Chapter II (2)

If we have to-day no great tyrant of contemporary convention in any of the arts, we have a hundred fashions. The age is eclectic; the conventional side of art is at a discount. Now in the drama, the conventional side of art is of peculiar importance. The more you surprise an audience, the less you will please it. The thing that entertains and relaxes people is to have something unmistakable and easy unrolled before them; something in which the problems are plainly stated and solved beyond the possibility of a doubt. The good man and bad man must be labeled; and so must the different sorts of plays receive labels--as, Comedy, Tragedy, Farce, Problem-play, Tank-drama, etc.; otherwise a great part of the attention of the audience will be exhausted in finding the right humor. The modern playwright has thus a problem that is new to the stage, the problem of giving the grand cue to the audience as to which kind of play is coming.

After all, the condition of the contemporary stage is very much like the condition of contemporary painting. Any good historical gallery contains samples from the whole history of art. There are as well-defined classes of pictures as there are of dramas: _e. g._, the religious picture, the genre picture, the portrait, the landscape, etc.; and within each of these classes there exists a world of half-defined traditions in which educated persons are learned, and by which all artists are somewhat controlled. Now each of these classes was originally the product of an age devoted to it. But to-day the artist is eclectic. He is eclectic in spite of himself because he is not forced by universal expectation to do a particular thing: he must choose. Whether he be painter or dramatist, the artist in Western Europe to-day is born into an epoch of miscellaneous experiment. Let him choose. The spread of international education has brought about this state of things: art is becoming an international commodity.

Let us return to the drama, and seize upon some convenient model of a conventional play--for instance, the old-fashioned melodrama. What a relief it is to find in the opening act of a play that we are upon familiar ground, that we know very well what is coming and can enjoy the elaboration of it. We must have a taste for the whole species or we can never either like or understand the particular example. And so also in judging of any drama of another age we must positively bring the whole of the epoch to bear upon it or we are lost. The Elizabethans before Shakespeare’s time had developed a drama of horrors, or running-mad play, in which the audience knew from the outset that someone was to be dogged and tortured and dragged through a living Inferno before being thrown on the dung-hill. The audience expected to be moved to awe and to a certain sort of solemn horror by the tragedy. The play was to be in blank verse, a narrative play full of incident--with a host of characters and many changes of imaginary scene. The story was to be new to the audience and as exciting as possible. Very often it had, to our modern thinking, no plot; but was a helter-skelter of delirious cruelty, accompanied by torrents of passionately excited words which sometimes broke into great poetry and more often soared in a cloudland of divine bombast. The people loved this language. They reveled in the rhetoric of the dialogue, and wallowed in the boldness of the action. The first line, or even the very name of a horror-play in Elizabeth’s time, was enough to throw the audience into the proper mood. How mistaken is it for one of us to-day to read any old play without conjuring up something of its epoch.

Now let us remember the Greeks, since we cannot escape them. The cultivated, conventional, logical, and over-civilized Greek wished his tragedy to be elegant and in a just measure solemn, not to say awe-inspiring. He expected this, much as we expect coffee after dinner when we dine out. It was to be done through the means of one of the old Greek myths, a thing half history, half fable in its complexion.

In the days of Æschylus the Athenian audience was made up of God-fearing, conservative people who could be moved to awe by the contemplation of religious ideas, and by pictures of lofty moral sufferings. But as time went on, the people became bored by the old Greek religion, and it required more highly colored pictures to satisfy them. In the days of Sophocles there is a certain amount of religious feeling left in the people, though one feels that Sophocles is making use of it for artistic purposes. In Euripides’ day, however, everything has been used up in the way of big moral ideas, and the emphasis is laid on the suffering. Mental agony is manipulated by a skilled hand. The taste is refined, the logic is perfect, the art is wonderful; but the dramas of Euripides were felt in his own day and thereafter to be a little corrupt. People blame Euripides instead of blaming the insensibility of the Athenian theatre-goer who required this sort of enginery to make him weep delicious tears. The thing to be noted in both of these instances--from the English and the Greek stage--is the part played by the audience. It is only through a tacit consent on all hands that a certain game shall be played, that very highly-finished, complex and perfect works of art are produced. There is so much to be conveyed by a drama that unless the audience will agree to take nine-tenths of it for granted, the project is hopeless. The conventions! These are the precious symbols which have been developed by centuries of toil. They possess such telling value that by their aid even mediocrity can do good things, and genius, miracles. How shall we preserve them?

