Chapter IV: Part 4

Ambrose Bierce is generally supposed to have had this quality; certainly he had intelligence and wrote respectable English with a cold pen. His _Dictionary_ does not impress me as the work of a spirit naturally ironical. Ade wrote satirically a long time ago; once in a while something occurs in the _Fables_ to justify the acclaim of which F. P. A. is the curator. There is much more in Artemas Ward, whose glory is kept alive, worthily, by the sardonic leader-writer of _The Freeman_, Mr Albert Jay Nock. As language neither Ade nor Ward approaches in interest the studies of Mark Twain in _Life on the Mississippi_, nor those of Dooley and Lardner. The difference between Bill Nye and Ward on one side and Montague Glass and Lardner on the other, is that the former did not use an actually viable language or dialect, but used distortions of English for a specific effect. (I am far from suggesting that Ward did not use American notably, nor that his language is the better part of his work; he was a real satirist.) It is my guess that in the beginning the misspelled words signified that the speaker was the hard sensible common man with none of “your” refinements. Juvenal and Johnson may have been superior to the thing attacked; it pleased the democratic American to pretend to be beneath it. The literary success of the dialects is another matter, which anyone who believes that ours is still an Anglo-Saxon country will do well to consider. Montague Glass is particularly interesting in this respect. He impresses me as being neither a wise nor a foolish man, but a smart one. What gave him his vogue was his conformity with the norm of business acuteness and his use of a highly complex private racial idiom, which expresses a highly complex integrated almost secret racial life; he transferred, almost transliterated it into recognizable, at least understandable English, with such a climax as “I wish I were dead, God forbid!” which was recognized by the populace as a part of American life ten years before Mr Henry Ford bought the Protocols. The racial dialect is also exploited, but not with so reliable an ear, by Hugh Wiley in his negro stories; it is possible that the stories of Octavus Roy Cohen are more accurate (they are not so entertaining); but the life they represent is, in any case, too near to America to be surprising to us.

I am convinced that nearly all of Mr Dooley and nearly all of the later Lardner would stand without dialect. It is not an odd-looking word that impresses most in Mr Dooley’s masterpieces about the Dreyfus case. “The witness will confine himself to forgeries” is English as Swift would have written it, and is neither better nor worse than, “How th’ divvle can they perjure thimsilves if they ain’t sworn?” or

“’‘Let us proceed,’ says th’ impartial an’ fair-minded judge, ‘to th’ thrile iv th’ haynious monsther Cap Dhry-fuss’ he says. Up jumps Zola, an’ says he in Frinch: ‘Jackuse,’ he says, which is a hell of a mane thing to say to anny man. An’ they thrun him out. ‘Judge’ says th’ attorney f’r th’ difinse, ‘an’ gintlemen iv’ th’ jury’ he says. ‘Ye’re a liar,’ says th’ judge. ‘Cap, ye’re guilty, an’ ye know it,’ he says.... ‘Let us pro-ceed to hearin’ th’ tisti-mony,’ he says.... Be this time Zola has come back; an’ he jumps up, an’, says he, ‘Jackuse,’ he says. An’ they thrun him out.”

It is no wonder that this passage was reprinted by the New York _Evening Post_ after the expulsion of the Socialists from Albany. Nearly everything serious in Dooley has the same relevance, and one reads about war experts and “disqualifying the enemy” (in relation to the Spanish-American and Boer Wars) with a slightly dizzying sensation that this man has said everything that needed to be said twenty years in advance of his time. We needed him badly during the war, but a comic song about him had somehow withdrawn his name from the rank of great literature and we had to do with sad second-bests. There isn’t a chance in the world that he will be forgotten, because he is recognized in England and we shall some day reimport his reputation. For he has the great advantage of being at the same time a humorist and a social historian, an every-day philosopher and the _homme moyen sensuel_.

His qualities are so immediate that analyzing them appears superfluous. He gets his effects by distortion, not by exaggeration. When he told Mr Roosevelt to call the next edition of his book _Alone in Cubia_ he extracted an essence from it, rather than inflated it. His adversatives are surprising and devastating. He conceives a Blood-is-thicker-than-Water speech in these terms (from the English to the American): “Foolish and frivolous people, cheap but thrue-hearted and insincere cousins.... Ye ar-re savage but inthrestin’.” Sometimes he leaves out the “but”: “They was followed be th’ gin’rals iv th’ Fr-rinch ar-rmy, stalwart, fearless men, with coarse, disagreeable faces.” His unexpectedness goes farther; he once said that left alone General Shafter could have taken “Sandago” without losing an ounce.

I do not wish to write a literary essay about Mr Dooley, and having mentioned Swift I have little to say. I must admit that the Irish of Mr Dooley is stage-Irish; what makes it acceptable is that it is entirely Dooley-Irish, and whatever the spelling, whatever the oddities of words, the intonation is always right. For of course it is possible to write a dialect without imitation of sound, and to do it effectively and honestly. Sherwood Anderson has done it in _I Want to Know Why_ and in _I’m a Fool_; Lardner has done it in _The Golden Honeymoon_; and the amiable efforts of Mr John V. A. Weaver are ineffective because in nine out of ten cases he is setting slang words, well observed and accurately recorded, to the rhythm of literary English. Mr Dooley’s rhythm is always that of the estimable, easy-going barkeeper who is speaking.

