Chapter VII: Part 7

To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do with upon what meat has this our Cæsar fed that he is grown so great. The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of Montgomery and Stone may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediæval attitude toward strolling players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable and often interesting. The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel tradition in America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana’s phrase, without any effort to do it justice.) Montgomery and Stone were in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn’t count as Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls went to see him, and so he was Art. The application to vaudeville is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on Broadway as the grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige _may_ venture into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly how far he has condescended to appear before them and accept, even if he doesn’t earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville he is digging his own grave, because there is a stigma attached to the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to “the vestments of refined society.” About every ten years the corrupt desire to be refined takes hold of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly and vaudeville remains simple and good.

It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to discuss it without reference to a possibly more noble past. I am well acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I believe, by Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which, invented or borrowed by him, has become classic. It leads to excellent prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself need not be all brass. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts, more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly coloured, zestful, with sharp outlines; and the classic attitude softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts and numbers of a better day; one _must_ say “music-hall” or be slain in the passages of the Jordan; in America a reference to the _commedia dell’arte_ is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time must come when it is possible to say, “Vaudeville is. Surely it could never have been worse than this--or for that matter, never better. Let us regard it as it is.” The moment must come in the history of general culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is, it happens, the only way I can take it, for in my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called _Change Your Act or Go Back to the Woods_; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and begin _Einst in meinen Jugendjahren_. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four Marxes and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy and Sweeney and Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.

I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a thing I dislike intensely; there is another sort of refinement in vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of technique. It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice’s impersonations is at least partly due to, and has been achieved through, the purely technical mastery she has developed; I am sure that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside; they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have to be always “in the picture,” for though the vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable opportunities, it holds them to strict account; it permits no fumbling, and there are no reparable errors. The materials they use are trivial, yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair’s breadth; the wine they serve is light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not a drop must spill over. There is no great second act to redeem a false entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment’s dulness. The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the presentation, every page has to be _written_, every scene _rendered_, every square inch of the canvas must be _painted_, not daubed with paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case is exactly that of the major arts. It is at least tenable that in this case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.

And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville when the tricky and the bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to see or hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest æsthetic dancing,[20] have heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have witnessed “drama.” If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how do these things get in and get by? Largely as a concession to debased public taste. Note well that all the culture elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its proper music is ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness the success of _A Slice of Life_) is burlesque. Yet like every other popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their boast that it does give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing is heard in connexion with the music played at moving-picture houses) because among its native acts appear _tableaux vivants_ out of Landseer or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of _Les Misérables_. The process continues, regrettably, and extends to the spoiling of good vaudeville material. It isn’t a loss of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is a defamation of something good in the major line and equally a loss of moments when the _“Affairs of” Anatol_ are inexpertly and tastelessly produced “for vaudeville.” But what shall we say of such a real disaster as the return of Miss Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New York, wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has become a “great actress” or is it “an _artiste_”? There was in Miss Levey something roughly elemental, something common and pure; whatever she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success abroad, she returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing, the form heavy but dominant--yet no longer vaudeville. She has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and silk-shaded lamps and draperies and sings _All by Myself_ with shocking bad sentimental _acting_, and gets all she can out of _Love’s Old Sweet Song_ before the touch of her old spirit protests--and recites a dramatic monologue entitled _Destiny!_ Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can’t be good in it if you are too good for it.

VAUDEVILLE. By Charles Demuth
]

I omit the people who aren’t, simply, good enough; there are second-rate people in vaudeville as in everything else, and first-rate people of _its_ second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced, is rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate, nor in the serious artistic playhouse where knowing one’s job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest things in the world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch of technical accuracy which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and stars, whom they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety themselves. They are as much entitled to the jazz bands as any other stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety, although it has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland’s ranking of Ted Lewis as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be perfectly appreciated elsewhere. (The æsthetics of the question have been canvassed in Laokoön, I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up the show in musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack Donahue, who was the sole attraction of another such piece, is always right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular of the big-time acts I am left cold by Van and Schenck, who are perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny, but not witty; their music is current, no more; their rendition is always near enough right to be passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the Six Brown Brothers are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent act, wholly self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other framework, except possibly a one-ring circus; it is a real variety turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these performers everything they do is exquisite.

