rules and being 
 didactic is, indeed, the beginning of wisdom. But to 
 harbor that fear is not to abandon the reasonable ques- 
 tion: How does tragedy achieve its effects? And the 
 answer is: By showing us human ills which we accept, 
 upon a full understanding of all their causes, as inher- 
 ently irremediable through such a form and tone as 
 demonstrate the author's transcendence of that world 
 of illusion which he delineates. When all these ele- 
 ments are present our pity is complete, our terror is 
 rooted in reason, but we are elated and not depressed 
 because the dramatist has taken us with him upon that 
 peak of vision from which he surveys the miseries and 
 the errors of mankind.
 
 Susan Glaspell 
 
 I. The Early Plays 1 
 
 IN the rude little auditorium of the Provincetown 
 Players on MacDougall Street there is an iron ring in 
 the wall, and a legend informs you that the ring was 
 designed for the tethering of Pegasus. But the winged 
 horse has never been seen. An occasional play might 
 have allured him; the acting of it would invariably 
 have driven him to indignant flight. For, contrary to 
 what one would expect, the acting of the Players has 
 been not only crude and unequal; it has been without 
 energy, without freshness, without the natural stir and 
 eloquence that come from within. This is the circum- 
 stance which has tended to obscure the notable talent 
 of Susan Glaspell. The Washington Square Players 
 produced Trifles and thus gave a wide repute to what 
 is by no means her best work. Bernice, not only her 
 masterpiece but one of the indisputably important 
 dramas of the modern English or American theatre, 
 was again played by the Provincetown Players with 
 more than their accustomed feebleness and lack of 
 artistic lucidity. The publication of Miss Glaspell's 
 collected plays at last lifts them out of the tawdriness 
 1 Plays. By Susan Glaspell. 
 
 IO2
 
 Susan Glaspell 1103 
 
 of their original production and lets them live by their 
 own inherent life. 
 
 That life is strong, though it is never rich. In 
 truth, it is thin. Only it is thin not like a wisp of 
 straw, but like a tongue of flame. Miss Glaspell is 
 morbidly frugal in expression, but nakedly candid in 
 substance. There are no terrors for her in the world 
 of thought; she thinks her way clearly and hardily 
 through a problem and always thinks in strictly dra- 
 n^atic terms. But her form and, more specifically, her 
 dialogue, have something of the helplessness and the 
 numb pathos of the "twisted things that grow in un- 
 favoring places" which employ her imagination. She 
 is a dramatist, but a dramatist who is a little afraid of 
 speech. Her dialogue is so spare that it often becomes 
 arid; at times, as in The Outside, her attempt to lend 
 a stunted utterance to her silenced creatures makes for 
 a hopeless obscurity. The bleak farmsteads of Iowa, 
 the stagnant villages of New England, have touched 
 her work with penury and chill. She wants to speak 
 out and to let her people speak out. But neither she 
 nor they can conquer a sense that free and intimate 
 and vigorous expression is a little shameless. To un- 
 cover one's soul seems almost like uncovering one's 
 body. Behind Miss Glaspell 's hardihood of thought 
 hover the fear and self-torment of the Puritan. She is 
 a modern radical and a New England school teacher; 
 she is a woman of intrepid thought and also the
 
 104 The American Stage 
 
 cramped and aproned wife on some Iowa farm. She 
 is a composite, and that composite is intensely Ameri- 
 can. She is never quite spontaneous and unconscious 
 and free, never the unquestioning servant of her art. 
 She broods and tortures herself and weighs the issues 
 of expression. 
 
 If this view of Miss Glaspell's literary character is 
 correct, it may seem strange upon superficial considera- 
 tion that four of her seven one-act plays are comedies. 
 But two of them, the rather trivial Suppressed Desires 
 and the quite brilliant Tickless Time, were written in 
 collaboration with George Cram Cook, a far less scrupu- 
 lous and more ungirdled mind. Her comedy, further- 
 more, is never hearty. It is not the comedy of char- 
 acter but of ideas, or, rather, of the confusion or false- 
 ness or absurdity of ideas. Woman's Honor is the best 
 example of her art in this mood. By a sound and 
 strictly dramatic if somewhat too geometrical device, . 
 Miss Glaspell dramatizes a very searching ironic idea: 
 a man who refuses to establish an alibi in order to save 
 a woman's honor dies to prove her possessed of what 
 he himself has taken and risks everything to demon- 
 strate the existence of what has ceased to be. The one- 
 act tragedies are more characteristic of her; they cleave 
 deep, but they also illustrate what one might almost 
 call her taciturnity. That is the fault of her best- 
 known piece, Trifles. The theme is magnificent; it is 
 inherently and intensely dramatic, since its very nature
 
 Susan Glaspell [105 
 
 is culmination and crisis. But the actual speech of 
 the play is neither sufficient* nor sufficiently direct. 
 Somewhere in every dramai words must ring out. They 
 need not ring like trumpets. The ring need not be 
 loud, but it must be clear. Suppose in Trifles you do 
 not, on the stage, catch the precise significance of the 
 glances which the neighbor women exchange. There 
 need have been no set speech, no false eloquence, no 
 heightening of what these very women might easily 
 have said in their own persons. But one aches for a 
 word to release the dumbness, complete the crisis, and 
 drive the tragic situation home. 
 
 The same criticism may be made, though in a lesser 
 degree, of Miss GlaspelFs single full-length play, Ber- 
 nice. No production would be just to the very high 
 merits of that piece which did not add several speeches 
 to the first and third acts and give these the spiritual 
 and dramatic clearness which the second already has. 
 Crude people will call the play "talky." But indeed 
 there is not quite talk enough. Nor does Miss Glaspell 
 deal here with simple and stifled souls. That objec- 
 tion is the only one to be made. The modern American 
 drama has nothing better to show than Miss Glaspell's 
 portrait of the "glib and empty" writer whose skill was 
 "a mask for his lack of power" and whose wife sought, 
 even as she died, to lend him that power through the 
 sudden impact of a supremely tragic reality. The sur- 
 face of the play is delicate and hushed. But beneath
 
 106 The American Stage 
 
 the surface is the intense struggle of rending forces. 
 Bernice is dead. The soft radiance of her spirit is still 
 upon the house. It is still reflected in her father's ways 
 and words. Her husband and her friend hasten to 
 that house. And now the drama sets in, the drama that 
 grows from Bernice's last words to her old servant. It 
 is a dramatic action that moves and stirs and trans- 
 forms. There is hardly the waving of a curtain in those 
 quiet rooms. Yet the dying woman's words are seen 
 to have been a creative and dramatic act. Through 
 a bright, hard window one watches people in a house 
 of mourning. They stand or sit and talk haltingly as 
 people do at such times. Nothing is done. Yet every- 
 thing happens death and life and a new birth. What 
 more can drama give? 
 
 II. Inheritors 
 
 While managers are returning from early spring 
 trips to London and Paris with the manuscripts of 
 plays ranging from Shaw to Bataille, our native drama 
 is gathering an ever more vigorous life. The process 
 has few observers. But all great things have had their 
 origin in obscurity and have often become stained and 
 stunted by contact with the world and its success. It 
 need matter very little to Susan Glaspell whether her 
 play Inheritors, which the Provincetown Players are 
 producing, ever reaches Broadway. Nor need it affect 
 her greatly whether the criticism of the hour approves
 
 Susan G las pel I 107 
 
 it or not. If the history of literature, dramatic or non- 
 dramatic, teaches us anything, it is that Broadway and 
 its reviewers will some day be judged by their attitude 
 to this work. 
 
 Inheritors is not, in all likelihood, a great play, as it 
 is certainly not a perfect one. Neither was Haupt- 
 mann's Before Dawn. Like the latter it has too pointed 
 an intention; unlike the latter its first act drifts rather 
 than culminates and needs both tightening and abbre- 
 viation. But it is the first play of the American theatre 
 in which a strong intellect and a ripe artistic nature 
 have grasped and set forth in human terms the central 
 tradition and most burning problem of our national 
 life quite justly and scrupulously, equally without acri- 
 mony or compromise. 
 
 In 1879 two men occupied adjoining farms in Iowa: 
 Silas Morton, son of the earliest pioneers from Ohio 
 who fought Black Hawk and his red men for the land, 
 and Felix Fejevary, a Hungarian gentleman, who has 
 left his country and sought freedom in America after 
 the abortive revolution of 1848. The two men were 
 lifelong friends, and Morton, who had had but two 
 months of schooling, absorbed from his Hungarian 
 friend a profound sense of the liberation of culture and 
 left the hill which the white man had wrung by force 
 from the red to be the seat of a college that was to 
 perpetuate the united spirits of liberty and learning. 
 In the second act we are taken to the library of this
 
 io8 The American Stage 
 
 college. The time is October, 1920. Felix Fejevary, 
 2nd, now chairman of the board of trustees, is in con- 
 sultation with Senator Lewis of the finance committee 
 of the State legislature. Fejevary wants an appropria- 
 tion and recalls to the senator that the college has been 
 one hundred per cent. American during the war and 
 that the students, led by his son, have even acted as 
 strike-breakers in a recent labor dispute. The son, 
 Horace Fejevary, is introduced, a youth who thinks 
 Morton College is getting socially shabby too many 
 foreigners! and who is just now enraged at certain 
 Hindu students who have plead the cause of the In- 
 dian revolutionists and quoted Lincoln in defense of 
 their position. Senator Lewis thinks the lad a fine 
 specimen. But, talking of appropriations, there is a 
 certain Professor Holden who does not think that the 
 Hindus ought to be deported, who has said that Amer- 
 ica is the traditional asylum of revolutionaries, and 
 who seems to be a Bolshevik in other ways. Fejevary 
 promises to take care of Holden, and the ensuing scene 
 between these two with its searching revelation of spir- 
 itual processes, its bitter suppressions, its implication 
 of an evil barter in values not made with hands touches 
 a point of both dramatic truth and force which no other 
 American playwright has yet rivaled. The ironic and 
 tragic catastrophe is brought about by another member 
 of the third generation, Madeline Fejevary Morton. 
 To her mind, natural and girlish though it is, the mon-
 
 Susan G las pel I '109 
 
 strous inner contradictions of the situation are not 
 wholly dark. It is two years after the armistice. Yet 
 a boy chum of hers, a conscientious objector, is still in 
 a narrow and noisome cell; the Hindu students who 
 are to be sent to certain destruction are but following 
 the precepts of Lincoln's second inaugural. She inter- 
 feres in their behalf and proclaims in public, crudely 
 but with the passionate emphasis of youth, the prin- 
 ciples for which her two grandfathers founded Morton 
 College. Her offense, under the Espionage Act, is no 
 laughing matter. People with foreign names have got 
 twenty years for less. Her uncle and. her aunt plead 
 with her; Holden asks her to let herself ripen for 
 greater uses; her father's state pleads for itself. Miss 
 Glaspell has been careful to make her neither priggish 
 nor tempestuous. Some inner purity of soul alone 
 prompts her to resist. Suddenly an outcast, she goes 
 forth to face her judges and suffer her martyrdom. 
 
 No competent critic, whatever his attitude to the 
 play's tendency, will be able to deny the power and 
 brilliancy of Miss Glaspell's characterization. The de- 
 lineation of the three Fejevarys father, son and 
 grandson is masterly. Through the figures of these 
 men she has recorded the tragic disintegration of Amer- 
 ican idealism. The second Felix remembers his father 
 and his inheritance. But he has faced the seeming 
 facts so long and compromised so much that he is 
 drained dry of all conviction and sincerity. His son is
 
 lio The American Stage 
 
 an empty young snob and ruffian. With equal delicacy 
 and penetration we are shown the three Morton gen- 
 erations the slow, magnificent old pioneer, his broken 
 son, his granddaughter Madeline whose sane yet fiery 
 heart symbolizes the hope and the reliance of the 
 future. Alone and pathetic among them all stands 
 Holden, the academic wage slave who knows the truth 
 but who has an ailing wife; who yearns to speak but 
 who has no money laid by; a quiet man and a terrible 
 judgment on the civilization that has shaped him. 
 
 In the second and third acts Miss Glaspell's dialogue 
 expresses with unfailing fitness her sensitive knowledge 
 of her characters. It has entire verisimilitude. But it 
 has constant ironic and symbolic suppressions and cor- 
 respondences and overtones. This power of creating 
 human speech which shall be at once concrete and sig- 
 nificant, convincing in detail and spiritually cumulative 
 in progression, is, of course, the essential gift of the 
 authentic dramatist. That gift Miss Glaspell always 
 possessed in a measure; she has now brought it to a 
 rich and effective maturity.
 
 An Evening at the Movies 
 
 To criticize the movies may seem to have fallen low 
 indeed. But Mr. D. W. Griffith, superman of the "pho- 
 toplay," invites you with a gesture of quite regal cour- 
 tesy. "Here," he seems to say, "is a thing that has 
 little in common with your quarter show around the 
 corner; here is, if anywhere, the unheard of and in- 
 comparable." You go and find yourself in the midst 
 of a sufficiently intense experience of life, if not of art. 
 All that depresses and discourages you in certain char- 
 acteristic moods of your countrymen is here: the moral 
 littleness and the physical magnificence, the intellectual 
 sloth and the mechanical speed. The contrast that 
 meets you is not the ancient and tragic one between 
 grandeur and mortality; it is a quaint and new one 
 between grandeur and silliness. But do not fancy Mr. 
 Griffith a Barnum, a knowing fakir on an heroic scale. 
 He creates or rather assembles his spectacles within 
 the mood to which they are to appeal; he himself throbs 
 and yells and hisses the villain with that vast audience 
 which is stirred and shaken by these racing pictures as 
 it could never be by the passion of Medea or the pit- 
 eousness of Lear. 
 
 He has taken the tawdry old fable of Way Down 
 
 in
 
 112 The American Stage 
 
 East the betrayal, the mock marriage, the villain's 
 downfall, the happy ending and left it, in all essen- 
 tials, precisely what it was. The written legends on the 
 screen that interpret the action in a style of inimitably 
 stale sugariness serve but to intensify the coarse and 
 blundering insufficiency of the moral involved. These 
 hectic appeals to the mob in favor of conventions as 
 stiff as granite and as merciless as gangrene are pow- 
 erfully calculated to tighten thongs that even now often 
 cut to the very heart and to increase the already dread- 
 ful sum of social intolerance and festering pain. For 
 in the applause of these audiences there is not only 
 satisfaction; there is menace. Ten thousand people, 
 an hundred thousand people, will, sooner or later, leave 
 a theatre after this picture and go out into the world 
 determined to make the ideals of Mr. Griffith prevail. 
 Woe to a neighbor, a friend, a kinsman who shall choose 
 to lead his life upon another plan ! Against this prop- 
 aganda poets and philosophers are as powerless as a 
 child trying to batter down a door of oak. 
 
 They are the more powerless because the manager 
 with a craftiness that, on this scale, has in it some- 
 thing grandiose, drives home his moral by the sharpest, 
 the most intimate, the most unashamed appeals. A 
 son dances a simple old country dance with his mother 
 and, with a grave and tender courtesy, kisses her faded 
 cheek. Dusk falls over two young lovers in an orchard. 
 Apple blossoms sway in the breeze. Behind the screen
 
 An Evening at the Movies 113 
 
 well-modulated choral voices sing an old-fashioned 
 ditty that brings back to every American those scenes 
 of his earlier years from which no man can withhold 
 a faint tenderness. Our youth does tug at our hearts. 
 If the steady and disciplined mind recognizes, however 
 austerely, the natural power of such things, consider 
 how those unschooled characters go down before so 
 vividly real and beautiful a presentation of them. They 
 are ensnared by what is not the worst within them, 
 and driven forth by their very pieties to persecute and 
 to traduce their fellowmen. Who is so base that, hav- 
 ing seen this picture, he will not battle for the security, 
 the permanence, the sanctity of well, of everything 
 exactly as it is? 
 
 Mr. Griffith's "elaboration" of the story is purely 
 scenic in kind. Not to praise his work in this respect 
 would be an empty affectation. Life is here in great 
 beauty and in great abundance. The gorgeous ball in 
 the prologue, the barn-dance, the farm-yards, the sleigh- 
 rides are all excellent. The directing especially in the 
 barn-dance scene is superb. No stage manager has 
 ever created a fuller sense of the authentic rhythm and 
 thrill and abandon of reality. All the group scenes, in- 
 deed, are magnificently done. There is in them a union 
 of strength and elasticity that required both insight and 
 imagination to produce. Wherever no moral ideas in- 
 trude, wherever neither straight thinking nor clean feel- 
 ing was to be done, wherever the scene has no signifi-
 
 114 The American Stage 
 
 cance beyond its physical aspect and movement, Mr. 
 Griffith and his actors have both grace and power. It 
 follows that the picture reaches its highest point where 
 nature and naked physical danger are to be shown. 
 When the heroine's past is discovered, the squire drives 
 her like Hazel Kirke out into the storm and the 
 night. The scene is excessively silly and mawkish. 
 But he does not drive her out, remember, into a storm 
 of paper from the wings. It is an authentic blizzard 
 in the forests of Vermont. The girl flees to the frozen 
 Connecticut river. But the ice cracks and is riven and, 
 lying on a floe, she is driven toward the thundering 
 falls. The hero follows her and saves her at the last 
 moment. A shabby old trick! But the feigning is re- 
 duced to a minimum. A large engineering staff worked 
 for two months to force nature itself to enact this scene. 
 The whirling storm, the icy water, the racing floes are 
 actually there. It is not art, but it is magnificent. 
 
 Anthropologists tell us that in primitive society the 
 violator of a taboo is the central object of vengeance. 
 Yet when trained observers question members of the 
 tribe as to the reason for any particular taboo, primi- 
 tive man cannot even comprehend the nature of that 
 question. His whole concern is with the how, never 
 with the why of his tribal customs. In the foreground 
 of his consciousness is always the will, never the reason. 
 In the face of nature he is agile, skilful, and intrepid; 
 before the uses of his tribe or phratry he is a shivering
 
 An Evening at the Movies 115 
 
 and unthinking slave. The parallel is, at least, instruc- 
 tive. Mr. Griffith and his kind harness rivers and play 
 with storms in order to -tell the tribe what it already 
 most potently believes, and to fortify its already over- 
 active and perilously blind volitions. In this vicarious 
 affirmation of its will the audience feels something that 
 approaches ecstasy, as it also does in witnessing the 
 contest between men and the primordial forces of the 
 earth. 
 
 There are secondary sources of pleasure. Miss Gish 
 is an extremely gifted young woman. The art of repro- 
 ducing the exact gesture and facial expression of life 
 could not well go further. She was present in a box on 
 this first showing of the picture and received a deserved 
 ovation. Yet were she to act the part of Nora Helmer, 
 as she so exquisitely could, these audiences would turn 
 from her in hot and angry contempt. Her art, as such, 
 is nothing to them. They only know that she violated 
 no taboo.
 
 The One-Act Play in America 
 
 IN the stricter technical sense the one-act play, like 
 the short story, is a modern invention. And even more 
 than the short story do its restrictions demand a very 
 high concentration of material and an economy of 
 means so strict that its besetting danger is a spurious 
 and loud effectiveness. But since precisely such ef- 
 fectiveness appeals strongly to the nerves of the aver- 
 age audience, the most successful one-act plays, those 
 of Sudermann or of Alfred Sutro, have not always been 
 the best of their kind. Strindberg's eerie acuteness of 
 vision and Schnitzler's beautiful awareness of the dra- 
 matic life in hushed and muffled things have made the 
 one-act plays of these two the best in the world. Such 
 symbolical projections of a poet's highly personal sense 
 of awe and mystery and spiritual values as Maeter- 
 linck's Interieur or Hofmannsthal's Der Tor und der 
 Tod are lyrical in method, though dramatic in form, 
 and hardly enter the question of the one-act play in the 
 broader life of the theatre. There are isolated master- 
 pieces such as Synge's Riders to the Sea. Generally 
 speaking, however, the contemporary one-act play will 
 conform to one of the three types: the artificial, the 
 psychological, the symbolist. 
 
 116
 
 The One-Act Play in America 117 
 
 The narrow means and tentative beginnings of the 
 experimental stages in America have made the one-act 
 play important in the recent history of our theatre. 
 Nowhere else has it held a quite comparable place. On 
 the Continent cycles of one-act plays by a distinguished 
 dramatist are presented whenever one has chosen that 
 form of expression. Among us there has been a cult 
 of the one-act play as such. In the hands of the Wash- 
 ington Square players this cult reached its highest point. 
 To-day, though it still persists, it is less intense. Our 
 insurgent theatre is entering upon a robuster phase of 
 its life. A bill of one-act plays by different authors, 
 chosen partly to harmonize and partly to contrast, is 
 after all a source of somewhat frail and artificial pleas- 
 ure. The audiences, at all events, have commonly been 
 a trifle self-conscious and have worn their sophistica- 
 tion with more pride than grace. 
 
 During the past ten years, however, the production 
 of one-act plays in this country has been very large. It 
 is a pity that one cannot also call it rich. But it did 
 not need Miss Mayorga's extremely useful though some- 
 what fantastically edited volume 1 to tell us that rich 
 is the one word with which to sum up all the qualities 
 that the movement lacked. It was a movement which 
 every one who cared for the theatre supported and still 
 supports. But if his sanity was quite firm, or if he 
 
 1 Representative One Act Plays by American Authors. Selected 
 by Margaret Gardner Mayorga.
 
 n8 The American Stage 
 
 was in close touch with other things in the modern 
 drama, he could never lose a sense of being in an artis- 
 tic atmosphere that was supposed to be keen but was 
 only thin. It was astir with a bustle of aspiration. But 
 the gusts were quick and a bit too explosive and died 
 down in a little mist of staleness. The figure halts. 
 And one is indeed embarrassed, in any critical descrip- 
 tion of these plays, by one's cordial sense of the talents 
 and ambitions of certain immediate contemporaries and 
 by one's clear vision of the lack that unites them all. 
 Realists or romantics, sociological or poetic playwrights, 
 they are all deficient in vitality, strength and sap. The 
 formula according to which all but three of the twenty- 
 five plays in Miss Mayorga's volume seem to have been 
 written is this: The one-act play is an admirable vehicle 
 for advanced thought or delicate fancy or dramatic 
 episode. Let us seek such a thought, fancy, or incident, 
 use the approved methods, and offer the result to a 
 little theatre. Nowhere is there a sense of that impas- 
 sioned fusion of impulse and form which alone makes 
 art; nowhere any evidence of the fire and compulsion 
 of an inner experience. The exceptions are painfully 
 few; two or three things by Eugene O'Neil, Theodore 
 Dreiser's The Girl in the Coffin, Bosworth Crocker's 
 The Last Straw. These few are tragic and dramatic 
 not only in gesture but in feeling; they were not writ- 
 ten to be played but played because they had been 
 written.
 
