Chapter IX: Part 9

I would be glad to temper all of this with praise: for Anita Loos’ captions and John Emerson’s occasionally excellent direction; for George Loane Tucker, for Monte Katterjohn’s flashes of insight into what makes a scenario. I have liked many more films than I have mentioned here. But you are familiar with praise and there remains to say what you have missed. The moving picture when it became pretentious, when it went upstage and said, “dear God, make me artistic” at the end of its prayers, killed its imagination and foreswore its popularity. At your present rate of progress you will in ten years--if you survive--be no more a popular art than grand opera is. You had in your hands an incalculable instrument to set free the imagination of mankind--and the atrophy of our imaginative lives has only been hastened by you. You had also an instrument of fantasy--and you gave us Marguerite Clark in films no better than the “whimsy-me” school of stage plays. Above all, you had something fresh and clean and new; it was a toy and should have remained a toy--something for our delight. You gave us problem plays. Beauty you neither understood nor cared for; and although you talked much about art you never for a moment tried to fathom the secret sources, nor to understand the secret obligations, of art.

Can you do anything now? I don’t know and I am indifferent to your future--because there is a future for the moving picture with which you will have nothing to do. I do not know if the movie of the future will be popular--and to me it is the essence of the movie that it should be popular. Perhaps there will be a period of semi-popularity--it will be at this time that you will desert--and then the new picture will arrive without your assistance. For when you and your capitalizations and your publicity go down together, the field will be left free for others. The first cheap film will startle you; but the film will grow less and less expensive. Presently it will be within the reach of artists. With players instead of actors and actresses, with fresh ideas (among which the idea of making a lot of money may be absent) these artists will give back to the screen the thing you have debauched--imagination. They will create with the camera, and not record, and will follow its pulsations instead of attempting to capture the rhythm of actuality. It isn’t impossible to recreate exactly the atmosphere of Anderson’s _I’m a Fool_; it isn’t impossible (although it may not be desirable) to do studies in psychology; it is possible and desirable to create great epics of American industry and let the machine operate as a character in the play--just as the land of the West itself, as the corn must play its part. The grandiose conceptions of Frank Norris are not beyond the reach of the camera. There are painters willing to work in the medium of the camera and architects and photographers. And novelists, too, I fancy, would find much of interest in the scenario as a new way of expression.[30] There is no end to what we can accomplish.

The vulgar prettiness, the absurdities, the ignorances of your films haven’t saved you. And although the first steps after you take away your guiding hand may be feeble, although bogus artists and culture-hounds may capture the movie for a time--in the end all will be well. For the movie is the imagination of mankind in action--and you haven’t destroyed it yet.

_Before a Picture by Picasso_

BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO

For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally call
“fine,” which seem to me fundamental for living.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

It was my great fortune just as I was finishing this book to be taken by a friend to the studio of Pablo Picasso. We had been talking on our way of the lively arts; my companion denied none of their qualities, and agreed violently with my feeling about the bogus, what we called _le côté Puccini_. But he held that nothing is more necessary at the moment than the exercise of discrimination, that we must be on our guard lest we forget the major arts, forget even how to appreciate them, if we devote ourselves passionately, as I do, to the lively ones. Had he planned it deliberately he could not have driven his point home more deeply, for in Picasso’s studio we found ourselves, with no more warning than our great admiration, in the presence of a masterpiece. We were not prepared to have an unframed canvas suddenly turned from the wall and to recognize immediately that one more had been added to the small number of the world’s greatest works of art.

I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn’t even important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and overwhelming thing to me was that I held the work a masterpiece and knew it to be contemporary. It is a pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and _know_ that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect, yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself--that is a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect--after one had gone away and begun to be aware of effects--was to make one wonder whether it is worth thinking or writing or feeling about anything else. Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day, it isn’t sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn’t, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest--that the real opposition is between them, allied, and the polished fake. To that position I returned a few days later: it was a fortunate week altogether, for I heard the _Sacre du Printemps_ of Strawinsky the next day, and this tremendous shaking of the forgotten roots of being gave me reassurance.

A PAINTING. By Pablo Picasso
]

More than that, I am convinced that if one is going to live fully and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence, one must care for both. It is possible to do well enough with either, and much depends on how one derives pleasure from them. For no one imagines that a pedant or a half-wit, enjoying a classic or a piece of ragtime, is actually getting all that the subject affords. For an intelligent human being knows that one difference between himself and the animals is that he can “live in the mind”; to him there need be present no conflict between the great arts and the minor; he will see, in the end, that they minister to each other.

Most of the great works of art have reference to our time only indirectly--as they and we are related to eternity. And we require arts which specifically refer to our moment, which create the image of our lives. There are some twenty workers in literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the dance who are doing this for us now--and doing it in such a manner as to associate our modern existence with that extraordinary march of mankind which we like to call the progress of humanity. It is not enough. In addition to them--in addition, not in place of them--we must have arts which, we feel, are for ourselves alone, which no one before us could have cared for so much, which no one after us will wholly understand. The picture by Picasso could have been admired by an unprejudiced critic a thousand years ago, and will be a thousand years hence. We require, for nourishment, something fresh and transient. It is this which makes jazz so much the characteristic art of our time and Jolson a more typical figure than Chaplin, who also is outside of time. There must be ephemera. Let us see to it that they are good.