One looks back with a certain envy to the time when a barkeeper could talk about the world. Our present social situation is disjected, and the period before the war seems incredibly calm and halcyon. It seems to us that then America was settling into the character it had made for itself in the Civil War, a time of consolidation and certainty. A minor passion for social justice seems to have been the only great force hostile to that sense of security and self-satisfaction without which no civilization can become sophisticated and refined. It was pre-eminently the time when a satirist could exist. Mr Dooley is the proof that he did. He understood his America, as in his time, and without bitterness he makes it live again.

Ten years from now, if we settle down, Mr Lardner may have another such opportunity. For the moment he is driven to the surface; he has no _point d’appui_ for his attack; in a bewildering and unsure civilization, he is himself unsure. It is possible that he will become so accustomed to shallow waters that he will never venture into deep; I should be sorry, because he has qualities too precious to be wasted. He is developing a strain of wild imagination, of something approaching fantasy. And his occasional pieces of fiction are far beyond the average of stories written in America. _The Golden Honeymoon_ (which Mr Edward J. O’Brien had the acumen to put in his collection of the best stories of 1922) is almost a masterpiece; it has a sort of artistic wisdom, is without tricks, and is beautifully written. He has also written a burlesque which failed drearily with the 49-ers and a sketch, _The Bull Pen_, in which the busher reappeared, which was a moderate success in the Ziegfeld Follies. This piece and _The Golden Honeymoon_ show a fresh tendency on Lardner’s part to understate; they are actually quiet, as if he were tired of noisiness. I do not think he is tired of anything. In an interview recently he said, “Some philosopher once said that if you want a thing badly when you’re young you’re likely to get too much of it before you’re old; _I hope to God he knew what he was talking about_.” He is afraid of nothing; one fancies he doesn’t care for too many things.

He grew weary, a little while ago, of the literary diaries published from week to week by the highbrows, these records “of who they seen and talked to and what they done since the last time we heard from them” and so he wrote his own for the New York Sunday _American_. Among the items chronicled were:

“When I got home Sousa was there and we played some Brahms and Grieg with me at the piano and him at one end of a cornet. ‘How well you play, Lardy,’ was Sousa’s remark. Brahms called up in the evening and him and his wife come over and played rummy....” (This is grotesque, but he knows his subject.) “Had breakfast with Mayor Hylan and Senator Lodge.... Went home and played some Rubinstein on the black keys.... President Harding called up long distants to say hello. The Mrs talked to him as I was playing with the cat.... Took a ride on the Long Island R.R. to study human nature....” And so on. It is a little better than verbal parody, is it not, Lardy?

Mr Lardner pretends still to feel some of the he-man’s contempt for letters, suggesting at the same time the fat-headed pride of a real-estate broker who has had a patriotic poem printed in the local paper. He is, as Sherwood Anderson says, “sticking to the gang.” But he is wise and witty and he has few compunctions about being vulgar. It is his most precious asset. For in America the fear of vulgarity is the beginning of deadness. Abase! (if I may quote Mr Dooley).

_A Tribute to
Florenz Ziegfeld_

A TRIBUTE TO FLORENZ ZIEGFELD

The incurable romanticist, George Jean Nathan, was the first to speak boldly in print and establish the rule of the silver-limbed, implacable Aphrodite in the theatre of Florenz Ziegfeld; and the equally incurable realist, Heywood Broun, has discovered that it isn’t so. Mr Nathan, obsessed by the idea that the world in general, and America in particular, goes to any extreme to conceal its interest in sex, really did a service to humanity by pointing out that there _were_ beautiful girls in revues and that these girls constituted one of the main reasons for the attendance of men at the performances. Mr Broun, sensing a lack of abandon and frenzy in the modern bacchanale, says, simply, that it isn’t so, and implies that anyone who could get a thrill out of that--! Like the king in that story of Hans Christian Andersen, of which Mr Broun is inordinately fond, the girls haven’t any clothes on; and this little child, noticing the fact, is dreadfully disappointed.

Now Mr Ziegfeld is, in the opinion of those who work for him, a genius, and can well afford to say, “A plague on both your houses,” for he has built up what he himself calls a national institution, glorifying, not degrading, the American girl (_pauvre petite_). He can afford to look with complacency upon undergraduates charging upon his theatre in the anticipation of unholy delights, and forced to bear the clownings of Eddie Cantor or the wise sayings of Will Rogers; then he can turn to Dr John Roach Straton who, having heard from Mr Broun that the Follies are chaste, approaches to see some monstrosity of a classic ballet and hears the vast decent sensuality of a jazz number instead.

Mr Ziegfeld has lived through so much--through the period when it was believed indecent to be undressed and through the manlier period when nudity was contrasted with nakedness (it is the basis of a sort of Y. M. C. A. æsthetics that the nude is always pure) and through the long period, 1911–15, when the reviewers discovered the superior attractiveness of the stockinged leg; art in the shape of Joseph Urban has left a permanent mark upon him, and he has trafficked in strange seas for numbers and devices; what was vulgar and what was delicate, boresome and thrilling, have all passed through his hands; he has sent genius whistling down the wind to the vaudeville stage and built up new successes with secondary material; the storehouses are littered with the gaudy monuments of his imitators. And all the time the secret of his success has been staring Broadway in the face.

