Chapter VI: Part 6

I repeat the material doesn’t matter. For Leon Errol has nothing but the type drunkard to work with, and is wonderful. In his case it is easy to analyse the basis of the effect--it is in the loping dance step into which he converts the lurch of the drunkard. The tawdry moment--funny enough if you can bear it--is always Errol’s breathing into someone else’s face; the great moment comes directly after, when the lurch and the fall are worked up into a complete arc of dance steps, ending in three little hops as a sort of proof of sobriety. Jimmy Barton has the same quality in his skating scene--he uses less material and the movement round the rink is beautiful to watch. But of him it is useless to speak. Someone has pointed out that he can slap the bare back of a woman and make that funny!

It is interesting to see how many of the people who give this special quality arrive out of burlesque. Harry Kelly is another. I recall him first with Lizzie the Fish Hound in _Watch Your Step_ and last in a quite useless musical comedy, _The Springtime of Youth_ (textually that was the title--and in 1922!) For two acts he was wholly wasted. In the third he was magnificent. He was playing the obdurate father: “No son of mine shall ever marry a daughter of the Baxters” was his line. He was informed that she was, in fact, an adopted daughter and that her uncle had left her the bulk of his fortune. For precisely a minute and a half Kelly played with the word “bulk”--one saw it registered in his brain, saw an idea germinating, felt it working forward to the jaw before the cavernous voice gave it utterance--and again one felt the inner struggle _not_ to say it a third time, one felt the conflict of pride and avarice. It was remarkably delicate and fine--so is all of Kelly’s work when he has a chance. His spare figure, long hands, and unbelievable voice always create a character--and it isn’t always the same character.

Bobby Clarke’s scene with the lion comes at once to mind (it is another burlesque act), and Bert Williams--in many scenes--always soft spoken, always understanding his case. There were five minutes of Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger, once, at the Winter Garden; to my surprise, there were more than that for Eugene and Willie Howard at the same house, but they were gained in spite of the Winter Garden technique which underestimates even the lowest intelligence. Willie is rather like Fanny Brice at moments; when he cuts loose one has an agreeable sense of uncertainty. Joe Jackson,[16] actually a great clown, although one doesn’t recognize this in the highly developed medium he chooses, has exactly the opposite effect--he doesn’t cut loose at all; he develops. Everything he does is careful and nothing exaggerated, so you think at first that, although he will be funny, he will not quite reach that top notch on which an artist teeters perilously while you wonder whether he will fall over or keep his balance. Yet Jackson gets there. As the tramp cyclist his acrobatics are good, his make-up enchanting; but his expressed attitude of mind is his most precious quality. It becomes almost too much to watch him worrying with a motor horn which has become detached from the handlebars and which he cannot replace. He tries it everywhere; at the end he is miserably trying to hang it up on the air, and when it fails to catch there he is actually wretched. His movements are full of grace--like those of the grotesque, Alberto, among the Fratellini--and the ecstasy he gives comes by a surexcess of laughter. Another moment of great delicacy, without laughter, however, is that in which Fortunello and Cirrilino swing about on the broomstick. They are a lovely pair, and the little one seated on the palm of the other’s hand is a beautiful picture.

BERT SAVOY
]

Either few women are brought out of burlesque, or women haven’t the exceptional quality I care for. In any case they have seldom given me the excess of emotion by what they have done. Their beauty is quite another matter on which I fail to commit myself. Ada Lewis, in her broad and grand way, has the stuff, and Florence Moore. And once in each performance you can be sure that Gilda Grey will utter a sound or tremble herself into a bacchanalian revel. For the most part her singing is undistinguished, and I do not care for the anxious way in which she regards her members, as if she fancied they would fall off by dint of shimmying. Yet I have never gone to a show of hers without hearing some echo of the nymphs pursued, or seeing a movement of abandon and grace. The dark shuddering voice is sub-human, the movement divinely animal.

Different in every way, but exquisite in every way, was Gaby Deslys. It is good form now to belittle her; she was so vulgar; she came so much on the crest of a revolution, she was such a bidder for our great precious commodity--news space. Ah, well! we have given publicity to less worthy causes. For she was perfect of her type, and in her hard, calculating, sublimely decent way she made us like the type. It was gently vicious--the whole manner. It was overdone--the pearls and the peacock feathers. But behind was a lovely person--lovely to look at and enchanting to all the senses. No, she couldn’t act--how pitiable her loyal efforts; she sang badly; she wasn’t one of the world’s great dancers. But she had something irreducible, not to be hindered or infringed upon--her definite self. She was, to begin with, outcast of our moral system, and she made us accept her because she was an independent human being. She had a sound and accurate sense of her personal life, of her rights as an individual. Nothing could stand against her--and it is said that when she was at grips, at the end, with something more powerful than popular taste, she still held her own, and died rather than suffer the spoiling of her beauty. If that were true one could hardly wish even her beauty back again.

_The “Vulgar”
Comic Strip_

THE “VULGAR” COMIC STRIP

Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dulness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste.

Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off in ridiculous postures--a counterpart to our inveterate passion for seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes. And the fact that we do care for the comic strip--that Jiggs and Mutt-and-Jeff and Skinnay and the Gumps have entered into our existence as definitely as Roosevelt and more deeply than Pickwick--ought to make them worth looking at, for once. Certainly they would have been more sharply regarded if they had produced the counterpart of Chaplin in the comic film--a universal genius capable of holding the multitude and exciting the speculations of the intellectuals. It happens that the actual genius of the comic strip, George Herriman, is of such a special sort that even when he is recognized he is considered something apart and his appearance among other strips is held to be only an accident.

It is by no means an accident, for the comic strip is an exceptionally supple medium, giving play to a variety of talents, to the use of many methods, and it adapts itself to almost any theme. The enormous circulation it achieves imposes certain limitations: it cannot be too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from its mockery. These and other restrictions have gradually made of the comic strip a changing picture of the average American life--and by compensation it provides us with the freest American fantasy.

In a book which appeared about two years ago, _Civilization in the United States_, thirty Americans rendered account of our present state. One of them, and one only, mentioned the comic strip--Mr Harold E. Stearns--and he summed up the “intellectual” attitude perfectly by saying that _Bringing Up Father_ will repay the social historian for all the attention he gives it. I do not know in what satisfactions the social historian can be repaid. I fear that the actual fun in the comic strip is not one of them. _Bringing Up Father_, says Mr Stearns, “symbolizes better than most of us appreciate the normal relation of American men and women to cultural and intellectual values. _Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity are revealing_” (italics mine). (Query: Is it vulgar of Jiggs to prefer Dinty’s café to a Swami’s lecture? Or of Mrs Jiggs to insist on the lecture? Or of both of them to be rather free in the matter of using vases as projectiles? What, in short, is vulgar?) I am far from quarreling with Mr Stearns’ leading idea, for I am sure that a history of manners in the United States could be composed with the comic strip as its golden thread; but I think that something more than its vulgarity would be revealing.

The daily comic strip arrived in the early ’nineties--perhaps it was our contribution to that artistic age--and has gone through several phases. In 1892 or thereabouts Jimmy Swinnerton created _Little Bears and Tigers_ for the San Francisco _Examiner_; that forerunner has passed away, but Swinnerton remains, and everything he does is observed with respect by the other comic-strip artists; he has had more influence on the strip even than Wilhelm Busch, the German whose _Max und Moritz_ were undoubtedly the originals of the _Katzenjammer Kids_. The strip worked its way east, prospered by William Randolph Hearst especially in the coloured Sunday Supplement, and as a daily feature by the Chicago _Daily News_, which was, I am informed, the first to syndicate its strips and so enabled Americans to think nationally. About fifteen years ago, also in San Francisco, appeared the first work of Bud Fisher, _Mr Mutt_, soon to develop into _Mutt and Jeff_, the first of the great hits and still one of the best known of the comic strips. Fisher’s arrival on the scene corresponds to that of Irving Berlin in ragtime. He had a great talent, hit upon something which took the popular fancy, and by his energy helped to establish the comic strip as a fairly permanent idea in the American newspaper.

The files of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ will one day be searched by an enthusiast for the precise date on which Little Jeff appeared in the picture. It is generally believed that the two characters came on together, but this is not so. In the beginning Mr Mutt made his way alone; he was a race-track follower who daily went out to battle and daily fell. Clare Briggs had used the same idea in his _Piker Clerk_ for the Chicago _Tribune_. The historic meeting with Little Jeff, a sacred moment in our cultural development, occurred during the days before one of Jim Jeffries’ fights. It was as Mr Mutt passed the asylum walls that a strange creature confided to the air the notable remark that he himself was Jeffries. Mutt rescued the little gentleman and named him Jeff. In gratitude Jeff daily submits to indignities which might otherwise seem intolerable.

The development in the last twenty years has been rapid, and about two dozen good comics now exist. Historically it remains to be noted that between 1910 and 1916 nearly all the good comics were made into bad burlesque shows; in 1922 the best of them was made into a ballet with scenario and music by John Alden Carpenter, choreography by Adolph Bolm; costumes and settings after designs by George Herriman. Most of the comics have also appeared in the movies; the two things have much in common and some day a thesis for the doctorate in letters will be written to establish the relationship. The writer of that thesis will explain, I hope, why “movies” is a good word and “funnies,” as offensive little children name the comic pages, is what charming essayists call an atrocious vocable.

Setting apart the strip which has fantasy--it is practised by Frueh and by Herriman--the most interesting form is that which deals satirically with every-day life; the least entertaining is the one which takes over the sentimental magazine love-story and carries it through endless episodes. The degree of interest points to one of the virtues of the comic strip: it is a great corrective to magazine-cover prettiness. Only one or two frankly pretty-girl strips exist. _Petey_ is the only one which owes its popularity to the high, handsome face and the lovely flanks of its heroine, and even there the pompous awkwardness of the persistent lover has a touch of wilful absurdity. Mrs Trubble, a second-rate strip unworthy of its originator, is simply a series of pictures dramatizing the vampire home-breaker; I am not even sure she is intended to be pretty. When nearly everything else in the same newspapers is given over to sentimentality and affected girl-worship, to advice to the lovelorn and pretty-prettiness, it is notable that the comic strip remains grotesque and harsh and careless. It is largely concerned with the affairs of men and children, and, as far as I know, there has never been an effective strip made by, for, or of a woman. The strip has been from the start a satirist of manners; remembering that it arrived at the same time as the Chicago World’s Fair, recalling the clothes, table manners, and conversation of those days, it is easy to see how the murmured satiric commentary of the strip undermined our self-sufficiency, pricked our conceit, and corrected our _gaucherie_. To-day the world of Tad, peopled with cake-eaters and finale-hoppers, the world of the _Gumps_ and _Gasoline Alley_, of _Abie the Agent_ and _Mr and Mrs_ serve the same purpose. I am convinced that none of our realists in fiction come so close to the facts of the average man, none of our satirists are so gentle and so effective. Of course they are all more serious and more conscious of their mission; but--well, exactly who cares?