 The One-Act Play in America 1119 
 
 The symbolical plays are the most bloodless. They 
 are either obviously and woodenly made, like Mr. Percy 
 MacKaye's Sam Average, or ineffectually and con- 
 ventionally idealistic like Miss Hortense Flexner's 
 Voices or Miss Alice Gerstenberg's Beyond. The 
 ideals are too correct, the sentiments too acceptable. 
 Here is the central weakness. What these pieces 
 lack is not skill or adroitness or good intentions, 
 There is no free and self-sustaining personality be- 
 hind them. The young Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal, 
 and Yeats had a vision unseen but by them, incom- 
 municable except through their words. They had 
 no philosophical notions in particular, no ideals for 
 practice, no saws for conduct. But they had a personal 
 vision of the mystery of life which burned away all 
 other vision, darkened for the hour all other light, 
 opened new vistas into the land of the soul. Without 
 that there is no art, no literature, no drama. The day 
 of the folk-singer is over. Nothing can justify the 
 creative act to-day, as Gourmont eloquently pointed out, 
 but personal vision. And that requires character, not 
 in the current sense of technical blamelessness or an 
 assent to common standards, but in the higher sense 
 of daring to experience in order to transmute experi- 
 ence into ripeness, wisdom, beauty. The moral, for 
 there is one, is this: Our young writers have been too 
 much concerned with technique and too little concerned 
 with their minds. The wide dissemination of techni-
 
 I2O The American Stage 
 
 cal instruction has persuaded persons to write plays 
 whose inner equipment sufficed for a family letter. 
 The published plays of the Harvard Workshop display 
 the same emptiness and technical dexterity as the 
 greater number of Miss Mayorga's exhibits. And here 
 again the kinship of the one-act play with the short 
 story is plain. Its composition has been taught. If it 
 were more profitable, courses would soon appear in the 
 curriculums of the correspondence schools. But the 
 patter about learning one's craft does not apply to lit- 
 erature. What truly destined "maker" was ever 
 silenced for lack of craftsmanship? True matter cre- 
 ates form. The only discipline the writer needs is 
 self-discipline. His impulse must be like love or 
 prayer. It is resistless or it is nothing. But how many 
 of these contemporary one-act plays could have been 
 left unwritten without causing their authors a mo- 
 ment's discomfort? That question both judges them 
 and points the way.
 
 The Lonely Classics 
 
 I. Medea t 
 
 No one should fail to see the Medea of Mr. and Mrs. 
 Maurice Browne. The play reaches you with unex- 
 pected intensity and force. You forget that it is ven- 
 erable. The passion of it pounds like the sea on rocks. 
 Gone are the two thousand three hundred and fifty-one 
 years since the drama's first performance at Athens. 
 You find yourself face to face with Euripides, the ear- 
 liest master of the problem play, the discoverer of the 
 great psychological dilemmas of mankind, the father 
 of a mighty progeny. That being so, one's little quar- 
 rels with Mr. Maurice Browne's production do not 
 greatly matter. What one missed was spaciousness 
 and simplicity of effect. The lighting devices are too 
 clever. Yet at the crucial moment they fail and the 
 sun-chariot is paltry. It was inevitable, of course, that 
 the version of Gilbert Murray should be used, and 
 hence the choruses admirably chanted and spoken 
 often sweep away the Euripidean passion and philos- 
 ophy and transport one to Swinburne's Forsaken Gar- 
 den by the brink of his mother, the sea. But Miss 
 Ellen Van Volkenburg acts with as compact and un- 
 
 121
 
 122 The American Stage 
 
 swerving an inner conviction as if she were indeed the 
 first prophetic proclaimer of the wrongs of her sex. 
 
 For such Medea is. When she has said that she 
 would rather thrice maintain herself in an embattled 
 field than bear once the pangs of childbirth she has 
 opened the great feminist case and destroyed the legend 
 of the sheltered woman. She also states with a hard 
 and final clearness the injustice of woman's social de- 
 pendence on her husband and stamps divorce as useless 
 so long as the practice involves a reproach. Under the 
 pressure of wrongs that are indeed intolerable she lends 
 a voice to the unhappy race of woman. With her own 
 hands she once slew her brother for Jason's sake; for 
 him she gave up home and friends and memories; she 
 bore him two men children. And now he would wed 
 the young daughter of Creon perhaps from ambition, 
 perhaps from desire and make Medea, to use the 
 naked bitterness of her own words, "a thing mocked 
 at." Why should she not be implacable? Even if to- 
 day we must dismiss the murder of her children from 
 the world of fact, we are still shaken by her passion, 
 which even at its extreme is scarcely more cruel than 
 her wrongs. 
 
 No wonder that Jason, accomplished sophist though 
 he be, shrinks and withers beneath her scorn. Nor is 
 it surprising that from a contemporary American per- 
 formance he emerges as morally loathsome. We may 
 deprecate the ferocity of Medea's deeds; we approve
 
 The Lonely Classics 123 
 
 that of her passion. But Euripides, whom none can 
 accuse of a lack of justice to her, has not left Jason 
 wholly without extenuation or defense. He lets the 
 man make three points. It was love, it was an ele- 
 mental infatuation, that caused Medea to slay Absyrtes 
 and Pelias for his sake. For the deeds done under the 
 sting of so selfish a passion Medea deserves no reward. 
 His guilt lay, of course, in accepting the benefit of her 
 crimes. His second point is that no Grecian, that is, 
 no civilized woman, would have been capable of them 
 and that hence the Colchian murderess and sorceress 
 whatever her wrongs is but continuing her ghastly 
 career. His third point is that Medea exaggerates 
 those wrongs monstrously because, like all women, she 
 identifies the life of sex with life's totality. If their 
 marriage is blest they want for nothing else; if it is 
 unblest they become furies and lose all sense of human 
 values. 
 
 Euripides dwells on the barbaric character of the 
 Colchian princess. Yet through the words of Jason he 
 generalizes from her and, ardent feminist though he is, 
 shows his knowledge of woman's fatal nearness to the 
 elemental and primitive. Jason balances many things 
 in his mind; Medea does not. In their last terrible 
 interview he reflects and remembers and regrets. She 
 scorns to answer and appeals to Zeus. Over the very 
 bodies of her murdered boys no doubt afflicts her. Her 
 revenge is for her as absolute in quality as was her
 
 124 The American Stage 
 
 wrong. She sees nothing above or beyond her sense of 
 outrage and promptly identifies it with the outraged 
 justice of God. Therefore the score is rightly evened 
 and a final satisfaction is hers: "I love my pains so 
 that thou laugh no more!" 
 
 One wonders whether Euripides saw in his imagina- 
 tion the latter years of this tragic pair. Medea went to 
 the land of Erectheus. There she ordained festivals 
 and rites to make due atonement for the guilt of having 
 slain her children. Since she believed such atonement 
 possible, nothing ever shook her conviction that she 
 was the purely tragic victim of a wicked man on whom 
 she had avenged not her wrongs only but those of 
 womankind. She cultivated an air of grandeur and of 
 noble melancholy. She became a privileged character 
 at the court of ^Egeus and nursed a tragic and self- 
 righteous pride. Jason had no such inner comforts. 
 He was quite broken. But an inner break brings 
 thought and wandering meditation. The sophist had 
 already begun to pass from the mere acts of persuasion 
 to deeper reasoning concerning the true character of 
 men and women and of their harsh contentions. In 
 the dust of a roadside he became, perhaps, more ac- 
 ceptable to the understanding gods than Medea at the 
 court of a king. 
 
 Is it to consider too curiously to consider so? As- 
 suredly there are hints in the text of the play that 
 Euripides was not unaware of what it must have been
 
 THe Lonely Classics 
 
 to be married to Medea. She had made terrific sacri- 
 fices and she was fiercely faithful. But past sacrifices 
 do not fill to-day with pleasantness or make it easier 
 to live. Medea, like many women, was acutely con- 
 scious of them. They made her stern, superior, and 
 exacting. Fidelity, given and received as a matter of 
 course, is beautiful. But it is a tender and a delicate 
 thing. Emphasized and psychically exploited it may 
 become first a burden and then a nuisance. Imagine, 
 to descend to the plain bread of life, a woman who 
 plays noble variations on this theme: You must not 
 cross me because I once slew men for your sake, and 
 your slightest thought must be mine because mine is 
 yours! Jason dares not tell her the truth. But the 
 reasons he pleads for his new marriage are hollow and 
 specious. His insincerity is evident. What he wanted 
 was brightness and nai'veness and a wife who did not 
 bring a moral menace and austere compulsions to his 
 bed and board. Only when Medea is in her unap- 
 proachable chariot does he tell her that real opinion 
 of her character and her past which sent him wooing 
 to King Creon's house. Is that ignoble as an interpre- 
 tation? Then so is life ignoble. It shows the depths 
 within depths of the great Attic poet. It points the 
 way, perhaps, to another tragedy on the immortal 
 legend, to A Modern Medea.
 
 1126 The American Stage 
 
 II. A Human Hamlet 
 
 Four fluted columns of olive-tinged gray with invis- 
 ible capitals stretch in a semi-circle across the stage. 
 About these the dun draperies change and melt gently 
 into shape after shape, marking the rooms and halls 
 and galleries of Elsinore. The abundant beauty of 
 shifting color is furnished wholly by the costumes of 
 the players. The columns remain even in the church- 
 yard scene when between the two central ones there 
 opens a vista of tumbled headstones, of an immemo- 
 rial Celtic cross, and of two solemn poplars against a 
 pallid sky. This whole imaginary world has a beauty 
 that is full of sadness, a sadness almost eerie with the 
 presage of imminent decay. It is shown us in the guise 
 it must have assumed to Hamlet's vision. For his 
 home had always been a prison to him, though like 
 many prisons it was not without tender memories. But 
 the scene of those memories had been darkened by 
 haunting shapes and in the corridors of the castle there 
 sounded the dull echo of the tread of doom. 
 
 The Hamlet of Mr. E. H. Sothern's impersonation 
 who moves amid these scenes has achieved a final es- 
 cape from the remoteness and confusion into which the 
 problem-mongers had driven him. He is free at last of 
 all false eloquence, all posturing, all undue conscious- 
 ness of self. He is a young poet, probably a minor 
 poet with more temperament than power. His posi-
 
 The Lonely Classics 127 
 
 tion and the feebleness of his impulse have kept him 
 from a complete dedication to his studies and his art; 
 but his culture is fine and a trifle sophisticated and even 
 at thirty he prides himself a little upon his superiority 
 to the rude and physical manners of the Danish court. 
 He had always been lonely there. He admired and 
 loved his father. But he idealized him too completely 
 ever to have known him well. The queen was not 
 without the natural instincts of a mother, but she was 
 restless, passionate, and perverse. So the little lad had 
 played with the court jester in the melancholy castle 
 gardens. But the jester soon died and Hamlet did not 
 find friends until many years had passed. Then he 
 clung to Horatio and perhaps to one or two others 
 with all the peculiar tenderness of a romantic and soli- 
 tary soul. He became a scholar, a wit, and something 
 of a poet. His intellectual faculties grew sharp and . 
 mature. But his heart remained the sensitive and as- 
 tonished heart of a child. He loved Ophelia with a 
 frank tenderness unschooled by wisdom or experience. 
 His cynicism, after the manner of intellectual youth, 
 was all verbal and at second hand. In his innermost 
 soul he held the world, at least his world, to be as gen- 
 tle, as humane, as proud, as pure as himself. 
 
 Then his world crumbled. His father died. His 
 mother's marriage wounded his delicacy to the quick. 
 His first impulse was to take refuge in the studious 
 cloisters of Wittenberg. But his fate was upon him and
 
 I2B The American Stage 
 
 there is a forlorn pathos in Mr. Sothern's quiet rendi- 
 tion of the line: 
 
 "Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me." 
 
 The full horrors sweep down upon him. But Hamlet 
 cannot at once grasp and deal with the enormity of a 
 world so changed and ruined. The habit of long years 
 drives him into the refuge of reticence and silence, 
 and the naturalness of the impulse which bade him sud- 
 denly exclude Marcellus and even Horatio from his 
 confidence is beautifully interpreted by Mr. Sothern 
 as arising from the inherent necessities of his nature. 
 He determines to feign madness, which is but another 
 escape for a sensitive soul intolerably wrought upon. 
 Yet the feigning is only for moments. Even in those 
 moments, as during the scene with Polonius, it is 
 tinged by his old irony. He cannot help dropping the 
 mask even before Rosencranz and Guildenstern. And 
 in the great scenes with Ophelia and his mother his 
 cry is that of the stricken idealist who will not endure 
 love in a world where it can lend itself to such uses, 
 nor touch a mother's hand that has been so unspeak- 
 ably defiled. That is his tragedy, the tragedy of a 
 pure soul whose moral world has been riven beyond 
 mending. He cannot set it right. Traditions and the 
 natural passions counsel revenge. But what will re- 
 venge avail? He falls into the profound disillusion of 
 his utterances in the churchyard old truths that have
 
 The Lonely Classics 129 
 
 come home to him and that are so at variance with his 
 great praise of man and into the recklessness of his 
 own safety that ends his troubled and irreparably 
 broken life. 
 
 Such is the character and such the story which Mr. 
 Sothern projects upon the stage. He has lost all con- 
 sciousness of his audience and all consciousness of 
 himself as in the act of playing a part so famous and 
 difficult. His Hamlet has a virile intellect and a subtle 
 one, but a nature that is all gentleness, courtesy, kind- 
 ness, and truth. Above all, he is simple at heart. The 
 monologues as Mr. Sothern renders them lose their 
 last tinge of rhetoric. They are impassioned or re- 
 flective self-communings, broken by the natural pauses 
 and gestures of a man who is alone with his own soul. 
 In the more intellectual and colloquial passages, such 
 as the prose scene with the players, Mr. Sothern speaks 
 as a man among men. Here Hamlet was bent upon his 
 proper business. But it is the same Hamlet, though 
 driven into a world of thought and action so alien and 
 abhorrent, who uses the subtlety of his mind to con- 
 found the courtiers and who becomes his mother's 
 accuser and her reluctant judge. It is in these transi- 
 tions from mood to mood that Mr. Sothern employs all 
 the delicacy and ripeness of his art. Beneath the irony, 
 the wit, the bitterness, the throttling passions that drive 
 him almost to the verge of madness, there is always 
 heard the deeper ground note of Hamlet's innermost
 
 130 THe American Stage 
 
 nature a note of spiritual gentleness and native peace. 
 It is this note that Shakespeare sounds again with 
 such incomparably simple loveliness in those all but 
 final words: 
 
 "Absent thee from felicity a while, 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 
 To tell my story" 
 
 words that mark fitly to every intelligence and every 
 heart the passing of the "sweet prince" of Horatio's 
 last salutation. 
 
 Among the details of Mr. Sothern's technique it is 
 to be remarked that he speaks the verse as verse and 
 yet as authentic human speech. He conveys an im- 
 pression of complete naturalness while never slurring 
 the iambic pattern of his text. He uses his voice 
 throughout like a man speaking out his insistent 
 thoughts and not, as Shakespearean actors with fine 
 voices are tempted to do, like a musical instrument. 
 His diction is beautifully clear without being over 
 elaborate. One may merely regret that he sticks to the 
 ugly and foolish old habit of improperly sounding the 
 "y" in "my" and "myself." His admirable realism 
 should not have stopped at so annoying a trifle. In 
 his movements and gestures he has equally heeded his 
 author's warning concerning the modesty of nature. 
 He strikes no poses, his mantle falls into no statuesque 
 folds. He gestures very little with his arms, but his
 
 The Lonely Classics 131 
 
 hands have the fevered motions of a highly nervous 
 nature under great emotional stress. . In brief, his per- 
 formance is so refreshing and important because it 
 lends to a character which the centuries have over- 
 laden with curious thoughts and with the dust of per- 
 ished mannerisms and traditions a living validity so 
 complete and a reality so immediate that, to one spec- 
 tator at least, he revived the music of a great poem 
 that had fallen a little silent amid the many noises of 
 life, and brought that almost legendary figure back 
 again into the gloom and glory of the human earth. 
 
 III. The Life and Death of Richard HI 
 
 From the third part of King Henry VI and from 
 King Richard HI a skilled and sensitive hand has 
 shaped a biographical play in three acts and sixteen 
 scenes concerning the life and death of Richard of 
 Gloucester. For this drama Mr. Robert Edmond 
 Jones has built scenery of a dark and naked magnifi- 
 cence. His Tower of London blends the architectural 
 reality with all one's imaginative visions of a harsh, 
 bloody, and turbulent age. The throne room is rich 
 and beautiful, but its very lines and patterns accord 
 with the swift and cruel fate of these transitory kings. 
 
 Through these scenes John Barrymore, clad in vary- 
 ing bursts of color, limps as Richard of Gloucester 
 slow, sinister, almost feeble, hiding yet accentuating 
 the deformities that have so wrought upon his soul.
 
 132' The American Stage 
 
 He wears an orange doublet that glows more bril- 
 liantly for the glossy sable of his hose; wrapped in 
 a scarlet cloak he sits on a white horse between the 
 dark robes of a cardinal and the gray wall of the 
 Tower; he flashes in a suit of golden armor. His face 
 is like a dagger now glittering, now dull. It sheathes 
 its malevolence or strikes out. But there is this strange 
 and unearthly thing about its temper: it breaks but 
 it does not melt. The art of Mr. Barrymore, which is 
 eager and self-conscious and flexible, has not been able 
 to mold into the flowing curves of life the rigid medi- 
 eval psychology of his hero. He has striven toward 
 that end, but the result is only a gorgeous artifice. 
 He begins upon a note of tragic self-pity: 
 
 Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so, 
 Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it. 
 
 It is, in his rendering, the cry of a wounded spirit that 
 would, like his Gianetto in Benelli's Jest, build a pro- 
 tective armor about its own infirmity there more of 
 ciaft, here of ruthlessness. And he lets Richard rise 
 to a very modern cry of self-justification in the words 
 "I am myself alone." But at once this interpretation 
 conflicts with the medieval ethical conventions of the 
 Shakespeare of 1593. A cripple stung to monstrous 
 deeds by his own sensitiveness would be aware of his 
 own inner qualities; his conflict would not have left 
 him without a presentiment of the relative aspect of
 
 The Lonely Classics 133 
 
 the moral life. Shakespeare, of course, cared little for 
 that. Richard is villain through and through. He 
 knows that the murdered Edward was a good man and 
 that he is a plain doer of evil "whose all not equals 
 Edward's moiety." He does not play with shadings or 
 excuses. So Mr. Barrymore, to give continuity to his 
 conception, lends Richard a mordant and cynical hu- 
 mor in whose very wildness and excess there is a hint 
 of the old pain. And the text does, indeed, fully bear 
 out the sinister humor, as in Gloucester's 
 
 Cannot a plain man live and think no harm? 
 
 or in his swift baiting of Margaret, or in the answer 
 to his mother's question "Art thou my son?" 
 
 Ay, I thank God, my father, and yourself. 
 
 But in the text this humor is like the sparks struck 
 from a flint; it neither hides nor betrays a malady of 
 the soul. It is a part of what Richard himself calls 
 his "naked villainy" which, for mere effectiveness, he 
 clothes 
 
 With old, odd ends stolen out of holy writ. 
 
 Throughout the whole of what is, in this represen- 
 tation, the third act, Mr. Barrymore lets Richard show 
 a disintegration of the spirit that is expressed by a
 
 134 The American Stage 
 
 growing feebleness and feverishness of speech and 
 bodily gesture. It was, obviously, his only refuge from 
 his author. For again the text plays him false. Rich- 
 ard is broken by danger from without and by defeat 
 in the field. The ghosts of his murdered men and 
 women are ghosts risen from a medieval purgatory to 
 blast and damn him. They are not the crystallization 
 of a long and suppressed spiritual agony. They do 
 not symbolize his conscience; they awaken it. Mr. 
 Barrymore's Richard has a tragedy of the inner life; 
 Shakespeare's chronicle illustrates the fact that even 
 the cleverest and strongest scoundrel is punished in 
 the end. In the tent scene on Bosworth field Mr. Bar- 
 rymore has a rich and resonant moment in the awaken- 
 ing from that fearful sleep. But in this very moment 
 he is forced to belie his own conception wholly. For 
 his Richard, stung to excess and crime by the bitter- 
 ness of fate, would have found pity for himself within 
 himself; his conscience would have used those "several 
 thousand tongues" before, or else he would have sought 
 to transcend it and would have hurled his defiance 
 against the very ministers of doom. The medieval 
 villain, having determined upon his course, dispensed 
 with conscience until hell and vengeance found him out. 
 Not a medieval villain of flesh and blood, of course, 
 who being human was divided and tormented, but the 
 villain of the medieval Christian tradition whom the 
 young Shakespeare accepted in all but the customary
 
 The Lonely Classics [135 
 
 inhumanity and in the customary unashamed homiletic 
 intention. 
 