The world of drama appears to-day to be at sea, by reason of the loss of the great compass of a controlling dramatic tradition, yet this is not quite true; because other influences--vague perhaps, yet very authoritative--supply, in some degree, the place of the older tyrant, custom. The controlling force of living dramatic practice has died away in the world, and has become dissipated into a thousand traditions. But in dying, it has left two influences as its heirs--namely, the influence of criticism, and the influence of academic training. These two watch-dogs of the drama tend to keep at least some record of the past. They organize and classify the new varieties of drama which are constantly springing up. For it appears that a new kind of drama is not so very difficult a thing for a community to develop. The oratorio, for example, and modern opera in all its forms, are even more artificial than the Greek drama, and require an even greater conventional sympathy on the part of the audience. Yet they have grown up naturally among us and are true children of stage life. In quite recent years Wagner, Ibsen, and Mæterlinck has each developed a personal theatre of his own. Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public, held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the age--such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would never have predicted for a playwright. This could only have happened in an age when there existed a large reading public made up of persons who were scattered throughout all the nations. For it must be noted that the reading of plays is as good as a chorus. It warns the people of what is to come. Not only the reading of plays but the reading of pamphlets and of essays is necessary in order that people may be primed to accept any new departure in the drama. The undeniable genius of Gluck was not able to establish his lyrical drama without the aid of many writers, talkers, and promoters. It required a war of pamphlets and the influence of royalty to make the new opera acceptable. Ibsen and Wagner have been accompanied by a wagonload of pamphlets and broadsides, as if they were the forerunners of a new circus. Bernard Shaw went with every play he gave as an advertising agent, a gladiator and shouting billman that would get the attention of the public at any price. It was quieter inside the theatre than outside of it, so people took refuge within.

Let no one think that criticism is an unnecessary part of the modern drama. Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.

There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. The history of criticism is tremendous in volume, in brilliancy, and in seriousness; and it has a great utility and mission toward the world at large. If anyone have a curiosity to know what this literature is, let him glance through Saintsbury’s History of Criticism in three great tomes of many hundred pages each, in which the great names and the great theories in criticism are reviewed. This is a part of the literary history, of the bookish history of the world. From Plato to Lessing, from Longinus to Santayana there have been acute-minded individuals who loved the fine arts, poetry, sculpture, music, the drama, etc., and who busied themselves with speculation upon them. These men would pluck out the heart of the mystery, they would touch our quick with their needle, they would satisfy our intellect with their explanations. And here arises one of the subtlest difficulties in all psychology; the difficulty of explaining clearly how men of the greatest intellect may be subject to the grossest self-delusion. The reasonings of these critics about art are valid as reasonings of critics about art, so long as they are kept in the arena of the reasoning of critics about art. But if you try to translate those reasonings back again into the substance of art itself--if, for instance, you bid the artist follow the admonition of the critic, you will find that the artist cannot do this without making a retranslation of the critic’s ideas into terms which now become incomprehensible to the critic. In order to take the critic’s advice--to produce the effects which the critic calls for--the artist must do with his material things which the critic has not mentioned and does not conceive of.

The critic, after all, is a parasite. He lives by illustrating the brains of the artist. He is an illuminator. He has produced a wonderful literature--a literature of embroidery--and this literature is very valuable to the world at large; but has, as it were, no mission as toward the artist. The reason is that the artist gets his experience of art by working directly and immediately in the art; and the problems he works on can neither be stated nor solved except in the terms of his art. The critic, meanwhile, believes that he himself has stated and solved those problems; but what he says is folly to the ears of the artist. The misunderstanding must continue forever, and neither of the parties is to blame for it. Listen to the most good-natured of artists, Molière, speaking with the authority of unbounded success, upon the subject that drives lesser men to helpless rage:--

“Vous êtes de plaisantes gens avec vos règles, dont vous
embarrassez les ignorants et nous étourdissez tous les jours.
Il semble, à vous ouïr parler, que ces règles de l’art soient
les plus grands mystères du monde, et cependant ce ne sont que
quelques observations aisées que le bon sens a faites sur ce qui
peut ôter le plaisir que l’on prend à ces sortes de poèmes; et le
même bon sens, qui a fait autrefois ces observations, les fait
aisément tous les jours sans le secours d’Horace et d’Aristote.
Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles
n’est pas de plaire, et si une pièce de théatre qui a attrapé son
but n’a pa suivi un bon chemin. Laissons-nous aller de bonne foi
aux choses qui nous prennent par les entrailles, et ne cherchons
point de raisonnement pour nous empêcher d’avoir du plaisir.”...