(_Copyright by the Star Company. By permission of the
publishers of the_ New York Journal)

MIKE AND MIKE. By T. E. Powers
]

The best of the realists is Clare Briggs, who is an elusive creator, one who seems at times to feel the medium of the strip not exactly suited to him, and at others to find himself at home in it. His single pictures: _The Days of Real Sport_ and _When a Feller Needs a Friend_, and the now rapidly disappearing _Kelly Pool_ which was technically a strip, are notable recreations of simple life. Few of them are actively funny; some are sentimental. The children of _The Days of Real Sport_ have an astonishing reality--and none are more real than the virtually unseen Skinnay, who is always being urged to “come over.” They are a gallery of country types, some of them borrowed from literature--the Huck Finn touch is visible--but all of them freshly observed and dryly recorded. Briggs’ line is distinctive; one could identify any square inch of his drawings. In _Kelly Pool_ he worked close to Tad’s _Indoor Sports_, and did what Tad hasn’t done--created a character, the negro waiter George whom I shall be sorry to lose. George’s amateur interest in pool was continually being submerged in his professional interest: gettings tips, and his “Bad day ... ba-a-ad day” when tips were low is a little classic. Deserting that scene, Briggs has made a successful comedy of domestic life in _Mr and Mrs_. No one has come so near to the subject--the grumbling, helpless, assertive, modest, self-satisfied, self-deprecating male, in his contacts with his sensible, occasionally irritable, wife. As often as not these episodes end in quarrels--in utter blackness with harsh bedroom voices continuing a day’s exacerbations; again the reconciliations are mushy, again they are genuine sentiment. And around them plays the child whose one function is to say “Papa loves mamma” at the most appropriate time. It is quite an achievement, for Briggs has made the ungrateful material interesting, and I can recall not one of these strips in which he has cracked a joke. Tad here follows Briggs, respectfully. _For Better or Worse_ is considerably more obvious, but it has Tad’s special value, in sharpness of caricature. The surrounding types are brilliantly drawn; only the central characters remain stock figures. Yet the touch of romance in Tad, continually overlaid by his sense of the ridiculous, is precious; he seems aware of the faint aspirations of his characters and recognizes the _rôles_ which they think they are playing while he mercilessly shows up their actuality. The finest of the _Indoor Sports_ are those in which two subordinate characters riddle with sarcasm the pretentions of the others--the clerk pretending to be at ease when the boss brings his son into the office, the lady of the house talking about the new motor car, the small-town braggart and the city swell--characters out of melodrama, some, and others so vividly taken from life that the very names Tad gives them pass into common speech. He is an inveterate creator and manipulator of slang; whatever phrase he makes or picks up has its vogue for months and his own variations are delightful. Slang is a part of their picture, and he and Walter Hoban are the only masters of it.

Ketten’s _Day of Rest_ is another strip of this _genre_, interesting chiefly as a piece of draughtsmanship. He is the most economical of the comic-strip artists, and his flat characters, without contours or body, have a sort of jack-in-the-box energy and a sardonic obstinacy. The Chicago School I have frankly never been able to understand--a parochialism on my part, or a tribute to its exceptional privacy and sophistication. It pretends, of course, to be simple, but the fate of every metropolis is to enter its small-town period at one time or another, to call itself a village, to build a town hall and sink a town pump with a silver handle. The Gumps are common people and the residents of Gasoline Alley are just folks, but I have never been able to understand what they are doing; I suspect they do nothing. It seems to me I read columns of conversation daily, and have to continue to the next day to follow the story. The campaign of Andy Gump for election to the Senate gave a little body to the serial story--he was so abysmally the ignorant Congressman that he began to live. But apart from this, apart from the despairing cry of “Oh, Min,” one recalls nothing of the Chicago School except the amusing vocabulary of Syd Smith and that Andy has no chin. It is an excellent symbol; but it isn’t enough for daily food.

The small-town school of comic strip flourishes in the work of Briggs, already mentioned, in Webster’s swift sketches of a similar nature, and in Tom MacNamara’s _Us Boys_. The last of these is an exceptional fake as small-town, but an amusing and genuine strip. It is people by creation of fancy--the alarmingly fat, amiable Skinny, the truculent Eaglebeak Spruder, the little high-brow Van with his innocence and his spectacles, and Emily, if I recall the name, the village vampire at the age of seven. Little happens in _Us Boys_, but MacNamara has managed to convey a genuine emotion in tracing the complicated relations between his personages--there is actual childhood friendship, actual worry and pride and anger--all rather gently rendered, and with a recognizable language.