It isn’t possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the distinctive quality of the head-liners. There are inexplicable things in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch, such as the persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the singing of Belle Baker, who destroys you with _Elie! Elie!_ Houdini is variety as all magicians are and all tricksters--the circus side of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath Brothers, who alone are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the circus. At the present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it burlesques itself. Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the manner of a clown; his despairing cry for the “spot_li-i-i-ght_,” his wail of unhappiness, with his appearance, his gesture, his shambling walk, make him a figure out of the _commedia dell’arte_--one of the few in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their _métier_; their whole fun is in their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of burlesque the accentuated form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to that type, and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real character with his jumping the rope “fi’ thousand conseggitiv times” and “tell ’em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” I am dragged into a catalogue of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit the macabre Moving-Man’s Dream of the Briants, the rustic studies of Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers, and the exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries farther than anyone else the appearance of not knowing the audience is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of human beings, individually probably all right, but _en masse_...! He leaves the stage and passes out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse itself while he’s gone. And his great finale, with a bowl of goldfish, a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated paper bag, and a revolver shot--at the sound of which exactly nothing happens, is the last word in destroying the paraphernalia of the magician and all his works.

I have committed myself to the statement that Joe Cook is perfect and am in no mood to withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can see him in no other _milieu_ because he lacks the gift--not needed in vaudeville, though useful there--of holding the audience in his hand. He is liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles, smiles, and laughter; seldom with guffaws. This is not necessarily to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville is made. As Ethel Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be, so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right. Yet to give the quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.

He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the “dippy” kind so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is structural. Mr Cook’s is probably the longest single act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.

His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to--but no one has ever discovered where it does go to. For after the card tricks--the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks after five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment’s notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is--Mr Cook finds it necessary to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savour his humours.

In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are _you_? Fine, how’s yourself? Good. And you? Splendid. How’s your uncle? I haven’t got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He’s fine. How are _you_? He is amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have ever seen: George M. Cohan.

* * * * *

JOE COOK
]

Had I had any doubts about vaudeville as we practice it in the United States they would have been dispelled in the past two years by one great success and one notable failure: the _Chauve-Souris_ of Balieff and the show of the Forty-niners. Balieff seemed for a moment to be destroying B. F. Keith; here was something certainly vaudeville, with turns and numbers, appealing to every grade of intelligence; here were good music, exciting scenery, and good fun; here were voices caressing the ear and dancers dazzling the eye; here was a gay burlesque and a sophisticated _conférencier_. Now if our native product were only like that ... (the implication was, Wouldn’t we just go every day to the nearest vaudeville house!). Then, to be sure, a reaction. Put Ed Wynn and Leon Errol and ... I omit the list--Wynn was almost unanimously chosen as _conférencier_--and we could give the Russians at least a good run for the money--and it _was_ money, loads of it, much to their surprise. And then, without Ed Wynn and the list, the attempt; for the Forty-niners were cheerfully setting out to be a company of Americans stranded in Russia, giving the Russians to understand what the folk and popular arts of America were. Months earlier the thing had been perfectly done, as a game, in the _No-Siree_, a wholly amateur single performance which was without doubt the gayest evening of the year in New York. (The tribute is not exactly wrung from me, for friends of mine were concerned in it; it was the high moment of the Algonquin Circle and they should have disbanded the following morning. Since I was not an adherent of the group, my advice was not asked; I do not know whether it still exists, has passed to further triumphs, or has repeated the Forty-niners.) Put on professionally, high class vaudeville showed all the weaknesses of the commercial kind, and had a dulness of its own. The Dance of the Small-town Mayors was exactly right, but most of the parodies were outdated, the burlesques were too _voulus_, the strain too great. There was lacking that technical proficiency which is essential to vaudeville, and the adjustment of means to material was sloppy. One fell back on Balieff and discovered, as the exoticism wore off, that he too had his weak points. Sentimental songs in however beautiful voices, the choreographics of figures come to life from Copenhagen plate however accurately the footfall coincided with Anitra’s Dance, and a number of other things suggested that in Russia, too, refinement could corrupt and stultify. There remained elements we could not match: we hadn’t encouraged our legitimate stage sufficiently to be justified in expecting cubist settings in vaudeville; nor when we heard American folk music (and its contemporary form in ragtime) did we so earnestly applaud as to keep them fresh in variety shows. Balieff never was “variety,” and we asked of variety that it be like him; we missed the meaning of Balieff as surely as we appreciated the fun. For he was a lesson not to vaudeville, but to us, to those of us who left vaudeville in the hands of the least cultivated audiences. We have asked nothing of vaudeville simply because we haven’t suspected what it had to give. Yet week after week at the Palace Theatre in New York there have been bills equal in entertainment to the average Balieff programme; there has been evident an expertness in technique, a skill in construction, a naturalness of execution, a soundness of sense and judgement, which ought to have appealed to all who had taste and discrimination. The people who do go there have something, at least; and lack snobbism generally. If the audiences of the Theatre Guild and the Neighborhood Playhouse were to add themselves to their number, were to accept what is given and be receptive to something more, it could not hurt vaudeville. Because like everything else variety must grow, and there is no reason why it should shut itself off from the direction of civilized life. It can exist very well without the Theatre Guild audience; I wonder whether that audience can exist as well without variety.

