Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that “Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it came from the pen of the author of _Incense and Splendor_ and _To the Innermost_. I confess this statement, especially when considering its authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “_Oh, You Beautiful Doll_”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and tenderness into “_O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!_” that one forgot the triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar illustration—Gertrude Stein’s _Tender Buttons_.[1] It is an exquisite little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms, and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of discovering the “_innerer Klang_.” Both iconoclasts have admirably succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says the Painter:[2]

The apt use of a word, repetition of this word, twice, three
times or even more frequently, will not only tend to intensify
the inner harmony but also to bring to light unsuspected
spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that,
frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original
external meaning.

Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition, and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The _Tender Buttons_ arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of one peculiar motive:

(From _A Substance in a Cushion_.)

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is
no pleasure in not getting tired of it.

(From _Red Roses_.)

A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sole hole,
a little less hot.

Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider
stop the muncher, muncher munchers.

(From _Breakfast_.)

What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is
when tears many tears are necessary.

Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain.... Why is
there so much useless suffering. Why is there.

Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood, most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—_Adieu_!

IBN GABIROL.

[1] _Tender Buttons_, by Gertrude Stein [Claire Marie, New York].

[2] _The Art of Spiritual Harmony_, by W. Kandinsky [Houghton
Mifflin, Boston].

London Letter

E. BUXTON SHANKS

_London, Sept. 11, 1914._

We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared. The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors, but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.

Meanwhile the literary result of the war is nothing but disastrous. All our more or less “official” poets—Mr. Bridges, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, and so on—have come forward with amazing arrays of abstract nouns. Mr. Bridges, who is almost the worst as well as almost the best of living poets, printed a copy of verses in _The Times_ which rhymed far less often than is proper in a ceremonial piece and ended thus:

Up, careless, awake!
Ye peacemakers, fight!
ENGLAND STANDS FOR HONOUR:
GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT.

Mr. William Watson has been prodigal of poetry and has reached his highest level in a poem which contains the following singular lines:—

We bit them in the Bight,
The Bight of Heligoland.

It is a very sad business. These gentlemen have retired to their studies, determined to feel what is proper, and they come out having done their best; but they will be heartily ashamed of it—I hope—in a few months. Unfortunately, Mr. John Lane has collected their verses in a volume and is selling their shame for charity. Three good poems have come out of the welter, one by Mr. G. K. Chesterton—_The Wife of Flanders_, a very fine composition—and two by Mr. De La Mare.

The trouble is that a poet does not feel war fever very acutely in a general sense. Patriotic poetry is nearly always bad. If there is a worthy reference to the Armada in Elizabethan poetry, it has escaped me; and the English resistance to Napoleon has never been a very happy subject for English writers. The good poetry that is provoked by war is of a different character: it is personal, visual, and concrete. It never expresses any general aspect of war, but only such subjects as have been personally observed and felt by the poet. I would give as instances Rudyard Kipling and the German poet Liliencron, both of whom have written well about soldiers and fighting, but foolishly about War and Patriotism.

Yet any poet going about the streets today must see and feel a quantity of poetical things. A week or so ago, I saw an endless baggage-train belonging to the artillery, as it passed through Barnet. It had come from Worcester, commandeering horses and wagons on the way; it was going to Brentwood and thence—God knows! It was very long and uneven—the carts had bakers’ and butchers’ names on them—the horses were ridden with halters and sacks for saddles—the men were tired and dishevelled. I spoke to one of them who was watering his horse at a trough, offered to bring him beer from a public-house close by; but someone had given him tea farther back on the road and he would rot. He thanked me and rode away, drooping very much over his horse’s neck. It was all a poem in itself or it gave me the emotions of a poem, because it had none of the conventional glitter of war. It was poetical because it was business-like, just as our khaki service uniforms are more beautiful than the bright clothes the troops wear in peace.

If the war-poets would confine themselves to real and tangible things like this, they might well express the experience through which we are now passing. But they seem unhappily obsessed with the idea of expressing an obstreperous valour and self-confidence and bluster which the nation is very far from feeling. The nation, so far as I can gauge it, is showing an obstinate, workmanlike silence and does not either make light of, or grumble at, the hardships it has to suffer: the baggage-train of which I have spoken was a very adequate symbol of this. But no one is ever so greatly out of touch with the people as a popular poet.