It is interesting to note that none of these strips make use of the projectile or the blow as a regular _dénoûement_. I have nothing against the solution by violence of delicate problems, but since the comic strip is supposed to be exclusively devoted to physical exploits I think it is well to remark how placid life is in at least one significant branch of the art. In effect all the themes of the comic strip are subjected to a great variety of treatments, and in each of them you will find, on occasions, the illustrated joke. This is the weakest of the strips, and, as if aware of its weakness, its creators give it the snap ending of a blow, or, failing that, show us one character in consternation at the brilliance of the other’s wit, flying out of the picture with the cry of “Zowie,” indicating his surcharge of emotion. This is not the same thing as the wilful violence of _Mutt and Jeff_, where the attack is due to the malice or stupidity of one character, the resentment or revenge of the other.

Mutt is a _picaro_, one of the few rogues created in America. There is nothing too dishonest for him, nor is there any chance so slim that he won’t take it. He has an object in life: he does not do mean or vicious things simply for the pleasure of doing them, and so is vastly superior to the Peck’s Bad Boy type of strip which has an apparently endless vogue--the type best known in _The Katzenjammer Kids_. This is the least ingenious, the least interesting as drawing, the sloppiest in colour, the weakest in conception and in execution, of all the strips, and it is the one which has determined the intellectual idea of what all strips are like. It is now divided into two--and they are equally bad. How happy one could be with neither! The other outstanding picaresque strip is _Happy Hooligan_--the type tramp--who with his brother, Gloomy Gus, had added to the gallery of our national mythology. _Non est qualis erat_--the spark has gone out of him in recent years.[17] Elsewhere you still find that exceptionally immoral and dishonest attitude toward the business standards of America. For the comic strip, especially after you leave the domestic-relations type which is itself realistic and unsentimental, is specifically more violent, more dishonest, more tricky and roguish, than America usually permits its serious arts to be. The strips of cleverness: _Foxy Grandpa_, the boy inventor, _Hawkshaw the Detective_, haven’t great vogue. _Boob McNutt_, without a brain in his head, beloved by the beautiful heiress, has a far greater following, although it is the least worthy of Rube Goldberg’s astonishing creations. But Mutt and Jiggs and _Abie the Agent_, and _Barney Google_ and _Eddie’s Friends_ have so little respect for law, order, the rights of property, the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all the other foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the Society for the Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently to court and our morals would be saved again.

_The Hall-room Boys_ (now known as _Percy and Ferdy_, I think) are also picaresque; the indigent pretenders to social eminence who do anything to get on. They are great bores, not because one foresees the denunciation at the end, but because they somehow fail to come to life, and one doesn’t care whether they get away with it or not.

_Abie_ and _Jerry on the Job_ are good strips because they are self-contained, seldom crack jokes, and have each a significant touch of satire. Abie is the Jew of commerce and the man of common sense; you have seen him quarrel with a waiter because of an overcharge of ten cents, and, encouraged by his companion, replying, “Yes, and it ain’t the principle, either; it’s the ten cents.” You have seen a thousand tricks by which he once sold Complex motor cars and now promotes cinema shows or prize fights. He is the epitome of one side of his race, and his attractiveness is as remarkable as his jargon. Jerry’s chief fault is taking a stock situation and prolonging it; his chief virtue, at the moment, is his funny, hard-boiled attitude towards business. Mr Givney, the sloppy sentimentalist who is pleased because some one took him for Mr Taft (“Nice, clean fun,” says Jerry of that), is faced with the absurd Jerry, who demolishes efficiency systems and the romance of big business and similar nonsense with his devastating logic or his complete stupidity. The railway station at Ammonia hasn’t the immortal character of _The Toonerville Trolley_ (that meets all the trains) because Fontaine Fox has a far more entertaining manner than Hoban, and because Fox is actually a caricaturist--all of his figures are grotesque, the powerful _Katinka_ or _Aunt Eppie_ not more so than the Skipper. Hoban and Hershfield both understate; Fox exaggerates grossly; but with his exaggeration he is so ingenious, so inventive that each strip is funny and the total effect is the creation of character in the Dickens sense. It is not the method of _Mutt and Jeff_ nor of _Barney Google_ in which Billy de Beck has done much with a luckless wight, a sentimentalist, and an endearing fool all rolled into one.

These are the strips which come to life each day, without forcing, and which stay long in memory. I am stating the case for the strip in general and have gone so far as to speak well of some I do not admire, nor read with animation. The continued existence of others remains a mystery to me; why they live beyond change, and presumably beyond accidental death, is one of the things no one can profitably speculate upon. I do not see why I should concede anything more to the enemies of the strip. In one of _Life’s_ burlesque numbers there was a page of comics expertly done by j held in the manner of our most popular artists. Each of the half dozen strips illustrated the joke: “Who was that lady I seen you with on the street last night?” “That wasn’t a lady; that was my wife.” Like so many parodies, this arrived too late, for the current answer is, “That wasn’t a street; that was an alley.” Each picture ended in a slam and a cry--also belated. The actual demolition of the slam ending was accomplished by T. E. Powers, who touches the field of the comic strip rarely, and then with his usual ferocity. In a footnote to a cartoon he drew _Mike and Mike_. In six pictures four represented one man hitting the other; once to emphasize a pointless joke, twice thereafter for no reason at all, and finally to end the picture. It was destruction by exaggeration; and no comic strip artist missed the point.