It is well to speak of Mr Ziegfeld’s success because in the last few years several things have happened to the revue; for almost as long as I remember the Ziegfeld Follies, I remember the Winter Garden opposition, the Passing Show, its exact antithesis.[12] But lately there have arrived at least two productions which give every guaranty of permanence, in addition to some others which may turn out to be equally sure of survival. I mean the Music Box Revue and the Greenwich Village Follies. The Music Box is only in its third year; its chiefs assets are one of the most agreeable theatres in New York, assuring a reputation on the road, and first call on the still unsatisfied talents of Mr Irving Berlin. The Greenwich Village Follies, even if it lose its present director, John Murray Anderson, will continue to be successful for one of the strangest reasons in the world--its reputation for being “artistic.” The Winter Garden, the two Follies, and the Music Box, are the four points of the compass in this truly magnetic field. When the needle points due north, I usually find Mr Ziegfeld fairly snug under the Pole Star.

There are, if you count the chorus individually, about a hundred reasons for seeing a revue; there is only one reason for thinking about it, and that is that at one point, and only one point, the revue touches upon art. The revue as a production manifests the same impatience with half measures, with boggling, with the good enough and the nearly successful, which every great artist feels, or pretends to feel, in regard to his own work. It shows a mania for perfection; it aspires to be precise and definite, it corresponds to those _de luxe_ railway trains which are always exactly on time, to the millions of spare parts that always fit, to the ease of commerce when there is a fixed price; jazz or symphony may sound from the orchestra pit, but underneath is the real tone of the revue, the steady, incorruptible purr of the dynamo. And with the possible exception of architecture, _via_ the back door of construction, the revue is the most notable place in which this great American dislike of bungling, the real pleasure in a thing perfectly done, apply even vaguely to the arts.

If you can bring into focus, simultaneously, a good revue and a production of grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, the superiority of the lesser art is striking. Like the revue, grand opera is composed of elements drawn from many sources; like the revue, success depends on the fusion of these elements into a new unit, through the highest skill in production. And this sort of perfection the Metropolitan not only never achieves--it is actually absolved in advance from the necessity of attempting it. I am aware that it has the highest-paid singers, the best orchestra, some of the best conductors, dancers and stage hands, and the worst scenery in the world, in addition to an exceptionally astute impresario; but the production of these elements is so haphazard and clumsy that if any revue-producer hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway. Yet the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and complacently permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART.

The same thing is true in other fields--in producing serious plays, in writing great novels, we will stand for a second-rateness we would not for a moment abide in the construction of a bridge or the making of an omelette, or the production of a revue. And because in a revue the bunk doesn’t carry, the revue is one of the few places you can go with the assurance that the thing, however tawdry in itself, will be well done. If it is tawdry, it is so in keeping with the taste of its patrons, and without pretense; whereas in the major arts--no matter how magnificent the masquerade of Art may be--the taste of a production is usually several notches below the taste of the patrons.

The good revue pleases the eye, the ear, and the pulse; the very good revue does this _so well that it pleases the mind_. It operates in that equivocal zone where a thing does not have to be funny--it need only sound funny; nor be beautiful if it can for a fleeting moment appear beautiful. It does not have to send them away laughing or even whistling; all it needs to do is to keep the perceptions of the audience fully engaged all the time, and the evaporation of its pleasures will bring the audience back again and again.

The secret I have alluded to is how to create the atmosphere of seeming--and Mr Ziegfeld knows the secret in every detail. In brief, he makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of production. Undoubtedly ten or fifteen other people help in this--I use Mr Ziegfeld’s name because in the end he is responsible for the kind of show put out in his name and because the smoothness I refer to goes far beyond the mechanism of the stage or skill in directing a chorus. It is not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show. Everyone with a grain of sense knows that Mr Urban can make all the sets for a production and Mr Berlin write all the music; Mr Ziegfeld has the added grain to see that if he’s going to have a great variety of things and people, he had better divide his _décor_ and his music among many different talents.

There have been funnier revues and revues more pleasing to the eye and revues with far better popular music; nowhere have all the necessary ingredients appeared to such a high average of advantage. Mr Anderson could barely keep Bert Savoy within the bounds of a revue; the Music Box collapses entirely as a revue at a few dance steps by Bobby Clark. But Ziegfeld as early as 1910 was able to throw together Harry Watson (Young Kid Battling Dugan, nowadays, in vaudeville), Fannie Brice, Anna Held, Bert Williams, and Lillian Lorraine and, as if to prove that he was none the less producing a revue, bring down his curtain on a set-piece of “Our American Colleges.” And twelve years later, with Will Rogers and Gilda Grey and Victor Herbert and Ring Lardner, he is still producing a revue and brings both curtains down on his chorus--once _en masse_ and the second time undressing for the street in silhouette.