The characteristic of the great arts is high seriousness--it occurs in Mozart and Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière as surely as in Æschylus and Racine. And the essence of the minor arts is high levity which existed in the _commedia dell’arte_ and exists in Chaplin, which you find in the music of Berlin and Kern (not “funny” in any case). It is a question of exaltation, of carrying a given theme to the “high” point. The reference in a great work of art is to something more profound; and no trivial theme has ever required, or had, or been able to bear, a high seriousness in treatment. Avoiding the question of creative genius, what impresses us in a work of art is the intensity or the pressure with which the theme, emotion, sentiment, even “idea” is rendered. Assuming that a blow from the butt of a revolver is not exactly artistic presentation, that “effectiveness” is not the only criterion, we have the beginning of a criticism of æsthetics. We know that the method does count, the creativeness, the construction, the form. We know also that while the part of humanity which is fully civilized will always care for high seriousness, it will be quick to appreciate the high levity of the minor arts. There is no conflict. The battle is only against solemnity which is not high, against ill-rendered profundity, against the shoddy and the dull.

I have allowed myself to catalogue my preferences; it is possible to set the basis of them down in impersonal terms, in propositions:

That there is no opposition between the great and the lively
arts.

That both are opposed in the spirit to the middle or bogus arts.

That the bogus arts are easier to appreciate, appeal to low and
mixed emotions, and jeopardize the purity of both the great and
the minor arts.

That except in a period when the major arts flourish with
exceptional vigour, the lively arts are likely to be the most
intelligent phenomena of their day.

That the lively arts as they exist in America to-day are
entertaining, interesting, and important.

That with a few exceptions these same arts are more interesting
to the adult cultivated intelligence than most of the things
which pass for art in cultured society.

That there exists a “genteel tradition” about the arts which
has prevented any just appreciation of the popular arts, and
that these have therefore missed the corrective criticism given
to the serious arts, receiving instead only abuse.

That therefore the pretentious intellectual is as much
responsible as any one for what is actually absurd and vulgar
in the lively arts.

That the simple practitioners and simple admirers of the lively
arts being uncorrupted by the bogus preserve a sure instinct
for what is artistic in America.

And now a detour around two of the most disagreeable words in the language: high- and low-brow. Pretense about these words and what they signify makes all understanding of the lively arts impossible. The discomfort and envy which make these words vague, ambiguous, and contemptuous need not concern us; for they represent a real distinction, two separate ways of apprehending the world, as if it were palpable to one and visible to the other. In connexion with the lively arts the distinction is clear and involves the third division, for the lively arts are created and admired chiefly by the class known as lowbrows, are patronized and, to an extent enjoyed, by the highbrows; and are treated as impostors and as contemptible vulgarisms by the middle class, those who invariably are ill at ease in the presence of great art until it has been approved by authority, those whom Dante rejected from heaven and hell alike, who blow neither hot nor cold, the Laodiceans.

Be damned to these last and all their tribe! There exists a small number of people who care intensely for the major and the minor arts and they are always being accused of “not caring really” for the lively ones, of pretending to care, or of running away from “the ancient wisdom and austere control” of Greek architecture or from the intense passion of Dante, the purity of Bach, the great totality of what humankind has created in art. It is claimed, and here the professional lowbrow agrees, that these others _cannot_ care for the lively arts, unless they romanticize them and find things in them which aren’t there--at least not for the “real” patrons of those arts--those who observe them without thinking about them.

Aren’t they there, these secondary qualities? I take for example a sport instead of an art. Nothing about baseball interests me except the newspaper reports of the games, so I speak without prejudice. In the days of Babe Ruth I took the sun in the bleachers once and saw that heavy hitter do exactly what he had to do on his first appearance for the day--a straight, businesslike home run, much appreciated by the crowd, as any expert well-timed job is appreciated by Americans. The game that day went against the Yankees; they were two runs behind in the ninth, and with two men on base Ruth came up again. Again he hit a home run. And the crowd roaring its joy in victory exhaled two sighs, for the dramatic quality of the blow and for the lovely spiralling of the ball in its flight over the fence. “A beauty--a beauty”--you heard the expression a thousand times--and “He knows _when_ to hit them.” They would have roared, too, if he had hit a single, which, muffed, would have brought in the winning run. But they would not have said, “a beauty”--and as far as I am concerned that is proof enough that the appreciation of æsthetic qualities is universal. It isn’t, thank Heaven, always put into words.

Take as another instance the fame of the Rath Brothers. They are acrobats who do difficult things, but there are others doing much the same sort of thing without approaching the _réclame_ of these two. Their appearance of ease is a delight; there is no strain, no swelling muscles, no visible exploitation of strength. The Hellenic philosopher who held that the arrow shot from the bow is never in motion, but at rest from second to second at the succeeding points of its trajectory, might have seen some ancient forerunners of these athletes, for each of their movements seems at once a sculptured rest and a passage into another pose. And that is precisely the quality which vaudeville and revue audiences care for, and in a groping way recognize as distinctive and fine. They may think that Greeks have been candy-vendors since the beginning of time and that Marathon was a racecourse; but they _know_ what they like.