At the extremes of the comic strip are the realistic school and the fantastic--and of fantasy there are but few practitioners. Tad has some of the quality in _Judge Rummy_, but for the most part the Judge and Fedink and the rest are human beings dressed up as dogs--they are out of Æsop, not out of LaFontaine. But the Judge is actually funny, and I recall an inhuman and undoglike episode in which he and Fedink each claimed to have the loudest voice, and so in midwinter, in a restaurant, each lifted up his voice and uttered and shouted and bellowed the word “Strawberries” until they were properly thrown into the street. This is the kind of madness which is required in fantasy, and Goldberg occasionally has it. He is the most versatile of the lot; he has created characters, and scenes, and continuous episodes--foolish questions and meetings of ladies’ clubs and inventions (not so good as Heath Robinson’s) and through them there has run a wild grotesquerie. The tortured statues of his _décors_ are marvelous, the way he pushes stupidity and ugliness to their last possible point, and humour into everything, is amazing. Yet I feel he is _manqué_, because he has never found a perfect medium for his work.

Frueh is a fine artist in caricature and could have no such difficulty. When he took it into his head to do a daily strip he was bound to do something exceptional, and he succeeded. It is a highly sophisticated thing in its humour, in its subjects, and pre-eminently in its execution. His series on prohibition enforcement had infinite ingenuity, so also his commentaries on political events in New York city. He remains a caricaturist in these strips, indicating, by his use of the medium, that its possibilities are not exhausted. Yet for all his dealing with “ideas” his method remains fantastic, and although he isn’t technically a comic-strip artist he is the best approach to the one artist whom I have only mentioned, George Herriman, and to his immortal creation. For there is, in and outside the comic strip, a solitary and incomprehensible figure which must be treated apart. The Krazy Kat that Walks by Himself.

(_Courtesy of_ Life--_from the burlesque Sunday Supplement
Number_)

A CARTOON. By R. L. Goldberg
]

_The Krazy Kat That
Walks by Himself_

THE KRAZY KAT THAT WALKS BY HIMSELF

Krazy Kat, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America to-day. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and fantasy--exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish _The Revolt of the Angels_; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the major arts. It happens that in America irony and fantasy are practised in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash; and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine. It is the result of a naïve sensibility rather like that of the _douanier_ Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a thought-out, a constructed piece of work. In the second order of the world’s art it is superbly first rate--and a delight! For ten years, daily and frequently on Sunday, Krazy Kat has appeared in America; in that time we have accepted and praised a hundred fakes from Europe and Asia--silly and trashy plays, bad painting, woful operas, iniquitous religions, everything paste and brummagem, has had its vogue with us; and a genuine, honest native product has gone unnoticed until in the year of grace 1922 a ballet brought it a tardy and grudging acclaim.

Herriman is our great master of the fantastic and his early career throws a faint light on the invincible creation which is his present masterpiece. For all of his other things were comparative failures. He could not find, in the realistic framework he chose, an appropriate medium for his imaginings, or even for the strange draughtsmanship which is his natural mode of expression. _The Family Upstairs_ seemed to the realist reader simply incredible; it failed to give him the pleasure of recognizing his neighbours in their more ludicrous moments. _The Dingbats_, hapless wretches, had the same defect. Another strip came nearer to providing the right tone: _Don Koyote and Sancho Pansy_; Herriman’s mind has always been preoccupied with the mad knight of La Mancha, who reappears transfigured in _Krazy Kat_. And--although the inspirations are _never_ literary--when it isn’t Cervantes it is Dickens to whom he has the greatest affinity. The Dickens mode operated in _Baron Bean_--a figure half Micawber, half Charlie Chaplin as man of the world. I have noted, in writing of Chaplin, Mr Herriman’s acute and sympathetic appreciation of the first few moments of _The Kid_. It is only fair to say here that he had himself done the same thing in his medium. Baron Bean was always in rags, penniless, hungry; but he kept his man Grimes, and Grimes did his dirty work, Grimes was the Baron’s outlet, and Grimes, faithful retainer, held by bonds of admiration and respect, helped the Baron in his one great love affair. Like all of Herriman’s people, they lived on the enchanted mesa (pronounced: ma-cey) by Coconino, near the town of Yorba Linda. The Baron was inventive; lacking the money to finance the purchase of a postage stamp, he entrusted a love letter to a carrier pigeon; and his “Go, my paloma,” on that occasion, is immortal.

Some of these characters are reappearing in Herriman’s latest work: _Stumble Inn_. Of this I have not seen enough to be sure. It is a mixture of fancy and realism; Mr Stumble himself is the Dickens character again--the sentimental, endearing innkeeper who would rather lose his only patron than kill a favourite turkey cock for Thanksgiving. I have heard that recently a litter of pups has been found in the cellar of the inn; so I should judge that fantasy has won the day. For it is Herriman’s bent to disguise what he has to say in creations of the animal world which are neither human nor animal, but each _sui generis_.