Even Molière is a little harsh to the critics. He seems not to remember that critics are “seized by the entrails” by a set of psychological terms, by “the sublime,” by “beauty,” by “contrast,” by the very idea that there should be laws underlying the mysteries of æsthetic enjoyment--laws which critics proclaim. The fact is that the sincerity and enthusiasm of the critic carries all before it. It seems to the critic as if the artist were a poor fool who does not quite understand himself. Molière has had his say, but what of that? No critic was listening. The critic feels too keenly about the matter to catch the drift of Molière’s remarks. You cannot persuade Ruskin that he does not understand painting. You cannot make Aristotle believe that he stands in the position of an outsider toward tragic poetry. He smiles at the suggestion. He feels himself to be quite on the level of his subject. Before he spoke, it had not spoken. Leave the critic, then, to his thesis: and let us confess that for everyone except for the artist, that thesis has a great and stimulating value.

The words of the critical, even though they come from outside the profession, have a value in preserving and in interpreting good traditions in art. The real power, however, through which these traditions live is the teaching done inside of the profession. What the apprentice learns at the bench from the master-craftsman--this is what controls the future of art. It is through this teaching that the raw youth is turned into a craftsman. No one who has not passed through the mill can conceive the depth to which nature must be affected through training before art is gained. The artist is as much a product of art as his own works are. To execute the simplest acts of his profession he must have passed through a severe novitiate. He cannot sound a note of it till he has been refashioned, as Mrs. Browning sang, from a reed into a musical instrument.

There are certain ways of reciting verse and of speaking prose, certain ways of walking on and off the stage, which are expressive, correct, and necessary. To drop them is a sign of ignorance and decadence. They cannot be replaced by something modern that is just as good: they are a race inheritance. If you lose them you will have to re-discover them subsequently, just as, if you were to lose the science of harmony, you would have to discover it again before you could understand the music of modern times. How is it that these practices and trade secrets of the arts get preserved during periods of public indifference, when perhaps the studios might forget them? It is by the institution of Academies and Lyceums: by the endowment of galleries and theatres. The nations of Continental Europe long ago resorted to state-supported schools, galleries, and play-houses as a means of preserving tradition. On the Continent no one is allowed to forget the old forms. They are nursed and cultivated. The very nations which need training the least, because of their natural talent, and of their proximity to the old Mediterranean seats of culture, get the most of it, because of their intelligent understanding of what art consists in. Among late-comers at the table of civilization, and among young people generally, there prevails an opinion that art is the result of genius, or of natural temperament, or of race endowment. But the persons who have the endowment of race, of temperament, and of genius know that art is a question of training.

It is a sign that civilization has been spreading to find that in England and in America, men are beginning to adopt Continental ideas upon the subject of endowed theatres. The chaotic condition of the English stage has been very largely due to the fact that it has been nobody’s business to preserve the old recipes. If the public taste swings away from lyrical drama for a decade, lyrical drama goes by the board--the very models and old wig stands are thrown out of the window. In a few years, only a few old actors and playgoers will remember the lost delights that went with these trappings. A whole province of human happiness has been eaten up by the sea of oblivion--by that all-surrounding, ever-active ocean that gnaws away the outlying realms of the mind, and will eat us back to mere grunts and a sign language unless we value our inheritance of articulation. Without the support of schools of acting the present moment remains continually too important. Those whole classes of exquisite, beautiful things which go out of fashion and are thereafter all but irrecoverable, should be held before the public with as firm a hand as orchestral music has been held before it, and for the same reasons. We are always being told by theatrical people that the public taste will or will not support something. Does anybody inquire whether the American public likes Bach or Beethoven, or does anybody take advice of the press as to how the works of those masters shall be played? No. The best traditions are followed, the best performers obtained, and the effect upon the public mind is awaited with patience and with certainty. That is the way a State Theatre is run in Europe, and that is the way that a New Theatre should be run in America.

With regard to music, we have adopted the Continental ideas easily, because we had no music of our own. But with regard to the drama we have certain crude ideas of our own, rooted in the existence of a domestic drama, and these ideas impede our progress. We have, for instance, a belief that because an audience is used to an inferior thing, therefore it will continue to prefer that thing to something better and that the reformer should content himself with giving the public only a taste now and then of something fine, and should keep in touch with them in the meantime through concessions to popular taste. This would be sound reasoning in the mouth of the business manager of an ordinary theatrical venture; but in the mouth of the manager of an educational theatre, it is blasphemy. The thesis upon which all education rests is this: give the best, and it will supplant the less good.