I cannot estimate the amount of satisfaction which since those early days Mr Ziegfeld has provided. My own memories do not go back to the actual productions in which Anna Held figured; I recall only the virtuous indignation of elderly people and my own mixed feelings of curiosity and disgust when I overheard reports of the goings-on. But from the time I begin to remember them until to-day there has always been a peculiar quality of pleasure in the Ziegfeld shows, and the uninterrupted supply of things pleasant to see and entertaining to hear, has been admirable. Mr Ziegfeld has never been actually courageous; his novelties are never more audacious than, say, radiolite costumes or an Urban backdrop. He is apparently pledged to the tedious set-pieces which are supposed to be artistic--the Ben Ali Haggin effects, the Fan in Many Lands or the ballot of A Night in Statuary Hall with the discobolus coming to life and the arms of the Venus de Milo miraculously restored. There are years, too, in which Mr Ziegfeld, discovering new talent, follows but one vein and leaves his shows so much in one tone that a slight depression sets in. Mr Edmund Wilson, in the _Dial_ repeats the plaint of Mr Heywood Broun in the _World_--that the Follies are frigid--the girls are all straight, the ballet becomes a drill, the very laughs are organized and mechanical. Well, it happens to be the function of the Ziegfeld Follies to be Apollonic, not Dionysian; the leap and the cry of the bacchanale give way to the song and dance, and when we want the true frenzy we have to go elsewhere. I doubt whether even the success of the negro shows will frighten Ziegfeld into mingling with his other elements some that will be riotous and wild; the best they can do will be to prevent Ziegfeld from growing too utterly “refined.” He tends at this moment to quiet fun of the Lardner type and the occasional horseplay with which he accentuates this murmur, this smile, is usually unsuccessful. I am, myself, more moved by broader strokes than his, but I recognize that Ziegfeld, and not the producers of _Shuffle Along_, is in the main current of our development--that we tend to a mechanically perfect society in which we will either master the machine or be enslaved by it. And the only way to master it--since we cannot escape--will be by understanding it in every detail. That is exactly Mr Ziegfeld’s present preoccupation. I dissent, however, from the suggestion that the physical loveliness of the Ziegfeld chorus has ceased to be seductive. Some, as Mr Lardner once said--some like ’em cold, and there are at least five other choruses which affect me as pleasurably. But for those that like the Ziegfeld-type chorus, which has always a deal of stateliness and a haughty air of being damned well bred, Mr Ziegfeld’s production of the wares is perfect. He has simply moved his chorus one step backward in order to make them appear slightly inaccessible and so a little more desirable. His attack is indirect, but it is no less certain.

In the back of the mind there always remains the idea that a revue ought to be a revue of something, and as far as I know, George M. Cohan is the last of those who have tried to accomplish that. Weber and Fields presented burlesque; Mr Cohan’s efforts are not lost in that dim perspective, and they seem superior, for he wove his amazingly expert parodies of current successes into a new creation, a veritable review. The high spirits and sophistication of the Cohan revues have not frequently been equalled on our stage, for the whole of Cohan’s talents were poured into them without reserve. The parodies and satire were merciless and spared not even himself; for he took the old jibe about his Yankee-Doodleism and wrote apropos of a show of his which had failed: “Go, get a Flag, For you need it, you need it, you know you need it!” He took off _Common Clay_ in swift and expert patter; he destroyed the “song hit” with _Down by the Erie_ ten years earlier and ten times better than the Forty-niners did; he advertised himself and ridiculed his own self-advertisement; he was the principal actor and he played fair with Willie Collier and Charles Winninger and Louise Dresser. Throughout he was the high point of Cohanism, of that shrewd, cock-sure, arrogant, wise, and witty man who was the true expression of the America of Remember the Maine!, the McKinley elections, the Yellow Kid, and _Coon! Coon! Coon!_ He was always smart, always versatile. To this day he is smart enough to produce _Mary_ and _Little Nelly Kelly_, knowing that the old stuff goes biggest and that even in the midst of his own sophistication he can capture vaster audiences with his own simplicity. This is an abdication of his proper function, to be sure. The man who had so much to do with the great-American-drama (I allude to _Seven Keys to Baldpate_ and the description “great-American” is deliberate) and who could take any trash (_A Prince There Was_) and make it go, through the indefatigable energy and the cleverness of his own acting, and who could fight the world with his preposterous _Tavern_--this man had no right to give up doing what he did so well. I care nothing for the famous nasalities of George M. Cohan; after the Four Cohans I saw him first as actor, so I do not mourn for his dancing days. But I know that with only a fraction of Berlin’s gifts as a composer, he had something which even Berlin lacks: the complete sense of the boards. His revues would have been desirable additions to each theatrical season if they had done no more than produce himself. His hard sense, his unimaginative but not unsympathetic response to everything that took place on the street and at the bar and on the stage made him a prince of reviewers--he was not without malice and he was wholly without philosophy. Perhaps that is why his revues were wonderfully gay. Why they ever stopped I cannot tell; when they stopped, strangely enough, they left the field to the Winter Garden. I make no claim that the revues at this house are always pleasing; people apparently still exist who are enthusiasts for Valeska Surratt. But I do claim that they are always revues, even if they are sometimes to be weighed by avoirdupois and not by critical standard.