That is how the Kat started. The thought of a friendship between a cat and a mouse amused Herriman and one day he wrote them in as a footnote to _The Family Upstairs_. On their first appearance they played marbles while the family quarreled; and in the last picture the marble dropped through a hole in the bottom line. An office boy named Willie was the first to recognize the strange virtues of _Krazy Kat_. As surely as he was the greatest of office boys, so the greatest of editors, Arthur Brisbane, was the next to praise. He urged Herriman to keep the two characters in action; within a week they began a semi-independent existence in a strip an inch wide under the older strip. Slowly they were detached, were placed at one side, and naturally stepped into the full character of a strip when the _Family_ departed. In time the Sundays appeared--three quarters of a page, involving the whole Krazy Kat and Ignatz families[18] and the flourishing town of Coconino--the flora and fauna of that enchanted region which Herriman created out of his memories of the Arizona desert he so dearly loves.

In one of his most metaphysical pictures Herriman presents Krazy as saying to Ignatz: “I ain’t a Kat ... and I ain’t Krazy” (I put dots to indicate the lunatic shifting of background which goes on while these remarks are made; although the action is continuous and the characters motionless, it is in keeping with Herriman’s method to have the backdrop in a continual state of agitation; you never know when a shrub will become a redwood, or a hut a church) ... “it’s wot’s behind me that I am ... it’s the idea behind me, ‘Ignatz’ and that’s wot I am.” In an attitude of a contortionist Krazy points to the blank space behind him, and it is there that we must look for the “Idea.” It is not far to seek. There is a plot and there is a theme--and considering that since 1913 or so there have been some three thousand strips, one may guess that the variations are infinite. The plot is that Krazy (androgynous, but according to his creator willing to be either) is in love with Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz, who is married, but vagrant, despises the Kat, and his one joy in life is to “Krease that Kat’s bean with a brick” from the brickyard of Kolin Kelly. The fatuous Kat (Stark Young has found the perfect word for him: he is crack-brained) takes the brick, by a logic and a cosmic memory presently to be explained, as a symbol of love; he cannot, therefore, appreciate the efforts of Offisa B. Pupp to guard him and to entrammel the activities of Ignatz Mouse (or better, Mice). A deadly war is waged between Ignatz and Offisa Pupp--the latter is himself romantically in love with Krazy; and one often sees pictures in which Krazy and Ignatz conspire together to outwit the officer, both wanting the same thing, but with motives all at cross-purposes. This is the major plot; it is clear that the brick has little to do with the violent endings of other strips, for it is surcharged with emotions. It frequently comes not at the end, but at the beginning of an action; sometimes it does not arrive. It is a symbol.

The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden Carpenter has pointed out in the brilliant little foreword[19] to his ballet, that Krazy Kat is a combination of Parsifal and Don Quixote, the perfect fool and the perfect knight. Ignatz is Sancho Panza and, I should say, Lucifer. He loathes the sentimental excursions, the philosophic ramblings of Krazy; he interrupts with a well-directed brick the romantic excesses of his companion. For example: Krazy blindfolded and with the scales of Justice in his hand declares: “Things is all out of perpotion, ‘Ignatz.’” “In what way, fool?” enquires the Mice as the scene shifts to the edge of a pool in the middle of the desert. “In the way of ‘ocean’ for a instinct.” “Well?” asks Ignatz. They are plunging head down into mid-sea, and only their hind legs, tails, and words are visible: “The ocean is so innikwilly distribitted.” They appear, each prone on a mountain peak, above the clouds, and the Kat says casually across the chasm to Ignatz: “Take ‘Denva, Kollorado’ and ‘Tulsa, Okrahoma’ they ain’t got no ocean a tall--” (they are tossed by a vast sea, together in a packing-case) “while Sem Frencisco, Kellafornia, and Bostin, Messachoosit, has got more ocean than they can possibly use”--whereon Ignatz properly distributes a brick evenly on Krazy’s noodle. Ignatz “has no time” for foolishness; he is a realist and Sees Things as They ARE. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” says he; “I’m too broad-minded and advanced for such nonsense.”

But Mr Herriman, who is a great ironist, understands pity. It is the destiny of Ignatz never to know what his brick means to Krazy. He does not enter into the racial memories of the Kat which go back to the days of Cleopatra, of the Bubastes, when Kats were held sacred. Then, on a beautiful day, a mouse fell in love with Krazy, the beautiful daughter of Kleopatra Kat; bashful, advised by a soothsayer to write his love, he carved a declaration on a brick and, tossing the “missive,” was accepted, although he had nearly killed the Kat. “When the Egyptian day is done it has become the Romeonian custom to crease his lady’s bean with a brick laden with tender sentiments ... through the tide of dusty years” ... the tradition continues. But only Krazy knows this. So at the end it is the incurable romanticist, the victim of acute Bovaryisme, who triumphs; for Krazy faints daily in full possession of his illusion, and Ignatz, stupidly hurling his brick, thinking to injure, fosters the illusion and keeps Krazy “heppy.”