_They Call It Dancing_

THEY CALL IT DANCING

One of the most tiresome of contemporary intellectual sentimentalities is the cult of “the dance”--a cult which has almost nothing in the world to do with dancing. “The dance” is “art”; dancing is a form of popular entertainment, one of the very few which can be practised by its admirers. It is also one of the arts which can be “polite” without danger of atrophy, the danger in this case being that the technical refinement may eventually make dancing a trick, a rather graceful sort of juggling.

In any case, we shall not have in America anything corresponding to folk dances; the ritual dance, the dance as religion, simply isn’t our type, and none of the tentatives in favour of that kind of dancing has made me regret our natural bent toward ballroom and stunt dancing as a mode of expression. In the rue Lappe in Paris nearly every other house is a _Bal Musette_ and in all but one of these dance halls the floor is taken by men and women of that quarter, working men and women who come in and dance and pay a few _sous_ for each dance. They do this every night and enjoy it; they enjoy the sometimes wheezing accordeon and the bells which, on the right ankle of the player, accentuate the beat. They dance waltzes and polkas and, since the Java is forbidden, the mazurka. Once I saw two couples rise and dance the _bourrée_, presumably as it was danced in their native province of Auvergne; it is possible to see other provincial dances of France, as they are remembered, in the Bal Musette of this district and elsewhere--occasionally and not by pre-arrangement. The ancient dances of America haven’t such roots, nor such vitality; and we may have to become much more simple, or much more sophisticated, before we will proceed naturally to buck-and-wing and cakewalk and the ordinary breakdown on the floor of the Palais Royal. There are Kentucky mountain and cowboy dances which the moving picture inadequately reconstructs, and I am afraid that even negro levee dancing has lost much of its own character in the process of influencing the steps of the ordinary American dance. Undoubtedly those who can should preserve these provincial and rooted dances; but it is idle to pretend that dancing itself can be a subject for archæology. It is essentially for action, not for speculation.

I do not belittle dancing when I attempt to deprive it of the cachet of “Art.” Nothing so precise, so graceful, so implicated with music, can escape being artistic; in the hands of its masters it becomes an intuitive creative process, but this happens most frequently when the dancer gives himself to the music and seldom when he tries to interpret the music. From the waltz to the tango, from the tango to the current fox-trot or one-step, polite dancing has held more of what is essentially artistic than the art-dance, and it has had no pretensions. The old tango and the maxixe were the only ones which could not easily be danced by those who applauded them on the stage; classic dancing, on the contrary, has always been an art of professionals--almost a contradiction in terms in this case, for it is the essence of the dance that it can be danced. It is not the essence of the dance that it can be staged, or made into a pantomime. The Russian Ballet has no reference to the subject for it is essentially the work of mimes and the dancing is either folk dance or choreography.

IRENE CASTLE
]

The reason politeness is not fatal to the dance is that there is only one standard of vulgarity in dancing, which is ugliness. Vulgarity means actively disagreeable postures and steps not exceptionally adapted to the music. The relation of the dancers to one another is the basis of their relation to the music, and that is why the shimmy has little to do with dancing, whereas the cheek-to-cheek position--the _bête-noire_ of chaperons a few weeks, or is it years, ago?--is fundamentally not objectionable, since it brings two dancers to as near a unit, with the same centre of gravity, as the dance requires. One doesn’t dance the fox-trot as one danced the Virginia reel, and the question of morals has little to do with the case. The “indecencies” of the turkey-trot, as we used to phrase it, disappeared not because we are better men and women, but because we are dancing more beautifully.