I doubt if anyone in the country is more grateful than I am to the managers of the New Theatre. They have begun a great work. The whole country is in debt to them already. They are showing a spirit which will make their future work continually improve; and their efforts have, on the whole, been received with that lack of intelligent gratitude with which society always receives its benefactors. Nevertheless their work and their position seem to illustrate so many points in the subject, that a little incidental criticism of them is unavoidable. If I find fault with the New Theatre for not being sufficiently academic, it is only to illustrate how completely academic standards have been vanishing in America. For instance, the art of reciting Shakespeare has been all but lost, and the New Theatre proved this quite unconsciously by a plunge, upon some occasions, into a sort of household naturalism in its method of reciting romantic drama. An epoch like the present, in which the current new plays are naturalistic, will tend to recite Shakespeare in a naturalistic way. But only the abeyance of good tradition could have led to the attempt to give Shakespeare’s lines in a conversational manner. We have forgotten how effective the lines are when conventionally given, or we should resent this experiment in taking the starch out of them. Indeed upon certain other occasions the old standards of speech were last winter brought back in magnificent triumph at the New Theatre. If it was chiefly to the Englishmen and Englishwomen of the New Theatre Company that we in America owed this beautiful lesson in speech, let us none the less be grateful for the lesson and draw from it what profit we may.

There are people who believe that verse is merely a decorated sort of prose; and that in connection with the drama, verse is a foolish superfluity. The people who think this have not heard verse well recited. The delivery of metrical language in an elevated manner is the noblest tradition of the stage. It is a thing at the same time completely artificial and completely beautiful. It lifts the play into a region native to great thoughts, where lightnings strike, as in their element, and music like a natural thunder rolls across the scene. To-day the secret of this majestic convention of verse is lost to the stage. Neither in the writing of it by the poet nor in the delivery of it by the actor, nor in the reception and enjoyment of it by the audience can the thing come off happily except under rare conditions, when all are prepared for it and when the right planets are in the ascendant. We live under an eclipse; yet is not the sun extinguished. Verse will return to the drama as soon as those themes return which only verse can carry.

All these conventions and settings of which we have been speaking are but the accessories, the servants of the stage; and, like insolent lackeys, they sometimes thrust themselves vulgarly forward. The wardrobe of Louis XIV might easily make the claim that the monarchy could not be carried on without it. And yet, on the stage, it is not quite so. On the stage, no particular set of accessories is ever so important as it thinks itself. The multiplicity of the forces at work saves us from such shameful subjection to detail. We can always, at a pinch, get on without any of the accessories. Have you ever, when charades were being acted, seen some talented person enter the room, wearing an old hat and having a shawl or perhaps a window curtain drawn across his shoulders? For some brief moments of inspiration he manages to make you see Hector of Troy, or The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. You cannot tell how it was done, it was so rapid. Yet you have had a glimpse of an idea. You have been transported somehow and somewhere. Perhaps the actor cannot do it again; for amateurs strike sparks and call up spirits by accident. Nevertheless, the thing you have seen is the essence of drama. An idea has been conveyed; and all the means that conveyed it have been lost--consumed like gunpowder in the explosion. We can all remember various amateur performances and revivals of old plays, in which the accessories were of the simplest; and in which the suppression of scenery and the focusing of the audience’s whole attention upon the actors had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon the talents of the actors. The means were at a minimum; the idea, the thought was at a maximum. In this amateur spark we have the key to the real theatre.

The building, the costumes, the incidental music, the blank verse, all the accessories of a play exist for the purpose of making an atmosphere of high conductivity, in which that spark of idea may fly out from the stage, across the footlights, into the audience. During great moments or great half-hours of a play this same disappearance of the accessories takes place, and gives us the life of drama. We are always losing this life, because the accessories have independent and fluctuating values of their own which attract our attention. Costume seems to be an advantage in helping to hold the illusion, and scenery is merely an extension of costume. Either of them may attract too much attention, and how much this too much is, depends upon the sensibilities of the auditor. For example, Twelfth Night is injured in my eyes when it is given with beautiful Italian scenery, no matter how beautiful. Toby Belch is, in my mind, connected with rural England, and to see him with Vesuvius in the background shocks me. Nevertheless, the next man may find in this Italian scenery a gentle stimulus which heightens his enjoyment of the inner drama. Again, blank verse, when properly spoken, adds to a play a moving charm like an accompaniment of music; but when the lines are declaimed with either too much or too little artifice, they become a nuisance. All the means and vehicles of expression should fill the mere margin of our attention, ready to step forward when the mind’s stage is empty and to vanish on the approach of the dramatic interest.