Not always, to be sure. Recently we beheld Krazy smoking an “eligint Hawanna cigar” and sighing for Ignatz; the smoke screen he produced hid him from view when Ignatz passed, and before the Mice could turn back, Krazy had handed over the cigar to Offisa Pupp and departed, saying “Looking at ‘Offisa Pupp’ smoke himself up like a chimly is werra werra intrisking, but it is more wital that I find ‘Ignatz’”--wherefore Ignatz, thinking the smoke screen a ruse, hurls his brick, blacks the officer’s eye, and is promptly chased by the limb of the law. Up to this point you have the usual technique of the comic strip, as old as Shakespeare. But note the final picture of Krazy beholding the pursuit, himself disconsolate, unbricked, alone, muttering: “Ah, there him is--playing tag with ‘Offisa Pupp’--just like the boom compenions wot they is.” It is this touch of irony and pity which transforms all of Herriman’s work, which relates it, for all that the material is preposterous, to something profoundly true and moving. It isn’t possible to retell these pictures; but that is the only way, until they are collected and published, that I can give the impression of Herriman’s gentle irony, of his understanding of tragedy, of the _sancta simplicitas_, the innocent loveliness in the heart of a creature more like Pan than any other creation of our time.

Given the general theme, the variations are innumerable, the ingenuity never flags. I use haphazard examples from 1918 to 1923, for though the Kat has changed somewhat since the days when he was even occasionally feline, the essence is the same. Like Charlot, he was always living in a world of his own, and subjecting the commonplaces of actual life to the test of his higher logic. Does Ignatz say that “the bird is on the wing,” Krazy suspects an error and after a careful scrutiny of bird life says that “from rissint obserwation I should say that the wing is on the bird.” Or Ignatz observes that Don Kiyote is still running. Wrong, says the magnificent Kat: “he is either still or either running, but not both still and both running.” Ignatz passes with a bag containing, he says, bird-seed. “Not that I doubt your word, Ignatz,” says Krazy, “but could I give a look?” And he is astonished to find that it is bird-seed, after all, for he had all the time been thinking that birds grew from eggs. It is Ignatz who is impressed by a falling star; for Krazy “them that don’t fall” are the miracle. I recommend Krazy to Mr Chesterton, who, in his best moments, will understand. His mind is occupied with eternal oddities, with simple things to which his nature leaves him unreconciled. See him entering a bank and loftily writing a check for thirty million dollars. “You haven’t that much money in the bank,” says the cashier. “I know it,” replies Krazy; “have you?” There is a drastic simplicity about Krazy’s movements; he is childlike, regarding with grave eyes the efforts of older people to be solemn, to pretend that things are what they seem; and like children he frightens us because none of our pretensions escapes him. A king to him is a “royal cootie.” “Golla,” says he, “I always had a ida they was grend, and megnifishint, and wondafil, and mejestic ... but my goodniss! It ain’t so.” He should be given to the _enfant terrible_ of Hans Andersen who knew the truth about kings.

He is, of course, blinded by love. Wandering alone in springtime, he suffers the sight of all things pairing off; the solitude of a lonesome pine worries him and when he finds a second lonesome pine he comes in the dead of night and transplants one to the side of the other, “so that in due course, Nature has her way.” But there are moments when the fierce pang of an unrequited passion dies down. “In these blissfil hours my soul will know no strife,” he confides to Mr Bum Bill Bee, who, while the conversation goes on, catches sight of Ignatz with a brick, flies off, stings Ignatz from the field, and returns to hear: “In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord ... all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.” Or we see him at peace with Ignatz himself. He has bought a pair of spectacles, and seeing that Ignatz has none, cuts them in two, so that each may have a monocle. He is gentle, and gentlemanly, and dear; and these divagations of his are among his loveliest moments; for when irony plays about him he is as helpless--as we are.

(_Copyright by The Star Company_)

FRAGMENT FROM THE KRAZY KAT OF THE DOOR. By George Herriman.

(The original, of which this reproduces only the central
episodes, is in colour. Cf. text, page 244.)
]

To put such a character into music was a fine thought, but Mr Carpenter must have known that he was foredoomed to failure. It was a notable effort, for no other of our composers had seen the possibilities; most, I fear, did not care to “lower themselves” by the association. Mr Carpenter caught much of the fantasy; it was exactly right for him to make the opening a parody--The Afternoon Nap of a Faun. The “Class A Fit,” the Katnip Blues were also good. (There exists a Sunday Krazy of this very scene--it is 1919, I think, and shows hundreds of Krazy Kats in a wild abandoned revel in the Katnip field--a rout, a bacchanale, a satyr-dance, an erotic festival, with our own Krazy playing the viola in the corner, and Ignatz, who has been drinking, going to sign the pledge.) Mr Carpenter almost missed one essential thing: the ecstasy of Krazy when the brick arrives at the end; certainly, as Mr Bolm danced it one felt only the triumph of Ignatz, one did not feel the grand leaping up of Krazy’s heart, the fulfilment of desire, as the brick fell upon him. The irony was missing. And it was a mistake for Bolm to try it, since it isn’t Russian ballet Krazy requires; it is American dance. One man, one man only can do it right, and I publicly appeal to him to absent him from felicity awhile, and though he do it but once, though but a small number of people may see it, to pay tribute to his one compeer in America, to the one creation equalling his own--I mean, of course, Charlie Chaplin. He has been urged to do many things hostile to his nature; here is one thing he is destined to do. Until then the ballet ought to have Johnny and Ray Dooley for its creators. And I hope that Mr Carpenter hasn’t driven other composers off the subject. There is enough there for Irving Berlin and Deems Taylor to take up. Why don’t they? The music it requires is a jazzed tenderness--as Mr Carpenter knew. In their various ways Berlin and Taylor could accomplish it.