I do not see, therefore, that recognition of these aspects of the gay arts can in any way detract from actual enjoyment--on the contrary it adds. You see Charlie about to throw a mop; the boss enters; without breaking the line of his movement Charlie swoops to the floor and begins to scrub. The first, the essential thing, is the fun in the dramatic turn; but what makes it funny is that there is no jerk, no break in the line--the two things are so interwoven that you cannot separate them. And if anyone were actually entirely unconscious of the line, the fun would be lost; it would be Ham and Bud, not Charlie, for such a spectator. The question is only to what degree one can be conscious of it--for I have known intellectuals who so reduced Charlie to angles that the angles no longer made them laugh. They have done the same with Massine and Nijinsky; they have followed the score so closely that they haven’t heard the music and they correspond exactly to the man who bets on the game and doesn’t see the play.

The life of the mind is supposed to be a terrible burden, ruining all the pleasures of the senses. This idea is carefully supported by “mental workers” (as they call themselves) and by the brainless. The truth is, of course, that when the mind isn’t afflicted by a desire to be superior, it does nothing but multiply all the pleasures, and the intelligent spectator, in all conscience, feels and experiences more than the dull one. To such a spectator the lively arts have a validity of their own. He cares for them for themselves, and their relation to the other arts does not matter. It is only because the place of the common arts in decent society is always being called into question that the answer needs to be given. I do not suppose that my answer is final; but I feel sure that it must be given, as mine is, from the outside.[31]

It happens that what we call folk music, folk dance, and the folk arts in general have only a precarious existence among us; the “reasons” are fairly obvious. And the popular substitutes for these arts are so much under our eyes and in our ears that we fail to recognize them as decent contributions to the richness and intensity of our lives. The result, strange as it may appear to devotees of culture, is that our major arts suffer. The poets, painters, composers who withdraw equally from the main stream of European tradition and from the untraditional natural expressions of America, have no sources of strength, no material to work with, no background against which they can see their shadows; they feel themselves disinherited of the future as well as the past.

At the same time the contempt we have for the lively arts hurts them as much as it hurts us. We have all heard of the “great artist of the speaking stage” who will not lower himself by appearing on the screen; as familiar is the vaudevillian who will call himself an artist and has hankerings for the legit; we have seen good dancers become bad actors, good black-face comedians develop alarming tendencies toward singing sentimental ballads in whisky-tenor voices, good comic-strip artists beginning to do bad book illustrations. The “step upward” is never in the direction of superior work, but toward a more rarefied acclaim. They are like a notable novelist who has for years tried unsuccessfully to write a failure, because he has only one standard of artistic success: popularity--but in reverse.

As these artists suffer under opprobrium and try to avoid it by touching the field of the _faux bon_, their work becomes more and more refined and genteel. The broadness, rough play, vitality, diminish gradually until a sort of Drama League seriousness and church-sociable good form are both satisfied. And all the more’s the pity, for the thinning out of our lives goes on from day to day and these lively arts are the only things which can keep us hard and robust and gay. In America, where there is no recognized upper class to please, no official academic requirements to meet, the one tradition of gentility is as lethal as all the conventions of European society, and unlike those of Europe our tradition provides no nourishment for the artist. It is negative all the way through.

In spite of gentility the lively arts have held to something a little richer and gayer than the polite ones. They haven’t dared to be frank, for a spurious sense of decency is backed by the police, and this limitation has hurt them; but it has made them sharp and clever by forcing their wit into deeper channels. There still exists a broadness in slap-stick comedy and in burlesque, and once in a while vast figures of Rabelaisian comedy occur. For the most part the lively arts are inhibited by the necessity to provide “nice clean fun for the whole family”--a regrettable, but inevitable penalty for their universal appeal. For myself, I should like to see a touch more of grossness and of license in these arts; it would be a sign that the blood hadn’t gone altogether pale, and that we can still roar cheerfully at dirty jokes, when they are funny.

What Europeans feel about American art is exactly the opposite of what they feel about American life. Our life is energetic, varied, constantly changing; our art is imitative, anæmic (exceptions in both cases being assumed). The explanation is that few Europeans see our lively arts, which are almost secret to us, like the mysteries of a cult. Here the energy of America does break out and finds artistic expression for itself. Here a wholly unrealistic, imaginative presentation of the way we think and feel is accomplished. No single artist has yet been great enough to do the whole thing--but together the minor artists of America have created the American art. And if we could for a moment stop wanting our artistic expression to be _necessarily_ in the great arts--it will be that in time--we should gain infinitely.

Because, in the first place, the lively arts have never had criticism. The box-office is gross; it detects no errors, nor does it sufficiently encourage improvement. Nor does abuse help. There is good professional criticism in journals like _Variety_, _The Billboard_, and the moving-picture magazines--some of them. But the lively arts can bear the same continuous criticism which we give to the major, and if the criticism itself isn’t bogus there is no reason why these arts should become self-conscious in any pejorative sense. In the second place the lively arts which require little intellectual effort will more rapidly destroy the bogus than the major arts ever can. The close intimacy between high seriousness and high levity, the thing that brings together the extremes touching at the points of honesty and simplicity and intensity--will act like the convergence of two armies to squeeze out the bogus. And the moment we recognize in the lively arts our actual form of expression, we will derive from them the same satisfaction which people have always derived from an art which was relevant to their existence. The nature of that satisfaction is not easily described. One thing we know of it--that it is pure. And in the extraordinarily confused and chaotic world we live in we are becoming accustomed to demand one thing, if nothing else--that the elements presented to us however they are later confounded with others, shall be of the highest degree in their kind, of an impeccable purity.