(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)

GEORGE M. COHAN. By Alfred Frueh
]

The annihilation of all the vast and silly posturing which went on a few years ago under the name of _The Jest_ was accomplished in a perfect burlesque by Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger (the latter played Leo Ditrichstein in one of the Cohan revues) and if _The Sheik_ never reached the stage it is possibly because Eddie Cantor burlesqued it in advance on a bicycle and with a time clock for the women of the harem. What has held the Winter Garden down (except, of course, when Al Jolson there inhabited) is the lack of good music; for the humour has always been broad and the slap-stick merry. The shows there always seem to be hankering a little for the additional vulgarity of out-and-out burlesque, but the Rath Brothers were as much at home there as the Avon Comedy Four; if my head were at stake I could not recall a single thing there which could be called exquisite, but I swear that as the show girls shuffled precariously up and down the runway I did at times fancy I heard the stamping of a goatish foot behind the scenes, and if I didn’t like the sound, I was in the minority. The Winter Garden has always been, in part, a direct assault on the senses and the method of art is always indirect; Mr Ziegfeld knows this and always manages to bathe his scenes in a cool virginal light, to the intensification of pleasure for the connoisseurs.

The difference between these two shows can be measured by watching one figure pass across the stage of each. Last year at the Winter Garden Conchita Piquer sang a _malagueña_. (You can discover all you need to know about the _malagueña_ in Mr Santayana’s Soliloquies; to us it is the perfect exotic, as strange to our ears as Chinese song--stranger because it remains recognizably Occidental, yet seems to be based on no intervals known to our scales, and its rhythm is capricious and uncertain). She sang it “wildly well,” with a pert assured air of superiority. Yet she cast flowers into the audience as she did so, and the background and the massing of the chorus behind her were all out of key and prevented the song from being what at the Ziegfeld Follies it inevitably must have been, exquisite.

At the Follies passes Gilda Grey, a performer of limited talents gifted with unutterable intensity. Against a flaring background in which all the signs of all of Broadway are crowded together, she sings a commentary on the negro invasion--_It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_--the scene fades and radiolite picks out the white dresses of the chorus, the hands and faces recede into undistinguishable black. And while the chorus sings Miss Grey’s voice rises in a deep and shuddering ecstasy to cry out the two words, “Getting darker!” To disengage that cry, to insure its repercussion, went all the skill of production in everything that preceded and in everything that followed. It was exciting, but it was also exquisite, and that is exactly what the Winter Garden could not have done.

Neither of the two Music Box revues has reached that height, because in neither has production kept pace with Berlin’s music. It is part of the technique of the revue to have “stunts” and Berlin, being _capable du tout_, last year set a dining menu to music. Yet nothing was added when lobster and mayonnaise and celery appeared in the flesh; even worse, this year something precious is lost when one of Berlin’s veritable masterpieces, _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil_, is produced with an endless number of trapdoors and hoists and all the other mechanics of the stage. The first of the two revues flourished on humour--Willie Collier and Sam Bernard were inexpressibly funny--and on Berlin’s _Say It With Music_; so long as it stayed in New York the appearance in person of Mr Berlin, explaining to the well-remembered tunes how he wrote each of his masterpieces of ragtime, added much.

The tone of this revue was the tone of the building itself--varying from the cool and well-proportioned exterior to the comfortable, a little lavish interior. Florence Moore was as outrageous as ever, and at least as active; she is the most tireless person on the stage and to me the most tiring, for her vitality affects me as a cyclone in which I am quite unnecessarily involved. All the more surprising, then, was her shift from horseplay to burlesque in the house-hunting scene with Sam Bernard, at the end of which the children were shot by their despairing parents to remove the one obstacle between them and the perfect apartment. In an earlier scene Collier had had his chance--the one in which Bernard tried to explain his difficulties and to read a letter. All of Bernard’s stutterings and flounderings in the English vocabulary availed nothing against Collier’s imperturbable indifference. Collier has always had a divine spark--it was visible even in _The Hottentot_--and in that scene it glowed beautifully. The show was, to be sure, held in the matrix of Berlin’s score, and was as much held _down_ as up to that level--I mean it was not spoiled by the intrusion of alien theatrical elements. Since then a new hydraulic system has apparently been added to the equipment of the stage, and Hassard Short, confusing the dynamics of the theatre with mere hoisting power, moves everything that can be moved except the audience. The elements are all there, but they are produced as if it were a benefit, not a revue.

(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)

WILLIE COLLIER. By Alfred Frueh]

John Murray Anderson’s is the hardest case to be sure about. A year ago he “struck a new note in revues”--by producing one without a scintilla of interest in any of its proceedings. Nothing quite so lackadaisical and dull has ever had such a success. Yet he had long before established a repute for being artistic--and, as far as I can judge, it was by the exploitation of millions of yards of draperies in place of the usual canvas scenery. It was a sound notion, and in the first of these productions, _What’s in a Name?_ there was a pretty air of the semi-professional, a challenging suggestion of improvisation, as if the chorus and principals weren’t sure from moment to moment what the _régisseur_ might suggest for them to do next.

He has always presented some of the loveliest and some of the ugliest costumes in New York; and now that draperies are no longer his only resource, he falls back upon transformations in scenery, or makes a painted backdrop of the Moonlight Sonata come to life, with music, to the astonishment of the multitude.