Two influences have worked to accomplish this. One is that our music has become more interesting and is written specifically to be danced, as the waltz-song always was and as our older ragtime was not. The other is the effect of the stage (through which we have, recently, learned a vast amount from negro dancing, an active influence for the last fifteen years at least, touching the dance at every point in music, and tending always to prevent the American dance from becoming cold and formal.) Dancing masters go to the stage to perform the dances they have elaborated in their studios; from the stage the dance is adapted to the floor. This is what makes it so unnerving to go through a year seeing nothing but men jumping over their own ankles, or to witness Carl Randall dancing himself into his evening clothes. One doesn’t know how soon one will be called upon to do the same sort of thing in the semi-privacy of the night club. Acrobatic dancing is interesting as all acrobatics are--brutally for the stunt and æsthetically for the picture formed while doing the trick. The dancing of choruses has something of the same interest. The Tiller or Palace Girls do very little that would merit attention if done by one of them; done by sixteen, it is entertaining; so are the ranks of heads appearing over the top step of the Hippodrome or at the New Amsterdam, and the ranks of knees rhythmically bending as row follows row down the stairs. But none of these affect actual dancing appreciably.

Acrobatic or stunt dancing has a tendency to corrupt good exhibition dancing--the desire to do something obviously difficult displaces the more estimable desire to do something beautiful. Yet some of our best stunt dancers can and do combine all the elements and to watch them is to experience a double delight. George M. Cohan always danced interestingly; he has sardonic legs and he is, I suppose, the repository of all the knowledge we have of the 1890–1910 dance. Frisco took up the same work near the place where Cohan dropped it; he is (but where I do not know) a character dancer with a specific sense of jazz, and was, for a moment, the symbolic figure of what was coming. His eccentricities were premature, his comparative disappearance unmerited. Eccentric also, and not chiefly dancers, are Leon Errol and Jimmy Barton. Eccentric and essentially a dancer is the fine comic Johnny Dooley. The difference is that almost all of Dooley’s comedy is _in_ his dancing, whereas the others are great comedians and their dances are also funny. It seems to be Dooley’s natural mode to walk on the side of his feet and to catch a broken, wholly American rhythm in every movement--to create dances, therefore, which are untouched by the Russian Ballet and other trepaks and hazzazzas. The foreign influence has touched Carl Randall, a gain in expertness, a loss in freshness. There seems to be nothing he cannot do, nothing he doesn’t do well, nothing he does superbly.

The dancing team which ought to have been the best of our time and wasn’t is that of Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian.[21] The suppleness of Miss Sanderson’s body, the breathless sway of the torso on the hips, the suggestion of languor in the most rapid of her movements, are not to be equalled; and Brian was always smart, decisive, accurate. It is difficult to define the defect which was always in their work; probably a reserve, a not giving themselves away to the music, a shade too much of the stiffness which dancing requires. Miss Sanderson gets along quite well without the lyric knees (as they were--one doesn’t see them now) of Ann Pennington; nor has she the exceptional height which makes the grace of Jessica Brown so surprising and her curve of beauty so exceptional. Miss Brown, I take it, is one of the best dancers of the stage, and, unlike Charlotte Greenwood, has nothing to do with grotesque. Miss Greenwood makes a virtue of her defect--the longest limbs in the world. Miss Brown is unconscious of hers as defects at all; like most people’s, her legs are long enough to reach the ground. It is marvellous to see what she can do when she lifts them off the ground.

I choose these names as examples, fully aware that I may be omitting others equally famous. But what remains is deliberate: two groups of dancers who were at the very top, I think, of their profession, of their art. Of Doyle and Dixon only Harland Dixon is now visible; the team is broken, but Dixon continues to be a wonderful dancer, in the tradition rather of Fred Stone, and with recent leanings toward acting. It was 1915 or so when I saw them dance Irving Berlin’s _Ragtime Melodrama_, and although I have never seen that equalled, I have never seen the team or Dixon alone dance anything unworthy of that piece. It was a beautiful duo, perfectly cadenced, creating long grateful lines around the stage; it was full of tricks and fun and character. And gradually the duo resolved itself into feats of individual prowess, in which Dixon slowly surpassed his partner and became a miracle of acrobatics in rhythm. He is agile, never jerky, with a nice sense of syncopation; he requires Berlin rather than Kern for his full value.

Kern gives all (and more) that Maurice can require, and whether with Florence Walton or Leonora Hughes the dancing of Maurice is always icily regular, and nearly null. His type of mechanism is exactly wrong and he sets off in bold relief the accuracy, the inspired rightness of Irene and Vernon Castle. That these two, years ago, determined the course dancing should take is incontestable. They were decisive characters, like Boileau in French poetry and Berlin in ragtime; for they understood, absorbed, and transformed everything known of dancing up to that time and out of it made something beautiful and new. Vernon Castle, it is possible, was the better dancer of the two; in addition to the beauty of his dancing he had inventiveness, he anticipated things of 1923 with his rigid body and his evolutions on his heel; but if he were the greater, his finest creation was Irene.