_Appendices_

APPENDIX TO “I AM HERE TO-DAY”

“The egregious merit of Chaplin,” says T. S. Eliot, “is that he has escaped in his own way from the realism of the cinema and invented a _rhythm_. Of course the unexplored opportunities of the cinema for eluding realism must be very great.”

It amused me once, after seeing _The Pawnshop_, to write down exactly what had happened. Later I checked up the list, and I print it here. I believe that Chaplin is so great on the screen, his effect so complete, that few people are aware, afterward, of how much he has done. Nor can they be aware of how much of Chaplin’s work is “in his own way”--even when he does something which another could have done he adds to it a touch of his own. I do not pretend that the following analysis is funny; it may be useful:

Charlot enters the pawnshop; it is evident that he is late. He compares his watch with the calendar pad hanging on the wall, and hastily begins to make up for lost time by entering the back room and going busily to work. He takes a duster out of a valise and meticulously dusts his walking-stick. Then proceeding to other objects, he fills the room with clouds of dust, and when he begins to dust the electric fan, looking at something else, the feathers are blown all over the room. He turns and sees the plucked butt of the duster--and carefully puts it away for to-morrow.

With the other assistant he takes a ladder and a bucket of water and goes out to polish the three balls and the shop sign. After some horseplay he rises to the top of the ladder and reaches over to polish the sign; the ladder sways, teeters, with Charlot on top of it. A policeman down the street looks aghast, and sways sympathetically with the ladder. Yet struggling to keep his balance, Charlot is intent on his work, and every time the ladder brings him near the sign he dabs frantically at it until he falls.

A quarrel with his fellow-worker follows. The man is caught between the rungs of the ladder, his arms imprisoned. Charlot calls a boy over to hold the other end of the ladder and begins a boxing match. Although his adversary is incapable of moving his arms, Charlot sidesteps, feints, and guards, leaping nimbly away from imaginary blows. The policeman interferes and both assistants run into the shop. By a toss of a coin Charlot is compelled to go back to fetch the bucket. He tiptoes behind the policeman, snatches the bucket, and with a wide swing and a swirling motion evades the policeman and returns. He is then caught by the boss in another fight and is discharged.

He makes a tragic appeal to be reinstated. He says he has eleven children, so high, and so high, and so high--until the fourth one is about a foot taller than himself. The boss relents only as Charlot’s stricken figure is at the door. As he is pardoned, Charlot leaps upon the old boss, twining his legs around his abdomen; he is thrown off and surreptitiously kisses the old man’s hand. He goes into the kitchen to help the daughter and passes dishes through the clothes wringer to dry them--passes a cup twice, as it seems not to be dry the first time. Then his hands. The jealous assistant provokes a fight; Charlot has a handful of dough and is about to throw it when the boss appears. With the same motion Charlot flings the dough into the wringer, passes it through as a pie crust, seizes a pie plate, trims the crust over it, and goes out to work.

At the pawnshop counter pass a variety of human beings. Charlot is taken in by a sob story about a wedding ring; he tries to test the genuineness of goldfish by dropping acid on them. Sent to the back room, he takes his lunch out of the safe, gets into another fight, in which he is almost beating his rival to death when the girl enters. Charlot falls whimpering to the floor and is made much of. He returns to the counter and the episode of the clock begins.

A sinister figure enters, offering a clock in pawn. Charlot looks at it; then takes an auscultator and listens to its heart-beat; then taps it over crossed fingers for its pulmonary action; then taps it with a little hammer to see the quality, as with porcelain; then snaps his thumb on the bell. He takes an augur and bores a hole in it; then a can-opener, and when he has pried the lid off he smells the contents and with a disparaging gesture makes the owner smell them, too. He then does dentistry on it, with forceps; then plumbing. Finally he screws a jeweler’s magnifying glass into his eye and hammers what is left in the clock, shakes out the contents, measures the mainspring from the tip of his nose to arm’s length, like cloth, squirts oil on the debris to keep it quiet, and, lifting the man’s hat from his head, sweeps the whole mess into it and returns it with a sad shake of the head.

A pearl-buyer has meanwhile come in and Charlot retraces his steps to the back room (carefully stepping over the buyer’s hat) and begins to sweep. His broom becomes entangled with a piece of tape, which fights back and gets longer and longer. Suddenly Charlot begins to tight-rope upon it, balancing with the broom, and making a quick turn, coming forward for applause. A final quarrel with the other assistant ensues. As they are swarming round the legs of the kitchen table, the boss comes in and Charlot flees, leaps into a trunk, and is hidden. As the others enter the room, the pearl-buyer, who has stolen all the valuables, holds them up with a revolver. Charlot leaps from the trunk, fells the robber, and embraces the lovely maiden for a fade-out.