In short, it would appear that Mr Anderson is introducing into the revue precisely that element of artistic bunk which has long been the property of the bogus arts. I resent it, and resent it the more because he doesn’t need it. In his recent show there were elements beyond words to praise; the singing of Yvonne George was superb and superbly arranged; the Widow Brown song, sung and _danced_ by Bert Savoy, had a quality of tenderness which all the sentimental songs in the Ziegfeld Follies try vainly to transmit; the two little tumblers, Fortunello and Cirillino, are by name and manner of the _commedia dell’arte_ and John Hazzard’s song about Alaska, with slides by Walter Hoban, is the stuff that Forty-niners are made of.

It was in this show that the Herriman-Carpenter ballet of Krazy Kat was tried and dismissed, and the fault here is the fault of Mr Anderson throughout. Again it was attempted with an artistic dancer, when everyone who has intelligence of Krazy knows that it should be done by an American stunt dancer until the time when Mr Chaplin finds time to do it. Krazy Kat is exquisite and funny--and whether Mr Carpenter lets him remain so or not, it is clear that Mr Anderson wanted him to be artistic at all cost. So with his whole production; he has sacrificed fun all the way down the line; one is pleased, much more than amused, and the gigantic revelry, the broad levity of Bert Savoy stand apart from the show like a stranger. It is the one revue in which the mass dancing entirely fails to remain in the memory, and I am convinced that if Miss Brice hadn’t, in the Ziegfeld Follies, made _Mon Homme_ a popular hit, Miss George’s far more fiery and varied and more generally interesting rendition of it would leave it cold in the ears of the audiences. For Mr Anderson has so far learned only to put over separate things, and until you put the whole thing over the individual things gain but half their victories.

That completes the circle to Mr Ziegfeld, and, since it is a question of putting it over, associates with him another man who on at least one occasion has done as well, Mr Charles Dillingham. If you omit the one man shows as practised by Ed Wynn, Frank Tinney and Al Jolson, and the nondescripts of Hitchcock, and pass over _Stop! Look! Listen!_ as varying too far from the revue type, there remains _Watch Your Step_ as another high spot in production, with the dancing of the Castles, the humours of that very great comedian, Harry Kelly, and of Tinney, the scenery and costumes by Robert McQuinn and Helen Dryden, and the whole story of contemporary dancing in Mr Berlin’s music. Except for Harry Kelly, every item was bettered in _Stop! Look! Listen!_, but in spite of the presence of Gaby Deslys, it was not a revue--whereas _Watch Your Step_ almost consciously set out to proclaim itself superior in fineness and slickness to the Follies and almost succeeded.

I am trying to sketch the main _types_ of revue, not to write a history of the revue; it is to be hoped that some one sufficiently sentimental can be found to do the job. Whether in a history the drunken scene of Leon Errol in the subway would figure largely, I do not know; I am not even sure that the scene in the Grand Central while it was building, with Bert Williams as the porter, would be noted; quite possibly the memory of Lillian Lorraine on the swings--to me merely a bearable necessity--and Frank Carter singing, (1918) _I’m Going to Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind_, will seem more important than Ina Claire’s mimicry of Frances Starr’s _Marie-Odile_. It is possible that the injection of real humour, like Lardner’s, may make the set scenes like Laceland or the History of Shoes through the Ages or Our Colleges more and more dispensable. I do not know. I feel fairly certain only of this: that the relative importance of the workers in the field is measured by their mastery of the art of production far more than by their skill in picking individuals and stunts. I am also convinced that those who have arrived at this perfection in an effort to give America pleasure have done more for us than those who haven’t got half way in trying to give us art.

_The Darktown Strutters
on Broadway_

THE DARKTOWN STRUTTERS ON BROADWAY

Anyone so minded can write an entirely false history of American civilization by setting down in parallel columns the vogues and rages which have overtaken us and Europe at the same time. The highly patriotic, but a bit undergraduate, habit of slanging your own country is always more effective if the facts about any other country are a little obscure, and, thanks to the cable and the efficacy of transatlantic mails, we now know virtually everything that isn’t so, and virtually nothing that is important, about Europe. So it is quite possible for a critic to say that in literature the taste of Europe is far beyond ours, on the ground that Harold Bell Wright is the typical American author and Conrad and Anatole France and Tolstoi the typical European. I mean that this is possible if a critic has never heard of the work of Nat Gould and William Le Queux in England, for instance.

The latest of these false parallels would be this: that while Europe was going in for the primitive sculpture of the African negro, America devoted itself and its theatres to musical shows composed and produced by the nonprimitive negroes of Harlem, New York.[13] The wail of the saxophone in _Shuffle Along_ had not yet died in my ears when a Serious Critic made moan in his journal that the authors of that piece were truckling to the white man’s sense of superiority by exhibiting their own flesh and blood as a pack of cheats and scoundrels. What had impressed me as a fairly awkward mechanism for introducing songs and dances was by him taken as a libel on a race; and forgetting the picaresque romance from the _Odyssey_ to _Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford_, forgetting that all peoples seem to take an abundant pleasure in exposing themselves as delightful rogues, he wept over this degradation. At about that time Mr Clive Bell, marking a reaction from the extreme vogue of African plastic, still ranked the sculptures produced by savage and semicivilized negroes as only a little below those of the two or three great periods of artistic production. Again it would seem that Europe had, in its effete way, stolen a march on us.