 The performance, despite the discrepancy between 
 its own central motivation and the Shakespearean text, 
 is an arresting and even a fascinating one. But it is 
 not really great. Mr. Barrymore has moments of the 
 highest histrionic effectiveness; he allures and dazzles. 
 But the word histrionic with all its connotations stands 
 between him and the spirit from which greatness issues. 
 He misses here, as he missed in Tolstoi's Redemption, 
 the note of an ultimate sincerity. He does not lose 
 himself; he is not consumed in the flame of his own 
 creative imagination. We watch John Barrymore do- 
 ing marvelous things, and he watches himself with an 
 eager appreciation and applause. He permits himself 
 to be surrounded, notably here, by large companies of 
 very inferior actors who play in subdued tones, raise 
 his personality into an immoderate relief, and shatter 
 the drama which he feigns to interpret. One quality 
 only his Richard adds to those with which we are 
 already familiar in him. His diction is wholly beauti- 
 ful clear, scholarly, and eloquent. He has, evidently, 
 the finest rhythmic sense. The verses of Richard III 
 do not yet flow in massive and interlinked paragraphs 
 as in the later Shakespeare. Many of them are end- 
 stopped and so a little hard and stiff. Mr. Barrymore 
 observes the versification very scrupulously and yet 
 wrings from the lines their utmost of musical value.
 
 136 The American Stage 
 
 As a declamation, in the best sense, his performance is 
 therefore beyond praise. As acting, it suffers from a 
 display of personal idiosyncrasy and untempered 
 power. 
 
 IV. Macbeth in the Void 
 
 The production of Macbeth by Mr. Arthur Hop- 
 kins, Mr. Robert Edmond Jones, and Mr. Lionel Bar- 
 rymore raises an old and fundamental question. 
 Neither an uninstructed dislike nor a sophisticated 
 approbation touch it at all. When Mr. Hopkins de- 
 clared that he and his associates had left behind "all 
 compromise with realism," he flung that essential ques- 
 tion nakedly at us and anyone moderately familiar 
 with certain artistic tendencies of the day could have 
 foretold the result. The mimetic function of art was 
 to be reduced to a minimum. Mr. Jones himself could 
 not have dreamed that it would quite cease from activ- 
 ity. Our eeriest and wildest imaginings still draw their 
 elements from experience. His jagged boards cut by 
 pointed arches have their ultimate origin in medieval 
 architecture; the masks of his weird sisters derive, 
 after all, from the lineaments of the human face. The 
 imagination cannot work in the void, and abstract 
 beauty is a contradiction in terms. What is the utmost, 
 then, that the artist can do? He can strip art of one 
 element of concreteness after another; he can get to 
 an irreducible minimum; he can take this irreducible
 
 The Lonely Classics 137 
 
 minimum and "stylicize" it. Thus he can get as far 
 from realism as possible and land straight in a hard 
 and shallow formalism. For these irreducible symbols 
 have an ugly tendency to become as constant and as 
 rigid as hieroglyphics. The rococo period also stripped 
 life in art and shut up the residuum in symbols and 
 substituted for the rough and beautiful multiformity 
 of the world the gardens of Watteau and the meads of 
 Pope. 
 
 The perfectly sincere intention of such an unwilling- 
 ness to compromise with reality is to raise art to a 
 higher significance, to omit everything that is not 
 packed with meaning, to make a play, for instance, as 
 Mr. Hopkins put it, "a play of all times and all peo- 
 ple." But in this train of speculation there is involved 
 a false analogy. If it were possible to drain art so 
 wholly of the concrete and the fluctuating as to uni- 
 versalize its meaning in that bleak and literal sense, it 
 would cease to be art and become mathematics. An 
 algebraic formula expresses an exact and universal 
 truth. But it is not a truth that will make the pulse 
 quicken; it is not a truth that can be touched with 
 hands. This ultra-symbolism may, with the utmost 
 sobriety, be said to be flying into the face of Provi- 
 dence. Man is no abstract spirit. To make him typi- 
 cal is to traduce him. Nor is he merely clothed hi his 
 flesh and his world. He is embodied so and only so. 
 He and his world interpenetrate each other. To tear
 
 138 The American Stage 
 
 the two asunder is to maim both beyond healing, and 
 to rob both of significance by obliterating their essen- 
 tial characters. There can be nothing in art which 
 was not first in life. Hence art is significant in pro- 
 portion to the richness of its vital content in terms of 
 flesh and gear and grass and stones and winds. Stick 
 to the elemental, if you choose. Nakedness can be 
 great, but not symbolic swathings about a core of noth- 
 ingness. Life has an atmosphere which art can pro- 
 ject. Abstract atmosphere does not exist. The most 
 entrancing fragrance is still the fragrance of some 
 earthly object. Particles of its material substance de- 
 tach themselves and thud faintly against the olfactory 
 nerve. We cannot smell anything unless there is some- 
 thing to smell. We cannot feel anything from art un- 
 less art is the expression of life in a concrete, recog- 
 nizable embodiment. 
 
 This is no plea for historical accuracy or creeping 
 correctness or a pedantic adherence to the Shakespear- 
 ean text. It was, for instance, quite legitimate to divide 
 Macbeth into three moral episodes centering respec- 
 tively in the murder scene, the banquet-hall scene, and 
 the sleep-walking scene. It was, indeed, a high and 
 sensitive intelligence that set the play to this spiritual 
 and artistic rhythm. But those scenes themselves with 
 their heavy and monotonous coloring, their cubist lum- 
 ber, their asymetrical polygons and lathe triangles, are 
 dreary beyond measure. And they are dreary not be-
 
 The Lonely Classics 139 
 
 cause they mean only the essential but because, from 
 the nature of things, they can mean nothing at all. 
 At the end of the banquet-hall scene there is a single 
 moment of human forlornness and of mortal ache. 
 That moment could be felt because here, at least, can- 
 dles burned and tables bore pewter cups and there 
 arose the semblance of a habitation of man. But that 
 image fades once more from the eye and the mind and 
 Lady Macbeth falters, holding a pathetically real little 
 lamp, among decorations so meaningless, because so 
 unrelated to reality, that all the pity of her distracted 
 soul cannot shield our nerves from the assault of the 
 boat-like hulks in the foreground. 
 
 The final and supreme oddity of this production is 
 that Macbeth, the "man possessed" of Mr. Hopkins's 
 explanation, is impersonated by Mr. Lionel Barrymore 
 as a creature of no tragic austerity, no vision of fatality, 
 no splendor, and no gloom. He is rough, sordid, unin- 
 telligent, ignoble. He is not a hero caught in the toils 
 of fate; he is a beast in a trap. The husky voice, the 
 lumbering movement, the shifty vision, the tangled 
 beard, the feeble exultation and ferocity all combine 
 to project the idea of a common, heavy, spiritually 
 soggy man who never approached the stature of his 
 'fate. Perhaps this is a legitimate interpretation of the 
 murderous Scotch thane who, according to Holinshed, 
 was always known to be "somewhat cruell of nature." 
 Nor is it to be denied that Mr. Barrymore carries out
 
 140 Tfie American Stage 
 
 his conception with an unrelenting consistency. But 
 what conceivable relation could such a conception of 
 Macbeth have been thought to sustain to the mystical 
 abstractions which employed the mind of Mr. Hopkins 
 and the eye of Mr. Jones? Miss Julia Arthur's Lady 
 Macbeth, though feeble and subdued, does not, at least, 
 wrench herself out of the frame of these eerie pictures 
 and bring the whole decorative scheme tumbling down. 
 Of the entire production, then, the final word must be 
 that the best and strongest forces in our living theatre, 
 that fine intelligence and something not unlike genius, 
 have been wasted here for the want of some close and 
 scrupulous reflection on the character and the possibili- 
 ties of the artistic process itself. One's consolation is 
 that those forces are actually with us and that a single 
 mistake cannot greatly enfeeble or diminish them. 
 
 V. The Beggar's Opera, 
 
 Spence's anecdote of how Swift once observed to 
 Gay "what an odd, pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pas- 
 toral might make," how The Beggar's Opera came to 
 be written, and how Congreve, having read the manu- 
 script, remarked that "it would either take greatly or 
 be damned confoundedly," is a commonplace of a hun- 
 dred classrooms. It is also known that the piece did 
 take greatly, that it made Rich the manager gay, and 
 Gay the author rich, that the actress who took the 
 part of Polly married an earl, and that Hogarth painted
 
 The Lonely Classics 141, 
 
 the whole triumphant company. But the opera itself 
 drifted into gradual forgetfulness. The early nine- 
 teenth century revivals were bowdlerized, softened, and 
 sweetened. Johnson, to be sure, had said: "I do not 
 believe that any man was ever made a rogue by being 
 present at its representation." But he had afterwards 
 added in order to give, Boswell tells us, a heavy stroke, 
 that "there is in it such a labefactation of all principles 
 as may be injurious to morality." The "labefactation" 
 theory prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. In 
 America, moreover, if we are to believe Hazlitt, "this 
 sterling satire was hooted off the stage," because the 
 Americans "have no such state of matters as it de- 
 scribes before their eyes and have no conception of 
 anything but what they see." Virtue or ignorance, in 
 brief, robbed the English-speaking stage for over a 
 century of this strong, witty, and delightful work. 
 
 Its very character came to be a matter of dispute. 
 It is, first of all, a dramatic satire in the exact taste of 
 the eighteenth century. To ascribe to highwaymen 
 and women of the town the pseudo-noble sentiments 
 and swelling speech which courtly life had borrowed 
 from the pastoral tradition was obviously amusing to 
 a fashionable audience of 1728. That audience was 
 also, in its own way, politically minded and relished the 
 secondary intention by at once identifying Peachum 
 and Lockit with Walpole and Townshend. So much 
 for the satiric substance. It was the form of The Beg-
 
 142 The American Stage 
 
 gar's Opera that made it an unmistakable burlesque of 
 the Italian opera. Whenever the action touches emo- 
 tion the characters drop speech and express themselves 
 in sudden arias. This was the technique of every opera 
 before Gluck and remains customary in the cruder 
 type of operetta to this day. Contemporary witnesses 
 are quite clear on this point. The Companion of the 
 Playhouse asserted that The Beggar's Opera overthrew 
 for a time the Italian opera, "that Dagon of the Nobil- 
 ity and Gentry, who has so long seduced them to idol- 
 atry." A final bit of evidence that has not always been 
 given its due weight is the fact that the Italian opera 
 company managed by Handel and Bononcini failed in 
 the very year of Gay's success. 
 
 The London production of Mr. Nigel Playfair which 
 Mr. Arthur Hopkins has brought to America gives us 
 The Beggar's Opera in a form as close to the original 
 as our modern lack of leisure permits. The satire now 
 reaches us with all its cold, sardonic force. It is bril- 
 liantly gay, but with a cruel sort of gaiety. The Duke 
 of Argyle in his box on that first night of January 29, 
 1728, was quite sure that the play "would do." He 
 was equally sure that all rogues ought to be hanged 
 and that to make game of them before hanging was 
 vastly good sport. The reprieve given to MacHeath at 
 the last moment does not soften the inner tone which 
 the piece shares with the comedy of Congreve. This 
 high-spirited mercilessness was no doubt in part a lit-
 
 The Lonely Classics 143 
 
 erary convention. But such conventions answer to a 
 prevalent mood. To-day that mood can be accepted as 
 a purely artistic one within which there live such in- 
 comparable verve and grace, elegance and wit. The 
 verses are as hard but also as translucent as clear agate; 
 the satiric thrusts in the dialogue glitter like rapiers 
 and glide home. We are very fine fellows to-day and 
 transcend the age of Anne in all our thinking. But we 
 have not its magnificent perfection of literary skill, its 
 power of sheer writing on little things or great. Our 
 musical comedy lyrists do not compose verses like Gay; 
 no pamphlet on the Irish question rivals the Drapier's 
 Letters of Swift. 
 
 There remains the music, which will appeal more 
 strongly to modern audiences than the wit or action 
 of the fable. The airs were all, in their origin, folk- 
 tunes, and students of popular song complain that the 
 transcriptions were not faithful and that the rhythm 
 and the whole modal character was changed. The lover 
 of music who is not a specialist need not regret this. 
 It was the age of Handel, a march from whose opera 
 Rinaldo (1711) is actually introduced. To the mod- 
 ern ear the airs seem all to melt into the mood and 
 pattern of the music of that age, to share its lovely 
 and pure simplicity of melodic line, its clear and sober 
 gravity, its compact and finite charm. This music is as 
 innocent as the gods. It knows neither regret nor 
 yearning. It is not always, not even generally, gay.
 
 144 The American Stage 
 
 But the sadness never cries or rebels. It accepts and 
 expresses itself as a plain fact like any other. The 
 melodies are neither like homeless souls nor like gar- 
 dens in the rain; they are like Grecian urns set in the 
 cool shadow of a well-trimmed tree. The dances are 
 as grave and graceful as the tunes, and but for the 
 secondary matter of decorative skill the earliest of all 
 musical comedies may still be said to be also the best.
 
 Ill 
 
 Contemporaries
 
 The French Theatre of To-day 
 
 IT is a tradition of the French theatre to conquer the 
 world. The classics of the seventeenth century ruled 
 the stages of Europe until the coming of Lessing and 
 of the Romantic age. In the nineteenth century the 
 playwrights of France once more took possession of 
 the theatre. But that second conquest was wholly dif- 
 ferent from the first. The classics of the great age 
 summed up and embodied the living ideal of every neo- 
 classicist in the world. They achieved what all desired 
 to attempt. They were copied through an inner con- 
 viction. But romanticism destroyed the continuous 
 surface of European culture. It left literature concrete 
 in substance and national in temper. Sardou and Scribe 
 swept across Europe not because they expressed an 
 ideal, but because they expressed none whatever. Their 
 plays could gleam for a moment in any climate because 
 they were rooted in no soil. With Augier and the 
 younger Dumas French drama almost attained another 
 European hour in the older and nobler sense. But 
 soon the society plays derived from the works of these 
 two became a by- word. When finally France created 
 a modern drama of her own, the business of dramatic 
 exportation fell off. The masterpieces of her new the- 
 
 147
 
 148 Contemporaries 
 
 atre Les Cor beaux, Amour euse, Les Fossiles, Con- 
 nais-toi, Le Pardon, Amants, Les Hannetons though 
 far more universal because far more concrete, have 
 stayed at home. Yet the average theatre-goer bases 
 his vague and simple faith in the supremacy of the 
 French stage not upon these plays of which he has 
 never heard, but on the persistence of the French skill 
 of manufacturing for export the trade-goods of the 
 theatre Bisson's Mme. X., Bernstein's Thief, and the 
 books of Revues and musical comedies. These prod- 
 ucts are analogous to others for which milliners have 
 invented the dreadful word "Frenchy." 
 
 The trouble with Mr. Frank Wadleigh Chandler's 
 useful and very learned book, The Contemporary 
 Drama of France, 1 is its light-hearted neglect of such 
 distinctions. He has read one thousand plays by two 
 hundred and thirty authors. He gives as much space 
 to Bernstein as to Hervieu and almost as much to Ba- 
 taille as to Curel. He thinks that brassy melodrama 
 Le Marquis de Priola "sternly tragic," and finds room 
 for synopses of hundreds of plays which, to use his own 
 description of Le Voleur, afford "no criticism of life" 
 and are "even highly improbable." Then why dwell 
 on such a play? Because "as a bit of clever drama- 
 turgy it has rarely been excelled." On the same prin- 
 ciple Kistemaeckers is described as "a master of stage- 
 
 1 The Contemporary Drama of France. By Frank Wadleigh 
 Chandler.
 
 The French Theatre of To-day 149 
 
 craft." Mr. Chandler, in a word, exhibits that blank 
 awe which strikes so many admirable academic minds 
 among us at the mere sight of a hollow technical dex- 
 terity. The truth is, of course, that these masters of 
 stagecraft do not enter the history of the drama except 
 as background, contrasts, or curiosities, any more than 
 the versifiers of the "smart" or comic press enter the 
 history of poetry. All of these people may be regarded 
 as clever craftsmen. All understand the application 
 of technical processes to their particular ends. But ask 
 poets or painters whether, in the memorable word of 
 Lemaitre, these craftsmen "exist" and come within the 
 limits of criticism at all. Our professors of literature 
 must, somehow, be persuaded to draw nearer to the 
 living practice of the arts whose progress they would 
 chronicle. 
 
 But to anyone familiar with its subject, Mr. Chan- 
 dler's busy heaping of synopsis on synopsis and of 
 name on name confirms the massive impression that the 
 French drama has fallen upon evil days. Not one of 
 the younger men shares the beautiful eloquence of 
 Porto-Riche, the elegiac grace of Donnay, the high 
 seriousness of Hervieu, or even the brilliant rhetorical 
 fecundity of Rostand. Nor is there any creative ex- 
 perimentation within the art of the theatre. The old, 
 rigid, mechanical technique prevails. And since that 
 technique cannot be used without a rearrangement of 
 the material of life guided solely by the exigencies of
 
 150 Contemporaries 
 
 external effectiveness, the monotony of the subject mat- 
 ter is overwhelming. The human triangles pass before 
 us in an unending procession. Slight variations are in- 
 finite, the foundations and essential reactions are the 
 same. There is indulgence, there is renunciation. But 
 both seem mere gestures and quite rigid, and the rich- 
 ness and the burning tragedy of life are far to seek. 
 
 The World War did not destroy the triangle. The tri- 
 
 f 
 
 angle simply went to war. Bernstein wrote UElevation 
 and Bataille L' Amazon, and the lovers who err or were 
 about to err are uplifted by sacrifice. They go and sin 
 no more, while the offended spouses exhaust themselves 
 with nobility and forgiveness and faith to the immor- 
 tal dead. It is the very rhetoric of the emotions false 
 and metallic. One turns, with warm relief, to the more 
 natural and Gallic gusto and gaiety of Feydeau's On 
 purge B&bi and Mais n'te promdne done pas toute nue! 
 The great spirits and the great artists of modern 
 France the sage and stylist Anatole France, the nov- 
 elist and humanitarian Romain Rolland, the poet Henri 
 de Regnier have stood aloof from the theatre of their 
 country. For that theatre is, despite exceptions and 
 interludes, the theatre of the boulevards, harsh, shal- 
 low, and turbulent. It has not followed the sober 
 veracity of Henri Becque; it has, uninfluenced by the 
 repeated attempts of gifted poets, found no home within 
 itself for the realities of the soul. To succeed in it has 
 been, commonly, to be corrupted by it. There is Henri
 
 The French Theatre of To-day 151 
 
 Bataille. He commenced his literary career as a poet 
 and wrote La Chambre blanche. The verses are of an 
 exquisite spiritual delicacy and are full of the strange 
 loveliness and twilight glimmer that common things 
 and experiences take on in the imagination of childhood 
 and adolescence. Their music is soft and wavering as 
 the notes of a violin heard across fields at dusk. Then 
 he turned to the stage, and, after tentative plays 
 of a poetic character, produced L'Enchantement, Le 
 Masque, and the widely discussed Hainan Colibri. The 
 dreary adulteries of dreary people had become his sole 
 preoccupation. And these characters do not come into 
 conflict with society or the state or others in the pur- 
 suit of inner freedom or at the urge of any creative 
 force. Hence the final act can never end with an inher- 
 ent triumph or defeat, but must always be built about 
 some shocking absurdity of plot or motivation. It is 
 precisely the glib craftsmanship of which Mr. Chandler 
 makes so much that is responsible for such a condition 
 of the drama. The French playwrights neither dom- 
 inate nor re-create the stage to their uses. They serve 
 it and are ensnared by its supposed conventions and 
 laws. Not till they have destroyed it will they make 
 it live.
 
 The German Theatre of To-day 
 
 THERE is a saying current in Vienna now: two places 
 are crowded the graveyards and the theatres. It is 
 true of all the German-speaking countries. Their the- 
 atre has survived a disastrous war; it is surviving de- 
 spair and bitter famine. And it does so because for 
 many years and to many thousands it has been a source 
 of neither mere amusement nor mere instruction but, 
 as expression and liberation, an integral part of the life 
 process itself. In a typical theatrical season before the 
 war we find Sudermann, to be sure, leading all living 
 playwrights with 1,344 performances. But Shake- 
 speare surpasses him with 1,484 and Schiller with 
 1,381. Hauptmann leads the great moderns with 800 
 performances and Ibsen follows him with 600. Plays 
 by Goethe, Lessing, Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Bjorn- 
 son, Hartleben, and Dreyer total far over 2,000 per- 
 formances. And that theatre was then and is now 
 guided and interpreted by a criticism of high and, at 
 times, almost perverse severity. The reviewers on the 
 chief daily papers Eloesser, Weitbrecht, Kerr, Bab 
 watch themselves with jealous strictness. The luxury 
 of a concession to the flabby or the false is unknown. 
 
 152
 
 The German Theatre of To-day 153 
 
 In a recent volume, full of a somber intellectual 
 energy to the brim, Julius Bab 1 chronicles the chief 
 happenings on the German stage from 1911 to 1919. 
 These years mark, primarily, the passing of natural- 
 ism. Halbe and Hirschfeld continued to write, but 
 their inner development had ceased. Hauptmann, long 
 drawing closer to the poet within himself, became a 
 master and leader of the youngest generation. Schnitz- 
 ler and Schonherr, to both of whom Bab is less than 
 just, wrote plays in their characteristic moods which 
 had never been those of the consistent naturalists of 
 the North. But the early neo-romantics who, influ- 
 enced by Maeterlinck and the Viennese lyrists, led the 
 first revolt against naturalism, faded in their turn. Or 
 all but one. For in Ariadne auf Naxos the vision of 
 Hofmannsthal deepened and his verse gained clarity 
 without losing richness or magic. Among the older 
 men who kept their position firmly and whose works 
 the unquiet youth of these fateful years held to be, in 
 a more intimate sense, its own, was Herbert Eulenberg, 
 the poetic psychologist of doom and of excessive pas- 
 sion, and the cold, perverse, essentially uncreative 
 Frank Wedekind. 
 