All of this takes about thirty minutes. I have put down nearly everything, for Chaplin is on the scene virtually all of the time. I am fairly certain that ninety per cent. of this film could not have been made, even badly, by anyone else. Analysis of _A Dog’s Life_ would give the same result: the arrival at the climax being a little more certain and the drama of the climax (the curtain scene--compared with the clock scene above) being more involved in the course of action.

Here follows a complete list of all of the pictures in which Charlie Chaplin has appeared--all of those officially recognized by him:

_Keystone_--1914: Making a Living, Mabel’s Strange Predicament,
The Kid Auto Racers, His Favorite Pastime, The Film Johnny,
The Cruel Cruel Love, The Dogcatcher, Mabel at the Wheel, The
Star Boarder, Twenty Minutes of Love, Caught in the Rain,
Tillie’s Punctured Romance, The Rounders, The Knockout, Caught
in the Cabaret, A Gentleman of Nerve, Mabel’s Busy Day, Mabel’s
Married Life, Dough & Dynamite, His Trysting Place, Laughing
Gas, His Prehistoric Past, Half Reel--Scenic Yosemite Valley.

_Essanay Film Company_--1915–16: His New Job, A Night Out,
The Champion, The Tramp, The Jitney Elopement, In the Park,
By the Sea, The Woman, The Bank, Work, A Night in the Show,
Shanghaied, Carmen, Police.

_Mutual Film Company_--1916–17: The Floorwalker, The Fireman,
The Vagabond, One A. M., The Count, Behind the Screen, The
Rink, The Pawnshop, Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant, The
Adventurer.

_First National_--1918–23: Shoulder Arms, Sunnyside, The Idle
Class, Pay Day, A Dog’s Life, The Kid, A Day’s Pleasure, The
Pilgrim.

“BANANAS” AND OTHER SONGS

It was not my happiness to have heard _Yes; We Have No Bananas_ first in America: and to understand phenomena one must know them in their natural setting. The phrase itself was created, or brought to notice, by Tad; as I have said in my wholly inadequate reference to his work, he is a master of slang and a creator of it; some acknowledgment to him might well appear on the cover of the song. His use of it was immeasurably more delicate and more amusing than the song, because he used it as a contradiction of all the blah and high-hat nonsense in the world; it is in his hands fantastic, funny, and impertinently pertinent. In the song I can’t see it; nor am I exceptionally taken with the music, which is largely synthetic.

However, if I cannot understand the success of the song (or misunderstand it, for it seems to me to be “merely” popular) there are those who understand better. I do not think that my quite secondary powers of analysis would have risen to the following, by J. W. T. Mason, correspondent of the London _Daily Express_, in New York:

New York slang usually changes monthly. Of late there has been
a falling off in inspiration, and picturesque argot culled from
the city’s polyglot interminglings has fallen sadly behind New
York’s quick-witted reputation. At last, however, after months
of waiting a creative effort has been made, and one of the most
effective phrases descriptive of life in New York has resulted.

One hears it on the stage, in the drawing-room, in the kitchen,
on the streets, everywhere: “Yes; we have no bananas.” A song
has been written about it, and is the musical rage of the
moment.

Cardboard imitations of bunches of bananas are making their
appearance bearing the legend, “Yes; we have no bananas.”
Business men hang these ornaments in their offices, as a
reminder that, after all, there must be a way out of every
difficulty. The phrase originated in the fruit shops kept in
New York by Greeks, Italians, and Jews, whose knowledge of the
English language is limited in verbiage, but not in volubility,
nor in willingness to try.

These ancient races come to the New World for profit, and
never like to turn a customer away. So they have evolved a
curious positive and negative for the same sentence. Why the
slangmakers hit on bananas has not been discovered. It might as
well have been any other commodity. But the phrase means that
one having asked for bananas in a fruit shop where there are
none, the anxious proprietor, seeking to be ingratiating and
not desiring to displease, answers: ‘Yes; we have no bananas.’
Thereupon he may seek to sell a cabbage or a bunch of beets
instead, since most fruit shops in New York are vegetable
establishments as well.

The phrase is a tribute to the optimism of the newly arrived
immigrant; to his earnest fight to master the language of his
temporary country, and so, somehow, is supposed to take on the
American characteristic of “getting there,” even though by way
of an affirmative in a negative sentence.

It is, I believe, a generation at least since the English began to say “Yes I don’t think.” And they talk about the cable having brought the two countries closer together. O God! O Montreal!

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THE SONGS WRITTEN BY IRVING BERLIN