In effect the coloured shows were entertaining and interesting to think about, whether they were good or bad, and most of them were pretty bad. As shows, that is. As shows in a country which really knows how to produce soul-satisfying eye-and-ear entertainment. They had certain attractive qualities, and if they were in essence second rate, they were at least dynamic, while the first-rate thing in Europe was static. While Europe remained calm after the war we, hysterically, went in for an enormous increase of pace in the active arts of the theatre. I do not know whether we are altogether the losers, and leave the question to others. I do know that for a moment these pieces seem to have overshadowed our (can I say?) native revues.

Of course, in America no one cares for revues except the unenlightened millions who pay to see them, so there is no one to rise and make lamentation over this state of affairs. For years we have laboured to perfect our revues--and the shuffling feet of a barbarian summon up an evil djinn to banish them. The serene smoothness of manœuvre which Mr Wayburn prepares for Mr Ziegfeld shrinks from the boards before the haphazard leaping of unstudied numbers; the sweet gravity of the dancers is forgotten for the barbarous rhythm of any half dozen darkies with a sense of syncopation innate in them. Lavishness from Joseph Urban precariously maintains itself against the smudged backdrop and the overall; and over the prostrate and flowerlike and seductive beauty of the chorus-girl, there steps and struts, magnificently struts, the high-yaller!

The comparatively sober truth is that the negro cabaret in the theatre is only a diversion, a necessary and healthful variation from our norm. It has qualities seldom exquisite and always arresting; and these qualities, having slowly vanished from the revue, have found themselves again in burlesque and in these exotics. And I think it highly probable that their only lasting effect will be to restore certain highly desirable things to revue and musical comedy. If there is any doubt of their goodness, another contrast will prove the point.

The one claim never made for the negro shows is that they are artistic. Set beside them, then, a professedly artistic revue, the _Pinwheel_, compounded of native and exotic effects. It had two or three interesting or exciting numbers; but the whole effect was one of dreariness. The pall of art was upon it; it died nightly. And _Shuffle Along_, without art, but with tremendous vitality, not only lived through the night, but dragged provincial New Yorkers to a midnight show as well. Facing the other way, one beholds a straight fake, the untimely efforts of Messrs McIntyre and Heath, who served only to remind us that in time since overpast the real nigger show, as practised by Williams and Walker, existed, and that what we are seeing now is actually a continuation thereof, brought down from Harlem to Broadway.

Now it was fairly obvious that _Shuffle Along_ had been conceived as an entertainment for negroes; that is why it remained solid when it took Broadway, to the intense surprise of its producers. It was, in short, an exotic for us, but it wasn’t an exotic for themselves. Its honesty was its success, and its honesty put a certain stamp upon its successors. In all of them there is visible a regrettable tendency to imitate, at moments, the worst features of our usual musical comedy. But the major portion of each show is native, and so good.

They have all of them an appearance of unpremeditated violence which distinguishes them from the calculated and beautiful effects of Mr Ziegfeld or Mr John Murray Anderson. It goes much beyond the celebrated (and by this time faked) appearance of “enjoying themselves.” They may never forgive me for it, but I really do not care whether the actors and actresses who amuse me are having a good time themselves. The theatre, for them, is a place for _producing_, not for _enjoying_ sensations and effects; so the one thing I wish them is that when they are good they may have the purely moral pleasure of being good. It is the method that counts, and in the negro shows the method has been always the maximum pressure in song and dance, and the minimum of subtlety in the conversations and patter songs. The exceptions are not notable.

The songs and dances must be scored _fff_, a _stretto_, and after that those diverging lines which indicate _crescendo_; the lines of violence never again approach each other in these numbers, and one has to wait for the appearance of a fairly silly sentimental song for a moment of quiet. The strange people who direct these shows and the responsive animals who sing and dance have with some success controverted the notion that it is in contrasts that the intelligent man has his greatest pleasure. One feels that the show is a continuous wild cry and an uninterrupted joyous rage, that the _élan vital_ is inexhaustible and unbridled and enormously good.

The most skilful individual player has been Florence Mills; merely to watch her walk out upon the stage, with her long, free stride and her superb, shameless swing, is an æsthetic pleasure; she is a school and exemplar of carriage and deportment; two other actors I have seen so take a stage; Cohan by stage instinct, Marie Tempest by a cultivated genius. Florence Mills is almost the definition of the romantic “_une force qui va_,” but she remains an original, with little or nothing to give beyond her presence, her instinctive grace, and her baffling, seductive voice. Without that endowment, a small one in comparison with, say, Gilda Grey’s, almost all the others give nothing but energy, and the trouble there is that if you have nothing but energy to give, you must give more than you can afford. The wild cry is a little too piercing at times, the postures and the pattings and the leapings all a little beyond the necessary measure. It remains simple; but simplicity, even if it isn’t usually vulgar, can be a bit rough.

In the past few years the line of development of most of our revues and musical shows has been clearly marked; the bad old days were slowly forgotten and whatever was suggestive had to become subtle; and gradually, as the surface polish grew brighter, the suggestive humours underneath were forgotten; our revues became denatured in more senses than one. There is one _risqué_ moment in the whole of a recent _Follies_, and that is one more than usual. The twittering about love and a kiss goes on; but the Great Reality of Sex is (quite properly, I am sure) forgotten. And in an encore stanza of _He May Be Your Man, But He Comes to See Me--Sometimes_, as sung at the Plantation, the whole conventionalized fabric of our popular love songs was flung aside and the gay reality exposed. This amorous frankness is part of a simple realism--a sophisticated realism couldn’t occur in a musical show, unless in the manner of Offenbach’s _La Belle Hélène_. It is a fitting counterpart to the exaggerated postures, the slightly lubricious gestures and movements, of the dance. Another simplicity, and a very good one, is in such a song as that about a dog from Tennessee in _Oh, Joy_--a song which with that one quality, and against indifferent music and unexceptional words, broke up the show.