 The exact character of Wedekind's power over the 
 younger generation can be best observed in the plays of 
 Carl Sternheim and Georg Kaiser. Both have richer 
 
 1 Der Wille sum Drama. Von Julius Bab. Berlin : Oesterheld 
 und Compagnie.
 
 1 54 Contemporaries 
 
 natures. But what Wedekind taught them was how 
 to attain dramatic range through speed. He broke up 
 the dramatic continuity which he considered as but 
 productive of a futile illusion and sought sweep, vari- 
 ety, and also concentration by lifting his characters at 
 crucial and frankly isolated moments out of the dark- 
 ness into a strong and sudden light. Within these ap- 
 parently random scenes hurled on the stage he likewise 
 makes no effort to produce an illusion of reality. All 
 gestures become symbols; all speech races toward its 
 ultimate significance. A terrible yet hopeless avidness 
 after the meaning of life dominates this drama, and 
 under its cold cynicism you feel a stifled moan of pain. 
 There is, for instance, Georg Kaiser's Von Morgens 
 bis Mitternachts. It was successfully produced last 
 winter by Reinhardt in Berlin; the production of an 
 English version by Ashley Dukes is promised by the 
 Incorporated Stage Society of London. A woman's 
 perfume stirs a middle-aged bank cashier out of the 
 lethargy of his life. He steals sixty-thousand marks. 
 In snowy fields he meets Death and makes a compact 
 for a day's grace. He glances into his home to con- 
 firm within himself the conviction of its death in life. 
 He goes to seek ecstasy, fulfilment, liberation. At a 
 great automobile race the crowd seems to soar beyond 
 itself. But His Highness appears, the national anthem 
 is sung, and the crowd withers into a herd. The cash- 
 ier drifts to a public hall and finds no ecstasy of the
 
 The German Theatre of To-day 
 
 flesh but sodden barter and sale. He seeks "the infinite 
 liberation from slavery and from reward" at a meeting 
 of the Salvation Army and meets chafferers over shop- 
 worn emotions. He races to the black cross stitched 
 on coarse hangings in that hall and shoots himself. 
 "His moaning sputters forth an Ecce, his last breath 
 gurgles a Homo." He is a martyr to the meaningless 
 monotony, the commonness, and slavery of life. 
 
 The "Expressionisten" share the speed technique of 
 Wedekind, Sternheim, and Kaiser. But they seek to 
 present man solely in terms of his inner conflicts. Only 
 the protagonist exists. The other characters, as in 
 Wilhelm Hasenclever's important and influential Der 
 Sohn, are but his subjective visions of reality which, 
 streaming back upon himself, determine his fate. A 
 kindlier interpretation of life, and one less stripped of 
 actual things and circumstances, is offered by Wilhelm 
 Schmidtbonn; a nobler one, in the older sense, by the 
 admirable but pathetically futile neo-classicists Paul 
 Ernst and Wilhelm von Scholz. A little apart from 
 these movements, yet honored within them all, stands 
 Gerhart Hauptmann, whose Winter ballade seeks in an 
 old Swedish legend the inner meaning of human sin 
 and atonement, whose Der weisse Heiland and Indi- 
 pohdi summon Prospero from the land of death and 
 dream to lament over a ruined world. 
 
 The serious German war plays are all anti-war plays. 
 Carl Hauptmann's Krieg, written before the outbreak
 
 156 Contemporaries 
 
 of the conflict, predicts the destruction of human nobil- 
 ity and goodness through the nature of war itself; 
 Stefan Zweig's Jeremias gives voice to the grief and 
 despair of those thousands of Germans whose imagina- 
 tive insight and human feeling isolated them amid the 
 tribal orgies of 1914; Hans Franck's Freie Knechte ex- 
 hibits the tragedy of the enslavement wrought by war 
 upon man among the peasants of the Northern coast; 
 Julius Maria Becker's passion play, Das letzte Gericht, 
 tears asunder the delusion that war is part of the in- 
 herent fate of man and not a product of the murderous 
 greed of a few for power; Fritz von Unruh, a Junker 
 , and a Prussian officer, embodies in the turbid passion 
 of Ein Geschlecht an unsurpassable horror of the self- 
 laceration of mankind. 
 
 The war plays have already faded a little from view. 
 Neither Kaiser nor Schmidtbonn nor Zweig is of the 
 stature of the men in the generation that came before 
 theirs. But what still distinguishes the German the- 
 atre is its unfailing sense of the identity of art and life. 
 All reputable dramatists write to project the sense of 
 life that is in them the passion and the vision that 
 must, somehow, be uttered. Hence they insist that the 
 physical theatre be their servant and not their master, 
 and they have the cooperation of the leading managers 
 m all the cities of Germany. Criticism accepts every 
 technical innovation and simply asks whether it served
 
 The German THeatre of To-day 157 
 
 the dramatic intention involved. Thus the art of the 
 theatre is here a plastic and infinitely expressive one. 
 It arises from a hunger and addresses itself to a need 
 of the soul of man.
 
 Shaw: Height and Decline 
 
 I. "Impavidum Ferient Ruince"* 
 
 MR. H. L. MENCKEN in his sagacious Prefaces an- 
 nounces the discovery that Bernard Shaw is a purveyor 
 of platitudes. What Mr. Mencken really means is that 
 the ripe and disciplined intelligence of a tragically small 
 minority has achieved some sort of contemporaneous- 
 ness with Shaw's thinking and lacks only his articu- 
 lateness. One wonders, nevertheless, whether Mr. 
 Mencken has descended often enough from his dwell- 
 ing place of intellectual aloofness and scorn to listen 
 to the ordinary talk of people admittedly not illiterate 
 on, let us say, the war, or the economic problems of the 
 world, or art, or morals. It is not the least among the 
 great qualities of Bernard Shaw that he knows what 
 the world is like, that his has never been a fugitive and 
 cloistered virtue, that he has never slunk out of the 
 dust and heat of the race. And hence the evil days 
 that have come upon us and that have tarnished so 
 many escutcheons of the spirit have found him erect 
 and incorruptible, the master of himself and of his 
 mind. What one discerns, above all, in Heartbreak 
 
 1 Heartbreak House, Great Catherine and Playlets of the War. 
 By Bernard Shaw. 
 
 158
 
 Shaw: Height and Decline 159 
 
 House is the rare and consoling vision of that just 
 man of the Roman poet whom, tenacious of his pur- 
 pose, neither the fury of citizens demanding evil things 
 nor the countenance of a menacing tyrant has power to 
 shake in his well-founded mind. 
 
 "All great truths," Shaw announces, "begin as blas- 
 phemies." He proceeds to utter in his own person the 
 brave, necessary blasphemies of the moment concern- 
 ing the delirium of war, the vulgar attack on Germany's 
 share in the spiritual life of mankind, the true nature of 
 the unspeakable peace. Truths of a more startling but 
 also of a more permanent character he presents as hav- 
 ing been arrived at through the living experience of 
 people in the grip of the historic process. There is 
 O'Flaherty, the Irish V. C., who dared not tell his 
 mother that he was fighting with the English. "She 
 says," he confides to the local squire and pillar of the 
 Empire, "all the English generals is Irish. . . . She 
 says we're the lost tribes of the house of Israel and the 
 chosen people of God." The squire is puzzled and out- 
 raged. But O'Flaherty has, to all appearances, the 
 soft answer that turneth away wrath: "Yes, sir, she's 
 pig-headed and obstinate; there's no doubt about it. 
 She's like the English; they think there's no one like 
 themselves. It's the same with the Germans, though 
 they're educated and ought to know better. You'll 
 never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism 
 out of the human race," There is Annajanska, the
 
 160 Contemporaries 
 
 Bolshevik empress in the exuberant intellectual farce 
 of that name. Into the hopeless muddle of political 
 authoritarians, vacillating between the orthodox sources 
 of power, a king and a majority, she flings her electric 
 perception of that reality from which she derives her 
 right to act: "Some energetic and capable minority 
 must always be in power. Well, I am on the side of 
 the energetic minority whose principles I agree with. 
 The Revolution is as cruel as we were, but its aims are 
 my aims. Therefore I stand for the Revolution." 
 
 Heartbreak House was written before the war. It 
 is the longest as well as the most important play in this 
 volume. It is softer in tone than many of Shaw's plays; 
 it is, for him, extraordinarly symbolistic in fable and 
 structure; it has a touch of weariness under the un- 
 flagging energy of its execution. He had seen, more 
 clearly perhaps than any other European, the ines- 
 capable shipwreck ahead. He saw a society divided 
 between "barbarism and Capua" in which "power and 
 culture were in separate compartments." "Are we," 
 asks the half-mythical Captain Shotover, "are we to 
 be kept forever in the mud by these hogs to whom the 
 universe is nothing but a machine for greasing their 
 bristles and filling their snouts?" His children and 
 their friends played at love and art and even at theo- 
 ries of social reconstruction. Meanwhile the ship of 
 state drifted. "The captain is in his bunk," Shotover
 
 '.' Height and Decline 161 
 
 declares further on, "drinking bottled ditch-water, and 
 the crew is gambling in the forecastle." "We sit here 
 talking," another character remarks, "and leave every- 
 thing to Mangan [the capitalistic swindler] and to 
 chance and to the devil." It is precisely the same re- 
 proach against pre-war Europe that Andreas Latzko ex- 
 presses with such ringing intensity in The Judgment of 
 Peace. Shaw prophetically represents the great catas- 
 trophe as breaking in its most vivid and terrible form 
 upon Heartbreak House. In the result of the symbol- 
 ical air-raid he sounds a note of fine and lasting hope. 
 The "two burglars, the two practical men of business" 
 are blown to atoms. So is the parsonage. "The poor 
 clergyman will have to get a new house." There is left 
 the patient idealist who pities the poor fellows in the 
 Zeppelin because they are driven toward death by the 
 same evil forces; there are left those among the loi- 
 terers in Heartbreak House who are capable of a purg- 
 ing experience and a revolution of the soul. Thus 
 before the war Shaw hoped against hope that after the 
 days of the great upheaval of the world "the numskull" 
 would not win. The playlets of the war itself are the 
 records of his bitter disillusion. He remembers that 
 Shakespeare compared man to an angry ape, that Swift 
 rebuked the Yahoo with the superior virtues of the 
 horse ; and he sees an army that went forth to "destroy 
 the militarism of Zabern" busy in Cologne "imprison-
 
 1 621 Contemporaries 
 
 ing every German who does not salute a British offi- 
 cer"; and sees the victors, their swelling moral phrases 
 unsilenced, "starving the enemies who had thrown 
 down their arms." 
 
 It is not to be expected that Heartbreak House will 
 add to its author's fame and influence to-day. The peo- 
 ple who admired his incisive thinking and his brilliant 
 speech when both could be safely taken as fire-works 
 in the void will not easily forgive his rending the veils 
 of all their protective delusions. We shall be told, we 
 are already being told, with a cunning and useful 
 shirking of the issues, that Shaw is less of a playwright 
 than ever, that these plays will not "play" (care being 
 taken not to make the experiment), and that, at best, 
 he is the easy jester shaking the negligible bells upon 
 his pointed cap. The truth is, of course, that Shaw is 
 a great comic dramatist who has, at times, followed 
 the classical methods of comedy by confronting shams 
 with realities, man's fraudulent gestures with his hid- 
 den self, but who, at other times, has invented the new 
 method of presenting on the stage a battle of those 
 naked ideas that struggle for mastery in the minds 
 of men. His best plays quiver with dramatic life and 
 play superbly before audiences who have risen to a per- 
 ception of the overwhelming reality of their conflicts. 
 To the supporters of melodrama and sentimental com- 
 edy they are meaningless. . But what, in the whole 
 world of art and thought, is not? Heartbreak House
 
 SKa<w: Height and Decline 163 
 
 will not, it is possible, ultimately rank with Shaw's 
 best work; it is worthy of all that is most memorable 
 in his mind and art. 
 
 II. Shaw Among the Mystics * 
 
 Bernard Shaw is sixty-five and in despair. The mad 
 peace finished what the mad war had begun. We still 
 live in a state of "boyish, cinema-fed romanticism"; 
 we are governed by grown-up children and defectives. 
 Strongly and naturally the doubt arises "whether the 
 human animal, as he exists at present, is capable of 
 solving the social problems raised by his own aggrega- 
 tion." So the human animal must be changed; we 
 must transform the biological process from a process 
 to a weapon and a tool. We must harness the Life 
 Force, the elan -vital, to our chariots and drive into a 
 city of God which we ourselves have built. It is sheer 
 mysticism; and that Shaw, like the aged Comte, has 
 become a mystic is something like a tragic disaster. He 
 accepts the full position of the mystic and glories in it. 
 "When a man tells you that you are a product of Cir- 
 cumstantial Selection solely, you cannot finally dis- 
 prove it. You can only tell him out of the depth of 
 your inner consciousness that he is a fool and a liar." 
 Alas, that sort of inner consciousness has borne witness 
 
 1 Back to Methuselah. A Metabiological Pentateuch. By Ber- 
 nard Shaw.
 
 164 Contemporaries 
 
 to a flat earth and a wheeling sun, to virgin births and 
 to transubstantiation, to the special creation of species, 
 to the righteousness of human slavery and war and 
 persecution. It is our old friend faith, the evidence of 
 things unseen. It is beautiful and pathetic. But it 
 has been the source of untold errors and miseries when 
 not strictly limited to the forever unseeable. If the 
 Neo-Darwinians are right, Shaw exclaims, "only fools 
 and rascals could bear to live." That is what the bish- 
 ops told Huxley; it is the cry of every timid sentimen- 
 talist whose world will not conform to his vision of 
 what it should be. And this from Bernard Shaw! 
 
 He builds his mystical structure upon a basis of ap- 
 parently scientific reasoning. According to the mod- 
 ern followers of Lamarck, "organisms changed because 
 they wanted to," and the chief factor in the transmu- 
 tation of species was use and disuse. According to the 
 followers of Darwin, the same process is accounted for 
 by natural selection, that is, by the propagation of a 
 species through those individuals which are best adapted 
 to survive in a given environment. Shaw identifies the 
 use and disuse of the Neo-Lamarckians with Schopen- 
 hauer's Will, with his own Life Force, with Bergson's 
 ilan vital, with the Holy Ghost. He plays ducks and 
 drakes with the distinction between inherited and ac- 
 quired biological characters and declares that creative 
 evolution, "the genuinely scientific religion," means 
 literally that we can shape the evolutionary process to
 
 Shaw: Height and Decline i6jj 
 
 our liking as we go along. The human animal will 
 change when it wills to change. 
 
 How should it will to change? First in the direction 
 of longevity. We die before experience has ripened 
 into wisdom. We do not attain vision and so muddle 
 intolerably the affairs of the world. If we lived three 
 hundred years we would, at least, transcend the lower 
 delusions of mortality. What these delusions include 
 no close student of Shaw can doubt. That magnificent 
 intellect has always been a little disembodied. His as- 
 ceticism is icy and his fastidiousness not quite human. 
 He regards sex as a nuisance and art as a bauble. He 
 is offended not only by disorder and dirt; he is offended 
 by the processes of procreation and metabolism. In a 
 word, he hates the body. If he is something of a super- 
 man in clarity and fire of mental vision, he is also a 
 super-Puritan in his anxiety to burn away the world 
 and the flesh in the flames of that visionary fire. The 
 three-hundred-year-old sages are not his goal. They 
 are still born of woman and nourished by the fruits of 
 the earth. Nor do the eerie, sleepless Ancients of the 
 three-hundredth century satisfy him except through 
 their ultimate aspirations. "But the day will come 
 when there will be no people, only thought." On that 
 day the goal will be reached "the goal of redemption 
 from the flesh to the vortex freed from matter, to the 
 whirlpool in pure intelligence." There is no variable- 
 ness nor shadow of turning in Bernard Shaw. Relent-
 
 1 66 Contemporaries 
 
 lessly he follows the logic of his own nature. It takes 
 him to the "vast edges drear and naked shingles of the 
 world." But he does not stop. He has no eyes for the 
 green earth or its poor, passionate, struggling inhab- 
 itants. He whirs his iron wings and sets out on his 
 lonely quest into the intense inane. 
 
 The five dramatic books of the revelation of the new 
 vitalist religion are less brilliant than Shaw's earlier 
 works, less humanly sagacious in detail, and, despite 
 several bravura passages, less eloquent. But they have 
 all his old energy and rapidity of intellectual move- 
 ment and the last two, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gen- 
 tleman and As Far as Thought Can Reach, are 
 matchless exercises of a cold imaginative vigor building 
 its structures out into the void. Yet so divorced from 
 essential human feeling are these stupendous parables 
 and legends that Shaw never suspects, for instance, the 
 true character of his Ancients. He means them to in- 
 spire awe; they arouse pity and disgust like the Struld- 
 brugs of Swift. Did he, by any chance, remember his 
 great predecessor and draw the parallel? Swift, hav- 
 ing castigated the follies and the crimes of mankind, 
 holds up as a saving ideal the simplest goodness, gen- 
 tleness, and innocence of soul. Shaw, suaver in ges- 
 ture but in reality more terrible, finds no hope in any 
 quality of human nature. It must be transcended; it 
 must be obliterated; it must be remembered witrUoath- 
 ing and contempt. Man must return "to the whirlpool
 
 SRaiv: Height and Decline 167 
 
 I 
 in pure force" whence the world arose. Form itself 
 
 has become an ache to Shaw. He thirsts for nothing- 
 ness. He destroys the cosmos not like Faust with an 
 imprecation, but with an argument. In no sense will 
 mankind take his bleak parable to heart. It is the 
 monument of a great despair. But men do not despair. 
 They are sustained by the very things that Shawlholds 
 to be negligible if not noxious by love and art, food 
 and wine, and even by a little warmth when, after dark- 
 ness, the goodly sun returns.
 
 The Quiet Truth 1 
 
 GOOD manners are commonly associated with a safe 
 disposition; a gentleman with well-creased trousers and 
 a nice taste in cravats is not suspected of a bomb under 
 his coat. Comfortable people shy at the soap-box ora- 
 tor and overlook Bertrand Russell in his study. To 
 be considered dangerous, a dramatist must have about 
 him something of the conventionalized radical. Few 
 things are seen until they have become myths. The 
 public that neither reads Shaw nor understands him 
 has a vague mental image of a flaming beard, a sar- 
 donic smile, a Jaeger shirt, and a Fenian meeting. That 
 is the real thing; it would make the very Lusk Com- 
 mittee take notice. But John Galsworthy? There are 
 his well-bred early novels; there is his friendship with 
 Winthrop Ames. He has lectured before the Drama 
 League here in a faultless frock-coat. When he was 
 not lecturing he was reserved to the point of taciturnity. 
 How admirable and how British! Promptly the crowd 
 identifies him with another myth, the gentleman, and 
 trusts and approves him. 
 
 If in the privacy of his study he is capable of con- 
 temptuous irony (one rather doubts it), his temptation 
 
 1 Plays. Fourth Series. By John Galsworthy. 
 
 168
 
 The Quiet Truth '169 
 
 toward it must be strong. The correctness of his de- 
 meanor has endeared him to broad and wealthy bos- 
 oms. And all the while, in the laboratory of his mind, 
 with instruments of deadly delicacy and serene pre- 
 cision, he has tested the political and moral pretensions 
 of mankind and found them a blunder and a shame. 
 He has seen legal justice to be a cruel farce, romantic 
 love a delusion, rigid marriage an instrument of stupid 
 torture, the crowd's charity an insult, and its windy 
 opinions the weapons of murder and disgrace. But he 
 has neither cried nor striven and rarely condescended 
 to argue. He has used a pair of balances exquisite, 
 fragile-looking things under a crystal globe and 
 weighed the issues of life. And the result of his weigh- 
 ing is more devastating than the rioting of an army 
 with scarlet flags. 
 
 Yet he has never forgotten that he is an artist. He 
 has never, to use his own words, set down directly 
 "those theories in which he himself believes," but has 
 let "the phenomena of life and character" tell their own 
 story and point their own moral. He has not always 
 been able to adhere perfectly to the logic and to the 
 rhythm of life. In The Fugitive, fine and right as the 
 details are, there are also artifice and, at the end, a 
 touch of violence. But by virtue of the inner control 
 and patience of his mind he has been able to follow the 
 rhythm of life oftener than any other English drama- 
 tist, and he has been able to reproduce it more richly
 
 170 Contemporaries 
 
 by virtue of his supreme sensitiveness to the true qual- 
 ity of human speech. The wit and eloquence of Shaw 
 spring from a different impulse and make for a differ- 
 ent goal. Galsworthy's dialogue escapes the caging of 
 the printed page at once. No theatre can contort it, no 
 actor vulgarize it with the false graces of his trade. 
 For it is thus that men speak in the eagerness of affairs 
 or under the sting of passion. 
 
 Of the new plays the first, A Bit of Love, is undeni- 
 ably the weakest. The dramaturgic method uses de- 
 tails both of speech and of character which, sound as 
 they are in themselves, scatter the impression and dilute 
 the concentration of the central action. That action 
 has power in itself, but its conclusion is lame. He who 
 follows Christ is crucified. The curate Strangway re- 
 fuses either to hold or persecute his wife, who has gone 
 to the man she always really loved. The people of the 
 parish rise up against Strangway as a coward and a 
 pagan. They despise a man who will not fight for what 
 is his own. The vicar's wife has the kindest intentions. 
 But she, too, cannot help reminding him that the 
 Church "is based on a rightful condemnation of wrong- 
 doing." Strangway leaves, praying for strength "to 
 love every living thing." Now it is a well-nigh uni- 
 versal experience that the passions of men will not let 
 them renounce force until they see its pitiful futility. 
 The curate shows no sense of the plain fact that perse- 
 cuting his wife would neither have brought her back
 
 The Quiet Truth 171 
 
 nor healed his wounds, and that dragging her back 
 would only have turned her remorse and compassion 
 into active hate. He renounces with vague emotional 
 gestures. These are to be approved; they are not likely 
 to be imitated. He is, in brief, more saint than man. 
 The representation of him as a miniature St. Francis 
 weakens the human validity of the play. 
 