No one else has ever given exactly that sense of being freely perfect, of moving without effort and without will, in more than accord, in absolute identity with music. There was always something unimpassioned, cool not cold, in her abandon; it was certainly the least sensual dancing in the world; the whole appeal was visual. It was as if the eye following her graceful motion across a stage was gratified by its own orbit, and found a sensuous pleasure in the ease of her line, in the disembodied lightness of her footfall, in the careless slope of her lovely shoulders. It was not--it seemed not to be--intelligent dancing; however trained, it was still intuitive. She danced from her shoulders down, the straight scapular supports of her head were at the same time the balances on which her exquisitely poised body depended. There were no steps, no tricks, no stunts. There was only dancing, and it was all that one ever dreamed of flight, with wings poised, and swooping gently down to rest. I put it in the past, I hardly know why; unless because it is too good to last.

_St Simeon Stylites_

ST SIMEON STYLITES

The most sophisticated of the minor arts in America is that of the colyumist. It is, except for occasional lapses into the usual journalistic disrespect for privacy, a decent art, and if it never rises to the polish and wit of such an outstanding colyumist as La-Fourchardière of _l’Œuvre_, it never sinks to the pretentious pseudo-intelligent vulgarity of the English counterpart. The colyumist is, to begin with, a newspaper humorist, and there are times, when questions of art and letters are discussed, when one wishes he had remained one. Phillips, who is now with the _Sun and Globe_ in New York, sticks to his game manfully; he tells nothing about himself, discusses no plays, and his colyum, which he illustrates with grotesque little drawings, is self-contained. You do not have to be in the secret to read him. His usual manner is to take a notable or obscure item of news and play with it, in the manner of Mark Twain. When Ambassador Harvey made a speech on the topic, “Have Women Souls”? Phillips reported the proceedings and the aftermath:

“Latest bulletins from Europe and Asia on the conduct of other American diplomats follow:

“Warren G. Harding,
President, United States:

Excellency:--

American ambassador here has brought about grave crisis by
speech, “Are Bananas a Fruit or a Flower?” and “Can Fresh
Roasted Peanuts Think?” Understand he has stated publicly his
opinion that John McCormack is greater singer than Caruso.
People are near uprising. Will you recall him or shall we give
him the bum’s rush?

KING OF ITALY.

and so on.

It is horseplay; but when he is in form it achieves a wild carelessness and gaiety which the intellectual colyumist entirely forswears. He has for compeer Arthur “Bugs” Baer, by all odds the funniest of the colyumists and a too-much-neglected creator of American humour. There is, also, a considerable number of colyumists of the Phillips type in other cities. I make no apology for not knowing them, for a colyum correctly conceived is written for the readers of its paper. It ought to be partly private, and wholly provincial. Even Mencken when he ran the colyum of the Baltimore _Sun_, and gathered much material for _The American Language_, and told of each new consignment of German beer after the blockade began in 1915, even he was not all things to all men.

The last man who kept his colyum balanced between the high and low comic touch was Bert Leston Taylor. He was a very wise and humane person, wise and humane enough to appreciate and to publish fun of a sort differing by much from the humour he created. There was something unnervingly oblique in his vision of the world, perfectly illustrated by the captions he wrote for clippings from rustic journals. He would take an item, “Our popular telegraphist Frank Dane had a son presented to him last week. Frank says he is going to stay home nights hereafter,” and write over it, “How the Days Are Drawing In.” There was nothing incongruous in the appearance side by side of his own expert parodies and the horseplay humour of some of his contributors. Taylor’s touch made everything light, everything right. In his house there were indeed many mansions. After him--before his death even--the colyumists divided and went separate ways. The Chicago _Tribune_ continues the Field-Taylor tradition indifferently well. Riq of the Chicago _Evening Post_ comes near the golden mean, but his own character as a colyumist is jeopardized by his contributors; when he gets a good theme--such as the necessity for keeping the seam of a stocking straight, he can be counted on. Calverley indicated his difficulty--or almost: Themes are so scarce in this world of ours.