At the beginning of the war, the musical in London were shocked by an announcement that no German or Austrian music would be played at the famous Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts. We were naturally a little upset, as we depend on these performances for solid and regular entertainment: and it seemed hard and unnecessary to renounce Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and even Schönberg. Luckily good sense and humour killed the absurd idea, but not before a French and Russian programme had been substituted for the first Wagner night. Now, much as I shrink from the thought of having to hear Tschaikowsky instead of Wagner, I do believe that we have a cause for national resentment against the second of these composers. His ridiculous and windy prose-works have been among the writings which have provoked the war. With Nietzsche, and with the renegade Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he has encouraged the notion that there is a special Teutonic culture which is superior to any other and which deserves to be spread at any cost. Such an idea has never appealed to the true Germans (e. g., Goethe, who knew what he owed to France and England), but it has been useful to the Prussian soldiers, who have debased and vulgarized true German culture. Perhaps I am exceeding the duties of a London letter-writer and becoming an advocate; but I think I am giving you an accurate account of the feelings of those here who admire German poetry and music. I am not a Chauvinist in art—few people are. I read Goethe impenitently in the public trains and trams, to the disgust of my neighbours, and I continue to sing German songs, a little out of tune: unless my Territorial uniform is served out to me very soon, I shall probably be arrested as a spy.

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

Some years ago a good woman, who would like to be foster-mother to all struggling heroes, was sitting at midnight in her down-town flat. Suddenly there was a noise at the front door, someone leapt up the staircases two steps at a time, and rushed into her room shouting “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” She turned around and saw the dark face of a young actor, shining with excitement. He immediately burst into a superb interpretation of a passage from _Hamlet_. He had been working over it for two weeks without being able to satisfy himself, but it had come to him that evening. He could not wait to let his good friend know, had jumped on an elevated train, and after being carried two stations too far in his elation, was there with his prize.

No, this is not the beginning of a magazine story, nor is it a passage from the biography of a deceased European celebrity. It is the simple truth about a young American dramatist who is known only to a few;—and he is of New England stock!

Later the young Hamlet, having completed his acting apprenticeship, began to write, and went into the real estate business to support himself. Nobody wanted his plays; they were too “highbrow.” So he began to build a theatre of his own. The managers’ trust put every difficulty in his way, and finally, when the building was nearly done and the company was engaged, succeeded in crushing him. The next attempt was a repertory company on the East side, but this wiped out what little was left of his resources before it got fairly started. One play was produced on Broadway;—it ran two weeks. Last year another was rehearsed for nine weeks, but it was withdrawn on the day of the dress rehearsal, because the author refused to make a change insisted on by the manager. Now the writer has retired to his farm in the Connecticut hills, where he and a companion have with their own hands built a little theatre. In this, on Sunday afternoons during the summer, he reads from his fifteen manuscript plays to such few people as can get there to hear him. And as he reads, there is on his face much the same enthusiasm as on the night years ago when he got his passage from _Hamlet_.

I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr. Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses, unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery.

The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is, of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much gilded fresco.

This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly perfect theatre I have known.

And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of _The Lure_ or _The Fight_. There was another, of subtler treatment, called _Deferred Payment_, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked for everything in a woman except companionship. _Keeping Up Appearances_—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the false ideals of the community. _Justice_, written before Galsworthy’s play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr. Davenport’s best work is in _The Importance of Coming and Going_, a satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight into the mysteries of birth.

Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr. Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?” has not elicited a reply.

This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began; he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.

And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?

If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—_Goethe._

Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be
outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be
acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond
is to the ocean.—_George Brandes._

The Theatre

Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet

(_Blackstone Theatre_)

One of the noblest things I have ever seen on the stage—or ever expect to see—is the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. The poet, the scholar, the philosopher, the great gentleman, the lover, the brilliant talker, the anguished boy—they are all there in the tall man in black with the graven face and the wonderful hands and the voice of surpassing richnesses—the tall, graceful, impetuous, humorous, agonized man in black who reads Shakespeare as if he were improvising and makes a true and charming human being out of a character that has had the misfortune to become a problem. “And please observe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “that this is not a cold Hamlet. He is none of your logicians who reason their way through the world because they cannot feel their way through it; his intellect is the organ of his passion; his eternal self-criticism is as alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.” His moment of expiation, alone at the back of the stage, with his arms raised to the vaulted heavens; and his gallant last moment on the throne with its single silver sentence, “The rest is silence”—these things are too moving to be articulate about. Richard Le Gallienne has expressed it all as well as it can be done: “All my life I seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in _Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant—death, life, immortality, what you will—of a surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.”