 The Foundations is a dramatic picture of the social 
 turmoil of post-war England. Its mood is one of rather 
 desperate gaiety. Things are going to pieces, but it 
 is better to understand and tolerate than to be glum 
 and important. From a little group of consummately 
 drawn characters there stand out Lord William Dro- 
 mondy, son of a duke and M. P., and Lemmy, gas- 
 fitter and uncompromising revolutionist. The bad joke 
 is that these two quite unlike Anthony and Roberts 
 in Strife are not opposed to each other at all. Lord 
 William knows perfectly well that the game is up. He 
 has been through the war and sees that Lemmy's diag- 
 nosis and accusation are alike unanswerable. The cap- 
 italist state asked labor to defend it and then "soon as 
 ever there was no dynger from outside, stawted to myke 
 it inside wiv an iron 'and." Lord William quite agrees. 
 But he is in a minority among his own class and no 
 rational course of action seems open to him at all. He 
 holds a meeting to relieve the conditions of sweated 
 labor, but he is aware of the fact that such feeble and 
 gentlemanly tinkering no longer counts. The repre-
 
 IJ2, Contemporaries 
 
 sentative of the press sputters the old phrases for the 
 wage paid him by a capitalist paper, but in his heart 
 he echoes the final cry of the indomitable Lemmy: 
 "Dahn wiv the country, dahn wiv everyfing! Begin 
 agyne from the foundytions!" It is the foundations 
 that must be rebuilt. 
 
 The Skin-Game has a more timeless touch. It takes 
 the tragi-comedy of all human conflict, localizes it nar- 
 rowly, embodies it with the utmost concreteness, and 
 yet exhausts its whole significance. For the staggering 
 truth concerning all human conflict, whether between 
 groups of men or individuals, is that each contestant is 
 both right and wrong; that each has the subjective 
 conviction of being wholly right; that as the conflict 
 grows in length and bitterness each is guilty of deeds 
 that blur his original Tightness and bring him closer to 
 the wrongness against which he fights; that hence to 
 be victorious in any conflict is to add your adversary's 
 unrighteousness to your own and to be defeated is to 
 gain the only chance of saving your soul. "Who touches 
 pitch shall be defiled" is the motto of The Skin-Game. 
 The pitch that defiled the Hillcrists and the Horn- 
 blowers was not in either of them but in the conflict 
 that arose between them. Galsworthy has never de- 
 rived a dramatic action from deeper sources in the na- 
 ture of man; he has never put forth a more far-reaching 
 idea nor shown it more adequately in terms of flesh and 
 blood the gentle Hillcrist who has an intermittent
 
 The Quiet Truth (173 
 
 vision of the truth, the too sturdy Hornblower who has 
 none, the clear-eyed, arrowy Jill, the confused and 
 passionate victim Chloe. There are far greater plays 
 in the modern drama greater in emotional power 
 and imaginative splendor. There is none that illus- 
 trates more exactly or searchingly the inner nature, 
 stripped of the accretions of myth and tradition, of 
 the tragic process itself.
 
 Barrie, or The Silver Lining 
 
 CONTEMPORARY reviewers of the drama may be divided 
 into three classes: those who debate whether Pinero or 
 Barrie is the greater playwright; those who are troubled 
 over the relative eminence of Barrie and Shaw; those 
 to whom both controversies are barren of content, as 
 hardly related to serious dramatic criticism at all. 
 What relation, let us see, has Barrie to serious drama? 
 It will be useful to examine the fable of Mary Rose, 
 a characteristic play. The Morelands take their little 
 daughter, Mary Rose, on a trip to the outer Hebrides. 
 Left for an hour on a tiny island that has an eerie 
 reputation among the Scotch country-folk, Mary Rose 
 disappears. At the end of thirty days she is found 
 sketching in the very spot whence she had vanished. 
 There is no gap in her consciousness; she thinks she 
 was left a moment before. At times thereafter her mind 
 seems to reach out after a lost memory; but since her 
 parents have told her nothing, her development is nor- 
 mal. At nineteen she is betrothed to a young midship- 
 man to whom the Morelands feel it their duty to com- 
 municate the strange adventure of Mary Rose's child- 
 hood. Her marriage with Simon Blake is very happy, 
 and when her little son is four years old she persuades 
 
 174
 
 Barrie, or The Silver Lining 
 
 her husband to take her on a fishing trip to the Heb- 
 ridean islands, of which her memories are quite un- 
 clouded. On the same fatal islet of her first adventure 
 she disappears again. This time the years drag on. 
 Her wild young son runs away to sea at the age of 
 twelve. Her husband becomes a distinguished naval 
 officer, but does not marry again. When twenty-five 
 years have passed and Simon Blake is visiting the 
 Morelands, a Scotch clergyman who was once the 
 Blakes's guide comes in and announces that Mary Rose 
 has reappeared just as she did on that earlier occasion. 
 She enters, young and fresh as on the far day of her 
 doom, and finds her parents old and weary and her 
 husband strange and gray. She asks for her little son 
 and asks for him in vain. At this point the action of 
 the play itself ends. The epilogue permits us darkly to 
 infer that she died of the shock of an estranged world 
 and her child's absence. For in that epilogue the son, 
 now a grizzled Australian veteran of the world war, 
 holds converse in the deserted Moreland house with 
 her unquiet ghost, which vaguely intimates that on the 
 island magical music lured her to an abode of blessed 
 spirits to which she is now fain to return. 
 
 It is clear that Barrie did not mean this fable to be 
 accepted literally, and equally clear that he was not 
 merely dramatizing a bit of folk-lore. We must look 
 for the idea about which the action crystallized. We 
 find it, if anywhere, at the opening of the third act,
 
 176 Contemporaries 
 
 immediately prior to the last appearance of Mary Rose. 
 The Morelands, except for tremulous hands and white 
 hair, are exactly as they were a quarter of a century 
 ago. They question each other and find that the great 
 and strange tragedy of their lives has left them essen- 
 tially untouched. After a little, happiness had come 
 "breaking through." Their daughter's unheard-of fate, 
 the loss of their grandson these things are now as 
 though they had hardly been at all. Time heals. That 
 is not a very notable idea, but in a literal sense it is true 
 enough. Ideas, however, have their own spiritual qual- 
 ities, and the fact that time undoubtedly heals may 
 be regarded in different ways. There is Shelley's way 
 of regarding it: 
 
 Alas! that all we love of him should be, 
 But for our grief, as if it had not been, 
 And grief itself be mortal! 
 
 There is the bitterest sting, the long, immedicable woe. 
 Forgetfulness is the last affront we offer the sacred, un- 
 resisting dead. Barrie does not think so. His famous 
 whimsical kindliness comes in. Moreland declares that 
 he has spent his life pleasantly with pleasant little 
 things; he is not equal to tragedy; he doesn't know 
 what to do with it. The return of Mary Rose makes 
 him horribly uncomfortable. He wants to get back 
 to his collection of prints. And Barrie sheds the tough, 
 pink glow of his optimism on this lost soul. He would
 
 Barrie, or The Silver Lining 177 
 
 undoubtedly avert his virtuous face from all human 
 errors due to passion, to excess, to the generous vitality 
 of nature. His plays are commended for their purity. 
 He surrounds with his gentlest pathos and all the beauty 
 he can command a triviality of soul that is as shameful 
 as one hopes it rare. Spiritual triviality we come very 
 close to Barrie with that phrase. He makes harsh 
 things sweetish and grave things frivolous and noble 
 things to seem of small account. No wonder he is 
 popular among all the shedders of easy, comfortable 
 tears. He dramatizes the cloud in order to display its 
 silver lining. 
 
 Mary Rose is as incoherent in its imaginative struc- 
 ture as it is false and feeble in idea. If the mysterious 
 world to which the island gives access is an abode of 
 the dead, why is the living Mary Rose permitted twice 
 to enter? If it is not, why does the same music sum- 
 mon the wandering ghost that once lured the living 
 girl? Why does she leave the blessed islands of the 
 dead to haunt the decaying house? Do those islands 
 give neither forgetfulness nor knowledge? Why does 
 a distinguished naval officer permit his twelve-year-old 
 son gradually to disappear in Australia? Would not 
 a cablegram have caused the child to be recovered and 
 sent home? Must he be lost only to give the ghost of 
 Mary Rose an excuse for haunting the house? Was 
 there some special purpose in making him so rough a 
 customer that he converses with his dead mother in
 
 178 Contemporaries 
 
 gutter slang? Did that circumstance add an extra luster 
 to the silver lining? Vain questions. Barrie's imagina- 
 tion is as uncontrolled as his ideas are feeble and con- 
 ventional. Yet this is the dramatist whose position in 
 permanent literature is seriously debated. This pur- 
 veyor of sentimental comedy to the unthinking crowd 
 deceives the semi- judicious by moments of literary 
 charm and deftness and mellow grace that recall the 
 years when he wrote Sentimental Tommie and Mar- 
 garet Ogilvie. But those years are gone. His noisy 
 stage successes have left him increasingly bare of scru- 
 ple, of seriousness, of artistic and intellectual coher- 
 ence. They have left him "whimsical" and false and 
 defeated in the midst of wealth and fame.
 
 Archer, or Loaded Dice 
 
 AN audience of extraordinary distinction gathered at 
 the Booth Theatre one night to witness the first per- 
 formance of The Green Goddess by Mr. William 
 Archer. Academic powers and principalities displayed 
 both easy majesty and graceful unbending. The lit- 
 erary and editorial world had sent its emissaries. Some 
 unsophisticated youth aspiring to the honors of letters 
 and of learning would have been abashed by such a 
 blaze of glory. To one who was neither young nor 
 unsophisticated the splendor of the scene was not un- 
 touched by gloom. Mr. Winthrop Ames, it is true, 
 lived up to the fondest expectations of his cultured 
 friends. The scenic production was superb in shape 
 and color and rich verisimilitude. There were group 
 scenes barbaric warriors with dark shields and slant- 
 ing spears silhouetted against a burning sky that took 
 one's breath away; there was a room in the rajah's 
 palace where faultless beauty spoke of malignity in 
 every detail. It is also true that Mr. George Arliss 
 gave a performance of such pliancy and precision that 
 he seemed to flash and darken like a polished blade in 
 alternate sunshine and shadow, that Mr. Ivan Simpson 
 was of an astonishing raciness and truth, and that Mr. 
 
 179
 
 i8o Contemporaries 
 
 Cyril Keightly and Miss Olive Wyndham displayed 
 their considerable talents to the best advantage. Nor 
 must one forget that, at the appropriate moment, Mr. 
 Arliss made a curtain speech whose easy elegance was 
 a triumph of the art which conceals art, and that the 
 distinguished dramatic critic and translator of Ibsen 
 followed him in one that added weightiness to grace 
 and glow to sparkle. And yet that touch of gloom per- 
 sisted. 
 
 For all this pomp and circumstance was secondary. 
 There was, after all, a play. And the fable of that 
 play is as follows: Two British officers and a woman, 
 unhappily wed to one, chastely adored by the other, 
 crash down in their airplane over the remotest Hima- 
 layas into the unknown principality of Rookh. While 
 the rajah is being summoned, the three sit in the left 
 of the stage-picture and explain to each other their 
 most guarded but common secrets. This is what is 
 known as exposition. The rajah comes and offers them 
 a sophisticated European hospitality. He has taken an 
 honors degree at Cambridge and is, on one side of his 
 nature, a cynical, dry-souled man of the world. But 
 his deeper and ancestral self is at one with his tribes- 
 men of the hills. Three sons of his father have just 
 been condemned to death in India; his opportunity for 
 revenge is at hand. Need one take the trouble to add 
 that the rajah makes improper proposals to the Eng- 
 lish lady, that her unnecessary husband is shot, not,
 
 Archer, or Loaded Dice 181 
 
 however, before he has sent to India a wireless call 
 for help, or that, at the precise moment when the lady 
 and the man of her spotless affections are about to be 
 tortured and sacrificed to the green goddess, the British 
 planes are heard metallically whirring in the air and 
 the bombs of warning and liberation drop? Needed one 
 to add that? Oak and triple brass must have sur- 
 rounded Mr. Archer's heart when in the evening of his 
 days he set out to compete with the early romances of 
 Rider Haggard. Dramatic critics need not write plays 
 at all. Nor if they do, need they write good plays. 
 But can one, to take an apposite example, imagine 
 Jules Lemaitre writing not Le Pardon nor L'Age dif- 
 ficile but La Femme X ? 
 
 In Mr. Archer's breast, however, as in Faust's, two 
 souls have always dwelled. He has done magnificent 
 service in introducing Ibsen to the English-speaking 
 public. He has also written a book called Play-making 
 which is widely used as a text-book and contains a chap- 
 ter called Chance and Coincidence. Here he wrote: 
 "The stage is the realm of appearances, not of realities, 
 where paste jewels are at least as effective as real ones." 
 If this referred to a ballerina's necklace it would be 
 true. But it refers to much more and so becomes dan- 
 gerously untrue. The world itself is only a world of 
 appearances. The drama seeks to interpret the spirit- 
 ual meaning of that phenomenal order by an act of 
 heightened and condensed and clarified imitation. It
 
 1 82 Contemporaries 
 
 must be, in a sense, more real, more packed with reality 
 than any fragment of the sprawling, shifting world of 
 appearances; it holds fast a concentrated bit of reality 
 for our contemplation. It does that or it is nothing. 
 And further Mr. Archer wrote: "The playwright is 
 perfectly justified in letting chance play its probable 
 and even inevitable part in the affairs of his charac- 
 ters." That is very loose and very inaccurate thinking. 
 For what is a chance or an accident? It is the event of 
 a chain of causality that our vision does not embrace. 
 Could we grasp the universe entire and be privy to all 
 its workings, chance and accident would disappear. 
 They are brief names for a necessary ignorance. But 
 it is the aim of the dramatist to make life more and 
 not less intelligible. It is his first business, so far as 
 it is humanly speaking possible, to command all the 
 chains of causality that explain the events with which 
 he deals. The wise Greeks derived chance from the 
 inexorable will of a fate to which even the gods were 
 subject. They made it part of their universal order. 
 Mr. Archer really means sudden intrusion of the un- 
 caused. But the uncaused does not exist. The seri- 
 ous modern dramatist who admits accident or chance 
 is not unlike a chemist who should assist recalcitrant 
 nature to produce the specious show of a successful 
 result to an experiment by the injection of substances 
 that negate the experiment's entire purpose and mean- 
 ing. The artist, to be sure, is fallible. He works with
 
 Archer, or Loaded Dice 183 
 
 treacherous and imponderable materials. His severest 
 masterpiece will seem to him still not inevitable enough. 
 He must be content if, in his innermost consciousness, 
 he knows that it has grown and has not been made. 
 Mr. Archer protests that, in spite of his statements, he 
 does not like to see the dice loaded. To admit chance, 
 accident, or inexplicable coincidence at all is to load 
 the dramatic dice at the very outset. Once you do 
 that you can translate Ibsen and write The Green God- 
 dess with equal cheerfulness. But the grim old Norse- 
 man among the shades would understand the touch of 
 gloom that would not, to two or three people, lift from 
 the Booth Theatre on a certain night.
 
 Somerset Maugham Himself 
 
 FOR several centuries the drama has been the outcast 
 of English literature. Men thought it good enough as 
 a source of fortune but hardly as a source of fame. Its 
 supposed technique kept them from using it as a vehi- 
 cle of true expression; a mingled contempt and rever- 
 ence for their audiences held in check their impulses 
 toward veracity and power. The man who wrote Tom 
 Jones threw off nearly a score of now forgotten com- 
 edies; the man who wrote Of Human Bondage is re- 
 sponsible for as many. But Fielding's action was the 
 more natural. There was not in any vital sense an 
 expressive drama in the England of his day. Nor could 
 he have borrowed fruitfully from the tragedy of Vol- 
 taire or the comedy of Marivaux. Mr. Maugham has 
 had the example of Shaw and of Galsworthy and of the 
 Germans among whom he passed his student years. 
 Yet he has gone so far, in the past, as to write for the 
 stage with a hard deliberateness from within the round 
 of illusions he must himself despise. He sank as low as 
 Ccesar's Wife. Perhaps a late uneasiness assailed him. 
 He heeded that warning and wrote The Circle. 
 
 He does not yet venture a tone that fits his subject 
 and his fundamental mood. He lets the irony lighten 
 
 184
 
 Somerset Maugham Himself 185 
 
 and brighten and become farcical; he lingers and hesi- 
 tates until one almost believes that he is at one with 
 the trivial Pinero who thought that Paula Tanqueray 
 was really an object of tragic compassion because the 
 ladies of the county would not come to tea. Late in the 
 third act the cleaving truth appears. But even here 
 Mr. Maugham will not let it be quite somber or else 
 quite radiant. He swathes it a little with sentiment 
 and muffles it a little with false memories. But it is 
 out. For the first time in the drama his intellectual 
 integrity is intact. 
 
 Two subjects seem to haunt the mind of the British 
 playwright: the subject of the socially unequal mar- 
 riage and the subject of the eloping couple who drag 
 out hopeless lives because their particular social group 
 will have none of them. And the tradition was that 
 the first of these two actions should end happily, as in 
 Robertson's Caste, and that the second should end 
 wretchedly and vindicate the social solidarity of the 
 British ruling class. Galsworthy's The Eldest Son 
 shattered the first of these traditional solutions, Somer- 
 set Maugham's The Circle shatters the second. 
 
 At first the conventional tone seems to prevail. Lord 
 Porteous and Lady Kitty who ran away together thirty 
 years ago return. They quarrel and bicker. He gets 
 tight after dinner because he had to give up his politi- 
 cal career and could not go big game shooting with his 
 equals. She is rouged and affected, old without peace
 
 1 86 Contemporaries 
 
 or dignity or comfort, because during the thirty years 
 in Italy she had no place or activity in society and had 
 to consort with kept women and shady barons. The 
 once abandoned husband circles about these two with 
 an old bitterness sheathed in a bright, luxurious, goad- 
 ing irony. But the mere visible example of Porteous 
 and Lady Kitty does not suffice to point the moral of 
 their fate. Elizabeth, Lady Kitty's slim and fiery and 
 romantic young daughter-in-law, is just about to bolt 
 with a young man from the Malay Peninsula. Por- 
 teous and Lady Kitty do a brave and ghastly thing. 
 They bare their history. Its boredom, its moral seedi- 
 ness, its brief rapture, and its long regret. Elizabeth 
 is frightened and subdued. But her young man makes 
 a final plea. He does not offer her happiness but splen- 
 dor and despair, not the peace of the world but the 
 sword of the spirit. She goes with him. And as she 
 goes old Porteous rises to a moment of self-recognition 
 that saves the play, crushes a sentimental convention 
 of the stage, and vindicates the mind and art of Som- 
 erset Maugham. He and Lady Kitty have failed not 
 on account of what they did but on account of what 
 they were. "We're trivial people, Kitty," he says sadly.. 
 It is the right and momentous word, the word that 
 Pinero did not utter even by implication in regard to 
 the Tanquerays. People who go to pieces morally and 
 mentally simply because the members of one small so- 
 cial group cast them off and who therefore herd with
 
 Somerset Maugham Himself 187 
 
 pinchbeck imitations of that group are trivial people. 
 The world is wide and full of magnificent persons from 
 all its ends who do not ask after the social register. 
 They whom the social register can bend were never 
 erect in any deeply human sense. It is character that 
 creates the quality of action. Not what you dp mat- 
 ters, but what your soul makes of the thing you do. 
 
 It will be seen, then, that with The Circle Somerset 
 Maugham at last approaches the serious modern drama 
 the drama in which conflict and solution are trans- 
 ferred from the superficial compacts and modes of so- 
 cial life into that realm of the reason and of spiritual 
 values in which those modes and compacts are them- 
 selves questionable and on trial. This is indeed the 
 test of any play: whether it accepts the rules of the 
 social or political or moral game as fixed and final or 
 whether it goes to those sources of truth in the nature 
 of man and of his world which these rules often slan- 
 der and betray. The hardest thing to do, Maugham 
 wrote in his great novel, is to "establish a contact with 
 reality." It seems hardest of all through the medium 
 of the drama. But in The Circle he has established 
 that contact at last.
 
 Max Reinhardt 
 
 IT is not often that a man retiring from public activity 
 at the age of forty-eight may be said to have changed 
 permanently the character of the art which he has 
 practised. Yet to say that of Max Reinhardt is, in one 
 sense, to say too little. It may be justly urged, from 
 another point of view, that he has created a new art or, 
 at the least, transformed a professional activity into a 
 creative one. For the essence of this man's work is 
 not to be sought in his revolving stages, his tiny or 
 gigantic playhouses, or even in the unexampled wealth 
 of great dramatic literature which he persuaded his 
 public to accept. His secret is his inner and initial con- 
 ception of his task; his triumph is in the lonely hours 
 of contemplation before his vision was transferred to 
 the theatre. 
 
 What was the character of the vision that came to 
 him? It was a vision of the play's soul, of its inner- 
 most nature in terms of images and sounds. What 
 came to him was the play's intimate "style," its inner 
 music, its inevitable rhythm of tone and color. The 
 sudden vision revealed to him how, in this special in- 
 stance, the "intensity of nature" could be equaled the 
 intensity of the play's own interpretation of nature, be 
 
 188
 
 Max Reinhardt 189 
 
 it observed. For Reinhardt's imagination is synthetic, 
 not analytic. He spent his apprenticeship with Otto 
 Brahm, first of the great naturalistic directors. But he 
 himself is a neo-romantic through and through. Hence 
 his close affiliation with Hof mannsthal and the younger 
 members of the Viennese school; hence in so many of 
 his stage-pictures the eerie grace and wild, haunting 
 loveliness that allies him to the spirit of Moritz von 
 Schwind and the romantic painters. The vision that 
 came to him was, in brief, one of a special kind of 
 beauty answering a special soul in art. So, brooding 
 over A Midsummer Night's Dream, it came to him that 
 this piece was a forest poem Waldgedicht. He saw 
 the forest in its changing moods; he saw the creatures 
 of the play blend with or detach themselves from the 
 trees and glades. He heard the forest music. He saw 
 and created a vision of the forest Shakespeare's and 
 also his own. The spectators were persuaded to yield 
 imaginatively to the vision and this now celebrated 
 production was performed nearly a thousand times! 
 What the "sacred bard" is to the hero, Reinhardt has 
 been to the bard himself. 
 