The colyumists are sophisticated, or _faux-naïfs_, or actually _naïf_. Of the first, F. P. A. of the New York _World_ is the most notable and Baird Leonard of the _Morning Telegraph_ the best. F. P. A. has all the virtues of the colyumist in the highest degree; unfortunately he has almost all the faults, in nearly the same measure. He is a defeated Calverley, writing the best light verse in America, and the best parodies in verse. His Persicos Odi, one of several (published in the quarterly “1910”), seems to me better than Field’s--which had the lines, “And as for roses, Holy Moses, they can’t be got at living prices.” Adams’, as I recall it, ran:

The pomp of the Persian I hold in aversion;
I hate all their gingerbread tricks;
Their garlicky wreathings and lindeny tree-things
Nix.
Boy, us for plain myrtle while under this fertile
Old grapevine myself I protrude
For your old bibacious Quintus Horatius
Stewed.

and his treatment of the same poem according to Service is perfect parody. Algernon St. John Brenon used to quarrel magisterially with Adams about Latin quantities, but he could never undermine Adams’ feeling for the ease and urbanity of Horace--and Adams isn’t in the business of preserving the tradition of dignity.

His trick verse is not exceptional; he has no Dobsonian feeling for form; in prose parody he is a duffer. His own prose has the one essential quality for wit--it is not diffuse.[22] His actual character is that of a civilized man who cannot be imposed upon by the bunk, and as he is fairly independent he recognizes fake--in the world of politics, business, and society--wherever it occurs. This is what prevents him from being a good radical (type: Heywood Broun; other things in his nature keep him from the insolence of martyrdom), and what makes his work sympathetic to mature and disillusioned minds. His exceptional good sense--he seems to have no sensibility--makes stupidity an irritation to him; he follows half of the biblical precept and does not suffer fools gladly. The habit of pontificating has grown on him, and from expressing himself with justifiable arrogance on minor matters he has proceeded to speak with assurance on manners, art, and letters. It would be more accurate to say that he speaks without the humility becoming to one who for many months boosted W. B. Maxwell in opposition to Joseph Conrad. He hasn’t, essentially, any idea of his great influence; for if he knew that a vast number of semi-intelligent people were guided by him he would not so rapidly praise and damn (or praise with faint damns, if I may quote another colyum). He is the most exasperating of colyumists; and his triviality when confronted by things he does not understand--I am thinking of his comment on _The Waste Land_--is appalling. Yet this same quality is what makes him precious; he is a gadfly to an exceptionally sluggish beast--the New York intellectual. He has, inevitably, become the patron saint of the smart. At any rate, he has done something to destroy the tradition that what is witty is unsound. It is only when he is serious that he becomes a little ridiculous.

I quarrel as much with Baird Leonard’s judgement on art and letters, but I am not irritated because Miss Leonard (who writes for a paper devoted to horse-racing and the theatre) is almost always willing to indicate the path by which she arrives at her discriminations. She hasn’t F. P. A.’s weak fear of the common, and her own mind is as far removed as his from the commonplace, it has movements of grace and lightness, and her humour is smooth and wholly urban. Too often for me she fills her column with Bridge Table Talk, a sardonic report of fake intellectualism done with vigour and ferocity, but hampered by the framework which is not adaptable. I do not, at this moment, recall a line she has written; I recall the tone of her whole work--it is unaffected, not self-conscious, brightly aware of everything, keen and curious and always on the alert. If the stage were what it seems from out in front, Miss Leonard would be well placed on a theatrical paper. She is writing for people wise enough to know the place of wit. Adams, I fear, is beginning to write for people witty enough (and no more) to despise wisdom.

The creator of an American legend--I quote from the advertisements--is certainly a wise man. Don Marquis, who now writes his colyum alone, has always had a good second-rate talent for verse, and a good first-rate understanding of humanity. It is the second quality which makes him appreciate the memoirs of William Butler Yeats, and helps him create _The Old Soak_. “Here’s richness”! It was right for him to make an entire second act of that play an ode to hard liquor, with lyric interludes about the parrot, for he is on the side of humanity, against the devils and angels alike. Hard liquor, loafing, decency, are his gods, and he fights grimly, with a tendency to see the devil in modern art. He is against a great many American fetiches: efficiency and Y. M. C. A. morality and getting on; and he has a strong, persistent sentiment for common and simple things. All of these together would not make him a good colyumist without some expressive gift. He has enough to render his most endearing qualities fully. And beyond them he has at times a bitterness which drives him to write like Swift and a fantasy which creates archie and Captain Fitz-Urse, and these also are parts of his wisdom.

Christopher Morley, like Rolla (not, however, Rollo), has come too late into a world too old, and daily dreams himself back into the time when a gentle essayist was the noblest man of letters and William McFee a great novelist. His latest work is bound in Gissing Blue Leather, is admired by Heywood Broun, and has been compared to nearly everything except the Four Gospels. Little children should not be permitted to read his colyum in the New York _Evening Post_, for it is a sort of literary _boy-scoutisme_, and very wrong! (It has recently ceased to exist.)