The Greek stage came as near to the charade as the theatre has ever come since. Here was no scenery, and the costume was merely suggestive. Play of feature was out of the question, because of the mask. The appeal of the natural voice was out of the question, because of the megaphone mouth-piece. There was nothing left but gesture and intonation. What a denudation that seems to us! But are you sure that the imagination is not heightened by just such devices as this? Are you sure that Hector or Heracles are not made ten times as real by this absence of realism as they ever could have been made by naturalistic treatment?

A character comes on the Greek stage, and you perceive by his talk that he is supposed to be walking in a wood. In a few moments he arrives at an imaginary point of view. Another character walks on the stage, and you perceive that this second character is supposed to have come walking up the valley. Your whole attention is on the story, and any striking scenery would be an unpleasant intrusion, an inartistic element. Surely the Greeks were very clever at mechanical contrivances and could have had scenery if they had desired it. What they had was much better,--imagination.

It is the same with the French classic stage, whose meagreness of decoration is almost an offense to the American. The higher the intelligence of the audience, the less will scenery be valued in plays. In the case of children’s toys, we all know that a rag doll and a wooly dog speak a more eloquent language than a mechanical doll and a realistic dog that walks. But we dare not employ this philosophy in dressing our stage, because of the lack of imagination in grown people.

I have no doubt that if you had, say, thirty new plays to produce, each of them as good as Hamlet, and if your audience were to consist of the most intelligent people in the world, and if your actors were all and each as good as David Garrick, I have no doubt, I say, that the most thrilling way you could produce those plays would be on a stage without scenery and with just such suggestion of costume as should lift the characters into the world of idea. Such was the Elizabethan method; at least it was the practice which the Elizabethans stumbled upon in their riotous career.

The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a story, which has happened and is over--but is a thing which is going on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real life--wax-works, for instance--impresses the unimaginative person more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view--to bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken them--a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality--and in this we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but only with several conditions of education in the audience.

The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in our life--the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not habitually live in the world of imagination. That world seems flat to them. Nevertheless, the same persons will, with a little encouragement, begin to enjoy humor, and trust poetry. Put them where they have no critical responsibility and they will blossom into enjoyment. O blessed amateurs! I wish someone would write a book and show that the whole history of art has been but the history of amateurs; and that every revival of painting, drama, music, architecture, and poetry has been due to them. They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to its ancestor--its good genius--the charade.

The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire evening. The “argument,” as they used to call it, is the main thing. It is astonishing what a good name this is for the exposition of ideas that takes place in a very good play either ancient or modern. The argument is what both audience and actors breathlessly follow. We err only when we begin to define what the argument is. It seems, in truth, to be something too subtle for analysis. In some plays we think we find it in the plot, in others in the characters, in others in the language, and so forth. But there is hardly a definition of it which some famous example will not instantly confute. There is, for instance, a charm that comes out of As You Like It, and which for three hundred years has made audiences consent to sit through its three hours of happy trifling. That charm is the “argument” of As You Like It. You cannot state the charm. It is as subtle as the ether and as real as the power of light that moves across the ether. Our senses are not at fault, but only our theories. There is a fluctuating mystery about all that happens in the theatre, and perhaps this indefinable power is what most attaches us to the place. It is not a place of learning, nor of scholarship, nor of information or ethics, nor even of such flights of mind as accurate thought can always follow. It is a place of enchantment.

NORWAY.

In Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them. Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania, and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature, and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their favorite hobby.

I saw a very nice play the other day about these people. If was about a very nice elderly man and his elderly sister, Jake Borg and Elisa Borg. Jake loved his sister, and his sister loved her cat--a Maltese cat of the largest variety. Both Jake and Elisa spent an hour or so each day in talking about the cat, and of how dangerous it was for the cat to insist upon walking on the back fence during the very hours when Jake was practising with his flint-lock at a target erected upon the fence. Jake, it appears, was a member of the village patriotic shooting society and was the president of it, and his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in it. The society used flint-locks rather than percussion caps because the time occupied by the explosion, being quite long with flint-locks, the nerves of the patriots would be the better steeled to bear the noise. Thus, during the forenoon, for several years, the devoted couple discussed the question whether or not the pet cat would be hit by the pet bullets; and it became alarmingly evident that such would be the case, unless one or the other of the afflicted persons should desist from the practice of his hobby. There were various other people who came in to help the principal characters in the play to discuss the peril. Neither party in the great conflict would budge from his principle--the one, for patriotic reasons, the other out of Christian piety and affection for dumb animals.