Behind the frankness and the violence and the simplicity there is found the most important factor of all--the music. And behind that stands a figure exceedingly attractive and, in its tragedy, almost moving, that of the late Jim Europe. Of the music itself--of jazz and the use of spirituals and the whole question of our national music--this is clearly not the place to write. One wishes to mention a name or two: Shelton Brooks, least _habile_ of pseudo-Balieffs, wrote long ago _The Darktown Strutters’ Ball_, which ought not to be forgotten; Creamer and Layton composed all of _Strut, Miss Lizzie_, and therein appeared _Sweet Angeline_, as complex a piece of syncopation as Mr Berlin ever composed. What portion of _Shuffle Along_ was composed by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake I do not know, but Sissle in action and Blake at the piano were wholly satisfying and expert. And all of these composers, and all of the jazz bands who play for them, have the ineffable advantage of being assured, in advance, of dancers who in fancy or straight dancing have the essential feelings for rhythm and broken rhythm in their bones.

And that interior response to syncopation Jim Europe had to the highest possible degree. He had been, before the war, the band leader at the Castles’; I am told by one who knows of such matters that his actual vogue was passing when the war came. He returned with the 369th U. S. Infantry “Hell-Fighters” Band and for a few Sunday nights in March, 1919, he packed the old Manhattan Opera House to the doors.

Say that what he played had nothing to do with music; say that to mention the name of a conductor in the same breath with his name is an atrocity of taste--I cannot help believing that Jim Europe had the essential quality of music in him, and that, in his field, however far from any other it may have been, he was as great as Karl Muck in his. He did have contrast; it was out of the contracting stresses of a regular beat and a divergent that he created his effects. The hand kept perfect time, and his right knee, with a sharp and subtle little motion, stressed the acceleration or retard of the syncope. His dynamics were beautiful because he knew the value of noise and knew how to produce it and how to make it effective; he knew how to keep perfectly a running commentary of wit over the masses of his sound; and the ease and smoothness of his own performance as conductor had all the qualities of greatness. He rebuked a drummer in his band for some infraction of discipline and was killed.

Whatever the negro show has to give to the perfected Broadway production has its sources fairly deep in the negro consciousness, and I put Jim Europe forth as its symbol because in him nearly all that is most precious came to the surface. He seemed sensitive to the ecstasy and pathos of the spirituals as he was to the ecstasy and joy of jazz. He was, as conductor, vigorous and unaffected and clean. In _Shuffle Along_, Messrs Sissle and Blake paid honour to his memory, but the unacknowledged debt of the others is greater. I am inclined to think that, if sterility does not set in for the more notable Broadway product, it will be because something of what Jim Europe had to give has been quintessentialized by his successors and adopted.

_Plan For a Lyric
Theatre in America_

PLAN FOR A LYRIC THEATRE IN AMERICA

I am going to establish a lyric theatre in America. Not an art theatre and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theatre. A lyric theatre where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern and Gilbert-and-Sullivan and Lehar--and NEVER by any chance Puccini or the Ring or Ibsen. I shall avoid the good things and the bad alike in the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American ballets. The chief thing is that it will be a theatre devoted to _all_ the forms of light musical entertainment and to nothing else. My theatre will put an end to those disheartening revivals (or resurrections) of popular musical shows because the shows will be kept alive, just as “grand” operas are kept alive by appearing in a repertory. Into the repertory I shall incorporate--as soon as their independent existence is at an end--such successes as _The Night Boat_ and such failures as _The Land of Joy_. There will never be a chance for _fashion_ to destroy things essentially good. I shall produce new pieces, too; and if they are good they will run along with frequent presentations until they are absorbed in the general scheme. And I think I shall have pastiches frequently--of revues and topical productions which aren’t, as entireties, capable of continuing.

That is the abridgement of a scheme, and I say I shall do it in the hope that someone else, even if it be the Messrs Shubert, will do it instead. Because I like musical comedy and it annoys me that I can hear _Un bel di_ (which I want never to hear again) fifteen times a season, and cannot hear _The Sun Shines Brighter_ or _The Ragtime Melodrama_ ever again. And I know that our present type of musical comedy is so good, so vigorous and snappy, that it tends to kill off its predecessors; a repertory is the only thing; and the usual objections to repertory will fail here, because in this case the devotees of musical shows will know in advance that “it is going to be a good show.” I don’t know whether the bill should change every day or every week; I feel certain that there ought to be half a dozen centres across the continent, and two or three touring companies. Further details I cannot give now. I shall try to find some means, however, of distinguishing between the second-act finale of _The Mottled Mask_ (“On to the ball at the palace of Prince Gregory”) from the second-act finale of _The Madcap in Motley_ (“On to the ball at the palace of Prince Gregory”). It is not part of my scheme to keep bad shows alive.