The influence of the daily column is so great that by this time a goodly portion of the literary criticism--or book-reviewing--appears in that form. Keith Preston is partly colyumist, partly literary critic, estimable if not always just in both departments, and a writer of excellent verse. Of the literary colyumists Broun is the most interesting case. He has a peculiar mind, apt to find a trifling detail the clue to too many great things; he has a great sense for the pompous and the pretentious; he is actually a humorist when he lets go. But a strange thing has happened to him. While he was acquiring a reputation as arbiter of taste in New York by putting down his simple feelings about books and other things, he was slowly becoming aware of the existence of the intellect. It was borne in upon him, as I believe the phrase is, that a work of art is the product of an intellect working upon materials provided by a sensibility. The discovery unnerved him--I might almost say deflowered. For Broun has lost his native innocence; he is a little frightened by the hard young men who sudden let loose the jargon of æsthetics, of philosophy, of the intellect in general--and what is worse, he _thinks_ that they may not be bluffing. He has gone manfully to work, but the middle distance is dangerous. It is likely to produce more dicta like his notorious dismissal of rhythmic prose by a reference to verse rhythms in prose. His characteristic statement is, however, apropos of a flying catch by Aaron Ward, of which, Broun said that no book had ever so affected him with the sense that the humanly impossible had been accomplished. He seems to wonder, now, whether discovering the mind will ever console him if he loses the catch, whether being an amiable, intelligent, courageous, radical humorist, with sufficient taste to dislike the third-rate and a jocular respect for the first rate--whether all this isn’t enough. And all the while the young men of three nations are giving him to believe that the really new movement is going to be intellectual. In the moment of hesitation he does one thing which may save him--slowly renouncing literature, he digs into his humour and works it hard. He or it will be exhausted presently; when that happens he will be out of the woods--on either side.

But I doubt whether Broun ever was as simple as Bugs Baer. His is called roughneck humour--for all I care. The truth is that Baer is one of the few people writing for the newspapers who have a distinct style. K. C. B. has a form which becomes a formula--it is exasperating to read it--one continues as one continues to read the Bull Durham signs along a railroad track. Baer writes like the speech of Falstaff and his companions, with a rowdy exaggeration. His comparisons are far fetched, his conceptions utterly fantastic. His daily commentaries on sport are concise and entertaining, his best work occurs there,[23] but in _The Family Album_, a Sunday feature of the Hearst papers, he succeeds, despite the subject and the length, in communicating his peculiar quality. It is mingled with banalities like “he was hunting quail on toast up in Canada,” but you also get:

So he felt better and met a friend of his and they skipped the
Eighteenth Amendment a couple of times and uncle came home and
challenged pop to anything. Pop wanted to know what, and uncle
said, “Anything at all. There ain’t one thing that you can do
that I can’t do better than you.”

He kept up his anonymous boasting and pop said to mom, “Your
escaped brother is loose again. That’s him. He takes one drink
of that radio liquor and he starts broadcasting.”

Uncle said, “I’ll broadcast you for a row of weather-beaten
canal boats. I’m mad and hungry. I’m as hot and hollow as a
stovepipe.”

Mom said to pop, “Don’t turn Abimelech away hungry. What does
the Good Book say about--”

Pop said, “Oh! That’s been vetoed by the President.”

There follows what he calls “another quaint tribal quarrel” in which “pop laughed a whole octave above sarcastic” and “Mom said, ‘Stop that debate before I take the negative.’”

Everything of Bugs Baer is foreshortened; he is elliptical, omits the middle step. His language is syncopation. His points of reference are all in the common life; I don’t suppose that he has ever touched a book or a play in his column. For all that, he impresses me as a naturally subtle spirit. I may be wrong. He is certainly a joyful one.