The anguish of the situation became so intense that it was almost a relief when the cat was shot by the heroic burgher in the very shot by which he completed a hundred consecutive bull’s-eyes--or would have completed them, but for the fated animal. Jake’s life was ruined by this failure; as Elisa’s was ruined by the loss of her companion, and the village life was ruined because there remained nothing to talk about thereafter. So, all the inhabitants of that Norwegian hamlet shut their windows tight, and continued each in the pursuit of his own serious hobby, neither washing, nor smiling, nor making allowance for the hobbies of the rest, but only grinding out remorsely the magnificent tragic material of Norwegian life.

DR. HOWE.

There are men who have great fame during their lives, and then disappear forever; and there are others who live unknown to their contemporaries, and then emerge upon posterity, and cast back a perpetual reproach upon their own times which were not worthy of them. To neither of these classes does Dr. Howe belong; for he was a hero in his own day, and has left behind him so many memorials of his mind and times that he can never become wholly lost to the world. He belongs rather to that class of reappearing reputations which die through successive resurrections, and distribute their message to humanity through many undulations of loss and rediscovery.

One cannot tell where to set the boundary to such men’s influence, for while the student writes, the shadow moves. The scribbler who is assigning values and labels to history becomes an instrument in the hands of his subject, and something is accomplished through him which is beyond his own horizon. This is the mechanism through which great men reach the world. The present age has all but forgotten Dr. Howe: his name has for some years been on the road to oblivion. For I do not count as fame the dusty memorials and busts of dead philanthropists which adorn and disfigure college libraries. Their honored and obliterated features carry something, but it is not fame. They are like neglected finger-boards which have fallen by the wayside and are calmly undergoing unimaginable dissolution through the soft handling of the elements. Wordsworth might have addressed a sonnet to these men had he not been so preoccupied with external nature. “Behold, this man was once the sign-board of classical learning, this of electricity, this of natural science.” But Wordsworth would have been obliged first to rub the moss from the inscriptions.

Some years ago it looked as if Dr. Howe, the great and famous Dr. Howe, had fallen by the wayside of progress and was to remain forever a dead finger-post and a reminiscence in the history of the world’s care for the blind. To-day a new image of him is beginning to form above the mass of letters, documents, and written reports which his busy life bequeathed to the garret, and in which his daughter, Laura E. Richards, has recently quarried for a book of memoirs. She has produced two large volumes which give us Dr. Howe from the intimate side of his character, and in a way that no man can be publicly known to his contemporaries. It is of this new image or _vita nuova_ of Dr. Howe that I mean to speak.

There is a variety of interest in his life, which shatters the picture of a philanthropist and leaves in its place the picture of an adventurer--an unselfish adventurer; that is to say, a sort of Theseus or Hercules, an unaccountable person who visits this world from somewhere else. After all, this is the impression he made upon his own times. Perhaps we are getting a breeze of the same wind that blew through him in life: I cannot tell. At any rate, it was not to Laura Bridgman only that Howe was sent into the world. I confess to a feeling that he was one of the greatest of Americans and one of the best men who ever lived.

Seventy years ago his name was known to everybody in the civilized world. The part he took in the Greek Revolution (1825-29) had made him famous while still a very young man, and his success in teaching the blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, (1837-41) seemed at the time, and still seems, one of the great triumphs in the history of human intellect. The world rang with it. The miracle was done in the sight of all men, and humanity stood on the benches and shouted themselves blind with applause. This accomplishment, which was the great accomplishment of his life, will always remain Dr. Howe’s trade-mark and proverbial significance; but other parts of his life almost equal it in permanent value. The historical interest of the Greek Revolution, and of the latter half of the anti-slavery period, are supplemented by the scientific interest of all Dr. Howe’s philanthropic work and by the personal interest of an extraordinary and unique character.

Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston in 1801, and was thus just twenty years old when the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. In that year he was graduated at Brown University, Providence, and thereafter studied medicine for three years in Boston. Byron’s poems had prepared the youths of Europe and of America for the Greek struggle, and Howe was one of the young men who responded in person to Byron’s final call to arms. Howe did not reach Greece till a few months after Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824. Howe spent six years in campaigning with the Greek patriots. He had enlisted in the capacity of a surgeon; but the exigencies of the primitive and very severe guerilla warfare tended to obliterate official rank and to throw the work upon those who had executive ability. The war was a scramble of patriot banditti and peasant militia against Mahommetan ruffians. The name of Greece, the name of Byron, the beauty of the scenery in whose midst the war proceeded, the heart-rending nature of the struggle and its happy outcome, all combine to make this the most romantic war in history. It was one of the last wars before that effective development of steam and gunpowder which have forever merged the picturesque in the horrible.