 Having seen his vision, he forced himself to work 
 with all the national passion for scholarly thoroughness 
 and accuracy. He read the commentators of the poet 
 and the play, the political history of the play's period, 
 the history of its manners and its art. But his inten- 
 tion was never realistic reproduction, never a cold his-
 
 190 Contemporaries 
 
 toricity; he sought the symbolical detail that blended 
 with and interpreted his original vision. Thus in work- 
 ing at his production of Othello he found that the 
 rhythm of color which his imaginative grasp of the 
 Venice of 1500 had awakened in him was almost ex- 
 actly identical with that employed by Carpaccio. And 
 so the whole play was embodied through a restricted 
 scale of tints: leaf-green, yellowish white, gray, brown, 
 brick-red. But in the scenes at Cyprus line and color, 
 within the framework of his own vision and Carpaccio's 
 testimony, were given an added sweep and a touch of 
 sultriness. For here, in spite of the Venetian domina- 
 tion, the Orient began to glow and throb. 
 
 Such details and a thousand others Reinhardt re- 
 corded in a document known as his Regiebuch. It con- 
 tained the text of the play and a paraphrase of that 
 text giving the most exhaustive directions for the phys- 
 ical embodiment of his vision. Not until this document 
 was completed did he call his assistants into confer- 
 ence; not until his creative work was done did he enter 
 his workshops or his theatres. And often, after many 
 weeks of labor, he would reject an entire production at 
 its final rehearsal. The vision had been lost; the 
 rhythm was somehow broken; the special beauty he 
 had dreamed had not been born. In that spirit and in 
 no other does art come into being. The perfect and 
 permanent things are difficult and rare. No wonder
 
 Max Reinhardt 191 
 
 that it took this man less than twenty years to revolu- 
 tionize the theatre of his country. 
 
 His concrete creation of the beauty through which 
 he sought to equal the intensity of nature in terms of 
 mood and light and line and color may be studied in 
 some of his stage-pictures. Take the scene of the ban- 
 quet in Macbeth. Every line is a straight line, every 
 angle a right angle. All form is reduced to a barbaric 
 severity. But the two rectangular windows in the back- 
 ground through which the cold Northern stars glitter 
 are narrow and tall so unimaginably tall that they 
 seem to touch that sky of doom. The torches turn the 
 rough brown of the primitive wooden walls to a tar- 
 nished bronze. Only on the rude tables lie splashes of 
 menacing yellow. There is something barren and gigan- 
 tic about the scene a sinister quiet; a dull presage. 
 Contrast with this the desolate modernity, the spiritual 
 malady expressed in the upper chamber in John Ga- 
 briel Borkman, or the splendor and gay yet pain- 
 touched passion in Much Ado About Nothing, or the 
 earnest charm and cool, autumnal grace of The Mar- 
 riage of Figaro. These scenes have body. But that 
 body is irradiated by a spiritual life. And that life 
 expresses the creative vision of Max Reinhardt.
 
 Art, Life and the Theatre
 
 A Certain Playwright 
 
 EMERGING from the lower East Side, he made his first 
 appearance on the campus of a well-known university. 
 The emaciated little figure in rough, baggy clothes 
 seemed even then but a passing accident that would 
 soon yield to the natural breadth and sturdiness befit- 
 ting a mind so vigorous and resolute. In a flat almost 
 unmodeled face one saw, first and last, the small, dark, 
 indomitable eyes that could melt into kindliness or 
 harden into a militant shrewdness. There was not a 
 shred of affectation about him and the lock of hair that 
 slanted across his forehead marked him as an intellec- 
 tual. He meant to write plays plays that would get 
 on. He had already contacts of some sort with casual 
 purveyors of vaudeville material and he let you know 
 with a grim and almost contemptuous good humor that 
 your pleasant idealisms would get you exactly nowhere. 
 He studied the great dramatists of several literatures. 
 He had both the mind and the humanity to understand 
 their virtues. But these, he informed you, were remote 
 and impossible. A teacher of deep personal strength, 
 drenched in the stream of reality, unattenuated by aca- 
 demic repression and refinement, might have stirred 
 him. He met none such and listened with mild ap- 
 
 195
 
 196 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 proval to the blithe, learned, and immensely accom- 
 plished gentleman whose notions, despite a flourishing 
 of great names and works, were at bottom identical 
 with his own. It is at this point that his story begins 
 to broaden in meaning. The university taught him 
 many things, but it produced in him no inner change. 
 It had, in no deep sense, held him, and he turned you 
 could almost see the doggedness of his attack to crash 
 through the obstacles that arose between himself and 
 Broadway. He disappeared from view into a half- 
 murky, half-garish world of vaudeville sketches and of 
 small collaborations with tinseled semi-celebrities of 
 the stage. According to his own notion he was mas- 
 tering his chosen craft. 
 
 He mastered it. He crushed the obstacles. But it 
 took him fourteen years. Of those years no direct 
 knowledge is available. But our friend's deliberately 
 direct gestures both of mind and body had never quite 
 concealed a lurking sensitiveness of the spirit. Per- 
 haps he attempted to write more truly and nobly than 
 his theories warranted, and indeed got nowhere; per- 
 haps such experiences caused him to harden both his 
 temper and his methods the more rigorously. One can 
 easily divine moments of half-success and moments of 
 empty despair. Both were but spurs to his tireless 
 energy. Suddenly, from any public point of view at 
 last, of course, from his own he burst with quite un- 
 paralleled resoundingness upon the living stage. At
 
 A Certain Playwright 197 
 
 the end of a single season he had three popular suc- 
 cesses of the first order to his credit. The houses were 
 thronged, road companies started West and South; a 
 golden flood poured in on him. He was to be seen 
 everywhere. Managers, actors, fellow playwrights 
 treated him with a caressing familiarity. You could 
 see him in a box at first nights, now broad and stocky 
 and more than ever full of strength and tenacity. But 
 the flat face was lined and almost scarred here and 
 there, and the clever, kindly eyes passed from satis- 
 faction to melancholy. For, strange to say, the critics 
 held out against him, and he, a man of scholarly train- 
 ing and hidden sensitiveness, shivered amid the heat 
 of his success. He wanted them on his side. Were 
 they not always ready to praise work upon no higher 
 plane than his own? He was, to be sure, writing down 
 to the taste of the largest and least discriminating pub- 
 lic. But so was everybody else. Only he did it more 
 effectively, with a hard, merciless, almost brutal knowl- 
 edge of human weakness and fatuity. The public wept 
 at his first piece, were thrilled by his second, laughed 
 with him at his third. He had conquered the stage of 
 his own day and country, as his old teacher had bidden 
 him to do; he did well what everybody else was trying 
 to do and usually did ill. But the critics jeered. Per- 
 haps they were irritated by the very assurance of the 
 steely cleverness with which, especially in his third 
 piece, he played upon the showy hypocrisy and hidden
 
 198 Art f Life and the Theatre 
 
 wantonness of his wretched audiences; perhaps they 
 rebelled against the too terribly calculated succession 
 of falsely tense moments in his second. The fact re- 
 mains. And, as that first magnificent season of his 
 progressed, he grew somber over the situation in which 
 he found himself successful by all the avowed stand- 
 ards of his profession and yet denied any ultimate rec- 
 ognition besides his profits and once, at least, broke 
 out in irritation and anger. 
 
 How deeply he felt that situation soon became clear. 
 The first play of his second season told his own story 
 and symbolized his own defense. A group of college 
 seniors meet on graduation night and discuss their fu- 
 ture. Their confidence in themselves and in each other 
 is boundless. By common consent one among them, 
 the poet and idealist, is doomed always to fail and to 
 depend upon his friends for his worldly welfare. At 
 the end of three years they meet and, as it is easy to 
 suspect, the soaring hopes have all gone under and the 
 friends have only humiliating confessions to make. At 
 the last moment the poet comes in. He alone has con- 
 quered the world; he alone is rich. He has not written 
 poetry, to be sure. He is, indeed, a garbage king. But 
 he alone, to whom material things meant least, has 
 beaten the world at its own vile game. He, too, it be- 
 comes clear as the play goes on, has not only conquered 
 circumstances, but, secure in the riches of his own 
 mind, has the magnanimity to cast the wealth aside.
 
 A Certain Playwright 199 
 
 The play failed. No critic saw the personal meaning 
 or the pathos of the fable. None suspected an apo- 
 logue. Nor were the critics to be blamed. For the 
 idea of the play had no embodiment that was worthy 
 of it. Our friend had learned no new methods in a 
 single summer by which to project dramatically the 
 realities of his own soul. Characters, incident, mechan- 
 ism were of the old insufferable hollowness and arti- 
 fice. Only the cold dexterity, the unscrupulous theatri- 
 cal skill these were lacking. The man, laying bare 
 his heart, had ruined the playwright. 
 
 On the second night of the play's brief run he stood 
 in the vestibule of the theatre, gesticulating with his 
 short, thick arms. The reviews that morning had been 
 contemptuous to the point of ferocity. "Did you see 
 the papers?" he cried. "What's the use of writing hon- 
 estly, of giving them good stuff? What's the use?" 
 The ushers were putting out the lights in the theatre, 
 the audience had melted away, even the vestibule grew 
 dim. He continued to stand in the shadow, expostu- 
 lating with vigor, with characteristic tenacity, yet with 
 a strange and almost boyish helplessness of appeal. 
 What was one to tell him? That his whole art must 
 be born again? That he must forget all he had slowly 
 learned, all his own resolves? That he must return to 
 early memories or purely human impressions and write 
 as simply as though he had never known a theatre? 
 That collaboration, despite misleading examples in
 
 2OO Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 another age, is the death of true art, which must arise, 
 like prayer, from the lonely chambers of the soul? 
 That his powerful intelligence, his generous gifts, his 
 wide knowledge would avail him nothing without a 
 shifting of his whole vision of man and life and art? 
 He turned at last to go, thrusting his broad shoulders 
 forward with a movement half of disgust, half of deter- 
 mination. His whole body, in its vigorous expressive- 
 ness, seemed to say that never had the futile absurdity 
 of his inmost self with its sounder impulses become 
 more clear. He walked up the dark alley beside the 
 theatre on his way to the players' rooms and disap- 
 peared. He will pass, in all likelihood, from one loud 
 success to another and, amid the plaudits of the crowd 
 and the wealth of the years, hide ever more guardedly 
 the undying ache in his own soul.
 
 Within Our Gates 
 
 LET us suppose that, among the many thousands of 
 visitors who throng New York during the fall and 
 winter months, there were also to be found one of those 
 forlorn children of light whom Matthew Arnold was 
 fond of mentioning. It might even be some college 
 professor from the West or the Middle West. Such 
 things have been known. He has probably taught 
 through a long winter and also, in order to save a little 
 money, through a dusty summer. He has lectured on 
 the drama, its development and technique, but has seen 
 nothing for many, many months except Mary Pickford 
 on the screen and once Mr. Robert Mantelf as Mac- 
 beth. And now the air of Broadway tingles on his face 
 and his great moment has come. He is here to draw 
 inner sustenance for another two or three years. And 
 luckily oh, yes, such things happen too he has mon- 
 eyed friends here to whom theatre tickets (war-tax and 
 all) are unconsidered trifles. His host is down-town on 
 business. But his hostess is admirably present and 
 sympathetic. Of course, he must see the new plays! 
 She quietly observes him, poor dear, with his blending 
 of a becoming gravity and a boyish eagerness. She 
 decides against box-seats and first nights. He hasn't 
 
 201
 
 2O2 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 probably again, poor dear! the proper clothes. She 
 scans the paper. The sunlight falls on the permanent 
 Marcelle waves of her hair. The Professor, once her 
 classmate, decides that the art and air of the metrop- 
 olis make for youth. She must be quite . . . The 
 hostess interrupts his reflections. "Marjorie Rambeau 
 is at the Maxine Elliott in a new play. How lucky! 
 She's perfectly wonderful. And they say that Wed- 
 ding Bells at the Harris is quite adorable. Such a 
 good cast, too. And of course you're not to miss The 
 Son-Daughter, Mr. Belasco's new production. Most 
 artistic, you may be sure. You'll love it!" Already a 
 little shadow creeps into the Professor's mind. She 
 mentions no authors. By whom are these plays? But 
 he is shy, and his two glittering weeks are all before 
 him, and he determines to let her be his guide. 
 
 He couldn't, somehow, share his friend's exuberant 
 enthusiasm for Miss Rambeau. He admitted that the 
 play, The Unknown Woman, put together by three 
 people of whom he had never heard, was preposterous. 
 He told his hostess that it was kept going only through 
 a voluntary suspension of common sense on the part 
 of both characters and audience. Nevertheless, he 
 could not help feeling that Miss Rambeau's intensity 
 need not have had that edge of roughness. There was 
 a twang in it, as of a brazen string. He honestly 
 thought the part of the fat ward-heeler the best taken 
 in the play, and his hostess concluded that learned peo-
 
 Within Our Gates 203 
 
 pie have their own crudities. The surface of her bril- 
 liant eagerness to amuse him was slightly dimmed. 
 
 The Professor did enjoy Wedding Bells. Again, al- 
 though he thought he knew the history of the recent 
 drama moderately well, the name of the author had 
 no associations for him. And again the fable of the 
 play was silly beyond belief. But he yielded himself 
 gladly to the verve and sprightliness and obvious intel- 
 ligence of the acting. It was not hidden from him that 
 Wallace Eddinger's mannerisms were merely stereo- 
 typed mannerisms carried from play to play. But to 
 him they were not stale. And he was delighted by 
 Miss Margaret Lawrence's suave brightness and intel- 
 lectual grace and by the full, rich flavor like that of 
 good ale of John Harwood's performance. His host- 
 ess was perceptibly cheered, and at once ordered mag- 
 nificent seats for the next night at the Belasco Theatre. 
 She anticipated a wonderful moment. 
 
 The solemn splendor of the playhouse's interior at- 
 tuned the innocent Professor to a mood of lofty ex- 
 pectation. He was thrilled by the lovely sound of the 
 bell that signaled the rising of the curtain. But he 
 gazed and listened with a growing astonishment and 
 finally with a sardonic smile. Tucked in his hostess's 
 car he spoke, poor man, with that touch of the didactic 
 which polite people deplore in his kind, and with a 
 virility of diction, that would come out whenever he 
 was at a safe distance from his dean and his president:
 
 204 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 "To smother such inhuman and debased drivel in Chi- 
 nese objects of art that are worth a fortune is the last 
 insult to the art of the theatre and the public intelli- 
 gence. It's literally trying to make a silk purse out of 
 a - -" His hostess interrupted him with infinite deli- 
 cacy and skill and made a mental reckoning of the num- 
 ber of days her friend had still to be entertained. 
 
 But she was really as heroic as she was kind. She 
 made appropriate inquiries and took the Professor to 
 the haunts of a supposedly more authentic art. He 
 followed her gladly, though now with an inner wari- 
 ness. He saw Lennox Robinson's The Lost Leader at 
 the Greenwich Village Theatre, and sorrowfully recog- 
 nized a noble intention unsupported by either dramatic 
 or intellectual power, so that the play trailed off into 
 a babble of empty verbiage. He wondered how so 
 clever a man as Frank Conroy could have been taken 
 in by so sterile and ineffectual a play. He was frankly 
 amused by the amateurs who spouted the sociological 
 platitudes of yesteryear at the delightfully built little 
 Bramhall Playhouse. Nor was he unaware of the 
 pathos of the discrepancy between its manager's aspi- 
 rations and abilities. He went to MacDougal Street 
 and saw the Provincetown Players (of whose former 
 seasons he had heard good reports) indulge in banali- 
 ties no less annoying for their frenzied queerness, and 
 found confirmation of his old adage that freedom in the 
 life of art and of the intellect is unattainable by febrile
 
 Within Our Gates 205 
 
 temperaments without either knowledge or power. He 
 went to the opening bill of the Theatre Parisien at the 
 Belmont Theatre and saw a hard, chill, shallow little 
 comedy of amorous intrigue performed with unmistak- 
 able skill, but in an almost archaic tradition of the art 
 of acting. He also heard there a little opera bouffe 
 charmingly sung. And he enjoyed one melody by 
 Claude Terrasse so much that, with his incurable touch 
 of rusticity, he hummed it on the way to his hostess's 
 house. 
 
 That lady felt both righteous and relieved on the day 
 of her friend's departure. She was far too busy to re- 
 flect, but he gave her an uneasy sense of his intellectual 
 remoteness. She was too clever not to have been able 
 to follow the paths of his thinking, but she was far too 
 comfortable in her present mental condition to attempt 
 it. The Professor, vastly stimulated by his experiences 
 despite his obvious disappointments, mulled over on his 
 westward-speeding train the outline of a lecture which 
 his local Drama League Center would find immensely 
 acceptable later in the winter. Certain sentences formed 
 themselves in his mind with a rare inevitableness and 
 ease: "Great wealth is being expended on our American 
 theatre, and there is no dearth of admirable talent 
 among our actors and our craftsmen of the stage. But 
 all this wealth and talent are left wholly sterile through 
 the lack of a directing intelligence. The managers are 
 commercial opportunists who have not yet attained the
 
 206 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 ordinary business man's instinct to employ experts. 
 They are advised by 'cheap' people to do 'cheap' things 
 that are supposed to be unfailingly successful and are, 
 in fact, the wildest gambles. Good plays, selected by 
 sound judges, would probably average quite as high a 
 number of .commercial successes as the pieces now pro- 
 duced. Hence the central problem is assuredly this: 
 to make the managerial mind more accessible to the 
 influence of the best available knowledge and judgment 
 in its own field. ..." Whether, for one wild and half- 
 waggish moment, the Professor had a vision of himself 
 lifted out of his poverty and appointed dramaturgic 
 director of some metropolitan manager at a fabulous 
 salary, history does not record.
 
 Play-Making 
 
 AT a Broadway opening one night the play-bill in- 
 structed the audience that the new drama to be pre- 
 sented was "by Margaret Lane and Howard Jack." 
 These names at least serve to veil the crude facts, pre- 
 serve the moral, and guard the proprieties. Below was 
 the further information, subdued by smaller type and 
 a pair of parentheses, that the work of these authors 
 was "based on a play by Milton Davis." It was no 
 masterpiece. It has already gone the way of many of 
 these noisy concoctions. But a clever actress played 
 the chief part, and the first night audience glowed and 
 applauded, and there was a flutter of enthusiastic visit- 
 ing in the stalls and boxes. Indiscriminate and slightly 
 illiterate adjectives hummed in the air. At the appro- 
 priate moment there was a loud and persistent call for 
 the author. Needless to say that these play-makers 
 and press agents, costumers and actresses out of work, 
 friends, "fans," and scene painters had no desire to 
 rouse Mr. Milton Davis, who was, after all, the "onlie 
 begetter" of the evening's masterpiece, out of his de- 
 cent obscurity. Nor was their applause more than per- 
 functory when Miss Margaret Lane, a stout, scared 
 lady, blinked for a forlorn moment across the footlights. 
 It was the great Mr. Howard Jack whom the audience 
 desired to see. He came large, lustrous, easy, com- 
 
 207
 
 208 Art, Life and itie Theatre 
 
 manding. He leaned on a polished cane and his top- 
 hat flashed. Diamonds twinkled from his studs and 
 waistcoat buttons. A large-boned, pink, crudely im- 
 pressive man, radiating success, monarch of the scene 
 he surveyed. He made the desired curtain speech. He 
 explained, not without wit and adroitness, that more 
 and more as time went on he had to neglect his own 
 work and act the part of a "play surgeon." Managers 
 had promising "scripts" as had been the case here 
 but the plays were not in shape to please the public. 
 Then he was called in to cut, re-write, and stage. It 
 was a humble office but a necessary one. At last he 
 had found a name for it. A tumult of respect and af- 
 fection followed him into the wings. In how many 
 bosoms glowed the hope that some day a shy little 
 manuscript now hidden in some managerial safe would 
 attract the lordly eye of Mr. Jack and become a roar- 
 ing Broadway hit! How many brown and blond and 
 black little heads thought of the many plays full of the 
 "cutest" parts which it was the great man's privilege to 
 cast! Why should they not applaud him? It was a 
 touching scene. 
 
 Mr. Howard Jack is not the only unerring judge of 
 the public heart. There are others who infuse "pep," 
 "punch," and patriotism into the plays on which they 
 operate. And sometimes these processes have a history 
 which is not nearly so gay as the result. We do not 
 know, for that matter, the feelings of the shadowy
 
 Play-Making 209 
 
 Milton Davis. We happen to know, on the other hand, 
 the inner and most instructive history of another case. 
 About five years ago a young playwright, lacking 
 neither talent, mind, nor character, hit upon an ingen- 
 ious technical device and a popular fable. His play 
 was very successful. The managers asked for more. 
 But our friend had other notions concerning his art. A 
 melodrama was well enough. You made a little money 
 with it in order to devote yourself to your true busi- 
 ness. He wrote, to use his own words, "fantasy, naked 
 tragedy, satiric comedy, psychological drama." The 
 managers would have none of it. They demanded 
 another Day in Court. One cannot live on the royal- 
 ties of a single play forever. The young playwright 
 wrote another ingenious melodrama. But he saw no 
 reason why even into such a play one might not weave 
 a little truth, some threads of intellectual honesty. In 
 the center of his action he therefore placed an artist 
 who, in a lurid enough way, does symbolize an eternal 
 human conflict. The rest was stage carpentry. But 
 our playwright had sacrificed briefly to his true gods. 
 A great authority, a greater than Mr. Jack the pundit 
 of pundits refused the play. The artist, he said 
 curtly, "would get a laugh." A somewhat less magnifi- 
 cent personage condescended to explain. "No artist is 
 ever taken seriously by an audience." Hence the man 
 in the stalls "has no interest in seeing him killed." 
 And since the melodrama is a mimic man-hunt, to
 
 2io Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 arouse such an interest is to win one's battle. At 
 this point the play surgeons entered the game. Their 
 task was to dehumanize the author's protagonist and 
 to reduce the whole play to a consistently melo- 
 dramatic level. One suggested turning the artist 
 into a licentious club man. The author refused. A 
 lady surgeon, herself a writer who ought to be 
 above such things, advised making him a psycho- 
 analyst. Then the "star" took a hand. He had been 
 selected to play, not, of course, the now plainly wicked 
 artist-clubman-doctor, but the righteous district attor- 
 ney who brings the rogue to justice and marries the 
 heroine. This gentleman declared that the doctor was 
 still "far too human." He might "steal the play from 
 the star ! " Preliminary performances, held on the road, 
 turned the poor artist of the original play not only into 
 a knave, but into a "nigger." The star, furthermore, 
 interpolated for himself a number of burly and senti- 
 mental and patriotic lines which he copyrighted in his 
 own name. To the dismayed author hurrying across 
 the continent to save some rag of his artistic decency, 
 a flat ultimatum was presented. The play is a success. 
 The villain is killed every night to the glee of the stalls. 
 The author's name shimmers in electric lights. He is 
 making money; he is envied. His real work lies in his 
 desk. The play surgeons will continue to share his 
 earnings. For he will try again to write not quite as 
 badly as one can. But he must live.
 