When I Lost You
When I Leave the World Behind
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning
(From _Yip-Yip-Yap-hank_)
Everybody’s Doing It
I Want to Go Back to Michigan
Ragtime Violin
When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’
Mysterious Rag
Yiddle, On Your Fiddle
My Wife’s Gone to the Country
That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune
Kiss Me
Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon
Grizzly Bear
I Want to Be in Dixie
Keep Away from the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile
International Rag
In My Harem
Snooky-Ookums
Somebody’s Coming to My House
You’ve Got Your Mother’s Big Blue Eyes
Araby
My Bird of Paradise
This Is the Life
They’re on Their Way to Mexico
He’s a Devil in His Own Home Town
He’s a Rag-picker
Along Came Ruth
Sadie Salome, Go Home
Wild Cherry
Next to Your Mother Who Do You Love
Sweet Italian Love
Piano Man
When I’m Alone I’m Lonesome
Ragtime Soldier Boy
Goody - Goody - Goody - Goody - Good
Pullman Porters on Parade
At the Devil’s Ball
Old Maids’ Ball
San Francisco Bound
If You Don’t Want Me, Why Do You Hang Around
Down in Chattanooga
When It’s Night Time Down in Dixieland
If That’s Your Idea of a Wonderful Time, Take Me Home
{ The Hula-Hula
{ Girl on the Magazine Cover
{ I Love a Piano
{ The Ragtime Melodrama
{ When I Get Back to the U. S. A.
(From Stop! Look! and Listen!)
I’m Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind
Settle Down in a One-Horse Town
(From Watch Your Step)
Mandy
(From Ziegfeld Follies)
A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody
(From Ziegfeld Follies)
Some One Else May Be There While I’m Gone
My Sweetie
Good-bye, France
The Hand That Rocked My Cradle Rules My Heart
I’ve Got My Captain Working for Me Now
You’d Be Surprised
If I’d Have My Way
(I’d Be a Farmer)
Nobody Knows and Nobody Seems to Care
I Never Knew
Homesick
All by Myself
Some Sunny Day
When You Walked Out
MUSIC BOX REVUE, 1922:
Say It With Music
Everybody Step
MUSIC BOX REVUE, 1923:
Lady of the Evening
Crinoline Days
Pack Up Your Sins

GOOD-BYE TO DEAR OLD ALASKA

By John Murray Anderson and Irving Cæsar

The scene it is Alaska and beneath the setting sun
We see a brave young miner toiling there.
He’s thinking of the home folks and when his day’s work is done,
To a humble little shack he doth repair.
He’s dreaming of the happy days
When he was but a boy,
The places he frequented long ago;
On memories’ wings he flies again to his dear mother’s knee.
’Tis then we hear him whisper soft and low.

REFRAIN

Good-bye to dear old Alaska.
I’m going across the sea,
Back to the dear old home land,
My country, the land of the free.
I can picture a love nest at twilight
Where the old folks for me sit and pine,
So good-bye, Alaska, for I’m going home
To that old-fashioned mother of mine.

Once again the scene is changed, he’s on a special train
And lands down at the Battery safe and sound.
He wends his way on Broadway and on every side again
The old familiar faces can be found.

He lingers but a moment as he passes City Hall,
And there he hears the national anthem sung,
And just to prove he’s Yankee, aye, Yankee through and through,
He sings the chorus in his native tongue.

--Sung by Jack Hazzard in “The Greenwich Village
Follies,” with dissolving views by Walter Hoban.

HEAVEN WILL PROTECT THE WORKING GIRL

Words by Edgar Smith. Music by A. Baldwin Sloane. Copyright, 1909, by Charles K. Harris. British copyright secured.

A village maid was leaving home, with tears her eyes were wet.
Her mother dear was standing near the spot;
She says to her: “Neuralgia dear, I hope you won’t forget
That I’m the only mother you have got.
The city is a wicked place, as any one can see,
And cruel dangers ’round your path may hurl;
So ev’ry week you’d better send your wages back to me,
For Heaven will protect a working girl.

CHORUS

“You are going far away, but remember what I say,
When you are in the city’s giddy whirl,
From temptations, crimes, and follies, villains, taxicabs and
trolleys,
Oh! Heaven will protect the working girl.”

Her dear old mother’s words proved true, for soon the poor girl met
A man who on her ruin was intent;
He treated her respectful as those villains always do,
And she supposed he was a perfect gent.

But she found different when one night she went with him to dine
Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.
And he says to her: “After this we’ll have a demi-tasse!”
Then to him these brave words the girl did say:

CHORUS

“Stand back, villain; go your way! here I will no longer stay,
Although you were a marquis or an earl;
You may tempt the upper classes with your villainous demi-tasses,
But Heaven will protect the working girl.”

APPENDIX TO “THESE, TOO ...”

I cannot write about Eva Tanguay--not in the way of Aleister Crowley, at any rate. Here are fragments from his appreciation:

Eva Tanguay! It is the name which echoed in the Universe when
the Sons of the Morning sang together and shouted for joy, and
the stars cried aloud in their courses! I have no words to
hymn her glory, nay, not if I were Shelley and Swinburne and
myself in one--I must write of her in cold prose, for any art
of mine would be but a challenge; I rather make myself passive
and still, that her divine radiance may be free to illumine the
theme. Voco! per nomen nefandum voco. Te voco! Eva veni!

Eva Tanguay is the soul of America as its most desperate
eagle-flight. Her spirit is tense and quivering, like
the violin of Paganini in its agony, or like an arrow of
Artemis--it is my soul that she hath pierced!

The American Genius is unlike all others. The “cultured”
artist, in this country, is always a mediocrity. Longfellow,
Bryant, Emerson, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, a thousand
others, all prove that thesis....