The young Howe kept a journal, which shows a character entirely at one with his rapturously poetic surroundings. Before I had read this journal I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man of this type, the seventeenth century navigator, whose daily life is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of Robinson Crusoe.--“Passed a pirate boat, but he saw too many marks of preparation about us to attack us; in fact, if vessels only knew what cowards these pirates are they would never be robbed, for the least resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high sides, two light guns and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off every vessel which approaches. The pirates always come in long, light, open boats which pull from sixteen to thirty-six and forty oars. They sometimes have a gun, and always select calm weather to attack. But how to get up the sides of a vessel if twelve men with cutlasses were to oppose them.”...

“But it was a great fault on the part of commanders of vessels of war not to have made examples. A few bodies hanging at their yard-arms, and displayed round among the islands, would have had more effect than all they have done.”...

There we have the reality of which Stevenson’s tales are the reflection and the traditional imitation. Again--“If he challenges, I shall have my choice of weapons. I am pretty good master of the small sword, and think I could contrive to disarm him and make him beg on his knees, for I am sure he is one of the most arrant cowards.”... Again--“They passed along the beach at full gallop not far from us, and I gave them a rifle ball which missed them.”... In another place--“But one of them held his head out long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall. Said I ‘A moment more and I may fall in the same way.’”...

On another occasion--“I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel.”... It must be remembered that inasmuch as Howe was a surgeon he had no right to be fighting at all; but dear me! we are on the Spanish main in Elizabeth’s time; and, as Howe observed a few days later, “I had been directed to keep below, but the scene was too interesting for a young man to lose sight of.”...

There was a touch of the buccaneer about Howe. His slight tendency toward lawlessness kept cropping out all through his life. It appears in an assault which he made on a sentinel at Rome in 1844, and in all his anti-slavery work--of which later. A great descriptive power is revealed in this journal, which he kept during the months when he often slept with his head on a stone and subsisted on fried wasps. As an example of vivid sketching take the following:

“On the road I had met bodies of peasantry of the lower class called Vlachoi (Wallachians), driving before them all their little stock, perhaps a few dozen sheep, as many goats, a donkey and a half-dozen fowls, all guarded by a pair of fine-looking mountain dogs and followed by the father lugging his rough capote, with gun in hand and an old pistol and knife in his belt, and the mother with her baby lashed to her back in a bread-trough, a kettle on her head, and sundry articles of furniture in her hands. A troop of dirty ragged boys and girls, brought up the rear, each bearing a load of baggage proportionate to their strength, a little donkey carrying all the rest of the furniture and farming tools, in fine, all their goods and chattels. Land they have none; they feed their flocks on the high mountains in summer, and now on the approach of winter they descend to the warmer valleys, where they build a wigwam and pass the winter.”... Sieges and battles on land and sea, assassinations and conspiracies, pictures of natural scenery and domestic life, of happiness, pathos, humor, heroism,--the diaries abound in all such things; and the pictures often burn and glow and sparkle. I cannot tell whether this sparkle is a literary quality, or a ray from Howe’s character, or an illusion of my own. But certainly, something remarkable appears in the step and carriage of the young man. He does not stay in the book, he walks into the room where you are reading. The substance and setting of these Greek journals at times remind us of George Borrow’s books; but Howe’s writing is done without literary intention and therefore speaks from a more unusual depth. No time has been spent over these jottings, the recorder is hardly more responsible for them than the pen that writes them down. The scenes have whirled themselves upon the paper. Howe was always somewhat wanting in the reverence for letters which obtains in Boston. He regarded himself as inferior in literary attainment to several of his friends. He had, however, the descriptive power sometimes found in condottieri. It is the thrilling stuff they deal in that endows these men with such talent. I cannot forbear transcribing a passage from a very different style of adventurer, Trelawney. It does not concern Howe directly; but it may serve as a sample page from the Greek revolutionary period. The passage is quoted by Sanborn in his Life of Howe.