 Play-Making 
 
 There are tailor-made plays. A popular star cannot 
 find a medium for his art. That statement which one 
 hears so often is, if literally accepted, sheer nonsense. 
 What the star means is that there exists, naturally 
 enough, no play in the world in which he can exploit 
 his personal mannerisms and favorite tricks in the cen- 
 ter of the stage throughout an evening. The masters, 
 alas, did not foresee him. In reality he does not want 
 to act, but, like Tom Sawyer, to show off. Hence he 
 himself or his sister or his wife writes a dramatic enter- 
 tainment about him in his most successful and fetching 
 poses. But the manuscript has not yet the requisite 
 theatrical "pep" and "punch." Enter the play surgeon 
 as co-author. 
 
 There are ghost plays. A young author has a manu- 
 script. One of the great play surgeons sees possibili- 
 ties in it. A contract is drawn up according to which 
 the surgeon has the right to make any and all changes 
 he sees fit. The surgeon also figures as chief author 
 and receives, contractually, two-thirds of all royalties. 
 The young author, who is something of an artist, is 
 ashamed of his bargain. But he must live. Such is 
 the art of play-making, the noble comradeship of col- 
 laboration! Learned professors speak of collaboration 
 and think of Beaumont and Fletcher. They should re- 
 member the elder Dumas and his methods of manufac- 
 turing literature. His example lives and thrives.
 
 Conversation 
 
 THE dark and distinguished playwright on the sofa was 
 deliberately drifting into confidences. But the art by 
 which he gained his effects had just a touch of crudity. 
 He forced the note too briskly and took for granted the 
 mood he should have striven to create. The critic, 
 watching him from a deep chair, was not surprised. 
 The playwright was good-looking and firmly intelli- 
 gent. But all his surfaces, from his boots to his cheeks, 
 were too un furrowed. He had obviously been born in 
 his particular Zion and all his efforts to prove that he 
 was not at ease in it seemed rather pointless. Nor had 
 anyone asked him so suddenly to justify his soul. The 
 room was a trifle chill, the afternoon light far from 
 mellow, the beverage only tea. Other matters, too, on 
 which the men agreed admirably were not lacking. 
 But the playwright had, as the critic observed with a 
 faint twinge of vicarious shame, set himself a definite 
 task. He crossed his legs and leaned back with elab- 
 orate casualness: 
 
 "What is one to do? You must either remain unper- 
 formed or adopt the public's point of view about life." 
 
 "Or what it thinks its point of view," the critic said. 
 But he saw at once that his mildness had prevented the 
 
 212
 
 'Conversation 213 
 
 words from reaching his friend's mind. The latter 
 went on: "And it must be done thoroughly. Half-way 
 measures are useless. Unless your manager owns his 
 house he can't keep a play on that plays to less than 
 eight thousand a week. The rentals are getting pro- 
 hibitive. Cheaper and noisier things are clamoring to 
 go on. To get even that chance you must cultivate 
 people of all sorts, attend to the publicity work oth- 
 ers always bungle it and spend the greater part of 
 your time on anything but your job." 
 
 The critic, afraid now that he was being cultivated, 
 stirred his tea. He felt rather dreary. He wanted to 
 say: "If it's so repulsive, why stick to it? You could 
 do a dozen other things. One doesn't have to write 
 plays." But before his small courage to inflict a prob- 
 ably futile sting rose to the point of speech, the other, 
 now with a pseudo-lyrical intonation, cried: "O for a 
 hermitage! Of course I do my own, my real work at 
 intervals. There are my unplayed plays. I'll send you 
 the new volume that is about to appear." 
 
 The cat a well-bred and not too obtrusive animal 
 was out of the bag. But a little flame leaped up, as 
 it will now and then, in the critic's brain. "I'm sorry," 
 he said, "but I can't admit your clearly implicit plea. 
 I want to believe in what you call your real work, but 
 I mustn't let you think it possible. You've written 
 The Adventure of Flip and Jack and Jill. You not 
 only built the false and therefore immoral fables, but
 
 214 drt, Life and the Theatre 
 
 achieved the rancid emotionalism of the dialogue. I 
 don't blame you for trying. Money tempts the best of 
 us. It buys freedom. I blame you for succeeding. 
 Your ability to succeed proves that you are not a na- 
 tive of the regions from which, as you think, the con- 
 dition of the theatre exiles you. You are at home here 
 a skilful playwright, and, privately, a cultivated gen- 
 tleman. But you'll never find your hermitage. Since 
 it was not in your mind from the beginning, it exists 
 on neither sea nor land." 
 
 With fantastic suddenness the conversation became 
 general and amid the hubbub and tinkle the blond and 
 energetic playwright came in. His voice was resonant 
 but monotonous. It had a little edge that kept rasping 
 some nerve. "Ah, Charlie's play! Have you seen it? 
 Charming. Oh, charming. But there were mistakes in 
 it at first. He sent for me during the rehearsals. 
 'Frank,' h.e said, 'what's wrong with it?' I saw at once. 
 The girl came on too soon; no preparation. In the 
 second place, the jokes would never reach the stalls. 
 They weren't led up to nor repeated." With a kindly 
 and instructive gesture he turned to the critic: "The 
 way it's done in vaudeville, you know. Now every- 
 thing is right and it's playing to nine thousand a week." 
 
 The dark playwright leaned forward. "That's bully! 
 Of course it's a smaller house. Jack and Jill did nearly 
 fourteen thousand dollars' worth of business last week." 
 He got up and strolled toward a window while the
 
 Conversation 215 
 
 blond playwright turned to the critic, who felt the 
 bleakness in his bones that he always does when he 
 hears brokers talk. He wanted to go home. But those 
 glossy eyes held him. "Haven't seen you since the first 
 night of Millions Don't Make the Man. That didn't 
 do so well. I've got a new thing going on that might in- 
 terest you. But my real work's more in your line. 
 Highly imaginative. Like Barrie. We're through with 
 the ugly. I'll send you the volume in advance of pub- 
 lication." 
 
 The critic sank deeper into his chair. The blond 
 playwright was so sure of himself. But just then he 
 seemed to withdraw to an inner contemplation of his 
 own assurance, and from farther down the room came 
 the Voice which the critic specially dreaded. It was 
 not rivalry or envy, Heaven knows, that made him 
 dread the other critic. It was the icy moment of terror 
 that he always feels when unbridgable chasms open 
 between his mind and another's. But the Voice arose: 
 "I admit the merits of The Brothers. But its success 
 or failure will not affect the development of a native 
 school of drama. Tragedy is foreign to us." 
 
 The critic jumped from his chair. A lady regarded 
 his rude suddenness deprecatingly. But he was beyond 
 the reach of her rebuke. "Then we are less than hu- 
 man," he cried, "or more. The tragic is in art because 
 it is in life! Why is nine-tenths of all great literature 
 shot through and through with tragedy? Because hu-
 
 216 Art, Life and tJie Theatre 
 
 man life is. The very Fool in Shakespeare has a som- 
 ber heart, the very grotesques of Dickens throw a 
 shadow on the understanding mind. If tragedy is for- 
 eign to us, then so are birth and love and death and all 
 spiritual conflict, then we are apes or gods but not 
 men! " The critic gasped. He hadn't meant to preach. 
 He was known as a sinister "highbrow" even so. He 
 smiled wryly. "Have it your own way," he said. "But 
 what a world you're making: bevo instead of beer, 
 drug-shops instead of taverns, flirting instead of love, 
 shop-work instead of Greek, business instead of beauty, 
 and Tillie's Triumphs instead of tragedy!" 
 
 With cool precision the Voice it seemed a collective 
 Voice floated above the dead silence: "You do not 
 understand the theatre." 
 
 "And you," retorted the critic wearily, "understand 
 nothing else." 
 
 He turned and, by some magic, found his coat and 
 hat ready to his hand. Outside the bluish dark was 
 splashed by the lights of Broadway. The stars had no 
 chance against that glitter. He walked in the oppo- 
 site direction. He needed a peace far from the theatre. 
 But near the corner of Seventh Avenue a round, com- 
 fortable little figure of a man, moon-faced and pudgy- 
 fisted, rolled against him, and he heard, in a moment, 
 the ingratiating purr of a soft Irish intonation: "Come 
 to see the little play next week. It's only a bit of craft. 
 But the 'old man' doesn't let anything fail. It ought
 
 Conversation 217 
 
 to play to good business. Some day, though, I'm going 
 to write a play I've got in mind and publish it. That'll 
 be my real work. I'll send you . . ." 
 
 But the critic had turned swiftly and melted into the 
 more solid darkness farther West.
 
 Marionettes * 
 
 TOWARD the close of the nineteenth century children 
 and simple folk in Europe still saw the puppets or 
 played with them as unreflectively as their remotest 
 ancestors had done. In windy summers or russet au- 
 tumns Italians displayed their marionettes in amuse- 
 ment parks far in the North of Europe. The gaudily 
 painted little stage was set up in the open; the benches 
 in front of it were firmly fastened in the earth. The 
 marionettes were rather tall and their movements very 
 angular. But they were all emperors or clowns, very 
 stately or full of the broadest fun, and their robes had 
 once been stiff with brocade and gold. And a child 
 who saw this show with his nurse-maid might then go 
 home and in his play-room snuggle into a curtained box 
 (Punch and Judy Show or Kasperletheater), take the 
 limp dolls, and make very vivid things of them by 
 placing his index finger in the head, his thumb and sec- 
 ond finger into the hollow arms, and letting them go 
 through a strange mixture of the old folk-plays and of 
 his own day-dreams. 
 
 The child and his nurse-maid did not have to play 
 at make believe. To them there existed no distinction 
 
 1 The Book of Marionettes. By Helen Hairaan Joseph. 
 
 218
 
 Marionettes 219 
 
 between appearance and reality, feigning and fact. 
 Their world had not yet been divided between day and 
 dream. It was of one stuff throughout; they were free 
 of all its regions and could pass from one to another 
 without jar. Only by recalling or recovering that state 
 of mind can we understand the origin and persistence 
 of the puppets. They belong to the old, old dream 
 world of myth and ritual and fairy lore. To those who 
 first fashioned them they were not dolls but men and 
 gods, like the winged bulls and sphinxes that were first 
 carved with hands and then adored. To abandon the 
 modern theatre to them, as mystical enthusiasts would 
 have us do, would be to give up in this art the slow 
 gains of the critical intelligence our one weapon 
 against delusion and cruelty and dread. But as the 
 clearest-minded will stop amid the bitter business of the 
 world to read a fairy tale, so there are moods when the 
 puppets may take us back to our own childhood and 
 to the childhood of the race. 
 
 The history and aspect of the puppets are both 
 charmingly recorded by Mrs. Joseph in her Book of 
 Marionettes. 1 She writes with a fantastic, airy touch 
 that suits her subject, and her illustrations are chosen 
 with admirable erudition and taste. Puppets have been 
 found in Thebes and in Attica, but time has dealt 
 roughly with them. They came from the Orient in the 
 beginning, and of the true folk marionettes those from 
 
 1 The Book of Marionettes. By Helen Hairaan Joseph.
 
 22O Art, Life and tJie Theatre 
 
 the far East are still the best. The rounded marion- 
 ettes of Java hold the dim dreams and terrors of their 
 makers, and the wooden puppets of Burma have an 
 eerie gaiety. The Cingalese puppets are, evidently, of 
 an incomparable delicacy and precision of workman- 
 ship. They have a sad and wondering gravity of ex- 
 pression; they were made by a folk that knew strange- 
 ness to have a beauty of its own. The shadow figures 
 of the Eastern islands are grotesque and wildly fierce, 
 those of China calmer and stealthier in their cruelty; 
 the puppet-heads of Japan are bland, but behind their 
 wan smiles lurk fear and horror. All these puppets 
 were made in faith, in rapt and dreamy earnestness, 
 and the shows aroused pity and terror. 
 
 The Christian centuries put the marionettes to more 
 definitely religious uses. But side by side with these 
 the puppets served to embody other figures of the folk 
 imagination Pulcinella and Arlecchino, Punch and 
 Judy, Kasperle and Frau Ritter Pantoflius which all 
 betrayed the humor and the realistic spirit of the West. 
 They persisted through later centuries and presented 
 popular legends, some recent, some of incredible an- 
 tiquity, and the booths of the puppet shows were as 
 regular as jugglers and magicians at festivals and fairs. 
 It was at such a booth that Goethe in his childhood 
 saw the puppet play of Doctor Faust, which has been 
 preserved in the version used at Ulm and illustrates 
 in its three parts, sub-divided into tiny acts, the char-
 
 Marionettes 221' 
 
 acter of the later plays of the puppet shows. But here 
 we are on or very near the dividing line between a more 
 ancient and more modern mood. The latter was soon 
 to drive the puppets out. They do not thrive amid rea- 
 soning and motivated actions. They and their specta- 
 tors must stay within the land of dreams. 
 
 Now, of course, no adult can go quite naively to a 
 puppet show. It remains a curiosity and an experiment 
 in aesthetic experience. Thus it is significant that the 
 best of the very few theatres devoted to puppets in the 
 world, the Marionetten Theatre Munchner Kiinstler, is 
 an exponent in miniature of the subtlest and most ex- 
 quisite devices of the modern craftsmanship of the 
 stage. The marionettes of Mrs. Maurice Browne in the 
 Little Theater in Chicago, those of the Cleveland Play- 
 house, and of Mr. Tony Sarg in New York all share that 
 sophistication, even when they strive most to approach 
 the simplicity of the old figures. Their makers do not 
 really believe in them and their audiences bring them no 
 creative faith. Only the marionettes of Richard Tesch- 
 ner of Vienna escape this difficulty. He was influenced 
 by the Javanese shadow play. But his little figures have 
 the faintly poignant morbidness of all the costly mala- 
 dies of the modern soul, and one can imagine them danc- 
 ing to faint verses of Verlaine or playing the obscurer 
 visions of Hofmannsthal or the moralities of Arthur 
 Symons. But their frail forms would wither in the 
 booths of the market-place.
 
 222 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 It is a great pity that the puppets cannot serve some 
 of their ancient uses among the many simple people 
 who are necessarily beyond the reach of the modern art 
 of the theatre. In every village of the land there is a 
 moving-picture show, and the stories told on the screen 
 by the images of real people in real places are of a con- 
 scious and malignantly corrupting falseness. In them 
 murder is represented as a small affair, war as a sort 
 of super-football, getting the better of one's neighbor 
 as the chief end of man. The lithe, brown men who 
 still watch the grave faces of their puppet kings and 
 queens act their old legends in Ceylon are far less ig- 
 nobly deluded. But a realism of means, of reproduc- 
 tion, is confused among us with reality of content, and 
 one wonders whether the villagers of southern Ohio or 
 of the North Carolina mountains would not laugh in- 
 credulously at a puppet show that brought them a truth 
 of poetry and of dreams and legends. Perhaps their 
 children would yield themselves to the lure of fairy- 
 plays and thus undergo a cleansing of the imagination. 
 The hope is forlorn as are the puppets themselves in 
 the modern world. But their history is full of fascina- 
 tion and of the infinitely quaint grace expressed by 
 Gounod in his Funeral March of a Marionette. With 
 grave, precise, and slightly mincing steps the little fig- 
 ures pass and are lost in the dusk.
 
 Toward a People's Theatre 
 
 THE rigid mind resists art. Not, to be sure, all the 
 arts. In music, where medium and substance are iden- 
 tical, each temperament may catch the echo of its own 
 mood. One man, listening to the andante of Beetho- 
 ven's twenty-third sonata (Op. 37), will hear the aus- 
 tere resignation of a great and lonely mind, another will 
 interpret that majesty and sweetness in a different fash- 
 ion and see the sky break and show the silver of an- 
 gelic plumage. But literature is built upon ideas and 
 the drama projects ideas in terms of concrete living. 
 Thus the same people will patronize good music and 
 flock to foolish plays. They are capable of hearing the 
 Symphonia Eroica in the afternoon and going in the 
 evening to see the latest melodrama by Channing Pol- 
 lock or Elmer Rice in which a foreign villain assails the 
 virtue of American women and is foiled by some pure 
 and heroic district attorney. Or, under the influence 
 of a quite transitory Idol of the Tribe, they are willing 
 to be edified by a third-rate Belgian actor's violent 
 mouthing of the remote, white loveliness of Albert Sa- 
 main's verses. But if Allan Monkhouse's Mary Broome 
 were to be brought from Grand Street to Broadway 
 their resistance to it would be complete and final. 
 
 223
 
 224 Art, Life and trie Theatre 
 
 This rigidness of mind is neither voluntary nor con- 
 scious. It is an instinctive weapon of defense that be- 
 longs to definite groups in the social and economic 
 order. The healthy and comfortable husband, unless 
 he is a born thinker, resents a criticism of marriage; 
 the prosperous business man, criticism of the methods 
 of trade; the self-satisfied father, criticism of parental 
 authority and wisdom. The possessor resists change. 
 To him truth is indeed pragmatic. How can you ex- 
 pect him to endure a vital questioning of all the truths 
 that he has found to pay so well? If he pretends to 
 culture he is willing to be mildly imaginative, and 
 hence the feebler kind of neo-romantic play occasion- 
 ally interrupts the spiritual sordidness of our theatre. 
 He will lionize the author of The Bluebird or of The 
 Faithful. The author of Man and Superman or of The 
 Sunken Bell would fare but ill. He faintly respects 
 the classic writers because the possessive orders against 
 which they rebelled have long been swept away. He 
 would be shocked and suspicious if you told him that, 
 in a period of reaction, John Milton was once pursued 
 for sedition and for having conspired against the gov- 
 ernment like any ragged communist in yesterday's raid 
 by the Department of Justice. But he is really neither 
 vicious nor stupid. His possessions possess him, and, 
 like Wagner's dragon, he desires to sleep. 
 
 These are platitudes. But they are eternal and eter- 
 nally forgotten. Their acceptance is confused by iso-
 
 Toward a People's Theatre 22$ 
 
 lated exceptions of various kinds the mental flexibil- 
 ity of a small crowd of Londoners in Shakespeare's 
 time, the revolt of an occasional aristocrat like Shelley. 
 But such exceptions do not touch the central fact. 
 Art arises from hunger hunger for beauty or harmony 
 or truth or justice. Even when art heals a dissonance, 
 that dissonance must first have been perceived. How, 
 then, can it speak to those who are convinced that they 
 hold beauty and truth and justice in the hollow of their 
 hand? And to-day, as never before, and in the drama 
 as in no other art, the great hunger which is also the 
 great rebellion and the great striving to remold the 
 world a little nearer to the heart's desire, vibrates in 
 every voice. Hence our theatre must seek another 
 audience than that of the possessors merely. It is not 
 necessary to have any romantic or sentimental illu- 
 sions about the people ; it is quite necessary to remem- 
 ber that among the possessing classes there are many 
 minds that are deeply troubled and divided. But to 
 watch the audiences in our fashionable theatres in the 
 mass is to know that here all hope must be left behind. 
 These people insist on being confirmed in all they have 
 and are. It is a popular error that they are tired. 
 They are magnificently fit and fresh. They have dined 
 and need no food; they possess all the truth they need 
 and want no art. What is left? A thrilling yarn of 
 offenders against their order who are crushed, or clowns, 
 or dancing girls. Therefore the theatre must go to
 
 226 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 those whose world is not complete and perfect, who 
 feel some lack of beauty or justice, whose hunger is 
 akin to the hunger of the creative artist himself, who 
 do not go to the table of art in an equal repletion of 
 body and of soul. 
 
 This people's theatre will not and must not be a 
 huge place. It should consist of many small stages in 
 different streets and cities. Its accessories can be sinv 
 pie, since the majority of its productions will require 
 only ordinary modern interiors. It should not charge 
 more than one dollar and a half for any seat and it 
 need not, in small houses, charge less than a dollar for 
 any. It must begin with professional actors, but one 
 of its chief aims should be to find and train gifted per- 
 sons who shall be willing to practise their beautiful art 
 on modest but regular salaries and hold this worthier 
 than the alternate affluence and squalor of the average 
 actor of the commercial stage. It must have, above all, 
 excellent producing managers. Several little theatres 
 among us that might have become starting-points of a 
 movement toward a folk theatre fail through the eccen- 
 tricity and incompetence of their producing manage- 
 ment. The stages of the People's Theatre will have no 
 room and no time for Cubist decorations or the plays 
 of young persons who have just escaped from a campus 
 and mistake singularity for freedom and distinction. 
 
 The productions at the Neighborhood Playhouse are 
 noteworthy examples of what a People's Theatre can
 
 Toward a People's Theatre 227 
 
 do even under untoward conditions. The players are 
 unhappily all amateurs. Yet when it is considered 
 that these young people work for their livelihood dur- 
 ing the week, rehearse at night, and play on Saturday 
 and Sunday, the result is astonishing. They have the 
 sense of the theatre and they have the sense of life. 
 Several of them put themselves into their parts with 
 extraordinary sensitiveness and flexibility. And they 
 do so, one suspects, because to them, far more than to 
 the professional actor of Broadway, the form and con- 
 tent of the art of the drama is an immediate and a 
 native experience of the mind and heart.
 