Eva Tanguay is the perfect American artist. She is alone. She
is the Unknown Goddess. She is ineffably, infinitely sublime;
she is starry chaste in her colossal corruption. In Europe
men obtain excitement through Venus, and prevent Venus from
freezing by invoking Bacchus and Ceres, as the poet bids. But
in America sex-excitement has been analyzed; we recognize it to
be merely a particular case of a general proposition, and we
proceed to find our pleasure in the wreck of the nervous system
as a whole, instead of a mere section of it. The daily rush of
New York resembles the effect of Cocaine; it is a universal
stimulation, resulting in a premature general collapse; and
Eva Tanguay is the perfect artistic expression of this. She is
Manhattan, most loved, most hated, of all cities, whose soul
is a Delirium beyond Time and Space. Wine? Brandy? Absinthe?
Bah! such mother-milk is for the babes of effete Europe; we
know better. Drunkenness is a silly partial exaltation, feeble
device of most empirical psychology; it cannot compare with
the adult, the transcendental delights of pure madness....
Why titillate one poor nerve? why not excite all together?
Leave sentiment to Teutons, passion and romance to Latins,
spirituality to Slavs; for us is cloudless, definite,
physiological pleasure!

Eva Tanguay is--exactly and scientifically--this Soul of
America. She steps upon the stage, and I come into formal
consciousness of myself in accurate detail as the world
vanishes. She absorbs me, not romantically, like a vampire,
but definitely, like an anæsthetic, soul, mind, body, with
her first gesture. She is not dressed voluptuously, as
others dress; she is like the hashish dream of a hermit
who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others
sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on
vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone,
melody, or purpose. She has the quality of Eternity; she is
metaphysical motion. She eliminates repose. She has my nerves,
sympathetically irritated, on a razor-edge which is neither
pleasure nor pain, but sublime and immedicable stimulation. I
feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body
goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease; and I know
absolutely that no ease is possible. For my mind, I am like one
who has taken an overdose of morphine and, having absorbed the
drug in a wakeful mood, cannot sleep, although utterly tired
out. And for my soul? Oh! Oh!--Oh! “Satan prends pitié de ma
longue misère!” Other women conform to the general curve of
Nature, to the law of stimulation followed by exhaustion; and
by recuperation after rest. Not so she, the supreme abomination
of Ecstasy! She is perpetual irritation without possibility
of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude of the
Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture
of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. She is the
one perfect Artist in this way of Ineffable Grace which is
Damnation. Marie Lloyd in England, Yvette Guilbert in France,
are her sisters in art: but they both promise Rest in the end.
The rest of Marie Lloyd is sleep, and that of Yvette Guilbert
death; but the lovers of Eva Tanguay may neither sleep nor die.
I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her....

And so on--until French intervenes.

THE KRAZY KAT BALLET

Mr John Alden Carpenter has been good enough to permit me to reprint the programme note attached to his ballet of Krazy Kat, performed Friday, January 20, 1922, at the Town Hall, in New York, and several times thereafter. The piano transcription of the score, decorated with many attractive designs by Herriman, is published. The note is:

To all lovers of Mr Herriman’s ingenious and delightful
cartoons it must have seemed inevitable that sooner or later
Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse would be dragged by some composer
into music. I have tried to drag them not only into music but
on to the stage as well, by means of what I have called, for
obvious reasons, a Jazz Pantomime.

To those who have not mastered Mr Herriman’s psychology it
may be explained that Krazy Kat is the world’s greatest
optimist--Don Quixote and Parsifal rolled into one. It is
therefore possible for him to maintain constantly at white heat
a passionate affair with Ignatz Mouse, in which the gender of
each remains ever a delightful mystery. Ignatz, on the other
hand, condenses in his sexless self all the cardinal vices.
If Krazy blows beautiful bubbles, Ignatz shatters them; if
he builds castles in Spain, Ignatz is there with a brick. In
short, he is meaner than anything, and his complex is cats.

After a few introductory bars the curtain is raised and Krazy
is discovered asleep under a tree. Officer Pup passes, swinging
his club. All is well. Then comes Bill Poster, a canine
relative of Officer Pup, with his bucket and brush, and pastes
upon the wall an announcement of the grand ball which will
shortly be given for all the animals. The job finished, Bill
departs.

Krazy wakes up; he rubs his eyes and reads the exciting
poster. He is moved to try his steps; he finds his feet heavy
and numerous. Of a sudden he spies on a clothes line which
the moving scenery has brought into view, a _ballet skirt_.
Undoubtedly it is his costume for the ball. He approaches
the clothes line, first with restraint, then with eagerness.
He snatches the skirt from the line, claps it on, and comes
bounding forward in high abandon.

He is interrupted by the appearance of Old Joe Stork, drilling
by with his bundle on his back. He passes on, but he has
carelessly dropped his pack. Krazy sniffs at it, filled with
curiosity. He picks it up and carries it triumphantly to his
tree in the corner. He opens the bundle, and finds that it
contains not what you thought it would, but a vanity case,
mirror, rouge, powder-puff, lip-stick and all, complete,
including a beautiful pair of white cotton gloves.

He abandons himself to the absorbing task of make-up for the
ball. Meanwhile the moving scenery has brought into view
the house of Ignatz Mouse. The door opens, and Ignatz’ head
appears. Opportunity has knocked. The Mouse steals forward and
is about to seize an inviting brick when Officer Pup (thank
heaven!) arrives in the very nick of time and drives him from
the scene. The unsuspecting Kat, in the meantime, has completed
his make-up. He now arises, draws on his white cotton gloves,
and then by way of further preparatory exercise, he indulges in
a bit of a Spanish dance.