They may not be able to write profoundly in the private idiom of Krazy. I have preserved his spelling and the quotations have given some sense of his style. The accent is partly Dickens and partly Yiddish--and the rest is not to be identified, for it is Krazy. It was odd that in _Vanity Fair’s_ notorious “rankings,” Krazy tied with Doctor Johnson, to whom he owes much of his vocabulary. There is a real sense of the colour of words and a high imagination in such passages as “the echoing cliffs of Kaibito” and “on the north side of ‘wild-cat peak’ the ‘snow squaws’ shake their winter blankets and bring forth a chill which rides the wind with goad and spur, hurling with an icy hand rime, and frost upon a dreamy land musing in the lap of Spring”; and there is the rhythm of wonder and excitement in “Ooy, ‘Ignatz’ it’s awfil; he’s got his legs cut off above his elbows, and he’s wearing shoes, and he’s standing on top of the water.”

Nor, even with Mr Herriman’s help, will a ballet get quite the sense of his shifting backgrounds. He is alone in his freedom of movement; in his large pictures and small, the scene changes at will--it is actually our one work in the expressionistic mode. While Krazy and Ignatz talk they move from mountain to sea; or a tree stunted and flattened with odd ornaments of spots or design, grows suddenly long and thin; or a house changes into a church. The trees in this enchanted mesa are almost always set in flower pots with Coptic and Egyptian designs in the foliage as often as on the pot. There are adobe walls, fantastic cactus plants, strange fungus and growths. And they _compose designs_. For whether he be a primitive or an expressionist, Herriman is an artist; his works are built up; there is a definite relation between his theme and his structure, and between his lines, masses, and his page. His masterpieces in colour show a new delight, for he is as naïve and as assured with colour as with line or black and white. The little figure of Krazy built around the navel, is amazingly adaptable, and Herriman economically makes him express all the emotions with a turn of the hand, a bending of that extraordinary starched bow he wears round the neck, or with a twist of his tail.

And he has had much to express for he has suffered much. I return to the vast enterprises of the Sunday pictures. There is one constructed entirely on the bias. Ignatz orders Krazy to push a huge rock off its base, then to follow it downhill. Down they go, crashing through houses, uprooting trees, tearing tunnels through mountains, the bowlder first, Krazy so intently after that he nearly crashes into it when it stops. He toils painfully back uphill. “Did it gather any moss?” asks Ignatz. “No.” “That’s what I thought.” “L’il fillossiffa,” comments Krazy, “always he seeks the truth, and always he finds it.” There is the great day in which Krazy hears a lecture on the ectoplasm, how “it soars out into the limitless ether, to roam willy-nilly, unleashed, unfettered, and unbound” which becomes for him: “Just imegine having your ‘ectospasm’ running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitliss etha--golla, it’s imbillivibil--” until a toy balloon, which looks like Ignatz precipitates a heroic gesture and a tragedy. And there is the greatest of all, the epic, the Odyssean wanderings of the door:

Krazy beholds a dormouse, a little mouse with a huge door. It impresses him as being terrible that “a mice so small, so dellikit” should carry around a door so heavy with weight. (At this point their Odyssey begins; they use the door to cross a chasm.) “A door is so useless without a house is hitched to it.” (It changes into a raft and they go down stream.) “It has no ikkinomikil value.” (They dine off the door.) “It lecks the werra werra essentials of helpfilniss.” (It shelters them from a hailstorm.) “Historically it is all wrong and misleading.” (It fends the lightning.) “As a thing of beauty it fails in every rispeck.” (It shelters them from the sun and while Krazy goes on to deliver a lecture: “You never see Mr Steve Door, or Mr Torra Door, or Mr Kuspa Door doing it, do you?” and “Can you imagine my li’l friends Ignatz Mice boddering himself with a door?”) his li’l friend Ignatz has appeared with the brick; unseen by Krazy he hurls it; it is intercepted by the door, rebounds, and strikes Ignatz down. Krazy continues his adwice until the dormouse sheers off, and then Krazy sits down to “concentrate his mind on Ignatz and wonda where he is at.”

(_Courtesy of the artist and the_ New York American)

KRAZY KAT. By George Herriman
]

Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich with something we have too little of--fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam--all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.

_The Damned Effrontery
of the Two-a-Day_

THE DAMNED EFFRONTERY OF THE TWO-A-DAY

The narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New York _Tribune_; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ better than Thomas E. Shea did:

“As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield turned to me and with venomous indignation said, ‘That is damned effrontery!’ It seemed to be Mr Mansfield’s belief that mere dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society.”