 The Strolling Players 
 
 THE strolling players of Scarron have joined those oth- 
 ers who traveled in the car of Thespis. The wander- 
 ing comedian belongs to a dying race. Yet it dies hard. 
 The instinct of the mime is strong and the roads of the 
 earth are many. We thought we had seen our last 
 company of such players suddenly and somewhat for- 
 lornly descend upon a Knights of Pythias hall in a 
 Southern village many years ago, when, behold, in 
 1914, in Marion, Ohio as yet unknown to fame we 
 came upon another boldly strutting through a curious 
 two-act play about a Kentucky colonel, a Yankee vil- 
 lain, and a wronged wife. And two years later, in an 
 amusement park on the straggling outskirts of a larger 
 city of the Middle West, there turned up a strange, 
 brave little troupe playing, of all things, Ibsen's Ghosts, 
 and playing it far from contemptibly, before a handful 
 of astonished yokels, a group of tight-lipped priests who 
 had wandered in from a neighboring vicarage, and a 
 large bat that whirred through the barn-like hall and 
 thudded softly against the hanging lamps. The play- 
 ers slipped away lonely symbols of an ancient and 
 perishing mode of life and art. There may be still 
 other troupes, shadowy and obscure survivals. No one
 
 The Strolling Players 229 
 
 sets down the story of their doings or their fate. How 
 many people know that, till but the other day, the old 
 show-boats still plied up and down the Ohio River? 
 The crew consisted of actors; the captain was manager 
 and leading man. The boats contained a hall and a 
 stage, dropped anchor at remote landings and lit their 
 lights, and the villagers came on board to see old melo- 
 dramas acted and to listen to sad stories of the deaths 
 of kings. The late David Graham Phillips introduced 
 a, show-boat into his story of Susan Lenox. But his 
 account is tawdry and episodic and no reliable history 
 of these strange craft exists; they have still no Scarron. 
 It is not the moving picture show that has given the 
 strolling players their coup de grace; it is the road com- 
 pany. The members of these companies are anything 
 but adventurous mimes seeking the open roads of a 
 gay world. They are employees. They might as well 
 be in shops. To them one-night stands in the Cana- 
 dian Northwest are as stripped of essential adventure 
 as working on the "subway circuit" in Brooklyn or 
 the Bronx. Pullman coaches connect the houses con- 
 trolled by the theatrical trusts from Alaska to the Gulf 
 of Mexico and the players carry the echoes of last 
 year's Broadway hits from Fargo to Mobile. The 
 wildest of the ancient arts is organized on a nation- 
 wide business basis and seventy-five dollars a week 
 plus railroad expenses paid from the New York office 
 drains the last drop of adventurousness from the play-
 
 230 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 er's bones. Tales of stranded road-companies, of shifts 
 and quaint accidents are out of date. All the hotels 
 serve grape-fruit for breakfast and the same dishes 
 with the same names in bad French for dinner. The 
 development of civilization, in flat contradiction of 
 Spencer's definition, is from variety to sameness, and 
 soon the dusty fellow with a collapsible merry-go-round 
 will be the last representative of the wandering mimes 
 who were proud, shabby, and eloquent upon the roads 
 to Babylon and in the shadow of the great cathedrals. 
 No wonder that romantic souls have been eager 
 somehow to revive the long tradition of the traveling 
 show. From Greenwich Village came last season the 
 announcement of a Caravan Theater. But no one 
 seems to have summoned it. A similar message comes 
 from England this season and they who send it may 
 have better luck. Mr. Stuart Walker's "Portmanteau 
 Theater" remains, however, the typical experiment of 
 its kind. It, too, has left the roads. But for certain 
 seasons it fared up and down the land. Only, alas, 
 it did not go to the people. No square or town-hall 
 was suddenly lifted into passion, poetry, and wonder 
 because of its coming. It was cannily summoned with 
 expenses guaranteed by Drama League centers and 
 women's clubs. It lacked robustness, breadth, and 
 popularity in the nobler sense. The little plays were 
 tenuous and neo-romantic and far more like millinery 
 than like folk-ballads. Later on Mr. Walker gave
 
 The Strolling Players 231 
 
 some superb productions and wrote one very beautiful 
 play. But he was too aloof and also too artful to 
 revive the tradition of the strolling players. If ever 
 we are to have such again, they must be more like 
 Vachel Lindsay in the days when he chanted his rimes 
 for a supper and a night's lodging. They must flee 
 the hot atmosphere of the scented studio and the "little 
 theatre" and all contamination of experts in the decora- 
 tive arts. A platform, a passion, a burning thought 
 and youth these are their only needs. Perhaps some 
 day a group of young collegians we have seen and 
 known possible ones instead of drifting to schools of 
 acting or "arty" cliques, will take to the road and act 
 both Shakespeare and Ibsen on the Main Streets of 
 towns and villages and redeem hungry souls from the 
 toils and graces of the stars of the "Realart," the 
 "Metro," and the "Universal."
 
 Interlude 
 
 THE critic was quite suddenly charged with a duty. 
 He hates duties imposed from without. It is hard 
 enough to meet the obligations dictated from within. 
 He was to take to the theatre a lady whom he had 
 barely met. He surveyed her coldly. Mouse-colored 
 hair, bluish-gray eyes, a faintly agreeable precision 
 and purity of lines, but no curves. Or, rather, all 
 curves were subdued. Her clothes were neither rustic 
 nor innocent. There was a pallid but ordered decora- 
 tive scheme. A large ring of turquoise brought out the 
 blue of her eyes. Severity is here, the critic reflected, 
 partly a matter of defense-; also of deference to a New 
 England ancestry, a doctorate, and the authorship of 
 several learned pamphlets. He was asked for sugges- 
 tions and reminded that the lady's stay in New York 
 was brief. He firmly named a given evening, prom- 
 ised a surprise, and was rewarded by a smile that was 
 meant to be wintry and ended by being wistful. 
 
 He had his first misgiving when he conducted his 
 friend to their seats in the Winter Garden on the open- 
 ing night of The Passing Show of 1921. She admitted 
 that the auditorium was magnificent but glanced nerv- 
 ously at the little glass ash-receivers attached to the 
 
 232
 
 Interlude 233 
 
 backs of the chairs. An obese gentleman on her left 
 smoked an obese cigar; the lady with the diamond 
 necklace in front lit a cigarette. The critic became for 
 a moment false to his own harsh intentions. "I hope 
 the smoke doesn't bother you." Of course she said 
 that it didn't. Next she glanced wonderingly at the 
 bridge which ran from the stage straight through the 
 audience. "The chorus comes out there," the critic 
 explained. He saw his friend's lips grow into mere 
 lines. Suddenly he remembered that one of her pam- 
 phlets dealt with the classification of images in Latin 
 poetry. He took a plunge and quoted: 
 
 Gratia cum Nymphis geminisque sororibus audet 
 Ducere nuda chores. 
 
 She laughed and there was a richer alto tone in the 
 depth of that laughter than he had expected. 
 
 She hadn't seen the recent Broadway successes and 
 the parodies bewildered her a little. The critic also 
 knew that her spiritual antennae quivered perceptibly 
 at the bare knees of the chorus. Nevertheless she ad- 
 mitted discreet conversation was easy here that 
 there was something exhilarating in the play of light 
 and color and rhythm. "The rhythmic movement of 
 the lightly draped human body singly or in groups," 
 the critic reminded her, "is not only the oldest but the 
 mother of all the arts." She looked at him with grave
 
 234 drt, Life and the Theatre 
 
 wonder. "I've made that very statement." "Very 
 well, here is your academic maxim come to life." Just 
 then the lights grew dim and the chorus, carrying small, 
 duskily glowing balloons, tripped across the bridge out 
 into the audience. The lady watched the girls closely 
 and almost with a quiver. Then she whispered, "I 
 suppose the artifice saves it. They're like girls in a 
 picture. Anyway it's lovely." The critic would have 
 put it differently. But he was well content. 
 
 Only the chief comedian, he saw clearly, repelled 
 her. A hard disdain came into her eyes something 
 aloof and feudal. She was building a wall of glass 
 about her nerves. The critic crashed through. "Ah, 
 yes," he said, "Howard has a monstrously Semitic nose 
 and, apparently, a forehead of brass. But remember 
 the clown must hit the fancy of the populace. We're 
 not in the Watteau garden described by Pater; How- 
 ard is no Pierrot lunaire. This is New York. How- 
 ard's Yiddish jokes offend you. But you see, the 
 descendants of the Back Bay families run no theatres 
 neither the Guild which you so delicately approve nor 
 the Winter Garden which you are almost ready to en- 
 dure. This rude farceur and Max Reinhardt of whom 
 the cultured patter and the divine Sarah whom they 
 glory to have seen all belong to the same tribe. How- 
 ard is, at least, effective. As a trombone, you think? 
 The Harlequin doesn't play the horns of Elfland." She 
 turned to the critic with a disarming smile. "I suppose
 
 Interlude 235 
 
 hie is funny." "Funny and, as he should be, vulgar. 
 He wants to reach the profanum vulgus." 
 
 During the second part of the entertainment the 
 learned lady did not speak. Her pupils expanded; her 
 features softened and glowed. All her life she had been 
 taken only to the more arid among the "better things." 
 Intently she watched the magic melting of one ex- 
 quisitely conventionalized background into another and 
 watched Cleveland Bronner and Ingrid Solfeng dancing 
 a vizualization of symbolic dreams. Here a new art 
 was revealed to her, an art she had known only from 
 the frozen gestures on some crumbling frieze. It was 
 allied to music, but less intricate and more primitive 
 an art of expression divinely perfect yet wholly natural. 
 Thus would we all dance if we could and dared and 
 had the beauty and strength of body and were not the 
 crippled slaves of routine and ugliness. Thus would 
 we all, intoxicated by our own fleeting but immortal 
 rhythms, throw off "the heavy and the weary weight of 
 all this unintelligible world." And now the critic's 
 guest gave a little thrilled gasp when in the Firefly bal- 
 let the innumerable chorus surged in wild rhythmic 
 lines about Mr. Bronner and a hundred limbs stream- 
 ing through the changeful lights built up an altitude of 
 pure motion like the fortissimo of a great orchestra. 
 And she smiled and even swayed gently when, in later 
 scenes, two less poetic and imaginative dancers created 
 with their dry but inimitable nimbleness the moods of
 
 236 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 ordinary pleasure and liberation that we meet upon 
 our dusty road. 
 
 She insisted on walking to her hotel. All her de- 
 fenses had broken down. A lock of hair tumbled from 
 under her hat and streamed in the wind. She said 
 good-night with a strange swaying forward of her body. 
 The lines had become curves. She chanted under her 
 breath as she went "Gratia cum Nymphis."
 
 Oasis 
 
 THE last week had been hard to bear. It had brought 
 The Man in the Making, a burly play for hard-headed 
 business men; it had brought Wait Till We're Mar- 
 ried, which dealt in lightning-like stage conversions and 
 ended on a smile; it had brought Mr. Edward Childs 
 Carpenter's tepid Pot Luck, with glimpses of talent 
 carefully curbed for the box-office. One felt, therefore, 
 quite in one's accustomed element when a stout gentle- 
 man whose diamond stickpin was as noisy as his voice 
 asked in the vestibule of the Ambassador Theater: 
 "Music by Schubert, eh? Which is it, Jake or Lee? 
 Never knew those fellows went in for composing." 
 Then one went in and the curtain rose and there 
 despite a hundred things to rasp the fastidious and 
 those who wisely or unwisely hold themselves aloof 
 from the arts that please the people there was old 
 Vienna, the city of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven, a 
 city that seemed not only to lend a home to genius 
 but to give that genius a touch of divine felicity and 
 serenity; there, somewhat in his manner as he lived, 
 was Franz Schubert. 
 
 The operetta named Blossom Time and presented in 
 a new Broadway theatre was, of course, the famous 
 
 237
 
 238 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 Drei Mddelhaus, which, after a resounding success in 
 Europe, had reached the Irving Place Theater in the 
 winter of 1918. Its performance by the German stock 
 company there was shabby to the eye and not impor- 
 tant musically. But a breath of poetry and pathos, of 
 earnestness and desiderium passed through it which 
 was sought in vain amid the magnificent mountings and 
 admirable voices at the Ambassador. 
 
 Professional devotees of music and devotees of 
 music are apt to be a little professional would not be 
 pleased, one saw at once, with the whole scheme of 
 Blossom Time. They might merely disdain the act of 
 building a play around the life of Franz Schubert. But 
 to trick out that play with Schubert's songs, to ring all 
 possible changes on the everlasting Standchen, to use 
 the great melody from the Unfinished Symphony quite 
 as the leit-motif and enveloping tune is used in the 
 cheapest music shows! Yes, it was barbarous. And 
 the American production added new atrocities to the 
 old. The tempo of the loveliest of the Wiener Walzer 
 was shamelessly accelerated "jazzed up" is the better 
 expression and, at the end of the second act, the mel- 
 ody from the D-minor was suddenly dovetailed into 
 that of Ich schnitt es gern in jede Rinde ein, which is 
 probably the feeblest, though one of the most popular 
 of the four hundred songs. It need only be added that 
 the Ave Maria was used as a "number" called Lonely 
 Hearts, and that in the midst of a musical pattern
 
 Oasis 239 
 
 hopelessly at variance with it we seemed to detect sev- 
 eral measures of the exquisite Forelle. There was 
 nothing to set off against these things except the fact 
 that the Military March was played with the nicest re- 
 gard for Schubert's intention. To which praise our 
 more terrible musical friends at once replied: Yes, but 
 his intention in this instance was quite unmusical and 
 popular and unfortunately happens not to interest us 
 at all. 
 
 Very well. But when, on leaving the theatre, we 
 heard the usher call out: "All the hits of the show at 
 forty cents apiece! " and saw the honest bourgeois with 
 still glowing faces crowd forward to buy "the hits of 
 the show," we felt certain that the American producers 
 of the Drei Madelhaus had done a good deed vital, 
 beautiful, beneficent. It is easy and lends you an air 
 of pleasing originality and saves you from the reproach 
 of priggishness if, having just come from Mengelberg, 
 you say: "Ah, yes, I find rag-time most interesting. 
 It's an original contribution to music. Irving Berlin 
 is a very clever chap." It is easy and rather disgust- 
 ing. Out in the land beside a hundred thousand pianos 
 and phonographs the young gather in the evening. And 
 among these young people are also students and espe- 
 cially the students of the great State universities. And 
 the pianos tinkle and the phonographs croak "When the 
 midnight shoo-shoo leaves for Alabam' " or "Honey 
 Boy, I hate to see you leavin' " and the hits from the
 
 240 Art, Life and tKe Theatre 
 
 latest Broadway successes by Mr. Otto Harbach or Mr. 
 Silvio Hein and, at most and best, some sugary, rhetori- 
 cal, fundamentally soulless bit from an Italian opera. 
 But suppose Blossom Time achieves the sweeping suc- 
 cess which it promised to achieve and in cottages and 
 fraternity houses from coast to coast the pianos and 
 phonographs play the Wiener Walzer ! Listen to it with 
 your inner ear in its original tempo as the words glide 
 past the eye: 
 
 Und unter bluhendem Flieder 
 
 Mil duftendem Mieder, 
 
 Die Eine, die Feine, die meine muss sein! 
 
 What soft gaiety through which breaks the eternal sad- 
 ness of the soul, what infinite grace, how spiritual a 
 rhythm, what yearning, what delight! Yes, we insist 
 that this time, if not before, the Messrs. Shubert 
 showed themselves public benefactors and wiped out a 
 multitude of their quite unquestionable sins. 
 
 And so at the risk of seeming incorrigibly barbarous 
 we express the final hope that Blossom Time will be 
 followed by a Beethoven operetta called Adelaide, and 
 by one woven of the songs of Robert Schumann. The 
 critics of music may sneer. But if phonograph records 
 of Mondnacht and Friihlingsnacht and Der Kranke and 
 Der Wanderer were played in every Main Street 
 "home" and every lonely farmhouse, what should we 
 care for the words of critics? Think of the delight 
 that would be spread and the souls that would be saved.
 
 Underworld 
 
 AMERICAN literature is said to be looking up. Dis- 
 counting the wilder claims and prophecies, one may 
 gladly admit a vigorous stir in poetry and in criticism. 
 If the production of sound fiction, novels that are both 
 creative and true, is still small, one can at least dis- 
 miss all anxiety for this branch of literary art. No 
 American novel that has distinction or promise need 
 go begging. The publishers yearn and pray for such 
 manuscripts and will leave their offices in search of 
 them. A different story must be told of the drama. If 
 an American playwright of the caliber of, let us say, 
 Dreiser or Hergesheimer, the Strindberg-Hauptmann 
 or the Donnay-Schnitzler type were to appear, he 
 would not perhaps be mute; he would assuredly be 
 inglorious. 
 
 He would, quite naturally, come to New York to see 
 the managers. He would find them heavily guarded by 
 underlings and excessively elusive. He would be told 
 to leave his "script" and given a perfunctory assurance 
 that it would be examined. Then an empty silence 
 would fall upon him. He would seek to break this 
 silence by telephoning or by repeating his call at the 
 
 241
 
 242 Art, Life and tHe Theatre 
 
 manager's office. In vain. Publishers can be reasoned 
 with, since they can be seen. Managers melt into thin 
 air. Our American dramatist, presumably young, would 
 sink into a kind of limbo of the spirit a gray and for- 
 lorn region. Recalling the glow of creation and the 
 deep urgency of his ambition, he would seek to find 
 other roads to the theatre. He would be aware of the 
 fact that two or three dramatic critics in America spend 
 their strength doing battle for precisely the kind of play 
 he has written. To these he will now address himself. 
 He will ask George Jean Nathan or even the humble 
 writer of these words to read his manuscript and will 
 be bitterly disappointed by the result. Yet the critic 
 is quite helpless. How is he to know that this particu- 
 lar play is a masterpiece? He must either read all 
 manuscript plays that come to him or none. Since 
 life itself forbids the former course and since discrim- 
 ination would be both unjust and futile, he chooses the 
 latter. He does so the more calmly as he knows his 
 influence with managers to be almost wholly limited to 
 suggesting the kind of thing they already want. Mr. 
 J. D. Williams's production of Eugene O'Neil's Beyond 
 the Horizon offers a solitary exception. But O'Neil's 
 one-act plays had previously been given a hearing 
 through the Provincetown Players, and profited by the 
 circumstance that Mr. Nathan prints one-act plays in 
 the Smart Set. To Mr. Arthur Hopkins and to the 
 Theatre Guild our stage owes inestimable benefits. The
 
 Underworld 243 
 
 production of a single seriously good play of native 
 origin was not until recently among them. 
 
 Our young dramatist, shivering in his hall bed-room, 
 will now remember as a last resort that playwrights 
 and players have often worked together. He will seek 
 out prominent actors and actresses. If by virtue of 
 social adroitness, a gift for flattery, and an ingratiating 
 manner qualities likely to be his in inverse ratio to 
 his talent and nobility of purpose he succeeds in inter- 
 viewing "stars," he will find, first, that they are com- 
 monly "owned" by managers quite as baseball players 
 are and have to play in the plays provided, and, sec- 
 ondly, that they themselves are not looking for good 
 plays, but for grateful and preposterously showy parts. 
 This point they will make clear to him with a gigantic 
 and unblushing simplicity of mind. 
 
 In these fruitless efforts our dramatist will have 
 spent at least six months. A dullness will have fallen 
 upon his spirit; his fastidiousness and sensitiveness 
 will show rents and callouses. In his rooming-house, 
 at restaurants, on Broadway itself, in the reception 
 rooms of managers, he hears interminable talk concern- 
 ing the art and business by which plays are "gotten 
 on." A tall, youngish man is encouraging. He is 
 about to have a play produced by a new manager. It 
 took him eight years. An elderly person with a moist 
 sputter and a crumpled face is bleak on the whole sub- 
 ject. Years ago he was co-author of a successful
 
 244 Art, Life and the Theatre 
 
 farce. Now he broods bitterly over a trunkful of un- 
 produced plays. Our young dramatist shudders, but 
 he listens. He has nothing else to do. "You've got 
 to give the managers what they want." "Yes, but what 
 do they want?" The feeble talk eddies back and forth. 
 Somebody says in a rough, tired, oracular voice: "Alf. 
 Stone's secretary once said to me, says he: 'What the 
 boss wants is melodramas to make people die of fright 
 or bedroom farces to make 'em die laughinV ' Our 
 dramatist happens to come upon another group. Here 
 the talk is of the gorgeous profits of the gilded hacks, 
 of the fabulous fees paid by the great film corporations 
 for scenarios and "movie rights." "Yes," some one 
 says, " 'is all right. But there's no use submitting sce- 
 narios. They steal 'em. You got to get next." That 
 phrase throbs in our dramatist's aching head. It sums 
 up his situation. He has spent his years on the noblest 
 of the arts, not on the art of "getting next." But con- 
 cerning his art he has not heard a syllable spoken. He 
 has slipped into an underworld of spiritual prostitution. 
 These people watch the plays with the largest box-office 
 receipts. These they imitate. Then they fawn and 
 cajole and treat underlings to luncheon and wait weary 
 hours in managers' offices to "get next." Swiftly our 
 dramatist walks to the office of the manager who has 
 had his play for the past five weeks. He demands his 
 manuscript. A young woman with rosy nails and bril- 
 liantined hair fetches it languidly from an inner sane-
 
 Underworld 245 
 
 tuary. No interest has been shown. No report com- 
 municated. He has not "gotten next." 
 
 This account is no fanciful one. It is based qn hard 
 facts. It may be replied that we have no American 
 dramatists of the nobler kind. But how are we to tell? 
 It is certain that a young Ibsen or Hauptmann or Shaw 
 would meet in New York to-day the fate described and 
 would withdraw in just and austere wrath to his native 
 province. Those that remain and sink into the under- 
 world of the theatre and at last succeed on its terms 
 are not they for whom we are waiting or whom our 
 drama needs.
 
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