_Burlesque, Circus,
Clowns, and Acrobats_

BURLESQUE, CIRCUS, CLOWNS, AND ACROBATS

This is a footnote in the interest of justice more than anything else. The general scheme of this book is that it is to be an outline, for each of its major chapters is devoted to a subject about which a book ought to be written--but not by me. In such an outline there is no specified allotment of space, and I have written most on the lively arts in which I myself take the liveliest pleasure. Burlesque is not of these--and I confess to enjoying it most in the person of those artists who come out of it into revue, or vaudeville, or any other framework with which I am familiar and which I admire. I can understand an enthusiast feeling the same way about them as I feel about revue and vaudeville players who try to enter the legitimate stage--that they are corrupted by a desire to be refined. The great virtues of burlesque as I (insufficiently) know it are its complete lack of sentimentality in the treatment of emotion and its treatment of appearance. The harsh ugliness of the usual burlesque make-up is interesting--I have seen sinister, even macabre, figures upon its stage--and the dancing, which has no social refinement, occasionally develops angular positions and lines of exciting effect. I find the better part of burlesque elsewhere, notably in clowns. And instead of trying to be fair to a medium I do not know well, nor care too much about, I have put in a picture which I greatly admire and which probably is more to the point than anything I could write.

I shall try to find a picture for the circus, too. Because the circus is a mixed matter and some of it is superb. The _jeux icariens_ I have never seen except in France: they are really exquisite. They are usually performed by a whole family. The training is exceedingly arduous, must be begun in childhood, and the art is dying out. In this act the essential thing is the use of human bodies as maniable material. The small boy I saw rolled himself into a tight round ball and was caught on the upturned feet of his father, flat on his back, and tossed to another grownup in the same position, the little rolled-up body spinning like a ball through the air. The beauty of the movements, the accuracy and the finesse of the exploitation of energy, delighted. Trained elephants, however, haven’t exactly this quality; and trained seals, agreeable to watch because they are graceful and supple of body, lack something. I have seen a diabolo player who was beautiful to follow, and a juggler who placed two billiard cues end to end on his forehead, threw a ball and caught it at the top of the cues, then dislodged the ball and put it into play with three others. This extraordinary mixture of good and dull things, this lack of character, makes the circus easy to like and useless to think about. The special atmosphere of the circus, the sounds and sights, and smells, are, of course, another matter.

CIRQUE MEDRANO. By Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
]

Two of its actual features justify speculation: acrobats and clowns. The American vaudeville player can say nothing worse of an audience than “they like the acrobats.” When they hang by their teeth I cannot respect them; the development of any part of the human body is interesting, no doubt, and I do not wish to insist that there _must_ be an æsthetic interest in every act. But I feel about them as the Chinese philosopher felt about horse-racing: that it is a well-established fact that one horse can beat another, and the proof is superfluous. But there are trapeze workers whose technique is a joy to see and who exploit all the possible turns, leaps, somersaults in air, so that one is pleased and dazzled. I do not wonder that painters in every age have found them a lovely subject. But a lady balanced on one leg of a trapeze bar, smoking a cigarette, fanning herself, _not holding on to anything_--means exactly nothing to me unless it is accomplished with some other quality than nerve. I am sure she will never fall and do not care to be present when she does.

Clowns are different. Even those poor nameless ones who dash in between major acts and with noise and toy balloons divert little children, have some quality. They partake of our tradition about masks, they can’t help having background. Everything exaggerated and ugly in burlesque is here put to the uses of laughter; even the dullest has some gaiety in make-up, in a mechanical contrivance, in gait or gesture. Marceline helping the attendants with Powers’ Elephants at the _Hippodrome_, so busy, so in the way, so unconscious of hindering, always created a little world around himself. Grock is incredible in the faultlessness of his method; as musical-eccentric he surpasses all other clowns, and his simple attitude before chairs and pianos and the other complications of life is a study in creativeness. I have written elsewhere of Fortunello and Cirillino, also great clowns; and they complete this sketchy footnote, since for the greatest clowns I have ever seen, nothing short of a separate title will suffice.[24]

NATIONAL WINTER
GARDEN BURLESQUE.

By E. E. Cummings
(_Courtesy of_ The Dial)
]

_The True and Inimitable
Kings of Laughter_

THE TRUE AND INIMITABLE KINGS OF LAUGHTER

Clowns are the most traditional of all entertainers and one of the most persistent of the traditions about them is that those who have just died were better than those one has laughed at a moment ago. A very obvious reason is that the clowns of the recent past are the clowns of our own childhood. It is my fortunate position never to have seen a clown when I was a child, and all those I have ever laughed at are alive and funny. One of them, the superb Grock, was a failure in New York; the remarkable Fortunello and Cirillino who arrived with the _Greenwich Village Follies_ of 1922 are acrobats of an exceptional delicacy and humour; there isn’t a touch of obvious refinement about them and they are exquisite. And the real thing in knockabout grotesquerie are the three who call themselves, justifiably, the true and inimitable kings of laughter, the brothers Fratellini at the Cirque Medrano in Paris.