“On our way from Argos to Corinth, in 1823, we passed through the defiles of Dervenakia; our road was a mere mule-path for about two leagues, winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged precipices. In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large Ottoman force, principally cavalry, had been stopped in the previous autumn, by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves of cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect picture of the war, and told its own story; the sagacity of the nimble-footed Greeks and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish commanders were palpable. Detached from the heaps of dead we saw the skeletons of some bold riders, who had attempted to scale the acclivities, still astride the skeletons of their horses, and in the rear, as if in the attempt to back out of the fray, the bleached bones of the negroes’ hands still holding the hair ropes attached to the skulls of the camels--death, like sleep, is a strange posture-master. There were grouped in a narrow space 5,000 or more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mules; vultures had eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their bones.”... Is not this picture worthy of the prophet Ezekiel? It was among such scenes as this that the Greek Revolution went forward.

In 1827-8 Dr. Howe concluded that the best service he could render the Greeks was to go to America and procure help. He came to America, and went about holding public meetings and pleading for the starving Greeks. Great enthusiasm was excited, and money, food, and clothing was generously contributed. Howe took charge of a vessel laden with provisions and clothing, and hastening back to Greece, arrived in time to prevent thousands from starving. “These American contributions,” he says, “went directly to the people; and their effect was very great, not only by relieving from hunger and cold, but by inspiring courage and hope. I made several depots in different places; I freighted small vessels and ran up the bays with them. The people came trooping from their hiding places, men, women, children, hungry, cold, ragged and dirty. They received rations of flour, corn, biscuit, pork, etc., and were clad in the warm garments made up by American women. It was one of the happiest sights a man could witness; one of the happiest agencies he could discharge. They came, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles, on foot, to get rations and clothing. Several vessels followed mine and distributions were made.

“An immense number of families from Attica, from Psara, and from other Islands, had taken refuge in Ægina, and there was the most concentrated suffering. I established a main depot there, and commenced a systematic distribution of the provisions and clothing. As the Greeks were all idle, I concluded it was not best to give alms except to the feeble; but I commenced a public work on which men, women, and children could be occupied. The harbor of Ægina was not a natural one, but the work of the old Greeks. The long walls projecting into the sea for breakwaters were in pretty good condition, but the land side of the harbor was nearly ruined from being filled up with débris and washings from the town.

“I got some men who had a little ‘gumption’ and built a coffer-dam across the inner side of the harbor. Then we bailed out the water, and, digging down to get a foundation, laid a solid wall, which made a beautiful and substantial quay, which stands to this day, and is called the American Molos or Mole. In this work as many as five hundred people, men, women, and children, ordinarily worked; on some days as many as seven hundred, I think.”...

Encouraged by the success of his mole, Dr. Howe determined upon a more ambitious venture.--“I applied to the government, and obtained a large tract of land upon the Isthmus of Corinth, where I founded a colony of exiles. We put up cottages, procured seed, cattle, and tools, and the foundations of a flourishing village were laid. Capo d’Istria had encouraged me in the plan of the colony, and made some promises of help. The government granted ten thousand ‘stremmata’ of land to be free from taxes for five years; but they could not give much practical help. I was obliged to do everything, and had only the supplies sent out by the American committees to aid me. The colonists, however, coöperated, and everything went on finely. We got cattle and tools, ploughed and prepared the earth, got up a school-house and a church.

“Everything went on finely, and we extended our domain over to the neighboring port of Cenchraea, where we had cultivated ground and a harbor. This was perhaps the happiest part of my life. I was alone among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help them, and they let me have my own way. I had one civilized companion for awhile, David Urquhart, the eccentric Englishman, afterward M. P. and pamphleteer. I had to journey much to and from Corinth, Napoli, etc., always on horseback, or in boat, and often by night. It was a time and place where law was not; and sometimes we had to defend ourselves against armed and desperate stragglers from the bands of soldiers now breaking up. We had many ‘scrimmages,’ and I had several narrow escapes with life.

“In one affair Urquhart showed extraordinary pluck and courage, actually disarming and taking prisoner two robbers, and marching them before him into the village. I labored here day and night, in season and out, and was governor, clerk, constable, and everything but _patriarch_; for, though I was young, I took to no maiden, nor ever thought about womankind but once. The government (or rather, Capo d’Istria, the president) treated the matter liberally--for a Greek--and did what he could to help me.”...

In 1844, about seventeen years after the planting of this Corinthian colony Howe returned to the Isthmus in the course of his wedding journey. “As he rode through the principal street of the village,” says Mrs. Howe, “the elder people began to take note of him and to say to one another ‘This man looks like Howe.’ At length they cried, ‘It must be Howe himself’! His horse was surrounded and his progress stayed. A feast was immediately prepared for him in the principal house of the place, and a throng of friends, old and new, gathered round him, eager to express their joy in seeing him.”