At its conclusion Krazy is suddenly confronted by the
_Mysterious Stranger_. The sophisticated audience will observe
that it is none other than Ignatz disguised as a catnip
merchant. Very formidable indeed! The Stranger steps briskly
forward and holds out to the ever-receptive Kat a bouquet--an
enormous bouquet of catnip. Krazy plunges his nose into the
insidious vegetable, inhales deeply to the very bottom of his
lungs, and then goes off at once into what Mr Herriman calls a
_Class A fit_. It is a fit progressive, a fit _de luxe_, the
Katnip Blues, in which the wily Ignatz joins as additional
incitement. When the frenzy has achieved its climax, the
Mouse throws off his disguise, seizes his brick, dashes it
full in the face of the Kat, and escapes. Krazy staggers back,
stunned and exhausted, but yet undaunted. There is the moment
of ecstatic recognition--Ignatz Dahlink--as he totters and
reels back to his little tree. He sinks down wearily under its
protecting boughs. The moon comes out. Krazy sleeps. Krazy
dreams. Indominatable Kat!

FURTHER NOTE ON THE FRATELLINI

The Fratellini are so ingenious and so full of surprises that it is useless to try to keep up with them. I have seen them a dozen times since first writing about them, sometimes three times in a week with a still growing delight. Some of the stunts demand to be mentioned. There is one as good as the photographer--it is based on the idea that a saxophone player who cannot play the saxophone, is engaged because he has a starving family; another, concealed in a box, does the actual playing in the test before the manager of the house. The complications can easily be guessed; but it is impossible to guess the combination of delicacy and uproariousness with which they are rendered. At the end of this act Alberto, the grotesque with the square painted windows over his eyes, hides in a sack and you have one of the everlasting sources of children’s humour carried to its supreme conclusion. Still another stunt is a dancing act, first as a burlesque of ballet, and then as a straight tango, with Francesco as a rather wicked old dowager in a green dress, and Alberto with complete facial make-up, but otherwise extremely chic, dancing exquisitely. Finally, I mention another entrance, superior to the one described in the text. Francesco, very much the English gentleman, arrives on the scene, followed by his two servants, Paulo and Alberto, the former with a ludicrous exaggeration of the Englishman’s travelling rug, the latter with a wicker hamper of unimaginable proportions. As these two stagger after their master he tries to get out, as if he had come into the wrong place. Finally he addresses himself to an attendant, at the same time ordering his servants to drop their impedimenta. Before these two have time to light cigarettes, Francesco is off again, they must lift the huge burdens and follow him; again he orders them to discharge and enters into conversation; and this goes on until it works itself into a fury, the master always walking in one direction while the servants are so far behind him that they are walking in the opposite one. The human basis of the event, the skill with which it is done, and the intensity of it, are combined to make a miracle. At the end Alberto is so exhausted that he sees visions and begins to fight a duel with his own shadow; he leaps back, guards, and finally falls upon it and beats it to death.

It may not be inappropriate to mention here the name of another clown also appearing, although not regularly, at the Medrano. He is one of the three Oréas, the other two being quite exceptional acrobats on the trapeze. The clown Oréas does not create as the Fratellini do; he parodies acrobatics and uses an amazingly physical adaptability for immense fun. To be sure he falls off and on the bars; but he is also capable of mounting a ladder in a series of march steps, and of missing the support, as he swings from the bar, sliding round it with his arm on the upright, and slipping down on his bottom, in a movement of great grace. His little trick of taking a glass full of beer out of his pocket at the end of each tumble is not new, but he does it extremely well, and he has the sense of gait as well as the sense of costume and impression.

THE CINEMA NOVEL

It begins to look as if we will have to find a new explanation for the French. Since that would be difficult, I suggest that we hold fast to the old one, with variations. Let us continue to say that they are moribund and explain any outburst of activity as a death struggle. The last gasp. History provides plenty of precedent, and we who find pleasant things in their art and letters will rank ourselves with those cultivated persons who cannot begin to care for Latin until it becomes a highly corrupt language.

I do not know whether seeing new opportunities and developing them quickly are the best signs of degeneracy, for I seem to remember reading about these things in the advertisements, where nothing as irrevocable as degeneracy is permitted. The adaptability of the moving picture scenario to something besides moving pictures was a thing easy to guess; the thing has been done in both America and England in burlesque of the films--an adaptation requiring and receiving very little intelligence.

It may be slightly beside the point, but it is interesting to note that the cinema influence in literature in France is almost exactly opposite to what it is here. There it seems to make for brevity, hardness, clarity, brilliance. You will find it in the extraordinary stories of Paul Morand and Louis Aragon; and you will find in neither of these those characteristic sloppinesses which American authors are beginning to blame on the movies. If they would take the trouble of studying the pictures, instead of trying to make money out of them, and discover the elements in the cinema technique which are capable of making their own work fruitful, we might have better novels, and we certainly would have a few less bad pictures.

Two Frenchmen have, at the same time, used the scenario as a method of fiction, and each of them has written a highly ironic piece which is capable of being transferred to the film, but which reads sufficiently well to be considered as an end in itself.